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.

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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).

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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.

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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.