Poetry Friday: Christ in the Universe by Alice Meynell

Jan15

I found this lovely poem via Elliot at Claw of the Conciliator:

WITH this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The myriad forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

He is, indeed, much Bigger than our minds have yet conceived, and at the same time He “became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)

Great Kid Books is the blog host for Poetry Friday this week.

Semicolon’s 12 Best Middle Grade Fiction Books of 2009 plus Newbery Predictions

Jan14

1. Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Semicolon review here.
2. Dani Noir by Nova Ren Suma. Semicolon review here.
3. Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick.
4. Heart of a Shepherd by Roseanne Parry. Semicolon review here.
5. William S. and the Great Escape by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Semicolon review here.
6. Leaving the Bellweathers by Kristin Clark Venuti.
7. Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams. Semicolon review here.
8. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Semicolon review here.
9. Any Which Wall by Laurel Snyder. Semicolon review here.
10. Black Angels by Linda Beatrice Brown. Semicolon review here.
11. Born to Fly by Michael Ferrari. Semicolon review here.
12. The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mich Cochrane. Semicolon review here.

What I Want to Win the Newbery (tba on Monday, January 18th):
Any of the above, but Heart of a Shepherd or Anything But Typical or Any Which Wall would please me to no end.

My Prediction for the Newbery Award and honor books:
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Semicolon review here.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phillip Hoose.
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.
I predict that one of those three will win the Newbery with the other two as honor books.

I’m not very good at this predicting thing, though. Last year, I tried to read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman twice and never did make it through the entire book.

Cybils Nominees that Betsy-Bee Read

Jan13

Betsy-Bee is ten years old, and she read:

Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur. A very sad book. Aubrey’s dad and sister died in a car crash, and then her mom ran away from her. So she had to go live with her grandma, and she meets a new friend named Brooke. Every chapter has a little sadness in it. Grade: A+

Jemma Hartman, Camper Extraordinaire by Brenda Ferber. Good book. Jemma gets to camp, and she thinks it’s going to be perfect with her best friend, Tammy. But her best friend’s cousin comes to camp, too, and Tammy spends all of her time with the cousin instead of Jemma. Grade: A-

Callie’s Rules by Naomi Zucker. Callie’s family isn’t really poor but they have a lot of kids. The mom and dad are kind of weird. The mom of the popular girl at school talks to Callie’s mom about replacing Halloween with Autumn Fest. Callie and her friend try to keep Halloween. Grade: A-

Red White and True Blue Mallory by This one was a cute little book. I learned some stuff about Washington, D.C. Mallory’s best friend deserts her and just wants to talk about this boy named C/Lo aka Carlos. Grade: B+

Boy Trouble (Claudia Cristina Cortez) by Diana Gallagher. This book is very short, and it’s about boys. Claudia, who’s thirteen years old, ends up with the boy she always dreamed of. The book didn’t have anything bad in it, but there was a bully and a popular mean person. Everything turned out OK. Grade: C-

Liar by Justine Larbalestier

Jan13

This book is seriously warped. Which I guess is the point.

The premise is interesting: Micah Wilkins is a compulsive liar, the ultimate unreliable narrator who promises at the beginning of the book that she’s finally telling the truth. At best, she tells half-truths.

“I’m undecided, stuck somewhere in between, same way I am with everything: half black, half white, half girl, half boy; coasting on half a scholarship.
I’m half of everything.”

It’s safe to say that Micah has some identity issues. She doesn’t know who she really is; her life feels out of control. Unfortunately, the idea of having Micah be completely untrustworthy, with the reader never knowing when she’s lying or what is truth, works against the story finally. Fiction is ultimately not about lies, even though it’s made up; fiction is finally about Truth, or else it’s bad fiction.

I’m not saying Liar is a bad book. But it’s a book that I could never get too close to or identify with completely because I never knew whether any given detail or scene in it was true, true in the world of the book itself. In fact, Micah, the narrator, tells us over and over again that at least some of the story she tells isn’t true. But she also says that she mixes a thread of truth into her lies. Well, of course she does; I couldn’t even trust her to be completely unreliable —or completely insane.

