Book Review with Reminiscence: The Walkabout Scribe

Title: The Walkabout Scribe

Author: Jill Penrod

Date: 2017

ISBN: 978-1386239673

Quote: "You said you were going to stop him from going walkabout across the country. He just did exactly that, with your blessing."

"Walkabout" is an Australian word; this novel is set in the United States. "Walkabout" traditionally meant walking through often hostile desert country; the pampered young people in this novel start out with two cars and then add more companions by plane. Errum.

Apart from that, the story takes place at a farm. Kincade, who spent his teen years being his mother's private nurse, wants to take a road trip--with lots of prayer and writing time of course--looking at a world that's as different from a hospital room as it's possible to get. The adults having this conversation about him have just planned the trip for him, giving him errands that will keep him busy visiting family friends and relatives. His second stop will be at "the farm," a real farm where various students work and hang out for parts of the summer, where he'll meet Priscilla.

The author wants us to know she spent some time creating the fictional Priscilla. (No, she had not been perusing either my blog or Priscilla Bird's.) The time paid off handsomely; Priscilla is as memorable as Jo March, and in fact has much in common with Louisa May Alcott's heroine. Priscilla is as serious, prematurely mature, a young Christian as Kincade, even a fellow introvert. The personality difference that will allow her and Kincade to have lovers' quarrels through this full-length novel are between Thinking and Feeling. Priscilla has planned her young adulthood: after earning high grades and a bachelor's degree in chemistry, she's going straight into graduate studies in chemistry. There's just one small problem. Priscilla does not actually like chemistry.

Well, join the throng, the reader may think. I certainly think that. I dated a chemist in my twenties; we ended the relationship yelling "You should get counselling!" at each other--the utterly eighties thing to say when you merely thought about half the men in Washington were more attractive than the first one who'd dared to ask you for dates toward the end of your ace phase, or some similar denouement, but no real grudges were earned or held. And I would say to The Nephews that I don't believe anyone really enjoys being a chemist these days. If you just enjoy the richness of the mineral and physical world, and want to explore it, that's great; you merely have to earn a good living doing something else. If you're going to get a full-time job to which a MS in chemistry is relevant, your choices are teaching, or working on chemical poisons for Big Ag, or working on almost equally vile chemical medications for Big Pharma. If you plan on teaching chemistry, all the good jobs teaching college students who are actually interested in the subject are taken, and enough high school kids hate chemistry that one of them will probably want to destroy you in the first year. If you plan on working in "the industry," you're going to sell your soul. 

Honestly I think the chemist I knew was happier tramping from door to door raising funds for Clean Water Action. He never liked any of his jobs or co-workers; he'd done well enough as a student to get work at a community college one year, before the students clobbered him with uniformly low evaluations, and then at a prep school, where a couple of them destroyed him with exaggerations of a teaching mistake he'd made. They were classy chicks; if they'd been less well brought up it would've been sex, which today's trashier type of girl students now use even against women. And he really had no talent for teaching, poor fellow, he only had too much of a conscience to want to work on the projects for which the corporations were hiring. Something opened at Eastman and he was one of over two hundred qualified chemists who didn't get called back after packing into Kingsport to apply. And yes, I do think that both he and I needed some counselling, though fortunately only the kind people get from their elders. We were well enough brought up not to need lawyers.

If the dismal job prospects ahead of her had been what was on the fictional Priscilla's mind, she would have been an interesting character. But possibly fear of the Evil Tetrad (Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and Pfizer) was at work in the editing process. Priscilla has nothing to say about what she's learned about the current state of the field of chemistry and why any reasonable young person would want to move out of it before it's too late. She's only lonely. She wants a boyfriend. She's not interested in any serious career because in her gawky, geeky body the hormones are finally starting to seethe. She's too well brought up to say it in too many words but she's aching for an excuse to drop out of school and have babies.

Is that a responsible decision, young women of the world? There are those--selfish people who want grandchildren right away--who will say that it is, because, by the time you're earning enough money that it's reasonable to have your baby, you might be too old. And they may be so far out of touch as to suggest that a BS in chemistry is enough education.

