Review: BABEL

Title: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Opening quote: 

By the time Professor Lovell found his way through Canton's narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one alive in the house.

Friday56 quote:

This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.

Summary: Babel is an historical fantasy that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as a dominating tool of the British Empire. The story starts in Canton, China when a young boy is whisked away from his home and his dead mother in the care of a professor who will train him up to become an Oxford translator, working to secure more treasures for the empire by going against his own country of birth.

Review: Babel is brilliant. Babel is complicated. Babel is like no other book I've ever read before.

My husband and I listened to the audiobook over a month-long period of time, often not listening at all for a week or two in between listening sessions. This is NOT a good way to digest this story because it is a complicated plot and has a lot of moving pieces to keep track of and it has a very long, drawn-out climax. Even though we consumed the book this way, we both still really appreciated it tremendously. And we had a lot to talk about and digest when we finally finished it.

The Plot: The British Empire has conquered the world because they have mastered the art of translation combined with silver, which allowed magical spells to be released. Everything in the empire runs on silver, and the silver has to be kept in top form by the Babel translators, the translation center of the empire on the Oxford University campus. Robin and his cohort group of four were are all brought into Babel from their homes around the world because of their language skills. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and understands the nuances of the language. This makes him especially valuable since Britain wants the China's silver. The Empire is even willing to start a war to get it. When Robin learns about this plot, he decides he must do something, and that something leads to a student revolution.

Themes: There are many themes. One theme I found fascinating related to all the Biblical allusions. Babel, the building where all the translators work and the silver is imbued with magic, is also the name of a  tower in the Bible. In Genesis 11:1-9 the fable of the Tower of Babel is explained. Once mankind all spoke one language and God saw this as a problem so he confused the languages so all people could not understand each other. Therefore mankind could not be ruled by one person or group. This idea of having one language was what the empire was attempting to do through the translators of Babel -- create a super language and suddenly the whole world is yours.

Another theme relates to the hubris of colonialism. The British Empire in this book wanted more silver, to get it they were willing to addict a whole nation on opium and start a war on false pretenses. We know that actual events from history were very similar, though the details were different. See information about The Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) if you are interested.

Friendship and loyalty were also prominent themes in the book making the reader really care about the characters and the outcomes of their lives and the effects their choices had on others.

The story was absolutely unique and riveting but the best part of the writing had to do with language. Author R, F. Kuang must be a genius for the way she used the word origins of several languages to create the magic. We both found this word play fascinating and impressive.

At 544 pages, this book is definitely not for the person hoping for a weekend read, but it certainly worthy of your attention.

-Anne

Review: THIS OTHER EDEN

The clock is ticking. There are just a few more hours of 2023. Just enough time to scrunch in one more review of the books I read in 2023.

Back in the fall the National Book Award Committee announced its list of finalists in five categories. Among the finalists for the fiction award was this book, THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding. I try to read at least one of the winners/finalists in two of the categories each year. I selected This Other Eden for the most mundane of reasons -- It was the shortest book of the five, at 221 pages in length.

Harding sets out to tell the story of Malaga, an island off the coast of Maine, and the multi-race families inauspiciously evicted from the island in 1912. Harding reimagines history by renaming it Apple Island and giving names to the inhabitants in 1911 -- some with biblical-sounding names like Patience, Theophilus, Esther and Zachary-Hand-to-God-Proverbs. The story begins with the first inhabitants who nearly lose their lives in a huge flood caused by a hurricane, bringing to mind Noah's flood, and the tree they climb for safety as Noah's ark. Patience envisions the parting of the storm like Moses did when he was leading the Hebrews out of Egypt. To add to the Biblical allusions there are apple trees all over Apple Island. Later in the story the idea of being expelled from Apple Island like Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden becomes a climax of the story.

I've only read one other Paul Harding story, The Tinkers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. I wasn't a big fan of that book at the time I read it, but on delayed contemplation I keep thinking about how the author played around with time in a very tangled story of three generations, making it genius. Just like in Tinkers the prose in Eden is mesmerizing. Through the inhabitants of the island and in shifting perspective, we learn the history of Apple Island and learn how come the residents of Maine decided to evict them --eugenics and racism.

In the 1800s, the Honeys face a flood; in the 1900s, they face Matthew Diamond, a white missionary and schoolteacher. Matthew comes to the island every summer to teach the children, but admits to feeling “a visceral, involuntary repulsion” when he’s around Black people. He’s disgusted by the island’s adults but enamored with the children who prove themselves smart and talented. When Matthew escorts a government committee around the island to study its inhabitants, he passively assists in the destruction of the colony. It’s his immediate regret and feeble attempts to delay what the committee plans for Apple Island that make Matthew so complex and fascinating a character — he is at once an embodiment of white supremacy and white guilt, a conduit for white power that would like to excuse himself from his responsibility in the episode of violence his well-meaning intentions made possible (NYT).

