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

The Secrets We Kept - Lara Prescott

 

Sometimes history sets down a series of events that include colorful characters, international espionage, romantic devotion, complicated and flawed heroines and heroes and it all sounds so fantastic, but when putting pen to paper, some of the magic of the real life humans does not get translated to the page. 

In theory, The Secrets We Kept should have been thrilling and heart breaking. And as a historically based novel about a famous author and his even more famous book, this novel should have been right at the top of my likes. But the rotating points of view and full chapters from a plural person narrator left two bland sides of a story that includes so much flavor individually.

So what happened? The Secrets We Kept centers around the publication of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. An epic love story spanning events in Russia from the Russian Revolution through World War II. Given the breadth of time and characters included in Zhivago it's impossible to write a succinct plot summary but suffice it to say, Yuri Zhivago is a physician and a poet, he has hard times, falls in love with Lara, war and famine and etc., and death. This is Russian literature after all. You want weddings and happiness look up Jane Austen (not a dig, I adore her). 

Anyway, because Russia at the time Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago was the USSR and Stalin was in charge, this novel was never going to see the light of day. The book included descriptions of Salinism, Collectivization, the Great Purge, and Gulags, and apparently that was a little too on the nose for the Soviet government so they were absolutely not going to let this get published. Then along came an Italian publisher who obtained a copy and published it in Italy and then quickly licensed the book into 18 other languages. This should have made Pasternak richer than Dan Brown after the DaVinci code, but he wasn't about to be able to accept foreign money for a book he was not allowed to publish in the first place.

So powerful was the USSR's dislike of the book that the CIA obtained a copy, had a thousand printed and then handed them out at the 1958 Brussels world's fair. They also made sure a copy made it into the hands of the Nobel committee. All of this was unknown until the CIA declassified some documents in 2014. 

Pasternak was awarded the Nobel, much to his dismay, the USSR's embarrassment, and the CIA's enjoyment. He was forced under threat to turn the award down. Then Premier Krushchev banned the book (although he later read it and liked it, duh) and Pasternak was made to scrape by until he died of lung cancer in 1960. His mistress and inspiration for Lara was arrested and imprisoned for four years for crimes related to the publication of the book.

Yikes. Look at all this drama! What good breeding ground for a novel. Except, when dealing with known facts, trying to create intrigue is just not intriguing. When someone can easily google the outcome of a story, it makes it hard to build tension. I'm talking more about the outcome of the CIA operation here, which was a large portion of the book but lacked a lot of the emotional weight that the Russian portion contained with telling the story from Olga Ivinskaya's point of view. Tales of human woe always contain tension if done right, and I really did feel a lot of that in the Olga parts. 

But the novel as a whole missed the emotional impact it was going for. There are chapters that are really well written, but then they are broken up by points of view from others that create for an uneven and unsatisfactory narrative. 

3/5 Stars. 

Dragon Pearl - Yoon Ha Lee

I've been reading books with my middle reader as he gets more into deeper narratives. I loved that middle reader books have these young protagonists that make the story more accessible. In Dragon Pearl, Min gets disturbing news about the disappearance of her brother Jun. He's off serving on a starship in the Space Forces as a cadet. He went missing during his training mission and is considered a deserter. Rumor is that he was in pursuit of the Dragon Pearl, a rare object that is said to be able to transform whole worlds turning barren landscapes into lush environs - a task currently reserved for the Dragon Guild, who, for obvious reasons, is not interested in anyone else getting possession of the pearl. 

Min's family are fox spirits, able to shape shift into anything their hearts' desire and use charm to persuade others to do their will. They are therefore distrusted and like to keep their identities secret. Min goes in pursuit of Jun and must find her way onto a starship and into the eerie Ghost sector where the terraforming went terrible wrong. Ghosts now populate the colony and space pirates frequent the area. But this is where the Pearl is rumored to be so this is where everyone is gravitating. Throw in a menacing Tiger spirit captain, and Min must best them all to find the truth about her brother, and the missing Pearl. 

I didn't realize this was based off Korean folklore but I really liked that aspect combined with the sci-fi space theme. A well done narrative that will capture the imagination of a middle reader. 

3.5/5. 

Sharpe's Tiger - Bernard Cornwell

So I finally figured out the Sharpe sequence and I'm going back to the beginning to see how Sharpe started. It feels kind of like cheating since early Sharpe fans had to go back and forth in his career rather than chronologically. I actually finished this almost two weeks ago so my fine detail recall is fading. What can I say? I'm a lazy reviewer this month. I just started taking classes for a new masters degree and I'm a little overwhelmed.

But anyway Sharpe. In Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's unit is taking part of the siege of Seringapatam, island citadel of the Tippoo of Mysore. And all of that was news to me. Having not grown up in the UK, all of this marching around the British soldiers did in India is NOT a surprise, but it is all relatively new information. I was trying to keep up.

In any case, a lowly private, Sharpe is considering deserting because his Sergeant, a vengeful, arrogant, disturbed man, Hakeswill, has it out for him. And his Captain, Morris, is lazy and also indifferent. All this over a woman who prefers Sharpe. After a wicked flogging, Sharpe is taken, mid-flog to see a general about a secret mission he will undertake with a fresh faced Lieutenant to rescue a Colonel who has been taken prisoner by the Tipoo.

It's a wonderful thing that Sharpe is clever and resourceful because he pulls off some pretty incredible last minute rescues and success. He also manages to teach the Lieutenant a thing or two about leadership that will better serve the entire unit, all while earning his sergeant stripes to boot. Was it so wrong of me to wish for Hakeswill's demise the entire book? He was a terrible person with no redeemable qualities.

I'm glad to have picked up another of Cornwell's series. He's such a good writer and I really have decided that I want to see how Sharpe continues to move up the ranks and into his field commission.

4/5 Stars.