Monthly Book Report: The Little Village of Book Lovers

This little gem of a book, by Nina George, was a library find.  Any title that invokes books and villages is likely to tempt me and so this book ended up in my library pile.  It was a new release, which means I only had it for two weeks before I had to scamper back to the library with it.  I forgot to make a picture before I returned it.  

But the story, set in rural France in the early 1960s, was lovely. We follow the life of Marie-Jeanne, who as an infant was tagged with the ability to see a spark of love on the face of anyone she meets, providing that the person they love is near at hand.  The story opens as Marie-Jeanne is an adolescent, being raised by the family who took her in after she was orphaned  As she matures, she realizes that her talent at seeing the spark of love on other people is not an ability that everyone possesses.  She can’t see her own spark and grows fearful that she may not find love.  She turns her attention to matchmaking, facilitated by books and her love of them.  

The story flows nicely and the novel is filled with rumination about love and happiness, anxiety and grief, and all the emotions in between.  It was a happy little read that kept me engaged and hopeful, two things I very much needed.

Ambitions

We’ve reached that point of the school year when I work round the clock, seven days a week.  My last few weekends have been jammed with a to-do list that is lengthier than I would like.  I long for an entire day to spend just as I would choose.  Such a day is on the horizon, but it’s not here yet.  

On Saturday and Sunday, I do treat myself to a long read - at least an hour or two spent with a book.  It’s my way of slowing down and relaxing.  But in true Sassafras fashion, my ambition  to read even more than my allotted quotient often gets the better of me.  Case in point:  Saturday. 

Among the day’s to-do l list was a trip to drop off my ballot for the June primary here in NJ.  And since the ballot box is near the library, I brought a library book to return.  And then I took the time to stroll the shelves.  And then…..

Well, no surprise there, really.  By the time they are due - June 24 - I will be done with this school year and I will have had a nice long weekend to spend as I please.  Until then, I’ve got a stack of books to cheer me on.

Monthly Book Report: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

 Maggie Smith is a poet and writer whom I found via the Internet, I think via Instagram but maybe Twitter, back in the before Elon days.  That I found her first via her poetry is interesting because I am sometimes an impatient reader of poetry.  Over time, I read more and more of Smith’s work and when this book came out earlier this Spring, I was eager to read it. 

It’s labelled a memoir and in certain ways, it is that.  It’s Smith’s story of the end of her marriage and what comes next; what she learns to make of the life that remains for her and especially for her two children.

So much of the book resonated with me.  Smith writes with clarity and intention about the end of her marriage and the pain of the loss.  She sorts out the matter of being a mother and a wife and the story is about how she finds her way forward as a mother who is no longer the wife.  She writes of feeling that a family of herself, two children, and a dog, feels impossibly smaller; smaller than just the subtraction of one, the husband and father who left.   

I’ve made this journey myself, not as a wife but as a partner.  At the time, my child was around the same age as Smith’s youngest.  Like single mamas everywhere, Smith finds that the days blur into one another, a frenzy of the activity involved in caring for others with very little time left for oneself.  But it is in the finding of one’s self, and the nurturing of her, that Smith finds her way forward.  This path is paved with both grief and a deep and abiding sense of happiness.  That the two can occur simultaneously is a lesson that I learned all those years ago when JT’s other mother left. 

I’ve thought about that time and those years a great deal lately.  Part of that has surely been the reality of my life as a parent right now.   A great deal of it is associated with the ending of my relationship with T.  First nine years and now eleven years of time with another human being whom I thought of as a partner for life is a lot to think about; two losses that I sometimes feel as failures on my part.  I am again at work to find myself on the other side.  I did it before, as a mother of a young child, and now I am doing that without needing to care for a little.  It’s different this time around, in some ways harder and in other ways easier.  I am not thinking about my obligations as the mama of a young child but I am certainly thinking about my son as I look toward the path ahead.  This time, I am aware that I will likely grow old alone, that plans for my future that once seemed like my bedrock turned out to be gravel.  

I’ve re-paved the road before and I can do it again.  Though I don’t know Maggie Smith, her book seemed like a friend who can help and that was a great comfort; a reminder that I there is a strength at my core that can see me through.

The Waning Days of Summer Reading

The arrival of June moves my reading habit into its highest gear and all Summer long, I consume books with a greater ferocity than usual.  Since the pandemic, I’ve taken to using my generous sticker collection to make bookmarks and in the Summer, each book gets its own bookmark. I make them by the gross because they make me happy.  I started a new book the other day and, as is my habit, chose a new bookmark.  As it’s August, the supply has thinned.  

