Book Review: A Different Day, A Different Destiny by Annette Laing

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Yesterday, I featured an interview with author Annette Laing along with a giveaway of her two books on time travel for middle grade readers, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When and A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Here’s my review of A Different Day, A Different Destiny:

Hannah, Alex and George are back in a second time-traveling novel for kids, A Different Day, A Different Destiny by Annette Laing. Readers first met the three in Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When while they traveled from modern-day Snipesville, Georgia, to World War I and World War II England. This time they are headed even further back, to 1851, and all three land in different places.

Alex stays in Georgia, with its slaves, cotton plantations and Savannah businesses. Brandon ends up in a coal mine in northern England, and Hannah finds herself working in a cotton factory in a small Scottish town. This story is grittier and more frightening for the characters than the first. Since they travelled to different places, they can’t share their experience and their fears of returning to their normal time with each other.

They are also finding out about the privations suffered by the lower working class people of the time and the hardships of slaves. Food and extra clothing is scarce, as is time off from backbreaking work. As they each find ways to earn their keep, readers get a glimpse of the social conditions of the time when Western society was shifting from mostly agricultural to mainly industrial work. For the workers, it was a time of exploitation in many ways until they were able to earn more rights through labor laws many years later.

While Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When felt more lighthearted, A Different Day, A Different Destiny has more depth. I felt as though I learned quite a bit about the mid-1800s and what it was like to live then. And I felt the characters, in their second time around with time travel, were more aware of the culture they were temporarily part of. As Hannah, Alex and Brandon travel around and search to find each other as well as figure out what they need to do before they can return home, they learn a lot from being around people with all levels of social standing and they observe expectations people have of members of a certain social class.

Readers will delight in the surprising plot twists that connect this story to the one that came before. And they’ll look forward to seeing how the story unfolds in the next book in the series. I recommend this book and the series to mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 9 to 12.

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Interview with Annette Laing, Author of Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When

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Last week I reviewed Annette’s book of time-traveling kids, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When. Tomorrow I’ll review the sequel, A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Today, I’m happy to have Annette visiting to share a few words with Mother Daughter Book Club about her background, why she’s writing a series on kids who travel through time and more.

Author Annette Laing in Scotland

Tell us a little bit about your background.

AL: I’m from Scotland originally, but my family moved to Stevenage, a small city north of London, when I was quite small. So I grew up as a Scot in England, which was a pretty odd experience. In the early eighties, I had what was at the time an incredibly amazing opportunity, when I was accepted as an exchange student to Northern California. I had a blast in high school: I felt like I was living in the movie Grease. I quickly returned to California to attend college, which, again, was very unusual for a Brit in those days. Then, having wanted to become a newspaper reporter since I was seven years old, I abruptly changed my mind, and decided to become a history professor instead, because dead people, unlike live interviewees, don’t challenge a reporter’s version of events. After finishing my PhD in early American and British history, I moved to Georgia to take up a university post. I quit my job two years ago, but, as I like to point out, I’m still a professional historian, and I still love to chat with historian friends about background material for my novels.

What do you like most about writing?

AL: It’s pure escapism. It’s a luxurious time spent daydreaming instead of worrying about everyday matters. The best part is when I stop consciously putting words into characters’ mouths, and start transcribing what they say, as they take on a life of their own. It’s a very weird feeling, and at first I worried that I was going a bit demented, so it was a huge relief to discover that this is a normal experience among authors!

How did you decide to write about time travel?

AL: It was kind of a no-brainer for a historian to turn to writing about the past, but of course, I could always have turned my hand to historical fiction. I wasn’t drawn to the sci-fi aspects of time travel at all—I don’t understand the physics, and don’t pretend to. What strikes me as a cultural historian was that so few kids’ novels which are set in the past, whether time travel or historical novels, captured the sense of how differently people thought in the past. So I set out to take three very modern kids, living in a town that’s a bit of an eccentric time warp but is nonetheless part of the twenty-first century, and drop them off in places that I know very well, both personally and as a historian, so that their confusion about how to act becomes fun to read about, while showing that the past is indeed a foreign country. It’s great fun to write, too.

