Sonya Sones' What My Mother Doesn't Know is a measly 99¢ today!
So, if you haven't read it*, you should take advantage of that.
It's one I wish I could read again for the first time.
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*FOR REALS? How have you not read it?
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I give you... the first Much Ado About Nothing trailer:
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
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Terry Farish's The Good Braider is $1.99 today.
(And, I just noticed, is part of the Prime Lending Library.)
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Every year, I read a few books that equate to an emotional punch in the face. This year, My Book of Life by Angel is one of them, as it deals with the massively-uplifting trifecta of teenage runaways, teen prostitution, and drug addiction.
Ag.
After Angel's mother dies, she spends less and less time at home with her father and her little brother, and more and more time at the mall. She starts shoplifting—she has an especially hard time saying 'no' to the sample shoes—and on more than one occasion, her father has to pick her up at the police station.
Then she meets Call. At first, he's just a nice guy to talk to, a guy who buys her meals and buys her presents. And then he starts giving her candy (<--but, you know, it's not actually candy):
At first is was so fun, Call's candy,
and all the missing of Mom went away
and I was all
I'm so baby uptown
I'm so baby bless my soul
I'm so baby high heels
I'm so baby rock and roll.
But then her father catches her with drugs at home, and gives her an ultimatum: clean up or move out. So she moves in with Call. Who promptly stops giving her the drugs that she now craves constantly... and makes her work for them:
As soon as I knew what Call had made me,
the first time a man said in a word what I was
and I couldn't even say that's not true—
as soon as that happenedI knew I could not bring that word home
even if I wanted to—
Jeremy and I weren't even allowed to say stupid
or hate—
my dad would never allow a word like me.
Then (yes, her situation gets worse), her friend Serena disappears one night. And Angel starts hearing rumors about a man in a white van who picks girls up and doesn't drop them off. And then Call brings home a new girl, a girl he calls Angel's 'retirement plan'.
She's eleven years old.
And so Angel has to make a choice.
Like Elizabeth Scott's Living Dead Girl, it's about a girl who considers herself a lost cause, but who still has the strength to try to save someone else. Like Living Dead Girl, it also has an ending that will be endlessly debatable, but My Book of Life by Angel has a much stronger undercurrent of hope. That said, it was gutting.
The Author's Note—in which Leavitt explains how Angel's story, while fictional, is unfortunately similar to the lives of many young girls—makes it even more so. In that section, she also gives a brief history of the Pickton murders, which don't have a central role in the book, but serve as more of a backdrop: from 1983-2002, well over 50 women disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. As the majority of them were sex workers, local law enforcement didn't pursue the cases, even when a man—who would later admit to 49 murders—was accused of handcuffing and knifing a sex worker in 1997. The reason no one followed up? Because a sex worker wasn't "considered a reliable witness".
Unlike a lot of verse novels, it reads like poetry: lots of rhythm, lots of passages that convey multiple meanings, even some wordplay. As the title suggests, Angel is writing her own story, and voice is believable, raw, determined, and surprisingly enough* considering her circumstances, displays a decent amount of humor. I don't want to say that there are moments of loveliness in the story—because, for me, there weren't—but the writing itself is lovely.
There's a Paradise Lost thread that runs through the book: a line or two from it precedes each milestone in Angel's story, one of Angel's regular johns is a college professor who has her read aloud from Milton's Paradise Lost (specifically Book Nine), and the more times she reads it, the more she understands it... and the more she understands it, the more she wants to read the whole thing.
It's not going to be for everyone—honestly, I doubt I'd have picked it up if it hadn't been a Cybils nominee—but it's a good one.
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*Then again, maybe that's what has allowed her to survive this long.
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Author page.
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Book source: ILLed through my library. This book was read for the 2012 Cybils season.
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From The Good Braider:
My mother calls me by two names, Viola, for Jesus,
and Keji, for firstborn girl.
"All men in Sudan will want to marry you," she used to say.
