Unhappy Families: Northward to the Moon

Although I know I've read My One Hundred Adventures, Polly Horvath's previous book about Jane and her family, I only remember scattered bits and a feeling of gentle quirkyness. When I browsed the HOR shelf for my Reading My Library quest, I naturally gravitated towards a familiar name. Yet Northward to the Moon left me feeling deeply sad, and I'm not sure that was Horvath's intention in writing the book.

Jane's poet mother, her three siblings, and her newish step-dad Ned have spent the past year far from their Massachusetts beach house. Ned's job in Saskatchewan has the two younger boys imprinting on vast prairies instead of constant waves, leaving Jane to wonder whether this will be a permanent dividing line in her family -- she and Maya imprinted on the ocean while their brothers belong to the land. This early musing indicates a theme of this book, that families break apart and love cannot hold.

The family wanders dazedly from one town to another, following Ned's hatred of the known and secure. Along the way they fail to make connections with his old mentor, then his brother, and then his entire family. His family stages a mini-reunion when his appearance at his mother's ranch triggers a life-long injury, so his sisters can rally around and again fail to connect. Jane slows down the plot for a paint-by-the-numbers unrequited crush on a cute adult, complete with the humiliating realization that her painfully obvious crush has indeed been noticed by everyone over the age of eight. Meanwhile Maya's discomfort at all these disruptions pushes her farther and farther into despair, but no one has time to care. Finally everyone returns to Massachusetts to complete the splintering of the family.

It's told in Jane's authentic and usually vivid descriptions and thoughts (the exception is during the dreary crush), and the beautiful language almost conceals the heartbreak and tragedy piling up on every side. I will not be leaving this book anywhere near my already sad fifth grader, and my seventh grader would refuse it anyway since it's a sequel.

Girl Hero: Claudette Colvin Twice Towards Justice

Rosa Parks is the famous name associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and the breaking of segregation, but she wasn't the only hero.  Phillip Hoose's Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice tells the story of Colvin's court cases, her life, and the blow to segregation in his oversized book for child audiances.  I approached figuring I probably knew all the facts and would appreciate the presentation and found that there was quite a lot I didn't know.

I had known that Rosa Parks wasn't the first to refuse to stand up; I hadn't realized that Colvin not only was the first to fight her arrest through the courts, but also went back and was one of the four names in the constitutional challenge that legally broke the back of segregation.  The bus company didn't fold in the face of the boycott -- the courts ordered them to cease segregation due to a court case that Colvin testified in to great effect. However, as an underaged single mother whose child was suspiciously "light," nobody really wanted to use her as the front of any publicity.

The epilogue was deeply moving -- pictures of Colvin speaking in front of students at Booker T Washington high school, the school which had expelled her the year after her first court case because she was pregnant.  It's a reminder that not only did she fight segregation twice in the courts, she also had to fight prejudice twice -- once as an African American, and once as a woman.

I'm posting this on a Monday so I can take part in Non-fiction Monday, hosted by The Children's War.

Declaring Victory on Where Are You Reading

Where are You Reading Challenge Complete!

I've managed to read books from every state of the United States, plus the District of Columbia.  Whew!  This was the challenge that I feared leaving incomplete, since my plan of just reading all the books accidentally turned out to be a bad one and I was left with about twenty books needed for the last several weeks.  Also, I'm now quite disgruntled at books with vague settings; in a few cases I actually emailed the authors to find out where the heck their books were set.  This is particularly a problem for middle grade and young adult books, which I like reading.

I may or may not manage to review all the books today, but I promise I've read them.  I'll keep updating this post with the emergency reviews for the books I've finished in the past few weeks, when all blogging was suspended because reading time took precedence.  I will say that I've really enjoyed the last few books, especially the nonfiction titles I picked up for a change of pace that made Rhode Island and Alaska such fun reads on the last day of the year.

I kept track of the states on my sign-up post, and I have a google map with pointers to the books I read.  Making that was pretty exciting.

Hey, looking at the conclusion post on BookJourney's blog it appears that not finishing every state doesn't  mean the list police will hunt you down.  Huh.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I'll probably do it again next year, but hopefully will pay attention and either permit myself to leave it incomplete or search out the books I need a bit earlier.