Realistically? I don't think. A BS in chemistry was enough education to get a person hired as "chemist" or "pharmacist" in the neighborhood drugstore, once. Or enough to get a person hired to teach general science or elementary school classes, which are less hostile than gangs of teenagers pushed to study subjects they hate. But those jobs aren't available any more. A BS in chemistry could be just enough to make people think a person couldn't possibly fit in with the rest of the crew as a stock clerk, factory hand, or grocery bagger.

Anyway, Kincade is too grief-stricken to pay much attention to the young women at the farm, but Priscilla is attracted to him and immediately shows it by becoming clumsy, selfconscious, and convinced that everything she says is the wrong thing. A person in that state of mind is likely to say a lot of wrong things. They seem more like enemies than like friends to the other young people at the farm, but when Kincade resumes his trip, Priscilla packs up her own car and takes her own road trip, a day or two behind him.

This being a wholesome Christian romance, they really have bonded through their bickering. When they finally meet, they won't want to part, and their friends will be so eager to marry the two nerds off to each other that two of them will fly out to join them so that they can travel as two carloads of males and two carloads of females. So much for prayer, meditation, and finding out what God really wants them to do with their lives. 

The danger for young people who have been seriously practicing celibacy, as responsible Christians, is that they can "fall in love with love" and rush to have babies they can't afford. Hormones really howl when people refuse to indulge their hormonal urges--the more serious and sensitive people are, the more hormonal--and, after all, while very few students have lived long enough for anyone even to guess how well they'll do their jobs, likewise, very few students have lived long enough for anything to be seriously said against them, as Partners for Life, except that they're young. 

When I consider some of my school friends...It is not possible to look at a twenty-year-old and predict what he or she will be like at forty. I knew this when I was twenty. It was why I was commitment-phobic. I already knew that some of the people who seemed most likely to succeed, at twenty, were going to have the most miserable adult lives, and some of the people who seemed like hopeless cases at twenty were going to pull themselves together and have admirable adult lives, and there was no way to predict which. 

When I was twenty, dozens of people were telling me that "Dudley Do-Right," who was in all the same church college activities I was, so we were friends, would be just right for me if he ever grew into his feet; I didn't have to listen to it, but later I learned they'd been telling him that I'd be just right for him if I ever grew into my bosom. We did become less awkward and spotty during each year at college. By age twenty-five we had even become what other adults not only recognized as being adults, but attractive adults; though when I met Dud, age seventeen, I couldn't imagine any such possibility for him or for me. Sometimes I'd look at him, and apparently sometimes he'd look at me, and think, "Well, well, he/she doesn't look bad at all any more! Who would've thought it?" Then these thoughts would answer themselves, in minutes or hours, with "But even if we've proved that there's no chance of our having had any common ancestors in the last two hundred years, we must have had more than one before that time, because HE LOOKS LIKE A RELATIVE! Urgh ick how could I even have thought about him as a prospective mate! What a disgusting idea!" People always thought an old snapshot of my father was a bad snapshot of young Dud. People who'd met his family sometimes mistook me for his sister, likewise. So although we'd practiced celibacy long enough to have moments when our hormones seemed to be screaming that they'd settle for anybody with whom a baby might be made, those hormones weren't making a very strong case. We worked well as a team and felt more attracted to other people, and other people didn't want to accept that. And I really had started to convince myself that all of those older people knew something I didn't, that all of those stronger attractions to twenty or thirty other boys were just snares and delusions, that Dudley Do-Right was my beshert even though the idea of dating each other made both of us become awkward and show each other our most repulsive aspects...when Dudley Do-Right taught his first freshman math class, and the word got out that he was going to have to marry the freshman whose gender was not obvious to the eye. It did have a girly given name, so I suppose it had looked more like a girl at birth, but girls were about as likely to think it was a cute boy as boys were to think it was a cute girl. The kind of Christians who liked to play matchmaker had almost talked me into burdening my life with a man who wanted that. 

