Really Random Tuesday: Unplugging & Giveaway Winners

First off, although I’ve just gotten back from vacation, I need some time off blogging right now, so I’ve decided to take the next two weeks off. Hopefully, I will catch up a bit on reviews during this time, and I will be popping around your blogs to say hello. (I’m not planning to be totally unplugged!)

In other news, I’ve picked two winners for my last giveaway (using Random.org): Amy and Dolly! They each win a copy of The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch (read my review). Congrats and I hope you enjoy this memoir as much as I did. Thanks to Indiana University Press for sponsoring this giveaway.
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Really Random Tuesday is hosted by Suko at Suko’s Notebook. Feel free to join in, copy the button and link back to Suko’s blog.

All Clear Read-along: Week 4 (Pages 471-641)

Welcome to the fourth and final discussion post for the read-along of All Clear by Connie Willis, which I’ve been co-hosting with Carrie at Books and Movies. (If you missed them, please go back and read the discussions for week 1, week 2 and week 3.) Oh and feel free to join the discussion if you read this book at any other point as well!

(Apologies for posting this discussion a day late: sometimes real life gets in the way of blogging.)

Note that the rest of this post contains major spoilers!

Wow, the fourth section of this book was intense. I can’t tell you how happy I was that Mr. Dunworthy’s theory was wrong! I didn’t believe it for a second (what a terrible ending that would have been), but it was a relief all the same that things worked out in the end, even though Michael died and Eileen stayed behind. I think Willis succeeded admirably in what she set out to do, which was to show how everyone in England, from ambulance drivers, firewatchers, air-raid wardens and nurses to canteen workers, shopgirls, chorus girls and librarians, contributed to winning the war.

Intellectually, though, I must admit to a couple of disappointments. First off, it bugged me that the ending was framed as the men (Michael and Colin) rescuing the women (although technically Eileen was not rescued, and both Eileen and Binnie were instrumental in the rescue as well). This just seemed so same old same old. I also kinda wished that we’d returned to 2060 at the end, although the end as it stands is dramatic and satisfying (and might not have worked as well otherwise).

I’m also left with a few questions, which I’m putting to you:

1. What does Michael mean when he says his name is not Michael or Mike Davis or Ernest Worthing or Shackleton—that in fact his name is Faulknor (page 550)? Was he really both Shackleton and Faulknor? (How is that possible?) Is he speaking metaphorically?


2. What does Polly realize when she looks at Colin and sees the resemblance (page 640)? My assumption is that Colin is Eileen’s descendant. Is that what you understood too?


3. Finally, who was it who goes back at the end of Blackout? Was it Mr. Dunworthy? (I don’t think it could have been Colin because he doesn’t return to 1940.) Oh! I just reread that section again and I understand it now: it was Mr. Dunworthy, but he wasn’t coming through from 2060—it’s when he came through as a young man...!

I almost want to reread both Blackout and All Clear immediately as I suspect that Willis sprinkled many other clues throughout the books. For example, at one point I was pretty sure that one of the characters (I can’t remember which, but I’m assuming it was Polly) bumped into Eileen’s reverend on VE-Day, and of course Colin runs into several women who knew Polly as Mary (though he doesn’t realize it).

What did you think? Were you as satisfied as I was with how things turned out? Did you have any other questions about the ending?

Thank you to everybody who participated in these two read-alongs—and thank you to Carrie for co-hosting them with me. As I mentioned before, please feel free to join in the discussion even if you didn’t read these books during the read-alongs.

Similar Covers: Girls

I was recently toodling around on a YA blog and came across three soon-to-be released books that have lookalike covers.

The first is Frost by Marianna Baer (Harper Collins Children’s, September 2011), which reuses the image found on the cover of Echo by C.L. Kelly (Zondervan, 2007)...

Then there’s Where It Began by Ann Redisch Stampler (Simon Pulse, March 2012), which reuses the image found on the cover of Dreamrunner by Clare Jay (Piatkus Books, 2010)...

And finally, there’s Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard (Delacorte, March 2012), which features the same girl found on the cover of Create in Me a Pure Heart: Answers for Struggling Women by Steve and Kathy Gallagher (Pure Life Ministries, 2007). (To see the original photos, click here.)

I have to admit that I think I like the new covers better in all three cases!

All Clear Read-along: Week 3 (Pages 301-470)

For all of you who are participating in the All Clear read-along that Carrie and I are hosting this month, don’t forget that last week’s discussion is happening over on Carrie’s blog, Books and Movies. I was so enthralled by the story that I read an extra chapter by mistake! Head over to Carrie’s discussion post to read her thoughts (as well as mine) and contribute your own. Come back here on Saturday for the final discussion post!

Brogan’s Review: The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest by Aminatta Forna

This is the second of two reviews by my sister Brogan that I’m posting during my vacation...

Whenever my grandfather arrived he seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Although I’m sure he must have carried his clothes in a bundle, he never appeared to have anything resembling luggage. And when he walked into the compound there was no evidence of the means of transportation he had taken, no bush taxi disappearing in a whirl of dust, no car or bus. Not even a bicycle. He looked as though he had just come from the end of the road instead of Magburaka, where he lived, a whole day’s travel away. By necessity, since there were no telephones and no mail service to speak of, he arrived unannounced and would stay for a few days or sometimes a few weeks.

[. . .]

Pa Roke wore mukay, pointed leather shoes, that men used as slippers with the back trodden down. He would slip them off and cross his bare feet at the ankle. Likewise my father took off his sandals. This signaled the beginning of their sessions. They talked for hours together in Temne, who knows what about, since I couldn’t understand a word they said. (pp. 50-51)

Some books just take you away, out of your day-to-day world and into a world of different colours and events than anything you know. Even though the subject matter is difficult, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest by Aminatta Forna was one of those books for me. Forna tells the true story of her father, Mohamed Sorie Forna, who was executed in 1974 in his native Sierra Leone. He was a prominent former Minister of Finance of the country, part of its first democratically elected, post-independence government in the late sixties. Forna was 10 when she lost her father, and much of the book is devoted to her vivid memories of him before he was taken as well as of her childhood in Africa (mostly in Sierra Leone) and Great Britain (mostly in Scotland).

The book goes back and forth in space and time, but Sierra Leone is its real anchor, and the stories of Forna’s life there are the ones that really felt like they transported me to a different, yet not alien, reality. I loved the scene where Forna and Milik, the cook, discuss storytelling and conventions of storytelling (morals of the story are quite different in African stories), and when Forna can’t figure out why the story Milik has just told doesn’t meet with her European sensibilities, he says, by way of ending the conversation: “You wouldn’t go back to find a devil. Just like you wouldn’t buy a dead chicken.” Some months later, Aminatta tells her grandmother in Scotland she shouldn’t buy dead chickens, and her grandmother, a little startled, asks, “Whatever makes you say that, dearie? You don’t think I’m going to kill it myself, do you?” (pp. 134-135). The cultural reference points are so different that it makes perfect sense not to buy a dead chicken in Sierra Leone, but what else would you do in Aberdeen? Because Sierra Leone is her homeland, Forna doesn’t turn it into exotica, neither romanticizing it nor condescending to it in any way.

The story itself is multi-layered. It’s a political story, of a man who was a doctor and became a politician for all the right reasons, who was eventually executed by the very prime minister who made him part of the government. It’s a personal story, of a girl whose father was taken from her without explanation and without his resistance, a child whose life already included being part of three different family configurations—along with her two siblings, she lived with her parents while they were together, then with her mother in Scotland, and then with her father and stepmother in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It’s a story about culture, about multi-generational, non-nuclear, sometimes polygamist family structures, and the Africa of ordinary people. And finally, it’s a story of government corruption, the whys and wherefores of the execution of 15 men, the botched trial, the motivations of those who lied and created lies to serve their own purposes.

