Archive | November 2009

I’m looking forward to reading what other bloggers have to say about Mrs. Gaskell and her books, and I’m hoping to have finished my book, North and South, by Wednesday. Yikes! I’d better get off the computer and go read.

Hymn of the Week: We Gather Together

Nov15

Lyrics: Adrianus Valerius (aka FranÃ§ois ValÃ©ry). Translated to English by Theodore Baker in 1894.

Music: KREMSER, a Dutch tune arranged by Edouard Kremser.

Theme: Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. I John 4:4.

This hymn was written in Dutch to celebrate the Dutch victory over Spanish forces in the Battle of Turnhout in 1597. The Dutch tune to which it is set was originally a folk tune with the lyrics, “Wilder dan wilt, wie sal mij temmen,” or “Wilder than wild, who will tame me?” The tune was tamed by Dutch Protestants celebrating their newfound ability to “gather together” after throwing off Spanish (Catholic) rule.

1. We gather together
to ask the Lord’s blessing;
he chastens and hastens
his will to make known.
The wicked oppressing
now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to his name,
he forgets not his own.

2. Beside us to guide us,
our God with us joining,
ordaining, maintaining
his kingdom divine;
so from the beginning
the fight we were winning;
thou, Lord, wast at our side,
all glory be thine!

3. We all do extol thee,
thou leader in battle,
and pray that thou still
our defender wilt be.
Let thy congregation
escape tribulation;
thy name be ever praised!
O Lord, make us free!

We Gather Together was, for a long time when I was a teenager, my favorite hymn, mostly because I liked the tune. I still do, even though I have gone on to other favorite hymns. I still like to sing this one at Thanksgiving as we gather to thank God for what He has done and petition Him to make us and to keep us free.

Sources:
The surprising origins of “We Gather Together,” a Thanksgiving standard by Melanie Kirkpatrick.
We Gather Together with Garrison Keillor. “Keillor is joined by Prudence Johnson, Rich Dworsky, the VocalEssence Chorus & Ensemble Singers, Charles Kemper and Philip Brunelle in musical renditions of traditional hymns and humorous adaptations of songs for the season.”

Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams

Nov13

Eight seconds of danger . . . a lifetime of honor.

Yeah, well, maybe. Bull-riding is not so much a sport as it is a deliberate courting of death or serious injury. The question is not whether you’ll get thrown off the bull, but when and how hard. And will you be able to scramble up and scale the fence before the bull turns around and tramples you?

Cam O’Mara is a member of a bull-riding family. His grandfather was a bull riding champion. His older brother, Ben, was a bull rider, too. Cam is more interested in skate-boarding, a sport with its own skills and dangers. However, when Ben returns from Iraq with TBI (traumatic brain injury) and confined to a wheelchair, Cam sees only one way to impress Ben and get him to work at his own recovery. Cam makes a bet with Ben: if Cam can ride Ugly, the fiercest, most dangerous bull on the circuit, then Ben will do whatever it takes to recover from his war injuries.

I really thought this book was both well-written and well-plotted. The details about the sports of skate-boarding and bull-riding felt right to me, although I probably wouldn’t know if they weren’t. Cam and Ben and their parents and Grandpa Roy all are full, well-rounded characters, and I wanted to know what would happen to them, how they would cope with the challenges posed by Ben’s injury. Author Suzanne Morgan Williams doesn’t give easy answers; Ben doesn’t miraculously recover to full health just because Cam tries to ride an angry bull. But there is hope and the support of family and friends. I recommend this book and the four others that I’ve read, published this year, about dealing with the stress of having a family member in or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Do you have any other suggestions for this list?

Other 2009 fiction books for children about the family of service members and the aftermath of war:

Peace, Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson.
Heart of a Shepherd by Roseanne Parry.
Operation Yes by Sara Lewis Holmes.
Scat by Carl Hiaassen.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
One or more of these books is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

A Recipe 4 Robbery by Marybeth Kelsey

Nov12

Nothing deep. No burning political questions. No kids who are out to save the planet. No serious relationship issues. No murder and mayhem. A Recipe 4 Robbery is just a plain vanilla kids’ mystery about a jewel robbery. This mystery is just right for middle school readers who still don’t want to deal with the violence and seriousness of YA and adult mysteries, qualities which are working their way down into children’s mysteries, too. One of my daughters, even when she was junior high age, wouldn’t read mysteries at all because she said they frightened her. A Recipe 4 Robbery would have been something she could enjoy without being scared.

