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Review: The Silence of the Girls

Review: The Silence of the Girls

In keeping with an unofficial “war” theme but going back in time a smidge….

Thank you to NetGalley, Doubleday Books, and Pat Barker for the free review copy of Silence of the Girls. This book entirely captured my attention and I am happy to post this honest review.

I could still hear him pleading with Achilles, begging him to remember his own father—and then the silence, as he bent his head and kissed Achilles’s hands. “I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son.” Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and brothers.

Synopsis
Everyone has heard of Agamemnon and Achilles. Epic poems were (literally) written in their honor. But what of the women behind them? What of the women who became spoils of war? The Silence of the Girls imagines the life of Brisesis, princess of Lyrnessus and concubine of Achilles, to present the stories of the women captured, put to work, and expected to love their captors during the Trojan War. The book begins with the fall of Lyrnessus and follows Briseis until shortly after the fall of Troy and the (SPOILER ALERT) death of the greatest Greek warrior, Achilles.

Title Thoughts: Women vs. Girls
At first blush, it felt limiting to call the women taken as spoils of war “girls.” The main “girl” Briseis spends the opening chapter of the book watching her family die and then deciding whether to become a slave or throw herself off a tower. Not exactly a decision for a juvenile to be faced with. These “girls” were nightly expected to sexually service (re: were raped by) the men who had destroyed their homes and killed their brothers, husbands, fathers, and male children. To call them girls felt diminishing—“girls” has the connotation of smallness, meekness, even inconsequentiality. These were women—young women to be sure, teenagers even—but these were mothers and sex slaves and to call them anything to diminish them felt wrong.

And yet, as I read, it was easy to forget that Briseis was young—that she was a teenager, albeit a married one (normal given the time and life expectancy). It was easy to see her as older and wiser, given that her life had forced her to become so.   Perhaps the title was the reminder of the youth of these women—their voices taken along with their safety, security, and- in some cases- innocence.

Stockholm Syndrome
While the events of this book predate the advent the term “Stockholm syndrome” by a few millennia, this naming is what I kept coming back to. When Briseis is taken, she does her duties out of fear that she will be cast out or even killed. Yet as the book progresses, Briseis struggles to continue to hate Achilles. As kindness is shown to her by the other women and by his best friend Patroclus, as Achilles never beats her or treats her with malice (besides generally using her as a sex slave), as she comes to see Achilles’s virtues and even his weaknesses, she finds herself caring for him.

This raised conflicting feelings—Briseis is describing Achilles to us as she comes to have changed feelings for him so it was easy for my feelings to change towards him too. Short vignettes are included from Achilles point of view beginning in Part 2, making it harder to hate him when I saw how hurt he was. I had to keep reminding myself that he was a violent killer who took women and made them his, without anything remotely resembling consent. And yet, he was a man abandoned by his mother and still obviously hurting. (Achilles needed all the therapy). He never treated Briseis as badly as he could have or as badly as others treated their slaves. But wait…as if that wins him a prize? That he wasn’t as forceful while he was raping her as he could have been? On the one hand, there is the idea that this was the time—that Achilles was only doing what was expected of him and was only receiving what was due him according to the customs of the time. But how often do we use that explanation to explain away racist grandpas, as if it’s ok that they didn’t keep up when the world changed?

It is a credit to Barker’s story telling that I still don’t know how I feel about Achilles—that she could take a character I would have assumed was black and white and made him all shades of gray. I connected to Briseis and cared for her as a character. Because I connected with her, I started to care for Achilles, though I didn’t want to and still don’t want to. This aspect of the book—the forgiving of violent men—may be something that some readers can’t accept and that will keep them from enjoying the book. That is totally valid. In some ways, I want that to be my reaction. I want this to be a place where there is no mercy for the men who stole the lives of these women, these girls. But perhaps they were hurting too. Perhaps this wasn’t the role they wanted to be filling either. And while we aren’t in ancient Greece anymore and it’s too late for Achilles, what does this say about the culture now? Are our modern day Achilleses beyond forgiveness? Is it Stockholm Syndrome or is it possible that even a violent man like Achilles can be forgiven and thus find his soul redeemed by one he violated most?*

Writing Style
While I enjoyed the story and connected to the characters, I will admit that I expected a bit more of the prose, knowing that Barker won the Man Booker and that this is a retelling of an epic poem. I wasn’t expecting dactylic hexameters, but I was expecting a bit more lyricism in the writing. Instead, the writing is on par for a solidly (3.5 star) written popular fiction novel. Perhaps the writing felt a bit pop-fiction rather than lit-fic because Briseis, though a princess and wife, was also a teenager and she was our main storyteller. The tone was conversational, a young woman confiding in friends rather than a memoirist carefully editing her words before recording them. The informal style fit the narrator and the story, it just wasn’t what I was initially expecting after hearing “Man Booker Winner.”

