A Little Touch of Melancholy

You know how you wait and wait for something, and finally it's here, and then you go through it as slowly as you can, trying to make it last as long as possible? Well, that's where I've been the past week or so with the last of Ann Turnbull's Quaker trilogy, Seeking Eden. And as is often the case after some much-anticipated event is over, I'm suffering a little touch of melancholy, for a variety of reasons.

The first reason, of course, is because it's over. There will be no more stories about Susanna and Will or their children. That makes me sad because I love those characters and because the time period (late 17th century) is so interesting. Turnbull's books are so well-written that I felt myself drawn into the world of the book and truly invested in the character's lives. Seeking Eden seemed a little slower to get going than the other two books in the trilogy (No Shame, No Fear and Forged in the Fire), but somewhere in the middle of the book, I became so caught up in the story I finished the whole thing in one sitting. So much for my plans to make it last by drawing it out!

Another thing that makes me sad is knowing this excellent book has, as we say here in the South, a hard row to hoe to find an audience. Candlewick, the publisher that created the US editions of the other two books, declined to publish this one, even though the story takes place in Philadelphia. A quick check of Amazon's website showed Seeking Eden is not available directly through Amazon in the US; one can, however, get it through one of Amazon's associated sellers. I had to get the book through Amazon UK, which meant shipping charges were more than the price of the book (worth every penny, though). And then I see the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy as an Amazon bestseller, and I just get angry. I suppose now we're going to see a whole slew of knock-offs of that book (which is a knock-off of Twilight) on the publishers' menu for the next couple of years. It's not that I think Fifty Shades of Grey shouldn't be published; if people want to read it, fine. But it really does make me angry and sad that high-quality, substantive books like Seeking Eden are squeezed out of the marketplace and become less and less available for people like me who have zero interest in Fifty Shades of Grey and its progeny.

Finally, I have to admit that one of my first reactions immediately after finishing Seeking Eden was a sense of   depression (sort of) because I realize my own writing just doesn't measure up. One of the things I appreciate about the story is how smoothly Turnbull balances so many different elements. There is the family story of 16-year-old Josiah's conflict with his parents, particularly his father (did Turnbull have spy cams on our 16-year-old son? ha ha). There is the love story between Jos and Kate. There is a wealth of historical information, ranging from details about the persecution of Quakers in the New World as well as the old, the early years of Philadelphia, apprenticeships, the slave trade, slave auctions, and slavery, including the fact that Quakers at that time owned slaves. Then there is the overarching moral conflict Jos faces - should he break his contract with his master in order to follow a higher law? And that's not everything - the book is so rich and so jam-packed with good stuff. Yet it maintains the flow of a good story, building up to a point where I felt tense with nervousness about what would happen.

I hope I'm being too hard on myself, but I definitely had that sinking feeling that my own story was a lightweight, fluffy little love story compared to Seeking Eden. Nothing's wrong with fluffy little love stories, but my goal for writing is to go beyond that. I want to write things that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. I want my stories to say something important about humanity. (Gosh, that sounds pretentious...but maybe you know what I mean.) Of course, I must remind myself, I've written one book and Ann Turnbull has written many. Maybe I can get there someday.

But I'll never get there if I don't find a way to work writing time into my daily schedule. I thought summer vacation would free me from the grind of teaching and grading - no, it's only replaced the grind of teaching with a different grind. If I'm going to write, I'm going to have to forcibly grab some time and guard it selfishly, which won't be easy and which the family probably won't understand. Another reason to feel melancholy....

One of Many Pleasures

One of the things I like best about writing and reading historical fiction is looking back at how real people lived in the past. Of course, the big historical events are interesting, but my favorite thing is finding out some small detail about daily life.

I read once in Harriette Simpson Arnow's book Flowering of the Cumberland that people used to sing a lot, and that makes sense. We have others do our singing for us these days via our iPods, but in the early 19th century people would have been their own iPods. So I incorporated singing into a scene in my novel. I found the names of some old ballads I was sure would have been around at that time and worked them into the story.

But until yesterday, I had only looked at the lyrics - I hadn't heard the songs performed. I was stuck at the computer doing some updates yesterday, so I amused myself by looking up the songs from my book on YouTube. It was such an enjoyable experience I decided to share.

One long-lived and well-known ballad is the beautiful Annie Laurie, performed here by the Scottish duo The Corries:



The next song is one I learned long ago in elementary school music (thank you, Mrs. Pauline Stewart!), The Keeper Did a-Hunting Go (performed here by David Holness):



Finally, this was my first introduction to this beautiful song, which I chose only because its name fit what I wanted to do in the scene. What a piece of luck that it was also such a lovely song - Ae Fond Kiss by Robert Burns, performed here by Dougie MacLean:



Sampling these three old songs makes me interested in learning more of them. As much as I enjoy The Script, Journey, and James Taylor, there's something to be said for the days before iPods, when people sang for their entertainment. Go out today and sing something!

Facing the "Ick" Factor

A few months ago, I read an interesting blog post on Frances Hunter's American Heroes Blog that talked about William Clark and his two wives (sequential, not concurrent, by the way). Clark met the girls who became his wives when they were tweens (11 and 14, to be specific) and he was "just past 30," according to the blog. He eventually married the younger of the girls, Julia Hancock, when he was 37 and she was 16. As the blog author said, "...we may recoil with a certain ick factor today...."

The book I just finished had a similar "ick factor."

Another Negative Review - And I Hate That

You may think, from reading my posts on this blog for the past months, that I am a negative and difficult-to-please reader. I hope that is not the case, and if it is true, it's not something I've been trying to cultivate. It just seems that several of the books I've read lately have some pretty significant problems in terms of what I've come to view as "good" writing, a view that is learned not only from my years as an English major but through following several blogs by successful literary agents and editors over the past few years. And believe me, I'm disappointed, not satisfied, to be noticing these issues.

My latest disappointment is especially sharp, because it comes from a writer with a top-notch reputation. Scott O'Dell is a HUGE figure in historical fiction, the writer of 20 or more books, the winner of the Hans Christian Anderson Award and the Newberry Award. Heck, he even has an award named after him - the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, for the best work of historical fiction for young adults in a given year. I was downright tickled to find a copy of his book The Serpent Never Sleeps at my favorite used bookstore. Colonial America! Jamestown! Pocahontas! What could be better?!

Well....to be honest...this book could be better. The story follows a young woman named Serena Lynn who leaves England to go to the Jamestown settlement with the young man she's madly in love with (even though he has murdered a man and is running from the king). They suffer through a terrible hurricane and spend a very long time stranded on an island in Bermuda before actually making it to Jamestown. Well, Serena makes it - her crushee is lost at sea. Once in Jamestown, Serena takes it on herself to find Pocahontas, since she's the only one who can save the starving colony by convincing her father to give the settlers corn and hold off his attacks. She befriends Pocahontas, survives an attack by unfriendly Indians, and finally marries one of the settlers and stays in the new colony.

Although I might have changed a few things, I'm not arguing with the plot. The story is fine. But the telling of the story seems simply soul-less to me. I honestly didn't care about any of the characters (which I believe to be one of the most fatal flaws a book can make). I found certain plot points (like Serena's first meeting with Pocahontas) to be a little too hard to swallow - the "willing suspension of disbelief" was strained just a bit too far. Even though I finished the book about a day ago and have been mulling it over ever since, I can't identify any overarching theme - the universal truth the readers should be able to take away from the story.

And you know why I think some of these problems plague this book? Once again, it's a matter of "telling" versus "showing." (Yep, here I go again on that!) Here's an example:

(the king's guard has just come on the ship to arrest the man she loves, Anthony Foxcroft) "Anthony and I were standing at the rail, close to the Great Cabin, but someone shut the door and we heard nothing else. It was a terrible moment. If Admiral Somers decided to turn back, Anthony would be given over to the captain of the guards and taken off the ship. Anthony always carried a dagger. He had his hand on it now. But what could he do with it? If the ship turned back, it would be of no use to him. There was no way he could ever withstand a dozen armed guards."

First of all, Anthony Foxcroft has to be the most underdeveloped character in this book. I can't for the life of me understand why Serena is attracted to him. He's a spoiled brat who quarrels with one of the king's favorite young gentlemen and who murders a servant in a fit of rage. There's nothing that explains the attraction Serena feels for him that makes her willing to run away from home and risk a scandal and take on the challenges of an unknown, dangerous life. (Maybe he's just really hot...)

