A Small Crowd of Strangers
A Small Crowd of Strangers, by Joanna Rose, Portland, Oregon: Forest Avenue Press, 2020.
Paperback 396 pp. $18.00.
Joanna Rose’s second novel, A Small Crowd of Strangers (Forest Avenue Press) drew me in with its blurb: How does a librarian from New Jersey end up in a convenience store on Vancouver Island in the middle of the night, playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest?
I was intrigued and struck by the author’s unique voice and writing style. Her ability to tackle the difficult subject of compatibility in marriage is refreshing. Too often books and movies suggest opposites attract and thereafter live happily ever after. However, most of us learn, through sometimes painful personal experiences, the importance of compatibility.
When we first meet Pattianne Anthony, she is a thirty-year-old part-time librarian without a concrete sense of direction in life. On the surface, she seems rather content with her job and boyfriend, who is more of a boyfriend out of convenience than commitment.
Soon after she meets Michael, a dreamy, beautiful man who happens to be Catholic. Pattianne, however, used to be a Catholic and renounced Christianity. Michael invites her to Easter Mass. “A warning tried to sneak into her brain…A warning about guys who starched their shirts and said Easter Dress” (22). While she initially struggles with this invitation, she convinces herself that the mass could just be about seeing the choir perform. There, she hears the choir sing Mozart, her favorite, and meets his family.
Everyone is polite and kind and that’s how her relationship with Michael progresses. Pattianne ignores every warning that pops in her head regarding their religious differences. They fall in love, yet only after Michael’s father falls ill, do they decide to marry. While they were already headed in that direction, Pattianne tells herself it was the next logical step since they stayed at each other’s homes almost every night.
Before marrying Michael, Pattianne visits Father McGivens telling him she doesn’t want to join the Catholic church and hopes she won’t have to in order to marry Michael. “And what do you think of Michael’s belief?” “I think I can live with it” (75). Father McGivens tells her Michael believes those stories. Pattianne tells him she knows. “But she didn’t know, didn’t know how anyone could really believe, Jesus as magician, playing to a crowd at the wedding feast, feeding thousands with a loaf of bread and a fish” (75-76).
Not long after they marry do their religious differences begin to surface, particularly after they move away from Pattianne’s family. On the one hand, you have a woman trying to find herself mentally and spiritually, trying to derive a sense of self in her changing world. A world where she finds herself a fish out of water in a new home and in a new place. Surrounded by family members more like her husband than herself. On the other hand, you have a man whose religion is the basis of his self-identity, conduct, and beliefs. Pattianne struggles to figure out where she fits into her new life. Her path to self-discovery was brought about by a promise she was determined to keep, a promise to a friend.
Loving the wrong person, or worrying that one is loving the wrong person, is something that will strike a chord in the heart of most readers. How do we know? What do we do when we find out? It is something every lover has asked at least once. It was refreshing to see that Pattianne never lost sight of herself despite all the pressures.
The title of the book and cover suggests the theme of the story. Someone navigating the road to their personal identity in a room full of others. Others the protagonist doesn’t or can’t identify with. The dog on the cover is looking toward the title as if it can relate and perhaps it can. Dogs and humans speak two different languages, yet they can coexist and be devoted to one another.
While the story is a slow burn, the writing is beautiful. The author has a way with words that resonate and illuminate. She makes the past and the present flow together as if they are timeless and not ordered. Her characters are ordinary people with ordinary struggles, who we may sometimes wish to applaud, and other times cajole.
At the heart of this novel is the story of a woman who did not observe the adage, “one must love themselves before they can love others.” Joanna Rose’s story gives us hope that even though the journey may be arduous, it is worth it in the end.
I would recommend this book for readers who enjoy contemporary fiction, women’s fiction, women’s issues, relationship, and friendship stories.
-Crystal Wilkins, Fiction Editor
Joanna Rose is the author of the award-winning novel Little Miss Strange, which earned the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Other work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Windfall Journal, Cloudbank, Artisan Journal, Northern Lights, Oregon Humanities, High Desert Journal, VoiceCatcher, Calyx, and Bellingham Review. Her essay “That Thing With Feathers” was cited as Notable in 2015 Best American Essays. She established Powell’s Books’ reading series and curated it for fifteen years. She is an Atheneum Fellow in Poetry at the Attic Institute and cohosts the prose critique group Pinewood Table. She also works with youth through Literary Arts’ Writers in the Schools and with Young Musicians & Artists. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and, at any given time, several dogs.
- Bio acquired from Literary Arts. -
