Review: Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman

I'm not certain what exactly I thought this book was going to be when I heard the description but somehow it didn't enter my conciousness that it would be essays rather than a memoir or even fiction. Don't know why I didn't think of essays but because I didn't, it took me a bit of time to readjust my reading mindset. Even once readjusted, I didn't love this look at mothering, how we demonize or sanctify perfectly normal parenting acts, and some insight into Waldman's own life as a mother/wife/author (not necessarily in that order). It really left me feeling so-so despite me wanting to like it a whole lot.

Waldman addresses the need we seem to feel to point out the "bad mothers" who make the rest of us look like "good mothers." She uses examples from the media--and ironically I was reading this as it came out that Madlyn Primoff made her two bickering daughters get out of the car and then she drove off. Not only did this turn into a prime example of what Waldman was arguing about, it made me examine my own reactions to examples like this (and incidentally, I would totally have done that to my two older kids--also 10 and 12--if I'd thought of it so I'm clearly already the Bad Mother of the books' title). Now hypotheticals are not all Waldman writes about, sharing moments in her life (besides the famed loving her husband more than her kids moment) that might or might not qualify her as a bad mom, mostly not. Well, really, all it qualifies her as in my mind is a human mom. And perhaps that is my biggest trouble with this book. None of the things that Waldman has written about seem egregious to me. They seem average, the sorts of things I do on a daily basis and which, therefore, I don't really need to read about. But I suspect there are moms out there who need the reassurance that they aren't going to break their kids if life isn't one hundred percent perfect all the time.

There are some very moving essays in here, such as when Waldman discusses her decision to abort after discovering a terrible chromosomal abnormality. The pain she must have faced and the grace with which she writes about this experience is fantastic. However, this is just a glimmer of what the whole book could have been (although I do rather question including the recounting in a book called Bad Mother but I guess that's a personal choice) and wasn't. The book is also very loaded with current touchstones, which could make for a very dated book even two years down the line. In some ways that's good as it showcases how we don't even manage to retain the names of the demonized "bad mothers" for terribly long but in other ways it didn't work for me.

The writing is strong but sometimes the topics of the essays seem questionable in terms of the over-arching theme. This left me with rather mixed feelings and a vague disappointment over what could have been.

Review: The One True Ocean by Sarah Beth Martin

Told in alternating chapters in the voice of mother Renee and daughter Jenna, this is the story of long buried family secrets and their eventual discovery. Opening in the aftermath of Jenna's young husband's death in a car accident, the narrative unwinds into two seperate threads as Jenna tries to cope with her loss. The first narrative path shows her life as it pushes forward despite grief, as she chooses to move back to Maine to the house she remembers vividly from her childhood and where she once lived with the long-dead beloved aunt she always felt a special kinship towards. The second thread is also triggered by her move as it goes back to the summer that her mother was 14 and 15, the summer that Renee got pregnant with Jenna. Jenna never knew who her father was, having only a name and a very slim tale told by her mother about the man who seduced and left a young girl pregnant. But by moving back to Maine, Jenna uncovers the story not only of her father, but of her aunt's inexplicable suicide even as she forges new, fragile bonds with her mother.

The theme of loss and connection, love and grief arch over the entire narrative but they are handled without resorting to cliche or heavy-handed drama. The depth of emotion of the characters feels very authentic and while each revelation about the past may not come as a surprise, it all fits without stretching credibility. On the other hand, there are one or two plot points that do stretch credibility a bit too far. Chief among these are the wallpapered bits of letters that Jenna finds in her mother's old room in her aunt's house. Having the house, its walls, and its hiding spots still contain all the keys to the long hidden secret of Jenna's paternity, as if people still just paper over any previous wallpaper is a bit disingenuous, especially as the building had gone through multiple owners. But if you forgive minor lapses like this, the rest of the novel was almost mesmerizing. I'd be curious to see what else Martin has written.

