Month: July 2020

What I’m Reading Now: Maude by Donna Mabry

I first heard Maude on a lengthy car trip from southern Mississippi to east Texas. At first I wasn’t too sure about the audiobook’s narrator, Shana Gagnon, but as time went on I grew accustomed to her accent, which sounded more Northeast than the expected Southern accent.

Maude is the story of a woman born in 1892 in rural Tennessee. She lives through many of the historic events of the twentieth century–the pandemic flu, the Great Depression and both world wars. While the story touches on all of these events, it’s really about her personal and family life and how she lives, loves, and survives through poverty, motherhood, and two marriages.

The book is one of my all-time favorites. I love how the story moves through time and lets us witness one family moving from the horse and buggy days to the modern era of running water and automobiles. I love the characters, too, and how Donna Mabry uses their dialogue and actions to characterize them. For instance, the mother-in-law “welcomes” her daughter-in-law on her first night in a new home by leaving her out on the doorstep, and the sheriff of a sleepy town takes frequent naps at his desk during the day.

Mabry tells the story in first-person from Maude’s perspective. The real-life Maude is Mabry’s paternal grandmother. As Mabry explains in her intro to the novel, her grandma Maude used to share a bedroom with her some evenings, and during those times Maude would share stories from her life. At the encouragement of her daughter, Mabry decided to write down the stories, and they became this novel, which I would call both uplifting and sad.

This weekend, I started re-listening to the novel on a short car trip to Knoxville, and it will be my go-to listen today while I’m on the treadmill. Gotta love these audiobooks!

Maude

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What I’m Reading Now: The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson

The Other Side, a memoir written by Lacy M. Johnson, at first feels like the story of her rape and attempted murder at the hands of her ex-boyfriend. However, it’s more than that. It also tells the story of a woman who continues to suffer PTSD as a victim of such a crime as well as a constant fear that her tormentor will come back for her.

The structure of the memoir might alienate some readers because the transitions between events are not smooth. She skips back and forth and back between childhood events, details about ex-lovers, and more recent details of her life with her husband and children. At times it took me a moment to figure out where we were in time, which annoyed me. Perhaps the author wants the narrative to give off a feeling of confusion and uncertainty, as if she’s trying to somehow give the reader a teeny tiny glimpse of what it might be like to live in a fractured mind. While I see the possible reasons for telling the story this way, I can still say it frustrated me.

The audio version I listened to was read by the author and lasts only four hours. Though the book is succinct, at times I questioned why she included certain details about her life after the rape that didn’t feel directly connected to the rape. Perhaps she did it to give the reader a sense of her personality and life circumstances.

One positive thing I can say about this author is that she doesn’t try to charm the reader into liking her. A lot of nonfiction writers choose to present themselves in a “good” light, but not Johnson. She doesn’t shy from things that some women would be ashamed to admit, such as her time working as a stripper or that she lived with her abuser for over two years before he kidnapped her. Given people’s tendencies to blame a victim for abuse, I think adding these details shows both courage and honesty on Johnson’s part. Brava. 

 

 

 

 

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What I’m Reading Now: The Most They Ever Had by Rick Bragg

Today I finished Rick Bragg’s nonfiction book, The Most They Ever Had, which is about cotton mill workers in northeast Alabama in the 20th century. The book is a series of vignettes that include stories of mill life. It takes you on a journey through working conditions before and after textile workers’ unions existed. I quite liked this book, but mostly for personal reasons. One reason is that it reminds me of the small Georgia town I grew up in–Commerce, GA (pop. approx. 6,000). We had an old cotton mill there called Harmony Grove Mill. It shut down somewhere near the century’s end. We also had another cotton mill in Jefferson, Georgia, the town where I attended high school. My mother’s brother, Toby, lost two fingers working in the Jefferson mill, and my oldest brother worked there one summer when he came home from college. Both my parents were poultry plant workers, but they picked cotton when they were growing up back in the ’50s and ’60s.

The other thing I like about Bragg’s book is that he reads the audio version himself. At times throughout, his voice catches ever so slightly, as if he’s struggling to choke back tears. He’s writing not just the personal histories of the mill workers he’s interviewed, but his own family history. His brother worked in an Alabama textile mill before it shut down. His mother picked cotton for years. Bragg has taken his own personal history and combined it with the histories of others, and added a bit of research to create something akin to a patchwork quilt.

Bragg’s book is written with nostalgia, which I’m not quite sure makes any sense. Why be nostalgic for a cotton mill? The pay was low. The job was often dangerous. And yet the book calls it the most they ever had. It reminds me a little of how some Southerners are nostalgic for the old South–a land of 90+ heat with no air conditioning, thick cotton fields, and race prejudice. Yet, sometimes when you hear an old Southerner speak of those days they will smile. I guess we all tend to romanticize childhood, regardless of what type of childhood it was.

My mother will often listen to audiobooks. When I first suggested The Most They Ever Had a few years back, she said it was too sad for her to finish reading it. I put it away myself without reading it because I was judging it based on her reading preferences. My mother hardly turns away from a sad book, so if she couldn’t finish it I didn’t think I’d be able to either. Still, I’m glad that I went back and finished listening to this one.

The Most They Ever Had

 

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What I’m Reading Now: My Dark Vanessa

I started the audiobook of My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell today. I got it free from the Hoopla app at the public library. If you’re a book lover who doesn’t have Hoopla, you should check with your local public library and ask if they have access to Hoopla. I’ve listened to a lot of good books on there so far, and you check them out the same as you would a regular library book. It’s free and easy.

As for My Dark Vanessa, I’m conflicted about this book, but I’m leaning more toward not liking it. It’s about a 15-year-old girl who has a sexual relationship with her 42-year-old English teacher. My major problem with the book is that so far it hasn’t surprised me. I’m more than five hours into it, which means I’m about 1/3 of the way through the book, and everything is turning out exactly the way I first envisioned it before I even started listening. Is there an unfair and unsettling power dynamic between the student and the teacher? Yes, there is. I also expected lurid details about their sex life, and it delivers on that as well. All these old binaries and clichés are on full display: powerful male vs. defenseless female, a younger and more naïve person juxtaposed with an older and sexually mature partner, and an older person who manipulates and controls the younger partner. The man is even so gross that he has big sweat stains under his arms. By comparison, the girl is much smaller and defenseless, barely coming up to his shoulder when they stand next to one another. He coaxes her into doing things she doesn’t want, which is exactly what I expected. So my big criticism so far is that the book plays into old hackneyed things we’ve seen before. It feels like the plot of a Lifetime movie. In fact, I’m almost certain Lifetime has more than one film about an older man pursuing an inappropriately young girl. He grooms her and manipulates her and then selfishly takes everything she will give. She’s so naïve that she thinks it’s up to her to give what he wants, even if it makes her uncomfortable and hurts her emotionally and physically.

My other big criticism is that the book feels much too long. The audiobook is over fifteen hours, and the physical copy of the book is close to four hundred pages. So far, I feel like I’m seeing some of the same things over and over again–him touching her, him asking permission after he’s already crossed a boundary, and her trying to hide the relationship from her parents and those at her school, etc. I feel like some of this stuff could just be told in summary instead of giving us all the details. Of course he has to tell her to keep quiet, so I don’t feel that we need to be reminded of this over and over again. The reader already knows that he’s risking his job, his reputation, and his freedom, and I don’t think all of this information has to be given to the reader so explicitly. It could be more nuanced. The novel, in my opinion, could be at least a hundred pages shorter.

On the positive side, I think the author is brave to take the risk of writing about this subject matter. Some readers will look at the synopsis and bypass the book altogether just because it sounds so sleazy and salacious. However, the author isn’t afraid to go there. She undoubtedly knows the material isn’t for every reader, yet she is brave enough to take the risk and go for it. I also like that it directly addresses the Me, Too movement. One of the teacher’s other young victims comes forward early in the book, which makes the narrator debate whether she should come forward in solidarity, and she even reflects on Me, Too and the cultural moment concerning victims coming forward to out their abusers. I guess that’s the only thing that’s making me want to keep reading this.  I want to see if our narrator, Vanessa, will stay quiet or have the courage to confront the teacher about what he’s done and also help prevent him from hurting someone else.

