In the past, I haven’t been the biggest ‘must read everything from that author!!!1!1!!!ELEVEN!!!’ kind of person. I like to spread my literary love around, see what’s out there, experience new-to-me authors as often as I can. While I love backlist, there’s always the fear of running out of backlist (*cue morbid screams*), because then what would I do? Wait until the next book comes out? WHAT KIND OF PATIENCE DO YOU THINK I HAVE??? But at this point in my life, it’s safe to say that Jennifer Crusie is a heavy favorite. Peeking in at her list of books on Goodreads, I’ve read eight of them, and I’m not sure I can say that about any other author (possibly Stephen King, but that’s reaching back into my childhood and teen years). So when my next task from the Modern Mrs. Darcy 2019 Reading Challenge was a book in the backlist of a favorite author, Jennifer Crusie was the first author who came to mind, and I grabbed a copy of Welcome to Temptation (St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2004) from my library.
Sophie is not loving the town she and her sister are rolling into. Small towns in general aren’t her thing, and they’re (grudgingly) here in Temptation, Ohio to shoot an audition film for Temptation’s most (only) famous resident, actress Clea Whipple. The drama starts with a bang, literally, when Sophie gets into a fender bender with a jerky town council member. Everyone’s okay, but when Sophie meets the town mayor, stupidly-hot-with-no-right-to-be Phin Tucker, she knows she’s in big, big trouble.
The film crew’s presence in this family-values town causes more uproar than they initially bargained for, and Sophie’s plans to film and run are dashed to the ground when the movie evolves into something a little dirtier, as does her budding relationship with Phin Tucker. Sophie had no plans on getting involved with anyone, especially not a town boy, but Phin? Irresistible beyond measure. When Clea’s ex turns up dead, the gossip mill works overtime to make half of Temptation seem guilty, and this movie- exactly what kind of movie is it?- isn’t helping matters. It just goes to show you that small towns don’t mean small drama.
Murder (maybe?). Adultery. Politics. Financial intrigue. Fame. Love. Lust. Revenge. Big dreams. Complicated sibling relationships. While there’s a lot going on in this book, Jennifer Crusie weaves each element of the story into a seamless tapestry. I did initially struggle to keep the large cast of characters straight, but I think that was more due to my daughter’s chattering (she really likes to hear herself talk and basically narrates her entire day; my son was the same way, but he was content to listen to the sound of his own voice and didn’t require answers every three seconds the way my daughter does) than it was the book itself, because once it was bedtime and things were a little quieter, I settled easily into the book and had no issues.
I feel like Jennifer Crusie is Christina Lauren’s super cool big sister; while their styles are different, their characters all engage in such easy, witty banter that I don’t think I’ve ever read either author without laughing out loud at least once in the book. Take, for example, this conversation Sophie and Phin have one night, not long before their first romantic interlude, about Julie Ann, a character in an old Appalachian song Phin’s grandmother used to sing him to sleep with:
“She fell in love with a bear?” “No, a bear ate her.” Phin rolled his head to look at her. “Appalachia is not big on silly love songs.” “A bear ate her.” Sophie shook her head. “Leave it to you to think that’s romantic.” “The song’s beautiful.” Phin looked back at the stars. “It ends with her ghost wearing a crown of sorrow. Very romantic.” “Dead women are not romantic,” Sophie said flatly. “Okay, she’s not dead,” Phin said. “The bear ate her and she came her brains out.”
I laughed so hard, I scared the cats.
There was a joke or two early in the book that I felt didn’t necessarily age well, but otherwise, this is a fun, funny, complex-but-not-complicated romance novel. While the characters move quickly in their relationship- Sophie and Phin are together for only a number of weeks before they start planning for their future- unlike the couple in Nicholas Sparks’s Every Breath, I had no problem believing in their immediate connection and in their chemistry, because the two of them are positively swimming in it, and it’s nearly enough to light every page on fire (again, this is also something that Christina Lauren excels at, and was SO good in the book I’ll have a review for next). The sex scenes are steamier than a five-jet shower fueled by twenty hot water tanks (they’re graphic, but not what I would consider explicit, so if you’re a more fade-to-black romance lover, Jennifer Crusie’s books may not be for you) . And when it comes to the non-romantic parts of the story, Ms. Crusie keeps the reader drawn in with the same witty banter that matches up with everything we would have wanted to say in that situation…but wouldn’t have thought of until later that night, after we’d gotten home and crawled into bed. Nothing is too heavy, and even something like a possible murder is still treated as something that’s just a little ridiculous.
Suffice it to say, Welcome to Temptation further fueled my love for Jennifer Crusie, and I’m looking forward to reading more from her in the future. I haven’t read any of her collaborations with Bob Mayer, so if you have, I’d love to hear your impressions of those books, especially. But if you’ve read any of hers, let’s talk! What have you read and loved?
Who would? Stacks upon stacks of previously loved literature for a low, low price. There’s nothing better than perusing dusty stacks of books, looking for a treasure or twenty, and know that you’ll be able to haul a ton of them home without breaking the bank. Used book sale? I’m in. I’ll be there. Putting it in my calendar now.