Review: Mastering the Marquess by Vanessa Kelly

In this Regency-set historical romance, Meredith's Burnley must take her sickly sister and flee her awful uncle's plans to marry her off to her cousin. But this plan is complicated. Meredith's sister is actually a half-sister and their reception at Annabel's grandparents' home is uncertain as her mother had been disowned for marrying Meredith's father. And no one knows how far their uncle will go to try and marry the nearly connectionless Meredith to his son while they wait to see if Annabel's grandfather will ever accept his granddaughter. Meanwhile, Annabel's grandmother has cooked up a scheme whereby her nephew, the Marquess of Silverton, will marry Annabel and mend the family rift. But Stephen is drawn to Meredith and vice versa. The evil uncle will not be denied and matters come to a head, in love and in war.

When I need a happily ever after, I turn to romances, knowing I will get my wish and this one delivered on that desire, as expected. The writing was fine but the plot was not terribly memorable, echoing so many other books in so many small and large ways. Most genre work has stock characters or situations and this one was no exception. I have to admit I am somewhat jaded by the "just in time" rescue from a kidnapping and of the one-dimensional evil character masquerading as a slightly off-putting generally upstanding person. But in asking for a certain outcome, I hav signed on to some of these cliches and I guess I should accept that. I can sacrifice unique for the desired predictability if I get a few hours of entertainment from the book and this one provided me with that. All in all, it was what I wanted.

Review: Jantsen's Gift by Pam Cope with Aimee Molloy

To an outsider, Pam Cope's life looked pretty darn perfect until her 15 year old son collapsed and died unexpectedly. This devastating blow sent Pam into a downward spiral that she couldn't pull out of and which made a mockery of her previous life. Her husband held their family together, waiting for the day that Pam decided to face life again. And that day did eventually come, but her priorities had shifted. She knew that she needed to honor Jantsen's memory and to make a difference in the world. This awakening gelled on a trip to Vietnam that she, husband Randy, and daughter Crista took to visit an orphanage started by a friend and to try and escape some of the suffocating grief they felt at home. Not only did the Copes come home determined to adopt the little boy they met in Vietnam who was an immediate part of their hearts, but they had found a purpose for some of the money collected in Jantsen's name after his death: to care for and make a difference in the lives of children who had few others to care for or about them. This wasn't the end of the grief at losing Jantsen or a cure-all for their family but it became a guiding principle that helped them get over the hurdles still in their path (Randy's chance to grieve properly, disappointments over the dispersal of some of the funds, the challenges of starting a non-profit, etc.). Their story is still a work in process. Jantsen's absence will always be a gaping hole but the creation of their foundation Touch a Life is a testament to the great love they bore their son and continue to bear for children of the world.

Each chapter after Jantsen's death starts with the recounting of a short letter to Jantsen from the journal Pam continues to keep years after his death. Cope and Molloy have juxtaposed the grief of losing a child with the admirable and inspiring story of one family who has taken that sorrow and channeled it into something beautiful and full of grace. This is not an easy book to read, dealing as it does with the loss of a child and the horrible conditions, including slavery in which other children continue to live even today. But it is ultimately a hopeful book. If such a sad event can lead to even the smallest spark of hope, it will not be dismissed as simply another tragedy to avoid in conversation. It's hard to critique the writing when the topic is so very personal (I wept copiously as I read) but there were a few bits in the book that made me roll my eyes or wish the narrative line would speed up. These bits were not overwhelming though and so didn't overpower my general feeling about the book which was that this was a moving book that deserves a wide audience. Inspiring and heart breaking, I hope the publicity from the book makes it possible for more children to be saved. Jantsen's life might have been a gift to the Cope family but his family's gift will be an enduring one to the wider world.

