Warren Rochelle's Blog, page 15

Some Thoughts on The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg

The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a beautiful book, the final volume of Rick Bragg's memoir/history of his family, beginning with his mother and her troubled marriage with his father, the childhood of their children, to his grandfather, his mother's father, a story of a time long gone, and finally, this book, The Prince of Frogtown.

Bragg's father, a man tormented by the demons of his own alcoholism, was, as The New York Times Book Review suggests, "the dark shadow in his life." This was the man whose murder Bragg and his brother, Sam, plotted as they hid under the bed. This was the same man who, right before his death at an early age a death caused by his drinking, gave Rick Bragg a box of books because they were pretty and he remembered his son like to read. When Bragg marries and finds himself with a stepson whom he loves and thus becomes a father, he finds himself trying to understand and make sense of or peace with his own father. "With candor, insight, and tremendous humor, Bragg seamlessly weaves these luminous narrative threads together and delivers an unforgettable rumination about fathers and sons." He makes of this "dark shadow... a figure of flesh and blood, passion and tragedy, and a father, at last, whose memory he can live with" (back cover).

Put this book on your list--after Ava's Man and All Over But the Shoutin'.



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Brief Remarks on Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

Ava's Man by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow.

Ava's Man is as beautiful and as well-written as All Over But the Shoutin'. Bragg's biography of his grandfather, his mother's father, is powerful and moving in so many ways. I was struck and impressed that the material for this biography was gathered by countless interviews with relatives and friends--indeed the book can be said be a memoir as it is an account, or rather a weaving together of many memories into a rich and wonderful tapestry of a life that should be remembered. It is also a history of a time and a people.

To quote the book jacket, this is a "A powerfully intimate piece of American history as it was experienced by the working people of the Deep South, a glorious record of a life of character, tenacity and indomitable joy and an unforgettable tribute to a vanishing culture. Ava's man is Bragg at his stunning best."

I know these people. I am related to people like them. Thank you, Rick Bragg, for honoring them.



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Some Thoughts on All Over But the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg

All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I try to reread this book when I teach it in English 307 (Writing Studies, once the Writing Process). I teach it as an example of memoir. Each time I read All Over But the Shoutin;, I am struck by the beauty of the prose and the story and the story's power and the strength of the writing. Bragg is damn good. I am also caught in the story: his mother, his brothers, the tragedy of his father, and the stories Bragg tells as a reporter. I am moved to tears.

I think of my mother and my brothers and my father. I think of my stories, the ones I have imagined, and the ones I have lived and am living.



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A Short Review of Rosemary and Rue, by Seanan McGuire

Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The root tale of October Daye, changeling, aka Toby, who is "forced to resume her old position as knight errant to the Duke of Shadowed Hills and begin renewing old alliances that prove her only hope of solving the mystery of [the murder of the Countess Evening Winterrose]." That the countess has placed a curse on her, forcing her to solve this crime only raises the stake. The curse could do her in. Told with wit and humor, as Toby finds herself also venturing into painful memories and old heartaches, this is a page turner.



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A Short Review of The Apple-stone, by Nicholas Stuart Gray

The Apple Stone by Nicholas Stuart Gray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I love it still. I can't remember the first time I read this whimsical fantasy of 4 English children who luck into the ancient Apple-stone, which can make the inanimate alive. There's flashes of darkness, the mad guy/Guy Fawkes, effigy, seeking fire, the powerful Quetzalcoatl, and the sweetness of the boy-turned-demon-turned gargoyle, rescued from misery, the rocket that was alive, and the rest. Of course, magic comes with a price. Lovely book.

I didn't even know I had a first edition from the UK, sold originally for 15 shillings.



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A Short Review of The School of Hard Knocks, by Theresa Crater

School of Hard Knocks by Theresa Crater

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


School of Hard Knocks
By Theresa Crater

The first time I can remember hearing the expression, “School of Hard Knocks,” I was a teenager some months away from going off to college and I had asked a girl at my church where she was going. All my friends were waiting for that question to be answered. No emails in those days: a fat envelope, acceptance, a skinny one, rejection. When the girl said the School of Hard Knocks, I shook my head, puzzled. Was that a school’s name? No school she said, but work instead. Her parents explained they believed that was for the best. She needed some real-world experience, which, apparently, was not be acquired in college.