This past weekend was one such sale. A women’s education nonprofit holds used book sales every few months around here. “Do you want to sign up for our emails, to know when our next sale will be?” the charming lady who took my money asked me at the previous sale. YOU BET I DID. I signed up immediately, and when the email hit my inbox, letting me know that there would be a sale on May 4th, I slapped that baby in my calendar and then showed up as soon as the sale opened on the second day. The second day, you see, is bag sale day. Everything you can cram into a bag for ten dollars…but if you’re on their email list and show them the email, you get a discount: everything you can cram into a bag for seven dollars.
Even better.
So what followed me home this weekend? First, a picture; then, a story.
Dear Martin by Nic Stone and Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen, I’ll share with my son; Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson is his outright (I’ve already read it, and if you haven’t read it yet, you NEED to. It’s incredible). The rest are mine, and I also grabbed a few things for my daughter. Not bad for seven bucks and about an hour of my time. 🙂
But.
BUT.
There’s a bigger story here, one that’s so wacky, I can barely believe it.
You might not be able to tell from what I’ve read so far this year, but I love a good romance novel (I recently finished reading Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation; she’s been one of my favorite authors for ages). I love watching a couple get together, I love one person pursuing another, I love romance tropes, I love happily-ever-afters. All of this started with the stack of books my mother kept stashed in the coat closet, and which I began raiding when I was about twelve years old. Recently, Book Riot had an article titled ‘The Books That Turned Us On to Romance,’ and that, along with my love of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and their amazing podcast, brought to mind yet again the nameless book from that closet stash that introduced me to my love of the genre.
I’d thought of this book many times over the years, but I could never remember the title. I’ve known about Smart Bitches, Trashy Books’s Help a Bitch Out feature, which helps romance readers remember those forgotten titles via crowdsourcing, but I feared I didn’t have enough information for them (I mean, I was twelve when I read this, so my memory is pretty fuzzy), and I didn’t want to be disappointed if no one knew what I was talking about. Here’s what I had: there was a character named Dulcy who was a pretty heinous bitch, but she wasn’t the main character; it took place during the Spanish-American war; one of the male characters, at least at one point, had some sort of involvement with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders; a vague detail about a sex scene that could have happened in basically any historical romance.
And that was it. Not much to go on there, huh?
So this unnamed book had been rolling around my brain lately, moreso than it usually had over the years. It wasn’t anything I was actively considering when I was at the book sale: I started at the YA and kids sections, stopped by the cookbooks, browsed the romance novels, hit up the classic fiction section, perused the mysteries and general fiction, then made the loop again.
And there, sitting on top of the paperback romance novels, that I had somehow missed in my first go-around, was a book that looked…familiar.
I paused.
Was that it?
Was THAT my book?
I flipped through it briefly, very briefly, because I was running out of time (I had two more errands to run and only an hour left). I thought it *might* be it, but I wasn’t entirely certain, but for seven bucks a bag, I could afford to take a chance. Into the bag it went, and I’d figure it out when I got home.
And later on that afternoon, once I got a chance, I opened the book and flipped through it. SHUT THE FRONT DOOR.
YOU GUYS. I found it! I found the book that got me into romance, all on my own! THE BOOK GODS AND GODDESSES HAVE SMILED UPON ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, I am FULLY prepared for this book to be absolutely terrible and problematic as hell. Obviously, my tastes have changed and matured after twenty-six years of heavy reading; this book was published in 1982 and romance (and what romance readers are willing to tolerate in their books) has changed substantially. And just read that blurb from Goodreads:
SHE WAS TORN FROM THE ARMS OF LOVE AND IMPRISONED IN THE HOT EMBRACE OF PASSION…
Sultry Tampa, crossroad for gallant soldiers of the Spanish-American War, was the beloved home of young Jessica Manning. Her elegance and delicate beauty entranced the most valiant men, but fate gave her the most ruthless–hot-blooded Brill Kroger. Ignited by selfish passion, Brill abducted Jessica, then swept his anguished prize on a blazing seaward quest for Aztec gold. Through it all, Jessica dung to one aching wish–a return to her glowing moments of surrender in the strong arms of dashing Rough Rider Lieutenant Neil Dancer. Neil’s heart burned wildly for his lost Jessica, and his fury now drove him to pledge his very life to rekindle the flames of their glorious love.
OH MY GOD, is that not awful???????? (Including the typo of ‘dung’ for ‘clung,’ which comes straight from the Goodreads blurb. My back cover reads ‘clung,’ fortunately.) I’m in love. I’ve got, of course, a stack of books to read before I get to this, but I’m absolutely going to read it and review the crap out of it for all of you. I feel more giddy than one of those puppies that wags its tail so hard, it pees a little. This is BEYOND exciting!
Have you ever spent years wondering about a book you lost track of, only to have it just pop up seemingly out of nowhere? I don’t know that I’ll ever get over how seamlessly this reappeared back in my life. Serendipity at its finest. 🙂
It’s been a while since I did a WWW Wednesday, so let’s get to that! WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words, and it’s all about answering these three questions:
What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?
Time to play!
What are you currently reading?
