A Girl is A Body of Water
by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
A Girl Is a Body of Water: A stunning coming of age story (7/18/2020)
With A Girl is a Body of Water, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi gives us an epic coming of age tale not only of Kirabo, a young girl growing up in the rural village of Nattette, but of the nation of Uganda. The story begins in 1975, when Kirabo is twelve. She lives with her grandparents and a house full of teenagers of unspecified relation to Kirabo. Kirabo has a gift for storytelling, and the book begins with her story of a woman who buries her newborn daughter in an anthill because her husband wants only sons. This sets the stage for a novel steeped in mwenkanonkano, the Ugandan feminist movement.
Kirabo is a "special child." She is born with "the original state" inside her, a consciousness going back to Ugandan origin myths. It allows her to leave her body and fly, swinging from the church steeple until, "like a canon, she launched into the sky." Kirabo is conflicted because her Christian upbringing tells her these powers are evil. In secret, she consults Nsuuta, the village witch. She has two requests: to lose her original state and to find her birth mother, who deserted her when she was a newborn. These conflicts propel Kirabo forward as she leaves the village for boarding school in Kampala, falls in love, and survives Idi Amin's reign of terror.
"Stories are critical," Nsuuta tells Kirabo. "The minute we fall silent, someone will fill the silence for us." Makumbi has told a critical story. With beautifully wrought prose, characters you cannot help but fall in love with, and the bravery to confront the complex issues of society, she gives us a vision of a brighter stronger, and more equal world.
The Yellow Bird Sings: A Novel
by Jennifer Rosner
The Yellow Bird Sings: A Story of Loss, Longing, and Music's Power to Heal (12/18/2019)
What if you were a happy five-year-old girl in Poland, surrounded by the sounds of music your family makes, and suddenly you were whisked away from your home and forced to live inside haybales, forbidden to make the slightest sound? This is the story of The Yellow Bird Sings the debut novel of Jennifer Rosner. It's told through the voices of Shira and her mother Róza, Jews who are forced into hiding when the Germans invade their village, killing Róza's husband and parents.
The book explores the themes of silence, creative expression, and identity and how they intertwine to shape our character. Shira and her mother find refuge in the barn of Polish farmers. As Shira is too young to understand what has happened, her mother invents stories of a magical garden to keep her entertained and press upon her the need to remain absolutely still and silent. In order to hold onto her identity when sound is denied her, Shira invents a little yellow bird, and it is through the bird's songs that she expresses herself.
Shira is a musical prodigy. Before their lives were shattered, she would impress her parents, both accomplished musicians, with her grasp of complex musical themes and composition. In the end, after Róza makes the difficult decision to send her daughter away, it is music that must save them both. "She and Shira have this: The soar of violins mixing with cellos. The flight of notes, like wingbeats, that transport them together, beyond the confines of a forest burrow, a convent wall."
Rosner's Author's Note sheds an interesting light on the story. While on tour to promote her memoir about, "raising deaf daughters in a hearing, speaking world," she went to a talk given by a "hidden child," a girl who hid with her mother to evade the Nazis during WWII, remaining silent to save her life. This was an experience antithetical to Rosner's own, where her children were encouraged to, "vocalize as much as possible." Hearing this experience planted the novel's seed in Rosner's mind.
I have to confess I did not fall in love with this book. The prose has a YA feel to it (not necessarily a detriment), and stretches of dialogue seemed a bit forced or mundane. But the story itself is both strong and compelling, and I was taken in by the deftly woven narrative arc. This is a strong choice for Young Adult reading, and book clubs will find plenty of subjects ripe for discussion.
Beirut Hellfire Society
by Rawi Hage
A Dance of Life, Death, and War (5/11/2019)
In Beirut Hellfire Society, Rawi Hage creates a dance that is savage, devastating, tender, mournful, and darkly, wickedly humorous. The novel is loosely a modern-day version of Antigone, set during one year of the Lebanese civil war. Rather than a sister intent on burying her brother, the protagonist, Pavlov, lover of Greek mythology and culture, is the son of an undertaker following in his father's footsteps in his pledge to lay to rest those who have been denied a traditional burial. The story interweaves vignettes of an outrageous cast of characters, complete with talking dogs and ghosts, vicious gangsters, cross-dressing hedonists, and a niece who howls like a hyena, with Pavlov's journey to survive and wrest meaning from an existence in which war continuously tears apart the fabric of life, order, and meaning.