View Book Trip in a larger map


What did I read? * are the ones I really enjoyed, and the mini-reviews here probably mean I read it in the past two weeks.  Or two hours.
Alabama:  Bird, by Angela Johnson
Alaska: The Map of My Dead Pilots, by Colleen Mondor.  A memoir about working with an airline in the frozen north, with all the fatalities involved.  It becomes a musing on memories and meaning and loss that encompasses much of what I think Xianjing was trying for and I wasn't seeing in One Man's Bible. *
Arizona: Alien Tango, by Gini Koch
Arkansas: Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader, by Amy Polakow.  Daisy Bates was a black woman who helped organize the Little Rock 9 to integrate the high school and ran a newspaper that reported on civil rights abuses throughout America.  This book gave a suspenseful description of her life and actions.
California: Mouse Tales, by David Koenig
Colorado: Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice
Connecticut: Because of Mr Terupt by Rob Buyea
Delaware: A Light in the Storm, by Karen Hesse.  Again I'm surprised by the authors writing in the Dear America series books -- Karen Hesse has won Newbery awards.  I thought this book gave a good sense of the culture and attitudes of people at the start of the civil war, although there wasn't much plot. Florida: You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, by Helen Seller
Georgia: Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Plot, by A.J. Hartley
Hawaii: Under a Blood-red Sky, by Graham Salisbery.  Historical fiction about a Japanese boy in Hawaii at right before and after the attack at Pearl Harbor.  Good enough to make me want to read the sequel.
Idaho: One Door Away From Heaven, by Dean Koontz.  My first Koontz, I found it interesting with vivid characters but too long for its chops and with a bit too much time spent in the eeeeevil killer's head.
Illinois: Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, by G. Neri
Indiana: The Beef Princess of Practical County, by Michelle Houts.  Straightforward and fun story of a girl learning to raise beef cattle and navigate some tricky situations during her twelfth year.
Iowa: Any Which Wall, Laurel Snyder
Kansas: Vengeance, David Thompson
Kentucky: Eli the Good, Silas House
Louisiana: Secrets of the Demon, Diane Rowland
Maine: Penderwicks at Pointe Mouette, Jeanne Birdsall
Maryland: Twist of Fate, M.J. Putney.  Romance between an insecure lawyer transitioning from cutthroat corporate work to touchy-feely law and a ex-software magnate turned carpenter recovering from the execution of his serial killer brother.  They bond over a last ditch effort to save an innocent guy from another execution.  Aside from them not noticing the clear clues the author leaves them, it was a fun story with a cute love life.
Massachusetts: Clementine, Friend of the Week, Sara Pennypacker
Michigan: Working Words,  ed. M.L. Liebler
Minnisota: Popcorn Days and Buttermilk Nights, Gary Paulsen
Mississippi: The Help, Kathryn Stockett
Missouri: Ghost in the Little House, William Holtz
Montana: The Whistling Season, Ivan Hoig
Nebraska: I Am a Man, Joe Starita
Nevada: Trick of the Light, Rob Thurman.  Standard paranormal with secret identies, hot ladies, and dubious man-friends.  Fun enough, and I like the strong emphasis on the action, not the sex.
New Hampshire: Horns, Joe Hill
New Jersey: The Half-Life of Planets, Emily Franklin & Brendan Halpin
New Mexico: Split, Swati Avasthi
New York: Every Time a Rainbow Dies, Rita Williams-Garcia
North Carolina: Wild Things, Clay Carmichael
North Dakota: Dakota Ambush, William W. Johnstone
Ohio: Sweet, Hereafter, Angela Johnson
Oklahoma: The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton.  Hey, I didn't review this book club book? As angsty as I remember, we all approved of Ponyboy and his pals. My son gave it a thumbs up in his guest appearance.
Oregon: Nightfall, Ellen Connor.  Oops, forgot to review this rather disappointing book about a group of people after the Apocalypse who battle bad guys who turn out to be werewolves and then discover they are changing themselves.  Not as fun as it sounds.
Pennsylvania: Circles in the Stream (Avalon #1),
Rhode Island: Backyard Giants, Susan Warren.  A tense year alongside amateur gardeners working towards growing a world record pumpkin.  Warren got lucky in that this was a really good year for the R.I. pumpkin club she shadowed for this book.
South Carolina: Army 101: Inside ROTC in a Time of War by David Axe.  Although Axe seems a bit puzzled about why anyone would want to join the military, he provides a good view on the lives of a corps of ROTC students and their struggles and hopes at the University of South Carolina.
South Dakota: High Plains Tango, Robert James Waller.  Slight tale of a man moving to a small town where he beds two women, sights a supposedly extinct bird, and loses his house to a highway.  The man is the illegitimate son of the guy from Bridges of Madison County.
Texas: Belly Up, Stuart Gibbs
Tennessee: Truth and Beauty, Ann Pratchett
Utah: Dinosaur Mountain, Deborah Kogan Ray
Vermont: How Tia Lola Ended Up Starting Over, Juliea Alvarez
Virginia: Paranormalcy, Kiersten White.
Washington: Five Flavors of Dumb, Anthony James
Washington DC: Liberty Porter, First Daughter by
West Virginia: Blue-Eyed Daisy, Cynthia Rylant.  A year in a poor girl's life, where she meets her father over a hunting dog and makes connections at school.
Wisconsin:  I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, Erin McCahon
Wyoming:  Scumble, Ivy Law