The one aspect that detracted from my enjoyment of this book was when Forna applies her journalist’s dedication to tracking down all those involved in her father’s trial. I just could not keep track of the many many witnesses she interviewed, nor of their exact relationship to the story. I sympathized with her need to be thorough and her need for a moral evaluation of the players (what did they do, and were they sorry about it?), but at a certain point I just couldn’t follow them all anymore.

I wondered if I would even be able to read this book, because the mere words Sierra Leone inspire a shudder in me, given my knowledge of the recent atrocities during the civil war in that country. However, I actually think my capacity to read about such events has been increased by reading The Devil That Danced, and I’m not sure there’s an entirely rational reason why, other than the opening of the heart that happened to me while reading this book. For one thing, I now feel like I care about this country in a different way, and for another, Forna’s description of her trip back to Sierra Leone during the war and of a couple she met then who are both war amputees made the horrors of war come down to a more individual, more compassionate level.
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Other reviews:

GhanaWeb • The life and times of a Heather
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Similar Covers: Old Schoolhouse

I don’t remember how I came across this trio, but the cover image is an old schoolhouse in North Carolina (according to Getty Images).

Disobedience by Jane Hamilton was published in 2001 by Anchor (a Random House imprint); Every Secret Thing by Ann Tatlock came out in 2007 with Bethany House and Und tot bist du (the German translation of My Gal Sunday) by Mary Higgins Clark was published by Heyne in 1999.

I think my favourite of the three is Every Secret Thing (I like the addition of the person in the doorway, though the box under the author’s name doesn’t work for me), but I can’t say I’m particularly drawn to any of these covers.

Mailbox Monday (August 15)

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: MM can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and huge wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia (who now blogs at A girl and her books) is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Staci at Life in the Thumb.

I received two books (that I know of) this week: Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto, which is one of my Canadian Bookshelf contest wins, and Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister, a win from Margot at Joyfully Retired. I also bought two books before I left on vacation: Isabel’s Daughter by Judi Hendricks and Paying for It: A Comic Strip Memoir about Being a John by Chester Brown.

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Life in the Thumb.

All Clear Read-along: Week 2 (Pages 124-300)

For all of you who are participating in the All Clear read-along that Carrie and I are hosting this month, don’t forget that this week’s discussion is happening over on Carrie’s blog, Books and Movies. I just finished this section, and I’m finding this book sooooo exciting now! I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a time traveller trapped in the past during the Blitz! Head over to Carrie’s discussion post to read her thoughts (as well as mine, which I will share shortly) and contribute your own!

Brogan’s Review: Still Alice by Lisa Genova

This is the first of two reviews by my sister Brogan that I’m posting during my vacation.

“If the piece of notebook paper with her mother’s recipe on it still existed, Alice didn’t know where it was. She hadn’t needed to refer to it in years. It was a simple recipe, arguably better than Marty’s cheesecake, and she’d made it every Christmas Eve since she was a young girl. How many eggs? It had to be more than six, or she would’ve taken out only one carton. Was it seven, eight, nine?

“She tried skipping over the eggs for a moment, but the other ingredients looked just as foreign. Was she supposed to use all of the cream or measure out only some of it? How much sugar? Was she supposed to combine everything all at once or in a particular sequence? What pan did she use? At what temperature did she bake it and for how long? No possibility rang true. The information just wasn’t there.

“What the hell is wrong with me?

“She revisited the eggs. Still nothing. She hated those fucking eggs. She held one in her hand and threw it as hard as she could into the sink. One by one, she destroyed them all.” (pp. 65-66)

Lisa Genova’s ear for the Alzheimer’s patient’s experience in Still Alice is impeccable. Although I’m not particularly familiar with the details of such an experience, this fictional version rang true to me. So true, in fact, that it was spooky. When I put the book down halfway through and couldn’t remember who had recommended it to me, I was unusually disturbed, actually distressed, until it finally came back to me.