Secondly, don't tell us "It was a terrible moment." Give us details that will make us say, "Gosh, that's a terrible moment" in the back of our minds as we are reading. Now, I don't pretend to be a Newberry-Award-winning writer of prose, but think how much more engaging that scene would be if it had gone something like this:

Anthony edged along the rail toward the Great Cabin, and I followed, keeping my hand on the back of his arm as if he might be pulled away from me just by getting closer to the captain of the guards. Just as we came close enough to hear their raised voices, someone shut the door, and I could no longer make out words, only the sounds of argument. I pressed closer to Anthony. My heart was pounding.

"If Admiral Somers agrees to turn back, you'll be given to the captain of the guard," I whispered. "They'll take you off the ship."

I felt his arm stiffen and saw his hand move toward his belt, where I knew he always kept his dagger.

"I'll not go," he said. "They'll not take me."

That could be improved with editing, I'm sure, but already I think it's more interesting and builds a sense of character and of what's at stake for those characters better than the original does. Why? Because it shows details that let us surmise what's going on in the characters' heads instead of taking all the fun away by simply telling us.

Some arrogance, eh, rewriting for a Newberry winner? Sometimes lately I've thought I'd like to do that with several of these books that have disappointed me - take the plot line and the basic framework of characters and rewrite the book to show instead of tell. I first had that thought about Pioneer Breed. Now it's this one. You can't copyright ideas, right, only the expression of ideas. So what if I wrote my own book showing the way a girl who runs away to follow her lover to Jamestown is changed by the experience......

An Experiment

One of the biggest challenges I've noticed since getting my Kindle has been wading through the hundreds of thousands of books that are available through the Kindle store to find books that might actually interest me. At one point, I thought it would be useful to have some kind of sorting service that was a little more specific than Amazon's broad categories. Nan Hawthorne has such a service for books about the Middle Ages at Medieval Novels.com, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a similar listing for my favorite historical fiction. Mostly that will be stories about U.S. history, although I will also have categories for other time periods and cultures, as well.

I've started with one page, which you can see listed just below the banner for this site. This page focuses on historical fiction about the U.S. Revolutionary War (since Johnny Tremain holds such a cherished place in my heart, ha ha), as well as stories about the colonial period and the antebellum period. That's a wide-ranging time period, and I may later need to break it up, but Blogger only allows me 10 pages, so I must be sparing until I settle in on a format for this list. My plan is to list the books alphabetically and in sections for the different time periods. I hope that will make them easy enough to find.

One of the main things I've wished I had to help me sort through the many, many books available on Amazon was some sort of filtering device, so I've attempted to provide one of those in this list. Besides being grouped according to time period, I've included a brief summary of the history covered in the book, a synopsis of the story, and a reading level for each book. Then, because I'm a rhetorical critic and can't help myself, I've given my evaluation of the book (very briefly). I'm not rating the books, but if I think there is something I wish someone had told me going into this book, I'm going to include it as sort of a "warning label."

I will add books to the list as time permits. The semester is in full swing, so my time for pursuits like this is pretty limited. But I think it's going to be fun, and maybe it can help someone find some good historical fiction to read.

Concept vs. Execution

I first read Pioneer Breed by Glenn Vernam when I was a teenager. Although I couldn't remember the details of the story all these years later, I did remember it was about a young guy who rescued a girl from an Indian raid on her family and ended up marrying her. (I didn't even bother with a spoiler alert, because I figure no one's going to read this book anymore). When I was going through one of my "hungry for pioneer fiction" stages a while back, I thought of this book and hunted down a used copy.

Reading it these past few weeks has been a bit of a disappointment. But I came to realize it was not the story that I was disappointed in; it was the way the story was told.

First, the dialect drove me absolutely up the wall.

"That's a notion worth yokin' some thought to," he said. "Such a thing plumb got past me. But now't you mention it, I kin see how another winda would work to lighten up the whole place. And it would be no big chore to chop a hole in the bedroom wall. And fixin' up a clo'es rack for dryin' would be easy, too; skin some willa saplin's to put up atween a post an' them two big trees. Yes, sir, that's a prime idea."

Now, I live in a rural area in the South, and I've heard real people talk pretty close to that. But writing all of Rance's conversation (and a lot of his thoughts, too) in that hicky dialect at some point began to get in the way of understanding what he was saying. It was a distraction rather than a character-building attribute (which I'm sure is what the author intended).  In my own novel, I also wrote dialogue in the uneducated vernacular.  After reading this book and seeing how annoying the dialect was, I'm going back and removing every single "ain't" from the manuscript.  Sure, maybe the dialect is accurate, but when it gets in the way and takes the reader out of the story, it's not working.

A second thing that disappointed me was such heavy reliance on "telling" rather than "showing."  For example,

The ensuing weeks brought a growing sense of well-being to both of them. Returning health found Tenny ever more eager to be of help. Gone, she said, were the old days of drying dishes or preparing vegetables while swaddled up in the cherrywood rocker. Rance was forced to lay aside his anxious protestations as he watched her go on to more active things without harming herself. Almost before either of them fully realized it, their lives had settled into an unplanned division of labor. It was a comfortable feeling, needing no words of explanation. Tenny accepted her position as might a shipwrecked sailor washed ashore on some verdant isle. Yesterday was dead; tomorrow a blank. She could only accept today's blessings of life and security with a deep sense of obligation which time might help her to repay.

Again, I understand why the writer did this. He needed for some time to pass in the story. However, it's really lifeless. I read over those words without caring about Tenny at all. I can't help thinking how much more emotionally affecting that passage would have been had the writer showed us howTenny's new life affected her, rather than just telling us. I guess this new emphasis on "showing" is a change in writing style since the 1970's, when this book was written, and I definitely believe it is a change for the better.

One last thing - there was some clumsy characterization going on here. I thought if I read one more time about Rance pulling on his "straw-colored forelock" or having O, Susanna "come to his lips," I'd go nuts. We got it the first time or two; those are meant to be quirky little character habits. We don't have to be reminded over and over and over throughout the book!

It's a shame, really. I still like the premise of the story.  I wish it could be written in a more up-to-date, more engaging style. Hey, since you can't copyright ideas, only the expression of ideas, maybe I'll do it myself some day, ha ha.

A Mixed Reaction

(Sorry, this will have lots of spoilers.)

Somewhere along the way, A Northern Light and I parted ways. At first, I loved it. The main character, Mattie, reminded me in many ways of my teen self. She loved words and writing, but her day-to-day life made it difficult, if not nearly impossible, to see how she could follow her dreams of studying literature and writing her stories. I liked the dilemma she was facing (and wrote about it in an earlier post). I liked the supporting characters of Weaver and Royal and Miss Willcox and Mattie's family.  I liked the slice-of-life glimpse into early 20th-century upstate New York, where the rich came to vacation in the mountains and the poor made a living by serving them.

But toward the end of the book, Jennifer Donnelly made several choices as a writer that I disagreed with and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth as far as this book is concerned. First, I think the turnaround of Emmie Hubbard was just too darn convenient. Emmie has been a -- well, I don't know what she has been. A victim? Royal's father has definitely been taking advantage of her for years. A prostitute? She's been accepting his "gifts" of the first, freshest milk, etc. for all those years. Whatever she is, she's definitely weak. I think Donnelly wants us to view her as a victim, but I can't see it entirely that way.  But, I digress - her turnaround.  At the end of the book, Weaver's mother has moved in with Emmie and, in the space of a week or so, has completely reformed Emmie, so that she is clean and respectable and able to provide for her children. I don't buy it. For one thing, if Weaver's mother has been living across the road from Emmie all these years (and it came as sort of a surprise to me when that was revealed at the end of the book), and if she's such a good influence, and if everyone in the area knew what was going on with Emmie and Royal's father, and if she thought Emmie was being wronged - then why didn't she do anything about it before???? I think it's because it ties in to something else that bothered me about the book - the way Donnelly wanted us to feel about Royal.

I'll admit I've changed my mind about having Mattie get together with Royal since my previous post. I really don't think they would be compatible. She is attracted to him because he's good-looking and because she thinks he is attracted to her, despite her plain and bookish self. She doesn't really care for him or have anything in common with him and isn't really interested in the things he cares about, so for them to marry would definitely be a mistake.

However, I think Donnelly wants to push all the blame for this failed relationship onto Royal. The reason he wants to marry Mattie is because he sees the opportunity to build a farm "empire." He doesn't love her or care about her interest in books. The two things that eventually make Mattie decide to dump him are that he is going to pay the back taxes on Emmie's land so he can have it (which means Emmie will be homeless) and that he brings Mattie a used cookbook for a birthday present. Although she doesn't say so, I imagine that Donnelly wants us to say, "The nerve of the guy!" and write him off as a jerk. Well, I refuse to do that.