My Dark Vanessa

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Girl Talk #6: The Ghost of Eagle Mountain, or The One in Which Native American History Is Distorted by Whites

And now we come to The Ghost of Eagle Mountain. As a child reader, this one and Face Off! were my favorites of the entire series. Told from Allison’s perspective, this book focuses on a skiing trip that she and her fellow seventh-graders take to Eagle Mountain (which I recently learned is a real place in Minnesota). Allison and the gang find out that they are rooming together, but the other four people in their cabin will be vain, snobby, Stacey “the Great” Hansen and her friends Eva, Laurel, and B.Z.

From the first mention of the trip to Eagle Mountain, Allison has a dreadful feeling that something terrible will happen. Then, she inexplicably finds a loose eagle feather in her locker at school. Allison’s grandma later tells her a story about a man named Eagle Feather who was one of their family’s tribe, the Chippewa. He was separated from his wife and child when the Indians were relocated to a reservation. The legend says that he haunts the area around Eagle Mountain, searching for his lost love.

On the way to Eagle Mountain, the school bus breaks down, and Allison can’t shake the ominous feeling of dread. Allison and her friends do have a good bit of fun learning to ski from their cute instructor. However, when given the task to go on a scavenger hunt on skis, the girls get lost after trying to take a shortcut. This feels like something that would almost never happen in real life. Chaperones are always right around the corner on school trips. It’s hard to believe they’d let a bunch of groups go off on their own through the woods on skis. Allison and company get sooo lost. They wind up crossing a stream and then skiing near a frozen river.

Inexplicably, the girls find their way back to the trail. Or, I guess I should say that they stumble onto the ski lodge by dumb luck.

After dinner, Ranger Rob begins to tell all the 7th graders a ghost story, and Allison realizes it’s the story her grandma told her about Eagle Feather. However, Rob’s story is completely different. He calls Eagle Feather by the name of Flying Eagle and says that Flying Eagle was a menacing Indian who liked to attack white settlers. He says that now that Flying Eagle is dead he roams Eagle Mountain in search of his next victims. Allison, of course, becomes enraged. I remember feeling upset, too, while reading this as a middle-schooler. I didn’t have the language to describe it back then, but I just knew and understood what an injustice it was. Now I see that this is a prime example of history being mistold and distorted by the victors. God only knows how many real-life instances we have of this. In grad school a white classmate of mine asked why we need to teach books by a diversity of authors. My best answer is that diverse reading helps us see things from multiple perspectives. When I teach slave narratives in American lit classes, students are often shocked by the stories. They grew up knowing that slavery existed in this country, but many history books don’t go into much detail about the gruesome, inhumane ways slaves were treated. That’s why we need diversity. We need for people to read multiple perspectives in order for them to understand. Same is true for Native Americans and settlers and the long and painful history about what happened between them.

One issue I have with this book is that things are tied up too neatly. Allison ventures off into the woods because she thinks she hears the ghost of Eagle Feather moaning. She gets lost but sits down and sings to the ghost. Her voice quiets the wind and the moaning. Then, an eagle feather drifts down from the sky. She takes this as a sign that the ghost is now at rest. Too easy. Then, her friends find her after she’s only been lost for about ten minutes. Too easy.

Don’t get me wrong. I still like this book because I like its message about giving a voice to oppressed people. However, I guess I was expecting a bit more complexity, which might be too much to ask of a book for middle-graders. Anyway, it’s still a good book and one I’d recommend to school kids.

Grade: A-

Ghost of Eagle Mountain

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Girl Talk #11: Mixed Feelings

This one focuses on Katie Campbell. The basic plot: Katie’s mother begins dating a newcomer to town, a man whose son plays on the hockey team with Katie at school. The son’s name is Michel, and the father is Jean Paul, and the twosome hail from Canada and have heavy, French Canadian accents. The accent is described by both Katie and Sabs as a French accent, which confused me. Would it really be called a French accent if they aren’t from France? As a child when I read these books I didn’t understand the difference between a race and an ethnic group, and I thought French Canadians were a different category of white and I even questioned their whiteness, and I believe the reason I did this is that the author makes mention of how dark Michel’s hair and eyes are, which made me think that he looks like a dark-featured Native American or a brown Hispanic. I’m not sure if this is what the author intended. I come from a small town in Georgia where most of the people are whites descended from Scotch Irish and have lived in this country for many generations. I didn’t hear too many foreign accents in my town and had never met any French or Canadian people. Reading these books as a middle schooler helped to introduce me to people outside my town, even though those people are fictional. Another great reason to read is that it opens people up to varying perspectives. I realize that a white writer might think of other white people as dark. Whereas, I’m a dark-skinned Black woman and rarely think of most whites as dark at all. In fact, if you’re past a certain shade, I question if you’re truly white.

