The Perilous Gard

(I've decided to cut down on my number of blogs in the hopes that I will be more faithful in maintaining only two. This is a post from a blog I had set up to try to get my kids to write reviews - pretty much a failed effort! They love to read, but they don't seem to have inherited their mom's compulsion to write about what they read...)


Finding this book was one of those happy accidents that happen from time to time in my reading adventures. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope brings together several factors that I enjoy - historical fiction, mythology and mystery, and romance. The story is set in Tudor England, in the last months of Queen Mary's reign. Katherine Sutton, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth, is exiled by the queen to a mysterious, isolated castle where she quickly notices that something weird is going on. She is especially intrigued by the handsome and aloof brother (Christopher) of the castle's owner, and her curiosity and infatuation with him (though she would never call it that) soon lead her into a dangerous encounter with the People of the Hill (who are faithful followers of the ancient, pre-Christian religion of the British Isles). She fights to save Christopher from being used as a human sacrifice in a religious ritual, with echoes of the Ballad of Tam Lin.

I liked Kate. When she finally gets the chance to step out of the shadow of her "perfect" sister, she develops into a strong and resourceful young woman who refuses to give up in her efforts to save Christopher. But when her sister re-enters the picture, Kate nearly slips back into the shadows before Christopher saves her, in turn. I liked the way the relationship between Kate and Christopher developed; for most of their "courtship," they can't even see each other and have nothing but talk to sustain them. I actually thought I might be imagining the "romance" angle of the story at first, but no -- the story ended in a satisfying, if rather predictable, way.

My favorite relationship in the book, though, is between Kate and the Lady in the Green (the leader of the Folk). Neither of them trusts the other, and yet they learn to have a degree of respect for each other - at least Kate does, which I think makes her the bigger person.

Teen readers today may be put off by the sort of stiff and old-fashioned writing style. I was, myself, at first. But as I read further into the book, I realized the writing style reflects Kate's personality - matter-of-fact and rational. That was just one more reason to like this book.

At Long Last, I Finished!

In my previous post, I was whining about how long it was taking me to read The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius. Instead of quitting, I decided to persevere, and I finally finished it today at lunch.

So what did I get from the book for my efforts? Here's a partial list of key points I want to remember:

People in the 19th century had a worldview that lumped their physical bodies and their environments together as governed by the same basic processes. For example, a body had "humors" that flowed through it, and land had "air" that flowed above and even from it. A particular body might have bilous humors, and a particular section of land might have miasma. Too much of either was likely to produce illness. To be healthy, bodies and land had to be in "balance."

White American settlers spoke of the land they were moving to as being "new," with no consideration that other cultures had lived on that land for perhaps centuries, and that the land had current inhabitants. The only settlement that mattered was that of white Americans. Very ethnocentric.

White people of the 19th century held to the scientific "truth" that certain types of people belonged in certain types of land. That theory was used to explain why white people who moved to the Mississippi Valley or the South suffered and so often died from "ague," while black slaves seemed immune to the disease or to suffer only a mild case. Whites, said the theory, belonged in cooler climates (like northern Europe); blacks belonged in hot, sunny, tropical areas (like Africa). The theory was used to justify the institution of slavery - white people simply were not suited for the difficult labor and exposure to the sun and humidity that it took to work a plantation. Blacks, on the other hand, were perfectly suited for such conditions. Very (conveniently) racist.

New settlers to an area had to go through a period of "seasoning" before they were fully acclimated to their new home. This seasoning usually consisted of recurring periods of fever and shaking (most likely malaria). If a person made it through the seasoning, he/she was proud of the fact and wore their newly sallow complexion as sort of a badge that he/she was not a novice anymore. Yet there was also a degree of ambivalence about having one's skin darkened by the sun or by disease; many people took that as a sign of the "degradation" of the white race (to become more like the black race).