What's wrong with Royal wanting to get Emmie's land? She hasn't been meeting her responsibilities for years, either for paying her taxes or for taking care of her kids (they regularly come to Mattie's family's house to eat). He wants to take the land and make it productive. Then add to that the fact that his father has been having a long-standing affair with Emmie, and Royal sees his chance to get her out of their lives. I totally understand his motivation, and don't see it as being particularly ignoble. Yet Donnelly wants us to see him as selfish and grasping, willing to turn a mother out on the streets. And she even has Weaver's mama step in and straighten Emmie out so Emmie's not a bad mother anymore. I just didn't like that whole bit.

Another thing I didn't like was making Royal into a jerk for giving Mattie the used cookbook for her birthday. When she sees the gift and knows it is a book, she gets her hopes up, only to have them dashed. The way it comes across in the story, that's the worst thing a guy can do - be so insensitive to his girl's feelings and so unaware of her desires. Like the "right" guy for a girl is going to be perfectly in tune with her and understand exactly what she wants. Come on. I bet most women out there have had a gift like the used cookbook. Maybe it's something you open and you think, "Why did he think I would like this??"  Or maybe it is a useful and totally impersonal household appliance. Yet the husband or boyfriend who gave the lame gift has enough other, good qualities that you'll let it pass. At least Royal thought about Mattie enough to remember her birthday.  He should get some points for that, instead of being turned into an insensitive lout. Let's face it - he's not the only problem in that relationship. Mattie didn't care about his dreams, either. She was thinking about Emily Dickinson instead of concentrating while he was talking about a new kind of corn.

As I said earlier, I don't have a problem with Mattie deciding she doesn't want to marry Royal, after all. That's actually a pretty good message for young women - don't marry the first guy who says you're pretty if you know you have nothing in common. What I didn't like was having Royal be villified for being that guy.

Finally, I didn't like having Mattie just leave at the end. All through the book, she's been so concerned about keeping the promise she made to her dying mother; at the end, she doesn't even think about that. She doesn't seem to care at all what will happen to her family, especially to Lou, the sister who seems to me to have some emotional problems following their mother's death.  Mattie's teacher once told her, "You are many things, Mattie Gokey, but selfish is not one of them." I disagree.

A Sharp Tongue or a Soft Answer

There's a saying on the marquee of a church that I pass frequently that reads, "A sharp tongue may cut your own throat." As I read The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, I couldn't help thinking of that saying, because apparently the main reason Martha Carrier was imprisoned and hanged as a witch was because she had a sharp tongue. 

Everyone, from family members to neighbors, was a target for that tongue. Most people probably just let it roll off their backs, labeling Martha as an unpleasant person you shouldn't cross. However, there were some who took her comments more personally, and, in an atmosphere charged with suspicion and fear, they saw their chance to make Martha pay for that sharp tongue.

Am I saying that Martha was wrong to speak her mind? Not necessarily. Her sister, Mary, who is portrayed as being as gentle as Martha is harsh, was also arrested and spent months in jail (though she wasn't hanged). And I'll admit - there are times when something negative really ought to be said. "I'm not going to let you lie and trick my son into marriage." "Your writing is not up to standard." "You're not getting enough done." "Yes, that dress makes you look fat." The trick is, how can we say those things without creating enemies, as Martha did?

When I used to teach interpersonal communication, one of the concepts I liked and emphasized in class was rhetorical sensitivity.  Put simply, rhetorical sensitivity is the ability to look at a situation and to shape a message to meet the needs of the speaker and the listener in a way that will meet those needs (as much as possible) and maintain a relationship. Martha's responses usually met her needs only. Maybe she didn't care about the relationship. I get that; there are a couple of people at work who really bug me, and I don't care if they like me or not. However, I understand that I'm going to have to live with these people. Even if I wish they would get another job, it's probably not going to happen. I have to work with them, and if I antagonize them, working with them is going to be all that much harder.

How much truer would that be in a frontier community? No one could be completely self-sufficient. Like it or not, Martha was part of a community, and when she refused to make herself a part, the community turned on her and her family.

It's sad. I don't think Martha was a bad person, and the characters she sparred with were pretty despicable.  But the circumstances gave them power, and one thing despicable people in power will do is dispose of their enemies.

There's a lot of wisdom in Proverbs 15:1 - "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." (KJV)

The Disappointment of Unfufilled Potential

I'm still plugging along with my A-Z reading challenge. I had reached "L," which was supposed to be Twain's Life on the Mississippi. But a couple of weeks ago when I was at the library with my kids, I saw an "L" book on the shelf that intrigued me - The Lace Dowry by Andrea Cheng. The story is about a young Hungarian girl whose mother had decided to commission a handmade lace tablecloth as a dowry.  According to the book cover, the conflict of the story centers around whether the mother and daughter who are working on the lace will be able to complete it, and the main character's attempts to help them be able to do it.

I was drawn to the idea of reading about a different culture that I don't know a lot about, and the book was set in 1933, which meant it is historical fiction. So, although I am actually eager to read Life on the Mississippi, I decided to suspend it in favor of The Lace Dowry.  While I'm not going to say that decision was a mistake, I will admit I was disappointed in The Lace Dowry.

The main problem is that it was so sketchy. It started off all right, setting up the character of Juli as a girl more interested in reading and in science than in getting things lined up for an acceptable marriage. The conflict between Juli and her mother is also set up; her mother is going to force Juli to go along with the dowry idea and with taking dancing lessons.  Finally, we get to meet Roza and her mother, who will be making the lace. We discover that lace-making is tedious and hard on the eyes, and that both Roza and her mother are suffering from eye strain.

All of that is a decent setup for a plot. But this book just doesn't deliver. (Spoilers ahead!) About halfway through the book, we are told that Roza's mother has gone blind and they aren't going to be able to finish the lace. At that point, Juli's mother sort of loses it. She gets a job and seems to be pulling away from Juli. Juli cooks up a plan to get jeweler's glasses that will help Roza and her mother be able to finish the lace. She lies to her parents and buys the glasses, but when she goes to Halas (the country town) alone to deliver them, no one is at Roza's house. So Juli takes the glasses and sticks them in a drawer. After talking to her father, Juli begins to see her mother in a different light and tries to make up with her. That seemed to have turned out to be the main plot - that Juli and her mother, though different, would come to peace with each other.  But then in the last chapter, Roza suddenly shows up at Juli's door with the completed lace, Juli gives Roza the glasses, the end.

After reading that, you may be wondering what my problem is. Sounds reasonable as a storyline, right? But it has so many holes and things that come together by what seems to be very convenient circumstances. For one thing, if Juli's future is so important to her mother that she's willing to invest a lot of money is a very expensive dowry, why does she suddenly just give up on trying to "improve" Juli once the dowry is in jeopardy? Is Juli worth something only if she can make a good marriage?  How did Roza (an uneducated country girl) find her way to Juli's apartment in Budapest? What happened about the lie Juli told her parents - they find out, they are mad, and then suddenly that's just dropped. But worst of all is the timing of the dowry showing up and the gift of the glasses. 

My understanding of how a plot should work is that the main character should be the one who effects the key change that happens. That's not to say that other forces -- possibly very powerful forces -- aren't at work as well.  But in order for the main character to be worthy of his/her status as the protagonist, he/she has to make some kind of decision that sets something in motion.  If outside forces create all the circumstances that shape the character's life, then he/she is passive. We as readers are denied the satisfaction of believing actions DO make a difference and that people CAN influence what happens in their lives - and isn't that part of the reason we read, to escape from the stuff we can't control in our own lives?  That's why we love Harry Potter - with everything against him, Harry still struggles on and manages to change his world for the better. I'm sure you can think of multitudes of other characters doing the same.

Given that theory, Juli should have been the one who made it possible for Roza and her mother to finish the lace. She should have had to make a real sacrifice to get the glasses (possibly the short-term sacrifice of having her parents be angry at her), and she should have delivered them at a point when the future of the lace was teetering on uncertainty. But as it turned out, Juli's efforts to get the glasses were for nothing. She lied to her parents and made a trip to Halas on her own, only to end up stuffing the glasses in a drawer. Roza finished the lace anyway, and then when Juli gives her the glasses, to me it felt like an afterthought: "Oh, yeah, I got these for you."

