House of Steps: Adventures of a Southerner Removed to Kansas

In a breezy manner, Blackmarr describes her move from a remote cabin in southern Georgia (the setting of her first memoir, Going to Ground) to a ramshackle home near Lawrence, Kans. From the vantage point of this house with stacked rooms connected by an endless series of steps, Blackmarr observes the ebb and flow of rural Kansas life in a series of essays. Throughout her descriptions of her conflicts with wasps in the attic, her explorations in surrounding fields and her encounters with an assortment of Kansans, Blackmarr's sentences often sparkle. Describing ""The Girl Who Could Talk to Trees,"" she writes: ""When she was a girl, an Oklahoma woman I know was best friends with an old sycamore in her back pasture. She ran to it when she was hurt or sad and sat under it and cried and told it her troubles, she said, and it sang to her and told her its secrets."" While Blackmarr's associative leaps are often intriguing, and her well-crafted sentences hold the promise of deeper meaning, she rarely mines her observations for true revelation. Rather, the writing tends to float from moment to moment, like dust on the Kansas wind. Occasionally, this airy style settles on its mark. An essay titled ""Magic"" neatly describes how the sacred world reveals itself in simple, material things. ""Origami Ducks"" captures in four concise pages the rituals of Thanksgiving and of giving thanks. More insight and less flutter would have been welcome, however. (July)