Jane of Lantern Hill

Every time I read a new L.M. Montgomery book I’m amazed at her seemingly infinite powers of characterization. Montgomery’s female characters may all spring from the same well of youthful optimism, but they are always unique individuals.

Jane of Lantern Hill begins on a cold day in Toronto. Jane lives with her hard-as-steel grandmother, crusty Aunt, and her mother, who is quite pretty and about as substantial as a butterfly wing. Smothered by her surroundings, Jane is always hoping that someone will let her do something useful. She is the type of girl who would rather have an old doll to take care of than a brand new one to display. Jane’s life is turned upside down when she finds out that the father she thought was dead is actually alive and living on Prince Edward Island. Her world changes forever when he writes that he wants her to come stay with him for the summer.

Why do I love Jane so much? Probably because I’m more of a Jane than an Anne Shirley, whom I love, but whose bright popularity and inability to stop talking are a bit foreign to my own personality. Jane is my kindred spirit. She’s quiet, but undaunted by those who would poison her with their cynicism. Jane sees the joy in taking care of a home, in houses with lights glowing from the windows, in geraniums in her windowsill, and special quilts tucked up on all the beds. She loves her garden and vows to bake the perfect pie. Of course, in an old maid such as myself, these attributes seem, well, old maidenly, but in a young girl there is a sweetness and wonder in all her accomplishments on Lantern Hill.

“There was a tangle of sunbeams on the bare white floor. They could see the maple wood through the east window, the gulf and the pond and the dunes through the north, the harbor through the west. Winds of the salt seas were blowing in. Swallows were swooping through the evening air. Everything she looked at belonged to dad and her. She was mistress of this house . . . her right there was none to dispute.”

It’s pure L.M. Montgomery magic. Lest you think Jane is just a homebody, she does have her fair share of adventures. I won’t ruin those for you though because I’m certain you need to read this for yourself!

Find the book here: Amazon

Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy

Alternatively helpful and useless, Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy, comforted me even while it made me scratch my head in bewilderment.

The first chapter, “Characteristics of the Age,” contained the best information. In it, the authors explained about the stages of equilibrium and disequilibrium that a child goes through. I found this comforting, as my 3 ½ - year -old is definitely in a stage of disequilibrium. “Your child is not your enemy. It is not you against him” (12), the authors, in emphasizing italics, remind their readers. So the next time your child throws cereal all over your freshly vacuumed floor, and then steps in it to grind it a little further into the carpet (and your soul), repeat this to yourself: “you are not my enemy.” It might help.

There were several things that were downright unhelpful or just so common sense you cringe to think that some parents are actually asking such questions (no, mom, your child is not a “mental crackup” because she wants to use her left hand for things). The chapter on the three-year-old birthday party didn’t seem to offer much. Let me tell you, there’s only one schedule for a child’s birthday party: chaos, pure uninhibited sugar high chaos from start to finish.

Their advice for hard to handle children often consisted of getting a babysitter or sending your child to day care so you don’t have to deal with them. “Day care when necessary can reduce the time you will need to spend together” (12). True, but not very helpful for the modern stay-at-home mom on a budget. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s always the other type of babysitter: “the television can be your friend. Wisely used, it can keep a child happy, well behaved and out of difficulty for long periods” (30). Here’s your golden ticket to guilt-free screen time for your children!

The letters from disgruntled parents at the end and the authors masterful, yet slightly insulting, advice was a real goldmine. One mother gave her child a toy clown and then let him watch a violent show on TV with clowns in it. Much to her surprise, he suddenly became afraid of his clown. She asked if maybe she should “burn the clown before his eyes” or whether they should take the toy clown on vacation or leave it behind. The authors opened up their response with the understatement of the year, “You seem to have made several mistakes.”

Find the book here: Amazon

The Hired Girl

I LOVED this book. My mom recommended and loaned it to me and I’m so glad she did. Reading The Hired Girl was like experiencing Anne of Green Gables for the first time. It was that good.

After her mother’s passing, Joan Skraggs seems destined for a life of drudgery on her family’s Pennsylvania farm. Forbidden by her embittered father from continuing her education, Joan must work tirelessly to take care of her three older brothers and emotionally abusive father. Cooking, laundry, ironing, scrubbing the floor, taking care of the chickens, cleaning out the privy … she does it all. Seeking a better life for herself and with the dream of someday obtaining an education and becoming a teacher, at 14 Joan runs away from home to become a hired girl. She finds employment in a Jewish household (Joan is Catholic), and what follows is a charming coming of age story set in early twentieth century Baltimore.

Written in journal format, the tone of this novel reminded me a lot of Daddy-Long-Legs. Joan’s voice is original and personable.

“I wish I was a hired girl. Of course, I’d rather be a schoolteacher. But I bet those hired girls – foreigners, most of them – don’t work a lick harder than I do, and they get paid six dollars a week. And here I am, without a penny to call my own” (39).

