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Growth and Stagnation

Nov21

I spoke with a friend recently who implied, perhaps without intending to do so, that my story and my growth in wisdom and understanding are at an end. This friend was, of course, a young person, and I am, to her, a very old person. Because I am not becoming more progressive in my political ideas and more culturally attuned in my thoughts and beliefs, I must be stuck in the past and somewhat irrelevant. I am not growing.

A lot of that first paragraph consists of what I read into and sensed from my friend’s attitude, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. There is an idea abroad in the culture that if you are not moving in a progressive direction in your beliefs and convictions, you are not growing. Conservatives are assumed to be mired in a web of out-dated and prejudicial beliefs that are destined to die. In fact, as far as the life of the mind and the spirit are concerned, conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, are half-dead already.

But I say, along with Mr. Twain, that the report of my death is an exaggeration. I am not becoming more unsure and doubting and open-to-all-comers in my beliefs. I no longer feel the need to revisit the intellectual and emotional struggles and insecurities that I went through and that were resolved (by my own work and the work of the Holy Spirit) years ago. I believe in certain things by faith and by decision, according to the preponderance of the evidence that I have been able to see and evaluate. I believe in God, in Jesus Christ His only Son, in the Christian church, in the authority of Scripture, in Christian marriage and family, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of joy in a free society. I believe in representative democracy with all its flaws and in a free market economy with all its limitations and inequities as the best political and economic systems geared to produce the most human flourishing in a broken world. I have seen very little that inclines me to doubt those fundamental truths and much that leads me to trust them.

But that does not mean that I have ceased to grow. I believe that, with much hesitation, vacillation, and indecision, three steps back and then four or five ahead, I am growing in the right direction, thanks to the Holy Spirit within me. I am growing in trust in a good God who will make all things right and just. I am growing in peace and acceptance of what is and what will be. I am growing in firmness of conviction and courage to face whatever may come, whether it be pandemic or hurricane or misunderstanding or disappointment or grief. I am growing in the knowledge that God is enough, that the life He gives is abundant and filled with joy, and that I am allowed to rest in Him. I am growing in prayer that believes even when the answers are not seen. I am growing in the assurance that even death itself will not put an end to the growth that I will experience in Him because Jesus Christ has promised me eternal life through His name.

If my friend sees me as old and set in my ways, perhaps she is right, in a certain sense. Nevertheless, just wait! “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” (I John 3:2) And that, my dear young friend, is growth indeed!

Cattywampus by Ash van Otterloo

Nov17

From the author’s website: “I’m enby/nonbinary, which means I don’t have strong leanings involving gender identification! My pronouns are they/them.”

From the book for middle grade readers: “Katybird shuddered as she recalled the crinkly, uncomfortable paper covering of the medical exam table and the sterile smell of the doctor’s office. The place had felt about as hospitable as a bed of skunk-infested stinging nettles outside a funeral parlor. A monotonous specialist had announced to Katy’s mother that Katy was ‘androgen insensitive,’ meaning she had XY chromosomes like most boys, but that nature had knitted her body up using a more traditionally female pattern. That hadn’t phased Katy much. She was a girl. That’s all she cared about. According to the doctor, she also had a pair of internal testes (the doohickeys that made all that testosterone her body didn’t use). No biggie, Katybird had yawned and swung her heels over the exam table, itching to go home. “

p.43

Also: “Except she wasn’t the same, not really, at least in her family’s eyes. There was a question now. Katybird was a girl, obviously, but words like ‘internal gonads,’ ‘testes,’ and ‘Y chromosome’ seemed to muddy the creek in their minds, as far as magic was concerned. Hearn magic had always been used by females. When her family talked about conjure now, Katybird always felt studied. She imagined them thinking, Is she a witch or isn’t she?

p.44

Middle Grade Speculative Fiction: Capsule Reviews

Oct28

Quintessence by Jess Redman. Ms. Redman is both a therapist and an author, and it shows. Quintessence is all about stars, and the essence of life, and finding one’s true self. It’s also about a girl, Alma Lucas, who after moving with her family to a new town, begins to experience panic attacks. Alma manages to join forces with three other children to form an Astronomy Club as well as a group dedicated to returning a fallen Starling to the heavens. As the children work together, they discover both their limitations and their strengths. The writing is beautiful at times throughout the book, but it’s all a little too therapeutic for my taste.