That's not the only thing I was disappointed about with the book (the writing style was rather stark and barren, I thought), but that's all I'm going to elaborate on since it's getting late and everyone else has gone to bed.  I just think it's a shame that a story that could have been fulfilling ended up leaving me wanting so much more.

Nothing New under the Sun

It's funny how sometimes what's going on in the real world and what's going on in my fictional world have something to say to each other. That just happened with the latest book I read, The King of Mulberry Street by Donna Jo Napoli.

King is the story of Beniamino, a nine-year-old Jewish boy living in Italy with his mother and extended family. Beniamino is illegitimate, which simply adds to the problems his mother faces as a Jew in trying to find work. The story begins when she has made a desperate decision - she gets Beniamino passage as a stowaway on a cargo ship heading to America. The catch? He's going alone (although he doesn't know it).

 On the passage, Beniamino gets a new name, Dom, from the sailors. When he gets to Ellis Island, he manages to escape being taken to an orphanage - but the alternative is living on the streets alone, speaking no English. Fortunately, Dom is a clever boy, and through a combination of initiative and people skills, he forms a partnership with a couple of other street boys to start a business selling sandwiches. The business thrives and at the end, Dom realizes that although his mother may have been cruel by sending him off on his own, she at least tried to help him by sacrificing to buy him a pair of shoes that saved him several times by giving the impression that he was a "somebody."

This book made me interested in reading more about the immigrant experience. Dom lived on the streets, sleeping in a barrel (until it was taken away by trash collectors) and eating whatever he could get. Yet he had it much better than the boys who were slaves to the padrone system, whose parents had indentured them in exchange for the price of a ticket to America. The interesting thing about the story is that it apparently is based on the experiences of Napoli's grandfathers. Dom may have been a character in a novel, but how many real "Doms" came into this country?

I was reading this book while reaction to the new immigration law in Arizona was being covered in news reports, and I realized again "there's nothing new under the sun." Right now, this country is struggling with attitudes toward illegal Mexican immigrants. But this struggle is nothing new. In Dom's story, the Italians see themselves as oppressed by their Irish bosses - the Irish even get to sit upstairs in the Catholic church while the Italians sit in the basement. That's in 1892. But 50 years earlier, it was the Irish who were the "undesirables" as they came to the United States to escape the potato famine.  And in the story, even though the Italians may be near the bottom of the social ladder, they still manage to find someone - the Chinese - to look down on as socially inferior. It seems to me that immigration has always been a hot button issue in this country. I read somewhere once that immigration to the United States happened in waves; first were the English and Scots and Germans, then the Irish, then southern Europeans, then eastern Europeans, then Russians (forgive me if I have the order wrong, please). Now it's the Mexicans. Each group came in to inital hostility and some degree of persecution. But eventually those groups assimiliated into the nation's culture (or the nation's culture expanded to include the group's identity) and they then became part of the establishment that looked with hostility on the next wave. It makes me wonder if the same thing won't be true of Mexicans in another 25-50 years.

I seriously would like to find some more stories about immigrants, and unlike the immigrants themselves, I have no prejudice about the national origin of the characters.  Anybody have suggestions?

Well, This is Depressing!

(April 21, 2009)

I had to do my "parental duty" tonight and go to a choir parents' meeting for my son's choir. So in between work and the meeting, I moseyed over to the local Hastings store to kill a few minutes and check out what was on the shelves for teens and young readers. It wasn't encouraging. Other than the classics and Newberry winners (like Johnny Tremain), I don't recall seeing a single work of historical fiction on those shelves! There was an entire shelving section, about 12 feet long and 6 feet high, devoted to the Twilight series - I kid you not. Across the aisle were all the Twilight-wannabes, with their promise of vampires and dark, angsty teen love. One book pictured a cheerleader with sort of zombie-looking eyes sprawled across a bleacher seat. My son was familiar with that series (apparently it's a series - aren't they all?), and he said something like, "Yeah, all the kids in my school want to read are books about people who are in love with vampires or dead people." (He's an eighth-grader, by the way, and he did like the Twilight series himself.) I said, "In love with dead people????" Sounds like a real fun read, ha ha.

Whatever happened to historical fiction? I fear that if it were not for all those English and Language Arts teachers who require kids to read one historical fiction book per quarter that kids wouldn't read it at all...I know my son wouldn't. That just makes me so sad. I think about all the wonderful adventures I've had, and all the wonderful characters I've met, and all the things, wonderful and not, that I've learned about our world by reading historical fiction. I find it so sad that kids would rather live on a steady mental diet of creatures from the underworld.

As an aspiring author of historical fiction, it also alarms me. How will I ever crack open a slot on those shelves for my book? I was joking with one of my friends that I should have written a book about gossipy, mean-spirited, well-dressed vampires who lived during the Tudor period and then I might have a better shot at getting published. It was just a joke, but I do wonder if ordinary pioneer folks who are struggling to live day to day are going to appeal to anybody. At least they have some of that angsty love going on, lol.

Maybe we need a new label for this genre. Maybe "historical fiction" has gathered too many connotative associations that turn people off. Maybe we need to rename it, something like "Fiction of the Past" or "Pre-modern Narratives." Anybody else have an idea?

Settling...In a Specific Case

I just finished Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring last night, and I couldn't help thinking of the recent "self-help" book for women, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough by Lori Gottlieb.  Now, I haven't read Gottlieb's book, and from the reviews I've read, I believe I wouldn't necessarily agree with what she argues in the book.  But in the specific case of Griet, I think "settling" was probably a mighty good choice.

(Sorry - there just have to be spoilers in this discussion.)

 In this imaginative account of the backstory for Vermeer's painting, Griet, the girl in the painting, develops a strong attraction to Vermeer.  I think a huge part of the attraction is that he represents a world Griet treasures, yet can't be part of in her actual life. I don't mean that he's of the upper class and (on the surface) wealthy; it's the artist's eye that appeals to her, looking at clouds and seeing ALL the colors that are there instead of just mushing them all together and calling them white.  She appreciates the way he orders the elements that go into the paintings to lead people to look at them in just the right way.  She understands that when he looks at something, he doesn't just see the surface of it, but what the "truth" of it is (maybe I'm exaggerating a little there).

On the other hand, she always seems to notice the blood residue around Pieter's fingernails and the smell of meat that clings to him, even when he's not at the meat stall.  It bothers her that he doesn't pay attention to those details.   Although in the end, she chooses to marry Pieter, I think if circumstances had been different and had allowed for it, she would have chosen Vermeer in a heartbeat. 

That would have been a mistake.

I say that because of respect. As I was reading the final portions of the book, when Vermeer was painting her portrait, I was completely annoyed with him because he had so little respect for Griet.  He didn't care that keeping the fact that he was doing the painting a secret made Griet's life with the other women in the household miserable.  (Actually, that started much earlier, when he ordered her to help him with grinding the paints.)  Because he didn't want to have to put up with the flack he would catch from his wife, he left the entire burden on Griet to bear - not just the burden of the truth, but the burden of what the wife and the other maid feared because they didn't know the truth.  I really disliked him when he gave Griet no choice about the earrings. So what if she had to go through the pain of piercing her ears herself? So what if wearing his wife's earrings would  threaten Griet's economic security and that of her family? Vermeer had no concern other than that he wanted to look at the earrings actually in her ear so he could paint the "truth."  He even made her pierce the other ear - the one that wouldn't even be seen in the painting - and wear both earrings so it would be "true."  And once the painting was finished, Griet felt his fascination with her was finished, as well.  She was really no different from the jewelry box or the blue table rug that were part of the set pieces in other paintings.

Pieter, though, respected Griet enough to let her keep her secrets. Sure, marrying him meant moving into that patriarchal system that marriage has always been, where he would be the dominant party.  Yet, in the specifics of this marriage, I get the sense that Pieter thinks of Griet as his partner in the enterprise. She may be cutting up bloody sides of beef rather than sitting for a painting, but with Pieter, what she wants and what she thinks matter.

So, how does this relate to "settling"?  Some people I know argue that a person should never give up passion.  They think it is most important in a relationship to be "soulmates" who understand each other and who value the same things.  "Settling" for less than that, they say, is to do yourself a grave disservice. Yet I think if Griet had kept trying to maintain the relationship with Vermeer (if she had the option - Catharina probably wasn't going to give her the choice), she would have been miserable throughout her life.  There might have been moments of pleasure - those fleeting times when Vermeer actually seemed to notice and appreciate her -- but they probably would have been few and far between.  By "settling" for Pieter, Griet actually opened up the world for herself.  She became a respected businesswoman with the right to refuse to serve people who were rude to her.  She had her own family and she helped provide for them.  Pieter allowed her the privacy of her past and her thoughts without prying into everything and without having to know the entire "truth" of her - he was satisfied with the part that was useful for life.  Pieter wouldn't have made Griet wear the second earring.