Review: Laughter on the Stairs by Beverley Nichols

I know I've already waxed rhapsodic about the first book in Beverley Nichols' Merry Hall trilogy (aptly titled Merry Hall) but I plan to be equally enthusiastic about this second book of the trilogy. This book focuses a bit more on the actual home that Nichols bought and its piecemeal restoration while the first detailed much of his fascination with bringing his gardens back to life. Like his previous book though, this is not nearly as boring as it sounds when I put it out there like this. It is a thoroughly delightful and entertaining book complete with more charming anecdotes about his eccentric neighbors, the previous owner whose taste was clearly egregious, and everyone else in Nichols' orbit. I truly wish I could have met Mr. Nichols (although he would likely have gently skewered me just as he does his other neighbors) and been a visitor to Merry Hall. I wouldn't even have asked for a cutting of his gorgeous flowers like his other much maligned, but fondly recalled nonetheless, female visitors. I truly don't know how to entice people to read these wonderfully witty and sly books since calling them garden books or estate books makes them seem far too tame and dull to do them any justice whatsoever. Suffice it to say, if you have any fondness for well-written, charm-laden non-fiction without event-driven narrative, you should read these. Even better if you happen to be a bit of an Anglophile. You can thank me later.

Review: The Old Forest and Other Stories by Peter Taylor

Before I discuss this book, I feel it only fair to disclose my general inability to connect with short stories except on very rare occasions and with very few authors. This inability is all mine and shouldn't reflect on the authors, but of course, it does to the extent that I write reviews about their stories. Ah well. The joys of being a published writer at the mercy of folks like me, I guess. That said, on to the review.

I didn't much like it. Now that comes as a surprise, doesn't it? The stories were well-written, elegant even. They are set in a south (20's and 30's) that was rapidly disappearing even as the characters lived their lives of quiet, privileged seclusion of sorts. This is a time and place I generally don't mind visiting in my reading but there was something about these stories that just didn't resonate for me. I almost felt as if each small story was happening at a remove from me as the reader, that there was no emotional pull, tugging me into each story whether I wanted to be tugged or no. The stories themselves were not superficial in any way although they were muted and restrained, proper even. And perhaps I'm too messy and uninhibited to appreciate that or perhaps my usual disdain for short stories colored my perception of this before I ever opened the cover. For whatever reason, I was pleased to turn the last page and be able to get on with other reading.

Review: Slam by Nick Hornby

Sam is nearly 16 and everything in life is going really well for him. His mom has dumped the boyfriend Sam didn't like; he's learned new, more difficult skating tricks (that's skateboarding, not ice skating--he's a huge Tony Hawk afficiando, even talking to his Hawk poster and having it talk back to him and show him his future); his teachers think he might have college potential; and he's started dating Alicia, a girl he'd thought was way out of his league. As Sam himself says in the novel, when everything's ticking along this well, it's time to go and screw it up. And this generally normal, average kid does that in spectacular, life-changing fashion. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, echoing his mother's worst nightmare for him (she had him while still a teenager as well). This is the story of Sam, how he screwed up, came to grips with his screw-up, and makes a new, unexpected and imperfect but liveable life for himself.

I'm sure there are a load of novels dealing with teenaged pregnancy but Hornby has managed to add a fantastic new one to the mix. With Sam narrating, rather than girlfriend Alicia, the reader gets a much different perspective than usual. How a soon-to-be teenaged father reacts is different than a soon-to-be teenaged mother. We are taken along in Sam's world as he battles the desire to flee without finding out if Alicia is indeed pregnant (well, he does flee but he comes back), as he tries to finish enough schooling to become something, and as he struggles through life with a new baby and a girlfriend he's not sure he wants to be with any longer. As in his novels for adults, Hornby is quite adept in drawing an adolescent boy and all the confronts him in life. Sam is realistic and sympathetic. The other characters make fewer appearances on the page than Sam does and in fact the other characters are fairly few in number. But the focus on Sam works and while this isn't the usual cautionary teen pregnancy tale, there is certainly no glorification, rather a humorous but still difficult realism. I generally tend to like Hornby's non-fiction better than his fiction but I can recommend this one as a well-written and satisfying read for young adult or even adult.

Review: Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe

I think I may have read this as a child as it was familiar but I picked it up this time to read it when my daughter read it for AR points at school. It is a cute story with just enough mystery and spookiness to keep a child reading along. Harold the dog and Chester the cat are at home when their family arrives back at the house with a small rabbit they'd found at the Dracula movie they went to see. Christening him Bunnicula, the family decides to keep our bunny and that is when things around the house start getting a bit strange. Chester the cat becomes convinced that the new bunny is in fact a vampire rabbit and goes to great lengths to try and convince the more skeptical Harold. But when vegetables in the family's refrigerator start turning up limp and white and drained of their juices speculation turns to a certainty of sorts.

What Chester and Harold do about this strange new member of the family and how they each react to the mysterious little bunny forms the bulk of this short children's chapter book. While the book is a children's book, it does a good job of being engaging enough to not have any adult readers (or perhaps it would be better to say adults reading aloud to children) avoiding the nightly reading. Harold is a loveable doofus while Chester is a more intelligent character and their interactions (Bunnicula never speaks) drive the story along. This really is a great book for the middle grades, never being too scary but having a slight element of suspense that should keep the most jaded 8-10 year old reading along.

Review: Jim the Boy by Tony Earley

Jim is a young boy, heading into his teenaged years, who lives with his mother and three uncles in a rural North Carolina town during the Great Depression. It is a gentle coming of age novel in a more innocent time. There are no major cataclysmic events driving the plot. It is just (as if it could be "just" anything) a lovely, almost nostalgic look at a family and a place. My bookclub chose this book on one member's recommendation and because it is set not far from where we all live and we were split on how we felt about it. I would liken it to the creek meandering through my backyard. Small and seemingly insignificant, it brings wonderful wildlife to our backdoor and offers a quiet, peaceful and contemplative place to escape the street out front. This book felt the same way to me. One of the reviews on the back cover compares it to a folk ballad and that strikes me as appropriate too. This very quietness or ballad like feel was problematic for some of the readers in our group. But I appreciated the poignancy that is rare nowadays and I look forward to the newly released sequel that will let me slip back into Jim's life and coming adulthood.

Sunday Salon: Review: Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood

Lucky Girl is a a memoir by Mei-Ling Hopgood, a Tawain born girl child who was given up to be adopted by an American couple living just outside of Detroit. This might not seem like such an unusual story but given that Hopgood was adopted in 1974, it is a story from the infancy of international adoptions. Not only was Hopgood among the first children adopted from outside the country, but her circumstances were incredibly unusual as well. As an adult, she was given the unique experience of not only reconnecting with her birth family, but being embraced as the lucky daughter adopted out and embraced again with open arms. The memoir itself talks of Hopgood's growing up as the oldest child (her parents later adopted two younger brothers from Korea as well) in the blue-collar Detroit suburb of Dearborn. She mentions but doesn't focus much on the fact that she and her parents were so obviously of different races and perhaps she didn't experience much racism at all, although she speaks of her desire to distance herself from anything Asian. As she scrolls through her memories of childhood and adolescence, she also writes of her almost unintentional discovery of the family she left behind, a family who didn't quite match her imaginings. Over time, and with the blessing of her parents, she visits and comes to know her birth family: the sisters who were not given away, the brother adopted in when no boy was born and lived, and the other sister who was given away as well. Hopgood was very blessed in the parents who adopted her, especially when she was coming to terms with being the "discarded" child trying to understand how her birth family could possibly make that decision. She must wrestle with not only trying to understand a decision that was decades old, but also with the understanding of who these biological family members were and are now. There has certainly been enough in her life that could make her uncomfortable in her own skin, but with the loving grounding of her atill somewhat awkwardly integrated family, it would seem, in the end that Hopgood has come to forgiveness and a peace about the lucky path her life traveled.

I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and the look at what an adopted child must feel when faced with the large and boisterous family Hopgood found. Having lived outside of Detroit myself, I was familiar with the landscape of her childhood and found the common ground there to give me just that extra bit of joy at the recognition of schools and places. I'm certain that Hopgood censored some of her feelings a bit out of courtesy towards family members but overall this was an interesting look into a very complicated situation that is probably going to become more common as today's international adoptees grow older. Recommended. My thanks to the lovely folks at Algonquin Books for the chance to read the Advanced Reader's Copy.

