B. Morrison's Blog, page 22

Permanent Rose, by Hilary McKay

I’ve been taking refuge in YA books from the depressing ugliness of some of my adult reading. This series about the Casson family started out fun. It’s a rather madcap family where the mother, flighty Eve, is too busy painting in the garden shed to feed the children, while the father Bill lives in London where he can do his “real art” without being bothered by children underfoot.

Yes, I should have know then.

However, at first it’s rather fun. As in the best MG and YA books, the children take c...

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie. The AFs are apparently companions for the children in this future time: they don’t go out much and have little contact with other children except through “interaction meetings” set up by parents of other “lifted” children.

Although never defined, lifting seems to be the use of genetic engineering to increase children’s future professional and financial success. J...

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies,...

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out ...

In the Memory House, by Howard Mansfield

What we remember and how we remember it continue to puzzle me. Sometimes a random, quite trivial moment remains vivid decades later while critical events are somehow lost. And then, as a memoir writer, the accuracy of my memories matters to me.

Oliver Sacks said:

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

I find this idea exciting and horrifyi...

All the Devils Are Here, by David Seabrook

This is a strange book. Seabrook creates a portrait of Kent, though not the popular “Garden of England” image and not the sort of portrait you’d expect. It is a form sometimes called a psycho-geography or an odd sort of travel memoir, where we are drawn into his mind, the odd things that interest him, the associations they carry with them. It’s like listening to a chatty passenger in the seat next to you whose inescapable monologue takes you to unexpected places, places you perhaps would never ...

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

As a high school student in Tallahassee, Florida in the 1960s, Ellwood Curtis studies hard and is chosen to attend classes at the university. When he isn’t studying, he listens to a record of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches which fire his idealistic determination to stand up to injustice.

However, it only takes one innocent misstep to suck him into the criminal justice system. As one member of my book club who is a lawyer remarked, we don’t see the trial. Another pointed out that for a blac...

The Right to Write, by Julia Cameron

I’m preparing to teach a workshop on creativity, so have been scavenging in my bookshelves for relevant books. In this book, subtitled An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life, Julia Cameron asserts that everyone can lead a creative life.

She makes it easy for the reader to take one small step after another by having brief essays—the invitation—followed by an exercise—the initiation. With each essay, she follows her own advice of starting where you are. She may describe the scene outs...

Declaration of Independence

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation....

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

As this popular novel opens, a 30-year-old woman returns to her hometown. Residents are shocked to see her, and word quickly travels around that one of the Vignes twins has been spotted. There are two reasons for this outsized reaction, one being that Desiree and her sister Stella have not been seen since they disappeared when they were 16 while everyone else was at the Founder’s Day Dance, dismayed that their mother pulled them out of school to start working as domestic servants. But the grea...