But not so much that I had no choice.     

As I reviewed my options, a horrifying thought arose: Summer is coming to a close.  Classes start in 4 weeks.  That development will markedly slow my reading ways.  I’m not quite ready for it.

December Book Report: Christmas Stories

When I was truly able to settle into Winter Break, I pulled out three holiday books to read.  Two of them, the books by Miss Read and Alice Taylor, are long-standing holiday favorites.  Reading them is a tradition that I look forward to and always enjoy.  The third, a mystery by Georgette Heyer, was new to me.  I read them all at once for the days before Christmas and they were a happy pause from the real world. 

Books are my comfort and joy in all times and that has especially been the case in this difficult year when there was extra time to read even as I had a greater need than usual to be comforted by good stories.   I am always grateful for the power of the written word and this year that was especially true.

July Book Report: Mrs. Griffin Sends Her Love

I first discovered Miss Read books in 2006, a very hard year in my life.  I saw a description of two Miss Read books in the Bas Bleu book catalog and took a chance on these two stories —- the first two books in the Thrush Green series, published in 1959 and 1961, respectively .

I loved the books at once and was best pleased (to use a Miss Read phrase) to discover that there were many more to be read, both in the Thrush Green collection and also a whole other series about a town on the English Downs named Fairacre.

These books and the stories within them were both my salvation in that year and a source of great joy to me since I first read them.  In theory, books set in mid-20th century rural England had almost nothing in common with my life as a 21st century single mama living in the the suburbs.  In fact, they proved timeless and reminded me to enjoy the small pleasures in life - a cup of tea, the vexing pleasure of abundant garden produce, the chirp of the birds on a Spring morning, the day in February when there is still a bit of sunlight to be had after 5 pm, the couch of Fall leaves on a cool morning, the first blooms of the coming Spring….really the list is endless.

Dora Saint, the writer behind the Miss Read books, passed away in 2012, at the age of 101.  This means that though her stories live on (and are among my favorite re-reads), there are no new works to be sought. Or that was the case until recently, when Orion Publishing released a collection of essays and small compositions that were the first Dora Saint works; all bits published in English newspapers and magazines that weren’t published in the United States.

New Miss Read! 

I bought a copy straight away and set it in my to-be-read pile with a great deal of excitement.  The book has light editing and commentary by Dora Saint’s daughter, Jill Saint, and re-productions of many of the illustrations from the original Miss Read books.  

At just over 300 pages, it was a splendid treat to spy in my book pile as the worst days of the pandemic raged on here in my corner of the world.  I read the introduction and back cover endlessly, but I saved the book itself to read after school was out.  Though I am typically the sort of voracious reader who gobbles up a good book in just a few days, I treated myself to just a little bit each day, so as to enjoy my treat just a little bit longer.

The volume ends with some classroom vignettes from the early drafting of the Fair Acre books.  Though Miss Read preferred the stories of her Thrush Green books (a fact I discovered in this volume),  the Fair Acre stories are my favorites.  Written in first person by the schoolteacher herself, whom Saint describes as a woman who, “…was born fully clothed in sensible garments and aged about forty,” they connect with me in ways too numerous to explain.

Ahhh, Miss Read.  Always practical and with a sentimental heart that never turns maudlin, she loves her students for the children they are, with practical affection and a tolerant patience that I both admire and seek to achieve.  This collection was a balm for my anxieties and a reminder of the joy to be found in the simple pleasures of life, like a good book to be read on the front porch come some happy Summer morning.

May Book Report: Florida

Florida is the first Lauren Groff book I have read.  It won’t be the last.  The book is a collection of short stories linked together by, fittingly, by the idea of the state.  Florida - the weird, oddball Florida that makes the state its own Fark category - is at the center of it all.

I am no fan of Florida the state but I do love the South and I always enjoy a story with a strong sense of place.  The further north you travel in Florida the more Southern the state is and Groff clearly knows this truth.  Florida, its teaming plants, its steamy, thick air, and its oddball ways are the character that is consistent across all of the these stories in this gem of a collection.

The stories are more descriptions of events in time and space than they are traditional narratives.  The characters who exist are well-developed, not always likeable but Groff is sympathetic to them and their humanity and, consequently,  so is the reader.

I am not usually a fan of short stories, though some of my favorite authors (Pam Houston and Bailey White come to mind) are short-story writers so maybe I am just particular about short stories.  Groff’s collection will go on that list of likes.  Like Houston and White, she can turn a beautiful phrase and there are dozens in this collection:

“…I decided that if I had to live in the South, with its boiled peanuts and its Spanish moss dangling like armpit hair, at least I wouldn’t barricade myself with my whiteness in a gated community.  Isn’t  it…dicey? people our parents’ age would say, grimacing, when we told them where we lived, and it took all my willpower not to say, Do you mean black, or just poor?”

“On my nighttime walks, the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums.”

To describe an incommunicative father and his leery son , Groff writes, “language wilted between them.”

Of a women remembering fragments of poems, she writes of “a strange, sad poem, Blake and Dickinson and Frost and Milton and Sexton, a tag-sale poem in clammy meter…”

Florida itself is in the language of this book’s dangling Spanish moss, aquariums; wilted, clammy, and thickly humid.

There are 11 stories in Florida  and I treated myself to one each morning over the last days of May, as the weather finally warmed up enough to be comfortable out on the front porch in the early morning.  I consumed them with my morning coffee and each made a companion for my busy days.  When I lay my head down at the end of each full day, the thought of a new Groff story come the morning passed through my weary mind.  It was - and is - something good to anticipate.

March Book Report: Excellent Women

One of the nice things about being me is that I always have a steady supply of books to read.  On my desk are two generous stacks of new books to be read.  I’ve an entire bookshelf (floor to ceiling with six long shelves available) of books I’ve read and loved and will happily read again.  I’m not likely to fall short if, say a pandemic strikes and I can’t leave the house.  

Ahem.

These days, that’s a very handy trait.  I’m reading a lot here in my locked down world and the end of March featured a great re-read: Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women.  Set in 1950s London and told from the point of view of Mildred, herself an “excellent woman” the book is an engaging observation of human nature.  The phrase “excellent women” is British and refers to unmarried gentlewomen of a certain age.  Women like Mildred abounded in British society in the 20th century, when more women than usual were unmarried thanks to a shortage of marriageable men generated by the World Wars of the period.

Mildred is unmarried and in her mid 30s, the daughter of a now-deceased vicar.  She lives happily alone in London and is just as happily a self-declared spinster.  She tells a story that is honest and offers a pointed commentary on her world, rather in the tone of a Jane Austen narrator.  This is delightful and just my sort of read.  As is the case in some of my favorite English novels, the arc of the story is focused on the seemingly hum drum nature of daily life.  In the moments, nothing magnificent occurs.  But lives, meaningful ones, are lived.  And I always find that it is the small moments that make a rich life.  This book was a re-read and a good one for a time period when current events were anxiety producing.  I read it with a cozy blanket and a cat on my lap, one of the small daily moments of my life that makes for much satisfaction and happiness.

February Book Report: The Young Clementina

I’ve been a fan of D.E. Stevenson books for the last few years.  Stevenson was Scottish and wrote in the mid-20th century.  She was prolific, writing over 40 novels over the course of her lifetime.  Some were written as series; others as singletons.  All are a treat.  I absolutely love Stevenson’s Miss Buncle series.  This month’s book was another of her works,  The Young Clementina.  

Like all the Stevenson books I have read, it has a well-developed story at the core.  The novel is filled with well-drawn characters and a narrator who is sympathetic to them all (well, right up to the moment when they no longer deserve sympathy).  There is amusement and wisdom in the story, which turns on the life of Charlotte Dean, who, after a series of complications,  is asked to look after her young niece Clementina.  Charlotte takes on the task out of a sense of duty and obligation and, despite the challenges, makes good on the job despite some difficulties that befall she and Clementina along the way.  In the end, Charlotte get a happy ending.  As she is a woman who very much deserves the happiness that Stevenson’s story serves her, that felt right.  I always love a happy ending and I enjoyed this story very much.

I will continue to keep my eyes peeled for Stevenson books.  They are always entertaining, filled with amusing characters and the sorts of comeuppances and happy endings I most enjoy in a book.  

That’s happy!

Competitive Reading

Yesterday afternoon, I curled up on the sofa with my current book.  I’m nearly done reading it so, as is my habit, I had two others nearby, nominees for the next book I will read.  At some point, T came downstairs and found me there, asleep with three books on my lap.  When I woke up, she teased me about it, amused that I took to the sofa with three books, as if some sort of book apocalypse might befall me there in the living room.

