Fran: U is for Ursu

I had some trouble finding a "U"--the public library is heavy on John Updike and Leon Uris, two authors I had read before, didn't feel particularly connected to, and whose rows of books make it feel daunting to pick just one.  I went to the teen room and found Anne Ursu's book, Breadcrumbs.

Hazel is best friends with Jack as they enter their 5th grade year.  Both children are undergoing serious life events at home (Hazel's father has left and her parents divorced; Jack's mother is severely depressed and dysfunctional as a result).  Additionally, they are feeling the pressure of gender conformity in school, especially on their friendship.  Against this backdrop of very real tween life, is the magic of fairy tale worlds--an imp with a distorting mirror that breaks creates an event that makes Jack look to the Snow Queen (who lures him from his world to hers), the Snow Queen herself, shoes that cause the dancer to dance to death, animal skins that transform the wearer, wizards, witches, transformed children.  Hazel braves the forest and the magic to bring Jack home.

There is much that is lovely in this book.  Hazel is an Indian, adopted by a white family; she is aware of her difference because of the emphasis placed on it by those around her.  Ursu is aware of the shifts in perception as we understand some of these things for the first time.  Describing an assignment Hazel is given in school, Ursu writes:

Hazel stared at the paint-splotted table in front of her.  There was a time when she would have loved this assignment, when she had a thousand made-up places at her fingertips just waiting for someone to ask to see them.  But now she could think of nothing.  There were so many real places in the world,  and they had so much weight to them.  There were front hallways and bus stops and the space on the other side of classroom doors.  There were lonely big slides and microscopically out of line desks and lunch tables that survived gravity shifts. How could anyone ever make something up?

The magic of fairy tales is meant to feel real, in a sinister Brothers Grimm way--especially because for Ursu and her characters, fairy tales are about longing.  About being given your heart's desire and how it changes you; about longing that drives us on incredible quests and drives us to continue against odds.  And how desires sometimes drive us to want more, remaining always unfulfilled.  And--I suppose--how the ways in which fairy tale desires relate to our real world desires and drive us back older, sadder, wiser but better able to see the positives in our own lives.

There are some issues--these themes of longing and desire/real world vs. fairy world aren't always intermeshed as well as they might be.  The first half of the book feels short on magic whereas the second half feels short on reality; I wanted more integration of the two.  Reading as an adult, the references to fairy tales in the non-magic part ("like Narnia") were more annoying; I assume a tween audience might need more of the markers to indicate connections.  Illustrations are balanced in both halves of the book but felt weighted to the magic half. 

On the whole, however, a quick read with much to recommend it!

Ed: D is for de los Santos and Teague

OK, I’ll start this one by telling y’all about this odd coincidence: I picked up Saving Lucas Biggs by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague from the YA shelf because I thought it looked good and because I needed both a D and a T. Not that I can count it for both, but one or the other, right? Anyway, I didn’t recognize either of the names, but the cover looked all right and the blurb was from Ingrid Law, and then also I was at the library, right? So what the hell.

It turns out that not only has Fran read one of Marisa de los Santos’ books, but it was her D book back in February. So, what I think is that there’s someone in the library who is a big Marisa de los Santos fan and had picked up the novels for the fiction collection and liked ’em, so when she (and her husband) wrote a YA book, the library got that, too. And good for them, because it’s a hell of a book.

First of all, it’s got a terrific sense of place. It’s set a Northern Arizona mining town, edge of the desert, edge of the mountains. Second, it’s got a terrific sense of history. That’s connected to the first, probably, in that it’s difficult to have a sense of place without it, but they get the particular mining-town history of Arizona right. Which is connected to the third thing, that I love it when a YASF book turns out to be full of old labor-left stuff, real rabble-rousing material that brings the iniquities of the Company right down to the present day. Hydraulic fracturing is killing people, yes, and you should believe that because mining companies have been killing people to make a buck for a couple of hundred years, now.

Having said that, I am disappointed, a little anyway, that Our Hero (and she’s a good character, too, even if perhaps just a trifle too quirky for my tastes at the moment) succeeds in the end by melting the heart of an old evildoer. I wanted a political victory. The kids reading this book should (in my opinion) learn of the tremendous achievement that was moving our labor conflict from machine guns to ballot boxes; we should politicize the fuck out of every dead miner and every spoiled river and every fracking earthquake so that it doesn’t come down to guns again. Because those things kill people, too.