Recommended
Overall, this was an enjoyable read and one I recommend for readers who enjoy historical (very, very historical) popular fiction centered on female characters. This is a book to skip if you have triggers with sexual assault.

Notes
Published: September 4, 2018 by Doubleday (@doubledaybooks)
Author: Pat Barker
Date read: September 3, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

*It is never the job of the victim to forgive if he or she doesn’t want to and if doing so isn’t safe. In this context, Briseis did care about him and not because she was pressured to do so. It is from that viewpoint that I raise these questions.

Featured image credit:Jonas Jacobsson

Middle-Grade Mini-Reviews: My Real Name is Hanna and Lifeboat 12

Middle-Grade Mini-Reviews: My Real Name is Hanna and Lifeboat 12

I’ve said many times before but I love a good WWII novel.  I don’t know what it is about this time period that I find so fascinating, even after studying it for years in college.  And, thanks to the DBC, I’ve actually started reading more Middle-Grade and younger YA.  I saw My Real Name is Hanna and knew I had to read it. A hot second later, Lifeboat 12 popped up on Netgalley and I requested it too.

Thank you to NetGalley, Mandel Vilar Press, and Tara Lynn Masih for My Real Name is Hanna and Netgalley, Susan Hood, and Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers for Lifeboat 12. I enjoyed both books and am happy to post these honest reviews.

My Real Name Is Hanna
My family told stories. We swallowed them in place of food and water. Stories kept us alive in our underground sanctuary. The world continued to carry out its crimes above us, while we sought just to remain whole below.

Hanna’s story is set in Ukraine which made me assume her town would have been subject to Soviet occupation–I know significantly less about the countries that came under the rule of the Soviet Union since Between Shades of Gray is the only novel I’ve read of this time period (though I am interested in more if you want to leave me suggestions in the comments!).  Instead, Hanna’s town, while briefly occupied by the Soviet army, spent more time under Nazi rule.  Of course, anti-Semitism wasn’t new with the Nazis–there were already anti-Semites in town whose feelings were exploited by both the Soviets and Nazis.

The book is told in three parts—The Shtetele, The Forest, and The Caves. The Shtetle sets the stage—Hanna’s family is more privileged than many, with a nice house and a father who is respected and needed for his skills by the non-Jewish families in town. When the book opens, the war has already started but is just beginning to touch Hanna and her family. Rumors begin and mysterious people show up to hide in Hanna’s barn. Hanna is just turning fourteen—that age where so much of her remains a child still, and yet she is old enough to begin to understand what is happening. Old enough to be pulled into the secrets necessary to keep her family and her people safe.

When the town is no longer a safe place, Hanna’s family flees to the woods, to an abandoned cabin. The family has to stay inside most of the time, prepared to flee at any moment. While food was scare in the town, in the forest is where the march to hunger really begins. The family must ration food and even their own energy since they cannot consume enough calories to keep them on their feet all the time. As the Nazis move in, the family and several neighbors from a nearby cabin are forced literally underground, into an extensive network of caves.

The real family this story is based on lived the last 511 days of the war in an underground cave system, with the women and children living entirely underground, never seeing sunshine or feeling even the slightest breeze. Hanna’s family is much the same, with her father or uncle venturing out very rarely to obtain whatever food they might possibly find to bring back to the starving families below ground.

Even underground, the family lives in fear of being caught and is, at one point, walled in to the cave by townspeople.  Even before this moment, many of the townspeople were not just bystanders but actively participated in the hunting down and killing–either outright or through starvation or deportation to the ghettos and camps–of their neighbors.  My Real Name is Hanna is realistic in this regard and does not hide that neighbors are turning each other in.  On the flip side, there are characters who help the family hide, at great cost and risk to themselves.  This is perhaps the aspect of the book that may be the most troubling to younger readers—while the history here is accurate and a topic worth discussion, it is something that would require discussion with parents or other adults reading the book. May we be encouraged, and encourage younger generations, to chose to be the helpers in the face of injustice, even when the cost to ourselves is high.

Recommended
My Real Name is Hanna sits somewhat squarely in between Middle-Grade and YA (in my opinion). The audience for this book is probably right around middle school readers, with mature fourth to fifth graders able to handle the writing and themes, though too far into high school and the writing may feel a bit young for older readers. This is a book I recommend, particularly for those who are interested in areas like the Ukraine, which is featured less in WWII fiction than areas like France or even Poland yet suffered heavy losses—only 5% of Ukranian Jews survived, only 2% of Western Ukranian Jews with almost no families intact. It is a book with a powerful message of responsibility for our neighbors—this is a book to be discussed, not simply read.

