Book Review

Light Boxes
by Shane Jones
Publishing Genius, 2009
www.publishinggenius.com.
ISBN-10: 1844714977

Among the many lists in Shane Jones's first novel, Light Boxes, appears a list of artists "Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness," which includes Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, and Richard Brautigan (98). To this list, twelve-long, allow me to add Shane Jones as number thirteen. Clearly inspired by Calvino's Ombrosa, García Márquez's Macondo, and Brautigan's iDeath, Jones's own fantasy world is one in which the familiar (a town, populated by hot-air balloonists) is complicated by the unfamiliar (the end of flight). With Light Boxes, Jones plunges readers into a world where bees fall dead from the sky and birds flap their wings in vain, where a family paints balloons upon all unseen surfaces (beneath floorboards, behind mirrors, under tables, inside cabinets) and the mother draws kites upon her daughter's arms so that she will "never forget flight" (13). Responsible for the destruction of "all things possessing the ability to fly" and the decree that "no one living in the town should speak of flight ever again," is the novel's antagonist—February, a month over 300-days long, a never-ending season, and a man who lives in the sky (12). Put simply, put best by February himself, Light Boxes is a novel of "sadness, war, heartbreak" (163).

Affected by "the sadness quotient," Jones's protagonist, Thaddeus Lowe, leads a war against February, and, from the novel's beginning straight through to its end, Jones maintains his seamless blend of fabulism, magical realism, and fantasy. One can't help but recall Calvino's The Baron in the Trees when the town's children, kidnapped by February, learn "to survive underground, [...build] an elaborate series of underground tunnels [...their] cold faces illuminated in the fire and lantern light" (89). One can't help but be reminded of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude—the trail of blood that trickles through the town, the inerasable smell of gun powder—upon reading, in Light Boxes, that when Thaddeus's wife Selah spills her tea it burns "a path through the snow from [their] front door and down into the town," and that upon learning about the death of his daughter Bianca, Thaddeus exudes "the smell of mint leaves [...so strongly] it turns the windows in town green," so that "the clouds look like moss" (50, 51). And it is impossible not to remember Margaret's death by hanging in Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar when Selah falls through a frozen river and feels "the cracking of ice against the bottom of [her] feet" (69). Like these writers before him, Jones is a master of blending real and unreal, lending physical details the necessary associative—emotional qualities that allow readers to suspend disbelief as, spellbound, they succumb to the persuasive powers of his prose.

It is all too easy, I think, to disregard young writers who attempt to follow in the groundbreaking footsteps of those who came before; they are no easy footsteps to fill, and so many writers stumble in their attempts—especially when creating a fantastic setting, which must, if nothing else, exist as a fully inhabited conceit. Thankfully, when I think of Shane Jones and his Light Boxes I see him taking large strides of his own; I see him bending now and again to brush away the dust from those others' footsteps; I see him studying and preserving them, fossil-like, taking photographs and placing them in his front pocket; and I see him assiduously patching the ground wherever it is broken, bridging the cracks with a fine parchment, upon which he has contributed his own indelibly inked words. To number thirteen, I say now: It is a certainty that your career, like those of numbers one through twelve, will most assuredly be long and illustrious. Whatever bout of sadness you were trying to cure, I hope Light Boxes did the trick. If not, then maybe this review will cheer you.—Molly Gaudry