The Englishist

“It’s truly extraordinary,” he said.  “Who would believe it?  ‘Jewish girl risks all for German solider.’  Tell me, Patty Bergen–” his voice became soft, but with a trace of hoarseness–”why are you doing this for me?”

I picked up Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene at the library book sale over a year ago, and finally got around to reading it this past week.  I don’t know what I was expecting, exactly, but I’m glad I read this story about a Jewish girl in America during WWII and her decision to help a German POW escape.

What I Liked

- THIS BOOK.  I liked this entire book from top to bottom.  Honestly, I kind of loved everything about it.

- The characters.  Patty and her housekeeper Ruth are the standouts here, but there’s also Charlene Madlee and her grandmother.  And while Patty’s parents are villainous, they are both pretty fully drawn and not flat at all.  Horrible, yes.  Understandable…not exactly.  But I understand their relationship to and with Patty and never felt like they were too anything, if that makes sense.

- Patty lives in an abusive household but the book isn’t really about that.  It’s not a problem novel at all is what I mean.  It’s part of the make up of her character, it’s part of the make up of her life, and it serves to explain, in part, her decision to help Anton (the POW).  I was a little nervous at first about what message the book would send to kids who live in abusive homes because there’s a focus in the beginning on Patty showing her parents her sweetness so they can be sweet to her, but it’s really well addressed at the end that, really, there’s nothing she can do about her parents because they just suck.  It’s done in such a great way, too.

- All of the relationships in this book were so well-handled and fully drawn.

- The overall themes about the importance of kindness and friendship and pride and love.

- Okay, everything.  I just liked everything.

What I Didn’t Like

- Just a warning that there is a lot of casual racism in this book that totally fits the time period, but it took a minute for my 2010 mind to adjust.  For example, Ruth is referred to as a Nigra, and the women in the novel see having “a Nigra” as a status symbol.  The black people live in “Nigger Bottoms,” and a “chink” is run out of town.  That said, the racism doesn’t go unchecked.  Patty, early on, says that Ruth is not uppity, just proud.  She knows that Mr. Lee’s family is Chinese and not Japanese, etc.  I think Greene does a fantastic job of setting the scene without reveling in racist language.

Pride.  Maybe that’s it, what Ruth has.  What makes her different.  Keeps her from looking down at her shoes when talking with white people.  Then it is all a lie what they say about her.  Ruth isn’t one bit uppity.  Merely prideful.

Women Unbound?

I think this book definitely takes a thoughtful look at the place of women in society, from Ruth to Patty to the spoiled mother to Charlene.  Not to mention, Patty’s decision to basically betray her country and family definitely qualifies her as girl/woman unbound.

In conclusion:  This book started as a bathroom read for me, but I would find myself reading huge chunks of it at a time.  By the end, I was so completely engrossed and swept up in the narrative.  I LOVED READING THIS BOOK.  I think this is my first unequivocal recommendation of the year.  It’s a book I want other people to read or have read so I can talk about it with them.

YA Challenge:  4/75

The topic of the current diversity roll call is paradigm shifts, more specifically:

Have you ever read a book and the character’s perspective opened you to ideas, beliefs or realities that you had never considered? Tell us a about a work or an author whose body of work changed how you looked at the world, others or yourself. Have you ever read a book and had a paradigm shift because of it?

It took me some time to come up with my answer to this question.  I have read a lot of books.  A LOT.  My main love, though, is series fiction.  The Baby-Sitters Club was my gateway drug into the world of series fiction, and then I moved on to Sweet Valley High before stumbling upon Katherine Applegate’s Ocean City and then Boyfriends/Girlfriends (now Making Out) series.  And I liked Applegate a lot because she always featured a minority character, which was a welcome change from SVH and its focus on the blonde twins and their ultra-white friends.