Sweet mother of pearl, I love Christina Lauren. I just started Love and Other Words last night, and since Wednesday is my grocery shopping day, I bought a pizza and will throw together a salad just so I can have some extra reading time and not have to cook a time/labor-intensive dinner. I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m loving this so far.
What did you recently finish reading?
Jennifer Crusie is another all-time favorite, and I finished Welcome to Temptation last night (review to come). There was one place in particular in the book that caused me to laugh so hard, I scared the cat. I rated this four stars on Goodreads and that’s pretty typical for me of her books. Super fun read.
What do you think you’ll read next?
For my final book challenge read, I’ve got a thrift store copy of Yes Please by Amy Poehler up next. I’ve had this on my shelf since last summer, so I’ll be glad to finally get it read (and then I’ll probably pass it along; we have four Little Free Libraries within walking distance of my house! Two are strictly children’s books, but the other two are mixed, so this is an awesome way to weed out things that I’m not planning on keeping forever).
Have you read any of these? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Happy Wednesday! 🙂
Janet Mock was born Charles, but although she didn’t have the words to explain how she felt, she knew that something wasn’t quite right with how the world saw her. Sports, roughhousing, crew cuts, none of these fit the way Janet saw herself; she wanted glamour, beauty, femininity. Her desire to be female predated the trauma she suffered via her parents’ divorce, her mother’s absence, both parents’ drug use, and two years of molestation by her father’s girlfriend’s teenage son (obvious content warnings for this; the description is fairly graphic). Living with her father was difficult; he didn’t understand the child he saw as being overly feminine and tried everything he could to repair what he perceived as misguided. Back home in Hawaii, the land of her birth, Janet (who began going by Janet at, I believe, age 13) found a more accepting family and culture. Her mother and siblings didn’t always get it right, but they tried, and Janet was able to surround herself with friends who loved and accepted her as she was.
This didn’t make Janet’s path to womanhood an easy one, however. There were still teachers at school who othered her and refused to stand up for her when students harassed her (there’s no excuse for this, and reading this made me SO angry for her. I was privy to a teacher turning her back on a classmate bullying a disabled student when I was in high school. I was utterly incensed, and yes, I stepped in and spoke up, loudly. Me, the person who rarely said a single word in class, EVER. The bully looked shocked and shut the hell up immediately. Moral of the story? Don’t be like that teacher). In order to pay for the expensive gender reassignment surgery, Janet, like so many transgender people, engaged in sex work (there’s a content warning here for violence). She still had years of personal growth ahead of her, to work through her earlier trauma and unlearn all the negative ways she’d learned to think about herself, but Janet Mock has grown into a beacon of strength and insight and self-acceptance. If I can ever afford to take whatever Master Class in confidence that she neeeeeeeeeeeds to be teaching, I would so be there. Her poise and determination are incredible, and I wish I had even a thimbleful of what she has.
If you’ve never read a book about being transgender before, this would be a good place to start. Ms. Mock explains a lot of the very basics of what it means to be trans (her preferred term) and what trans people go through in order to live what their souls know is true. She does a lot of this in a manner of, “I later learned that many trans people…”, which helps the reader to feel they’re not alone in learning something new, that even she had things to learn, which I think would be helpful if someone is looking to expand their knowledge of this topic. She also explains the Hawaiian concept of mahu, third gender persons, which fascinated me. Not everything is as binary as some societies demand, and I so love learning about different ways of viewing the world (I also love learning about Hawaiian culture and history, so the fact that this was set there and Ms. Mock is native Hawaiian made me so happy to read!).
What a moving story about a remarkable woman who has had to work so hard just to be herself. 🙂
A book read just because I wanted to read it? Nearly unheard of around these parts! A friend of mine read The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) earlier this year, and although it was different from what she expected it to be, I was still intrigued by her review. Since then, I’ve seen it on numerous blogs, and so this Saturday morning, I downloaded a copy from my library- before the library was even open (!!!). For those of us who are old enough to remember the days when the library closed its doors at 4 pm on Saturday and didn’t reopen again until Monday morning at 9 am, being able to get new reading material in this way will never stop being utterly miraculous. 🙂 (For the record, I feel the same way about the internet when I wake up at 2 am Sunday morning, wondering what the capital of Liechtenstein is.)
The Trauma Cleaner is a biography of Sandra Pankhurst, an Australian woman who is and has been many things during her time here on earth. These days, she’s head of her own business that cleans after grisly death scenes, hoarding situations, and fires and weather-related disasters, but Sandra hasn’t always been Sandra. Her assigned gender at birth was male, and in order to differentiate between her past and present, Ms. Krasnostein gives Sandra’s past self the name of Peter (which is not her actual deadname, but that name is something Sandra prefers to keep private). Peter was adopted by a family that had recently lost a child; he was that child’s replacement (I have NO idea how people think this is a good idea), but instead of providing him with a loving home, that family abused him horrifically. They beat him, starved him, forced him to sleep in a shed out back, refused him entry into the house past 4:30 pm, and he wasn’t allowed to use the bathing facilities or the toilet. All his teeth had to be removed by age 17 due to malnutrition, which was the same year the family threw him out for good. Desperate for love, Peter married at 19, but almost immediately, it was clear this was a terrible decision. Nevertheless, Peter fathered two children with his wife before leaving to live a more authentic life under a variety of aliases, eventually settling on Sandra (the Pankhurst came after another marriage which was later voided by the state).