Notes
Published: September 15, 2018 (September 18th for Kindle), available for pre-order now from Mandel Vilar Press
Author: Tara Lynn Masih (@taralynnmasih)
Date read: August 26, 2018
Rating: 3 ¾ stars

Lifeboat 12
Lifeboat 12 is a middle-grade novel in verse told from the point of view of a survivor of the S.S. City of Benares, a boat carrying children being evacuated from London that was sunk by a German U-Boat in September 1940.

Lifeboat 12 is also structured in three parts—Escape, Adrift, and Rescue. Escape sets up the dangerousness of life in London during the Blitzkrieg, Ken’s feeling of being unwanted by his stepmother, and the boarding and sinking of the ship. Adrift is the story of the eight days the survivors spent at sea. And Rescue is exactly what it sounds like—it is the boy’s return home, a return from the grave for their parents had been notified they had been lost at sea. While these three sections make for a hefty book—336 pages—because the story is told in verse, this was a quick read. Hood’s poetry lends the story a spare quality—the narrator is a twelve year-old boy so there are no flowery turns of phrase here. Each of the words seemed chosen for maximum impact, so that I might have only read fifty words on a page, yet the scene was as richly set and the characters as alive as if they were right next to me. The poetry also lent a more dramatic air—with portions of the book feeling as if they were pulled straight from an adventure novel.

Ken is a charming narrator—he’s a boy’s boy, obsessed with planes and always willing to give some help to a pal. Unlike most other narrators in WWII books I’ve read, Ken’s family is poor—I feel like I’ve read novels where everyone was effected by wartime rationing and scarcity, but I’m not sure I’ve read a book where the main character was poor before the book started—where liver was once or twice a week luxury. He represented an under-represented class in WWII narrators. He also doesn’t have a perfect family life—he’s fairly convinced his stepmother can’t stand him and this plan to send him to Canada is partly just to get him out of the house since she doesn’t like him. My heart ached for him when he talked about feeling unloved—while Ken does realize she cares for him by how she reacts when he comes home, my one criticism of Lifeboat 12 is that more wasn’t done with this relationship. With so many kids coming from blended families, books with boys Ken’s age who come to realize that their stepmothers really do care feel necessary.

I knew Lifeboat 12 was based on a true story, but I didn’t realize just how closely Hood stuck to the truth until I read the Author’s Note and afterward. Ken Sparks was a real survivor and the book is based on Hood’s interviews with him as well as her extensive research on the S.S. City of Benares. The Note and afterward are necessary reading—if you pick up this gem, you can’t stop reading at the end of the novel.

Recommended
Because it is so closely based on fact, I recommend Lifeboat 12 for kids (or adult middle-grade readers) who like books about historical events and adventure tales. The sinking of the S.S. City of Benares was another event I had no knowledge of—Lifeboat 12 was an enjoyable introduction to the event (if one can say learning about a devastating loss of life is in any way enjoyable). This is Hood’s first middle-grade novel after a successful career as a picture book author. I can’t wait to see where she goes next for her middle-grade-and-up readers.

Notes
Published: September 4, 2018 by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers (@simonandschuster)
Author: Susan Hood (@shoodbooks21)
Date read: September 7, 2018
Rating: 4 ¼ stars

Featured Image credit: Jonas Jacobsson

August 2018 Wrap-Up

August 2018 Wrap-Up

August was a fair amount of reading but not so much with the writing of blog posts.  I had good intentions.  They were not realized.  Birthday pass?

I finished ten books this month–There There, Drums of Autumn, Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Instructions for a Heat Wave, The Round House, Heads of the Colored People, The Dinner List, I am I am I am, and My Real Name is Hanna.  Thanks to that Gabaldon tome, my monthly total was 2,597 pages for a year total of 20,678 pages.  The three audio books–There There, Instructions for a Heatwave, and I am I am I am–clocked in at 23 hours and 2 minutes for a year total of 208 hours and 29 minutes.  Not too shabby for the old birth month.

I also acquired more books than I want to think about because it’s my party and I’ll buy books if I want to.  I’ll spare you the list but you should be impressed that I still have Amazon credit left.

The Dinner List
The Dinner List was a Book of the Month* pick for August and comes out on September 11th.  I hemmed and hawed over my box last month, trying to decide which books I wanted to get.  I actually hemmed and hawed so much that other people in a BOTM Facebook group I’m in received their books and started talking about them.  I try to make my BOTM picks books I think I will want to re-read since I’m making the splurge and getting them in a physical copy.  The Dinner List is lighter than my usual BOTM fare and yet I’m glad I took a chance and picked it as an extra.  I picked it up last weekend in the middle of two crazy weeks at work and it was exactly the distraction I needed.

The premise is fairly simple and reminiscent of an icebreaker game you were probably forced to play at summer camp–name any five people, living or dead, you’d like to have dinner with.  Thus begins Sabrina’s thirtieth birthday with her best friend, Audrey Hepburn, her ex-boyfriend Tobias, and a few others.  Serle does an excellent job weaving the connections to Audrey Hepburn into the book so that the choice of Ms. Hepburn at the table feels less random than it could, or the throwaway choice every girl who had A Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster on her dorm room wall would make (guilty as charged).  And, as Anne Bogel noted, Audrey makes it work–she brings levity and a bit of magical whimsy to otherwise heavy moments, yet her own actual tragic history brings perspective to others.

I went into The Dinner List wanted an easy escape read and discovered a surprisingly poignant gem.  The writing gave me the easy escape I wanted, the premise made the plot move fast enough to stay compelling, and the characters made me care deeply for each of them.  The Dinner List probes the reasons people leave, why certain people seem drawn to our lives, and what it means to let go.

Notes
Published: September 11, 2018 by Flatiron Books (@flatiron_books)
Author: Rebecca Serle
Date read: August 25, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

Cupcake header photo credit: Audrey Fretz

*This is a referral link.  I’ll get a free book if you decide to try it out.  There are always deals going on for a free tote and/or free book.  I’d love to chat if you want to know more, but no pressure. <3

Review: The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

Review: The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea

At the end of the day, all he really knew was that he was a Mexican father. And Mexican fathers made speeches. He wanted to leave her with a blessing, with beautiful words to sum up a life, but there were no words sufficient to this day. But still, he tried. “All we do, mija,” he said, “is love. Love is the answer. Nothing stops it. Not borders. Not death.”

Synopsis
Big Angel is dying, but before he goes, he wants his family—all of the twisting branches of it—gathered for his last birthday. Nothing will derail Big Angel’s party—not borders, not internal family feuds, not even his own mother’s death.  Told over the span of the days leading up to the party and the party itself, The House of Broken Angels is the story of an unforgettable Mexican-American patriarch and the life he built for his family, spanning decades and borders alike.

Prose
There is a distinctive voice to The House of Broken Angels—though I am an adult myself, Big Angel’s story is presented so intimately and warmly, I felt as if I were a child, drawn onto his knee, to hear a story from my grandfather. The prose is beautiful and enveloping in a way that invites the reader to join the family—this messy, imperfect, sprawling, grieving, celebrating family. Every word felt deliberately chosen and just right. The tone of the vignettes swing wildly from sad, to shocking, to funny, to irreverent—and yet every swing was just right.

As I read, I lost myself in this book—I wasn’t sitting in bed holding a kindle—I was in Big Angel’s backyard, smelling the food, listening to the children shriek, and waiting for Big Angel to come out of his house. For entire stretches at a time, I was in Big Angel’s world in Southern California, only to snap back after thirty or forty minutes to my quiet bedroom. Those moments when you can lose yourself so completely in a book that you are no longer aware that you are reading are so rare, and yet they became common for me on the nights I read this book.

Characters
This family is far from perfect—there’s sadness and violence waiting in the wings for many of these characters, there’s machismo and terrible choices—and yet I loved them. I loved Big Angel’s son Lalo as he grieved, as he fumbled around his definition of what it meant to be a man. I loved Little Angel (so named because Big Angel’s philandering father reused the name on his youngest son) as he sought his place within this family as the half-brother, chosen by their father over them and then ultimately abandoned as well. Minnie, dutiful daughter, yet still missing something—torn between exasperation at being treated far younger than her thirty-something years and yet wanting to stay the baby of the family if it means her father is alive to treat her that way. And Big Angel—imperfect patriarch, yet capable of such dedication to his wife and his children that he seemed larger than life, though trapped in his wasted body. These are complicated people, defined by their blood to Angel and also their humanness, their ordinariness. I half expect there to be a real De La Cruz family in San Diego throwing Big Angel his birthday this weekend.

Immigration and current events
The De La Cruz family and Big Angel himself are Mexican-Americans. They are of one place, living and contributing to the community and economy of another. Some of the members of the family, including Big Angel himself, are undocumented. And here again is where I come back to Urrea’s presentation of Big Angel as larger than life and yet so very ordinary.   The House of Broken Angels is the story of the family next door, or maybe across town. You buy groceries next to Big Angel’s wife Perla and you sat next to his son Lalo in high school bio.

