When Dimple Met Rishi

A month ago, I became an aunt to an adorable and winsome boy named Rishi.  Around the same time, people started telling me about the book When Dimple Met Rishi, and I thought I would read the book and then maybe give it to my sister to read and imagine a fun future for her child.

When Dimple Met Rishi is about two Indian-American kids who go to an app development summer camp the summer between high school and college.  Rishi and Dimple's parents are friends and want their children to meet and get married.  Rishi is totally on-board with this, and he goes to Insomnia-con just to meet Dimple and propose (with his grandmother's ring, no less).  Dimple has no idea; she's at Insomnia-con to develop an app to help people deal with diabetes.  They meet, Rishi basically proposes, and Dimple freaks out.  But then they get to know each other, and Dimple realizes that he's not all bad.

In general, I veer away from young adult romance because I find it too angsty and dramatic.  I would never want to return to the period of my life when I was an overly-dramatic teenager, and it is hard for me to read books centered on characters at that age without rolling my eyes multiple times.

But I also grew up Indian-American, and I love that this book exists.  There's an Indian girl on the cover, there are Hindi words in the text, there are Indian narrators on the audiobook (who pronounce all the names and words correctly!!!).  All of these things are so great.  It is like the YA romance version of Hasan Minhaj's Netflix special.  I also appreciate that in this book, it's Dimple who is ambitious and driven and totally into being a techie, with big dreams on how to make it happen.  And that Rishi loves art but feels like he needs to go to engineering school to make his parents happy.

Much about this book rings true, as someone who grew up here to Indian parents.  One of my favorite parts, a tiny detail, was when Rishi explained to Dimple's friend that he speaks Hindi, but that he speaks a version of Hindi that is from Mumbai, where locals speak Marathi.  And his parents went to Mumbai from elsewhere, as did many other people, and so the Hindi they speak is not often understood outside of Mumbai.  This is so 100% true.  My parents grew up in Bangalore, which is a Kannada-speaking city.  But their families are both originally from Andhra, which is Telugu-speaking.  But so many people from Andhra go to Bangalore that the version of Telugu they all speak is completely different than the Telugu spoken in Andhra.  It's a small detail, but many Indian people live through it, and I loved that it somehow made its way into this book.

I also appreciate that the author, Sandhya Menon, made cultural pride and knowledge such a positive thing in this book.  Rishi in particular is very well-versed in his heritage and has no embarrassment at all about fully embracing it.  I think that is a really great lesson.

But there were also many things in this book that bothered me.  Putting aside my general annoyance with young adult romance (and this book had many of those same tropes and bothers), there were things that just were too much for me.  Granted, I am 100% sure that I would notice these and judge these more as an Indian than probably other people would.  But they still grated.

For example, Rishi.  He's this really perfect guy.  He's extremely rich and goes to private school with other rich kids, but somehow he's not spoiled or bratty or entitled, even though all the other rich kids in this book totally are.  This is never explained.  Also, he is really smart and funny and kind.  And he is an AMAZING artist who tells his dad that his "brain just doesn't work the same way" as an engineer's brain does.  But... he somehow managed to get accepted to MIT, anyway, and is going there to major in computer engineering.  Because THAT's an easy thing to just swing.  Also, as a 17-year-old, he just shows up somewhere with his grandmother's engagement ring to propose marriage to a complete stranger and this strains credulity to me.

Also, Rishi had this whole encounter with this other Indian guy, Hari, that annoyed me.  Hari was a jerk in the book, but there was one point when Rishi asked him where his parents were from (meaning, where in India) and Hari very pointedly said that his parents were born in the US.  And then Rishi somehow "won" this competition by talking about how he was so happy and proud to go back to his family's home in India and really connect with his culture and background.  This seemed to imply that somehow Hari was less Indian or less whatever than Rishi.  This really bothered me because, personally, I despise when people ask me where I am from and then act as though my answer ("Chicago") is incorrect, as though they assume I am from somewhere else just because I am Indian.  I realize that this question is different when asked by one Indian to another, but I completely understood Hari's anger in the situation, and I found Rishi's "I love my heritage and go to India all the time" holier-than-thou attitude pretty grating in that instance.

And then there's Dimple's relationship with her parents.  Apparently, Dimple's mom wants her to wear Indian clothes all the time, even at school.  (And Dimple does this, as there are multiple comments on her kurtas and odnis).  And her mom wants her to wear a bunch of make-up and get married stat.  Whereas Dimple wants to wear her glasses, no make-up, and focus on school.  This part just never really rang true to me because it seemed like the author really wanted to set up this weird misunderstanding/antagonistic relationship between Dimple and her mom, but it was hard to believe in (as an adult, anyway) because her mom didn't come off that way at all, really, when you encountered her in the story.  Maybe that's the way an adult would read the story, though, whereas a teenager would read it quite differently than I do :-)

The other thing about this book that just was off to me was the relationship between Rishi's brother, Ashish, and Dimple's friend, Celia.  It felt like a waste of time and space to me, and I don't really think it needed to be included at all.  Especially as I felt like the book dragged a bit at times with the plotting, and getting rid of that would have made it a bit tighter.

I think what frustrated me most was that it didn't quite rise as high above the Indian stereotypes as I would have liked.  You still have two really good kids who do not rebel much at all against their parents.  They both somehow get into Stanford and MIT (because God forbid they go to a place like UC-Berkeley or something).  They watch Bollywood movies and, conveniently, perform in a talent show with a Bollywood dance number.  And their parents want to arrange marriage for them at 18.  Honestly, I'm surprised there wasn't a mention that Rishi had won the Scripps spelling bee as a child.

But!  This book exists, and it is so proudly Indian-American, and it owns that culture, and I love that.  I'm so glad that Dimple was going after her coding dreams and that Rishi had a great love for art,  but I wish that it could have gone a bit further.

Nicola Yoon's The Sun is Also a Star

I did not expect to love Nicola Yoon's The Sun is Also a Star.  But I did.  I feel like tons of people are giving this book glowing reviews right now, so I'm not sure that I have a lot to add to the conversation.  But I enjoyed so many things about this book!

I don't read a lot of young adult romance, mostly because I find it overly dramatic (see my review of The Wrath and the Dawn for more on this).  But this book was good after good!

It centers on Natasha, a Jamaican immigrant who is being deported (TODAY) and Daniel, a Korean-American who really doesn't want to go to Yale to be a doctor.  They meet at a music store while they are both avoiding what appears to be the inevitability of their lives, and then they spend a mostly perfect day together.

I say that this book centers on Natasha and Daniel, but what drew me into the story right from the beginning were the vignettes from other people's points of view.  We get brief moments into other people's lives and minds and these insights brought so much depth to the story.  We learn about Natasha's parents and how the move to New York strained their marriage.  We learn about Daniel's parents and how all they want is to ensure their children never have to live in the extreme poverty they saw.  But we meet people who have only a periphery connection to the story, too.  A drunk driver whose daughter was killed in a car accident.  A security guard who wants desperately to connect with people but cannot find a way to do it.  A paralegal who falls in love with her employer.  A lawyer who realizes he's in love with his paralegal.  These vignettes are short and bittersweet but show just how much we can impact other people's lives, from those closest to us to those that we hardly notice.  I loved them.