Sandra’s life is chaos, broken up by brief periods of stability. Like many transgender people, she engages in various forms of sex work in order to earn money (there’s a content warning here for a fairly graphic description of rape and assault). Her attempts at more mainstream employment sometimes work out and occasionally end in disaster, but Sandra eventually finds her niche and opens her own business dealing with the clean-ups that others refuse to do. It’s here that she thrives, but even with that success, her future is uncertain: Sandra lives with terminal lung and liver disease.
The details of each clean-up scene are fascinating, horrifying, and grotesque, and Sandra has the amazing gift of being able to work with hoarders with the goal of restoring order to their homes and lives with the least amount of mental anguish possible. Gently and respectfully, she engages each occupant and meets them at whatever place they’re coming from and helps them move forward. She can tolerate abominable conditions and has no qualms about walking into houses piled high with urine and feces-soaked furniture, bugs, rats, mold, all the hideous detritus that signifies a deeply distressed inhabitant, or the blood, decay, and rot that stems from a tragic and/or unnoticed death. These are remarkable qualities, but my biggest takeaway from this book is how very, very complex humanity is. Sandra has suffered massive trauma herself, from her adoptive parents, through her sex work, from the society that declared her very existence a perversion and attempted to force her out of every viable means of both labor and human connection, and the upshot of this is that at many times in her life, Sandra has been kind of a terrible person. As Peter, she cheated on her first wife and left her two sons without a further word; as Sandra, she cheated for years on the husband who gave her the last name of Pankhurst. She’s made terrible decisions, done terrible things, and still she exhibits remarkable qualities in her work as a trauma cleaner. Her friends and neighbors seem to adore her.
We’re quick to write people off for doing or being certain things- I know I’m guilty of this, I think we all are- and at times, it’s necessary to create distance in order to protect ourselves. But The Trauma Cleaner is a wonderful example of how we grow and change, of how many people we can be throughout our lives. Who we are and how we’re seen by one group of people may be entirely different than the person we are and the way we’re seen by another group later on. And that’s not a bad thing, I think.
What a fascinating book about a complex woman. I’m definitely glad I read this.
You know that feeling when you’re about to return a library book and you realize you haven’t taken a picture of it yet, but it’s a really sunny day and you’re in the car and there’s a glare, but you still need that photo?
Behold the photographic evidence of that feeling. ————————————————————> (My apologies for the terrible photo. I mean, my regular photos aren’t great either- all I have is my cell phone- but this one? Yikes.)
So, one of the tasks for this year’s Modern Mrs. Darcy Reading Challenge is ‘a book you chose for the cover.’ I’ll be frank: I almost never notice book covers, at least not enough to be drawn in or turned away by them. Solves the problem of judging a book by a cover, doesn’t it? I’m far more likely to pick up a book because the title intrigues me, and fortunately, there’s no pithy saying that condemns me for judging titles. 😉
As my library lines new books up with the spine exposed and no cover showing, when I was there trying to find a book specifically for this task, I was forced to yank books out one by one, squinting at the covers and hoping something would pull me in. The little guy on the cover of Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris (Sourcebooks Landmark, 2018) did, and into my pile this went. I’d heard about it on another blog; that blogger had had issues with the book, but the premise still interested me enough to give it a try.
Ellis Reed is barely what you could call a reporter. He works for a newspaper, anyway, desperate to move up the ranks, but so far, all his efforts have been for squat. He’s thankful to have any job since the Crash, but he knows he’s capable of so much more. One of the pictures he took recently, however, definitely has a story behind it: a sign in front of a ramshackle house, advertising two children- two boys– for sale. When Lillian Palmer, an overworked secretary with dreams and secrets of her own, shows the boss Ellis’s photo, he agrees that Ellis should write up the story behind it. When the photo is damaged beyond use, Ellis, frantic to prove himself, returns to the scene of the photo, and, unable to recreate it, uses two neighbor children, a brother-sister pair, as stand-ins. What Ellis isn’t expecting is for his story to go whatever the Depression-era version of ‘viral’ is. Suddenly, his photo and story are everywhere, and this has terrible consequences for those two neighbor children. Gutted by the news and plagued by a deep feeling of responsibility, Ellis enlists Lillian’s help, and together, they’ll risk everything in order to make things right again.
There is a LOT going on in this book. Ellis wants nothing more than to prove to his gruff, doubtful father that he can make it as a reporter, but he can barely make rent each month, let alone afford food. Lillian’s got a secret son stashed at home in another city with her parents; she lives in a boardinghouse during the week and travels home every weekend to visit him. She’s trying to save up enough money to be able to afford her own place, where she can live with her son full-time and maybe pretend she’s a widower to escape the shame of being a single mother in the 1930’s, but she also has dreams of doing some reporting of her own. There’s a tepid romance, then a better, more well-suited one, but wait, it’s actually a love triangle of sorts, kinda. Ellis wades into some involvement with various members of the mob in order to gain sources for his reporting. Everyone’s bosses act as though they have shorts full of angry tarantulas, there’s tuberculosis and an asylum, shame, guilt, trauma from the past, several cases of buying children, a temperamental car, abusive parents, an orphanage, child loss, potential career loss, time spent in jail, delusions that makes it okay to replace your dead child with another random one, breaking and entering, an enabling banker spouse, a mobster brother… Are you following all of that?
