Month: November 2024

AfterMath, by Emily Barth Isler

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In this middle-grade novel, twelve-year-old Lucy starts at a new school in a new town, carrying a secret burden: she’s mourning the death of her younger brother Theo from congenital heart disease and the loss of the family environment she’s known all her life. Mired in their own grief, her parents pretend all is well, yet move to another state in hopes of a fresh start.

In a misguided attempt to place Lucy in a school that will help her deal with her grief, they enroll her in a school that suffered a mass shooting four years earlier and in the very class that suffered that trauma. As the first new member of the class since the shooting, Lucy faces a solid block of young people who have made their traumatic journey together, helped by therapists and hurt by public perception.

All except one girl, Avery, who is ostracized by the entire class. At lunch on Lucy’s first day, she can’t find an empty seat, so she sits at a table that is completely empty aside from Avery. Gradually Lucy begins to learn about this withdrawn girl, particularly through an after-school mime class.

As is obvious from this summary, the story tackles themes of grief, family, friendship, and mental health, and it does so in a sensitive way. The author’s extensive research underpins the story without loading it down. Of course, the experiences of Lucy and her classmates make for heavy reading– emotionally, that is; the prose flows well and the story unfolds naturally.

I especially enjoyed Lucy as a character. She likes math, its concrete answers that are either right or wrong, though she’s troubled by the concept of infinity. Each chapter is introduced by a math joke, which is fun. Lucy finds them in her room and wonders where they come from.

What kind of angle should you never argue with?
A 90-degree angle. They’re ALWAYS right.

Some readers may find these jokes and Lucy’s way of using math to understand the world intrusive or boring. I loved them, though, both for their welcome lightness and for the way they reflect her need for structure and certainty in a world where such things can be hard to find. I also loved seeing a girl who likes math and logic: such a rarity in stories, though not in real life.

In the mime class—which may appeal to readers who are more interested in the arts than in math—Lucy and her classmates find another way to interact. Communicating without words, trying something new together, putting on a show at the end—these are all effective tools for opening emotionally to each other. Or in other words, for becoming friends. We all could use a friend.

There are a few issues with the book, such as that, after the school where the shooting had occurred had been torn down and new one built, such a class would have been split up rather than kept together in isolation. Also, the school’s lack of interest in dealing with Avery’s extreme situation seemed unlikely.

Still, I highly recommend this novel for adults and—with care—for young readers. Grownups get a chance to experience these devasting attacks and their long tail of trauma from the students’ point of view. Young people can see their fears or their own experience reflected—and not resolved so much as coped with—in a story. Which is, after all, one of the great gifts bestowed by sharing stories.

Have you read a middle-grade story that impressed you?

My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

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Suspecting we might need a reason to feel good about our country, one of my book clubs selected this well-known novel. It turned out to be an inspired choice (thank you, Pamela!). Published in 1918, most of the story takes place in the 1880s in Black Hawk, Nebraska, based on the tiny town of Red Cloud where Cather grew up.

After a prologue, the story is narrated by Jim Burden, who—like Cather—moved from Virginia to Nebraska. Unlike the author, though, his parents have died, and 10-year-old Jim goes to live with his grandparents. On the train he meets the Shimerda family, newly arrived from Bohemia and planning to homestead outside Black Hawk. He and their oldest daughter Ántonia immediately become friends.

It is still the early days of pioneers on the vast plains. While some, such as Jim’s grandparents, are finally making a living from the land, others must start from scratch. The Shimerda’s land turns out to have only a rough cave in the earth for a home and land that is mostly unbroken prairie. Near neighbors and somewhat isolated from town, Jim and Ántonia’s friendship grows.

The time and place come alive through their adventures in this picaresque story—tragedies, successes, hard work, plenty of play—and through the characters of Jim, described as “romantic and ardent” by another character, and Ántonia who is near bursting with joy in being alive. She reminds me of Lucinda Matlock from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology:  “It takes life to love life!”

Cather’s prose fills me with delight. Appropriately for the setting and characters, it is both clear and rich. It’s plain enough for young readers, yet there are layers of complexity for adults to appreciate. She sets the pace for the story right away, in the prologue. We are on a train. We will get there when we get there. You can’t hurry it along, so relax and look out the windows:

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

From this encounter between a middle-aged Jim and a former neighbor, we move into Jim’s account of his youth. Some of it strikes us, more than a hundred years on, as problematic: the treatment of the few Black characters, the sod-breaking that we now know will yield only a few good harvests before blowing away in Dust Bowl storms.

But what does come through, and became such a balm to us, are the virtues of these two characters: Ántonia’s life force and Jim’s passionate loyalty to friends, family and country. Even more, though, it is how the inevitable tensions and prejudices of people who have been thrown together are overwhelmed by the need to work together. Best of all is the way they, without hesitation, give unstintingly to neighbors when they need help.  

As happens in the best novels, Cather signals these tensions on the first page.

Once when he [Jake, the farmhand who’d been sent to accompany Jim to Nebraska] sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.

‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.” She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!’

