What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But it still really hurts.

Daughters Who Walk This Path is Yejide Kilanko's first novel.  It's centered on Morayo, a Nigerian girl who is bright, fun, and grows up surrounded by a big family and many friends.  When she is about 12 years old, Morayo's cousin Bros T moves in with her family.  Bros T is tall, handsome, and charming, but he's also in trouble.  He was kicked out of school, was caught stealing from his own family, and seems a little too touchy-feely with Morayo and her sister.  Bros T sexually abuses Morayo, and even after she speaks out and he is forcibly removed from her home, the horrors of her experience continue to shape Morayo's life.

It's hard to make a book about surviving rape sound anything but depressing, but this book is not depressing.  Yes, there are depressing scenes.  But there is also so much depth and love and forgiveness and passion and strength here, and I don't want you to miss it because you're nervous about one aspect of the book.  I was nervous about it, too, but I am very glad I read this one.

King Hereafter and Queen Once Again

I read Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter over several weeks, but I don't think I would say that I read it slowly.  It's a long book with tiny font, with foreign words and subtle plot development, with larger-than-life characters and evocative landscapes.  It's the sort of book you can't read too slowly because it takes some time to get into the rhythm of it, to remember everyone's names and their histories and their relationships to the other characters.  So I would read it in bursts - 40 or 50 pages in a night being a "burst" - and then go to bed, exhausted but enthralled.

So much happened in King Hereafter that I am not even going to attempt to do a plot summary.  Instead, here's the blurb from the back of the book:

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett's stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland.  Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue.  He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.

Dunnett depicts Macbeth's transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.  She creates characters who are at once wholly creatures of another time yet always recognizable--and she does so with such realism and immediacy that she once more elevates historical fiction into high art.

In this novel, Thorfinn is a giant - he is taller than everyone around him, with a deep and gravelly voice.  He's ugly, hardly ever smiles, and he rarely takes anyone else's advice.  He's brilliant, like so many of Dunnett's other male characters are.

He's also married to one of the most beautiful women ever, Groa, who has the great honor of being the newest entry (and the first new entry in years) to my Heroines Who Don't Annoy Me list.  Groa is wonderful.  She supports Thorfinn in everything, but she is also one of the few people who talks back to him.  She's witty and well able to understand political intrigue, and she was, for me, the focal point of this whole story.

[NOTE:  The rest of this review assumes that you know how this story (the story of Macbeth) ends.  I wouldn't say they are spoilers as it's heavily implied through the whole story, and well - most people know the ending, but just wanted to give a heads up.]

Guernsey: A tax haven that's home to a delightful cast of characters

When listening to the audiobook of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (which I highly recommend), I often thought, "This would make a fantastic costume drama for the BBC, possibly with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench playing two of the busybudy but entirely well-meaning islanders."

And it would.  In fact, I would be surprised if no one has bought the movie rights to this book and if Judi Dench isn't on the list of people shortlisted to play Esola.

This book is such a treat.  And when I say "treat," I mean the very sweet, hurts your teeth kind.  It reminded me a bit of Anne of Green Gables because everyone in it is just so well-meaning and kind and wonderful except for some people who really are just too bumbling and ridiculous to be taken very seriously.

Is it a character flaw to like a book a lot on every level but not love it because you think it is TOO PERFECT?  Probably.  But that's the way I am!  I can't help it.  I admit there were times when this woman Elizabeth was being described as saving yet another person from death or despair or loneliness, and I just rolled my eyes because seriously, this Elizabeth woman seemed too good to be true.

Who is Elizabeth, you ask?  Well, let me tell you.

[TSS] What I'm doing when I'm not reading

Has anyone read a book by Italian author Italo Calvino?  There was a Radiolab short featuring a story by him and I was completely enthralled by it.  I have just purchased a copy of Invisible Cities for my Kindle and I hope it's as captivating as I think it will be.

Here's a description of the story on the Radiolab website:

According to one theory, the moon formed when a Mars-sized chunk of rock collided with Earth. After the moon coalesced out of the debris from that impact, it was much closer to Earth than it is today. This idea is taken to it's fanciful limit in Italo Calvino's story "The Distance of the Moon" (from his collection Cosmicomics). The story, narrated by a character with the impossible-to-pronounce name Qfwfq, tells of a strange crew who jump between Earth and moon, and sometimes hover in the nether reaches of gravity between the two.

 And here's the podcast where you can listen to the story in full and perhaps become as enthralled as me.

It's fantastic and well worth the 40 minute investment.  Liev Schrieber is an amazing narrator.

If you want a shorter commitment, the below Dove video that compares how women describe themselves with how other people describe them has been making the round this week.  I'm really only posting it here for context, since you may have already seen it.  But I actually want you to click through to here.  Why?  It puts the whole video in fantastic context and really offers a lot of great insight.  Need a teaser to get you to click through?

And my primary problem with this Dove ad is that it’s not really challenging the message like it makes us feel like it is. It doesn’t really tell us that the definition of beauty is broader than we have been trained to think it is, and it doesn’t really tell us that fitting inside that definition isn’t the most important thing. It doesn’t really push back against the constant objectification of women. All it’s really saying is that you’re actually not quite as far off from the narrow definition as you might think that you are (if you look like the featured women, I guess).   -jazzy little drops 

See?  Pretty powerful commentary, isn't it?  So go ahead and click through.



And that's what I'm doing when I'm not reading! That is, besides gearing up for my sister's wedding, which is on SATURDAY!  Very exciting/stressful/emotional week coming up for me!

What about you?

