A Book A Week: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1989 (personal copy)

By telling the story of one family, of one girl, Lowry delivers the story of en entire nation. During World War II, in occupied Denmark, Annemarie Johansen and her family help her best friend Ellen and her family escape Nazi capture to the safety of Sweden. This is a beautiful, dramatic, suspenseful, middle-grade fiction that illustrates several truths about humanity. 

Lowry’s Afterword explains how she came to tell the story, the research she did and her reasons for writing it. The passage that brought me to tears, the moment that made her determined to tell the story, was finding a photograph of a young man who was a member of Denmark’s Resistance. She quotes a letter written by the man to his mother the night before his execution: “… and I want you all to remember — that you must not dream yourselves back to the times before the war, but the dream for you all, young and old, must be to create an ideal of human decency, and not a narrow-minded and prejudiced one.” Lowry goes on to say that she hopes that “the story of Denmark, and its people, will remind us all that such a world is possible.”

We cannot in our world suffer any intolerance like that which Lowry shares with the story of Annemarie. We cannot allow the torment of any Jew, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, any person of any color or sexual orientation or other discriminating feature. We must embrace and empathize with our neighbors in the world and mingle our pride. Not to dilute that which makes us individuals, but to celebrate our shared humanity and difference. Let us not simply tolerate each other, but instead let us love, respect, and protect each other. Let us lift each other up.

ABAW: Summerland by Michael Chabon

Summerland by Michael Chabon

Hyperion Books 2002 (library copy)

Baseball is a beautifully simple and complicated game, filling our lives with useful metaphors. In the story of eleven-year-old Ethan Feld, his friends Jennifer T. Rideout and Thor Wignutt, baseball brings them together, sets them off on an unexpected adventure, and helps them to understand and cope with the joy and pain of their young lives. Every character in this story is missing something or someone. The characters hover at edges, never feeling completely part of one thing or another. In this story they are called shadowtails, part this, part that, and their liminality gives them the power to move through the universe in interesting ways. Chabon creatively redeploys familiar folk tales and mythologies in this adventure that will appeal to adults and kids. The baseball is populated with ferishers (like fairies, but don’t call them that), a diminutive giant, a heartbroken troll, a helpful werefox with no pants, a homemade zeppelina, an orange Saab with a a funny name, one very sad and sensitive sasquatch, and a talent scout named Chiron “Ringfinger” Brown who might just have been the hero-trainer you associate with Hercules. The prose is also colorful and bemusing, the careful words wrapping around us and transporting us with the magic of the Summerlands.

Ethan, who thinks the world is just the world, is unexpectedly recruited to be a hero, to save the tree that supports the four worlds that make up our known universe. He’s up against Coyote, the changer, who has kidnapped Ethan’s dad, and wants to poison the tree and bring about the end of the worlds, Ragged Rock, the end times. Nothing is simple in this story. Coyote isn’t all bad, for instance. He did invent baseball, after all. And even the good people make some bad decisions. Sometimes, in baseball like in life, a game, an inning, even an at-bat can change everything. When Ethan learns to accept the things that hurt him, he’s able to use that pain as a power source to finally swing for homeruns.

I listened to a few chapters of Summerland on audiobook read by the author (which I enjoyed) before deciding I had to share it with the Sonars.  We read this one out loud together, and none of us wanted it to end. Easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, perhaps for several years.

ABAW: The Magnificent Steam Carnival of Professor Pelusian Minus by Sean and Connor Hayden

A Book A Week, occasionally more!

The Magnificent Steam Carnival of Professor Pelusian Minus

By Sean Hayden and Connor Hayden

Episode 1: First Flight (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, promotional)

Episode 2: Second Chance (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, purchased copy)

Episode 3: Third Time (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, purchased copy)

If dastardly villains and the clank of coal-powered steam engines — plus just a hint of magic — appeals to you, then you’ll enjoy the storytelling of the father and son team of Sean and Hayden Connor. Our heroes are Dane and Paige Ellis, twin steamsmiths snatched from their cradles by Professor Minus’s dimwitted henchman Abraham, then raised under the metal fist (really!) of Minus to maintain the curious contraptions of the carnival. The twins love their carnival family (except for the diabolical Minus) but dream of a better life. Paige and Dane are clever with machines, too clever perhaps because Minus works them to exhaustion and exploits their ideas for his own increasingly criminal benefit. Minus controls Dane’s growing rebelliousness with an explosive collar around the neck of his dear sister. Mechanical shminions, brass birds, and flying twins make for a fun steampunk serial.

Sonar X8 is enjoying the series now, and we are looking forward to future episodes.

ABAW: 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson, HarperCollins e-books 2011 edition (free Kindle version)

This book begins with Ginny Blackstone, a teenage girl in New York setting off for a trip to London. She’s not sure why she’s going to London, and her parents don’t really want her to go, but a letter from her recently deceased aunt has told her to go to London, so she does. She goes along with the instructions thinking that she’ll figure out why her aunt suddenly left New York — and Ginny — a few years back. Her aunt’s instructions come in the form of thirteen fancy little numbered blue envelopes that Ginny is to open one at a time, and only after she’s completed the task in the previous envelope. The instructions are just specific enough to get Ginny to be active, but just vague enough to keep Ginny wondering, and to empower her to make some brave choices and do some things she might not otherwise do. Ginny travels and meets interesting characters, including a funny, creative, charming boy who doesn’t seem too bothered that Ginny’s lurching-along-through-Europe seems a little crazy. Ginny finds some answers about her aunt, but she learns more about herself: she is more powerful and resourceful than she realized, life can be both haphazard and purposeful, most people are nice (sometimes too nice, sometimes nice even if they’re weird), and grief is complex and can jump out at you unexpectedly.

Maureen Johnson gives us a book that is funny and quirky in a realistic way, showing us that sometimes life is puzzling but we can keep moving forward, and sometimes bad stuff happens, but not all the time, and mostly we figure out how to deal with it.

A sequel called The Last Little Blue Envelope was released April 26. I look forward to finding out what’s in that thirteenth envelope.

ABAW: How to Read/Write a Dirty Story by Susie Bright

A. Book. A. Week. (Approximately.)

How to Read/Write a Dirty Story by Susie Bright, Venus Book Club 2001

This book found me, not the other way around. Among other things, I always browse the writing books when I’m in a used book store, then curse myself for not keeping a list of the books I’ve been hunting for. I don’t remember this book being on any of my lists, but when I picked it up from the shelf and browsed through it for a minute, I knew I’d like it. 

Writers, you do not have to read or write “dirty” stories in order to learn something from this book. Bright has seen a lot in the publishing world, as a writer, editor, marketer, rabble-rouser and mimeographer, at small presses and large. In this book she gives advice to writers based on her experience. Some of that advice is specific to writing erotica, but far more is relevant to writing in general, and even the erotica advice and prompts can be adapted to other subjects. Her chapter titles include, “Thinking about Erotica,” “Reading It,” “Writing It,” “Editing It,” “Publishing It,” “Selling It,” and “Doing It,” plus an appendix of references and resources for writers.  

Bright has a frank, direct style that makes me feel like she’s telling the gritty truth about publishing without launching into diatribe and attack. Even as an author who has experienced some success, she still sounds like someone writing from the trenches, scrabbling to get by like everyone else, but with the wisdom to know what’s worth the effort. 

She is a cheerleader for anyone who wants to write for the sake of writing, without worrying about publication. She is also a pragmatist who understands that even writers have to eat. She offers a great rundown of what writers must consider, whether they want stories fit only for a plain brown wrapper or they want authentic sexuality for their epic masterpiece, or they just want to understand the publishing industry from a different angle. This book is ten years old, and while Bright does discuss self-publishing and the internet, we all know a lot has changed in that arena in the past decade. I wonder how she’d revise the book to address the boom in social media and digital publishing.

Update on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 10:06PM by Eglentyne

I didn’t realize just how unusual my copy of this book might be. Here’s a cover shot.

Venus Book Club Edition