The book does have some offensive sexual content, the requisite dollop of violence, and a bit of bad language, but the part that really annoyed me was this almost offhand scene near the middle of the book:

“What do you think?” Lisa interjected, addressing the class. “What is it about writing for teenagers that leads to so much censorship?”
I knew the answer to that one but I didn’t raise my hand. It’s because grown-ups don’t remember what it was like when they were teenagers. Not really. They remember something out of a Disney movie and that’s where they want to keep us. They don’t like the idea of our hormones, or that we can smell sex on one another. That we walk down halls thick with a million different pheromones. We see each other, catch a glance, the faintest edge of one, that sends a shiver through our bodies all the way down to the parts of us our parents wish didn’t exist.

Nonsense. I don’t know whether those are just Micah’s warped thoughts or whether that explanation for the controversy over the sexualization of young adult literature is the author’s own interpretation. Either way, most book censors aren’t trying to infantilize teens, and neither are those who simply observe that the over-sexualization and the crude language found in many YA books is pandering to their (our) basest instincts. In fact, those who say that we should give teens something besides raging hormones in their books, that teens themselves are more than just their hormones, are showing respect for young adults. If anyone is trying to dupe and dumb down teens and keep them in a Disney movie world, it’s those authors and others who tell them that they’re too young for a committed relationship (marriage) but they’re also too immature to control their sexual appetites. So they have no other choices besides sexual promiscuity, guilt, heartbreak, and please-at-least-practice-safe-sex. Infants and young children have limited control over their needs and desires. Adults, even young adults, can choose to delay gratification, or they can choose to gratify their desires within the safety of a loving committed relationship (marriage). As one who thinks we can do better than pander, I don’t want to deny that young adults are sexual beings; I want us to be mentors who help them to discipline and express their sexuality responsibly rather than panderers who leave them to burn uncontrollably with no hope of having a fulfilled and healthy marriage and sexual relationship.

And I’ve gone off on a ranting tangent. Liar is maybe a study in insanity, maybe a picture of a very conflicted and confused young lady, maybe even an indictment of our society’s failure to give young adults clear messages about their sexual, racial and moral identities. But it doesn’t quite work for me, and I suspect won’t for most of its teen audience, because the whole thing may just be One (very artful) Big Fat Lie.

Sometimes a Light Surprises by Jamie Langston Turner

Jan12

OK, right up front, this one is not my favorite Jamie Langston Turner title. That honor might go to A Garden to Keep or maybe the first book I read by Ms. Turner, Winter Birds. I supppose I’d have to say I liked Some Wildflower in My Heart better than this one, too.

And still Sometimes a Light Surprises is a nice slow ride through the psyche of an older man, Ben Buckley, who has encased himself in ritual and hidden himself in books and wordplay and is now living in a “gated community of [his] own making.” He’s walled himself off because of the death of his wife Chloe, murdered by an unknown assassin nearly twenty years before. After Chloe’s death, Ben withdraws emotionally from his four children and becomes an unapproachable, unloving father. I never did quite understand what Ben had done to make his family, especially his daughter Erin, quite so angry with him. He seems to have been an emotionally distant, but decent, father. He gave the children financial support, but not much love and caring. I would have liked a couple of flashback scenes or memories in which I could have read about exactly how Ben’s neglect of his children affected them. However, we are told that it did, and that has to be enough.

The book switches from one point of view to another frequently, and in addition to Ben Buckley, the reader is introduced in turn to:

Kelly Kovatch, a young Christian homeschool graduate whose mother, Kay, is dying of cancer,
Caroline Mason, Ben’s cranky and nosy secretary, who discovers a secret and doesn’t know what to do about it,
Erin Buckley Custer, Ben’s estranged and barren daughter,
and a host of minor characters who are mostly well-realized and interesting in their own right.
It would have been easy for Ms. Turner to go off on a tangent, telling us the stories of any one of the minor characters, and it almost feels as if she did that when Caroline and Erin, in particular, occupy center stage and the spotlight moves from Ben Buckley and his limited life to the people around him and how they interact with other people, some of whom never even come into contact with the main character. In this sense, the novel sometimes reads like a set of intertwined short stories or novelettes: one about Kelly Kovatch and her coming to terms with singleness, one about Caroline and her thirst for intrigue and significance, and another about Erin and her struggles with wanting a child and distrusting her father’s attempts at mending their broken relationship, and a final over-arching narrative about Ben Buckley.

