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

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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.

Saturday Review of Books: April 16, 2016

Apr15

“Books may preach when the author cannot, when the author may not, when the author dares not, yea, and which is more, when the author is not.” ~Thomas Brooks

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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.

Wee Gillis by Munro Leaf

Apr14

Alastair Roderick Craigellachie Dalhousie Gowan Donnybristle MacMac, aka Wee Gillis, doesn’t know which he wants to be: a Lowlander like his mother’s relations, calling cows, or a Highlander like his father’s relatives, stalking stags. He tries both out, but in the end he turns out to be something else entirely.

This picture book by Munro Leaf was published in 1938, two years after Leaf’s most famous picture book, The Story of Ferdinand. Both book share a common illustrator, Robert Lawson, and similar protagonists, seeking their identity. Ferdinand must decide what kind of bull he is, and Wee Gillis must choose how and where he will be a Scotsman. Lawson’s illustrations, black and white pen-and-ink, complement the story and its setting in Scotland with memorable, detailed facial features and clothing for Wee Gillis and all of his relatives.

Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson were in fact friends before Ferdinand was published in 1936, and Leaf actually wrote The Story of Ferdinand “on a whim in an afternoon in 1935, largely to provide his friend, illustrator Robert Lawson (then relatively unknown) a forum in which to showcase his talents.” Lawson went on to illustrate many more books, two others with Munro Leaf as author, The Story of Simpson and Sampson and an edition of Aesop’s Fables. Mr. Lawson also illustrated another book in 1938 that won a Newbery Honor in 1939, Mr. Popper’s Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater.

The details are what make this picture book stand the test of time: a picture of Wee Gillis yelling through the fog, Wee Gillis’s absurdly long name, the alliterative fun of “calling cows” and “stalking stags”, and the tempestuous tantrum that Wee Gillis’s uncles throw when trying to persuade him to choose either the Highlands or the Lowlands for his home. And of course the theme/plot of finding a way to reconcile both halves of your heritage and still become uniquely yourself is always timely.

Read to your primary and preschool age children and then, listen to some bagpipe music together:

Reviewing Old Books: March/April 2016

Apr11

“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books…. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.” ~C.S. Lewis

I have my Saturday Review of Books, a place for all the bloggers’ reviews from the past week to be linked and enjoyed. However, I thought today that it might be a good thing, once a week or once a month, to do a post where I round up the reviews I find of “old books”. We could all use a few more “old books” to season our reading lives and to give us a different perspective on things. Lewis was probably writing about really old books, written in classical Latin and Greek, but for the purposes of this round up, I’m going to go with 70 years old or more, so published before 1946. I’ll post the reviews I’ve come across this month of books more than 70 years old, and if you have written a review of a qualifying book or if you’ve seen one, please leave a link in the comments. I’ll be happy to pull it up into the post.

So, without further ado, the monthly (?) round up of reviews of old books, for your reading pleasure:

The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations by George Herbert (1633) at Operation Actually Read Bible.

An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers by Samuel Johnson (1744) at Tweetspeak.

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853) at Across the Page.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859) at Semicolon.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens (1870) at Happy Catholic.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (1889) at Barbara’s Stray Thoughts.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy (1899) at Semicolon.

Beatrix Potter’s Tales (1902-1905) at Simpler Pastimes.

I Will Repay by Baroness Orczy (1906) at journey-and-destination.

Sir Nigel by Arthur Conan Doyle (1906) at journey-and-destination.

Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter (1913) at Living Books Library.

Peacock Pie (1913) by Walter de la Mare at Wuthering Expectations.

South! The Story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914-1917 by Ernest Shackleton (1919) at Margy Meanders/Powell River Books.

The Pastures of Heaven by John Steinbeck (1932) at Becky’s Book Reviews.

The Flowering of New England by Van Wyck Brooks (1936) at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White (1938) at Barbara’s Stray Thoughts.

The Baker’s Daughter by DE Stevenson (1938) at Books and Chocolate.

New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 by Van Wyck Brooks (1940) at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

The Long Ships by Franz Gunnar Bengtsson (1941, 1945) at Brandywine Books.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945) at journey-and-destination.

For more “old book” suggestions and reviews, check out:

The 1938 Club at Stuck in a Book. Here are the links to reviews of books published in 1938.

Books of the Century website lists best-selling books by year beginning in 1900.

Back to the Classics Challenge 2016.

The blog Simpler Pastimes has a Classic Children’s Literature event going on, where bloggers can add links to reviews of classic children’s books written at least 50 years ago, so published prior to 1966.

Saturday Review of Books: April 9,2017

Apr9

“No place is like my study. No company like good books, especially the book of God.” ~Matthew Henry

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SORRY I’M SO LATE AGAIN! 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.

The Wednesday Bazaar by Neha Singh

Apr8

A picture book from India, The Wednesday Bazaar is a lovely tale of a little girl who loses her mother at the market/bazaar and finds her again after much searching and with help from many people at the bazaar. The illustrations by Sonal Gupta are beautiful and very evocative of India and its colorful scenery and and clothing.

The story itself is rather slight, but younger children will enjoy the suspense of watching little Bela look throughout the marketplace for her “Ma”. Characters who help Bela in her search are not so much introduced as they just appear in the story, but maybe that’s how it would seem to a lost child in the huge Indian bazaar.

