Should I stay or should I go? A slave contemplates

Holy cow, this book doesn't hold back.  When I told my friend that I planned to read Wench on audiobook, I asked her if she thought it would be too graphic for an audiobook.  She said no.  "I don't think the graphic-ness was the hard part.  The utter despair of slavery was."

And she was right.  This book is really good in the way that Kindred was really good - it makes slavery so immediate and personal that you cannot look away and you cannot think about it in vague, abstract terms.

Because I'm lazy and want to get to the meat of this review, and because the book summary is actually pretty good, here's how Publishers Weekly describes the novel:

In her debut, Perkins-Valdez eloquently plunges into a dark period of American history, chronicling the lives of four slave women—Lizzie, Reenie, Sweet and Mawu—who are their masters' mistresses. The women meet when their owners vacation at the same summer resort in Ohio. There, they see free blacks for the first time and hear rumors of abolition, sparking their own desires to be free. For everyone but Lizzie, that is, who believes she is really in love with her master, and he with her. An extended flashback in the middle of the novel delves into Lizzie's life and vividly explores the complicated psychological dynamic between master and slave. Jumping back to the final summer in Ohio, the women all have a decision to make—will they run? Heart-wrenching, intriguing, original and suspenseful, this novel showcases Perkins-Valdez's ability to bring the unfortunate past to life.

Lions on the Loose in a War Zone

Pride of Baghdad is one of those books I would see everywhere.  Every library branch I go to seems to have it on the shelf, and every bookstore stocks it, too.  After at least three years of running across it and never picking it up, I bowed to the inevitable this week and impulsively checked it out from the library.  I thought the fates had finally aligned and I would meet a book soul mate.  Eh, not quite.

Pride of Baghdad is about a family of lions that, in the midst of America's bombing of Baghdad, escapes from the zoo.  They are overwhelmed by the experience of being out on the streets and having to catch their own food, and the artwork really illustrates the impact of war.

But in my opinion, the impact of war has been illustrated in other books in a much more vivid and moving way than it is here.  This book is based on a true event that really is a great basis for a story - starving lions were found by US military personnel in Baghdad - but it was just not executed in a way that drew me in.  The lions had no real depth to them.  They just went from one danger to the next, one episode to the next, and while I understood they were scared, I didn't really understand anything about them as individual characters.

They wanted to escape the zoo - okay, fine.  That doesn't really make them that unique (I would guess).  And then, they get culture shock.  That's reasonable, seeing as they are in a human war zone.  And then, they encounter a psychotic bear.  Well... okay, but why?  It was just a series of occurrences that didn't feel connected.  While the story moved forward chronologically, I didn't feel like there was any progression in plot.  And then the book just ends so abruptly and I assume I was supposed to feel sad and bitter about the heartlessness of war but instead, I just felt annoyed that I had read this whole book and still couldn't differentiate between the two lionesses.

So, sadly, all that karmic energy that kept putting this book in front was all for naught!  Hopefully the next time that happens, it's more of a successful pairing.

An Aussie Feminist Rejects the Empire

One of the reasons I don't like setting official reading goals is because at some point in the year, I either start panicking or I give up completely.  So instead I set myself unofficial goals or guidelines that I would generally like to meet.

But I realize my unofficial goals for this year - to read more authors of color, to read more from my own shelves, and to continue learning more about women's history - have started to stress me out.  I am behind in both goals and I am having trouble balancing them.  When I pick out a new book to read, I constantly wonder if I should pick a different one that may align better with my unofficial goals.  And then I sometimes do pick a different one but am left feeling upset that I picked a book solely to meet a goal instead of just reading what I wanted.

And that's really all the build-up to my picking up this book.  It's been on my shelf for a long time and it's a feminist's memoirs of growing up in the Outback.  That meets two unofficial goals!  So recently, I picked up Jill Ker Conway's memoir The Road from Coorain.

For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf

When a book title is as long and descriptive as this one is, I feel no need to be creative in my post titles.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is the second book by Ntozake Shange that I have read (both via audiobook).  The first was Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo.  Both are excellent.  For Colored Girls started as a series of poems and then was turned into a stage play.  It's also been made into a movie.  I am not sure how to describe it, so I'll share the book description here, though it is not particularly descriptive:

From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater and on Broadway, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encom­passing . . . every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

In her introduction to the book (which is also brilliant), Shange shares the story of how the work evolved.  She describes it as a "choreopoem," in which many individual pieces come together to form one statement.  She also talks about how the work has resonated with so many people across cultural and societal lines.  It's not only performed by African-American women.  It was also adapted by white women in Appalachia to talk about the class system.  It was done in Brazil.  It was done with an all-male cast.  It's been adapted in so many ways, by so many people, and it was so moving to hear Shange describe how amazing it is to have created a work that touches people so deeply.  I also loved, loved, loved Shange's thoughts on feminism and how she wrote the work for women.  When men decry it as being anti-Black male, they are turning something very personal to women to something about themselves, which is not what Shange intended or wanted at all.  It was so enlightening to read and I have a serious literary girl-crush on Shange.