Anyway, here are a few notable things that happened in this one:

  1. Katie’s mom meets Michel’s dad, Mr. Beauvais, when he applies for a mortgage at the bank where she works. Later in the series it’s revealed that the Beauvais family is stinking rich, so why are they applying for a home loan? Why wouldn’t they just pay cash?
  2. The title is a bit misleading. Katie doesn’t have mixed feelings about Michel. She likes him as a friend and doesn’t really think of him as more than that. She doesn’t spend much time thinking about him at all. Instead, she wants to win the big hockey game and make the playoffs. She also worries when her mother gets a makeover and announces that she’s seeing Jean Paul, and this is because he’s the first man she’s dated since Katie’s father passed away three years ago. Katie doesn’t have romantic feelings for Michel, and in fact she gets excited when she finds out that Michel thinks her friend Sabrina is cute. However, the blurb and cover photo lead you to think that there’s a love triangle between Katie, Michel, and Sabrina:

Mixed Feelings

3.  Katie changes clothes in a separate locker room away from the boys. Scottie Silver sticks his eye into a peephole and giggles. Katie squirts him with water and has a chuckle about it. If I were her,  I’d be horrified that a group of boys has a peephole into my private changing space. Katie doesn’t even tattle to the coach or report it to anyone to get the hole plugged.

4.   Remember how Scottie treated Katie so heinously in book #2 when she tried out for the team? He teamed up with the guys and beat her up on the ice by playing super rough. He even taunted her about it afterward. In this book, Scottie again shows jerk behavior. Jealous that Michel is a better hockey player than him and jealous that Katie hangs around with Michel, Scottie acts like a jerk and freezes Katie out by sulking, yelling at her, and staring off into the distance. I get that he’s a middle school boy and perhaps his age makes him prone to doing stupid things, but wouldn’t it make better sense for him to just ask Katie if she’s into Michel rather than mistreat her? After Katie becomes injured in a hockey match, Scottie starts to play rougher toward the other team as a way of lashing out and getting rid of his frustration about her injury, and this behavior gets him called for a penalty, which puts the team in danger of losing the big game. However, Scottie gets out of the penalty box in time to assist in the game-winning goal Michel scores. Scottie does eventually apologize to Katie for being so mean to her, and she instantly forgives him.

5.   Sabs, Randy, and Allison all act strangely and mysteriously around Katie. For instance, they stop talking whenever she walks into the room. Her birthday is coming up, so it’s obvious to the reader that they’re sneaking behind Katie’s back to plan a surprise party. Katie doesn’t catch on, and instead she becomes hurt and worried that her friends are keeping secrets from her.

6. This book reminds us how physically tough ice hockey can be. Katie is injured in this one to the extent that she needs eight stitches in her chin. If she were my child, I’m not sure I’d let her continue to play hockey, and while her mother dotes on her and babies her a little after the injury, there’s never a mention of Katie giving up the sport.

7. For me, the best part about the book is reading about Katie’s reactions to her mother dating Jean Paul. Even though her father’s dead, Katie feels that her mother somehow shows disloyalty to his memory by dating another man. Neither Katie nor Emily want Mrs. Campbell to date, but they cannot say they dislike Jean Paul. He treats them cordially and makes Mrs. Campbell happy. Also, the mother wants Katie and her sister Emily to be happy and is nervous to introduce them to Jean Paul for the first time. Later in the series we’ll see both families struggle as members of a blended family, which is a real-word issue that I think a lot of readers connected with.

Come back later this week for my recap of The Ghost of Eagle Mountain. I remember loving that one when I was a child, and I hope I still enjoy it now.

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