Seven Things That Made Me Smile in April

May1

April was a difficult month, but I’m not going to tell you about all the things that made me do the opposite of smile in April. (Hint: for one, initials are DT, and police were involved in another frown-maker.) Instead, I’m going to play Pollyanna and tell you about the stuff that made me smile, sometimes through the tears, this month in the grand old year of 2016.

1. Speaking of Pollyanna and the the “glad game”, this post at Living Books Library, called “Are You Glad?” made my day a little gladder (gladder or more glad?) when I read it.

2. Randy Acorn’s book, Happiness, was a compendium on the subject of happiness from a Biblical perspective. He quotes practically everyone from the Bible itself to St. Augustine to Matthew Henry to John Piper, and most every Christian writer or thinker in between, all on the subject of happiness. I didn’t finish the book because I had to return it to the library, but I think I need a copy of my own anyway so that I can dip into it whenever the frowns and grumps seem to be gaining the upper hand.

Being happy in God and living righteously tastes far better for far longer than sin does. When my hunger and thirst for joy is satisfied by Christ, sin becomes unattractive. I say no to immorality not because I hate pleasure but because I want the enduring pleasure found in Christ.
~Randy Alcorn, Happiness

3. Podcasts. I am truly glad to have discovered podcasts a few months ago. They have made my driving times and other times much more enjoyable. I found a couple of new-to-me podcasts to add to my growing list of favorites. Here’s the list of favorites, which I notice that I have never before posted here on Semicolon:

Read Aloud Revival. The lovely Sarah MacKenzie talks all things reading aloud with your children. She’s interviewed such guests as Sarah Clarkson, Andrew Pudewa, N.D. Wilson, Anne Bogel, Melissa Wiley, and many more. Excellent podcast.
Homeschooling IRL with Andy and Kendra Fletcher. “Discussing the topics that you might not find covered at your local homeschooling convention, veteran homeschooling parents and bloggers, Andy and Kendra Fletcher, use humor, honesty, and grace to pull the veil back on Christian homeschooling.” Good, encouraging, real stuff here.
The World and Everything In It, a daily, Monday through Friday, news update from the people at WORLD magazine.
What Should I Read Next? with Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy. I wrote about this new-to-me podcast here.
Two from NPR: This American Life and The Moth Podcast.
Two from the CIRCE Institute Podcast Network: The Mason Jar, about Charlotte Mason’s ideas on education, and Close Reads, a book discussion podcast.
Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.
Tea or Books? with Simon of Stuck in a Book and Rachel who blogs at Book Snob. This one is velly, velly British, and I’ve just listened to one episode so far. But I like it–if I can understand what the two podcasters are saying, what with my hearing loss and their accents.

What podcasts do you recommend to make me smile?

4. My youngest daughter will be acting in a musical called Malcolm at the end of May, based on the book by George MacDonald of the same name. The book was edited by Michael Phillips and republished as The Fisherman’s Lady, and it has a sequel, The Marquis’ Secret. These updated versions of Macdonald’s romantic novels are, I’ve been told, quite well done and useful for modern day readers who might have trouble with MacDonald’s use of Scottish dialect and Victorian language. I’m already smiling to think of watching Z-baby and her friends in the musical version of Malcolm, and I hope to read The Fisherman’s Lady and perhaps another one or two of MacDonald’s books in May.

5. I would take a picture if I could of the lovely books that I was able to purchase at Half-Price Books this week, a few additions to my library. But a list will have to suffice:
God King by Joanne Williamson.
Abigail Adams (Childhood of Famous Americans) by Jean Wagoner.
Rosa Parks (Childhood of Famous Americans) by Kathleen Kudlinski.
Elizabeth Blackwell (Childhood of Famous Americans) by Joanne Landers Henry.
*How Do I Love Thee? A Novel of Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Nancy Moser.
Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool.
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears by Verna Aardema.
*The Sword and the Flame by Stephen Lawhead.
*The Dolphins of Laurentum by Caroline Lawrence.
*Dealing With Dragons by Patricia Wrede.

I’m smiling about the ones I’ve already read and can now give to my family and library patrons and about the ones that I’m looking forward to reading (*).