I defended myself by pointing out that I am nearly done with the book du jour and was auditioning candidates for my next read.  She laughed but I could tell she thinks I am a crazy book lady.  As I am in fact a crazy book lady, I took no offense.

I record books that I have read on Goodreads and, in keeping with my competitive spirit, participate in their yearly Reading Challenge, whereby you pick a number of books you expect to read in the year and the app records the books.  This morning,  I logged in to record the book I finished the night before.

At this point, Goodreads informed me that I am behind in the reading challenge for 2020.  Though this is an entirely artificial matter and there is neither reward nor bragging rights involved (I am private on Goodreads and so no one but me sees it), I am quietly freaking out.  Behind on reading?  Me?  What will become of me?  How will I face myself each day?  And most importantly.....How can I read more?

It is ironic that this terrifying news happened less than 24 hours after I fell asleep on the sofa with three books in my lap.    I feel like Goodreads needs to check in with T, who can attest to my bona fides as a good reader.

November Book Report: Over the Gate

On Instagram, I follow a handful of book readers, among them a group calling itself #missreadalong.  It’s a group that loves Miss Read books as much as I do and for some months of the year, the group reads a particular Miss Read book.  This November, the pick was Miss Read’s Over the Gate and of course I participated.

I’ve read this book before, but these days that is rather the point of a Miss Read book for me.  I’ve been reading them since 2006 and in every way, they have been comforting and happy reads.  The stories, which are unfailingly rooted in the joys and frustrations of everyday life, offer companionship and comfort.

There are two series in the Miss Read collection:  Fairacre and Thrush Green.  Each represents its own tiny universe of characters with amusing foibles of their own.  I love them both because of the way they are populated by very human people.  The Fairacre series is narrated by the wry Miss Read, the head teacher at the Fairacre school, a woman whose heart is kind without being sappy.  

The stories were written as a series and, as time passed, author Dora Saint filled in gaps in the collections, sometimes with stories of the characters who populate the books.  That is the case with Over the Gate, a collection of stories about Fairacre.

Nothing big ever happens in Fairacre and that is the charm of the stories - they are about daily life.  In Miss Read’s evocative descriptions of the everyday, there is always grace to be found.  When I need that grace I return to the stories, reading and re-reading them as often as I please.  That’s happy!

October Book Report: Thirteen Moons

Back in June, to start my Summer, I read Varina by Charles Frazier.  I enjoyed the book a great deal and, as I finished the last pages, I heard an interview with Frazier in which he talked about his second book, Thirteen Moons.  Since I’d now read two of Frazier’s books (he also wrote Cold Mountain), and liked them both a great deal, it seemed like picking up Thirteen Moons was a plenty good idea.

Indeed it was.

Set in the 1800s, the novel is the story of Will Cooper, a 12 year old orphan whose aunt and uncle sign a contract to bind him to a merchant.  The merchant owns stores in the mountains on the edge of Indian land and has “hired” Will to man a store.  At 12 years old and with no other choices, Will travels to the isolated outpost to manage the store.  Over time, he makes acquaintance and then friends with the native tribes and their leaders who live in the area.  Often alone for hours of each day, he reads and becomes a self-educated lawyer.  Will is intelligent and curious and as he grows past his loneliness and into adulthood, the tribes, and two of their leaders, adopt him as their own.  He becomes a wealthy and successful man, one who straddles two worlds and comes to prefer the natives to the American whites.

The novel begins as an elderly Will reflects on the long years of his life.  His story meanders through the past and the events Will has lived through.  He discusses the final years of Indian removal and the lives of the tribal members who stayed in the isolated mountains of Georgia and North Carolina.  He details the politics of the eras and discusses the expansion of railroad lines.  He ruefully reflects on his participation in the Civil War and considers its aftermath.

The book’s understanding of history is powerful.  It’s discussion of the events of the mid-1800s in the lives of Will and the native tribes whom he knows and loves is filled with the gluttony for land and intolerance that were at the heart of Indian  removal policy.  Frazier also takes care to tell the story from the Indian point of view.  It’s heartbreaking, of course.  Frazier takes care that the reader sees it all with open eyes.