I noted in my last review that The Fruit of the Drunken Tree is a single story that explains why so many people might leave their homes in South American to come across our border. The House of Broken Angels is another. Immigration is never simple once actual human beings are involved. It is one thing to speak of policy and “illegals.” It is another to look a human being in the face—a veteran, a long-time employee, and favorite neighbor—and tell them they do not belong. You are not us. The stories of Big Angel’s families are not all stories of lives well-lived. Not yet. And yet they are lives of value. They are lives that belong. Books like The House of Broken Angels seem vitally important in this current climate—in a climate where it is not safe for a neighbor to confide over the fence that he is undocumented and scared. When maybe you don’t know whether you know anyone who is undocumented and it’s not really the thing you ask right now. Read books like The House of Broken Angels and Fruit of the Drunken Tree to remind yourself that what is at stake is the dignity and lives of people.

Notes
Published: March 6, 2018 by Little, Brown, & Co. (@littlebrown)
Author: Luis Alberto Urrea
Date read: July 11, 2018
Rating: 5 stars* (I swear I don’t usually give this many books 5 stars, I’ve just had a really good streak of reading).

Featured Image credit: Jonas Jacobsson

Review: Fruit of the Drunken Tree with Flight Pick: Tell Me How It Ends

Review: Fruit of the Drunken Tree with Flight Pick: Tell Me How It Ends

I received a digital ARC of Fruit of the Drunken Tree from Doubleday on NetGalley. I’m grateful to Doubleday for their generosity with this powerful and timely read. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis
Set in the 1990s, Fruit of the Drunken Tree follows the Santiago family, presented primarily through the eyes of the youngest daughter, Chula, and their new maid from the guerilla-controlled slums, Petrona. Chula is immediately fascinated with Petrona while Petrona finds herself pulled in too many directions at once—forced to leave her own family to care for another, all while falling in love for the first time. As the conflict in Columbia between the paramilitary and the guerillas escalates, with Pablo Escobar at the center, Chula and Petrona are forced headlong into a crisis that will permanently alter both their lives.

Narrator
Though Chula is older when the book opens, the majority of the book takes place in her early childhood. My knowledge of world history is woefully full of holes and there’s a giant one where Columbia is on the map. This created a bit of a problem for me since my understanding of what was happening was limited to Chula’s understanding and her understanding was limited by her age and her parents’ sheltering her as much as they could from what was going on. This is where I shamefully admit that Wikipedia aided in my reading. Are there better and more authoritative sources of information out there? Yes. Did I have them immediately available on my phone while I was reading? No. So Wikipedia it was. Chula discusses Pablo Escobar (heard of him), Galan (nope), and the fight between the military, paramilitary, and guerillas (nope x 3) as if the reader knows what is going on with these people—this is where Wikipedia was helpful, to give me a basic primer on who was aligned with whom and why. If you also don’t know the basics of Escobar, Galan, and the struggle between those three groups, a quick bit of research to familiarize yourself with Columbia in the 90s will probably be helpful.

Chula isn’t an unreliable narrator, or at least, not deliberately so. She is, however, naïve and, therefore, limited. For example, she stays within the gated compound guarded by security guards—and yet because she wasn’t preoccupied by how this limited her life, I wasn’t thinking about the reason for this set-up being to prevent kidnappings. Chula presents her life at face value and it is easy to be lulled into the false feeling of safety that she generally feels. The action and events as the book approached its climax seemed all the more shocking when they happened—as Chula didn’t see them coming, neither did I. It wasn’t until the end of the book when I had a firmer grasp on what was happening that earlier events and statements in the narrative took on a deeper meaning. In many ways, this naivety was welcome—experiencing the book as Chula experienced her life was a new experience for me as a reader. Because I didn’t know where the narrative was going, I was sucked in and everything felt fresh.

Class
Fruit of the Drunken Tree is steeped in class issues that are highlighted by Chula’s ignorance of her place within Columbian society and her mother’s low-stakes attempts at being the upper-class savior of Petrona. Chula lives a charmed life in Bogota behind the fences of her upper-class neighborhood, though like most young children doesn’t realize it. Indeed, there is a much richer woman who lives nearby whom Chula and her friends call “The Oligarch” without irony and without appreciation for their own deeply privileged place within Columbian society. When her family hires a new maid, Petrona, Chula comes to care deeply about her and sees her as a friend, in the way of children who think it is possible for the thirteen year-old maid to be the best friend of the seven year-old girl she waits upon.

