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The Clear Light of Day by Penelope Wilcock

Sep30

I’m a huge fan of Penelope Wilcock’s series of books called The Hawk and the Dove about a medieval monastery and the lives of the monks of St.Alcuin. So when I spotted The Clear Light of Day, set in present day England, at the used bookstore, I snapped it up. And it was a lovely, but frustrating, read.

The lovely part was an unconventional romance between a middle-aged, divorced Methodist minister, Esme Browne, and an older (much older) country eccentric who repairs bicycles, does odd-jobs, and spins rather unoriginal homespun philosophies. The frustrating part was the Oprah-ish spirituality that was supposed to be oh-so-free-thinking and new and unorthodox. Jabez Ferral and his even older friend Ember are “spiritual but not religious” and the parts of the book in which they told about how they believed in “simplicity” and “thinking globally and acting locally” bored me and made me want to quit reading. Here’s an example:

I’m not sure what deity is, my love; but life is sacred, life is wise. One day, if my smoke finds the way home, and wakes the great Spirit, then the face of life that is death will come speeding silent like a hunting owl, and take the cancer of humanity off this poor, stripped, raped mother Earth, take it silent and quick, no more than a squeak of alarm; and the mountains will have their peace again, and the oceans give back the heavenly blue. The guns and the cars will rust, and the televisions will be quiet at last, and the factories and schools and government buildings will be for the bramble, the rat, and the crow. Is that what you call praying?

I don’t like preachy books, especially when they’re not even preaching the gospel, but rather some kind of spiritual gobbledygook.

So, good story, good characters, too much (bad) philosophy. Stick to Ms. Wilcock’s monks, who sometimes venture into post-modern spirituality but are kept from its worst excesses by the need for historical verisimilitude.

Golden Boy by Tara Sullivan

Sep17

“Burning in the daylight and hunted in the shadows, having albinism is often a death sentence in East Africa. In Tanzania, one out of every 1,400 people has albinism, a genetic condition characterized by a lack of pigment in the body. That compares to a global average of one in 20,000 people.” Huffington Post, June 15, 2013.

“In fact, the number of albino murders are decreasing in Tanzania because of all the publicity and the government’s stern warnings that they must stop. But African albinos still grow up in a world of prejudice and misunderstanding.” NPR, All Things Considered, November 30, 2012

“People with albinism in East Africa face profound social stigma and isolation, due to the negative myths that surround the condition. In addition, most children with albinism have early signs of skin cancer by their teen years, and only 2% of people with albinism live to reach their 40th birthday.” Asante Miraimu website.

Golden Boy, Ms. Sullivan’s debut novel, is the kind of book that impels the reader (at least this reader) to go to the internet and start looking up facts about the problem that is portrayed, in this case the persecution of individuals with albinism. But even without all the fact-finding follow-up, Golden Boy is a good story that highlights the difficulties and sheer pain of growing up and living in a place where you are humiliated and ridiculed and maybe even physically assaulted (or killed) as a result of physical differences. Even those of us who have never been persecuted or made to fear for our lives can identify to some extent with Habo, the albino protagonist of this novel, and his search for significance, his desire to see himself as more than just a zero-zero, the Tanzanian term for albinos.

Who hasn’t been made to feel like a zero at sometime by someone? But for for Habo, life is much more dangerous than it is for most people with low self-esteem, and the stakes are much higher than they are in the typical neighborhood bullying incident. People actually do kill albinos in the place where Habo’s family comes to live. And Habo must run away and hide himself, unable to trust anyone. Even the blind sculptor he meets, who doesn’t know about his secret, may become a threat if and when he finds out that Habo is an albino.

Yes, this story has a moral, but it is far from moralistic. Habo feels and acts like a real person, even as he becomes a fictional symbol for all of the children who suffer from the twin afflictions of abuse and physical impairment as a result of their albinism.

Other reviews of Golden Boy:
My Head Is Full of Books: “Golden Boy has just catapulted itself onto my list of top YA books of the year. The topic, living in Africa with albinism, is certainly a unique one. Yes, it is a story about prejudice and the effects of poor education, but it is also a story of acceptance and of bravery.”
Megan Cox Gurdon in WSJ: “This harrowing but ultimately redemptive story benefits from Ms. Sullivan’s deft use of simile: She writes that panic crawls up Habo’s throat ‘like a hairy spider.'”
Abby the Librarian: “an accessible novel with a compelling plot that will interest kids and may inspire them to learn more about the plight of albinos in Tanzania and what they can do to help.”