6. WORLD magazine’s latest issue features children’s books, including an article about the WORLD Children’s Book of the Year, Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley, an interview with John Erikson, author of the Hank the Cowdog series, a discussion of Victorian author GA Henty and reading historical books in cultural context, and lots and lots of book suggestions. I was on the committee that picked the middle grade fiction Book of the Year and the runners-up, so I definitely had a smile on my face as I read the many articles about children’s books in this weeks issue of WORLD magazine.

7. I had three library open house dates for my private subscription lending library that I run out of my house here in southeast Houston. Several families came to visit, and it looks as if several will join the library. I really, really enjoy having a library for children and adults (mostly homeschoolers) and sharing my books with them.

Saturday Review of Books: April 30, 2016

Apr29

“Books are the most enduring monument of man’s achievement. Through them, civilization becomes cumulative.” ~Frederick M. Crunden, inscription in the Detroit Public Library

SatReviewbutton

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read.

Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo

Apr29

Serendipity. I read two books this week about children who are traumatized and lose their ability to speak. I wondered how common this “selective mutism” or traumatized mutism is, so I looked it up. It turns out that selective mutism is rare, and mutism caused by trauma is quite rare, almost nonexistent. But it makes for a good story.

While fishing in the Scilly Isles off the coast of Britain, Alfie and his father find a young girl on a small, uninhabited island, and they bring her home with them. The girl is injured, near death, and she speaks only one word: “Lucy”. So they call her Lucy Lost, not knowing where she came from or how she came to be abandoned on the island. World War I is bringing changes to the island where Alfie lives, and Lucy becomes a victim of the islanders’ ignorance and fear as many of them come to believe that she is actually a German girl, perhaps even a spy.

One of the best World War I middle grade novels I’ve read, Listen to the Moon would be a good companion novel to Erik Larson’s Dead Wake, a nonfiction book about the sinking of the Lusitania. Read Dead Wake (for adults) first, and then read Morpurgo’s story of Lucy Lost, Listen to the Moon. In fact, I would have titled the book Lucy Lost instead of Listen to the Moon. Lucy Lost is more memorable, whereas Listen to the Moon sounds just like a dozen other book titles that wouldn’t stick in the mind for very long. (Yeah, I just typed in “moon” and “listen” in the search bar at Goodreads and came up with Goodnight Moon, Walk Two Moons, The Moon and More, Moon Over Manifest, The Moon Is Down, Just Listen, I Should Have Listened to the Moon, and too many more. I definitely have a future career as a book namer.)

Silent to the Bone by e.l. konigsburg

Apr28

When Z-baby was about nine years old, her favorite book was E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. She mostly listened to the audiobook, sometimes following along in the print book, and she listened so many times that she had portions of the book memorized. It’s a book perfectly suited for eight, nine, ten and eleven year olds who enjoy the adventure of Claudia and her little brother Jamie, running away from home to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

All that to say, Silent to the Bone is not Mixed-up Files. Silent to the Bone is a good mystery/psychological thriller YA book, rated PG13. The seduction scenes and the details about male adolescent physicality are appropriate for teens, but not really very relatable for the eight-twelve year old audience of Mixed-up Files.

Connor, our narrator, is willing to help his friend Branwell, but it would help a lot if Branwell would just tell everybody what really happened when Bramwell’s baby sister Nikki fell ill and went into a coma. The au pair, Vivian, says that Branwell must have dropped the baby, but she didn’t really witness the injury. And Branwell won’t, or can’t, talk at all. So it’s up to Connor to find a way to communicate with Branwell and to figure out what really happened to Nikki.

Ms. Kongisburg told a good story in this YA novel. Connor and Branwell are fine young men, thirteen years old, dealing with family tensions, growing up, and adolescent sexual changes. I would recommend this story to any twelve or thirteen year old who is beginning to deal with adolescent issues in himself or in friends. It’s a decent, well-written mystery with underlying themes that will speak to young adolescents, especially boys.

The Roquefort Gang by Sandy Clifford

Apr27

We’re three for one
and one for three.
The Roquefort Gang
is who we are!
Though danger’s near
we think not twice
What’s there to fear?
ARE WE NOT MICE?