Alice is a successful and driven Harvard professor in psycholinguistics when she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 50. We meet her before her personality has been impacted, and the book follows her month by month (each chapter is a new month) as the disease and her life progress. We get to know her husband and her three grown children, and we also follow her to medical appointments, which orients the reader in terms of Alice’s deterioration, as well as providing information about the disease itself.

Genova’s writing reminds me in parts of Margaret Laurence (whom I admire greatly). In the following passage, Alice, who is about to go for a run with her husband, has gone back into their summer home, but she can’t remember why. She begins to retrace her steps to try to remember, thinking (twice) it may have been for her fleece, but never coming to the real reason for her back-track. Eventually she gives up and heads back out, when:

“Just as she reached the front door, an urgent pressure in her bladder announced itself, and she remembered that she really had to pee. She hastened back down the hall and opened the door to the bathroom. Only, to her utter disbelief, it wasn’t the bathroom. A broom, mop, bucket, vacuum cleaner, stool, toolbox, lightbulbs, flashlights, bleach. The utility closet.” (p. 149)

These startling moments have such perfect tempo and are so imaginable that they are simply chilling, even though nothing like them has ever happened to me.

What worked less well for me were some of the plot elements in the book, particularly aspects of the ending, which also felt like it happened too quickly. By the end of the story, Genova seemed unsympathetic or at least not attuned to Alice’s husband, John. In addition, some of the sibling dynamics between Alice’s children felt forced.

The speed of the ending and the lack of empathy for John may have been inevitable, given that Genova gave herself the near-impossible task of telling the story from Alice’s point of view, and Alice’s vision of what is going on around her becomes less and less coherent with time, as does her understanding of what is happening within her. In that way the last third of the book reminded me of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, where the telling remains sympathetic but the distance between reader and narrator increases to the point where it stops being in any way familiar.

However, Genova never loses sight of Alice—her telling is absolutely faithful. The stories she chooses to tell about what happens to Alice are stories of the human heart’s capacity to love. And yes, this book will make you cry. Several times.

I am left thinking about what Still Alice is meant to leave with its readers. Yes, it is an injunction to be more sympathetic towards Alzheimer’s patients and to consider them as full human beings in spite of their impairments—she is, still, Alice. Also, Genova is clearly bent towards a vision that medical solutions will eventually eradicate or transform this disease. But more than that, Still Alice is about the heart, about the particular displacement of self that love is, its flows and its allowances, whether it is love for one’s parent, one’s spouse, one’s children, or even, oneself.
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Other reviews:

Bibliophile by the Sea • Books on the Brain • Daisy’s Book Journal • Life in the Thumb • Life... with Books • Musings of a Bookish Kitty • Reading on a Rainy Day • The Infinite Bookshelf
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Really Random Thursday: Vacation and October Read-along Announcement

I know it’s not Tuesday, but this is random, so you’re getting a Really Random Thursday instead. I just wanted to let you all know that I’m off to the Maritimes for a couple of weeks, so I won’t be commenting as much as usual. My Internet access will be sporadic at best. (I will be at the beach!)

I will still be posting regularly: I’ve got two guest reviews from my sister Brogan coming up as well as “similar covers” posts and read-along posts (although the discussion will take place on Carrie’s blog, Books and Movies, for the next two weeks).

Speaking of read-alongs, Carrie and I have selected our next read-along book, for the month of October: Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant.

From the author’s site:

In a sweeping, beautifully written story, Joan Leegant weaves together three lives caught in the grip of a volatile and uncompromising faith. Yona Stern has traveled to Jerusalem from New York to make amends with her sister, a stoic mother of five dedicated to the hard-line West Bank settlement cause. Mark Greenglass, a gifted Talmud teacher and a former drug dealer saved by religion, has lost his passion and wonders if he’s done with God. Enter Aaron Blinder, an unstable college dropout with a history of failure who finds a home on the radical fringe of Israeli society. Emotionally gripping, timely and prophetic, Wherever You Go tells the story of three Americans in Israel and the attractions—and dangers—of Jewish religious and political extremism.