I also loved Natasha and Daniel's story.  I wasn't sure if I would at the beginning, mostly because Natasha said something about how she didn't think she was "wired for love," which did cause me to roll my eyes a bit, coming from a 17-year-old.  But the more I learned about Natasha, the more I realized this was in line with her personality.  And Daniel the dreamer, who wants to become a poet, not a doctor - he was pretty great, too.

One thing I really loved about this book was the way Yoon portrayed immigrant families.  This is where the insights into other characters and the omniscient narrator really shone.  Yoon showed that there is often a generational divide between immigrant parents and their children, but that under that is a deep level of love and trust that often can be overlooked by people who have not directly experienced it.  Both Natasha and Daniel disagree with their parents on important things but they still respect and love them.  And their parents really do try to do what is best for their children, but their definition of what is best is different than their children's.  One moment that made this clear was when Daniel said, honestly and clearly, that his parents would never attend his wedding with Natasha.  They probably would stop speaking to him if he married someone who was not Korean.  I know many parents like that (and some parents who used to be like that and then changed), and it was a very realistic scene.

I really enjoyed this book, and I think that even if you don't enjoy YA romance, you might enjoy it, too!  Give it a try!  And if you enjoy audiobooks, I definitely recommend listening to this one on audio!


Related Links:

The "Parents" episode from See Something Say Something.  Beautifully done interview and poetry about growing up as the child of immigrants.

How to follow your dreams and disappoint your parents

I am not sure why comics are such great vehicles for memoirs, particularly memoirs of growing up and coming of age.  Whatever it is, I definitely have a weakness for memoirs in comic book form (whereas I hardly ever read memoirs in prose).  So when I heard about Ozge Samanci's Dare to Disappoint, her memoir of growing up in Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, I put it straight on my library wish list.

As usual, I have no idea where I first heard about this book.  I think possibly on some comic book round-up from the end of 2015.  While the story itself is nothing earth-shattering or ground-breaking, it's related in a very endearing and visually appealing way, and I really enjoyed it.

Ozge grew up in a pretty tense environment.  Turkey was in a period of high militarization, religious fervor and conflict, and an opening of the economy and culture to outside influences.  In the midst of all that, Ozge's parents worked very hard at low-paying jobs; they were insistent that Ozge and her older sister would do better for themselves.  Only study engineering at the very top school!  Otherwise, they'd be failures.

As someone who grew up in an Indian household, I completely understood the pressure Ozge felt to do well in subjects that were not nearly as interesting to her as others were (though, to be fair, Indian parents require their kids to be good in all subjects, not just math and science).  Similarly, I can understand parents' deep desire to ensure that their children's lives are easier and more comfortable than their own.

As this is a pretty universal conflict, it's not really Ozge's struggles that draw you into the story, though they are shared in a humorous and entertaining manner.  Instead, it's the juxtaposition of her coming-of-age against Turkey's growing pains.  She learns about herself, understands her environment better, and navigates a complicated system.  All with the help of fun, colorful illustrations and collages.

I really enjoyed learning more about Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s, at the end of the Cold War.  It's always fun to learn about everyday life in a different place, particularly when systems are set up so differently from what you are used to.  For example, Turkey's school system was set up (maybe still is?) in such a way that you had to do really well on tests to advance to the good schools and the well-paying jobs.  Students practiced military drills at school.  Ozge encounters devout Muslims (she is not one herself), studies and works herself to exhaustion, discovers boys, chats with Jacques Cousteau, and tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life.

Dare to Disappoint is not likely to change your world or blow your bind, but it's funny, bright, and thoughtful.  If you're a fan of comics or of coming-of-age stories or memoirs (that's a pretty wide range), then I'd recommend checking it out.

Gabi, the amazing girl you wish you knew in high school

I am not sure how I first heard about Isabel Quintero's novel, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces.  But whatever serendipitous circumstances finally worked to bring me and this book together, I'm grateful for them.  Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, is funny and heart-breaking and marvelous.

The book is written as a series of diary entries over Gabi's senior year of high school.  Gabi is an overweight Mexican-American girl in southern California.  Her father is a meth addict, her mom is a very traditional Mexican mother, her brother is angry, one of her best friends just came out and her other best friend is pregnant.  Through all this, Gabi applies to college, discovers a deep love for poetry, finds her own considerable creative genius, and deals with the complications of many boy problems.

I really loved reading this book.  Gabi is such a wonderful narrator.  She's smart, she's sassy, she's confident, she's loyal, and she's a great person with whom to spend a few hundred pages of teenage drama.  To give you a sense of her personality and why I would have loved to be her best friend in high school, here are a few quotes:

That's the magic of poetry - some gay Jewish poet wrote about people wasting away around him because of drugs, and I, a straight Mexican-American girl. know how he felt because I am seeing the same waste he witnessed over fifty years ago.  Ginsberg is talking about my dad in those first lines.  He didn't know it then, but he was. 

I feel bad about that, like I'm supposed to be lying in bed, distraught, eating an entire container of Chunky Monkey.  But I already did that last night.  And I think one night of crying for a guy I-think-I -really-like-but-am-not-so-sure-about-anymore is enough.

And my absolute favorite:

Then I looked myself straight in the eyes and said, "Gabi, get over it.  You look spectacular.  You look amazing, so stop your bitching or do something that makes you feel better."  I took a deep breath and took off my shorts and shirt and stepped out on that beach like I owned that shit and didn't give a fuck about all the skinny girls around me.  After a while, I didn't feel like an outsider and nobody made comments or even cared about what I looked like.  The other thing about being fat is that you spend too much damn time worrying about being fat and that takes time away from having fun.  But I decided today would be different.  And it was.

Gabi was such a breath of fresh air, and I loved her.  Quintero makes clear that Gabi is overweight and loves to eat, but she also makes clear that Gabi is extremely attractive to people.  She has no less than three guys after her over the course of this book, showing that even teenage guys are drawn to smart, confident women.  Gabi also is very secure in herself and her talent.  She has no issues with writing poetry and reciting it in front of other people.  You won't find long, angsty paragraphs here about not wanting other people to know about her family drama, or not wanting to attend an open mic night at a coffee shop because people won't think it's cool.  You'll find a girl who just STEALS THE SHOW.

It's because Gabi is such a fantastic narrator that this book doesn't ever get weighed down by all of the serious issues it confronts.  In some ways, it felt like Quintero tackled a bit too much in this book to give any one issue enough attention on its own.  But in other ways... maybe that's just what teenagers these days deal with all the time.

