Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber

Nov4

I read this memoir conversion story on my Kindle back in 2011 when it first was published. I said then that I enjoyed the story, but it left me feeling . . . incomplete and sort of lacking in understanding. I don’t think I read well on an e-reader, and that may be why I was ambivalent about Surprised By Oxford when I read back in the day. So, when I heard about the movie that recently came out, based on the book, I thought I’d watch that.

It was a good movie, not great, but solidly good. Now I had to re-read the book that I really didn’t remember much about, since I read it over ten years ago, and since I have a leaky brain. I didn’t review the book back in 2011 when I read it the first time, which is another reason I couldn’t remember much more than a vague impression of possible dissatisfaction or maybe appreciation from my first read through.

The story is deceptively simple: Agnostic Canadian feminist gets a scholarship to Oxford. She is dazzled by the Oxford experience, meets a group of “serious Christians” (and others who are not Christian at all), and eventually becomes a Christian herself. The hook is that Ms. Weber tells the story of her Oxford education and conversion to Christianity with a great deal of poetic language, wordplay, puns, Brit-speak, simile, metaphor, and philosophical thought processes. It’s not always easy to follow Caro, as she is called in the story, as she winds her way through Oxford and through literature to get to Jesus.

The influences in Caro Weber’s conversion are many and varied. There is surprisingly much less C.S. Lewis in the book than I thought there would be. Caro does attend a meeting of the C.S. Lewis Society at one point in the story, but the speaker there talks about joy and prayer rather than about Lewis specifically. Lewis sometimes enters the discussions, but not that often. Her influences seem to be more tilted toward the Romantic poets that she is studying, as well as John Milton, George Herbert, William Blake, and the other students and professors who engage with her in many conversations over the course of a year at Oxford. These conversations, sometimes adversarial, sometimes encouraging, make up most of the book, and they are indeed both surprising and challenging.

There’s also a lot of Caro’s family history in the book. The author has, or had, “daddy issues”, rightly so since her father sounds like a very broken and abusive man. (As far as I can tell, she has since reconciled with her father, who has shown some signs of repentance and change.) Of course the father issues translate to God issues, and a large part of her conversion is due to her coming to understand that God is not like her father.

The book is better than the movie, but also harder to digest. Caro sees metaphors and signs everywhere and in everything, and sometimes the language she uses to describe her thought processes is obscure and difficult to follow, at least to me. If you are more well read than I am, you may understand more clearly. I did enjoy the book more this second time than I did the first time, and I do recommend it to Anglophiles and seekers and lovers of poetry who want to read a Romantic (in the literary sense) memoir.

I would like to read Carolyn Weber’s second book, Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present. And maybe her most recent one, Sex and the City of God: A Memoir of Love and Longing?

I Took a Walk by Henry Cole

Oct31

“I found a path that led to a meandering stream. I wonder who’s watching me?”

This book encourages children to sit quietly in nature and observe all the many plants and creatures that can be found. It would pair well with one of the books listed in Picture Book Preschool, Play With Me by Marie Hall Ets, in which a young girl gets the pond and woodland creatures to come to her by sitting still and making them unafraid. In I Took a Walk, the “I” of the title doesn’t try to tame or approach the creatures he sees, but he does manage to spy out many plants and animals in their habitats and name them for the reader to find in the pictures.

This would be a good book for children who enjoy the “Where’s Waldo” kind of seek and find books that so many find engaging. The advantage to this one is that it shows children how they can play this discovery game outdoors in nature. The narrator visits the woods, the meadow, and the pond, and in each place he finds a multitude of natural wonders to observe and enjoy. A fold-out page for each habitat produces a three page spread illustration with a list of all the plants and animals and nature objects to be found on the page.

I like the idea and the execution. The book could keep primary age children busy for a long time, finding the various things in each picture, some of which are well-camouflaged. And then the extension to the book is, of course, to go outside and see how many plants and creatures one can discover “in the wild.” Make a list. Talk about habitats and camouflage. Learn the names of the plants and insects and other things that you see. Play the “I Took a Walk” nature game together.

Excuse me, I think I’ll go for a walk.

Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell

Oct28

What are Fibonacci numbers? Who was Fibonacci? Why does the Fibonacci number pattern appear in sunflowers, pineapples, and even the spirals of a nautilus shell?

This book, illustrated with photographs taken by the author and her husband, Richard Campbell, answers the first question and the second (in the end section, called. “More about Fibonacci Numbers”), but the third question of why remains a mystery. The pattern for Fibonacci sequence is: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . . Each Fibonacci number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers before it in the pattern. Leonardo Fibonacci was the Italian mathematician who first wrote about this fascinating number pattern.

