Lory
These tales from an intrepid reporter's sojourn in West Africa offer much to educate, inform, and awaken human interest in the incredible suffering and courageous acts that take place in the region. The glimpse behind the scenes of a reporter's work is interesting, but the portions about Searcey's personal life were at times uncomfortable to read. With her high-powered career and an urge to save the world, it often seemed that her family was of relatively minor importance – her husband and children were ciphers to me, far less vivid than the people of her stories and even some of her coworkers. As an issue of balance, I could suggest that this thread should either have been given more space to develop, or left out entirely. Aside from that, I am grateful to have learned about some amazing people, and for Searcey's earnest efforts to bring their stories to the world.
Allende's first novel is the one that put her on the literary map, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Chilean family in turbulent historical times, written in a dreamy, fanicful style known as “magical realism”. I actually enjoyed her memoir My Invented Country more, as it revisits some of the same settings and people as the novel but with a personal (and non-fantastical) perspective.
Usually I try to choose books for my Around the World project that primarily represent one country, but this one is about the intersection between countries and cultures, linked by war, cultural dominance, and emigration. I didn't know about Korean immigrants as an underclass in Japan, and this multigenerational saga brought that history to life.
This was a fantastic, essential read. It was horrifying to learn of the cruelty exercised toward women in the name of “protection” and harrowing to read of what the author went through. Her description of her upbringing and how her own thinking changed was most fascinating. If only many more people, especially (but not limited to) men, could go through such a process.
Here's a book I've heard about for so long, but never read — the perfect pick for a Classics Club Spin, as well as a chance to take part in Brona's Australian Reading Month event, and to represent another country in my Reading Around the World project. But even without all these side benefits, the story had enough to offer in itself, and I'm glad I finally delved into it.
It was a bit different than I had expected — various blurbs and summaries I've read present the narrator, Sybylla, as bravely attempting to choose a writing career over marriage, not an easy thing for a young woman in the early twentieth century. (I suspect these blurbs may be influenced by the movie version by Jane Campion, but I haven't seen it, so I can't be sure.) In fact, the book ends with Sybylla in despair after rejecting a good offer of marriage from a man she likes, but does not love, thus apparently dooming herself to a life of peasant drudgery. Far from resolving to become a writer, she expresses contempt for her own talent and dismisses her efforts so far.
Though throughout the story there are frequent references to Sybylla's longing for an artistic life, given her time and circumstances, a “career” is never a serious option for her. The title is sufficiently ironic, without the “(?)” she wanted to add (till her publishers nixed that idea).
Sybylla was described by some readers as “a frustrating heroine,” and I could see why. Certainly she is a very frustrated young woman. Though she escapes from her poor, trodden-down family to live with her wealthier grandmother, she doesn't want to admit that this can only be a brief respite, given to her as an opportunity to make a decent match. Her longings for other things, for music, for creativity, have no outlet in the Australian bush, and only make her unhappy when she's not dreamily ignoring her actual prospects.
In this state she drifts into an engagement with a decent young man who is probably enticed by her difference from other girls, but with whom marriage would never work — a fact that she finally, painfully, has to face and to communicate with him. She is then punished for her discontent by her own mother, sent to drudge for a family even grubbier and lacking in culture than her own. She only escapes when disgust makes her physically ill.
What a bitter, woeful tale, you may think! Yes, in a way, but Sybylla's voice (a thin disguise for Franklin's own, one can't help but assume) often speaks with keen irony, a sharp bush-honed sense of humor, and a knack for observation that helped pull me through. Published when the author was barely out of her teens, the novel is rough-edged and sometimes self-indulgent. With a bit more distance, a more mature perspective, the raw emotion and painful teenage confusion of the novel might have been mitigated. But some of its power might also have been lost.
Frequently the book made me think of a darker, Australian version of Anne of Green Gables. There was the girl heroine with a taste for music and a talent for writing, brought from a life of toil to a more genteel home; there was the conflict-ridden romance; all amidst a dramatic natural setting on the edges of European immigrant civilization. But Anne never loses her home at Green Gables, and she doesn't torture Gilbert with her own confusion in quite such an extreme way, either. Anne goes to college, but also finds true love; Sybylla goes back to the cows on the home dairy farm and gives up on marriage. Their fates, in the end, diverge utterly, with Franklin's account the more realistic, if less reassuring.
