Evangelina Everyday, book review
by Dawn Burns
Cornerstone Press, Stevens Point, WI, 2022
Evangelina is the kind of book you want to curl up with. It is a small collection of flash stories—indeed reads like flash memoir, of a Midwestern wife who hails from Indiana—a state that I saw in my feed, the latest to institute posting the Ten Commandments in schools—who has a vivid thought life and not so much a vivid life. She wants to go along with the flow, but has a hard time getting into the flow. She is intelligent in the way a Renaissance thinker may have been, but, being a woman, may have also been judged a witch and drowned. At the wrong place at the wrong time, if she had tried to tell her whole story she would have been outcast.
The “stories” features her looped thoughts and ponderings. All she really wants to be is accepted and walk in the fields—not the wind-whipped ones full of trash and plastic bags sticking to straw grass, but the ones just waking up from night and enveloped in dew, glittering in new sunshine. She wants to find her heart and center, the person within, struggling to be free. Maybe not free, but at home. Happy.
I think many Midwestern women can relate to Evangelina and her hopes and desires.
It is a book that could have many sequels, prequels, numerous
lives in the in between.
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