The Girl and the Deer in the Canyon
The book is a portrait of a specific geographic region of California known as the Inland Empire. This spot is brought to life with first-person narration: "I shined the flashlight into her face and almost passed out. Her eyes. I put my fingers on her neck. Nothing...The deer was making terrible noises from the brush. It had managed to crawl a ways...sage and brittlebush smelled peppery. The blood left her with no sound." This is visceral imagery painting the aftermath of a collision between a VW Beetle and a deer. The brutal and lonely scene is made tragic with revelation that thousands of cars flying by on the toll road above could pass the ravine without ever knowing the collision had occurred.
The Santa Ana Winds
The simplest imagery becomes especially effective in conveying the power of the unseen forces of nature. "The eucalyptus trees had white bark trunks, like giant bones, and the long silver branches blew sideways like the hair of old women. The wind gusted hard every few minutes, and the windows inside our house hummed. We slept in our boots...When the next big gust came blowing down the canyon, she crossed her arms over my chest." The Santa Ana Winds have become notorious well beyond the Inland Empire in the 21st century due to their devastating impact upon the intensifying wildfires in the region. The winds have long been legendary to the residents for centuries and this description efficiently explains why.
2020
The narrator flat out asserts that as far as individual years go, 2020 sucked. Imagery is immediately employed to illustrates why. "Dante hadn't been to school for weeks. He couldn't even go to Manny's to play baseball in their yard. The baseball diamond was closed, the park was closed, everything had yellow police tape around it. Every day Dante finished his homework in two hours. He talked to Manny on the phone." The images of empty baseball fields, vacant parks, and police tape could lead to a number of different conclusions in any other year. Kids actually using their phones to talk to their friends effectively nails the scene as a description of the summer of Covid.
Inside Number 12
The conventional use of imagery for character description reaches its height through the observational skills of a housekeeper at a spa. For instance, the inhabitant of room number 12 is a woman sporting a mane that "was reddish-gold. Thin and long as silk fringe against her neck. Her cheeks, turned away, splashed with freckles like a gathering of gold flakes. A tattoo on her shoulder blade. A striped bee, smiling, and the top two legs held up, wearing boxing gloves, On the other shoulder, a girl rabbit wearing a red dress, her tall ears cocked forward, as if listening." The housekeeper is a fount of information on what such visitors to a spa are like behind closed doors. Imagery for her eyes only inside number 12 include lipstick and mascara-smudged tissues and dirty diapers in the wastebasket.