Library Returns Today!

A shelf of books had to go back to the library today because of tedious things like due dates and other people's holds.  And then I went off to Utah for vacation.  But here are some swift reactions to the books they got back.

Book From My TBR List:

• Don't Be Such a Scientist, Randy Olson.  Written by a marine biologist turned semi-successful movie producer, this polemic against boring attempts at persuasion looks at traditional ways of conveying information and laughs with scorn.  Too often scientists use the same protocols for public speaking that they do for research proposals, sometimes salted with contempt for their audience and general arrogance.  Olson suggests this may not be as effective as they seem to think.

Books From Reading My Library:

• Border Crossing, Maria Colleen Cruz.  Twelve year old Cesi Alvarez would be a good friend to Keeper, since they both have the common sense of a newt.  Apparently no one ever told her that Mexico is a different country than the US.  It tries to be a cute story about a girl understanding her heritage, but it relies heavily on willful and strident stupidity from Cesi.  Luckily she sits next to her long-lost cousin on the train, much as a mermaid steers Keeper home.  But it completes North America for my Global Challenge!
• Liberty Porter: First Daughter, Julia Devillers.  Nine year old Liberty looks forward to her new life in the White House, but first she has to straighten some things out with her dad's PR tool.  Cute and bouncy story that I think my fifth grader would like.  Also doubles as a location book for Washington DC, SCORE!

State Books:

• How Tia Lola Ended Up Starting Over, Julia Alvarez.  A blended family starts a B&B (or C&C&C) in VERMONT.  I liked the way the two families and their extended friends interacted and the conflict from the mysterious ill-wisher kept things interesting.  The sudden U-turn in the last few pages threw me violently out -- why suddenly tell me this is a book from a library and the characters aren't real?  I mean, I KNOW that...
• Popcorn Days and Buttermilk Nights, Gary Paulsen.  City living has poisoned Carley, so that he intermittently erupts in meaningless acts of violence.  His mom ships him to northern MINNESOTA to spend time in the country, where he learns about beauty and hard work and grinding poverty that gets alleviated with genius and more hard work.

Vampire Literature Books:

• The Vampire Defanged, Susannah Clements.  A review of vampire literature from Dracula through Sookie Stackhouse, looking at how Christian themes first dominated the literature and then gradually become replaced with more secular interests, paralleling the change from horrible monsters to sexy man-friends with an edge.  Clements thinks the genre would benefit from a return to a harder edge, which would also allow the Christian themes more room to thrive.

Books From My Favorite Authors

• I read Tempering of Men by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear just as the news of Anne McCaffrey's death come out, and it's an interesting homage to the Dragonrider books.  These men bond with their wolves, but the wolves are the dominant end of the equation, and the men adjust their lives to accommodate the wolves more than vice versa.  Sex gets complicated, for example.  And just as in later Pern books, these men are also facing the results of success -- they have beaten back the main threat that led to the pairings, so are they even necessary?  And what happens if the man you love doesn't love you back?

Good Kid: Wild Things

I grabbed Clay Carmichael's Wild Things from the shelf because the jacket copy mentioned a setting in North Carolina, and I feel very efficient when I combine Reading My Library with the dangling book challenges.  In addition to the lucky location, Wild Things also delivered a strong orphan character and a touching story of two loners letting people back into their lives.

As a kid, I liked reading about competent protagonists, and I even liked it when the child clearly took on too much, but did it well, and then found some place where adults could take over and let the kid be a child again.  That's the pattern here; Zoe's uncle Henry takes her in when her mother dies, and she even admits to herself that dying was probably the best thing her mother ever did for her so that Zoe could go to him.  Zoe has been taking care of herself all her life, and Henry has been alone almost that long, and it takes them a while to find their places in Henry's home.  Quirky neighbors also join in, as well as a mysterious adolescent who runs about with an albino deer and provides chances for Zoe to choose when to trust Henry and when he has to trust her.  It's all well done with the added pleasure of a stray cat throwing in his opinions on occasion.

