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A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce

Jan14

“The story of Rumplestiltskin is what folklorists call a ‘Name of the Helper’ tale, in which a character must defeat a mysterious helper by discovering his True Name (or Secret Name or Hidden Name). . . I’ve also found it fascinating that in Rumplestiltskin, the heroine is known only as ‘the miller’s daughter’ or ‘the queen,’ while Rumplestiltskin’s name becomes a magical talisman–an object of power in and of itself. In a story about the potency of names, the heroine is anonymous.” –From the Author’s Note at the end of the book.

Author Elizabeth Bunce gives the heroine in this retold fairy tale a name, Charlotte Miller. The other characters also have names: Rumplestiltskin becomes Jack Spinner, but of course, that’s only his everyday name. The revelation of his True Name awaits the end of the story. Charlotte’s love, and later husband, is Randall Woodstone, a stable and dependable pillar of love and faith in an otherwise precarious and unreliable world. Names and naming of both people and places in this book are very important. Note to readers: watch the names.

The setting, too, is a key to the entire story. Again, in her author’s note Bunce tells us that Charlotte’s village is not based on any real place. However, it is some combination of late eighteenth century England and New England and influenced by the woolen industries of those countries as the Industrial Revolution changes manufacturing from a village-based, home-worker centered system to a city-based, factory system. Charlotte’s world is a pagan, superstitious place, with only a veneer of Christianity symbolized by crisis prayers and an occasional blessing on official occasions. Curses and hexes and wards and magic circles are the powers that be in this setting, and Charlotte must learn to fight the shadows and the curses of the past with her own inner courage and the help of friendly villagers and family.

A Curse Dark As Gold paints a picture in story of the essential hopelessness and darkness of paganism without ever presenting much of an alternative. Charlotte finds the ability within herself to love and forgive and break the curse of the past, but I’m not sure where that power comes from. I found the entire story to be both fascinating and terrifying. If all I have to depend upon is my own inner strength, or even the kindness of friends and strangers, it’s not enough. Although some whispered and desperate prayers and some Christian symbolism underlie the final denouement of the story, I’m glad I don’t live in Charlotte’s neck of the woods. It’s a scary place.

Blogger reviews:
Miss Erin: “I wonder how many times the word “gold” or “golden” appears in the book!? Golden hair and golden fields and Gold Valley and gold gold gold . . . it was obviously a major theme in it. I love themes in books.”

The Puck in the Midden: “I loved the way that marriage is presented as imperfect, as flawed, as not the happy ending, but instead as merely the middle of someone’s story. I loved the strong female characters, Charlotte and Rosie both, and I loved their flaws. I loved the very creepy ghost story.”

Melissa at Book Nut: “It took me a while — 50 pages or so — to get the rhythm of the book, to understand what Bunce was trying to do with Charlotte (she grated on me at the beginning, but eventually I understood, and liked, her as a character), and to really enjoy what I was reading. But once I got past that point, life got put on hold.”

Secret Keeper by Mitali Perkins

Jan13

I had been saving the ARC I received of Mitali Perkins’ new YA novel Secret Keeper for a treat and because I thought that a review closer to the time of publication would be more helpful to readers. In December I succumbed, and read it.

Such a powerful story! It’s something of a romance, and I so wanted everything to turn out just like the fairy tales. And yet I felt as I read that it couldn’t really have a traditional happy ending and that it couldn’t have been written in any other way. Secret Keeper is a tale of love and loss, of traditional family and of new ways and mores creeping into and disrupting the old conventions. It’s a story that bridges cultures and creates understanding and makes even WASPs like me feel a twinge of identification with the characters and their very human situations.

