Karen

“I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden. But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of this soil as well.”

This wonderful book is about the garden in Ft. Collins, CO that Camille T. Dungy, a professor at Colorado State University, cultivates. It is also about the history of nature writing in the US, and the historical relationship Black people have with land and gardens here. It's about ecology, understanding ecosystems and trying to work with them instead of dominating the landscape. There is a lot in this book that is not specifically about gardens, but bears directly on the garden that Dr. Dungy is building. I loved it and I think it's an important contribution to the nature writing genre.

I was disappointed. Characters were either good guys or bad guys (or, in the case of women, all good, strong, highly competent, independent–fighting off rapists while becoming successful businesswomen). Hints of a mystery pop up here and there, then fade away for another 150 pages, until the mystery is solved anticlimactically near the end of the book. No attempt is made to give the characters the sensibilities of their own time–Philip, as the prior of the monastery, probably comes the closest, simply because being the prior of a monastery is a rather medieval thing to be. And at 900 pages, the book is flabby. A lot happens in that 900 pages, but not all of it is interesting or significant. I was expecting something gorgeous, like Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree (which some web sites recommend to people who liked Pillars of the Earth), a story about moral conflict and being true to oneself. Instead, I thought this book was more like a novel you'd buy at the supermarket.

A beautifully crafted story of the friendship between two young working class girls in 1950's Naples, Italy. The story is told from the perspective of Elena, the girl who is able to go to high school, and follows the progress of their lives and friendship as they grow from little girls to young women. In the process, we also get to know the inhabitants of the neighborhood where they live–their parents, their neighbors, the grocers, teachers, barkeepers, bakers and mechanics. We also get glimpses of the dark stories that the adults have from “before”–before the girls were born. Who was a Fascist, who is a Communist, where some people get the money that finances their business, who has a financial hold over whom in the neighborhood–all these things are undercurrents in the story that occasionally surface to disturb us. The depiction of the girls' friendship is anything but sentimental (it's not an easy friendship) but as a whole it's very moving. When I finished the book I was in awe. Also, I was on fire to get the next book (this is the first of a trilogy) to see how the story continues.

This is a really great teen novel, told from multiple perspectives, about the shooting of a young black man by a white man and the aftermath for the community where the shooting took place. On the face of it, it's a simple story told through the experiences of the people affected by the shooting. The author does a beautiful job of showing how the effects of the shooting ripple out from the immediate community to touch people surprisingly far away, and she creates voices for her characters that feel authentic, however likable or unlikable they may be. The result is a deep and painfully human story that doesn't offer any easy answers for the problems it depicts, but offers hope in the resilience of some of its characters.

This book was chosen for the Saint Paul Public Library's 2015 Read Brave program, a community reading/teen reading program. The Luther Seminary Book Club read and discussed it in January, and some of the participants expressed interest in attending author events in February.