Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

Trollope is fast making a bid to become my favorite of the British Victorian novelists. I love the story of how he worked as a civil servant in the post office for twenty years while writing novels on the side. “He trained himself to produce a given number of words an hour in the early morning before going off to his post office duties.” By this means, he eventually wrote and published 47 novels and 16 other books and became well known in the Victorian book world, especially for his series of six novels about clerical life in the made up county of Barsetshire.

I also like the novels themselves. Trollope lands somewhere between Dickens and Thackeray in tone. His novels are less sentimental and heart-rending than those of Dickens. The reader does begin to care about Trollope’s characters, but we see the flaws in each of them as well as the pathos, and we’re never too surprised or struck down when their lives are a jumble of good and bad as a result of poor and not-so-poor decisions and eventualities. I’ve not yet been moved to tears or deep emotion by any of Trollope’s novels.

Trollope’s heroes and heroines are human and flawed, but Trollope is not so cynical and world-weary as Thackeray on the opposite side. (Vanity, but enjoyable vanity.)Trollope’s books have a lot to say about marriage and romantic relationships, both prudent and imprudent, mercenary and idealistic. But his characters are generally multi-dimensional, not completely out to marry for love or for money or for social position, instead maybe for some combination of the three.

Anyway, I read all the Barsetshire Chronicles last year and the year before, and then I decided to continue on with Trollope’s political series of novels, The Palliser Novels. The Barsetshire novels take place mostly outside London among people who are country people even though they may rich and aspiring to be “citified.” The Palliser books are set in and around Parliament, and there is a great deal of talk about British politics and political maneuvering. It’s all very confusing for an American reader, and maybe even for a current day British reader. But I could just read through all of the political mumbo-jumbo and set it aside to get at the meat of the story, a tale in this second Palliser Novel of a young Irishman, Phineas Finn, who is flattered and cajoled into running for office in the British House of Commons and wins a seat therein. Then the rest of the book is about Phineas’s romantic adventures and entanglements with some parliamentary wrangling and angling thrown into the mix.

Phineas Fin is young and innocent and Irish when he comes to London to take his seat in the House of Commons. And by the end of the book three years later, he has become romantically involved with no less four different women, and yet managed to remain rather innocent, even if he is somewhat older and and wiser.

Phineas is a frustrating and endearing character, a “gentleman” working hard to maintain his own integrity and honor while swimming along in a sea of political intrigue and compromise and conflicting rules and societal norms. He becomes an outsider, then an insider, then an outsider again, all in the space of three busy years. And his romantic and monetary fortunes rise and fall just as quickly. He falls in and out of love several times, considers marrying for the sake of money or position, resolves to give up all money and position for the sake of the woman he loves, and finally ends up with the best of the four women he has been courting. But I wasn’t sure that in the end he would remain happy with the marital bargain he made.

It was a good story. One of the things it made me think about, on this day after the inauguration of our 47th president, was the responsibility that we have to pray for our politicians and elected officials. It’s not any easier now than it was in the nineteenth century to maintain one’s integrity and do the work of government in Washington, D.C. or London or even Austin, TX. I thought about praying especially for Vice-President Vance and for other younger men and women who have been elected to office for the first time. It really is something of a swamp up there, and it’s not easy to know when to compromise and when to stand firm and how to stay out of trouble and how to still keep the courage of one’s convictions.

So, Phineas Finn is the second of the Palliser Novels, and the third one is called The Eustace Diamonds, which I believe has nothing to do with Phineas Finn. Then comes a book entitled Phineas Redux, which I assume is all about our man Phineas Finn again. Will he return to Parliament? Will he become some other sort of public servant? Will his marriage work out? Will the other ladies that he didn’t marry reappear in his life? Stay tuned, as they say on TV.

The House Before Falling Into the Sea by Ann Suk Wang

Jan18

Wang, Ann Suk. The House Before Falling Into the Sea. Illustrated by Hanna Cha. Dial Books for Young Readers, 2024.

This picture book, based on the true experiences of the author’s mother and the illustrator’s grandmother, tells about a seven year girl living in Busan, South Korea, during the Korean War (1950-1953). Kyung, the little girl, sees her family welcome many refugees, both strangers and relatives, into their home near the seashore. Kyung gradually learns through the example and words of her parents that their hospitality in “the house before falling into the sea” is a gift to the refugees but also to Kyung and her family.