Reassuringly cozy it may not be, but My Brilliant Career is a book with a unique and memorable persona, an author-heroine I will not easily forget. Against Sybylla's pessimistic predictions, her creator, at least, did indeed become a writer, leaving her mark upon the world of literature — maybe not the “brilliant career” of a teenager's dreams, but a real and impressive story of one woman's struggle to make her voice heard.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Of course I've heard of Oliver Sacks, author of many books with intriguing titles (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, Seeing Voices, etc.). But in spite of hearing that Sacks was a terrific writer about fascinating topics out of his practice as a neurologist, I managed to avoid actually reading these works for many years.
Until, while questing for something short and inspiring to read this summer, his little book Gratitude – barely even a book, just a compilation of four brief essays that originally appeared in the New York Times – caught my eye. I polished it off in an hour, was captured by the intelligent and compassionate mind that spoke there, and looked for more.
Awakenings, his second published book, was one I had heard about; I had vague impressions from when the Hollywood movie came out, with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. I haven't seen that either, but the premise of patients coming out of a decades-long pathological “sleep” sounded interesting. So I checked it out and dove in.
The edition I read in e-book form is the latest of many incarnations. A preface explains some of the transformations the book has gone through: adding footnotes, removing them, putting them back in again; going back to the original stories after further developments; weaving in further developments in neurology, science, and medicine, including chaos theory; adding notes on the stage and film incarnations of the story; and more.
It's an unwieldy mass of material, and exactly the kind of book I prefer to read in print versus the electronic version. With all the footnotes, cross-referencing, and a glossary of medical terms, it would have made it much easier to flip back and forth, and to maintain awareness of the place of the parts within the whole. If it hadn't been such a fascinating story at the core, I probably would have gotten frustrated and given up. Probably I will buy a print copy, because I want to go through it again and take it in more thoroughly.
“When is she going to get to that actual story?” you are probably asking. Yes, like Sacks, I am making you wade through a lot of prefatory and explanatory material – probably because that's how I experienced the book. Pushing all this aside, at the core are twenty case studies of individuals who went through a bizarre, little-remembered epidemic of “sleepy sickness” that erupted worldwide along with the more famous influenza epidemic in the early twentieth century. This viral disease fatally disrupted their brain activity, pushing them into states of torpor and/or of manic inability to sleep; many died, or were left permanently disabled. While some seemingly recovered, later they began to display symptoms of Parkinsonian syndrome, particularly disruptions in movement and speech.
As they became less and less able to function, often needing round-the-clock nursing care to survive, these people were placed in institutions for “hopeless” cases. To one of these institutions near New York City Oliver Sacks came as a young doctor in the 1960s, and there his work with these post-encephalitic Parkinsonian patients changed his life.
In a stroke of fate, Dr. Sacks was present at the moment when a “wonder drug” was discovered that roused these patients out of their decades-long fixation and immobility. L-DOPA, which works to elevate dopamine levels in the brain, at first seemed to promise total, almost instant recovery. People leaped out of their wheelchairs and sang and danced with joy.
But then so-called “side effects” set in, as the medical establishment likes to call unwanted or adverse drug results that are fully as much a part of the treatment as the results they are aiming for. Pulled between extremes of manic and torpid behavior, the patients felt themselves to be walking an ever-narrowing path that became a tightrope over an abyss. Different titrations and schedules were tried, and sometimes a precarious balance was reached that allowed some individuals to have a higher-functioning life for their remaining years.
When that didn't work out, though, the results were often terrible and tragic to behold. Patients who had to be taken off the drug were left in a state far worse than they had been in before. Frequently they lost the will to live, or went mad, descending into a hellish hallucinatory state. Some were quietly euthanized, mercy killings that also meant the doctors need no longer observe the results of their tampering. One has to wonder to what extent the risk of doing such damage is warranted by the desirable results that sometimes, unpredictably, come about.
Great moral questions indeed are raised by this story. For me, frequently it resembled a horror story, a Frankenstein-tale of men enchanted by the Godlike powers they can achieve through the intellect, without the deeper knowledge of what will result from their experiments. Is it right to tinker with human subjects like this? What truly is the nature of consciousness, of life and death? In our quest for a better life on earth, what harm do we do through unawareness and egotism? Is it enough to have good intentions, or should we also be striving for higher knowledge, for the wisdom that sees the whole and not just isolated, disconnected parts?