Oddly, prior to their expulsion from the island, the residents of Apple Island all seem to be completely oblivious to the racial politics of the times. They acted as if things just happened to them so this expulsion, as odious as it was, was taken in stride. The book is full of love for family, for nature, for home, for life. "Harding has written a novel out of poetry and sunlight, violent history and tender remembering. The humans he has created are not flattened into props and gimmicks, instead they pulse with aliveness, dreamlike but tangible, so real it could make you weep" (NYT).

I'm ending my year of reviews on a good one. I hope you can find your way to it someday soon.

Happy New Year.

-Anne

My Kind of Information Books!

Way back in April I purchased and read a book which I learned about on the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC),  Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway. In the preface, titled 'Ballast' Galloway says, 

We are a nation adrift. We lack neither wind nor sail, we have no shortage of captains or gear, yet our mighty ship flounders in a sea of partisanship, corruption, and selfishness. Our discourse is coarse, young people are failing to form relationships, and our brightest seek glory at the expense of the commonwealth...What will it take to to turn this vessel before the wind and plot a course for peace and prosperity? OK, enough with the sailing metaphors. I can't tell a mainsail from a job, but I do know how to read a chart. There is something powerful about the visual representation of data (2).

Tell me some interesting information and I may or may not understand. Show me a well-constructed map, chart, graph, or illustration and you will have my attention. That was this book. Each of the 100 charts about America is accompanied by one page of text and falls into one of ten categories of approximately ten charts. See example below about gender equality/inequality:

I spent a day or two looking through all the charts, only reading the text for those charts I didn't understand fully. My husband, who had urged me to buy the book in the first place because he wanted to read it, too, didn't think he had time to dig in. "But the book reads extremely fast", I told him. "Just look at the charts and you'll see what I mean." He disagreed. To him the text was more important than the charts. He wanted all the information, not just the bulleted points. Different learning styles.

For some reason I never reviewed the book in April. I think I expected myself to say something profound about it and found I had no words other than have a look at it yourself. Then this week a book arrived at the library for me to peruse as a Cybils judge, Wild Maps for Curious Minds: 100 Ways to See the Natural World by Mike Higgins. I realized I could talk about both books in one review and talk more about the style than the substance,

Higgins' book is targeted toward middle grade and YA readers, though I sometimes think the line is very blurry between YA nonfiction and adult nonfiction, and it only uses maps to convey the information. In the book's forward, Chris Parkham talks about how this generation, living in the age of information, don't know how to read maps because they can get places by GPS. Everytime they drive to same place, they can use GPS, if they want, so they never get the maps in their heads. I know that feeling. On a recent trip to Ecuador we took a four day tour with the transportation provided. I knew the names of the places we visited but I didn't know where they were in relationship to each other or even on the map of the country. It bugged me. I knew I was alive and I knew I was in Ecuador, all else were question marks. 

The maps in this book illustrate a very broad range of facts that fall generally into eight categories. All the maps have something to do with the natural world through ancient times into the future. See the world map colored in according to how many of its people believe in climate change.

I found myself carrying this book around my house with me and pestering whomever would look up to check out this or that map. Like the one about which country has the highest number of cat lovers in the world (Russia has a higher percentage of cat lovers, but Italy and the US come in second). Or that map about the tiny creek that connects the Atlantic and the Pacific (It's called Two Ocean Creek in Wyoming. At a split, half goes west toward the Snake River and ultimately the Pacific. The other half heads toward the Mississippi River via the Missouri River, ultimately dumping out in the Atlantic, via the Gulf Coast.) I've known this for a long time, I love maps. I wonder if Higgins has made a map of which country or state has the highest number of map lovers? It is such a joy to get information in such a visual and easy to understand format.

Years ago when I was a new high school librarian I purchased a small book about maps. The maps weren't about normal stuff like the borders of countries or where mountain ranges are, this one was filled with weird and wonderful maps of unusual topics. One I remember was a visual maps of all the jack-o-lanterns in a subsection of a town. The cartographer has gone around and photographed all the pumpkins and placed the photo in the correct location on the street where it could be found. I no longer have access to that libraries catalog so I can't look it up to see if it is still in the library. When I attempted to locate it on the Internet, not remembering its name, I found there is a plethora of books about weird maps. I must investigate some of these further.

I hope this review spurs you to check out information books full of interesting and informative maps, charts, illustrations, or graphs. These tow books are great places to start.

-Anne

Review: THE LAND OF LOST THINGS

Title: The Land of Lost Things by John Connolly

Opening quote: 

Twice upon a time - for that is how some stories continue - there was a mother whose daughter was stolen from her.

Friday56 quote:

You can destroy a book. You can burn it, you can tear it to pieces and scatter them to the four winds, you can soak it until it reverts to pulp or the ink turns the water black, but you can’t destroy the contents of the book, or the idea of the book, not as long as there are those who care, who remember… Who read. Neither can you destroy stories, not unless you destroy people—and some have tried.

Summary:

Phoebe, an eight-year-old girl, lies comatose following a car accident. She is a body without a spirit, a stolen child. Ceres, her mother, can only sit by her bedside and read aloud to Phoebe the fairy stories she loves in the hope they might summon her back to this world.

Now an old house on the hospital grounds, a property connected to a book written by a vanished author, is calling to Ceres. Something wants her to enter, and to journey - to a land coloured by the memories of Ceres's childhood, and the folklore beloved of her father, to a land of witches and dryads, giants and mandrakes; to a land where old enemies are watching, and waiting. (Publisher)

Review: This book is the sequel to one of my most favorite books of a decade ago, The Book of Lost Things. I was so, so wrapped up in that story, clearly living inside the world where everything was different and warped.

I didn't even know that I needed a sequel. The Land of Lost Things is a darker version of the first story where some pretty horrifying things happen and yet, the same kernel is there...the importance of our STORY. The opening quote sets the stage nicely for a sequel, don't you think? And the Friday56 quote, which isn't actually from page 56, sets the stage for the importance of books and owning our own story. 

It is a clever but dark book, published over fifteen years after the first book in the series. I enjoyed it a lot but wished I had reviewed the original. Too much time had elapsed and I forgot many of the details. Here is my short review of The Book of Lost Things.

-Anne

Review and quotes: NEWS OF THE WORLD

Title: News of the World by Paulette Jiles

Opening page quote: 

Wichita Falls, Texas, Winter 1870

Captain Kidd laid out the Boston Morning Journal on the lectern and began to read from the article on the Fifteenth Amendment.

Friday56 quote:

He said, Miss Dillon, you know this how?

     An Gorta Mor [The Irish Famine of 1845-49], she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They were forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.

Summary: Captain Jefferson Kidd, an elderly widower who participated and fought in three wars, is now an itinerant who makes a living by traveling around Northern Texas, reading the news to people hungry for a connection to the rest of the world. Captain Kidd is asked to deliver Johanna, a ten-year-old girl captured and raised by Kiowa Indians, to her only living relatives 400 miles over rough and dangerous terrain, one filled with natural barriers (rivers, deserts) and man-made obstacles (political, cultural, and financial.) Johanna, who completely embraced the Kiowa culture, does not want to go. She wants to return to "her people", her Indian father and mother. She is wild by many standards: eating with her hands, throwing away her shoes, preferring the floor to a bed. But she is smart about nature, knows how to handle a revolver, and is a good problem solver. Nevertheless, as the miles pass, Capt. Kidd and Johanna form a bond of friendship and comradery. 

Review: News of the World was a National Book Award finalist in 2016. I read and reviewed it in 2017 and I loved it. When it was chosen as a recent book club selection, I decided to reread it and, boy, am I glad I did! It seemed more relevant to me today than I remember it being in 2017. On further reflection the word "classic" kept coming to my mind. In 1980 Italo Calvino described "a classic as a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." This seemed a very apt statement related to this book. It had something completely different to say to me in 2023 than 2017.

In 2017 I focused on the drama related to Johanna and Captain Kidd. I learned about the history of Texas during reconstruction years. I delighted in the descriptions of the geography, the towns, and the people they encountered along the way. In 2023 what I found myself focusing on was the politics and the lawlessness. In post Civil War days in Texas civility had broken down. Many people were angered by the acts made by Gov. Davis. They were angry about the success of the Union in the war and that federal soldiers were sent to keep the laws. They had to abolish slavery and pledge their loyalty to the union to be reinstated in the United States. Newspapers often printed biased and made-up, fact-free stories intended to incite anger and dissatisfaction. I couldn't help comparing what was happening today to what happened in the 1870s in Texas -- newspapers [news sources] that didn't bother with facts; people taking sides and fighting with their neighbors about their beliefs. I am not sure if it is a comfort, but it is interesting to learn that what we are experiencing in the US today isn't new to this century.

