All Blog Entries

In Betty Culley’s novel in verse, “Three Things I Know Are True” (HarperTeen 2020) teenage Liv will not give up on her older brother Jonah, who accidentally shot himself in the head with a gun belonging to his best friend’s father.

Now Jonah requires round-the-clock care to stay alive, at home, in their Maine mill town. Liv’s mother works a minimum wage job.

Last year when her father was alive, he’d lost his job when the mill closed. “He’d watch Clay’s father pull out of the driveway of Number 24 in his “Bugz Away” van and say, Now there’s a smart man—he’s his own boss, and as long as there’s bugs around, he’s got himself a job.” Now her mom is suing Clay’s family because his dad left a loaded gun in their attic. Liv isn’t supposed cross their street to Clay’s house, but she does. And she might be falling in love with Clay.

Clay has dropped out of high school and is working for his dad. Liv worries about Clay inhaling all that insecticide.

Liv senses her brother inside his wracked body, but their mother cannot. Liv understands that “Jonah has faces and sounds that mean different things. If you’re watching and listening, he will tell you what he wants, what he doesn’t want.” Mom, on the other hand, is retreating, working more hours: “I think the Schedule is Mom’s way of caring for Jonah without watching or listening.”

With the mill closed, the town depressed, townspeople are taking sides between Clay’s and Liv’s families. Liv messes up in school and is punished with service at the soup kitchen where she meets Hunter who is homeschooled. Hunter’s mom, a hippy who’s in touch with the earth and feelings tells Liv, “Trust your hands and they’ll lead you where you need to go.” Liv discovers she has good hands, hands that can massage Jonah such that he can stop thrashing, calm and fall sleep.

Thank heavens for the fabulous team of nurses who care for Jonah around the clock. Liv feels jealous that the nurses and Jonah have an intimate rapport that doesn’t involve her. She likens that jealousy to “the little animal inside me gets throw-something mad.” She says, “I know it’s wrong to feel this way about my brother, but the animal is hurt and won’t listen to reason.”

Liv’s friend Rainie is a compulsive shop-lifter—carrying that propensity inside people’s homes. Liv sees Rainie’s stealing as her wild little animal—her big flaw.

Author Betty Culley lives in a small river town in central Maine. She has worked as a pediatric home hospice nurse. She surely has the authority, voice, and wisdom to tell this insightful well-written story.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

“Dancing at the Pity Party: a dead mom graphic memoir” (Dial 2020) is Tyler Feder’s graphic novel about her mom dying of cancer. The subtitle tells you plenty about this tragic, funny, insightful story which is sort of a map for processing major grief.

Tyler’s illustrations augment the text rather than replicate it. On the first page she lists small and large teachings—one is: “She taught me to speak my mind.” Her picture is a mother bird feeding her fledgling a worm—just one example of how far she takes us with deep simplicity. The next page shows the fledgling alone in a nest. The words: “In 2008, the summer after my first year of college, she was diagnosed with cancer. By spring break my sophomore year, she was dead. Not to be melodramatic, but it was THE WOOORST.”

You love this polite subdued mom, who she describes as having a “sneaky” sense of humor—this mom who does “a blink-and-you’d-miss-it bunny hop” walking down the grocery store aisle, with a straight face like nothing happened. Feder says: “The treatments and doctors’ appointments were wildly time-consuming, like a part-time job with awful pay.” Yep, many of us have been there with a loved one—or for ourselves. And “Chemotherapy was totally different from what I’d always pictured . . . what chemo is actually like: basically a nail salon with IV drips instead of pedicures.”

On a page headed “Preparations” she says “If you can’t cry in front of the rabbi who’s officiating your mom’s funeral at a meeting discussing said funeral, when can you, though, you know?”

On the receiving line: “There were the people who grabbed my arms tightly and gave me such powerful eye contact that I felt their eyes burning a hole in my brain. . . hugs from near-strangers (with varying amounts of force, wetness, and odor).”

Maybe I’m telling you the funny bits so you’ll read it. But every page gives insights into grieving.

The service: “By that point, I was in full denial. It was almost an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was watching a movie of myself, totally devoid of the emotion the situation demanded.”

Her family writes her mother’s obituary. That hit home. So did the Kubler-Ross stages of dying which she also applies to grieving. And because she’s Jewish you get a bird’s eye view of the wonderful cultural benefits of sitting shiva, which includes: “… we took a series of the CHEERIEST PHOTOS EVER . . . The group photo, especially, could be in a museum exhibit about the surreality of death (or just denial, depending on how you look at it).” When the week is up: “We slowly lumbered through the neighborhood, a mass of salt-stained parkas and flushed cheeks. Somehow, there was no thoughtful piano score accompanying us, even though it would have been very appropriate.”

Ten years later the author is still recovering. And writing and illustrating this book helped that recovery. It will help a lot of us.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

“Everything Sad is Untrue” (Levine Querido 2020) is Daniel Nayeri’s childhood story of fleeing Iran with his mother and sister. By a series of minor miracles the little family manages to evade Iran’s secret police and get to Italy where they stop at a refugee camp for a couple of years before landing in Oklahoma. Born as Khosrou, he is now Daniel.

As the book cover suggests, the story swirls in time like an Oklahoma cyclone with bits of Persian artifacts caught in the swirl. Starting at eight-years-old, he stands before his American classmates and tells wild stories that are structured like a French braid. Choose your metaphor.

He takes strands from the rich Persian culture of myths, pulls in strands of his ancestors who he knows through stories, all vividly pulled from his own immigrant child life. You hear about evil uncles who betrayed his grandmother—another strong Persian woman who had to flee Iran. Speaking of those uncles, Nayeri dispenses universal wisdom, such as, “One is the kind of villain who wants more for himself. The other is the kind who wants less for others.” He admits that he doesn’t have all the details so details of his story are speculated. He walks us through the steps of how he chooses those speculated details, and along the way teaches us how to write.

Scheherazade wove stories to entertain the king to keep herself alive. Daniel tells stories in an attempt to enter a new culture and be known for who he is. “I am ugly and I speak funny. I am poor. My clothes are used and my food smells bad. I pick my nose. I don’t know the jokes and stories you like, or the rules to the games. I don’t know what anybody wants from me…Like you, I want a friend.” See how gracefully he invokes “you,” the second person point of view? And we feel completely involved in his world including the tarofing­­—where you compete with your neighbors in lies so polite you can’t find the truth. This is Persian etiquette. Nayeri shows so much—such as the cruelty of other children who dismiss him, but never does it feel like he’s whining. On the contrary, he’s insisting on being known.

Food plays a big part. “Soon the dinner carpet was full with trays of kebab, grilled onions and tomatoes, platters of fresh chives, green and purple basil, cilantro, radishes and dill…A stew of chickpea, lamb, crispy shallots and fried mint was the khan’s favorite.”

As he advances to middle school and loving Kelly, he says, “I don’t want to stop just because she laughs at me. I want to stay in love with her until she realizes I am a person.”

This books is like no other. This new publisher Levine Querido is like no other. Check both of them out. Please.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

Following an evening performance as acrobat/dancers with the Stanislav Circus, teenaged Lillia, her father, and her baby sister flee Poland, as planned. But her mother, in the chaos, goes missing. The three members of the Jewish Kazka family head for Shanghai in 1941 in “Someday We Will Fly” (Viking 2019) by Rachel DeWoskin. I hadn’t known that Shanghai was a refuge for Jewish people. It turns out that the Chinese once considered Jewish people mystical—and therefore desirable.

By foot, by train, by ship the dumb-struck family travels to Shanghai, arriving with little money, no ability to speak Chinese, no food, no home, no Mama—yet they’re allowed to enter.

The family crowds into a tenement house with other Jewish families. A shell of his former self, Lillia’s Papa looks for work, day after day until their money runs out. Everyone in the tenements is struggling to various degrees in Japan-occupied China.

Lillia, in between taking care of her disabled infant sister and searching for food, manages to go to the Jewish school. She befriends other refugees. Biata’s family, also from Poland, hopes to start a bar in Shanghai. American Rebecca, Lillia’s favorite, is rich due to her father being a doctor. Sally, also American, scorns Lillia, but Rebecca discretely gives Lillia a pink dress—Lillia’s only dress—and invites her to Scouts. She tries to fit in with the girls but she can’t pay the Scouts membership—and is usually hungry. Rebecca takes Lillia to the theater, but Lillia doesn’t fit in there.

Lillia befriends Wei, the Chinese janitor boy at school. The other girls are aghast at their friendship, but Lillia is falling in love with Wei. She borrows school supplies from his janitor closet to make puppets at home. She has dreams of her friends making a theater/circus production with her, using her beautiful hand-made puppets and her own dancing.

Lillia’s father finds a manual labor job. But both he and her baby sister Naomi, contract cholera. Their neighbor Taube, who has become a mother to the children, dies of the disease. Lillia nurses her family, and despite wronging him, Wei helps her obtain healing Chinese herbs. At a breaking point, Lillia finds work as an escort and dancer at a “gentleman’s club,” where one particular Chinese gentleman regularly buys her meals. Many of the girls are forced to go beyond dancing, including Wei’s sister. Lillia’s life is perilous. And always they wait for her mother.

After Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, the war in China escalates. Bombs take down tenements and warehouses. As Japan takes stronger control of China even wealthy Jews are in danger—maybe more than the poor who are better able to remain invisible. The Japanese have imprisoned all Americans and their outcome looks bad.

There is plenty of heartbreak in this story but much beauty in coming of age while struggling for one’s survival. If you love learning history by reading well-researched well-written historical fiction, this book is a must. The audio book (Listening Library – available on Overdrive from our public libraries) is fine, too.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com