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to ‘Jesse James.’ Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

Later in the story, we see divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, and between the “town girls” and the “country girls” who were often from immigrant families. But these distinctions were forgotten when an untimely death, a fire or a blizzard struck.

I was also impressed by Cather’s capsule descriptions of characters. Here is how she introduces Jim’s grandparents (in Jim’s voice):

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance . . .

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

We get a sense of how they look and of their distinct personalities. If you haven’t read this classic novel, or only long ago, try it out. You might find, as we did, a portrait of what is best about this country, what we can achieve when we remember that we are not just individuals, but members of a community.

What classic novel have you reread? How did it hold up?

Hello, Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano

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Families. They can be great or not. They don’t mean to hurt you, but too often they do. In Napolitano’s 2023 novel, William Waters was raised without love or attention, his parents having withdrawn into silence after the death of his three-year-old sister when he was only six days old.

He finds respite and respect on the basketball court, and friends among his teammates. At college, on a sports scholarship at Northwestern, he meets Julia Padavano, the oldest of four tight-knit sisters and is welcomed into their family. Julia’s father calls her a rocket: she knows what she wants and won’t let anything get in the way. William is a welcome and malleable companion, happy to have her tell him what to do.

When he suffers a career-ending injury, he begins a descent into darkness. His teammates and the Padavanos stand by him. Still, these relationships—between William and those around him, between the Padavano sisters, between their parents—are challenged as the story unfolds.

I’d been told this novel, loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and infused with Walt Whitman’s poetry, was a tear-jerker. For me, not so much. It was enjoyable for sure—certainly enough so to distract me from the news—but I found the characters too shallow to engage my emotions. Admittedly, this is often a problem for me with stories that have multiple main characters and multiple points of view.

The writing in some parts of the story, especially one long night involving William, is just amazing. I loved the descriptions of one sister’s murals and their effect on others. There were some parts that I questioned, though, such as the way William’s parents completely shut down. I was a little dismayed by the depiction of William’s teammate and best friend Trent who seems to be in the story only to provide him with unstinting support and love. As a Black male, Trent struck me as a riff on the mammy stereotype.

Kirkus, home to the Kirkus Prize and celebrated book reviews, places Hello, Beautiful in the category of literary fiction. A subject of much discussion among my writer friends, categories and genres have undergone many changes. It used be that fiction was divided between literary fiction and genre fiction, which included romance, mystery, science fiction, horror, etc.

As many of the books in these genres have become so well-written that they qualify as literary (as some already were, but that’s another soapbox), literary has become a catchall for everything else. New genres have been added to try to identify books that are well-written, but a lighter read, perhaps, than people might think of when they hear literary: women’s fiction, upmarket fiction, book club fiction. However, as you can imagine, there has been pushback against these new genres.

Defining the term “literary” is a discussion for another day. One of my book clubs, the one I’ve been a member of for decades, differentiates between difficult reads and lighter reads. We include both, of course, but like to mix it up. Some books take a little more effort on the reader’s part, a little more attention. This novel was not difficult to read, which is a plus for many readers. Another plus is that it explores family and love in new and fresh ways. It’s won literary awards and been selected for Oprah’s Book Club.

Families are complicated. They can be wonderfully supportive. However troubled the relationships over the years, siblings are—or so my mother’s sister told me as she lay dying—the only ones who remember what you do. We also sometimes come to appreciate once-despised parents when we become parents ourselves. Not always, of course.

What I appreciate about this story is Napolitano’s exploration of one family’s story and of different ways of being together.

What would you expect to find in a literary novel? What’s a story about families that you would recommend?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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People wander into Funiculi Funicula, a small café in a Tokyo alley and, charmed by its quiet atmosphere, become regulars. Almost unchanged since it opened over a hundred years ago, the café is mostly a haven for those who want to read or have a leisurely cup of tea or coffee. But sometimes people drop in who have heard the rumor that it contains a portal that enables you to travel into the past.

In this play-turned-novel, translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot, four people decide to risk a trip into their past. And it is a risk. You are launched when you sit in a particular chair and Kazu, cousin of the current owners, pours you a cup of coffee, but you must return as the title says or risk becoming a ghost, like the woman in white who inhabits that chair most of the time, silently reading a book.

Another rule is that the present cannot be changed, no matter what the time traveler does, so you would think no one would attempt such a dangerous journey. Why twist yourself to obey all of the arcane rules and risk becoming a ghost when you cannot change whatever it is about the present that is making you unhappy? Why indeed do we pick over our pasts, write memoirs, visit psychoanalysts when whatever we learn does not change what has happened?

It seems like a thin premise for a book, and I expected a light read. However, Kawaguchi endows each of the four stories with subtle and surprising layers of emotion. The writing was a bit clunky in places: repetitive or explaining too much. Perhaps this was due to its genesis as a play. And without giving too much away, some of the women’s stories were annoyingly patriarchal.

Still, I enjoyed reading it and am left wondering which part of my past I would visit if I made my way to Funiculi Funicula. Would I want to enjoy once again a particularly happy time or attempt to repair a terrible mistake I now regret?

If you could travel into the past, would you do it?