But then, I feel bad about complaining—no kid would really read this book and think Why bother joining a union or voting or calling my congressman, I’ll just melt the heart of an evildoer. No, kids will read this book (I hope they will) and think the bastard mine-owners are still killing people to make a buck.

Thanks,
-E.

Ed: F is for Frank

I suspect I would have read Barney Frank’s book even if I didn’t need an F for my A-to-Z year. And starting it, I would certainly have finished it; it’s a hell of a book. He’s a funny man, of course, and that helps, but he’s also a very smart man and a man with a long and fascinating history in public service. And, I suppose, it helps that I agree with him 90% of the time or more, both on policy substance and on process efficacy. I completely agree with his insistence on the benefits of incremental change, both because incremental improvements are real improvements that help real people and because each incremental improvement in a particular policy area makes it a little easier to make the next one. He has lived this history with LGBT rights; he has in the last twenty-five years seen it work the other way on affordable housing—and has also seen how refusal to accept incremental change and compromise is counterproductive, on both sides. It’s fascinating.

Where I disagree with him, I think, is in his dismissal of events and activities outside politics, and their ability to move public opinion and lead to change in people’s real lives and in their politics. He is dismissive—contemptuous is not too strong a word, I think—of protests and marches and rallies. He says (and he writes strikingly, I admire his writing) that if you have been to an event with people who agree with you, and you feel good about yourself afterward, then you almost certainly haven’t achieved anything. We all would like to believe that isn’t so, but… I think it is probably mostly so. Or at least somewhat so. Alas.

On the other hand, protests and marches and rallies can certainly go alongside a conventional inside political effort. Barney Frank does recognize this, although he is deeply skeptical that the groups holding the rallies will have the discipline to go through with it, and that’s from personal experience I have to believe. But when it happens, I think it works very well indeed. Let’s take, for example, the minimum wage fight, where street protests and rallies have been coupled with some very strong state and local legislative lobbying. Or, alternately, the T.E.A. Party movement, which successfully coupled political theater with direct mail to stymie a second economic stimulus package and make the sequester bite into popular public spending programs. And then—Gavin Newsom’s ridiculous and irresponsible decision to authorize same-sex marriage in San Francisco in 2004—did it make it easier for the other guys to pass Proposition 8? Did it delay legal same-sex marriage nation-wide? Barney Frank believes it did; I can’t really argue it. But I can’t say I regret that it happened, either.

I had for years talked about the Two Browns theory of government—you need Willie, who is willing—eager—to sell out to corporations and special interests to collect the crumbs of the deal for his own supporters, and you need Jerry, who is willing to forego alliances and give up power and influence in order to make unpopular points and maintain independence and freedom from corruption. Of course, that was two or three Jerry Browns ago, before he decided he actually was interested in governing, so the whole theory is shot to hell, but the point is that the two attitudes are both necessary. Without the Willie Browns you get no actual governance, and the lives of the people in the area are that much worse. Without the—well, without the, let’s say, Bernie Sanderses, or on the other side, I dunno, the Mick Mulvaneys?—without the uncompromising standers on principle, there’s little pressure on the folk sitting across the table from the Willie Browns, and the Willie Browns sell out for less and less.

If I were a legislator (and no, that would be gruesome and awful) I would hope to be a Barney Frank, a man who managed to maintain both his principles and his compromises, who always kept his eyes on his Henny Youngman lodestar: compared to what? Anything can be made better, any slide to the worse can be halted or at least slowed. People can be helped and any progress is progress. But the point is not the compromise, the point is the people. He helped an awful lot of them along the way.

And, you know, it’s hard not to read the current fiasco in the House—with the so-called House Freedom Caucus going all-in to prevent legislating from occurring at all—in light of Barney Frank’s career and his very real accomplishments as a consummate compromiser.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: F is for Furnivall

Closing in on my 26...F is for Kate Furnivall who wrote the book, The Jewel of St. Petersburg, a prequel to The Russian Concubine in terms of plot, though written afterwards.  Set in Russia of 1910, it leads into the violence of the eventual Revolution, following characters of varying social classes.  The heroine, Valentina, is born to her White Russian life but, through the actions of rebel terrorists, is driven to "make something more of herself".  She dedicates herself to learning nursing.  She falls in love with a Danish engineer, who despite working for the Tsar, is himself dedicated to improving the lot of the poor workers by building sewer tunnels.  Furnivall tells a sweeping tale, interweaving chauffeur provocateurs and bizarrely apolitical/both sided Cossacks and snooty Hussars, with the backdrop of the decaying Russian society.

