Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews

Trafficked

Before I read Trafficked, a young adult novel by Kim Purcell, I knew pretty much zero about human trafficking in the United States. I met Kim through a woman I met at BlogHer Writers '11, and when I heard about the subject of her novel, I asked if I could have a copy to review.

Trafficked is the story of Hannah from Maldova, who is called "Elena" by her Russian-American owners, whom she thinks are her employers. Lost yet? So is poor Hannah. She thinks she's in the U.S. legitimately to work as a nanny paid $400 a week to care for kids and do minimal housework. Her parents are dead and her uncle is missing, and her grandmother desperately needs surgery that Hannah's salary can quickly pay for -- she thinks.

When Hannah arrives in her new home, she's shown to a room in the garage, even though there's a guest room in the house. "Minimal housework" quickly becomes "scrub the house from top to bottom daily," and she's not allowed outside except late at night to take out the garbage. Despite the sadness of Hannah's situation, it was fascinating to watch her start to piece together what has happened to her. As she pokes holes in the stories of her captors, I found myself turning the pages faster and faster. 

The novel got even more interesting when I read a guest post by Kim Purcell on The Story Siren, describing a research trip she took to Maldova:

I followed her off the bus. Outside, large men in black overcoats swarmed around us. They didn’t look like drivers. Nor did they look like nice Moldovan men coming to pick up their wives. The Moldovans walked past them into waiting cars or walked over to a nearby bus stop to wait. I also attempted to ignore the men as I got off, but they all started yelling at me, telling me in broken English they could help me. I’d experienced this in many countries, but these men were bigger, pushier and more intimidating than what I’d experienced before. Some of the men just stood there, arms crossed over their broad chests, glowering at me. I thought, I’m here to research trafficked girls, not become one of them.

Sort of bone-chilling to find out how many of the scenes in the novel could still be happening -- here in the U.S. in 2012. Trafficked is about an important subject, and Hannah is completely relatable as a young adult who's been dealt a pretty bad hand yet still manages to find good in every day. Skip the scary news articles and learn about human trafficking through Hannah's eyes to see how it could really happen today.

The Kitchen Daughter

The Kitchen Daughter, by Jael McHenry, is an ambitious book. For one, it's narrated by a young woman with Asperger's. For another, Jael McHenry does not have Asperger's. And for a third, there are ghosts.

It's interesting that I read this book write after The Murderer's Daughters, because both books are stories of sisters and their struggles for dominance over one another. In this story, Ginny, the older sister, resists younger Amanda's efforts to get her diagnosed with Asperger's after their parents die unexpectedly. Amanda doesn't think Ginny should stay in the house alone after having been sheltered from so much as going to the store alone her whole life. Ginny worries any diagnosis will give Amanda the upper hand and reduce her chances of staying put, even as she begins to acknowledge her need to hide in closets for hours with her hands in her parents' shoes.

The best part of this debut novel is the dialogue. The character of Gert, the cleaning lady, has some great lines about grief. And the conversations between Amanda and Ginny are jarring to someone like me who has only recently begun to say what I really think instead of pretending like everything is always okay and then seething later.

For example:

Amanda says, "God, are you even listening to me?"

I tell her the truth. "No."

"This is your future we're talking about!"

"You're talking about it. I'm not."

"This is the bottom line," she says. "Will you go to the doctor to make me happy?"

"No."

"That makes me unhappy."

"Then be unhappy," I say. We're all unhappy sometimes. I don't see why Amanda should get to be exempt.

I think that's what I took from this book. I have no idea if the Asperger's parts are accurate, because I don't have any Aspies in my immediate sphere. I do like the authenticity of the relationship between the sisters and thinking about saying what you really feel and what that does to a relationship. I really could've done without the ghosts, as they didn't add anything to the story and seemed sort of thrown in as an afterthought to me. The story would've been much better without them.

Read it for the dialogue, skip the ghosts.

