Melissa Wyatt

Funny How Things Change by Melissa Wyatt takes place in what's left of a West Virginia mining town. Jobs are scarce. Money is scarce.

Remy has a college bound girlfriend and he's got a job at a local mechanics. He's been planning to follow Lisa when she leaves for college. He figures he can get a job at any garage. Then, things change with the arrival of a student artist, working with grant money to spruce up the town and capture the coal mining history through her art.

Her fish out of water take on this little ex-mining town makes Remy re-examine his own relationship with both the town and the mountain. His internal struggle acts as the stage for building character studies for the town and the mountain.

As it happened, I read this book on the heels of finishing Jeannette Wall's memoir The Glass Castle — part of which covers her time with her father's family in West Virginia. While the conditions depicted in Funny How Things Change are no where near as bleak as Walls's memoir, her descriptions continually crept in and colored my interpretation of Wyatt's novel. I think, though, that Wyatt's book is to be open ended.… (meer)

Remy is seventeen and in love with Lisa. The roots of his small hometown run so deep into him. The question is, do they run deep enough to hold him there? This book was a creeper, meaning the story slowly crept over me and pulled me right into it. It wasn't long and I could feel Remy's desperation at wanting to escape his small town. Then the reader gets tossed about with his confusion. Remy is a very relate-able guy.

The interesting thing about this book, is that it told a fairly simply story in an eloquent way. Before long the reader can sense his strong familial and geographical connections. It's not just the town that he's tied to but the land itself. The description in this book is beautiful. Remy thinks of the mountains as beings with water filling their capillaries. Check this book out and find out how Remy answers the age old question, should I stay or should I go?

For all it's loveliness, I give this one four big kisses!… (meer)

There’s not a big, intricate plot in this book; rather, it follows one character as he struggles to figure out who and what is most important to him in life. Remy would be perfectly content to live out his days in his small town. But people tell him that he can’t be okay with that, that he has to want more, to see more of the world than Dwyer, so he decides to move out of state with his college-bound girlfriend. Though it’s just one choice, the implications of it are far-reaching, and it could change everything in Remy’s life.
When he meets Dana, Remy’s plan to give up the life he knows for a new life with Lisa isn’t as straightforward as he once thought it would be. It’s not just that he finds Dana attractive, or that he questions his love of Lisa because of that, but through his interactions with Dana he has the chance to look at his life from an outsider’s perspective. Honestly, if the whole story could be wrapped up into a choice between two girls, the book would have been far too simple for me. Instead he has to really consider what he is and isn’t willing to sacrifice for love, and also what love really is.
Books like this live and die on the author’s ability to write compelling characters. Fortunately Remy is a well-written character and I enjoyed the glimpse into his life. I have to admit that at first I thought he was a slacker who just didn’t want to leave Dwyer because it’s comfortable to stay where everything is familiar. But he proved me wrong. There’s nothing about Remy that’s easy to categorize, and that’s why I love this character. Everything about him is complicated: his relationship with his father, his feelings for Lisa, his inexplicable love for Dwyer, the depth of his friendship with Dana. Throughout the book Remy is forced to reevaluate his future plans time and again as he comes against resistance from different directions. Ultimately the decision he makes about his future is fraught with complicated explanations, just like most difficult decisions in real-life.
One thing this book does that I haven’t come across much in the books I’ve read is show a relationship between a father and son where the dad isn’t either overbearingly controlling or overcompensating for what a lousy guy he is (or has been in the past), and the son isn’t always thinking about how much he hates his dad. Remy and his dad are just two guys, living together, no need for apologies or explanations for being the way they are. When Remy’s dad questions the motivations behind the decisions Remy is making about his future, at first it seems like their relationship will shift into one full of tension, but instead it becomes clear that his dad just cares about him. The sacrifices he’s willing to make to bring about Remy’s happiness are astounding, and those sacrifices are what lead Remy to consider what sacrifices he can make in his life.
By the end of the book, Remy’s growth as a person is evident. Through the conversations he has and the things he observes, he is forced to consider the consequences his decisions have in the future not only for him, but for the other people in his life. He does a lot of maturing over the few weeks of the story, and I think that the book ends with him making the best decision for him.… (meer)