Book Reviews

Sudanese-American author Safia Elhillo’s magnificent novel-in-verse “Home is Not a Country” (Make Me a World 2021) is based on her own experience as an immigrant.

 

Before Nima is born, her father is shot and killed by Sudanese police. Nima’s pregnant mother manages to immigrate to America where Nima is born and grows up longing for the old country. Through Sudanese music and old photos, Nima learns about the colorful culture of her beautiful fun-loving parents. She longs for her heroic father and creates an alter ego for herself—Yasmeen—who she believes she would be if her parents lived happily in Sudan amongst their extended family.

 

Nima says: “I miss the country that I’ve never seen   the cousins/ & aunts & grandparents   i miss the help/ they could have offered   the secrets they knew/ that i never learned”. Thank heavens for her best friend Haitham who arrived the same way, inside his pregnant mother, at the same time. Nima’s mother “makes us tea/ boiled in milk   poured into mismatched mugs/ & hands us packs of captain majid cookies she gets/ from the bigala that Haitham & I call   ethnic wal-mart/where we buy everything   from bleeding legs of lamb/ to patterned pillow covers   & casettes/ covered in a layer of dust”.

 

Mama Fatheya, Haitham’s grandmother says, “ours is a culture that worships yesterday over tomorrow/ but I think we are all lucky to have left yesterday/ behind.” Nima’s love of the old country prompts Haitham to call her “nostalgia monster.” She loves the old tunes and their Arabic lyrics. She dances with her mother at home, but closes herself off at school until she feels invisible. Haitham is friendly, joking, and popular with everyone. He is Nima’s anchor. Until one day, white boys scatter her books and Haitham doesn’t come to her defense. Nima and Haitham’s fight seems insurmountable.

 

Soon after, in an ethnic hate assault, Haitham is attacked, wounded, and admitted to the hospital in a deep coma. His life hangs on a thread. Nima is devastated and in her misery of not belonging, having accused her best friend of ugly behavior, and furious at her mother for bringing them to this horrible country, she has a mystical experience. By enters her parents’ sepia photo she finds herself with her alter-ego Yasmeen in Sudan viewing her parents’ young life. Is Yasmeen a jinn, which Mama Fatheya warns the teens of repeatedly? Or did Nima invent her? Or both?

 

In a prolonged episode of magical realism, Nima takes us through old Sudan, her parents’ happy courtship, as well as the horrific and life-threatening experience of Khaltu Hala—Haitham’s mother—who was pregnant and unmarried in Islamic Sudan. Can Nima banish Yasmeen? Should she? Unseen, Nima overhears conversations and discovers a devastating secret about her father.

 

She returns to her actual life in America with new appreciation and love for her mother and their present life together. Not only does the beautiful language, insights of living between two cultures, and innovative formatting open our eyes, but the plot makes the reader turn pages. This is an important book.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning books: Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women’s suffrage, Martha Graham, Joe Ernst. talesforallages.com

 

“Call Me Athena: Girl From Detroit” (Andrews McMeel 2021) by Colby Cedar Smith is a novel-in-verse based on the immigration experience of the author’s grandmother.

 

Mary, in Depression era Detroit, is the first narrator. At sixteen she is horrified by her parents’ plan—an arranged marriage with an older man. Mary’s twin Marguerite has no such restriction on her life. But in her parents’ eyes, Mary must be protected from her independent nature. Her wild behavior entails wanting to work in the family store. A working girl? Scandalous in her Greek American father’s estimation.

 

When Mary laments her upcoming marriage and expects suppoort, her sister says, “It can’t stay the same forever./ Even if/ we wish it could.” Mary says, “I feel like someone/ has thrown a stone/ into the heavens/ and smashed the stars./ We are falling/ from the sky.” Smith’s lyricism is intoxicating.

 

When returning a shovel to the cellar, Mary finds a packet of dusty love letters written by a woman who calls herself Petit Oiseau (Little Bird) and a man who calls himself Loup (Wolf). The lovers live in France during World War I. Readers eventually realize that Petit Oiseau is the second narrator, Jeanne, who comes from a wealthy French family. Jeanne is serving as a nurse in her village in 1918 when a wounded American, Giorgos, is admitted.

 

Giorgos (who we guess is Loup), the third narrator, had stolen a lamb back home in Greece to feed his sick, dying sister. He fled the repercussions, immigrated to America and was immediately drafted into WWI. The patchwork of voices is beginning to come together.

 

At school Mary hears a survivor of the Ford Massacre of 1932—the prior year, say: “We held signs that read/ Give us Work/ We want Bread Not Crumbs/ Tax the Rich and Feed the Poor/ As we got closer/ to the plant/ Ford’s hired goons/ attacked us./ Tear gas, fire hoses,/ clubs./ Men running everywhere/ trying to escape/ the bullets/ pelting the crowd./A boy was shot/ Blood spread across his chest/ like a car dripping oil/ onto the pavement.” The presenter, a war veteran, protested at Henry Ford’s factory. The workers want health care and an end to racial discrimination.

 

This is not only pertinent to our lives today but to the violence of Giorgos’ and Jeanne’s lives in war-torn Europe. Giorgos describes the horrors of the battlefield. Jeanne nurses wounded soldiers and when a boy dies, she writes home to their parents. On the positive side, war tends to equalize people’s class and status. Jeanne is rich. Giorgos is poor—and a foreigner. The unlikely pair marry and move to Detroit.

 

Eventually, in Detroit in 33, Mary’s parents allow her to work in the store—baby steps for her rights as a woman are made by necessity. Mary goes on a secret date with a young man. Life is indeed changing, as it must. Somewhere along the way the reader unravels the puzzle to realize who Jeanne and Giorgos are to Mary.

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  Books forthcoming about women suffrage, Martha Graham, Joe Ernst. talesforallages.com

 

Germany 1945. The war has ended. The concentration camps have been liberated and Zofia Lederman, just released from Gross-Rosen death camp, is searching for her brother, Abek. She knows that the rest if her family—her parents, grandmother, and aunt—were all sent to the gas chambers when they all arrived at the camp, in “They Went Left” (Little Brown 2020) by Monica Hesse.

 

Zofia, 18, accompanied by a young Russian soldier, travels through Germany to her home in Poland, hoping to find Abek there. No Abek. Clearly the apartment was occupied by the enemy during the war. She finds her old neighbors unsympathetic. Anti-semitism has not been erased by the atrocities that occurred during the war. She eludes the soldier and sets out for Germany in search of Abek who she’d promised to protect.

 

Eventually she finds herself in a displaced-persons camp, but Abek is not here. Nearly everyone at the camp is searching for someone. One young woman searches for her twin sister, having been separated after surviving medical experimentations by the Nazis. A former heiress is becoming a farmer and waits to marry a fellow worker in a simple ceremony before finding their way to the new state of Israel. Enigmatic Josef assists at the camp and drives Zofia to another station where her brother just might be or might have been seen.

 

Zofia places notes requesting information about Abek everywhere, questions everyone, sending out a broad search net. And waits. Having suffered trauma and cruelty in the camps, she is not healthy, either physically or mentally and her reality becomes distorted. But she is alive.

 

Will she heal? Or will she succumb to mental hallucinations? Her memories are not reliable. Just as she begins to wonder, the reader, too, comes to understand that she’s an unreliable narrator. She is surrounded by so many others, also in crisis. This is the aftermath of the war and each character wonders what a new normal might become for themselves. Throughout her search Zofia is attracted to the mysterious Josef but Josef protects himself behind a thick veil of secrets. Love could be an antidote, but who is this man?

 

Zofia comes to believe that love is a decision. You can decide who to love. The displaced people support each other, giving moments of joy within the story, such as the wedding of the farming couple. Will one couple’s solution work for Zofia or will she have to find her own way? The book ends with no overall happily-ever-after, but there is hope. It is an authentic outcome, surely.

 

Monica Hesse’s raw and powerful, and well-researched story, is relevant today. Do consider reading it.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com

 

Rita Williams-Garcia’s “A Sitting in St. James” (HarperCollins/Quill Tree 2021) is set in Louisiana, 1860, before Southerners believed their way of life could actually be shattered by a civil war.

 

The story opens with a bit of Creole bayou history—a culture created by a mix of  Indian, French, Spanish, and African peoples. We jump to Sylvie, a young French aristocratic orphan, post Revolution in Paris, 1793, who agrees to marry the under-educated but land-owning and slave-holding American, Bayard Guilbert. One page-turn later, the despicable Madame Sylvie Guilbert is now a widow, upholder of fashionable old ways, and the matriarch of a failing plantation in St. James parish, Le Petit Cottage.

 

Think: “Gone With the Wind” (time and approximate place) meets “Twelfth Night” (love matches and sly humor) meets “Bridgerton” (sexual identities and love matches), in a world where enslaved people are not seen as human.

 

Madame’s personal Black servant, Thisbe, named by Madame after a dog, shows the lowly experience of a house-slave (who gets no Sunday off), unable to visit her parents in the slave quarters (who do get Sunday off), who sees nothing, hears nothing, yet—actually observes everything.

 

Madame’s middle-aged son, widower Lucien, has one living white child, Byron, who is a gay cadet on holiday-leave from West Point who has brought home his lover, cadet Pearce—an easy going Northerner who will inherit his adoptive parents’ fortune. Oh, and Lucien has a gorgeous Black enslaved daughter, Rosalie the recognized half-sister of Byron, who Lucien intends to marry off to a wealthy Black plantation owner’s son, Laurent, to save his own family plantation, Le Petit Cottage. But our Guilbert family is a bit scandalous for the upstanding Black family. See what I mean about the Shakespearean aspect?

 

The real fun begins when Jane enters. She’s the mannish daughter of a white Creole high-society mother and English father. In today’s parlance we’d say, she was on the spectrum. Madame is tasked to educate the “impossible” girl who has been bribed to learn ladylike protocol against the threat of shooting her beloved horse, Virginia Wilder, who she rides wildly throughout the mornings. Jane shines a light on the ridiculousness of Madame’s manners and protocols and her exchanges with Madame in the hands of Williams-Garcia are uproarious. Jane is most definitely a lesbian in a time when such a thing was so scandalous (and illegal) it couldn’t be mentioned.

 

Byron (the gay grandson) is betrothed to the lovely clever plantation neighbor, Eugenie, who is not submissive. Eugenie befriends the unique Jane, and for her part has no interest in having sex with her betrothed—after their requisite son is born.

 

The title refers to Madame’s sitting for a portraitist, LeBrun, who is related to a famous French court portraitist, making the sitting a high prestige venture—for Madame. There is much interacting between this diverse cast—so many secrets to be discovered, with sometimes fascinating outcomes. This epic and masterfully-told tale is a must-read.

 

 

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

Author, Grant Farley, takes from his own life growing up in northern California in the 70s for his debut novel, “Bones of a Saint” (Soho 2021). Fifteen-year-old RJ is a clever and irresistible “bad boy” who lives in a trailer and cares for his younger siblings while their mother works hard for low wages. RJ is especially protective of his disabled brother, Charley. And when Charley becomes endangered, RJ steps up.

The dead-end town of Arcangel has been ruled for generations by a gang, the Blackjacks. The gang spends its energy enlisting the poorest young people to continue its criminal legacy. The police turn their heads. Heck, members of the gang are police. The Blackjacks have left RJ alone—until now.

Ed the Head says, “The Blackjacks are POed at that old city dude for buying the Miller place. He stole their best flatland hangout.” The Blackjacks decide that RJ must drive the old man out of his newly purchased home.

RJ has one friend, Manny, who’s pretty different from him, but they’re both poor and live under little supervision. RJ says, “I’m skinny and he’s fat. I’ve got five younger sibs and he’s got four sisters. I lost my dad when I was three and his sister Theresa killed their mom just getting born…” His information comes out fast, succinct, and unique.

So RJ sets out to drive out the old man, Mr. Leguin. But he likes him. Clever RJ tells stories, but the old man tells better stories. They entertain each other and convey information by metaphor.

RJ’s mostly-Catholic world view is pretty much summed up here: “Mr. Sanders, with his Canterbury Tales, he taught me about pilgrims that lived in a past that went back hundreds and hundreds of years. And Father Speckler, with his New Testament, he preached about a future that won’t come until forever and ever, amen. Neither way does me any good now against the Blackjacks. All I can do is live in my own here and now.”

RJ knows he could disregard the Blackjack directive. He also knows there would be big consequences. He says, “Maybe God made free will just for His fun. If God cranks the world up and lets it go without knowing where it’s headed, well that’s got to be a whole lot more fun for him.” Free will or fate. Catholics side with free will. Hope you get an idea of the unique and fabulous voice here.

The story twists and turns and Mr. Leguin delivers information to RJ which just might help the teen escape his rough circumstances and release the town from the grip of the Blackjacks. Know any clever young readers who want to read a unique voice? Or such an adult?

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. She teaches community classes at Parkland. talesforallages.com