Quintero deftly juxtaposes Gabi's traditional upbringing and the expectations of her family against her newly-awakened feminism.  She does this with glorious references to feminist poetry, such as Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman and Tracie Morris' Project Princess.  As someone who doesn't read a lot of poetry, all the references to poems in this book had me Googling all over the place, trying to find the poems that Gabi mentions so that I, too, can experience what she feels when she reads poetry.

There is so much more that is covered in this book; if I were to talk about all of it here, I'd be gushing on and on.  To me, Gabi's confidence and her budding feminism butting heads against her upbringing were the most memorable.  But there's something for everyone here, something that will resonate with you and remind you of your own childhood and your own insecurities and how you can face them.  Personally, I haven't owned a swimsuit in I don't know how many years.  (Mostly because I really don't like beaches, but also because, well, swimsuits are a pretty stressful piece of clothing to buy.)  But after reading Gabi's comments that I quoted above, I realize that, damnit, I can wear a swimsuit if I want to, and there's no reason to deny myself an enjoyable experience on the off-chance that someone else who probably sucks, anyway, will judge the way I look.  So there!

Seriously, read this book.

The Wrath and the Yawn

I was very excited to read Renee Ahdieh's The Wrath and the Dawn, pretty much entirely because I love anything based on the Arabian Nights.  Ahdieh's book got rave reviews on GoodReads, which was another good sign.  But really, it was all about the 1,001 Nights and those interlaced stories.

Which is why I was pretty disappointed when I realized that this book did not in any way center on the stories that Shahrzad tells her husband each night in an effort to extend her life.  From what I recall, we hear two stories that Shahrzad tells the caliph, which is significantly less than 1,001, I think you'll agree.  It is probably unfair of me to hold this against the book, but I definitely do.  I just really wanted all those layered stories, and I got zero layered stories.

Mostly, this book is about the dramatic love story between Shahrzad and her husband, Khalid, the caliph.  And all the heartache the two must endure.  In mostly agonizing silence.

It was difficult for me to be fair to the book after finding out that there are hardly any tales shared, especially when I also discovered that this book is, to quote Care, "more YA than the YA I usually read."  I nearly laughed aloud when, early in the novel, there was Jill's telltale sign of a YA novel, the hero tucking the heroine's hair behind her ear.  (I knew it was coming because her hair whipping around her face had been mentioned at least twice by that time.)

But there wasn't a lot of laughing in this book.  It's a lot of drama and tension around Shahrzad's Stockholm Syndrome of falling for her husband (after approximately 36 hours of marriage, from what I could tell).  She is filled with angst for loving someone who has killed so many women already, including her best friend.  At least, that's what we're told.  But as Shahrzad spends hardly any time in the book thinking about her friends or family that she left behind when she got married, it's hard for readers to feel much empathy for her situation. Once Shahrzad got married and moved to the palace, it was as though she lost interest completely in the people she left behind.   I wanted to know the people she left behind so that I could understand her guilt (which didn't last long).

It's not that Shahrzad is a weak character.  She's not.  She's fierce and stubborn and beautiful, and I can see why so many teenagers would fall completely in love with her.  But she didn't really develop as a character, we were just supposed to like her because she was independent and good at everything and didn't feel bound by the rules that usually governed women.  All of that just got tiring for me.  Shahrzad just blew either fully hot or fully cold.  Promptly after falling in love with her husband, Shahrzad switches from guilt about betraying her friends to anger with her husband for not divulging all his secrets to her.

There are other characters in this book.  Khalid, Shahrzad's husband, is also tortured and dramatic and beautiful.  His cousin and Shahrzad's handmaiden.  Shahrzad's first love, Tarak, with his piercing eyes.  (Shahrzad, in contrast, has "tiger eyes.")  Bedouins and magicians and armed guards.  I think they all could be pretty interesting people except that there is so much angst around Shahrzad and Khalid that they are not given the opportunity to develop very much.  And everyone and every moment is described in such flowery language.  It's hard to imagine 16-year-olds and 18-year-olds speaking in such a manner.  It was just a lot, and in many ways, a bit too much for me.

The Wrath and the Dawn is the first book in a duology.  I am not entirely sure if I will read the next book.  Though the story had some solid points and there is a fairly intriguing curse/mystery/magic situation brewing, I don't know if these characters are for me.  Too much hot and cold, too much too quickly, and not really enough focus on developing deeper characters and deeper emotions.

Even witches go through an awkward stage

Jillian Tamaki is an author whose work I really enjoy, and her newest book, SuperMutant Magic Academy, is no exception.

I didn't know a lot about this book heading into it except that it was about mutant humans going through high school.  I was under the impression it would be one story with many characters involved in a big plot.  That's not at all how the book is set up, though.  SuperMutant Magic Academy started as a web comic, so it's written in vignettes that are usually only one page long, much like a comic strip.  Through these, Tamaki provides funny, sweet, and realistic snapshots of high school life.  The characters interact with each other in the classroom, at lunch, in their dorms, and elsewhere.  So many lovely moments in so little space.

What is great about this book is that you can enjoy it just as much by reading one or two pages at a time or by reading it in much bigger chunks.  I would love a copy for my bookshelf; I imagine myself strolling over, picking the book up, choosing a page at random, and then smiling at the humor, poignancy and all-around wonderfulness that comes through on that page.  And then I'd probably read the next page, and then the next, and continue standing there, smiling, until my legs began to complain.

This book is nothing like other fantasy books set in boarding schools.  In fact, it's nothing like fantasy books.  It's more like Calvin & Hobbes.  The characters happen to be magical, but the magic is in zero ways important to the stories that are told (except sometimes to add a dose of situational humor).  Instead, what's important is a group of teenagers nearing the end of their time at high school, making and keeping friendships, understanding truths about themselves and others, learning about what is important to them, and dealing with the normal trials and tribulations of being a high schooler.  The characters are usually very fun and kind to each other; I especially liked how very popular, beautiful, and good-at-everything Wendy always chastised her friends for being unkind to anyone else.  She is the sort of person we all want to be friends with.  And the casual acceptance the characters have for their gay classmates is quite heartening as well.  It's not a big deal.  It doesn't define them.

But even kind people make mistakes sometimes or can be cruel without meaning to, especially at an age when we are all so insecure and worried about our looks and what other people think of us.  That comes through a lot, too, particularly with the character of Frances, the artsy girl that no one quite "gets" (even though she is dating the biggest jock at school).

It's just a really lovely book.  I highly recommend it!

Carnivorous horses #ftw!

I am not sure how she does it, but Maggie Stiefvater can take plots that in zero ways appeal to me and create amazing stories from them.  She did it with the whole star-crossed lovers thing in the Raven Boys Cycle, and now she's done it (or, she did it a while ago, and I've only just got around to discovering she's done it) with swimming carnivorous horses in The Scorpio Races.

Seriously, this book description had me a little nervous when I was considering which audiobook to download next.  It's about a boy who always wins races with carnivorous horses and a girl  who has never raced carnivorous horses but really needs the money, so enters the race.  And then they get to know each other and fall in love by... guess what?  Riding horses together.

