Book Reviews

The voice of Zara, an aspiring teenaged photographer in Rhode Island, alternates with the story of her mother, Nadja who survived the 1990s Yugoslav War in “We Are All That’s Left” (Philomel 2018), a novel by Carrie Arcos.

 

The Yugoslav War led to the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia. Serbs and Croats were bent on “ethnic cleansing” and ridding their country of Muslims. Nadja’s family, non-practicing Muslims, were all shot and killed as teenaged Nadja watched—hidden. She managed to escape to war-torn Sarajevo with the help of her non-Muslim boyfriend Marko. But he was gone now.

 

In Sarajevo, Nadja heard people screaming. “She decided if she were to get shot, she would not scream. She would not make a sound. She would be . . . silent and strong, like a large willow tree near the river.” It was no wonder she’d closed off. But after some harrowing years, she made her way to the U.S. and married an American physician. Considering her background, it’s clear to see why Nadja’s mothering skills were less than stellar. Zara is not close to her mother, but she longs to be loved.

 

Arcos begins the book with terrorist attacks in Rhode Island and around the U.S. Zara and Nadja happen to be at the farmer’s market when a terrorist’s bomb explodes, seriously injuring Zara and putting Nadja in a coma. Zara has the shrapnel excised from her back and face and returns home to her brother and attending grandparents. Her father spends much of his time in the hospital keeping busy and checking on his comatose wife.

 

Almost a universal experience among survivors, Zara says, “I think of . . . the people who lost limbs. Those who died. Why did I survive? . . . Nothing makes sense . . .” Not long before the attack Zara had refused to talk to her seemingly cold mother. “I wanted to be mad because I felt like it was justified, like anger gave me a strength to fight the loneliness and hurt I felt.” At the time her mother had the wisdom to say to her daughter, “It takes a stronger person to let others in.”

 

But now Nadja is in a coma. Zara longs to let her mother in—to know her. She wants to know about the war years. In her mother’s closet, Zara finds a box filled with mementos from the war—objects we have become privy to, as we read Nadja’s story.

 

Wise, handsome Joseph befriends Zara at the hospital. He studies world religions in order to deal with his own traumatic life experience and paraphrases Rumi, the Muslim mystic, saying, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”

 

Zara is wounded inside and out. Eventually she realizes, “Scars . . . don’t diminish our lives, but make them richer somehow.” This is a story of mother and daughter, of love and bonding, as well as of survival.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker among other books   talesforallages.com

Joe Moon is seventeen and hasn’t seen his older brother Ed in ten years in “Moonrise” (Bloomsbury 2018) by Sarah Crossan. Joe is nearly penniless, but he leaves New York to go to Wakeling, Texas. Ed is on death row and his execution date is set.

 

Angela, his sister, stays in Staten Island to earn money for the family, slinging burgers. Joe’s father is not in the picture. His junkie mother left and who knows where she is. Aunt Karen helped out as long as Joe and Angela would denounce their brother. In this novel-in-verse, with great economy, Crossan shows the deep emotional story. “But Ed’s crime put us in another league,/ and that’s where Aunt Karen stepped in—/she spat on us and shined us up to look/ like a decent family . . .” And when they couldn’t denounce their brother any longer, Aunt Karen left.

 

Ed was almost a father-figure to Joe ten years earlier when Ed was 17. But now? Joe hardly knows him. But Ed’s his brother.

 

Ed says he didn’t do it. The justice system is well known to want a conviction when a police officer is murdered. Teenagers like Ed don’t know not to speak without a lawyer present. Police are known to bully a “confession” out of minors by means of abuse and fear tactics. There’s no DNA at the scene that links Ed. But in the end, does it even matter if Ed is guilty or not? Is the death sentence reasonable? Especially when the justice system might have chosen the wrong perpetrator?

 

Ed is on the news and made to look vicious. But Ed isn’t vicious. And being related to a convicted murderer? Joe is shunned. He says, “ . . . Newscasters love revealing the beauty of the victims—/like they’re the only ones who got slammed./Reporters don’t give a damn about our family./ We’re not a story. We’re dirt.”

 

Joe says to Angela “God. It’s better to be guilty and rich,/ I reckon . . .” But Joe gets himself to Wakeling, finds a filthy slum room to live in, tries to line up a job as a mechanic and screws up the nerve to visit Ed on the row. Joe is searched and led down the corridor. “From somewhere close by comes a holler—/a laugh, barbed and desperate.” One feels the culture on the row. Joe speaks to Ed through plexi-glass via a phone. It’s not easy to communicate.

 

In the meantime, Joe finds Nelly. He needs a friend. He needs support. But, is Nelly a good match for Joe? Will Angela come like she promises? Has anyone seen their mother? These kids need help pretty badly. But maybe they’re the best support there is.

 

And how do you say goodbye? Time is ticking. The emotion pulls you along and the situation invites discussion on life, death, and love. What’s more important?

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker among other books   talesforallages.com

Sarah is fifteen, blue-eyed, blonde—and Jewish—living in 1939 Nazi Germany in “Orphan Monster Spy” (Viking 2018) by Matt Killeen. The story opens with Sarah’s mother being shot at a roadside checkpoint. Sarah, now an orphan with no identity papers, runs. Her former gymnastic training helps her scale walls and skirt roofs. She meets a man with an unidentifiable accent. In her desperation, she lets him rescue her.

Just as Sarah, aided by her rescuer, is about to find freedom on an outbound ship, she returns the favor by getting off the ship and rescuing her rescuer. Sarah knows her rescuer, first, as Captain Floyd, a British spy. Sarah learns about her mysterious savior through his library. She assesses him “A liar and a trickster.” “Correct,” he says. Can we trust him?

Soon Captain Floyd becomes Herr Haller. With Sarah’s Aryan looks she can pass for Hitler Youth. Haller enrolls her, as Ursula, his niece, at an elite Nazi girls boarding school. The daughter of a Nazi scientist who is purported to be building a bomb on his nearby estate—a bomb capable of destroying European cities—is also enrolled.

Sarah’s job is to befriend the Nazi girl, get invited to her home and report about this bomb project. It helps that Sarah’s mother was an actress who trained her daughter in languages, accents, and acting. Principles of acting run throughout this page-turner. “Stay in character.” Never “drop your mask.” Most importantly, “Use the fear. Fear is an energy. Break it up and build something new.”

After playing the piano, Sarah says, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” The Captain tells her “Good National Socialist girls don’t quote Picasso, or play Satie. You’ve got to be a good dumb little monster now.”

Girls can be mean. Nazi schoolgirls have had special training for the task. Sarah has issues with the monster role. She instinctively wants to protect the weak. At the same time she competes with the strong, in an effort to win their respect. She must win over the “Ice Queen,” the leader, to get to her real subject—daughter of the bomb builder.

Sarah feels she must win a brutal cross-country race, which spans a fast running river and miles of woods. She uses the power of memory of Kristallnacht—the injustice of what was done to Jews—to fuel her ability to cross over the canopy of trees, which spans the river, rather than the regular route over the bridge. Is this cheating? In a world so brutal a little cheating is easily forgiven. If she can defuse the process of bomb-making by reporting secrets to Herr Haller, the free world might be saved—she hopes. Big stakes. And it’s all told in a believable manner.

There are those who think this is an adult book, which would be enjoyed by young adults, but it’s published and marketed as young adult. The flaws of the protagonist make us believe in the authenticity of this high-tension high-stakes story.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker   talesforallages.com

In “Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World” (First Second 2017), author/illustrator Pénélope Baglieu rocks the stories of thirty ladies—in graphic novel form. Some of these ladies you may know, others you may not. How about Agnodice, born in fourth century Greece, disguised herself as a man to study medicine and became the first female gynecologist? How brazen is that?

What about Margaret Hamilton, who vied for Hollywood’s ugly women roles and landed the role of Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz?” Did you know that in her first scene where she exits by disappearing into a cloud of smoke and flame, she actually caught fire? It took three months of healing before she could continue the movie.

Of course you know Josephine Baker, the African American star who made it huge in Paris in the 1920s because America was too racist to support a black super star. What about rapper Sonita Alizadeh, born in 1996 in Afghanistan? She sings about the horrors of young girls sold into marriage, as she was.

The likeness of the characters is extraordinary. The cartoons of Hedy Lamarr, the gorgeous actress and inventor, look just like Hedy Lamarr (see streaming documentary—“Bombshell”—for an idea of Lamarr’s brilliance). Temple Grandin, the autistic animal whisperer, looks like herself. So does Josephine Baker. The art is affecting—sometimes uproarious—the text cheeky.

Pénélope Baglieu is the queen of sarcasm—done tastefully in small pithy strokes. About the Mirabal sisters, activists from Dominican Republic, the author says, “By a stroke of luck all four of them are brilliant, determined, and beautiful.” They’re known as Las Mariposas—Butterflies. (The reader learns about Trujillo the DR dictator). Each chapter about each woman or cluster of sisters ends with a double page spread of art. You know these gals from their depictions. Las Mariposas are super-bad, sexy, and Catholic. You’ll love them.

Each nine or ten page biography is a small book in itself. After reading about Lozen, the Apache warrior and clairvoyant shaman from the nineteenth century, I had to look her up and find out more, which I did with almost all the women. I think that’s the point of this book.

Frances Glessner Lee, born in Chicago in 1878, loved making miniatures. She became a crime scene miniaturist to teach deep observation. No detail is too small for Frances. In a tiny model farm kitchen where a farmer was found dead, she affixes labels to jars, dishtowels in drawers, headlines on newspaper from the day of the crime, potato peels in sink. Tiny locks lock with itty bitty keys. Yikes.

Baglieu, who has a huge blog following in her homeland of France, is irreverent, references popular culture and is becoming an international star. Check her out. Read this book. Discover Tove Jansson, another comic maker, creator of trolls, and openly lesbian in WW2 era Europe. I hadn’t known about Wu Zetian, Empress of seventh century China. I loved this book so much I bought it.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker   talesforallages.com

“We Are Okay” (Dutton 2017) by Nina LaCour, is the winner of the 2018 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. This gorgeously written brief story centers on Marin and her survival of grief. LaCour begins Marin’s story in an upstate New York college dormitory, emptied of girls who have gone home for the holidays. A snowstorm is looming. It’s a perfect gothic touch and oddly, I longed to be in this lonely setting. It’s no coincidence that Marin is obsessing over “The Turn of the Screw” and “Jane Eyre.”

In copious flashback we learn that Marin is an orphan, raised by her grandfather in the San Francisco Bay Area. They lived near a beach where her mother had drowned when Marin was a toddler, in a surfing accident. Marin never knew her father. Marin’s best friend growing up, Mabel, is coming for a dreaded two-day visit to the dorm, before returning home to the Bay Area.

Marin remembers herself with Mabel coming of age in sunny California. She says, “It was terrifying, the idea that we could fall asleep girls, minty breathed and nightgowned, and wake to find ourselves wolves.” A perfect metaphor. This is realistic fiction.

The story is largely told in Marin’s musings. About growing up, Marin says, “ . . . there’s a difference between how I used to understand things and how I do now.” And “ . . . even the fiercest denial can’t stop time.” And yet another: “The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.” These insights come amidst the setting of growing up carefree alongside the ocean—an enviable upbringing.

Here’s a universal experience. “I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.”

In cold New York, Marin is coming to terms with her grandfather’s secrecy. They’d lived comfortably together, he having given her loads of freedom. Marin had thought she’d known her grandfather, but was mistaken. Now she constantly mulls over the tragedy that occurred at the end of the summer. “There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity. . .Each time I thought I may have understood, some line of logic snapped and I was thrust back into not knowing.”

Mabel arrives, the snowstorm hits, they’re isolated from the outside world, and they begin to repair their broken relationship. Marin must face what she’s run so far from. In the end there is hope, which is one of the things I love about young adult literature. Almost always there is hope.

I haven’t bawled like this over a book in a long time. (Thank Heavens I was home). Not because it’s so sad, but because it’s so emotionally beautiful. There were many terrific books published in 2017, but I agree with the Printz committee that this story rises above the others.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker   talesforallages.com

“The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives” (Farrar Straus Giroux 2017) is nonfiction brilliantly pieced together by journalist, Dashka Slater. Using interviews, letters, videos, diaries, social media posts, and public records, she tells the story of the victim, Sasha, who is white, affluent, brainy, agender—that is, doesn’t identify as any gender—and attends a private high school.

The perpetrator is the understandably naïve, black, ghetto-raised Richard, who attends a huge public high school. He didn’t know that he shouldn’t speak to the police without a lawyer or even an adult present. Slater tells us that 90% of youth do the same. Richard says—or might even have been coerced—into saying things, which make officials consider this a “bias crime” or a “hate crime.”

When the reader gets the whole story, derived from bystanders and friends on the 57 bus, it looks more like one teen impressing his cohorts—not necessarily “hate.” After all, Richard had sought out help from a counselor at school to pull himself out of a spiral that takes so many black youth into a life of crime. He’s a nice kid. He has a mother who might be overwrought but she cares deeply.

The gender and sexuality glossary starting on page 33 is enlightening. Agender Sasha has asked to be described as “they” or “them.” The author, in solidarity, complies. She says you get used to it. Thank heavens “they” was used only in Sasha’s short chapters, because I had a hard time translating the plural to the singular. Some gender fluid people prefer the new pronoun, “ze” or “xe,” which I wish would catch on.

The author describes scientific research and brain development during adolescence. During puberty the brain lines neural pathways with a fatty sheath—myelin—“making them about a hundred times faster than unmyelinated circuits.” The adolescent limbic system becomes more sensitive to things in the environment and sends an emotional response: “Avoid! Investigate! Eat! Fight! Flirt!” The pre frontal cortex controls reason, planning, and deliberation. She says, “ . . . while teenage emotions have gone into hyperdrive, reason and logic is still obeying the speed limit.”

She says juvenile justice studies find “that around the world antisocial behavior increases by a factor of ten during adolescence and then begins to taper off as people reach their early twenties.” Not just in America, not just one the California Bay Area, where this story takes place, but “around the world.” This is the nature of adolescence.

We get to know the families of both Sasha and Richard. They go through waves of emotions, but both sets of parents are good. They’re trying.

This highly-researched well-written cautionary tale invites empathy, provokes discussion, and ultimately gives one faith in humanity.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is author of the young adult documentary novel Loving vs. Virginia and Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Joseph