A Novel That Proves Anyone Can Be a Published Author

Dream With Little Angels - Michael Hiebert

Alvin, Alabama, is the only home eleven-year-old Abe Teal has ever known. His mother, Leah, is a second-generation town cop who’s gotten her life back on track after getting pregnant at 17 with Abe’s sister Carry. Alvin’s so tiny that the high school is in the next town, but it isn’t too small for murder… When one of Carry’s classmates disappears, Abe’s mother is haunted by memories of the death of another teenaged girl twelve years ago. Her first case as the town’s new detective remains unsolved. Now that not one but two young girls have disappeared again, Mother Teal finds herself driven – and extremely worried about her own daughter, who has only recently entered “the difficult years.” Meanwhile, Abe and his BFF Dewey are convinced that the new neighbor across the street from the Teal home is up to no good – maybe he’s even the killer.

Abe Teal is about to get a hands-on education in the sort of goings-on that make small southern towns so strange.

Dream With Little Angels is the first novel from author Michael Hiebert, whose biography says he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Why a Canadian author would choose to set a novel in a small town more than two thousand miles away as the crow flies is a mystery. It’s certainly more of a mystery than this novel, since Hiebert only populates his novel with three potential villains, two of which are clearly red herrings – this reader figured out the killer’s identity the second time s/he was mentioned.

While first-time authors are often instructed to “write what you know,” that’s advice this author decided to ignore. Instead, he chose to cobble together a coming-of-age southern Gothic murder mystery. Doing so was probably a mistake: Hiebert’s ignorance of the cultural and physical landscape is a constant irritant to a reader who has any familiarity at all with either. In addition, his attempts to capture southern dialect are almost laughable, consisting only of dropping the letter G from gerunds and sprinkling every speaker’s words with double negatives and grammatical errors. And naming a river in Alabama the “Anikawa”? Surely you jest – that’s more reminiscent of Snohomish than Coushatta.

In addition, the novel suffers greatly from ongoing continuity problems. The prologue places the first murder (twelve years ago) in 1975, yet a character speaks of something that happened twelve years ago as having happened in “eighty-one.” Anachronistically, however, Leah Teal carries a cell phone (or sometimes a “car phone”). There’s plenty of puzzlement to go around: for instance, twelve years ago when Leah Teal was about 19 years old, she was promoted to detective – quite a feather in her young cap. And although the Teals (occasionally) attend a Baptist church, it has a Catholic crucifix above the altar and Mama Teal wears a necklace with “the Blessed Virgin” on a chain. But what can you expect from writing like this opening paragraph?

Spanish moss... on the ROOTS?

“The grass is tall, painted gold by the setting autumn sun. Soft wind blows through the tips as it slopes up a small hill. Near the top of the hill, the blades shorted, finally breaking to dirt upon which stands a willow. Its roots, twisted with Spanish moss, split and dig into the loam like fingers. The splintery muscles of one gnarled arm bulge high above the ground…”

I’m surprised prose like that hasn’t shown up on the Bulwer-Lytton nominees!

Hiebert mightily strives to extol the virtues of racial harmony, as Abe’s mother refuses to suffer any racist sentiment from her young son -- even though the town’s “Mexican” visitors and a Japanese immigrant family are rude, stereotypical caricatures. In all, we’re left with a poorly-written novel that lacks any sense of place, a pre-teen boy written in a part unsuited even to his seventeen-year-old sibling, and a plot that jumps around in time more than Scott Bakula in “Quantum Leap.” Do yourself a favor and give Dream with Little Angels a pass.

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