I didn't sleep for even a minute on my cross-country flight, which left JFK at 9pm and landed at SFO more than six hours later at midnight and change. Most of the time I was too busy reading Frost Burned, the latest entry in the Mercy Thompson series. (Note to Loud Melissa: you really need to get started on these, now that you've caught up with The Hollows!)
Against the wishes of her parents (but with their permission), Karen Armstrong entered a convent at 17. Her memoir reveals what being a nun was like in 1960s England--the spiritual, physical and emotional challenges, as well as the joy of feeling called and chosen to strive to be close to God.
Davidia, who doesn't speak for most of her Mississippi childhood after being beaten by her drunk of a mom, develops an insane crush on the BMOC at her school about ten years into her silence. Being a psychologically mute school weirdo without a single friend, that doesn't go particularly well for her.
West Indian immigrant Phyllisia Cathy has been plopped down in Harlem with her proud, larger-than-life father, dying mother and pretty, compliant sister.
Jeune fille is French for nanny. 19-year-old Rosie is spending a year in France escaping her life by taking care of three kids with an exacting mom and a physician dad on a houseboat in Paris. Ooh la la. While the storyline might make this book sound like chick lit, it's really not.
Today I thought of the first time I realized you [older sister] were not me. I was five and you were setting that red alarm clock and I watched you and I knew that you weren't having the same thoughts. That you wouldn't dream the same thing that night. And that we would die at different times. And that you might die first. It was the first time I ever felt alone. I feel that all the time now.
Three rows down [at a bullfight in Spain], Americans were pushing their way through, boys in backwards baseball caps and T-shirts advertising universities or pubs in other countries. They were boys with wide shoulders and loud laughs, boys oblivious to their foreignness, their wealth, and their freedoms. I felt a sudden compassionate, maternal contempt for them.
Marci Cruz has an abusive father, a mother who is blinded by love for her husband, and wants to be a boy so she can love girls. The story can be hard to read sometimes because Eddie Cruz really is a champion cabrón (there's a ton of Spanish in the book), but seeing 11-year-old Marci and her seven-year-old sister Corin fight back is satisfying.
Like with First Spring Grass Fire, you wonder of Someday, Someday, Maybe how much of the story of a young aspiring actor in NYC written by a former young aspiring actor in NYC is autobiographical. While reading it I was thinking that it's possible that fictionalizing one's life might make it easier to tell the emotional truth.
I grasp onto the nearby silver pole, steadying myself as the train lurches along, my hand slipping on the smooth surface, vying for a safe position along with half a dozen other hands. Today, everything about New York leaves me feeling like I'm competing for space, and just barely hanging on.
Spoon's book is listed as a novel but reads like a memoir, told in nonlinear episodes with the protagonist sharing the author's name. I suppose I shouldn't care about the distinction, but I can't help wanting to know what I'm reading. Regardless, one should treasure the rare opportunity to read about the real or fictionalized life of a genderqueer child growing up in a religious family in the Canadian prairies.
Here's a twofer: highlights from the March 2013 SACO editorial meeting and new LCSH from March 2013.
[SACOLIST] Summary of Decisions, Editorial Meeting 13/03, March 18, 2013
Preview: Chaotic synchronization is now a SACO approved thing!
With Caroline Paul laid up after an accident and a new girlfriend on the scene, one of her cats goes missing. The cat comes back, but perhaps being bored from lying around the house, or maybe because she's just like that, Paul wants to know where the cat, Tibby, went and who took care of him while he was gone.