I'm not in favor of settling just for the sake of having someone.  But when the most important factors like basic respect and an attitude of love and equality fall into place, why sweat the small details?  Does the bloodstain around his fingernails really matter THAT much?

In Celebration of "Man Camping"

It's spring break week around these parts, and last night, my 14-year-old son invited a couple of friends over for what he called "man camping." That means the three of them took a tent to the creek bottoms that run through our field (less than a quarter-mile from the house) and spent the evening running around in the dark shooting at each other with soft-pellet air rifles.

My husband and I were betting these three boys wouldn't last the night in weather that hovered around 40 degrees, especially once the coyotes started yipping (they can sound like they are right on top of you, even if they are halfway across the field). We were wrong. After about 9:00 last night, we didn't see the boys again until 7:15 this morning when they came to the house for a "man breakfast" (cooked by a woman, of course - LOL). They were in high spirits. Apparently they had a great time. They even cooked their own supper over a campfire - hot dogs, hot chocolate mixed with instant coffee, and potatoes and onions fried in a cast-iron skillet. Supper was served about the time my husband went down to check on them for the last time, and he said the potato dish was hideous - the potatoes were barely cooked, and the whole dish was so heavy with pepper he couldn't taste anything else. But the guys were talking this morning about how great those potatoes and onions were. I guess independence is the best sauce.

I'm telling about the "man camping" because it came together in my mind with the book I just finished reading, Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson.  The protagonist of Anderson's book is 14-year-old Mattie Clark, who starts out with the self-centered, tunnel vision attitude of many a modern teen (maybe a little too close to modern teens, but more on that later).  Mattie lives in Philadelphia, which in 1793 was the capital of the new United States. The city is suffering through an unbearably hot, unbearably long summer.  But as summer drags on, a new threat emerges; people begin to fall ill with the dreaded yellow fever and to die, in staggering numbers.

I don't want to give spoilers here, so I'll just say Mattie's family -- and Mattie herself -- are touched by the fever.  Mattie faces some pretty tough circumstances, and at one point she is given a choice: she can go to the orphan home, where she may have to work hard but at least will have someone to take care of her, or she can go back home, where there are no guarantees of anything, including whether she will have another meal. (Ok, can't avoid a spoiler here - ARRGH) She chooses to go home, and the consequences of that choice force her to grow up. By the end of the book, Mattie is confident, competent, and comfortable in the role she's taken on.

What does this have to do with "man camping"? Stepping back. Sometimes we adults complain about how childish teenagers are, about how self-centered they are, about how they can't or won't do anything for themselves except recharge their iPods.  But maybe we are part of the problem.  How often do we step back and let our teens work things out on their own - even if they end up with inedible potatoes? Do we allow them the opportunities they need to find their own solutions, and to develop the confidence that comes with finding it?  Or do we hover over their shoulders, sharing our wisdom, until finally we see they are about to fail (by our standards) and step in to "save" the situation, leaving the teen feeling frustrated and like it's not worth trying?

I'm not advocating a completely laissez-faire approach to parenting teens - that would be dangerous in many ways! However, I think we have to recognize the opportunities that will give kids the chance to try their wings in an environment that is low-risk enough that they won't be hurt too much if things don't work out, but that they perceive as high-risk enough that they feel pretty good about getting through it.  For our family, "man camping" was a good opportunity. Hopefully, we can find other ways to help our kids make the transition Mattie made - without having to suffer through a dangerous plague!

A couple of notes: I said above that Mattie seemed awfully "modern" for the heroine of a historical novel. I'm not sure where I stand on that. I've not encountered other teen characters in historical novels who had the sort of disrespectful attitude and antagonism toward her mother that Mattie had at the beginning of the book, but....that doesn't mean teens in past ages didn't have those attitudes. Maybe it was the language, the way Anderson conveyed those attitudes, that seemed a little too modern.

Note #2: Blogger now offers the ability to include a link to Amazon to purchase the book. There's a possibility, I guess, that some reader of this blog might be so moved by my discussion of a book that they would be simply burning to buy the book, and I'll help make it easier for them.  You should know that I am not an Amazon Associate and will not receive any compensation if you do click on the link.

The Literary Equivalent of a Casserole

When I was a teen during the 70s, and Crock-pots were new, there was a casserole recipe for the slow cooker that was featured at just about every family get-together for a while. The casserole was called Panama Johnny Hash, and it featured a long list of tasty ingredients: browned ground beef, cheese, several "cream of" soups, noodles, onions, and probably some other things I've forgotten. Sounds pretty good, huh? The problem is, once all those good things were put together, Panama Johnny Hash was really sort of nondescript, with no one flavor that really stood out and gave the dish character.

As I drew near the end of Jacqueline Kelly's book, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, I came to think of it as the Panama Johnny Hash of the books I've read lately. The book, which is a 2010 Newberry Honor book, has a lot of good ingredients: a spunky heroine, an interesting setting (both in terms of time and place), some important themes (more on that later), some beautiful descriptive passages, some moments that really ring true with rural life. However, if I'm going to be honest, I have to say nothing about this book rose from the mix and stood out in my mind as THE distinctive ingredient. I was left feeling unsatisfied, and as is my manner, I want to try to figure out why.

I guess the thing that bothers me most is that I can't identify the overall message of the book. Maybe this is a false notion, but I feel that when a reader has invested the amount of time it takes to read a book (I'm talking a serious book, here, not one of those pulp novels meant for nothing but entertainment), he or she should be able to bring away some nugget of truth about life. I have a feeling Ms. Kelly wanted the "truth nuggest" for this book to be something about how limited the life choices for girls used to be (see? I can't even put into a sentence what that "something" is). Calpurnia is not interested in the traditional "girl" activities; she wants to be a scientist like her grandfather. Yet at the end of the book, we are left wondering just what Calpurnia is going to do. (Spoilers!) On Christmas Eve, her parents give her a book called The Science of Housewifery, and she is crushed.

"...there was no new century for me, no new life for this girl. My life sentence had been delivered by my parents. There was no pardon or parole. No aid from any corner. Not from Granddaddy, not from anybody....Great fatigue washed over me like a tidal wave, drowning my anger. I was too tired to fight anymore."

Later, on New Year's Eve, she makes a list of the things she wants to see in her life, but even as she reads them to the rest of the family, she felt "vaguely melancholy." The next morning, though, there's snow -- a very unusual sight in that part of Texas -- and Calpurnia runs out into it, and concludes

"My feet were turning into blocks of ice, and I realized I was exhausted...It was the first morning of the first day of the new century. Snow blanketed the ground. Anything was possible."

So....does that mean she's not too tired to fight anymore? Does that means she's going to keep fighting against the social roles that tighten around her like a corset? Probably. But I can't be sure. That one sentence - "Anything was possible" - is not enough, mixed in with the context of observing a coyote in the snow, and wondering about the finches, and having cold feet, and seeing her grandfather in the window. If that was meant to be THE message, it just blends in to everything else, like the melted cheese in Panama Johnny Hash.

There are other instances of the same kind of thing. The word "evolution" in the title leads me to believe Callie is going to undergo some kind of change and become something new and better. I don't really think that happens, unless it hinges on that "Anything was possible" sentence. The word also makes me think there is going to be some link to Darwin's theory of evolution. Sure, Calpurnia's grandfather teaches her about "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection." Sure, every chapter begins with a short epigraph from Darwin's Origin of the Species. But for most of those epigraphs, I didn't see a connection to the content of the chapter; it was more like the epigraph was put there to be Meaningful (if you know what I mean).

My biggest problem is that this book couldn't seem to decide what it wanted to be. Is it a book about a girl who chafes against the restrictions of late 19th-century life and wants to be a scientist? Sort of. But then there are several chapters that have nothing to do with that theme. Several chapters make me think the book wants to be one of those funny collections of stories about a quirky Southern family. Some parts make me think the book wants to be about growing up and realizing you won't be living in the same house forever and wanting to hold on to that. Some parts make me think the book wants to be about a girl who comes to have a close relationship with her grandfather. (Actually, that's the "flavor" that stands out most to me.) Any one of those themes is great, but having all of them in there together really makes it hard for one to predominate and give the book its character.