What do you think? Sounds good, right? I hope some of you will join us!

Oh and check out this article about the Montreal Book Bloggers over at The Savvy Reader!

Also, don’t forget to enter my giveaway for the fantastic memoir, The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch!
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Really Random Tuesday is hosted by Suko at Suko’s Notebook. Feel free to join in, copy the button and link back to Suko’s blog.

Similar Covers: White Mask

Once again, I’ve spotted a familiar cover in LibraryThing’s latest batch of Early Reviewers books. This time it’s The Rape of the Muse by Michael Stein (2011), which I recognized because Stacked recently discussed a lookalike cover, Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey (2010). When I plugged these covers into TinEye, I found two more lookalikes: Simply Wicked by Lisa G. Riley (May 2008) and Brilliant Insanity by Yvonne Mason (July 2008).

I dislike all of these covers (I think that mask looks creepy), but if I had to pick one to read, I’d go with Guardian of the Dead. I also think it’s interesting that the mask is slightly different on each cover—and that three of the four covers use red fonts. What do you think? Do any of these covers appeal to you?

Mailbox Monday (August 8)

Mailbox Monday is a gathering place for readers to share the books they received during the previous week. Warning: MM can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and huge wish lists! Mailbox Monday, which was started by Marcia (who now blogs at A girl and her books) is on blog tour—this month, it’s hosted by Staci at Life in the Thumb.

Since I didn’t post a MM post last week, I actually have two weeks worth of books to blog about today. First, I received two books in the mail from my Canadian Bookshelf contest win...

• Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life by Paul Quarrington
• The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark by Christopher Meades

I also bought three books: I ordered one from Book Depository and bought two from S.W. Welch Bookseller at a street fair (for $1 each)...

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• The Poison Principle: A Memoir of Family Secrets and Literary Poisonings by Gail Bell
• Dance Me Outside: The Illustrated Screenplay adapted to the page by Nick Craine

What did you find in your mailbox this past week? For other Mailbox Monday posts, head over to Life in the Thumb.

Review and Giveaway: The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch

Opening lines of the book:

“There’s rain and there’s rain. Maybe there’s a difference at the edge of a continent.”

Why I read it:

I was born in 1970, a year before Boruch went on the road trip she chronicles in The Glimpse Traveler. I was curious to get my own glimpse into the American counterculture of the 70s.

What it’s about:

It’s a Thursday, almost spring, in 1971, when 20-year-old University of Illinois student Marianne Boruch meets Frances, a 21-year-old widow, who’s about to embark on a hitchhiking trip to California. Frances casually invites Boruch to tag along. The Glimpse Traveler recounts that memorable road trip.

What worked:

I always find it hard to review books I love, and The Glimpse Traveler is one of my favourites this year. What Marianne Boruch has done in this memoir is nothing short of extraordinary: nearly 40 years after the fact, she has managed to recreate a road trip—and a time period—so wholly that I felt like I was there, in the car (or van), speeding west and drinking in the sights with Boruch’s younger self. It helps that Boruch is a bit of an observer on this trip, which is driven by Frances’ search for answers; the reader can easily identify with her.

Although the title of the book refers to glimpses, there’s nothing choppy about this memoir—in fact I’m astonished that Boruch could remember so much of this road trip so many years later. The memoir’s short chapters drew me in, and Boruch’s occasional tangents only added to the magic of her story. As Boruch says, “Certain moments open and you fall right in, sucked back to some previous elsewhere” (p. 136). This is what she succeeds in doing in this memoir: taking the reader back with her to a moment in her personal history—it’s hard to believe this road trip lasted only nine days—while at the same time giving us a vivid glimpse into a pivotal time in American history.