It may come as a surprise to you, but I am not an animal lover.  I enjoy animals in the wild, in that I generally like to imagine animals roaming free in the wild and doing their thing.  Sometimes I see a photo of a puppy and think, "Aww!"  But I've never had a pet, I do not want a pet, and I am often flummoxed by the very real, very deep friendships that people have with their pets because I just can't really imagine what that's like.

Also, as a city dweller, it really pisses me off that so many people have dogs but don't take on the task of cleaning up after them.

So, anyway, stories about people's relationships with animals generally don't move me the way they do other people.  It's not like I'm dead inside (but maybe I am?), but I have never experienced that connection myself, so I don't feel the need to read about it.  All that to say - I was not particularly drawn to reading a book about two horse lovers falling for each other.

But I really enjoyed the audiobook versions of the Raven Boys series, and I figured I might as well get back into Stiefvater before the final book in that series comes out at the end of April.

And wow.  I should just trust Stiefvater implicitly (Ok, I say this, but I admit that I can't bring myself to read her werewolf series, either).  This post so far is just a lot of build-up to me not being able to explain to you why I enjoyed this book so much.  Yes, there are some great characters, including the two horse lovers, their horses and the stony, isolated island that is the book's setting.  This is Maggie Stiefvater, so the magical elements are brought to life in a very distinct manner.  The best way I have of describing Stiefvater's brand of fantasy is by saying it's like those massive urban graffiti murals.  There is structure, but there's also coloring outside of the lines.  There's beauty in the grit and smog.  There's a lot of symbolism you probably miss.  But, standing in front of it and looking at it, you don't really care that you don't fully understand it because it's obviously making a statement, and you are glad that you are a witness to it.

I've told you not so much about this book or its key characters, and that's because I feel like me telling you about the plot and the characters will not convince you to read the story.  So maybe just trust me, or trust Maggie Stiefvater, and read it.  Let me know what you think.

A girl's journey through a failed revolution

Julia Alvarez's Before We Were Free is about Anita, a pre-teen growing up in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship.  Julia Alvarez herself escaped the Dominican Republic and came to the US in the 1960s; this book is her imagining of what life must have been like for the cousins she left behind.

I listened to Before We Were Free on audiobook.  At first, I thought it was going to veer a little too young for me.  But as I got deeper into the story, I became much more invested in Anita's life, her family, and how they all tried to live normal lives in the midst of chaos.

The world is in the midst of a refugee crisis.  (In addition to all our other crises.)  It's easy to get caught up in all the numbers and the logistics and the impact such an influx of people from a different culture will have on a host country.  It's easy to forget that every refugee is a person with her own history, hopes and fears.  Alvarez's book does an excellent job of showing the steps that lead to a decision to leave your home and seek out a different life for yourself.

Anita lives in a huge family compound with her extended family.  At the start of the book, she's surrounded by friends and family.  By the end, it's just her and her mother, hiding in a friend's bedroom, desperate for news of their loved ones and hoping for some chance of escaping the country. Through the story, Anita grows thoughtful, more introspective, and more aware of the situation around her, and how her own family is involved.

I wish we had gotten to know Anita's father and uncle better in this story as they were the most involved with the rebellion against Trujillo.  Even her mother seemed fairly involved, but there isn't much light shed on that for readers.  In a way, that makes sense.  Anita is 12 at the start of the book, and she is not central to the planning and execution of plans to topple a government.  We see more hints at Trujillo's reign of terror than overt descriptions.  Anita's beautiful older sister receives flowers from the president, who has an eye for pretty, very young girls, and immediately, her family finds a way for her to leave the country so that she won't disappear.  All girls are told to avoid him, and many of the men in his regime, and you can feel the undercurrent of fear in all conversations about him.

But that's not to say that this book is all about fear.  It's not.  There are many funny moments and a lot of truly heartwarming ones.  Alvarez isn't afraid to talk about big, difficult questions and issues, and the book is better for it.  

Review-itas: Books I didn't love

Finnikin of the Rock, by Melina Marchetta, is one of those books that so many people recommended to me.  Or, I should say, Melina Marchetta is an author that many people love, and I have never read her.  But I've had Finnikin of the Rock on my Kindle forever, and I finally read it!

Or, tried to.

The book reminded me of Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana.  It's a fantasy novel about displaced people trying to find their way home.  I really liked that part of the story - all these people, separated for years, finding each other and joining in The Quest, and trying to get home.

Unfortunately, there was also a massively inconsistent romance in the book that really annoyed me.  Sometimes Finnikin and this at-first-mute but then really talkative religious-novice (supposedly) Evanjalin are BFF, and sometimes they hate each other, and sometimes they love each other, and sometimes they want other people, and it was all just TOO MUCH for me.  Also, I thought Evanjalin was all over the place, character-wise.  So I didn't finish this one.

I did finish Karen Thompson Walker's The Age of Miracles, but that's really only because I was reading it on audiobook and I figured, since the book is about the apocalypse, that I should get to the end and see what happened to the world.

In this dystopian young adult novel, the earth's rotation is slowing.  The days are growing longer, the crops aren't growing at all, and Julia is growing up.  She's 11 years old, her best friend is moving away, and she has a big crush on a sk8r boi.

It's hard to be an adolescent at the best of times, and it's probably even harder to be one when the world is ending.  Julia goes through quite a bit of heavy stuff, but she also goes through life as a pre-teen.  She loses her best friend, she faces her parents' crumbling marriage, she tries to just be normal.  I liked the way Walker mixed the extraordinary with the ordinary to show what life could really be like in such a situation - people just keep trucking on.

That said, the book didn't really succeed for me.  Julia sometimes was far too deep for an 11-year-old.  And this was a very quiet book in many ways, which isn't exactly what I was expecting from a novel about the end of the world.  I appreciate that Walker didn't fill it with massive wars or thieving hordes, but I also wish she had done just a little bit more.

A swing and a miss

Shadow Scale is the follow-up to Rachel Hartman's Seraphina, set in a world where humans and dragons live uneasily together.  In Shadow Scale, our heroine Seraphina sets off to find other half-dragons like herself in an effort to help the Goreddi war effort.  But a powerful enemy also wants to reach the other half-dragons, and the only way to combat her is for Seraphina to let her own powers loose.

One of my favorite things about Seraphina was the way Hartman built complex political and religious systems for Goredd.  The world-building was amazing.  That continues here in Shadow Scale, to an even greater extent, as Seraphina travels beyond the Goreddi borders and learns more about other cultures and belief systems.  Religion was important in the first book but takes an even more central role in this one.  Add to that the politics and the languages and the dress codes and all the rest and you have a world that comes completely to life.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, the characters didn't quite keep up with the setting.  A few of my favorite characters from the first book, mainly Princess Glisselda, were hardly present at all in this one.  Instead, we follow Seraphina on her journey from one place to another, never staying long enough to understand the location, and never spending a meaningful amount of time with the newer characters to get to know them.  It felt like we were just crossing items off a list without any real character depth or growth.  The only character who did get depth (and, in my opinion, way too much airtime) was Seraphina's nemesis.  She shows up early and then never leaves, and I grew tired of her pretty early on.

