Coffee House Press

256 pages, $15.95

Reviewed by Michael Peck

Fairy tales are the Legos of art. From Mother Goose in 1695 to Pan’s Labyrinth, they uncork latent desires and dreams left otherwise bottled. Very much in that vein, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky sits at the crossroads of Gen X frustration and childlike wonder. “There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary,” Dan Beachy-Quick’s narrator says, “but like the equator, it is an imaginary line — one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations.” With Purest Sky Beachy-Quick crosses and re-crosses that demarcation, then implodes it.

The protagonist of Purest Sky, Daniel, is in the process of uncovering a fairy tale volume, Wonders and Tales, a tome his eccentric father forbade him from perusing as a child. That volume, Daniel believes, holds the key to his father’s journey to the Galapagos Islands in search of an occulted scroll of songs and the hardships meted on Daniel ever since. Weaving in his doomed relationship with Lydia, a woman who chooses physics over love, and remembrances of his entire family’s demise, Beachy-Quick rifts the world neatly in two.  Continue reading →