Bookish girls and women who were once bookish girls will relate to Joan’s love for literature, her active imagination, and the way she romanticizes her own life and the lives of others. Not surprisingly, this leads to some awkward situations and personal disasters as she discovers that life doesn’t always mirror art in the way one would expect. I loved Joan Skraggs. She was feisty, optimistic, loveable, witty, clumsy, intelligent, and in turns mature for her age and then very much a naive fourteen year-old. She was real.

What impressed me the most about this book though was how it dealt with the topic of religion. I learned a lot about Jewish customs, but it also touched on religious persecution and how people who hold different, but very strong religious beliefs, can come to understand and love one another.

Find the book here: Amazon

The Underground Railroad

I can’t say I enjoyed this novel. Much like Holocaust fiction, you really can’t enjoy slave narratives (especially ones bent on exposing every cruelty imagined). But I didn’t dislike this novel either. Ripe with metaphor and reimagined horrors perpetuated against African Americans, it kept me interested with its strange mixture of fact and fiction.

Whitehead’s novel reconfirmed my childhood misconception that the underground railroad contained a real train that ran underground. The reader is conveyed through a network of dark tunnels and iron tracks, carried on rickety engines with strange conductors. We accompany Cora, the protagonist and runaway slave, whose fierce desire to run to freedom is awakened when the cruelties, both present and anticipated, of the Georgia plantation she is on become heavier than the fear of capture and torture. Early in her journey on the railroad, Cora is told that if she “look[s] outside while [she] speed[s] through, [she’ll] find the true face of America.” It doesn’t take a skilled English major to interpret this metaphor, which is repeated throughout the story. The only light Cora ever sees in the tunnel is when she comes to the end of it. What lies beneath, what’s in the heart of America, is only darkness.

This novel was bleak. Whitehead reminds the reader that even though slaves can escape, memory will never allow them to truly break the bonds of their past. The white people are generally depicted with an overinflated love for cruelty and barbarianism. Even the white people who help convey Cora to different stops on the railroad or hide her at their own peril are not shown in an advantageous light. I found his depiction of Ethel particularly degrading. “No one was spared, regardless of the shape of their dreams or the color of their skin” (216).

In one memorable scene, Cora is hired to work as an actor in a display for a Museum of Natural History. As she participates in this pantomime of the slave experience, Cora begins to rebel against the sneering faces that scowl and mock her by staring back at the crowd, “her eyes, unwavering and fierce,” (125) until the person she has chosen to give “the evil eye” turns away from her. “They always broke, the people, not expecting this weird attack, staggering back or looking at the floor or forcing their companions to pull them away. It was a fine lesson, Cora thought, to learn that the slave, the African in your midst, is looking at you, too” (126). Black history has been stolen by white narrators and Whitehead aims to take it back.

This novel was thought provoking and certainly worth reading, but Whitehead’s emphasis on violence often seemed indulgent, as though the only way to drive his point home was to make a spectacle of horror. The fact that this novel won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a testament to the current racial tensions in our country. While I didn’t agree with all of Whitehead’s racial conclusions, the truth of this statement is what I will take away from my reading:

“All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together” (286).

Find the book here: Amazon

Journey to the River Sea

The Amazon is a magical place, filled with butterflies the size of birds, fragrant orchids, wondrous medicinal plants, and friendly Indians who are happy to see you, as long as you’re nice to them and show them you’re there to learn, not judge. Humidity, mosquito bites and malaria, cannibals, piranhas, poison dart frogs, boas, vipers, and anacondas are only to be feared if you’re a stodgy, pudding loving Anglophile who doesn’t properly appreciate the Amazon.

While certainly not realistic, Journey to the River Sea is enchanting. The sentiment that “children must lead big lives,” is at the heart of this story. Ibbotson makes you believe that pre-teens are capable of doing things better than most adults and that an enlightened parent would actually let their child sail down the Amazon, provided they took their mathematics textbook with them and continued to brush their teeth.

Find the book here: Amazon

The Hummingbird's Daughter

Set in pre-revolutionary Mexico, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, is an absorbing and richly imagined tale of the little known “Saint of Cabora,” Teresita Urrea. Teresita had many sobriquets, but my favorite is the brazenly dramatic: “Mexico’s Joan of Arc.”

This article in True West, “The Most Dangerous Girl in Mexico,” gives a brief but thorough summary of her life.

