Archive by Author | Sherry

Forest Born by Shannon Hale

Feb18

Forest Born is the fourth in Shannon Hale’s Books of Bayern series, a series that began with The Goose Girl, Ms. Hale’s debut novel and the one that made a name for her, winning all kinds of awards and accolades. The Goose Girl tells the story of crown princess Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee of Kildenree, aka Isi, who has the gift of being able to hear and speak to animals and to birds.

The next book in the series is about Isi’s friend Enna who has the more perilous gift of fire-speaking, hence the title Enna Burning. And the third book called River Secrets is about Razo and Dasha, two more Bayern characters whose lives become intertwined with that of Isis and Enna and the kingdom of Bayern and its neighboring kingdoms.

Forest Born tells the story of Razo’s little sister, Rin, who harbors deep within herself a gift and a secret. It’s a coming-of-age tale with elements of adventure and even a bit of romance. Rin is an intriguing character with depth, and she’s different enough from Isi, Enna, and Dasha that she seems real and provides a new slant on the culture and mythical world of Bayern.

It’s also kind of fascinating that central to the plot of Forest Born is something called “people-speaking,” the ability to hear whether or not others are telling the truth and the ability to influence others with words. Kristin Cashore’s Fire and her previous book Graceling also play with this idea, the possibility that some people have a gift of being able to speak to other people and make them believe what they’re hearing and act upon it. In both Fire and in Forest Born this skill of being able to practically control others’ thoughts and actions through the use of words is a perilous gift, possibly helpful in defeating evil but also possibly soul-destroying to the gifted one. Perhaps each author is trying to say something about the power of words even in our world and the care with which we need to choose our words. There’s also a shared Spiderman-type message: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Forest Born is a worthy sequel to the other Bayern books and worth your reading, especially if you’re a Goose Girl fan.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Feb17

Miles’s twin brother Hayden has been missing for ten years. Every year or two Miles receives a letter or an email or a phone call that sends him off on another wild goose chase to locate and perhaps rescue his mentally disturbed, possibly criminal, brother.

A few days after graduation Lucy Lattimore leaves her hometown in Ohio in a Maserati with her high school history teacher. He takes her to Nebraska to a deserted motel on the edge of a dried-up lake, and there she begins to notice that Mr. George Orson may not be exactly the man she thought he was.

Ryan Schuyler drops out of college and goes on the road with his long-lost con man dad, Jay. Ryan’s OK with using stolen identities and using computers to move money from one bank account to another, but he’s puzzled about unreadable email he’s getting written in Cyrillic script. What’s that all about?

What do these three stories, these several lives, have in common? Author Dan Chaon has woven an intricate web of lies, deceit, multiple identites and personalities, and stories told, believed and rejected to make up this novel about a Great Imposter. I was, of course, reminded of the original Great Imposter, Ferdinand Waldo Demara.

I was also reminded of an old friend who admired Demara and took him as something of a role model. My friend, “Bill,” was something of an imaginative storyteller himself, always looking for ways to aggrandize himself and his own history. He used multiple names and told people that he was a colonel in the Air Force or a rabbi or private detective. He was a member of several churches, and he loved to talk about the Bible and about Jesus Christ. I truly think Bill believed his own stories, at least while he was telling them. As far as I know Bill never did anything criminal, but he did have a few close calls in which people to whom he had told different stories met up with one another and compared notes. It was a sad thing to watch from the outside, and yet Bill truly loved people. And people loved him, usually even when they found out that he was not completely trustworthy. Bill died a few years ago, and his funeral was attended by many, many people who knew at least parts of him and loved the man they knew.

The identity chameleon in Chaon’s novel, Hayden Cheshire, is similarly charismatic and even more enmeshed in his own lies. The novel is a convoluted walk through Hayden’s convoluted life from the points of view of his victims, those who fall for his lies and fall for Hayden’s charm. If you’ve never met anyone like Bill or Hayden, you might find aspects of the novel unbelievable, but let me assure you, it could happen. Hayden is believed by his brother to be schizophrenic or to have a personality disorder, but he is also quite capable of shedding personalities and identities and taking on new ones and juggling schemes and bank accounts and destroying lives as he passes through them.

I found this novel to be both fascinating and disturbing, and although the ending was a bit abrupt and unresolved, I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the themes of deceit and imposture and identity theft. You’ll find a lot to ponder in this near-attack on very idea of fixed identity.

