Short takes

August 01, 2010

ONE DAY THE WIND CHANGED: Stories
By Tracy Daugherty
South Methodist University, 197 pp., $22.50

A dreamy boy who suffers from asthma, studies architecture, and solaces himself by looking up at the stars in the night sky, appears in many of these luminous short stories. West Texas is his home, but homelessness is his state of mind.

In “Magnitude,’’ he is a guide, taking schoolchildren through the Dollman Planetarium, explaining the status of Pluto (planet or space trash?), causing the sun to set by pulling a silver lever, and considering time, space, infinity, nothingness. In “Shanty Irish,’’ he is a 7-year-old boy struggling to catch his breath, soothing his baby sister with the bells on his mother’s slippers, sharing his mother’s constant sadness, despairing over his father’s advancing lethargy. In “The Saint’’ and “Bern,’’ he is the odd man out fighting to win a woman’s love in a contest he doesn’t understand and cannot even see clearly.

The Oklahoma City bombing, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and Hurricane Katrina are referred to — catastrophes that flatten landscapes — but he is a builder, who can design new structures. He knows that great cities wax and wane and wax again.

BLACK MAMBA BOY: A novel
By Nadifa Mohamed
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 240 pp., $25

How much misery can one boy endure and still survive? This is the unspoken but resounding question at the heart of this stunning first novel. Jama is only a child when his father disappears and his mother dies. In Aden, Yemen, the Somali child runs with a pack of feral, boisterous, hungry boys and develops an instinct for self-preservation. Trusting his instincts and mindful of his mother’s high expectations, he decides to track down his father in the Sudan.

Trusting his instincts and mindful of the high expectations that accompany the special name his mother gave him — Goode — he decides to track down his father in Sudan.