Why did you choose World War II England as a place for your characters to travel to?

AL: Like many Brits of my generation, I have an obsessive interest in The War (we always called it that, with implied capital letters.) We feel like we missed out somehow, although why we would want to suffer through bombing and food rationing is beyond me…. A few years ago, I started creating time travel workshops for kids, where we spent days making believe we were in the past. I decided to treat myself and “send” us first to wartime England. I had no idea if the kids would be remotely interested, so it was kind of selfish, but they were absolutely fascinated. It was pretty surreal for me to watch all these kids from rural Georgia pretending to be British kids in 1940, so I can only imagine what it felt like for the guest speakers who visited us who had actually lived through the Blitz. The kids’ programs are what kickstarted my idea for The Snipesville Chronicles, so it was probably inevitable that I would set the first book in World War II England. The whole series will be set in British and American history, for reasons that I hope will become clear…

Why did you insert a double time travel and send one of your characters back even further to World War I?

AL: I wanted to show how quickly people and places can change. Britain in 1914, the year the First World War began, and Britain in 1945, the year World War II ended, were very different places, and yet only thirty years had passed, less than most people’s lifetimes. People too often assume that the present is the only thing that counts, that the past is quaint and irrelevant, but this isn’t so. The past never entirely disappears. I hope Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When spurs readers to think about how quickly and profoundly the way we think changes over time, and yet how much we have in common with people throughout history.

Why did you decide to make one of your characters a black boy? How did that limit and/or enhance your story line?

AL: Brandon arrived in my head as who he is. Having lived and taught in a small town in the South for many years now, I couldn’t imagine why I would make all my main characters white: Sure, I’m not black, but neither am I an American by birth, or a teenager, or a boy, so all my main characters took a leap of imagination on my part.

Early in the story development, Brandon began to run into all kinds of attitudes toward race in early twentieth-century Britain, and I did briefly wonder whether it would be a problem that his blackness would always be an issue in the stories. Then it struck me that this is how it has always been for black people in Britain and the United States, and that I should be no less honest about “race” in my fiction than in my history. What’s most important is how Brandon reacts. He is taken aback at first by his reception in a pre-multicultural England, but he’s no wuss, and he refuses to be defined by the color of his skin. Like many young people I’ve known in Georgia, he is comfortable with who he is, as an individual and as a member of a middle-class black family.  He’s not perfect, and he’s a little eccentric, which makes him an ordinary but interesting and likeable kid. All in all, I am very pleased with Brandon. Recently, there has been much blog discussion about the lack of black characters in kids’ novels, other than slaves and members of the civil rights movement, and I hope that Brandon is a modest contribution toward addressing that absence.

Tell us a little bit about your second book in the Snipesville Chronicles.

AL: A Different Day, A Different Destiny, true to its title, is quite a different book from Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When. I want to surprise my readers with every new entry in the series. This book is much more of an odyssey than the first one, with all three kids taking long separate journeys in the year 1851. This is a time when kids are providing an exploited labor force in both Britain’s industrial revolution and America’s cotton boom, and the kids get caught up in both. At the same time as they are trying to make their way in Victorian times, they have been told to find a modern pocket calculator to get home to the present day, which is even harder than it sounds…

How many books do you plan for this series?

AL: Five, but I am leaving open the possibility of a sixth.

Anything else you’d like to say to readers at Mother Daughter Book Club?

AL: If you read Don’t Know Where together, I would love to hear about your group’s reactions to the character of Hannah, who would always rather go shopping than read a book, and who has found out that you can act out your issues in the past as well as in the present. Readers respond very strongly to her, but girls are afraid to admit out loud that they identify with her, so they claim that they have more in common with Alex or Brandon instead. Like I believe them. Yeah, right.

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Book Recommendations for Boys

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The Art of Manliness recently posted a list of 50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men that you may want to check out if you’re looking for good books for boys. The website in general is intriguing, and you may find yourself spending a few minutes looking around at other things it has to offer once you’ve finished checking out the book recommendations. I found it to be both funny and informative. Here’s the description from the site:

“The Art of Manliness is authored by husband and wife team, Brett and Kate McKay. It features articles on helping men be better husbands, better fathers, and better men. In our search to uncover the lost art of manliness, we’ll look to the past to find examples of manliness in action. We’ll analyze the lives of great men who knew what it meant to “man up” and hopefully learn from them. And we’ll talk about the skills, manners, and principles that every man should know. Since beginning in January 2008, The Art of Manliness has already gained 53,000+ subscribers and continues to grow each week.”

Of course not all the books are limited to boys. I really want to read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. And books I loved when I was growing up and still do are Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Holes by Louis Sachar, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I adored Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of my all time favorites. My daughter, Catherine, would appreciate The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Check out the whole list to find your new or old favorites.

Questions to Answer When You Choose Your Book Club Book

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When you choose your book club books, have you ever thought to start off your discussion by answering a few questions about why you chose it? Starting out with this little step can get the ball rolling and provide insight to the rest of your conversation. Here are a few questions you may want to answer:

  • What made you want to read it?
  • What made you suggest it to the group for reading?
  • Did it live up to your expectations? Why or why not?
  • Are you sorry/glad that you suggested it to the group?

There’s often a lot of self-imposed pressure when you choose a book for your book group to pick something everyone will like. But unless you’ve read the book first, you may not even like it yourself! It actually helps you relax and lead a discussion more easily if you can say, “I expected to like this book because…” “I think this book brings up several issues we can talk about like…” Then you can focus more on the discussion topics and less on whether everyone liked and disliked the book, which is very subjective. I’ve rarely seen a book that 100 percent of our book club members liked and would recommend to others. And that’s a good thing actually. Because the best discussion usually comes about through disagreement, although I’m talking about respectful disagreement where you may benefit and learn from someone else’s opinion even if you don’t share it.

Be the first to open up, and you may just inspire everyone in your group to be more candid.

Book Review: Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When by Annette Laing

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When Hannah and Alex move to Snipesville, Georgia from San Francisco with their father they are incredibly bored and somewhat resentful. Their mother has died in a car accident, and when they leave California they also leave their grandparents behind. But their dad says he’s being transferred, so off they go to an area of the country totally alien to them.

To occupy their time, their dad enrolls them in summer camps at the local community college, which is where they meet Brandon. None of the kids really wants to be in the camp they signed up for, so they sneak away and hide out in the library. But something odd happens when they leave to go home. The community college buildings disappear, their clothes change, and they suddenly find themselves outside of London during World War II. Mistaken for children being sent by their parents to the countryside to escape London’s bombings, they find an ally in a woman they recognize as a professor at the community college they just left.

So begins the adventures in Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When, Book 1 of The Snipesville Chronicles by Annette Laing. Hannah and Alex are billeted with a local couple who don’t seem happy to have them. Brandon, who is black, ends up being singled out and runs away, then taken to London by Mr. Smedley, who is with the Ministry of Health. When London is bombed, Brandon ends up going even further back in time to 1915 and the days of World War I.

These time traveling kids are lucky: their clothes and accents change and they have money in their pockets. So while their sensibilities are modern, they don’t stick out right away. The professor occasionally shows up to check on them, and she gives them clues about tasks they need to complete before they can go home. Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When is like The Magic Tree House for older readers in some ways. A clue to a former time shows up in their current lives, and suddenly they are transported back to that time to solve a mystery.

I really liked Alex and Brandon’s characters. They were smart and inquisitive, and while they occasionally slipped up and said things that didn’t fit with their times, they were always aware of their mistakes. Hannah was hard for me to like as a character. She didn’t exhibit much curiosity about the time or place she was in, and she didn’t care if the things she said were out of time and place. But I suspect that kids reading this books wouldn’t have the same concerns about Hannah that I did. I think girls and boys aged 9 to 12 are more likely to see this is an adventure and happily read about what all three kids experienced when they went back in time.

Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When gives a great sense of the people of wartime England. The kids realize that while they know Hitler eventually loses, the people around them don’t know that. The bombings and shortages and insecurity everyone feels are very real. Mother-daughter book clubs that read this book can talk about the historical time period as well as the fantasy of time travel.

King Cake Recipe for Mardi Gras

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It’s Mardi Gras season down in New Orleans, and I’m sure the people there are celebrating even more with news that the Saints are going to the Super Bowl. I grew up near Baton Rouge when the Saints were first getting established, and I well remember all the losing seasons when they were known as the ‘Aints and fans wore paper bags over their heads. Now they are going to play for the NFL championship for the first time in the franchise’s 43 years. With Super Bowl Sunday on February 7 and Mardi Gras on February 16, I’m sure lots of people will be having parties. And every party during Mardi Gras has to feature a King Cake.

If you’re not familiar with King Cakes, they come in many different flavors, but they are similar to coffee cakes and perfect with a good cup of coffee with chicory.

As you might guess, King Cakes are great to serve to a crowd. They’re good for breakfast or dessert, and they’re good to serve at your next mother-daughter book club meeting. Here’s my recipe:

King Cake

(Recipe Makes Two Rings)

Basic Dough

* 1 envelope dry yeast
* 1/4 cup warm water
* 1/2 cup milk
* 1 cup butter
* 2 egg yolks
* 2 whole eggs
* 4 cups (or more) unbleached flour
* 1/2 cup + 1 tsp. sugar

Mix yeast with warm water and 1 tsp. sugar and 1 tsp. flour. Bring milk to a boil then stir in butter and sugar. Pour into a large bowl and mix. Once mix is lukewarm beat in egg yolks, whole eggs, and yeast mixture. Beat in approximately 2 cups of flour until dough is fairly smooth, then add enough flour to make a soft dough you can form into a ball. Knead by hand until smooth and elastic. Lightly oil a bowl, turn dough once or twice to coat, cover with a cloth and leave in a warm spot until doubled in size, about 1-1/2 – 2 hours. Pat down cover with damp towel and refrigerate overnight. Remove dough from fridge. Divide in half. Shape each half into a long sausage shape. Roll dough into a 30″x9″ rectangle as thin as a pie crust. Let dough rest while you make the filling.

Filling

* 16 oz. cream cheese
* 1/2 cup confectioners sugar
* 4 Tblsp. flour
* 4 egg yolks
* 2 tsp. vanilla

Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl. Divide filling in half and place each half in a one inch strip down the length of each dough shape. Fold one end of the dough over the filling and onto the other side. Crimp at ends so filling won’t come out. Shape dough into rings, place each on a separate cookie sheet or jelly roll pan and let stand 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350. Brush with egg wash and cut deep vents into cake. Bake for 20 – 35 minutes until risen and golden.

Icing

* 1-1/2 cups confectioners sugar
* 2-1/2 Tblsp. milk
* 1/4 tsp. vanilla

Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl. Once cake has cooled spread on icing. Sprinkle colored sugar crystals of purple, green and gold over the icing before it hardens. (You can buy colored sugar or make it yourself by placing ½ cup of regular sugar in a zip lock bag and adding one drop of food coloring at a time until you get the color you desire. For purple mix equal parts of red and blue.)

Book Review: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

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The summer of Calpurnia Virginia Tate’s 11th birthday was a hot one. Everyone in her large family suffered from the heat in their Fentress, Texas home, but as Calpurnia was the only girl in a family of seven children, she also found freedom during afternoon naptime. That’s when she stole away from her room and down to the river, where she floated dreamily in the cool water.

During her outings away from the noise of having six brothers, Calpurnia discovers the natural world and starts making observations about it in her notebook. She also screws up her courage to talk to her grandfather, a shadowy figure who spends most of his time by himself caught up in reading or scientific experiments. But when her grandfather discovers that Calpurnia’s interest is genuine, he begins to include her in his experiments and observations. When they believe they discover a new species of vetch, they send it in to the Smithsonian for judgment.