Bleeding was a commonly used remedy for all sorts of illness, as was lancing (for boils or "risings"). These remedies were seen as allowing the bad matter in the body (whether too much blood, bad humors, or pus) to escape and to bring the body back into balance. Valencius draws the parallel to the cultivation of the land. As with bleeding, she says, plows cut into the surface of the land, releasing miasmas. Although it was a painful, wrenching process - for both the land and the person doing the cultivation - it was necessary to bring the land into a condition of being useful and "healthful" and productive.

There were a lot of sources of miasmas - standing or stagnant water, rotting trees or other vegetation, cold winds, low-lying land, freshly-plowed dirt. "Miasma" was sort of a catch-all term for any conditions people had a hunch were unhealthful but didn't have the scientific knowledge to describe.

"Medical geography" was big. People would do detailed observations of the land, its weather, its vegetation, its people, and/or the patterns of health and illness over a period of time. These observations were frequently published by reputable journals in the Eastern cities, giving backcountry doctors and wannabe scientists a chance to connect with the academic world.

As I was reading on section that talked about the stereotypes of the ways in which the Southern climate influenced Southern character, I thought I saw maybe another seed of the Civil War beginning to grow. Medical students from the South and the Mississippi Valley were consistently treated as ignorant and lazy by their Northern counterparts and teachers in the "elite" medical schools along the East Coast. As a result, Southerners began to argue that Northern medicine and its practitioners simply couldn't understand the diseases and environmental conditions in the South; that gave the Southerners a chance to feel superior about something. It reminded me of the way nationalism often begins - "We are different, and you just don't understand us. We have to do for ourselves to have it done right."

There were more interesting bits (including some pretty wild planting practices meant to ensure the fertility of the land!). I have two main disappointments. First, Valencius doesn't mention the interaction of white settlers and Indians all that much. She is much more interested in the contradictions between how free white settlers and black slaves viewed the "health of the country." Secondly, I felt she focused almost exclusively on those contradictions in the second half of the book. Not everyone in early Missouri and Arkansas was a slave owner; it would have been interesting to see more about how the people who were doing their own cultivation viewed their relationship with the land.

Anyway, I'm done now. The chapter on race motivated me to read Richard Peck's The River Between Us next (young adult - won't take long); then it's on to a book I promised to read earlier this summer - more historical fiction about the Civil War, A Difference of Opinion by Nancy Dane.

When Is It Time to Give Up?

You may have noted in the previous post that I planned to read two nonfiction books for my summer reading challenge. You may have also noted that that post was written on June 25. You may have further noted that I was a little unsure how having those nonfiction books on my list was going to affect my ability to complete the list.

It is as I feared - I've become bogged down in one of those nonfiction books. The Health of the Country is full of great historical information, things I want to know and need to know if I want to write historical fiction about the nineteenth century. But (insert sound of frustration here)! I am crawling through it, and I'm not especially enjoying the trip. Every night I pick it up to read when I go to bed (I forget about it during the day), and I get through about three paragraphs or maybe half a page before I'm dozing and the book is hitting me in the nose. Every night when I place it back on the nightstand, I glance at the position of the bookmark, and it never seems to move.

Is it time to quit? One of my librarian friends said he frequently "samples" books rather than reads them cover to cover, but I have a hard time doing that. I guess I have the "clean your plate" mentality instead. It's especially hard with this book, since I know its contents are so potentially valuable to me. But I'm really starting to long for the joy of reading again. You know the feeling - you are so swept up in a book that you can't put it down. You prop it on the cereal box at breakfast so you can read as you eat. You do only the most necessary household chores and you find a way to do them one-handed so you can hold the book in your other hand. You stay up far later than you really ought to since you have work tomorrow, and while you are at work, you are only half-listening to conversations because you are wondering what's going to happen next in this fictional world your mind is living in. When the book is over, you are happy and sad at the same time, and sometimes you start again, just so you can go more slowly this time and savor the journey. I want that. It's been far too long.

Summer Book Splash

The ladies at Teen Lit Review are hosting a summer reading challenge, and I've found in the past that challenges like this are a great way to motivate myself to actually DO the reading. Here is my wishlist of books for this summer:

Alex and the Ironic Gentleman by Adrienne Kress
(this is cheating, I suppose, because I'm almost finished with the book already!)
The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
A Difference of Opinion by Nancy Dane
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier (this makes the third time this book has been on my list for a reading challenge - maybe this time I'll actually read it!)
The River Between Us by Richard Peck
Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
Pioneer Breed by Glenn R. Vernam (one of those out-of-print books I remember from my youth and managed to find - hope it's as good as I remember)

That's not a very extensive list, but I think it's pretty ambitious for me, given everything that's going on this summer (our family is going to Yellowstone - I can't wait!) I also have a tendency to get distracted from my list, meaning something will catch my eye and I will pick it up and start reading. But it's a start! Maybe I will even exceed my list! (With two hefty nonfiction books on the list? I doubt that....)

Disappointment Is Even More Bitter When Promise Is Great...

Did you ever have a package for your birthday or Christmas that looked and sounded like the most fantastic gift ever? You just knew it was Just What You Always Wanted. You quivered with the anticipation of the moment you would be able to pry open the lid of the box and behold the wonderful gift. When the time finally came, you held the gift in your hands for a moment before opening it, enjoying that last bit of anticipation before you opened the box and discovered......socks. Or something like socks, servicable and entirely practical.

That's just how I felt shortly after reading the first couple of chapters of Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells. It's been a long time since I've had the chance to read any historical fiction for young adults, especially historical fiction about American history. I picked up this book at a school book fair, but had other reading obligations that kept me from being able to read Wells' book until recently. It was with great anticipation that I opened the book and read the first page.

The first chapter was fine, and in fact, it set up a nice mystery for the rest of the book: "All else that followed during the war came of those three promises, two kept and one broken, made the week before I was born." But beginning with the second chapter, Wells shifted to using the present tense ("When you first see me, it is July 30, 1861."), and I felt a little itch of irritation start in the back of my mind. I really dislike present-tense narratives. Really dislike. In my opinion, present tense gives a book the tone of a book written for very young children. That tone simply wasn't appropriate for the mature ideas and events with which India has to wrestle in this book.

That brings me to another problem: the character of India was inconsistent. Some of the time, she is this tough, confident girl who holds the family together when her father is off in the war. Other times, she seemed to have more in common with my 10-year-old daughter, carrying a doll around. (Actually, even my 10-year-old daughter doesn't carry a doll around anymore.)

Actually, the characters in this book all seemed to have problems of development and consistency. To tell the truth, there was no one in the book I came to care about. There was no one that I identified with and was pulling for. They all seemed sort of like paper dolls acting out a story, but with no emotional depth - when the story was rife with opportunity for emotion! For example, India falls in love (I guess) with her tutor, Emory Trimble. There are scenes in which they are working together on science experiments and recording data, but I don't really see that they are coming to have any feelings for each other until Wells has India tell us they do. Here is the description of their first kiss: "Emory's kiss stays for only the drawing in and letting out of a single breath, but it is warm and steady, as I have pictured it so many times when no one can read my unchaste thoughts." And that's it. I'd like to get to feel that moment. That was my biggest disappointment - that I wasn't able to immerse myself into the characters and their lives.

Wells does have some nice historical details included in the book, and the plot has some interesting twists. Wells also tried to "open our eyes" to the poor medical practices in the Civil War and to the very circumscribed role of women of that time. Actually, I thought she was rather heavy-handed in doing that for both issues. I might write some more about that in a different post.

I'm not sorry I read the book. I'm just really disappointed that it fell so far short of its potential. I'm sorry that it is probably one of those books that I will forget rather quickly, stuck in the "sock drawer" of my mind.

The Wonder of Little Moments

There's a song I enjoy by Rob Thomas with lyrics that include "Our lives are made in these small hours/ These little wonders, these twists and turns of fate/ Time falls away but these small hours/ These small hours still remain." As I finished reading The Side-Yard Superhero, by Rick D. Niece, those lyrics came to mind, because this book is a celebration of the "small hours" that make up our lives and of how memory keeps those small hours with us.

