Strange Piece of Paradise: Terri Jentz's Unique Investigation
Written: Mar 21 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: I've never read anything like it; Jentz has an articulate, captivating voice.
Cons: Possibly a bit repetitive, but I was so engrossed that I hardly noticed.
The Bottom Line: This was my favorite non-fiction reading experience of 2006, and I actually read it twice within a twelve-month period. I highly recommend it.
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| kchowell's Full Review: Terri Jentz - Strange Piece of Paradise |
It’s a tale fit for a cold, dark night around a campfire… a man with an axe descends on an isolated tent, attacking the occupants, and leaving them badly wounded and barely able to seek help. Except that for Terri Jentz, it’s her real-life camping experience. In the summer of 1977, Jentz and a college friend were camping in Oregon when their tent was run over by an unidentified man in a truck, who then attacked both young women with an axe. Both were horrifically injured, but recovered. Their attacker was never arrested, and the women moved on with their lives. However, Jentz never fully moved on, and eventually she returned to Oregon to gain more perspective on the event that reshaped her life. In Strange Piece of Paradise, Jentz documents her research, her discoveries, and her surprise at gaining an appreciation of how many people knew of, and were profoundly affected by, this defining event in her life.
I first heard of Strange Piece of Paradise on through an NPR interview with Terri Jentz last July, aired just as her book was published. I’m not normally a reader of True Crime, but I was immediately interested in this book. I was yet another person with no tangible, actual link to Jentz, but who vividly recalled this event and very much wanted to learn more.
In the summer of 1977, Jentz’s story was much discussed in the Howell household. Our family was fond of camping and did so frequently. One of the people who often joined us was my mother’s cousin, who was a single woman living in Bend, Oregon, not very far from where Jentz was attacked. I have lingering memories of that summer; my mother and her cousin carried on many hushed conversations, attempting to change the plans for our extended summer camping excursions while trying to shield me from the details that I was most likely too young to hear. But I picked up the basics. Women camping alone had been attacked in Oregon while riding their bicycles cross-country, and we would no longer be doing any camping that didn’t include at least one adult male. That rule stayed in place for the remainder of my childhood, and hearing Jentz’s interview brought those recollections right back.
I found Strange Piece of Paradise to be a completely engrossing book; I’ve read through it twice since purchasing it last summer. Jentz’s writing style is a bit journalistic, but the component of her writing style that I find most compelling is its simple, yet striking visual nature. Whether what I envisioned was an accurate representation I cannot know, but as I read the book, I had no difficulty immersing myself in the landscape that Jentz described. Early in the book, Jentz revisits Oregon, and describes the landscape that she bicycled through in the days preceding the attack:
Our car climbed through a tunnel of bright green, heading up Highway 242 to McKenzie Pass, and with each sharp turn I marveled that I had once hauled my own body and thirty pounds of gear against this much gravity.
It was gratifying, in a queer way, to have the remembered imagery of the road now sharpen into a tight focus outside the window. I knew that as we drove, the humid green rain forest would dissolve into a cool, treeless tundra of black lava, and as we descended, the tundra would dissolve into a hot, dry desert. I knew if I followed this road deeper into the desert I would end up in Cline Falls. And I knew that that vaguely remembered place would suddenly become real again, and I would breathe in its molecules, and the memory of that night would rush back, fresh and alive. This landscape would conjure that memory, would pierce to the core of the experience buried beneath the calcified strata of so many tellings of the story.
The book picks up momentum when Jentz revisits the small Oregon town where she was attacked, and discovers that though no one was ever arrested for the crime, there is a single suspect that many of the townspeople felt was the guilty party. As Jentz meets with more individuals and conducts her own personal research into her attack, she gains insight into just how many people were affected by, and have opinions about, this act of violence that occurred so long before.
I obviously very much enjoyed this book, and in part, my second reading was to gauge whether my own personal perspective on the crime itself was influencing my opinion. I will say this… I’ve read reviews of this book that found it to be repetitive. I will acknowledge that it is repetitive, but for me personally, I found the repetition to feel organic within the context of the book, and it did not detract from my enjoyment.
Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise was my favorite non-fiction reading experience of 2006.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
kchowell
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Location: Surrounded by books somewhere in Texas
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About Me:
I have a toddler and an infant. I'm too sleep-deprived to write much of anything.
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