For Dr. Sacks, there are no easy answers, but as he portrays his own struggle and his own “awakening” we gain a sense of how one morally striving person has engaged with these questions. He speaks against the tendency of modern medicine towards a mechanistic view of the human being, and movingly describes his own human encounters with his patients, encounters that inspired in him an awareness of the person who lives beyond statistics, beyond symptoms, beyond paralysis and speechlessness. He is filled with wonder when he observes the strange experiences his patients are subjected to, and humbled by what they need to call up in order to face their existence day after day.
Such an attitude is one we can all strive to emulate, even if we are not physicians. We will all do harm at times, often out of the best intentions, but let us not obscure the real, living human being with our fixed, mechanistic thoughts. The call to awaken to this power and this responsibility was for me the real message of the book.
I'll certainly be reading more by Oliver Sacks; there is so much to learn from these kinds of stories, pushing us beyond our “normal,” safe ways of experiencing the world. Have you read anything by him? What is your favorite?
As I just finished Don Quixote, I had to read this book. I've only read two other books by Rushdie: his children's books Haroun and the Sea of Stories (loved) and Luka and the Fire of Life (hated). Although I enjoyed some parts of Quichotte, on the whole it did not come together for me. Rushdie's writing was a mishmash of cliches, quotations, and derivative elements, meant no doubt as parody and homage, but lacking a distinctive “music” of its own. The dissolution of the world of the novel in the end paralleled the dissolution of any caring I had developed for the characters, as the whole scenario just became sillier and more bizarre. Maybe that was the point, but it left me feeling cheated rather than exhilarated.
Along the way I thought often of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, who have played similar kinds of games with words, language, and literature, but have done it so much better. Either of them would be more deserving of the Booker Prize, in my opinion.
I read this in two parts, fair enough since it was published in two books ten years apart. I was surprised by how much the first part departed from Don Quixote's adventures to interpolate other stories from different people he meets along the way, and even a manuscript he finds (which may have been written by Cervantes himself, in a metafictional touch). The second part keeps the focus firmly upon the Don, because he has now become famous through Cervantes's novel (more metafiction), though a rival false Quixote is also abroad. His persona has hardened because of the self-consciousness this necessitates, but at least the story stays in one track throughout.
It was all very confusing and muddled, and I need to read it again to understand better what was partly obscured by my previous assumptions and ideas about one of the most famous books in the world. But I would already argue with anybody who sees Don Quixote as a benign, kindly champion of idealism and of the imagination, a notion that seems to be common. He's a coward and a fool, who can prate of great deeds but does nothing worthwhile. As such, he is probably a good representative for humanity, but the honestly self-serving Sancho is more palatable.
I appreciated this view of life in Cairo, with all its challenges, but in spite of the title did not gain much insight into the appeal of Islam for the author. I was also concerned by her plunging into marriage in a misogynistic society with little knowledge of her spouse. I hope she is really all right.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. A copy was received for review purposes from the publisher. No other compensation was received, and all opinions expressed are my own.Set in Newport, Rhode Island, across more than three centuries, The Maze at Windermere takes us through a panorama of history as seen through the eyes of five memorable characters: a washed-up tennis pro, a predatory social climber, a budding novelist, a British spymaster during the Revolution, and an orphaned Quaker girl. Their stories are told in turn through several cycles, slowly revealing the similar themes and motifs that can guide such very different lives. At the conclusion, these narratives begin to meet and merge in a quicker and less orderly alternation, coming together into a whole that closes some gaps, but leaves some still tantalizingly open.
Having been at various overlapping times a bastion of religious freedom, a commercial center, an important military base, a playground for the rich, and a breeding ground for artists, Newport is a small but fascinating location from which to explore American history and culture. Smith's command of different voices and points of view is dazzling – including writing in the voice of the young Henry James, which would seem quite daunting for any novelist. He moves seemingly without effort from one narrative to the next, writing in sometimes in first person, sometimes in third person, completely changing his tone and style while somehow retaining a sense of the underlying unity of his story. It's quite an impressive achievement.
Fortunately, Maze never descends to being a mere parlor trick or showing off the writer's verbal facility. At its heart are questions about life, the world, and our place in it that play out differently for each one of us, yet are always the same throughout the mortal journey we all share. How do we form connections that leave one another free? How do we embody our desires in a way that honors the deepest parts of ourselves, and of the other person? Some of Smith's characters grow in their progress toward self-knowledge, while others make questionable moral choices. But by means of the healing distance of fiction, all stories can contribute to our own learning.