The book should be enjoyed for what it is: an attempt at writing Christian fiction in which the characters are complicated and some of the issues remain unresolved at the end of the story. I do think I know what Ms. Turner was trying to do. In fact, she telegraphs her intentions in a scene where Kelly, who is also Mr. Buckley’s employee, visits her mother’s grave:

“I read one of those Christian novels you gave me, and I hated it,” Kelly said suddenly. . . . I mean I hated the fact that everything came out so happpy at the end, because it didn’t seem real. The girl acted too perfect, even when things went wrong, and then the man came along at just the right time and loved her at first sight, and at the end they overcame all their problems and got married . . . of course, they got married. Everybody gets married. The whole world gets married. Somebody ought to write a novel that doesn’t turn out so—”

This novel doesn’t turn out so, and Ms. Turner is to be commended for writing such compelling characters. I like character-driven novels. However, a little more plot in the next novel might be nice.

Texas Tuesday: Wait for Me, Watch for Me, Eula Bee by Patricia Beatty

Jan12

My Texas history class at homeschool co-op read this novel over the holidays. Patricia Beatty wrote over fifty books of historical fiction, and every one of them that I’ve read is a winner. Wait for Me, Watch for Me, Eula Bee is no exception.

Our hero is Lewallen, age thirteen, who’s been left to be the man of the house (and farm) when his older brother and father go off to fight for the Confederacy. Lewallen Collier has a younger brother and a little sister, Eula Bee. Because most of the men have gone to war, the Comanches have become more daring in their raids on farms and ranches, and Lewallen’s family is invited to shelter in the local fort and come back to their farm when the Indians have settled down or when the men have come back. Unfortunately for them, the Collier family make the wrong decision, and they fall victim to a band of Comanches who take Lewallen and Eula Bee captive and kill the rest of the family. (Warning: this scene in the book is fairly violent, not for squeamish readers.)

As a captive of the Comanche, Lewallen learns to work harder than he’s ever worked before, ride a horse like a Comanche, and hunt buffalo. He eventually escapes, but he spends the remainder of the book trying to rescue Eula Bee, for whom he feels a great sense of responsibility. In the course of his adventures, Lewallen saves the life of an Indian chief, becomes friends with the comancheros (Indian traders), and confronts the Kiowa brave who killed some of his family. The question throughout is whether or not Eula Bee will remember Lewallen if he ever finds her again.

The depictions of Comanche life and of Texas frontier life are vivid and memorable. Lewallen is a tough kid who has to grow up fast. And some of the minor characters are well-drawn, too, such as Grass Woman, a captive who has become one of The People (Comanche) and no longer wants to go back to the white man’s ways.

I was particularly struck by the family loyalty that Lewallen showed as he searched for his sister. I wonder if I would have that kind of stamina and faithfulness, or if my kids would.

If you’re teaching this book, here are a couple of links for materials:
Vocabulary quiz for Wait for Me, Watch for Me, Eula Bee