When Kyung wishes for things to go back to the way they used to be with no noisy visitors and scary sirens, Kyung’s mother tells her:

“Kyung. Our visitors are not stones we can toss to the sea. They are people, our neighbors, to help and to love.”

And one of the refugees, Mr. Kim, tells Kyung:

“Kyung, do you know why I called your home ‘the house before falling into the sea’? Because without your umma and Appa opening your doors to us, we would have had no other place to go. Soldiers might have chased us farther, until we fell into the sea. Being here with you, safe, is a gift that Sunhee and I will never forget.”

The story reminds one of the story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan, and that affinity is reinforced by the “Questions to Consider” given in the end notes. “How do you define neighbor? Who are your neighbors? What have you learned from a friend? What have you taught a friend? How can you show kindness to others?”

These questions are, of course, optional. Use them or not as you see fit. I would tend toward letting the children with whom I was reading this book ask me their own questions, and there might very well be some questions about Korean words used in the story, about war in general and the Korean War in particular, and about the hospitality and care that Kyung’s family shows to the refugees. There’s a glossary in the back for the Korean terms, and a note about the author’s and the illustrator’s family stories of living through the war.

Recommended for children of Korean heritage, for those who are studying the Korean War and the general time period of the 1950’s, and for children of any background who have questions about war and refugees. It would also be a lovely story to read in conjunction with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Just read it and let the children make their own connections.

Knight Owl and Early Bird by Christopher Denise

Jan17

I read and reviewed Christopher Denise’s Caldecott Honor book, Knight Owl, last year, and I added it to the new edition of Picture Book Preschool. It’s a fair to say I’m a fan of Denise’s storytelling and his beautiful, colorful illustrations. And Knight Owl, the character, is adorable as well as brave.

Well, Knight Owl is back, with a new, adorable—and brave—friend, Early Bird. Early Bird is Knight Owl’s “biggest fan.” She wants to be a knight just like Knight Owl, and she’s very vocal with lots of questions about how and when and where she can begin her knighthood journey. Unfortunately, while Knight Owl quietly guards the castle during the night and sleeps during the day, Early Bird begins the day at dawn, “making a great deal of noise.” How can Knight Owl mentor or even tolerate such a noisy, chatty, questioning Early Bird?

Some sequels are a disappointment, and others are just O.K. This one has illustrations just as good as Knight Owl, and I liked the story even more than I did the the story in the first book. In Knight Owl, the little owl manages to tame a dragon, an eventuality for which I was willing to suspend disbelief. However, I tend to think the “dragons aren’t so bad” trope that is common nowadays is a bit of a cop-out. Dragons are meant to be villains. In this story, however, we have true danger (wolves!), and Early Bird gets to save the day with his early warning and his noisy ways.

The illustrations are so expressive. Knight Owl looks sleepy and grumpy and watchful and frightened in turn, all as a result of something that Mr. Denise does with the eyes and the lighting and the interplay with the text of the story. Early Bird manages to look admiring and innocent and industrious all at the same time. And the two-page spread in which Early Bird goes out into the forest in the snow because Knight Owl is exasperated with all the questions and noise—what a masterful illustration of a sad and forlorn little bird!

I read this book out loud to myself, and it reads well. I can’t wait to read it to some children for storytime or to my own grandchildren. Perfect read aloud, published in 2024, fun and fanciful, Knight Owl and Early Bird will be my next purchase for the library, and it’s one of my favorite picture books of 2024.

Gifts from the Garbage Truck by Andrew Larsen

Jan16

Gifts from the Garbage Truck: A True Story About the Things We (Don’t) Throw Away by Andrew Larsen. Foreword by Nelson Molina. Illustrated by Oriol Vidal. Sourcebooks, 2024.

I have mixed feelings about this picture book biography of sanitation worker, Nelson Molina, a collector of throwaway items. I liked the basic story of Mr. Molina and his Treasures in the Trash Museum. Stories about ordinary people who have extraordinary hobbies and adventures are the best. The letter at the beginning of the book, written by Nelson Molina himself, was great. In fact, that letter, in which Mr. Molina tells about how he came to be a collector, reuser, recycler, and up-cycler of other people’s trash, could have been a much better text for the picture book.

