I really enjoyed Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s novel Madeleine is Sleeping, a lyrical and dreamy book that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. When I read that Bynam recently published a new book, I was interested. When I found out that its main character is a teacher, I was in.
Ms. Hempel Chronicles is really a collection of eight short stories about Beatrice Hempel, a woman in her late twenties who teaches English (and sometimes social studies) to seventh graders. Each story could certainly stand on its own—completely perfect as its own little slice of life. (In fact, six of the eight stories originally appeared in various literary magazines over the past ten years.) Taken together, they form a wonderful mosaic.
Most of the stories cover the years that Ms. Hempel spends as a teacher, capturing the energy of seventh-grade students, her doubts about herself as a teacher, her engagement to a young man she first knew vaguely back when they were in school, her relationships with other members of the staff. They also, though, take frequent glances back to Beatrice’s childhood—and especially to her connection with her father.
One story in the collection, “Creep,” breaks significantly from the others in order to tell about a teen-aged Beatrice who listens to punk rock on a late-night radio show and carries on telephone conversations with a strange older caller. Another, “Satellite,” finds Beatrice visiting her young sister and their widowed mother and discovering things about both women that she never before imagined. In the collection’s final story, “Bump,” Ms. Hempel, who has now left the teaching profession, encounters one of her former students on the street; in the conversation that follows, she learns as much about herself as she does about the young woman.
This quiet, insightful collection doesn’t disappoint!
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