Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

This week I (finally) managed to finish one of the books that I started before the holidays and then ended up leaving by the wayside, because, well, the holidays.  (The Christmas stuff is still not all put away, but I’m trying!)  I received a copy of Sam Maggs’ Wonder Women:  25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History almost, well–2 1/2 years ago.

Ouch.  Kids just slow down certain aspects of your life, you know?

Anyway.  Clearly, this review is LONG overdue, especially since the folks at Quirk Books were kind enough to send me an ARC.  Without further ado, then…

THE GOOD:  Okay, these were seriously fascinating stories.  What kills me is that at 39, I’d only heard of 4 of the 25 before I started the book–and I love history. Which means that the majority of these stories aren’t known the way they should be, so kudos to Sam Maggs for bringing them to our attention.  She also gives us brief paragraphs on more women for each category, making this a book packed with stories that need to be told.  The sections are long enough to give a sense of each story but short enough so as not to feel overwhelming for teens who may not be big nonfiction fans (I certainly wasn’t at that age!).  I wanted more, but again, I’m 39, and I quite enjoy nonfiction at this point in my life.

THE NOT-AS-GOOD-FOR-ME:  I noted multiple reviewers complaining about Maggs’ tone, and I will say that I was a bit tired of it by the end.  I’m not a teen and my oldest is 12, so she may have been spot-on for her intended audience–I wouldn’t know.  Its specific sort of slangy, modern chattiness narrows its appeal a bit, though.

THE LESS-THAN-IDEAL-OVERALL:  In the first few sections, Maggs went out of her way to cast relevant male characters in the worst possible light.  That seemed to ease up as the book progressed, but it weakened the effect a bit.  (It’s true that nonfiction slanted in the opposite direction for, well, centuries, but I’d rather see a problem rectified than the pendulum swing out in the other direction.)  Maggs also went out of her way to point out any nontraditional lifestyle choices made by the women in question, and at some point, their sexuality is not only not relevant, but mentioning it falls into the old trap of focusing on different information when describing women than when describing men.

THE VERDICT:  This is not a book written for adults that appeals to teens, but a book written for teens (or possibly those just past their teens).  The stories in it, however, are stories that need to be told, whatever the age of their audience; I’m interested to see what else Sam Maggs has to offer.

Since I didn’t post on the 7th (again, due to technical difficulties rather than “I spaced it”!), you get a freebie–especially since it’s one that will be eagerly devoured by my older girls as soon as I hand it off to them.  Last night I finished Barry Deutsch’s Hereville:  How Mirka Met a Meteorite, the second installment in a series that really ought to be more well known than it is.  (Seriously.  It’s got adventure, it’s about a minority culture, and it has a troll who can do impressive things with yarn.  Who could ask for anything more?)  In it, Mirka retrieves her sword from the troll only to end up contending with a meteorite (who happens to be her doppelganger) for control over her own life.  There are monsters, thrown rocks, and eye-rolling siblings.  There are poor choices, technicalities, and a brief visit with the moon.  If you don’t want to read this book, well–WHY NOT?

I checked Nidhi Chanani’s Pashmina out of the library mostly for my graphic novel obsessed 9-year-old, although I imagine my oldest will also enjoy it; being the mom I am, however, I kept it in my room until I’d read it first.  (To clarify:  occasionally I intentionally preview for appropriateness of content, often I preview to see if it will appeal and/or be worth reading, and ALWAYS I abide by the ‘if I want it first, I get it first’ rule.  That’s just how I roll.)  I was actually going to review it on the 7th, but my admin screen wouldn’t load, so here we are.

First of all, the strengths.  Both the story and the characters were likable for me; I was pretty aggravated at Pri’s mom’s reticence about her father for a while, but when the truth comes out, I couldn’t actually come up with a lot of ideas for what she should have done instead.  (Parenting is just plain hard.)  I also liked the marriage of universally relatable themes with a culture relatively unknown to me.  The art was engaging, and the color choices added to my perception of the story.

As for the weaknesses?  More than one of the conflicts introduced were dropped rather abruptly, and the transitions sometimes felt stilted; also, taken as a group, the themes of the book don’t point definitively to one age group.  Much of it seems geared more toward the middle grades, but between the relationship Pri’s aunt and uncle have with each other and the reason her mother won’t talk about her father, I foresee some serious conversations with my 9-year-old.  (The one about unwed teenage pregnancy is the one I’m least looking forward to.)