A Matter of Days by Amber Kizer

Sep14

Inspired (or scared silly) by Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Stephen King’s The Stand, author Amber Kizer says she first became fascinated with viruses and pandemics and apocalyptic survival when she was in middle school. “With Nadia and Rabbit’s story I got to live out one fantasy of a worst-case-scenario pandemic,” says she.

Nadia and Rabbit are a teenage girl and little brother, alive in world where a nasty weaponized virus has killed 98% of the world’s population. And what’s left is a lot of dead bodies and anarchy. It’s a pretty repulsive and violent world, but Nadia and Rabbit have been taught by their father, a marine, and their uncle, an epidemiologist in the military, to “be the cockroach”—in other words, to survive. So, using practical survival techniques and common sense, Nadia and Rabbit leave their home in Seattle to travel eastward to West Virginia where they hope to find their grandfather and uncle still living and preparing a place for them to survive in this brave new world. Don’t read any more if you want to read the novel for yourself without spoilers.

I liked this story a lot, although it had its flaws. The main thing that didn’t make sense was that Nadia and Rabbit at first think they might be the only people left in this world, but after the halfway point of the book, they meet people, other survivors, almost on every page. And there are plot developments that just seem to be dropped. At one point Nadia is captured, and her captors threaten to trade her to some one named “Jonah” who “wants all the girls.” In most stories, Jonah would show up later, and we’d get some idea about who he is and why he wants all the girls. In this story, Jonah is never mentioned again. That’s realistic, but not very satisfying as a story (see Chekhov’s gun).

Still, I recommend this story for those who have not tired of the recent spate of apocalyptic survival stories. Read-alikes would include: The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, Epitaph Road by David Patneaude, Chaos Walking series by Patrick Ness, The Compound by S.A. Bodeen, Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, and Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeiffer.

2013 Cybils nomination category: Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Poetry Friday: Nobody’s Secret by Michaela MacColl

Sep13

In 1846 fifteen year old Emily of Amherst, Massachusetts, meets a mysterious young man whom she nicknames “Mr. Nobody.” Since he refuses to tell Emily his real name, she is regrettably unable to identify him when he turns up dead in her family’s pond. However, Miss Emily Dickinson feels a responsibility not only to find out the name of the deceased but also to determine just how he died.

I was reminded of Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries as I read this murder mystery featuring a fictionalized Emily Dickinson as amateur detective. Emily, as portrayed in Nobody’s Secret, is a sharp, intelligent, and very private young lady who is already scribbling down poems in a secret notebook that she keeps hidden in a very secret place. Like Flavia, Emily is not afraid of dead bodies or possible confrontations with murderers, and she is just as determined and ingenious as that other fictional girl detective.

However, in this novel we have the added flavor and pleasure of poetry, and not just any poetry but the verse of Miss Dickinson herself. The author of this YA mystery writes in a note at the end of the book, “Emily’s poems inspired this story, especially ‘I’m Nobody! Who Are You?,’ which is about how enticing anonymity might be in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.”

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog! –

Emily Dickinson’s use of “creative punctuation”–particularly all the dashes– annoyed editors and publishers in the nineteenth century and provoked them to change her punctuation marks to more acceptable ones. That kind of editing, in turn, provoked Emily Dickinson, and as a result she did not allow very many of her poems to be published, or “corrected,” during her lifetime. Her poems also often had several versions. I memorized the one above a long time ago with the words “banish us” instead of “advertise”, and that’s the way I quote it, frequently, to my children.

A good solid mystery woven around immortal poetry: what more could one desire? Nobody’s Secret would be an excellent Cybils nominee in the category of Young Adult Fiction.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Jen at Teach Mentor Texts.

Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein

Sep10

Rose Under Fire is billed as a companion novel to Wein’s popular and award-winning World War II story, Code Name Verity. It’s not really a sequel, but it does take place after the events in Code Name Verity and some of the same characters do make an appearance, particularly Maddie, Queenie/Verity’s best friend. However, this new book is really about 18-year old American pilot, Rose Justice, who joins the British Air Transport Auxiliary in order to help end the war. The story takes place in England, France, and later, Germany, as Rose’s flying assignments take her closer and closer to danger and destruction.

Rose Under Fire may not please all of the fans of Code Name Verity because it’s not as psychologically suspenseful as Code Name Verity is. However, Rose Under Fire is a fascinating look at an aspect of the Holocaust and the concentration camps that I didn’t know much, if anything, about. After a series of misadventures, Rose ends up incarcerated in Ravensbruck, the infamous German death camp. It’s 1946, and the war is coming to an end. However, the Germans are determined to fight to the bitter end, and those who have been committing atrocities in Ravensbruck and elsewhere are making every effort to cover their tracks and maintain order before the Allies liberate the camps.