No?
Is your head spinning? Are you squinting at the words, unable to follow along?
That’s how I felt when I was reading this. I was about a hundred pages in when I started wondering if maybe it was me. Was I heading into a reading slump? Had I been spending too much time online lately and thus lost my ability to focus well? (That happens sometimes.) I’d read for a bit, but I kept getting pulled out of the story and couldn’t quite stick with it. I decided to push through, as the writing is good, so that helped. It wasn’t until I was probably about three-quarters of the way through the book where I was finally able to breeze through the rest of it to the end, and beginning my next book, I had no problems focusing.
Wasn’t me.
While I do enjoy characters having complex lives and backstories, this was maybe a little *too* much complexity, at least for me. Though Lillian is definitely a sympathetic character, Ellis veered a bit towards too calculating, too desperate for power for my tastes. It’s a compelling story, based on a real photograph, and while that should have made for a deeply emotional reading experience, this just didn’t pull me in in the way I had hoped it would.
Do you read books just because of the cover? I have to say, this didn’t quite help inspire me to do that again!
Mysteries have never been my thing. When I was young, my mom attempted to get me hooked on Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Bobbsey Twins. Each of these series fell flat and I was bored to tears (my apologies to all the many Nancy Drew fans out there! These books just weren’t the books for me, and I tried. Multiple times in every series, even!). I don’t remember reading any mysteries as a teenager, either, because by then, I already knew that this was a genre that didn’t much captivate me. But I’m always interested in shaking things up in a literary sense, and so I grabbed this copy of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley while visiting a thrift shop a few months ago. I remember when this was published and it seemed like everyone I knew was reading it, so I was looking forward to giving it a go myself.
Flavia de Luce is 11 years old and knows way more about chemistry than you do. She even has her own lab tucked away in her family’s Georgian home, a lab where she learns, experiments, and dreams up ways to torture her two older sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. After adding the oils she extracted from poison ivy leaves to Ophelia’s lipstick, Flavia happens upon several events that will change everything for her. First, a curious bird turns up dead on their doorstep, a postage stamp impaled on its beak; the next morning, she stumbles upon a body in the garden, a man who breathes his chemical-scented last in her face. Far from being terrified, the precocious Flavia is deeply intrigued. Using her well-honed powers of deduction and despite the efforts of law enforcement and other pesky adults, she sets forth determined to figure out the real story. Who was this dead man? How did he die? Did his death have anything to do with that argument she overheard Father having last night? The stakes rise when Father is arrested and jailed, and Flavia will have to use everything she’s learned about chemistry and life in order to save him…and herself.
I enjoyed this. It wasn’t so much the mystery aspect of it that drew me in, but instead Flavia’s precocity, her no-nonsense way of looking at the world, and her deep love of science. I barely managed to pass high school chemistry (I accept some of the blame for this, but the class average was 33; the teacher wasn’t a great one. He was also a creeper who used to sit on his porch and stare at my mom through bincoulars when she was sunbathing when I was young, but that’s another story), so I admired her strive for knowledge in her chosen subject. There was something that reminded me immediately of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; despite their differences, Flavia and Christopher operate by the rules of logic, rather than feelings, which give both stories a similar air. Not to mention that both books are considered to be written for adults, yet they’re narrated by children. I’ve come across instances where that’s annoying, but for these two books, the authors made it work well.
I also liked getting a glimpse of village life in postwar Britain in this. Dogger, the family’s gardener (among other jobs), has a terrible case of PTSD and both Flavia and her father are so protective of him, which was absolutely lovely to read. The descriptions of the clothing and decor, Father’s hatred of the telephone, the library that’s only open Thursday through Saturday (THE HORROR!!!), Flavia’s mention of listening to the radio…it all added up to such a fascinating picture of a time I’ve only really ever read about in one other book (one of my favorites, Back Home by Michelle Magorian). And Flavia’s explanation of bits of chemistry here and there definitely interested me. I’ve always wanted to understand chemistry, but when it comes down to it, I can never wrap my mind around the different kinds of bonds, and how many electrons are shared here or there, and if you can’t grasp the basic building blocks, there’s nowhere else to go from there. Still, reading her commentary on various chemical makeups and her descriptions of experiments delighted me. I’ll take any chemistry I can understand!
Will I read more cozy mysteries? Hmm. Maybe. Some of the other choices on Book Riot’s list, such as Death by Dumpling by Vivien Chien and Murder with Fried Chicken and Waffles by A.L. Herbert intrigued me; I was planning on reading one of those two before I happened across my copy of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. I generally don’t care for books with a lot of grisly murder scenes or action that makes me feel anxious, but maybe this is a genre I can keep in my pocket for a rainy day, when nothing on my TBR interests me or I’m looking for something different to pull me out of a reading slump.
