Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 63

All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown; All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown, by Sydney Taylor

I've been rereading this charming series about a Jewish family in turn-of-the-century New York City. It remains a great read, full of vivid details of everyday life, and incredibly relatable despite the massive changes that have happened since then.

Uptown starts off with one of my all-time favorite stories, in which the girls walk into the wrong house and eat their aunt's neighbor's dinner. I also loved the stories where Ella and Jules go out on a date to a fancy restaurant, each convinced the other is super comfortable there until they realize that both of them have never been to one before, and when Henny borrow's Ella's fancy dress without asking, spills tea on it, dyes it with tea to cover it up, and replaces it in the closet without saying anything.

This book also features WWI. In retrospect it had an awfully rosy picture of how a soldier would come through the war if he was physically unhurt.

Downtown is not as much of a favorite as the rest as a lot of it focuses on a neighborhood boy, an Italian immigrant named Guido whose mother is sick. I just wasn't that into Guido. However, I really identified with the girls taking turns getting the best spot near the stove in winter, and Henny having a day where everything goes wrong and she stirs up trouble she doesn't even enjoy, and has no idea why she keeps doing it. On that note, Henny is hilarious in this book. My favorite bit is when she rips up her clothes to impersonate a tragically poor girl so she can sneak into a local Christmas charity event where they're giving away fancy dolls.

[image error]

[image error]

comments

Clarissa Triumphant

She is now defiantly sitting in the other nest.

comments

Clarissa Update

The cage separation didn't work, as it was too cold to make her sit in a cage all night and when I let her out for the night to roost, she instead sat in her empty nest.

I have removed the cage and placed two frozen icepacks in her nest. She is stomping around the run looking very pissed off.

comments

The Trials of Koli; The Fall of Koli, by M. R. Carey

In book one, Koli discovers the key secret of his home village: the precious and rare tech does not choose its owners, but just needs to be turned on. One family, which figured out how to activate it and transfer ownership, set it up as this huge ritual mystery in order to maintain their own power as the tech conveniently only ever chooses them. (This isn't a spoiler; it's obvious to modern readers that something along those lines is happening, even if the exact details of how they're doing it aren't immediately clear.)

When Koli learns this, they railroad him and run him out of town before he can tell anyone. He leaves behind his mother and sisters, the woman he loves, his best friend, the village leader who fucked him over, and others with whom he had important connections. On his journey, he learns a lot of crucial things about the world and changes as a person. Meanwhile, back in the village, the people he cared about are having their own adventures and learning things with no idea of what's going on with him - and vice versa.

I thought this was all building up to a climax in which Koli returns to Mythen Rood and meets up with everyone he's been separated from for so long - some who he loves, some who he hates, some who he never understood. And in turn, the village would FINALLY find out that he's alive, their leader fucked him and everyone else over for power, he's not the terrible person he was accused of being, and have the emotionally powerful reunions and confrontations I'd been awaiting for the entire series.

Hahahahaha! How foolish of me!

I hated the ending of this so much that I regret paying for the second two books.

Big angry spoilers. ( Read more... )

I can't think of a less satisfying way to end the series.

Also, in the early parts of book one, any time anyone went outside the town walls, they got attacked by mutant flora and fauna every thirty seconds. There's a huge big deal made of how almost impossibly difficult it is to survive for even a single day outside, and this isn't a lie - we see that it's absolutely true. Once Koli gets booted out, the mutant flora and fauna attack only when convenient for the plot.

I wanted mutant plants and animals, and instead I got all these looooooong sequences where he gets imprisoned by cannibal cultists and robots raising evil clones, and interminable battle sequences against humans, and I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened when he finally came back to Mythen Rood, and I am very annoyed that I actually paid for these books.

[image error]

[image error]

comments

Chook Update

Supposedly hens do not go broody in their first laying season, in winter, or when they have no eggs to sit on. Tell that to Clarissa. She took over a nesting box, refused to emerge, and rushed back to it whenever I hauled her out. I removed all the eggs from the box; she still sat there. She ignored treats to sit in that box. Clarissa is convinced she can hatch some chicks from thin air.

If it wasn't winter I'd be tempted to order some fertile eggs and let her try. But after repeatedly removing her did nothing, I hauled a giant chicken crate (a repurposed dog crate) into the run and have locked her in it with food and water. I'll let her out to roost at night. Supposedly doing this for three days de-broods them. (You don't want broody hens if you don't mean to hatch chicks, because they sit there without eating and it's bad for their health.)

Clarissa is very annoyed. The other hens are very thrilled at this new addition to their coop and have been perching on top of it.

comments

Mary-Lou Goes for the Gold

Or, in this case, the mealworm. Also depicted: Gwendoline Mary Lacey looking up, and Sally and Bill's fluffy butts.



comments

Please entertain me

I got the covid booster yesterday. Slept on couch with chills and fever because I could plant myself next to a space heater.

Looks like I will also be spending today on the couch. Please entertain me. Recommend a nook or movie, discuss sorting systems in literature, ask fo advice, or whatever.

comments

Magic in the Park, by Ruth Chew

Jennifer thinks she hates Brooklyn, until her mother suggests she go to Prospect Park. There she meets Mike, a neighborhood boy, and makes her first friend. She and Mike discover that Prospect Park is full of magic, from a mysterious man who likes to feed the birds to a disappearing tree.

I'd never read this book before, and it's one of Chew's best. She's wonderful at hitting on childhood "what if" fantasies, like "What if I could travel underground and see tree roots from underneath and pet moles in their burrows?" There's also a hilarious plotline in which Mike gets turned into a pigeon and he and Jennifer have a lot of awkward conversations with birds. The bird-feeding man's identity was unexpected and very numinous. And it all feels more real for being set in a city where you have to watch out for broken glass and bicycle thieves.

[image error]

comments

House Updates

I now have curtains, and I've hung some art. Sorry for the dark lighting - the house isn't actually dark, but the light outside the windows was very bright.

My bedroom and under-the-bed reading nook, with bonus Erin.

My loft reading nook, with bonus Erin.

My Zoom office and living room (doubles as a reading nook), with bonus Alex.

I posted an egg glamour shot to the Crestline Facebook group, and offered to trade fresh-laid eggs for home-made goodies. So far I've received pomegranate jelly and peach preserves, and am arranging to get homemade jerky, a caramel-apple pie, and a cinnamon-Nutella babka.

comments

The Elementals, by Michael McDowell

Pat Conroy wrote, My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, “All southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'”

Michael McDowell has a different but equally great encapsulation of the southern Gothic. Click to listen to a brief audio excerpt of The Elementals.

"Did they stick the knife in the dead baby too?"

What I like best about is the way it just keeps going and going and getting more and more Gothically batshit. I actually burst out laughing.

McDowell wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This book is much darker and more serious overall, but a lot of the dialogue and some of the events has a similarly anarchic, bizarre humor.

The Elementals is a slow-paced, extremely atmospheric southern Gothic about two intermarried families, the Savages and the McCrays, and a profoundly ill-fated vacation they take on a private island called Beldame. It has a parrot that squawks "Savage mothers eat their children," a haunted house slowly being swallowed by a sand dune, haunted photographs, and a heaping helping of bizarre family drama. It also, unfortunately, has perhaps the Platonic ideal of the Magical Negro trope in the form of the housekeeper Odessa.

Apart from that, I enjoyed this a lot. It's eerie rather than scary for the most part, all sun-drenched lassitude with background creepiness punctuated by sudden interruptions of surreal horror and dark comedy. Beldame is a character in its own right, as is the heat and the sand.

Giant spoiler! ( Read more... )

The eponymous elementals are only referred to by that name two or three times. I have no idea why the book got named that rather than The Third House, which is crucial to the story and referenced about once per page.

[image error]

comments