I read something last week that said everything in a book should support and underscore the theme. Anything that doesn't contribute in some way to conveying the message of the book should be left out. I think that's why I'm not satisfied with Kelly's book. There's so much, so many competing flavors, that I'm left feeling full, but without any real sense of what it was I ate.

Hey, Girls, Be Glad It's the 21st Century

My 11-year-old daughter has recently decided she wants to be a zoologist and work with big cats. She also wants to be a chef, thanks to too much time spent watching the Food Network with her dad. Whether her goals will stay the same over the next ten years or not, I don't know. But I do know she at least has a chance to be those things, which is more than could have been said had she been born in a different time.

I'm reading Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende right now, and I just can't keep from thinking about how restricted women's lives used to be. (Warning: There may be spoilers below!) The part of the book that got me started thinking about this theme was when Eliza turned 16 and her guardian/mother figure, Rose Sommers, begins to try to set up a "proper" marriage for Eliza. That's what girls did for most of human history - get married, whether it's really what they wanted to do or not. I think about Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman that I read last summer - Birdy isn't even old enough (only 13) to really have any idea of what she might want to do (assuming she had the choice), and yet her father is already searching around for a husband for her. Even women who were capable of taking care of themselves in a lot of ways, like Hannah in Hannah Fowler, realized that the world was stacked against single women. Eliza's guardian, Rose, is a good example of that. She never married, but she still had to be attached to a man's household in order to have any social standing. Luckily, she had an unmarried brother for whom she could serve as mistress of the household. Otherwise, she would have had a very sad, marginalized life.

I'm also struck by how much marriage has been used as an economic tool throughout history. Birdy's father isn't concerned with whether Birdy will like her new husband, but whether her marriage will add to the family's prestige and wealth. Mary Hoffman's The Falconer's Tale has at least two examples of a young woman who was married off to an older man to enhance her family's economic position. I guess this shouldn't be a surprise to me, but the practice really reduced a daughter to a commodity.

I suppose it's even more specific - it's the young woman's virginity that is a commodity. In Alice Turnbull's Alice in Love and War, Alice realized she had "lowered her market value" as soon as she slept with Robin. In Daughter of Fortune, there are three women who are seduced by lovers and face the consequences of lowered market value: Rose, who never marries and gets to/has to serve as housekeeper and hostess for a brother who silently but most definitely holds her "fallen" status over her head; Joaquin Andrieta's mother, who is thrown out of her family when she becomes pregnant and who is forced to raise her son in abject poverty; and Eliza, who actually gets off easiest, I think. I'm not sure what would have happened had she stayed in Valapraiso rather than running away to follow Joaquin to California. She might have faced a fate similar to Rose's, or she might have been tossed out, like Joaquin's mother. But because she broke the accepted social norms and found a way to follow Joaquin, she gets to have a satisfying relationship with Tao Chi'en (I think - I'm not completely finished yet, but I've read ahead a little, and it looks like that's where things are going). She gets a happy ending - though people at the time wouldn't have thought so, since she married outside her race. I guess they would have thought that fate was more disgraceful than either of the others.

One last thing strikes me as I read this. How unfair is it that the women have to pay for their lack of sexual self-control, but the men get a free pass, so to speak? Rose is put in a very restricted social role that could be blown apart if the story of her past was revealed. Joaquin's mother is sentenced to a life of desperate poverty and an early death from disease because she got pregnant out of wedlock. Eliza takes drastic action to get to the father of her baby, even if it means the danger of stowing away on a ship to a place she's never been before. Yet Joaquin and Eliza's father, John Sommers, get to go on their merry ways, pursuing their dreams of gold and their lives without another thought of the circumstances faced by the lover they left behind. Unfair!

I'm not trying to argue that girls should get a free pass for a lack of self-control, any more than boys should. These stories just make me reflect on what limited lives women used to have, and to feel fortunate that the world has changed in ways that allowed me to marry for love, not economics, and that give my daughter the chance to be a zoologist chef who feeds her leftovers to the tigers.

Who's Cribbing from Whom?

Ok, I'm kidding with that title. I recently finished reading Caddie Woodlawn for the first time. How did a girl who loved pioneer stories as much as I did as a child grow into adulthood without reading this book?!! Well, that's a question for another time. My point tonight is to talk about the similarities I kept noticing between Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink and the Little House book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There were a number of events that happened to the girls in both stories - a prairie fire, encounters with the Indians, interaction with a overly prim girl, an unruly student who threatened to disrupt the school, the disappearance of a beloved dog, a potentially life-threatening dunk in a body of water. I know it's not the case, but it's almost like one author was copying ideas from the other. I checked the publication dates, and it's sort of ironic, I think, that both Caddie Woodlawn and Little House on the Prairie were published in 1935. There just must have been certain experiences that were common in pioneer communities. Some, like the prairie fires, were due to the landscape; some, like the encounters with the Indians, were due to the proximity of the different cultures; some, like prim cousin Anabelle and snotty Nellie Olsen, are just a part of human nature, regardless of the time or place.

The thing that is interesting is the way the different authors develop these similar experiences. Let's just use as an example the threat of a possible Indian attack. Here's an excerpt from Caddie Woodlawn:

"After dark, sentries were stationed about the farmhouse to keep watch during the night, and the women and children made their beds on the floor of the parlor, after the bedrooms were filled. No one undressed that night, and fires were kept burning in the kitchen and dining room for the men to warm by when they changed their sentry duty. Windows were shuttered and lanterns covered or shaded when carried outside. A deep silence settled over the farm. They did not wish to draw the Indians' attention by needless noise or light."

Now, here's an excerpt from Little House on the Prairie:

"Laura crept out of bed and huddled against Ma's knee. And Mary, left all alone, crept after her and huddled close, too. Pa stayed by the window, watching."
"The drums seemed to beat in Laura's head. They seemed to beat deep inside her. The wild, fast yipping yells were worse than wolves. Something worse was coming, Laura knew it. Then it came - the Indian war-cry."
"A nightmare is not so terrible as that night was. A nightmare is only a dream, and when it is worst you wake up. But this was real and Laura could not wake up. She could not get away from it."
"When the war-cry was over, Laura knew it had not got her yet. She was still in the dark house and she was pressed close against Ma."

I enjoyed Caddie Woodlawn, and I will definitely be recommending it to my 11-year-old daughter. But I have to admit, I like Laura Ingalls Wilder's version of the pioneer life better. Her description makes me feel like I was right there, hearing that terrifying cry in the dark. I guess that's the difference between telling about your own pioneer experience (which Wilder was doing) and telling the stories of someone else's experience passed down to you (which Brink was doing).

This should be required reading....

(Note: This entry will be rife with spoilers!)

When I was a teenager, I ordered a paperback copy of a little novel called I Want to Keep My Baby through the Scholastic book orders. It was about a teen girl who got pregnant and whose teen boyfriend refused to marry her. She decided to keep the baby and raise it on her own. I think the reason I bought it was because I was curious about sex, and reading about it in a book (although I don't remember there being very much, ha ha) was preferable to talking about it with my parents.

Well, that was a long time ago, and the world has changed a lot, but some things haven't changed. Teens are still curious about sex, and they generally don't want to talk to their parents about it. And they don't have to - messages about sex are everywhere in popular culture. Watch a half-hour of music videos, in any genre -- flip through the ads and articles in popular magazines -- read the books at the top of the young adult list -- you'll see plenty about sex, and most of it is much more explicit than anything in I Want to Keep My Baby. However, there's one thing you don't see a lot of, and that's consequences of sex.

That's why I say Ann Turnbull's fine historical novel, Alice in Love and War, should be required reading, at least for teen girls. Alice is one of them, albeit living 300+ years ago. She feels stifled and trapped on the farm owned by her aunt and uncle, who adopted her when her father died. She's 16 years old, old enough to be recognized as a sexual being (including by her uncle, who has recently begun to make advances toward her). She longs for escape and love. Both present themselves in the form of Robin, a handsome, flirting young soldier with the Cavilier army (this is during the English Civil War). Alice falls hard for Robin, and provoked by the fear that he will be leaving soon when the army moves on, she gives her virginity to him in a clandestine meeting in an abandoned shepherd's hut.