On a side note, I was absurdly pleased that this book connected me to another of my recent reads, Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch (read my review), by mentioning the wildfires that devastated California in 2008. (Boruch and Frances visited Big Sur and stayed with painter Emil White, whose house was miraculously spared from the flames years later.)

What didn’t work:

There was nothing in The Glimpse Traveler that didn’t work: Boruch’s narrative is pitch-perfect throughout this spellbinding tale.
 
Favourite quote:

“Outside it would gradually turn to wheat and grazing land, to full-blown prairie, not simply land wrenched by sweat and axe from its woods. Because hadn’t it always been like this, endless and pretty much treeless? I knew those fields would eventually give way, rolling on and out to mountains I’d heard of, to this thing, the sea, only a word to someone of my land-locked childhood but the dazed, bluest eye of it, multiplied way past eight zillion times.

“That something sharp and tangled caught in me: what to call it exactly? We kept going, into day two’s long afternoon. Forgive me: I’m cutting ahead to that place for a moment, to us waiting for ride number whatever-it-was, dropped there a good long time by this time, midway through Nebraska. Was it the stillness of old wheat cut down to its jagged quick or that distant line of maple and ash? Was it the darkening sense of all those truly hard crossings and betrayals a century before? Our own waiting—not exactly legendary, its little half-teaspoon of not-quite-misery, three hours now, our hope for the flash of a car, that someone going in the right direction was generous. But it did something, to time.” (pp. 16-17)

Final thoughts:

I highly recommend this thoughtful memoir set in a turbulent period of American history.

Thank you to Indiana University Press for sending me this book to review.
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Other review: Sophisticated Dorkiness

You can also read reviews on the Indiana University Press site.

Author interview: Indiana University Press blog

Excerpt of the book: The Glimpse Traveler
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Would you like to win a copy of The Glimpse Traveler? Indiana University Press has generously offered to send autographed books to two of my readers. The giveaway is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only (no P.O. boxes). I will accept entries until 11:59 PM Eastern Time on Monday, August 29.

If you are a follower or subscriber, please let me know and I will give you another entry.

Make sure you provide me with a way of getting in touch with you. Entries without a blog link or email address will be disqualified.

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED.
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All Clear Read-along: Week 1 (Pages 3-123)

Welcome to the first discussion post for the read-along of All Clear by Connie Willis, which I’m co-hosting with Carrie at Books and Movies. How are you all doing so far? I just finished read the first 120 pages, which is why I’m posting this discussion post a bit late.

Although I’d been warned that I’d want to read All Clear as soon as I finished Blackout, I didn’t realize just how much these two books are actually one story that’s been chopped in half. Neither book stands on its own: All Clear just continues where Blackout left off. (For that reason I’ve decided to review them together, at the end of this read-along.)

Note that there are spoilers in the rest of this post!

As I said to Carrie during the last Blackout discussion, I’ve been tempted to plot out who is where when since it’s now clear that this is significant to the plot. (We already knew that Polly has a cut-off date, and it now seems that Eileen has one too.) I had also suggested that Douglas, the historian in the VE-Day section, is Polly (which made sense to me since it seemed unlikely that Willis would be introducing us to another historian who’d been there on that day), but I find it curious that Polly hadn’t thought about the fact that Eileen also has a cut-off date until we find out about it via Douglas in 1945 (but maybe that was just to confuse us?).

Speaking of dual identities, I originally thought that Flight Officer Lang, whom Mary picks up in Biggin Hill, might be Gerald Phipps, but in the end I don’t think he’s a historian. But where does he know Mary from? (And who the heck is Mary anyway?) Then I thought that maybe Ernest is Gerald Phipps, but he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time (Ernest is in Kent in 1944 and they are looking for Gerald in 1940), so maybe not. I find Ernest’s story is the most confusing—and I have no guesses so far as to what he’s up to!

