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The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda

Dec5

Not exactly my kind of book. The Savage Fortress was inspired, writes the author, “by the real Savage Fortress–a maharajah’s palace near Varanasi, India–as well as his life long fascination with the goddess Kali.”

So, this Hindu goddess:

'Goddesses' photo (c) 2008, LASZLO ILYES - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

And this rather medieval looking maharajah’s palace:

'India - Varanasi - 010 - one of the Maharaja palaces' photo (c) 2007, McKay Savage - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

And the tag line is: Heroes aren’t made. They’re reborn.

If you’re interested in a reincarnation story in which an British teen of Indian ancestry must fight to keep Ravanna the evil god of the rakshasas (demons) in his place of exile so that Ravanna won’t take over the world and make it into a place of (more) chaos and suffering on a grand scale, then The Savage Fortress is your book. To me, it just felt evil and confusing, although I will admit to a certain train-wreck fascination. The writing certainly ranged from adequate to good, but I’m just repelled and bewildered by Hindu mythology. If everybody is going to come back after death and fight the same battles all over again, what’s the use?

Then there’s the Kali motif that I found deeply disconcerting in this story for middle grade readers:

“Kāli is the Goddess of Time and Change. Although sometimes presented as dark and violent, her earliest incarnation as a figure of annihilator of evil forces still has some influence. . . The figure of Kāli conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself.

Can mercy be found in the heart of her who was born of the stone?
Were she not merciless, would she kick the breast of her lord?
Men call you merciful, but there is no trace of mercy in you, Mother.
You have cut off the heads of the children of others, and these you wear as a garland around your neck.
It matters not how much I call you “Mother, Mother.” You hear me, but you will not listen. From a poet named Rāmprasād Sen in Wikipedia article on Kali.

And our hero, Ash, ends up defeating Ravanna with the power of Kali, the goddess of Darkness and Death. Ewwww. (I’m not too fond of zombies or vampires, either.)

Christmas in Norway, c.1330

Dec5

“It was the custom for all priests at Christ Church to give supper to the poor. But Kristin had heard that fewer beggars came to Gunnulf Nikulausson than to any of the other priests, and yet–or perhaps this was the very reason–he seated them on the benches next to him in the main hall and received every wanderer like an honored guest. They were served food from his own platter and ale from the priest’s own barrels. The poor would come whenever they felt in need of a supper of stew, but otherwise they preferred to go to the other priests, where they were given porridge and weak ale in the cookhouse.
As soon as the scribe had finished the prayers after the meal, the poor guests wanted to leave. Gunnulf spoke gently to each of them, asking whether they would like to spend the night or whether they needed anything else; but only the blind boy remained. The priest implored in particular the young woman with the child to stay and not take the little one out into the night, but she murmured an excuse and hurried off. Then Gunnulf asked a servant to make sure that Blind Arnstein was given ale and a good bed in the guest room. He put on a hooded cape.
‘You must be tired, Orm and Kristin, and want to go to bed. Audhild will take care of you. You’ll probably be asleep when I return from the church.’
Then Kristin asked to go with him. ‘That’s why I’ve come here,’ she said, fixing her despairing eyes on Gunnulf. Ingrid lent her a dry cloak, and she and Orm joined the small procession departing from the parsonage.
The bells were ringing as if they were right overhead in the black night sky–it wasn’t far to the church. They trudged through the deep, wet, new snow. The weather was calm now, with a few snowflakes still drifting down here and there shimmering faintly in the dark.” ~Kristin Lavransdatter, Mistress of Husaby by Sigrid Undset, translated by Tina Nunnally.

Kristin Lavransdatter is one of my very favorite books, so realistic and yet encouraging. Kristin is a real person: warts, and passions, and good intentions, and stupid decisions, all wrapped up in the life of one fourteenth century woman.

The scene I quoted above takes place near Christmas-time when Kristin is visiting her brother-in-law, a priest, because she is having marriage and family conflicts. She goes to the church to think and pray about all her sins and her life. Orm is her step-son.

I would highly recommend Kristin Lavransdatter as a gift for the wife/mother/reader in your family.

Infinity Ring: A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner

Nov20

Dak Smythe and Sera Froste are geniuses and friends who live in an alternate version of our own time. Unfortunately, their world is falling apart: high crime, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, forest fires, blizzards, storms, a dictatorship police government, and general unrest and confusion. It’s all because of disruptions in time, perpetrated long ago at several key points in history by the SQ, a group of Time Thugs who have altered the course of history.

The series looks to be a LOT like Margaret Peterson Haddix’s The Missing series, except with more bells and whistles. The Infinity Ring series was developed by Scholastic, and Mr. Dashner (The Maze Runner) was recruited to write the first and last book in the seven book series. The other books are to be written (or have been written) by Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth), Lisa McMann (The Unwanteds), Matt de la Pena (Mexican Whiteboy), Matthew J. Kirby (The Clockwork Three), and Jennifer A. Nielsen (The False Prince). Book 2 in the series is available in bookstores and libraries now, and Book 3 comes out in February 2013. There are games and online clues and apps and videos–all sorts of extra stuff to enrich (subvert?) your reading experience.

How Infinity Ring parallels The Missing:

1. Time itself has been disrupted and needs to be “fixed.” In the Infinity Ring books, specific events in history have been changed leading to changes in the course of history that are damaging to the planet. In Missing, key children have been kidnapped, causing the course of human events to be disrupted.

2. The good guys are fighting against the bad guys against the backdrop of history. In Infinity Ring, it’s the SQ against the Hystorians. In Missing, it’s the kidnappers against the Time agents.

3. Kids have to visit specific times and places to fix Time and put things right. Dak and Sera and another young man they befriend, Riq, are the heroes of Infinity Ring. Jonah and his sister Katherine are the main time-rescuers in The Missing books. In both series there are adults who are there to help the kids on their way, but it’s the young people who have to do the heavy lifting and time-traveling.

4. The kids in Infinity Ring have an infinity ring to transport them through time and some kind of implant in their teeth (?) to translate the new languages they encounter. Jonah and Katherine have an Elucidator that translates for them and enables them to be invisible when they need to be unseen.

5. Jonah and Katherine see tracers, ghostly bodies that show them how time would have progressed if it hadn’t been changed. The Infinity Ring time travelers have Remnants, deja-vu-like experiences in which they feel and even envision how history is supposed to be without the changes.

6. There’s lots of history and historical fiction mixed up in both of these series. Between the two series, a reader could learn about Richard III and the Battle of Bosworth, Christopher Columbus, the Viking invasion of Paris, the Underground Railroad, Henry Hudson’s explorations, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the French Revolution, and the early career of Albert Einstein. That’s not a bad start on world history, especially since I think learning about historical events is more fun and memorable in a fictional, story format.

So which series would I recommend if you could only read one? Haddix’s books are far more interesting, suspenseful, and better written, but if you want the extras, games and online stuff, then you’ll probably like the Infinity Ring books better. The Infinity Ring books are also shorter and perhaps meant for a little bit younger audience.

The Seven Tales of Trinket by Shelley Moore Thomas

Nov16

I don’t like short stories, and I don’t much like it when authors disguise a book of stories as a novel by creating some over-arching narrative that sorta, kinda ties the stories together. Thank goodness, The Seven Tales of Trinket is NOT that kind of book.

Yes, there are seven tales here: folk tales about faeries and banshees and selkies and a gypsy fortune-teller and a pooka. And the journey of Trinket and her friend, the pig-boy Thomas, to find adventure and to find Trinket’s father is the Tale that ties all of the seven tales together. But the book is a meditation and a story about telling stories, about the art of the Irish seanechai or storyteller. And the author, Ms. Thomas, is storyteller herself. So it all works together; it just fits.

As Trinket looks for her father, James the Bard, who left on a story-telling journey of his own long ago and never returned to Trinket and her mother, she grows and becomes the storyteller she wants to be. She’s not a copy of her father or of her beautiful mother, although she carries a little of each of them in herself. She’s Trinket, the Story Lass, her own person and a teller of tales in her own right.

My favorite story of the tales Trinket lives and collects is the story of the The Faerie Queen and the Gold Coin. I delighted in this story of Orla, a girl who’s such an accomplished dancer that the Faerie Queen takes notice and challenges her to a dancing contest. Of course, as Trinket says, “humans and magical beings often see things differently.” The Faerie Queen changes the rules of the contest at the last minute, and Orla must dance the dance of her life to win the contest.

These are lovely stories, drawn from Celtic sources but adapted to fit with and enrich Trinket’s story. If all story collections were this well harmonized and tied together, I’d read more stories. Because it’s a story-telling kind of book, this one would be a great classroom or homeschool read aloud.

A Couple of Ghost Stories

Nov15

Ghosts are always good for a fall evening of reading. My favorite ghost stories: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Hamlet by Shakespeare, The Saracen Lamp by Ruth M. Arthur (an oldie but goodie for children/YA), The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens,

As you can see, old-fashioned ghost stories are my favorites, so these Cybils nominees were just O.K. for me. If you’re a fan of the ghost story genre, you may really enjoy them, though.

The Whispering House by Rebecca Wade.
This ghost story reminded me at first of an Agatha Christie novel or an Alfred Hitchcock TV episode. The tone was very matter of fact and not supernatural at all. I kept thinking throughout the first half of the book that everything would turn out to have a natural, if somewhat sinister, explanation: the dusty, spooky attic, the creepy doll, the deteriorating house, the stories of mysterious death a hundred years in the past. But then a ghostly visitor, a little Victorian girl named Maisie, who may or may not have been murdered by her ugly spinster aunt, starts making appearances, breaking things, leaving messages in strange places, and generally creating poltergeist-like havoc. And our twenty-first century protagonist, Hannah Price, travels or dreams herself into Maisie’s time, chasing the elusive ghostly girl in the white dress with the long dark streaming hair (see cover art, which is very good and evocative, by the way). And after that, things get really ghostly and somewhat ghastly, and there is obviously not going to be any natural explanation for the events in the story.

Still, the sensible, pragmatic actions of the children in the story make the supernatural elements that much more eerie. Hannah and her friend Sam go to visit their friend Miss Murdoch, a Wiccan witch, to get her take on the strange events in the borrowed house that Hannah’s family has rented. Hannah asks her friend the bishop what he thinks about it all. (The bishop and the Wiccan have a friendly but competitive discussion about the differences between magic and miracle, a discussion that I would have liked to read more of.) Hannah takes the doll, which has human hair, to be tested by her friend at the police lab. (Hannah has a lot of useful adult friends.) The kids do normal things to solve this abnormal mystery. I liked that aspect of the story.

A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle
A Greyhound of a Girl is very Irish, and I liked that. But it didn’t really feel like a children’s book, exactly. The story is about four generations of women, and it’s partly told from the youngest girl’s point of view. But it’s also about the girl’s grandmother and great-grandmother (who’s a ghost), and I guess it just left some questions unanswered for me. Why did the great-grandmother feel as if she had to stick around as a ghost? She says it’s to make sure her daughter was O.K. but that took about 60 years of ghost-hood?

The themes are death and dying and living life to its fullest, and the characters have rich and thoughtful conversations about those issues. I think adults would enjoy this book more than children would, but I could be underestimating children and over-estimating adults.

A few ghost quotes:
“You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.” ~Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“[M]ost people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful – if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.”
~Shirley Jackson, Come Along With Me

What’s your favorite ghost story?

Neversink by Barry Wolverton

Oct29

Near the Arctic Circle lies a small island called Neversink, home to a colony of auks including a puffin named Lockley J. Puffin and his wife Lucy Puffin. The colony also includes, rather incongruously, a walrus named Egbert and a hummingbird named Ruby. The auks live a happy and uneventful life until Egbert in a fit of misplaced hospitality and a bid for popularity invites the owls from the nearby island of Tytonia to come to his birthday party.

“These are birds who happily spend much of their time at sea, eat fish, fly underwater, and are not to be confused with penguins. On Neversink auks could nest safely in the nooks and crannies of the island’s ice gouged rocks, far away from the perching birds of nearby Tytonia, protected from predators by a girdle of ocean, safe from most threats other than old age and an unpredictable sea goddess named Sedna.
So it had been since the Age of settlement. And so it would have remained, many believe, if Rozbell (the owl) had never tasted Lucy Puffin’s fish smidgens.”

I enjoyed my visit to the island of Neversink. Rozbell the Owl is a suitably evil and crazed villain, and Lockley, Egbert, Ruby and the other auks of Neversink are valiant and at the same time reluctant to start a war even in the face of tyranny and mistreatment from the owls. The main thing the book lacked was much of a theme. The plot and characters carry the story. Maybe the theme is “insane, evil, power-hungry owls must eventually be opposed—and deposed?”

Anyway, the auks and owls and Egbert and Ruby all work out their relations and government over the course of the novel, and in the meantime, there’s some witty commentary, fluent description, and decent dialog.

A few examples:
“Lockley had never been so happy to see his large friend (Egbert). He would have given him a hug, except that it is physically impossible for a puffin and a walrus to embrace.”

“The lamentation of swans exploded from the ground and took to the air, graceful and powerful in flight in a way Lockley knew he could never achieve.”

“‘Actually, I meant that rhetorically,’ said Ruby.
‘Rhetorically?’
‘It’s a word I learned from Egbert. As best I can tell, it’s just a way for creatures who love to hear themselves talk to keep talking.'”

I kept picturing this story as an animated movie in my mind. I think Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks could definitely do something with Neversink. It’s got the characters and the plot, as I said, and they could stick in a moral underpinning about faithfulness and peaceful resistance.

Mr. and Mrs. Bunny: Detectives Extraordinaire! by Mrs. Bunny

Oct2

Translated from the Rabbit by Polly Horvath.

This particular book is a tricksy one. I was expecting talking animals, something along the lines of Rabbit Hill or maybe Charlotte’s Web, and I got a hilarious tale about a couple of ridiculous, bickering, married rabbits who “adopt” the neglected daughter of leftover hippy parents who are, in turn, kidnapped by foxes.

Madeline is the girl, and she is a sort of Alice in Wonderland character, a very responsible daughter who takes care of her less-than-brainy parents and finds herself in a fantastical predicament. When said parents, Mildred and Flo, are kidnapped by some nefarious foxes who say MUAHAHA a lot, Madeline must find and rescue them. But the only help she can get is from Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, who have just bought fedoras and are attempting to solve their first case as amateur detectives.

The resulting mis-adventure is a lovely romp through Rabbit-land and the woods and valleys of Vancouver Island, British Columbia with several running gags. There are repeated references to learning languages and communication difficulties as Flo tries to learn fox language from his captors, and Madeline decides she’s a Bunny Whisperer because she understands rabbit. Mr. and Mrs. Bunny compete with one another for who can be the most clueless, aimless, and scatterbrained detective in Rabbit-land. Then, there’s The Marmot, whose first name is The, and who has a passion for garlic bread. The Marmot is even more foolish and brainless than Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, Flo and Mildred and all the foxes put together.

I think with humor and comedy you always run the risk that some of your readers just won’t get the joke or won’t have the same sense of humor that you do. I saw some reviews at Amazon that criticized this book for using the word “crap” and for making fun of New Agers and the British royal family, among others. (Prince Charles does make a cameo appearance in the final chapters, and he comes off rather well as a reassuring adult character, actually.) All I can say is that this story tickled my funny bone in just the right places, and I was only sorry to see it end.