Part of Alice knows she shouldn't have done it, but she justifies her decision by convincing herself that Robin loves her - the fact that he wants to make love to her proves that, doesn't it? When the army is ready to move on, she begs Robin to take her with him, and he does. For the next several months, Alice follows the army. She is very lonely, even though she makes friends; she has little time to be with Robin -- except at night, when he always manages to find a place where the two of them can be together. Just before the army is going on leave for winter, Alice discovers she is pregnant. When she tells Robin, he evades her insistence that he must marry her, and when she wakes the next morning, he's gone. He's left her a note and some money, but no mention of marriage or of a way she can contact him.

Long story short, Alice goes through the pain and heartbreak of miscarrying the baby. When Robin does return in the spring, Alice has to seek him out and confront him, at which time he confesses that he is already married and had, in fact, gone home for the birth of his second child with his wife. Alice has made friends among the wives of other soldiers, so she remains with the army. Eventually, however, her friends are killed and she manages to find refuge in a small village nearby. There she meets a Parliamentary soldier who is severely wounded, and she helps nurse him back to health. As she sits by his bed and reads to him and talks to him, she falls in love with him, but she fears a godly man like Jem will never have anything to do with a woman with her history. When Jem returns to the army, they continue a correspondence, and eventually he asks her to marry him. Alice gets a happy ending, after all.

I think there are so many messages of value in this story for young women. Yes, one of them is that sex is a pleasurable thing that draws people together. However, the story also brings home the message that if the situation surrounding the sex is not right, the worry and insecurity and shame outweigh any pleasure. From the first time Alice slept with Robin, she was worried - about losing him, about the perceptions of other people, about becoming pregnant. She constantly has to reassure herself that he loves her, drawing on any little sign she can muster - or manufacture. Her married friends and their intimate knowledge of their husbands (and I mean "intimate" in the sense of knowing something deeply, not just sexually) contrasts sharply with the fact that Alice knows almost nothing about Robin, and she feels that lack. She tells herself that Robin takes care of her, but looking at it from the outside, we can see that he leaves her to fend for herself during the day, reappearing each night to take her somewhere that they can be together - even if that place is shared with a dozen other couples. There's no getting around it - Alice made a mistake, and even when she won't admit it to herself, she knows it.

I'm glad Turnbull redeemed Alice in the end, though, and gave us a picture of a positive courtship. Through the sickbed conversations and their letters, Alice and Jem come to know each other as people long before the relationship becomes a sexual one. Wait, I take that back. Alice feels herself attracted to Jem fairly early in their relationship, and I'm sure the same is true of Jem. But they don't allow that attraction to get out of control and to dominate the relationship. Their sexual attraction to each other is only one facet of their entire, healthy relationship. On their wedding night, Alice "felt not only passionate but also safe and certain in a way she had never felt with Robin."

In my humble opinion, that's the message teens need to get about sex. Parents and teachers and preachers may say it over and over, but I think sometimes a story may be more effective in allowing teens to reach their own conclusions. And that's why I think this book ought to be required reading.

History As It Was, and History As It Is Remembered

(Here's another post from the other blog - June 11, 2009)
I'm reading a young adult book about the Civil War right now, and I came across something last night that brought up an issue I think writers of historical fiction may have to consider. The first-person narrator of the book noted that the newspapers were filled with news about the proclamation Abraham Lincoln had made freeing the slaves. This gave me one of those "Now, wait a minute..." moments because the date in the book was in the fall of 1862, just after the battle of Antietam, and I thought I remembered from my history classes in school that the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863. I thought, "Surely this author CAN'T have made such a careless error???!!!"

This morning I decided to look it up. What I found was that Lincoln originally put forth the Proclamation as a sort of ultimatum - the states had until January 1, 1863 to rejoin the Union or all their slaves would be freed. The second order, issued on January 1, 1863, specified 10 Southern states in which the slaves would be freed. So the author was more right than my history classes. But my point is, what if I were too lazy to check the facts? I would have continued reading this book with a reduced suspension of disbelief, believing it was the author who had things wrong, not me.

That leads me to my issue for writers to consider. To what degree do we have to adapt to readers' understanding of history? Sometimes popular culture (and that includes education) has simplified things to make it easier to remember and to deal with the plethora of facts that make up not only American history, but world history. The Emancipation Proclamation WAS issued in the fall of 1862; however, it technically didn't take effect until none of the states met the ultimatum, which happened in 1863. So, instead of taking time to offer the more nuanced version of the events, my teachers told us the Proclamation came out in 1863. I memorized the fact for a test, and I'm sure I passed (I liked history class!). I felt pretty proud of myself since that bit of information has stayed with me for 30 years--until I found out what really happened.

Do I blame my teachers for giving me a dumbed-down version of the events leading to the Emancipation Proclamation? I don't know. It must be tough to try to cram 400+ years of human events into a year-long course, and that's just American history. Add to that difficulty the fact that most students, unlike me, aren't especially motivated to care about history, and I think I can begin to understand why teachers try to get whatever facts they can into kids' heads, even if those facts aren't fully accurate.

A writer, it seems to me, has a good opportunity to help educate children (and adults) about the full version of events. The advantage of historical fiction is that these "facts" are coated with the sugar of a plot and compelling characters, perhaps motivating the reader to care a little more about learning the history. My WIP provides an interesting example. Just about everyone has heard of the Trail of Tears, when the eastern Cherokee were forced by the U.S. government out of their homes in Georgia and made to travel in horrible conditions to what is now Oklahoma. That's only a part of the story, though. About 10-15 years earlier, the same scenario played out in Arkansas Territory. The Cherokee who had voluntarily moved to Arkansas were pushed out of their homes by the government and the greed of the white settlers. I don't think a lot of people realize that. Through the vehicle of a story about some of the white settlers and their Cherokee neighbors, I have the opportunity to bring those events back out of the obscurity of history and to remind people that they happened. That's part of what I enjoy about writing historical fiction, and it's definitely a part of why I enjoy reading historical fiction.

But...if it's not something that fits into the familiar history people have learned, and if they know they are reading fiction, how do I keep them from having the reaction I had in my reading last night? I can write an author's note, but people probably wouldn't read it until the end. I can try to link to events that are familiar and hope readers will get and buy into the connection. My favorite method is to make the characters and the setting ring true enough that the reader believes he/she can trust me to be right on the history too. This is where I think the author is failing in the book I'm reading right now. I had already had several other "Wait a minute..." moments earlier in the book, which set me up to be looking for them. That, I think, is the kiss of death for a writer of historical fiction.

A Short Treatise on What Gets Published

For the past two years (nearly), I've been submitting queries and, in a couple of cases, the manuscript of my historical novel to publishers and agents in an attempt to find someone who will bring it to the reading world. This post is not meant to talk about that experience but to talk about an apparent inconsistency in the way publishers apply the "rules of good writing," based on a published novel I just finished.

The book in question is The Falconer's Knot by Mary Hoffman, published in 2007 by Bloomsbury. (And in the interest of full disclosure as required by the government, I bought this book at my favorite used-book store). I had read a synopsis of the book online while shopping for something else, thought it sounded interesting, and even put it on my "wish list" for my favorite online bookstore. When I found the used copy, I was quite excited and pleased to have the chance to read it.

Excitement and pleasure turned rather quickly to disappointment and disbelief. I'm sure my husband got tired of hearing me say each night, "I can't believe this book was published." Let me temper what I'm about to say by saying it's not that I don't think the book has any merits at all; there were some characters who had potential to be sympathetic, and the idea for the plot was interesting. But this book also violated some of the most basic (in my opinion) rules of good writing without having any other qualities that made me willing to forgive the rule-breaking. Let me review some of the lapses that bothered me most.

1) Maintain a consistent point of view. Generally speaking, storytellers are advised to choose a "viewpoint character" and then to tell the story through the eyes of that character. All action in the story is interpreted through that character's mindset, even when the character interprets things in the wrong way (which I think provides some fun for the reader who can see the flaws in the interpretation). Granted, an author doesn't always have to limit him/herself to a single character's viewpoint; I can think of some books I've enjoyed that have had two viewpoint characters. There is also that third-person omniscient viewpoint that is sometimes used (but less effectively, for reasons I will discuss later).

This book had multiple viewpoint characters. In fact, it seemed that any time the plot needed to have something explained that the main character wouldn't know about, that the voice of the story shifted over to the thoughts of some character who could explain it - even if those characters were only minor players in the story. I'm not going to take the time to go back and count every instance, but I can think of about 10 different characters the book utilized as the viewpoint character. I personally found that unsettling, because it led to what I see as the second broken "good writing" rule.