Part of the cover-up involves silencing those who can bear witness to the worst of the atrocities. Rose, who becomes an accidental witness to some of Ravensbruck’s most horrific secrets, is charged by the other women prisoners to survive and tell the world about the things she sees and learns while she is imprisoned.

While I was reading Rose Under Fire, I was reminded of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. (I highly recommend both the book and the movie.) I thought perhaps that reminder was because Wein’s book takes place in Ravensbruck, the same prison camp where Corrie and her sister Betsy were held. However, it turns out that there is more to the echo than just a common setting. Ms. Wein lists The Hiding Place in her bibliography at the end of her book, and I found the following information in an article online:

“. . . at age eight, she (Elizabeth Wein) first encountered information about concentration camps, in a comic book adaptation of Corrie ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. She read the book itself a few years later, and then drew her own illustrated version of Boom’s memoir about hiding Jews from the Nazis at the family’s watch shop in Holland. ‘I was obsessed with her story, frankly,’ Wein says. ‘Something about how they managed to maintain hope resonated with me.’ ~Publishers Weekly

I was reminded of The Hiding Place because Ms. Wein did her research well. The Ravensbruck in Rose Under Fire is the real Ravensbruck, the same horrible place that is shown in Corrie Ten Boom’s memoir and testimony to God’s grace and mercy. Rose Under Fire isn’t a religious or “Christian” book at all, but there are touches of grace: a motherly prisoner who always prays before allowing her brood their daily crumbs of bread, another prisoner who gives her life in Rose’s place, and Rose herself who receives supernatural strength to endure unspeakable suffering. Rose is a poet as well as an aviator, and in her poems (Elizabeth Wein’s poems) she writes about suffering and hope and redemption.

I was reminded of Corrie Ten Boom’s famous statement of faith and courage: “No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still; with Jesus even in our darkest moments, the best remains and the very best is yet to be.”

And there’s the admonition of Elie Weisel, who said, like so many other Holocaust survivors say: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Rose Under Fire, though it’s fiction, is a true witness to the depravity of man and the tenacity of hope, sure to get a Cybils nomination in the YA fiction category.

An interview with Elizabeth Wein at Playing by the Book.

Imperfect Spiral by Debbie Levy

Sep5

The marketing blurb on the back of this YA novel says “for fans of Jodi Piccoult”, but since I’ve been underwhelmed by the Jodi Piccoult novels I’ve tried, that’s not much of a recommendation. I would say that Imperfect Spiral is much better than a lot of YA novels and transcends the “problem novel” genre.

Danielle Samuelson spent her summer babysitting five year old Humphrey Danker. Humphrey is precocious, persistent, and perhaps slightly “perculiar”, as he likes to pronounce the word. He has an imagination that stretches from aliens called Thrumbles of the planet Thrumble-Boo all the way to throwing the perfect spiral with a pint-sized football. That is, Humphrey imagines throwing the perfect spiral, but he never actually does it because he is killed as our story begins in a tragic car accident.

And it’s all Danielle’s fault. Or is it? This book is about assumptions and the judgments we all make about ourselves and about one another. Danielle thinks Humphrey’s parents, especially his father, might be somewhat overbearing and expecting too much out of Humphrey. Danielle’s parents think her brother Adrian, who dropped out of high school, should shape up and live up to his abilities. Danielle believes that she should have prevented the accident that killed Humphrey. The neighbors think that the illegal, undocumented immigrant family who ran into Humphrey should be held responsible. No one knows exactly what Humphrey’s parents think about the death of their only child. Everyone in the story makes judgments and finds fault when the guilty party is mostly just an imperfect world.

I am fascinated by how people survive after a horrendous tragedy changes their life, especially a tragedy in which the person in question is at fault or might have to accept some blame for the tragedy. I’m also amazed and saddened at how we as a culture and society need to find someone or something to blame for every single tragic event that occurs. If a car malfunctions, it must be the fault of the manufacturer or of the last mechanic to work on that car or of the owner for not being more careful in its maintenance. It can’t be just an accident. If I fall and break my head open, it must be the fault of the people who made the surface I’m walking on or my fault for walking recklessly or your fault for distracting me from walking. Someone must take responsibility. Something must change so that no one, anywhere, ever will fall and break their head open ever again. Laws must be passed and named after me. Rules must be formulated for safe walking. Walking must be regulated or outlawed or only done where there are no possible distractions or safety hazards.

