There are always newly published books to discover, but I often find myself revisiting older titles that I adore, titles that should not be forgotten. With Valentine’s Day upon us, I returned to one of my favorite books by Cynthia Rylant: A COUPLE OF KOOKS and other Stories about Love, published in 1990.
This slim, young adult collection of eight marvelous stories explores the many dimensions of love and romance, all kinds of love and people in love, young and old. The stories are low key yet powerful, simple yet complex, tender yet not overly sentimental, heartbreaking yet quietly humorous and uplifting. They visit innocence, idealism, confusion, longing, hope, insecurity, sorrow, and great happiness. Each feels universal and unique at the same time… unique in a way that, true to Rylant’s style, sometimes leaves me feeling a little off kilter, in a good way.
These small gems capture moments in time in the lives of endearing, sometimes quirky, characters — a young mentally challenged man with a healing crush, two teens who are smitten but are the victims of their own shyness, a lonely man who rescues a woman at a truck stop and finally gets his ‘just due’, an old man musing over fleeting love at his granddaugher’s wedding, a young girl writing to tell her mother about her high school boyfriend, a 68-year-old woman mourning the loss of her husband but finding joy in their one-year marriage, a teenage boy worrying that he’s fallen for two very different girls, and an unmarried teenage couple growing to love their unborn child before giving it up for adoption.
Rylant’s masterful writing is spare, crisp, poetic, elegant and rich with imagery. For those of us who love language and often reread just to appreciate the author’s way with words, she delivers —
“Love is such a mystery, and when it strikes the heart of one as mysterious as Ernie himself, it can hardly be spoken of.”
Her parents “moved her to Cincinnati, where for a month she spent the greater part of every day in a room full of beveled glass windows, sifting through photographs of the life she lived and left behind. But it is difficult work, suffering, and in its own way a kind of art, and finally she didn’t have the energy for it anymore, so she emerged from the beautiful house and fell in love with a bag boy at the supermarket.”
“Those two young people are in love as surely as this is spring, and if their feelings last not another day, for this moment they are as real as anything God Himself ever created. And let’s face it—some of God’s best beauties are momentary indead. I have seen certain rainbows . . .”
“ . . . he [Boyd] resigned himself to this unfortunate feeling of almost having everything, and sure enough life arranged itself to work out this way. He almost went to technical school, he almost won a Chevy Nova, he almost got married, and he almost died when his coal truck rolled over on him. For the fourth thing, he had no complaints. But all the rest of the near misses he regarded as his basic lot in life because he simply never expected to actually get something. . . . Stories do have happy endings and Boyd would have been the last to believe it, but they do, and the way things worked out was so perfect, so perfect a win across the finish line, that he was even grateful for all the almosts of his history because he had an even keener, exquisite sense of finally coming in first.”
“I like him, Mama, don’t ask me why. Maybe the reason I like his so much is because he likes me so much. You wouldn’t believe how totally smitten he is with me. Is it possible, do you think, to love somebody just because he’s so good at loving you, or is that the most conceited thing you ever heard of? He loves my hair, Mama. Says I have the prettiest hair he’s ever seen. And the biggest lonesome eyes. But I won’t tell you what he says about my legs, to save us both from blushing.”
“Love at sixty-seven is not much different from love at seventeen. It is perhaps closer to the feelings of first love than any time of romance in the years intervening because at sixty-seven, as at seventeen, one is able to live wholly for love and to believe it will last the rest of one’s life.”
“Joe was fifteen years younger than Ruth, and this fact as well filled her with the greatest glee. Joe did not even qualify for the 10 percent senior citizen discount at Thompson’s Drugs and Hank’s Homemade Ice Cream Store, and she would watch him pay for a bottle of Sine-Aid or a coffee ice-cream soda and marvel that someone still paying list had fallen in love with her.”
I could go on. A Couple of Kooks is a marvelous story-a-night read aloud to share with those you love, but it’s also a book to read and think on in the quiet of your own heart. Sadly, it’s out of print but so very worth seeking out at your library or used bookstore. You won’t regret it.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
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Here are some other favorite books about love.
Picture Books:
Henry in Love by Peter McCarty
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear, illustrated by Jan Brett
Novels:
A Rat’s Tale by Tor Seidler
Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen