Book Reviews

Clara Lemlich works in the garment district of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, with other teenage girls from the old country—various “old” countries. Clara and her family came from a Russian shtetl—Jewish village—where girls were not allowed an education. Against her father’s orders Clara barters for books—Tolstoy and herbals. She helps cure people of their illnesses. She would like to be a doctor one day.

Her father does not want her speaking—and definitely not reading the oppressor’s language—Russian. When he finds her books, he burns them. It’s too late. She has already learned Russian.

So begins “Audacity” (Philomel 2015) by Melanie Crowder, a beautifully written novel in verse based on the story of union organizer Clara Lemlich.

When the pogram comes, the five Lemlich children are sent fleeing into the woods. Crowder writes, “Tonight/ we will sleep/ in the woods/ with the night crawlers/ and the wolves/ and the soft-throated owls.” Jewish people are murdered, their houses burned. The Lemlich family saves their kopecks and flees, starting the long journey to America, in 1904.

After jostling in carts and trains they’re sequestered in an English poorhouse, then travel steerage to New York City. Clara’s little brother is detained at Ellis Island with a fever. Weeks of anxiety ensue before the family is reunited.

Clara’s orthodox father and her brothers spend their days praying while the women work. Her mother sews piecework at home, scrubs floors, and cooks cabbage. Clara works in a sweatshop to support the family. And goes to English classes at night.

Clara speaks out against being locked into the workroom, not being allowed to use the lavatory, speaks out against the filth, fifteen hour days, seven day each week. She’s fired. She finds a new job at another sweatshop, worse than the first. At school she is singled out as the one immigrant who might earn a scholarship to go to college.

She works fifteen-hour days, then attends night school. A fellow worker sickens but is not allowed a trip to the lavatory. Clara speaks up and is fired again. She finds the union house and listens. As her English improves she goes into the streets, stands on a soap box and asks well-to-do women if they know where there shirtwaists—their tailored blouses—come from? Clara gets another job and starts organizing. Strikebreakers or “gorillas” beat her up repeatedly. She is fired again.

Men workers want to strike, but will not include the women workers. Clara fights for women’s rights within the union. Workers begin striking—but too few. Shop owners call the striking women whores. Newspapers report it. Husbands and fathers forbid their wives and daughters from striking. Clara speaks at a union meeting and calls for a general strike. Thousands walk out of work. Finally some changes are made.

As a reader your blood will boil against the injustice. You’ll cheer for the courage of this small bold reformer.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker was awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction, Boston Globe Horn Book Nonfiction Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

Thousands of paper flyers were dropped from German planes over Norway and Denmark in April 1940, announcing the Nazi arrival and offering wartime “protection.” Norway fought back against Germany and suffered massive losses. Denmark cooperated, such that Winston Churchill would eventually call Denmark “Hitler’s tame canary.”

That is the history behind the remarkable “The Boys Who Challenged Hitler” (Farrar Strauss Giroux 2015) by Phillip Hoose. The author visited the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen and learned that the Resistance for Denmark evolved only late in the war—except for a group of ninth grade boys headed by Knud Pedersen, who was humiliated by Denmark’s acceptance of Nazi occupation. Knud was still alive in 2010. Hoose contacted him.

The book is comprised of Knud’s first hand account detailing his patriotic activities with a handful of classmates, interspersed with historical context, partly derived from other first hand accounts. Knud and his older brother Jens founded the “RAF” (named after the heroic British Royal Air Force) in the southern town of Odense.

The Germans marched into Odense and posted directions so that their forces could find their way around town. In broad daylight, riding bicycles, the boys of the “RAF” twisted signs so their arrows pointed in wrong directions or tore them down altogether and sped away. Next they cut telephone wires leading to German headquarters. The boys knew they could be arrested or shot if they were caught.

Their parents knew nothing of the boys’ activities, nor did the rest of their classmates. That same year, the Pedersens moved north to Aalborg where the Germans installed an important airstrip for sending bombers off to Norway. The “RAF” continued in Odense and the Pedersen brothers started “The Churchill Club” in honor of another of their heroes.

The Pedersens’ father was a pastor and the family of seven were housed at Holy Ghost Monastery. The boys attended Cathedral School where Danish children of the town leaders were educated. Knud and Jens carefully recruited a few boys at a time. Their headquarters was Jens’ bedroom on the second floor of the large medieval monastery.

The boys trained themselves to calm their nerves around the ever-present German soldiers. Breathe slowly, don’t laugh, don’t talk—unless you’re the decoy engaging the guard in a distraction. Eventually the boys would progress to arson and theft of Nazi weapons, which they hid in the monastery cellar, in preparation for battle.

Eventually the boys were discovered and arrested. Who would try them—the Danes or the Germans? Where would they be imprisoned—in Denmark or a German work camp? Even if the Danes set the punishment, the Third Reich would lean on them to ensure the sentence showed that the Germans meant business.

The teenage prisoners became stars to many Danish people, helping Denmark wake up and enact an efficient resistance against the brutal Nazis. What a great well-researched story of real teenage heroism!

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

“Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2015), written and illustrated by Don Brown, is a powerful nonfiction graphic “novel”—that is, written as a comic.

In early August 2005 an “unremarkable wind” from Africa crosses the Atlantic, becomes a category one hurricane, is named Katrina, and sweeps across Florida to kill six people. It augments to a category five, the “most catastrophic,” and everyone waits for it to batter New Orleans with its 155 mph winds.

New Orleans in the lowlands is vulnerable with its aging levees and inadequate pumping system. Pictures show the eye of the whirling blue storm “lifting the ocean surface into a kind of massive bubble.” The water level will be raised 25 feet above normal. The National Weather Service announces that Katrina will hit New Orleans in twenty-four hours on Monday, August 27th.

Cut to the 80% of New Orleans people who evacuate. En route, they’re stuck in deadlocked traffic. 200,000 people remain in the city, due to poverty (no car, no bus fare) or stubbornness. Trains offer to take people out of the city. The government declines.

Katrina diminishes to a category three, slips east and hits Buras, wiping out the entire town. Fortunately, everyone has evacuated.

Water overflows the levees of New Orleans. A million gallons of water per minute flood Lake Pontchartrain. The pumps can’t keep up. “Water rolls down the street” floating cars and loose barges down the avenues. People are forced into their attics by rising water. If they can’t cut their way out, they drown. A refiner tank bursts and crude oil is added to the mix.

People cling to floating cars, houses, chests—anything—as the rain pours down on them.

People seek shelter in the Superdome, but it is under-stocked with food, water, bedding. Plus, it is compromised and leaking. Police are rendered helpless by the magnitude, and some flee.

Once the rain stops, Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries, Coast Guard, and individuals rescue people using small boats, but the onslaught of insects and snakes is horrifying. There is no electricity, no lights, no ac. The weather is stifling. Stores or looted of SUVs, computers, TVs. People in sweltering darkened hospitals die.

No aid from the government—state or federal—is forthcoming. Leaders are arguing among themselves. Communication is abysmal.

Families are divided, stranded on bits of high ground, scared and starving. Five thousand children are missing.

Promised buses don’t arrive at the superdome. Finally government rescue efforts take hold. Helicopters circle, searching for survivors.

The catastrophe is beyond reckoning.

Almost all the references that Brown used are contemporary news programs—PBS, CBS, ABC—and newspapers. The drawings add much to the tragic episode in the nation’s history, in this slim volume—a fast read. A stamp on the front cover promises that a portion of the profits goes to New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

Finn O’Sullivan lives in Bone Gap, Illinois with his older brother Sean, at the edge of town among the cornstalks, in the young adult book “Bone Gap” (Balzer & Bray 2015) by Laura Ruby. Finn is called Moonface, Sidetrack, and Spaceman by his friends—in fact by the whole town.

Sean is a paramedic who has put off medical school until Finn finishes high school since their mother has run off to Oregon with a dentist. A young woman, Roza, shows up dirty and bruised, in their barn. As she recovers she cooks Polish food, gardens, and the boys begin to recover from the hurt of their missing mother.

But then Roza goes missing. Finn witnesses the man in the black SUV carry her off while the two are at the fair together, but he can’t describe the abductor except to say he moved like a “cornstalk in the wind.” The police detective is disgruntled by Finn’s inability to describe the man. Both the detective and Sean who has fallen in love with the beautiful Roza, blame Finn for letting Roza be taken.

All is real, if creepy, until a black Arabian horse arrives in the barn from nowhere—and things get strange. Or magical. Finn rides the horse to Petey’s, who everyone thinks is an ugly girl, except Finn. Finn and Petey ride the horse and leap through the air and sail for what feels like forever. This magic happens without a hitch—smoothly, believably.

Roza’s garden wilts and dies. And then you get it. It has something to do with Greek mythology. Roza is Demeter? Whose daughter Persephone has been taken to the underworld. Or is Roza Persephone? Abducted to the underworld? Demeter might be Roza’s grandmother back in Poland.

Ruby writes chapters from Roza’s viewpoint as well as Finn’s. The man who took her is mysterious and cruel and clearly he is the Hades character.

Can someone pass from Finn’s world to the underworld somewhere in the endless cornfields surrounding their house? If so, how do you find the way in? Bone Gap is indeed the name of a small town in southern Illinois, but does it also suggest a passage to the underworld? Why can’t Finn describe the man who took Roza?

To say more would give away the reason you should read this book.

I was lost in the pages of this remarkable story of magical realism, largely because there is so much realism. Laura Ruby writes fantasy books for middle school readers and realistic high school stories for young adults. She has brought these genres—fantasy and realism—together in a tour de force.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

What is more important in life than love and death? In Martha Brockenbrough’s young adult novel, “The Game of Love and Death” (Arthur Levine 2015), Love is personified as a gentle man. And Death, a hard woman.

The story begins February 13, 1920 in Seattle with the birth of two babies—Henry who is white and Flora who is black. Love chooses Henry as his player and Death chooses Flora. The game begins. Love, the weaker of the two players, wins, if Henry falls in love and marries Flora. Death wins if they do not fall in love, at which point she’ll take Flora. The deadline is July 1937 when the players are seventeen.

Love and Death meet unexpectedly in Venice on a gondola ride. Death “looking like an angel in a long coat of winter-white wool” and wearing a red cashmere scarf looks seventeen in this incarnation. Love has chosen middle-age “a reflection of the weariness he felt with his lot,” having spent an eternity losing the game. Was Death beatable?

Back in Seattle, 1937, Henry’s well-to-do parents have long since died. His guardian is a rich cold newspaper owner whose son Ethan is Henry’s best friend. Ethan is a bit of a slacker, has never learned to read or write, but fortunately Henry takes up the slack and keeps Ethan’s secret both in school (by doing his homework) and by writing Ethan’s feature stories. Henry is a little too good to be believed, but Love is his guy, so why not? (Don’t ask me how Ethan does on his tests at school).

Flora, also an orphan, is raised by her loveable grandmother and uncle with whom she owns a nightclub. She’s a fabulous jazz singer and an aviatrix who would like to do what Amelia Earhart is doing. Death is her guy, so the odds are she’ll, well, die. Of course we all will. But when?

Henry does not fit into his family, but he has an outlet. He plays a mean stand up bass—mostly classical, but he does love his jazz.

Brockenbrough is confident, honest, inventive, and succinct when she embodies the characters Love and Death. For instance, Death is there when the Hindenburg burns. “Death plucked the rising souls like flowers, decorating her mind with the residue of human experience while the fire lit and warmed her face.” Death creates herself as Helen, Ethan’s capricious cousin, trying to win Henry’s love, in order to win the Game. Sometimes she sidles around the ankles of the players as a black cat.

Love creates himself as James Booth and wins Ethan’s heart—in order to draw him away from his loving Henry—Love’s attempt to win the Game.

Of course the odds are against Henry and Flora’s love in racist pre-war America. Love is weaker than Death. Will Love ever win the Game? The book itself is handsome, with each of its seventy-one chapters beginning on black matte paper printed in white ink.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com

“Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own” (Crown 2015), Kate Bolick’s adult memoir should be read by all women, but in particular, by young adult women. There are so many points to ponder and discuss.

About young adulthood, Bolick says: “When we “invented” adolescence as a sociological and developmental category in the 1950s, we robbed it of dignity, turning teenagers into a faceless mob of deranged hormones. In fact, it’s a noble and brave and terrible time . . .” And the perfect time to think about one’s future.

The word spinster once meant a woman who spun woolen thread as an occupation; in 1890 it has meant prostitute; and presently it has strong emotional connotations—usually derogatory—of a woman who can’t find herself a husband. In another feminist cultural history, “Writing a Woman’s Life” (Ballantine 1989), Carolyn Heilbrun calls an unmarried woman an “ambiguous” woman—one who chooses not to center her life on a man. Bolick prefers “spinster” feeling that its connotations are undeserved and “spinster” ought to be viewed as a destination.

“Spinster” begins: “Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn’t practice.” This did not ring familiar to me, so I asked around and was told a myriad of experiences—all very interesting. Whereas the opening premise might not hold true, it’s a good starting point. What Bolick is getting at is that women generally see themselves in relation to men—and marriage.

Beginning with the poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bolick writes about five “awakeners” —writers who guided her in her long coming-of-age quest. The others are essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton, and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

All but the Irish Brennan came of age, roughly, between 1880 and 1920, a time which may have been “the single woman’s most glorious moment yet.” Women had struggled for suffrage, and upon achieving the vote in 1920, their mission petered out. Interesting.

Bolick entitles one chapter, “Are women people yet?” Looking through the lens of the five awakeners and their century-old but familiar-enough-to-be-contemporary experience, the author asks about a woman’s life. Does she control her life? We are reminded that having children is a choice. Women must be people first, and women second.

Bolick has several landmark thoughts concerning her own marrying. When in college, she assumed she’d marry by thirty, giving her time “to learn about the world before settling down.” To not do so, “would require a very good explanation, which I certainly didn’t have.” However, when she reached thirty, she wasn’t ready. Now she is forty something and still a spinster and intends to stay so, although she is presently in love with a man.

The book ends with a quote from a Mary Oliver’s poem: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?” Good question.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell’s book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker has recently been awarded a Sibert Honor for Nonfiction as well as a Coretta Scott King Honor for illustration. talesforallages.com