In his acknowledgments, Frazier takes pains to tell the reader that this is story of the imaginary Will Cooper.  Though there are parallels to the real life of William Holland Thomas, this is not Thomas’s story.  In Frazier’s telling of Will’s story, we are offered the 18th century and all its warts from a variety of views.  The tale is sometimes bewildering but always generous to the human spirit despite its failings.  I enjoyed the novel very much and it’s a keeper; a book I will re-read over the years.

Bookish

I start every summer with a pile of books to be read.  For the most part, I make steady progress through that pile, picking up a new read every week or so.  Books get added to the pile when the mood strikes; others are set aside for a different time.  The existence of a list of to-be-read books is a source of enduring happiness for me; a way of looking forward with ease in my heart.  I see it as a comfort; as a way of looking after myself.

Books are that way for me: comfortable friends who make life richer and happier.  Summer’s relaxed pace and long, warm days ensures that I have plenty of time to sit on the front porch and read.  Come September, mornings on the front porch are too dark to read.  If there is time when I get home, I will steal it on the porch with my current book.  But it’s not as dependable as it is in the Summer. and now it feels like a treat  In the busy days at the start of school, there’s no time to mourn the seasonal transition.  That waits for Winter, when I cozy under a blanket on the sofa and look out the front door to the porch, marveling at the hours I spent out there just a few months back and sometimes longing for the ease of days when I can step outside in flip flops without fear of frostbite.

Seasons change; my habits do not.  I read whenever I have the time.. There is less time when school is in session but I travel everywhere I can with my book. I grab the time that is available.  I maintain a list of books to be read and eagerly look forward to my next read.

That’s happy!

August Book Report: Washington Black

I picked up Washington Black by Esu Edugyan as part of an assortment to be discussed at monthly faculty book club meetings at my school.  It was a book that had been on my list for a while thanks to its inclusion on a bunch of “best of 2018” lists.  I’m so glad that I picked it up because it is a powerful book one I enjoyed.

The book is the story of Washington Black, an 11 year old who is enslaved in Barbados when the story opens.  The author shows us slavery from Wash’s point of view and though it’s not news to experience the profound disempowerment and denial of humanity that the institution of slavery created, it is powerful to experience it in the eyes of a child.  Wash knows who he is and what that means and he is familiar with the expectations in the sugarcane fields where he spends his days.  When he and his mother Kit are unexpectedly asked to serve as house slaves for an evening, sorting out the expectations of this temporary new role fill him with fear about the expectations.  In his uncertainty, the reader sees how precarious life is for the enslaved, who are denied agency even as they are expected to act.  In these scenes of the novel, Wash’s profound disempowerment resonates.

Wash attracts the interest of a kind man, Titch, the brother of the plantation owner.  From that seemingly random connection, Wash’s life will experience profound change.   As Wash escapes slavery and begins to make his way in the 19th century, the reader travels along.  The uncertainty of his status lingers long past Wash’s escape from slavery and Edugyan makes much of that element of his experience.  As the reader comes to feel real affection and anxiety for Wash, Edugyan has the opportunity to ask us into the world of inequality and anxiety that belongs to Wash and people like him.  I found myself thinking about the themes of the novel when I wasn’t reading and and immersed in the story when I was reading.  It was the best of both experiences.

Washington Black deserves its spot on “best of” lists, both for the splendid writing and also for the power of the story.  It’s a book that will linger long past the last page and one I look forward to re-reading time and time again.

July Book Report: Free Food for Millionaires

I read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko earlier this year and found it brilliant.  I picked up her earlier debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, because I had liked Pachinko so much.  As was the case with Pachinko, I loved Lee’s style and this book lured me right in.

Set in New York City of the 1990s, the book opens as the story of Casey Han, a second generation Korean immigrant who has made good and pleased her parents by graduating from an Ivy League university and now needs to find her way forward.  With a younger sister studying science at MIT, Casey’s economics degree doesn’t seem practical to her parents.  Caught between her desire to make money and demonstrate the success her parents expect and the reality of being a freshly-minted college grad with realms of confidence but no life plan, Casey is struggling.

The novel navigates the life of Korean immigrants finding their way in the United States and shows us the high stakes that Casey and her sister experience in the world.  In that sense, it’s a timeless American novel.

It’s well-written, with an honest and acerbic narrative style that is right up my alley.  The characters are well-developed and the third person omniscient narrative style ensues that we have the chance to view the world for their point of view.  Even though there were characters I did not like or respect, the style of the narrative ensured that I still found a way to sympathize with them. 