It all takes place at The Bloomsbury Cucumber Festival where Lindy is doing her best to avoid all vegetables, especially any concoction cooked up by Mrs. Unger, aka Granny Goose. Unfortunately, Lindy’s mom helps her plate to a heaping helping of Granny’s cucumber casserole. Fortunately, Lindy finds a ruby necklace hiding under the cukes and goop. Unfortunately, Lindy and her friends know that if they turn in the necklace to the police, Granny Goose’s goose will be cooked, and she’ll probably be arrested for the theft that happened a few days before at the Grimstone Estate. Besides, there’s a reward for the intrepid crime busters who find the perpetrators of the robbery.

So, Lindy, her best friend, Margaret, and saxophonist Gus Kinnard team up to find the crooks. Lindy wants to get enough reward money to go to band camp this summer. Gus wants to show off his skills gained as a member of the computer-based Not-So-Clueless Crime Buster Club (NSCCB). And Margaret just wants to be a part of the band –and vindicate Granny Goose, of course. As I said, it’s good clean fun.

Does anyone remember the Alfred Hitchcock 3 Investigators series? This book reminded me of those books: simple plot, quirky suspects, and kids running around having fun.

Author Marybeth Kelsey’s website.

Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez

Nov12

As soon as I realized that this middle grade fiction book was about illegal immigrants from Mexico and particularly about the plight of children brought to the U.S. by their parents, I was looking for a political bias or for an author with an axe to grind. And I found it. This story was unabashedly sympathetic to the difficulties and even horrors experienced by these economic immigrants, and it had a message. From the author’s letter to readers at the end of the book:

“Many farmers from Mexico and Central America are forced to come north to work because they can no longer earn a living from farming. They make the dangerous border crossing with smugglers called coyotes, who charge them a lot of money and often take advantage. . . . National troops are being sent down to patrol the border. We are treating these neighbor countries and migrant helpers as if they were our worst enemies.”

I could argue with some of what Ms. Alvarez says. (Forced? We shouldn’t patrol our own border? Maybe some of them are our worst enemies?) However, I couldn’t help finding my own sympathies engaged with the immigrants in the story who are, I believe, emblematic of most of the immigrants who do come to the U.S. Mari and her family come to North Carolina, then to Vermont, in search of simple things: work, a place to live, and opportunity. Mari’s father, uncle, and cousin are hard workers, content with low pay and long hours and a difficult job on a dairy farm. Mari herself is an intelligent, obedient child who just wants to do well in school and take care of her little sisters in the absence of her mother.

Because Return to Sender is a novel, not an essay or a working paper, Ms. Alvarez only has to tell a good story and present more than one aspect of the issue. She fulfills that task. I didn’t feel as if I were being preached at or tricked into believing that all immigrants should be allowed free rein in the U.S. even though the author rather obviously believes something of the sort. The book is written partly from the point of view of Mari, who quickly becomes a sympathetic character, and partly from the viewpoint of Tyler, the eleven year old son of the farmer for whom Mari’s family, the Cruzes, work. Tyler’s feelings and actions are conflicted. He doesn’t understand why his parents are willing to break the law in hiring illegal immigrants even while they tell him that he must obey the laws and rules to be a good citizen. He doesn’t know what to do about his sympathy for Mari’s family and his respect for the law of the land. Tyler even does something he knows is wrong while justifying it to himself with excuses, unintentionally mirroring his parents’ actions. Tyler ultimately falls on the side of compassion and friendship for Mari and her family but not without some bumps along the way.