Hage writes with the incendiary passion of someone whose early years were shaped by the war that tore Lebanon apart between 1975 and 1990. In this work, life cannot be taken for granted from one minute to the next; streets are a chaos of rubble and destroyed buildings; the falling bombs are as omnipresent as the rain. Since childhood, Pavlov has watched the "parade of caskets" that winds toward the cemetery beneath his window. Death and life form a continuous dance that, his father teaches him, is forged in fire. With sparse, urgent, and wounding prose Hage lays bare the nature of war and its human consequences. The book is, as he states in the acknowledgements, "a book of mourning," but it is also a book of hope. Beneath the despair, Hage shows us that hope and life always burn beneath the surface, waiting to be kindled.
Lost Luggage
by Jordi Punti
Four Brothers Search for a Father (9/18/2013)
Jordi Punti's Lost Luggage, translated from the Spanish by Julie Wark, reminds me of those nested Russian dolls; open a layer of the story and inside is another layer, couching another, and so on, until you get to the tale's vibrant, pulsing heart. Lost Luggage is storytelling at its best. On the surface, it is the quest of four brothers--each named some variable form of Christopher--for a father they have each barely known. Although he has always been missing from their lives, he has now gone officially missing, and the brothers believe that by piecing together the story of his life from their disparate points of view, the completed puzzle may lead to the discovery of the man. What is interesting to me is that even though the story is told in sections from each of the four Christophers' points of view, there is very little variation in voice between them. The decision is clearly deliberate, as if each brother is a piece of clay cleaved from the same block. The result is a novel that unfurls slowly, quietly, and gracefully toward that golden moment of denouement. As if we sit with Jordi Punti at a crackling fire, listening to hims spin his tale, we wait for that moment spellbound. We know it is coming, but we know, too, that it will surprise us, a sleight of hand delivered by a master magician.
The House Girl
by Tara Conklin
Spellbound by the narration (11/21/2012)
The two juxtaposed strands in Tara Konklin's The House Girl immediately pulled me in: Josephine, fiercely proud house girl, born into slavery in Virginia in the 1830's, and Lina Sparrow, ambitious and fiercely independent lawyer, beginning a career with a prestigious New York law firm. The characters were tenderly wrought, their stories compelling and richly complex, bound together not only by what they have - a propelling drive for justice and for recognition—but also by what they lack – the presence of a mother in their lives. I was spellbound as the narrative propelled me forward, the two stories weaving closer and closer together in both inevitable and unexpected ways. Alas, for me, the spell was broken in the last third of the novel when the narrative veered from these two voices into those of more minor characters. I had fallen in love, and I did not want the sharp-edged beam of Conklin's prose to look away.
The Light Between Oceans: A Novel
by Margot L. Stedman
The Light Between the Oceans: A Strong Debut (7/13/2012)
From the first sentence, M.L. Stedman's The Light Between the Oceans draws the reader into the world of its memorable characters. With lyrical prose and a breathtaking setting, Stedman almost literally places the central conflict of the novel at our feet: a dingy with a dead man and a live baby. Isabel, who finds the child, considers the discovery a miracle from God, and in those first exquisitely wrought pages, we can see that this will set the stage for a story of both tragedy and love as Tom and Isabel, husband and wife, must deal with the consequences of their choices concerning this baby. The story is set on Janus, an isolated lighthouse on a beautiful but forlorn portion of the Australian coastline where Tom is the keeper of the light. Throughout the novel, Stedman returns to the image of the light, its beam illuminating a path of safety for sailors traversing the dark union of horizon and night. By extension, she casts this same light across her pages, offering her characters a ray of hope and guidance when they find themselves most lost, most tangled in the web their lives has cast around them. The intricacies of plot keeps us turning pages, the breathtaking descriptions keep us firmly inside place and story, and the complex and well-drawn characters keep us hoping for the best, even in the darkest moments. The only elements that drew me out of the story were tense switches, which I found jarring and unnecessary, and sections of point of view switches that I felt drew attention away from the central story and the central conflict rather than added to it. These were not fatal flaws, however. I found this to book to be engaging, well-wrought, and above all, a book of substance. It is a book I will remember.
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