Now I'm off to see if I can find the movie of News of the World starring Tom Hanks.

I highly recommend the book.

Here is a link to the review I published in 2017.

-Anne

Review : THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON

Title: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Opening page quote:

“Citizens, gather ‘round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors — wherever your loudspeaker is located, turn up the volume!”

Another quote (no guarantees it is from page 56):

"Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change."

Poetry Review: FROM UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez

from unincorporated territory [amot] by Craig Santos Perez the 2023 winner for poetry for the National Book Award.

This book is the fifth collection in Craig Santos Perez's ongoing from unincorporated territory series about the history of his homeland, the western Pacific island of Guåhan (Guam), and the culture of his indigenous Chamoru people. “Åmot” is the Chamoru word for “medicine,” commonly referring to medicinal plants. (NBA)

"Perez’s project is complex, layered, and shifting. It’s a work of activism, history and archiving, and through it all, a carefully composed work sensitive to a poetic history. Just as each book is positioned as part of a larger work, so too is each poem." (The Poetry Project)

Each poem in this set begins the Chomoru word "Ginen" which means "here (by way of)". Ginen is a perfect precursor to each poem since so many of the events that have happened on Guam (here) came (by way of). For example the book is full of poems about the brown tree snake which came to Guam by way of some place else and has nearly decimated the bird population on the island. Now everything is out of whack ... too many spiders and beetles, for one thing.

Even Bingo, the Catholic faith, and Spam have come to Guam by way of elsewhere but are now deeply embedded in the culture.

My favorite poems are in a series revolving around Spam -- The Zen of Spam.

ginen the zen of spam

                towards spamvana

what is

the true

taste

of spam 

                                            spam is

                                            the absence

                                            of striving

                                            for spam

does a poem

have spam nature

This series of poems are humorous and made me laugh as I shared them with my husband but most are serious, perhaps presented in a playful way, and possibly heartbreaking. Why does the USA have an unincorporated territory? Why don't we ever address the challenges and problems caused by colonialization? Even though I have several friends from Guam I have never, until now, wondered what the US occupation on Guam has done to the culture? Or how Guamanians feel about it. Sigh. When one is part of the dominant culture it is so easy to ignore other cultures. 

The second poem in the collection, ginen the legends of juan malo, really got me thinking. Among the fifty or so questions the poem asks, these stopped me in place:

...Is #Guam the tip of America's spear in Asia? Is #Guam dangerous? Is #Guam a target for North Korean missile strikes? Is #Guam in danger?...

So many questions with no answers.

In another poem Santos Perez talks about what it is like to live on a tiny island where 30% of the territory is a US military base. A rare tree exists on that part of the island which needs protection so the tree doesn't become extinct. The military's response, "Don't worry. We'll build a fence around it."

The judges for the National Book Award said this about from unincorporated territory [amot]:

The work of poetry as both praise and redress comes into intense realization in from unincorporated territory [åmot]. While tenderly elegizing family and homeland, Craig Santos Perez is also always aware of the forces—of colonialism, militarism, environmental destruction, and systemic sexual abuse—that devastate what is intimate and hallowed. Proudly polylingual, as lyrical as it is outraged, from unincorporated territory [åmot] is poetry as fierce medicine. (Judges citation, NBA)

If you want to read poetry which also makes you think and feel something new, this collection is for you. If you want to learn about Guam and its struggles, this collection is for you. If you like Spam or making fun of Spam, this collection is for you.

It is for all of us!

I give high praise for from unincorporated territory [amot] which will undoubtedly make my 2023 list as favorite poetry books read in the year. Now I am going to read backwards and see if I can find the other four books in the series.

-Anne

Review and quotes: YELLOWFACE

Title: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

Beginning quote: 

The night I watch Athena Liu die, we are celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.

Friday56 quote:

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much.

Summary: Athena Liu and June Hayward are both writers. They've known each other since college. They still get together occasionally, mostly to celebrate Athena's accomplishments since she is a successful author and June is not. On the night when Athena dies they are celebrating yet another accomplishment. Not only is Netflix knocking but Athena has just finished the first draft of another novel which June finds herself rewriting and publishing after her friends death. And then finds herself running from Athena's ghost because she thinks she deserves the fame she has received. "Yellowface grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media."