Do you enjoy cozy mysteries? Any recommendations that are along the lines of this book?
Would you look at that? This is amazing. This is monumental. This might be a miracle.
I read a book from my own shelves, you guys!!! *lolsob*
In the interest of finishing up the remaining tasks on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2019 Reading Challenge, I pulled Watched by Ancestors: An Australian Family in Papua New Guinea by Kathy Golski (Sceptre, 1998) off my bookshelf. A friend of mine (hi, Sandy!) had read and enjoyed this years ago, and when I expressed interest in it, she mailed me her copy (last year, I read a different book from my own shelves; when I went to log it on Goodreads, I noticed that same friend had marked the book as want-to-read, so I asked if she’d like my copy. She said yes, so I mailed it to her. Hurray for bookish friends!). It’s been sitting on my shelves for a bit, staring at me, so I was glad to read this as the challenge task of ‘a book recommended by someone with great taste.’ 🙂
Kathy Golski’s life has been in a constant state of flux these past few years. Her husband and father of her first older children passed away, leaving her a bereaved widow and single parent. She remarries a friend and colleague of her deceased first husband, a Polish man who is working towards his PhD in anthropology. Unwilling to be apart from her husband while he completes his fieldwork, Kathy packs up her three older children and her newborn baby and heads to the remote highlands of of Papua New Guinea, to live for two years among the Gamegai tribe in a village known as Rulna.
Life in Rulna is both joyful and precarious. Malaria and diarrhea, injuries and infections, all are constant companions to both natives and visitors. Food is often scarce, as is money to buy necessary supplies. The local tribesmen are fascinated by the belongings of this strange white family and possessions often go missing even before they come through the door of their hastily-constructed hut. Kathy spends her days tending the children, cooking, painting, and observing the locals, whose nonstop bickering and drama are straight out of any soap opera. But Kathy also comes to love her new neighbors, who love her children and care for her baby as if he is their own, and her older children’s identities become so intertwined with that of the Gamegai tribe that returning home to Australia presents multiple challenges.
While I enjoyed learning about tribal Papua New Guinea (I’m trying to think if I’ve ever read a book set there, and I can’t come up with anything…), I had a hard time connecting with this book. Watched by Ancestors is reconstructed from Kathy’s diary entries that she wrote at the time she was living there, and something about the style made everything feel kind of flat to me. She was also there as kind of a secondary bystander and not an active observer-for-academic-reasons like her husband was, so her constant description of the bickering between the people of Rulna and her husband being grumpy for different reasons became tiresome and repetitive to read after a while. There are a lot of tense moments here: people, including children, fall deathly ill, and some die; war breaks out between tribes; multiple times, Kathy’s husband and children head out into the bush and don’t return when they’re supposed to. Yet somehow, despite this, I never really felt the urgency of these situations. The book was overall okay, but I didn’t love it, and since I really love learning about people and cultures that are new to me, this was kind of a disappointing read.
Interestingly, Kathy’s daughter Nadya grew up to become a singer, and her first big hit was in Papua New Guinea. A lot of her songs are available to listen to on Youtube.
I will admit that I know very little about the Aboriginal community of Australia, other than, much like the Native population of the United States, they’ve been treated terribly (one of the books I read in the past few years contained the phrase, “Colonization is violence,” and it’s something I’ve never forgotten). Rabbit-Proof Fence highlights exactly how terribly, beginning with a few stories of the native community of western Australia before the white men show up, and then revealing how much the Aboriginals’ lives changed once these white men began to force them off the land their people had lived on for thousands of years. There are content warnings that go along with this early part; rape and murder are, tragically, part of every story of colonization.
Molly, who would one day become the author’s mother, is known as a half-caste, the daughter of an Aboriginal woman and a white man. She, along with her two half-caste cousins, Daisy and Gracie, are forcibly taken from their families and sent to an institution for Aboriginal children with white fathers. This was done at the Australian government’s behest because it was their belief that half-caste children were more intelligent than full-blooded Aboriginal children, and, as Molly’s paperwork stated, they hoped that ‘they will grow up with a better outlook on life than back at their camp.’ (Similar horrors were perpetrated upon the Native children of America and Canada, if you’re looking to enrage yourself further.) The three cousins, along with a fourth girl named Rosie, are taken to the East Perth Girls Home at the Moore River Native Settlement. Upon arrival, they’re expecting a school but are instead greeted by a bleak, overcrowded dormitory where the doors are chained, the windows have bars, the beds only have sheets when important visitors tour the facilities, and there are small cells where children who break the rules are locked in, sometimes for weeks at a time, after being whipped.
Monstrous.
Molly, the eldest, makes up her mind immediately that she and her cousins aren’t staying. Having been trained in bushcraft and survival skills by her stepfather, Molly leads the girls out the next morning, and for the next nine weeks, they make a barefoot journey that spans 1600 km (994 miles), following the fence built by the colonizers to try to prevent the spread of rabbits (that the colonizers themselves brought in, because there’s seriously no end to the problems caused by people arrogant enough to claim someone else’s land as their own). They sleep in rabbit warrens and out in the elements, eating rabbit, emu chicks, baby cockatoos, and a feral cat along the way, occasionally stopping by a farmhouse to beg for a decent meal. Barely managing to evade the authorities, the girls return home (without Gracie, who left to find her mother before reaching the end), but their stories have no happy endings. Colonization is violence. Never forget that.