What is it about mice? They make excellent book characters. Illustrators can dress them up in all sorts of costumes, and authors can give them human personalities and have them walk around on their hind legs while brandishing swords or canes or other tools and weapons with their tiny front paws. They’re just cute little animals—at least as anthropomorphized in books. Favorite mouse characters include Reepicheep (Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis), Stuart Little (E.B. White), Bernard and Bianca (The Rescuers by Margery Sharp), Ralph S. Mouse (Beverly Cleary), Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien, The Tale of Despereaux by Kate diCamillo, Mouse Minor (The Mouse With the Question Mark Tail by Richard Peck), Ben Franklin’s mouse friend Amos (Ben and Me by Robert Lawson), Norman the Doorman by Don Freeman, Mary Mouse (The Orphan and the Mouse by Martha Freeman).

Of course, there are many, many more. And now Giovanni, Sid, and Marlowe, the three mice of the Roquefort Gang, join the crowd of my favorite mouse characters. In this short book, 79 pages, the French immigrant mouse, Nicole, meets the Roquefort Gang in the dangerous Wild-berry Lot, and the four mice go on a rescue mission, similar to the one in the book/movie 101 Dalmatians or in Mrs. Frisby.

For any reader who might enjoy the books in the list above and others like them, The Roquefort Gang would be an easy read in this same category. I thought it was lots of fun, and I was sorry to see that Ms. Clifton only wrote this one book about the gang. It was interesting to me to see, however, that CBS had a Saturday morning animated series called Storybreak back in the 1985, and one of the episodes was based on The Roquefort Gang by Sandy Clifton.

Just Like David by Marguerite de Angeli

Apr26

Jan Bloom writes in her authors’ guide, Who Should We Then Read?:

“From her earliest days, Marguerite had a desire to draw and paint. When not yet two years old she experimented with some pastels she found next to a portrait her father was sketching. She knew she must not touch the face so she did a border around it, using every color in the box of pastels. Her parents were stern, but loving. She was scolded but not punished for her artistic expression.”

Marguerite was a professional singer before she married, but after her first three children were born, she began drawing, hoping to become an illustrator. The first drawing she sold was to a Sunday School publication. Her first book, fourteen years later, was Henner’s Lydia, about an Amish girl. Marguerite de Angeli won the Newbery Award for her story of a boy handicapped by polio during the Middle Ages, A Door in the Wall.

I found Just Like David on the shelf in one of the local thrift stores that I frequent, looking for bargain book treasures. I had never heard of this particular de Angeli title, but I knew from looking at the illustrations and sampling the story that it would be good. The book is 122 pages long with nice large print, hardcover and lots of pictures; it’s we would nowadays call a “beginning chapter book”. Just Like David tells the story of a five year old boy, Jeffrey, who wants to go to school like his older brother, David. But Jeffrey is not old enough to attend school in Pennsylvania where his family lives. However, when the family decides to move to Ohio for Father to take a new job, there’s a chance, just a little “if”, that Jeffrey might be able to go to school, too, just like David.

Most of the story is about the car trip from Pennsylvania to Ohio. It’s quite an adventure for Mother and Father and three small boys (baby Henry is two years old). That the journey takes place in another era (the book was published in 1951) is obvious from the details: no seatbelt, no carseat for Henry, tollgate tickets, and thermos bottles. Some of these details would need to be explained to present day readers or listeners, but it would be fun to read along until you came to an unfamiliar word or phrase and then discuss. Father explains many unfamiliar concepts to David and Jeffrey as they go on their long car trip and then later as they explore their new home and it environs: things like courthouses and county seats and turnpikes and Indian arrow heads and fossils and many other discoveries that the boys make along the way.

Similar to Ms. de Angeli’s other books, Just Like David is a gentle story about a child growing up in a loving family. It might be a little slow for today’s media-fed children, but if Mister Rogers and Carolyn Haywood and Laura Ingalls Wilder are about your speed, Just Like David might be just right, too.

I thought it was a delight, and I learned a new expression: “put your mouth!” I tried to look up this idiom, used several times in the book by Jeffrey, David and their family, on the internet, but I got some rather nasty results and nothing that defined the term as they used it. From context, I think it means something like “unbelievable” or “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” Maybe it was something the de Angeli family said or an expression people in the midwest used back in the 1950’s. I rather like it and think I’ll try to revive the saying.

“I have eight of Mrs. de Angeli’s lovely books in my library now, and I’d be pleased as punch to have the rest of them!”
“Put your mouth!”