We are obsessed with blame and with making everything completely safe and risk-free. But sometimes there are just accidents. Maybe, in hindsight, those accidents could be prevented, but at what cost to our freedom and our sense of adventure and our joy? I believe that as we have become a post-Christian culture with a belief that this life is all there is, we have become so concerned about preserving life that we have boxed ourselves, and especially our children, into tiny, circumscribed lives that have no room for risk and creativity and untrammeled joy.

And yet, if my daughter died because I let her walk to the grocery store by herself, how would I live with myself afterwards? I don’t know, but I like the way Ms. Levy’s Imperfect Spiral asks the questions that I ask myself about this tension between guilt, responsibility, imperfection, and freedom.

Definitely recommended for 2013 Cybils nominations in the category YA Fiction.

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

Aug3

I really liked Sara Zarr’s YA novels Once Was Lost and How to Save a Life. I thought her Sweethearts was O.K. but nothing to write home about. I haven’t read Story of a Girl, a National Book Award finalist in 2007, because I’m wary of the subject matter, a girl who gets a bad reputation and can’t live it down. This latest one from Ms. Zarr (2013), The Lucy Variations, was a good read, but a little odd in some ways.

The characters and their actions and reactions reminded me of Madeleine L’Engle’s young adult fiction. Her young protagonists are usually oddly grown-up and mature and at the same time naive, getting themselves into situations that went too deep, too soon. It’s an atmosphere and characterization that I can identify with:

Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. The right people knew her name, her performances were booked months in advance, and her future seemed certain.

That was all before she turned fourteen.

Now, at sixteen, it’s over. A death, and a betrayal, led her to walk away. That leaves her talented ten-year-old brother, Gus, to shoulder the full weight of the Beck-Moreau family expectations. Then Gus gets a newpiano teacher who is young, kind, and interested in helping Lucy rekindle her love of piano—on her own terms. But when you’re used to performing for sold-out audiences and world-famous critics, can you ever learn to play just for yourself?

Not that I was ever a promising concert pianist or any other kind of prodigy, but I was a reader and somewhat mature for my age—in some ways. I knew about “stuff” from books just as Lucy knows about the adult world from being immersed in world of concert piano competitions from an early age. But that narrow, once-removed experience of adulthood doesn’t really prepare one for acting as an adult at age sixteen. Even if people expect maturity from an accomplished concert pianist.

So The Lucy Variations is about growing up when certain people expect you to be all grown up already.

And now that I’ve written all I have to say about this novel, I refer you to Liz Burns’ review at A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy in which she says what I think about this book.

Being Henry David by Cal Armistead

Jul23

Cal Armistead lives near Concord, Massachusetts, where most of this story is set, and of course, since it’s Concord, the “Henry David” of the title refer to Henry David Thoreau, Concord’s most famous former resident. This YA novel, however, is set in current times, and it’s an amnesia novel, just so you know going in.

Amnesia, the kind where you forget your own name and everything about your past, is not very common, but it’s really useful in creating a suspenseful, roller coaster plot with and identity, who-am-I theme. Being Henry David is strong in terms of plot. Unexpected events give the story credibility and draw the reader into the plot. I wanted to keep reading to find out who Henry David, or Hank as he calls himself in the book, really was and what would happen to him. I was fairly sure that he was not, as one minor character suggested, a reincarnation of Henry David Thoreau, even though Thoreau does appear in Hank’s dreams and give him advice.

The characterization in this novel, on the other hand, is just O.K., not bad, but also not exciting. I never really felt as if I knew Hank or completely understood his motivations, even after he remembered who he was. And the other characters are stereotypical: the love interest with a silky, sultry voice, the kindly research librarian, the absentee parents, a couple of abused teen runaways, and the scary drug dealer. These are all characters who could exist, but I never totally bought in to any of them.

So Being Henry David has a good plot, OK characters, recognizable themes of guilt, remembrance, and identity. It was an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.

No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner

Jul21

Jamie Langston Turner is one of my “go-to” authors for Christian-themed fiction. So when I saw a copy of a novel by Ms. Turner that I hadn’t yet read while I was perusing the shelves at Half-Price Books, I bought it without a second thought. And I’m glad I did.

