Review: The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

This was a totally delightful children's book, complete with a lovely old-fashioned feel. Like many of the children's and YA books floating around the house, I read a description of this one and decided that my crew needed to have it always available to them in case reading inspiration should strike. And like any other book I have waved enticingly under their adorable noses, they have snubbed this book without a second glance. So I had to read it. And I am so very, very glad that I did because it is simply charming. Now I just have to come up with an underhanded and completely sneaky way to get the intended audience to read it too. Even if they don't, I want the sequel!

The Penderwicks are four sisters, a father, and one large, scruffy dog. The book opens with the family driving into their rented summer cottage tucked at the back of the estate of the rather snobbish, intolerant Mrs. Tipton and her very lonely son, Jeffrey. The bulk of the novel focuses on the madcap escapades of the girls and Jeffrey as they traipse through the summer, annoying Mrs. Tipton and causing their absent-minded botanist father to emerge from behind his policy of benign neglect. From 12 year old Rosalind's crush on the young gardener to 4 year old Batty's love of wearing butterfly wings and refusal to speak to strangers, from budding writer Jane's tendency towards melodrama to Skye's enmity, competition, and friendship with Jeffrey, this novel has the feel of being the latest entry in the beautiful children's literature of yesteryear.

The conflict here is, of course, Mrs. Tipton's blindness towards what makes the rather sad Jeffrey happiest and her desire to impose her strict and joyless life even on the free-spirited Penderwicks. The plot is more a series of connected scenes than a novel in the strictest sense but in this lighthearted book of adventures, this works. The childrens' characters are all nicely defined and while the adults are more stereotypical, they are by no means the focus of this sweet chronicle of friendship. I highly recommend this book for the young and young at heart, especially those who like a nostalgic feel to their children's literature.

Review: An Inside Passage by Kurt Caswel

This slim book won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, a prize I had never heard of before. But after reading this beautiful collection of essays, I think I will have to search out other winners. The essays are generally chronological and take place in the quiet, amazing places found in nature and inside author Caswell's very soul. His descriptions are gorgeous and his personal introspections and gentle ruminations into the human spirit are completely appealing. He has captured varied places around the world on his tramps, offering up his life, his failed marriage, and his vision quest through his communes in nature. Reading this book is like accompanying Caswell at each place in his life, journeying along as an equal privy to all the beauty and all the pain.

I am afraid that I am making this sound dreadful and cliched when it really is a lovely, introspective sort of book. It is one to savour slowly and to appreciate fully. The beauty and peacefulness of the writing was soothing and majestic. If you enjoy contemplative sorts of books, this is definitely one to pick up and to lose yourself within the pages.

Thanks to author Kurt Caswell for sending me a copy of this book to review.

Review: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

A quiet, contemplative novel, this has received accolades and raves in abundance from the literary world. As I am always contrary, the short of is that I liked it but wasn't wowed by it like everyone else. Perhaps it is simply yet another victim of excessive expectations up to which it couldn't possibly live.

Trond, a 67 year old man, has chosen to buy a house in a remote part of Norway, and to mostly seal himself off from the rest of the world in spare solitude. But a chance encounter one night with his nearest neighbor, sends him tumbling back in memory to the pivotal summer of his adolescence. His neighbor is the younger brother of Trond's friend, the one with whom he adventured and imagined and played the summer he lived with his father at another remote summer cabin home before tragedy played itself out in both boys' lives.

Told with heedlessness to a linear timeline, the novel slides forwards and backwards from the present to the distant past and back again, from Trond's current, slow labor around his cabin to his childhood to his father's past. Petterson has a quiet way of revealing the story behind that pivotal summer and the main players in the book. This subtleness is a real strength of the novel. Trond, drawn as the slightly curmudgeonly would-be hermit, is a very different literary character than I usually encounter in my reading and he comes across as entirely authentic. He is gruff and short and yet curious and glimmers of the imaginative boy of his youth still shine through.

Other characters are really incidental in the story as it is Trond and his memories and understandings of the course of his life and his father's which matter most in the narrative. But other characters are introduced and are left as merely sketches from Trond's memory. Even his daughter, who comes to visit him one day, is a flat character, one whom the reader may be surprised to encounter, given her brief exlanationless flash through the pages.

While I recognize that this was a beautifully crafted novel, it still wasn't one that called to me to immerse myself in it constantly. I needed breaks from the simple, intense, and yet oddly slow moving revelations found within its pages. Just as Trond held himself aloof from others, uneasy but wanting to be content with his solitude, I found myself staying aloof from the story but wanting to be drawn in. In looking back on the book as a whole, I find myself labelling it lovely and sleepy, somehow unfinished and quietly startling. An intriguing read, it didn't hold my interest as well as I'd hoped.