April Book Review Club: TESS OF THE ROAD

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@Barrie Summy

It's raining! The snow's washing away!

That's all I've got in my head right now. Sorry.

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Tess of the Road

By Rachel Hartman

Random House Books for Young Readers, 2018

Three years ago on this very blog, I turned myself into a pretzel trying to convey my delight in Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina duology, a pair of fantasies about a richly multicultural human/dragon society and an inspired young woman breaking free from convention.

Hartman’s at it again in TESS OF THE ROAD, set in the same world as the earlier books, and once again we’re all going nuts. (Four starred reviews!) Yet again the first book of a duology, TESS gives us another young woman held down by the stultifying conventions of Goredd, the most hidebound of nations. We watch her break free first physically, then psychologically and spiritually, on a road trip across borders and prejudices. Yet again, we are entranced.

I don’t think it’s necessary to have read the Seraphina books, although the events in them do predate this story and there might be some broader context missing. It’s fun recognizing old friends in the new book, but I suspect it would be just as much fun the other way around.

Tess is Seraphina’s younger stepsister, one of a pair of twins born to Seraphina’s father and a horrendous mother, intractably religious, snobby, and bigoted. The “bigoted” part mostly has to do with dragons, mathematically-minded philosophers who are able to assume a human form and co-exist uncomfortably with humans. In the first duology, the humans and dragons fell into a war, but that’s all over now.

Seventeen-year-old Tess is naturally rebellious, and has destroyed her social chances by losing her virginity (in what is essentially a date-rape) and becoming pregnant. Back home after giving birth, she becomes handmaiden to her lovely twin sister, hoping to win her a splendid court marriage that will save the family bacon. When the wedding day arrives she gets drunk and punches her new brother-in-law, so now she’s destined for the convent.

Instead, prodded by the unconventional Seraphina, she finds herself dressing as a boy and taking off down the road, seeking oblivion. She runs across her childhood friend Pathka, a small, intelligent, spiritually-minded dragon called a quigutl, whose race is particularly adept at inventing and fabricating technology in an otherwise medieval land. She joins his quest, searching for a giant, mythical serpent sacred to his race, keeping body and soul together through theft, cons, and manual labor.

Tess is a wonderful, difficult character, mired in self-hatred, always hearing her mother’s toxic, disapproving voice in her head. Watching her slow healing and release is a privilege and a triumph. Pathka is another marvel: tortured, loyal, irascible, brilliant. Maybe not such a great parent. (We meet his kid.)

This book doesn’t have the broad political sweep of the Seraphina books, although it looks like the second book might. Seraphina had a personal quest, but also she was trying to save the world. I missed the saarantrai, the exotic, conflicted dragons in human form, pursuing mathematical order despite the perplexities of human emotions. But Tess and Pathka’s quest, and what they found at the end of it, more than made up for any loss.

Marvelous, marvelous book.

(Dear FCC: I bought this book with my own money, because how could I not? Nobody cares if I review it. Hey . . . how about that Sinclair Broadcast Group? Isn’t monopoly supposed to be a bad thing?)

March Book Review Club--BORN A CRIME

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@Barrie Summy

Hello. It's supposed to be almost spring but Maine has a nor'easter bearing down on us that could give us 18 inches of snow. I think the storm will have wreaked havoc for much of the East, kinda like the one we had a few days ago. Feel like putting your sense of grievance in perspective, and laughing your head off at the same time? Read on. 

Also, don't forget to click the icon for more reviews!

Born a Crime

By Trevor Noah

Spiegel & Grau, 2016

In 1984, when South Africa’s apartheid regime was in full clamp-down, a spirited young Xhosa woman called Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah decided she wanted to have a baby with the guy down the hall, a Swiss/German named Robert. This was a crime that could send both of them to prison and their baby to an orphanage. She went ahead and did it anyway.

The baby turned out to be comedian Trevor Noah, now the anchor of The Daily Show on Comedy Central. He opens his memoir with a reproduction of the 1927 Immorality Act, which made “carnal intercourse” illegal between a European and a “native.” 

Later, he describes walking down the street with his mother at age six, his father across the street pretending he didn’t know them. Because he was light-skinned, his mother had to pretend she was his nursemaid when they were out in public.

There were perks, though. When Trevor and his mom were staying in Soweto with her mother, Trevor did something “naughty” (a big word in his life) for which his cousins were punished but he was not. “I don’t know how to hit a white child,” his grandmother explained.

He never fit in anywhere: at school with the white kids or even with the “colored” kids (Indian and other nonwhite, non-black races) who looked most like him.  

Noah’s remarkable mother helped him turn his oddity into an advantage. She made him speak English—the key to getting ahead in South Africa—but also Xhosa and Zulu and Sotho and Tswana and Afrikaans. Noah tended to walk on the wild side throughout his youth—“naughty” was putting it mildly—but if he was about to get beat up, he could disarm his attacker by unexpectedly speaking his language.

“I became a chameleon” he writes. “My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

If you like your memoirs linear, this one will drive you nuts. It’s a collection of stories, jumping back and forth in time, about the funny, harrowing, weird, horrifying experience of growing up in South Africa and doing it as Trevor Noah. The writing is wonderful, as you’d expect, and Noah can’t help being funny, or at least wry, even when he’s telling you about the time his mom almost died. It’s a total page-turner.

The day five-year-old Trevor decided to avoid the rain-soaked outhouse and do his business on a newspaper in the kitchen—leading his female relatives to think the house is demon-infested—is comedic gold.

There’s anger under the comedy—how could there not be? And you’re always off balance, reading this book. Because it jumps around in time, you’re always stepping back and thinking, “Okay, so this was when they lived in that suburb, right?” That’s actually a good thing—this was not a childhood in which anyone should get comfy.

But possibly the weirdest thing about BORN A CRIME is the detachment of the author. We see him beaten, jailed, humiliated, and also triumphant, but none of it ever hits you in the heart and lungs. It’s entertaining as all get out, but you’re in no danger of weeping.

If you were going to survive this life and become Trevor Noah, I guess you’d have to be well armored.

(Dear FCC: I got this for my beloved for Christmas, or maybe his birthday, can’t remember which. They’re close together, which I believe I’ve told you before can be a real pain in the prat. I don’t recall getting any sympathy from you, though. )

January Book Review Club--GLASS HOUSES

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@Barrie Summy

Happy New Year! Big storm coming here in the East, and more grueling temperatures. (On the other hand, my friend Lilly in Australia is sitting in 122 degrees F. Count your blessings.)

Either way, time to hunker down with a good book. Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews!

Glass Houses

By Louise Penny

St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur, 2017

A bitterly cold week between Christmas and New Year’s. A political fray you’re loathe to re-enter. A writing deadline, but you can’t write ALL day, can you?

This is the perfect situation for a visit to Three Pines, the mythical Québec village Louise Penny created twelve years and twelve books ago. Penny’s a master at creating characters, and Three Pines is one of them. Armand Gamache, now the chief superintendent of the Sûréte du Québec, is another. Nothing heals the soul like spending time with them.

In GLASS HOUSES, which came out just too late for my August birthday but in plenty of time for Christmas, Penny is at her best. I’m going to re-read this book as a primer in building suspense. The writers among us will be not even slightly surprised to know that Penny wrote it during and after her ailing husband’s final illness. She was in touch with every nerve ending in the universe, and it shows.

Three Pines is a little like Cabot Cove in the late, appalling television series “Murder, She Wrote.” (Except for the horrendous Maine accents and the ocean on the wrong side, but I digress.) The crime rate per capita is about two-to-one. If a villager isn’t buying the farm, some beleaguered somebody from away manages to stumble there before croaking. Somehow this never seems odd.

This is the thirteenth time Supt. Gamache, an accomplished, urbane, seemingly gentle man who in recent books keeps trying to retire, has followed the murders to Three Pines. At this point, he and his estimable wife, Reine-Marie, have actually moved there, looking for peace and quiet they never seem to get. They are part of the village’s fabric, along with a famous artist, a bookstore owner, a baker, a male couple who run a bistro and B&B, and a wizened, evil-tongued poet (also famous, to those with taste) who has a duck under her arm and the vocabulary of a drunken sailor. Everybody cooks well—Penny loves describing food that makes you watch the clock for dinner—and they know how to make one another comfortable even when they’re at each others’ throats.

The books are anything but comfy. Penny does not hesitate to kill or maim people you’ve come to like—you can’t trust her not to break your heart, which of course makes the suspense unbearable. She’s equally unprincipled with her characters’ psyches—there isn’t a person in Three Pines, in Gamache’s family, or among his close colleagues who isn’t deeply scarred by personal disaster.  

GLASS HOUSES makes profligate use of those scars. It’s impossible to say much about the plot without spoiling the fun: The book starts with Gamache as witness for the prosecution in a murder trial with a mysteriously unidentified defendant and a prosecutor working hard to discredit his own star witness.  Over time, we learn that Gamache is risking his family, his village, his reputation, and possibly his freedom for a higher end. He’s morally wrong in just about every way—upsetting, because until now he’s been your moral compass. There are physical dangers, psychic horrors, a ticking clock, and a black-cloaked figure standing still and silent on the Three Pines green, apparently there for vengeance. I tell you, this tale’s got it all.

Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? I promise you it isn’t. And if you want a master course in character, setting, and suspense, this is your book.

(Dear FCC: I got GLASS HOUSES for Christmas. I’d suggest you read it, but Three Pines is close to the Vermont border and I think you might be insulted by the sly references to U.S. politics. These include a warning about the vigilance required to prevent a government from turning fascist. There’s nothing about this book that isn’t chilling.) 

December Book Review Club: A Gentleman in Moscow

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@Barrie Summy

Tra-la-la-la-la.

Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. See you in the New Year . . . 

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

Viking, 2016

In 1922, an insouciant Moscow aristocrat appears before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. As a threat to Communist ideals, he should be executed. Fortunately, he is the author of a celebrated 1913 poem many viewed as a call to revolution, so his sentence is relaxed. Instead of dying, he is ordered to spend the rest of his life in the formerly luxurious Metropol Hotel, where he has occupied a suite for the previous four years.

“Make no mistake,” the presiding officer concludes, “should you ever set foot outside of the Metropol again, you will be shot. Next matter.”

The record of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s appearance before the committee, set in a utilitarian typewriter font, occupies the first three pages of A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW. Having heard little about the book, only that it was wonderful, I read this, decided the book might be depressing, and set it aside for a day when I didn’t need cheering up. (ARE there such days anymore? If you read newspapers, I mean.)

I could not have been more wrong. This book isn’t only wonderful. It’s delightful.

Everything depends on the character of Rostov: beautifully educated, well-traveled, urbane, amused, and kind. He reacts to his sentence as many of us would, welcoming it as a chance to get some reading done. Ejected from his suite and relegated to a tiny room in the attic with all his books and a few beloved bits of antique furniture, he settles down to read his father’s copy of Montaigne’s essays. We are with him intimately as he slogs through page after page, watching the clock. The book turns out to be the perfect size for propping up a wobbly chest of drawers.

Life awaits outside his attic room. Even in an era of revolutionary seediness, the Metropol’s staff manages to approximate the days of old. There’s a barber, a seamstress, kitchen staff, wait staff, concierge, and other residents, mostly party officials and their families. It’s a whole world, and we fling ourselves into it without a hint of claustrophobia.  

The crux of the story arrives with Nina, the nine-year-old daughter of some commissar living in the hotel. She has a skeleton key that opens every door, but better yet she has attitude. Before long, Rostov is a partner in crime, exploring forbidden rooms in the cellars or splitting the seat of his pants to eavesdrop on a party committee. He becomes Nina’s confidant and protector, and when she is a grown-up party functionary he renders her a service that changes both their lives.

Our narrator takes us outside the Metropol occasionally, but we’re always happy to return. By the end of the book, we could find our way up the stairs and through the halls blindfolded, and we want to spend as much time as possible with Rostov and his cohabitants. There’s everything in the Metropol: quiet humor, slapstick, love, sex, friendship, intrigue, and a hidden pair of dueling pistols that wait an entire book to live up to Chekhov’s instructions. (“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.”)

A less depressing book you will never find.

(Dear FCC: I got this book for my birthday. Nobody cares if I review it. Now, about net neutrality . . . )

October Book Review Club: NORSE MYTHOLOGY

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@Barrie Summy

I'm in the midst of helping to organize Word, a literary arts festival debuting in Blue Hill, Maine, October 20-22. (Check it out here: www.wordfestival.org)  Life is fraught, so it's nice to settle down at night with a wolf who wants to eat the moon. Also to read about Ragnarok, which is so awful it seems churlish to complain about October's dying of the light. 

Anyway, read on, and don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. Happy Halloween! 

Norse Mythology

By Neil Gaiman

W.W. Norton & Co, 2017

For those of dinosaur mentality, Thomas Bulfinch is the go-to source for news about Thor and Odin and Loki. (Not to mention Arthur, Charlemagne, and all those Greek guys.) Forget Marvel Comics. Forget Chris Hemsworth. For us, 1881 is where it’s at. (Being a modern, can-do woman, my edition of Bulfinch dates from 1913.)

That’s all changed now.

For future generations, Neil Gaiman’s NORSE MYTHOLOGY may very well be the definitive version. He tells the stories straight—this is not AMERICAN GODS or ANANSI BOYS, the novels that made his name by bringing gods to life. But he’s a marvelous writer, far more graceful and giving than Bulfinch. And he knows these guys well, especially Thor and Loki, the best (maybe the only) real characters.  He says he’s been obsessed with these gods since the age of seven.

He’s comfortable sharing the character insights he’s gleaned. “That was the thing about Loki,” he notes after the trickster has provided the gods with their hallmark treasures but cheated to do it. “You resented him even when you were at your most grateful, and you were grateful to him even when you hated him the most.”

Where Bulfinch devotes a paragraph to the god Frey’s courtship of the beautiful giantess Gerda, Gaiman gives us nine pages, introducing the love story by telling us, charmingly, that handsome and mighty Frey “was missing something in his life , and he did not know what it was.”

To win Gerda, Frey gives up his sword, a magical weapon so powerful it can fight by itself. The story ends with ominous regret. “Ragnarok is coming. When the sky splits asunder and the dark powers of Muspell march out on their war journey, Frey will wish he still had his sword.”

These are fun and funny stories, but they are not cheery. They never have been. When gods have children, they’re likely to come out weird—Loki’s include the Midgard Serpent, the snake that encircles the human world; Hel, the half-girl/half-corpse who runs the underworld; and Fenrir, the giant wolf who wants to eat the sun and moon. Ragnarok, the final battle between gods and giants that will end everything in fire and fury, is always looming, although supposedly the world is reborn after the cataclysm. (Hollow reassurance, since we’ll all be dead.)

Writing in The Guardian last March, Ursula K. Le Guin complained that, while Gaiman’s humor and fluent writing make these Norse stories suitable for children as well as adults, he minimizes the “strangeness” of the religion being depicted, with its bleak view of the world and its future. “I felt sometimes that this vigorous, robust, good-natured version of the mythos gives us everything but the very essence of it, the heart.”

I can see her point from a scholar’s perspective, and I did feel a certain lack of red meat here, despite Hel the half-corpse.  But I’m glad Gaiman opted for accessibility.  He’s clearly written the tales to be read aloud, one at a time—he keeps repeating facts from two tales ago, in case we’re reading one a night and have forgotten who’s who.

These are wonderful stories and, with the Greek myths, form the basis for much of European culture. Gaiman is helping to keep them alive in something close to their pre-Hemsworth form. And for that I’m grateful.

(Dear FCC: I borrowed this book from the Friend Memorial Public Library, Brooklin, Maine. They want it back. I have to buy my own— it’s one of those books you like to have around. It can go on top of that stack on the floor over there. If you have any spare bookshelves, FCC, please send them along.)

September Book Review Club: Golden Hill

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@Barrie Summy

We're having infrastructure issues here at Desperation Acres. Internet outage first, then a power outage this morning. The joys of rural life. Nevertheless, we persist. Here's the first review of the 2017-18 season. Don't forget to click the link for more reviews!

Golden Hill: A Novel of Old New York

By Francis Spufford

Scribner (Simon & Schuster), 2016

If TOM JONES novelist Henry Fielding traveled from the 18^th century, acquired a 21^st century sensibility and approach to novel-writing, he’d try very hard to write GOLDEN HILL. It may be, though, that only Francis Spufford could actually do it.  A celebrated writer of nonfiction ( I MAY BE SOME TIME and RED PLENTY, for example), he admits to having “come close to being a novelist” while turning, say, Britain’s obsession with icy places into a page-turner. Now, he says, “I’ve completed my shy, crabwise crawl towards fiction.”

GOLDEN HILL reads as an exuberant, occasionally raunchy adventure in the Manhattan of 1746, just like Fielding and friends except that the narrator doesn’t sidetrack into unrelated topics for pages and pages. Also, this novel has a very modern set of teeth in it.

Our story begins when a youngish man, known to us chiefly as Mr. Smith, arrives in New York with a promissory note for a thousand pounds, which he aims to cash at a counting house run by a Mr. Lovell. Consternation ensues: Is this promissory note real, or is Smith a con man? If it is real, there’s not enough cash in all of New York to pay off the note, even if you combine the available coins (Mexican, Portugese, Dutch, Danish and so on) with the more common paper money printed by New York, Rhode Island, or any of the colonies.

Smith is charming enough to be a con man. But he’s clearly well educated and widely traveled, a man of parts who could perfectly well be a sprig of the nobility. In fact, he does agree to wait for verification of his note on the next ship from London, as an honest man would.

And off he goes into the streets of New York.

Manhattan is practically a village at this point. Dutch and English live side by side, more or less in harmony. Smith notices that people are much healthier than in London, taller, well fed, and with fewer smallpox scars. He also notices the black slaves, which seem to be more prevalent than in England.

He notices the slaves a lot. They’re important to him. We don’t find out why until the story is three-quarters done, and the full tale emerges only in the last pages. Even the narrator’s identity is a surprise left to the end. The author is canny about the way he keeps us on tenterhooks, doling out a hint here, an insight there. You know you’re being played and you love it.

Being the talk of the town, Smith soon is embroiled in New York politics. He starts a romance, playing Benedick to her Beatrice. He finds out potentially fatal secrets. Is nearly killed by a mob that thinks he’s a papist. Is imprisoned for this and that, stands trial, betrays his own ethics.

In other words, he is extremely entertaining. So is this book. I hope Mr. Spufford sticks to novel- writing.

(Dear FCC: This book was a birthday present, chosen by my beloved with help from Samantha Haskell of Blue Hill Books. All hail the independent bookstore. Also beloveds.)

Delayed Gratification (almost entirely my own)

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@Barrie Summy

Unforeseen circumstances are delaying this month's review. Check back tomorrow.

Sneak preview: GOLDEN HILL, a historical novel by Francis Spufford, is a splendid confection with a good, hard center.

May Book Review Club: ARABELLA OF MARS

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@Barrie Summy

After a couple of months off, part of which I spent breaking a leg, I rejoin the Book Review Club for one session followed by a summer off. We'll be back in September.

Click the icon above for club members' other reviews. (OOPS--the link's not working. I've appealed for help. In the meantime, take this instead: http://barriesummy.blogspot.com/ ) 

Click the book title below for the ARABELLA OF MARS Indiebound page. 

Arabella of Mars

By David D. Levine

Tor, 2016

Get your willing suspension of disbelief primed. Turns out interplanetary space has blue skies and thunderstorms. And asteroids grow oak trees.

I’m a stick-in-the-mud, so as I read ARABELLA OF MARS I wasted valuable breath grumping and moaning about blue skies on the way to Mars, not to mention breathable atmosphere. I kept thinking how much more I would have respected author David D. Levine if the steam-punk space travelers had confronted a vacuum.

Levine salvaged my good opinion by writing a good ol’-fashioned Yarn, befitting a well-regarded writer of short fantasy and sci-fi. (This is his first novel.) Better still, he thought up a feisty heroine.

It’s 1812, and mankind has been traveling in space since the late 1600s. (Isaac Newton had something to do with it.) Arabella Ashby grew up on Mars, which has been colonized by the British in raj-like fashion. At 16, she is accustomed to rampaging around the red planet with her brother, schooled in hunting and other unladylike pursuits by her nanny, a female Martian warrior with eye-stalks and a carapace.

But it’s 1812. Arabella’s mother is determined that her daughter should act like a lady and, what’s more, should do so back where there are marriagable men and nobody has eye-stalks.  She drags Arabella and two younger daughters back to England, leaving her husband and son behind to run the family estate.

A year later, word comes that Arabella’s beloved father has died. Sent to the country to grieve, she discovers a cousin’s dastardly plot to travel to Mars, kill her even more beloved brother, and inherit everything. Space travel notwithstanding, English estates still don’t descend to women. Arabella, her mother, and her sisters will be out on the street.

Arabella to the rescue. Ridding herself of proper female attire bit by bit en route, she makes it to London to sign on as captain’s boy on the Mars Trading Company ship Diana.

Apart from the above-mentioned annoyances of atmosphere and oak trees, the voyage is ingenious. Interstellar ships are more or less round, propelled by three sails catching the breeze generated by space storms or a coal-fired furnace. In a pinch, the crew descends into a hell-hole to pedal for hours. Everything else aboard ship is Patrick O’Brian down to the grog and seabiscuit.

Adding to the fun, although also to my stick-in-the-mud annoyance, is the fact that everyone is weightless. Oh sure, do away with the pesky vacuum but make everything float because it’s a hoot.

I have to admit, it is a hoot.

Levine does confront the pesky fact that the British colonizers are every bit as objectionable on Mars as they were in India. Nobody thinks the Martians could possibly be anything but savages and servants—my dear, they have shells—and British attitudes eventually trigger an uprising. Arabella’s close relationship with her Martian nanny comes in handy.

On her way to Mars, Arabella experiences a shoot-out with a French war ship (Napoleon being on the rampage in space, too) and a mutiny. Having shared with her father a love for automatons, she masters the ship captain’s pet navigation device, a highly intelligent machine called Aadim. Conveniently, the captain himself is a figure of romance.

This is a fun book, and there’s a sequel coming in July. I will be reading it, grumping and moaning.

(Dear FCC: I got this book from the library. Actually, a friend did, and passed it along to me because she figured I’d like it. As always, nobody cares whether I’m reviewing it or not. Most of us do care about net neutrality, so devote your attention to that, please.)

February Book Review Club: HOMEGOING

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@Barrie Summy

We skipped January, so Happy New Year! If you need a break from the news (and who doesn't?) lots of good books to choose from. Click the icon above for reviews. And click the book title below if you're moved to buy the book. 

Homegoing

By Yaa Gyasi

Alfred A. Knopf, 2016

In the late 1700s a pair of half sisters, who don’t know each other, are experiencing opposite floors of the Cape Coast slave castle in Ghana, then known as The Gold Coast. Effia, an Asante, lives on the top floor as wife of the castle’s British overlord. She tries not to acknowledge what’s happening in the dungeon, where her Fante half-sister, Esi, is packed literally like a sardine into a cell whose floor is feet deep in human waste. In time, Esi is loaded onto a ship headed for an American slave mart.

Born in Ghana but raised in Alabama, Yaa Gyasi makes use of her dual experience in following Effia’s and Esi’s descendents as they navigate European dominance and vileness over two centuries on two sides of the Atlantic.  On both sides, there is captivity.

The book alternates between Ghana and the U.S., one representative from each of seven generations.  This is fascinating but a little frustrating because the book is relatively slim—you feel you’re just getting to know a character when it’s time to move on to the next generation.  You never get the chance to sink in. Still, an absorbing read.

Possibly because of her background, Gyasi could be fearless in examining the involvement of Gold Coast tribes in rounding up their enemies for the European slave traders.  (Effia’s son, uneasy but complient, follows his father’s lead in rounding up slaves for the castle’s maw.) She finds more fertile ground in the Gold Coast and modern Ghana than in the U.S., where she almost seems to tick off boxes—emancipation, Jim Crow, ghetto life, jazz, the demoralization of African-American men, drugs, fatherless children. The Ghanaian chapters are more character-driven and richer.

The Door of No Return at the Elmina slave castle in Ghana, 

which I visited a few years ago. This castle was run by the Dutch, 

while nearby Cape Coast Castle was British. 

Effia and Esi’s mother left each of them a black stone pendant, but Esi lost hers in the mire of her Cape Coast dungeon. Effia’s gets handed down the generations. This is an obvious but still potent symbol: African-Americans lost a critical part of their heritage when their ancestors were herded out the Door of No Return in one slave castle after another.

Effia’s great-great-granddaughter Akua, plagued by dreams of a fire woman who has made her burn her own children, takes the necklace to a fetish man to see if there’s any way to undo whatever evil is dogging her family.  “. . . Sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home,” she tells her son, Yaw.

“When someone does wrong,” she adds, “whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.”

Although it’s not perfect, I highly recommend this book. It’s heartfelt, talented, and brave, essential qualities in this awful time.

(Dear FCC: I got this book for Christmas and nobody cares if I review it. I’m sure you have better things to concentrate on just now.)

December Book Review Club: GOODBYE STRANGER

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@Barrie Summy

Jingle, jingle. Also, ho. Not feeling the holiday spirit yet, possibly because it's dark and it keeps raining when I want to put the spirit-saving lights on the maple tree out front. And I've about had it with 2016.

Enough whining. If there's a middle-schooler on your gift list, read on and get out the credit card. If, like me, you're a middle-schooler at heart, time to buy yourself a present. 

Don't forget to click the icon above for more reviews. And Happy Holidays! 

Goodbye Stranger

By Rebecca Stead

Wendy Lamb Books, 2015

Let’s say you want to stay in a character’s head while she subjects her own motives to brutal analysis, meanwhile remaining cagey about who that character actually is. Turns out second-person narration is just the ticket. Who knew?

Rebecca Stead knew, or anyway she figured it out. GOODBYE STRANGER, a brilliant excursion into the minds of (mostly) seventh graders, intersperses brief chapters in which a mysterious character plays hooky for a day, addressing herself in second person as her situation and identity gradually unfold.  Also interspersed are a boy named Sherm’s letters to his grandfather, unmailed because he’s ticked Nonno Gio walked out on Nonna after fifty years of marriage.

These are not gimmicks. They are paint brushes.

They’re also not the book’s chief beauty. Every now and then, an author displays her (or his) unerring memory of the hell that is middle school, when everything changes, ready or not. Stead tapped into those memories in this book, even more so than in WHEN YOU REACH ME, the only other book of hers that I’ve read. (Going to correct that in a hurry.)

Set in Manhattan, GOODBYE STRANGER offers a full pallette of seventh-grade wonders and horrors. Friends change into strangers, strangers unexpectedly become friends, mistakes bring public humiliations, teachers and parents are oblivious except when they surprise you with understanding, support, and moments of beauty.

Our protagonist is Bridget, who has now decided her name is Bridge. She missed third grade while she recovered from horrendous injuries she incurred rollerskating into traffic. Her survival was a miracle, and now she keeps wondering what that nurse meant when she said “You must have been put on this earth for a reason, little girl.”  She freezes up sometimes at crosswalks. This year, she’s decided to wear cat ears on her head—even she can’t explain why.

Meanwhile, one of Bridge’s two best friends has suddenly acquired “a body,” to the extent that she’s now the toast of the eighth grade in-crowd: a treacherous accomplishment, it transpires. The third member of the trio has become “kind of a know-it-all.” Sherm has unaccountably  become yet another best friend—not, not, not a boyfriend, thank you very much. Bridge discovers that she can be quite a looker herself if she spends time on hair and make-up. A sensible kid, she decides she probably won’t bother.  

Some things are stable, keeping Bridge on her feet. She and her brother continue their long-held tradition of quoting lines from the animated movie “Frosty the Snowman.” Bridge’s mother, a cellist with her own rich life, knows just how to calm her daughter down after her recurring nightmare of being bandaged like a mummy, immobilized.

Middle school is complicated, requiring more than one perspective. The wonder of this book is its ensemble cast of characters, each one a brush stroke.  Bridge is our focus, certainly, but her friends and family have their own lives and concerns that illuminate hers. The mysterious You-narrator, who’s clearly older, offers glimpses of what may lie in store for Bridge and friends—high school can be its own kind of hell.

All of this is accomplished smoothly, masterfully, painterly, from the heart as much as the head. No writer could ask for more.

(Dear FCC: I read this book because I was going to a conference at which the author was a speaker. I bought it with my own money. Never met the author, and if I had I would’ve gushed like a fan-girl. Middle school lives on.)

November Book Review Club: THE DREAMHUNTER DUET

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@Barrie Summy

If ever we needed to escape into a good book, now's the time. I'm seriously considering spending the next week under the covers with a flashlight. Hey, it worked when I was ten, why not now?

Anyway, here's a possibility. Don't forget to click the link above for more reviews!

The Dreamhunter Duet

(Dreamhunter & Dreamquake)

By Elizabeth Knox

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006 & 2007

When you’re head-over-heels in love, you overlook a person’s flaws. In time, they either become endearing or you pack up and leave, snarling about toilet seats left up or the way he chews a cheeseburger.

That’s how I feel about Elizabeth Knox’s DREAMHUNTER books. The premise, characters, and world-building are marvelous, breath-taking, the writing evocative yet urgent. I couldn’t stop reading.

I also couldn’t stop griping, especially at the end of the second book.

This is a young-adult alternate history set in Southland (Knox’s native New Zealand) c. 1905. Our teen protagonists are Laura Hame and her cousin, Rose Tiebold, children of the rich and famous. Laura’s father, Tziga, stumbled as a young man into the Place, a separate dimension tied to the “real” world at various geographical points. He returned having “caught” a dream that he shared with others during sleep—this proved  to be a source of solace and therapy, especially in hospitals, but also entertainment. Before long, others learned to enter the Place to catch dreams, and an industry grew up, with dreamhunters selling their dreams to those who needed them for therapy or just wanted the entertainment.

Not everyone can enter the Place, and not everyone who gets in can catch a dream. Tziga’s exceptional talent has made him rich. Ditto Grace Tiebold, Rose’s mother and the wife of Tziga’s brother-in-law and best friend: She is the darling of the Dream Palace, where customers in ornate sleepwear occupy sumptuous bedrooms to share a sleeping hunter’s dream.

Tziga and Grace have constructed a unique family unit. His wife, Laura’s mother, died of cancer, so the families joined households. The two dreamhunters are the breadwinners, but have to spend so much time in the Place that they are hardly ever around to parent and run a household. Those responsibilities are lovingly discharged by Grace’s husband, Chorley, a house-husband who makes films on the side. Laura and Rose are more sisters than cousins, inseparably bonded.

Everybody wants to grow up to be a dreamhunter. When the time comes for Laura and Rose to try, Laura enters the Place but Rose cannot. If you’ve read any YA at all, you see this coming a mile off, simply because Rose wants it so much and Laura doesn’t care. And of course Laura ends up with exceptional dreamhunting talent, inherited mystical abilities, and a hopeless, possibly illegal quest that will uncover hidden evil and throw her and her family into the teeth of danger. Familiar tropes, yes, but so winningly carried out that you’re too breathless to care.

Far less familiar to the YA reader is an omniscient point of view that puts us in the heads of adults, not teens, about 60 percent of the time. This is very, very odd for YA, but I was never in any doubt that the Laura and Rose were the story’s focus. Getting to know the adults so well only added to the richness of the story. My only trouble with the characterization was the way these two feisty, capable girls ended up wimping out at the end—no amount of self-analysis will tell me whether that’s legitimate literary criticism or just me wanting a happy ending. Probably the latter, so take it with a grain of salt.

As you read, your brain will keep prodding you for metaphysical logic. You have to ignore your brain because there ain’t none, especially when All Is Revealed at the end of the second book. The time paradoxes alone could kill you. Up to you whether that’s a problem.  

A far more serious breach, in my view, is the fact that the Hames and the Tiebolds and the other original European settlers apparently happened upon a completely empty variant of New Zealand: No Maori or other indigenous people.  I’m surprised there wasn’t an outcry about this, as there certainly was when an American YA author did much the same thing right around the time these books came out. Political correctness aside, it seems to me that the presence of indigenous people would have enriched the book.

I’m ashamed to say that this didn’t occur to me until about halfway through, but now it’s making me sad. I wish a book with so many wonders in it could have done better.

(Dear FCC: These books were on the reading list for next week’s Children’s Literature New England symposium on Passages of Hope, intended to examine whether it’s possible in this day and age to write authentic stories that also offer hope. This’ll be an interesting discussion, FCC. Drop by if you have minute.)

September Book Review Club: THE BURIED GIANT

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@Barrie Summy

The Book Review Club is back and ready to read! Hope the summer was splendid but you got more rain than we did. No high hopes for the apple harvest.

On the other hand, a new crop of books! Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews. 

The Buried Giant

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Hardcover: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015
Paperback: Vintage International, 2016

King Arthur is dead and buried. The wars between Britons and Saxons have dwindled to an unsettled truce. And so, the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice feel it’s reasonably safe to travel from their settlement, a warren dug into a hill, to find their son in a distant village.

They don’t exactly remember details about their son. Why are they living apart? Do they really know the way to his village? Not sure.

Blame it on the mist—that’s what everyone calls the odd loss of memory that’s settled on England in recent years. Like a fog, it comes and goes—one minute you don’t remember anything older than a few months, but then the gloom lifts long enough for a dim memory to return. Only to fade again hours later.

Axl and Beatrice are devoted to each other, but they don’t exactly remember how or why they fell in love, or much about their years together. Is this a good thing, this living in the moment? Or are they missing the real beauty of their lives?

THE BURIED GIANT is flat-toned, written in amber. There are no sharp colors, no thrills or real moments of tension, just a vague sense of unease and a gradual awakening. Its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, is adept at characters who don’t reveal all—the Booker Prize-winning THE REMAINS OF THE DAY is one of his books. In this case, the characters’ secrets are hidden from themselves as well as from us.

It sounds like a complete bore, and yet I found this book hard to put down. The characters are just so dear—especially Axl, our primary narrator. His focus is on Beatrice, how to keep her safe and happy, how to deal with that worrying pain she has in her side. And yet we (and he) keep getting hints that he lived a bolder life at one time, a warrior and a trusted emissary.

He and Beatrice have plenty of adventures on their way to find their son. They meet Saxons, Britons, upright knights, bad monks, pixies, ogres, and eventually a dragon.  Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and trusted lieutenant, wanders in and out as a decrepit, befuddled relic of bygone glory. Merlin had his hand in things, long ago.

It’s all told in that flat tone. At one point a potentially thrilling scene even is told in retrospect, all danger over. This should be a buzz-kill but . . . then there are those mysteries. What IS the source of the mist? Who IS Axl?

What does memory do for us? What if we forgot we were at war?

This probably won’t be your book of the year—it’s a tad too muted for that. There’s a feeling that it never really digs down, just skims the surface of things. The mysteries are solved, but the forces behind them remain vague. Nevertheless, it’s a lovely read and will stay with you.

Autumnal, in fact.

(Dear FCC: This was a birthday present, suggested to my beloved by the wizards at Blue Hill Books. Nobody paid me to review it or even cares that I did. Autumnal indeed.)

June Book Review Club: SLADE HOUSE

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@Barrie Summy

It's spring even  in Maine now, and a slim book is just what you need: easy to carry in your beach satchel, quick to read in between bouts of gardening. I'm not entirely enthusiastic about this one, but if you've enjoyed earlier books by David Mitchell you might like it fine. 

The Book Review Club is taking July and August off. Click the icon above for more reviews, and see you in September!

Slade House

by David Mitchell

Random House, 2015

A lesson to us all, that’s what SLADE HOUSE is. Up to now, I’ve occasionally pondered whether the absolute necessity for a character to be the agent of his own fate was just a kidlit/YA thing. If you were writing for adults, could you get away with a deus ex machina, medieval drama’s god-figure descending to solve everything?

In SLADE HOUSE, David Mitchell answers that question. No, you can’t.

Mitchell is the author of THE CLOUD ATLAS, which I haven’t read, and THE BONE CLOCKS, which I liked a lot. Most—if not all—of his novels take place in a universe that contains “atemporals,” immortals who jigger about with time and with us. There are bad guys, the vampiric Anchorites who suck our souls to stay alive, and there are good guys, the Horologists who try to save us. The books aren’t sequential (they couldn’t be, messing with time as they do) but familiar characters reappear. In SLADE HOUSE, there’s a reference to “bone clocks” (that would be us) and the deus ex machina is a Horologist called Marinus, known to us from the previous book.

There’s a lot to love about SLADE HOUSE, and Mitchell’s universe is intriguing as hell. (I may mean that literally.)  The central characters in this round are a set of twins who’ve become Anchorites. They inhabit a very cool London mansion called Slade House, and keep themselves and the house going by imbibing the soul of an “engifted” human every nine years. (I’m not sure what “engifted” means—psychic, maybe. The term may originate from THE CLOUD ATLAS.) Mitchell can be an entrancing writer, and he's having fun here, which is endearing. 

This is a slim volume with five sections, one for each soul under attack, set every nine years starting in 1979 and ending in 2015. (The first section apparently debuted on Mitchell's Twitter feed. Huh.) Four sections are told from the point of view of an imbibee, while one of the evil twins narrates the last one.

Therein lies the problem. The evil twins are just evil, not at all compelling as characters, and they're the ones we're visiting the most. The victims are more fun to hang out with, but we get to know them a-a-a-almost enough to care about them and then they’re gone and we’re off to the next case. Each victim appears once more as a vague, ghostly residue trying to warn a successor, but otherwise none of the humans takes any lasting action. It’s up to Marinus the immortal to swoop in at the end, out of nowhere except the previous book. The human reader closes this book feeling flat and cheated. At least I did.

It doesn’t help that I read this just after Salman Rushdie’s TWO YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS, in which warring jinn bring their battles to earth with humans as either pawns or allies. The contrast was telling. We know the heroine jinnia very well, having followed her through the book. Her human allies are well known to us and instrumental in their own salvation.  It’s a masterful, soul-filling tale. SLADE HOUSE, taken by itself, is not.

Now, here’s the thing. In a multi-course meal, SLADE HOUSE may be intended only as a garnish. THE BONE CLOCKS, although it had its faults, was a far more substantial and satisfying experience, and I have every intention of reading THE CLOUD ATLAS to make sure I’m prepared for the future.  A few books from now, we may be sitting back, loosening our belts, and calling for a toothpick.

(Dear FCC: I bought this book for my beloved. It was either for Christmas or his birthday, which is exactly one month before Christmas and a total pain in the prat for the gift-giver. Do something about that, would you?)

May Book Review Club: INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES

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@Barrie Summy

It's supposed to be spring, and for most of you it probably is. Here in Maine, the window shows us budding trees, we dance out the door, and we freeze in place. This is why they call it "climate change" rather than "global warming."

On the plus side, more wood stove time. Here's a lovely bit of escapism that would work just as well on a beach if you don't live in The Land the Sun Forgot. Yes, I'm whining.

Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews.

Instead of Three Wishes

By Megan Whalen Turner

Greenwillow Books, 1995

Guilty secret: Every now and then, I google “Megan Whalen Turner Book Five,” grasping for news on the promised sequel to the four Queen’s Thief novels. So far, the series consists of THE THIEF, THE QUEEN OF ATTOLIA, THE KING OF ATTOLIA, and A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS, each better than the one before. Which is saying something, considering that THE THIEF won a Newbery honor.

The last book came out in 2010, and Turner has said there would be two more in the series. If that's not true, I will turn into a heap of disappointed dust on the floor.

