The Book Review Club: March

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@Barrie Summy

I'm just finishing a revision (yay!) and then, I swear, will get back to telling you all about Ghana. (God. I'm such a loser.) In the meantime, I have been working my way through my Christmas books, and I've fallen in love once again with the verbal stylings of Sir Terry Pratchett. So, here's his latest book.


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Snuff
By Terry Pratchett
HarperCollins, 2011

It took me a long time to cotton to Terry Pratchett, and now I have catching up to do.

Especially when it comes to Samuel Vimes, who commands the City Watch in Ankh-Morpork, the starring city-state in Pratchett’s Discworld. There are around forty Discworld novels. I’ve read six or seven, mostly the ones for kids, and this is the first involving Commander Vimes.

My trouble with Pratchett early on was that, although I loved his style, I couldn’t get comfy with his characters. I can’t put my finger on why: Maybe they were too foreign or not sympathetic enough, or maybe I wasn’t in the right mood. Then I met Tiffany Aching, the apprentice witch of the four middle-grade Wee Free Men novels, and I pretty much wanted to adopt her and/or be her best friend.

My dear one gave me SNUFF, the latest dispatch from Discworld, for Christmas. Now I would like to have several beers with Sam Vimes, except he doesn’t drink alcohol so he’ll have to have beetroot beer with chili peppers and celery seed. I’m happy to report that he turns out to have appeared in at least a dozen books, usually as the star, so I have more blissful encounters in store.

Discworld, in case you don’t know, is a flat world supported by four elephants balanced on the back of a turtle. Humans, a few of them wizards and witches, live there in varying degrees of harmony with every fantasy creature you can name, including vampires, werewolves, dwarves, trolls and goblins. Some of the humans and creatures are very nice. Others are utterly the opposite. Their city is a festering den of iniquity. Daily life is a dangerous undertaking.

Also hysterical. On the first page of SNUFF, we learn that goblins have a cult of Unggue, “a remarkably complex resurrection-based religion founded on the sanctity of bodily secretions.” Every goblin makes gorgeous ritual containers for earwax, nail clippings, and snot. Fortunately, water and food are viewed as passing though the body without becoming part of it.

Unggue containers play an important role in the mayhem to follow.

Sam Vimes grew up in the back streets of Ankh-Morpork. Now, after many years as a copper, he is Duke of Ankh and the Commander of the City Watch, as well as a former blackboard monitor. He is married to Lady Sybil, the richest woman in the city. Their six-year-old son, Young Sam, is obsessed with poo.

In this installment of the Vimes saga, the commander is being dragged from the city to his wife’s ancestral home, ostensibly for a forced vacation. He has barely adjusted to the absence of city noise when a goblin girl is murdered and it becomes apparent that the countryside is rife with intrigue and evil-doing. Vimes solves the case with help from a goblin, a local policeman, a bartender, and his trusty valet, Willikins, a handy man with a cross-bow and brass knuckles.

I won’t tell you what happens next, partly because I don’t want to spoil the book for you but mostly because I couldn’t possibly do it. One peculiarity of the Discworld books is that the plots are so convoluted you’d need a computer to keep track of them. This is not a criticism—I loved every minute. But it is peculiar.

What I will tell you is that there’s a serious undercurrent about the treatment of goblins, who are underestimated to the point of enslavement. And Sam Vimes is a serious undercurrent all by himself, convinced as he is that a moment’s inattention and the right combination of circumstances will unleash The Beast in him. He’s a total sweetheart: A loving father, cheerily downtrodden by his wife, with a good eye for the hidden diamond in other people’s souls. But he also fights dirty, and he’s worried that he might lose control.

My next act will be to forget I ever read this book and get my hands on GUARDS! GUARDS!, Vimes’ debut novel. Can’t wait to start at the beginning and get to know this guy.

Why Ghana?

I'm chipping away at a Picasa album about my trip to Ghana, but the way I operate, that'll take us through July at least. So I figured I'd throw a few of my favorite pictures at you as a place-holder. They're all of people: My traveling companion, Lisa, and I decided early on that, given a choice, we wanted to meet people more than we wanted to see monkeys and hippos. And, boy, did we ever.

I've heard it said that you go to East Africa for the landscape and West Africa for the people. Unlike most of what you hear about Africa, this turns out to be true, if Ghana's any example. I hope we'd be as welcoming to a well-meaning but clumsy visitor to the U.S. , but I'm not 100 percent confident.