Catalyst by Sarah Beth Durst. When Zoe’s newfound kitten Pipsqueak grows to an enormous size almost overnight, Zoe and her best friend Harrison try to keep the giant kitten a secret. However, the only people they can trust to help are Zoe’s estranged aunt, Aunt Alecia, and the summer babysitter, Surita. Can Zoe and Harrison make it to New Hampshire during the time they’re supposed to be at summer camp without anyone finding out about Pipsqueak? A lion-size kitten is hard to hide, hard to move, and hard to keep quiet. The premise was good for this fantasy adventure, but the plot felt jerky. The denouement was too long in coming, and then it happened too quickly. And after the solution to the problem was revealed, then the mop-up action felt disappointing. Still, cat lovers and cat fantasy lovers will enjoy.

The Forest of Stars by Heather Kassner. Deserted by her father long ago, twelve year old Louisa LaRoche is left alone when her mother dies. For some reason, she decides that her father might be found in forest at the Carnival Beneath the Stars. If you want a book about magic at the circus, I would recommend Circus Mirandus and The Bootlace Magician, both by Cassie Beasley. The Forest of Stars is darker and much more incoherent than I prefer.

Scritch Scratch by Lindsay Currie. Claire has absolutely no belief or interest in ghosts, unlike her father who makes his living writing about Chicago’s ghost stories and leading a ghost tour of the most haunted sites in the city. But she can’t ignore the ghostly boy who keeps playing tricks to get her attention and writing, whispering, and scratching the number 396 for some unknown reason. Claire is afraid the ghost boy might injure, or even kill her, and she needs help. But where can she get that help now thather best friend, Casley, prefers to hang out with the new girl, Emily, instead of Claire? Unfortunately, the ghostly number changes from 396 to 369 in the middle of a page (169)–an editorial error that threw me out of the story and into a rant (in my own head) about the lack of good editing these days.

The Copycat by Wendy McLeod MacKnight has protagonist Ali Sloane discovering her own magical ability to transform into copies of other creatures as she’s trying to fit in at a new school and to resolve old family rifts and to deal with her great-grandmother’s illness and aging and to deal with her family’s lack of money in comparison to other kids at school. It’s all a bit much rolled into one book. Or as the blurb in the front says, “The Copycat is a perfect storm of family, magic, mystery, and friendship.”

Arcade and the Fiery Metal Tester (The Coin Slot Chronicles) by Rashad Jennings. This book is from Zonderkidz, a Christian imprint, and I really liked the way prayer and faith in a good God are presented as natural parts of everyday life for Arcade Livingston and his Black family living in New York City. It reminded me a little of Adventures in Odyssey, in a good way. But the plot is sometimes creaky and episodic as Arcade and his friends experience unexpected and uncontrollable time travel, care for a displaced flamingo, and search for Arcade’s lost dog. In a somewhat implausible subplot, Arcade’s friend Doug has been living with his great-grandmother, but when she has to go to a nursing home, eleven year old Doug is left to live alone in the building his great-grandmother owns.

The City Under the Back Steps by Evelyn Sibley Lampman

Sep11

A friend on Facebook mentioned this book the other day, and I remembered that I owned a copy but hadn’t read it. So I set out to remedy that neglect.

Cousins Craig and Jill inadvertently offend the new Queen of the City Under the Back Steps, and it turns out that Queen has the power to shrink them down to ant size and keep them in the city of ants until she’s good and ready to make them back into Mashers (what the ants call humans) again. The laws of Ant City are simple and immutable: Eat without being eaten, and protect the babies. Everything the ants do is in obedience to one or both of these laws. And contrary to Craig’s ideas about boys being stronger and more useful than girls, the ants don’t have much use for males of any species. Male ants in this city are not worth much as workers, and they only live for a day or two at the most.

In this transformational fantasy tale, the children don’t actually become ants, but they do shrink to the size of ants. They find that their human characteristics–only two legs to walk on, a lack of antennae to sense direction, and their need for sleep and rest—make them unfit for life in the City Under the Back Steps. However, when the red ants attack the City and carry off the babies, Craig and Jill are able to think of a way to bring the babies back and restore the City to stability and law-keeping. Will it be enough to make the Queen return them to their proper size?

Craig learns that not all societies think girls are “dumb”, and Jill and Craig both learn to accept other cultural norms even though they don’t really understand them. The ants are very different in their values and actions from humans, and Jill and Craig find that their pride in being human might be a somewhat overweening. After all, they only have brute strength and size to be proud of while the ants, ever busy and always law abiding, have a society that withstands repeated calamity and builds again.

This book is out of print and quite expensive to purchase online. First published in 1960, the story and the characters hold up quite well. If you can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a used copy, maybe you can get it from your library —or if you live in Houston, you can borrow it from my library.

The City Under the Back Steps would be a great story to read aloud during a study of insects and bugs or a study of different cultures. Different isn’t always wrong, and sometimes it pays to just listen and try to understand another person’s (or ant’s) thoughts and values. I’m trying to think of other books like this one, where a child enters an animal world and learns from the somewhat anthropomorphized animals who still carry some of the characteristics of animals as well:

In The Tune Is in the Tree by Maud Hart Lovelace, Annie Jo spends the day with the birds who use magic to shrink her to bird size and give her a pair of wings so that they can take care of her while her parents are away.

In The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli, the man-cub, lives in the forest with the wolf pack, but he is still a human boy. He learns to obey the law of the jungle, but eventually he turns to the community of village life.

T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone has Merlin the Wizard turn young Arthur or Wart into a fish, an ant, a badger, and a wild goose, and each transformation is meant to teach him a lesson about the role he will play as king someday. So, although Wart still thinks more or less like a human when he is transformed into various animals, he has the body and skills of the animal he becomes.

I know I’m forgetting other books like these. What other books have children entering the world of animals, transformed into the size or body or community of a member of the animal world? And what does the child learn from the experience?

A Few Family Names for Your Consideration

Sep8

I would imagine that everyone has a few names on their family tree that are . . . unusual, maybe even peculiar or bizarre. But one of those old family names might just be the perfect fit for a twenty-first century baby who wants to distinguish himself or herself from the pack. So, here, presented for the consideration of my own family, and yours, if you’re looking for that special name for a special child, are a few names (first and middle) from my family tree:

  • Joseph Author. Not Arthur. This was my grandfather’s name.
  • Monger Stacy. This was my great-grandfather, whom I never met. He was born on New Year’s Day in 1885, so if you have a New Year’s baby . . .
  • Jimmie Quency. My grandfather, whom I also never met. If you use this name be sure to spell Quency with an “e”. I think it’s much more distinguished.
  • William Lafayette. They called him “Fate” for short. My great-great grandfather.
  • Newton Lafayette. My great grandfather. As far as I know he had no nickname. (Different family line) Why were these Southerners so fond of Lafayette?
  • Wilburn Scott. Another great-grandfather.
  • James Kemble. Yet another great-grandfather.
  • Larkin George. My third great-grandfather. I like the name Larkin. You could call him Lark as a nickname. There’s also a Joseph Larkin on the family tree.
  • Hampton Butler. Sounds southern. like something from Gone With the Wind.
  • Edom Robbinson. My husband’s great-great grandfather.
  • Robert Wallace Thomas. I have two Baptist preachers, father and son, on my family tree with this solid name.
  • Philemon Thomas. It would take a special boy to carry off the first name Philemon, but maybe you could switch the two and make it Thomas Philemon.
  • Carlisle Haines. My seventh great-grandfather.
  • Tristram Thomas. May be my original emigrant ancestor from Wales and also maybe my seventh great-grandfather.
  • Vespasian Kemble. My sixth great-grandfather. I’m not sure anyone could carry this name off, ever. I’m not even sure how to pronounce it.
  • Zuritha Chaney. Sometimes spelled Zooritha. My third great-grandmother.
  • Bonnie Leota. My grandmother, and a fine name she had, if I do say so myself.
  • Lorena Adair. My great-great grandmother.
  • Oleta Eudora. Engineer Husband’s mother. One of my children has the middle name Oleta.
  • Emily Alvira. Engineer Husband’s great-grandmother.
  • Icey Ann. My husband’s great-great grandmother.
  • Lula Perle. My husband’s grandmother.
  • Lula Mae. My great-grandmother.
  • Palmyra Jane. My husband’s great-great aunt.
  • Delana Faith. Called “Laney”. Husband’s great-great grandmother.
  • Narcissa Caroline. Another great-great grandmother.
  • Hattie Mae. My great-aunt.
  • Ida Mae. My great grandmother.
  • Ola Myrtle. Another great-aunt.

Feel free to borrow any of these. What are some beautiful or unusual names on your family tree?

Show Me a Sign by Ann Clare LeZotte

Sep4

Author and librarian Ann Clare LeZotte is deaf, so this story of a deaf girl living in community that is half deaf and half hearing on Martha’s Vineyard is born out of the author’s own experiences, for what that is worth. I do think it’s always enlightening to read “own voices” stories when they are available and well written.

The story takes place in the early 1900’s when there actually was such a community of mixed hearing and non-hearing persons living together on Martha’s Vineyard. This community used their own version of sign language (MVSL) to communicate, and that sign language formed part of the basis for ASL (American Sign Language) years later in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mary Lambert, the protagonist of the story, is a deaf girl who has grown up up safe and protected in little island community. Nevertheless, before the story opens, Mary’s family has experienced a devastating tragedy: Mary’s brother George died in accident. And no one else knows that the accident was Mary’s fault. George saved her life at the expense of his own.

Mary’s mother particularly doted on George, and Mary is unsure about whether her mother truly loves and cares for her, now that George is gone. At this point the story veers off into the coming of a stranger to the community, a stranger who wants to study the deaf people on the island and find out “what’s wrong with them.” The problem is the stranger’s prejudices; the islanders, hearing or not, don’t think anything is wrong with being deaf.

This novel definitely gives new perspectives on both deafness and Native American attitudes and culture. (Some of the minor characters in the book are Wampanoag, and the author goes to great lengths to write about the Wampanoag respectfully and accurately.) About halfway through Something Bad happens, and the story gets exciting. I really did enjoy and learn from reading this book about a place and time in history that was previously unknown to me.

However, there are some weaknesses in the book. It starts off slow and veers off onto various rabbit trails that ultimately go nowhere. What is the point of the Wampanoag servant characters, father and daughter, who work for Mary’s father and Mary’s best friend’s family? In fact, what is the point of pages and pages about Mary and her best friend, Nancy and their escapades? Why do the two friends apologize to each other at the end of the book? (Maybe I missed something?) The ending itself went on way too long, several chapters of getting home and tearful reunion. And yes, the setting and characters were unique and interesting, but the friendships in the story were odd and unfocused.

We Could Be Heroes by Margaret Finnegan

Sep3

Hank Hudson can’t stand one more day of listening to his teacher read aloud the horrible, sad book about a boy who is hiding in the forest from the Nazis. He’s already protested and asked to be excused, to no avail. So he does the only thing left to do: burn the book.

With this scene of attempted book burning (no one is harmed and even the book survives the attempt), we are introduced to Hank who loves rocks, and perceptive readers will understand that ten year old Hank is “on the spectrum” even though the label of autism is not introduced until later in the story. Hank’s unsuccessful book burning catches the attention of a girl in his class, Maisie, who is looking for an accomplice and a friend to help her rescue a dog named Booler, and off we go with Maisie and Hank on a series of madcap, slightly dangerous, highly illegal adventures.

