Clifford Garstang

In very simple Chinese, this book is a fun way to practice reading instead of just studying grammar and vocabulary. This is the first Mandarin Companion book I've read and it was perhaps too easy for my level–not the book's fault, of course–so I'll look for more advanced books in the series. Recommended for students of Chinese.

The book is structured in two parts–leaving and coming home. In the first part, we glimpse the 4 siblings spinning away from home and finding their own lives; in the second part their being reeled back in as the story builds toward a Christmas Day climax with their mother, Rosaleen. The five points of view, then, represent the family. The short sections toward the end of the book feel a bit like unravelling, but not in a good way. Perhaps the novel ends in the wrong place?

Waltzing with Horses by Felicia Mitchell is a poetry collection published by Press 53 that I picked up a few years ago and have only just now gotten around to reading. It's a terrific collection that I enjoyed making my slow way through, a poem or two a day usually. Many of the poems are personal and confessional, and a good number of them are about the poet's mother, moving ever closer to death through the pages until, in the collection's last poem, “After the memorial service/ we buried a salamander instead.” In another poem, a keen observation: “In the museum she has made of her living room/ photographs of my mother's life are stacked and pinned/ as if looking at them will take the place of memory.”

As an adult, I'm not this book's intended audience, but I still appreciated the story and the depiction of the main characters (including the house with all of its nooks and hiding places). Lainie is a girl with spunk, and, despite her family's traumatic past, a healthy dose of optimism (tempered by standard age-appropriate angst). I think young readers will definitely enjoy going along for the ride as Lainie attempts to solve a family mystery with the help of her best friend and a crush-worthy boy.

Having been, like the author, a Peace Corps Volunteer (although in a different country), and also having worked in Kazakhstan for a time (a decade before the author), I very much enjoyed these essays that are part memoir and part journalism about some of the challenges that Kazakhstan faces. Anyone who is interested in how the rest of the world works–and everyone should be–would benefit from reading this book.

I'm no expert in the young-adult genre, but this is a terrific book. Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird, with which it has some important similarities, this book is about kids who will seem real to a modern reader: they're flawed and they're from flawed families. For more, see my review at Perpetual Folly.

The narrator of this brilliantly assembled book is unreliable as any you'll come across, but that's what makes him so fascinating. He has such a high opinion of himself that there is nowhere for him to go but downhill, and the reader gets to watch. The prose is flawless, and the book is a master class on “voice.”

One Life to Give, written by Andrew Bienkowski with Mary Akers, is divided into fourteen chapters, each one a separate lesson derived from Bienkowski's life as a child when he and his family were exiled from Poland to Siberia. They endured incredible suffering that the book can only really hint at. But through the suffering and the sacrifices of others, Bienkowski learned. And so the reader learns about the concept of “Radical Gratitude”—taking nothing for granted and remembering all the things in our lives with which we are blessed. We also learn about Listening, Hope, Perseverence, Kindness, and Love. But these are not abstract lessons at all. They are concrete suggestions for living a more fulfilled life skillfully crafted by Bienkowski, a therapist, and Akers, a talented writer. The total package is one that will be hard to put down and even harder to forget.

See my full review at Perpetual Folly.

I'll probably have more to say about this later, but wanted to comment that this book was a fast and fun read. I'm still not exactly sure what happened, though. The main character, JB (the author's initials) is obsessed with a woman who may or may not at one point become his wife. They meet frequently on elevators. They break up and obsess over each other. I think I need to read it again.

Let me just say, though, that it bugged me that the copyeditor doesn't know the difference between “a while” and “awhile”–might have cost the book a star in my estimation.

I remember reading “Familial Kindness” when it appeared in One Story. At the time I thought it was a bit of a puzzle, but it seems to fairly standard for Lunstrum's stories. I'm not a fan of clear resolutions, but these stories seem end ambiguously in a big way. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but for me is less than satisfying. I found motivations of characters to be something of a puzzle, as well. Not that they behaved improbably, just that within the story it wasn't always clear why they made the choices they did, and that seems important.

This is an odd little book that is something of an oral history of the United States told from a leftist's perspective, which is fine if, like me, you're a leftist. I knew of Banks's views when I bought the book, so it's orientation was no surprise. And I enjoyed it very much, agreeing with it virtually every step of the way. Whether it really should be a book that someone charges $21.95 for is another question, though. I think it would have made a fantastic magazine article in, say, The Nation.