I thought this paragraph in Chaon’s acknowledgements at the back of the book was interesting since I’m always interested in literary influences. Mr. Chaon writes:

“This book pays homage, and owes a great deal, to many fantastic and better writers who inspired me, both in childhood and beyond, including Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ira Leven, C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Peter Straub, J.R.R. Tolkien, Thomas Tryon, and a number of others. One of the fun things about writing this book was making gestures and winks toward those writers I’ve adored, and I hope that they —living and dead—will forgive my incursions.”

I did notice some of those gestures and winks, but reading that statement made me want to re-read the book and look for the ones I missed.

Many Happy Returns: February 16th

Feb16

Henry Adams, b. 1838. He was the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of another. Numbered among his many friends were Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, geologist Clarence King, Senators Lucius Lamar and James Cameron, artist John La Farge, and writer Edith Wharton. His most famous work was an autobiography written in third person, The Education of Henry Adams. (online here) He also wrote and published many books about his extensive travels and about history.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

LeVar Burton, b. 1957. Star and executive producer of the PBS series Reading Rainbow. We used to watch a lot of Reading Rainbow, and I still have quite a few episodes on videotape. Mr. Burton also starred as Geordie in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he got his start as Kunta Kinte in the mini-series Roots, based on the book by the same name. How many of you read Roots when it was a best-seller, about thirty years ago? I remember it as a good story, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. However, in 1978 Mr. Haley was sued for plagiarizing several passages in his book from a book called The African by Harold Courlander. Haley admitted that he did copy Courlander’s work “unintentionally,” and the suit was settled out of court for $650,000.
It was still a good story, and Mr. Burton started a fine career with it. Thanks to Roots and its success as a TV-miniseries, we have Reading Rainbow, a good deal if you ask me.
“But you don’t have to take my word for it.”
Reading Rainbow Official website.
On January 29, 2007, LeVar Burton announced that he had made his last episode of Reading Rainbowand that he was retiring, citing a difference in vision with the new owners of the show. “Their vision was not in alignment with what I stand for,” he said.

Lenten Blog Break and a New 100 Project

Feb16

Today is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), and tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. For the past three years I’ve taken a break from Semicolon and from blogging for the forty days of Lent. I’ve been blogging since October 2003, and I plan to continue blogging. I just feel that this break is a good time of rest and reevaluation for me and for my family.

I will continue to post the Saturday Review of Books each week, but I may not be able to read your reviews until after I get back in April. I also have a few posts and re-posts and links set up to come online on certain dates while I’m gone.

Last year I conducted a Top 100 Hymns Poll during the spring and summer. I had such a great time counting down all the favorite hymns of all my readers, so I decided to try something similar this year.

IMG_0209I thought a Top 100 Classic Poems Poll would be a great spring/summer project. I might learn something and be encouraged in my own quest to learn and appreciate poetry. You might learn some new poems or be reminded of some classics. We all might enjoy visiting and re-visiting the best in English poetry together.

Here’s how I think this poll/journey is going to work:
1. Make a list of your top ten classic poems of all time.
Classic: judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind.
For the purposes of this poll the poems you choose should be poems that are no longer under copyright protection. Anything written before 1910 (1923?) is most likely no longer under copyright. Anything written after 1910 (1923?) is probably still protected by copyright. I’m putting this restriction on your selections for two reasons: first, this way the poems in our list will be truly classic, judged over a period of time. Second, if we restrict the list to poetry that is not under copyright, then I can freely share the poems that are chosen here at Semicolon.

2. List these poems in your order of preference. So your #1 poem would be the one you like the best, and so on. I will be giving your first choice 10 points, your second choice 9 points, and so on.

3. Submit your list to me at sherryDOTearlyATgmailDOTcom. Write “Poem Survey” in the subject line. I’d rather you didn’t leave your votes in my comments here because it’ll be easier to tabulate all the votes if they’re all in my email (plus I want everyone’s votes to be a surprise). Deadline for votes to be sent to me is midnight, March 26, 2010.

4. If you like, you can submit a justification for each poem (tell me why it’s a favorite). Or you can send me a link to an audio or video version online. Include the title or first line of the poem and the name of the poet. At the end of March I will tally up the totals, and I will pull from the submitted pieces why one reader or another liked a particular poem (naming the reader, of course). That way we’ll be able to hear from a whole bunch of people about why they love one poem or another. I will then count down from 100 to 1, over the course of Poetry Month (April), May and into June, the top choices of what folks feel the best classic poems of all time are.