I was first introduced to the idea of the “nine cities of Newport” through Thornton Wilder's novel Theophilus North, which remains one of my favorite novels. The Maze at Windermere will go on the shelf alongside it as another marvelous evocation not just of this particular place, but of the puzzling, mysterious, frustrating, exhilarating endeavor we call life. I hope you'll enter this maze, and maybe find a new favorite as well.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. A copy was received for review purposes from the publisher. No other compensation was received, and all opinions expressed are my own.The Bear and the Nightingale was one of my favorite books of 2017, and just shy of one year later author Katherine Arden has produced a sequel – greatly pleasing those of us who are weary of waiting years for a follow-up book. And I'm glad to say that The Girl in the Tower is a worthy successor, showing no signs of a sophomore slump. A third book is already slated for August of 2018, which will no doubt bring the trilogy to a rousing conclusion.
Girl is a tauter and leaner book than Bear, with a more streamlined plot and fewer POV switches, but still with the atmospheric Russian setting steeped in both history and folklore that so enchanted me in the first book. What was built up over many chapters is now taken for granted in this second volume, with few new elements added, but characters and themes are extended and deepened. New readers will definitely want to start with book one, and not jump into the middle of the story, as they will miss half the pleasure of entering into Arden's half-realistic, half-mythological world. (And you might want to go get that book right now before reading the rest of this review, to avoid spoilers. If you like that one, I'm sure you'll want to continue straight on to the next.)
On the run from her remote village, where she's been branded as a witch by a malicious priest, Vasya encounters her long-lost brother Sasha and sister Olya and enters into a perilous deception that brings her into a treacherous world of shifting alliances. As she journeys to Moscow, powerful but vulnerable heart of her people's land, she must try to reconcile the old powers that still speak to her with the demands and prejudices of this urban world. An explosive climax brings secrets to light and sets the stage for further journeys.
I was especially glad that Vasya got to be reunited with her siblings, who disappeared from the action somewhat suddenly in the first book. Arden fruitfully explores the tensions between them, which arise from their very different upbringings and societal expectations, as well as Vasya's struggle to express herself in a world that represses and limits female power. Her relationship with the frost demon Morozko is also developed into a poignant Beauty-and-the-Beast story arc that yet resists falling into mere stereotype. And a wonderful new character is introduced in Vasya's niece, who, it seems, will play an even more important role in the third book.
I'm definitely looking forward to that one, and glad that we won't have a terribly long wait. In the meantime, if you enjoy the intersection of historical fiction and fantasy, this is a perfect winter treat for you.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. After I read five out of the six books on the New York Times list of “Six Books to Understand Trump's Win,” I thought I might call it quits. The final book seemed to have such a dry and dull angle on the topic, and would probably be full of political-science jargon that I couldn't comprehend. What would it add to my understanding after I'd been through so many different angles already?
Well, I decided to give it a try, largely because it is a very short book (only 124 pages plus notes), and I'm glad I did. Far from being beyond my comprehension, it served as a helpful guide for this political ignoramus, explaining and defining terms and movements in a completely lucid way, while not shying away from the real-life ambiguity and uncertainty that keep politics such a tricky business.
The very term “populism,” for example, can be a slippery one, meaning slightly different things to different people at various times. But in general it can be characterized as a mindset that pits “the people” against an “elite.” This is not the same as socialism (working class vs. capitalist class), but a broader and more murky worldview. Nor is it a conservative movement. In fact, populism can exist on both the right and the left, and as the elites of both ends of the political spectrum have become more calcified, populism has drawn its support from the dissatisfied denizens of both sides. The difference, author John B. Judis argues, is that left-leaning populists simply oppose an elite, as in Bernie Sanders' campaign against the 1%. Right-wing populists add opposition to another “out” group: immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans, etc., as amply demonstrated by Trump's own campaign rhetoric.
Today, with the explosive rise of populism in the United States and Europe, we have an unprecedented situation: a movement that previously fizzled out against the stronger forces of other political parties and ideologies, now has a chance to be in a position of power. What will it do with this opportunity? It's already caused a chaotic challenge to the prevailing “neoliberal” consensus, in which impossible-to-maintain economic structures keep going as if there were no tomorrow. It often seems bitter and mean, especially when campaigning against refugees and immigrants, but it does raise important questions that are not addressed by the upholders of the status quo. I don't know where this journey is going, but I do feel glad to have more of a grasp on some of the underlying causes and trends that are affecting us all right now.