There is no real plot to for colored girls.  It doesn't need one.  It's a series of poems that describe such a range of situations and emotions and experiences that I can't imagine reading this only one time.  It's the sort of work you read and you just know if you read it again in a few years, you'll get even more out of it, or what will resonate with you then will be so completely different than what you got out of it this time.  I'm so disappointed that I didn't read this book until I was 30.  I feel like 20 year old me would have gotten a lot out of it, too.

I did this as an audiobook, and it was amazing.  I surprisingly really enjoyed hearing all the stage directions and notes in the play.  I also enjoyed listening to the poems.  As I found out when listening to Make Lemonade, it is less intimidating to approach long-form poetry through audiobook than through written form.  That said, I do think this is a book I will want to read physically.  I want to savor the words and linger over phrases, dogear the pages and copy down quotes.  It is a book that I am excited to read again, and I hope that all of you who haven't read it yet will pick it up - I am sure it will resonate with you just as it did with me.

It's like stealing rice from your mother

 Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a man born and raised ("raised" is a generous term) in a notorious prison camp in North Korea.  He is one of very few people to ever have escaped from a prison camp and his life story - one of constant threats, severe hunger, and terrible punishment - is a harrowing account of life under a totalitarian regime.

Escape from Camp 14 is a pretty short book.  The audio version was only about 5 hours long.  There's a lot of information packed in there, though, and to be perfectly honest - there's only so much of this sort of book a person can take.  It's not heart-warming and there aren't many moments that make you believe that people are generally good at heart.  And what's most disturbing is that this is not horror that occurred in the past, that we can hear about, shudder, and then snuggle more comfortably under our warm blankets and think, "Thank goodness that sort of thing could never happen these days."  Because that sort of thing is happening these days.  And when the people doing it have access to an arsenal of nuclear weapons that they could set off at any time.... well, that makes it even more horrifying.

So many things about North Korea are disturbing.  An entire population of people that suffers from malnutrition and starvation just so that a few people can live a luxurious life that they denounce so strongly to all their followers.  A massive cult with no real access to the outside world and the widely-held belief that their leader (and the leaders before him) is descended from heaven.  People who feel no affection, love, or loyalty for one another.  There is so much here that is hard to believe, that seems straight out of a dystopia novel.  But it is real.  And even now, when it seems as though everyone has instant access to all information, it still happens.  And you keep thinking, "There's just no way this regime can last."  But it does.  And it makes people do horrible things.  For example, when growing up, Shin would eat his mother's meals and not care that it meant she would starve for the day.  And when he found out that she and his brother were trying to escape, he turned them in and felt no remorse.  Shin had no sense of familial feeling until he left North Korea and realized that, as a general rule, most people would feel some sense of guilt at betraying their own mother.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But it still really hurts.

Daughters Who Walk This Path is Yejide Kilanko's first novel.  It's centered on Morayo, a Nigerian girl who is bright, fun, and grows up surrounded by a big family and many friends.  When she is about 12 years old, Morayo's cousin Bros T moves in with her family.  Bros T is tall, handsome, and charming, but he's also in trouble.  He was kicked out of school, was caught stealing from his own family, and seems a little too touchy-feely with Morayo and her sister.  Bros T sexually abuses Morayo, and even after she speaks out and he is forcibly removed from her home, the horrors of her experience continue to shape Morayo's life.

It's hard to make a book about surviving rape sound anything but depressing, but this book is not depressing.  Yes, there are depressing scenes.  But there is also so much depth and love and forgiveness and passion and strength here, and I don't want you to miss it because you're nervous about one aspect of the book.  I was nervous about it, too, but I am very glad I read this one.

King Hereafter and Queen Once Again

I read Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter over several weeks, but I don't think I would say that I read it slowly.  It's a long book with tiny font, with foreign words and subtle plot development, with larger-than-life characters and evocative landscapes.  It's the sort of book you can't read too slowly because it takes some time to get into the rhythm of it, to remember everyone's names and their histories and their relationships to the other characters.  So I would read it in bursts - 40 or 50 pages in a night being a "burst" - and then go to bed, exhausted but enthralled.

So much happened in King Hereafter that I am not even going to attempt to do a plot summary.  Instead, here's the blurb from the back of the book:

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland.  Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue.  He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.

Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.  She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

In this novel, Thorfinn is a giant - he is taller than everyone around him, with a deep and gravelly voice.  He's ugly, hardly ever smiles, and he rarely takes anyone else's advice.  He's brilliant, like so many of Dunnett's other male characters are.

He's also married to one of the most beautiful women ever, Groa, who has the great honor of being the newest entry (and the first new entry in years) to my Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me list.  Groa is wonderful.  She supports Thorfinn in everything, but she is also one of the few people who talks back to him.  She's witty and well able to understand political intrigue, and she was, for me, the focal point of this whole story.

[NOTE:  The rest of this review assumes that you know how this story (the story of Macbeth) ends.  I wouldn't say they are spoilers as it's heavily implied through the whole story, and well - most people know the ending, but just wanted to give a heads up.]