Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Lorna Barrett’s cozy mystery Murder Is Binding, which I had doubts about last week - but in the end I quite liked it! It had a reasonable explanation for why our heroine the mild-mannered mystery bookshop keeper is forced to turn detective (the sheriff has taken a dislike to her, which will presumably force our heroine to keep investigating things for the rest of the series), and I liked the plotline about the heroine and her semi-estranged sister trying to reconnect.

I also finished Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The President’s Daughter, a children’s novel about Theodore Roosevelt’s younger daughter Ethel, which was okay. The pacing’s a bit off - it spends too much time on Ethel’s dislike of her new school and difficulty making friends there and resolves it quite suddenly in a chapter at the end.

And honestly, much as I love boarding school stories, it seems like missing the point to write a book about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter and then spend most of it at boarding school instead of with the Roosevelt family. Any character could go to a boarding school. I want more Roosevelts!

What I’m Reading Now

Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey, the book that the movie Homeward Bound is based on, although the feel of the two stories is very different for me - probably because the dogs & cat in Homeward Bound can talk (to each other/the viewer, at least), whereas the ones in The Incredible Journey don’t.

So it’s sort of like we’re watching them do everything from above, rather than inside their heads, which is distancing for me: I’m finding it hard to get attached to any of the characters.

What I Plan to Read Next

I decided to read Elizabeth Warren’s new book for my next reading challenge (“a book that addresses current events”), but I am currently 27th on the hold list at the library so that may not arrive in May. So for May, I’m going to skip ahead to the next challenge on the list: an immigrant story.

I loved immigrant stories when I was a child - The Secret Voice of Gina Zhang; Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear; that one book Lynne Reid Banks wrote about a Canadian family emigrating to Israel, although I never quite forgave the father for uprooting his unenthusiastic wife and daughter from their happy lives in Canada to drag them to a war-torn country for the sake his dream. Follow your dream yourself, dude.

Oh hey. I was going to say “But I don’t have any on my to-read list right now,” but then I stopped to look up the title of the Banks book (One More River), and it turns out that Banks recently wrote a novel about a family immigrating to Canada from the UK during World War II. So perhaps that should be my immigrant story!

Well, it’s a possibility. Does anyone have a recommendation? (I’ve already read Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again and An Na’s A Step from Heaven.)

Comments

[sovay]

although the feel of the two stories is very different for me - probably because the dogs & cat in Homeward Bound can talk (to each other/the viewer, at least), whereas the ones in The Incredible Journey don’t.

I believe the animals in the first movie adaptation—Disney's The Incredible Journey (1963)—do not speak, either; there is a third-person film narrator instead. I haven't seen it since elementary school, but I remember liking it. I am not sure I ever read the original book.

[osprey_archer]

I've never seen the original adaptation. We did have Homeward Bound on VHS, though, so I watched that a bunch of times.

[thisbluespirit]

And honestly, much as I love boarding school stories, it seems like missing the point to write a book about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter and then spend most of it at boarding school instead of with the Roosevelt family. Any character could go to a boarding school. I want more Roosevelts!

LOL, yes. I mean, it'd be a different thing if it was a regular boarding school series, where this term they had a president's daughter (real or fictional), but that does sound kind of random.

[osprey_archer]

I think the author got suckered in by the fact that Ethel Roosevelt really did go to a boarding school while her father was in the White House. Just because it really happened that way doesn't mean you have to follow it, Bradley! It's called historical fiction for a reason.

[missroserose]

One More River! I read that a bunch of times as a kid. I think my reaction was similar to yours - I enjoyed it, but I was firmly in Leslie's camp of "but WWWHHHYYYYYY??" I had similar thoughts about Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (although in that case the father is a missionary, not an immigrant...but still, his wife and daughters aren't exactly thrilled to be relocated to Africa).

...If you're feeling particularly ambitious, might I recommend Chernow's Hamilton? :)

[osprey_archer]

You know, Hamilton never occurred to me, but it totally counts, doesn't it? And I have been meaning to read it...

Oh look, and the library has available copies. Clearly it is meant to be.

[missroserose]

Hurrah! I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts!

[brigdh]

Oh, I love The Poisonwood Bible and would totally recommend it as an immigrant story – except that I'm not quite sure it counts? Are missionaries immigrants, especially when most of the family ends up back in the US by the end anyway?

But anyway, I completely agree that the father in the book is a complete dick, but the book's pretty clear on calling him out about said dickishness, I always felt.

[missroserose]

I don't think you're wrong, although (in fairness) it's been a decade since I read it. I could never quite figure out what it was that didn't sit right with me with that book; I have so many friends who loved it. I think it was the family's passivity - which wasn't at all out of character, given the time period/demographic group, but some part of me just rebelled at the idea that the wife (and all the daughters) would meekly follow him into something so clearly a Bad Idea. If I'd been the eldest daughter especially, I would have been bargaining with all my might to find some way to stay - I need to finish school, I can stay with a friend, whatever. That whole authoritarian family dynamic rubs me the wrong way, and while I get that the story was in part about the problems with exactly that outlook, I think I just lost too much respect for the main characters at the start for buying into it in the first place. I wonder if I'd feel differently if I'd read it more recently, now that I have a somewhat more nuanced view of social structures and conditioning.