Last time I guiltily googled, I was reminded that Turner’s first book actually was INSTEAD OF THREE WISHES, a collection of short stories. “Why haven’t I read these?” I muttered, scrambling for the “buy” button.

Why indeed.  Unlike the Queen’s Thief books, which are set in a fantasy realm, most of these stories are in my favorite sub-genre, fantasy set in the real world.  What's more, they're blessed with the dry, wry, understated sense of humor best served up when the supernatural meets the humdrum. Example: Having watched a Cinderella-esque coach-and-four appear and disappear in her front yard, a protagonist's mother says calmly, “It's a good thing we don't have many neighbors. They'd wonder.”

The stories don't have the literary heft of the novels, but lordy they're fun. My favorite, I think, is the title tale (quoted above), in which a high school student named Selene unwittingly earns the gratitude of an elf prince who grants her three wishes she doesn't really want. One after another, she rejects the coach, a palace, and a charming but dimwitted prince with matrimony on his mind, until the desperate elf turns up on the doorstep pretending to be a history professor who needs to rent a room. (Mom, a historian herself, finds it odd that he's never heard of the Battle of Hastings.)

The conundrum's solution is both neat and heart-warming.

In other stories,  a New Hampshire town withstands a leprechaun sighting and onslaught of tourists,  a kid goes back in time to rid a Viking settlement of its cockroaches, and a fledgling punk suffers nightmares in which he sees what other people think of him. Ghosts are addicted to reading. A young king masquerades as a baker.

My second-favorite story, the one whose complex texture most resembles Turner's novels, is “Aunt Charlotte and the NGA Portraits.”  An elderly aunt enthralls her niece with the tale of a girlhood summer on the North Carolina shore, when she helped a strange but beloved neighbor solve a series of art-related puzzles and challenges. I quibbled a bit with the storytelling aunt device—couldn't see why it was necessary. But the story itself was marvelous.

Elements of this collection took me back to the ironic, deliciously weird short stories that got me through my teen years, written around the turn of the last century by journalist H.H. Munro under the pen-name “Saki.” (If you've never read “The Open Window” or “Sredni Vashtar,” correct this gap in your education immediately.) (None of Turner's stories is as bloody as "Sredni Vashtar," I hasten to add.)

I would love to know if Turner ever read Saki. She has claimed Diana Wynne Jones as an inspiration, so that’s almost as good.

For those of us who are Turner-deprived, these stories do ease the ache.

Also, Ms. Turner, hurry up.

(Dear FCC: Do you not recognize the addiction here? Think I’d wait for someone to pay me or otherwise incite this review? In short, I bought this book and no one cares what I say about it.)

April Book Review Club: Grayling's Song

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@Barrie Summy

Well, it's a good thing there are books, because winter has returned to Maine with freezing temperatures and breathtaking wind. Far from dashing outside and dancing in the sunshine, we're pulling up our socks and huddling by the woodstove, sick of the sight of one another. Time to grab a blanket and turn on the reading light.

I was greatly cheered by this book, and I hope you will be too. Don't forget to click on the icon above for more reviews!

Grayling’s Song

Advance Reading Copy

By Karen Cushman

Clarion Books, June 7, 2016

I do love it when a girl learns to sing her own song. Especially when she’s got that familiar inner voice telling her she can’t do it.

Such is the charm of GRAYLING’S SONG, Karen Cushman’s latest, due out in June. This is Cushman’s first fantasy, although the medieval/renaissance setting will be delightfully familiar to fans of her historical novels (Catherine, Called Birdy; The Midwife’s Apprentice; Alchemy & Meggy Swann, to name a few).

As in many middle-grade fantasies, magic provides the Big Challenge our heroine must overcome, but her success depends less on her mystical powers than on her ability to conquer her inner demons. Magic is all very well, we learn, but courage, wit, insight, and kindness are a person's most powerful weapons.

Grayling is the daughter of a cunning woman, the aptly named Hannah Strong, who serves her neighborhood as healer and counselor. When we meet the two it’s clear that the daughter reveres her talented, fierce-minded mother to the point of feeling utterly inadequate herself. Almost immediately, however, Hannah Strong needs help—some evil force of “smoke and shadow” burns down their cottage and roots Hannah to the ground for a slow transformation into a tree. 

Worst of all, the force has spirited away Hannah’s grimoire, the recipe-book for her craft.

It’s up to Grayling to get help, ideally by rescuing the grimoire. Setting off reluctantly, she discovers that most other magical folk also have lost their grimoires and been turned into trees. But she finds that if she sings her mother’s grimoire will answer her, drawing her to it.

Following the grimoire’s song across the countryside, Grayling collects a motley band of helpers: a talking, shape-shifting mouse, a sorceress who ensnares the unwary with her beauty, an elderly magician with a mule, an even more elderly “weather witch” and her sullen apprentice.

Everybody knows more than Grayling does. And yet she finds to her astonishment that she’s always the leader. As the quest goes on, she finds in herself an unsuspected level of intelligence, bravery, and, yes, even what she might call “magic.”

You’ll be purring as you read. At least, I was.

I ransacked the internet to see if there’s going to be sequel to GRAYLING’S SONG, but there’s no hint of that yet. I’m concerned because there seem to me to be loose ends in this book. The first chapter tells us that Grayling’s country is plagued by battling warlords, vastly unequal distribution of wealth (sound familiar?), and drifts of homeless people (“edge dwellers”). We meet a warlord and some edge dwellers, but they don’t contribute much to the plot. I want to know more about them, and I want comeuppance for the person who caused the “smoke and shadow” situation, which I don’t feel I got.

Grayling, moreover, seems ripe for further adventures at the end of the book.

Surely, Ms. Cushman, there will be more?

(Dear FCC: I read an Advance Reading Copy of GRAYLING’S SONG, which I got as a free ebook through NetGalley. I signed up for it because I knew I’d love it, which does seem like cheating. But I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry.)