A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

This is a depressing book and one that I really didn't want to read, and couldn't really stop.

The story flows from the everyday life of Ishmael in Sierra Leone. He is a young boy infatuated with rap music and the 'gangsta' world of hip hop. Then his childhood ends as the rebels take over the village where he lives. He is separated from his parents and all he knew ended.

I couldn't help but wonder how the children in my life would react. We live in a world of conveniences and ease. Ishmael lived in a world of story and family and love and hard work. As the story began he and his friends were walking 16 miles to a larger town to take part in a talent show. They never made it back to the home they left.

IC is 16 miles away...as I read I imagined children raoming the countryside between here and IC. Wandering around starved and searching for family and food. And finding only death.

The story is told in Ishmael's 10 year old voice. Through the yearnings to belong and be something. It is a told as a story - moving through a shady timeline. Weaving through the images and the happenings of the next several months. And they are awful...he must constantly kep away from the rebels and slowly make his way to the army. Yet that doesn't solve things either...

So, I kept reading - through the blood shed and the heartache. Knowing there must be a redemption...I found one. Ishmael was rescued. Against his better wishes he was sent away from the army into the arms of aid workers. These workers helped to rehabilitate him and reunite him with his uncle.

So - you breathe a sigh of relief. You relax. But, just like any horror movie, it isn't really over. The war finds them in the capital of Sierra Leone - his uncle dies and Ishmael just escape again.

I finished the book, I am glad I read it. And I understand why the images were necessary. But, that doesn't make me like what I read.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

Wow! This is one of those books that begs you to not stop reading. I read late into the night and then stopped. I wanted to savor the last couple hundred pages. I was not disappointed!

This is a story of a mother and the decisions that she must make in an impossible time. Anna is the privileged German daughter of a wealthy and horrible man. She falls desperately in love with a Jewish doctor at the start of WWII. When the SS come to get Max she hides him in her home. It is here that she conceives her daughter.

Her father turns Max in and he is taken to Buchenwald, the camp near the town of Weimar where they live. Anna leaves her father's home and end up at the bakery run by a large woman with sympathies toward the Jews.

So, the next phase of Anna's life begins. After the birth of Trudy, she becomes the baker's apprentice. This continues until the baker make a fateful decision and Anna is left alone with Trudy. As she waits for her fate, a tall man with pale eyes and very small feet appears at the door. He is the head of the camp and he wants Anna for his mistress. Her choice...life or death.

The decisions made in the next several years never really leave Anna. The story moves between a modern day Trudy, searching for ways to deal with her silent elderly mother and the lives they lived through the war.

Trudy grows up knowing nothing of her history but for a small picture of her and her mother and a Nazi officer hidden in the depths of her mothers dresser drawers. Her mother refuses to say anything about their lives before being saved by Jack, the tall American.

It is through a research study on the lives of Germans during the war, that Trudy meets a man who knew her mother.

This is one of those stories that is filled with unanswered questions...why... what would I have done... is it ok...is survival worth it...

It reminds me of the Commadant's Girl and the Diplomat's Wife. Yet, it has it's own place. It is not the story of those living through the atrocities, but how those decisions continue to change the lives of the next generation. The war has ended, but the shame and the pain and the secrets continue.

I would strongly recommend this story!!! It would be another good discussion starter!

An Elegant Gathering of White Snows by Kris Radish

I feel like I've very unelegantly slogged through those snows from the title. The premise of this book is wonderful...eight women have been gathering at different houses to connect with one another's lives. Then following a late night session when Sandy, a 40 year old admits that she is pregnant with her lover's baby, the group decides to start walking.

And that they do... they walk out the front door and into the media frenzy that centers on them.

But, because they are in rural Wisconsin, the police and the people respect their need for privacy and keep the media hounds and the curious and the nosy and the deranged away from them and allow them to walk... just to walk. Their identities are never revealed, they are never interviewed or photographed. They simply walk.

Sounds good doesn't it! As they walk they tell their stories, they cry and they laugh and they love and they heal and they gather the strength to change their lives. To face the past and to take a new step.

As the story of the walk unfolds there are the stories of the walkers told in their own voice. It makes you understand why it is they are on the walk. There are also snippets of those sent to watch the walkers, reporters, and police. And there are tales of women who gain the courage to change their lives due to the imagined courage of the walkers.

This is the kind of book I really like. I even wrote down a quote...
"But I have learned in these days to stop lingering on what could have been and to simply to head to what I need now." It totally spoke to me...

BUT I HATE THIS BOOK! The writing is awful. I kept slogging and slogging through needless description, ridiculuos personal preaching, political blahing and cliche after cliche. Radish is a columnist - she must have an amazing editor - because this book was just crying out for a red pen.