Addo Dombo (striped shirt) and family, our primary hosts for all but our first week, when we were volunteering in a village in the Volta region. Addo is a government official and his wife, Eunice, (far right) is a teacher. They head a lively household in Accra that at the moment includes three daughters, a niece, a nephew, three grandchildren, and a daughter's friend. Addo sent us (guided by his cousin, Odette) all over Ghana in his car and driver, giving us unparalleled access to places we'd never have seen otherwise.

Here's a smattering of other folks we met, starting in "our" village, Abutia Agodeke, and moving on through the cities of Accra, Kumasi, and Wa in the far north, plus towns and villages in between.

Agodeke kids, on the porch outside Lisa's and my room.



Robert Tornu, director of project and volunteer management for Disaster Volunteers of Ghana (DIVOG), the organization that placed us (and took care of us) in Agodeke. "Disaster" in this case means a child going without an education. More about DIVOG in my next post. He's in a "tro-tro"-- the vans that are the backbone of the public transportation system-- as we headed back to Accra after our week in Agodeke. (Actually, this was an upper level of tro-tro, with air conditioning and comfortable seating. This level of transport is known locally as "a ford. "Take that, Chevy.)



This is in the far north, in the village our host family calls home.



In the northern city of Wa, these ladies were making pito, the local beer brewed from millet. It has a bit of a kick.



The digital camera is your passport to anywhere: Everyone wanted their pictures taken and shown to them afterwards. That's Lisa's hand at left, vainly groping for her camera as these Wa market vendors yuck it up.

More coming soon!

The Book Review Club: February

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@Barrie Summy

I'm back from Ghana, and almost back to reality after a stunning three-week trip. I have 1,033 photos on my camera, which I'm trying to edit before getting them online somehow. In the meantime, with the fervor of the recently returned, I've chosen for this month's review a Ghanaian book I read on my Kindle while I was away.

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Tail of the Blue Bird
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Flipped Eye Publishing, 2011
(Originally: Jonathan Cape, London, 2009)

There's something magical about engrossing yourself in a murder mystery set in an African village not that far from your very own mosquito net. But this book, written by a poet, would be magical wherever you  read it.

Last month, spending a week in Abutia Agodeke, a tiny village in Ghana's Volta Region, I uncorked the Kindle and started reading this book. The room I shared with my travel companion, Lisa, was in a simple, modern brick house that belonged to a village elder. I didn't really need the mosquito net provided for me--the windows had screens, and it was dry season so we'd seen maybe one mosquito. But I was far from home and liked feeling tented in, the only light from my Kindle and Lisa's headlamp across the room.

Outside my window was a world of tidy mud houses with thatched roofs, much like those Nii Ayikwei Parkes describes in TAIL OF THE BLUE BIRD. Every now and then a sleepy goat would bleat. Otherwise, it was just me and Opanyin Poku, the village hunter who narrates most of Parke's debut novel.

It's Opanyin Poku who describes the day when a minister's short-skirted girlfriend, "the one whose eyes would not lie still," follows a blue-headed bird and her nose into Kofi Atta's hut, and starts shrieking "like a grasscutter in a trap." (A grasscutter is a ginormous hamsterish rodent whose meat is a delicacy.) The girlfriend has discovered something repulsive on Kofi Atta's bed--a fetus? Afterbirth? Whatever it is, it's alive with maggots and stinks to high heaven.

Because of whose girlfriend she is, the horrifying report gets back to Accra, Ghana's capital city. A police inspector on the make strong-arms Kayo, a lab doctor who got forensic training in England, into taking on the case. Regardless of the facts, the inspector wants a "full CSI-style report" that will create a high visibility incident he can use for a power-grab. Failure to deliver such a report means imprisonment or worse.



Abutia Agodeke, from my front porch

 Kayo and his sidekick, Constable Garba, set up a methodical scientific investigation, although they also endear themselves to Opanyin Poku by observing the niceties of village protocol. As it turns out, there's nothing methodical about this situation. The repulsive object, rapidly decaying, proves to be human but not a fetus. At the behest of the village medicine man, the policemen burn it in the woods. The task transforms into a mystical experience, and the book transforms from procedural to fable.

This is a surprise at first, although it probably shouldn't have been. The narration in the first part of the book shifts back and forth from Opanyin Poku in first person to a third-person narrator with Kayo's viewpoint: from traditional to scientific, from rural to urban, and the two worlds don't meld. It's clear that Kayo is a good guy because he observes village courtesies, but it's also clear that he's a technical man, married to his ALS goggles and fluid samples.

The burning ceremony shakes him to his core. It begins his journey--and ours--toward the real truth of what happened in Kofi Atta's hut. Forensic science gives way to magic and storytelling in an exceptionally satisfying way.

