Mona Rae Miracle's Wesley's Gift
a book review by celia miles

Mona Rae Miracle’s Wesley’s Gift introduces a man guaranteed to remain in your fictional world consciousness. It’s an added pleasure for local readers that Wesley lives in and thus much of the novel is set in the Montford section. On the surface, Wesley may seem the average guy: When the novel opens he’s happily (he thinks) married to a wife of oriental extraction, satisfied with his twin sons’ progress at university, disgruntled and contentious with his son-in-law, content with his management job at a local electronics store. But a closer look reveals a man with more than twenty cats (his “boys and girls”) living in his basement, a man with a plan he sees go awry, a man with much to learn about surviving marriage, parenting, and police suspicion. “Unique” is a much-too- much bandied about word, but it fits Wesley Davis. Of course, his world shifts drastically. Flashbacks to Wesley’s youth and army years reveal how he came to be the man he is; now after some years in Asheville, he is confronted suddenly with plenty of problems.

The plot intrigues and the tone of the novel quickly engages the reader; with memorable and exquisite phrasing, Miracle delineates Wesley’s trip from child to quasi-adult–to fully realized (yet still growing) adult. As a reader whose favorite domestic creatures are not cats, I had to overcome a certain prejudice: how does a man get to the point of loving generously such a mass of felines, each so individual? Trust me, you’ll accept Wesley’s eccentricity and even revel in the descriptions of various cat antics. The story itself, with its spirited dialogue (was there ever such an erudite family with such riveting dinner conversation?), its humor and irony, is complemented and complimented by Miracle’s style. The perfect mesh of style and story creates an inimitable novel. We end up rooting for Wesley, understanding the man he is, dismayed about his present and caring about his future. He’s become family...we want the saga to continue.

Born in Kentucky and having lived in seven states, Mona Rae Miracle has called Western North Carolina home for fourteen years. She knows the area about which she writes, and, in addition to extensive study of cat lore and oriental culture (Wesley is a karate expert and an oriental aficionado) she visited China. Thus Wesley’s Gift brims with an authentic voice. Miracle is co-author with her mother of My Sister Marilyn (Algonquin), a biography of Marilyn Monroe, and is the author of a collection of short stories, Nuclear People.

Wesley’s Gift (ISBN 0-7414-1564-X) is available from buybooksontheweb.com or amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com.