Teresita is a distant relative of the author, Luis Alberto Urrea, which probably explains why he invested 20 years of his life learning about hers. A lot of times such a well-researched book feels like a summary of the author’s notes, as if they tried to pack every little thing they learned about their topic into their novel. Happily, that's not the case here. Written in the style of magical realism, Urrea’s novel deftly carries the reader through a world where the possible and the impossible are so intertwined that you can’t help but believe, if only for the duration of the narrative, that it all makes sense. In the process, you learn about vaqueros, shamanic healers, desert landscapes, and Yaqui and Mayo cultural history. There is a lot of heart, history, and humor in this novel, but also violence and some sexual content. While I think this novel is beautiful, heartbreaking, and overall very enjoyable, you might want to steer clear of it if that’s not something you want included in your reading.

The English Patient

The English Patient is probably best known because of the 1996 movie. I haven’t watched the movie (do love the soundtrack), but I think it would be a difficult book to adapt to the screen. The English patient, a man burned beyond recognition after his plane goes down in the North African desert during WWII, is actually one of four central characters in this story. There is Hana, a young Canadian nurse suffering from PTSD. Caravaggio, also a Canadian and a professional thief, who worked for the British intelligence during the war and who knew Hana when she was a child. Finally, there’s Kip, a sapper from India who has a talent for dismantling even the most intricate of bombs and who embodies the conflict between East and West. In the present, they all reside in a bombed out Italian villa. The narrative voices of these four characters converge and flow apart; illumination comes most often through flashbacks. At the heart of the story is the question: who is the English patient?

Ondaatje’s prose, like poetry, is best read slowly and with the intention of visualizing and savoring it. Don’t try to stomp and speed your way through this book and don’t expect an abundance of clarity. The good news: if you lose the narrative thread (which, I promise, you will do from time to time), the language is so enthralling that you will most likely overcome your feelings of  frustration that things are getting hazy. I suppose anyone who can write, “In the street of imported parrots in Cairo one is hectored by almost articulate birds,” can get away with leaving the reader in a desert of confusion, riding the wave of an almost articulate narrative.

Find the book here: Amazon

Amy Snow: A Novel

This was an amusing read. Just a few hours old, infant Amy Snow is abandoned and left for dead in a snowbank on the great Vennaway’s estate. Their kind daughter and heiress, Aurelia, finds Amy and forces her parents to keep her in their household. Amy grows up hated by Aurelia’s parents, but loved by Aurelia. Tragically, Aurelia dies young, but she leaves Amy coded letters that lead her on a hunt across England to discover Aurelia’s great secret. As she goes on this quest, Amy learns much about herself and her deceased friend.

While the resulting love story got a bit sappy for my taste, and the “mystery” wasn’t hard to figure out, Amy Snow is interesting enough as a character that the transparency of the mystery can be overlooked. Meek and abused at the beginning, she gains strength and self-respect as she overcomes obstacles and discovers that the world isn't as black and white as she imagined. Some aspects of the story needed to be better developed though. I wasn’t completely satisfied with the resolution and the explanation for Amy’s poor treatment as she grew up in the Vennaway household.

Still, if you’re looking for that comfortable combination of light reading + historical fiction, you will probably be able to overlook where this story falls short. I’m guessing fans of Julianne Donaldson, author of Edenbrooke and Blackmoore, will find this novel very appealing.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

Unless you consider yourself a Shakespeare scholar (or aspire to be one), you will probably find this book dense and tedious. That’s not to say it doesn’t contain a plethora of worthwhile information. I learned much about King James’ obsession to unify England and Scotland, Jacobean attitudes towards witchcraft and sorcery, and the Gunpowder Plot. Of the three plays Shapiro focuses on, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, I most enjoyed Shapiro’s analysis of King Lear and I found the chapter, “Leir to Lear” intriguing - I had no idea King Lear was based on an older play, King Leir. However, by the time Shapiro got to the “Equivocation” chapter, my attention began to wander.

Ultimately, I learned more about the historical context of the year 1606 than I did about Shakespeare. Suppositions in this book abound; things Shakespeare might have read, done, or seen are included without any evidence. Educated guesses are intriguing, but not reliable scholarship. There’s a reason a number of Shakespeare scholars came together for the publication of a rebuttal book, Contested Years: Errors, Omissions, and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s ‘The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.’ According to the Amazon synopsis, it is “an essential companion to one of the most flawed and misleading works by an accredited academic professor of the last decade.” Yikes. I think this is one of those books that is better fit to be picked apart in a classroom than it is for personal reading, but more power to you if you decide to wrestle with it on your own.

Victoria: The Queen

I didn’t think I could enjoy a biography about Queen Victoria as much as I did Christopher Hibbert’s, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, but Julia Baird’s “intimate biography” of Victoria proved me wrong.