According to his Amazon bio, Nii Ayikwei Parkes divides his time between Ghana and the U.K., with occasional visits to the U.S. for readings. Ghana has honored him for his poetry and literary advocacy, and this book was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He writes children's stories as K.P. Kojo, notably about Ananse, the trickster god.

Judging from his YouTube videos, he's got his school visit techniques down cold. Here he is telling one of his Ananse stories:

Now I'm dying to read K.P. Kojo!

Off to Ghana

Yup. Starting way, way too early tomorrow morning, I'm going here:

Everybody asks, "Why Ghana?" I have to admit, Ghana specifically was not my idea. I had a vague notion that I wanted to go someplace in West Africa, and my friend Lisa has wanted to visit Ghana for years. The more I've learned about the country the happier I am at the choice. It's a country rich in crafts and history, a stable democracy that has done all it can to support its fellow African nations. Judging from my minimal contacts so far, Ghanaians are astonishingly generous: We have been offered help and hospitality in an open-handed fashion makes me ashamed of our Western reserve.

Lisa and I will spend a week in a village in the Volta region through a "voluntourism" organization called GlobeAware, working with local school children and being ferried around to various sites and sights, among them weaving. We'll then spend ten days traveling around the rest of the country.

Speaking of weaving, just LOOK at this cloth:

I won't be participating in this month's round of the Book Review Club. But if you want to read some great reviews, click this icon:

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Book Review Club: December

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@Barrie Summy

This entry for the Book Review Club is utterly, completely, totally biased. Three friends of mine have books out, and I love the books to bits so I’m bloody well going to tell you about them. I’ve organized them by age: picture book through adult.

I can’t stress enough how prejudiced I am. (Got that, FCC?) One book (GOOD CAT) was even present from the author, who is in my writers group. (I bought the other two.) But I swear, if I didn’t love them I wouldn’t be writing about them at all—I’d just shut up and smile. Really. You can trust me.

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How To Be a Good Cat
Written and illustrated by Gail Page

Bloomsbury, 2011

This is Gail Page’s third book featuring Bobo, a huge, clumsy, adorable fool based on her late lamented dog, Gimpel. The New York Times once described Bobo as “the canine Oscar Madison,” and that’s about right.

In his earlier adventures—HOW TO BE A GOOD DOG and BOBO AND THE NEW NEIGHBOR—Bobo learned how to sit and stay, and succumbed to a muffin temptation that taught him to share. This time around, Bobo is saintly (we see him sweeping the floor and dusting the cake) but beleaguered by a kitten named Bonkers.

In simple, boldly colored illustrations, he tries to apply his hard-won know-how by teaching Bonkers to sit and stay. No dice. The little menace knocks over the fish bowl, unrolls the toilet paper, and pulls down the curtains.

Fortunately, Bobo still lives with Cat, the deadpan savant who rescued him in the previous two books. Cat gives Bobo a crash course in feline behavior, and the final page finds Bobo and Bonkers sharing the one thing a dog can teach anyone: a cat nap.

As a painter and illustrator, Gail is a brilliant fool herself. Bobo and Cat live with Mrs. Birdhead, who inexplicably wears a contraption on her head that provides a home for a small bird. Bobo has the outlook and mannerisms of a real dog, but he’s always on his hind legs and enjoys a bubble bath complete with back-scrubber and rubber ducky. Bonkers is the uber-kitten, insanely cute and insanely insane.

This level of whimsy is a delight to all ages, one to a hundred and one. It even delights the curmudgeon I live with. A book can meet no greater challenge. (Click on the pictures to appreciate them larger.)

Circus Galacticus

By Deva Fagan

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

Ever want to run away and join the circus? What if the Big Top were a spaceship, being pursued by opposing sets of intergalactic bad guys and/or bureaucrats?

When the chance presents itself to Beatrix Ling, a talented teenage gymnast whose hair has turned pink overnight, she doesn’t hesitate for a minute. Her life on earth is dreary: Her parents are dead, and she’s in a boarding school where everyone looks down on her. Among its other charms Circus Galacticus has the Ringmaster, a sequined mystery-man who insists that Trix’s pink hair proves she belongs in the Big Top.

The Ringmaster and crew are Tinkers, outcasts blessed with wildly diverse colors, shapes and skills. The Tinkers are on the lam from the militantly conformist Mandate and from an intergalactic government that has outlawed them both. Trix, whose parents entrusted her with a mysterious rock before they died, has already had a visit from one of the Mandate’s henchmen, a creep in a silver gas-mask who tried to take the rock from her.

Trix isn’t sure she’s a Tinker, but she’d sure like to belong somewhere. Her efforts to fit in among the circus’s other young adults are every bit as important to the story as the larger issues of diversity and self-determination.