2) Characters should be well-developed, fully-rounded people. This may be what disappointed me most about the book, because there were some good characters outlined in the story. The young nobleman who is wrongly accused of murder is compelling. The young woman who is forced into a convent by her cheap brother is very compelling. Yet as a reader I didn't really connect with either of them, because there is a distance that exists from the way the story is told. These two characters, who ought to be the heart of the story, get lost in the shuffle of all the other characters who vied for space on the stage. At one point, I found myself thinking, "What a waste of a wonderful character!" I would have loved to get to know Chiara (the unwilling novice) more intimately, to have been able to get inside her head and feel what it was like to think you are trapped inside this stifling, limited life when there is this attractive and interesting young man in the friary next door who doesn't seem to be any more committed to the religious life than you are. OK, I'll admit my prejudices; I'm a sucker for character-driven stories. This book is more of a plot-driven story. But even that aspect of the book breaks the good writing rules.

3) The plot should be logical and reasonable; it should never make the reader say, "WHAAAAAT????" I don't want to give away plot points. I'll just say that the entire story was built around a series of murders and the effort to find who was committing the murders - sort of a historical thriller. Except it wasn't that thrilling. The two characters who were under suspicion from everyone else in the book - the young nobleman and his mentor at the friary - obviously are not the people who committed the murders. There is no suspense that maybe these guys we like are not who they seem to be, that they are hiding something from us. There aren't even good clues that we as readers can put together to have the story as a "whodunit." About three-fourths of the way through, there is a single sentence that tells who committed the first murder, clearing the young nobleman. The other series of murders are solved in the last couple of chapters, when the young nobleman and his mentor suddenly realize (two dangerous words for good writing) who has committed the crimes. And the culprit is a minor character who has made maybe four appearances in the book otherwise. Just disappointing.

The romance plot is not much better. We know the young nobleman and the unwilling novice will end up together, and they do. But it really stretches the imagination that he would ask her to marry him and become his baronessa when they really haven't talked to each other all that much, constrained as they are by the separation between the friars and the nuns. The mentor and his former lover get together too, even though it requires him to give up his religious vows - and he's given a very convenient "out" to do that.

That leads to the last broken rule:

4) Show, don't tell. Long passages of exposition that tell us how people feel and why they are doing what they do are to be avoided - at least according to everything I've ever read about writing well. There is so much more emotional punch to watching characters act out a scene and listening to their dialogue than having the author/narrator tell us how the characters feel. Take the young novice, for example. Instead of telling us that she thinks the young nobleman is attractive, it would be so much more effective in terms of the story's impact to tell us she feels jittery when he's around, that she can see him from the corner of her eye past her white veil even when she's not supposed to be looking, that her heart races each time he speaks. Don't tell us she's attracted to him; give us the symptoms and let us figure it out. That's a lot more fun for a reader, in my opinion. Again, I think this problem relates to the use of too many viewpoint characters (that third-person omniscient viewpoint) and the fact that book is plot-driven; when trying to juggle so many people, it's hard to slow down and let us watch the story develop. It's easier to just tell us what's happening and move the story along.

All that leads me back to my frustrated question. How did this book get published? The rules I've given above are staples on the blogs of agents who are telling people how to improve their writing to increase their chances of catching someone's eye. If those rules were applied consistently, I honestly don't see how this book made it out of the slush pile. The only thing I can give as a possible reason is that the book cover says, right under the author's name, "Author of the STRAVAGANZA series." Hmmmmm.....I haven't read that series, but from what I understand by reading descriptions of it, it is a fantasy series with a really intriguing hook - a 21st-century boy with cancer is magically transported to a world similar to 16th-century Venice, where he is not ill and becomes involved in a struggle between good and evil. Sounds like it had some success and popularity. I bet The Falconer's Knot was never even in a slush pile. Since the Stravagnza series was catchy enough to get someone's eye, Mary Hoffman had her "in" -- and no one was holding her to the same standards for later works.

I'm beginning to think being published is just a crap shoot. Sometimes it's about good writing; sometimes it's about a catchy idea; sometimes it's about something that will sell; sometimes it's about something that will sell a lot. But good writing is not necessarily a prerequisite, no matter what the agent blogs say.

I'm Sorry, but I Just Don't See It That Way

I recently finished reading (and really enjoyed) My Brother Sam Is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier. The edition we have (from a book fair at my son's school, I think) had bonus features, including an interview with Christopher Collier. In that interview, Collier said, "Johnny Tremain provides a simple interpretation of the Revolution that puts it into easy categories of 'good' versus 'bad'....that book shows the war in a way it didn't really run."

Granted, I've been a huge fan of Johnny Tremain since Mrs. Howell read it to my sixth-grade class. So I immediately took offense to seeing it labeled as "the Revolutionary War for Dummies." Hot on the heels of finishing the Colliers' book, I started in on Johnny Tremain, seeing if maybe my fond nostalgia had clouded my memories and judgment.

My conclusion? No, it hasn't. I know Christopher Collier is the historian of that pair, and I am not the expert on the Revolutionary War that he is, but I think he is selling Forbes' book short on its portrayal of the war.

Let's take for an example his contention that the book puts the events of the war into "easy categories of 'good' and 'bad'." One area in which a reader might expect to find those easy categories would be in the development of characters. So for Collier's thesis to hold up, the British would be unequivocally "bad" and the Americans unequivocally "good." Yet I think of the portrayal of Lieutenant Stranger, the young British officer who at one point taught Johnny to jump with his horse. Certainly he is shown as eager for the fight; as one character described him, "He likes fightin' real good. He ain't no cardboard soldier...." Yet when Johnny is taking riding lessons with Lieutenant Stranger, he finds the officer treats him as an equal when they are in the saddle. The officer also displays a strong sense of honor. "Johnny knew he longed to own [Johnny's horse] himself. He could, any moment, by merely saying 'commandeer.' And Johnny knew he never would say it." The next paragraph sums up the complexity of Johnny's relationship with Lt. Stranger: "Johnny almost worshipped him for his skill and almost loved him...but still it was only where horses were concerned they were equals. Indoors he was rigidly a British officer and a 'gentleman' and Johnny an inferior. This shifting about puzzled Johnny. It did not seem to puzzle the British officer at all."

I can think of other British characters for which there was that same ambivalence. The deserter Pumpkin, tough little Sergeant Gale who married the daughter of Johnny's former master, the admired and hated Major Pitcairn. I think Forbes made it clear that though the characters disagreed on politics, they were all, at the heart of it, human beings with a combination of good and bad characteristics.

So maybe the fault lies in Forbes' portrayal of the American characters. But again, I would have to say no. I think about the way Sam Adams, one of the heroes of the revolutionaries, was portrayed. You would think a writer who is oversimplifying events would show the heroes to be universally good. But Forbes has Johnny observing that "the Tories were saying that Sam Adams has seduced John Hancock, even as the Devil had seduced Eve -- by a constant whispering in his ear." The reader is left with the impression that maybe the Tories aren't so wrong in their assessment. Adams is consistently shown as a warmonger: "He doesn't care much any more about our patching up our differences with England." Granted, Forbes does seem to indulge in some hero worship of Paul Revere (reading this book made me want to hunt up her Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of him).

Maybe Collier's objection rests with the glossing over of violence. He and his brother take a "gritty" approach to describing what happened in the war, like when the boy sees the slave's head come bouncing off his shoulders during a skirmish. Yes, Forbes doesn't go into graphic detail, but she does include the violence that was part of the war, and not just in battles. At one point, Johnny hears a Tory man being beaten by the Sons of Liberty: Johnny heard blows and oaths from the street outside. His hands shook....They were doing something -- something awful, to the Tory." And strangely enough, it was one of the images of violence, from Pumpkin's execution, that was most deeply linked to my memories of this book: "Squared scarlet shoulders - and on each shoulder a musket. Each musket ended with a wicked round eye....Eight cruel eyes. It was like looking into the face of death."

I would have to conclude that Mr. Collier's comments are wrong. However, I have a theory as to why he would think Johnny Tremain is oversimplified. Yes, it doesn't place the reader right into the action of the war the same way My Brother Sam Is Dead does. I think that's because the Colliers wrote their book after television and Forbes wrote hers before television. Once we have seen footage of actual battle scenes and extreme closeups of actor's faces, I suppose anything other than "gritty" writing seems naive and oversimplified. Johnny Tremain depends on the reader to be involved and fill in the details; My Brother Sam Is Dead gives the reader the details up front. Johnny Tremain allows the reader to stay at arm's length if he/she wants to; My Brother Sam Is Dead forces the reader to be right in the action.