God, this story is utter tragedy. Tragedy in what was lost, tragedy in what could have been lost, tragedy in that none of this story needed to occur because the girls’ families should have been left alone to live their lives. There’s a heartbreaking write-up where Ms. Pilkington details how the girls fared as they grew into adults. Daisy is the only one with a halfway happy story; Molly and Ms. Pilkington’s own lives continued to be marred by the brutal policies of the white men long after Molly returned home. So much heartbreak forced onto people who didn’t deserve it. So much pointless heartbreak.
Despite the sorrow that infects every page of this book, I did enjoy the experience of reading it. Ms. Pilkington describes the customs and lives of her people with such love that it’s impossible not to be drawn in and want to know more. The girls’s dialogue is peppered with phrases from their Mardu language (there’s a glossary in back!), and having only seen Aboriginal Australian language in print a few times before this, I was fascinated. The mixture of strength and desperation that the girls must have felt in order to undertake such a journey is impossible for me to begin to fathom; even thinking about it makes me want to throw things. There’s seriously no limit to the horror that humans are eager to inflict upon one another, and it disgusts me that so many people continue to defend these kinds of policies.
A movie was made from this book in 2002; my library has a copy, so I may grab it this week when I return the book. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a short book, but it packs a punch. Don’t let that stop you; the story of these girls and all peoples native to Australia need to be heard.
Doris Pilkington, born Nugi Garimara, passed away in 2014.
Where did April go? (I feel like I start off every post saying something like that, but seriously, this year feels like it’s flying by.) Last month, I figured I would read fewer books once the weather started warming up, and so far, that’s been true. Of course, I spent a bunch of days being sick this month, and then spent several more cleaning up after being sick (have you ever seen pictures of, say, Buckingham Fountain or Niagara Falls? That’s pretty much what my daughter looked like for four days straight, except with vomit and not water. Picture that and you’ll have an idea of the amount of cleaning and laundry I had to do. Even when she made it to the bucket in time…she usually didn’t make it alllllllllllll the way in the bucket. Laundry, laundry, laundry). I’ve also been spending some time working outside in the yard that’s been badly neglected the past four years (due to my daughter being too young and not a great listener. I couldn’t trust that she wasn’t going to run off into the road while I yanked weeds!). I’ve been ripping out dead and unsightly plants and s.l.o.w.l.y. moving wagonful after wagonful of rocks from in front of my house to behind my yard. When that’s done, the area will look nice, but I’ve got a start on it! However, it does eat up my reading time, so BOO to that.
Let’s start this recap party with a list of all the things I’ve read this month!
20. Rabbit-Proof Fence: The True Story of One of the Greatest Escapes of All Time by Doris Pilkington (review to come)
21. Watched By Ancestors: An Australian Family in Papua New Guinea by Kathy Golski (review to come)
Not too bad! Poetry, fascinating nonfiction, thought-provoking middle grade and adult fiction, plenty of new-to-me authors, and some childhood rereads that I was able to share with my daughter (who both adores Ramona Quimby and is horrified by her behavior…which mirrors my daughter’s behavior SO often!). The numbers are okay, but in this list are two novellas, a bunch of children’s books, a slim volume of poetry…yup, my reading definitely slowed down this month!
Book Challenges Update
I’m closing in on completing Book Riot’s 2019 Read Harder Challenge! I blasted through a ton of books from that this month, and here’s what my list looks like now.
Three books left! I’m working on the cozy mystery right now, my library has a copy of a novel by a trans author, and then I’ll pick out a humor book and be done!
I completed some tasks from Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2019 Reading Challenge this month as well. I finally read Watched by Ancestors: An Australian Family in Papua New Guinea by Kathy Golski (review to come). This came to me via my friend Sandy, who read and recommended it to me (and then sent me her copy! Thank you again, Sandy!), so I’m counting that as task #4, a book recommended by someone with great taste. 🙂 And as for a book published before I was born, I’m counting Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl, which I read aloud to my daughter. Bonus points because I never finished this one as a kid (probably because it wasn’t one of Dahl’s best). Here’s what my challenge looks like now:
Three more and I’ll have completed this as well! 🙂 For someone who used to start challenges and then immediately fizzle out, I’m pretty proud of myself. 🙂
Books I Acquired in April 2019
I won the copy of The Woman in the Dark by Vanessa Savage from a giveaway at Always with a Book. Thanks, Kristin! (Okay, technically, I won in March, but the book arrived in April, so I waited to count it for this month.) And I picked up a copy of Purity by Jackson Pearce when I stopped by the thrift store in search of books for my daughter’s birthday. Their children’s’ books, YA included, are ten cents apiece, so I figured for that price, it was worth it!