The main character of the novel is sixteen year old Asha, the younger of two daughters in the Gupta family. As the story opens, Asha, her sister Reet, and their mother are on a train headed for a visit of indeterminate length with their Baba’s family in Calcutta. Baba (Father) himself is in America looking for work, having lost his job as a result of the economic difficulties in India in the early 1970’s, the time period for the book. Asha is not sure how the small family will manage to fit into her uncle’s household in Calcutta even for the short amount of time she expects them to stay before Baba send for them to join him in the U.S. Asha’s grandmother lives with Asha’s uncle’s very traditional family, and the three women will be three more mouths to feed, unable to make much, if any, contribution to the welfare of the family. As events unfold, Asha depends on her diary, nicknamed Secret Keeper, to hold her thoughts and dreams and to keep her sane in a tension-filled household.

Girls, especially those who are trying to balance responsibilities to family and to themselves, will find Asha to be a sympathetic character and a role model. When she is faced with a crisis, she makes the best decision she can both for herself and for her small family, and even though her solution to the family’s problems is imperfect and open to criticism, it is the difficulty of her decision that makes the family strong again and renews their bonds, bonds that have been stretched to the breaking point.

I really think that this book is Ms. Perkins’ best book to date, an exploration of cultural norms and changing roles, of responsibility to self and to family, and of flawed but loving answers to difficult issues. I highly recommend Secret Keeper, available in bookstores and from Amazon starting today. (Click on the book cover to order from Amazon.)

Other reviewers:

Book Embargo: “It was a beautiful book.. (haven’t I said that already?) But it really was. The family dynamics, with the father gone to America, the mother and two sisters left to live with relatives. The money problems, the Indian culture, it was all so beautifully written and described.”

12 Best Young Adult Fiction Books I Read in 2008

Dec26

The Declaration by Gemma Malley. Semicolon review here.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman. Semicolon review here.

The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale. Semicolon review here.

Tamar by Mal Peet. Semicolon review here.

The Missing: Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Semicolon review here.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson. Semicolon review here.

Here, There Be Dragons by James Owen. Semicolon review here.

Love Me Tender by Audrey Couloumbis. Semicolon review here.

Six Innings by James Preller. Semicolon review here.

Bringing the Boy Home by N.A. Nelson. Semicolon review here.

Every Soul a Star by Wendy Mass. I didn’t manage to review this one yet, but you can read Melissa’s Book Nut review here. Pretty much what she said.

The Giver by Lois Lowry. Semicolon review here.

Some of these are borderline, between young adult and children’s or between young adult and adult. Nevertheless, I think teens would enjoy all of these books, and I did, too, even though I’m long past my teens.

Christmas in South Dakota, 1910

Dec17

She unwrapped an unwieldy bundle, covered with newspapers. Out of it fell a giant tumble weed, its spiny leaves dried on its skeleton stalk; its bushy top mounted on a trunk made of a broomstick. “Do you think that would do fer a Christmas tree?” she asked.

Becky looked at the dry bush with softened eyes.

“I thought maybe I could use some plum brush fer a tree, went on the child. “But I just hate the switchey look of’em for Christmas. So when this whopper tumble weed came along last fall it stuck in our chicken wire, and I hung it up in the barn. It dried just that way, and I thought maybe the children would like it fer a tree. The little ones never seen no pictures of one, even, and they wouldn’t know if it wasn’t just like. I got a pail of sand to stick that broomstick down in. I could hang the popcorn and the light strings on the tumble weed, and put the rest around it. Do you think that would work, Miss Linville?”

“I’m sure the children would love it.”

~The Jumping Off Place by Marian Hurd McNeely

Last night and today I have been enjoying this story, first published in 1929 and republished this year by the South Dakota State Historical Press for a new generation of readers. (The cover pictured here is from the older edition since the new paperback cover is not available at Amazon.) Little House on the Prairie fans who have exhausted Ms. WIlder’s canon and all its spin-offs, should try this story of a family of four orphan children who take up a homestead in South Dakota, determined to hold down their claim for fourteen months until they can gain title to the 160 acres of South Dakota farm left to them by their beloved Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim’s death at the beginning of the story gives the children a grief that is slow to heal, but the words and plans that he left them guide them in their new life on the prairie.