Laugh With the Moon by Shana Burg

Sep25

In the summer of 2011, a small group of young people from my church went to northern Zambia to help out for a month at Kazembe Orphanage there. Two of the girls who went were only thirteen years old at the time. While they were there, a new baby was brought to the orphanage. The baby, Jessie, was very sick, as many of the orphans brought to Kazembe Orphanage are. These girls helped care for Jessie, held her at night, tried to feed her, prayed for her . . . and mourned her when she finally died.

It was a difficult experience for the girls from our church, but it’s one that is all too common in southern African countries like Zambia and Malawi. Laugh with the Moon by Shana Burg is set in Malawi, and I admire the author for not being afraid to portray the suffering and tragedy that often characterizes life for children in rural areas of southern Africa in particular. As I read Laugh with the Moon, I wondered if the conditions and possible tribulations of life in an African would be “sanitized” for the consumption of young American teens, but they weren’t. The book includes sickness, orphans, poor living conditions, malnutrition, deprivation, and even death.

And yet, there is hope. Thirteen year old Clare Silver comes, against her will, to Malawi with her doctor father. Both of them are still grieving the death of Clare’s mother, and Clare is not sure she can survive yet another disruption in her life. Dad, on the other hand, is looking for comfort and distraction, and he refuses to “listen” to Clare’s silent protest except to tell her to “cut it out, already.”

Then, Clare meets Memory, a village girl who has lost both of her parents. The book never tells how Memory’s parents died, but the implication is that death is so common in rural Malawi that it’s not even especially significant how they died. Clare and Memory become friends. Clare attends the village school, imagines her mother’s voice counseling her, and slowly comes to understand that “grief isn’t a tunnel you walk through and you’re done. It waxes and wanes like the moon.”

I love books set in other, foreign-to-me, countries and cultures, especially Africa. I don’t know why, except that I feel as if we can learn from one another if we can only begin to understand how God made us all individual and unique and yet able to communicate and understand across and through time and culture. I sound like an advertisement for cultural diversity curriculum, but I really do believe that all peoples, all cultures have aspects and artifacts that God wants to redeem and use to enrich us all with all the, yes, diversity, that He has made. Anyway, Laugh with the Moon is a sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes educational, always fascinating look into the life of children in rural Malawi.

It’s a story I’m going to recommend to those girls who encountered death and suffering in rural Zambia a couple of summers ago. They’re planning to go back in 2013.

Laugh with the Moon is eligible to be nominated for the 2012 Cybils Awards in the category of Middle Grade Fiction. Nominations open on October 1, 2012.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith

Jul30

As always, Mma Ramotswe and her family and friends were entertaining and relaxing to read about in this latest episode of Mr. McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. This particular installment has Mma Ramotswe meeting her long-time literary mentor, CLovis Andersen, author of that hallowed tome, The Principles of Private Detection, upon which Mma Ramotswe has based her own business of private detection in Botswana.

One theme of the book seems to be whether truth really matters, whether basic principles of detection or of life must be “True Truth” in order to be useful. Mma Ramotswe says not:

“[T]here were plenty of old Botswana sayings that did the same thing, that gave you little rules for getting through life, for coping with its disappointment and sorrows. And did it matter, she wondered, whether they were true or not? Words could hurt you,and hurt you every bit as badly as sticks and stones. So that saying was wrong but that was not the point. The point was that if it made you better, made you braver, then it was doing its work. The same thing was true, Mma Ramotswe thought, of believing in God. There were plenty of people who did not really believe in God, but who wanted to believe in him, and said that they did. Some people said that these people were foolish, that they hypocritical, but Mma Ramotswe was not so sure about that. If something, or somebody, could help you to get through life, to lead a life that was good and purposeful, did it matter all that much if that thing or that person did not exist? She thought it did not—not in the slightest bit.”