I recently reread book one in the Girl Friends series, a ten-book series most people have never heard of.  It was extremely popular with me, of course, but one person does not a successful series make, and author Nicole Grey’s contract wasn’t extended, so the series ends on a wicked cliffhanger.  I had stumbled upon Girl Friends in 1993, voracious bookstore goer that I was.  And at first, I thought it was my pick for the paradigm shift because of what I said at the end of my review there.  Namely:

Empowerment through female friendships.  I’d be lying if I said that this series hasn’t inspired my dissertation topic focusing on female friendship.  If I didn’t love these books with all of my heart, I doubt very seriously that I would even think about or consider friendships between girls as much as I do.

But that’s not even it.  Because Applegate had strong female friendships, and the BSC is founded by best friends.  No, it’s more than that.

In his memoir Bad Boy, Walter Dean Myers talks about his experiences reading.  And he says that he read a wealth of writers, mostly white and male.  But it wasn’t until he read James Baldwin and Langston Hughes that his world changed because they talked about Harlem, and he so strongly identified with their writing about it because that’s where he lived.  He saw himself and his family and friends in their writing.  What he said, and I’ll never forget, is that reading Baldwin and Hughes gave him permission to write the stories he wanted to write about the people and places he knew.

And that’s what Girl Friends did for me.  I always wanted to write a book series because that’s what I liked to read, but I didn’t live in a world like BSC and SVH.  I lived in a world with lots of people of color.  A world where there would only be one white main character, if there was one at all.  (Janis, the only featured white character, is introduced last.  LAST.  Most of the series fiction I’ve read centers around a blond white female.  And if not blond, then still white.  The first character introduced in GF is Stephanie–who is Chinese-American.) It wasn’t until I read Grey’s series that I felt like anyone would read or write a series populated with girls of color or a series that talked about the things I saw going on with the people I knew.  It was the first series I read where it felt like a world I lived in, and that blew my mind.

So, not only did it impress upon me the importance of female connection (note:  none of these girls were ever in competition with each other over a boy), nor did it just open my eyes to true contemporary realism in series fiction, but it also showed me there was a place for me and the people and situations I knew in series fiction.  And that gave me permission to dream, for real, about writing my own series one day.

Which I may get around to doing one day.

I was not anxious to write this book.  Writing an autobiography at my age seemed presumptuous.  Moreover, I felt that to write about my life, what I did, what I thought and what happened to me would require a posture of difference, an assumption that I was unlike other women–other Black women–and therefore needed to explain myself.  I felt that such a book might end up obscuring the most essential fact:  the forces that have made my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of my people.

When I signed up for the Women Unbound Reading Challenge, I knew immediately that I was going to read Angela Davis’s autobiography.

I feel like I can’t even talk about this book without talking about why I wanted to read it.  So, a brief history.

I have seen this book practically my whole life because my mother owns it.  (It has a slightly different cover than the picture in this post.)  I never read it.

In college, I read Assata:  An Autobiography, and I absolutely loved it.  LOVED IT.  I was enthralled by her, wanted to know more about the Black Panthers.  So when my professor said he was going to teach a class on the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, I signed up.  [The Wikipedia page may be more accessible.]  And I read a host of literature by and about the Panthers.  We read Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown and George Jackson.  We read about Eldridge Cleaver and Li’l Bobby Hutton and the Soledad Brothers.  (My favorite book we read that semester was David Hilliard’s This Side of Glory.  I wrote a paper on it.)  I saw the movie. Still, I didn’t read her book.  (It wasn’t on the list.)

Angela Davis came to speak at Iowa State University when I was a student there.  I went; I was enthralled by her words.  She is an eloquent speaker.  Still, I didn’t read her book.

When I went to Oakland this summer, I considered going on the tour.  I didn’t go for boring financial and time reasons.  And still, I didn’t read Angela Davis’s book.

Until the challenge came, and I knew there was no excuse not to anymore.  In fact, I was going to make it my first non-fiction read for the challenge.  So when I went to my parents’ house for Christmas, I asked my mom if I could read her copy, and she told me yes, and I started it the day after Christmas.