Review: The Viscount's Bride by Ann Elizabeth Cree

A Regency-set historical romance, this book is fairly substantially different than the back cover copy describes. I only mention this because I think other readers, like me, expect books to have more than a passing resemblance to their jacket copy and this one comes perilously close to nto doing so. It is also a sequel, although that is not noted on the book and a lack of knowledge of the previous story did leave me at a bit of a disadvantage, although as is the case with most romances written today, it stood alone well enough aside from a few references to backstory. This is the story of Chloe, who is visiting her late brother's wife and her new husband at teh same time Brandt, Lord Salcombe, her chief nemesis. She spends much of her time during the visit either sparring a little peevishly with Brandt or trying to determine if the local lord, who is a safe and friendly sort, is the man for her. When Chloe's guardian writes to tell her of his plans to marry her off to a disgusting, old reprobate, Chloe decides that the time has come to force Sir Preston's hand and she manages to find herself in a compromising situation with him, not that any sparks fly or that anything untoward happens. At this point a whole comedy of errors ensues, leading to Chloe's engagement not to Sir Preston but to Brandt, Lord Salcombe, who might turn out to be the perfect man for her in the end. The story is a light and fluffy bit of fleeting entertainment that didn't turn out to be terribly memorable as I had to flip back through the book in order to write this review. I didn't love the immature heroine who went from self-involved to consciously caring of others' feelings in the space of a paragraph and I wondered at the chemistry between the main characters. Not the best romance I've read but not the worst either.

Sunday Salon: Review: The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble

I like Margaret Drabble's work. I know next to nothing about Korean history. And I have a ridiculous fascination with royalty. So Drabble's The Red Queen easily caught my interest with only the barest minimum of jacket copy. Taking a fairly unknown, at least in the West, account written by a Crown Princess in eighteenth century Korea and weaving it into a novel, Drabble has written a completely engrossing story in three sections. The first section, narrated by the Crown Princess' ghost, tells the outline of her life. She married the Crown Prince as a child, long before his later mental illness became not only evident but increasingly dangerous and uncontrollable. She tells of her everyday life, sequestered in the palace, surrounded by political enemies and a few friends. Her account of a priviledged woman's life would be interesting enough without her marriage to the Crown Prince but the manueverings that his illness caused the court and his father the King to emply were also terribly interesting. The second section of the book, once the Western reader is conversant in the Crown Princess' life, focuses on Barbara Halliwell, an English academic travelling to South Korea for a conference, and the chosen "emissary" for the Crown Princess' story. Babs reads the princess' diary on her way to the conference and her interest is so piqued that she spends much of her down time (and a bit of the conference time as well) exploring the places connected to the princess. She is accompanied by a Korean doctor she meets and the pre-eminent speaker from her conference, with whom she embarks on a brief affair. The third section shows Babs after the conference is over and all the momentous events of it are long concluded and it details how the Crown Princess' story will be passed along into the future because it is a story that deserves to be told. There is a neat convention that strikes me as particularly Drabble-esque in this last part of the book but you'll have to read it yourself to see what it is. As always in Drabble's novels, the writing is precise and tight and very well done. The links between the three sections are strong and pull the reader along happily. I am thoroughly glad I took the time to read this one last month and recommend it to others who like depth and thoughtful reading in their lives.