I resented the coincidences at the end, but that's an adult curmudgeonly reaction that I wouldn't have had in my youth.

Hard Place: Split

I'm moving faster through the 2010 YA Novels Cybils finalists, since that's the largest category left for me this year.  Luckily King County has Swati Avasthi's Split for my NOOK, so I could read it conveniently.  I also tend to read my NOOK in short bursts, which helped me with this novel, which had me in turns dreading to see what main character Jace would do next, or what would happen next.

The plot follows Jace's escape from his abusing father; after Jace finally hits back and gets thrown out, his mother gives him the address of his older brother who had disappeared from Jace's life five years ago.  Then things start piling up -- Jace seems determined to sabotage himself.  I started to wonder if Avasthi was deliberately making him hard to like -- he's a thief, he's rude to his peers, he resents his brother's girlfriend, he lies to his brother.  Pieces of his past float up, memories of the abuse he watched his family suffer, and then what happened when his father included him in the violence.  And the destructive relationship with his girlfriend that ended with him hitting her, the act that really precipitated his flight.

Jace is trying really hard to not be his father, and he's terrified that he's already lost this battle.  He tries to keep all girls away from him, fearing that he'll erupt again.  And he's terrified about his mother and desperately wants her to escape with him.  Avashti depicts the relationship between Jace and his older brother Christian with harsh accuracy; Christian is both the beloved older brother from Jace's childhood and a young man still trying to deal with his own abused childhood that he's not sure he escaped.  Jace's arrival also brings forward the fears for his mother that Christian has buried deep, mainly because there is nothing he can do. The story of Jace's step forward is a very powerful one, although I don't think I'll order the print version to give my thirteen year old.

The climax of the novel happens around Thanksgiving, so I'm glad I finished this one in time for Turkey Day.  And I'm grateful for all the good reading the Cybils have brought me this year.

Rotten History: "I Am a Man"

I picked Joe Starita's "I Am a Man" from the library catalog because I need a Nebraska book for my Where Are Your Reading challenge, and the last few ones I tried didn't actually have anything to do with Nebraska.  Starita's history of the Ponca tribe's struggles with the American government's constant treaty revisions and lies seemed safely Nebraskan, although I admit to having qualms when their reservation was accidentally given to the Lakota (yes, that's right) so the administration decided that the best thing to do was force all the Ponca to move to Oklahoma, which was clearly better than admitting to making a mistake.

By that time I was less interested in qualifying for my challenge and genuinely caught up in the disaster wrecking upon Chief Standing Bear's people.  Corruption, incompetence, and prejudice resulted in several horrific journeys causing the death of hundreds of people, especially young children.  The last third of the book showed the legal struggles of Standing Bear; when he snuck back with the remnant of his family and was arrested for basically not dying, he found some legal help which established the right of Native Americans to sue in federal court (something the feds contested).  One part of the legal decision involved legally declaring Indians to be human, which is frightening in that this was actually a contested point.  The court battle ended with partial restoration of their home lands, although it let me to consider the issue of granting tribal lands to a tribe versus to individuals and maybe I'll read more about this (another Stream idea!).  Starita did a good job describing the people and events involved to a popular audience, since I didn't have more than a basic knowledge of the history involved.

Following the Footsteps: Any Which Wall

E. Nesbit wrote some great books about groups of children, usually siblings, who find magic in their everyday world (a carpet, a creature in the sand pit) and then have adventures which usual ending untidily.  The kids then have to deal with awkward interactions with adults who don't want to hear "magic" as part of any explanation.  I love those books.

So did Eager, who added to the tradition by writing his own books about kids, sometimes using cousins to round up the numbers, who also come across magic and have their own adventures, sometimes mentioning how much they learned from reading Nesbit about how to handle these kinds of things (a magic well, or lake, or a partial coin).  And now in Any Which Wall Laurel Snyder also embraces this tradition with her group of kids (neighbors, two sets of siblings) who find a magic wall and use their knowledge of magic learned from Eager and Nesbit's books to figure out the system and how to handle the magic-induced fall out.

It's hard for me to judge how kids would appreciate this book, since they would not feel the warm cozy blanket of nostalgia.  But they'd probably like it for the same reason that Nesbit and Eager's contemporary children liked their books -- interesting children solving interesting problems on their own, and the problems range from esoteric magic theory through escaping danger to facing unpleasant facts about yourself.