Tyler, his parents, Tyler’s grandmother who also befriends the Cruz family, the elderly anti-immigration Mr. Rossetti, even Mari and her family, none of them ever resolve the underlying questions that the novel raises. What do we, the United States, do about the thousands of illegal immigrants who cross the border every year? Can we find a way to accommodate them, allow them to work here, and still maintain some kind of security that keeps criminals and terrorists out? Are these immigrants an asset to our country and our work force that should be welcomed or a drain on our resources that should be shunned and criminalized? What about the children who come the United States with their parents or who are born in this country to parents who are here illegally? How can we be compassionate as a people and still maintain the rule of law? What should individuals who are confronted with these situations do? Is it morally wrong, even if it is illegal, to hire people who want to work and whose work you need to keep your business or farm going? Is it morally wrong for people to cross a border to find work? Would you do the same thing if your family were living in poverty with no other way out?

Ms. Alvarez doesn’t really have answers for those questions. I don’t either. But we had better start talking about them seriously and effectively. This novel might be a good start to that conversation for middle school children, particularly if a teacher or other adult can bring out all the nuances and conflicting opinions on this issue. Yes, the book is biased in favor of the open immigration, and it repeated the obligatory, but annoying, slogan of the environmentalists: “we are citizens of the world, and you can save the planet.” Still, the characters and the plot are engaging, and the book could provoke a good, healthy discussion.

War and Remembrance: Armistice Day

Nov11

This day was known as Armistice Day because the armistice ending World War I was signed on November 11, 1918 at 11 AM. On May 13, 1938, it became a legal holiday in the U.S. to be observed every November 11th. In 1954, many held that the heroic struggle of the veterans of World War II and Korea needed to be acknowledged. Therefore, the term “armistice” was removed and replaced with veteran. In other countries this day is known as Remembrance Day.

HERE DEAD WE LIE
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.

by A E Housman

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That thereâ€™s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of Englandâ€™s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

by Rupert Brooke

Veteran’s Day is really for remembering and appreciating those who have served and protected us, those who are living and those who died. So this last poem is for those who didn’t die in war, but who served and loved and tried to bring us through war to peace.

Peace
by Henry Vaughan

My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars
Where stands a winged sentry
All skilful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger,
Sweet peace sits crowned with smiles,
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious friend,
And (O my soul, awake!)
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges;
For none can thee secure
But One, who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Grief, Guilt, and Recovery in Four Cybils’ Middle Grade Fiction Books

Nov11

The Last Invisible Boy by Evan Kuhlman.

Gone From These Woods by Donna Bailey Seagraves.

Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur.

The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by MIck Cochrane.

Disclaimer: There are some spoilers in these reviews. I couldn’t discuss the books otherwise. If you just want to know the general subject, see the title of this post and go read one or all of them. The Last Invisible Boy uses metaphor and imagination to deal with the grieving process in a creative way. Love, Aubrey is about a girl whose father and little sister have died in an accident and whose mother is so immersed in her own grief that she neglects Aubrey. In The Girl Who Threw Butterflies Molly deals with grief by using baseball as both therapy and metaphor. And Gone From These Woods is about a hunting accident. Read on only if you want to know more.

Betsy-Bee and I already discussed Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur in this post a couple of weeks ago. I reviewed The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, which I loved, here. I don’t have much to add, except that Aubrey and Molly seem much more resilient than the boys in the other two books featured here.

In The Last Invisible Boy twelve year old Finn Garrett is convinced that he is slowly fading into invisibility after his father’s sudden death caused by a heart attack. Everyone else in the book is also convinced that something is wrong with Finn since his hair has faded to white and his skin has become “as pale as a ghost’s.” I never quite understood what it was that was really happening to Finn, but I decided to just go with it, willing suspension and all that jazz. Obviously, Finn feels like “the Bleached-Out Nearly Invisible Boy,” so metaphor or fantasy or reality, it’s where Finn is, anyway.