No Dark Valley is a little more “religious” than some of Ms. Turner’s other novels, although all of them are about how ordinary people find redemption and strength through faith in Jesus. Nevertheless, just like the characters in her other books, the characters in No Dark Valley are real. I can imagine meeting these people, talking to them, understanding them. There are no pasteboard saints in this story, although Ms. Turner does indulge in a meta-fiction thread that runs through the novel about how Celia, the protagonist, imagines that her life and the people in it would never be believable as fiction:

“Another reason her life would make a bad novel, Celia had decided, was that the characters would seem so stereotyped. Nobody would believe that one person could have so many rigidly religious relatives, all stuck in the rut of such predictable, countrified ways of viewing life, all trekking to church several times a week, all so unaware that the twentieth century had come and gone. You could get by with one or two characters like that in a book, for quirky splashes of color, but not dozens and dozens of them. The whole thing would turn into a farce.”

Of course, the funny thing about No Dark Valley was that I found the characters to be quite plausible and true to life–my life in the South, in the Bible Belt. I’m not sure if Ms. Turner was actually worried that readers would find her Christian characters stereotypical and so wrote her concerns into the book, or if she was simply having fun with Celia and her own rigid ways of thinking. (Celia is a champion at projecting her own rigidity and prejudice onto her relatives and others.) Either way, Celia’s interior monologue, and later in the novel when the point of view switches to Celia’s neighbor, Bruce Healy, his thoughts, are both relatable and authentic.

No Dark Valley is both a romance story and a conversion story. Jamie Langston Turner’s prose is intelligent, vivid, and sometimes crosses over into the poetic. I really enjoy Ms. Turner’s novels. If they can be classified as “Christian chicklit”, it’s excellent, smart Christian chick lit.

Jamie Langston Turner’s other books:
Suncatchers
Some Wildflower in My Heart (1998)
By the Light of a Thousand Stars (1999)
A Garden to Keep (2001)
Winter Birds (2006)
Sometimes a Light Surprises (2009)

And if you like a series of novels with recurring and overlapping characters, Ms Turner’s novels, like those of another of my favorite writers, Madeleine L’Engle, have characters from one novel that reappear in later books. In No Dark Valley, Eldeen Rafferty from Suncatchers makes a (loud) appearance. Margaret Tuttle, from Some Wildflower in My Heart, is the friend of a friend. And Elizabeth Landis from A Garden to Keep becomes a friend and mentor to Celia as the two women play on a tennis team together.

And now I have to admit that Ms. Turner and I have a little bit of a mutual admiration society going here, and I am pleased to read that she has a new novel coming out in 2014.

Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter

Jul15

First, I read Ally Carter’s novelette, Double Crossed, on my Kindle. It’s an intersection between her Gallagher Girls books and her Heist Society adventure novels. Macey Henry, Gallagher Girl, meets W.W. Hale the Fifth and his maybe girlfriend Katarina Bishop, the daughter of an infamous family of con men and criminals. Macey and Hale foil a gang of would-be jewel thieves at a high society charity event while Kat and Gallagher Girls’ Covert Operations teacher, Abby Cameron, provide help from the outside.

So, after getting a taste of Heist Society adventure, I remembered that I hadn’t yet found the time to read the second book in the Heist Society series, Uncommon Criminals, even though I bought it for Brown Bear Daughter for Christmas. And since said daughter is in Slovakia, I have unfettered access to her books. So, while waiting for the fireworks to start at the 4th of July celebration in Friendswood, I read about jewel thieves and con artists and the people who love them.

The book reads like a movie, a romantic adventure sort of movie, which, if one could go back in time, would suit a young Cary Grant playing opposite Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn. Most of the story takes place in Monaco, which is probably why I thought of Grace Kelly. Alfred Hitchcock, of course, would direct. A young Jimmy Stewart could play the second love interest, Nick. I’m not sure who would play Katarina and Hale in a movie made with actual actors who are available nowadays.

At any rate, Ms. Carter has created a couple of fine, entertaining series for teens: The Gallagher Girls spy novels and the Heist Society crime caper novels. Try either series, but read the books in order and get ready to have some fun. Classify these as light summer (or anytime) reading when you’re in the mood for a little mind candy.

Gallagher Girls Series
I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You (2006)
Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy (2007)
Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover (2009)
Only the Good Spy Young (2010)
Out of Sight, Out of Time (2012)
United We Spy(2013)

Heist Society Series
Heist Society (2010)
Uncommon Criminals (2011)
Perfect Scoundrels (2013)

Novella cross between the two series: Double-Crossed (2013)

Now, I still need to read United We Spy and Perfect Scoundrels. I’ll probably save them for my next summer event that involves waiting in a crowd or mild distractions that aren’t conducive to reading more serious tomes. Actually, these books would be just the right ones to keep on your e-reader and pull up in case of just such a reading emergency.