Review: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

What a cool concept for a book: nesting stories like Russian babushka dolls. I read a later book of Mitchell's and thoroughly enjoyed it but was still leary of this one given that I already knew that Mitchell pushed the time period of at least one (turns out it was two) of his stories into the realm of the future and I am not often happy to follow where speculative fiction leads. But this was a marvelous book that managed to keep me engaged even through the sections about which I initially worried. Mitchell takes us through the centuries and around the world in his amazingly inter-linked story novel. We start in the 1850's in the tropics reading the diary of an upstanding American notary traveling home from an assignment. The diary ends abruptly mid-sentence as we jump to letters written to a friend by a penniless English composer in the Netherlands. We leave our composer mid-story to detail a young female detective in California looking into the suspicious deaths of several people in connection with a power plant funding corporate greed and carelessness. Our detective in mortal peril, we move onto a disheartening modern day England where a small publisher fleeing the thug brothers of his most famous author is committed to an assisted living home by his brother. Onward to a Korea set in the future where bio-engineering and corporate dissimulation have reached new terrifying highs. And thence to an island in the Pacific where the remnants of civilization, starting over after an unnamed catastrophic event has almost completely decimated the human race, we come to the apex of the story. Each story ties into the previous story in inventive ways and the arc of the story, especially as it gains momentum, running back through the earlier stories and telling the tales originally left untold, is masterful. This was well worth the time I spent and once I understood and accepted the form, it moved along swimmingly.

Review: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

I ran across this book on one of my book group lists on the internet a couple of years ago but like so many books, I bought it and promptly stashed it into the masses to be read at some vague and later date. It can be quite hard to be rescued from this indignity as I forget about these books but this one is apparently a classic of Italian literature and appears on the list of books that could be read for the 1% Well Read Challenge so I headed to my stacks and pulled it out. The story, told from the perspective of a man looking back in time, tells of the Finzi-Contini family, a rich and somewhat reclusive Jewish family in Italy in the years leading up to World War II. The narrator is a young man, a Jew, who comes to be included in the inner sanctum of the Finzi-Continis, first befriending Alberto and Micol Finzi-Contini and then falling in love with the beautiful Micol. The story is an intricate one that balances the growing menace throughout Europe with the insular nature of the Finzi-Contini estate. The novel starts when the narrator is traveling with friends to Etruscan tombs. Their young daughter innocently sends him on a journey through memory to the time that he knew Alberto and Micol and their intriguing, eccentric family. This is not a lighthearted book, even though it details the narrator's growing love for Micol. The future looms too darkly over the Ferrarese Jews, including the Finzi-Contini family for all their seeming unconcern for Hitler and the suddenly enforced racial laws. There is a definite feeling of melancholy and dirge about the book and whether this is original or a function of the translation, it suits the storyline quite well. I won't say this is an easy book; it would be difficult if for no other reason than that we as readers know what inescapable fate is in store for these people but it is also a slow and ponderous book to read. There is much to appreciate but it has to be done slowly and with great deliberation.

Review: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

I've been sitting and stewing about this review for several weeks now because I have had a hard time deciding how to review a book that has so many plot twists that it resembles nothign so much as a DNA double helix. Obviously plot summary of any length would ruin the reading experience for the three people in the world yet to read this fascinating story of two Victorian era women who prove that appearances and even perceptions can be completely deceiving. I'm sure some other reviewer before me has labelled this a tour de force and it really is so I'll just echo their rather trite sentiment. I was happily accepting of the story that our first narrator, Sue, an abandonned child whose mother was hanged for thieving and who was subsequently raised and protected from the more sordid aspects of her situation by a loose gang of petty criminals, tells us. But this is a Rashomon of novels and nothing is as it seems, with each narrator building on previous accounts, and in some cases completely and totally turning what the reader knows to be true on its head. This could have been disconcerting except that Waters handles it well and never makes the reader think that she has thrown a twist in out of the blue. We are as surprised as some of the characters as they find out the truth of their lives and who they are, different in so many ways from their original perceptions of themselves. I wouldn't call this a thriller but it is definitely suspenseful, if only because you can't wait to see what's around the next bend or laying in wait for you on the next page. This will keep you up at night, racing to finish and find out all of it, even if you are generally an early to bed person.