Baird’s writing style is engaging, yet I never felt that she was compromising historical facts in order to dwell in maudlin speculation (though she came dangerously close when writing about Victoria’s relationship with her Highland servant, John Brown). I have no time or patience for writers such as Daisy Goodwin, whose recent novel, Victoria, and the accompanying PBS miniseries about Victoria’s life, are really nothing more than a gaudy charade of history that panders to the unsuspecting and uncaring. I have nothing against entertainment, but why distort the facts of a life and the character of a person that was already colorful enough? Victoria is not a minor historical figure and there is so much known about her and her life that it seems irresponsible and ridiculous to misrepresent her for the sake of trying to please a modern audience.

Baird points out the contradictions that shaped Victoria’s life. Unlike the steadfast and principled Albert, Victoria was a woman of spirit and feeling - which means she was often inconsistent and hot-tempered. She didn’t support women’s suffrage, yet she clamored for political control throughout the course of her reign. She was happily married, but came to decry the institution. She worried over her children and loved them, but that didn’t keep her from saying cruel things about them, having favorites, or disguising feelings of disgust or disrespect for a number of them. She was personally kind and compassionate, advocating for animal rights and worrying about individual’s feelings, and she was remarkably open minded about equality and race for her time period, yet she stubbornly refused to acknowledge or intervene in some of the greatest human rights atrocities of her age.

One area that I think Baird should have further examined was the parallel between Victoria’s actions and temperament in later years and that of her mother’s. Victoria had chaffed under and rebelled against her mother’s control when she ascended the throne, yet she was a domineering presence in her own children’s lives, even going so far as to try and keep her youngest daughter from marrying. Just as power hungry John Conroy had controlled and manipulated her mother, so Victoria was seen as being over reliant and brainwashed by her close servants, especially John Brown and Abdul Karim. Victoria detested Conroy just as her own children deplored her two closest advisors.

Finally, I thought Baird’s claim that if Albert had lived longer the age might well have been known as the “Albertine Age” was an intriguing one. Morally unmoving and staunch in his views, meticulous, scholarly, driven, and a tiring advocate for social reform, I think Baird makes a strong case that Albert is the one who embodied our conception of Victorian prudery and progress, much more so than Victoria.

Baird’s biography is refreshing (and hopefully will be more widely read than Goodwin’s novel) in that she manages to be entertaining without drama-mongering.

Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel

It is 3 a.m. on a damp and freezing night in the tiny English village of Slough. Just three miles north, in Windsor Castle, King George III lays sleeping. The night is moonless and billions of stars brilliantly pulsate from the heavens. All is silence and slumber, and then, a strange phantasm - twenty feet above his garden, a man sits on a platform, his eyes trained on the upper end of a monstrous telescope of his own making. An assistant stands below him, ready to move it at his command. A weak light from a nearby window breaks the unadulterated darkness and there a small woman sits at a desk. Books spread before her, clocks and mechanical instruments nearby; she sits posed with a pen in hand and paper in front of her. It is so cold the ink is nearly frozen in her inkwell, but on signal from the pull of a cord she opens the window. A man’s voice breaks the stillness and she carefully copies down his shouted observations. Then, consulting the charts and books in front of her, she shouts back information about where to look next in the sky before she closes the window. All is silence again, except for the scratching of her quill on paper.

It sounds like the makings of a science fiction novel, doesn’t it? But it is the story of William and Caroline Herschel: the 18th century brother/sister stargazing duo. William is probably best known for his discovery of Uranus and as the foremost telescope maker of the 18th century, but between the two of them they discovered new moons on Jupiter, countless nebulae, double stars, and comets. The author, Michael Hoskin, consistently points out that they were also instrumental in revising the view of the cosmos from a mechanical and clockwork universe, to a universe that changes, grows, contracts, and evolves. I guess you could say they were the Darwin of the skies.

William and Caroline were like a pair of binary stars. William was the brilliant inventor, observer and dreamer, but he was bound to Caroline who, though not the genius of the pair, was no less important as his assistant and as an astronomical observer in her own right. The success of one really depended on the help of the other.

While William was the driving force behind their discoveries and inventions, I find Caroline to be a more fascinating figure. From a 21st century feminist perspective it is a little hard to read Caroline’s half of the story and not feel like she was taken advantage of – first by a mother who wanted to keep her as an uneducated drudge, and then by her brother, who rescued her from a life of drudgery but then consistently put his own interests above hers. Hoskin sagely points out that it is both because of William’s selfishness and Caroline’s extreme unselfish commitment to him, that William was able to accomplish so much in his life. One can’t feel too sorry for her though. She was unyieldingly devoted to her brother and regularly made choices that kept her at his side. She was proud of her work, but more proud of his.

This book was succinct. Hoskin spends little time dwelling on the personal details of the Herschel’s lives, which I actually would have liked to see more of. For instance, when William finally marries there is little mention as to why he chose the woman he did or what he really saw in her. Perhaps no record of his emotions exist or quite possibly he saved his emotional and romantic energy for science rather than relationships.

Overall, this was a quick and fascinating read. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about the Herschel’s and the wonders of early astronomy.