And finished it a month later.

I was kind of surprised by how long it took me to read the book.  It’s well-written to be sure, and I have read these types of autobiographies before (see above), but for some reason I couldn’t quite engage with the book.  Then I figured out what it was.  The last memoir I read was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and the two books are vastly different in style.  For one, Angelou’s book reads like a novel.  There’s dialogue and scene building and characters.  Not so with Davis.  And that’s when I realized I was reading the book wrong.

Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading.

This is an autobiography, but it’s intention is not to describe people and places.  It’s not even to provide a clear snapshot of Davis’s transformation into a revolutionary leader.  Her assumption is that the reader understands all of that (probably because it was first published in 1974, on the heels of the Black Liberation Movement).  When I guide my students in their reading, I always tell them they should be able to answer one question clearly at the end of a selection:  “What am I supposed to do, think, or feel after reading this?”  I know what I wanted to think and feel when I was reading.  But what I actually wound up realizing is that this is the chronicle of the events that led to Davis being on the FBI hit list.  It’s to show what she was actually doing and involved in while the charges were being trumped up against her.  It’s also to show the conditions of prisons and prisoners, the importance of communication between prisoners and those outside, the reasons we shouldn’t isolate their experiences from our own.  It’s to show the systematic oppression of blacks and women and black women.

Prisoners–particularly Black prisoners–were beginning to think about how they got there–what forced them into prison.  They were beginning to understand the nature of racism and class bias.  They were beginning to recognize that regardless of the specific details of their individual cases, most of them were in prison because they were Black, Brown, and poor.

When I finished the book, I didn’t feel like I knew Angela Davis the person or the adolescent, the way I felt I knew Marguerite after reading I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings or even Harriet Jacobs after reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl or Frederick Douglass or David Hilliard.

But I do understand Angela Davis as an intellectual and a fighter.  I understand her approach to activism, the fact that she won’t tolerate bullshit from the people she works with or the people who sought to silence her. I also understand that there are benefits to being educated, to being a part of the intelligentsia, and to knowing and understanding our rights.

This is, in actuality, her defense.  She talks about her trial and that she and her legal team had set up a fantastic defense, intended to last days or weeks.  But it was condensed to three or so days once it became clear that the prosecution had nothing on her.  But the thought and care put into the autobiography shows what she put into her opening and closing statements of her trial.  This is the narrative to support her defense, not the narrative, necessarily, of her life.  It’s her story in her words and it paints a complete picture of the woman who stood trial, why she stood trial, and how she accounted for her time before and during her trial.

Jails are thoughtless places. [...] The void created by this absence of thought is filled by rules and…fear.

When I saw Angela Davis speak at ISU, she spoke again of the importance of connections in prison.  She spoke about the importance of narratives, and how important it is for the voice of the people to be heard.  She talked about how the media shapes our responses and our forgetfulness.  All things addressed in her autobiography.

The tremendous energy of the movement which had so swiftly transformed my jail situation was energy my sisters and brothers had a more than equal right to.  I tried to assuage some of my pain by establishing contact with sisters and brothers in prisons all over the country. [...] I answered letter after letter from prisoners…More than ever before I felt a need to cement my links to every other prisoner.  My very existence, it seemed, was dependent on my ability to reach out to them.  I decided then and there that if I was ever free, I would use my life to uphold the cause of my sisters and brothers behind walls.

I’m glad I got over my assumptions of what I thought the book should be and appreciated for what it is.  It’s a political document, not a story narrative.  It’s Angela Davis speaking in her own voice and constructing her own narrative and making sure her story isn’t forgotten.  But it’s also a call to not let other people’s stories be forgotten.  It’s a call to keep fighting for the rights of those who maybe can’t speak for themselves, especially political prisoners.  It’s a call for a continuing social justice movement.

What had just unfolded was incontrovertible proof of the power of the people.