I'll try it on my seventh grader.  And my fifth grader, if he catches up on the reading I've already piled around him.  They are good test cases, as I don't think they've ever read the Nesbit or Eager books.  Humph.

Sister Power: Children of the Waters

Carleen Brice's Children of the Waters follows two women with completely different lives who discover that they are sisters, and from that discover what family really means and how they can define it.  Trish is struggling to define herself as a divorced mom, worried about her son's edging into manhood and especially confronting how his mixed-race status defines him in ways she doesn't want to consider. Worrying about the way her family seems to be fraying, she delves back into some family history to discover that her younger sister didn't die; her grandparents put her up for adoption.

Billie grew up with educated and rich parents who take pride in their African American heritage.  She has immersed herself in spirituality and healing to control her lupus, and her unexpected pregnancy may push this technique to the limit.  Her relationship is tottering under the stress of this pregnancy, and then her connection to her parents is also strained by the sudden revelation that she was adopted, and that her sister is white.  Billie and Trish slowly become friends despite their differences, although each step closer meets a hesitant step back.  The intersection of race and family issues develops organically, with the gentle and rhythmic prose keeping each woman distinctly understood.  I'll look for more books by Brice.

And of course, it takes place in Colorado, which makes me even happier.

Kids Dying Young: Yummy

The latest 2010 Cybils Graphic Novel (Young Adult) finalist book definitely represented a change of pace.  Yummy: Last Days of a Southside Shorty by G. Neri delivers a tough history lesson about the decaying culture of the Chicago southside, where children turned to gangs for support, and the gangs exploited the kids by using them in violent crimes for which juveniles received almost no punishment.  Neri invents a child to view the events, someone who played with Yummy when they were small and who never knows whether Yummy has turned up to bully him for lunch money or to show off a frog found in the sewers.

When Yummy tries to impress his gang leaders by shooting a rival, his world collapses.  He kills a neighborhood girl instead, and the authorities who ignored him while he stole cars and mugged his peers instigate a man-hunt (a boy-hunt) that leaves Yummy terrified and lost.  The nation solemnly discusses Lost Youth and gang violence while Yummy huddles in derelict houses and under dripping bridges, until the gang decides he's more trouble than he's worth.  My seventh grader had eagerly grabbed this book (he loves graphic novels) and then indignantly told me that it wasn't fit for kids.  He views the death of children as too harsh for his eyes, and he was shocked to learn that it basically told a true story.  Neri tells a powerful story, but one that is probably more appropriate for high school than junior high. Sad that the boy in the story might still be in elementary.

Setting the Bar Low: Dakota Ambush

The last western I read aggressively pulled the average down for literature everywhere.  The plot was silly, the characters cardboard stereotypes, the setting monotonous, the theme childish, and the dialogue laughable.  So when I finally found and read Dakota Ambush (Matt Jensen: The Last Mountain Man, No. 6), a Matt Jenson book by the deceased William W Johnstone (with the help of J.A. Johnstone), living person, I really wasn't expecting much.  I didn't get much, but that was more than I bargained for, and it was clearly a case of a book meeting the goals it set for itself.

Matt Jenson is a Good Guy and a Fast Shot.  He travels about defeating bad guys, who are briefly and unpleasantly surprised by the swiftness of Matt's draw and the steadiness of his aim.  He meets and helps good but inadequate people, such as the relentlessly crusading newspaperman or the lonely (and widowed) boarding house proprietor, and then he moves on, leaving a trail of dead bad guys and the accompanying bodies of the good guys killed before Matt showed up.  In this book, that pile was disconcertingly large, but then postal service was slow in the old days so it took him a while to hear the call for help.  I'm not going to seek out more of these books to read, but reading this book rarely made me squirm with disbelief.

Now I just have to figure out which Dakota to claim this for my 50 States challenge.

ARC ARC: Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact

A.J Hartley's middle grade book Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact is a lot of fun, even if follows a steady traditional plot pattern. Darwen is a Manchester United fan who is orphaned and moves to Atlanta to live with his aunt. She means well but doesn't understand children or grief. His school is deliberately heartless and encourages bullies. These problems pale behind the magical dangers he discovers threatening his world through portals disguised as mirrors. With the help of two friends he tries to stop the invasion.