Other picture books set in India:

Atkins, Jeannine. Aani and the Tree Huggers. Illus by Venantius Pinto. Lee and Low, 1995. A little girl tries to save a tree from harvest.
Balachandran, Anitha. The Dog Who Loved Red. Kane Miller, 2011. An Indian family’s dachshund chews everything, especially red things.
Bannerman, Helen. The Story of Little Babaji. Illustrated by Fred Marcellino. HarperCollins, 1996. The Story of Little Black Sambo, recast, to be set in India.
Bash, Barbara. In the Heart of the Village: The World of the Indian Banyan Tree. Sierra Club, 1996. A banyan tree is the heart and center of a rural Indian village.
Bond, Ruskin. The Cherry Tree. Penguin, 2012. Rakish plants a cherry seedling in his garden and watches it grow to maturity to bear fruit.
Cleveland, Rob. The Drum: A Folktale from India. A poor boy dreams of having a drum and learns kindness in pursuit of his dream.
Das, Prodeepta. I Is for India. Frances Lincoln, 2016. An Indian alphabet book with color photographs.
Das, Prodeepta. Geeta’s Day From Dawn to Dusk in an Indian Village. Frances Lincoln, 2010. Photographs of an Indian child’s day in the series A Child’s Day.
Hamilton, Martha and Mitch Weiss. Ghost Catcher. Illustrated by Kristen Balouch. August House, 2007. In a Bengali folktale, a barber outwits a bunch of ghosts.
Harvey, Miles. Look What Came From India. Franklin Watts, 2001. Products and inventions of India.
Heine, Theresa. Elephant Dance. Illustrated by Sheila Moxley. Barefoot Books, 2004. Grandfather tells Anjali and Ravi stories of India and the holiday parade of elephants.
Jayaveeran, Ruth. The Road to Mumbai. HMH Books for Young Readers, 2004. Show and her monkey, Fuzzy Patel, meet many characters on their imaginary journey to Mumbai for a cousin’s wedding.
Krishnaswami, Uma. Monsoon. Illustrated by Jamel Akib. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. A child and her village await the beginning of the rainy season as the clouds bring the monsoon.
Makhijani, Pooja. Mama’s Saris. Illustrated by Elena Gomez. Little Brown, 2007. A seven year old girl wants to wear her mother’s beautiful, colorful saris.
Nayar, Nandini. What Should I Make? Illustrated by Proiti Roy. Tricycle Press, 2009. Neeraj’s mother is making chapatis and she’s given him a handful of the dough. What should he make with it?
Ravishankar, Anushka. Tiger on a Tree. Farrah Straus and Giroux, 2004. A frightened tiger climbs a tree and is trapped by the villagers. But what can they do with a tiger?
Sheth, Kashmira. Monsoon Afternoon. Ilustrated by Yoshiko Yaeggi. Peachtree, 2008. A young boy and his dadaji (grandfather) head out for a walk into the rainy monsoon weather.
Whelan, Gloria. In Andal’s House. Illustrated by Amanda Hall. Sleeping Bear Press, 2013. Kumar is turned away from Andal’s high caste Brahmin home because Kumar is a Dalit.
Whittaker, Zai. Kali and the Rat Snake. Illustrated by Srividya Natarajan. Kane Miller, 2006. Kali has always been proud of his father, who is the best snake catcher in their Indian village. But when he attends school, the children make fun of his Irula ways.
Young, Ed. Seven Blind Mice. Philomela, 1992. Seven blind mice investigate the strange Something by the pond. And one by one, they each come back with a different theory about what the Something is.

Giraffe Meets Bird by Rebecca Bender

Apr7

An indeterminate but colorful species of bird meets a a large, mostly peaceful giraffe. Bird and Giraffe learn to share, live and let live, and eventually they face and conquer danger together.

This Canadian picture book opens with Bird flying, or perhaps dancing, off the edge of the front endpaper into the beginning of his growing friendship with Giraffe. However, the title page shows Bird’s egg beginning to crack open, and the real story begins at hatching. Giraffe and Bird are in turns surprised, amazed, fascinated, tickled, cross, angry, pleasant and polite as their unusual friendship moves through its successive phases. Then, danger unites the two friends, and they share in their escape together. On the final endpaper illustration, Giraffe gets his own picture, upside down and munching on a leaf.

I looked for “giraffe books” a few months ago when a teacher I know was doing a giraffe day in her ongoing series of animal mini-units. The only good giraffe-themed picture books I found in my library were Jaffa by Hugh Lewin, about an African boy who pretends to be different animals, and Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andrede, about courage to fail and self-expression. I may never be asked again for a set of books featuring giraffe characters, but if I am, Giraffe Meets Bird would be a nice addition to the other two.

It’s cute and light-hearted, and the illustrations, also by Rebecca Bender, are adorable, especially the expressive eyes, faces, and bodies of the two main characters. The story is a little illogical in a couple of places: at the end Bird and Giraffe say a tearful goodbye (to each other?) and then set off together. And they hide from danger together in a rather peculiar position. Nevertheless, I can overlook and suspend disbelief since the pictures and the story are just cute and engaging.

As it turns out, when I look on Amazon I see that Giraffe and Bird have been featured in two previous picture books written and illustrated by Ms. Bender, Giraffe and Bird and Don’t Laugh at Giraffe. Those two look delightful, too.