Women Unbound Challenge:  1/8; POC Challenge:  1/15

“Superman’s not brave. [...] He’s indestructible. You can’t be brave when you’re indestructible. It’s guys like you and me that are brave, Angus. Guys who are different and can be crushed–and know it–but go out there anyway.”

Athletic Shorts:  Six Short Stories by Chris Crutcher is…a book of six short stories.  All of the stories except one feature characters from his books Stotan!, Running Loose, and The Crazy Horse Electric Game.  Of those books, I have read exactly none–not that it matters.  The stories are accessible and stand up well on their own.  They are also slightly spoilery for the other books–not that that matters either.  If anything, they made me more interested in the stories and worlds featured.

What I Liked

- My favorite story is probably the first one, “A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune.”  Mine and Hollywood’s since it was turned into a movie.  At any rate, Angus’s parents are awesome, his voice is awesome, and the story is a lot of fun.  It’s one of the two more light-hearted of the six stories, so that’s also a plus.

- Even though these are short stories, they are clasic Chris Crutcher, dealing with issues of death, racism, abuse, guilt, homophobia, and bullying.  You know, the usual.

- “The Telephone Man” is the story about racism and it is uncomfortable to read because it’s from the POV of a racist, but I liked its honesty.  Before each story is a small explanation for it, and this is what Crutcher says about Telephone Man:

Racism speaks volumes about those who hide behind it, says exactly nothing of those at whom is it directed.

I think the story does a great job of exposing the kid who hides behind racism and also where he gets his ideas.  (Hint:  It’s his daddy!)

- I loved the story about homophobia.  It was very affecting.  Great characters.

What I Didn’t Like

- I think there was maybe one story I’d count as a weak link.

In conclusion:  One weak link makes for a very solid short story collection.  It’s  a great introduction to the themes that dominate Chris Crutcher’s works as well as to his storytelling style.  I liked it a lot.

YA Challenge:  3/75

I was supposed to play the piano. [...] I play the organ.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban can be summed up in the words of the Rolling Stones:  “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”  As the breakout quote shows, main character Zoe wants to play the piano.  Instead, she gets an organ.  So the whole book is about how she deals with what she gets versus what she really wants.  You know, like an organ instead of a piano or a dad who is too scared to drive her anywhere versus the freedom to go to parties with her friends.

What I Liked

- I loved the characters.  All of them.  They are awesome.  From her comptroller mother to her slightly autistic/socially anxious dad to her music teacher to the bully turned friend.  I was sad when the book was over because I wanted to spend more time with the characters.

- I liked that the dad was this complicated man who wanted the best and meant the best but didn’t know how to achieve that exactly.  Which could be said for all of the characters.

- I loved the emphasis on practicing your craft.  Zoe wants to be a prodigy.  She isn’t.  Zoe wants to play beautifully but thinks it should come naturally.  But her mom shows her in the best way possible (LOVE HER MOM) that it takes practice to make it sound effortless.

- “Just keep playing.”  (The musical equivalent of “Just keep swimming.”)

- I always feel funny shipping tweens but at the same time, OMG, I JUST WANTED THOSE TWO CRAZY KIDS TO WORK IT OUT.  Hand holding, burping contests, hanging out at each other’s houses, walking home from school together.  Cute, cute, cute, cute!  I wanted more middle school cutesy dating stuff even if it’s not really dating.

- I thought all of the relationships were really well handled and developed.

- I loved the resolution of all of the conflicts in the book.  All of them

What I Didn’t Like

- The book was too short.  It was the perfect length for what it was trying to accomplish, but, as I said earlier, I wanted it to be longer so I could spend more time with the characters.

In conclusion:  The title of the book is spot on.  It is a crooked kind of perfect–just a little slice of perfection, really.

“I am a third child!  I want to be treated like everyone else!”

When I did my independent study at Iowa State University, the professor book talked Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden, so when I saw it at the library book sale, I snatched it up.  It’s not hard to make the premise interesting because it is.  Luke is a third child, living in a world where it is illegal to have more than two children.  He’s not supposed to exist, and so he hides in his family’s home, unable to go to school or play outside or…anything.  And then one day, he sees the face of what could only be another third child in one of his neighbor’s windows.

What I Liked

- The premise.  This is dystopian fiction, so Haddix is able to call attention to the silent and nameless and faceless.  These children aren’t alloted food or privileges because they shouldn’t exist.  Why?  Because they’re a drain on the country’s resources and have no real purpose (according to the government) except to drain those resources.

- Jen.  Jen is awesome and amazing and I love her.  LOVE.  In fact, I honestly wish the narrative had been about her instead of Luke.  Or at least that we got to spend more time with her.  You know, like the whole book.

- Among Jen’s awesome?  She starts a movement to protect and guarantee the rights of third children.

- As with other dystopian novels I’ve read, this one is very strongly anti-censorship.

- There is also a great discussion of propoganda.  The ultimate message?  Extremes are not good.  Period.  Balanced information is key to making informed decisions.

- The book moves fast.  It does drag a little in the beginning, but as soon as Luke sees Jen, it picks up and never really slows down until the end.  That’s not to say it’s all go, go, go, but the readability factor is very high.

What I Didn’t Like

- As usual, there are, apparently, no minorities in the future/dystopia (unless you count the third children).  Unlike The Giver, no mention is made of what could have possibly happened to all of these people or why there is an absence of them.  (It’s like Minority Report in that way.)  You could read the book as minorites, the poor, etc. being third children, but, you know.  It’d be nice to get a mention in there somewhere.

- Jen is way more interesting than Luke, and, yet, he is the POV character.  When Jen isn’t around, her absence is obvious.  (Did I mention that I love her?)

In conclusion:  All in all, a good read.

I wasn’t going to count this for the YA reading challenge because it’s really a middle grade novel.  But it is an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, so on the list it goes.

YA Challenge:  2/75

A review I wrote of Robinn Gourley’s Bring Me Some Apples and I’ll Make You a Pie and Anita Silvey’s I’ll Pass for Your Comrade: Women Soldiers in the Civil War appears in Purdue University’s First Opinions, Second Reactions. [Direct link:  "First Opinion: Women of Distinction".]

So since I last updated, a lot has happened.  For one, I had a database crash, which means my first two reviews of the year were lost.  (In summation:  Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer is heartbreaking, wonderful, and extremely hard to get into; Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling [as read by Jim Dale] is a fun reread.)  It also sucks because one of my resolutions for the year was updating within two days of finishing a book.  Obviously, that got shot down these past two weeks.

Thankfully, my wonderful friend and her mom were able to recover all of the other posts, so I’m going to get back to reviewing as soon as possible.

And then, Bloomsbury went and lost its mind.  Again.  So I have decided to join the POC Reading Challenge.

I’m going to do Level 4, which is 10-15 books.  I will probably surpass that, especially since I had already informally decided that my Women Unbound non-fic books would be largely focused on women of color.

I tend to read as I go, so I’m not going to make a list except to say that I’m currently reading Angela Davis:  An Autobiography.

Books Read for the Challenge

1. Angela Davis:  An Autobiography by Angela Davis

So, last year I read 74 books, several of which were rereads.  Here’s a list of my favorite new reads of 2009, in neat little categories.

Non-fiction
1-2-3 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 by Thomas W. Pelan & Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child by Robert J. MacKenzie, Ed.D. – I have a kid.  Sometimes she is difficult.  Both of these books helped me in different ways.  Setting Limits totally saved my relationship with my daughter because it helped me successfully set limits with her.  1-2-3 Magic reminded me how effective counting could be.  I had forgotten.

I’ll Pass for Your Comrade by Anita Silvey – This middle grade book about women soldiers in the Civil War really delves into the motivations and experiences of the women who chose to serve.

Middle grade fiction
The Road to Paris by Nikki Grimes – This quiet little novel about a girl in foster care and her desire for a family is both sad and hopeful all at once.