Other Indian captive books:
Trouble’s Daughter: The Story of Susanna Hutchinson, Indian Captive by Katherine Kirkpatrick. Susanna, daughter of the famous dissenter, Anne Hutchinson, is captured by the Lenape after the massacre of her entire family.She draws strength from the memory of her famous, strong-willed mother, but she finds herself becoming more and more admiring of the Lenape women she comes to know.
I am Regina by Sally M. Keehn. When Regina is captured by the Indians, she repeats her name to herself to remeind herself of her identity. However, after eight years of living with the Indians, all she knows is her Indian name. Based on the true story of Regina Leininger, Pennsylvania, 1755.
The Ransom of Mercy Carter by Caroline Cooney. 11 year old Mercy is taken captive by the Mohawks during the French and Indian War in 1704. Mercy also becomes accustomed to Indian life and may not want to go back when the opportunity arises. Study guide for this book.
Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison by Lois Lenski. 12 year old Mary is captured by the Seneca, based on a true story of a girl by the same name taken by the Indians in New York in 1758. Mary first becomes Corn Tassel, then later gets a new name, Woman of Great Courage. Discussion guide.
Standing in the Light: The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan, Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania, 1763 by Mary Pope Osborne. Part of the Dear America series. Quaker children Caty Logan and her brother are also captured by the Lenape, and although they eventually return to their home, Caty feels estranged from her family and misses Indian life.
Where the Broken Heart Still Beats: The Story of Cynthia Ann Parker by Caroline Meyer. Cynthia Ann Parker was ckidnapped by the Comanche, married a Comanche leader, had three children, and was then kidnapped back by Texas Rangers in this story based on a true incident.
Captive Treasure by Milly Howard. In a sudden encounter on the trail with a Cheyenne raiding party, Carrie Talbot is taken off to a new life in the Cheyenne camp along the river.
The Raid by G. Clifton Wisler. When his little brother is carried off by raiding Comanches, fourteen-year-old Lige disguises himself as an Indian and joins a former slave in a bold rescue attempt.

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

Jan11

I just got around to reading Ms. Blundell’s National Book Award-winning young adult novel this weekend. If it wasn’t a 2008 publication, I would add it to my list of Best YA Books of 2009. It was nominated for the 2009 Cybils in the YA Fiction category, probably because it was published toward the end of 2008. And I’m not second guessing the panelists, but there must be some extra-fine books on the finalist list to have beaten this one out.

The setting and atmosphere reminded me of Mad Men and The Great Gatsby, although it takes place about a year after the end of World War II, in between Jay Gatsby’s follies (1922) and Don Draper’s escapades (1960’s). The setting and characters feel historically authentic, kind of film noir, with lots of cigarettes and Scotch and red lipstick and dancing and full skirts like those in White Christmas. I could imagine Alfred Hitchcock making a movie of this book, but I don’t know of anyone nowadays who could do it with the right touch.

The story itself is Hitchcock-ish, with “adultery, blackmail, and possible homicide,” very much dependent on the reader’s point of view, with a few surprising twists and turns along the way. I can imagine a very young Grace Kelly playing the lead part, a fifteen year old named Evie who has a crush on a twenty-three year old ex-GI named Peter (Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant?). There are a lot of scenes in which it’s obvious that something else is going on underneath the surface of the dialog, but it’s not so obvious just what that something else is. Hitchcock would have had a blast with camera angles and the characters’ complicated interactions.

The book is quite well-written. Evie, the narrator, has a voice that is vintage 1940’s and typical fifteen year old girl, going on forty, anxious to grow up and unsure of how. I chose a few lines to whet your appetite, almost at random:

“Now I recognized that other woman, the one I’d seen angry and turning her face away. All that pizzazz and underneath it was a whole lot of sad.”

“Ugly. Once in the schoolyard Herbie Connell threw a rock and it hit me in the back. This felt like that, ugly hitting me in the back. . . . I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I was gulping my tears into my mouth. I didn’t want to hear any more ugly tonight. So I ran.”

“I looked like a doll, a dish. The image in the mirror—it wasn’t me. If I had the clothes and the walk, I could make up a whole new person. I wasn’t who I used to be, anyway. A different me would do the thing I had to do today. The dish would do it.”

What I Saw and How I Lied is well worth your reading time as a coming-of-age novel, or a psychological thriller, or a study in family dynamics, or just a thoughtful, insight-filled romance. I found it intriguing, hard to put down, and fun to try to figure out.

Other bloggers said:

Bookshelves of Doom: “Evie Spooner’s story is a coming-of-age story. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, there is a tragedy. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, there is a first love. Like a lot of coming-of-age stories, our heroine learns that the adults in her life are not the shining stars she has always believed them to be. There are lies, there is betrayal, there is injustice, and Evie sees it all. Heck, as the title suggests, she participates in some of it.”

