Book Review: The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg

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Seventeen-year-old Clara longs to escape the confines of her family homestead in small Mica Creek, near Spokane, Washington. But finances are tight, and the family is in danger of losing their home and land if they don’t raise the money needed. When Helga, Clara’s mother, comes up with a plan to walk from their home to New York City as a way to earn money, Clara goes with her. The question is, will her trip show a way for her to leave home forever, or will it bind Clara more tightly to the family and neighbors she leaves behind?

The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg is a fictionalized story based on real events from the late 1800s. Helga and Clara are the author’s great grandmother and great aunt, and Dagg breathes life into their saga through Clara’s eyes.

At eighteen, Clara chafes at the life of drudgery that comes from living on a farm and the prospect of marrying someone not for love, but for reliability and proximity. Restrictions on women in particular were strict in those times, and they were limited in the ways they could earn money. Helga is active in the suffragette movement and takes the opportunity to promote the vote for women on their trip.

Through Clara’s eyes, the country the two women pass through and the challenges they face come alive. Railroads were crucial for life in those times, and travelers often depended on the kindness of strangers they would never see again

While the real Clara did keep a journal of her trip and the two hoped to write a book about their experience, their adventure was never captured in publication and Clara’s journal was destroyed. In a note at the end, Dagg says she hopes “Helga and Clara would not wince at the words I have put in their mouths or the thoughts I have put in their heads.” To readers, the important thing is that the story is well told and brings this time in history to life.

I highly recommend The Year We Were Famous for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 12 and up. Issues to discuss include women getting the right to vote, differing views of women and their abilities between then and now, young people making decisions about their future, and what we can learn when we travel far away from home.

I received a copy of this book from the author for review.

Book Review: Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry

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Second Fiddle imageJody and her friends, Giselle and Vivian, can’t believe their music teacher has to cancel their trip to Paris for a musical competition. It was supposed to be the last chance they would have to play together before Jody and Giselle leave the U.S. Army base in Berlin and return to the U.S.

Then they witness the attempted murder of a Soviet soldier by his own officers. The girls realize the only way they can truly save his life is to smuggle him out of Berlin. And that trip to Paris may be just the way to do it—if they can figure out how to pull it off.

Second Fiddle by Rosanne Parry is set just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As children of military or diplomatic parents, the girls in the story all live in homes that are highly disciplined. They’re good kids, and because they’ve moved often they know how to adapt to different environments. But Giselle and Jody are nervous about their impending move. They’re not sure they will fit in with the kids at school in the states, and they don’t want to lose their friendship in the process.

Their decision to take the soldier to Paris, and the events that follow, can provide great things to discuss in a mother-daughter book club with girls aged 9 to 13. Issues to talk about include kids taking on responsibility, asserting their independence, contributing to important family decisions, and deciding whom they can trust. There’s also plenty to talk about in regards to the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, military family life, and visiting Paris. I highly recommend it.

The author sent me a copy of this book to review.

Interview with Barbara Dee, Author of Trauma Queen

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Barbara Dee

Yesterday, I posted a book review with giveaway information about Trauma Queen, author Barbara Dee’s latest book. Today, I’m featuring an interview with Barbara. who has also written This Is Me From Now On, Solving Zoe, and Just Another Day in My Insanely Real Life. As I mentioned in my review, I believe Trauma Queen is a great book for mother-daughter book clubs to read and discuss. It’s funny, and it brings up serious issues about the mother-daughter relationship that should provoke good discussions.

How did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

BD: Actually, I’ve always wanted to be a writer! In fact, I wrote my first book when I was five years old. It was called “Mitchell Colleps,” and it was about a naughty boy who had a robot who ate Spanish rice. What strikes me now (other than the Spanish rice-eating-robot!) is how much dialogue I wrote. It’s still my favorite thing to write!

If you’re curious, you can see a photo of “Mitchell Colleps” on my website,  http://www.barbaradeebooks.com/about.html. I’ve also shared it on http://www.VYou.com/barbaradee.

Your books are often humorous. Do you think you have a sense of humor all the time or mostly when you are writing?

BD: Humor is very important to me, so I try not to save it all for my writing! Actually, my whole family is really funny. The point of dinner conversation at our house is to crack each other up. In fact, the “Funny Word List” in Just Another Day in My Insanely Real Life started out as something we came up with one evening over hamburgers!  We’re also all obsessed with Monty Python, which we quote all the time.

Trauma Queen is a fun play on words for drama queen, which is a term often associated with teenage girls. Why did you decide to turn the tables in this book and have the mom be flamboyant and the daughter be responsible?

 

BD: As a mom myself, I hate to admit this, but I know that many girls, when they turn twelve or thirteen, start to look at their moms a bit critically. Even when they love their moms deeply, they’ll cringe at things their moms do or say. This sort of embarrassment is such a common tween emotion that I thought it would be fun to write about a truly off-the-charts embarrassing mom—a performance artist who has very few inhibitions, and who actually believes that “there is no such thing as negative publicity.” I wanted to show how brave and creative this mom is, as she tries to balance her work with her family obligations—but also how challenging from the daughter’s point of view.

