Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I am rarely a fan of movie tie-ins.  When I worked at Borders (may it rest in peace), I’d look at new copies of established books coming in with actors and actresses on the cover and usually wince, and not just because it meant more copies to fit on the shelf; I wanted Tolkien’s own drawings, not Liv Tyler!  (Not that the editions with Tolkien’s drawings are still in print, but those are still my favorite.  Even if my secondhand copies have seen some seriously better days.)  The cover art chosen by the author/publisher/whomever tends to express something about the book in question that a still of an actor doesn’t, and I want the idea, not the still.

For me, this often (but not always) holds true regarding the trend towards photographic covers as well.  I just finished Kathryn Erskine’s Mockingbird, and my copy is a lovely blue hardcover; the current paperback available on Amazon is a photograph of the back of a girl’s head in front of a tree, and I’m just not feeling it.  Current cover art aside, however, Mockingbird is a pretty amazing book.  Caitlin’s Asperger’s makes her an incredible naive narrator, and the school shooting aftermath that frames the plot was timely and beautiful, despite my initial misgivings.  (The inside cover told me Caitlin’s brother was recently dead, not how he died, and so that was a surprise.)  As a parent I wanted to shake her father more than once, and yet the man lost a wife to cancer and a son to a school shooting in a 2-3 year period; he’s also dealing with a grieving special needs child.  That’s rough.  It was a privilege to tag along during part of a community’s journey to healing–even a fictional one–and Erskine does an excellent job reminding us that communities grieve as both communities AND as individuals.  Caitlin’s path to closure is not an easy one, especially since kids are not always kind to the different, but she treads it while we cheer.

And cry.  But I blame that on parenthood.

Anyway.  This is a relatively brief but profoundly beautiful read, and one I highly recommend.  (Read the print copy, though.  I did NOT love the narrator on the audio.)  I don’t want Mockingbird‘s plot to be timely and relevant–none of us do–but we live in the world we live in, and this book is at least one beautiful thing that was created as a response to a tragic one.