Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells

Jun9

I know Rosemary Wells, and maybe you do too, as the author of the Max and Ruby picture books for young children. She can write for young adults, too. Red Moon at Sharpsburg is proof that Ms. Wells has the ability to write and research and create a wstory and a world for young adults as vivid as the one created with very few words and pictures in her Max books.

Red Moon at Sharpburg is, as can be deduced, a Civil War novel. It’s told from the point of view of a southern girl, India Moody, who lives in Northern Virginia with her family —her daddy, a harness maker, her mother, her little brother and her aged grandfather. The Moodys aren’t rich before the war begins, but they are comfortable with a home and a profitable business. The war, of course, changes everything. In spite of a couple of holes in the plot, I thought Red Moon at Sharpsburg was one of the best Civil War novels written for young adults that I have read. The “holes” involve minor characters, namely India’s baby brother and her elderly grandfather, who have a tendency to disappear when they might interfere with the action. I also found it difficult to believe that a young girl in the South during the war was able through a series of fortunate connections to obtain medicines (aspirin?) from Europe that would cure fever since aspirin wasn’t really invented until the late 1800’s. And the one of the characters has a suspiciously modern knowledge of medicine and chemistry and bacteriology that would have made him somewhat prescient in the mid 1800’s.

Still, the narrator and main character, India, is a delightful young lady and role model. And the descriptions of the war, of battlefields and prisons, and of atrocities are accurate and chilling. Ms. Wells says in the back of the book that part of her purpose in writing it was to reveal “the profound immorality of war.” She goes on to say, “Sometimes we must fight wars, but it is unforgivable to pump war full of glamour and glory.” I’m no pacifist, but I agree with Ms. Wells. She also has a mildly feminist agenda, but it doesn’t become overbearing or preachy.

The best thing about this novel was the gems of language and writing that popped up when I was least expecting them. Here are a few examples:

“I follow him down to Buckmarsh Street to catch a last glimpse of him. Then I cry, standing in the the street like a child with a skinned knee.”

Mauve is a pinkish purple of such delicacy I can only hold the silk square to the light and gaze at it. I have seen it only in petunias and stained-glass windows.”

“The moon is in its last quarter. It appears low on the horizon above the smoke. The crescent sits like a bloody smile in the sky.”

“I am aware of a sudden force, as if I have been flung through space at the speed of a comet. I know what this speeding ahead is without being told. It is me being hurled forward in time to the empty spot at the head of my family. It is a place where I was not meant to be for years to come and now I’m there.
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Other good Civil War novels for young adults:

Beatty, Patricia. Turn Homeward, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Be Ever Hopeful, Hannalee.
Beatty, Patricia. Charley Skedaddle. (Bowery Boys and deserters)
Hunt, Irene. Across Five Aprils.
Fleischman, Paul. Bull Run.
Keith, Harold. Rifles for Watie. (Cherokee Indian leader Stand Watie and the repeating rifle)
Paulsen, Gary. Soldier’s Heart: a Novel of the Civil War.
Perez, N.A. The Slopes of War: A Novel of Gettysburg.
Rinaldi, Ann. An Acquaintance with Darkness. (Lincoln’s assassination)
Rinaldi, Ann. The Last Silk Dress.
Rinaldi, Ann. Numbering All the Bones. (Andersonville Prison)
Wisler, G. Clifton. THe Drummer Boy of Vicksburg.

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt

Jun9

This peculiar tale reminded me of Scheherezade in 1001 Nights and of last year’s other Death Personified story, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. I told the Eldest the bare outline of the plot, and she immediately said, “Chaucer’s already used that plot device.” Indeed, Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale does have three drunken men go into the forest to meet and conquer Death. And then there’s the flavor in the story, if not the humor, of The Princess Bride.

However, Keturah and Lord Death is neither fish nor fowl, neither romance nor comedy, neither fairy tale nor high tragedy. I thought about saying that it was a sort of prosaic hymn to Death itself, but it’s not that exactly. It may be speculative fiction about the inevitability of Death. Or about the power of love to transcend Death. It may be an old folk tale reworked into a modern novel. Or something else altogether.

I’m not completely sure. And in this book, the uncertainty fits. Keturah and Lord Death isn’t an allegory; it’s a regular old story of the kind that C.S. Lewis would have approved as much as he disapproved of allegory. It’s not exactly a “Christian” story, but it doesn’t contradict the Christian view of life and death.

“Tell me what it is like to die,” I answered.

He dismounted from his horse, looking at me strangely the whole while. “You experience something similar every day,” he said softly. “It is as familiar to you as bread and butter.”