I wanted to like this book.  I was pleased by the elements where she drew on complicated Bolshevik/Menshavik history to suggest that the Revolution does not happen overnight.  But the characters do seem flat--an after effect, perhaps, of having written the prequel after their characters have taken shape in other novels.  Valentina survives a lot because she's beautiful with flashing dark eyes.  Valentina's governing minister father is a particular caricature--decadent, greedy, corrupt, old fashioned in values especially towards women, short sighted.  The writing was occasionally engaging but then there would be suddenly points where the writer seemed to lose interest, where a scene should have continued but just stops and then jumps quickly to the next scene.

Meh.  On the whole, just average.

Ed: W is for Walton

I enjoyed Jo Walton’s My Real Child enormously. I found it sweet, absorbing and problematic; I didn’t want it to end.

The end was always going to be a problem, wasn’t it? When a novel is told, more or less, in flashback from the point of view of an elderly person with Alzheimer’s-related dementia, eventually that’s going to be a problem. And in this book, where the tension between two stories—two versions of a life, and a world that life takes place within—is the primary narrative tension, well, there is no satisfactory way of resolving it, is there? If there were, the book wouldn’t work as well. I didn’t want the book to end because I wanted to stay and spend more time with the folk in the book, yes, but also because I knew I would be disappointed in the ending, no matter what.

The central theme—well, the theme I think is central, anyway—is very meta: it’s an alternate history story where the alternate history barely matters. The difference in war, politics, and scientific progress are peripheral to the main character’s life. They do affect it—I will refrain from plot spoilers, I suppose, but World Events make a difference in the lives of our friends only indirectly, and often well after the fact. As they often do in my own life—the most closely the destruction of the World Trade Center has touched me, for instance, has been years after, when friends have been arrested for things that wouldn’t have drawn notice beforehand. Portraying that sort of thing is a critique of the Great Man focus that alternate-history stories often take, and of the Great Man stories that we tell ourselves about the actual world. I’d call it an inherently feminist argument, but it’s more than that; it’s a critique of the reach of politics in general. And while I’m not altogether in agreement with it, it’s a powerful one.

All of which lies underneath a terrific book about people that I enjoyed spending time with.

Thanks,
-E.

Fran: L is for Lake

The late Jay Lake's book, Mainspring, was a complicated read.  It's an alternative history with a steampunk setting and an adventure feel.  The main character, Hethor Jacques, is a clockmaker's apprentice and in the first pages is charged with finding the Key Perilous by the archangel Gabriel because the Clockwork of the World is running down.  His quest rapidly set in motion by the competing theologies of those who believe God to be an active clock maker, involved in Creation, and those who seek to tear down the orbital clockwork of the world and free man to his own ingenuity, Hethor travels from New Haven to Boston to the equatorial regions where the Wall divides industrial North and magical/pastoral-Edenic South.  The South is filled with unusual creatures and part of this book is Hethor's discovery of his own racism/bigotry/errors.  Hethor drives onward to the South Pole to the Mainspring to fulfill his quest.

I found it slow-going but definitely worth continuing.  I liked the idea of "Brass Christianity"--this steampunk rendition of God as an actual clockmaker winding the world.  I was--as an art historian who reads a lot of theology--disappointed by the lack of nuance in some of the characters and Lake's lack of interest in explaining more deeply the concept of the worldview.  One of the things that I wish were clearer is the reason for selecting Hethor--he hears the sound of the world the way a clockmaker hears the watch mechanism and when he's in the South, that becomes a magic shaping/constructing force.

But I think part of the sacrifice of the theology was for the adventure (a la Edgar Rice Burroughs).  The fancy of the Candlepit where Hethor is held captive, the airship on which he sails, the scary winged creatures who carry him off, the jungle cities of immense size and shaping, the "correct people" who live in the Southern Hemisphere--straight out of the Burroughs kinds of worlds (King Solomon's Mines, Tarzan, etc.). 

The book has problems--mired in the sexism and colonialism of the steampunk alternate history and the Christian frame, Lake chooses to some extent to live in those stereotypes (few women of real character, Aryella--the "correct person" with whom Hethor falls in love and helps him on his quest--is an Eve Type).  And Hethor (our connection as readers) learns from some of his prejudices--especially in learning to love the correct people--but is ultimately contained in this steampunk Edwardian aesthetic/worldview, rather than busting out of it to create something fully new.

Mike Perschon has a much longer review on his site.