After getting about halfway through this book, I started skimming pretty significantly.  I just couldn't concentrate enough on the story.  I really enjoyed the setting and some of the religious stuff was really fascinating (though in general, I don't like books in which religion plays a big role), but the plot and characters just didn't pull me in.

However, there are people who feel very differently!  Ana wrote a glowing review of Shadow Scale, and you should check that one out as a counterweight to this one.

Note:  I received a free audiobook CD of Shadow Scale to review from the publisher.  However, I read the hardcover version of the book, not the audiobook, and my review is based on the hardcover version (which I checked out from the library).

Review-itas: The last reads of 2014

Wife of the Gods introduces us to Inspector Darko Dawson of the Central Investigation Department in Accra, Ghana.  Dawson is a devoted husband and father, though he also displays a rebellious and angry streak when he feels provoked.  Dawson grew up in rural Ghana and has been haunted for years by his mother's disappearance seemingly into thin air one day after visiting her sister.  Now, Dawson is sent back to that same area to investigate the murder of a promising medical student.

What follows is a mystery that takes many twists and turns before arriving at the conclusion, and a story that introduces us not only to the moody Darko Dawson but also to his extended family.  There's also a lot here about Ghanaian culture.  For example, the title Wife of the Gods refers to the practice of marrying a young girl off to a religious leader to ward off bad luck.  We also meet witch doctors, traditional healers and more modern doctors, learning how each interacts with the others.

I enjoyed this book enough to continue with the series, though as usual for me, this is more because I am intrigued by the potential for character development much more than I am the mystery itself.  I am particularly interested in seeing more of Dawson's relationship with his wife; there was one scene in the book in which his wife got very angry with him for not including her in an important decision regarding their son, and I look forward to seeing how the two of them navigate their marriage.  I also hope Dawson's older brother will have more of a role in future books.  In fact, I hope many of the secondary characters introduced here get more quality time in future books.

This One Summer is a great book to read in the depth of a cold, dark winter.  The cover itself made me feel like I was sitting outside with a book and a glass of chilled white wine, enjoying the glorious warmth of the sun.

But alas, summer has never felt further away.  And when it comes, it is always far too short.  This beautifully illustrated graphic novel by the Tamaki cousins makes clear just how fleeting summer is, and just how much people can change from one year to another, just how drastically people can be impacted by an event.

Rose and Windy are best friends who meet every year at the beach.  But it seems like this year they are kind of drifting apart.  Rose's parents are fighting a lot, and Windy doesn't understand why Rose is so obsessed with the older townie kids.

I have mixed feelings about this book.  On the one hand, I didn't like Rose very much, and I wasn't expecting so many heavy subjects to be covered here.  On the other hand, I think the Tamakis really captured the transition from childhood to adulthood perfectly, with all its false starts and skids.  Rose is just like any teenager, making snap decisions on people based on limited information, fairly self-absorbed, and almost callous in the way she treats and talks about other people.  Windy, just a year and half younger than Rose, serves as a great foil to show just how painful and wide the chasm can feel sometimes between childhood and adulthood.  A very realistic snapshot of a tough time in many people's lives, captured beautifully in lovely blue tones.

Review-itas: Life through the 20th century

Bud, Not Buddy, by Christopher Paul Curtis, is about a 10-year-old orphan boy living through the Great Depression in Michigan.  Bud's mother passed away when he was six and he never knew his father.  But in his suitcase filled with his most prized possessions, he has fliers that his mother saved over the years.  The fliers show a jazz band, and Bud's sure that his father is in that band, so he sets off to go find him.

I read Curtis' The Mighty Miss Malone earlier this year and quickly decided that I should read all of his other books, on audiobook if possible.  Bud, Not Buddy is my second Curtis book and Deza Malone even has a cameo!

I like the way Curtis writes about a black child's experience of the Great Depression.  While the Great Depression was difficult for everyone, it was particularly hard on people of color who were passed over for jobs, often couldn't own property, and were discriminated against in many ways.  I think Curtis does really well in bringing these important facts to life in ways that would make children curious to learn more and have a discussion with their parents or a teacher about how people experience the same world differently.

As with The Mighty Miss Malone, I liked how Curtis showed examples of different family structures.  Bud is an orphan but has many happy memories of growing up with a single mom.  He meets a stranger who is a proud father of a growing (and very fun) family, and a jazz band that acts as a family.  While I didn't love Bud, Not Buddy as much as I did The Mighty Miss Malone, I did enjoy learning even more about the Great Depression and am looking forward to Curtis' perspective on other important historical events in American history.

Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in free verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, is set in the 1960s and moves from Ohio to South Carolina to New York.  I did this book on audio.  I do better with poetry in audio since I don't worry so much about whether I am getting the pacing and the rhythm right.  Like pretty much everyone else, I loved it.

Woodson's stories tell of her early childhood growing up during a tumultuous time in American history, struggling with school, and falling in love with words and the art of story-telling.  I wish I had read this in physical form because the poetry is stunning.  I love the way Woodson confused facts and stories - she would hear something and then immediately incorporate that fact into a story about herself.  It wasn't lying, it was learning the art of the story, and she excelled at it.  This excerpt sums up very well the way I felt reading this book - I didn't want it to end, either:

“I am not my sister. 
Words from the books curl around each other
make little sense
until
I read them again
and again, the story
settling into memory. Too slow my teacher says.
Read Faster.
Too babyish, the teacher says.
Read older.
But I don't want to read faster or older or
any way else that might
make the story disappear too quickly from where
it's settling
inside my brain,
slowly becoming a part of me. 
A story I will remember 
long after I've read it for the second, third, 
tenth, hundredth time.” 

Aya:  Life in Yop City, by Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie is about 3 teenaged girls growing up in boom-time 1970s and 1980s Ivory Coast.  Aya is dedicated to going to medical school and doesn't let anything distract her from that goal.  Her friends Adjoua and Bintou, however, are more easily distracted.  The three of them deal with a lot of family drama (seriously - everything from paternity drama to secret second family drama to homosexuality and everything in between).

I am a little torn about this book.  On the surface, it's like a soap opera, with twists and turns on every level.  I don't know much at all about what life is like in a polygamous society, but it seems very complicated!  It was so interesting to learn about such a foreign culture, from the funeral parties to beauty pageant, from polygamy to witch doctors.  Everything was new to me!