Sunday Salon: Review: Firmin by Sam Savage

Although I was always turned off by animal stories (even those like Animal Farm or Watership Down that were allegories for our own or future society) as a younger reader, I couldn't resist asking for a review copy of a book that features a rat born in a bookstore. Basically, mention books in your jacket or marketing copy and you can reel me in hook, line and sinker. The good news is that this book did not disappoint. Firmin is born into a nest of shredded pages torn from Joyce's Ulysses. This, perhaps, makes it understandable that it is a bit of a struggle to get into the book initially. But persevere and the omnivorous reader is rewarded. Firmin tells of his life in books, both eating them and once he learns, in reading them. I definitely chuckled when our intrepid rat tastes toilet paper for the first time and discovers it to taste similarly to Emily Post's etiquette tomes. But Firmin is the book rat in all of us. His imagination, nutured by his reading, is writ large and oftentimes gets him into trouble. He sees the coming destruction of his neighborhood but prefers to stay oblivious, with his nose in a book. He is, in short, a furry scholar who can only shut out the real world for so long. And don't for one minute think he's limited to the highbrow. Oh no. He is also a connisseur of girlie movies, featuring women he calls his "Lovelies," shown at the local movie theater, which is also a treasure trove of food for a rat. Firmin is a funny and loveable character and the book is a small gem for eclectic readers.

On a non-content related point, I will say that the chunk missing from the cover and pages of the book (shaped to look as if Firmin was a giant rat and had taken a chomp of the book), was highly annoying. It was cute in the store (yes, this was one of those Advanced Reading Copies I never received because of my new address snafu and so bought myself to fulfill the review obligation), but it was hideous in practice. The chunk was exactly where I try to hold a book and made holding this one uncomfortable. So any publishers out there thinking of doing something like this, it's nice to look at novelties of this sort but not a good idea in practice, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Review: How Not to Live Abroad by Shaun Briley

The title probably tips you off to the fact that this is not your typical moving and starting over travelogue. In fact, Briley and girlfriend Helen take a trip to Spain, mainly to avoid having to get actual jobs and to get away from Helen's mother. While there, they start entertaining the idea of investing the last of their dwindling money into a Spanish farm. Now, if they had money behind them, ensuring that they didn't actually have to farm, this would be a good idea, but for two people who seem fairly averse to working, buying a primitive (no running water, no electricity) farm seems the height of ridiculous. But they do it anyway, under the impression that Mother Nature will be kind and abundant. They soon discover that farming is a lot more work than they had anticipated, as is making their home a bit more amenable to people used to creature comforts. They do not go about modernizing right away, more like jerry-rigging things, because they are in financial straits. While this memoir of their time in Spain does have the requisite locals, they are folks living on neighboring farms, not workers come to improve an ex-pat's dream home or a summer retreat. Briley and his girlfriend learn how to exist with and on the land from the fellow residents of the campo but their life remains uneasy. Money is a continual problem. Their relationship is fraying. And they are at odds over what modernizations are welcome or needed in their lives. I doubt that this book would convince anyone of the appeal in a run-down, primitive farm life in Spain but it is, in its own way, still a paean to that country's more remote areas. I do think that the amount of backbreaking work that these two must have faced on a daily basis just to exist was certainly downplayed, perhaps in deference to an audience who might or might not believe how many hours a day one can spend fighting shrubby growths or trimming almond or olive trees. Even with the whitewashing of the work aspect, it was still clear that this paradise was an uneasy one both in the traditional sense and in terms of life there not being easy. This was a quick read and while I thought there was definitely a bit of bitterness towards Helen that still managed to squeak through, it was probably a fairly balanced accounting of their folly (relationship and life choice). For fans of the moving and starting over travelogue, this is a unique and different look at life as an ex-pat.

Review: The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

This Victorian children's morality tale is one that I've not heard many other people mention and that is a shame. It is more sophisticated than many elementary school-aged books written now and yet still sweet. Tom, a little chimney-sweep who is smacked about by his master, is cleaning a chimney at a great house when he is mistakenly thought to be a thief. He is terrified and runs off, all the while trailed by the queen of the fairies. After encountering huge obstacles in his path and overcoming them, he faces more mistrust and so wanders off to bathe in the river. He falls in and is transformed into a water-baby. As a water-baby, he has many adventures and learns to be a better boy than he had ever been when on land. This story owes much both to Gulliver's Travels and to The Odyssey. There are many strange creatures who instruct Tom in what is right and good during his quest and he has a loyal girl waiting for him to come home to her during his strangest adventure. The language would probably be a bit tough for elementary school readers today, either because they didn't understand it or simply because it is quite ornate and descriptive, unlike today's books, but the creativity of the land in which the water-babies live and the creatures that populate it might help children overcome these difficulties. There were pockets of the story that were a bit tedious in their insistence on moral lessons being pointed out in case the reader missed the significance of Tom's experience but this is very much a hallmark of the literature of the time and didn't ultimately detract from the overall loveliness of the story.