The Jumping-Off Place was a Newbery Honor book in 1930. (Laura Ingalls WIlder didn’t win her first of four Newbery Honors until 1938.) It’s a wonderful story of pioneering on the Great Plains in the early part of the twentieth century. Only one caveat: one of the characters does use the phrase “ni— work” to refer to the hard work of making a life on the prairie, a phrase I’m sure was common usage in that time and place, but offensive to modern ears nevertheless.

The book is for a bit more mature readers than those who first come to the Little House books. Ms. McNeely doesn’t sugarcoat the drudgery and suffering that those who settled the Great Plains had to endure. In one scene a baby dies of snakebite in a poverty-stricken dugout home, and fifteen year old Becky, the oldest of the four children, helps to lay out the body of the little girl and prepare it for burial. Some of the settlers are kind and helpful to the children, while others are mean and ornery. I think older children (ages 11-14 or so) who like this sort of tale will read anxiously to see if and how the children hold their claim and become part of the new Dakota society.

Other read-alikes in the pioneering children and young adults genre:

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson. Another Newbery Honor book, reviewed here at Maw Books Blog.

By Crumbs It’s Mine by Patricia Beatty.

My Face to the Wind: The Diary of Sarah Jane Price, A Prairie Teacher. Broken Bow, Nebraska, 1881 by Jim Murphy

West to a Land of Plenty: The Diary of Teresa Angelino Viscardi, New York to Idaho Territory, 1883 by Jim Murphy.

Any other suggestions?

Christmas at Hatfield, 1548

Dec6

“We kept Christmas at Hatfield that year instead of going to court . . . I sent my gentlemen and yeomen out into the woods to collect red holly-berry branches and evergreens to decorate the place, chestnuts to roast. They went gladly. Then, just as gladly, my knights helped me decorate. After that they went hunting with Roger Ascham for the Yuletide dinner. I put cloth of gold and velvet ribbons on everything, from newel posts to clocks.

We prepared a Yuletide feast that would do my father proud.

My yeomen cut a Yule log and some applewood, and soon the fragrances of applewood, evergreen, and chestnuts permeated the whole house.”

The Red-Headed Princess by Ann Rinaldi.

Young Adult Fiction of 2008: The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Oct28

Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s nonfiction study, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, won a Newbery Honor medal in 2006 for its compilation of accounts of what it was like to grow up in Hitler’s youth organization, Hitler Youth. In The Boy Who Dared Bartoletti returns to the Third Reich to tell the story of a boy who joined the Hitler Youth, but secretly and courageously resisted the Nazi regime until he was caught by the police.

The subtitle to this book is “A Novel Based on the True Story of a Hitler Youth.” The book reads like a novel in some ways. We get to hear the thoughts and fears of and imprisoned seventeen year old, Helmuth, as he reminisces about his growing up years under the growing shadow of Nazism. However, it’s obvious that the novel is constrained by the facts of the case, so to speak. From the beginning of the story, when the omniscient narrator tells us from Helmuth’s prison cell that “the executioner works on Tuesdays,” we know that that there is no happy ending in store for Helmuth Hubener, the protagonist of the novel.

Then there are various facts that lend interest to the story but that probably wouldn’t have occurred to a novelist writing a story not based on true events. For instance, Helmuth’s family is Mormon. In the author notes at the end of the book, Ms. Bartoletti says that the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints had about one thousand members living in Hamburg during the war. Another set of unlikely facts: Helmuth’s mother marries a Rottenfuhrer in Hitler’s SS, a dedicated Nazi who nevertheless adopts Helmuth and writes a letter in his support after his arrest for espionage.

I have a particular fascination with World War II stories, especially those that take place inside Nazi Germany or in Nazi-occupied territory. I think we’re all still, almost seventy years later, trying to figure out how the Holocaust and the other evils of Nazism could have happened in a “civilized” country. So I look for clues in stories of the times. The clues here are the ones you’ve heard before: the people were economically devastated. They believed Hitler would lead them to prosperity and to dignity for Germany after the ignominious defeat of World War I. When the Jews were persecuted, the bullies joined in the bullying and the good people looked away. When freedoms were taken away one by one, people said it was temporary, that these were emergency measures, that everything would be O.K. eventually.

