Dear Edward - Ann Napolitano

When I was in undergrad and had recently changed my major from chemistry to English, I took a creative writing class where a guest speaker read a short story of her about a plane crash. It was 2002 and she noted she'd probably never get the story published given the events of 9/11. I thought about this a lot when I picked up this book for the first time. There are young adults now who were not alive on 9/11 and perhaps this type of story doesn't feel as jarring for them. But there was something about this story that was deeply sad and unsettling for me.

But that's not to say that the book wasn't well written or worth reading. It was. But wading through individual trauma through the lens of national trauma of 9/11 was uncomfortable.

Dear Edward tells the story of a plane crash. 12 yo Edward Adler and his family are moving from New York City to Los Angeles where his mother is taking on a job writing for a TV show and his father is moving to a new university to be a professor after losing his bid for tenure. Along the way they meet several other passengers going through their own minor dramas.

And then the plane crashes. And Edward is the only survivor. To say that his life is completely changed is a drastic understatement. The PTSD alone is immense. Survivor's guilt. Orphan. He goes to live with his aunt and uncle who could never have kids of their own. But he's not ready to be folded into a family. And all this makes sense. Edward's reaction to everything is detailed and nothing seems out of the question.

The book alternates between Edward's life after the crash, and the hours and minutes leading up to the crash itself. This led to some confusion on my part since I was listening to the audio book and it interrupted the flow of the story somewhat. The actual events in the cockpit were lifted from an actual crash and that somehow makes the entire thing terrifying. Eventually Edward starts to process his trauma and one of the things that helps him is finding a trove of letters written to him by family members of those on the plane. Corresponding with these people feels cathartic for him. And in a way, it's cathartic for the reader as well.

4/5 Stars. 

Song for a Whale - Lynne Kelly

I really loved this book. I occasionally snag my middle reader's books and it makes me so nostalgic for all the books I read in my room in my own middle reader days. I would have loved this book as a kid too.

In high school, I was lifeguarding at a local water park and started to take sign language classes with my mom and St. Rita School for the Deaf in Cincinnati. I really loved watching the students communicate and loved learning about how ASL changes and adapts with slang and regional "accents" just like spoken English. We not only learned ASL there, but we learned about the history of ASL and why schools like St. Rita's were so important to the deaf community.

I loved seeing these sentiments reflected in Song for a Whale. The main character, Iris is a sixth grader in a main stream school where she can't communicate with anyone. Her mother and brother have a strong grasp of ASL but her father struggles. Her mother was born to two deaf parents and grew up knowing how to sign. When I was learning ASL, I learned that kids of deaf parents knew ASL, but that parents of deaf kids rarely learned. This is a sad reality and leads to a lot of miscommunication between kids and their parents, further isolating deaf kids if they don't have access to other ASL signers.

Iris feels lonely and isolated until she learns about a whale, Blue 55, who sings at a different frequency from other whales. He travels alone through the ocean with no one to talk to since no other whales can understand his song. Iris feels and instant connection and sets out to help Blue 55.

The best part of Song for a Whale is that Lynne Kelly has made sure that Iris is proud of her deaf heritage. She doesn't spend the book longing to be like other kids, she really is just longing to find her place in the world and yearns to be around people she can talk to. She stands up for herself and her identity. It's a great message for kids (and me, I really loved this one). 

5/5 Stars. 

Ploughshares Summer 2020 - Guest-edited by Celeste Ng

I loved reading the introduction to the Summer 2020 edition of Ploughshares and finding out it had been curated during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when we were in the early stages of lock downs and uncertainty was swirling in the air. Celeste Ng did a fantastic job reaching into those moments and finding stories that echoed the feeling of the time. I always appreciate the diverse voices I hear in Ploughshares and I often feel I've lived so many lives by the time I finish.

In the very first story, Wandering Gliders, we are introduced to Manu and Eve as they sit in the hospital awaiting the arrival of their twins. The story is told from Manu's point of view as he tries and fails to fully capture Eve as a person, as his wife. The story has the feeling of always being on the cusp of connection, until it's gone.

Jamel Brinkley's painful story Comfort is about a woman who has lost her job and is a bit adrift following the death of her brother at the hands of a police officer. Terribly timely, the story is full of grief and the simple comfort another human can bring when our hearts are not quite ready to let new people in.

Go Forth, Miss Trout! tells the story of a group of writing students awaiting the arrival of their teacher only to find out she has died. Having a grandmother that lives in Toronto and having been a visitor to the city for more times than my brain remembers, I loved all the Toronto specific details in this story.

Doers of the Word was an great story of a woman healer who helped escaped slaves on their way to freedom. Told from the point of view of Liberty, the healer's daughter, a man shows up in a coffin and is thought to be dead only to be brought back to life by her mother. Liberty, having grown up free, struggles to understand the anger boiling inside the man.

Code W by Sonya Larson was a great story of a new ranger at Glacier National Park learning the ropes of which Park visitors need rescuing, and which need toughening up. The Code W is a visitor who insists on help but is not actually in danger, but because of their own incompetence has become scared and insists they are likely to die without rescue from a ranger. It is the ranger's job to determine if an attempted rescue would put more people at risk. Chuntao, the new ranger struggles with this idea and thinks at first her fellow rangers are being callous.

Susan Shepherd's Goats about a wildfire and a man living off the land and the generosity of a woman with a hoarding problem was wonderfully complex and I really felt the tension of the fire as it moved closer to the house. This was just a really well drawn story that had a lot of feel to it.

Those were just my favorites that pushed this edition into a five star read. The other stories I don't mention specifically were just as good.

5/5 Stars. 

The Last Wish - Andrzej Sapkowski

 

I love Geralt of Rivia. In my world of fictional boyfriends, he's basically roommates with Uhtred. He's a bit snarky, a bit cool, and yes I read this after watching the first season of the show and I can't quite get Henry Cavill's portrayal out of my brain. So there were some minor changes from the TV show that my brain had trouble overriding. Essentially, in The Last Wish, a completely new world is created in which some children are taken and manipulated to have special learning and powers to deal with evil creatures that populate the world. But as the world turns away from fantasy and into an agrarian fiefdom somewhat like our own Earth's middle ages, the need for Witchers and sorcerers and magic at all is fading. It's an interesting look at a world on a precipice of losing those things that would make it a fantasy realm at all. There's a big deal in the book about destiny and can we avoid it and how are we wrapped into it. In the TV show, Geralt seems to decry the idea, but in the book he's all in, which was a hard thing to reconcile. But in any case, the motivations of people, and how their choices affect the future, is a big theme in the story. Geralt tries to thread the needle by keeping his head down and doing his work, but his actions seem to entangle him further in the politics of the realm. I'm looking forward to getting into the next installment of the series and ahead of the world I've already seen on TV. I'm going to be sticking with this one for a while. 5/5 Stars