The Reading Zone: “I hate to summarize the book, because Judy Blundell has woven an intricate story, full of dark twists and turns down paths you can’t even imagine. There is murder, intrigue, a fascinating backdrop of World War II, racism, classism, and a classic (but dark) coming-of-age story. To summarize more would give away too much of the plot and I would hate to ruin it for anyone.”

The YA YA YA’S: “Blundell did an amazing job creating a moody, atmospheric, noirish novel. You can practically see the action unfurling before your eyes, complete with cigarette smoke wafting toward the ceiling. The atmosphere is so evocative that it elevates the quality of the book.”

At 5 Minutes for Books they’re inviting you to share a review that you read at anyone’s recommendation. I read What I Saw and How I Lied because of the many, many reviews I saw in the Kidlitosphere and because it won a National Book Award.

Advanced Reading Survey: Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

Jan11

I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.


Author: As Anthony Trollope’s mother, Frances, and his older brother were both writers, Trollope was following in a well-established family tradition when he bagan writing novels. Barchester Towers is the second novel in a group of six on the theme of clerical life in Victorian England.
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.” — W. H. Auden

Characters:
Dr. Proudie: newly appointed bishop of Barchester.
Mrs. Proudie
Dr. Grantly: archdeacon.
Mr. Slope: Dr. Proudie’s chaplain.
Eleanor Bold: a young widow.
Mr. Septimus Harding: Mrs. Bold’s father.
Charlotte Stanhope
Bertie Stanhope
La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni
Mr. Arabin

Summary:
Bishop Proudie and his unpopular and managing wife are the new occupants of the see of Barchester. As Mrs. Proudie interferes in almost all the cathedral affairs, the bishop’s chaplain, Mr. Slope, makes himself disliked by his pursuit of Eleanor Bold, a wealthy young widow and daughter of Mr. Harding, the warden of the hospital and hero of Trollope’s previous novel, The Warden. Church politics rule the day, until all misunderstandings and double dealings are unravelled, and romance wins out in the end.

Quotations:
“Till we can become divine we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we sink to something lower.”

Mr. Arabin: “It is the bane of my life that on important subjects I acquire no fixed opinion. I think, and think, and go on thinking, and yet my thoughts are running ever in different directions.”

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.”

“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

I do think I need to read more Trollope.

Bonnie reviews Barchester Towers.
Becky’s Book Reviews on Barchester Towers.
Between the Covers: Barchester Towers A-
Carol at Magistramater.

Many Happy Returns: January 11th

Jan11

Alan Paton, b.1903.

Alan Paton is a South African author, famous for his book Cry, the Beloved Country about the system of racial apartheid that kept South Africa in turmoil for so many years. Alan Paton is a writer you should read. There are passages in Cry, the Beloved Country that bring tears to my eyes whenever I read them. And here’s a brief discussion of a couple of Mr. Paton’s other books.

A writer who can evoke emotion that well and who writes hope in the midst of tragedy is not to be missed.

Many Happy Returns: January 10th

Jan10

Today, according to my handy, dandy Booklover’s Day Book, is Lord Acton’s birthday, b. 1834. I had heard of him, but couldn’t place him. It turns out that he’s the one who said this:

“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end…liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition…The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to to govern. Every class is unfit to govern…Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

I had never heard the part about “every class is unfit to govern.” I like that. We are unfit to rule over others for an indefinite period of time. After a while, we do get power-mad. We enjoy playing God. According to Wikipedia, “Most people who quote Lord Acton’s Dictum are unaware that it refers to Papal power and was made by a Catholic, albeit not an unquestioning one.”

Acton was a historian and also a book-lover. I read somewhere that he owned over 60,000 books when he died, and many of them had passages marked that he thought were significant. I thought I had a lot of books!

Do you mark your books? If so, have you ever thought about people reading your booknotes after your death? I think I’m going to start leaving clues to a treasure in mine. (I just have to figure out where to obtain the treasure.)