The book starts out easy with pictures of flowers that display the Fibonacci numbers. The reader is told to count the flower petals, which turn out to be a number equal to one of the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Most flowers have a Fibonacci number of petals, although some do not. Then it gets more complicated.

Pinecones, pineapples, and sunflowers also display Fibonacci numbers, but these are found in the number of spirals in the pinecone, or in the center of the sunflower, or in the pineapple skin. I truly had trouble counting and understanding the spirals, even though the photographs were clear and even had the spirals numbered.

Then we get to the growth of the spiral on a nautilus shell. This growth can also be expressed in a Fibonacci number sequence. I think I understood this one, but it’s complicated and might be hard to explain to children. I’m not sure the book does an adequate job of explaining (or maybe I just didn’t do a great job of understanding).

I would pair this book with the picture book biography, Blockhead: the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese. Blockhead tells the story of how Fibonacci discovered the numbers sequence that is now named for him as well as popularized the use of Arabic numerals in the West. Even though people thought he was a head-in-the-clouds blockhead, Leonardo Fibonacci is now known as the “greatest Western mathematician of the Middle Ages.”

These two books together give a much more enlightening introduction to Fibonacci numbers than does either book on its own. The photographs in the first book, Growing Patterns, are vivid and helpfully labeled and numbered. The story of Fibonacci’s mathematical obsession and the diagrams that illustrate the numerical sequence are good for creating more interest and for helping children (and adult like me) understand the fun of finding and counting Fibonacci numbers. After reading both books, you could spend a lot of time discovering Fibonacci numbers in nature: in flowers, lemons, apples, leaves, shells, waves and other natural and even man-made objects. Or you could let your children discover more of these numbers for themselves after you have introduced them using these picture books, if they are interested. Spread the feast and see who partakes of the wonder.

Home on the Range by Deborah Hopkinson

Oct24

Home on the Range: John A. Lomax and His Cowboy Songs by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009.

“John Avery Lomax grew up singing. Why, he probably knew more folk songs, tunes, and ballads than there were cattle in the great state of Texas.”

John A. Lomax was an “ethnomusicologist”. In layman’s terms, picture book language, that’s a collector of folk songs. He’s of special interest to me, a Texas girl, because he collected cowboy and western folk songs, many of them songs of Texas. John Lomax was a Texas boy, born in Mississippi, but raised in good old Texas. Deborah Hopkinson’s book tells the story of how Mr. Lomax became a folk song collector and how he recorded thousands of folk songs that might be lost to history if not for his work. Lomax’s book Cowboy Songs and Frontier Ballads, published in 1910, helped to preserve songs such as “Git Along, Little Dogies” and “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and of course, the titular song for this book, “Home on the Range.”

The book chronicles the studies and travels of the peripatetic John Lomax and his son Alan who also became a well-known ethnomusicologist. Scattered throughout the biographical material are the lyrics, or at least partial lyrics, to many of the songs that the Lomaxes collected. Unfortunately, unless you already know the songs included, you’ll have to look them up somewhere to find the rest of the lyrics to the song and the tunes. But on YouTube you can find the likes of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Johnny Cash and Burl Ives and others singing these old cowboy songs. Some of the songs that are alluded to:

S.D. Schindler’s illustrations that accompany Ms. Hopkinson’s fine text are first-rate. I especially liked the beautiful two page spread of cowboys in a Fort Worth saloon, where Lomax attempts to get them to sing into his “large recording horn.” There’s also a two page spread illustration of John’s classmates at the University of Texas, transformed into cowboys, and even one cowgirl, sitting around the campfire listening to Lomax sing the old songs of the West.

In the end notes to the book, Hopkinson tells readers that many of these songs, including “Home on the Range,” were thought by John Lomax to be folk songs of unknown origin, but some of them indeed had specific lyricists and composers.

“After the song (Home on the Range) became popular in the 1930’s, an Arizona couple claimed to have written it in 1905. Eventually, the song was traced to two Kansas men, Brewster Higley and Daniel E. Kelly, who wrote it in 1873. Finding the origins of songs can be difficult!”

Anyway, whoever wrote these songs, they belong to all of us now, and we can be thankful for John A. Lomax who recorded and preserved them for us to enjoy and for Deborah Hopkinson and S.D. Schindler who were also preservationists, giving us this lovely picture book biography of a pioneer musicologist and his work to save all of the old cowboy songs.