Sunday Salon: Review: I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers edited by Faith Conlon and Gail Hudson

I found this one sitting in my stacks and added it to one of my challenge lists with the thinking that I have a child racing towards the teen years so I should start reading along and preparing myself. After reading this book, I can see a good reason to follow the adage "Ignorance is bliss." Yowza! I am not ready for some of the challenges in this book. Will I be ready in a year? Probably not. But I don't think I get to stop the train now. My own personal state of panic aside, this was an interesting read. Very few of the writers focused on the really big issues you see in the news so frequently: drugs, alcohol, teen pregnancy, etc. Instead, they mostly confined themselves to the everyday irrationality of teenagers. They detailed frustrations, challenges, hormonal swings, and heartbreaks but the essays in here gave equal time to the overwhelming love the writers all felt (feel) for their teens, who amidst strife and chaos, are untying the apron strings and emerging from the chrysalis of childhood. I suspect that it's still hard to see exactly who the teens will be as adults, but these famous writer parents seem, for the most part, to be enjoying watching the transformation. The essays do run the gamit from humorous takes on the moodiness we all expect of teens to the pain of watching as your two oldest run away again. In the first essay, W. Bruce Cameron writes, "Congratulations! You are now the proud new owner of a teenage daughter. Please read this manual carefully, as it describes the maintenance of your new daughter and answers important questions about your warranty (which does NOT include the right to return the product to the factory for a full refund)." This essay stands in sharp contrast to Debra Gwartney's heartbreaking essay about her struggles with her daughters. Her essay details her attempt to change the situation after her daughters run away the first time but towards the end, she writes, "In the end, they had to go and keep going until they decided to return. I must have known that on some level, hard as it was to accept. When they left the second time, I didn't try to stop them."

Obviously, experiences with teenagers are as varied as the teenagers themselves and this book doesn't make any claims to be a parenting manual or even to dispense advice (except in the most flip and humorous of ways). It isn't designed to scare the pants off of parents (although some essays did have that effect on me) nor is it designed to fool them into a sense of complacency about the trials of living with teens (no chance of that!). It is merely an entertainment, filled with well-written and interesting essays about a time of life that no parent escapes. And on that level, it fulfills its purpose. As in most collections, there were essays I enjoyed far more than others. Some were better written than others. And as is often the case with specialized collections such as this, I'm not convinced of its universal appeal but for parents who can stomach reading about the teen years, this is a pretty decent choice. For my own part, after reading this, I have decided that "Dee Nile ain't just a river in Egypt, baby." If I ignore it hard enough, maybe I won't even notice the teen years as we plow through them here, right?!

Sunday Salon: Review: Amy's Answering Machine by Amy Borkowsky

Borkowsky is a comedian. Or at least she was when this book was written in 2001 (and the reason I give you the date is to orient you to the dominant technology of the time). Apparently one of the things she does/did in her act was to play tapes of her answering machine messages from her mother and then riff off of the over-protective messages. I have to hope that she is funnier doing stand-up than she is when writing this stuff down. Because this isn't funny. It's just dull. There is a good chance that her intonations and mannerisms made this a successful stage bit but it clearly loses in the translation to the page. Thank heavens this was short because had it been any longer than it was, I would have been sound asleep, head pressed to print, and drooling into the spine. I'm also hoping that the advent and proliferation of voice mail and the lack of taped evidence of her mother's over the top concerns means that we won't ever be subjected to another book of this stuff. Obviously not the way I wanted to start off my reading year and I recommend you don't bother with this either.