On another level, though, the book touches on some really important themes.  For example, Aya wants to be a doctor, but her father just wants her to get married to some rich guy.  Aya's girlfriends seem sexually liberated and like they just want to have fun in life, but they both deal with very real consequences of their promiscuity while the men seem to get off pretty easily.  Aya's mother wrestles with the knowledge that her husband sleeps with many other women but gets very little sympathy because every man does that.  And the two gay men in the book struggle with their homosexuality and what to do, knowing that they will never be accepted.  And there are more examples of this - the beauty pageant, Aya's friend's impending marriage to a much older man, the catcalls every woman faces each time she walks down the street...

This is why I think perhaps the translation was a little lacking.  The translator did a great job of getting the humor and wit across in each panel, but it was harder for me to understand the deeper issues and social commentary that were under the current here.  Was Abouet just writing a fun drama?  Or did she have more meaningful messages that she wanted to share?  My opinion is that the latter is true (but I also probably look for feminism everywhere).  In any case, this book is worth reading just for the immersion in another culture and the fantastic, vivid art.  And, PS, it was made into an animated movie!  I'll have to try and find it (with subtitles).

Don't Wake the Third Sleeper!!

Blue Lily, Lily Blue is the third book in Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle series.  I got into this series after Ana, Jenny, Teresa and Memory told me about it, and now I am totally into it, too.  Every time I read a book in this series, I start out really cool and disinterested.  And then I get further in and.  I.  Just.  Can't.  Stop.

This was particularly difficult in the past as read the books on audio, so there was only so long I could sit in the car without being late for a meeting at work.  This time around, I read it as a physical book, and instead of being late for meetings, I drove super-groggily to work after staying up late at night tearing through the last 150 pages of the book.  It sucks you in the way Glendower sucks Gansey and company in, and I don't know when the next book is going to come out, but I am SO PUMPED.  (And nervous.  There are many loose ends to tie up.)

I am not going to do any sort of plot summary here because this is the third book in a four book series.  The story?  It continues.  The plot?  It advances.  The plot?  It thickens.  (Though in pretty expected ways.)

The characters?  They are amaze-balls.  I feel like in every book review, I say "Adam!!  Ronan!!"  And here, I shall continue to say, "Adam!!  Ronan!!"  I mean, Blue and Gansey are fine, but they are in this whole, "Our love is doomed!" camp and Gansey is everyone's best friend and Blue is the lone girl in the book, and while both of them are fully fleshed-out and interesting characters, I can't help but feel that they're both shallow pools compared to the depths we see in Adam and Ronan.

Adam and Ronan separately are wonderful here.  Adam really grows up, learns that friends often want to do things for him because they like him, not because they feel sorry for him.  There is this scene with his father, and then this scene in a courtroom, and both times, I just wanted to hug him.  And Ronan, for the first time in this book, seemed like someone who would maybe accept a hug from people.  And the way he works so desperately hard to keep his mom and brother safe... oh, it's so lovely!

But Adam and Ronan TOGETHER.  That is like, the best thing ever.  Seriously, when these two team up with each other, it just makes my heart happy.

Blue and Gansey - well, they are feeling all the feelings, but they don't really let that get in the way of the bigger picture.

And that's what I really love about this series.  Yes, there's a Doomed Romance that is kept secret because the two involved don't want to hurt other people (though, honestly, I don't think the others care very much).  But what's at the center of this book is the people and their relationships with each other.  Family bonds and friendship bonds more than any other kind.  I LOVE what these friends do for each other, in every way.  Not just the teenagers with each other, but the adults with each other and the adults with the children.  There are friendships on all levels and across multiple generations here, and they are all beautifully written.  I can't wait to see what happens next.

#Diversiverse Review: The Book of Unknown Americans

Cristina Henriquez's novel The Book of Unknown Americans is
is mainly about two families. The Toro family moved to the US years ago from Panama and have assimilated pretty completely into American life. The father works at a restaurant, the older son has a soccer scholarship for college, and the second son, Mayor, is in his rebellious stage in high school, trying not to be (negatively) compared to his brother all the time. The Rivera family has recently moved to the US. Maribel, the teenage daughter, recently had an accident that caused brain damage, and her parents brought her to the US for better care.

The story is narrated by Maribel’s mother, Alma, and Mayor, the rebellious younger son of the Toro family. Every couple of chapters, there are interludes in which other minor characters share their life stories. These interludes were my favorite part of the book. I loved seeing a character in one light and then learning about her difficult life path and gaining a better understanding of what made her the way she was. I loved hearing stories of how people met and how they all decided to move to the small apartment block in Delaware in which they all ended up. And what they’ve done since they arrived there.

I also really enjoyed Alma’s voice. Henriquez wrote about her struggles wonderfully – her guilt over Maribel’s accident, her inability to come to terms with the fact that her daughter will never be the same, her terror in a new country where she feels she cannot protect her daughter from harm, and the way all of these things affect her relationship with her husband. Alma was such a well-developed character, and her fears and concerns became my fears and concerns, too. I also appreciated that for Alma, it was the white characters and the Americans that were frightening. Most of the time, we hear the other side of the story, but through Alma’s eyes, we can see just how menacing Americans can be to foreigners, especially those who don’t speak English well and have beautiful, disabled children.

I didn’t like Mayor’s sections nearly as much. I admit that I was a little disturbed by Mayor’s obsession with Maribel, a mentally handicapped girl who also happened to be breath-takingly beautiful. Would he have felt so drawn to her if she wasn’t beautiful? I think readers are supposed to believe that Mayor and Maribel are totally in love and meant to be together (at least, we are told that multiple times by Mayor), but I didn’t buy it. And Mayor’s complete disregard for Maribel’s parents’ wishes or his own parents rules were maybe true to his life stage, but again, it really felt like he took advantage of Maribel, and I was pretty uncomfortable with that. Maybe if Maribel had a voice in the story, it would have felt better. But we never hear her side of anything, and so it felt a lot like she just kind of went with Mayor because it was easy, not really because she wanted it.

Unfortunately, Mayor is a pretty key character in this book so his sections impacted my overall enjoyment of this novel. But for the interludes from the minor characters alone, and for Alma’s story, it’s well worth reading this book. I really enjoyed hearing the life stories of so many people (this is particularly excellent in the audiobook, as there are multiple narrators for these sections, all with very distinct voices).

Review-itas: #Diversiverse edition

Walter Dean Myers' Monster is about Steve Harmon, a teenager in prison on trial for murder.  The book is written as a screenplay from Steve's point of view, with cues for lighting, credits, and people entering and exiting the screen.  There are also parts in between, in which Harmon speaks directly to the audience about how he's gotten to this point in his life.

As you can tell from the cover, this book has won numerous awards.  I especially wanted to read it after finishing The Enchanted, because I feel like I should know more about the criminal justice system.

This book felt a little too young for me.  I could understand Steve's path and I enjoyed the screenplay, but there was a lot less about his background and life before he got into prison than there was about the trial itself.  I would have preferred a bit more character development to balance the courtroom drama.  Monster certainly highlighted the difficulties of working within the US jury system, though, especially when you are young, black, and poor.  I also enjoyed the audiobook production - multiple narrators and great editing.