Thanks in advance for your votes/nominations. I’m going to enjoy this little exercise, and I hope you will, too.
Oh, and if you don’t mind, I would appreciate your publicizing this poll on your blog. I’d like to get at least 100 nominations or lists for this survey; more would be even better. If you want to post your top ten list on your blog, that’s fine. Just be sure you send me a copy.

Finally here are a few links to help you as you observe Lent, waiting and watching for our Lord’s Resurrection Day:

10 Lenten Traditions to Enrich Your Family’s Easter Celebration by Barbara Curtis.

Books for Lent to Lead You into Resurrection

Lenten Links: Resources for a Post-Evangelical Lent by iMonk.

At a Hen’s Pace An Anglican Family Lent

Vegetarian Recipes for Lent.

Janice Meredith by Paul Leiscester Ford

Feb15

OK, so older is not always better. The bestsellers of today are sometimes full of gratuitous sex and violence, without much depth of character and devoid of significant meaning.

Janice Meredith, one of the ten best selling novels of 1900, didn’t have any sex, other than a few stolen kisses, and the violence of the American Revolution was described somewhat obliquely through the eyes and experiences of the noncombatants, Janice and her mother. For example:

“Only with death did the people forget the enormities of those few months, when Cornwallis’s army cut a double swath from tide water almost to the mountains, and Tarleton’s and Simcoe’s cavalry rode whither they pleased; and the hatred of the British and the fear of their own slaves outlasted even the passing away of the generation which had suffered.”

Nevertheless, the character development in Janice Meredith is poor, and by today’s standards, the book could have been edited down from 503 pages to about half that. Janice herself begins the novel as a giddy teenager reading romance novels and indulging in romantic fantasies, and she ends the novel, after having bounced from one suitor to the next and back over a dozen times, indulging in her new romantic fantasy of marriage to dashing young officer with her father’s reluctant permission.

The characters of the Revolution –George Washington, Cornwallis, General Gates, General Lee, and others—appear with as much historical accuracy as can be expected in a romance novel. The battles and the deprivations that the people experience as the war drags on seem real, and if the language is little flowery, the descriptions are at least based on fact.

The main problem with the novel was that I never really liked wishy-washy little Miss Meredith. She never knew what she wanted. SHe ran away with one man and was fetched back by her parents. She promised herself in marriage to at least four different men over the course of the novel in return for their help to her and her family as they attempted to navigate the vicissitudes of war. Janice’s father promised her to several different men, usually the same ones Janice affianced, but at differing times. It made for several confusing reversals of plot, and Janice ended up seeming fickle and willing to give herself in marriage to the highest bidder.

If all of the bestsellers of 1900 are like this one, I feel sure that:

a) most of the books on the bestseller list must have been purchased and read by women. I can’t imagine any man reading through 500 pages of this.
b) surely Dickens’ and Thackeray’s heroines were a relief to the ladies of 1900 after reading about Miss Janice. At least Dora (David Copperfield) knows she’s found a good man in David, and Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair) could have transplanted herself to the New World and had a whopping adventure in the time it took Janice to dither around, flirt with half the British army, and then end up where she began with a penniless and somewhat immature American fiance.

Footnote: I looked up the author, Paul Leicester Ford, and his life, or more particularly his death, would make a rather lurid novel. (In fact this NY TImes article about Ford’s death reads like a novel. Ah, the good old days of yellow journalism!) Ford wrote biographies as well as novels, and his subjects were several of the founding fathers, including Washington. So I’m guessing his facts and characterizations are, as I said, quite accurate.

Sunday Salon: Random Stuff

Feb14

The 2009 Cybils Award Winning Books in all categories.

The Semicolon Book Club selection for February is Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. There will be a discussion post on the 28th here at Semicolon. So if you’re reading with us, it’s time to get the book and get reading.

I can spend a lot of time playing Lexulous (Scrabble) if I let myself.

I’m looking forward to my now-annual blog break for Lent. It’s not that I’m tired of blogging, just that I’m ready for an enforced break. Even a self-enforced break.

My sister, Judy, just started her book blog a few weeks ago, and it’s great. If you get tired of reading recycled Semicolon during the forty days of Lent, go over read at Carpe Libris.

I’m starting a new blog project while I’m on break: come back and read all about it on Tuesday, Mardi Gras. Do you do anything special on the Tuesday before Lent? Do you do anything special to observe Ash Wednesday?