I’m glad to see I wasn’t wrong about the Hodbins making another appearance in the story—and we obviously haven’t seen the last of them yet, though I have no idea what’s going on with them either.

Finally, I’m still undecided as to whether the historians have actually changed history (and whether Dunsworthy already knew about it). Polly’s theory about why the drops were rescheduled is an intriguing one. What do you guys think? I guess we might find something out soon, as the next chapter takes us forward to 2060 again (finally!).

Please share your thoughts in the comments! Keep in mind that I haven’t read past page 123, so please don’t comment on the book beyond that point.

The next two discussion posts will appear on Carrie’s blog at Books and Movies. I will post the final discussion post here on August 27.

Review: Wishing for Snow: A Memoir by Minrose Gwin

Opening lines of the book:

“I am the daughter of the woman who wrote this poem. My mother was born in the July heat of a Mississippi summer in 1921.”

Why I read it:

I’m a big fan of memoirs, and I was curious to see how the author’s mother went from being a “cheerful, perceptive young girl” to a mother with a serious mental illness.

What it’s about:

In Wishing for Snow: A Memoir, Minrose Gwin becomes the archivist of her mother’s life, sifting through old papers, diaries, letters, scrapbooks, clippings, cards, pictures and poems to find the woman she never knew. Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner, was, as Gwin puts it, a “crazy mother”: erratic, violent and unable to nurture her children. But she was also a poet, and, as Gwin discovered when reading her mother’s childhood diary, she had once been a perceptive child with a bright future. Wishing for Snow is Gwin’s attempt to come to terms with her mother’s downward spiral into darkness.

What worked:

Wishing for Snow has an unconventional structure: Gwin doesn’t tell her story chronologically or with flashbacks, but instead circles around and around, approaching her mother’s life from multiple angles and interspersing her narrative with Erin Taylor’s poems and diary entries as well as lists, letters, recipes and song lyrics. Although this circling structure might sound repetitive, it never felt that way: instead, it gave the memoir a sense of immediacy and poignancy. Memory, after all, is not linear. Gwin writes with a poet’s sensibility, weaving together the disparate pieces of her mother’s life while reflecting on her own childhood and the impact her mother’s mental illness had on her. I especially appreciated that she included so many of her mother’s poems in this memoir: at times, they made me wonder if, had she been born under a luckier star, Erin Clayton Pitner might have become a household name.

What didn’t work:

At the beginning of the book, Gwin goes through her mother’s family history, which I found quite confusing, in part because many of the relatives are described but not named. Because I’m interested in such things, I sketched out Erin Taylor’s family tree going back two generations on her mother’s side and even then I couldn’t make sense of it. Gwin clearly tells us that her mother’s maternal grandmother had seven children, but her mother seems to have five aunts and two uncles on that side of the family (which adds up to eight children, if you include Erin Taylor’s mother!).
 
Favourite quote:

“After a few nights, I begin to dream that [the pillows from Mama’s sofa, which have been discarded in the storage shed,] are unhappy. They want to be dry-cleaned. They want to come inside and lie on my couch. They are thinking they can toast themselves in front of the fire and look out the window. They are wanting us to rest our heads on them and take dreamy naps on hot summer afternoons, or throw them at each other in fun.

“One night I dream that they are climbing over the lawn mower and working the lock to the shed. The next day I gather them up fast and throw them in the garbage can. For days I picture them there, wounded by this unseemly treatment, like cousins who knock at the door and are turned away for no good reason.