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex – This book did drag a little in the middle, but, all in all, the adventure of Tip and J. Lo as they search for Tip’s mom after an alien invasion is a load of fun while providing commentary on the state of the US.  Bonus:  the main character is a little black girl.

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson – The only way I can describe this book is as being deeper than me.  When a boy who looks like Jesus enrolls in their elementary school, a girl and her classmates struggle with questions of faith.

YA fiction
Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott – This book is so creepy, but I also couldn’t stop reading it.  About a girl who is kidnapped by a pedophile and her desire to escape.

My Fair Godmother by Janette Rallison – This book was a surprise read for me.  With three strong female characters,  two well-developed themes (“be careful what you wish for” and “don’t underestimate yourself”), and a great premise (the main character gets trapped in a fairy tale), I really enjoyed it a lot.  The book also has my absolute favorite quote I collected from a book this year:

Fairy’s side note: Guys can smell desperation. It triggers an instinct in them to run far and fast so they aren’t around when a woman starts peeling apart her heart. They know she’ll ask for help in putting it back together the right way–intact and beating correctly–and they dread the thought of puzzling over layers that they can’t understand, let alone rebuild. They’d rather just not get blood on their hands.

But sharks are different. They smell the blood of desperation and circle in. They whisper into a girl’s ear, “I’ll make it better. I’ll make you forget all about your pain.”

Sharks do this by eating your heart, but they never mention this beforehand. That is the thing about sharks.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman – About a girl in coma, deciding whether to live or die, I didn’t want this book to end.

Kendra by Coe Booth – At times this book was hard to read because I was so worried about Kendra, and her emotions are so raw and close to the surface.  That said, it’s an excellent book about the choices a girl who is desperate for love and attention–from the person she feels should care for her the most–makes.

Pure by Terra Elan McVoy – About a group of friends who all have purity rings and what happens when one of them decides to have sex.  I liked this for its emphasis on female friendship, but also because it doesn’t condemn religion as the main character tries to make sense of her world and her faith.

I Know It’s Over by C. K. Kelly Martin – A painful book about a relationship and its demise from the boy’s point of view.

YA series fiction
A Likely Story Book 1: Likely Story by David van Etten – It’s about a girl who WRITES A SOAP OPERA.  It has my eternal love for that alone.

Princess Diaries 10: Forever Princess by Meg Cabot – A fitting end to the series.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – The final part of the trilogy comes out this year, and I can’t wait to read it.

The Treasure Map of Boys by E. Lockhart – The penultimate book in the Ruby Oliver series.  I also can’t wait to see how this wonderful series ends.

Adult fiction
The Princess Bride by William Goldman – Far superior to the movie, and the author wrote that screenplay.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby – This book was honestly like a little slice of perfection.  About a woman who realizes that she’s deeply dissatisfied with her life.

I am reading two very serious books (serious in different ways–one is an autobiography, another is just kind of hard to read), so to give myself a break on Christmas Eve, I broke out my copy of The Magic Christmas because I knew it would be easy, and it’s always fun.  The twins get dolls that come alive!  They go to a magical world!  There are riddles to solve!  And magic!

Anyway, there’s not much to say about it except I totally laughed at Elizabeth being self-centered and twelve because her grandmother was all, “Samantha and Amanda stopped speaking because Samantha (I think) framed the love of her sister’s life and got him sent to prison and they regretted it their whole lives” and Liz is basically like, “Yeah, okay, whatever, but Jessica hated my lame Christmas gift so she totally deserves my ire.”  HAHAHAHA.  Oh, Liz.

The book is great because even if you don’t know the twins, it’s easy to follow their drama.  Also, you could cut out all of the details that make it specific to Liz and Jessica and turn it into a story about some other twins.  Plus also, it is kind of creepy cool that each girl basically develops a crush on her sister’s personality doppelganger.  I don’t know how to feel about that except…creepy cool.

Fun way to end the year.  Now I have to finish the other two books.