Judis didn't actually think Trump would win, not realizing that his vulgarity would be an asset in the final reckoning, rather than a liability. It would be interesting to read his views about the past year's events, and where he thinks American populism stands now.
For me, though this small book answered many questions, it raised many more. Who are “the people” anyway? And is it good to pit ourselves against an elite that, while it does embody much that is selfish and even evil, also bears the fruits of our cultural heritage: intellectual striving, art, and so on? Do we really want to drag society down to the lowest common denominator? Is there another way, a way of integration rather than opposition? When will we recognize that our enemy is ourselves?
Such questions probably seem naive and idealistic, and may not belong in a political discussion. Yet I can't help feeling that in setting up all these left-and-right, you-and-me, inside-and-outside opposites, we're missing something essential about ourselves: that the human being is not only a duality, but a trinity, and it's in the dynamic middle that our true potential lies.
So, as I come to the end of this particular journey of trying to understand, I have encountered much that is alarming and baffling, but also much that inspires me to keep asking these unanswered questions, to keep trying and searching, keep believing in a future that often seems impossible. Humankind has been through so many changes, and yet change is still hard for us to navigate. What yet-unmanifested reality is trying to speak to us through these phenomena? Each of these books has given me some piece of the puzzle, but the wholeness remains beyond my grasp. Still, I've not yet given up the quest, and am grateful for what I've gained along the way.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. I have to admit that I had a difficult time puzzling out what was metaphor, what was delusion, and what was reality, and that this made me uncomfortable. There were some indications that what certain characters described as otherworldly creatures or phenomena (e.g. ogres) had a more mundane explanation, and that the pre-conceptions of the characters determined the world they perceived. This is an interesting philosophical point, but disorienting when applied to a story, in which generally the author is performing the magic trick of making us believe in something that doesn't exist. It matters not whether that something is a dragon or a duchess or a dachshund; within the world of a story it must gain being and presence, or why bother with it?
This dis-orientation was inconsistent. There were times when it was very hard to imagine an alternative explanation for what the characters were describing, other than that they were all completely insane. And yet, if that were the case, what could be gained from entering into their fractured minds? Are we meant to reflect on our own self-delusional versions of an impenetrable reality? That's a stage on everyone's quest, but to me it cannot be the end. I believe in meaning and wholeness, and if that betrays my lack of sophistication as a reader and human being, but so be it. I'm not interested in subversion for its own sake, only when it helps to break us through to a higher level of understanding.
Though I enjoyed parts of the journey, and grew to care for some of the characters, in the end I was left frustrated and dissatisfied. Perhaps a reread will enlighten me further as to what Ishiguro might have been trying to say, but right now I'm not at all sure.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. As I read Excellent Women, the best-known work by the once-neglected, now widely praised English novelist Barbara Pym, I was reminded of another acclaimed comic novel that I read not long ago: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. On the surface, Amis's hard-drinking, buffoonish misogynist Jim Dixon may seem to have little in common with Pym's un-effusive, church-going “excellent woman,” Mildred Lathbury. But the two books shadow and reflect each other in a fascinating way.
Jim is an exercise in how uncongenial one can make a main character, while still attempting to elicit our sympathy for him. An English professor who apparently despises English literature, he goes on epic benders when he's supposed to be giving a lecture, leaves cigarette burns in the sheets when he's a houseguest, and is unable to disentangle himself from a woman he doesn't love or respect – she's marginally better than no girlfriend at all, it seems, in his “woman-as-object” universe. Some readers find him so awful, he's adorable; I just found him awful.
Mildred, meanwhile, is about as self-effacing as a character presented in the first person can be. Set in postwar London, the book opens with new neighbors moving in upstairs, and as Mildred becomes a witness to and sometimes participant in their disordered lives, so much more glamorous and seedy than her own, we find us asking ourselves what she really thinks about all this. Other characters in the novel are always eager to tell her what she should be feeling, seeming to find the sensibilities of an unmarried woman over a certain age to be public property; she quietly expresses annoyance at this, while baffling us with sideways expressions and half-uncoverings of her true self.