Maisie is not autistic, but she is quite immature and fixated on Booler, a dog with a seizure disorder. Maisie sympathizes with the next door neighbor’s dog to an excessive degree. Hank, on the other hand, just wants a friend, and he finds one in Maisie, even though the two fifth graders both have some things to learn about true friendship.

This middle grade fiction book is a funny, easy read with a good message–“different is not less”–and a good heart. The story is a sensitive yet entertaining portrayal of autism and other differences and of good intentions gone awry.

Pippa Park Raises Her Game by Erin Yun

Sep2

Korean American seventh grader Pippa Park gets a scholarship to a rich private school where she tries to ingratiate herself with the popular clique while covering up her working class, public school background. She’s also busy with trying to understand algebra, play winning basketball, and take care of her chores and responsibilities at home. The popular girls get mean; Pippa gets exhausted, enmeshed in lies and half-truths; and the good-looking math tutor that Pippa’s sister hired for her barely acknowledges Pippa’s existence.

It’s a fairly cliche plot with a standard cast of characters. However, the thing that made this book fun for me is that it’s a “reimagining” of the Charles Dickens classic Great Expectations. Pippa is Pip, of course. Her rich math tutor, Eliot Haverford, who lives in a mansion and deals with unreasonable family expectations, is a take-off on Estella. Pippa lives with her older sister, Mina, who also has high expectations for Mina’s academic achievements, and with Mina’s husband, Jung-hwa, who is a warm and fuzzy Joe Gargery. And so on.

If reading this book would cause some middle school readers to take on Great Expectations, I’m all for it. I think Great Expectations is one of Dickens’ most accessible novels. I read it aloud to three of my children the they were about ten, eight and six years old. I’m not sure the six year old followed all of the plot and action, but she listened with the other two who did demonstrate an understanding of the basic outline and ideas of the novel. And we all enjoyed the read aloud, so I’m sure an average middle schooler could handle Dickens’ rags to riches story.

Pippa Park Raises her Game has a lot of crushing on boys, mean girls being mean, and Pippa herself being somewhat deceitful and ashamed of her family and background. If you would rather not read about any or all of these subjects, then caveat emptor. Never fear, however, good does triumph, and Pippa, like Pip, learns her lessons after much drama and turmoil brought on mostly by her own actions.

Oh, I liked the fact that Pippa listens to K-pop and watches K-dramas. These are good details in a good, solid book that reads a little bit like a K-drama.

Village of Scoundrels by Margi Preus

Sep1

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loiredepartment in south-central France. Residents have been primarily Huguenot or Protestant since the 17th century. During World War II these Huguenot residents made the commune a haven for Jews fleeing from the Nazis. They hid them both within the town and countryside, and helped them flee to neutral Switzerland. In 1990 the town was one of two collectively honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

~Wikipedia

Village of Scoundrels is a fictional depiction of the activities of the villagers of Le Chambon during World War 2, especially the teens and children who were either refugees or resistors or both. The book doesn’t really have a clearly defined protagonist, but some of the heroes and villains in the books are listed in the opening pages, and these characters are mostly based on the lives and actions of real, living people:

  • Celeste is a high school student who becomes a courier for the Resistance.
  • Jean-Paul is a Jewish teen who wants to become a doctor, but who find that his talent for forgery is in demand.
  • Jules the Scoundrel is a ten year old goatherd who plays dangerous games with the French policeman who is collaborating with the Nazis to uncover the secrets of Le Chambon.
  • Henni and Max are German Jews, boyfriend and girlfriend, who take refuge in Le Chambon.
  • Philippe, a high school student from Normandy, hides refugees and smuggles them to Switzerland.