OMG!!!! I’m a huge fan of the Dummies books, along with the Complete Idiots Guides. They give great overviews of broad topics, and I always enjoy delving into something new. I found this copy of Opera for Dummies at a church yard sale- it even has the CD!- and I could NOT be more excited about this. I enjoy listening to opera, but I don’t know much about it, so between this and my copy of 100 Great Operas and Their Stories (which has been on my shelf for a while), I’m ready to learn! The copy is pristine and only set me back fifty cents. 🙂
Bookish Things I Did in April 2019
My library takes part in the Reading Without Walls challenge every year. The challenge is to read a book about someone who doesn’t look like you or live like you, read a book about a topic you didn’t know much about, or read a book in a format you don’t normally read. I figured my reading of The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail counted for this, filled out the paper (which looked like a brick), and turned it in to the librarian at Adult Services. I’m eligible to win a raffle prize of some sort, but really, I’m just glad that my brick/paper will be displayed as another sign in the fight against ignorance. 🙂
Book discussion group this month covered Circling the Sun by Paula McLain, and as I predicted, we did have a great discussion. Overall, everyone seemed to like the book. One woman enjoyed the horse racing aspect of it, because it reminded her of visiting the racetracks with her father when she was younger, while others of us were more like, “Wow…that’s a lot of horses in there…” We were all surprised and fascinated to learn how Gatsby-esque colonial Kenyan society was during this era. I’m sad I’ll be missing next month’s meeting (my son has a choir concert scheduled that night); they’ll be reading The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan. Whatever they’re reading in June hasn’t been announced yet, so I’m looking forward to that!
On April 23rd, @the_WriteReads featured my post on books I love about Mister Rogers as their review of the day. I’m really proud of this post and am happy that @the_WriteReads helped me to spread the Mister Rogers love a little. 🙂
I also logged my 2000th book on Goodreads!
Current Podcast Love
I’ve finished up listening to all the back episodes of All the Books! from Book Riot! This is such a great podcast, where Liberty Hardy, super reader extraordinaire, and her rotating cast of fellow Book Rioters choose several of the week’s new releases to gush over. I’ve read a bunch of books I learned about from this podcast and added plenty more to my TBR. If you’re looking for something book-related to listen to, you really can’t go wrong with All the Books!
I floundered for a few days before finally settling on my next bookish listen, and it’s:
I listened to my first episode of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books yesterday, and OMG WHERE HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE? *sobs with joy* I LOVE these women. They’re smart, funny, they talk about books in a way that speaks to my soul (swear words! Feminism! Ridiculous euphemisms for genitalia! Picking apart romance novels for the good and the laughable!). I am in LOVE and I totally want to ignore all the rest of my life and binge all 347 episodes that I have left.
Real Life Stuff
We started out the month recovering from my daughter getting a case of the pukes, only to have both of us throwing up mid-month. NOT my favorite thing. Wedged in around both of us looking like the little girl from the Exorcist, we attended my daughter’s kindergarten orientation. She’ll go to full-day kindergarten in the fall and we’re both pretty excited! (I’ll miss her, but she’s a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped in an earthquake, so it’ll be nice to have some time when I’m NOT on damage control.) Her school is within walking distance, so when it’s warm out, we’ll be able to get some exercise, and her classroom is suuuuuuuuuuper cute. They even hatch chicks in the spring, and they have the best little reading corner with a TON of books. I kind of want to go back to kindergarten…
My daughter turned 5! Seems like just yesterday I was throwing up in the bathroom…and the kitchen…and the living room…and dry-heaving in Walmart (pregnancy and I are NOT friends), and now she’s half a decade old. For the third year in a row, her chosen birthday activity was to eat lunch at Ikea (what can I say? She’s both a creature of habit and a weird little kid :D). We got really lucky in regards to her party, because we had a bounce house scheduled for Sunday, but Saturday, it snowed the entire day because apparently we live in Siberia now? Oh, Midwestern spring, what the actual. Sunday turned out to be lovely, in the upper 50’s with full sun, so the snow was mostly melted by party time and all the kids bounced to their hearts’ content.
My son’s school put on stage performances of Romeo and Juliet, and it was incredible. I say this every time, but his school’s Fine Arts Department is phenomenal, and I’m blown away at every musical and stage performance we attend.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand my cat brought me a mouse. A live one, small, only about two inches long. (Which I prefer over the one she killed in the basement and left for me to find via its overpowering odor who-knows-how-many days later.) It lives somewhere outside now, far away from the house. Here’s a picture of the mouse after I caught it in the plastic container that lives next to my chair in the living room. This plastic container is known as ‘the mouse bucket,’ which lets you know that this is not my first mouse gift rodeo. Thanks, cat…
And that was my April! Summer reading starts at my library on May 1st and you know I’ll be there to sign up. 🙂 I’m going to finish off these two challenges in May and I’m looking forward to that. My daughter will finish up preschool, my son will wind up his junior year of high school (NO! GET BACK ON THE COUCH AND WATCH BLUE’S CLUES WITH ME, THIS IS NOT ALLOWED), and I have a book sale to go to this upcoming weekend. And maybe, MAYBE it will finally stop snowing, but who knows around here. 😀
She's probably at the library... 
