Book Reports

I haven't blogged about any books I have read recently, so I'll lump them all together into one long post. I told my children I wanted a nap and uninterrupted time to lay on the couch and finish reading The Help for Mother's Day today. They left me alone while I had a nice nap and gave me time to finish reading my book. It was a glorious Mother's Day!

I'll give my opinion of each book and follow it with a professional review taken from amazon.

If you are an adoptive parent of children from China, you MUST read Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother. All of Xinran's books are very good. I have read this book a couple of times. The first time, I probably went through an entire box of tissues. It is not a happy read, but it is an important read. It helps me understand more about the culture where my children were born. It makes me wonder about their birth families and the circumstances which led to their being placed in orphanages.

I give this book 10 stars.

"Xinran (Good Women of China) collects the heartbreaking stories of Chinese women forced to give up their baby girls because of the one-child-only policy or feudal traditions that prefer boys, in an oral history written for those abandoned daughters. Speaking with midwives, students, businesswomen, adoption workers, peasants, and "extra-birth guerrilla troops" (people who live on the lam eluding the system so they can have more than one baby), Xinran is compassionate and remarkably adept at getting her interviewees to open up about their most painful memories: how some mothers were forced to put their babies up for adoption or abandon them at hospitals, orphanages, or on the street, and how they've seen newborns drowned or smothered at birth. She shows how outdated traditions, modern policies, and punishing poverty spur the abandonment of so many female infants, and an abnormally high suicide rate for women of childbearing age. This is a brutally honest book written for those relinquished children, so that they will know how much their birth mothers loved them and how--in the words of one mother who gave up her daughter--"they paid for that love with an endless stream of bitter tears." (Mar.)
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I just finished reading The Help. I'm going to recommend this book to our book club. It is excellent. My favorite character is Minny. I love the pie she serves to my least favorite character, Hilly. You will have to read to find out what I am talking about:)

I give this book 10 stars.

Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who “yes, ma’am,” and “no, ma’am,” to the young white ladies who order the days. This is the world Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth’s two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches on to the idea of writing the story of such fraught domestic relations from the help’s point of view. With the reluctant assistance of Aibileen’s feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the city’s maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson’s world in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for character and setting, Stockett’s richly accomplished debut novel inventively explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to generate keen interest in Stockett’s luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty, courage, and redemption. --Carol Haggas --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
I enjoy reading books about WWII Japanese internment camps. I seriously didn't know about the camps until I was an adult. It is certainly an embarrassing part of US history and I suppose my high school teachers didn't want to talk about it. I enjoyed Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because many of the places discussed are familiar to me because the setting is in Seattle. I was especially excited about the mention of the elementary where I used to teach. I loved the Romeo/Juliet theme between the Chinese American boy and the Japanese American girl. Another excellent book.

I give it 9 stars.

Henry Lee is a 12-year-old Chinese boy who falls in love with Keiko Okabe, a 12-year-old Japanese girl, while they are scholarship students at a prestigious private school in World War II Seattle. Henry hides the relationship from his parents, who would disown him if they knew he had a Japanese friend. His father insists that Henry wear an "I am Chinese" button everywhere he goes because Japanese residents of Seattle have begun to be shipped off by the thousands to relocation centers. This is an old-fashioned historical novel that alternates between the early 1940s and 1984, after Henry's wife Ethel has died of cancer. A particularly appealing aspect of the story is young Henry's fascination with jazz and his friendship with Sheldon, an older black saxophonist just making a name for himself in the many jazz venues near Henry's home. Other aspects of the story are more typical of the genre: the bullies that plague Henry, his lack of connection with his father, and later with his own son. Readers will care about Henry as he is forced to make decisions and accept circumstances that separate him from both his family and the love of his life. While the novel is less perfect as literature than John Hamamura's Color of the Sea (Thomas Dunne, 2006), the setting and quietly moving, romantic story are commendable.—Angela Carstensen, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City
This book was our book club book for April. I'm glad it was a book club book or I might not have finished it. It started kind of slow. It gets more and more exciting as the mother tells her fairy tale which turns out to be the story of her life in Russia during the Stalin era. It is incredibly sad. You will need a box of tissues for this book.

I give this book 9 stars.

The Whitson family is rocked by the sudden death of patriarch Evan, a warm, loving man who doted on his two adult daughters, Meredith and Nina, and his reserved Russian wife, Anya. Meredith, who runs the family business, and Nina, a photojournalist whose job takes her to war zones around the world, have never been able to connect with their cold, forbidding mother. When Anya begins to act strangely, Meredith thinks she belongs in a nursing home, but Nina decides to try to fulfill her father’s dying wish and get her mother to tell her and Meredith the elaborate fairy tales she used to share with them. Anya is initially reluctant, but once she begins, Nina realizes these tales are actually the story of Anya’s life in Stalinist Leningrad. Meredith and Nina decide to attempt to uncover the truth about their mother’s tragic past in the hope of understanding her, and themselves. Though the novel starts off fairly maudlin, it evolves into a gripping read, although it’s a tearjerker. Hannah’s previous books, including Firefly Lane (2008) and True Colors (2009), are tailor-made for book clubs, and her audience should find plenty to discuss in this equally enthralling entry. --Kristine Huntley --This text refers to theHardcover edition.

I read this book for book club this month. I ended up doing a little research on the Nazi WWII occupation of the British Channel Islands as I read this book. I found it to be very fascinating. I thought the plot was good (a book club formed when a German soldier questioned why they were out past curfew...they lied and told him they were a book club...many of them had never read a book their entire lives and now they had to continue meeting and discussing books to fool the Germans who kept an eye on their book club). The book was written in the form of letters between the characters. My only complaint is the characters didn't seem unique. All the letters sounded the same. The farmer who never read anything besides the back of seed packets should have had shorter letters filled with mistakes or something yet he was as eloquent and had the same "voice" as the professional writer.

I give it 8 stars.

Winding up her book tour promoting her collection of lighthearted wartime newspaper columns, Juliet Ashton casts about for a more serious project. Opportunity comes in the form of a letter she receives from Mr. Dawsey Adams, who happens to possess a book that Julia once owned. Adams is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—no ordinary book club. Rather, it was formed as a ruse and became a way for people to get together without raising the suspicions of Guernsey’s Nazi occupiers. Written in the form of letters (a lost art), this novel by an aunt-and-niece team has loads of charm, especially as long as Juliet is still in London corresponding with the society members. Some of the air goes out of the book when she gets to Guernsey; the humorous tone doesn’t quite mesh with what the islanders suffered. But readers should enjoy this literary soufflé for the most part, and curiosity about the German occupation of the British Channel Islands will be piqued. --Mary Ellen Quinn --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

I didn't finish this book. It was highly recommended to me by a friend, but I didn't like it. I like some science fiction, but not this book. I really like House of Scorpions by Nancy Farmer and when I mentioned that book to her, my friend told me about Oryx and Crake. I highly recommend Farmer's book (I'd give that one 10 stars), but I wouldn't recommend Oryx and Crake unless you really like science fiction. There was too much sexual innuendoes for me too. I put it down after reading about 150 pages and started reading The Help instead. I think my sister, Becky, would like it though. If you actually read this post, Becky...read this book and tell me what you think:)

I give this book 5 stars.

In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca