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• Bloodroot by Amy Greene • 10 Comments
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Bloodroot by Amy Greene

 As you may have gathered by now, I read a lot. And I think about reading and writing a lot. And if I’m reading a particularly engrossing book, it is sometimes hard for me to focus on real life but I can do it. I have become somewhat adept at switching back and forth. Now that I’m trying to write movies though it is getting harder because I keep visualizing things as scenes, and I can’t even watch a movie without thinking about the re-writes and the dialogue between director and writer etc.

ANYWAY, even though it completely sucked that my daughter got this weird high fever/ bad tummy illness on our way to the mountains over spring break and had to spend the first 36 hours of the trip in bed/ on the toilet, it turned out to be super convenient for me because I was reading Bloodroot. So, I just lay next to her and read. I checked her fever with my lips on her forehead—dosed her with Motrin when needed, tried to breathe through the stench of stomach flu/little kid methane gas and was so wildly absorbed in this crazy-ass book that I could have done it for another 36 hours but by then she was ready for a snowball fight and a piece of toast. (I stayed up most of the next night to finish.)

Here’s the one scene I told my husband about. I never tell him anything about any books because he doesn’t read, but every now and again I like to give him a shocking little nugget from my books that may in fact hold a candle to his hunting/ military/war shows on History Channel and Discovery. Let me just preface this scene by saying that all the actions by all the characters in this book seem entirely justified. I know I’ve used this verbiage before: this is something that I heard over and over again in my writing programs in school. You have to justify your characters actions—as the writer. In other words, enough information/background/action/character interface has to be given so that a character’s subsequent choices seem justified. This is why a lot of movies don’t work. People fall in love all over the place or get super angry or whatever and there hasn’t been enough in the plot prior to that moment to JUSTIFY them suddenly feeling that way or making that choice. Okay, so Myra Lamb’s actions in the following scene are entirely justified by what comes previously in the novel.

Myra waits for her husband to come home to their tiny shack by the tracks in Appalachia. She is desperate to leave her abusive husband. She is desperate to escape her life and get back to her people on the utterly magically described nature of Bloodroot Mountain. She knows, because it’s Friday, that he’ll have spent his paycheck on booze, stumble home and pass out on the sofa. She’d have left already but she doesn’t want to leave without her grandaddy’s ring which she had given to her husband during their initial courtship. She knows he won’t voluntarily give it back. She waits for him to pass out and places his hand on the little crate they have in front of the couch and brings a hatchet down on his ring finger. Course that’s tough to do; so in the process she cuts off all three of his fingers between the thumb and pinky and very nearly takes the pinky off too. He, of course, wakes up bellowing and bleeding, she takes the stub end of the hatchet and shoves him full tilt in the face and breaks his jaw and knocks him out; grabs the ring (and his ring finger) and runs off. Doesn’t see him again for 10 years. She’s pregnant at the time. She lives in utter fear and despair while she raises her twins, petrified that he’s coming for her but determined to protect her kids. Even my jaded and tough Marine husband was sorta flabbergasted by that scene. Powerful stuff. I’m giving 2 thumbs up.