I cringe now at my naïve 18-year-old self’s assumption and lack of tact. But, looking back, I am not sure they were right. The expression, which is attributed to a 1902 Cosmopolitan piece by Elbert Hubbard on himself, is often used to assert experiential learning is equal in value to academic learning. Such learning or wisdom, especially the “hard knocks,” is, at times, painful, and comes from one’s mistakes and misfortunes. When given in response to such questions as the one I asked—especially—if the one asked doesn’t have a formal education—the implication is that that life’s experiences are what should be valued. Common sense, not book sense.

I would argue instead that knowledge itself and its acquisition, whether from a book or a lecture or direct experience, is what should be valued. Some things can’t be learned in a classroom, and some things must be learned through formal education. I would also argue that all knowledge, in the end, comes from the learning gained experientially, albeit in a lab or through observation or direct engagement.

And, yes, sometimes, gaining knowledge comes with hard knocks and pain and loss and grief. Sometimes the price is steep. Such is the story told by Theresa Crater in her new novel, School of Hard Knocks (Crystal Star Publishing, 2017). For Crater’s fans, this novel is somewhat different, as there are no mystical experiences and mysteries associated with the occult and arcane knowledge. The knowledge acquired here, comes through more mundane ways.

Crater follows two students in this school, both living in dangerous times, especially for people of color, and for women. The reader travels with both women from childhood into adulthood, and into middle and old age. Maggie Winters, who is first encountered in the 1890s, is a young bright African American girl, living on a North Carolina plantation owned by Mr. Winters, a man later proved to her father. The 1890s and the decades after the turn of the 20th century, was the time of Jim Crow and the resurgence of the KKK. The brief moment of African American participation in American society had passed. As one the former slaves still living on the plantation explains to Maggie, “White folks was determined to put us back in our place” (6).

Maggie, as a child, has two teachers. One, Miss Grayson, is hired by her father to teach Maggie how to read and write. For her father, doing so was dangerous. Former slaves were to be kept ignorant. Her mother’s teaching was the more practical: how to be a well-trained and well-bred house servant, how to walk, how to present herself. From both, she acquired knowledge of place, of family, and what it meant to be an African American girl in a white supremacist society.

Her father’s efforts to circumvent a rigid social order, fail in the end, resulting in Maggie learning lifelong lessons in grief and loss and pain, with healing only to come years later. Forced by his family to leave the plantation and marry, he abandons Maggie and her mother, leaving them vulnerable and without protection. “Uppity” blacks have to be put in their place, through brutal assault and murder and rape.

Maggie survives, one hard knock after another. She bears the child of the rape, but gives him up to be raised by a white family, a family that teaches him that she is inferior. She finds love, Paula, but it is a love that must be kept hidden. But Maggie survives.

The other student in this school is Caroline, a young girl in the 1950s, a time on the cusp of enormous change and social unrest. The civil rights movement is gathering strength as Martin Luther King, Jr. is rising to prominence. Caroline’s family is caught in turmoil and abuse. Her father is sent to prison and her mother begins to fall apart. Caroline begins talking to “people in the corner between the refrigerator and the door to the back to the back porch. Nobody else could see them” (134). A chance encounter has brought together Maggie and Caroline’s mother, Lily, and it is to Maggie, that Lily goes to for help. That the family of Lily’s husband was directly involved in the attack on the plantation and the murder of Maggie’s mother and Maggie’s rape becomes knowledge that is secret.

Caroline, Lily, and Maggie are connected for the rest of their lives. Secrets are shared and kept, and some secrets are endured. Old wounds are healed. Their stories are also shared, remembered, linking them inextricably together, as their lives become reflections of each other. Beyond the personal, the public history of race and bigotry and, at times, grace and justice, is also part of who these women are, in this school of hard knocks.

This is a novel of many ways of knowing, of lessons learned in pain and sorrow. What is known and who knows it and how, and the secrets Maggie keeps and eventually shares, heals and relieves some of the pain and the sorrow. That the lives of these women, black and white, are so intertwined, speaks eloquently to what we share, not what keeps us apart. Their private stories are important and need remembering. As Caroline tells her own daughter, lost and later found,
“I have so much to tell you. I wrote some of it down” (271). Yes, how we learn matters, albeit through direct experience, in a classroom, through a book, but perhaps more, I would argue, is the learning itself, and what is done with this learning. Here, these women persist, they endure, they tell their stories, they teach what they know.

I think the reader will want to know these women and their stories.

Recommended.