“Yes, I said. “It is like every night when I fall asleep.”

“No. It is like every morning when you wake up.”

Ms Leavitt begins her tale with a snippet of Emily Dickinson (Because I could not stop for Death,/He kindly stopped for me;/The carriage held but just ourselves/And Immortality) and ends with this revelation in the Acknowledgments:

“Finally, I express my love to my younger sister, Lorraine, who died many years ago of cystic fibrosis at the age of eleven. Now, as a mother and grandmother, I realize what a long journey dying must be for a child to make alone. I wish I could have walked with her a little way. This book is my way of doing so.”

If you like faity tale and romantic fantasy and uncoventional quest stories, the journey is well worth your time.

Rickshaw Girl by Mitali Perkins

Jun8

I don’t know if this book really qualifies for MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge; the books were supposed to be about fifth grade level or above. I’d estimate that the reading and interest level for this book woud be about second or third grade. Nevertheless, I don’t care. I read it, and I loved it. Your little girls (and boys) need to read this book. I’m going to add it to Betsy-Bee’s (age eight) summer reading list. Rickshaw Girl is a great book.

Naima is a ten year old village girl in Bangladesh, and she’s a talented artist. She’s already won one prize for her alpanas, decorative rock paintings. But Naima sees how hard her father works as a rickshaw driver because he has no sons to help him drive the rickshaw. Naima wants to do something to help out, but her ideas are sometimes counter-productive. How can a girl help the family financially when girls are only allowed to “stay home and help their mothers”?

The themes of making mistakes, and being forgiven, and trying to fix your mistakes are universal ones, and at the same time the sense of place in this simple story is strong. Children will get an understanding of what life is like in a small village in another part of the world. And they’ll appreciate the story of how Naima perseveres in her goals even after she has a near-disastrous accident.

The illustrations in the book by artist Jamie Hogan are wonderful, to, and certified as authentic by Mitali’s Bengali mother, Madhusree Bose. It would be fun to read this book aloud and then have the little girls create some of their own alpanas, or an approximation thereof.
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For those of you who homeschool and use Sonlight, this book needs to be part of the Kindergarten level emphasis on world cultures. It would make a great read aloud book at that level, or it would be perfectly suited as a reader for second or third graders. In fact, I need to email the people at Sonlight and tell them about Rickshaw Girl. I think they’ll love it.

Marika by Andrea Cheng

Jun8

A few months ago I read another book by Andrea Cheng, Eclipse, the story of precocious eight year old Peti, the talkative son of Hungarian immigrant parents. Marika, the book I just finished, is narrated by a girl character, a little older than Peti, eleven rather than eight, but it has the same feel of a very serious story about adult problems being told from a child’s point of view.

I’m not sure, judging from the two books I’ve read, that Ms. Cheng is really a juvenile author. I think she writes adult or young adult books with child narrators, told in a child’s voice. The subject matter in the two books includes child abuse, adultery, genocide, and rape (mentioned), and I’m just not convinced that elementary school children would appreciate the rhythm or the content of either book.

That said, however, Marika is a great novel. The blurb in the back of the book says that Andrea Cheng is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants and that Marika, the character and the book, are loosely based on her mother’s story. Marika, the character, is a young Hungarian girl who happens to have three Jewish grandparents. Her family is culturally Catholic, but they can’t escape their Jewish ethnic identity in World War II Budapest. Marika’s struggles to understand this identity and what it means to be Jewish even though you don’t believe in the Jewish religion, even though you don’t want to be Jewish, from the core of the story.

Here’s a sample of Marika’s voice, on the day she is rescued by her father from confinement in a Jewish prison:

“I sat by the window and looked down at the Danube below, flowing so peacefully along its banks. Lots of people wrote poems about the Danube. We had to memorize one in fifth grade about the wind blowing off the water. I recited it to myself, and when I was done, I sobbed.”
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That’s the tone of this book: serious, sad, flowing, yet childlike. Marika does mature over the course of the novel, and that growth is reflected in the way she writes about her experiences. However, as the novel ends, and the reader finds out how the war ended for each of the characters in the story, the feelings continue to be mixed. Some survive the war and the Holocaust, and others, of course, do not, a very adult and true lesson to learn about life.

The Loud Silence of Francine Green by Karen Cushman

Jun8

“It was probably just a silly rumor, but I’d heard that nuns had their heads shaved, and I was afraid they relaxed by taking off their veils and running around bald, something I certainly did not want to see.”