Review: As I looked over the reviews on Goodreads-- which is funny since that is what June Hayward does too, to her detriment -- I think I may have goofed up reading Yellowface before R.F.Kuang's novel Babel, which I am reading right now. They both deal, to some degree with cultural appropriation, though Yellowface is a modern story with a much more light-handed touch, so it is hard to go back to much harder, serious story.

I ultimately gave Yellowface a rating of 4 stars. At first I wanted to give the book the heave-ho because it felt like I'd just read this story, minus the cultural appropriation and racist angles, with The Plot by Jean Haniff Korelitz two years ago. I also decidedly didn't like June Hayward, or any of the other characters for that matter, and I always have trouble wanting to continue reading books when I don't like the characters. But I persisted and decided that the book was pretty entertaining. Its truth about social media and the publishing industry made it feel like it was worth my time. Who knows we may even select it for book club, giving me one more chance to put my thoughts together on this book.

Have you read Yellowface? What did you think of it?

-Anne

A remarkable book and a possible literature pairing for it -- THE OTHER PANDEMIC

I just completed a YA memoir: THE OTHER PANDEMIC: AN AIDS MEMOIR by Lynn Curlee. I couldn't stop thinking about the 2019 masterpiece, THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai. Now these two books are married in my mind. What I've decided to do is to grab excerpts from the review I wrote for that book and incorporate my thoughts from The Other Pandemic. If you'd like to read my whole review of The Great Believers, here is the link.

Lynn Curlee is a gay man who lived in both New York and L.A. in the late 1970s and 80s when the AIDS epidemic starting hitting the gay communities very hard. No one knew what was happening, they just knew that the un-named disease (at the time) was striking gay men, Haitians, and needle-drug users the hardest. It was often referred to as "Gay Cancer."

I started teaching in the fall of 1980. I was a junior high teacher at the time teaching health and PE. As a college student majoring in health education I learned everything there was to know at the time about what we then called STDs or sexually transmitted diseases and I was prepared to impart my knowledge onto my students in hopes that they wouldn't get one of them...I remember the moment in 1983 or '84 when a parent questioned me about what I was teaching about AIDS. At the time I had no inkling of how serious and life-threatening the disease was and how it would dominate my curriculum for years to come. In 1988 or '89 our state required mandatory AIDS prevention lessons for every student from grades 5-12, every year. In my schools those required lessons often fell to me, though not always. Not only would students' eyes glass over during those lessons but so would the teachers'. An important topic became boring and tedious. I did a lot of personal education on the topic of HIV and AIDS, attending conferences, visiting AIDS hospice houses, interviewing people who were HIV+ about the drugs they had to take and the symptoms they were hoping to thwart. I remember throwing around terms like cytomegalovirus, histoplasmosis, thrush, toxoplasmosis, Kaposi sarcoma, and HIV-wasting syndrome. I knew more about HIV/AIDS on the educational level than the average person, but not much on the personal level.

As I started reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai this past week I was hit head-on with how very little I really understood about the AIDS crisis on a personal level.

As a health educator I knew a lot about AIDS and became very creative in my teaching techniques, trying to help my students understand how complex the treatment for AIDS was and how important it was to always practice Safe Sex. What I didn't know on a personal level was how devastatingly difficult it was to be a part of the gay community due to the fear and sorrow. Fear of catching the disease personally and sorrow/grief for the huge number of friends who were dying. Curlee said that he kept count in the beginning of how many people he knew who died from AIDS. He stopped counting at 41 because "what was the point?" Can you imagine losing 41+ friends to death in less than ten years? It is mind-boggling to think about, yet so many gay men lived through this reality.

When the AIDS epidemic begins to race its way through the gay community in Chicago's Boystown neighborhood in 1983, Yale Tishman and Fiona Marcus become good friends. Fiona's brother, Nico, was the first of the artsy friend group of gay men to die of AIDS. Since Nico was disowned by his parents, Fiona became his caretaker at the end of his life. Yale, who is employed at an art museum, was in the same group as Nico so he got to know Fiona. 

In the Great Believers Fiona not only takes care of her dying brother, but many, many others in his friend group who have no one else to care for them in their last days. It takes a life-long toll on Fiona, it was such a draining, all-consuming activity. Lynn Curlee, too, talks about the caretakers in his community. When John Martin, his life-partner, gets ill from AIDS and is placed on hospice, other friends step up to help care for John in his last days. Many of those men went on to die themselves from AIDS.

 Survivors of WWI were considered the "Lost Generation". This generation of people came of age during WWI where 40 million people died. The term "lost" also refers to their aimlessness and disorientation after the war.

In a lot of ways survivors of the AIDS pandemic are like the survivors known as the lost generation, disoriented by what has happened in their life. And though we don't often hear much about it these days, especially with so much focus on our recent COVID-19 pandemic, AIDS is still out there. There is still no cure for it, or vaccine to prevent it.

Fiona stands for all those women [and men] who ended up being the caretakers for AIDS patients. Fiona later become aware of their role in preserving memories which were never documented.

I was blown away by The Great Believers. The title comes from a quote in My Generation by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “We were the great believers, I have never cared for any men as much as for those who felt the first springs of life when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved — and who now walk the long stormy summer.”  I saw for the first time a new take on a topic which had dominated my life for the majority of my teaching life---a very personal take. I realize now that with each death there were friends, relatives, and caretakers who were asked to shoulder the lion's share of the burden. We also have been robbed of all of their memories.

When Lynn Curlee was approached about writing a memoir of his experiences with the other pandemic, he balked at first. What would it be like to dredge up all those old memories and hurts? But when he started doing the research for the book he realized that he was helping preserve the memories of those friends, most who died in their 30s, since many had no one else to do it for them. It became a sacred opportunity for his to be the memory keeper for those men, those friends who had once partied together at Fire Island Pines off Long Island so happily and carefree.

Though the book isn't a joy to read, it is real. At first I thought I might just sample the book but found myself compelled to read on, to allow myself to feel a bit of the pain and loss that came with the other pandemic. Published as a YA nonfiction memoir, I found myself wondering if that is the appropriate audience for the book. I probably feel that way since I had such a hard time getting teen readers to pick up any nonfiction books during my time as a teen librarian. Let's just say this, there is nothing about this book which screams YA! Look for it at your public library and pair it with The Great Believers by Makkai. You will be touched, I promise.

-Anne

Review and quotes: HELLO BEAUTIFUL

Title: Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Book Beginnings quote:

For the first six days of William Waters's life, he was not an only child. He had a three-year-old sister, a redhead named Caroline after John F. Kennedy's daughter.

Friday56 quote:

Sylvie had read somewhere that the more times a story was told, the less accurate it became. Humans were prone to exaggeration; they leaned away from the parts of the narrative they found boring and leaned into the exciting spots. Details and timelines changed over years of repetition. The story became more myth and less true. Sylvie thought about how she and William rarely told their story and felt pleased; by not being shared, their love story remained intact.

Summary: 

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.

But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most? (Publisher)

Review: I finished this book in September in time for book club where we were to discuss it and then I had to miss the meeting. Darn. I would have loved to be there for that one. Here is what I said on my Goodreads review right after I finished it. I think you'll get the point that it was a very impactful book...

Okay. First piece of advice: Listen to the audiobook with the speed bumped up. I listened at 1.3 speed and that was almost too slow.

Second piece of advice: Drink plenty of Gatorade before or during the last twenty percent of the book. I didn't and I feel lightheaded and dehydrated from my tears. At one point I had to stop listening just so I could get control of my sobbing. SOBBING.

Thirdly, don't build up too much expectation about Little Women and the similarities. It is there, but just a tiny bit and if you wait around for it you'll be disappointed.

Fourthly, if you have any siblings, call or text them and tell them you love them before it is too late and you don't get any more chances. Wouldn't that be the worst thing? Not to fix what is broken while you still have a chance? 

Here come the tears again...

-Anne

Review and quotes: A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING

A graphic memoir.

Title: A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat

Opening quote:

"I grew up in a small town just outside of Los Angeles." pg. 1

Friday56 (pag 56) quote:

Charles De Gaulle Airport: "Okay, everyone grab your bags! After you do that we'll all end up at the south end of the baggage claim!" Okay, let's go get our stuff." Come on, Dan."

Summary: After being bullied all the way through middle school Dan has low expectations about everything, including the three-week trip to Europe with other students his age. "But during his travels, a series of first begin to change him -- first Fanta, first fondue, and maybe even...first girlfriend?" The book is heartfelt and heartwarming. It also felt so true. Do you remember those torturous middle school years? How did we survive?

Review: On November 15, 2023, just a few days ago, the National Book Award for Young People's literature went to this book A First Time for Everything. Since I always try to read at least two of the National Book Award winners or finalists, it was a no-brainer that I would select this book. I enjoy graphic memoirs if they are done well -- and this one is. It felt so true -- the awkwardness, the uncertainty, the mixed-up emotions, the abrupt shifts in moods. Dan Santat nailed them all. I loved the message about how travel can really help us get a new perspective on ourselves, too.