Instead, author Andrew Larson retells Nelson Molina’s story, and the text is rather pedestrian. In addition, the illustrations are flat and uninteresting.

“Nelson Molina collected things. He collected all kinds of things.”

“Nelson brought the objects he found back to the sanitation garage. He displayed them in the locker room so everyone at work could see them. There were toys and teapots. Yo-yos and photos. There were knick-knacks and thingamajigs and whatchamacallits. People throw away the most extraordinary things.”

Then, at the end of the story, someone decided to add a didactic and unnecessary information page that reiterates what the story has been telling us, in case we’re too dense to get it. The title is “The 4 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Rethink”–with a definition and explanation for each “R” as well as ideas about how to up-cycle junk that’s headed for the garbage truck.

I was fascinated by Nelson Molina’s story of collecting, repairing, and recycling things from the New York City garbage. It reminded me a little bit of my work, rescuing books. But I wish Mr. Molina could have had a better picture book profile. And a few more photographs or pictures of the whatchamacallits and thingamajigs in the museum would have been nice. (There are a few photos in the back of the book.)

This picture book is worth checking out from the library just because of the story. But one time through the book should be enough for most kids and grownups, too.

Evidence! by Deborah Hopkinson

Jan13

Evidence! How Dr. John Snow Solved the Mystery of Cholera by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Nik Henderson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.

I read an adult nonfiction book called Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, about Dr. John Snow and the 19th century London cholera outbreak associated with the Broad Street water pump. So, I knew the basic outlines of this picture book story by noted author Deborah Hopkinson. Still, it was good to be reminded that the solution of medical mysteries has always required dogged work and investigation to find evidence that will pinpoint the source of diseases and lead to treatments and a cure.

When cholera came to Broad Street and surrounding areas in London in 1854, the prevailing theory was that the disease was caused and spread by “bad air.” Dr. Snow, who had already been researching the disease of cholera for some time, believed that cholera was spread by sewage-contaminated water. This book tells the story of exactly how Dr. Snow proves his hypothesis and stops the Broad Street cholera epidemic from continuing to kill London’s tenement dwellers..

The text of this story is simple but detailed enough to make the story clear to young readers. Step-by-step, Ms. Hopkinson leads us through the thought processes of Dr. Snow as he asks questions and interviews people to test his hypothesis and to eventually show the people of the Broad Street neighborhood what they must do to stop the cholera outbreak.

The illustrations in the book by Nik Henderson are adequate, depicting a foggy, Dickensian London with Dr. Snow moving quickly and confidently through each picture on a quest to find the answers to the cholera problem. The appendices include a brief restating of “the case against the Broad Street pump”, a short biographical sketch of Dr. Snow, a list of major infectious diseases and their causes, and a list of books and internet resources for adults and children about cholera and other infectious disease epidemics.

This post here at Semicolon, called Epidemic, Pandemic, Plague and Disease in Children’s Books, could be helpful for those who want to pursue the subject further.

Orris and Timble: The Beginning by Kate DiCamillo

Jan11

Kate diCamillo is one of my favorite contemporary authors, and she has had a great year. Ferris was probably my favorite middle grade novel of 2024, and now Orris and Timble:The Beginning is set to be my favorite new easy reader of 2024, and maybe my favorite series, if the other two books in the projected trilogy are as good as this first one.

“The old barn was abandoned. Only Orris lived there.” So the story begins. Orris is a rat, a solitary soul who has made a nest for himself and filled it with his favorite recycled treasures. He’s happy and seemingly self-satisfied.

But Orris is a rat with a conscience, personified in the picture of a king on a sardine can who looks Orris in the eye and reminds him to “make the good and noble choice.” And when a snowy owl, Timble, is caught in a trap and begs for help, Orris has a choice to make. Will he make the good and noble choice? Or will he stay safe in his own little nest and ignore the needs, and the danger, of the world outside?

This book, with short chapters, and very few words on each page, reminded me of the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. The story itself is simple and straightforward, a mirroring of the story of Androcles and the Lion, but there’s a subtext that speaks to adults as well as children. It’s a story and a subtext about friendship and adventure and choices and risk taking, but I won’t go much farther than that. You and your children can pull your own ideas and images from the book.

The illustrations by Carmen Mok are adequate, but not spectacular. The charm is in the story. The vocabulary in the book is not controlled, and the author uses some moderately difficult words. Early readers will gain confidence after sounding out words such as “windowsill” and “disappeared” and “butterscotch”. The story itself should carry readers who are beginning to enjoy chapter books right along to the ending, which is lovely in its “openendedness”.

“Orris?” says the owl.

“Yes?” says the rat.

“Are we friends?” says the owl.

“Yes, Timble,” says the rat after a long silence, “we’re friends.”

“But that’s not the end of the story,” says Timble.

“No,” says Orris, “it’s the beginning.”

The Contender by Robert Lipsyte

Jan10

Some bad ideas just keep coming back to haunt and hinder human flourishing all over again. In this book, published in 1967, Alfred Brooks, a black seventeen year old high school drop out who lives and works in Harlem, hears all the same taunts and race baiting remarks that are common on the internet nowadays.

“You just a slave,” sneered Major. “You was born a slave. You gonna die a slave.”

“You come on, Alfred,” said James softly. “Whitey been stealing from us for three hundred years. We just going to take some back.”

It’s the appeal to enslave oneself to bitterness and resentment that keeps coming back to capture impressionable young minds. Alfred, who lives with his aunt and her daughters in an apartment and works at a local Jewish-owned store, isn’t interested in the siren call of crime and drugs that his tormentors are offering and that his best friend James is yielding to. But Alfred doesn’t really know what he does want to pursue, what his true adventure might be, until he steps over the threshold of Donatelli’s Gym and commits himself to training to become a boxer.

The Contender is a book for older teens and adults, especially for those young men who are considering what it means to become a man. It’s about boxing and drug abuse and the temptations that come with racial hatred and poverty and aimlessness. But it’s mostly about coming of age through struggle and discipline and perseverance to find the person you want to become.

The novel is gritty for 1967. There’s the violence of the boxing ring and of the streets, and the desperation of heroin addiction (Alfred’s friend, James). The bullies, also black teens, who taunt and try to take revenge on Alfred for something he didn’t do, make use of the n-word twice to tell Alfred what a loser he is. But the words and the violence are there for a reason, and by today’s standards, they’re mild. No sexual content other than a few references to young men looking for Friday night girls to date.

Robert Lipsyte is a sports journalist as well as a writer of nonfiction sports biography and memoir and young adult fiction. He was awarded the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature in 2001. The citation for the award noted that, “The Contender and its sequels, The Brave and The Chief transformed the sports novel to authentic literature with their gritty depiction of the boxing world. An ongoing theme is the struggle of their protagonists to seek personal victory by their continuing efforts towards a better life despite defeats.”

I haven’t read The Brave or The Chief, but I did find The Contender to be thought-provoking. I know a young man who might get a lot out of the story if I could get him to read it.

Kadooboo by Shruthi Rao

Jan9

Kadooboo: A Silly South Indian Folktale by Shruthi Rao. Illustrated by Darshika Varma. Page Street Kids, 2024.

The word “silly” in the subtitle signals to the reader not to expect anything too profound from this adapted South Indian folktale, but the fact that it’s a folktale, passed down from grandmother to granddaughter, means that the story certainly has some significance and meaning. And it’s fun. Fun is not twaddle, and comedy is not useless. Therefore, classify this one as a humble living book.

Anya’s Appa (dad) is making kadooboo, “pouches of dough filled with sugar and grated coconut.” (Yes, there’s a recipe in the back of the book.) Anya’s friend Kabir is asked to take some home to his Amma (mom). As he runs home, hurrying to beat the impending rainstorm, Kabir collects other friends who come along to share the kadooboo and to get in out of the rain. But Kabir also becomes more and more confused about the name of the treat he is carrying. Is it bookoodoo? Dubookoo? Duckooboo?

This picture book just tells a sweet little story. Yes, silly, but the wordplay and the multiethnic cast of friends elevate the story into more than a simple misunderstanding or joke. The illustrations and the names of the children that Kabir meets show that this is set in South India where all kinds of ethnicities share the same Indian subcontinent, but there’s nothing in the story that preaches “diversity”. It’s just a show-and tell story with funny words that children will repeat and try to remember themselves. The pictured children remind me of Dora the Explorer, so it’s a colorful, 21st century sort of picture book.

This story would be perfect for reading aloud, but the read aloud-er might want to check the ending before attempting the final word in the story. And of course, the story cries out for some homemade kadooboo as an after-story time treat. The ingredients are not too exotic or hard to find, and the recipe instructions a fairly straightforward, although adult help and supervision is required (kadooboo pies are fried in oil).

“The story is a modern retelling of a South Indian folktale my grandmother used to tell me when I was a child. In the original story, a man eats kadooboo at a feast. He hurries home, excited to tell his wife about, and repeats the word over and over so as not to forget it. . . . The kadooboo in this story is a fried dumpling.” ~Author’s Note

The Best Adult and Young Adult Fiction I Read in 2024

Jan7

If it’s good for young adults (older teens) it’s probably good for adults, too, and vice-versa. So, these are the adult fiction books I really enjoyed in 2024. (Links are to reviews here at Semicolon)

Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse. I read this one for Cindy Rollins’ summer course. Wodehouse is always good and funny and just all-around delightful.
Flambards, The Edge of the Cloud, and Flambards in Summer by K.M. Peyton. I’ve wanted to re-read these British young adult romance/horse books for a long time, and I finally found copies this year and read them. Just about as good as I remembered them to be.
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope. I read a lot of Trollope in 2024, and I’m reading another book by Trollope now in the first days of 2025. Almost as good as Dickens and Thackeray.
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope.
Stateless by Elizabeth Wein. Pair this book about the early days of aviation with the Flambards trilogy. They are all good.
The Swedish Nightingale: Jenny Lind by Elisabeth Kyle. A lightly fictionalized biography of the famous singer.
Girl With a Pen: Charlotte Bronte by Elisabeth Kyle. Another fictionalized biography, but mostly factual. And clean. And not iconoclastic or deconstructionist.
Pastures of the Blue Crane by H.F. Brinsmead. An Australian classic.

That’s it. I read a lot of thrillers by Ruth Ware and by Susan Hill (Simon Serraillier series) and by Ann Cleves and by Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series), but I can’t really recommend any of them. They were all to some extent gritty with bad language and horrific crimes and bad language. I think it’s time I gave up on that genre.

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

Jan3

My eldest daughter saw this book on my bedside table and asked to take it home and read it. So she read Leif Enger’s newest novel before I even opened it. When she brought it back I asked her how it was, and she said, “Well, it’s good, but it’s rather dark.”

Dark indeed. I Cheerfully Refuse is the story of a man, Rainy, who becomes a fugitive, innocent of any crime, but pursued by a villainous lawman in a dystopian world that has traded law and order for despotism and chaos. It was unclear to me whether nuclear war or climate change or something else or a combination of things made the setting, in and around Lake Superior in Michigan and Canada, so degraded and oppressive. However, something happened to the country and then something else to Rainy in particular, and Rainy is caught in a hellish predicament, not of his own making. So he sets sail in a dilapidated old sailboat to escape the bad guys and find the good.

It is a doomed quest, but Rainy doesn’t give up. He meets with people and situations both good and evil in his journey. And (SPOILER ALERT), he does, after much suffering, win through to a semi-hopeful ending. There’s a bit of magical realism and some futuristic dystopian fantasy as the story winds through the islands and shores of Lake Superior. The plot, however, is not the best part of the book. It’s the words. Mr. Enger is a master at manipulating and communicating with words. He verbs a few of the nouns, and nouns some adjectives and verbs, and mixes up the syntax and casually drops in the metaphors and similes just enough to keep a reader on her toes, reading carefully and slowly, and going back to savor and make sure I didn’t miss something along the journey.

Enger in this book writes lovely sentences like these:

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

“. . . our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

“[I]t began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”

“One shelf became two. Then a wall. Then eight-foot rolling racks from a shut library in Hayward, Wisconsin. Maudie suggested changing the shop name to reflect its inventory. Bread and Books. Loaves and Lit. Pulp and Provender. Lark laughed off the idea. She said all of it was bread.”

So, I Cheerfully Refuse is a good book, but dark. In times of chaos and uncertainty and change, it might be good to read a book about man living through similar (but much worse) times. Or it might not. I enjoyed the book, but your mileage and ability to stay cheerful may vary.

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”