Many Happy Returns: February 13th

Feb13

Eleanor Farjeon, b. 1881. Click on her name to read a little more about her life and her poetry.

Grant Wood, b. 1892. American artist born near Anamosa, Iowa.

Georges Simenon,, b. 1903. He was a Belgian-born author of detective fiction. Many of his books feature the Parisian detective, Inspector Maigret. Has anyone read these books? I think I tried one a long time ago, and it seemed that it lost something in the translation. But maybe not.

IMG_0201
Betsy-Bee, b. 1999. She’s a joy and a wonder, Miss Fashion, full of life, our Funny Little Gypsy Girl.

President’s Day for Kids

Feb12

Monday, February 15th is Presidents’ Day, so I thought I’d re-run this list with a few additions. Have a happy holiday!

Leetla Giorgio Washeenton by Thomas Augustine Daly.

More Washington Poetry.

O Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman.

White House site with mini-biographies of all 44 U.S. Presidents.

More information on the Presidents for President’s Day.

Recommended Children’s Books about the Presidents:

The Buck Stops Here by Alice Provensen.

So You Want to be President? by Judith St. George and David Small.

Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame (and What the Neighbors Thought) by Kathleen Krull.

A Book of Americans by Rosemary Carr and Stephen Vincent Benet.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House: Foolhardiness, Folly, and Fraud in the Presidential Elections, from Andrew Jackson to George W. Bush by David E. Johnson.

George Washington and the Founding of a Nation by Albert Marrin.

George Washington’s World by Genevieve Foster.

George Washington’s Breakfast by Jean Fritz.

Dangerous Crossing: The Revolutionary Voyage of John and John Quincy Adams by Stephen Krensky.

John Adams: Young Revolutionary by Jan Adkins. (Childhood of Famous Americans series)

Abigail Adams: Girl of Colonial Days by Jean Brown Wagoner. (Childhood of Famous Americans series)

A Picture Book of Thomas Jefferson by David A. Adler.

The Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz.

Young John Quincy by Cheryl Harness.

Old Hickory: Andrew Jackson and the American People by Albert Marrin.

William Henry Harrison, Young Tippecanoe by Howard Peckham. (Young Patriots series)


Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman

Lincoln Shot: A President’s Life Remembered
 by Barry Denenberg.

Chasing Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson.

Abraham Lincoln for Kids: His Life and Times with 21 Activities by Janis Herbert.

If You Grew Up With Abraham Lincoln by Ann McGovern.

Unconditional Surrender: U. S. Grant and the Civil War by Albert Marrin.

Bully For You, Teddy Roosevelt by Jean Fritz

The Great Adventure: Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of Modern America by Albert Marrin.

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery by Russell Freedman.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Russell Freedman.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Young Military Leader by George E. Stanley.(Childhood of Famous Americans series)

Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter’s Story by Wilborn Hampton.

Ronald Reagan: Young Leader by Montrew Dunham. (Childhood of Famous Americans series)

Many Happy Returns: Poetry Friday

Feb12

Happy Birthday to poet and novelist George Meredith, b.1828, of whom Oscar Wilde said, “”Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.” (Wilde had an opinion on everything and everyone, didn’t he?)

Meredith wrote one novel that I’ve read, Diana of the Crossways.

I’ve also read a series of sonnets that Meridith wrote, called Modern Love, in which he worked out his feelings about his wife who three years after their marriaage deserted him and ran away with a Pre-Raphaelite artist. (Those Pre-Raphaelites!) the sonnet sequence consists of fifty sonnets tracing the decay and the death of a romance and a marriage. Rather a sad subject for the advent of Valentine’s Day. Think of it as an antidote to all the hearts and flowers clogging the airways.

It is the season of the sweet wild rose,
My Lady’s emblem in the heart of me!
So golden-crownèd shines she gloriously,
And with that softest dream of blood she glows:
Mild as an evening heaven round Hesper bright!
I pluck the flower, and smell it, and revive
The time when in her eyes I stood alive.
I seem to look upon it out of Night.
Here’s Madam, stepping hastily. Her whims
Bid her demand the flower, which I let drop.
As I proceed, I feel her sharply stop,
And crush it under heel with trembling limbs.
She joins me in a cat-like way, and talks
Of company, and even condescends
To utter laughing scandal of old friends.
These are the summer days, and these our walks.

Ouch. I hope if you send your love roses for Valentine’s Day, they fare better than the one in the poem.