The problem is that I look at Nazi Germany, and I see ideas and attitudes that are very much alive here and now. No, we in the United States in 2008 are not Nazis. History does not really repeat itself; it echoes. And the echoes I hear now are disturbing. People in a time of economic crisis are looking for a saviour. Innocents are killed daily by abortion, and good people look the other way. Candidates talk about taking away freedom of speech in the name of fairness, and we are oblivious.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a politicized review, but oh, God, remove our blind spots and have mercy on us.

The Boy Who Dared is a good reminder of what we have to lose and what can happen in a country that loses its moral compass.

YA Fiction of 2008: Slipping by Cathleen Davitt Bell

Oct9

How is it possible to write an entire book about the boundary between life and death, about what happens to people after death and never once mention God?

When his grandfather dies, Michael begins “slipping” between his own identity and someplace “between life and death” in his grandfather’s memories and in his grandfather’s ghostly mind. It’s a sort of “mysterious river between the living and the dead” where Michael must figure what it is that will satisfy his grandfather and help him rest in peace and at the same time keep himself from being sucked into the river forever.

The story draws on a lot of psychic mumbo-jumbo and at the same time derives some of its philosophical underpinnings form the realm of psychology. So there’s lots of father/son relationship stuff and talk of repressed emotions as well as the idea that the dead may not be able to rest in peace, may become rather annoyingly insistent ghosts, if they have unfinished business in this world. The young people in the book even go to visit a psychic, Charlisse Hillel-Broughton, who talks to them about Plato and the river of the dead and finally tells them they’ll have to figure it all out themselves because “there is little I can do.” Typical psychic.

Oh, and video games are an important element of the story. Michael sort of thinks in video game terms, a thought frame that might appeal to the gamer mentality, but doesn’t do much for me. Slipping was a good story, but the worldview upon which it hangs its plot and themes is not one I can get particularly excited about.

Other opinions:

B Is for Books: “From the very first page I was hooked. What was happening to Michael was totally freaky but cool at the same time. Being able to [experience] his grandfather’s memories and everything was so awesome.”

YA Fiction of 2008: Love Me Tender by Audrey Couloumbis

Oct7

What would it feel like to have a father who was a landscape gardener by day and by night (and on long weekends) was an Elvis impersonator? And what if he and your pregnant mom had an argument, and Dad-channeling-Elvis went off to Vegas to try to revive his stalled career in Elvis impersonation? And what if, just as he left, he said, “I’m relying on you, Elvira. Don’t let things fall apart once I’m gone.”

This book was hilarious. Elvira’s mom is a character, just the type to be able to be married to an Elvis impersonator and still remain halfway sane. She threatens her kids, “I’ll snatch you baldheaded if you do that!” Or “if you throw yourself on the floor again, I am going to put you up for adoption.” If you think either of those statements is a terrible thing to say to your seven year old or thirteen year old daughter, then you won’t like this book.

Elvira has a mouth, and she gets it from her mom Mel, short for Melisande. Elvira’s little sister, Kerrie, is cute, whiny, and somewhat manipulative. Dad is having a mid-life crisis, with his desire to be like Elvis and win Elvis competitions. And when the three girls in the family go to Memphis to visit Mel’s mom, the grandma that Elvira hasn’t ever even met, well, let’s just say that the smart mouth and the over-the-top rhetoric runs in the family.

There are some great scenes in this book: when Elvira convinces Kerrie that the police are after her for murder, when Kerrie gets a pair of fake eyelashes stuck to her eyes and has to go to the emergency room to have them removed, when Grandma burns a great big hole in the “warshing room”, when Elvira decides to get her ear (one ear) pierced in three places by someone named Pandora . . . It’s really just one laugh-out-loud episode after another. And the dialog is full of humor, too, if you like your humor Southern, sarcastic, and exaggerated.