Creekfinding: A True Story by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Claudia McGehee

Oct18

Once there was a creek in northeast Iowa that got covered up by a cornfield. Then, a guy named Mike bought the land and anted to bring the creek back. But it took a lots of planning and work and rocks and dirt and plants and insects and birds and fish—and even some big earth-moving machines–to revive the creek and make a place for Brook Creek to flourish and nourish both people and wildlife.

“If you went to the creek with Mike, you’d see the water. But a creek isn’t just water. You’d see brook trout and sculpin. You’d hear the outdoor orchestra—herons, snipe, bluebirds, yellowthroat warblers; frogs returned home; and insects–thousands, and thousands, and thousands of insects.”

I’m not much of an outdoors girl. But I did find this true story of how Mike Osterholm, who is “passionate about the prairie, cold water streams, brook trout, and partnering with the earth,” decided to revive the creek that once flowed through his land and how he did it, a fascinating one. The implication in the book, never stated, is that a cornfield is of lesser value or “earth-friendliness” than a brook full of trout. I’m not so sure about that. But a brook was what Mike wanted, just as the farmer who owned the land before him wanted a cornfield, and I liked reading about how it all came about.

The illustrations by artist Claudia McGehee, are all “prairie greens, creek blues,” yellows and browns, nature colors. Etched out in scratchboard and then painted, the pictures are evocative of a wild natural world restored, and they do add to the text a certain earthy feeling that couldn’t be achieved by words alone. It’s a beautiful book, and for this indoor girl, it makes me actually want to find a creek or a brook or some sort of running water to sit beside and observe. That’s a sign of a well done nature picture book.

This book was recommended to me by Sandy Spencer Hall of Hall’s Living Library. It would be a good addition to a Charlotte Mason-style nature study read aloud time, best served next to flowing water—or perhaps in a cornfield?

Across So Many Seas by Ruth Behar

Oct17

Across So Many Seas, the story of four twelve year old Sephardic Jewish girls from different time periods, felt very . . . educational. I didn’t mind the didactic tone of the story, and I was somewhat fascinated by the saga of the Sephardic Jewish experience from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to the United States (Miami). We tend to know and read more about Ashkenazi, Eastern European Jews and Judaism than we do about the Sephardic Jewish people, who came from Spain after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (yes, Columbus’s sponsors). These Sephardic Jews spoke a Spanish-derived language called Ladino and either became conversos (converts to Catholicism) under threat of death, or left Spain as refugees, going to Italy and Turkey and other places to find freedom to practice their Jewish faith.

The first story in Across So Many Seas features Benvenida, a Jewish girl living in Toledo, Spain in 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews. Benvenida’s family is forced to leave Spain, and they end up living in Turkey where the sultan has promised them freedom of religion. Again the story feels as if the author has a lesson to teach: “Here’s a story, children, to teach you about your history and heritage. Listen, while I make it into a tale for your edification.” Benvenida, who speaks and thinks like a miniature adult, never seems like a real person, only a vehicle for the teaching of history. But still, I was interested enough in the history to keep reading.

The other three girls in the story are Reina (Turkey, 1921), Alegra (Cuba, 1961), and Paloma (Miami, FL, 2003). These three are grandmother, mother, and daughter, and their tales are full of more displacement and emigration, as each girl experiences her own story of travel across the seas. Only Paloma seems to have a stable home where she can make free choices for herself without having to labor under the prejudice of others and the expectations that her family has for proper Jewish girls.

The author, Ruth Behar, comes from both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. The book is based in part on the story of Ms. Behar’s Abuela, her paternal grandmother, who came to the United States via Turkey and Cuba and who was of Sephardic heritage. It’s a lovely tribute to Ms. Behar’s heritage and to her grandmother, and I enjoyed learning more about this stream of history. But be warned that the book is heavy on the history and light on believable characterization, dialogue, and plot.

The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett

Oct15

It’s easy, almost inescapable, to find children’s books set before, during and after World War II–fiction, adventure stories, Holocaust stories, biography, memoir, nonfiction about battles and about the home front. I have about three shelves full of World War II books. But when I am asked to recommend books about or set during World War I, the task is harder. There are some good books about World War I, fiction and nonfiction, even picture books, but that war just doesn’t live in our collective imaginations in the same way that World War II does.

Someone recommended The Silver Donkey to me, and I thought, what with the comparative dearth of books set during that war in comparison to the Second World War, I’d add it to my library. Sonya Hartnett, the author, is an Australian writer. Her books, mostly written for children and young adults, have won numerous awards and prizes, including for the author the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award from the Swedish Arts Council in 2008, a sort of lifetime achievement award in children’s literature. Knowing all of this, I was primed to enjoy The Silver Donkey.

And enjoy it I did. However, I must say that it’s an odd sort of book. Two sisters who live on coast of the English Channel (do the French call it the French Channel?) in France, find a man lying in the forest who appears to be dead. The sisters, Marcelle, age 10, and Coco, age 8, are deliciously thrilled with their discovery, brimming with “anticipation and glee.” Their response feels very French, and somewhat true to the nature of children. As they approach the man, they find that he is not dead, but merely sleeping. He also tells them that he cannot see.

Marcelle and Coco have found a British deserter who wants nothing more than to go home across the Channel, to see his family, especially his younger brother who the soldier believes is calling to him to come home. Marcelle and Coco, and later their brother Pascal, find a way in their childish simplicity to help the soldier by bringing him food and eventually by discovering means for him to cross the Channel to England. In return for their help, and to pass the time, the soldier tells the children stories–stories about donkeys.

These are not perfect children, nor are they role models. They take food from the family larder and lie to their parents about what has happened to the food. They keep secrets. They aid and abet an army deserter, and they squabble with one another. They are somewhat ghoulish; Pascal in particular wants stories about war and battles and violence and heroism. The donkeys in the stories are more admirable. The first story the soldier tells is about a faithful old donkey who takes the expectant Mary to Bethlehem for the census and brings her and her baby home safely. The second story is about a humble donkey whose humility saves the world from a terrible drought. And the war story that Pascal begs for ends up being about a donkey who carries the wounded to safety in the midst of battle–at the cost of his own life.

The whole book is bittersweet. The heroes are all fictional donkeys. The children are funny and very human; somehow they feel as if they could only be French children with a sort of French attitude toward life. The soldier is a hero who calls himself a coward, and he is both brave and tired, tired of war. He is so tired that he decides one day, after having fought courageously in the war for a year or more, to leave the battlefront and walk home. His blindness seems to be a psychosomatic response to the horrors of war.

I wouldn’t recommend this book for younger readers, but for children thirteen and older it might be a good introduction to the controversies surrounding the entirety of World War I. Was it a wasteful stalemate of a war, initiated and perpetuated by old men who sent young men to die for no reason? Is honor worth fighting for? Should a soldier be like the donkey, brave and humble and faithful, or are humans called to be more discerning and wise than donkeys can be? What is the proper response to a war or to a soldier who has abdicated his responsibility in a war? These are certainly questions for older children and adults to think about, and The Silver Donkey gives rise to thought and discussion about questions of this sort.

The donkey stories are the best parts of the book, though.

Come Again, Pelican by Don Freeman

Oct10

Freeman, Don. Come Again, Pelican. Viking, 1961. Republished by Plough Publishing, 2024.

Come Again, Pelican tells the story of a boy, Ty, and his day at the beach, and his pelican friend. Ty and his family come to the same wind-swept beach for their family vacation every year. This year Ty says he is “old enough to learn how to fish,” and his parents turn him loose for the day to do just that with only a couple of general cautions: “Be sure to stay away from the big waves.” “And be sure not to lose those new boots of yours.”

I don’t know how old Ty is; the book doesn’t tell. But I’m fairly sure that in our overprotective times, Ty would not be allowed to spend the day fishing in the ocean and talking to a pelican—all by himself. Of course, Ty does have a bit of an adventure when the tide comes in behind him while he is sitting on and fishing from a post that was once part of an old pier. In the meantime, the pelican is fishing for his supper, and Ty and the pelican eventually exchange gifts and fishing tips as the tide rolls back out.

This one is such a gentle story, not a cautionary tale, not a high-stakes adventure, just a beautiful little story about a boy and a pelican and a day of growing and self-education and independence-within-boundaries at the beach. The illustrations by the author, Don Freeman, are similar to those in Freeman’s other more well known books such as Corduroy, Mop Top, and Beady Bear. These pictures are appropriate for a beach story–lots of blue and yellow and orange. And Ty is an all-American boy in his T-shirt and beach trousers and captain’s hat.

I’m nostalgic and find myself wishing we could return to simpler times as portrayed in this picture book. But if we can’t return, we can at least read about it. Come Again, Pelican is the perfect book for reminiscing if you grew up near the the ocean, and even if you didn’t, you’ll enjoy the story about Ty and Mr. Pelican and fish and Ty’s red boots. I added this one to the Beach/Seashore week in Picture Book Preschool, and I was especially happy to do so because Plough Publishing has brought it back so that a new generation can easily purchase it and enjoy the story.

The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman by Gennifer Choldenko

Oct7

When I first started reading The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman, I thought, “Oh, no! Not another condescending middle grade fiction book full of bathroom humor!” On the very first page, we find out that eleven year old Hank, who is trying to potty train his little sister, Boo, would prefer his sister called him “Superman”. Instead, her affectionate nickname for her beloved older brother is “Pooperman.” However, Boo’s nickname for Hank turns out to be about the only “potty humor” in the book, and precocious little Boo is a delightful breath of freshness and innocence in a book that otherwise deals with some heavy subjects.

A week ago, Hank’s single mom left him in charge of Boo in an apartment with very little food or money. Hank has taken care of himself and Boo so far with no major errors, but now they are completely out of food and money. And the apartment manager is threatening to evict them. With no family to turn to and no idea where his mom could be, Hank takes Boo across town to the home of a stranger that his mom once mentioned. It may be a level 10 mistake, but what else can he do?

The stranger, Lou Ann Adler, turns out to be an old friend of Hank’s dead grandmother, and she takes them in–for now. But Hank has to find his mom, figure out why she abandoned them, and decide whether or not he can trust her to take of him and Boo in the future. Hank is a good kid, hyper-responsible, and deeply afraid of making a mistake that will ruin their lives. I won’t spoil the story, but there is a positive, hopeful ending, after a lot of trauma, anxiety, and dangerous situations have been resolved.

The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman reminded me a bit of Gary B. Schmidt’s novels Okay for Now and Just Like That. All three of these books show good kids thrown into situations that are way too hard for their maturity levels. And in all three books the kids, the boys, are desperately trying to figure out what to do about their situation and which adults to trust. I’m not sure Choldenko is quite as good as Schmidt at showing the nuances and complexities of the situation, but she’s not bad. Hank Hooperman is a good, believable character, and I really, really sympathized with his plight and his desire to avoid both small and catastrophic mistakes.

Cautions: There’s an ongoing thread about Boo’s potty training, including the words “crap” and “poop”. Hank engages in a major deception, for what seem like good reasons at the time, and he pays the consequences. A female friend at Hank’s new school wants to be his girlfriend, and his male friends tease him about the possibility of kissing her.

I would recommend this one for sixth grade and up. The story portrays positive models of compassionate adult behavior as well as the fact that not all adults are trustworthy. Hank himself is a character to root for, even though he does make mistakes and wrong choices.

“Why doesn’t someone invent a way to know if you’re about to make a mistake? A Mistake-a-nator that would light up red if you’re about to mess up. I could use one of those.”

Sparrow Being Sparrow by Gail Donovan

Oct6

Sparrow Robinson is a nine year old Dennis the Menace or Ramona Quimby. She likes to dance and move and leap and play. She loves all of the cats that belong to Mrs. LaRose next door. Sparrow and her parents have just moved to a new house in a new town, and she has lots to say and lots of questions to ask. And she sometimes “gets carried away”, as her parents put it.

When Sparrow and Mrs. LaRose get carried way, dancing like butterflies, and Mrs. LaRose falls and breaks her hip, Sparrow is sure that it’s all her fault. The only thing she can do to try to make up for the fall is to take care of Mrs. LaRose’s cats, as she promised. But taking care of the cats, seven of them in all, leads to more complications, a few accidents, and even a big lie. How can Sparrow learn to control her actions and her tongue and make friends in this new place?

If you’re looking for stories for yourself or for your children about perfectly behaved little boys and and girls who would never tell a lie or an exaggeration, who always think before they act, and who never, ever argue with their parents, this book is not the right book for you. Sparrow is a normal nine year old, maybe a little over-active (no diagnoses, please!) And the other characters in the book are refreshingly ordinary, too. Sparrow’s parents are practitioners of “positive parenting”, but as with any parenting technique, the positive doesn’t always stay so positive. When Sparrow sincerely apologizes for one of the mishaps she gets into, her new friend Paloma doesn’t immediately forgive and forget, although she does come around eventually. Some neighbors invite Sparrow and her parents to go to church with them, and they go–to a normal, somewhat boring (for Sparrow) church service and a decent little Sunday School class. It’s good to read about regular kids and parents and neighbors doing regular stuff in an ordinary community.

There’s nothing profound here–just Sparrow being Sparrow, lots of cats, a bit of trouble over broken cups and an inadvertent lie, making new friends, and learning to deal with the ups and downs of life. Kids who are fans of Ramona and Clementine and Clarice Bean will enjoy Sparrow Robinson. And it’s short, clocking in at 178 pages, and new, published in 2024. I loved it.