And the verdict?  It’s worth reading, and I think middle graders will love it.  If you’re a parent, be prepared to talk about the themes with your kiddos.  In the meantime, I enjoyed it enough to go see if Chanani has any other books out there, so Goodreads, here I come!

Last night I finished listening to Eli Brown’s Cinnamon and Gunpowder, which my sister highly recommended.  I’ve spent quite some time trying to come up with comparisons that will give you a sense of the plot; my best effort goes something like this.  IF you crossed “The King and I” with “Pirates of the Caribbean”, added elements of  “Star Wars” and Robin Hood, threw in a bit of Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds on Nantucket and something of the character of Fantine from Les Miserables,  and then aired the resulting story on the Food Network, you might end up with something like Eli Brown’s second novel.  It’s a bit odd, a bit bloody, sometimes poignant, and sprinkled with food porn.  What begins as a tale of a captured cook forced to prepare lavish Sunday dinners for an infamous female pirate captain becomes a David vs. Goliath sort of clash, and it surprised, delighted, and moved me.  If you like history, food, or the clashing of two polar opposites, don’t miss this one!

You know that review I’ve mentioned more than once, the one I’ve been putting off because I haven’t had the emotional energy for it?  Well, it’s time.  I finished Antonio Iturbe’s The Librarian of Auschwitz on the 24th of November, but the holidays were already overwhelming me by then, and I was working to finish the Book of Mormon by the end of the year; the review just got postponed, and postponed again, until–well, here we are.  Much of the intensity of the reading/listening experience has faded, partly with time and partly because I’ve read another novel about WWII and its aftermath since then, but not so much that I can’t tell you honestly how amazing it was.  I don’t read a great deal of fiction about the Holocaust–fiction seems a consistent second choice with so many actual narratives available–but Librarian was based on a true story, and it felt authentic.

It also held me spellbound.

I received a copy for review months ago, but the size had been intimidating me; my current stage in life spares me only so much focus and time.  When I found that it was available on audio I jumped at the chance to listen to it (while skimming my print copy at odd moments to ensure I wasn’t missing anything!), and I found a bonus–an afterward that wasn’t in my uncorrected proof but that made the entire book that much more compelling.  (I’m honestly pondering buying a copy just for that afterward.)  If you have any interest in the Holocaust–if you’re passionate about books and what they make of us–even if you’re just looking for something fascinating to read–do yourself a favor.  Get yourself a copy of this book–audio, print, whatever works for you in the here and now–and join Dita on her journey from Prague, to Terezin, to Auschwitz, to Bergen-Belsen, and back again to Prague and beyond.  Hers is a journey no one should miss.

So I missed the 29th, because there was craziness, and then there’s been more craziness, and now it’s New Years Eve with its own brand of craziness.  Goodnight to everybody, and I’ll see you next year!

I hope all of you were as blessed as we were this Christmas–with family, with warmth and comfort, and with the Savior’s love.  There is more family to come as the new year approaches, but for now, I get to review for you the book I finished listening to while wrapping presents on Christmas Eve.  Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle sounded like exactly the sort of book that appeals to me–fellow widows of German resistance fighters gathering in a crumbling down castle to support each other and face life in postwar Germany–and I was quite excited when Britt offered me her extra copy.  Upon reading it, however, I found that the book is a good deal more complicated than that.  It both was and wasn’t my sort of book.

The back of it quotes the NY Times–“Moving…A plot that surprises and devastates”–and the USA Today–“The Women in the Castle stands tall among the literature that reveals new truths about one of history’s most tragic eras”; both of those blurbs strike me as accurate.  The blurb on the front, however, caught my eye first.  The author of a recent bestseller (The Nest) is quoted there as saying “A joy to read, this is a beautiful and important book.”  I looked at that a number of times during the course of the novel, and while I’m not going to quibble with ‘beautiful’ and ‘important’ as adjectives–it’s certainly beautifully written, as well as being the kind of thought provoking that can’t help but be enlightening in its way–nothing about this book struck me as a joy to read.  Compelling, yes, powerful, yes, but a joy?  Seriously?

As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of a memoir called We Were Not Alone:  How an LDS Family Survived World War II Berlin.  I suppose I had wanted Shattuck’s book to contain those same themes of trying to be true to one’s conscience in an unconscionable world–and being blessed for it.  Instead, it spotlighted differing German views of the war, the Nazis, and a people’s moral responsibility, embodied in three very different women whose bond was not at all what I wanted it to be.  I wanted them to build relationships based on trust that would sustain them in postwar life, but that did not feel like the point at all.  Shattuck, to her credit, does an excellent job of showing me why that was–I imagine what she describes was painfully real for many, many people–but I’ve always loved stories about healing and overcoming, and that wasn’t quite the vibe here.  Surviving, yes–in different kinds of ways–but what true healing and overcoming there was didn’t happen when (or how) I was expecting it to.  I find myself thinking of The Kite Runner, which was beautiful and painful and, at the very end, cautiously hopeful, but no more than that.  I respect the level of thought The Women in the Castle inspired in me, but it was an emotionally difficult rather than an emotionally satisfying read.  Whether or not you ought to read it depends entirely, then, on what you’re looking for.*

*I ended this sentence this way because it’s exactly how I wanted it to sound; in the interest of full disclosure, however, I still struggle to look at the preposition ending a 3-paragraph post.  It works, but it hurts.

Yes, I should have posted last night, but December, you know?  At any rate.  Tonight I finished Martin Sandler’s Island of Hope:  The Story of  Ellis Island and the Journey to America.

Alone.

I started out reading it to my girls, but my highly emotionally intuitive 9-year-old didn’t like the sadness implicit in even the most successful stories, and my mystery-loving 11-year-old (she’s 12 now, but she wasn’t when we started it together!) wasn’t engaged, possibly because it’s a series of grouped experiences covering different parts of the immigrant journey instead of a conventional plot.  At any rate, reading it together was becoming a negative experience instead of a positive one, and so we bailed as a group and started something else instead.  I sure wasn’t going to bail on it individually, however, and so I’ve been snatching a few pages at a time, here and there, because (again) December.  Tonight I snatched the last few, and so here we are.

Here’s the thing.  I found the experiences (and the photographs!) fascinating, but I’m passionate about that part of history anyway; as a straight-through read, it’s probably best for kids who have an interest in the topic already.  (It would be a great research tool, though.)  It’s well done overall, although Russell Freedman is a better writer for the audience, but it’s not going to be captivating for everyone.  Bottom line?  I’m glad I read it, and interested kids should enjoy it, but it’s not the sort of book that’s going to win converts among the unenthused.  Do with that what you will!

Oh, and in case you hadn’t guessed from today’s title–I’m taking a break until after Christmas.  Don’t we all have miles to go before we sleep at the moment?

Because we’ve liked several different kinds of titles by Charise Mericle Harper, I checked The Amazing Crafty Cat out last week and read it yesterday evening (it’s quite short).  It’s slightly odd–“Crafty Cat” is the girl’s imaginary superhero alter-ego and she invokes her anytime she runs into trouble, thereby saving the day with crafts and crafting skills–but fun, if on the young side for my older girls.  I’m guessing my 9-year-old will still like it because GRAPHIC NOVEL (AND because Birdie’s dilemma will appeal to her emotionally intuitive personality); normally I’d say that my 12-year-old would pass, since it’s way too young for her, but it has crafts.  As in, crafts that come with directions at the back of the book, so that you can make them yourself.  This being the case, it’s impossible to predict how it’s going to go over, so what can I say but–I’ll keep you posted!

I realized this week that I didn’t have specific book titles in mind for my older girls for Christmas, which was a serious problem, because books will be received for Christmas in this house!  After pondering and browsing online for things that would arrive in time, I decided to take a chance on Barry Deutsch’s Hereville:  How Mirka Got Her Sword, because my 9-year-old is obsessed with graphic novels, and who can resist the tagline on the cover–“Yet another troll-fighting 11-year-old orthodox Jewish girl.”  It’s currently on its way, if it’s not in one of the boxes that arrived today, so I started reading the library copy I already had in my stack of books-to-preview-for-the-kiddos late last night.

Yeah, I finished it today.  And sure, it’s not a LONG graphic novel, but still.  You fall right into it and it keeps you reading, and it’s quirky and delightful and out of the common way.  It’s also worth the risk I took in ordering it for Christmas before I read it, although there’s always the danger that the daughter it’s earmarked for might be scared (she’s unpredictable that way).  If you want a glimpse into orthodox Jewish life cleverly and well-disguised as an adventure involving an intrepid girl, a pig, and knitting needles–and really, who doesn’t?–than this book is for you.  I can’t wait to see what my girlies think of it!