Lee has become must-read for me and it’s nice to know that she’s got a few more novels in her.  

Talisman

I am a voracious reader and summer is when I come into my own, with time enough to read at least five or six books a month.   All year long, I keep a stack of books to be read.  I build it like a wall to protect against the anxiety about the prospect of "nothing good to read" a terrifying notion that has never actually materialized.  A reckless joy seizes me when summer arrives.  I travel everywhere with my book, eager for quiet moments that I can fill by reading.  

I seek information from other trusted readers, especially lists of happy books, because I prefer that kind of story.  All year long, I add to my pile of books-to-be-read, mixing history and biography with fiction and especially collecting the titles of books which combine the two.

When I finish a particularly good book, I like to savor the quiet in my mind when the last words have been read.  I don’t feel loss because I return to good books as a sort of reader’s reunion, picking up time with the characters of a pleasing story whenever the mood strikes.  Even so, a first reading is always special and there are invariably moments as the number of pages remaining dwindles that I think about slowing my pace.  But I don’t really slow down.  Instead, I scan my bookshelf and select my next read, a talisman against the ending of my current book.  

January 31 Book Report: Caroline: Little House Revisited

My affection for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books is unbounded and enduring.  There were the first real books I read for myself as a child and the stories and illustrations formed the backbone of my lifelong joy in books and a good story.  I read them endlessly as a girl, took a bit of a break as a teenager, but returned to them in my 20s.  I read a few of them each year, picking up one or another as one would make plans to see a good friend.  I’ve also read everything else about the Ingalls family that I can find.  From Laura’s newspaper columns to the writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter, to dozens and dozens of more serious historical understandings of Laura’s life and experiences, I’ve devoured it all.  

Because of that deep interest, I know that while Laura based her children’s stories on her life as a pioneer girl, some of what she wrote was only a shard of the truth of her life and family.  The historian in me understands that the Little House books are both an artifact of their time (they were originally written in the 1930s and 1940s) as well as the post-Civil War America they sought to chronicle.  I know that the story of the Ingalls family that Wilder chose to share was a sanitized version of her past.  As a child, I loved the idea that these stories were “true.”  As an adult, I see that a child’s “true” is much different than an adult’s.  The distinctions and contradictions in the Laura Ingalls Wilder stories don’t bother me so much as engage my inner historian.  No better the truths, there are enduring stories and lessons told in Wilder’s novels about Laura and her family.  Those stories have shaped my life.  

From Laura’s books, I learned so much.  I knew the beauty of the prairie before I even set foot in Nebraska.  Even when life in the rural Midwest was a challenge, I had learned to love and appreciate the landscape.  I learned to appreciate the hardships and hard work of the pioneer settlers who headed west to find land and opportunity.  I learned to take pleasure in things made by hand and created by hard work.  I learned the power of Mother Nature.  I learned the value of kindness and saw the value of patience and grace well before I was able to consistently practice those traits on my own.

This last lesson came from Ma, Laura’s mother, Caroline, who is a prominent in all of Wilder’s stories.  Read from a child’s point of view, Wilder’s books seem to celebrate her father.  As an adult, reading Wilder’s series for my own pleasure and later to my son as he was growing up, it is Laura’s mother, Caroline, known as Ma, who stands out.  She is notable for her patience and grace, for her steadfast care and nurturing of her family, and for a resilience that is really quite remarkable.  From her, I understood the power behind such ideas such as “least said, soonest mended” and “what can’t be changed must be endured.” No matter the hardship, Ma turned toward the light.  I respect that about her.

When I first learned about Sarah Miller’s book, Caroline, I knew that I would read it.  Miller traces the events that Wilder outlined in her second Little House book, Little House on the Prairie, but tells the story entirely from Caroline’s point of view.  The book is simply dazzling, both for the power of the author’s words and for her ability to imagine Caroline, a character at once familiar and still mysterious to her readers.

It’s a tricky task to tell a well-known story from a different point of view, but Miller does it well.  She works with the contours of the Little House on the Prairie story that Laura told, gently inserting historical truths.  As was the case with Wilder’s books for children, Miller’s book is about a close-knit pioneer family.  It is about resilience and hard work; love and family.  

This book was my first read of 2019 and it set the bar high.  It was a treat to return to the world of the Ingalls family.  It will join my collection of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, a story that I will return to again and again.  That’s the highest complement I can pay a book.

