Shambles

The protagonist of this novel, Delia Arco—a mother, neighbor, mentor, and a force of nature—embodies a new version of the American dream.  Raised in the hinterlands of Idaho by an inept but well-intentioned father, Delia ekes out a living as a social worker in Port Town, Texas, where she counsels teenagers as outcast as she was. Delia cares for Esme, the adopted daughter she loves fiercely, and she rations out the rest of her time to needy teenagers under her supervision, to a small menagerie of neighbors, and to two men who can’t fathom her self-protective detachment—her sometimes lover, Mike Cleary, and her occasionally rehabilitated ex-lover, Hector Jaramillo. Enter Dannie Lampass, a student intern whose life-story is the stuff of true-crime novels: Dannie’s parents were brutally murdered by her cousin. Convinced that Delia was sent by God to replace her dead parents, Dannie insinuates herself into Delia’s life. In a landscape dominated by rumors and refinery smoke, Delia struggles to cope with competing demands on her sympathy, all the while seeking to understand her long-lost mother’s seedy life and puzzling death. “The one time I saw her alive I understood that in the flesh an angel mouth and deer eyes add up to a face that quivers too much: all reception, no broadcast. If someone sent brute signals, she got them.” Delia searches furiously for the mother in herself, only to find that she must look back and forgive the mother she never knew. Not a story about fear and absence but their repercussion—about the staggering effort it takes to ride out the grisly aftermath once an essential piece of your happiness has been removed—Shambles depicts the trivial and profound rearrangements by which survivors struggle toward a life built from incomplete scraps of the past, for the uncharted but ultimately arrived-at moment when, as Delia says, “for the first time I felt fixed, not transient, invited.”

 

 

This is big-time storytelling, full of sass and danger.

—Jonis Agee, author of Love on Indigo Road

The writer has a passion not to protect her characters but reveal them. Delia, honest-to-the-point-of funny, easily carries the entire novel.

—Carol Lee Lorenzo, author of Nervous Dancer

 

 

An emotionally wrenching and profound read.

—Midwest Book Review

 

 

Reading Monroe is like reading Chekhov. Luminous and passionate prose … irresistible. Monroe at her edgiest and wisest.

—John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light

 

 

Delia Arco is less a narrator than a journal entry come to life, constant distilling from everyday experience a complicated, ready-to-wear philosophy, moving through her days with a jolting combination of conviction and uncertainty. Monroe is writing from deep inside her character. The prose is effortless, sharp, electrifying. Shambles is about the tenuous connections we forge, the brief shimmer of kindness, the simplest acts of motherhood that bind us to each other.

—Carrie Fountain, Texas Observer

 

How to describe the heroine of Debra Monroe’s novel? A female Huck Finn, that’s what she is. Delia Arco possesses all of Huck Finn’s winning traits: grit and good humor; that furiously funny take on life; and above all, his stubborn moral streak.

—Sharon Oard Warner, author of Deep in the Heart

 

An intriguing, expertly crafted tale of outsiders coming together, for evil and yet also for good.

—Austin Chronicle

 

Debra Monroe writes about people who live on the fringes of society with so much compassion and so much detail, she leaves us wondering who draws those lines in the first place. Her prose is like fireworks, bright, layered, surprising. A smart, funny, wry, and winning book.

—Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

 

Debra Monroe’s work is about power—the power of her visceral, honest language; the power of large people over small; and the power of the tormented to take hold of themselves and, instead of being led by circumstance, to lead their lives.  This novel merits round after round of applause.

—Frederick Busch, author of The Night Inspector and Girls: A Novel

 

Shambles is rich in character. All herein, “real, needy, confused,” are full citizens. We know them top to bottom, their secret selves, their run-down dreams and 86-octane hope. The talk between these folks is elliptical, roundabout, skewed by desire and fear, forthright, and as much like life as what will blare out of the radio today. Beguilingly arch, wise and droll, Shambles is as choice as life itself.

—Lee K. Abbot, author of Wet Places at Noon