And where he continues to be for almost 230 pages. The book is h-e-a-v-y, even though Finn gives the reader permission to take a break and go play outside. Finn has a lot of feelings to work through, and his grief and anger and guilt feel real. As bibliotherapy, the book might work, or might be such a downer that the child reading it would go into a major depression. I don’t know. As a picture of what it feels like to lose a parent and how grief is a process that takes time and energy and even decisions to feel better eventually, the book would be of interest to a certain type of psychoanalytic or morbidly curious child. That’s not a criticism, by the way; I have more than one “mordibly curious” child, and I’m a bit that way myself. I just don’t know if I could read this one, or if I would recommend reading it, when grief is fresh and personal.

Gone From These Woods is a more straightforward narrative about a boy, eleven year old Daniel Sartain, who accidentally shoots his favorite uncle and surrogate father, Clay, while the two are hunting. The accident is fatal, and Daniel feels like a monster. The book is not anti-hunting, although it seems to me as if it might a good book to give to a young man who’s going hunting for the first or the fortieth time to remind him to be careful. Daniel has to deal with not only grief, but also an overwhelming sense of guilt, since the shot that killed his uncle came from Daniel’s shotgun, even if it did go off accidentally. In fact, Daniel is so depressed that he nearly commits suicide, but his uncle’s memory keeps him from completing that desperate act. It is doubly sad that Daniel is bereft of his uncle and also of almost all support in dealing with his uncle’s death, since Daniel’s father is an alcoholic with his own demons of guilt and abusiveness.

I found this book to be “morbidly fascinating,” too. I’ll try it out on Karate Kid, but he may have too sunny a disposition for this kind of reading.

What about you? Do you have any “grief books” that you find especially insightful and even enjoyable to read? I define a grief book as one in which someone dies at the beginning, and the main character spends the book dealing with his or her grief and healing. Any suggestions, either for adults or for children? Come to think of it this recent read by Elizabeth Berg was a “grief book,” and I enjoyed it, too.

Texas Tuesday: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

Nov10

I read several reviews of this debut novel set in 1899 in Caldwell County, Texas, before I actually read the book itself, and I remember all of the reviews being quite positive. That’s sort of a dangerous thing to do because my expectations can be raised too high—which is exactly what I think happened with The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Maybe if I had discovered it serendipitously, I would have liked it better.

As it was, the book felt preachy to me and sort of generationally snobbish, if I can use that term. We are soooooo enlightened nowadays, whereas back in 1899 girls could only become housewives and no one believed in Darwinian evolution. I know there was a time, not so long ago, when well-bred young ladies didn’t study science, at least not in depth, and when nobody who wasn’t heathen read Darwin. But in this novel, I felt as if the messages that “girls can become anything they want” and that “science is vitally important” got in the way of the story. I wanted to understand Grandfather, Calpurnia’s mentor in scientific studies, better and see what motivated him. I wanted a little more humor in the story. I don’t know what I wanted, exactly, but I do think mostly I just expected too much. And dare I use the B-word? Some parts of the book just dragged with very little action and a whole lot of exposition.

The setting itself was just right, though. Ms. Kelly begins the novel by describing the Texas heat, and she even gives a few methods for beating the heat back in 1899. My father-in-law, who was a boy back in the early 1900’s in West Texas, said that they used to haul their bedding outside and sleep out under the shade trees. Of course, if a rain storm came up, everyone had to high-tail it back inside. Calpurnia’s observations as an amateur naturalist are sprinkled throughout the book, and these passages are some of the most fascinating reading in the book.

If only The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate could have soft-pedaled the evolutionist and feminist preaching a bit, I think it would have come closer to being a favorite for me.

Other Bloggers’ Opinions:
Melissa at Book Nut: “I also liked the way Kelly evoked a particular feel; the sense of anticipation, of change that must have accompanied the time period was quite palpable in the book. It’s a historical novel that actually felt like it. Callie was modern, sure, but she was struggling with her modernity against all the traditional values that were around her, and that dichotomy was intriguing.”
Welcome to My Tweendom: “Jacqueline Kelly has written a piece of historical fiction with depth, detail and characters that leap off the page. From the first telephone coming to town, to Callieâ€™s grandfatherâ€™s first time sitting in an automobile, to the kerosene powered ‘wind machine’, readers will find themselves immersed in the sweeping changes that were happening at the dawn of the 20th century.”
The Reading Zone: “Itâ€™s historical fiction that kids will actually enjoy! There are great little tidbits about the turn of the century- kids will love the idea that Coke was invented and wasnâ€™t always around.”
Never Jam Today: “I loved the Tate family. I loved watching the interplay between seven siblings–you don’t get that very often. I loved the generation-spanning relationship between Callie and her grandfather. These things breathed.”