It kind of reminds me of the old TV show Roseanne. If you liked that, you might like Love Me Tender. However, I didn’t much care for Roseanne, and I don’t usually like mouthy kids, in books or movies or in real life. But I loved this book. So go figure.

Other reviews:

Becky’s Book Reviews: “Honestly, I thought this one was a bit disappointing. When I see the name Coulombis, I expect better things, greater things. Not that this one was bad, it just wasn’t as magical as I expected. The premise, the author, the cover, I expected to be wowed a bit more than I was.”

Look Books: “The book was fast-paced, and easy to read. It needed a more decisive end, especially after so many memorable events. I feel like the end was sort of pre-conceived before the book was written. Too perfect.”

The Goddess of YA LIterature: “The characters are nicely drawn; the dialogue snappy and sharp tongued. THIS is a family story about real family members. You can’t pick your family members, but you can decide how to live with and among them. Important lessons for us all, folks.”

Young Adult Fiction of 2008: The Redheaded Princess by Ann Rinaldi

Oct6

Maybe I’ve read too many books and seen too many movies about the Tudors. We’re big Ann Rinaldi fans around here, and I’m fascinated by the Tudor kings and queens of England, but Ms. Rinaldi’s latest about Princess Elizabeth Tudor, the red-haired daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was just O.K. Nothing to write home about.

I didn’t get any new perspective on Elizabeth the princess or Elizabeth the queen. I didn’t find myself attracted to her character, and indeed I thought Ms. Rinaldi’s Elizabeth was a lot too ambitious and self-serving for me to want to be anywhere near her. I suppose most absolute monarchs, or those who think they might become absolute monarchs, tend to be all about power and self-preservation. It just wasn’t very attractive to read about.

I felt as if the author wanted to make Elizabeth likable, but was constrained by the facts of history. Every time I started to like her, Elizabeth would do something that she really did do, and the only motivation that Ms. Rinaldi’s book could find was a rather ugly one. Elizabeth’s servants are arrested, and although she’s terribly upset about it all, Elizabeth doesn’t even write a letter in their behalf. Her good friend Robin Dudley is in the Tower, accused of treason, and Elizabeth wonders if she’ll ever see him again. But she doesn’t bother to write him either, maybe because she thinks it would be too dangerous for her. She’s jealous of Lady Jane Grey and only mildly sad when Miss Jane is put to death.

I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed being friends with the real Elizabeth, but the person portrayed in this book is just petty and not very pleasant. Red-headed, rich, intelligent, and popular, none are a guarantee of either virtue or amiability.

I would recommend any of Ms. Rinaldi’s American historical novels or her book, Mutiny’s Daughter, about the supposed daughter of HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian, over this fictionalized biography of Elizabeth I. Read it if you’re a collector and fan of any and all books about Elizabeth. If not, it’s skippable.

War and Reconstruction: Establishing Democracy in Italy and Iraq

Sep23


I read two books this month about U.S. attempts to establish democracy in a conquered/freed nation. A Bell for Adano by John Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. It’s about Major Victor Joppolo, an Italian American officer in the U.S. army who was “more or less the American mayor after our invasion” of Adano a small village in Sicily. Sunrise Over Fallujah is a contemporary young adult novel by Walter Dean Myers about young American soldier, Robin Perry, and his tour of duty in Iraq as a member of a Civil Affairs unit, a sort of put-out-the-fires public relations unit that’s called on to smooth relations with the Iraqi people in special, sometimes ticklish, situations.

