New Book for Review: Literary Fiction ‘Glorify Each Day’ by John Banks

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John Banks is touring in September and October 2011 with his literary fiction novel, Glorify Each Day.

Glorify Each Day is a darkly comical novel depicting the consequences of violence in modern American life. It tells many stories. Tommy “Teach” Morrison, the novel’s main character, tells the story of his relationship with his childhood friend Charles – a story of a horrible misunderstanding and a story that Tommy can never retell. It tells the story of Tommy and Cait, a story of shared love and shared jokes, but a story that Tommy has doomed to end unhappily.

Glorify Each Day is the story of how Tommy becomes Teach, a man on a mission and on a quest for redemption – instructor extraordinaire (at least in his own mind) who must become the protector of all the ill-fated youngsters put in his charge. It is the story of Teach and his father, a crusty, foul-mouthed abuser of everyone around him and proof that nuts don’t fall very far from the tree.

Glorify Each Day is a story about storytelling and the many different ways to tell a story – stories about Teach’s students; about superheroes, Jesus, races, raps, rapes; about a young woman who learns how to forgive her father, another young woman who learns how to forgive herself, and another young woman who learns that she doesn’t need anyone’s forgiveness. And these are stories that Teach should be able to learn something from, too, stories that shine a light on lives disfigured by violence and loss.

HERE’S A TEASER FROM CHAPTER ONE:

ONE SUMMER SATURDAY when I was eight, my mom decided she wanted to spend the afternoon visiting with her friend, Mary, who lived about a mile from our house. We lived on a winding country lane, with houses far apart, separated by large tracts of land. My dad was on the road.

“It’s Saturday! Can I just stay here?” I said. Normally, I would spend most of Saturday with Charles, but he was at the beach.

“I’m not leaving you here alone all afternoon. You and Robbie go put on your shoes.”

“I don’t want to!”

“I don’t care if you don’t want to. . . . You two go pick out a couple of games to take with you. You can watch TV.”

As we were getting ready to leave, our Chihuahua, Señor Perro, came running up to us, tail wagging, mouth panting and yapping. Any collective movement within the household would set him off. Mom bent over and vigorously rubbed the dog along both flanks. As was her habit, she started babbling in baby talk. (She had another habit, more unusual – if Señor Perro misbehaved, she would inexplicably translate the dog’s name into English – Mister Dog! Bad Mister Dog! – even though, I suppose, that would have negated any effectiveness of yelling at a Mexican dog.) Although technically belonging to me and Robbie, Señor Perro was most loved by our mom. He, true to his nature, had a tendency to snap at us if we got too rough, which we, true to our natures, usually did.

Robbie and I selected the games we wanted. I chose Monopoly because it took the longest to play. Robbie chose one of his silly kid games called Horsefeathers!, which involved putting strange animal body parts together to create even more unusual creatures.

Mary was an older woman who lived alone, and there wasn’t anything in her house for a kid to get excited about. Robbie and I spent an hour playing Monopoly, arguing incessantly about dice rolls, how to count money, which was the best railroad to land on, what did Water Works mean. At one point Robbie threw all the Community Chest cards at me, and the game was stopped peremptorily by Mom when I lunged at Robbie, grabbed his neck, and tried to make him eat a hotel.

Robbie had a more sedentary disposition than I and seemed satisfied to spend the rest of the afternoon lying on Mary’s living room carpet watching cartoons. But soon after the Monopoly debacle I was desperate to be outside.

My persistent badgering finally paid off.

“Alright, Tommy,” my mom relented. “I’m going to leave in a few minutes anyway. I guess you’ll be okay at home by yourself for a little while. . . . You can go on two conditions. Number one, don’t walk in the road. Stay on the grass. Do you hear me?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Repeat what I just said.”

“Don’twalkintheroad. Stayinthegrass.”

“Okay. And when you get home, stay in the yard. Don’t go into the woods. . . . Now what did I just say?”

“Stayoutofthewoods. Stayoutofthewoods. CanIgonow? CanIgonow?”

Even though Mom had to drive over, it was easy for me to run back home. I stayed on the road all the way. The idea of running on the grass was ridiculous. The ground was uneven and rutted in places; I was much more likely to fall and hurt myself if I followed my mom’s instructions.

The reason I was so eager to leave Mary’s house was because I was excited about practicing my pitching. Dad, a few months ago, had put up a tire swing in the backyard. It didn’t take me long to figure out the swing was also the perfect device to improve my pitching. The tire’s inside circumference was an excellent approximation of the Little League strike zone, and its height off the ground matched the height of most batters my age. Making this development even more exciting, I had finally been able to convince my dad to “ruin” the backyard by building a pretty convincing pitcher’s mound. So far, I had collected five baseballs from various places, which I carried in a toy bucket brought home from the beach. After throwing my five pitches, I would run to the chain-link fence to retrieve them. It was a perfect set-up, though I did wish I had more than five balls to pitch.

When I got back home, after a nearly mile-long sprint, I wasn’t even breathing very hard. I walked around to the side of the house, to where the spare door key was hidden, and let myself in.

293 pages

Visit John’s website at www.819publishing.com.

If you would like to review Glorify Each Day, please fill out the form below or email Dorothy Thompson at thewriterslife(at)gmail.com. Deadline for inquiries end September 25 or until the tour is filled. Thank you!

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Question of the Day

How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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