Charlayne Woodard's series of fove vignettes assembled together under Pretty Fire was a fantastic read, and I wish it was much longer.  It clocks in at just about 2 hours on audiobook, so if you could find a physical copy to read (which does seem difficult), then you could probably read it super-fast.

Woodard starts with telling us about her very premature birth, growing up in New York City, visiting her grandparents in the Jim Crow south, and working hard to succeed and make her family proud of her.  The title Pretty Fire relates to the way she and her sister described the burning cross that the KKK left on her grandparents' lawn.  Her grandmother told her very firmly that it was not pretty, but the ugliest thing she would ever see.

Told with humor (she tells the audience how she grew up wanting to be Lassie the dog, or the black butler in Little Orphan Annie), Woodard really engages with her audience in a way that brings the audiobook to life.  I wish I could see her perform in person!  Apparently, there are a few companion pieces to this one.  I absolutely plan to check them out!  Such a great introduction to this talented performer, and one that reminded me (again) that I really enjoy short stories.  Highly recommended.

Review-itas: The difficulties of transitioning to high school and my first Toni Morrison!

I found Faith Erin Hicks' Friends with Boys at the library and picked it up mainly, I admit, because of the cover.  Also because it is published by First Second Books, and I really enjoy their graphic novels.  It's a story about Maggie, entering her freshman year of high school after years of home schooling.  Her three older brothers are already in high school, but as she sees them in a new setting, she learns a lot more about them.  And she meets two new people, too, Alistair and Lucy, a brother and sister team who do everything together.  It's a sweet story about accepting change in your life, accepting what you can't change, forgiving others, and trying your best to be a good person.  Not really new lessons, I know, but the artwork is absolutely beautiful, and the characters come to life so completely not only in their words and facial expressions, but in the ways they dress and the settings in which Hicks places them.  Really enjoyed this one!

Honestly, if reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon taught me anything, it is that Toni Morrison probably should not be read via audiobook.  The author narrated the story herself and was actually quite good.  But I have never read Morrison before, and she is all about the symbolism and the slippery chronologies, and the complicated family trees, and I think it was a failure from the start.  I assume it would be a lot like trying to read 100 Years of Solitude on audiobook, with characters that are all related to each other and named after each other, and a whole lot of confusion unless you can go back a few pages or to the family tree and ground yourself again.

So, audiobook, maybe not the best plan.  But what gorgeous language!  What fantastic names that probably all were symbols for other things that went completely over my head!  What dramatic plot twists!  I definitely need to read more Morrison, but I need to read her in printed form.

The Stuff of Dreams. But in real life, not in Dreams.

The Dream Thieves is the second book in Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Boys series.  Surprisingly, I enjoyed this book more than The Raven Boys, even though it's in the middle of the series.  I think this is mostly because each character finally has a distinct personality, and the focus is on the two characters that interest me more than any of the others, Adam and Ronan.

Adam!  Ronan!  Those two are so intense and are at that point in their lives where things can go in so many directions and so they make some really horrible decisions but some brilliant ones and sometimes they are jerks and sometimes they are sweethearts, and I just loved it.

Adam has so many personal demons, growing up unloved and trying to be a better person than everyone around him.  His struggle not to become like his father is so painful to watch, and you cannot help but want him to win REALLY BIG in the lottery of life because he works so hard to deserve it.

Ronan is a completely different kettle of fish.  I don't know if I understand him much better now than I did before, but I like him, and I liked being in his head.  He certainly doesn't waste words or time or space on anyone he deems unworthy, but he is willing to go deep-sea-diving without an oxygen tank for those he loves.  There was this scene when he realized that he didn't have to steal things but could just ask for them and people would be generous enough and love him enough to give them to him, and that was just great.  And his whole development as a rough guy into someone with moments of generosity and kindness - it's great.

I mean, Gansey and Blue are fine, but they seem likely to descend into doomed lovers mode shortly, and I don't think that will appeal to me.  Of course, I thought that would happen in the first book, and it didn't, so perhaps Stiefvater will pull through for me again.

I am not sure what all I can say about this book as it is the second in a series.  Suffice it to say, the plot moves forward, and in very compelling ways.  We get more backstory on all of the characters, and we even meet a new one, Mr. Gray, who was one of my favorites.  Honestly, Maggie Stiefvater, I feel like you do not get enough credit for writing Mr. Gray so well because people are so obsessed with the Raven Boys themselves, but I found Mr. Gray's development fascinating, and I loved spending time inside his head.  That a hit man (not really giving much away here, we know this very quickly in the book) could be given so much depth and that you can have compassion for a character who is both terrifying and suffering from his own internal angst and fear is just glorious.

I have gone on at length about the characters, and that is probably because I feel like I lost track of the plot a bit in this book.  I am not *quite* sure where we are going, but I trust Stiefvater to get us there in an exciting and unexpected fashion.

"We all fight our own private wars."

Guys, this book.  It is so, so good.  Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz, has such a glorious title and a beautiful cover, and it DELIVERS the fantastic story that both of these promise.

Aristotle (Ari) is a 15-year-old living in El Paso, TX in 1987.  He is angry a lot of the time.  His father is a Vietnam veteran and still has horrible memories of the war.  His mom is a sweetheart but never wants to talk about Ari's brother, who has been in prison for 11 years.
It's hot, it's summer, and he doesn't have any friends.  Ari goes to the pool but doesn't know how to swim.  Another guy there, Dante, offers to teach him.  Ari and Dante become best friends, though the two are polar opposites.  Dante wears his heart on his sleeve and seems happy and well-adjusted all the time.  Ari is an introvert; even readers, who spend the entirety of the book in his mind, get no access to his innermost feelings and what drives him to do the things he does.  As the story progresses, Dante's feelings for Ari develop into something deeper than friendship, and both Dante and Ari must come to terms with that.

I loved this book so much.  Saenz packed so many beautiful moments and relationships in here.  Ari and Dante both deal with being Mexican-American, though neither of them fit the stereotype of  Mexican-Americans.  They are both 15-year-olds coming of age, too, and deal with the whole "threshold to adulthood" thing that all of us have gone through and that people will continue to go through for ages and ages.  Ari has a lot of family stuff to deal with - an uncommunicative dad, a brother no one will talk about, an over-protective mother.  Ari also is so angry and lonely inside, and it's hard for anyone to understand why, including Ari himself.  And the way Ari and Dante play off each other and grow and stay such strong friends through so much, was so wonderful.  The dialogue between the two of them is so fun.  They enjoy each other's company, they are quick-witted, they talk about big things and small, and they drift away and back towards each other over the course of a few years in this book.

I loved the emphasis on family, and just how supportive family can be when you are going through a really rough patch.  There is one line from Ari's mom near the end that just set me over the edge because she is SO KIND and wonderful, and you can just see all of Ari's walls and defenses slowly beginning to crumble, and it's because his parents are just so loving and fantastic.  And Dante's parents are just the same.  This book is not just about Ari and Dante, it's about two families.  Every character gets so much care and attention, and the insights that come from all of them are just wonderful.

