Reading Local Review: "Little Green" by Loretta Stinson

Janie Marek is a girl who has had a tough life. First her mother died, then her father, leaving her with a disagreeable stepmother. She ran away at fourteen and lived on the streets for two years. After trading sex for money, drifting from place to place, working as a stripper, and being brutally raped, she landed in a long-term relationship with a drug dealer named Paul Jesse. Paul started out okay, but soon began abusing her. Then things get worse.

This is the basic plot of Little Green (Hawthorne Books), Loretta Stinson’s debut novel

The portrait of a drug-soaked 1970s Oregon is well done. As is the pain of a spiraling downward, increasingly violent relationship. I’m going to spoil the ending by telling you that Janie comes out okay. Without knowing that, it can be a pretty hard read.

Stinson faces a common predicament in constructing Janie’s character. How does an author get a reader to sympathize with a character who makes bad choices and keeps winding up in awful situations? Stinson does this by giving Janie the aforementioned history of bad breaks, and by making her thoroughly benign. While I was rooting for Janie, her character is pretty dull for the leading role. She’s a quiet girl, the kind you barely notice because she sits in the corner fervently wishing herself elsewhere. And some of the choices Stinson made about Janie’s character seem too obvious. Because Janie lost her family and home, she fantasizes about houses, is determined to serve the perfect Thanksgiving dinner to her drugged out boyfriend and his loser friends, and enjoys learning knitting from an old neighbor lady. I would have welcomed a few quirks and surprises.

While the good characters verge on annoyingly good, Stinson is more successful with the druggies. The portrayal of Paul, Janie’s abusive boyfriend, shows him spiraling out of control as his crank use and accompanying paranoia reach dizzying heights. In Paul’s loser friends, Stinson captures the self-centered, non-malicious insensitivity of chronic drug use. The loser brigade inject a bit of humor into the novel, which is a nice respite from the sadness and horror of much of this material.

Local publisher Hawthorne Books has turned out a good looking book, with a pretty cover and pleasant layout.

Stinson herself is bound for big things. She has her MA in publishing and her MFA in fiction writing, both from PSU. In 2008, she won an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in fiction. She currently teaches writing classes in Portland, and is working on her second novel.

Image credit Hawthorne Books.