(no subject)
One of my cousins has died of brain injuries following a car accident. We knew by Friday (by when, of course, I was already at PUF) that it was pretty much a question of "when"; I had my funeral kit with me at PUF and could have gone to meet my parents needing nothing more than an iron. As it was, I got the news from my mama this afternoon after the staff dinner that they'd taken his body to St. Louis, to donate his organs.
So, there's that. I'll be out for the funeral for part of this week.
PUF was good. I don't really want to process it as a blog entry, I don't think, because other than "FROG AND SPACE! ALL THE THINGS THAT I LIKE!" the weekend was pretty devoid of stories that are of interest to people that weren't there. We had awesome shows with GBMOJO, the musical brainchild of gingerdoss & Bekah Kelso - who will, of course, be performing in Memphis on June 11, and at Goddess & the Moon in Nashville on June 12, as well as all their other appearances in various places around the U.S. on their Summer of Sound & Soul Tour. (If you're wondering if that was a paid announcement, no, but it was a blatant plug; Ginger & Bekah are win and cake. Their dual releases, This Cocoon & Mudblossom are in current perma-rotation in my car.)
At PUF I actually had enough staff and free time to get some reading done; gobbling Sybil's Garage #6 like particularly delicious cake. (I forgot to get ktempest to sign. Note for next year...) Sybil's is awesome and I'm bending the laws of the book ban by hovering over the idea of just buying up the back issues insofar as possible, because oh, sweetheart, there is a pack and a half of good shit in that there tiny magazine. Any magazine that contains no diet tips and has an instruction, in the featured interview, that "Everyone should read We Have Always Lived in the Castle"? Has my vote. Any vote you like.
I am sending one of our staffer's kids - who has always been a frightfully intelligent young man and is just now getting to the age where you can have a decent conversation with him about books - a box or two of YA for him to have to mess with while I am off Being In College. I figure it'll be a mutually beneficial arrangement. I already sent him with one of the books I've got to review for the weekend and sent the other with the lovely thegreenyear.
While I'm not going to do too much PUFfery here: it was wonderful to see all of you, I did not get to hang out with any of you nearly enough, and I hope you all had a wonderful time and that next year won't be quite so busy (although, of course, it always is).
Onward! to the book reviews!
Lorene Carey, Black Ice.
I picked this book up at Wiscon from the nice gentleman who sold me a bunch of buttons (and hps_sterling too, if her backpack at PUF was any indication). He didn't have very many books, but I set my intention a while ago that I needed more biographies and autobiographies in my reading list for 50books_poc, so when I noted that Ms. Cary's book was an autobiographical look at her life in an exclusive private boarding school, I snatched it up. My own experiences at exclusive day school have lead to a lifelong interest in reading about different people's experiences with private education. This book's territory, however, was a new one on me.
Ms. Cary attended St. Paul's School in the early seventies, going on to teach there and later to sit on the Board. She told her story well - not stinting the parts that were frightening, painful, racist, or not very self-flattering. But it is this that gives the book its wholeness and its uncompromising and yet approachable voice. My own experiences with private education with the children of the mostly white and very rich immediately came back up in reading hers, the same fears in many particulars...except in her case shot through with fears of how she would be judged for her race, fears which never entered into my consciousness along with class and variations in religion and personal ability. I can't say that I enjoyed this book, but I devoured it, nodded my head at it, winced at memories she and I share and many we don't.
I have the distinct feeling that I'm going to be checking out the fiction of Lorene Cary here shortly. Anyone who writes their own story that unsparingly and well, who writes in multiple genres and considers "social activist" just as much her job as "teacher or "author"? Sounds like my kind of person.
Lorene Cary, Black Ice. 0679737456 . #13.
Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear.
The 50books_poc challenge has given me a lot of awesome reading thus far, and not least among the results is my newfound and apparently enduring love for Virginia Hamilton. That said, this was my least favorite of anything that I've read by her...and it shouldn't have been, because it involves all kinds of things that I am all kinds of down for, including but not limited to Underground Railroad connections, spooky houses with secret passages, and Infant Twins who are Wise Beyond Their Years (which is different than Creepy Twins, for which I will not link you to TVTropes because I love you.) This book should have grabbed me and didn't, not the way I expected after the extremely well-crafted Justice & Her Brothers.
The fact that you're two-thirds of the book before anyone calls a twin by name, that I noticed anyhow, is jarring. The narrator is "close to" the twins, but thinks of them as one unit in a way that seems unwarranted and unnatural. The fact that Mrs. Small seems to have no character at all until she decides she'd like to take part in the climactic events - after which she's cut out of them for no plot reason I can see other than to make her disappointed and remove from the child narrator the comfort of her presence - was disappointing. She seemed the way mothers often are in Heinlein's juveniles, a sort of stereotypical presence of Motherliness with little to no character definition, which is something I did not expect from someone who could write the character of M'vy from Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush.
While the other books by Hamilton that I've referenced appear to be intended for older children, this one was written for the middles who are past picture books and ridiculously simple chapter books with little to no artifice, but not quite ready for trilogies or stories that end with actual deaths. It's possible to write great books for that age group; this one was good, but not great. It had some intensely good moments, and Mr. Pluto (although obvious to my jaundiced and agéd eye to be not the bogeyman Thomas thought he was) had some great scenes. The way in which the role of the Black church was woven into the story and the frankness with which it was addressed was surprisingly frank and I found it very strong. The descriptive passages were imagination-provoking as usual. But the book cut corners in places where I feel it shouldn't have. I know Hamilton can write kick-ass moms and complex sibling relationships, so the book suffered from their absence. But it was still good enough for me to send it home with the kid, with the warning that it was perhaps a little young for him but had some good parts. And I have every intention of reading the sequel as well.
Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear. #14 in an ongoing series.
Love to all of you. See y'all when I get back, more than likely.
So, there's that. I'll be out for the funeral for part of this week.
PUF was good. I don't really want to process it as a blog entry, I don't think, because other than "FROG AND SPACE! ALL THE THINGS THAT I LIKE!" the weekend was pretty devoid of stories that are of interest to people that weren't there. We had awesome shows with GBMOJO, the musical brainchild of gingerdoss & Bekah Kelso - who will, of course, be performing in Memphis on June 11, and at Goddess & the Moon in Nashville on June 12, as well as all their other appearances in various places around the U.S. on their Summer of Sound & Soul Tour. (If you're wondering if that was a paid announcement, no, but it was a blatant plug; Ginger & Bekah are win and cake. Their dual releases, This Cocoon & Mudblossom are in current perma-rotation in my car.)
At PUF I actually had enough staff and free time to get some reading done; gobbling Sybil's Garage #6 like particularly delicious cake. (I forgot to get ktempest to sign. Note for next year...) Sybil's is awesome and I'm bending the laws of the book ban by hovering over the idea of just buying up the back issues insofar as possible, because oh, sweetheart, there is a pack and a half of good shit in that there tiny magazine. Any magazine that contains no diet tips and has an instruction, in the featured interview, that "Everyone should read We Have Always Lived in the Castle"? Has my vote. Any vote you like.
I am sending one of our staffer's kids - who has always been a frightfully intelligent young man and is just now getting to the age where you can have a decent conversation with him about books - a box or two of YA for him to have to mess with while I am off Being In College. I figure it'll be a mutually beneficial arrangement. I already sent him with one of the books I've got to review for the weekend and sent the other with the lovely thegreenyear.
While I'm not going to do too much PUFfery here: it was wonderful to see all of you, I did not get to hang out with any of you nearly enough, and I hope you all had a wonderful time and that next year won't be quite so busy (although, of course, it always is).
Onward! to the book reviews!
Lorene Carey, Black Ice.
I picked this book up at Wiscon from the nice gentleman who sold me a bunch of buttons (and hps_sterling too, if her backpack at PUF was any indication). He didn't have very many books, but I set my intention a while ago that I needed more biographies and autobiographies in my reading list for 50books_poc, so when I noted that Ms. Cary's book was an autobiographical look at her life in an exclusive private boarding school, I snatched it up. My own experiences at exclusive day school have lead to a lifelong interest in reading about different people's experiences with private education. This book's territory, however, was a new one on me.
Ms. Cary attended St. Paul's School in the early seventies, going on to teach there and later to sit on the Board. She told her story well - not stinting the parts that were frightening, painful, racist, or not very self-flattering. But it is this that gives the book its wholeness and its uncompromising and yet approachable voice. My own experiences with private education with the children of the mostly white and very rich immediately came back up in reading hers, the same fears in many particulars...except in her case shot through with fears of how she would be judged for her race, fears which never entered into my consciousness along with class and variations in religion and personal ability. I can't say that I enjoyed this book, but I devoured it, nodded my head at it, winced at memories she and I share and many we don't.
I have the distinct feeling that I'm going to be checking out the fiction of Lorene Cary here shortly. Anyone who writes their own story that unsparingly and well, who writes in multiple genres and considers "social activist" just as much her job as "teacher or "author"? Sounds like my kind of person.
Lorene Cary, Black Ice. 0679737456 . #13.
Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear.
The 50books_poc challenge has given me a lot of awesome reading thus far, and not least among the results is my newfound and apparently enduring love for Virginia Hamilton. That said, this was my least favorite of anything that I've read by her...and it shouldn't have been, because it involves all kinds of things that I am all kinds of down for, including but not limited to Underground Railroad connections, spooky houses with secret passages, and Infant Twins who are Wise Beyond Their Years (which is different than Creepy Twins, for which I will not link you to TVTropes because I love you.) This book should have grabbed me and didn't, not the way I expected after the extremely well-crafted Justice & Her Brothers.
The fact that you're two-thirds of the book before anyone calls a twin by name, that I noticed anyhow, is jarring. The narrator is "close to" the twins, but thinks of them as one unit in a way that seems unwarranted and unnatural. The fact that Mrs. Small seems to have no character at all until she decides she'd like to take part in the climactic events - after which she's cut out of them for no plot reason I can see other than to make her disappointed and remove from the child narrator the comfort of her presence - was disappointing. She seemed the way mothers often are in Heinlein's juveniles, a sort of stereotypical presence of Motherliness with little to no character definition, which is something I did not expect from someone who could write the character of M'vy from Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush.
While the other books by Hamilton that I've referenced appear to be intended for older children, this one was written for the middles who are past picture books and ridiculously simple chapter books with little to no artifice, but not quite ready for trilogies or stories that end with actual deaths. It's possible to write great books for that age group; this one was good, but not great. It had some intensely good moments, and Mr. Pluto (although obvious to my jaundiced and agéd eye to be not the bogeyman Thomas thought he was) had some great scenes. The way in which the role of the Black church was woven into the story and the frankness with which it was addressed was surprisingly frank and I found it very strong. The descriptive passages were imagination-provoking as usual. But the book cut corners in places where I feel it shouldn't have. I know Hamilton can write kick-ass moms and complex sibling relationships, so the book suffered from their absence. But it was still good enough for me to send it home with the kid, with the warning that it was perhaps a little young for him but had some good parts. And I have every intention of reading the sequel as well.
Virginia Hamilton, The House of Dies Drear. #14 in an ongoing series.
Love to all of you. See y'all when I get back, more than likely.