The two books, although dealing with similar situations, had completely different atmospheres and a completely different take on war and its aftermath. Operation Iraqi Freedom versus Allied Miitary Government Occupied Territory (AMGOT). In one war, the Americans and their allies are invading an enemy’s country to conquer the fascists and establish democracy, no doubts that democracy is best or that it will work, just confidence and determination to finish a tough job no matter what the obstacles. Maor Joppolo must deal with army bureaucracy and with Italian obfuscation, but he is, as the author tells us from the beginning, “good.” In fact, again according to Mr. Hersey, “there were probably not any really bad men in Amgot, but there were some stupid ones.” Hersey’s American soldiers are more or less well-meaning, sometimes drunk, sometimes selfish, but bumbling toward a trustful relationship with the Italian people who are under their temporary rule in spite of mistakes and because of their essential good nature.

In the other war, the soldiers are confused about their mission, circumscribed and limited in their ability to do anything meaningful, worried about seeming too “gung-ho” and worried about not doing enough, afraid for their lives as they see roadside bombs kill comrades, and finally deceived and betrayed by their own commanders into participating in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. The Iraqis themselves are very minor characters in Sunrise Over Fallujah; one Iraqi who works for the soldiers at their base is asked what he thinks about the Americans being in his country, but his answer is ambiguous and noncommittal as befits some one who is being paid to work for the U.S. military.

All the Italians, even the “enemy” fascists, in Hersey’s book are somewhat comical and clownish; there’s not much to fear from the former mayor of Adano who can’t even decide if he wants to escape and run to the Germans or stay and be “reconstructed.” And Hersey’s good guys and bad guys are easily distinguished. Myers’ Iraqis are much more shadowy figures, and Robin can’t decide who the enemy is half the time. The issue of trust and whom you can trust in such a foreign land is a continuing problem in in Sunrise. Finally, the soldiers in Iraq in Sunrise Over Fallujah find that they can only trust their buddies, and sometimes not even everyone in their own unit.

In both books a child dies, by accident, at the hands of the Americans. But in A Bell for Adano the accidental death of an Italian child run over by an American military truck results in a new policy for ensuring the safety of the children who run beside the trucks to beg for candy from the AMerican GI’s. Major Joppolo says that the accident is a result of the Americans’ generosity:

“Sometimes generosity is a fault with Americans, sometimes it does harm. It has brought high prices here, and it has brought you misery. But it is the best thing we Americans can bring with us to Europe. So please do not hate the Americans.”

Throughout the book, Major Joppolo is sure that, in spite of mistakes and tragedies, the Americans are in Italy to do good, to defeat the bad guys and lead the Italian civilians to a better life. And the Italians, for the most part, go along with the major’s view of things. They see the AMericans as liberators, and even when mistakes are made, the Italian protest is muted and more mournful than angry.

In Sunrise Over Fallujah, children die as a result of “collateral damage” from an American bombing run, and the protagonist, Robin Perry, also holds a dying Iraqi child in his arms. (I don’t remember the exact circumstances, and I’ve already returned the book to the library.) No one talks about the good intentions of the Americans or tries to explain the tragedies as misplaced American generosity. No one is ever sure that what the Americans are doing or trying to do in Iraq is good or right or better for the Iraqi people.

I tend to believe that war and reconstruction are always much more Fallujah-like (confusing and dangerous) than Adano-like (good-natured and bumbling), but maybe the difference is one of attitude and a crisis of confidence. Was the American military governance of Sicily really more of a farce than a tragedy because the Americans of that generation believed in what they were doing and so made others believe in it, too, even their erstwhile enemies? Can we do the same thing, win hearts and minds, establish democracy, in Fallujah and in Iraq, or are the people of Iraq too foreign, too Muslim, too different, and too dangerous? I’m not there, and I don’t know, but reading these two books in conjunction with one another has made me think. We do live in different world now than my grandparents lived in after WW II, but we are engaged in much the same task as Major Joppolo was in A Bell for Adano. Surely, if we could win Italian hearts and minds in 1945, we can win Iraqi hearts and mind in 2008. It’s just going to take a bunch of Major Joppolos and a great deal of wisdom and restraint on the part of some very young soldiers like Robin Perry.

Just.