Cybils YA Fiction Finalists

Feb11

Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney
Chronicle Books
I haven’t found this one yet.
Others who have read it: Frenetic Reader, Pop Culture Junkie, Sarah’s Random Musings, Amanda at A Patchwork of Books.

Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
Disney Press
Carter is a typical male, I guess. I also guess I don’t want to read about every thought that goes through a typical male’s rather mundane and typical mind. Locker room humor disguised as reality/comedic fiction. Didn’t finish.
Lots of other people loved, loved, loved it.

Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Macmillan
With the f-bombs and other crude words dropping at a rate of one or two per paragraph, and the crude, rude, and socially unacceptable “situations” multiplying, I found it difficult to get to the actual story. So I didn’t finish. School Library Journal’s review says it’s “marked by explicit language and frank sexuality.” Yeah. It is–and not much else, at least as far as I got into it.
Again it was quite popular with other reviewers and bloggers.

How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford
Scholastic
This one was both quirky and fascinating. I loved “listening” in on the late night radio call-in show, Night Lights, in which lonelyhearts and conspiracy theorists and assorted oddballs called to share their thoughts, feelings, and warnings about the apocalypse. The teen protagonists of the novel, Bea and Joshua, aka RobotGirl and Ghost Boy, share an addiction to late night radio, especially Night Lights.
However, even though I enjoyed the book, read it in one afternoon, I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. I found much of it, plot and characters, quite unbelievable. In fact, the Night Lights callers were some of the more believable characters in the novel. I mistakenly thought Joshua was a liar, making up stories to get attention, for about half of the novel. The truth was a little too fantastic to be believable. Then, Bea’s mother seems at first to be merely eccentric, but she quickly moves into the realm of insanity. However, Bea and her father expect Bea’s mother to function as a sane person, and eventually by the end of the story Mom wanders back to the sane side of the street. Finally, Bea and Joshua come up with a plan so fantastic and so completely unworkable that it’s hard to believe any two halfway intelligent high school seniors could even entertain the notion.
And yet . . . with a high tolerance for strange, odd, and even looney, a reader might really grow to love this novel of two teen in search of an identity.
Becky, and Jen, and Amanda, and Tirzah all liked it.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern.
Feiwel & Friends
I actually read several chapters of this story of Jessie and her friends, Bizza and Char. First of all, Char doesn’t do much of anything except bake a few cookies, so I’m not sure why she’s in the story. Bizza on the other hand is an expletive deleted, and I’m not sure why she and Jessie are friends in the first place, or the second place, or any place. While Bizza proceeds to contract VD from Jessie’s crush, Jessie considers joining the nerd crowd playing Dungeons and Dragons. Blech.
Several bloggers disagree with me and give it a thumbs up.

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen.
Little, Brown. Semicolon review here.
“North of Beautiful transcends the problem-of-the-week genre, and it’s a truly beautiful novel. The strength of the book is in its treatment of relationships and family dynamics. Terra Cooper, the protagonist of the novel, isn’t just a girl with low self esteem because of her facial disfigurement and her controlling dad.” Not my favorite of the year, but it’s a good solid pick.
North of Beautiful got lots of good buzz from everywhere: Teen Book Review, Presenting Lenore, S. Krishan’s Books, Miss Erin, and many others.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Viking. Semicolon review here.
I read this one earlier last year because I usually like Ms. Anderson’s books. However, I really think Wintergirls was just O.K., nothing special, another problem novel, this time about anorexia. And the plot sometimes gets obscured by an attempt to be poetic, or fanciful, or something.
You can find lots of much more enthusiastic reviews of this one by a very talented author.

These are the books that won out and made the finalist list over Marcelo in the Real World and Flygirl and What I Saw and How I Lied and Secret Keeper? I don’t get it. I don’t mean to diss the committee, but can I respectfully disagree? Tell you what, I grant you the right and privilege of reading all of the nominees yourself and forming your own opinion. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about some of them.

And I almost hate to mention it, but in light of discussions about the dearth of characters and authors who are not white, not one of these books has a protagonist who is anything other than white-bread-white, and only one of the authors could be called a Person of Color. I don’t believe in quotas, but actually many of the YA books I thought were outstanding in 2009 featured persons who were Asian, Hispanic, and African American (see preceding paragraph).

If I were on the committee to pick the Cybils Award winner for YA fiction, and I had to choose from this list, I’d go with North of Beautiful. The Cybils winners will be announced on Valentine’s Day.