In both books, though, the opposite sex is a total mystery. The masculine Jim approaches this riddle with bluff and bravado, the feminine Mildred with puzzlement and a sort of understated obstinacy. Yet both stories left me with a sense of melancholy, a sadness that human beings must so often miss and misunderstand one another. This was in many ways the source of the comedy, as in a screwball plot where everyone is running in circles after each other, and yet there was an undercurrent of tragedy in spite of the guardedly optimistic endings. Can either Jim or Mildred ever find a satisfying relationship that gets beyond the surface differences which separate us? I'm not so sure.
Interestingly enough, the two authors had a friend in common – the poet Philip Larkin, who both provided the model for Amis's antihero, and had a warm admiration for Ms. Pym, whom he called one of the most criminally underrated writers of our time. This connection seems most suitable, as she helped me to see poor old Jim in a different light, and maybe even forgive some of his excesses. I'll certainly be seeking out more of her novels, continuing to ponder her subtle perspective on men, women, the gulf between us, and the fragile bridges that we might try to build.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Though McKillip's early novel has become a classic of fairy-tale-flavored fiction, a favorite genre of mine, I've somehow managed not to read it until now. I'm so glad I finally did, thanks to a new, beautifully designed paperback and e-book edition from Tachyon books. This is a lyrical, thoughtful exploration of love and power, pride and forgiveness and freedom, rich with evocative imagery and resonant language. I've already read it twice in a row, and I'm sure I'll be returning to it again.
Americanah is book that was mentioned several times when I asked for contemporary fiction recommendations. This is a journey, away from and back to the heroine's country of Nigeria and her childhood love, along the way sharing with us her brutal, enlightening, comical, destructive, empowering experiences. An annoyingly didactic tinge crept in at times, but Adichie's beautiful writing and powerful sense of place pulled me along.
Looking at books that were written about or in Switzerland (including Frankenstein, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, A Farewell to Arms, and Tender Is the Night, along with a good many spy novels and noir fiction), longtime resident Padraig Rooney gives us a dark-edged view of a land that is more complex than its popular image would suggest. Rooney makes no secret of his prejudices and blind spots (the Chalet school books and Rudolf Steiner are rudely dismissed, while Heidi is barely mentioned) and blithely admits to not bothering to finish books or visit museums when he doesn't feel like it. His use of outdated pop culture references made me roll my eyes at times as well, and I wouldn't take his opinions for gospel. Still, I enjoyed this quick slalom through a certain subsection of Swiss literature and history, particularly the seamier side.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. The premise sounded irresistible to me, yet even though The Essex Serpent had all the ingredients for a book I ought to love, I had a hard time warming to it somehow. Perhaps this was partly because the constant switching of perspective also made it hard for me to settle into the story. Certain threads and relationships were not developed as much as I would have liked, as the zigzagging plot kept dropping one to pick up another. I remained oddly distant from the characters, and sometimes had the sensation of being told rather than shown about their characteristics; they felt intellectually constructed out of era-appropriate ingredients (paleontology, anatomy, consumption, sexual repression, etc.) rather than spontaneously living.
Unsettling is definitely what The Essex Serpent is all about, though, so perhaps this is an appropriate effect. And at the end, suddenly, the characters came together in a way that surprised me, bringing them to life more vividly. If the book had gone on from there for another hundred pages or so, I might have felt more connected to it.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Ever since Betsy Bird put this long-lost Newbery honor book from 1934 at the top of her list of underrated middle grade books I've been dying to read it. And lo and behold, sometimes dreams do come true! Three years later, it's back in print thanks to the fantastic folks at Paul Dry Books, with an afterword by Betsy herself.
Set in ancient Crete, The Winged Girl of Knossos starts out with a thrilling scene in which our heroine, Inas, goes deep sea diving for sponges – just for the fun of it, not because she needs the work – and the action doesn't let up from there. She also takes a dramatic turn in the bull ring, helps out her friend Princess Ariadne who has inexplicably fallen for one of the boorish Greek captives, and comes to the rescue of her father Daedalus who is causing a stir with his outlandish inventions (including hang-glider-style wings that permit humans to soar with the birds). Danger abounds, but so do moments of beauty, artistry, and lyricism.