I liked the balance between action and emotional realism -- Darwen's grief over his parents is treated seriously even through the magical journeys and somewhat overblown awfulness of his school. His friends have their own problems that appear naturally rather than in placards over their heads as they appear. I enjoyed this book, and so did my seventh grade son.  He's rather blase about the early reading copy, but it makes me excited.

Silly People: Vengeance

When preparing for the Read-a-thon last June, I picked up a scattered selection of books to fit any mood, including a few westerns. I paid no real attention to what I was getting, which means that I fell victim to Sturgeon's law and got some lousy books. I'm sorry to say that I classify David Thompson's Vengeance among these.  

In fairness, this is book #43 in the Wilderness series, so I'm clearly starting in the middle; maybe the characters spent so much time displaying common sense and humanity and competence in the first forty two books that Thompson felt readers would be bored if he inflicted any more of that on them. Instead they display a variety of incompetence and petulance. Lou goes for a walk and almost gets lynched, then complains when the man who rescued her doubts her ability to single-handedly defeat the evil pair who wander about murdering and plotting vengeance willy-nilly. Zach suffers from an author who alternates praising him to the sky with forcing him into endless defeats and foolish mistakes. It's too bad television wasn't invented yet, because he could have learned a lot from watching Knight Rider in battle. Or even watching Spritle and Chim Chim in action.

I did have to admire the concept, though. Zach is a half-breed (the term is used repeatedly by everyone, including the author) who resents the contempt showered on him by whites, although his (white) wife Lou can't understand why he's so stressed about this. He has just miraculously escaped hanging when a jury failed to convict him of the murder of two white brothers; society is furious at this gross miscarriage of justice, since clearly the half-breed deserved to die. But, this is all part of the VENGEANCE of the dead men's sister, who bribed the jury to acquit so she could have the pleasure of torturing the man herself. To cover her tracks, she immediately has everyone she talks to murdered, sometimes in public restaurants, using her ginormous indentured servant/lover for the dirty work. Luckily the law can find no evidence, stacks of corpses piling up in the houses she rents being too circumstantial to act upon. Zach apparently believes his gun has a range of about ten inches, so he spends the book having his weapons slapped away by the bad guy. I just wish I could just give these guys the mobile number of a Sackett.

Spooky Good: Horns

One concept that I'm trying to drill into my kids' minds is self-censorship.  Everyone has mean thoughts and desires, but not everyone shares these evil impulses with the world.  Joe Hill's Horns: A Novel would add an exception to that rule, because everyone Ig meets after he develops horns on his head confides all their darkest wishes to him, and he finds himself able to nudge them along the path to fulfilling these.

Ig navigates among the terrible hidden thoughts of first strangers, as he tries to figure out why he has sprouted horns, and then his family, made worse by finding that even his closest relatives believe him guilty of the horrific murder of his almost fiance Merrin.  The nature of good and evil gets examined from many angles -- some characters are truly evil (Lee), some are weakly bad, and some have bad impulses they don't follow for reasons of laziness, social standing, or conscience.  The book starts with the horns and moves back and forth to the start of Ig and Merrin's relationship, as well as Ig and Lee.  Religion gets skewered, as does the the nature of the devil, Ig's new patron.  Yet everything is grounded in characters who stay real despite the magic realism curling around them, characters who alternately accept and reject the miracles crossing their lives.  The themes sound heavy, but Hill also saturates the text with references to everything from Gremlin cars to deviled eggs so that I found myself grinning even as the plot spirals downward around Ig.

Round Up 2

Here's another catch up post of five books I read on my summer vacation:  Now I'm only three behind on my daily book posting.  Notice I'm not behind on reading, just bragging about them afterward.

When I'm reading books, sometimes I'm having fun while reading them, and sometimes I enjoy having read them.  Ideally I like both -- those are my favorites! -- but sometimes I'll roll along in a story but afterwards regret the time spent, or find that unpleasant memories linger longest.  Other times I'll cringe through the text, but afterward find that my soul has stretched and strengthened and I like myself better now that I incorporate that book.  Or just that I've got a good memory stored away from hard winter nights.  And then there are the books that I read while wishing I were better at putting books down -- reading is painful and all memories of the book will burn my brain.  Blogging helps me pick out which books I'm reading for which purpose, and maybe in my next life I'll be better at aiming at the golden quadrant.