Calpurnia’s activities with her grandfather brings up a conflict with Calpurnia’s mother, who believes that in the year 1899 girls must prepare to be women who run households, and nothing more. That means cooking, sewing, knitting and tatting, all occupations Calpurnia abhors. As she struggles to follow her heart’s desire, Calpurnia must discover if there are options for women in her time who have interests other than the domestic.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly is historical fiction that reveals turn-of-the-last-century times in rural Texas. It was a time not very far removed from the Civil War, and Calpurnia’s grandfather as well as many others in town fought in the war. The Tate family farms cotton, and they are wealthy by the standards of most people in town. They have a housekeeper and a cook as well as regular farm hands, and while the children have daily chores, they don’t have the responsibility of making the farm productive.

This was also a time when Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was making an impact. It had been published for about 50 years, but his conclusions were still hotly debated, and as Calpurnia found out, some libraries refused to carry copies of the book. Each chapter begins with a quote from Darwin that’s applicable to the action to come. As the book progresses, Calpurnia grows in her ability to understand the people and the world around her through observations made with a microscope and her regular vision.

This book is sure to delight mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged nine and up. Discussions can center on the differences between life for girls and women in 1899 versus life now, living up to the expectations of your parents versus following your heart, and scientific experiences. Girls may even find inspiration for a school science project, and groups can even tie in craft or sewing projects. I highly recommend it.

Book Review: Forever Lily by Beth Nonte Russell

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When Beth Nonte Russell was asked to accompany a friend to pick up the baby girl she was adopting from China, she expected it to be an adventure. An avid traveler, Russell had never been to China, and she welcomed this chance to help a friend while discovering a new country.

But when the friend is presented with a frail baby who seems developmentally far behind her age, she balks at going through with the adoption. Russell finds herself responding in a way that will change her life forever: she agrees to take the girl herself once back in the U.S. Forever Lily: An Unexpected Mother’s Journey to Adoption in China is the memoir Russell has written about her experience.

Russell masterfully tells the story of her journey, which included other soon-to-be adoptive parents who had all planned for a long time to bring a new baby into their lives. Russell weaves tales of the groups’ sightseeing excursions to famous landmarks along with heartbreaking images of the babies’ orphanage when the group visits. She shares her conflicting thoughts of China, whose society is vibrant and modern, but also ancient and repressed.

An undercurrent of the story is Russell’s vivid dreams, some of which started before her trip began and lead her to believe she may have a stronger connection to China than she ever would have imagined.

While Russell’s decision to take the baby is clearly heroic, she doesn’t make herself out to be an unblemished hero, which makes her seem more human. She freely shares that her relationship with her stepchildren was reserved, and that she didn’t open herself up to love and the possibility of being hurt in the past. As she struggles emotionally to accept what she knows she must do, she shares with the reader her personal spiritual beliefs and her journey to get to those beliefs.

Forever Lily is a fascinating story that engrosses to the end, and it will have readers asking themselves, “What would I do if something extraordinary was asked of me?” While it’s most appropriate for moms, who will more easily relate to Russell’s story, older girls will find something of interest here too. Russell also makes book club discussion easy with a list of discussion questions and an interview featured in the back of the book along with a list of activities the group can consider.

Also a testament to the profound way Russell’s life was changed by her experience is the fact that she has started a new non-profit organization called The Golden Phoenix Foundation. Here’s a description of the foundation from the website:

“Motivated by the plight of orphaned children in China and elsewhere, Beth and Randy Russell founded the Golden Phoenix Foundation in 2006.

The mission of the Golden Phoenix Foundation is to end child abandonment worldwide. The Foundation supports existing initiatives, helps develop research projects and plans for future direct initiatives to help better the quality of life of children without families throughout the world.”

Russell hopes to raise funds for her foundation through product sales on the website, Good True Beautiful, which sells her book, an eau de parfum called Forever Lily, t-shirts and a tote baag.

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