“At 8:17 on Tuesday morning I am watching from behind my curtain for the garbage truck to round the bend in my street. I fully expect that there will be some accident, a spillage, and the pillows will make their getaway. Then, the clank of the truck making the bend and, before I can take a deep breath, the garbage men have picked them up and thrown them into the back of the truck. This, I feel, is a miracle of vast proportion.” (p. 6)

Final thoughts:

Wishing for Snow is not always an easy read, nor does it offer easy answers, but it is a moving and unforgettable tribute to a talented poet and difficult mother.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for sending me this book to review.
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Wishing for Snow is on blog tour with TLC Book Tours in July and August. Visit these other blogs for reviews:

Cozy Little House • Reviews by Lola • Knowing the Difference • Lisa’s Yarns • Natty Michelle • Good Girl Gone Redneck • Ted Lehmann’s Bluegrass, Books, and Brainstorms

Recommended review: Lit Endeavors (also part of the TLC Book Tour)
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Similar Covers: Girls in Dresses

What is up with headless women (or girls in this case) on covers? Here are three pairs of similar covers that feature headless (or near-headless) girls:

First, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (2004) and A la intemperie (the Spanish translation of À l’abri de rien) by Olivier Adam (2008)... (Apparently, the Spanish title translates as in the open or in bad weather, while the French literally means sheltered from nothing.)

Then, The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley (2009) and Among Others by Jo Walton (2011)... (Technically, this girl is not headless, but the cropping is still odd since it cuts across her face.)

Finally, Millie and the Night Heron by Catherine Bateson (2005), which was republished as The Boyfriend Rules of Good Behavior with the same cover image, and Heathen Girls by Luanne Jones (2007).

In each case, elements have been added (or removed) in one of the covers, which makes each distinctive, though still very similar. I can’t say I really like any of these covers, though I really want to read both I Capture the Castle and Among Others!

Really Random Tuesday: Canadian Bookshelf Win & Personal Reading Challenge

For the past two months, Canadian Bookshelf, “the one-of-a-kind resource for discovering, discussing, and indulging in Canadian books,” has been running The Personal Book Shopper Contest, hosted by Julie Wilson aka Book Madam. To enter the contest, participants are asked to describe themselves in five words. Three winners are then chosen at random, and a rotating panel of book people (librarians, booksellers, publishers, authors and book bloggers) selects books for the winners based solely on the words they submitted.

I entered the contest for the first time last month and, thinking I was being clever, decided to describe myself using only words that begin with the letter “q” (inspired in part by Marie at Daisy’s Book Journal, who had described herself as quiet and quirky among other things). My five words were thus quiet, quirky, questioning, Québécoise and quibbler. I considered and discarded quixotic—I don’t think it’s an accurate descriptor—but I didn’t even think of queer until too late!

As you may have guessed, I was one of the three winners last month, and I won nine books! (I was very surprised by this since the previous month the panelists had each picked only one book for each winner.) The books selected for me are the following:

• You Comma Idiot by Doug Harris (Goose Lane)
  
• ManBug by George K. Ilsley (Arsenal Pulp Press)
  
• The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark by Christopher Meades (ECW Press)
  
• Breakfast with Cora: An Autobiography by Cora Tsouflidou, trans. by Dawn M. Cornelio (McArthur & Company)
  
• Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life by Paul Quarrington (D&M Publishers)
  
• Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto (NeWest Press)
  
• Sandra Beck by John Lavery (House of Anansi)
  
• Apocalypse for Beginners by Nicolas Dickner, trans. by Lazer Lederhendler (Vintage Canada)
  
• Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel (Unbridled Books)

Not only did I win nine books, but eight are books I’d never heard of before. (I reviewed Last Night in Montreal in 2009, but gave away my ARC, so I’m happy to get another copy.) Since most of these books are not only new to me but also not the type of book I’d likely have picked up on my own (with the exception, perhaps of Chorus of Mushrooms), I’ve decided to create a Personal Canadian Bookshelf Challenge for myself: I want to read and review all these books between now and the end of next summer.

Oh and keep an eye out for the next Personal Book Shopper Contest in September: I just might be one of the panelists!
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Really Random Tuesday is hosted by Suko at Suko’s Notebook. Feel free to join in, copy the button and link back to Suko’s blog.