Even Chula’s mother who grew up in the slums herself places herself in the role of savior, forcing a fancy First Communion upon Petrona, yet failing to act as savior when the stakes are higher. As Americans, we so often want to put ourselves into this role—we want to save the less fortunate by giving them the things that cost very little or nothing to us. Yet when we are in the position to do more, to actually put action behind what we say we believe, we don’t—these acts will cost us more than we are comfortable giving up. It is in the moments when our comfort outweighs our compassion that our privilege is perhaps most highlighted.

Flight Pick: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the current refugee crisis at our southern border


The children who cross Mexico and arrive at the U.S. border are not “immigrants,” not “illegals,” not merely “undocumented minors.” Those children are refugees of a war, and, as such, they should all have the right to asylum. But not all of them have it.

Every now and then I recommend a second book that I think should be read alongside another—a “book flight” as Anne Bogel calls them. While it focuses on the children coming from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala rather than Columbia, Tell Me How It Ends is a book that is a must-read. It adds context to Fruit of the Drunken Tree—it turns Rojas Contreras’s tale of a single family’s immigration story ten-plus years ago into a microcosm of what these children are fleeing now. Reading increases empathy and Luiselli’s essay is the bridge that connects Fruit of the Drunken Tree to the refugee crisis on our southern border. If I were Chula or Petrona and my best chance at continuing to live were to risk life and limb crossing Mexico in the hands of a coyote and present myself at the United States border, I would take it. Rojas Contreras’s story leaves no doubt as to what waited Chula’s family or Petrona in Bogota.   Chula was lucky to have a family with connections to an American company that could help her come the “right” way—but right and wrong ways be damned. When your choice is death or the American border, you chose the border.

Tell Me How It Ends makes clear that the flood of humanity presenting itself at our border (because let’s be clear—the vast majority are presenting themselves at the border as refugees, not sneaking over and trying not to get caught) are the fruit of the tree the United States planted in Central American countries many years ago. We funded the military groups to counter what was seen as a leftist/Communist threat. Our money fueled the wars between the military, guerillas, and paramilitaries. We remain the largest consumer of Columbia’s cocaine—American money that continues to send large sums of money to keep these conflicts going. This is the violence these children are fleeing. We planted this poisonous tree and we continue to water it. These children and the chaos they are feeling are the fruit of our tree.

Recommended
At a time when white men still tell most of our history, Fruit of the Drunken Tree (though fiction), is a highlight of female storytelling. Here are the girls and women forced to be brave in the chaos and conflict of 1990s Columbia. Fruit is a story of the many forms of female resilience.   This book was a highlight of my reading so far this year and will likely earn a place on my Best of 2018 reading list at the end of the year.

Notes
Published: July 31, 2018 by Doubleday (@doubledaybooks)
Author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras (@i_rojascontreras)
Date read: August 12, 2018
Rating: 5 stars

Flight: Tell Me How It Ends
Published: April 4, 2017 by Coffee House Press (@coffeehousepress)
Author: Valeria Luiselli
Date read: August 15, 2018
Rating: 5 stars

Review: Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win by Jo Piazza

Review: Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win by Jo Piazza

I received a free e-version of Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley. I’m grateful to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for their generosity in providing a copy for me to review and, because I thoroughly enjoyed Charlotte Walsh, was happy to post this honest review. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis
Charlotte Walsh likes to win—she’s the Chief Operating Officer of a Silicon Valley technology company, mother of three under six, and best-selling author. She’s set her sights on replacing her home-state’s incumbent senator—a serial philanderer who still manages to cinch tight his Bible belt every Sunday morning, his latest half-his-age wife shining in pastels and pearls beside him. Charlotte returns to Pennsylvania with her less-than-enthused husband Max, her children, and old dog in tow. Yet, as the race heats up, the attacks turn nastier, leaving Charlotte desperately hiding one last secret and wondering whether she and her family will still be standing come election day.

Timing
Shortly after I finished Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win, I came across an Instagram post that called it “The book I didn’t know I needed to read after the 2016 Election.” That quote sums up in its entirety how I felt about Charlotte Walsh (and if it was you who said that or you know who it was, please comment below so I can credit you). I remember beginning that night in November 2016 texting with a friend who planned to travel to DC with me to see the first woman president be sworn in—we had our inauguration tickets, our lodging in DC worked out. We just needed to buy our plane tickets after Hillary was declared (Thank the universe we waited to buy those tickets). And then the growing feeling of disbelief until, finally, I went to bed shortly after eleven central time feeling shell-shocked and empty. I still question how we have gotten ourselves to this point—to the point where we have a president who aligns himself with David Duke and equates protestors with literal Nazis marching in the street. I realize this shock is the shock of privilege—I knew things were bad. But I thought they were bad in pockets; I thought the arc of history was steadily trucking towards justice. Timing is everything of course—Piazza’s book wouldn’t have had nearly the resonance it did if it weren’t published now—on the even of the midterms when hopes are riding high for a blue wave. Indeed, I don’t think Piazza would have even written this book had it not been for that night in November 2016—in many ways Charlotte Walsh feels like Piazza sharing how she wrote herself out of that shock and disappointment.