This book is gaining lots of accolades this year, and indeed the subject matter cries out for a good novelization or narrative nonfiction telling (maybe there is a good nonfiction book about this WWII event?). However, the mix of fiction and nonfiction in this one was not that well done. It should have either been more fictionalized to make the story flow with a clear protagonist and plot or just straight nonfiction with chapters telling the stories of each of the various children and young adults who were active in the French Resistance in Le Chambon. I found it interesting, but hard to follow.

The last part of the novel, where the story coalesces around the French policeman, Perdant, and Jules the Soundrel, is pure fiction and better reading than the rest of the book. Then, the afterword attempts to help the reader sort fact from fiction, but I found it just as confusing as the preceding chapters. Again, can anyone recommend a well written nonfiction book on this subject? Preus provides a bibliography of twenty or more titles at the end of the book, but which one is the best?

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Aug30

Our family–me, some of my adult children and their spouses–are participating in a book club together this year. We’re taking turns choosing a book a month. The July book was The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. It was a novel about a Ponzi scheme and the people who become enmeshed in it, both before and after the scheme goes bust. In August we read a book of short stories, The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who also wrote the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah. She is a good writer, and although I always enjoy full length novels more than I do short stories, these stories were well worth the read.

I started a couple of weeks ago and read one story each night before bedtime. It was a good way to digest a book of seemingly unrelated short stories that are at least somewhat tied together by theme if not characters or plot. Reading only one story at a time gave me an opportunity to reflect and learn from each one.

The stories are about cultural encounter and clash between men and women, parents and children, Christian and Muslim, younger and older generations, modern and ancient, Nigeria and the United States. For the most part the tone and the outlook of each story are rather bleak. With one exception, the cultural and generational encounters in each of the stories are fraught with misunderstanding and even tragedy. In the first story “Cell One” a young man learns a lesson when he is imprisoned for a few days. In the second, “Imitation”, a properly submissive young wife confronts her husband’s blatant adultery. Another story is about a black woman from Nigeria who becomes the girlfriend and lover of a white man in Hartford, Connecticut. As in the other stories, the romance/story ends sadly, not with bang but rather a whimper.

The one story that shows two people coming to some sort of bridge of cultures is called “A Private Experience.” Two women are trapped together in a small store by violence and riots in the streets of a small market village in Nigeria. One is a Hausa Muslim woman, a mother; the other is a young Christian college student from the city. They are different is so many ways: economic status, religion, age, experience. And yet as they are thrown together, the two learn to trust and help each other, and they survive. This tale, too, does not have a happy ending, and yet there is a spark of hope in the patient endurance of the Muslim woman and the awakening understanding and empathy of the young Christian student.

And on it goes. A Nigerian nanny misunderstands the actions of her artist employer. A young wife whose son has died is applying for asylum in the United States, but she is unable to explain the complexities of her situation to the customs official who is taking her application. There’s a Cain and Abel story featuring a girl and her older, favored brother. Two Africans in college housing become friends and bond over their grievances about past lovers in spite of their differing religious perspectives. An arranged marriage sours very quickly.

Then, the last and culminating story , “The Headstrong Historian”, tells of a grandmother and the granddaughter who carries on her strength and cultural awareness even though the interceding generation has been Christianized and diminished by white colonization. In all of these stories, when it appears, Christianity is dour and powerless, never a fulfillment of African destiny and understanding, but rather a threat to the deep roots of African greatness or an empty husk to be discarded in the wake of modern twentieth century wisdom. This story begins when the grandmother is young in the late nineteenth century, immersed in African thought patterns and African religion and African community life. The next generation, the son and his wife, accept Christianity, Catholicism, and are made weak and pitiful and rigid by the tenets of the new religion. Then, finally comes the granddaughter, a new, educated, strong woman who learns her true history and goes back to her roots “reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmother’s world.” She writes a book, subtitled A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. But nothing in the story indicates that the granddaughter understands the darker elements of attempted murder and revenge and slavery and mistreatment of women that form part of her history just as much as the depredations of colonialism. The granddaughter changes her name from Grace to Afamefuna, “My Name Will Not Be Lost”, but I wonder if she really knows the meaning and background of her new-old name.