• Truth and Beauty, Ann Pratchett. (NOOK) I always meant to read Autobiography of a Face, the story of writer Lucy Grealy; the descriptions of it in Daedulus book catalogs looked fascinating.  Sadly, it's still on my TBR list. But the memoir by Ann Pratchett of her friendship with Grealy and her delight in Grealy's brilliance and unbridled race towards life and happiness, as well as her equally impetuous drive towards misery and failure gives a poignant description of a relationship between a grasshopper and an ant who never tired of each other.  As an added bonus, Pratchett ends up in Tennessee, so I'm crediting my state quest here.

• The Eternal Tomb: Oliver Nocturne 5, by Kevin Emerson.  I liked this book because the author's name is Kevin, but otherwise it was a pretty blah read.  I read it as part of the Read-My-Library project, and it's a middle book from a series in the children's series section.  It's a boy book about vampires, so I'll tell my son about them; he could race through them but he'd insist on reading in order.  It seems to be like Animorphs in terms of reading interest; if you don't know what those are it is unlikely you'd be interested in this. Not much fun, not too many good memories.
• The First Cut, by Dianne Emley:  I picked up this book because I saw an internet book club going through authors by the alphabet, which I like because of my A-Z challenge.  Unfortunately, my current library stack of 65 items meant that I didn't read it until the month after its selection.  It's a murder suspense story, so a bit gory and scary, and I think it's the first of a series.  It's a cop procedural, with the twist being that the main character has just returned to work after being dead for a few minutes after an on-duty attack.  She's still dealing with the ramifications, from panic attacks in nice homes to strange communications from the victim.  I would have preferred to skip the woo-woo stuff altogether, since it didn't really fit in with the gritty realism of the rest of the book.  I had more fun reading the book than I did thinking about it afterward.
• The Search, Nora Roberts.  Our July book club book was an unabashed beach book, chosen for that very characteristic.  Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington, stars as an important love interest, along with the word working, laconic hero and the dog-handling reserved heroine.  Many of the women in the club found the man's terse, sometimes rude manner unlikable, but I figured he made up for it by his habit of carving deck rocking chairs and dropping them off at her house.  There is some ickiness with an ooky serial killer, and Roberts seems to take as much joy in describing the horror scenes as with the love scenes, but as the book is meant to be read in bright sunlight (never candlelight) I guess she felt she had to impose her own darkness.  A fun read if you find it in your beach house, but not really worth hiking into town to pick up.

• Nowhere Near Respectable, Mary Jo Putney.  By now I'm reading the Putney books mainly out of habit; the anachronistic feel of her regency romances has become familiar while the strange situations feel impossibly contrived.  Her current series follows alumni from an incredible boarding school who all find themselves astonished to be in the nineteenth century.  Yet this one crossed over so many implausible hurdles as to almost transform itself into alternate history, allowing me to relax and enjoy the story with its strong female lead dashing about using her special snowflake knowledge of martial arts and birth control and the equality of women while the more hesitant man followed along with his reported death and fancy club owning and master of disguise abilities.  The conversations are often earnestly insane but in a warm and fuzzy sort of way.  It's not a book I'm proud of enjoying, but I can't quite begrudge myself the time to read it.

Book and Movie: The Help

My friend, who knows everyone or at least knows somebody who knows somebody who knows everybody, got us tickets to a special preview of the new movie "The Help." I'd been planning on reading this book sometime but was waiting for it to show up and throw itself at me; clearly I needed to speed up this process so I ordered the library to deliver it to my NOOK soonest. And they did.

I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help (Movie Tie-In) very quickly, and enjoyed it. It's about women defining themselves against other women; black and white, young and old, married and single, mothers and childless. It's set in the midst of the civil rights battle; the dominating crisis in the book is the danger posed by whites fighting to keep the status quo, whether by shooting agitating blacks or blackballing liberal whites.

The movie keeps this focus, delivering a touching portrayal of women showing courage, determination, spite, despair, and love. The white Skeeter moves from a rather clueless naivete to a richer idea that the lives of black women do in fact operate by different rules, although they are women like herself. Aibeleen and Minny, the black women who face real risks writing their book with Skeeter, strongly portray their friendship as well as the strengths and risks they face in forging connections with the white families they work for. The movie does a great job of distilling the important relationships in the book and telling the story in a tightly woven, powerful way.

