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CLAIRE CONSIDERS Hotel Impala by Pat Sears
CLAIRE CONSIDERS Hotel Impala by Pat Sears
Hotel Impala (Twisted Road Publications 2024) by Pat Spears is a singularly powerful, heart-stopping novel of resiliency and survival—and love. Part coming-of-age and part modern family saga, Hotel Impala tells a poignant, intense story written with the realism of a memoir, though it is fictional. The love that drives the story involves two sisters, a husband and wife, and a mother and her children.
The problem in the family is that the mother/wife, Leah, is severely mentally ill. The family lacks the financial resources to get her proper help. The chaos created by her illness builds suspense, conflict, and crisis. There are edge-of-your-seat moments of life and death when the two daughters confront evils they are too young and vulnerable to cope with—and their mother is too delusional to help them.
Living with someone with that degree of mental illness creates a maelstrom of not just physical peril, but emotional turmoil for the children and the husband. All that is captured in a haunting, sensitive way; and yet, despite the ravages of Leah’s mental illness and her vicious downward spiral, there are moments of sheer joy in the book. (Wait for the scene where Leah and her daughters dance with sheer abandon.) The love within the family, the friendships that survive ordeals, the faithfulness of Leah’s sister, and the random acts of kindness by strangers create an uplifting quality to the novel.
Besides the kindnesses of strangers, a concerned female police officer and her compassionate wife, a veterinarian, weave in and out of the story. They become essential as the plot moves forward. They become the only real safety net the two daughters have.
Leah’s mental illness is never given a name but appears to be schizophrenia or manic-depressive. She hallucinates, she has bursts of mania often followed by unexplainable rage, she falls into pits of deep despair. Her expensive prescription drugs help even as they place an undue financial burden on the family. When Leah takes her meds, she can work at a job and care for her children. But, like many mentally ill patients, she won’t stay on the meds. As her older daughter observes: “Everything about Mom, even at her best, made it hard to know what was to come.”
In a telling exchange, when asked what it was like inside her head, Leah answers “that explaining her illness was like explaining a bark without ever having seen a dog.”
The hapless but sympathetic husband barely makes a living working for his brother-in-law as an auto mechanic. In one passage, his behavior is described as being like “a prisoner whose guard had the authority to shoot him without cause.” He, like Leah’s daughters, is committed to hiding his wife’s condition to protect her and keep her at home. He fears losing his daughters to social services and foster care if the true extent of Leah’s mental illness becomes known. As it turns out, keeping Leah’s mental illness hidden might not have been the best decision. Nonetheless, it is a choice motivated by love.
The two daughters are the heart and soul of the novel. Grace is only twelve when the story starts and, six years later as the story concludes, is college-age. Even at her young age, she is always driven to care for her mother, promising her mom to never abandon her. At the same time, Grace is equally driven to protect her younger sister, Zoey, who is too young to fend for herself in any meaningful way.
Grace not only holds the story together, she holds her dysfunctional family together—at least for a while. To Grace fall tasks like washing her mother’s urine-soaked bedclothes and acting as Zoey’s de facto mother and Leah’s caregiver. Despite the erratic nature of Grace’s public schooling, she excels academically and hopes to win a college scholarship. She is also athletic, and her physical strength will serve her well when she, her mom, and Zoey face violence on the streets.
When Leah’s actions cast her and her two daughters out in the world with only the family’s ancient Impala car to sleep in, the father loses track of them. Grace can’t save them from the horrors and dangers of being homeless. Yet, Grace and Zoey discover they have a certain cunning, driven largely by hunger and fear. They are compelled into rash, sometimes illegal acts. Any ethical concerns are overridden by the sheer necessity of survival.
Leah’s descent into a deepening spiral of mental illness might destroy them all. She leads them to a hotel filled with drugs, enslaved and underage hookers, and a pimp plying Zoey with chocolate as she sits on his lap. Seeing clearly how Zoey’s life is endangered by this pimp, Grace must make a desperate choice if she and Zoey are to survive.
The story is strong, but the high quality of the writing makes it even stronger. The empathy author Pat Spears shows her characters adds to its many strengths. Our society’s failure to help provide better for the homeless and the mentally ill and the need to improve upon these failures is a theme carefully and subtly infused through the plot. Pat Spears is too fine an author to hit readers over the head with her message, but Leah, Grace, and Zoey will lead readers to understand that societal need. All in all, this is a stellar book, wonderfully crafted with a story that needs to be told.
