a tree grows in brooklyn

July 3, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Red, White, And Blue Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re highlighting books with red, white, and blue covers because tomorrow is Independence Day! Or as my very British brother-in-law calls it, Unruly Colonists Day. Since this is a cover-focused list, I’m not going to write about my choices, but I will note for the record that all of these books take place in the USA!

The Great Gatsby

Into The Wild

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

From Dead to Worse

Americanah

Fahrenheit 451

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Beloved

All The King’s Men

October 10, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Autumnal Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Early October is like peak fall, for me…the leaves are changing and colorful, the weather is usually crispy but not yet cold. It’s my favorite time of year, and I’m celebrating it with this week’s topic, which is books with fall-seeming covers. These books all have the purples and oranges and yellows and reds and browns that fit in with the loveliness outside! I usually have an explanation for my picks, but this week I’m going to let the visuals do the talking and just list my selections below.

Jane Eyre

To Kill A Mockingbird

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Where The Heart Is

The Help

The Cider House Rules

Ella Enchanted

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Catching Fire

Chocolat

May 16, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Mother-Daughter Relationships In Fiction

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Since we just had Mother’s Day this past weekend (hi Mom!), I thought I’d look at some mother-daughter relationships in fiction. Some are good, some are bad, all are interesting.

White Oleander: Astrid has many mothers- primarily, her biological one, Ingrid, whose reckless murder of a faithless lover leaves her daughter to the mercies of the foster care system. The relationships she has with the various women who take her in change her in different ways.

The Red Tent: This book tells the story of Dinah and her mothers: Leah, who birthed her, and Leah’s three sisters, all of whom became the wives of Jacob. It’s a lovely story focused on the relationships between women and the ways each of her mother-aunts leaves indelible fingerprints on Dinah.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Katie Nolan prefers her son and plays favorites in a way that feels a little jarring to a modern audience (maybe just me?), but that doesn’t mean she loves her daughter Frances any less fiercely.

Pride and Prejudice: Mrs. Bennett is always scheming to get her five daughters married off and makes many blunders/faux pas along the way, but her love for her girls is always obvious.

The Golden Compass: This is really across the entire His Dark Materials series, but the growing relationship between Lyra and her mother, Mrs. Coulter takes lots of twists and turns over the course of the series.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: While I prefer to view this novel by itself (rather than along with its companion Little Altars Everywhere), I find the complicated relationship between Vivi and her daughter Sidda fascinating…remembering that our family members are people with stories that go far beyond any particular bond is always helpful.

Chocolat: I love this book, and the way Joanne Harris draws the relationship between Vianne and her daughter Anouk with such devoted love and tenderness is definitely a part of why I enjoy it so much.

The Guineveres: Each of the four main characters in this book has a different story about her own mother…each of which leads to being left at a convent as a teenager, which are revealed only piecemeal as the story progresses. By the way, this book is only $2.99 right now on the Kindle!

The Joy Luck Club: The story of four immigrant Chinese ladies and their American-raised daughters (and the inevitable clashes that result from that tension, along with the natural ones that come along with being mothers and daughters), it’s an emotionally perceptive look at the way the told and untold stories of the mothers’ lives play against the lives of their daughters.

Beloved: This story asks an impossible question- how far could a mother’s love go? Escaped slave Sethe commits an unspeakable act when she believes she and her child are about to be captured and forced back into bondage, which figuratively and then literally haunts her for years. I tend to be wary of magical realism, but this book uses it powerfully.

March 20, 2017

My Reading Life: What I Wish I Would Have Read In High School

The title is a bit of a misnomer. There are some books that I read in high school that were amazing: To Kill A Mockingbird (read in 10th grade), The Great Gatsby (read in 11th grade, and which I super hated at the time and think high school is too early to really appreciate it). But there were also some clunkers: Of Mice and Men (read in 9th grade), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (read in 12th grade). High school is such a heady time, hormones and emotions running high, and the right book at the right time can instill a lifelong appreciation for books and the worlds you can explore through them. If I was redesigning the standard-issue high school curriculum (which I know doesn’t really exist, my in-laws are teachers), here are the three works I would want everyone to read each year

Freshman Year

Romeo and Juliet: I read this one freshman year, and I think that’s the perfect time to read it. Romeo and Juliet is a bonkers play, you guys. Fighting in the streets! Romantic obsession! Sex! Death! It’s a story about teenagers being crazy and stupid and perfect for 14 year olds.

1984: In terms of actual reading comprehension level, this is very understandable for a teenager. Some parents would probably freak out because of some very mild sexual situations, but they need to chill out. This is a great novel to inspire kids to start to think critically about political and media manipulation (especially in this new age of “alternative facts”)

The Hunger Games: I think recently popular lit gets overlooked on school reading lists, but I think this would actually go great with 1984. The language is a bit more modern but touches on similar themes about government control, and features a badass female heroine.

Sophomore Year

To Kill A Mockingbird: This literary classic was on my own 10th grade reading list, and I think that was a great time to have read it. Scout is a fantastic heroine, and lessons this book imparts about standing up for what’s right and empathy for others are powerful at any age, but especially around this time.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower: This story, about the tight bond that develops between flawed teenage outcasts, is sensitive and powerful. As much as parents would love to pretend otherwise, teenagers do have sex lives and sexuality, and this novel speaks to those developments in a way that will ring true for 15 year-olds.

Speak: On the dark side of that idea about teenage sexuality is the reality that sexual assault is a real risk during these years. The book is incisive and witty and can help girls understand that unwanted sexual attention isn’t their fault…and boys understand the importance of consent.

Junior Year

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: The story of Francie Nolan is one about overcoming the odds, mostly because of a love of reading and school. Francie lives through some pretty tough stuff and manages to stick it out, and I know when I was 16, I was pretty sure I had it pretty bad myself, so this book will bring both perspective and an example of triumph over obstacles.

The Catcher In The Rye: I really think this book speaks most powerfully to teenagers, who are obsessed with the idea of being real, the idea that adults are fake. By the time I read it, in my early 20s, I mostly wanted to give Holden a hearty smack across the face and tell him to snap out of it. But for a 16 year-old, the sense of aimlessness and feeling like you should know what you want from your life even though you totally don’t is very identifiable.

Fahrenheit 451: Our world today has more easy distractions than ever, making the relevance of this novel, about the importance of books and reading and how easy it is for these things to fall by the wayside, even more obvious. This book will likely not speak to every 11th grade student, but for those who make the effort to understand it, it would be richly rewarding.

Senior Year

In Cold Blood: Truman Capote’s masterpiece about a shocking murder in Kansas is a fantastic way to work with 12th graders about style. It was one of the very first non-fiction novels, and is perfectly paced and plotted. The appeal of a story is about the way it’s told as much as anything else.

A Brave New World: This fits right in with the 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 suggestions earlier along the way about the ways that the powerful can subdue the masses through social control. This one is, for my money, the most mature of the three I’ve picked and as you’re about to send kids out into the world, one that I’d like to have fresh in their minds.

Lord of the Flies: I think I actually read this in 11th grade, but it works fine here too. Finding and trying to fit into groups is a big part of the teen years, which continue into college, and the power of those groups to influence their members is something that’s good to put into 17 and 18 year-olds minds as they get ready to really experience life outside the home for the first time.

November 29, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Holiday Gift Guide

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s prompt is to create a holiday gift guide. As my gift guide, I’m going to tell you about ten books that I’ve reviewed on this blog over the last year, and who they would make a good choice for this holiday season!

Beloved: Someone interested in the ways that slavery’s pernicious evil continues to reverberate. Toni Morrison’s classic makes the horrors of slavery, which can almost seem abstract in their scope, personal and real.

All The King’s Men: Anyone who is interested in what can be hiding behind a populist veneer. President-Elect Trump is not the first politician to rise to power behind a populist message. There are some definite parallels to Robert Penn Warren’s Willie Stark in our incoming administration.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Budding feminists. Most of us have heard of and are at least somewhat familiar with Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo’s examination of the myths that have sprung up around her and how they’ve changed over time is a great primer on variable views of women over time.

The Serpent King: Anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong. Which is kind of everyone, right? Jeff Zenter’s story about three high school misfits in their senior year brings that aching longing of adolescence rushing right back in the best possible way.

The Namesake: Someone with a complicated relationship with their parents. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s justly lauded novel, Gogol’s angst over his given name mirrors the tension he feels with his immigrant parents and their culture as he grows up in America.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Anyone who’s loved someone unreliable. Little Francie Nolan worships her ne’er-do-well father in Betty Smith’s coming-of-age classic. The pain that he causes both Francie and her mother, Katie, without really “meaning” to will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has tried to count on someone that they shouldn’t.

The Big Rewind: Nostalgic older millennials. Remember mixtapes? If the actual creation of a putting songs on a cassette before your time, Libby Cudmore’s witty, entertaining debut probably won’t resonate with you very hard. But for the rest of us, it’s a treat!

American Gods: Mythology buffs. Neil Gaiman is an incredible writer, and this is one of his most popular works for a reason. It posits a world in which the gods of classical mythology (along with more modern subjects of worship) are actual, corporeal beings…a great mind-stretcher for people who love myths!

The Group: Young women who’ve just graduated from college. When you graduate, you feel like the whole world is in front of you. And it is! But the struggles that exist out there in the real world: relationships, work, motherhood are the same ones that we’ve been dealing with for nearly a hundred years. It’s comforting to realize we’ve all been through it before.

Enchanted Islands: Anyone who feels like the later stages of their life are fated to be boring. After a difficult but not particularly exciting life, the heroine of Allison Amend’s novel experiences real adventure for the first time in her late 40s, in a way that continues to play out through the rest of her days. Life’s adventures never really end.

September 13, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten ALL TIME Favorite Coming of Age Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s theme was a fill in the blank: top ten books in a particular genre. I don’t do much “genre” reading (literary fiction is probably the biggest through-line), but I have read a lot of coming-of-age novels. Even as an adult, there’s something so universal and compelling about these kind of stories. I think we’re all still carrying around the psychic scars of our own growing-up process, so they’re easy to identify with. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyways, here are my ten absolute favorites.

The Last Picture Show: Small-town Texas high school senior Sonny doesn’t have a lot of direction. Over the course of that year and the couple months following, though, he plays his last season of football, covets his best friend’s girl, loses his virginity to his coach’s wife, experiences the death of his father figure, has a brief fling with the aforementioned best-friend’s-girl, and another person close to him dies. At the end, he finds himself at a high school football game and feeling desperately alone on the sidelines. His innocence in just about every sense of the word is lost and McMurtry writes it with beautiful poignancy.

The Lords of Discipline: Will McLean is on the cusp of graduation from The Institute, a prestigious military college when he gets assigned the task of protecting the school’s first black student. It takes him back to his truly hellish freshman year hazing experience, which did a number on him, and the situations he finds himself in during his final year (first love and loss, the death of a roommate, a fight against a shadowy group) rob him of any last vestiges of childhood. He’s a man, for better or worse, by the end. This book is seriously amazing.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: This book follows Francie Nolan from her childhood through to her early adulthood. Any bookish soul will see themselves in library-haunting, education-loving Francie, and while there are few “big events” in the book, we read along as she goes from a little girl to a young woman, ready to go out into the world and conquer.

To Kill A Mockingbird: We’ve all read this one, right? I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone who’s read TKAM who doesn’t love it. Scout is a little younger than your usual 16-20 year old coming-of-age protagonists, but what she goes through as her father defends a black man accused of rape and she digs into the mystery of her neighbor, Boo Radley. Things get pretty real for Scout, and if she’s not quite a woman by the end of it all, she’s not a little girl anymore either.

The Cider House Rules: Homer Wells is raised in an orphanage run by Wilbur Larch, a kindly abortionist (long before the procedure was legal). Homer is trained in the performance of but vociferously opposed to the termination of pregnancy, and moves away to begin a new life in on an apple farm. It’s there that he learns that the world isn’t always as neatly black and white as he would like it to be and he’s forced to come to terms with the reality that his father figure is a better man than Homer gives him credit for.

The Giver: It’s an oldie (I read it in middle school), but a goodie. At the age of 12, the members of Jonas’ dystopian sameness-oriented society have their professional futures chosen by their elders. Jonas is picked as the receiver of memory, the one who holds all the accumulated memories of the past, good and bad, that have been denied to the populace as a whole so they can be more numbly content. Joy, and hunger, and despair, and delight turn Jonas from a normal boy to an adult who makes difficult and hard choices.

Sabriel: On the more fantasy side of things, Sabriel is a young woman about to graduate from school, who is thrust into adult responsibility when her beloved father dies, leaving her an orphan. She’s called upon to fill his role as a sort of anti-necromancer and keep the world safe from the dead and those who would manipulate them to their own ends. A young schoolgirl becomes a powerful woman, and that’s always catnip for me.

The Golden Compass: Oh man Lyra Belacqua is the best. A tough-as-nails little wildcat of a girl raised by scholars in a parallel world, she longs for nothing more than a real family. When she finds out who her parents actually are and what they do, she becomes a leader of a rebellion against them and all they stand for. This book is crazy amazing (as are its sequels) and Lyra is awesome.

White Oleander: Figuring out one’s relationship with one’s parents, is, to me, a hallmark of actual adulthood. Astrid only has the one parent she knows, but Ingrid is enough to deal with for any one person. Astrid’s experiences in foster care and the various mother-types she encounters help her come to terms with who she is, who her mother is, and their overlaps. I haven’t re-read it in years but it still sticks with me.

Harry Potter (the whole series): I know, this is cheating. These are seven books. But taken together, they tell one entire and incredible coming-of-age story, so I’m giving myself a pass here.

April 28, 2016

Book 22: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

“The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.”

Dates read: February 19-22, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Lists/Awards: NY Times Bestseller

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today’s world, it’s ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It’s more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn’t always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family.

If you’re a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn’t going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens…two young people, the children of Irish and German immigrants, meet, fall in love, and marry. They have two children, a girl and a boy. The father, Johnny Nolan, is charming and sweet-natured but fundamentally weak, incapable of holding down a steady job because of his alcoholism. The mother, Katie Nolan, is strong-willed, hard-working and tries but fails to hide her preference for her son over her daughter. The family lives in poverty, barely scraping by, as the children grow up. Francie, the daughter, is the center of the story, and the plot is largely about her poor but otherwise mostly unremarkable childhood.

But for me personally, I didn’t even really notice that there was less in the way of plot, because the characterization and quality of writing were so strong. The shy and bookish yet resilient Francie and her world were apparently an only thinly veiled version of author Betty Smith’s own childhood experiences, and a feeling of lived emotional truth resonates throughout the novel. Smith’s prose isn’t showily beautiful like Vladimir Nabakov’s, but she strikes home keen insights about childhood and growing up with elegance and sensitivity. The characters are all people that exist in the real world: the good-natured and lovable but ultimately feckless overgrown child, the harried parent who has to stay strong enough to keep it all together at the expense of their own emotional wants and needs, the standoffish person who holds themself apart and pre-rejects everyone else before they can be rejected, the younger sibling who manages to get away with more than the older sibling would have ever thought to try. It may be set 100 years ago, but the story it tells is still meaningful today.

It was pure coincidence that I read this book right after The Namesake, and a minor plot point got me thinking about immigration, second languages, and class. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, both Katie and Johnny, despite being the children of immigrants, speak only English. Their parents are determined that their children will be American, and to be American is to speak English. It actually reminds me of a story my dad has told me about my grandfather, who is 100% pure Polish but speaks not a lick of the language. When my dad asked his grandpa about it, he said something similar: we’re Americans now. We speak English. The Gangulis and their friends in The Namesake, on the other hand, make an effort to preserve their Bengali language and culture with their children. Their offspring hold oral fluency, at least, in their parents’ native tongue along with their spoken and written English. When I was at the University of Michigan, I had friends whose parents were immigrants from the Middle East or Asia, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear them answer calls from their parents in Mandarin, Hindi, or Farsi. There was never a sense of judgment attached to it. But there’s a real hostility to Latino immigrants and their children speaking Spanish with each other, although their children brought up in America speak English just as well as anyone else. The perception of immigrants and their children who speak a second language seems to be tied more strongly to the social class of the speaker than any value judgment about having a non-English home language.

Tell me, blog friends…do you or anyone you know have immigrant parents? Did they speak a second language at home?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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