The book is labeled at a memoir for middle grade readers but I think it fits more in the YA milieu. As an adult, I loved it and didn't feel like I was reading a book for little kids either. I'd age range it 12 years to adults. If your library doesn't have a copy, be sure to request that they buy one.

-Anne

THE FIRST NOTES and two other nonfiction Children's books about music

My mother-in-law was an Elementary Music specialist. She shared how difficult it was sometimes to keep her students, especially her youngest ones, engaged. When those moment arrived any of these three books about musical topics would have helped the students to quiet down and center themselves.

The First Notes: The Story of DO, RE, MI by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton

Little, Brown and Company, 2022.

We all know the song from The Sound of Music, "Do-Re-Mi", but most of us don't know who coined the names of the notes and how written music came to be. Here beloved actress, Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, introduce the readers to a monk named Guido d'Arezzo who lived in the 11th century. "With creativity, passion, and perseverance, one hamble man invented a way to share music across the world." What struck me was the fact that I'd never once given the thought to the fact that there was a time when all music had to memorized because there was no written language for it.

My rating: 4 stars

The Story of the Saxophone by Lesa Cline-Ransome

Holiday House, 2023.

It is hard to think of a time when o saxophones existed. But back in 1840 in Belgium, a young daydreamer and inventor named Joseph-Antoine Adolphe Sax, started playing around with various instruments, trying to create a sound louder than a clarinet, but softer and more subtle than a trumpet. The result was an instrument named for him, the saxophone. It was not accepted easily in Europe at the time of its invention until the French military got involved. . Napoleon loved the "saxophon" as it was spelled in those days. Later the instrument made its way across the ocean and found a new home in New Orleans where it found its rightful place with the Jazz musicians of the day. And it has never been out of style since that time.

My rating: 5 stars

The Girl Who Heard the Music: How One Pianist and 85,00 Bottles and Cans Brought New Hope to an Island by Marni Fogelson and Mahani Teave

Sourcebooks, 2023.

Imagine living on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), where there is only one piano on the whole island. That is what happened to Mahani Teave, who loved music but had few chances to play the piano when she was growing up. Not until a musician from Chili learned of her interest and talent and took her to the mainland did she get proper musical training. Mahini Teave was so gifted and talented she traveled all over the world playing her piano in large concert halls, but her heart was back in Rapa Nui. When she went home she and other islanders built a music conservatory out of the many bottles and cans which constantly washed ashore on the island's beaches. Now many children on the island can learn to play instruments. Watch this video about Mahani Teave and her music school made here. The book and its message are both so inspiring.

My rating: 5 stars

-Anne

Review and quotes: ACCOUNTABLE

Title: Accountable: The True Story of a Racist Social Media Account and the Teenagers Whose lives It Changed by Dashka Slater

Opening lines quote: 

[Prologue] Looking back, it's hard not to wonder how the whole thing could have been prevented. All the sorrow, all the fear, all the rage. All the lives derailed, all the milestones missed, all the plans upended. The hearings. The lawsuits. The brokenness that settled over everyone involved. The undefinable and uncountable losses: the friendships wrecked, the optimism withered, the joy stolen. Somebody could have spoken up before it went that far, before the entire town was shattered. But who?

Friday56 quote: 

{October 2016} It had started back in the fall, in Algebra 2. She was deep in her own thoughts when she felt a hand in her hair.

Summary: 

When a high school student started a private Instagram account that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as “edgy” humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account, and pretty soon, everyone knew. Ultimately no one in the small town of Albany, California, was safe from the repercussions of the account’s discovery: not the girls targeted by the posts. Not the boy who created the account. Not the group of kids who followed it. Not the adults―educators and parents―whose attempts to fix things too often made them worse. In the end, no one was laughing, and everyone was left wondering: What does it mean to be held accountable for harm that takes place behind a screen? (Publisher.)

Review: I can't even begin to describe how impactful this book, Accountable, is. Dashka Slater did a masterful job of getting behind every story through interviews, looking at social media, surveillance videos, public records, and other sources and staying with the story for years. She skillfully shows us the complexity of issues that teenagers confront every single time they interact with social media. She questions who is responsible and looks at how racism and racist memes are created and accepted as something funny because the creator didn't "mean it." 

I was really blown away by the accounts of this actual event. No one won. Everyone lost. Albany stands in for the whole country, the world. We unleash this social media and then let our children play with it. What started as a joke between friends tumbled into a racist fiasco, one that no one could put back into the box. The adults in this account are so ignorant, too. They all seem impotent to do anything to quell the situation. 

