Book Review: The Turning by Helen Ellis

The Turning imageMary Richards isn’t sure what’s wrong with her. She got so tired in school she fell asleep…and purred. She’s sprouting fur wherever a cat rubs against her skin. And she’s craving milk. When Nick, the guy she has a crush on, seems to understand what’s happening to her, and he offers to help, she decides that maybe what’s happening to her isn’t so wrong after all.

The Turning: What Curiosity Kills by Helen Ellis is a new teen series focusing on humans who can turn into cats. Ellis pokes fun at Upper-East-Side-priveliged- Manhattan life with her cast of characters—most of whom attend an elite private school populated by scads of fertility drug, embryo implanted twins and children adopted as babies from Asia. Mary and her sister Octavia are the only students adopted out of the foster-child system in the U.S. when they were eight. Their school is super politically correct.

The Turning brings up several issues for Mary: Who can she tell about what’s happening to her? Given the chance to go back to her regular life, will she take it? Can she adapt to her new realities without getting hurt in the sometimes-violent cat life? This first novel is funny and intriguing. While it sometimes feels like a prologue for the books that are to come,  I expect teens interested in finding a new series with an intriguing premise will find a lot to like here.

Book Review: The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott By Kelly O’Connor McNees

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott imageLouisa May Alcott is one of the most beloved literary figures in American history. Her book Little Women, has never been out of circulation, and it’s been adapted for the screen and stage many times. As Little Women is widely known to be somewhat autobiographical, it’s easy for readers to feel they know Louisa May as well as they know Jo, her fictional counterpart.

I would expect this familiarity would make writing a novel about Louisa and her real family daunting, especially for first-time novelists. But I’m glad that author Kelly O’Connor McNees took up that challenge when creating The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott. The book is full of enough facts about Louisa’s real life to make her situation come alive for readers, but those facts are woven into the story well enough that they remain interesting instead of becoming a boring list forced into a story line.

We see Louisa as a real women influenced by her own upbringing to reject romance and marriage for herself. We see the struggles she faced when deciding between accepting the reality of love freely offered to her and pursuing her dream of being a writer. Married women in Louisa’s time were mostly relegated to a life of drudgery and endless chores. Few had the option of pursuing anything other than domestic pursuits. Even those who by necessity worked, usually earned their money through sewing or teaching or cleaning.

Louisa’s father plays a prominent role in the book, as he did in her life. His unwillingness to earn money affected the whole household, making the family dependent upon friends and relatives for their support. It’s no wonder that Louisa developed a fierce drive to make money from her writing so she would not be forced into the same situation during her adult life.

Since we all know the real Louisa May Alcott never married, it’s no surprise how her romance in this book will end. But McNees weaves her words so well that you want to keep turning pages anyway, hoping against hope that the outcome will be different than you know it to be. The resolution, when it comes, feels true to Louisa, and satisfying to the reader as well.

Mother-daughter book club members who read The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott will have a lot to discuss including the writer herself, constraints on women of her time and family relationships. Also interesting to discuss will be how men of the times were just as constrained in many ways by the expectations of society. Clubs may also want to consider watching Louisa May Alcott, The Woman Behind Little Women. It’s an excellent documentary created for PBS from the book written by Harriet Reisen. See the website http://www.alcottfilm.com/ for more details about the biography. See McNees’s website for more info about The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott: http://kellyoconnormcnees.com/

I highly recommend any of these titles for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 15 and up.

Book Review: Tombstone Tea by Joanne Dahme

Tombstone Tea imageJessie is acting on a dare when she shows up at the Laurel Hill Cemetery one night. Her instructions are to spend a whole night while wandering the cemetery and collecting rubbings from the gravestones of 10 residents. Desperate to make friends in her new high school, Jessie has agreed to the task despite her misgivings.

Almost immediately she runs into Paul, a boy who seems to be near her age and who says he works as a night caretaker at Laurel Hill. He offers to help her. While collecting rubbings Jessie meets what Paul call “actors” playing the parts of inhabitants of certain graves. Jessie thinks they’re doing a great job until she finds out they’re not actors, they’re really the spirits of the people they claim to be. Most are friendly, but Jenny is not, and Jessie has to escape with Paul’s help.

Undeterred, Jessie is back the next day, and she begins to volunteer at the cemetery during daylight hours on a regular basis. As she helps to revive the Tombstone Tea Laurel Hill held years before, she also works to find a way to reconcile Jenny with her daughter in the hopes that her spirit can move on.

