Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Vanessa Fogg’s “The Lilies of Dawn” centers on Kai, the daughter of a priestess, and acting priestess herself because her mother is sick with a disease that could have been easily cured - if only Kai had the right medicine. But that medicine derives from the water lilies that grow on the lake attached to the shrine - and those lilies have been under attack for the last few years by a flock of ethereally beautiful cranes. The lily harvest has dwindled year by year; the pilgrims have stopped coming; the entire village hovers on the brink of ruin if Kai can’t solve this problem.

I loved this novelette, so I won’t spoil it for you, but only say that I found the path of the story unexpected and satisfying and gently touched by the numinous. The whole story emanates from that image of the lake of floating lilies: it’s beautiful and a little sad.

Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents has been on my mental to-read list for over a decade now, and perhaps inevitably when a book languishes that long, you end up with a mental picture of what it’s going to be like. I expected the fairly standard immigrant story: the Garcia girls move to the United States, culture shock, homesickness, etc., followed by English language acquisition, acculturation, probably a crowning scene where they celebrate their American identity by giving a speech about citizenship or eating an apple pie. (There are at a conservative estimate 5,000 children’s books that follow this pattern and I have read a lot of them because I love them.)

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents bears some resemblance to this book, if you cut it up and put it in backwards (the books begins in 1980 and ends with the beginning of the story, in 1956), and also had far more emphasis on the home country than the children’s book version usually has: the final section of the book, which is to say the earliest part of the story, takes place entirely in the Dominican Republic. It’s always so interesting to me so see these differences between The Thing as Osmosed and The Thing Itself.

It’s also really good. If you, like me, have been vaguely planning to read it without ever getting around to it, consider this a definite upvote.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m still working on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. I expected more focus on Reconstruction itself, and the book is really more about the development of white supremacist imagery and ideology in the decades after Reconstruction, which is interesting but not the reason I got the book… which is why my progress has been kind of slow.

I’ve also begun William Dean Howells’ collection of literary reminiscences, My Literary Passions, which is basically a whole book of Howells swooning over the books that he has loved over the course of his life (as a boy he loved Don Quixote so much that when a Spanish gentlemen visited his class at school, Howells was all but prepared to swear him eternal fealty on the spot). If it weren’t for the hundred-year gulf between us, I feel that Howells and I could have been buddies.

What I Plan to Read Next

Vivian Alcock’s The Monster Garden is on hold for me!

Comments

[asakiyume]

So glad you liked "The Lilies of Dawn"--it's a lovely story, and I was very satisfied with the ending, which I thought was unusual and *good*.

And I will add How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents to my list--yes, "patient zero" for a style of story is actually sometimes very different from the standard pattern that develops from it.

[osprey_archer]

I picked it up because it was published by Annorlunda Books - on the theory that "if they published Francesca, they must be pretty good!" I may dip further into their catalog after this. Have you read any of their other stuff? Any recommendations?

I'm pretty sure there was a long tradition of immigrant stories before How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - it's not patient zero for the genre, but maybe is the beginning of a new twist on the genre? But I'm really more familiar with immigrant stories as told in children's books, so the protocols may have been different in adult novels in the first place.

[asakiyume]

I also liked Water into Wine, by Joyce Chng, which is a very different type of novella (but still SFF). Another one that's even more different (in that it's not SFF and not even fiction) that I had a connection to--I've been copyeditor for all of these--is Micah Edwards's Here's the Deal, a humorous retelling of Exodus. (It's a sequel to his retelling of Genesis, which I haven't read.)

[osprey_archer]

Thank you!

[redrikki]

I recently read and enjoyed Julia Alvarez's In The Time of The Butterflies, so I'm not surprised How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is good and structurally unexpected. I shall have to add it to my list. I'd recommend adding In The Time of The Butterflies to yours.

[osprey_archer]

I've already read In the Time of the Butterflies, and I found it underwhelming, although I no longer remember it well enough to say why. I've had this experience with most of the previous Julia Alvarez books that I've read; it's somewhat surprising that I actually gave How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents a try, given that track record.

[minutia_r]

The Lilies of Dawn sounds so far up my alley that I just bought a copy.

[osprey_archer]

Hooray!

[evelyn_b]

Man, William Dean Howell's book of literary swooning sounds delightful.

And I'm definitely in that group of people who meant to read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents at some point and never got around to it, so your recommendation has been noted.

[osprey_archer]

I think you would love William Dean Howells' book of literary swooning. It's kind of like a good book blog, except perfectly nineteenth century, on account of... well, actually being written in the nineteenth century.

I suspect there may be a number of us who have long intended to read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Agents. Someday its time will come for you!