Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve been on a children’s books binge, which means LOTS OF BOOKS, children’s books being pleasantly small & bite-size.

On Saturday night I was having trouble sleeping, so I broke out Christina Diaz Gonzalez’s The Red Umbrella... and then I ended up reading the whole thing in one go, oops. It’s been two years since the revolution in Cuba, and Lucia’s life as the fashion-obsessed daughter of a banker has gone on just as usual. But then a feverish revolutionary excitement infects her small seaside town, slowly growing more oppressive and violent until Lucia’s parents decide to send her and her brother to the United States for safety.

The book is painful in an entirely unintentional way: parents fleeing political persecution could once send their unattended minor children to the United States for safety and actually expect them to find it. But it’s also good on its own terms: Gonzalez does a good job showing the slowly ramping tension as support for the revolution becomes ever more compulsory, and Lucia’s adjustment to the United States is well-done, too.

I also read Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey, the sequel to The Breadwinner. Parvana has been separated from her family and must travel through war-ravaged Afghanistan to find them, first alone but soon accompanied by a ragtag band of orphans - although it occurs to me that this phrase suggests that the story will be charmingly picaresque, which it is not. I wouldn’t call it depressing, but it’s definitely grim, and I suspect the series can only get grimmer from here - but I’m already hooked so I’m just going to keep going.

On a lighter note, I finished Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks at Last, the fifth and final Penderwicks book. I enjoyed it, though I think I should have reread the earlier books in the series before reading this one: essentially everyone showed up again and I didn’t remember who they all were so it got somewhat confusing sometimes.

Also Raina Telgemeier’s Drama! Which is a graphic novel about Callie, a seventh-grader on the set crew of her middle school’s drama club, and the various romantic entanglements that swirl through the club. The romantic entanglements do take up a good bit of time but to the book’s credit, there’s also plenty of drama club detail: I particularly liked the plot line about Callie’s quest to build a cannon that will fire an appropriately lively burst of confetti on stage.

And at last I’ve completed My Brilliant Career! And can therefore say with confidence that this is one of those rare cases where the movie is better than the book.

What I’m Reading Now

Nayana Currimbhoy’s Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, which I got off a list of books about girls’ schools. It’s all right so far. The book feels like a story being told after the fact, rather than shown to us, which has a distancing effect; but I’m not very far into the book so we’ll see how it develops.

What I Plan to Read Next

My interlibrary loan on Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Eyes in the Fishbowl has come through!!!

Comments

[asakiyume]

Re: Parvana's Journey, grim but not depressing is interesting: I wonder how the author pulls that off--or maybe what I wonder is, for any individual reader (it's bound to vary from person to person), what makes a thing cross that line. I think for me it's probably if people are at least sometimes good to one another--a story can be not particularly grim, but if the people are always awful, then it sure is depressing.

And The Red Umbrella sounds good.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I think that whether at least some of the people are good to each other is the thing (or maybe one of the things) that makes the difference between realistically grim for the setting vs. depressing - so that a story about starving children wandering through war-torn Afghanistan looking for their families can be less depressing than a story about a suburban American high school.

You might like The Red Umbrella. It didn't blow me away so much that I feel like telling everyone "GO READ IT" like with Inside Out and Back Again, but it was good.

[asakiyume]

so that a story about starving children wandering through war-torn Afghanistan looking for their families can be less depressing than a story about a suburban American high school.

--which seems crazy, right? Except that it isn't. The cliché of poor but happy is odious, but it's odious because it ignores all the ways that poorness tends to make for unhappiness. And the same with the rich-but-miserable cliché, only in the opposite direction. But the truth of both clichés is that your spiritual and psychological well-being matter more than your physical well-being for your happiness. (All the usual caveats and riders apply...)

[osprey_archer]

And I think there's a distinction between unhappiness/sadness and depressing-ness, too. Parvana and her friends are unhappy, because they're starving in a wilderness on a quest that may be hopeless - so the book is sad, but it's not depressing because they do have each other and they haven't given up.

Whereas if a character has everything except friends/family/companionship and has given up on ever finding that, the book will be depressing even if she gives up while lying on a feather-soft divan nibbling bonbons.