Saenz packed so much into this book and I've barely scratched the surface because I don't want to ruin the discovery for you.  So much is left unsaid (mostly because of Ari's repressed narrative style), but as you progress in the story, it just blooms into this majestic story, and then you feel ALL OF THE FEELINGS.

I think I've been fairly inarticulate here, but hopefully my gushing has made you want to go out and read this book.  Personally, I plan to read everything Saenz has written because the man can write.  A beautiful story on so many levels - highly recommended.

Gary to Flint via Hooverville

The Mighty Miss Malone, by Christopher Paul Curtis, has been on my wishlist for years, so long that I don't quite remember how it first came onto my radar.  Curtis has written multiple historical novels about the Black American experience, from the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement.  The Mighty Miss Malone is set in Indiana and Michigan during the Great Depression.

Deza Malone is a very happy 12-year-old in Gary, Indiana.  She has a fantastic relationship with her parents and older brother, she and her best friend are doing brilliantly at school, and her teacher has agreed to tutor her over the summer.  Life is grand, even though her father hasn't worked in months, there are bugs in the oatmeal, and her teeth are so bad that she can barely eat solid food.  One day her father goes out on a fishing trip, and when he returns days later, he is not the same man.  He goes off to find work in Michigan, with the rest of the family going later to try to find him.  But it's hard to find work anywhere, and even harder to scrape enough money together to feed a family.

I listened to this book on audio and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was so easy to fall in love with Deza, who worked hard to improve her vocabulary and always told us exactly where every city was "geologically located."  She also had such a strong relationship with both of her parents, who came to life so completely.  Often, I feel like parents in books written for children or teens are a bit wooden or stock characters, just really there to administer punishment, drop some life lessons, and provide a means of transportation.  But in The Mighty Miss Malone, both parents are fully fleshed out with their own histories and personalities.  Deza's father likes alliteration ("my darling daughter Deza") and her mother is that combination of strong, stern, and loving that is so ideal.  Deza's brother Jimmy was great, too.  So ... basically everyone in this book is someone I would love to know.

I also like the way that Curtis wrote about the black experience of the Great Depression for a younger audience.  When the book begins, readers do not realize how poor Deza's family is.  All we know is she's a happy, well-adjusted kid who has a lot going for her.  We learn slowly through hints thrown here and there that start to add up that Deza Malone's life is not a bunch of roses.  Curtis hints that it's difficult for Deza's father to find work not only because of the Depression, but also because he's African-American.  Her mother works as a maid for a rich family in Gary, but the letter of recommendation that her employer writes for her is less than glowing and lets readers know that Deza's mother's job probably was a difficult one.  We see how families just up and left their homes overnight, not even getting to say goodbye to their friends.  We meet people who live off the land, hitch rides on freight trains, and make homes in Hoovervilles.  It's an excellent introduction to such an important part of American history, and I could see a class reading this book in school and doing many related history lessons, too.

There was a somewhat odd situation in this book with Deza's father's fishing trip and the ripples it sent through the family; I didn't quite understand what the point of that was except maybe to separate Deza's father from the rest of the family for a bit.  To me, it didn't really fit with the rest of the book.  But that was just a small thing and all of the good aspects of the book totally trumped it.

Really, a fantastic book that brings the Great Depression vividly to life and shows us just how much strong family bonds can help people get through tough times.  Thoroughly enjoyed this one, and I hope you all give Christopher Paul Curtis a try!

Money can't buy you happiness, though it can buy you a beautiful wife

I reacted to The Brides of Rollrock Island, by Margo Lanagan, in much the same way that I reacted to the only other novel by her I have read, Tender Morsels.  It was a painful and difficult read because of the way it draws attention to gender roles and the dynamics of power.  But it was ultimately very satisfying.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is set on a very small island where everyone makes their living on the sea, and everyone knows each other.  They are not a beautiful race, but they are hardy and loyal and stick to what they know.  But one day, the short and fat and ugly witch Misskaella changes all that by bringing a beautiful woman out of a seal.  The seal woman catches sight of one of the island men and the two are locked together, the woman utterly devoted to the man, and the man truly in love with the seal-life who will never speak a word against him.  Soon, all the men want seal-wives, and the women of Rollrock leave the island to seek happiness elsewhere.  But how happy are the men with their new, obedient wives?  And how happy can a woman be, no matter how in love she might be, when she is always longing to be somewhere else?

It probably took me a week to get past the first 70 pages or so of this book.  I honestly considered just returning it to the library unfinished because it was not working for me.  But many people I trust told me that the book is so good, so I persevered.  And I'm so glad I did because this was such a rewarding read on many levels.

I think Ana does a fantastic job of explaining what it is that makes this book so good, so I will refer you to her.  There's little that I can add to her post that is more than a "Me, too!" but I will spend some time describing something that I think is an important aspect of the book and I haven't seen touched on very much before now.

Part of what makes The Brides of Rollrock Island so powerful is how quickly things become "normal."  When the seal women first make their appearance, everyone judges the men who succumb to their lust and desire, no matter how beautiful the seal woman is.  The men love the idea of a woman who will never question or nag the way that their hardy Rollrock wives do.  And so the women of Rollrock leave, to be replaced very quickly by seal-wives.  And soon enough, no one even really remembers what it was like to have other women on the island.  In fact, soon enough, people forget what it's like to have women on the island, period, who were not seals first.  And one of the most chilling aspects of this novel is how immune you become to the horror of events that you find normal (like, you know, slavery, rape, racism, violence ...).  None of the boys on the island spends a lot of time thinking about girls because there aren't any around.  The men on the island don't think anything is wrong with taking a seal from her life in the ocean and forcing her to live with him for the rest of her days, just because that is what he wants.  And there's nothing wrong, either, with selling half your fortune and most of your soul to a witch so that you can have a wife as beautiful as everyone else's, even if you never thought you wanted one in the first place.  Lanagan makes it so painfully clear that we are all creatures of habit, and how difficult it can be for one person to wake up and realize that something is not quite right.  And she does not place blame anywhere, exactly, but shows what an uphill battle we are all fighting.

I'll leave you with one quote (and I apologize, because it is a long one) that really stood out to me and made this clear:

I remembered Aran standing shocked at the cupboard door, the padlock in his hand, and all of us staring at it.  But it was not the padlock keeping the skins in the cupboard, it was what had hooked and locked it there in the first place:  the whole island's agreement.  Let us take these coats, by force or by trickery, from their rightful owners, Rollrock men had decided, and forever keep them apart.  They may have thought that this would gain them their own happiness, but they might as well have vowed, Let us all stay miserable together - dads, mams and lads alike - to the end of our days! 

And all the men had agreed this - even a man as kind as my own dad.  Against so many grown men and what they wanted, what hope did one boy have of bringing relief - of bringing maybe happiness, even! - to our poor mams, to our poor dads?