"You are a girl from Juba."
After suffering through—and surviving—years of war in Sudan, the family faces one danger too many, and Viola's mother makes a huge decision: to attempt the journey to the United States. And so that's what they do.
Which makes it sound quick and easy.
It's not. It's a long journey from Juba, Sudan, to Cairo, Egypt, and once in Egypt, they have to eke out an existence while hoping, every single day, that it will be the day when they get the blue cards that make them eligible for resettlement.
They wait over a year.
Once they're in the United States—in Portland, Maine!—while life is significantly less immediately dangerous, Viola's journey continues as she struggles to reconcile two very different cultures, to integrate into (and excel in) public school, as well as deal with the emotional repercussions of her entire journey.
First of all: I LOVE THIS COVER. It's just so pretty. Not just because of those gorgeous braids (I typed 'brains', like, four times just now), but because of the swoop of the model's neck, and because of the wide blue sky. It's clean and clear and makes nice of negative space, as befits the cover of a verse novel. Wow, I sound like a mega-dork. But it's true, so I'll leave it in.
As I just said, The Good Braider is a verse novel. Like many verse novels—AND OH MY GOD, PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M (MORE OF) AN IDIOT OR WHATEVER FOR SAYING THIS—it reads more like extremely spare prose with lots of line breaks than it does, you know, poetry. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT. (Or is free verse just supposed to read like that? You'd think that with my background—I was all over the poetry classes in college—that I'd know that, but maybe too much Hart of Dixie* truly has made my brain smaller. Do I just not GET IT? Possibly. Anyway.)
It's got a fantastic sense of place and Farish conveys long periods of time spent waiting without ever slowing the pace of the story, both of which are quite impressive considering how few words she uses. The contrast between cultures is striking, and it's especially nice that the book portrays Viola attempting to understand and fit into American (and even more specifically, Maine**) culture, but never uses the somewhat-tired "I renounce my former culture/this new culture is so horrible and wrong; oh wait, now I'm proud to be a part of both cultures" storyline. She's drawn towards both worlds, but she just... keeps on keeping on, and eventually finds her place in both. That isn't to minimize what she experiences AT ALL. It's just that, especially in comparison with, say, the heroine in the last book I wrote about, she comes off as pretty damn even-keeled.
Oddly enough, it's not a book that I emotionally connected with***, though the story has stuck with me. As I read, it was clear to me that the author had, at the very least done some serious research, a vague feeling that was supported when I read the Acknowledgements: in which she thanks specific people from the Sudanese community of Portland. Because, despite my lack of emotional resonance, it was a book that felt true.
TRIGGER WARNING/SPOILER: Viola personally endures some particularly ugly (sexual) brutality before she leaves Sudan, and while much of it takes place off-screen, it's still... ag. Personally, I found the passages about her emotionally processing/coming to terms with that part of her history much more painful than reading about the actual assault/s, but the experience will be different for different readers.
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*GARY COLE JUST SHOWED UP. GARY FREAKING COLE. I love him.
**She hits much of it dead-on. I may have squealed at the mention of Barber Foods.
***Though it's very possible that I held myself back—I have a tendency to do that with war stories, purely out of self-preservation.
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Book source: ILLed through my library. This book was read for the 2012 Cybils season.
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From the Bodleian Library's website:
Now, in the year of the Cultural Olympiad, we invite Shakespeare lovers and Bodleian supporters to join our Sprint for Shakespeare campaign to digitize and publish our First Folio online for the benefit of everyone, from schoolchildren to scholars.
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If you've never heard it performed, click on through for a treat.
(via reddit)
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From the Guardian:
Inspired by one of the English language's seminal works, 24 modern-day pilgrims – including two from China and one from Bermuda – braved piercing April 'shoures' to undertake a full-scale re-enactment Chaucer's masterpiece, acting out the tales as they travelled on foot to Canterbury in aid of the National Literacy Trust.
Click on through for audio and photos!
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