Category: book review

"All The Messy Glory"

Posted in book review, death, funerals, mourning, Southern life6 Comments

Sometimes the perfect book comes along at the perfect time.  When I was in Memphis for my mom’s funeral last week, I stayed with a dear friend who is a children’s librarian.  She urged me to read Each Little Bird that Sings, by Deborah Wiles.  It’s the story of 10 year old Comfort Snowberger, who lives with her eccentric and endearing family in a funeral home in Snapfinger, Mississippi.

The Snowbergers have a good honest relationship with death, and Comfort has attended 247 funerals.  She reports on the funerals, hoping one day to get in the local paper for her obituaries which are much more exciting than the boring things that do get published.  She feels it is her duty to keep everyone’s spirits up.  It’s her contribution to the general family attitude of  being of service. 

However, Comfort is finding it too hard to be of service to her bratty cousin Peach.  She hates him and his whiny ways.  She also finds out that her best friend, Declaration, is in the process of dumping her for cooler girls.  Declaration is being mean and  has begun to taunt her for being around dead people all the time.  Her best friend, it seems, is her dog, Dismay. 

Then Uncle Edisto dies.  Then Aunt Florence.  These elders of the family take with them the wonderful sense of security that Comfort has grown up around.  That’s 249 funerals.  Who will be number 250?  Aunt Florence promised a sign for Peach at her funeral.  What happens takes Comfort so close to the reality of death that it impacts the whole family.  It portrays the changing nature of  friendship in a delicate but realistic way.  Life altering events, in fact, alter lives. 

This book was engaging and funny and sad.  It was also a reassuring companion as I navigated my mother’s funeral.  It helped me appreciate the deeper meaning of the hymns and the sermons and the rituals we went through to honor my mother. 

When we were young, our family was torn apart by divorce, alcoholism and poverty.  We never really got proper training in how to handle funerals, weddings or any other public rituals.  I never know what to do.  My mother had the foresight and faith to arrange her own Christian funeral, and my sister, who took care of Mom, dealt with all the final details.  All I had to do was go, mourn and commune with family and friends. 

My friend who gave me the book, it turns out, went to funerals all the time with her family.  One of the reasons she loved Each Little Bird that Sings, is that it reminded her so much of her childhood experience with beautiful funerals and the camaraderie that can happen around them.  Her family would decorate and clean the graves of family members and loved ones. They took extra flowers to decorate graves for neighbors who could no longer make the trip to the cemetery. 

I never really saw myself as a person to visit graveyards, but sure enough, now I want to visit my brother, my grandmother and my mother every time I go to Memphis.  The funeral provided a closure, but it also provided a gateway.  The small plots of ground that contains my family’s bones seem like passageways now — I can’t quite make it through to them, but I know they are there, removed from what Uncle Edisto refers to as the “messy glory” of life, but not gone from my messy life.

Each Little Bird That Sings has all the charm and culture of a small Mississippi town, or any rural town.  The names and phrasings and insights and humor seem unique to the South and this book highlights all the goodness that can be a part of Southern life.  Even though Memphis is a big city, it’s on the border of Mississippi and in the Mississippi River delta.  Reading this novel took me back home in so many ways that when I got back to Portland, Oregon, the first thing I did was order my own copy.  

Here’s a link to an excerpt on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4699100

From her website:
 http://deborahwiles.com/site/
Deborah Wiles is the author of two picture books, ONE WIDE SKY and FREEDOM SUMMER, and four middle-grade novels:  LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER, EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS (a 2005 National Book Award Finalist), THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS, and her new novel, COUNTDOWN, book one of The Sixties Trilogy for Young Readers.
Her work has received the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, the PEN/Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award. She has taught writing workshops to thousands of children and teachers all over the country. She teaches in the MFA in Writing for Children Program at Vermont College and lives in Atlanta, where she grows the world’s most beautiful zinnias, climbs Stone Mountain, and avoids the Atlanta traffic.

Review: Summer of the Mariposas

Posted in book review, guadalupe mccall, mythology10 Comments

I was a little skeptical about the premise of this book.  It was hard to believe that a group of girls would plot to transport the corpse of a stranger from their home in Texas to his home in Mexico.  However, the story is based on the Odyssey, and promised magic and divine encounters, so I gave it a try.  I was hooked from the first page.

The Summer of the Mariposas, by Guadalupe Garcia McCall, (Tu Books, 2012) tells the story of 5 sisters set adrift one summer after their father has abandoned the family and their mother is always at work.  Odilia, the eldest at 16, is responsible for the supervision of the sisters, but the story gives each sister a distinct voice and personality.  One of the many things I liked about this book was how well McCall handled the personality of the sisterhood.  It’s easy to have one main character, and Odilia is that, but her personality and character can’t be separated from those of her sisters.  McCall integrates the multiple views seamlessly.   

The town itself has entered a kind of enchantment, beset by a plague of butterflies.  There are echos of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but the butterflies here are a symbol of metamorphosis for the Garza girls.