Overall, this is a rediscovery that no fan of children's historical fiction, adventure stories for young readers, or Newbery-award books should miss.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Kassi Underwood, May Cause Love (2017)
At the age of nineteen, Kassi Underwood had an abortion. She was a directionless college student, drinking too much and pursuing a road-to-nowhere relationship with a drug dealer in the absence of her childhood sweetheart from her Kentucky home town. Abortion seemed the only logical, the only compassionate option, yet she could not let go and move on. Her choice continued to haunt her, especially after her ex had a child with another woman. How could she find peace, go through the grief and pain that the world told her she either shouldn't be feeling or was feeling for the wrong reasons? How would she get through to the other side without losing her mind?
One problem was that it was so difficult to find other women who were willing to talk honestly about their abortion experiences, even though according to statistics they should be walking around everywhere. Kassi desperately needed to feel she was not alone, that she was not the only person who had terminated a pregnancy without wanting to either subsume herself in religious shame or toe a feminist party line. But those voices seemed to be silent, including her own.
I was sorry about the abortion, not necessarily because I'd made the wrong choice, but because other voices had been so loud that I hadn't been able to hear my own. Nineteen years of listening to the schizophrenic collective conscience about girls and pregnant people and motherhood and money had filled my head with opinions that did not belong to me.
Why was I here? Because I had quit running. Because you can run from grief and sorrow and responsibility and rush headlong into a new relationship or a new city or stalwart friends who will love you while you run, but if you want happiness, if you want love, if you want to become the figure you see in the distance, the future self calling your name, if you want to live the life you chose, one day you will have to stand still and hold all of it – scorched heart and broken brain, bones and skeletons of the past, the black wave of grief and the lucid thoughts of forgiveness.
Thanks to the publisher and to TLC Book Tours for the opportunity to review May Cause Love. For more stops on the tour, click here.
For information from the publisher, HarperCollins, click here.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. I was struck that although the jacket copy emphasizes this as a novel that shows the devastating effects of war on children, the destruction of the family comes about not truly through war (something else could have caused a similar trauma), but through the selfishness and narcissism of the children's mother. Evacuation isn't even necessary for them to be separated, as she shuffles them off to boarding school as fast as possible so she can pursue her own proclivities. Her need of them as ornaments and reinforcements for her own self-image is sharply portrayed, forming a devastating, disturbing portrait of a woman utterly without self-knowledge or caring for how her actions affect those around her.
Members of a privileged class, the children remain somewhat elevated above the worst deprivations of wartime, and certainly far above what children on the continent were suffering. I found them quite unlikeably spoiled at times, as they threw fits about trivial things like having to sleep in a different room than they were used to or having to share a desk with another child in an overcrowded school. But such “poor little rich child” problems were ultimately signs of their deeply insecure, unstable foundation, their lack of real mother-love.
It's a sad, bitter story, one I wish had ended differently – not necessarily in a happier way, but in stronger and less fragmented way. The characters still haunt me even as I'm frustrated by how they dissolve into sketchiness, and I'm glad to have read this book even if I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. It casts light on a side of Streatfeild's writing life of which I would otherwise have remained ignorant, and which brings an interesting dimension to her sometimes one-sided tendencies.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Closely following The Fellowship, a splendid group biography of the Inklings, comes this new collection, a fine companion volume for those looking for more on CS Lewis and company. A student society founded in 1982 with the aim of grappling with “the rich relationship between Christianity, culture, and the imagination, including literature,” the Oxford CS Lewis Society has had hundreds of talks given under its aegis throughout the years. What a delight it must have been for an Oxford student sympathetic to these themes to be able to belong to this club and participate in its activities.
Much of the material produced for the club has never been published, but in this volume we are privileged to read a pithy but very rich and deep selection, encompassing essays on philosophy, theology, and literature in the first half, and memoirs of the Inklings in general and CS Lewis in particular in the second. Some highlights for me included Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, giving an appreciative reassessment of one of Lewis's less popular novels, That Hideous Strength; Peter Bide's memory of how he married Lewis and Joy Davidman, setting straight the record which has been rather sentimentalized and distorted by fictional treatments; and Owen Barfield himself, who outlived almost all his fellow Inklings, brilliantly analyzing his relationship with Lewis and teasing apart their intertwined opinions.
Each reader, however, will find his or her particular points of interest, whether in studies of the esoteric fiction of Charles Williams, considerations of the relationship of WH Auden to the Inklings, or personal reminiscences of Lewis and his family and friends. Framed by a Foreword and Afterword that put them into the context of the origin and history of the Society, these diverse contributions give a welcome taste of the many ways there are of encountering and understanding Lewis and the Inklings.