I never react this way.. The story was so good - but there is no way I can recommend this because it's just too painful to try to read....

Shucks!!!

Song Without Words by Ann Packer

I really like Ann Packer, but there are moments that I really hate Ann Packer. She has a way of peeling back the covers we use to hide what we really are and her characters stand exposed in front of the world. It's not a pretty site, and it's absolutely beautiful!

Sarabeth and Liz grow up intertwined: best friends, neighbors, survivors. Sarabeth's mom commits suicide while Sarabeth is in high school. She moves in with Liz and her family when her dad flees the life he is left with.

Then the story speeds up to today...Sarabeth and Liz still live tangled lives. Liz is the responsible stay-at-home mom of two teens and Sarabeth has a series of 1/2 jobs and barely gets by on her bohemian lifestyle.

But - then things change...Lauren (Liz's daughter) attempts suicide...and life falls apart of one and all. Liz, who has always been the one on top, the one with it all together, the one who doesn't stumble has had her life shredded into tiny unfamiliar pieces. And she falls flat on her face.

So, Sarabeth, who's life has been a train wreck should be there to help her best friend...but she can't be. She is frozen in the hell of her own life. Hiding in a living room filled with tiny items scavenged from each relationship she has been a part of.

This isn't one of those books that is easy and fast and a true escape. No way..instead it's hard and uncomfortable and moves in spurts and stutters and is rather ugly for much of the time and then without anyone really noticing, it's better. It's life.

I waited and waited for the title to make sense.. Sarabeth comments a couple of time about the song she hears in her head. Near the end we find out that hearing the song is fine - it's when you start to hear the words that are in the song...that's when you need to be afraid! It was the words that drove Lauren to make four long cuts on one wrist and two on the other.

That gives me something to think about... me who listens to the negative voice in my head way to often...maybe I need to strain to hear the music instead! :)

The Grand Complication by Allen Kurzweil

This one was for the future librarian in me. Alexander Short is an eccentric reference librarian at the NYC public library. His life is filled with call slips and odd jottings in his 'girdle' book - a book attached to his coat through a leather tab in the buttonhole. In the book he jots lists of oddities...a major oddity in itself.

Then he meets Henry James Jesson, an even odder old man. His interests lies in antiques, small spaces and a stolen watch.

He 'happens' to befriend Alexander and together they begin researching the missing watch to complete his antique compartment display.

Against Alexander's wife, Nic's, wishes he becomes more and more enmeshed in Jesson's life - to the point of moving into his house. It is there that Alexander discovers that Jesson has created the entire story and research - in his loneliness Jesson has created this elaborate scheme to gain a friend...what a loser!

Anyway - it was a book to be enjoyed by a future librarian for it's library humor - library references and library connections. Otherwise - it was not one of my favorites...a little slow, a little odd, a little too full of references to things and people I really didn't know...


one of my favorite quotes was...
"Remember library work is not science, whatever claims our profession might make. Never forget that luck and error are the handmaidens of all research." Hmmm....

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

This is not one of my favorites...really not one of my favorites.
But, there were parts that lifted it up a bit. It is the story of Helen - a truly twisted tale of a murder. Helen is telling the story of the murder of her mother - and she is the murderess. (Weird word - murderess)

Anyway - Helen's mother is an agrophobe who has slowly smothered her...or so we think. Helen's father committed suicide years earlier. Helen has carried the weight of her mother in her outlook, her relationships and her very being. Murdering her should have lifted that weight - rather she is bound to the house, the body, and the braid that hung down her mother's back.

It's a dark story and very depressing!

But - there was a standout scene - that remains with me...Helen's father cared for her mother in a loving and doting way as he dealt with his own mental illness. She didn't really understand this until he took her to see his old home. It was in a town that had been moved due to a dam and the coming flood. But, the flood didn't really happen, instead it was more of an oozing of mud and muck which kept people out and caused the houses to die a slow death for a dejected place. It was there, in that empty world, her father found solace. There he created the family and the life he really wanted. He shared that with his daughter on a summer afternoon. Her father had created wooden cutouts of family scenes in the deserted rooms of his family house, scenes depicting events from his childhood and Helen's including the siblings that Helen would never have.

That scene seems to me to be the center of this story - a woman caught in an impossible life, a life that should have changed with a whoosh as she was freed from her mother through marriage and moving. Instead she was tied to the decaying life of her mother and the scenes of an imagined world.

So - I followed Helen through the day following the death of her mother. Hoping for some sort of resolution at the end...WRONG. It just ends...it just stops. I really hate that. That in itself made me decide how much I really didn't like the book.