Their life takes on a macabre turn when they are at their favorite forbidden swimming hole and the body of a dead man floats into their lives.  Hurting from the loss of their father, they devise a scheme to take the body back to his home in Mexico.  Odilia is visited by La Llorna, the weeping woman, who is said to have drown her children.  She encourages Odilia to take the journey and gives her a gift to help her along the way.

The story just zooms along from there.  The real journey is one of the heart to get back to the place of family, but the physical and metaphorical journey of returning a body, finding a grandmother, and getting back home, is the adventure of the book.  McCall is a colorful and poetic writer with a keen sense of plot.  She is quite sly and adept at replacing Greek gods with Aztec and Mexican ones. 

But where Greek mythology often has a sense of fated doom, this book is shot through with hope and merriment. That is not to say the girls don’t encounter real danger, terrifying beasts and bouts of immaturity.  The girls bicker, they forget the lesson they just learned, they yearn for candy.  The twin sisters have a private bond and want to be television stars.  One of the reasons they don’t call the cops is a fear they’ll look terrible on camera — they want to go home and change clothes first.  Little bits of humor like this kept the characters real even in their most surreal circumstances. 

This book also portrays a deep respect and love for the blending of cultures, the strength of families and the tenacity of women, young and old. The girls learn the power of kindness and forgiveness, as much as they learn to trust their own strengths.  It’s marketed as a Young Adult novel, but I recommend for any age.  In fact, an 89 year old friend is reading it now.  I hope you get to, too.

McCall won the Pura Belpre Award for her first  novel, Under The Mequite, which I’ll be reading soon.  She is also a published poet and school teacher.  

Here is a link to the publishers site with a great interview with Guadalupe Garcia McCall.
http://www.leeandlow.com/books/484/pb/summer_of_the_mariposas?oos=hc&is=pb

 

Review: The Where, The Why, and The How

Posted in Big Questions from Little People, book review, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, illustrationLeave a comment

Curiouser and Curiouser:  Books That Answer and Spark Questions

Do you ever long for a no-electronic media night?  I have two books to recommend that will make such a thing both a delight and a learning experience for everyone.

I’ve always have loved science and art.  Science always seemed to be more like an art to me, but it’s probably because I approach it that way.  The world is full of wonders — whole universes live in a drop of pond water, in a dribble of saliva. Science gives me the stories of those small universes and the ones that are bigger than I could ever imagine on my own.
  

So I highly recommend The Where, The Why, and The How, 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science, by Jenny Volvosky, Julia Rothman, and Matt Lamothe, Forward by David Macaulay, (Chronicle Books, 2012).  It provides a lot of scientific theory  and great splashes of color to illustrate what we can only speculate on. It’s promoted as “Science like you’ve never seen it before.”  The editors are partners in ALSO, a design firm based in Chicago and New York.  Julia Rothman is also author of the popular blog Book by It’s Cover. 

In the introduction, author and illustrator David Macaulay (The Way Things Work, Cathedral), talks about how we’ve become spoiled by an abundance of information.  “If you want to know anything, just Google it.”  He tells how a lively discussion about why eggs are shaped like eggs was abruptly ended by Wikipedia brought up on someone’s phone.  “The most fun, the period of wonder and funny guesses was lost as soon as the 3G network kicked in.  Fortunately, there are still mysteries that can’t be entirely explained in a few mouse clicks.  With this book, we wanted to bring back a sense of the unknown that has been lost in the age of information.  While scientists have figured out a great deal, much remains theoretical and sometimes opposing theories exist.”

Fifty scientists agreed to be a part of the project and explain theories around unanswered questions.  Then 75 of today’s “hottest” artists and illustrators were let loose to provide visual accompaniment — they were free to be as literal or imaginative as they liked. 

Often they seem to go off on an improvisational riff which can be both baffling and add to the general sense of wonder.  What is the origin of the moon?  What causes depression?  Why do pheremones work?   Why do humans have so much genome “junk”?   And there’s a lot of humor here.  Why do we blush?  Why do pigeons bob their heads when they walk?

The illustrations have a modern and retro feel.  “We chose a mix of well-known and up-and-coming illustrators, comic artists, fine artists and designers.”  It has a remarkable cohesion and sense of style without being too stylized.  The book is dense and has the heft and weight of a new text book and invites hours of perusal. 

You can see a video of the art of this amazing book here.
 http://vimeo.com/50786051#

While The Where, The Why and The How aims to rekindle curiosity,

Big Questions from Little People and Simple Answers from Great Minds, by Gemma Harris, (Ecco, 2012) is aimed at getting children curious as early as possible.  It’s a very entertaining and educational collection of short essays from philosophers, scientists, reporters, artists and doctors.  Harris collected questions from school children all over the world and then asked experts to answer them in a language the kids could understand.  The great minds include Mary Roach, Phillip Pullman, Sir David Attenborough and a host of other writers and scholars.  
Can animals talk?  Why can’t I tickle myself?  Are we all related?  Who invented chocolate?  Why are some people mean?  Do aliens exist?   
The editor is from Scotland, and the book originated in England, so many of the scholars are from England, Scotland, Wales, Australia and other English speaking countries. The book provides an opportunity to talk about how measurements and language differ in countries that speak “English.”
Both of these books will inspire wonder and give you a chance to think outside the electronic box.  They’re good to keep by the bed to inspire wonderful dreams.