The Murderer's Daughters

It's hard to believe The Murderer's Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers is a debut novel. I really like reading debuts. The first novel is, in my mind, the book the author has been carrying around for years, the magnum opus of a writing career up to that point.

The Murderer's Daughters is an ambitious book, beginning when sisters Lulu and Merry are little girls, and heartbreaking in its plotline. From the very beginning, the girls are thrust into a nightmare when their father kills their mother and knifes Merry. They're shuttled from grandma to grandma until finally everyone dies and their one remaining aunt sends them off to an extremely rough orphanage.

Meyers follows the girls from that terrible childhood well into their adult lives. The importance of this novel is in its shining character complexity. Lulu, the eldest, survives better through childhood but grows into an unhappy and inflexible adult until yet another tragic event shakes her loose. Merry is sweeter and softer and also something of a failure to launch as she wobbles through adulthood -- living in Lulu's guesthouse and stealing her coffee every morning -- though it is Merry who ultimately prevails in an event that shakes loose years of shoulds and prods herinto at last becoming a fully formed adult.

The girls, enmeshed by necessity, evolve through every aspect of their painful lives. The outcome is gratifying, one I wish always happened but I'm certain doesn't, as I've found complex characters are difficult to find either in novels or in real life. So many people get stuck in old patterns so deep that even an attempt to change just mires them worse. These sisters' ability to love each other and grow through everything they experience, recognizing finally how they've been holding each other back unintentionally, is powerful and beautiful.

The writing is great. The book is important. The story is tough to read. It's very sad. There are some trigger scenes for anyone who has experienced domestic violence or substance abuse. If you're a lover of character development, this book is immensely satisfying and I highly recommend it.

Life From Scratch, by Melissa Ford

Last night on my way to a reading by the book doctors, I called my sister. I was talking about the book we had read for my social change book club (Cheap) and for what seemed like the 81st time, she said, "Don't take this wrong, but don't you ever read anything fun?"

And the answer, really, is no. Not usually. But Life From Scratch, a novel by my good friend Melissa Ford, is fun.

It's the story of Rachel, a recently divorced woman going through a coming-of-age of sorts. She decides to teach herself to cook, very Julie and Julia, and start a food blog to go with it. Her food blog, though, is more of a personal blog, and it takes off big-time. She wins a blogging award and finds herself cyber stalking someone reading her blog from her ex-husband's law firm. She's sure it's him. I was sure it was not.

It was not.

But this novel was far from predictable, because while I congratulated myself several times for paying attention to foreshadowing, I did not see the end coming at all.

Since Mel lives and works in the world of blogging, she does a fantastic job describing the agony and the ecstasy of stats and comments and the release of personal blogging. I laughed out loud when Rachel justified her actions because her commenters agreed with her. And I loved the concept of the 24-hour mope.

The novel's fast pace and likable characters made it very fun for me to read. It was fun! I liked it!

Take that, little sister. ha!

My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson

My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson, sat for months in my "to read and review" pile, so long I actually can't find the email from the publicist who sent it to me. (This is embarrassing. I hope they find the review via Google Alerts. Hi!)

I ignored it for a long time because of its title, its cover, even though I know covers are rarely chosen by the author. I am one of them! Those people who judge a book by its cover. And that is so very unfortunate. Because I now want to read everything Mona Simpson ever wrote, not because I loved the novel, but because I loved the writing.

I thought it would be light and frothy, and I don't really like light or frothy. I like books and films that make me think. I like fiction to play out in such a way I ask myself how I would have done things differently, to take life lessons from imagined individuals set forth like parables to incite questions. (I am also fun at parties.)

And, whoa. This did.

I alternately loved and hated the two protagonists, Lola (the nanny) and Claire (the employer), and -- to a lesser part -- Judith, the second employer. Claire hires Lola to take care of her son, William, in the midst of her thirty-something existential crisis. Claire's a composer married to a television writer. Her life sucks. Her husband is never home. She can't find time to work. She seems completely overwhelmed with keeping food on the table and a bottle in the mouth of her son even with a live-in nanny. It's hard for me to identify with Claire, because even as a working creative mother, I've never experienced the back-up plan that is live-in help. I understand cramming in one's creativity between feedings and preschool and a full-time job, and ... I'm jaded. I don't feel sorry for Claire. And reading this book, I'm relieved I haven't had live-in help, because it seems that the female employers in it are only able to grow once they release their nannies and try life on their own.

Maybe there's a point there?

At first I loved Lola, the Filipino nanny, and thought she was above criticism. Not in a position of power, she makes decisions best for children not her own and ignores her progeny in the Phillipines in order to provide for their education. It doesn't work out.

Her first love, Williamo, forgets her by the end of the book. Her second, Laurita, ends up calling Lola out of retirement after she's returned to the Phillipines to children and grandchildren she doesn't know and husband Bong Bong's basket of rotten fruit (an affair). Lola, it turns out, places her affections oddly, or at least oddly to me, and the consequences are both touching and devastating in turn.

I loved the book 50 pages in because I was deeply impressed with Simpson's ability to bounce between two unique writing styles -- the alternating chapters voiced by Lola and Claire seem not to be written by the same author. That's hard to pull off, and Simpson does it well -- so well that I was not distracted in the least by the point of view and thus fully got to love and hate the story.

It's dark. The American women are not portrayed in a flattering light. I sided with the nannies, which was fine until I realized that Lola was, in fact, ignoring her own life in favor of someone else's, and that made me angry with her -- and then happy to see that she, too, was a complex character.

The novel appears at first glance to be about working motherhood, as both the Americans and the foreign nannies who care for their children make choices about with whom they will spend their time and energy, how they will earn their money.

By the end of the book, I felt it was really a story of on whom should one bestow her love.

As a full-time working mother who has always used American institutionalized daycare and neighborhood sitters, I can't relate to the nanny/employer relationship. I never felt threatened as a mother by my childcare, because it was always somewhere else that I took my daughter -- not my home, not my world. Nobody else ever sang my daughter to sleep, took her to the zoo, stood in as a parent. Simpson draws those relationships as a mix of affection and power differentials, with Lola judging Judith for having a sexual relationship with a new man and calling her room unholy and Judith deciding, once Lola has returned to the Phillipines, to take away the cell phone link between Lola and Laurita because it's best for the child -- at least in her opinion. As a reader I was angry for Lola when this happened, then as a mother I was sympathetic to Judith -- she didn't handle it well, but ultimately, what was this strange crossing of boundaries between employee and charge? What would I do if I thought my daughter loved her nanny better than me? And why didn't Lola feel that way about her own children?

My Hollywood is a huge, dark book of questions for the working mother. I identified most strongly with the passage in which Claire's symphony is reviewed badly and she compares her creative work to a gift no one asked for. I'm in a place creatively where I'm working on a piece I'm not sure anyone wants and yet I still feel compelled to write it -- I cried after reading that sentence, bookmarked it with which to torture myself later. Simpson's ability to claw open Claire's soft underbelly is impressive, and it makes me hate Claire while at the same time seeing in her what I'm afraid I could become. All three women -- Claire, Judith and Lola -- all seem to have wasted a great deal of time. It's frustrating and eye-opening and worth examining.

April & Oliver

Freshman novels. New writers. New FICTION writers. I chose April & Oliver from the list of possible review books for all of those reasons. Will it be good? I always wonder. Do first-time novelists ever make it?

Some of them do.

April & Oliver is Tess Callahan's first novel. If you like sexual tension and stories of lifelong friends, this is the read for you.

The writing is tight, tighter than the plot. I got a little lost with the nuances of how April & Oliver are connected -- there are family ties that aren't really family ties, and I think the story would've actually been stronger without the opening death of April's brother, Buddy. So many things happen in this book over such a short period of time I got lost a little. But the sentences were so lovely I got over it pretty fast.