Saturday Review of Books: April 23, 2016

Apr22

“The reflections and histories of men and women throughout the world are contained in books….America’s greatness is not only recorded in books, but it is also dependent upon each and every citizen being able to utilize public libraries.” ~Terence Cooke

SatReviewbutton

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Apr19

Alzheimer’s seems to be serendipitously (is that word only for happy things?) popping up all over in my life lately. I saw a reference to a PBS special on Alzheimer’s on my Facebook feed last night, had a conversation about relatives with the disease a few days ago, and then, I read this book.

Still Alice is fiction told from the point of view of a research psychologist who is progressing, or regressing, into the fog of early-onset Alzheimer’s. I thought the author really understood the experience of a person who is diagnosed and then lives with the disease of Alzheimer’s. I suppose she ought to understand: she has degree in Biopsychology and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University. But degrees don’t alway equal empathy and insight. The book is realistic and yet compassionate, not without hope. It would be a hard read for someone who has a relative or friend with Alzheimer’s, as do I, but ultimately I think it is encouraging rather than discouraging.

Lisa Genova seems to specialize in novels about characters with devastating injuries or illnesses and the family dynamics involved in such illnesses. In addition to Still Alice, she’s also written Left Neglected (about traumatic brain injury?TMI), Love Anthony (about an autistic child), and Inside the O’Briens (a father with Huntington’s Disease). I also read that there’s a movie based on the book Still Alice. Has anyone seen the movie or read any of Ms. Genova’s other books? What did you think?

“I used to know how the mind handled language, and I could communicate what I knew. I used to be someone who knew a lot. No one asks for my opinion or advice anymore. I miss that. I used to be curious and independent and confident. I miss being sure of things. There’s no peace in being unsure of everything all the time. I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what’s happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and family.”

“You’re so beautiful,” said Alice. “I’m afraid of looking at you and not knowing who you are.”
“I think that even if you don’t know who I am someday, you’ll still know that I love you.”
“What if I see you, and I don’t know that you’re my daughter, and I don’t know that you love me?”
“Then, I’ll tell you that I do, and you’ll believe me.”

I have two relatives currently living with Alzheimer’s, and one who died with Alzheimer’s, and what I have observed in them is that they have and had much the same personality before and after the onset of Alzheimer’s as they did before. All three of these relatives were joyful, giving, selfless people before they began to lose their memories and intellectual abilities. And they are still that kind of people, sometimes frustrated by their inability to recall things or to perform simple tasks, but still joyful, still generous, still themselves. I don’t know if that’s true of everyone who has Alzheimer’s. Maybe some people do truly lose themselves and become other. Maybe my relatives still will lose themselves. I hope not. Right now, they laugh a lot about their disabilities and memory lapses, and they know they are loved, even when they can’t recall the names of those who are their caregivers. May it always be so.

The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz

Apr18

I don’t really want to summarize the plot of this novel because for me it wasn’t about the plot. In fact, as an older teen or an adult reads the book, he or she can pretty well predict what’s going to happen to fourteen year old Joan as she goes from life on the farm to the big city of Baltimore to escape her father and find a new life for herself in 1911. Her only real knowledge of life comes from a few chance remarks from her beloved teacher, Miss Chandler, and from the three novels that Miss Chandler gave her: Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Just think what your ideas about how the world works would be if you had grown up rather isolated on a farm with an emotionally abusive father, a devoted but sickly mother, and those three novels to inform your views. I haven’t read Dombey and Son, but I can easily imagine the romantic excesses that Jane Eyre and Ivanhoe might lead one to commit. And Joan is just the sort of strong, passionate, naive girl to get her self into quite a bit of trouble, well-meaning but a bull in a china closet.

The Hired Girl is a diary novel; Ms. Schlitz allows us to see into the mind and motivations of a fourteen year old Catholic housemaid in a Jewish household in the early part of the twentieth century. And the author gets Joan’s voice just right. I really believed in this innocent but intelligent girl, hard-working, trying to become a “refined lady”, confident yet dangerously naive. She reminded me of Jo March, without the nervous energy of a March daughter, or Anne Shirley with a somewhat harder road to hoe. Joan, who calls herself “Janet” to disguise her identity, lucks out in that she gets a job with a kind, rich Jewish family, but she does not get a Matthew or a Marilla to adopt her and treat her as a daughter, although she almost gets a substitute father and mother in her employer and the elderly housekeeper that she works with. She also, like Anne, lets her passionate nature and impulsivity get her into a lot of scrapes, but Joan/Janet’s scrapes are quite a bit more serious and even dangerous than Anne’s ever were. (That’s why the book is for older teens, at least the age of the main character or older.)