I think Mma Ramotswe is somewhat right and somewhat wrong. If you comfort a child with a truism that is not really True, eventually that child will see that you are not a person of wisdom, not trustworthy. However, since God really does exist, it can only be a good thing for a person to act as if he believed in the God of Christianity even when he doesn’t completely believe. But this acting as if is only good because God is, and His law is good, and He is good. If there really were no God, then how could it be worthwhile or meaningful to follow the commands of this imaginary God? One might as well make up one’s own code of conduct and be one’s own autonomous god.

Clovis Andersen’s book helped Mma Ramotswe to start and sustain her detective agency because it had within its pages true principles of detection that Mma Ramotswe was able to apply to specific cases using the wisdom and native common sense that she already had. Even if Mr. Andersen didn’t know it, what he wrote was truth, not exhaustive truth, but truth nevertheless. Had Mr. Andersen written a book that was untrue in its basic underlying principles, Mma Ramotswe would not have found it useful, no matter how much she believed in it or pretended to believe in it.

It is never foolish to follow Truth, whether you believe in what you are doing or not. It is always foolish to follow falsehood, even if it seems to work out in the short run. All Truth is God’s truth in the end.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee

Jul9

So, how are fortune cookies and Powerball (lottery) related?

And who really invented fortune cookies anyway–the Chinese or maybe the Japanese?

Why do Jewish people love Chinese food, or as Ms. Lee asks, “why is chow mein the chosen food of the Chosen People?”

Do you know where in China all those illegal immigrants to the U.S. come from—and what they leave behind?

Is chop suey really Chinese?

Who is General Tso, anyway, and why are we eating his chicken? Is it really his chicken?

And what’s the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside of China?

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: A Book Adventure through the Mysteries of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee (what’s with the middle numeral/initial?) purports to answer all of these questions and many more you didn’t know you had about Chinese food in the United States and the rest of the world.

There are more Chinese food restaurants in the U.S. than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendy’s combined. Our family only eats restaurant or take-out Chinese food once or twice a year, but apparently we’re in the minority when it comes to Chinese food lovers.

I enjoyed reading about all of the quirks and ramifications of Americans’ love affair with Chinese food, but I must admit that Ms. Lee’s writing style, journalistic in nature, sometimes gave me reader’s whiplash. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles starts out as a book about the connection between a flood of of Powerball winners in March 2005 and the fortune cookies where they all found their winning numbers. Then it becomes a book about Chinese cuisine and where fortune cookies were invented. Then, suddenly we were dealing with other topics, such as Chinese illegal immigration or the Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989 or Cajun Chinese food or the source of take-out boxes or the soy sauce controversy.

Yes, all of these topics and more are at least tangentially related to Ms. Lee’s main topic, American Chinese food, but the material, while fascinating, is not organized as well as I might have liked. A lot of back-tracking and rabbit trails lead the reader on a winding road through the world of Chinese food and Chinese restaurants and Chinese influence in the United States and in the world. As long as you can take the twist and turns, which hardly ever slow down enough to be boring, you’ll like Ms. Lee’s guided tour through the world of Chinese cuisine.

A few facts and stories I found particularly interesting:

Did you know that there’s one particular day in the year that hundreds of Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown choose to get married? No, not Valentine’s Day and not New Year’s Day and not in June.

Most of the fortunes in the fortune cookies we get from our favorite Chinese restaurants are curated, written, and sold by three guys, two of whom aren’t on speaking terms as a result of stolen fortunes (the written ones, not money).

There really are a bunch of “kosher Chinese restaurants” to serve the Jewish community.

People who organize the smuggling of illegal Chinese immigrants into the United States are known as “snakeheads”.

I especially found the chapter about a specific Chinese immigrant family who bought a restaurant and saw their family implode from the pressures of running that restaurant in rural Georgia and adjusting to the cultural expectations of 21st century America. It was a sad story of family dysfunction and cultural misunderstanding and over-zealous child protection services run amuck. I wanted to know what happened to the family and where they are now. So I stopped and prayed for them. (Do you ever pray for the people you read about in magazine articles and nonfiction books?)

Real Chinese people and fortune cookies: