BOOK REVIEW: ABOVE THE EAST CHINA SEA

     I do love me some Sarah Bird.  By which I mean that I love her novels, but I also mean that I have a very strong sense that if I were ever to actually meet her, I would want so badly to be her BFF.  Her books glow with wacky humor and deep compassion.  Her sharp intelligence enlivens all of her intricate plotlines and their satisfying conclusions.  She's one of the handful of authors whose names I periodically Google to see if they've published any new novels, and if they have, I scoop them up.  That's how I found out about Bird's ninth novel, ABOVE THE EAST CHINA SEA (Vintage Press, April 2015).

     Unlike her other novels, this one didn't draw me in at first.  Writers are always told to begin a story with a hook, and I have to admit that a first chapter consisting of a conversation in stylized language between a dead fetus and his dead teenaged mother missed the sweet spot for me by a wide margin.  But this was Sarah Bird, so I persevered.  I'm glad I did.
     We don't learn the name of Tamiko, the pregnant 15-year-old, who lived on Okinawa and died during World War II, until much later in the book, but we do learn a lot about her life before the War.  Her two parents exemplify opposite ends of the social spectrum at the time: her mother comes from a long line of pragmatic, rough-mannered Okinawan peasant farmers, while her father's family has long followed white-collar pursuits - mathematics and calligraphy -  and considers itself refined and elegant, superior in every way to those who toil in the fields.  Tamiko is ashamed of her mother, and ashamed that she takes after her physically: dark skin, round face, broad feet.  Her older sister Hatsuko, on the other hand, seems to have inherited more of her father's genes, and is everything Tamiko longs to be: beautiful, graceful, sophisticated.  Of course, Hatsuko was selected last year to be one of the Princess Lily girls - the chosen few from the entire island who will be invited to attend the one and only girls' high school.  Tamiko is up for the selection process this year, but she has almost no hope for her own prospects and is more or less resigned to her fate - a lifetime of farm work - in advance.  But when the war suddenly arrives on Okinawan shores in the form of invading American ships, the old social order is instantly upended.
     Switch gears to the book's other story, also set on Okinawa but 70 years after Tamiko's.  Luz James is a tough-talking, rule-breaking 17-year-old military brat who pulls off looking like she has her shit together, but secretly contemplatesending it all by jumping off one of the island's high black cliffs.  For Luz, Okinawa is just one more in the endless series of her mother's interchangeable short-term postings.  At first her mother pumps her up about the prospect of meeting their Okinawan relatives - Luz's maternal grandmother was from the island - but that idea is shut down totally after her mother receives a mysterious letter she refuses to discuss with Luz.  So now, the only difference between Okinawa and anyplace else, as far as Luz is concerned, is that this is the first time she's started over in a new place as an only child. When Luz's older sister stunned her by enlisting right out of high school and then promptly getting herself killed on her first deployment, Luz lost the only person who made her feel like she mattered.  All she's doing now is going through the motions of hanging out with yet another band of base-kid stoners while trying to decide whether it's even worth the effort.  But that begins to change when Luz finds herself trapped in a cave and follows the sound of whimpering until she comes upon a starving, wounded young Okinawan girl who wordlessly begs Luz for help - not for herself, but for her tiny newborn baby.  And it changes even more when she leads Jake, the handsome Okinawan boy who follows Luz to the cave because he's worried about her, back to where she saw the girl and her baby.  But now, only minutes later, there's nothing there but a pile of bones.
     But what's even crazier is how matter-of-factly Jake reacts when Luz can finally bring herself to tell him about the disappearing girl in the cave.  "This is Okinawa," he tells her.  "This is how it is: We live with the dead and the dead live with us.  It's not spooky or creepy or woo-woo; it's just how it is."  But what Jake fails to mention at that point is how much more true all of this becomes during the three-day festival of Odon, when the line between the living and the dead becomes so thin that it requires almost no effort to slip across it  - in either direction.
     I don't know about you, but my knowledge of Okinawa has, until now, begun and ended with Mr. Miaggi.  Wax on, wax off.  I didn't know that Japan had used Okinawa as a pawn in World War II, putting it in harm's way and then not even making a pretense of defending it.  I didn't know that, despite the fact that Okinawa had no stake in the outcome of the War, something like a third of its population was killed by the end of it.  And I didn't know that afterward, part of Japan's peace treaty with the Allied forces was its agreement to cede about one-fifth of Okinawa (which was given no say in the matter) to be used for American military operations. 

Or that it didn't matter to the Americans what they were plowing under - fertile fields, ancient burial grounds - in order to build their bases and airstrips.  I didn't know that the tiny island of Okinawa has been shamelessly screwed over by more powerful forces, time after time after time.
     I was bothered by one gaping plot hole.  There's a ton of backstory for all the major players, and a huge emphasis on family, but Luz's absent father barely even gets a mention.  Still, to me this omission is heavily outweighed by the sheer pleasure of reading this lovely novel and following its clues until, at the end, the reader fully understands how and why - as the Okinawans say - "life is the treasure."

NEVER THOUGHT I'D GET THE CHANCE...

...to meet my #1 Kidlit Writing Hero, but barring something unforeseen, it's going to happen.  I'M GOING TO HAVE TEA AT HER HOUSE, you all!! Okay, first let's see if you can guess who it is.  This person:
     - was born in China between the two World Wars;
     - was a teacher in Japan;
     - has won (among many other awards) two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards;
     - was recently a U.S. National Ambassador for Children's Literature; and
     - is (I just discovered) active on Facebook!

     It's Katherine Paterson, and here's how this came about.  In June I saw on someone's website that the MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts was going to be hosting an auction.  Just out of curiosity, I looked to see what the prizes were, and saw to my amazement that one of them - the only one, as far as I was concerned - was Tea with Katherine Paterson (who's on the VCFA Board of Trustees) at her house.  I mean, how many world-famous writers do you know who would open up their homes to complete strangers and serve them tea??  So I pledged an absolutely insane amount of money, because talk about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!  And I won the auction, because luckily for me, no one else seemed to be willing to spend quite so much of his/her children's inheritance as I was.  Sorry, kids.  Someday maybe you'll understand.

     Katherine Paterson is who I want to be when I grow up.  She's been publishing books since the 1970s, and they've been delighting and inspiring me for twenty years or more.  And I heard her deliver a keynote address years ago at some conference or other, and she was exactly as awesome as I expected her to be, which is an extremely high bar to meet.  She signed books afterward, and when it was my turn to get her autograph and I asked her if I could give her a hug (yes, yes, I'm mortified that I did this, okay?), she didn't bat an eye, just smiled, stood up, came out from behind the desk, and hugged me back.
     Paterson has written picture books, a memoir, some essays and other nonfiction, and 16 novels for young people covering an enormous variety of subjects, both historical and contemporary.  The common thread between almost all of the novels is that her protagonists are outsiders and sometimes outcasts.  They're displaced persons, uncomfortable in their surroundings and, often, in their own skins.  Paterson understands them all so deeply that she makes the reader love them even though they don't (yet) know how to love themselves.  Paterson's background is intensely Christian (her parents were missionaries, her husband was a minister, she has an advanced degree in Christian education).  She doesn't ever use her books to shove her faith at you, but what she does do, over and over, is beautifully, credibly illustrate both the pain of isolation and the power of redemption.  Her books have brought solace to kids all over the world, and are very close to my heart.
     And in September I'm going to meet this woman and spend a few hours in her company and bask in her glow.  And then I'm going to come back home and write about every last detail.  So stay tuned.  And follow her on Facebook!  Because, as if all her other accomplishments weren't enough, apparently she's tech-savvy too!

p.s.  No, I'm sorry, you can't have tea with Katherine Paterson, because (as I might have mentioned)  I WON THAT, but maybe if you're lucky (and also cool with hijacking your family's financial security), you can have lunch with A.S. King: https://www.facebook.com/as.king.author/photos/a.286927082468.144637.45802717468/10153025337017469/?type=1&theater.  I guess writers eating meals with their slavering fans is a thing now! Go for it!

BREAKING NEWS: ANOTHER HARPER LEE DISCOVERY!!

     So have you heard already that there might be yet a third Harper Lee novel lurking in that mysterious vault in Monroeville?  Or possibly even a fourth??  That vault seems to have the capacity of Hermione Granger's bottomless bag, doesn't it?  But here's an exclusive scoop the media hasn't gotten hold of yet: the vault also contained an fully authenticated Harper Lee graphic novel, carbon-dated to the year 1958, only a few years after the time when GO SET A WATCHMAN took place.
     That's right, folks.  Harper Lee wrote a graphic novel decades before the genre was thought to have been created.  And not only that - although I cannot reveal my sources, I have been given permission to share here an exclusive excerpt from this extremely rare and valuable manuscript.  Are you ready?  Okay then, here goes:

Don't forget, folks - you saw it here first. 

ELIZABETH WEIN'S "BLACK DOVE, WHITE RAVEN:" A SAD LITTLE BOOK REVIEW

    

     I love Elizabeth Wein.  That's why I drove two hours each way to see her at a book signing last year.  I adored ROSE UNDER FIRE and CODE NAME VERITY.  The second I learned that she had a new historical YA novel (Hyperion, March 2015) coming out, I preordered it.  I've read it now, and I wanted so badly to love it and to write a shamelessly glowing review of it, but I can't.  Wein tells a good story - I don't think she could do otherwise if she tried - but I felt distanced from the characters as if I was seeing them through a screen.  And I think that's because Wein herself is more in love with Ethiopia, where the heart of the book is set, than with either of her two main characters.
     The original Black Dove and White Raven of the tale were, respectively, Delia (African-American) and Rhoda from Blue Rock Farm in Pennsylvania (Caucasian), a pair of Jazz Age, fearless, wing-walking, barnstorming young pilots who traveled around the United States in their little biplane, performing in air shows. 

     Oh, and each of these Wonder Women had a baby: Rhoda's daughter Emilia (Em) was eight months older than Delia's son Teodros (Teo), and the two solo women were essentially co-parents of both children.  Life was wonderful and exciting, but the women chafed against the racism they encountered everywhere they went.  Delia proposed a solution: that the four of them move to Ethiopia, the homeland of Teo's conveniently deceased father, a place to which she's never been but which she imagined to be race-blind.  Rhoda soon comes to embrace this dream too, and they begin diligently saving money to prepare for the move.  But then Delia dies in a terrible airplane encounter with a flock of birds, and Rhoda, now somehow the uncontested guardian of Teo as well as Em (the facts get a little hazy here), retreats to her parents' home where the children are cared for by her family members while she suffers a prolonged and extreme period of depression.
     Meanwhile, while Em and Teo's physical needs are being met, they have no one but each other to turn to for emotional support.  Together they develop a fantasy world in which the two of them are now Black Dove and White Raven, encountering comic-book-style adventures and perils from which they always emerge victorious.  Eventually, Rhoda recovers from her grief to the point where she decides to pursue Delia's dream on her own: she pulls up stakes with the two children and moves to Ethiopia.  But unfortunately, there are a lot of things about her newly-adopted country that Rhoda has yet to learn. 
     It's probably safe to assume that 1930's Ethiopia, a.k.a. Abyssinia,  is not a subject about which most modern readers would have an expertise.  But Wein wants us to know everything about the country as it was at that moment in time - its history, climate, geography, culture, political situation - because she so passionately wants her readers to love the place as much as she does.  And the way she solves this problem is via information dumps.  Over and over, people toss into their conversations the kinds of facts that people never toss into conversations, like that Ethiopia was the only African nation never to have been colonized, or that it had just joined the League of Nations, or that a lot of the guns on the street when Teo and Em first arrived in Ethiopia had been picked up at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.  Wein creates elaborate backstories to explain how her characters have come to be who they are, but to me, the stories were too elaborate, and by and large unnecessary.  After I finished reading the book I went back to the beginning and realized that I had no recollection of most of what I had read there.  I didn't care how Rhoda and Delia first met, or how Rhoda met Em's Italian father, Papa Menotti, or how Delia met Teo's father, or how and when Rhoda and Delia had first learned to fly.  I just wanted to find out what happened to Em and Teo, and none of the backstory mattered to me so I forgot it as soon as I read it.  And I'm an adult, and I'm generally fascinated by history, which to me suggests that a teenage reader with a shorter attention span would forget it all even faster.
     It's easy to see from photographs how mesmerizingly beautiful a place Ethiopia is.

     You can't possibly fault Wein for having fallen in love with it after she'd been there.  Em and Teo have a lot of adventures in Ethiopia, some wonderful, some horrifying.  Often their former imaginary identities as White Raven and Black Dove help them to navigate through the worst real-life catastrophes that befall them.  They make a great team, and their devotion to each other is lovely to read about.  But the real, in-your-face star of this show is Ethiopia itself, not Em and Teo, and I kept finding myself wishing that it were the other way around.

WELCOME TO MY FONTFAIL

     Courier New, anyone?  Is there something tragically wrong with Courier New that no one ever bothered me to tell me about?  I'm assuming, of course, that you're more font-forward than I am, because let's face it - who isn't?  Courier New is the default font I use at work.  To me, it's so mild-mannered and inoffensive as to be invisible.  I mean, it's not like it features little clowns acting out the letters, is what I'm saying.  It's BLAND.
      And yet, when I met with an agent for a critique at the NJSCBWI conference I attended two weeks ago, she started off the conversation by telling me, in a seriously aggrieved tone, that I had (Crime #1) sent her my submission in her least favorite font.   And if that weren't enough, when she tried to change the font to something more tolerable, everything went "all wonky" because (Crime #2) I had done such a terrible job of formatting.  I got the strong impression that, had my crime spree ended with the use of Courier New, she might have courageously gritted her teeth and sailed onward, difficult as it would have been.  But by following it up with Crime #2, I had truly drilled the last nail into my own coffin.  Oh, the agent also really did not like my manuscript, by the way, but her response to that seemed so much less visceral; she was not remotely interested in the content, but neither was she personally offended.
     It's taken me a while to figure out what was going on here, but I've got it now: I was being told that I had demonstrated an appalling lack of taste and judgment by utilizing what I should have known was a clearly inferior font in a submission to a clearly superior person.  Or - perhaps even worse - that I knew full well how nightmarish Courier New was, but I simply didn't care.  I was utterly indiscriminate (cf. "That's my last duchess painted on the wall").  In short, I was a fontslut.
     I realized only today that I had been font shamed, and I was going to post about it when it occurred to me that I might actually not be the first person to come up with that phrase.  Enter Google.  I now know that font shaming is a concept that has existed for the Internet equivalent of millennia, i.e., at least two years.  If you don't believe me, read this and this and this, and then join me in my hatred of people everywhere who will stop at nothing to let you know how much better they are than you.

                                         Look!!  It's Little Lord FONTleroy!!!  hahahahahahaha

     So.  Have YOU ever been font shamed?  Please let me know.  If there are enough of us, maybe we can form a support group!

UPDATE: Today I Googled "font snobbery," and what an education I've gotten!  Thank God I didn't send my submission in Comic Sans; if I had, my picture might be up in print shops all around the country under a "MOST WANTED" caption.  But I didn't see one mention of Courier New among the lists of Most Reviled Fonts.  And besides, the people who seem most offended by certain fonts seem to be mostly graphic designers, who I suppose have a right to care about things like that.  But the rest of us?  Please.  Get a life.

BOOK REVIEW: A GOD IN RUINS, by Kate Atkinson

    


     Very close to the end of this book, which is built on the framework of the Second World War, Atkinson gets into the numbers.  "Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from [presumably only British] Bomber Command."  By that point, having not quite emerged from the long, ordinary, astonishing fictional life of one Edward Beresford Todd, the reader understands the significance of the number.  Those were 55,573 similar stories never told, similar lives never lived.
     You don't need to have read Atkinson's TIME AFTER TIME (here's my review) to appreciate this beautiful new companion novel.  In fact, not having read it might spare you some confusion, because didn't that book end (and also begin) with Ursula Todd, Teddy's sister, killing Hitler in front of a roomful of his hangers-on just as his political star was starting to rise?  Her lifespan from that point on could only have been counted in seconds, and very few of those.  But now, in A GOD IN RUINS, don't we see Ursula surviving the War and dying in late middle age following a stroke?  And wait - if Hitler had been killed in the early 1930's, would there even have been a War? 
     But you would not have been confused for long, because you would have known before even cracking the cover of A GOD that Time, as we know it, does not bind Atkinson; it's her plaything, not her prison.  Which is not to say that Teddy, Ursula's beloved younger brother and their mother's favorite child, is not slowly and inexorably being crushed - ruined - under its weight, just as the rest of us are.  And he lacks Ursula's handy-dandy knack (see TIME AFTER TIME) of repeatedly dying and then popping back up again in what start out, at least, as the exact same circumstances as before.  But Atkinson doesn't need the flashy gimmicks to prove to us that Teddy will come back again.  All she needs is a few lowkey mentions of the Buddha, and the song of a skylark.
     The pre-War Teddy Todd is an amiable, bright-enough young man of no particular talent or ambition who seems destined to remain in a despised career in banking because he can't think of anything better to do.  When the War arrives, he hits rather haphazardly on the idea of training to be a bomber pilot.  Then he goes off to serve his country.  Years later, when his plane is shot down over Germany, he is taken prisoner.  After the War ends, he marries the literal girl next door, the one he's loved since the age of three.  Teddy stumbles into a job as a columnist ("Nature Notes") for his local newspaper, which eventually becomes the editorship, which eventually becomes his career.  He and Nancy have a daughter.  Some nine years later, Nancy develops a brain tumor, and dies not long after.  Teddy raises Viola by himself.  She grows up to be a one-woman horror show.  When she abandons her own two children, Teddy raises them by himself too.  He gardens.  He cooks.  He does not travel, or fall in love again, or develop meaningful friendships, or have epiphanies about the meaning of life.  Time passes.  Teddy retires from the newspaper; quietly grows old, then very old;  misses all those he has loved and lost; dies.  An uncomplicated story about an uncomplicated man.  Neither of which is even possible.
     Teddy's is a life lived with decency, and Atkinson shows us, step by step, how it's done.  Teddy has fulfilled his duty to Bomber Command after 30 runs, but he knows he's a good, steady pilot who inspires confidence in his crews, so he signs up again.  And then again.  By the time he's captured, he has completed 72 bombing runs. Rained death and destruction on the Germans; done much more than his part to crush the German was machine. The postwar Teddy is well aware of the cost of his bargain with the devil, although in hindsight he would have made the same choices, and  Atkinson includes those numbers too, lest we forget: 7 million German dead, including 500,000 killed by Allied bombers. 

 

                                            Hamburg (one of the cities Teddy's crew bombed)

Five hundred thousand, including, perhaps, a white-haired, mechanically-inclined orphan boy whose song Anthony Doerr sings to us in ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE. Who's to say that fictional people don't exist in the same dimension as each other, especially during the chaos and displacement of wartime?
     Before her mind has been ravaged by the tumor, Nancy asks Teddy to help her die when the time comes.  Although he cannot bring himself to make the promise, he does bring himself to keep it.  Of course, this act of heroism is not without consequences either: unbeknownst to Teddy, Viola is a silent witness of the scene. Could it be part of the reason she becomes such an inhuman adult?  Why she eventually becomes so relentless in her efforts to move Teddy along the old-age conveyor belt toward his demise? 
     Without drama, without expecting anything in return, Teddy saves the lives of his grandchildren, Sunny and Bertie, with his patient, quotidian love for them.  But this good deed somehow goes unpunished: unlike Viola, they love him in return, each in his or her own way.
     The lesser joys of reading a Kate Atkinson novel are too many to list.  Bertie's hilarious parenthetical commentary on her mother is the voice in our ear of the snarky best friend we wish we had. Teddy, much to his chagrin, is the involuntary subject of his flamboyant, childless Aunt Izzie's  hugely successful series of boys' books, THE ADVENTURES OF AUGUSTUS ( "What makes you you?  What do you like doing?  Who are your friends?  Do you have a thingamajig, you know -" she said, struggling for alien vocabulary, "David and Goliath - a slingshot thingy?")  And then, as if Augustus were not enough of a cross to bear, Viola becomes a novelist, specializing in thinly-veiled revisionist history, and he becomes her antihero ("He also failed (apparently) to understand that the book - young girl, brilliant and precocious, troubled relationship with her single-parent father, etcetera - was about them.  Surely he knew that?  Why didn't he say something?")  Ah.  Point well taken, Kate Atkinson.  Not all literary incarnations are rewards for a life well lived.
     "A man is a god in ruins," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in Nature.  Atkinson has the heart and wisdom  to celebrate both aspects of the dialectic.  Thanks to her, Teddy's song lives on.  Happy Father's Day, Edward Beresford Todd.

THE HUNGRY, HUNGRY BLOG (and blogger)

Please help.  My blog is starving and I have nothing to feed it.

     I'm stricken with pity and guilt by my blog's plight, but pity and guilt don't help it any more than they would help this tiny scrap of avian life to survive, to grow, to someday unfold its new wings, to launch itself into the infinite nest of the air.  My blog needs nourishment, and I have none to give.
     Unfortunately, the USB ports on my laptop don't accept worms and grubs.  If they did, I could probably manage to find some good specimens in the back yard.  But the food I need to produce for the blog has to be manufactured in my brain, and my brain seems to have closed up the creativity shop.  The only thing it seems able to produce these last few weeks is anxiety, and as we all know, the only thing anxiety can feed is more anxiety.

     It's embarrassing to reveal what I'm so anxious about, but I will, in the hope that if I spill a little of my own blood between the keys, the blog will at least be temporarily mollified.  I'm anxious because in 13 days I'll find myself in attendance at the New Jersey Society of Book Writers and Illustrators (a.k.a. "NJSCBWI") annual Conference.  I've attended this Conference for many years, and for every one of at least the last five, I've gotten my heart broken.  I've submitted the first 15 pages of a book manuscript for one-on-one critiques by editors  and/or agents, and I've been told by at least one such critiquer that she (it's always been a she) loves what I've written, loves the way I write, and wants to see more, more, more.  So I've duly sent more, more, more, only to (occasionally) be told never mind, or (more frequently) never hear so much as a syllable in response.  This happens every.  Single.  Year.  And yet I keep making my annual pilgrimage to this Conference, because where else will I find the opportunity to receive real critiques from real industry professionals?  It's truly an amazing perk that NJSCBWI offers, and I keep taking advantage of it, and I keep getting my hopes up, only to eventually be spat out once again upon the slush-pile shore.
     But here's the thing: my writing keeps getting better.  I know this to be true beyond all doubt.  So of course, each year I can't help believing that THIS TIME will be the charm.  And each year, I do inch closer and closer, but - at least so far - never close enough.  Which is why for the past week I haven't been able to draw a full breath - not like that's annoying, right? - and I'm not expecting any relief from this condition until I'm back home post-Conference.
     Truth be told, writing all this is not only embarrassing; it's mortifying.  What's wrong with me??  Do I not have one of the most fortunate of lives?  I have a good, wise, supportive husband.  I have two healthy, smart, talented, funny, kind children.  I live with the two best dogs in the world.  I have a career that I find challenging and rewarding, and that also pays decent money.  I have a handful of friendships that go bone-deep.  In sum, I have everything I have any right to want, and more.  So why can't I just be grateful and STFU????
     I'll tell you why.  Because, much like my blog and a certain caterpillar, I'm hungry, hungry too.