This "automythography," as Niece calls it, is a collection of stories about the people and events that impacted Niece as he was growing up in small-town DeGraff, Ohio. Nothing all that extraordinary happened to the author when he was young, and that's exactly what makes this story extraordinary. Niece is a good storyteller with a talent for observing the little details. He uses those details to frame truths about life, sometimes stated, sometimes implicit. The stories in the book are loosely framed by young Rickie's relationship with Bernie Jones, a boy who is confined to a wheelchair by cerebral palsy.

There were a number of entertaining stories in the book, but my favorite chapters were the two in which Niece told about the carnival that came to DeGraff. Several small stories are imbedded in that larger story, including a very touching account of how Rickie and his friends tried to help Bernie Jones experience the carnival - in some ways, they succeeded, but in other ways, they failed. I also liked but was sort of saddened by the story of Rickie's trip to the "Nature's Oddities" tent, when he got a "back-stage" view of one of the performers. My favorite bit, though, was Niece's description of watching his parents ride the merry-go-round together: "It's nice when your parents are in love and not afraid to show it." Again, he's hit on one of those unimportant little moments in life that mean everything.

Having thought about the book some after finishing it, I think I see another theme at work, as well. At several points, Rickie is made aware of the limitations Bernie faced because he was bound to the wheelchair - he can't go to school, he can't ride the Ferris wheel. It was a major undertaking for Rickie to take Bernie along on a portion of his paper route one afternoon. However, it seems to me that a number of the characters in the book have lives that are restricted in some way. There is Miss Lizzie, who rarely leaves her house after long ago losing her fiance. There is Danny, one of Rickie's friends, who is emotionally crippled by a terrible set of parents. There is Tim, the carnival performer, who is doomed by being a little person in the 1950s to being "Teeny Tiny Tim." There is Mrs. Waite, who is limited in activity and lifespan by an illness.

Sometimes people in the story try to break out of the restrictions. At first I thought the story about Fern Burdette was sort of strange. Fern had been a pioneering female journalist, and on her return to DeGraff, wore nothing but a brassiere from the waist up. After reading the rest of the book, though, and thinking about it, I can see that Fern was trying to break out of society's limitations on her. She'd been doing it all her life, but once her career was over, abandoning the "normal" dress code was a clear way to say, "I refuse to let you tell me what to do." Even though she tried to break free, I don't think Fern was entirely successful; everyone considered her an eccentric -- loveable, but definitely eccentric.

I don't know that Niece would agree with me on this point, but I think he faced his own limits growing up in a small town. Unlike most of the other characters in the book, though, he was able to escape the limits by attending Ohio State University. After that point, he was never the same, and life in DeGraff disappeared as well - his family moved from the town. I'm not trying to say the limits placed by the small town were negative. I think it's like Bernie's wheelchair. At the end of the book, the adult Rickie returns to Ohio to visit Bernie in a nursing home. Bernie is pretty much bedridden by that point, and Rickie realizes that as much as the wheelchair limited by Bernie could do, it also provided him with at least some degree of freedom and self-control. So what is a wheelchair -- or a small-town upbringing? Is it something that keeps you from riding the Ferris wheel? Or is it something that supports you as you go out on adventures like helping Miss Lizzie give out Halloween treats? Is it something you can occasionally escape to ride the tea cups, something comfortable and familiar you can return to when the ride is over?

On the surface, this is an entertaining and nostalgic collection of short stories. But below the surface of all those little moments, I think we can find some big truth.

The Great Kindle Debate

Over the last few days, I've been on an out-of-state trip with my husband's high school band. That means hours on a bus (charter, at least, not yellow school) and nighttime chaperone duty (he was nice and gave me the 5 a.m. shift instead of the 3 a.m. one) and sitting-around-waiting time -- all of which are perfect reading opportunities. One of the other parents on the bus had a Kindle reader, which prompted the following mental debate between Self 1 (S1) and Self 2 (S2).