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I can tell you're Hazara just by looking at you

Guys, I was so excited to read this book.  I read the following description and pretty much requested it IMMEDIATELY:

This extraordinary book, derived from the long oral tradition of storytelling in Afghanistan, presents a mesmerizing portrait of a people who triumph with intelligence and humor over the oppressions of political dictators and an unforgiving landscape.
A musician conjures stones to rise in the air and teaches his art to a mute child. Master Poisoner, Ghoroob of Mashad, has so perfected his craft that it is considered an honor to die from his meals. These are stories of magic and wonder in which ordinary people endure astonishing extremes in a world of bloodshed and brotherhood, miracles and catastrophes.

With lyrical wit and profound simplicity, The Honey Thief reveals an Afghanistan of greater richness and humanity than is conveyed in newspaper headlines; an Afghanistan not of failure and despair, but of resilience and fulfillment.

 Doesn't that sound brilliant?  I was imagining Arabian Nights and The Kite Runner and all sorts of admittedly stereotypical things when I started this book.  I didn't quite get what I was hoping for.

When life gives you lemons...

Make Lemonade, by Virginia Euwer Wolff, is the first book I've ever read that was written in free verse.  I read this via audiobook and I must admit - I could not tell at all that it was a novel in verse.  Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly wasn't what I was expecting.

Make Lemonade is about two very different girls from inner city Philadelphia.  LaVaughn is a high school freshman who has plans to go to college and make something of herself, to leave her neighborhood behind her.  Her mother is supportive and strong and pushes her to succeed.  To save for college, LaVaughn decides to get an after-school job.  She starts baby-sitting toddlers Jeremy and Jilly while their mother, 17-year-old Jolly, works at a factory.

Jolly's life story has a very different arc from LaVaughn's that comes up as the story continues.  She sees herself as a victim, which LaVaughn doesn't tolerate, but she also has had a really difficult life to date, and very few role models.  She doesn't live in a nice place at all, and she barely has money to buy toilet paper.  When she gets unfairly fired from her job, she's unable to pay LaVaughn to babysit any more and the relationship between the two girls begins to evolve.  LaVaughn pushes Jolly to go back to school and make something of herself, and Jolly learns to take charge of her life and its trajectory.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Michael Moss' book Salt Sugar Fat:  How the Food Giants Hooked Us has gotten a LOT of attention in my world since it came out.  Full disclosure:  I work in the processed foods industry and my company gets quite a bit of coverage in this book.

Salt Sugar Fat is about much more than the blurb lets on, but the blurb is pretty good, so I'm going to share it here (a truncated version):

Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It’s no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It’s no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year. In Salt Sugar Fat, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Michael Moss shows how we got here. Featuring examples from some of the most recognizable (and profitable) companies and brands of the last half century—including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Nestlé, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more—Moss’s explosive, empowering narrative is grounded in meticulous, often eye-opening research.

A Multi-Generational Saga of Rebelling Against Your Parents

The House of the Spirits was the first novel written by the now-prolific author Isabel Allende.  I have never read anything by Allende before, but I've had this one on my shelf for quite some time.  As it met two of my unofficial goals of reading books I already own AND reading books by people of color (yes, I am going to qualify Central and South Americans as people of color), it was inevitable that I would pull it down from the shelves this year.

I really had no idea what this book was about going into it.  I think that was part of the fun.  It's set in a South American country (never named, though it's commonly believed to be Chile) and centers on one family, the Truebas, and their ups and downs through good and bad economic, political, and interpersonal times after the end of colonialism.  There are light doses of magical realism thrown in, and a lot about passion, forgiveness, and the complications of the many types of love that can exist between people.

The Delicious Life of Lucy Knisley

Relish:  My Life in the Kitchen is a memoir in comic form about the author's life experiences with food.  I read it over the course of a couple of nights and really enjoyed it - though I highly suggest you read it when you have delicious food in the house and not when you are in the midst of a grocery shopping drought like me.  It's a little depressing to read a book about the joys of cooking and eating well when you yourself are eating Morningstar buffalo wings and whatever you can salvage from a bag of green beans.

But other people plan their grocery shopping better than I do!  And Knisley does spend some of her book defending the joys of fast food restaurants and Ramen soup, so  I didn't feel so bad.

And honestly, Knisley is such a bright and cheerful person who draws such bright and cheerful (and colorful!) pictures and shares such bright and cheerful food stories that it's impossible to feel bad when reading this book.  I'm a big food lover myself, so I can identify with Knisley's inability to separate places she's visited from the food she's eaten while there.  And the way she talks about potluck dinners and having friends over to share a meal -  I absolutely agree with her, it's one of my favorite things in the world to have or attend a dinner party with close friends.

Yul Brynner Inspires Illegal Border Crossings

One of my unofficial reading goals for the year is for at least 50% of the books I read to be written by people of color.  A difficulty I have with this goal is that my personal collection of books is sadly not very diverse.  While I work on purchasing more books by minorities, I have been supplementing with selections from the Chicago Public Library's fantastic collection of audiobooks.

The most recent book I've gotten from that collection is Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Alberto Urrea.  Urrea is an author of Mexican and American heritage who writes both fiction and non-fiction about immigration.  Into the Beautiful North is about a group of young Mexican women (and one man) who live in the town of Tres Camarones.  Over the past several years, the economy has dried up and all of the men have left town to try their luck in America.  As a result, there are no men left to defend the city from the mafiosos and there aren't any children around, either.

After watching the movie The Magnificent Seven at the local theater, a small group of friends gets the inspiration to go north to America, find seven Mexican men, and bring them back to Tres Camarones to keep the town safe from the mafiosos.  So they set off into the beautiful north on a grand adventure to save their town.