Written for younger teens (Amazon has it as ages nine and up), CIRCUS GALACTICUS is Deva Fagan’s third fantasy but her first foray into science fiction. It’s heavier on the fantasy than the science, which is the way I personally like my SF, and the emphasis is on characterization. I was in Trix’s head and heart from page one, and I’m totally in love with the Ringmaster—he’s Doctor Who with humility and real sweetness.

Settle down with this book the day after Christmas. It’ll be your reward for making it through the season.

All My Dogs
By Bill Henderson
Drawings by Leslie Moore
David R. Godine, 2011

Bill Henderson is the founding publisher of the Pushcart Press and its famous Pushcart Prize. But mostly he’s a story-teller, as evidenced by this and the four memoirs that preceded it.

If you’ve read any of his previous accounts (HIS SON, HER FATHER, TOWER, SIMPLE GIFTS), you think you know Bill’s story well enough to be leery of another version. Turns out that if you want to make an old story new and fresh and charming, you simply add a dog. Or ten.

I have read three of the earlier books, and yet I couldn’t put this one down. I love dogs every bit as much as Bill Henderson does, but I’ve never paid that much attention to what they were teaching me. Bill’s chief gift is that he does pay attention.

Here, for example, is his recollection of the day in the early 50s when his dog Trixie won “Best in Show” at the elementary school pet exhibition.

She and I walked home together waving her blue ribbon, gushing in victory. (Gushing was another of Pop’s verbotens. Men of that era were supposed to be reserved.) Trixie gushed whenever she felt like it. She barked when it suited her, danced on her hind feet when asked, and charged around our house and yard possessed by her dog’s wonder of each second. She was a supreme gusher. Years later I would remember that lesson from her—it was OK to dance and wonder and gush.

I barely survived the tale of the later dogs Ellen and Rocky—I won’t tell you about it, partly because you shouldn’t know and partly because I’ll start sobbing. Each of the ten dogs Bill’s known has a tale (so to speak) of wonder or poignancy or insight. They are enriched by pencil drawings of each dog by Leslie Moore.

Read this one New Year’s Day, for solace and resolve.

EDITED TO ADD: I just realized I left out an important point (that's what I get for quitting coffee). Bill Henderson has had an extremely entertaining life--running the gamut from New York partying to religious revelation--and he tells it well. This is not an animal sob story. It's fun and funny, although also insightful.

Book Review Club: November

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@Barrie Summy

Phew! Running around like a madwoman today, but now it’s time to take a deep breath and contemplate the simple joys. Don’t forget to click the icon at the top for more reviews!

 Red Sled

By Lita Judge

Atheneum Books for Young Readers

November 2011

When a writer (speaking strictly hypothetically) is up to her neck in the complexities of the teen years plus magic plus mayhem, it's a blessing when something comes along that alters the perspective. For me right now, that’s RED SLED, a brand new picture book by New Hampshire writer/illustrator Lita Judge.

This book has a simple plot and practically no words. It’s a book someone has thought about, hard, and pared down to essentials. It’s beautiful.

Here’s the plot: A child in a white snowsuit and red hat trudges home for the night, leaving a red sled outside his/her cozy cabin in a white wilderness. A bear borrows the sled, and before long is plummeting downhill with a collection of friends from a moose to a mouse. Some of the animals are giddy; others are terrified. They crash gleefully at the bottom of their hill, then return the sled. Next day, puzzled by all the paw-prints, the child waits for nightfall and peeps out to see what’s happening.

On the last page, a delirious pile of animals and red-hatted kid scuds downhill into the snowy night.

The text consists of “hmm?” (twice), “whoa” (twice), and “alley oop” (once), plus a marvelous, thoughtful collection of sounds: “gadung, gadung” when the sled hits some bumps, or “ssssffft” as it glides past on a straightaway. My favorite is “fluoomp…ft,” which is the noise a pile of animals makes when crashing into some snow.

A parent would enjoy reading this aloud with sound effects, but a child also could enjoy it alone. No wonder it got starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and School Library Journal.

I’m indebted to Melissa Stewart and the New England chapter of the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for letting me know about RED SLED. The author is recovering from an auto-immune disease (here’s her blog post on the subject), and is unable to help promote her book. So the word went out on the NESCBWI drums that others should step in. I’m happy to do so, and urge you to help spread the news any way you can. Judge’s web site is http://www.litajudge.com/, if you want more information (or a peek at her other illustrations, which you definitely should see).

This is a book to treasure regardless of circumstances. But if you’re immersed in complexities, it’s a lifeline.

Book review on the way!

Hello there, book review club! Today's schedule got a bit wonky, so I won't be posting my review until early afternoon. See you then!