S1: Did you see Suzy P's Kindle? It was the coolest thing! I never really expected to see anyone with one of them. It was really cool!

S2: Yes, it was cool.

S1: Is that all you've got to say about it? I was surprised at how small and light it was. I swear it couldn't have been more than a quarter-inch thick! I had expected it to be a little clunky, maybe about the size of a trade paperback. But it was sleek and very, very lightweight. And it had its own little carrying pouch.

S2: But the screen wasn't all that big. It was probably an area about the size of a 4 x 5 photograph. That's not much of a book page - can't fit much text on that.

S1: Well, that's true, but you could easily scroll from one page to the next. It looked like there was a little button just under where you would hold your right thumb that you could press to get to the next page.

S2: And you're reading off a computer screen. Who wants to read a 300+ page book on a computer screen? I can't stand to read really long webpages on the computer - and even the longest webpage isn't going to be more than 4 or 5 pages of printed text.

S1: BUT...you're not having to sit at a desk and read it like it is a computer screen. You could curl up in your favorite chair with the Kindle, hold it up to read in bed, lie on your stomach in the grass, lots of different positions. And some of the bigger books are not all that easy to read in bed - sometimes I hit myself in the nose when I doze off and the book slips. Did I mention how thin and lightweight the Kindle is?

S2: Yeah, yeah, you did.

S1: Suzy told me how many books she has on it. I can't remember the number, but it was a LOT. And she said she has an account at Amazon where she can store the ones she doesn't want to keep on her Kindle all the time. She said she has the Bible on her Kindle -- the WHOLE Bible! I could have used that on this trip. I didn't bring my Bible, thinking it was sort of big and bulky and there would be one in the hotel room -- but there wasn't. If I'd had a Kindle, I could have had it with me, no big and bulky. I did take three other books to read on the trip - one for myself and two for my daughter. The one I took for myself is a pretty hefty hardback from the library -- it definitely weighs more than a Kindle! My shoulder bag would have been that much lighter if I'd had the book on Kindle instead of in hardback.

S2: So? You would have had to buy the book. You couldn't just check it out from the library.

S1: That's true. I'm glad enough I'm reading this book, but I don't think I'd want to buy it.

S2: And what about the aesthetic experience? You know, the feel of the paper, the smell of the book, the heft of the book in your hands -- people have been reading books for centuries. Do you really want to break with that long and proud tradition?

S1: Oh, come on, Self 2! Reading is about the content of the book, the story. The aesthetic experience is secondary. I don't pick up a book to read because I like the way the paper feels. And some books (older ones especially) smell pretty awful.

S2: So you would just dump all your books and replace them with this electronic gadget? What if it crashes and you lose all your saved books? You know computers - they can be pretty crazy...What if it runs out of battery in the most exciting part of the story?

S1: Sure, the technology aspect of it is a little intimidating to me. I still can't access the internet from my cell phone.

S2: Just stick with good ol' paper books. They don't let you down. And anyway, a Kindle is EX-PEN-SIVE!

S1: I don't know. I'm not going to rush out and buy one right now. Like you said, they're pretty expensive, and I'm not confident all the bugs are worked out yet. But there are a lot of advantages -- it's more environmentally friendly, and there aren't a lot of books around collecting dust, and if there was a fire, I could just pick up my Kindle and save all my books--

S2: What about all the books you already have? It would cost a bundle to get them on Kindle, and I bet some of your favorites are not even available on Kindle. You'd just have to start with new books - and there would go the only type of shopping you actually enjoy, going to used bookstores!

S1: That's true, I guess. But it was cool. And Suzy seemed really happy with hers....I wish there was some way I could try one out for a few days. I wonder if Suzy would show me hers again?

S2: You! Never content with what you've got! Always running after the newest gadget! You had a perfectly good clipboard, legal pad, and pencil -- but you just HAD to get that laptop computer for your writing..... (goes away grumbling)