This short book is a combination of two novellas. The
first, 'I Can Make it to California Before it's Time for
Dinner' tells of an unfortunate teenaged boy with learning
difficulties who goes on an impromptu journey and gets
blamed for a girl's death, then taken advantage of by an
older man. The boy, Jimmy Dembrowski, is well realised as
only half-understanding what goes on around him and not
understanding strange people's motivations.
The second story, 'May-September' is quite a different
matter. Sandra is a grandmother whose daughter Andrea has
talked her into writing a blog. This will keep Andrea's
kids up to date with her life and help Sandra keep in touch
with the modern world. Reluctant but hiding it, Sandra buys
a computer. She posts up an ad and Alice answers, a young
woman who is willing to help with computer skills and
ghostwriting the blog.
There are no quotation marks in the latter story which can
make it difficult to follow and to be sure of who is saying
which sentence. Sandra is only sixty-seven and she and
Alice swap details of their lives. The women in this story
are absorbed with themselves and Sandra tends to look back
over her life rather than look outward through the
worldwide web, as most people would when handed a net-
connected computer.
COULD YOU BE WITH HER NOW is not a casual read but
concentrates on drawing characters and could suit students
of modern creative writing. Jen Micalski has founded a
quarterly creative journal called jmww.
The title novella is a first-person account of a mentally
challenged fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally kills a
neighborhood girl and winds up running away and hitching a
ride with a trucker who is not as trustworthy a companion as
Jimmy believes him to be. Jen Michalski examines the dangers
of living in a world while having a compromised reality in
this beautiful and engaging story.
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