And yet the book is funny. I laughed out loud sometimes at Joan’s artlessness and enthusiasm. And I became very anxious when I saw the direction in which her decisions were taking her. It’s a direction that the reader will know is bound to lead to disaster, even though Joan, caught up in imagining herself as the heroine of one of her favorite novels, is oblivious to the impending ruin that her innocence and ignorance are inviting. The juxtaposition of Joan’s rather immature but devoted Catholicism and the sophisticated, ingrained Judaism of her employer’s family was quite well-written and so intriguing. Not many writers can write religion and religious differences both convincingly and respectfully.

I can only imagine the skill and hard work that were required for Ms. Schlitz to pull this novel together, make its voice, that of a fourteen year old innocent, true and convincing, and still show the reader what is going on behind the scenes, in the minds and decisions of the other characters in the novel. I’d recommend The Hired Girl to mature teens and adults. Anyone who’s ready for Jane Eyre should be ready for this one, too, although I suppose an argument could be made that fourteen year old Joan wasn’t quite ready to really understand and interpret Jane Eyre in all its full meaning. It’s an interesting question. What novel(s) could Miss Chandler have given Joan that would have better prepared her for living as a hired girl in the city? (Not that Miss Chandler knew that Joan would be running away to the city.)

Maybe she should have read Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, published in 1900, as a sort of cautionary tale. Or Madame Bovary. But maybe the lessons of those adult novels would have gone right over her head.

Code of Honor by Alan Gratz

Apr16

Kamran Smith, football star, West Point applicant, and homecoming king, has spent his entire life admiring, following, and emulating his older brother, Darius. But now Darius is accused of a heinous crime: Darius’s face is all over the news, and he’s acting like a terrorist. Can an Army Ranger, West Point graduate, and all-around good guy like Darius really be brainwashed or persuaded into joining al-Qaeda or some shadowy group of radical Muslim terrorists?

Code of Honor is a timely and opportune look at honor and treachery and the psychology of the family member of an accused terrorist. The action in the book is pretty much non-stop, and yet Kamran has time to think a lot about trust and and loyalty and commitment and whether or not people are good or bad or some mixture of the two. Karan’s unrelenting faith in his brother is a little hard to swallow since by all appearances Darius has changed and become an adherent of jihadism. And Kamran’s escape from a secure government facility (CIA prison) was really difficult to read without a large dose of suspension of disbelief. However, I went along for the ride and enjoyed it for the most part.

The book could have taken a deeper look at what makes someone decide to become a jihadist or terrorist, but that’s not the direction the author chose to take. Instead, it’s an action thriller for young adults with an understated moral lesson about not judging by appearances and keeping faith with friends and family. I can deal with that.

Other YA books about Afghanistan, terrorism, American military in Muslim countries, etc.:

If You’re Reading This by Trent Reedy. As his senior year in high school begins, Mike receives a series of letters from his father who died in Afghanistan when Mike was eight years old.

Words in the Dust by Trent Reedy. The fictional story of Zulaikha, a Muslim girl living in northern Afghanistan, based on the story of the real Zulaikha and on the stories of other people Mr. Reedy met during his time in Afghanistan.

Bull Rider by Suzanne Morgan Williams. When Cam’s brother, 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: a bull-riding challenge.

The Last Thing I Remember by Andrew Klavan (and sequels). A thriller series that celebrates faith, karate, self-defense, and American values without being didactic or cheesy.

If We Survive by Andrew Klavan. Teenager Will Peterson and three friends, along with their youth director from church, go to some unspecified country in Central America to build a school. While they are there, a revolution takes place, and Will and his group are caught up in the violence and politics of the country.

The Terrorist by Caroline B. Cooney. Eleven year old American Billy is handed a mysterious package in a London Underground station, and his family’s lives are changed forever.