Charlotte
Charlotte is everything I wanted her to be. She is the kind of woman who can pull off this kind of campaign—which is to say she’s already incredibly rich and powerful in her own right. She’s taking names, not excuses. As an attorney, I receive my (un)fair share of side-eye when I’m assertive or, dare I say, bossy. Charlotte is a next-level boss, and yet, because it seems like every woman who dares put a little steel in her backbone gets a side-eye (particularly here in The South), Charlotte feels relatable, even to us little-b bosses. Sexism is, unfortunately, a seemingly universal experience for those of us with two X chromosomes, and the intensity she receives doesn’t make Charlotte less relatable.

I also applaud Piazza for making Charlotte not a size two and occasionally a sweaty mess when she has to do things like wear a blazer outside in August while judging a pie-eating contest.   I read that particular scene and could practically feel my sweat glands chime in with empathy—I know what it’s like to have to wear a long-sleeved suit in a Texas court in August. You have to wring out your coat just crossing the street to get back to your car.

Charlotte’s relationship to her husband Max was a major element of the book and created much of the tension in the plot.   Charlotte didn’t marry a house-husband. This is a marriage of two alphas, with the campaign forcing the issue of who gets to be first. In any relationship built on equality, that decision should be made jointly and with equal decision-making power. It isn’t so much that you should “take turns” but rather that the person whose needs are greater in any given moment should take precedence. When all things are equal, “needs” includes choices that would further a career or fulfill a dream. And yet, that’s always easier said than done. Having been the subordinate in an unequal marriage, it chafes to be the person on the bottom. Max becomes the subordinate to Charlotte during the year and a half she runs and that causes the friction you’d imagine. As a reader, Max’s attitude made me feel for Charlotte. I understood that Max didn’t like how the new role felt –neither do we Max when its forced on us—but it was Charlotte’s time. He agreed to this trip, so he needs to keep his hands and feet inside the car at all times until it stops moving.

Scandal
There is, of course, a scandal that Charlotte is hiding. The existence of the scandal felt predictable—there had to be some looming threat, something to create the climax in the campaign besides election night itself. Piazza gets a pass there from me for the predictability. You knew it was coming (but not what it was) but there wasn’t really another way to create the tension the book needed.

And holy smokes was the scandal bigger than I could have guessed. Charlotte’s inner fretting and sweating told me it was big. But…wow. And yet, here is where Piazza almost lost me. The scandal made Charlotte unlikeable. I get that it had to. It needed to be the kind of scandal that could threaten the election so it had to be the kind that would drive people away from her, make her seem unrelatable. I get it. But gosh darn it, I don’t have to like it.

Recommended
This book fits squarely within the camp of popular-lit, a category in which I don’t often find myself (#UnapologeticBookSnob #ButOnlyInMyChoices #ReadWhatYOULike). Reading the synopses of some of Piazza’s other work, I have no reason to doubt they’re as strongly written as Charlotte Walsh, but they probably aren’t my cup of tea. Charlotte Walsh had that hook, though. Piazza told a story I wanted and needed to hear. It was engaging without being fluffy. It was easy to read while still being tightly-written and well edited. It’s a book I recommend for readers wanting a book that feels immediately relevant, with flawed but relatable characters. It’s a book I recommend for any woman who went to bed on that night in November 2016 feeling empty and sick. There is a way forward and it starts with you getting your butt to the polls in November. And maybe it continues with you running. If Charlotte Walsh can do it, so can you.

Vote
To confirm you are registered to vote and find your poling place, you can check here. With all of the voter suppression happening, please confirm now that you are still registered to vote—even if you voted in the last election. And then get your butt to the polls in November. <3

Let us vote in such overwhelming numbers that we show everyone who much we love our country, how much we love our people, how much we love peace, how much we love life itself. -Nelson Mandela

Notes
Published: July 24, 2018 by Simon & Schuster (@simonandschuster)
Author: Jo Piazza (@jopiazzaauthor)
Date read: July 19, 2018
Rating: 4 stars

July 2018 Wrap Up

July 2018 Wrap Up

Hello dear readers <3

As I mentioned in my previous post, July was a bit of a crazy month for me.  My boss hadn’t taken a real vacation where she didn’t check email or wasn’t available by phone for something like twenty years.  And then in July she went to Europe for three weeks.  It was a well-deserved vacation for her but it meant I got to experience whatever the exact opposite of a vacation is, all while also finishing up an intense yoga training program.  Needless to say, I’m glad July is over.  Hello August, Hello Birth-month.