Family Fun: Penderwicks at Point Mouette

Jeanne Birdsall has a talent for nailing a child's perspective exactly, and she hits the spot with each of the four Penderwick sisters, from young Batty through responsible Rosalind.  Most of the attention in the third book about their family, The Penderwicks at Point Mouette, goes to second oldest Skye, who reluctantly assumes the job of responsible older sister so Rosalind can have a relaxing vacation with a friend while their parents trot off on a delayed honeymoon.  A kindly aunt takes the remaining three and their friend Jeffrey to a small cottage in Maine (new state!  Yay!) where they make new friends, collect golf balls, and react to one of the giant coincidences that can only happen in children's books of this genre.

I'm torn about the coincidence; it pulled me out of the book a bit but on the other hand it was so important to the characters and their happiness that I want to be in a universe where it would happen.  I love how the sisters take care of each other, even when arguing or getting frustrated with each other.  I liked the look at love and relationships as seen through Jane's first crush; and I liked the friendship between the youngsters Batty and Mercedes.  The dialogue between them reminded me of listening to my five years olds when they couldn't see me.  I'll offer this book to my son, but I think the shadow art cover will make it a hard sale.

School Days: The Whistling Season

Ivan Doig's The Whistling Season is like an onion.  Maybe one of the sweet Walla Walla Onions that are the state vegetable of Washington (there's a fact we like to get into every conversation.  Now I just have to work in the state grass).  The framing device is the thin story of Montana's school governor contemplating shutting down the one-room schools so that the danger of Sputnik can be fought with hours of school bus riding towards large comprehensive buildings.  This reminds the narrator of his one-room school house, not during the years of poor teaching but during the year class was taught by the unusual brother of his housekeeper.

That was the year after his mother died, when his father and brothers and he tried to hold onto their lives despite their loss. The year the housekeeper Rose whistled her way through the chores (except for cooking) while her dandy brother stood out like a sore thumb on the prairie.  The year that brother Morrie tamed the schoolyard and introduced the prodigy narrator to Latin.  The year the secrets behind Rose and Morrie became the price of admission to adulthood for Paul.  All these stories wrap around each other, occasionally pulling all the way back out to the grown-up Paul and his difficult decision, which he uses an equally difficult but much more personal decision from that momentous year to ground his strength on.  I enjoyed the family setting and the close view of Paul's emotional growth during that year; thanks to BookNAround for recommending this book.

This book about schools and learning is a fitting one to mark our first full day of summer break, which the kids spent either sleeping in until noon or waking up at dawn to watch cartoons, depending on their druthers.  Tomorrow we are hoping the temperature creeps up far enough to justify a trip to the pool.

Growing Up Fast: Every Time a Rainbow Dies

I put Rita Williams-Garcia's book Every Time a Rainbow Dies on my TBR list early last year, and now I can't remember who or what recommended it to me.

This thin novel covers a few months in adolescent Thulani's life, from his lonely isolation with only his pigeons to console him for the death of his mother through his shocking encounter with Ysa that eventually leads to friendship. His obsession with Ysa helps convince him to connect more with some of his classmates, healing him up enough to weather the next set of catastrophes when his brother abandons him.

I found Thulani's family chilling, both his loving but casually cruel mother who abandoned him and his overbearing and overwhelmed older brother forced to parent him. And although his relationship with Ysa eventually warmed into a real friendship, his pursuit of her was creepy and alienating. I also can't see his life going in very good directions; he's still very young and terrible at long term thinking, where long term is more than a week away. I prefer it as a short story, which leaves more room for hope; as a novel it was profoundly depressing. I read this quickly on an airplane trip, but immediately jumped into a romance for some optimism therapy. B+

Cops and Demons, Working Together: Secrets of the Demon

Diana Rowland writes the fun kind of urban fantasy -- regular person with a regular job is trying to get along, but they have this other stuff. Angst level kept low, action level high.  In Secrets of the Demon (Kara Gillian, Book 3), Kara is working hard to make it as a cop in her small Louisiana town, but she makes time for her family hobby of summoning creatures (demons) from other dimensions.  This has led to complications.

Some of the complications come with benefits, as is traditional for female protagonists.  In the previous book Kara promised to bring over a major player, a Demon Lord, every month in return for the life of the man she's been considering as a boy friend.  MEANWHILE, There's a new case involving several murders and several petty crimes, all centered around a small group of people.  Kara and her task force (including the possible boy friend) work on figuring out how they connect while Kara also struggles with her relationship with the gorgeous creature she's been summoning.  The sex is great, but she's not sure whether she's just imagining a friendship growing as well.  And should she stop the great sex in case her human friend wants to move to the next level? Nothing too earth-shattering, but readable prose and a lack of pretension makes this a good book for a lazy afternoon or a relaxed vacation.  B