Tombstone Tea by Joanne Dahme has plenty of action to give you the creeps, it does take place in a cemetery and spirits are some of the main characters, but it’s not so spooky that it’s likely to keep you awake at night. Jessie is a strong character, and while sometimes I worried for her, I really liked her growing confidence and her ability to turn a strange situation into a purpose. Mother-daughter book clubs members will be able to talk about spiritualism, beliefs about what happens to you after you die, the history in cemeteries, and courage. I recommend it for groups with girls aged 11 to 14.

Volunteering with Your Book Club

When Marci’s mother-daughter book club girls were in fourth grade, their group read Rent a Third Grader by B. B. Hiller. In the book, students raise money to help an old police horse remain part of the community. That story inspired the girls to help their local animal shelter by organizing a bake sale.

In addition to raising $300, Marci believe the girls and moms both learned a lot from the experience. “The girls learned how to put into action the good feelings they got from the book,” says Marci.  “They also had an opportunity to learn about each other in a different environment and see each other out in the world.” Besides spending time on a worthy cause with their daughters, Marci says the moms got to see “individual personalities and passions come out.”

If you haven’t yet volunteered with your book group—mother-daughter or otherwise—this summer may be the perfect time for you to consider taking on a project. Volunteering with children can teach them more than how to be compassionate for others and caring of the world around them. It can also teach them skills, boost their self-confidence, and help them appreciate people of different backgrounds and beliefs. Volunteering as adults helps you work together to build community and meet others who also have an interest in the cause you support.

How can you decide where to focus your efforts? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Think about your interests to help you decide where to give your time.  Many non-profit organizations can be broken down into three broad categories: human welfare, environmental welfare, or animal welfare.
  • Once you define your broad category, think about the things your group members like to do. For instance, if you all like being outdoors, you can work at a community garden for a local food bank to benefit human welfare. You can help clean up litter from local beaches or riverbanks to help the environment. Contributing to animal welfare may involve participating in a backyard bird count or helping restore a wild habitat.

Because you are all readers, you may decide to focus your efforts on organizations that promote literacy. Or, like Marci’s group, you may be inspired to pitch in after something that inspires you.

Check these online sites for more ideas on how your book club can get involved in helping out:

http://www.handsonnetwork.org/

http://thevolunteerfamily.org/

http://www.volunteermatch.org/

http://liveunited.org/volunteer/

http://idealist.org/

http://www.voa.org/Get-Involved/Volunteer.aspx

Book Review: What I Would Tell Her, Edited by Andrea N. Richesin

What I Would Tell Her image

What I Would Tell Her image

The relationship between dads and their daughters is often complicated in ways neither understands or is likely to talk about much. A peek into the dad’s side of the equation can be glimpsed through a new collection of stories called What I Would Tell Her: 28 Devoted Dads on Bringing Up, Holding On To and Letting Go of Their Daughters, edited by Andrea N. Richesin.

These stories honestly express the fears, hopes, insecurities, and dreams dads feel for their daughters. There are dads of newborn daughters, young daughters, adopted daughters, and adult daughters. One particularly powerful story even portrays a dad’s experience of having his wife deliver a stillborn baby girl. Each essay is moving in its own way. Some will make you laugh, and others will make you cry, but they will all give you reason to contemplate the father-daughter dynamic.

Pictures of the contributors with their daughters are in the back of the book, and I found myself studying the photo of a writer and his daughter after reading his essay. If you particularly like a writer’s style, in many cases you’ll also find other works he’s written listed in the bio. I’m not sure who would enjoy this book most, dads or daughters. Moms are likely to want to read it too, for the insights they may gain about their own dads as well as their husbands.

Book Review: Magickeepers, The Pyramid of Souls by Erica Kirov

Magickeepers imageNick is tired of living in the Las Vegas hotel/casino that acts as the cover for his magical family. All he gets to eat is Russian food, all he does is practice magic, and his older cousins keep access to the outside world at a minimum for him. So he’s excited to think of a whole convention of Magickeepers, the guardians of magic in the world, coming to his hotel. But then he discovers that Shadowkeepers plan to target the convention, and Nick and his cousin Isabella are in danger of having their souls stolen. Will his training be enough to help him fight them off?

Magickeepers: The Pyramid of Souls by Erica Kirov is the second book in this series where magic has to be protected from evil in the world. Crystal balls, magical swords, Egyptian pyramids, and even Edgar Allen Poe writing his famous poem “The Raven” all add to the adventure. Historical facts get a makeover from a magical standpoint and historical Russian culture also is featured. The Magickeepers series is lots of fun for readers aged 9 to 12, who will also enjoy the preview of the next book, which starts out with famous illusionist Harry Houdini.