What I didn't like about it? Somewhere along the line, I stopped identifying with April. I have this problem in my own writing -- writing from close third and drawing every other character as more complex and sympathetic than the heroine -- and so maybe I'm hypersensitive to it in other people's writing -- but it seemed to stand out here. Everyone was always saying how tough April was, and I couldn't tell if it was an act or if she really didn't care anymore. If she doesn't care, how can I care about her?

What did I like about it? The writing.

"A picture was taped to the back of the tank. At first April thought it was a landscape. Then she recognized the hills as hips, the river a seam between a woman's thighs. Her nipples were pink as pieces of coral, her hair lemon blond. The walls of the tank were stained with algae. An angel drifted, fins folded, kissing the surface for air. April wondered if fish could drown."

What else did I like? The story of April AND Oliver. The twists! The turns! The longing! THE ENDING!

The ending.

LOVED THE ENDING!

Here's to hoping Callahan is sitting at her laptop writing another novel right now.

The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents

Need a hipster baby shower gift?  Check out The Perfect Baby Handbook: A Guide for Excessively Motivated Parents, by Dale Hrabi.

 

Aspring helicopter parents, this is your guide. It contains:

• A color chart for poop analysis

• Charts to forecast baby's gear storage needs between now and high school graduation

• How-tos for everything, including helping your baby develop a signature stride

It's funny. It's yummy. There are cool charts and illustrations. And it did its job: It put parenting a baby into perspective in an entertaining way. I would definitely slip this book in between the Dr. Ferber and the Dr. Spock to keep your new-mommy friends from thinking they actually have any control at all over that little flesh purse of theirs.

I wouldn't buy it for someone with an older child, as it's really only for babies, and I might go so far as to say really only for first-time parents. It's a quick read, too, which is helpful for new parents.

The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons

Want to feel smarter?  Get yourself a copy of The New Yorker Book of Mom Cartoons.

This paperback includes cartoons from 46 cartoonists, including the more famous Roz Chast, Danny Shanahan and Leo Cullum.

It's not a book your child will enjoy, though my daughter forced me to read her the entire thing when it arrived in the mail for review. The entire book sailed over her head, and for the most part, that was a good thing. It's The New Yorker, after all, and there's very wry humor here.

Though some of the cartoons are definitely dated, I laughed out loud several times, including the cartoon in which a stick mother walks into her son's classroom and is instantly recognized from her child's drawings. You really can't beat that on a Friday afternoon.

Church of the Dog

Church of the Dog, by Kaya McLaren, was actually first published in 2000 and republished in 2008 by Penguin.  What a lovely and encouraging thing that is, that someone would rediscover a book and bring it back to life.  I understand why COTD was brought back.

It's a novel about choices and self-discovery told from disparate points of view -- Mara, an art teacher; Daniel, an orphaned transient; and Daniel's grandparents, the aging Edith and Earl.  It's often hard to tell stories in first-person narrative from different angles, but doing so helps us see the change in perspective from individual to individual over events, choices and circumstances. My favorite line:

There were times when it looked like our boat was no match for the enormous sea. I just sit there and think about floating, floating in any storm, floating through anything even when it feels so much bigger than me.

Blue Elephant DVD Winner & Sikulu and Harambe

Lorib, you've won yourself a Blue Elephant DVD!  E-mail me your mailing address at ritabiermann(at)hotmail(dot)com.  Congratulations!

Next up! Sikulu and Harambe By the Zambezi River:  An African Version of the Good Samaritan Story by Kunle Oguneye.

Sikulu is the spider and Harambe is the hippo.  They encounter an old woman who has lost the clothes she was washing in the river.  The other animals ignore the woman's pleas, but not our heroes. And I think you know how the story ends.

The illustrations are Crayola-like, and the idea of a spider and a hippo hanging out cracked me up.  The little angel gave this take on a Bible story a hearty thumbs-up.