It didn't end there, either. When we were in our thirties I was certified as a legitimate massage therapist; I already had street cred as having "cured" various effects of stress and tension, so I'd studied the science behind those "cures." Before the sex trafficking scandal broke, more people were advertising "erotic massage" in Washington than were advertising board-certified therapeutic massage, but every week two or three tiresome men called my voicemail line to make it clear that they thought it was all the same thing. And one week I listened to a whole voicemail message, bouche bee, hearing a familiar voice spouting the tediously familiar line. "I don't want to get involved with the kind of people who do erotic massage but I'm told some massage therapists can be very understanding about the problems in a marriage..." Most massage therapists want to throw heavy objects at men who leave that kind of messages; some of us even learn techniques that cause enough pain to get their minds out of the gutter if they've failed to identify themselves as lousy creeps and set up appointments. But yes, it was none other than Dudley Do-Right, who had married the androgynous freshman, now cheating on it. The kind of Christians who liked to play matchmaker had almost talked me into imagining that I wanted to be married to THAT. 

Having inherited that Irish temperament, I laughed. Like a loon. Like Kamala Harris. I replayed that message for my husband and pawed the air and whinnied. I never called Dud back, but if he ever reads this web page I want him to know that I, we, did listen to the message. 

In novels, all of which take place in the Neighborhood of Make Believe anyway, it's possible for Kincade and Priscilla to be sure they're in love before either of them has any idea what they're going to do for a living. When they stop bickering and admit they like each other, they can call that love, and in the fantasy world of romance novels everyone is lovable, so it will be love. In real life, there are people who've chosen to act in love, and can thus claim they've loved, one person from the age of thirteen, here and there, now and then...and then there are normal people. 

Even in fiction it seems to me that no girl who is scrupulous about paying her own way at twenty-one, as Priscilla is shown to be in this novel, is likely to be pleased with the results of depending on a man to support her children. It's pleasant to happen to fall in love with a rich person, but people who are going to produce babies should be certain of their own ability to support the said babies if the babies' other parents die and their estates are gobbled up by bankers. Kincade and Priscilla clearly have a similar kind of faith. The Walkabout Scribe is clearly written as part of a series, or saga, in which readers will see them mature and no doubt discover along with them that they have some talent for some kind of work they can do together, to build a home and provide for their baby before they have one. As it is, pairing these two late bloomers off before either has any idea what they want to do for a living seems irresponsible. They may be old enough to marry each other, legally, but as individuals they've been presented to readers as having managed to live more than twenty years as children.

I suspect Jill Penrod was baiting some of the kind of overzealous feminists who agree with today's young men that no woman should ever plan on being a full-time mother. How else could she have even a smart child like her fictional Priscilla think that she didn't want a profession so much as she "wanted a person," i.e., a baby-daddy. As long as a girl is naive enough to think she can depend on a man--never mind on his ability to choose monogamy, I'm talking about his employability or even his physical life--for twenty years after starting a baby, she's too young for two-person dates! Girls, and boys for that matter, may "want a person" more than they want a job. Many people think sex is more fun than work, though the emotional "high" of work lasts longer. But it's irresponsible to indulge in "wanting a person" with whom you can produce a baby until you are prepared to rear that baby. Wanting to switch from chemistry to medicine or engineering, or even a step-down job in a store or factory, is reasonable, but Priscilla needs to keep her mind on the choice of which. 

So. Final verdict? This book is well enough written that instead of rushing through it thinking "Oh, another Teen or at least very Young Romance," I found myself engaging with these characters and thinking seriously about what they ought to do with their fictive lives. That means it's well above average. I don't want readers to agree with the characters in The Walkabout Scribe or imagine that I do, but I can guarantee them that it's a well written, lively, thought-provoking Christian romance. I don't think anyone who wants a Christian romance will be sorry if they buy this one. And I find myself wanting to read the rest of the series, to see what Penrod has in mind for her characters. As regular readers know, that's very far from my usual reaction to romance novels, even good ones. This writer should go far.