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A Short Review of Once Broken Faith, by Seanan McGuire

Once Broken Faith by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


All right, it's official. I am a Seanan McGuire fan, especially of her October Daye series. I like this tough, kick-ass detective for the Fae, a changeling who can work her own magic. Not that always helps her, as there are some powerful fairies out there in the Kingdoms of the West Lands, the fairy dominion superimposed over (sort of) North America. She is one good heroine.

Following close on the story of ARed-Rose Chain, in which October, aka Toby, returns to the Kingdom of the Mists from a struggle in the Kingdom of Silences where she has helped prevent a war. But she comes home with a cure for elf-shot which puts a person to sleep for 100 years. A conclave of fairy rulers has been called: should this cure be disseminated, or not? "This conclave is hosted by Arden, Queen of Mists, "and overseen by the High King and Queen themselves. Naturally, things have barely gotten underway when the first dead body shows up" (backcover).

Political intrigue, fairy politics, and more murder. As RT Reviews puts it, "Plenty of well-plotted action, danger and some genuinely perilous moments ensure the plot moves at a blisteringly fast pace ... " (backcover).

Lots of good stuff here, McGuire is a first-rate storyteller. I am impressed with her world-building. Yes, she is using Celtic fairy lore, but in a fresh and innovative way. Her people are real. I was particularly struck in this book and the last one in the series, by the casual easiness of her presentation and inclusion of gay characters. There are plenty of queer folks, but they just are. No coming out, no homophobic bigotry--the bigoted ones are us.

Good work.
Recommended.

And as the second book finished in 2018, this feels right.



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A Short Review of No Time to Spare, by Ursula K. Le Guin

No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is my first book for 2018, just finished last night. I was, and still am, reading another book at the same time, but for the first book of the year, this one seemed the most appropriate. It's not just because I am a big Le Guin and have been since high school, it's also because her work has always been a touchstone in my life, from The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness and Language of the Night and ... (insert a string of titles here ) all read and reread I don't know how many times. I wrote my dissertation on her rhetorical use of myth.

I recognized, and still recognize, myself in her stories and essays and I did, again here, in this beautiful collection of short essays and musings, in which she is examining "the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice--sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical--shines" (front cover). The subject matter ranges questions from readers, her cat, Pard, turning 80+, faith and belief, among others. She writes, as always, with grace and style. Her prose is beautiful. As Michael Chabon says, "As a deviser of worlds, as a literary stylist, as a social critic and as a storyteller, Le Guin has no peer" (back cover).

My love affair continues.

Highly recommended.





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A Short Review of A Man Called Ove, by Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Somehow, it seems fitting that A Man Called Ove is the last book I read in 2017. Yes, it is often very funny, or "hysterically funny," as Kirkus Reviews says, and yes, I agree with Publishers Weekly, " a funny crowd-pleaser that serves up laughs to accompany a thoughtful reflection on loss and love." Ove is a recognizable character, or archetype, the "angry old man next door," who people" think is bitter and he thinks himself surrounded by idiots" (backcover).

Funny, yes, and heartbreaking, as Ove is haunted by an overwhelming grief after his wife's death. Ove lives alone in a very ordered world. Then, things change, after the arrival of new neighbors, "a chatty young couple and their two boisterous daughters" who "accidentally [flatten] Ove's mailbox with their U-Haul" when they move in (backcover). Things evolve from there and Ove acquires a scraggly cat, saves his neighbor from being taken into care, rescues a gay boy kicked out by his parents, and ... well, read the book.

Love wins. I found myself crying at the end. That is a good thing.



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A Short Review of The Long Past & Other Stories, by Ginn Hale

The Long Past & Other Stories by Ginn Hale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm imagining Ginn Hale and her wife hanging out one afternoon, drinking coffee. They start talking about the Weird West and its stories, and one of them said: what kind of world, what kind of Weird West, would there be if magic was real? Suppose the practitioners of this magic, mages, wage war, and this war results in " a vast inland sea that splits the United States in two. With the floodwaters come creatures from a long distant past. What seems like the End Times forges a new era of heroes and heroines who challenge tradition, law, and even death as they transform the old west into a new world" (backcover). What kind of adventures would these heroes and heroines have?

The stories in this collection, love stories all of them, include tales of a "laconic trapper and veteran mage" risking everything to close the rift that unleashed the great flood, of a "brilliant magician and her beautiful assistant fight one of the most powerful men in the world and his diabolic automaton invention, and of "an impoverished young man and a Pinkerton Detective" fighting a corrupt judge, are the results of these "what-if" questions, this world building. That these are GLBT heroes and heroines, and people of color, makes these well-told tales all the richer.

Check this book out.



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