I told you most everyone else loved it. Use my review to lower your own expectations, and then form your own opinion. (I really hope this one doesn’t win the Newbery.)

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

News and Notes: Links

Nov9

Esther Hautzig, who wrote The Endless Steppe a memoir of her family’s deportation to Siberia in 1939, died November 1, 2009. She was 79 years old.
Betsy at Fuse #8 knew and worked with Ms. Hautzig.
School Library Journal article on Ms. Hautzig: “In Hautzigâ€™s many appearances at conferences and classrooms, she encouraged people of all ages, especially young people, to keep a journal and record their stories. She believed that all stories were unique to the individuals writing them and each life story important in its own way.”

Nominations list for the Clive Staples Award for Christian Speculative Fiction. I’ve not read any of these, but I’d like to sample a few after my Cybils work is done. Any suggestions? If you voted, which book did you vote for?

The Next Big Hype: Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James out of Australia. Has anyone actually seen this highly touted YA novel?

10 Coolest Bookends.
15 Coolest Bookshelves.

Advanced Reading Survey: Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Nov9

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

Author Note:
Charles Dickens was born near Portsmouth in 1812, the son of a government clerk. His parents, being rather incompetent in money matters, put young Dickens to work in a London warehouse at the tender age of ten. The time of chid labor in his life was brief, and DIckens soon returned to school. Nevertheless, the experience affected him deeply. Nicholas Nickleby was Dickens’ third novel, published after The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

Summary:
After the death of his father, young Nicholas must make his own way in the world, and serve as protector to his sister and mother, in spite of harsh schoolmasters, a grasping and greedy uncle, and other characters who are ready and willing to exploit the innocence of Nicholas and of his sister, Kate.

Characters:
NIcholas Nickleby: a young man who must come of age quickly when his father dies without leaving him any money.
Ralph Nickleby: Nicholas’s avaricious uncle.
Newman Noggs: Ralph Nickleby’s clerk and drudge.
Wackford Squiers: a one-eyed Yorkshire schoolmaster, head of Dothebys Hall.
Madeline Bray: an unfortunate young lady.
The Cheeryble Brothers: Nicholas’s patrons.
Mrs. Nickleby: Nicholas’s mother.
Kate Nickleby: Nicholas’s sister.
Miss La Creevy: a painter of miniatures.
Smike: Nicholas’s friend.

Quotations:
Persons don’t make their own faces, and it’s no more my fault if mine is a good one than it is other people’s fault if theirs is a bad one.

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

Mrs. Nickleby: “I would rather, I declare, have been a pig-faced lady, than be exposed to such a life as this!”
(Sometimes so would I. So would I.)

Two of my children were in a play a couple of years ago based on this novel, so I got to re-visit it then. I found it just as absorbing and full of life as a drama as I did when I read it thirty plus years ago. Has anyone seen this movie version? Is it any good?

Other bloggers talk about Nicholas Nickleby:
Books and Border Collies: “I have a literary crush on Nicholas Nickleby! And on his creator, Charles Dickens. Those of you who are veterans of Dickens’ writing will please forgive the silly gushing of a neophyte. He is such a joy to read! His characters are beyond memorable and his descriptions are so creative that I’m constantly thinking I would never in a million years have written something so imaginative.”
Bookphilia: “Dickens’ writing, for me, is always a joy to immerse myself in; as well, I liked many of the characters and wasn’t always irritated by how un-subtly Dickens employed them. It’s just that Nicholas Nickleby is so obviously the work of a writer much younger and perhaps less thoughtful than the writer who, 20-25 years later, produced A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend. But it’s still brilliant because it’s still Dickens.”

If you’ve written about Nicholas Nickleby, leave me a comment and I’ll link.