Before the celebrations begin, I suppose I should give July a proper wrap up.  I finished seven books in July — Dear Mrs. Bird, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, The House of Broken Angels, Census, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, Still Lives, and Breakout for a total of 2240 pages.  The only audiobook I finished was Barracoon, which clocks in at at an easy-peasy 3 hours and 50 minutes.  (I finished another audiobook at the very beginning of August that was mostly listened to in July, but since it missed the July 31 cut off, I guess you’ll just have to wait in suspense for what it was.)  My year totals so far are 18,081 pages and 191 hours and 21 minutes.  While the stress kept my from writing much, not surprisingly, books remained my refuge and I still managed to get in some good reading, though it skewed lighter than my usual go-to reads.  I wouldn’t say I’m a true “mood reader” like Madeleine or Katharine, but I definitely go for books that are easier to read and more escapist when work and life stress are particularly intense.

Census
Census was one of the Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide Picks.  While Anne frequently picks books that are literary (as opposed to just pop-fiction) and full of discussion-fodder, this one is the first one that I can remember thinking might have just been entirely over my head.  On its face, Census was the story of a dying widower who takes his son with down syndrome on one last trip through the country.  They travel from town to town–in order named A through Z–taking the “census” which involves asking a series of never-revealed questions and then leaving a tattoo on the ribs of the person from whom the census was taken.  There’s a vaguely sinister feel to the census-taking and I was left with the sense that it stood for something larger….though I’m not sure for the life of me what it was.  The book raises questions around the themes of kindness and how we treat people with disabilities, though Ball never provides the answers as to how we should treat people.  He simply shows how we do.  I was left with the impression that Census was beautiful and haunting but that there had to be something more to it that I was missing.  I still don’t know what it was.

(I found this review in the New York Times to be helpful in discussion Census as well.)

Barracoon
Barracoon, originally written by Zora Neale Hurston but with added introductory information, is one of those books that I think is a must-read (or listen).  While still a fairly young writer, Hurston met Cudjo Lewis, the last living slave brought from Africa and transcribed his recollections of life in what is now Benin, the Middle Passage, and slavery in America before the outbreak of war.  As I noted above, this is short–it’s under four hours when performed, including all of the introductory material.  It was a tad hard to follow simply because this is the kind of book that has words that aren’t common to English and because Hurston transcribed Mr. Lewis’s accent and vernacular phonetically, though it didn’t take long for me to settle in to the language, so don’t let that turn you off.  Given the dearth of available primary sources from Africans and African Americans during this time period (relative to the histories written by white men), this is a book that should be on every reading list and in everyone’s hands.

Still Lives
Quite literally the day after I posted a mini-review of Still Lives on Instagram, Reese Witherspoon picked it for her August book club pick.  I guess Reese and I have slightly different taste. I’ve said it before but thrillers, unless they raise questions like those in The Blinds, aren’t really my thing.  I pick them up when I’m in a rut because they’re easy and fast but I never love them or feel it necessary to own my own copy once I’m done.  I was having trouble picking a book and needed something that didn’t make me think, since work was requiring all my extraneous brain cells–so Still Lives happened.

Artist Kim Lord goes missing on the night of the opening of her show, “Still Lives,” an exploration of the glorification and commodification of female murder victims–their bodies are taken by their killers and yet the violations continue as we repeatedly gaze at and speculate about their murders.  Lord dresses up as each of the victims in their infamous death scenes or poses, photographs it, then paints from the photographs.  The result is pictures that look like the victims until you look closely and can see that each victim could be someone else (in this instance, Lord).  Maggie, ex-girlfriend to Lord’s boyfriend and employee of the museum hosting the exhibition, finds herself pulled into the investigation.  At the end of the day, the whodonit was fine and Maggie was relatable protagonist, but the most interesting part of the book to me was simply the message being sent by the fake Kim Lord with her fictional paintings.  If you like mysteries and the premise sounds interesting to you, this might be worth your time.  It just wasn’t my thing.

I’m still deciding on some August reads–are you reading anything good?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments.  <3

Header Photo Credit Stephanie McCabe