Review: Little White Duck

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Back in the late 1980s, produced a radio program called Reading Aloud Here, for Memphis Community Radio. I got a chance to do an interview with the Chilean-born writer Ariel Dorfman.  He predicted that the comic book would be the most popular form of literature in the future.  It combined language and images so that people with limited reading skills could still enter the world of books.
Although he liked the idea, it seemed a grim prediction because my hope was that people would become more literate not less.  But I had to admit, I really enjoyed the cartoon histories that Larry Gonick created.  Now, some 30 years later, with the explosion of graphic novels and illustrated books, I am delighted that the language of pictures is becoming a part of literature.  After all, the first books were illustrated and illuminated. 
Of course, we can all make pictures with our minds and sometimes that’s the most sublime way of enjoying a story.  But I love art, especially narrative art and illustration. I’ve long thought some of our best contemporary artists are working in the field of children’s illustrated books.  I am delighted that the world of illustrated books is expanding into more mature stories. 
Which brings me to the exquisite Little White Duck: A Childhood in China by Na Liu and AndresVera Martinez, published in 2012 by Graphic Universe, a division of Lerner Publishing Group.  This is a wonderful book for older children and readers of all ages.   It’s a series of stories about the author’s childhood growing up with her sister in Wuhan, China in the 70s.  The first story pulls you in with a dream sequence of Da Qin – Big Piano, and Xiao Qin – Little Piano, flying a giant golden crane over the muted city rooftops. 
Na invites you in with a friendly “Ni Hao!” and explains why she is called Big Piano.  “Children are hardly ever called by their real names.  All children are given nicknames…because it was thought that bad luck and spirits couldn’t find you if your true name was never spoken out loud.  Everyone calls me Qin.”
Though the stories are set during a time of turmoil for China, the child’s eye perspective keeps it from being maudlin or severe.  The girls are loved by their parents, they want to be heroes, they want to have adventures, and they have lots of lessons to learn.  Their sweetness shines through the beautiful muted watercolor and ink illustrations of Martinez. 
Although the children seem to be “poor” – with outdoor plumbing, modest homes and very basic furniture, we come to understand through the stories how the family is rich – not only in the love that they share but in contrast to the peasant life of their parents.
“Don’t Waste Your Food – Children are Starving in China,” tells the parents’ tales over the dinner table as the girls are reprimanded for not finishing their rice.  The children starving in China are not remote foreigners, they are beloved relatives.  The fragile relationship between modern China and peasant China is again beautifully told in the final story of the “Little White Duck.”  Da Qin has a fine warm jacket with a beautiful white duck appliqued on it.  On a trip to her father’s village she comes to understand how much of a luxury it is. 
Na Liu’s short biography in the back of the book tells what it was like growing up in Wuhan in the 70s as China slowly began to open up to the world.  “My parents grew up during a time when Chinese leaders wanted to put an end to old traditions and replace them with a nation where all people are treated equally.  My parents benefited from the changes that took place.  My sister and I are from a newer generation…under the surface, my childhood stories reveal the drastic shift from how my parents grew up to how children of China live today.”  Her storytelling is engaging and spare.  It works seamlessly with the illustrations.
This is a “new world” sort of book in many ways.  The graphic novel format sets it apart, as well as the weaving together of history and personal story.  It’s also a collaboration between the author and her husband.   Na Liu is a doctor of hematology and oncology.  She moved to Austin, Texas, in 1999, to work as a research scientist for MD Anderson Cancer Center.  In Austin, she met and married the illustrator Andres Vera Martin.  He was raised in Austin and has created comics and illustration for Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, CBS/Showtime, and the New York Times.  The couple lives in Brooklyn, with their daughter, who inspired them to write this book.
“My husband, Andres, says he loves to hear stories about my childhood…’It’s stuff I can’t learn in books.’”  They talk about their process in an interview at the School LibraryJournal website, “Whenever he talks to someone, he wants to know all about them. He was curious about my family stories. I don’t think many children know what was going on in China at that time—it wasn’t an open society.”
Martinez’s palette for this book is muted and subtle with moments of brightness.  I particularly love the way gray skies sometime glow with the hint of sunlight.  The girls are drawn with big expressive eyes and round faces. They exude energy.  In the “Four Pests” and “Lei Feng Day”stories there are wonderful reproductions of Chinese educational posters.  Grim pictures of famine, peasant life, sparrow and rat hunting, are elevated by the detail and comforting use of color.  The details of everyday life pull you right into the story.  The panels lead readers into strange circumstances then back to the tender relationship between the girls, their parents, and their dreams.
We get so much of our information on other cultures through news of conflict.  Our understanding of other governments is often skewed to our own sense of how life “should” be.  This is a clear window into a culture that seems so different from our own.  The universal themes of love, and of family, resonate subtly through the work like a dream, like the viewpoint of a golden crane where perspective isn’t limited by borders.