by Liza Ward
Henry Holt and Co., 2004
ISBN: 0805075984

Reviewed by Jeannetta Drueke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

If you go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries or Lincoln City Libraries to look for books on the 1957-1958 killing spree by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, chances are that every single one will be checked out or missing. The librarians will tell you that the books have been stolen and replaced many times. Their loss is evidence of a continuing fascination with the events. The question of who killed eleven people that winter was never much of a mystery. Outside Valentine is a fictionalized retelling of the old story of Starkweather and Fugate.

It also tells new stories about people affected by the events. At the center of each story is a mystery. The novel offers three first person narratives in which fact and fiction are blended. The first fictional narrative, dated 1991, is by Lowell Bowman, the son of the wealthy Lincoln couple who were the ninth and tenth victims. Thirty-three years after his parents’ murder, Lowell is a 45-year-old dealer in antiquities, a reticent and distant figure to his wife and family. He has just received notice of nonpayment on a safety deposit box. His wife insists that he retrieve the box and open it. He refuses but cannot say why. The contents of the box and the reasons for his refusal to open it are the mysteries at the center of his story.

The second narrative, which is dated 1959-1963, is by a young girl nicknamed Puggy. When Puggy moves to Lincoln, she becomes obsessed with the killings and with Lowell, who has moved back to his murdered parents’ home. She plays detective to investigate two mysteries: how Lowell survived the loss of his parents and why Starkweather and Fugate killed so many people.

The third narrative, dated 1957-1976, is by Caril Ann Fugate. The extent of her own complicity in the crimes is Fugate’s mystery. Two of the three narrators recall the end of the killing spree as it happened in real life—on the highway near Douglas, WY. In Fugate’s narrative, they never make it to the Wyoming border. They are captured hiding in a barn outside Valentine, NE. This is a story about the ways in which terrible events affect people and the ways in which people come to terms with terrible events.

The author, Liza Ward, is the granddaughter of Clara and C. Lauer Ward, the Lincoln couple killed by Starkweather and Fugate.

by Ted Kooser, Copper Canyon Press, 2004
ISBN: 1-55659-201-9

Reviewed by David Bristow, Nebraska Life Magazine

Ted Kooser is one of Nebraska’s best poets, living proof that poetry does not have to be obscure and difficult to avoid being ordinary and clichéd. As a poet should, he says more in a few clipped lines than most writers do in pages of dense prose. Kooser mostly writes about small subjects, little corners of life such as a motorcyclist at a stoplight, a screech owl “no bigger than a heart,” a woman walking slowly toward the examining room at a cancer clinic, or grasshoppers that are “exactly the size / of the pencil stub my grandfather kept / to mark off the days since rain.”

He describes people and events in a startlingly fresh manner, but never gives the impression of literary posturing or showing off—or even of working very hard (good writing seems effortless). He describes, for example, a group of china painters and their “clouds of loose, lush roses, / narcissus, pansies, columbine,” painted on pots, teacups and saucers “spread like a garden / on the white lace Sunday cloth, / as if their souls were bees / and the world had been nothing but flowers.”

In Kooser’s hands, the commonplace ceases to be ordinary. The sense one gets from these fifty-nine poems is that of a person who appreciates deeply the brevity and value of life—not in some large, abstract sense, but within daily activities—and who is therefore determined to let none of it escape his attention.

Ed. Note: See page 1 for related story on Ted Kooser’s Pulitzer Prize for this book. For more information, see <www.Pulitzer.org>.