One of the things Trauma Queen is about is how these two—the flamboyant, artistic mom and the responsible, sensitive daughter—figure out how to communicate with each other. I think they do it in a unique way that works for both of them, and in the end, I have high hopes for their relationship.

When you were a teen did you tend to be more like Marigold or her mom?

 

BD: Oh, I was definitely more like Marigold (but my own mom was nothing like Becca)! I was also very much like Evie in This Is Me From Now On—a good girl who is both fascinated and horrified by someone with a freer spirit.

Random acts of culture and organized performance events for flash mobs have been getting more popular lately. Do you see this as different than the performance art that Marigold’s mom creates, and if so how?

BD: Well, I’m not an expert on flash mobs, but from what I understand about them, they’re often pretty abstract. Becca’s performances usually make some sort of point (for example, she once wrapped herself in Saran Wrap to make fun of plastic surgery). She’s also such an individual that I can’t imagine her organizing 5000 people by Twitter for a pillow fight, or being part of a crowd that suddenly freezes in Grand Central Station.

Are you or have you been active in theater?

BD: When I was a kid, I was often cast as The Narrator in school plays. (Who knows why—maybe because I loved to read?)  With such a dull role to play, being onstage wasn’t much fun for me. In college I reviewed plays for my school newspaper, which I really enjoyed. But that’s basically the sum total of my theatrical experience. I do love going to the theater, though, and I’m so happy that my three kids do, too.

Do you have a good theater warm-up exercise to recommend for mother-daughter book club members?

BD: Here’s one. Pair each mom with a daughter (not her own). Tell them to have a 30-second conversation consisting of YES and NO. (Assign YES to one, NO to the other. You might want to have them switch words at the 15-second mark.) The pair can use only these two words during the conversation, and they must maintain eye contact for the entire 30 seconds. It’s amazing how much you can say with these two words—if you don’t start laughing!

To see a video interview with Barbara Dee, see the Simon and Schuster website: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Trauma-Queen/Barbara-Dee/9781442409231

Book Review: Trauma Queen by Barbara Dee

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Trauma Queen imageBarbara Dee’s last book, This Is Me From Now On, was one of my favorites from last year. So I was looking forward to reading her latest, Trauma Queen, about a girl and her mother and how they learn to understand important things about each other. Just as I had hoped, the book was a delight to read. Here’s my review:

Marigold feels she has more reason to be embarrassed of her mother than most teenaged girls. Her mom, Becca, is a performance artist who gets attention for doing what a lot of people consider weird. She’s also not shy about saying what she thinks about someone—and when she uses her performance art to parody Marigold’s best friend’s mom…well things don’t work out so well for Mari.

Now that the Baileys have moved to a new town, Mari hopes she can keep her mom out of the limelight and start living a normal life. Then Becca offers to teach an after-school improv group of Mari’s classmates, and she’s back to worrying about losing everything she’s built up again.

Trauma Queen by Barbara Dee is a funny and thoughtful look at what happens when the daughter is the responsible one in her family and she feels the need to mother her own mother. Becca is a free spirit, who doesn’t consider consequences before she acts. In response, Mari is super-organized and personally conservative. They each need to find a way to acknowledge and respect each other’s strengths without dismissing the things they don’t particularly like about each other.

There are so many issues for mother-daughter book clubs to explore when they read Trauma Queen, including getting along with family members even when your personalities are very different, respecting someone else’s choices although you disagree with them, ways moms embarrass their daughters, and more. I highly recommend it for groups with girls aged 9 to 12.

Publisher Simon and Schuster provided me with a copy of this book to review.

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Book Review: Mothers and Daughters by Rae Meadows

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Mothers and Daghters imageMothers and Daughters by Rae Meadows is about three generations of women all trying to do the best they can as they raise their daughters. Each has a tale to tell of their relationships to their mothers, as well as how they relate to their own children.

Sam is the modern mother of an infant. She can’t bear to be separated from her daughter for even short times. She knows she can’t go back to the woman she was before her baby was born, even though there’s a part of her that longs to create art with her pottery wheel.

Sam’s mother is Iris, who tells her story from her retirement home in Florida, where she is spending her final days in a struggle with cancer. Iris remembers the hard life she spent growing up on a farm in Minnesota, and her mother, Violet, who never showed much affection.

Violet loved her daughter, but she harbored a secret about her past and the true place she was born and grew up. It’s left to Sam to puzzle out the story her grandmother never talked about, the details of which only the reader of the novel knows.

Mothers and Daughters examines so many emotions a woman can feel in relation to her children: protective, loving, helpless, powerless, inadequate, fierce and invincible. Each of the women profiled has to break away from their mothers and become independent. They each do it in their own way, influenced heavily by the times they live in. It touches on the story of the Orphan Trains that took children away from their lives in New York City to farms in the heartland, and the shame these children often took with them as they went. It’s a powerful book that captures the joys as well as the heartaches of being either a mother or a daughter.

Book Review: A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary

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A Girl from Yamhill imageBeverly Cleary is known and loved for her books that appeal to young readers. Ramona Quimby, Age 8 and The Mouse and the Motorcycle are just two of the titles that have remained popular through multiple generations.

In her memoir, A Girl from Yamhill, Cleary talks about her early life, first on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon, then in Portland. Cleary was an only child, and her stories of small town life are punctuated by the adults she spent most of her time with—her parents, her grandparents, and the characters that lived in the town of Yamhill.

In Portland, Cleary enters grade school and finally has other children to play with. Her tales of growing up in the 1920s, then living through the early years of The Great Depression, are full of rich details that are sure to fascinate both young (ages 12 and up) readers and adults about this time in the past.

Cleary’s memories of school and teachers should provide great conversations between moms and daughters about what education was like in the early part of the last century, versus what parents today experienced, compared to what current students encounter. Cleary’s relationship with her parents is also good for discussion as a look at how parents communicated with children then and now.

A Girl from Yamhill is not a thrilling read; instead it’s a delightful meander through the people and times that were important to Cleary. It’s also a revealing look at lifestyle differences between her era and ours, and it gives insight into events that sparked her desire to be a writer. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs.

In honor of Cleary’s 95th birthday, the New York Times Book Review featured an article on her writing and her life that talks about her enduring legacy as a writer. Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/books/review/profile-of-beverly-cleary.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

 

 

Book Review: A Song for My Mother by Kat Martin

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A Song for My Mother imageWhen Marly Hanson ran away from home as a teen to get married, she thought she’d never return. But when her young daughter finishes treatment for brain cancer and asks to meet her grandmother, Marly can’t turn her down, even if it means confronting the past she hoped to forget. She’s determined to keep her distance with her mother, but as she sees her mom through the eyes of others, Marly finds she wants to know more. She also finds herself becoming attached to the very things she rejected when she was younger.

A Song For My Mother by Kat Martin is a story of love in many forms: between mothers and daughters, between spouses, and between friends. It explores how to bridge a gap created with an emotional break and over the distance of years. Through the story, author Martin encourages readers to question their assumptions about painful actions others take, and strive for understanding as well as consider the possibility of forgiveness. There’s also a bit of romance added to the mix.

Even though the topics, like spousal abuse and cancer are tough ones, A Song For My Mother will also charm you with its descriptions of small town life in Dreyerville, and the thoughtful people who live there. It’s an idyllic place that will have you wishing you had grown up in a small town or wondering why you ever moved away if you did.

Publisher Vanguard Press provided me with a copy of this book for review.

Author Barbara Dee Shares Her Perspective on Internet Safety for Kids

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Barbara Dee

The other day Zoey’s mom’s sent me an email.

A couple of weeks earlier, her daughter had begun emailing me about my second book, SOLVING ZOE:  “Hi I just finished reading probably the best book in the world called Solving Zoe it’s actually kind of funny because my name is Zoey with a Y.”

When I emailed Zoey back, she replied immediately, asking about my next book, TRAUMA QUEEN, describing her dog, inviting me to speak at her school. (Although she warned me, “Don’t get your hopes up because I will have to ask my principal if it’s OK.”). She also asked where I’d be signing books next, so she could meet me, and she told me the name of her town. It wasn’t nearby, so I told her that if she couldn’t make it to the TRAUMA QUEEN launch party, or to any of the book festivals I’d be attending this spring, I’d be happy to mail her a signed bookplate.

And then I paused. “Before you send me your address,” I wrote her, “PLEASE, PLEASE ask your parents first!!! Never give out your address to anyone online unless your parents say it’s okay. Okay?”

I waited uncomfortably for her reply, because if she emailed back with her home address, how would I know if she’d gotten permission? I wouldn’t—unless her mom wrote to me herself. (Which a few have in the past.)

For a tween author, it can be tricky having direct contact with readers. You want to be chatty, accessible, and kid-friendly. After all, it’s why kids are writing to you in the first place!

But I’m not a twelve-year-old kid. I used to be a teacher. I’m also a mom of three teenagers whose internet activity I worry about. So when tween readers email me their personal information (everything from where they live to where they go to school, their ages, the names and health of family members, even home phone numbers!), I think I have the responsibility to say something.

Obviously, authors aren’t bad guys, and if a kid is handing over personal info to their favorite author, there’s no risk. What I worry about is kids getting a little too comfortable sharing personal info with strangers. I think it’s part of my job to remind them about internet safety. But of course—and here’s the tricky part– I need to do it in a way that maintains the precious author/tween reader relationship. I can’t sound like a teacher. Or (especially!) a mom.

That’s why I was so delighted to hear from Zoey’s mom: “I have been monitoring the emails & just love it… My husband & I believe this is the “stuff” that make young people want to be “someone” (like an author )  I hope her many emails aren’t bothering you.”

No, Zoey’s Mom, they aren’t. I promise you, authors LOVE to hear from enthusiastic readers! We also love to encourage kids to be whatever kind of “someone” they want to be. Thank you for supporting Zoey’s passion for reading and writing. And thank you also for monitoring her emails to adults you don’t know personally. It means that authors—and I hope Zoey is writing to many others!– don’t have to worry about her safety online.

Until she becomes a teenager, but that’s another whole story.

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