A lot of this book reads like a “silly rumor”. However, some of it is true-to-history, and how is a young adult reader to tell the difference? Were Catholic schools and Catholic nuns back in the 1950’s really repressive and threatening? Probably some were. Were some people blacklisted for Communist sympathies in Hollywood during the so-called “red scare”? Yes, some were. Did those who were blacklisted become so intimidated and frightened by the questions and the pressure from the FBI that they committed suicide? Not unless they were already disturbed and depressed. (The author’s note in the back of the book says that “at least two” of those Hollywood types who were blacklisted committed suicide, but I can’t find any names or independent verification of this fact.) Did children really learn to fear The Bomb and the Reds so much that they worried that airplanes flying overhead might drop a bomb on them? I’m sure some imaginative children did.

Author Karen Cushman lived in California during the late forties/early fifties. I didn’t. She attended a Catholic school. I didn’t.
She says she was taught to “duck and cover” in case of a nuclear attack. I wa taught to go out into an interior hallway and cover my head in tornado drills, but by the time I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, no one was talking about nuclear attacks or fallout shelters to schoolchildren in West Texas. At least, not to me.

So, I’m giving the events in this book the benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, I found it difficult to read as a straight story. It felt more like a series of caricatures: the angry nun teacher, the poor Jewish liberal actor blacklisted as a consequence of his compassion for the poor and downtrodden, the friend who speaks out and gets herself into trouble, the pious goody-two-shoes who wants to become a nun, the empty-headed teenage sister who’s only interested in fingernail polish and boys, and the bumbling dad who can’t figure out what to do to protect his family from godless Communists and atomic bombs.

Only the narrator, Francine, felt like a real person. Francine is conflicted; she wants to be friends with Sophie, the afore-mentioned outspoken defender of lost causes, but she doesn’t want to get in trouble. Francine is a self-described coward. She’s become accustomed to being overlooked and ignored, and some part of her likes to be unnoticed. The nuns at school and her family at home never ask for her opinion on anything, so Francine isn’t even sure she has any opinions of her own. Francine’s supposed to be a representation of the American public, silent in the face of McCarthyism and persecution of Hollywood Communists. But Francine is more than a symbol. As a character, she insists upon being more complicated and interesting, just as I’m sure the politics and culture of the 1950’s were more complex and multi-layered than this simple presentation would indicate. And the ending is confusing and would be epecially so for those “imaginative young people” to whom I would think this book is targeted. What happened to Sophie and her father? Did the Big Bad FBI put them in a dungeon somewhere? Did they emigrate to Russia? Did they just decide to move and start over elsewhere? The uncertainty is realistic, but annoying, perhaps giving young people the idea that America in the 1950’s was a place like Chile in the 1970’s where people just disappeared never to seen again except as bodies in a mass grave somewhere.
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It’s a middle school/young adult novel of one author’s experience of the 1950’s, the red scare, and growing up to become a person with thoughts and ideas of one’s own. There’s some humor in the vein of the opening quotation, a decent plot, and one very engaging narrator. In Texas idiom, I’d call it “fair to middlin”.

Reviewed, much more favorably, by Fuse #8.

Starting . . .

Jun8

MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge.

I’ll be reading and reviewing (and transporting and eating and sleeping and taking care of urchins) from now until 10:00 A.M. Sunday morning. Then, I’ll go to church and worship the Lord of all, books and authors and even blogs, with a full mind and a clear conscience, I hope.

Poetry and Fine Art Friday: Home Sweet Home

Jun8

What do these subjects have in common? Frankenstein. Cherokee Indians. Tunisia. Operatic arias.

Tomorrow is the birthday of John Howard Payne (b. June 9, 1791). He was an interesting guy. He was born in New York City and became an actor when he was sixteen years old. He was popular and good-looking and invited to perform in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in various roles. He went to London, failed in the theatrical business, and was imprisoned for debt. He wrote several plays, and the only one that had any success was an opera called Clari, the Maid of Milan that was produced at Covent Garden in 1823. For the opera, Payne wrote a song called Home Sweet Home. The song became quite popular, but Payne received little or no money for it. While he was living in England, Mr. Payne developed quite a crush on Mary Shelley whose husband Percy died in 1822 in a boating accident. Mary wasn’t interested in John Howard, preferring to cling to the memory of her erratic and unfaithful, but talented and romantic, late husband. John Howard Payne returned to the United States after nearly twenty years in Europe and went to live with the Cherokee Indians. He lived with Cherokee Chief John Ross and collected myths and traditions of the Cherokees and wrote magazine articles. In 1842, he somehow got himself appointed by President John Tyler as U.S. Consul to Tunis, Tunisia. (?) He died in Tunis ten years later in 1852.

Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home

Mid pleasures and palaces
Though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble,
There’s no place like home.
A charm from the skies
Seems to hallow us there,
Which seek thro’ the world,
Is ne’er met with elsewhere.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

I gaze on the moon
As I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother
Now thinks of her child;
As she looks on that moon
From our own cottage door,
Thro’ the woodbine whose fragrance
Shall cheer me no more.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

An exile from home,
Splendor dazzles in vain,
Oh, give me my lowly
Thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gaily,
That came at my call:
Give me them and that
Peace of mind, dearer than all.
Home, home, sweet sweet home,
There’s no place like home,
There’s no place like home.

Payne wrote in a letter to C.E. Clark (approximately 1850): “Surely there is something strange in the fact that it should have been my lot to cause so many people in the world to boast of the delights of home, when I never had a home of my own, and never expect to have one now—especially since those here at Washington who possess the power seem so reluctant to allow me the means of earning one!”

Poetry Friday round-up is at HipWriterMama today.

Reading Projects for Me For This Summer

Jun7

My Madeleine L’Engle Project. Oh, boy, I get a three-fer when I re-read A Wrinkle in Time—since Sawyer was reading it on the beach in one of the LOST episodes first season and it’s a Newbery Award book, too.

My Newbery Project. I’ve let this one slip, but I’m determined to get back to work reading the Newbery Award and Honor books.

Once Upon a Time Faery Challenge. I’m supposed to finish the books for this challenge by midsummer night eve, June 21st. I’ve got some reading to do.

MotherReader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge. I don’t really know how this is going to work since I have to take Eldest Daughter to Winedale on Saturday, but I’m going to start Friday morning and do as much as I can.

LOST Reading Project.

The TBR List.

As I look at it, that list of projects is totally unrealistic and bordering on insanity. If I completed all of those projects, I would be arrested for child neglect or divorced for husband neglect. But it’s fun to dream.

LOST books

Jun6

James Brush at Coyote Mercury has been reading the books referenced on the TV series LOST. An interesting reading experiment. What if you deliberately concocted a TV series or a movie that would spur the American public to read more books? That stir curiosity through literary references embedded in a story? I’m not talking Oprah’s Book Club or Reading Rainbow, although both of those are creditable efforts.

Has any TV series stirred more curiosity than LOST? (Dallas: Who shot JR?) I wonder if the books featured on LOST have risen in Amazon rank or in total sales and popularity since being shown or mentioned on a LOST episode?

Lostpedia says that the following books have been mentioned or shown or alluded to in LOST episodes:

After All These Years by Susan Isaacs.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume.

Bad Twin by Gary Troup.

Bible, especially the book of Exodus and the 23rd Psalm.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Carrie by Stephen King.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.

Dirty Work by Stuart Woods.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie.

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Hindsight by Peter Wright.

I Ching

Island by Aldous Huxley.

Julius Caesar by William Shakepeare.

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton.

Lancelot by Walker Percy.

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabakov.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt.
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne.

Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce.

The Odyssey by Homer.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

Watership Down Richard Adams.

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

Other books that seem to be related to LOST;

The Stand by Stephen King. Damon Lindelof has said that Stephen King’s novels, especially The Stand are an influence on LOST.

On Writing also by Stephen King. James writes about this writing reference book in relation to LOST at Coyote Mercury.

Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner. The Dharma Initiative is said to be partially inspired by the work of behaviorist B.F. Skinner.

Lost Horizon by James Hilton. In the season 3 finale, Through the Looking Glass, Jack acts like a man who is trying to return to Shangri-La, the utopian paradise in the Himalayas where people never (?) die. This fictional cmmunity was the creation of of author James Hilton. LOST Island was no Shangri-La, but perhaps the two places have some features in common: prolonged life for some inhabitants and difficult entrances and exits.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

“Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,” said Scrooge, “answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.

“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I tried reading this famous novel a few months ago, but I suppose I quit before I got to the good part.

Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

I’m definitely going to try to read and review some of these this summer —along with all my other reading projects.

Laughing in London

Jun6

OK, I’m not an artist or a graphic designer, but what do you all think? Isn’t this just ugly? And can you see what it’s supposed to spell out before you go to look at the Daily Mail article telling all about it?

“Design guru Tyler Brûlé, founder of Wallpaper and Monocle magazines, said: ‘It should have been a chance to showcase the cutting-edge design work being produced in London. People are laughing at us around the world.'”

Thanks to The Head Girl at The Common Room for the laugh.