The book is long, 480 pages, but the way the book is organized makes it seem much shorter. There is a lot of white space on each page. It took me less than a few days to read it. I actually had to set it down several times just to give my brain time to process what I was reading. If the length of the book sounds like more than you are willing to tackle, please consider checking the book out from your library and reading the few pages from the chapter titled "Shame." (pgs 248-252.)

The whole school community and many in the city of Albany got involved or caught up in publicly shaming the boys who created and were participants in the racist account. But as I read the account of what the shamers did I realized they were at fault, too. The point of shaming someone is to make them feel bad. "But legal scholars have argued that public shaming is inherently bad for society because it normalizes cruelty and degrades human dignity" (249). What the boys did was wrong. What the shamers were doing was wrong, too. Two wrongs do not make a right and as we see as this account moves through the story, there is nothing that could be said to make situation better.

It feels like this story has a lot of implications for those of us trying to maneuver through life today. No one knows how to treat other people with respect anymore since it is so easy to anonymously awful to others on-line. Fortunately, the books ends with some positive notes and some signs of growth and self-acceptance.

I highly recommend this YA nonfiction book which I read for the Nonfiction November challenge.

 

-Anne

WOMBATS ARE PRETTY WEIRD and two other fantastic children's nonfiction books

Batch #4 of Children's nonfiction books. (Interested in the other batches? Here are the links: #1, #2, #3)

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Wombats are Pretty Weird: A [Not So] Serious Guide by Abi Cushman

Greenwillow Books, 2023.

Gotta love a book that admits it is not so serious about an animal that is weird. "Wombats Are Pretty Weird is funny, kid-friendly, and informative, and features sidebars, comic panels, extensive backmatter, and a map. Acclaimed author-illustrator Abi Cushman’s nonfiction debut contains everything anyone could ever possibly want to know about wombats!" (Publisher)

I read this delightful and funny book to my grandsons, ages 6 and 3, and they both thought it was awesome. A few days later when I asked the three-year-old what he remembered about the book he told me with no hesitation, "Square poop!" There has got to be a direct line from humor to memory in our brains. If we laugh, we remember. Btw- Wombats do make square poop so it doesn't roll off the boulders when they are marking their territory.

Librarians, I know this is probably a niche purchase, since we don't have any wombats, like our friends Down Under, but I highly recommend you purchase it anyway. It is way too much fun to avoid.

My rating: 5 stars

The Moon Tonight: Our Moon's Journey Around the Earth by Jung Chang-hoon

Blue Dot Kids Press, 2023.

"As our closest celestial neighbor, the moon touches on many aspects of our lives and has inspired interest from people across centuries. In The Moon Tonight, you can share that same sense of wonder through the eyes of a father-daughter duo as they learn the science behind the twenty-nine-day lunar cycle and the moon’s four phases: crescent, quarter, full, and new. With age-appropriate and easy-to-follow scientific explanations by astronomer Jung Chang-hoon paired with stunningly beautiful drawings by Jang Ho, this picture book offers families a reading experience that is both poetic and educational." (Publisher)

This is embarrassing for me to admit, but here goes. Until I read this little gem of a children's book, I didn't know that the phases of the moon always appear in the same location. For example the full moon always rises in the eastern sky. Overnight the moon hangs in the sky, and sets in the west in the morning. The first quarter moon rises in the east around noon and trails the sun all day. It hangs high in the southern sky in the early evening. At midnight, it sets in the west. If I ever thought of the moon's patterns, they were just random thoughts. I didn't know how predictive the whole 29-day lunar cycle was. I love it when I learn new information, even at my age, and it is always fun if it comes with cool illustrations and not that many pages to read!

The Moon Tonight is a perfect STEM classroom read or a bedtime story for little readers curious about where the moon goes and why!

My rating: 5 stars

An American Story by Kwame Alexander

Little, Brown and Company, 2023.

Poet Kwame Alexander asks How do you tell an American story? A story of struggle, a story of strength. A story of horror, a story of hope. A story of survival that must be told...the story of us!

How do you tell a story that starts in Africa and ends in horror?

The story of slavery is part of the American story and this story must be told.

It is more important than ever to tell this story to all Americans since some today think it is not a story worth telling. Or the story makes them feel bad. Or the story isn't their fault.

This delightfully colorful book is illustrated by Dare Coulter who used paints along with water-based clay and polymer clay which give the characters almost life-like features.

Kwame Alexander is a not-to-be-missed children's and young adult poet. If I see he has a new work published, I read it. I highly recommend this for young children, ages 4-8.

My rating: 5 stars.

-Anne