December Book Report: Last Christmas in Paris

The arrival of the holiday season and some much-welcomed time off  brought me some extra time to read, a welcome way to close my year.  I picked up Last Christmas in Paris, a novel written by Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, because it looked like just my sort of satisfying read.  I was right about that.

This book is set during WWI and, as 2018 closed it seemed fitting to spend some time thinking again about this war.  This year is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended WWI and in so many ways the 20th and 21st centuries were defined by this horrible war.  The historian in me is endlessly fascinated by the conflict.  The reader in me likes a good story and this one, recommended by the reviewers at Bas Bleu, was a great read.

The story is told from the English point of view in a series of letters exchanged between a young woman, Evie, who is just an adult as as the war breaks out.  She writes to her brother and other friends who are deployed in France and the exchanges are the backbone of the novel.  As each year of the war closes, the reader is treated to an observation from 1968, as an ailing Tom, a frequent recipient of Evie’s letters and now at the end of a long life, reviews the years of the long-ago war.  He's in Paris, where he has come to spent his last Christmas.  

The novel is written in letter format (think Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society) and, like that novel, has reflections on both the horror of war as well as the more mundane aspects of life lived while at war.  Evie exchanges letters with a handful of people and, like many young women of that era, realizes that she wants more from life than the narrow social confines of her privileged upbringing.  For one thing, that privilege doesn’t protect her from the losses of the war and, for another, she craves the ability to help out.  She eventually comes to write a column about the war on the homefront and though the reader never experiences Evie’s life after the war, we do come to understand that the war will open up enduring opportunities for her.

Much of the novel’s letters traffic in the hope that WWI will be the war to end all wars, an idea that the characters both embrace and believe.  Given the history that would follow, the notion is especially bittersweet and gives the reader much to consider.  The novel is well-written, with a strong sense of the historical time and engaging in those details.  I enjoyed it even more than I expected and it has earned a spot on my bookshelf.

August Book Report: Miss Read

I’ve written before about how much I love Miss Read’s books.  Over the years, both the Thrush Green and Fair Acre series have provided me hours of happiness and companionship.  I love these books, the characters in them, and the feelings and sentiments they describe and nurture.  

I read a lot of books in August but in the middle of the month, as I got closer and closer to moving JT to college, it was the Miss Read books to which I turned.  I re-read a handful from the Fair Acre series, aware that they would provide a familiar and pleasing comfort and while I rode the roller coaster of emotions involved in sending JT to college.

True to form, the familiar stories made me laugh and provided happy comfort, a reminder that lives are made of many moments.  My favorite books are just this kind of story, an entry into a another world; one that feels comforting and comfortable with characters who are companions that linger well past the final chapter of the story.

That’s happy!

July Book Report: The Underground Railroad

When I finally picked up Colson Whitehead’s book, it came with some pretty serious expectations on my part.  I haven’t read all of Whitehead’s works but what I’ve read I’ve enjoyed.  I’ve read and listened to interviews with him and admired his way with words.  So I figured I would like this book.  But as high as my expectations were, they weren’t high enough.

Whitehead’s novel is the story of Cora, a young woman born into slavery on a Georgia plantation.  Whitehead’s descriptions of the slavery that Cora experiences are both harrowing and universal to the institution that existed in this nation for nearly 300 years.  They bear witness to already well-known historical descriptions of America’s peculiar institution and also manage to be fresh, as we witness life from Cora’s point of view.  She is resilient and fragile all at once and when she finally makes her escape, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I shouldn’t have.

Whitehead’s imagined escape route is a literal railroad built underground with well-meaning conductors but nevertheless imbued with all the fear and anxiety of descriptions of the “real” underground railroad.  Cora’s flees into places in Whitehead’s imagination, where escaped slaves only briefly feel the safety that whites get to take for granted.  Cora makes her way through Whitehead’s re-imagined South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana but never quite finds the comfortable freedom for which she has always longed.

As Cora moves toward a more secure freedom, she learns to read and finds both happiness and escape in the words she can decode.  As the reader of her story, I found the same in Whitehead’s words.  He writes splendidly and precisely, with vivid descriptions that will linger in my mind.  Cora’s story is both individually hers and a universal imagination of the power of freedom in the life of an individual denied its most basic protections.  It’s a novel well-worth the emotional energy it required.