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Discussing North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley

Discussing North of Beautiful by Justina Chen

Recently the moms and 15-year-old girls in my mother-daughter book club gathered together at my home to talk about North of Beautiful by Justina Chen. My daughter Catherine and I had recommended it to our group, and we were glad we set aside a lot of time to talk about this book. Discussion went on for a full hour, and even though we had to close the meeting because it was getting late and homework beckoned the girls, we could have gone on even longer.

North of Beautiful provides a great way for moms and their daughters to have a discussion about beauty in our society—the things we do to achieve it, how we work to hide our imperfections, ways we judge others based on their looks.

In the book, the main character, Terra Cooper, has a port-wine stain birthmark covering part of her face. All her life her parents have taken her for treatments to lessen the effects of it. Terra is an expert at using heavy cover up.

I started the discussion by asking everyone to talk about their own perceived imperfections and how they try to hide them from others. One of my ears is larger than the other, something I’ve always taken pains to hide with the kind of haircut I choose. One mom said her sister had serious disabilities, so she didn’t feel she could afford the luxury of worrying about small imperfections. One of the girls worried about a mole on her face. Talking about these things made us all realize how our own imperfections appear larger in our minds than they do to those around us.

In the book Terra has a boyfriend. She feels he doesn’t really get who she is, but she also feels like she’s lucky to have him because of her birthmark. She does things with her boyfriend she doesn’t really want to do, but she’s afraid to tell him how she really feels.

This was a hot topic, and one I’m glad I was able to talk about with my daughter and her friends. The moms mostly let the girls talk, and we were happy to hear them say they believed Terra needed to be true to herself, and she should realize that when someone pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, they don’t really care about you for who you are. I hope they can take that conviction to heart throughout their own lives.

Other topics we talked about in this rich book:

Dealing with verbal abuse—Terra’s dad belittles her mom, and she cooks and overeats to feel better. Consequently, she is overweight. We recognized that Terra’s mom had to feel better about herself before she could stand up to her husband. We also talked about the tendency not to label hurtful words as abuse.

Facing problems head on—Both Terra and her mom spend a lot of time avoiding conflict. But conflict doesn’t go away; it just builds into more conflict. We talked about how hard it can be to face your problems, but in the long run it’s better than putting them off.

Making judgments based on appearances—Jacob is a Goth Asian boy Terra comes to know. We discussed how people create opinions of you based on your looks when they don’t know you. One of the moms said that’s not all bad, because some people who look scary really should be avoided. But when we can get to know someone we should try to see past the exterior they project to see what they are truly like.

The sport of geocaching is also featured in North of Beautiful. If I had thought of it in advance, I would have researched a nearby cache that our group could go out and find. Even better, we could have created our own cache to hide. I’ve been geocaching with my own family, and I think this would be a fun way to extend the reading and discover something new.

North of Beautiful is classified as a teen read, but it’s written well enough for adults to enjoy even if they don’t have teen daughters to talk about it with. I expect the issues we discussed will stay with all of us for quite some time.

For more info, read my  review and an interview with Chen.

Book Review: Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods

For me a great memoir does more than tells a personal story. It also engages both my emotions and my intellect and leaves me wanting to know more about the author and what she writes about. Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods, delivers on all counts.

The book opens with Woods in crisis as she is about to board a plane with her fiancé from Paris to Kinshasa, Congo, where she will stay at a sanctuary for orphan bonobos. While most of us have heard of chimpanzees and know about their plight, far fewer people are aware of bonobos, even though they are more endangered than chimps. Like chimps, bonobos carry a good portion of the same DNA we do. Unlike chimps, bonobos are peace loving, female-dominated, and very sexual.

Most of us also know that Congo is a dangerous place where women are raped, children are conscripted to fight, and millions of people have died at the hands of various rebels and government groups in the last decade. It is part of deepest, darkest Africa, with plenty of disease and other natural threats to add to the human ones. Few outsiders find compelling reasons to linger for any amount of time. Even fewer spend time to truly understand the nature of the various factions and conflicts.

Yet Woods and her fiancé, then husband, go back again and again over several years to work with the bonobos, hoping to gain scientific knowledge of how these apes are wired, and possibly learn how humans can benefit knowing more about them.

Bonobo Handshake is a story of love, politics and science woven around the details of Woods’ personal story, the story of apes, tales of Congo and other African countries, and accounts of scientific research. The narrative flows effortlessly from one topic to another. Woods is not afraid to show her weaknesses, and if anything she downplays her own courage while highlighting the everyday bravery of those who live and work full time in the Congo on behalf of bonobos.

I was fascinated from the first page to the last, and I was glad to see resources for more information included at the end of the book. Mother-daughter book club members may want to consider the active sex lives of the bonobos before choosing this as a group read, but there is much that girls aged 16 and up and adults can learn from Bonobo Handshake. I highly recommend it.

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