We started out April discovering that we had water coming up from under our floorboards after a rainy day, so we’ve had some home maintenance this month! And also another round of upper-respiratory sick, which I think is just what happens when you have a toddler.

In Books…

• The King’s Curse: They’re not good, and sometimes even actively bad, but I do enjoy Philippa Gregory’s series of books about the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor dynasty. They’re always quick-moving and page-turning! This one explores the life of a significant but less prominent player in the drama around the court of Henry VIII: Margaret Pole. Born a Plantagenet, the daughter of Edward IV’s brother George, she was married off to a cousin of Henry VII, a relatively minor knight who was nevertheless well-established within the king’s government. She and her husband, parents to five children, were appointed as members of the household of Prince Arthur, Henry VIII’s older brother, and his wife Katherine of Aragon. Gregory picks up her story more or less at this point and traces its trajectory, in which she becomes a devoted friend and courtier to Katherine and her daughter Princess Mary. As they fall out of favor, though, Margaret finds her position increasingly tenuous, until she is eventually executed. Margaret’s story begins sympathetically enough, with her grief when her brother is executed as a condition of Katherine’s marriage to Henry to prevent him from becoming the figurehead of rebellion against the crown. Nevertheless, she shows fondness and devotion to both Arthur and Henry, and bravery in the face of Margaret Beaufort’s attempts to bully her into admitting that Arthur and Katherine had slept together. For this, she finds herself out of favor when her husband dies, leaving her with very little money and all those children to provide for. But once Henry VIII’s reign begins, she’s restored to her family’s fortunes and she turns into a complete and utter asshole in a way that was honestly kind of hilarious. Does she ever think about her own father having been executed for plotting treason against his brother? Nope! She crows constantly about the strength of the Plantagenet claim to the throne in comparison to the Tudors and ignores the fact that Edward IV himself deposed Henry VI rather than being born to the position! She is money-grubbing and greedy! She thinks of people only in terms of what they can do for her and her family legacy! She has a very obvious least favorite child! She constantly talks about how she is too smart to plot against the king but then goes ahead and plots against the king and gets caught! By the time she’s finally imprisoned I was actively rooting against her. It was easy to read and moved very quickly for a nearly 600 page book but honestly it was nothing more or less than fine and I likely will forget everything about it within a matter of weeks.
• The Summer Book: My book club’s April read! Tove Jansson was most famous as the creator of Moomin, which is something I’m aware of but have never really interacted with. This book is probably the most notable of her writing for adults. It’s very short, less than 200 pages, and told as a series of vignettes. There isn’t really a story here, just a family who spends their summers on an island in the Gulf of Finland: Sophia, her father, and her grandmother. There isn’t any real sense of time among the stories, they all seem to take place when Sophia is young but none seems to be before or after any of the others necessarily, though it seems unlikely that they could all be a record of a single summer. This is a book I have a hard time evaluating because what it seems to be trying to do is so far from anything I’m inclined to respond to that besides it not making any real impression on me or catching my attention and interest in any way, I don’t know how to articulate if it’s doing what it’s trying to do well or not. It was not memorable or engaging for me but I suspect this is just a major mismatch of book and reader.
• A Great Improvisation: I feel like I learned about the American Revolutionary era in school about a million times, but found it so deeply boring that I retained very little of it. It wasn’t until I watched the John Adams miniseries a few years back that I learned/was reminded that Benjamin Franklin had gone to France to try to whip up support for the American cause during that period. This book tells that story in detail. Almost exhaustive detail, honestly. This is my second Stacy Schiff, I’d previously read her very well-regarded book on Cleopatra and not understood the hype. And with a second very meh experience with her work in this book, I think I’m ready to draw the conclusion that she’s not for me. There’s a lot of interesting information here, honestly, about how delicate the situation actually was and the challenges Franklin faced in trying to extract the money, goods, and personnel from France that were crucial to America’s successful independence, but the book as a whole is so overstuffed that’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Which is what a good history should do, at least as I see it as a reader. It should create a narrative and sense of momentum, both of which I found lacking. I felt like I was slogging through it for the most part, though Schiff is often witty and the humor kept it from getting completely bogged down. But there were so many things that could have been cut down significantly, like Franklin’s flirtations with French women, without sacrificing the core of the events that she’s trying to relate. It was fine. I wished it was better.
• Mornings in Jenin: This book has been on my to-read list since 2017, but I pulled it to read this year for obvious current-events reasons. I’d never read a book about Palestine or by a Palestinian before. It’s a pretty standard-issue multigenerational family story, beginning shortly before the Nabka and ending in the early 2000s, illustrating major events in Palestinian history through the lives of the Abulheja family. Author Susan Abulhawa writes vivid characters: the family members (kind-hearted and hard-working Hasan, the high-spirited Bedouin Dalia who becomes his wife, their son Yousef with his father’s inherent gentleness but more of his mother’s fire, and Amal, the protagonist, who comes into the world in a refugee camp in Jenin after her family is expelled from their ancestral village) come to life on the page. Amal’s life is a hard one: her beloved father disappears after the Six-Days War, her mother had already never recovered from the kidnapping of her six-month old baby during the Nabka and deteriorates significantly once her husband fails to return, her brother abandons the family when she’s just a teenager, she’s shot for no reason by Israeli soldiers and wounded, she’s orphaned, and that’s not even all of it…it would almost seem overly tragic but for the fact that all of those things have happened to Palestinians and it’s entirely probable all of them could happen to one person. Despite it all, she follows her father’s dreams of an education for her all the way to the United States. There’s marriage, motherhood, and even more loss and grief. But there is also kindness and love. It’s a very sad book in many ways, but that’s unsurprising as it relates a very sad history. Abulhawa has clearly written the book to be educational to a Western audience, and it does show: there is a lot of exposition, and the dialogue is often clunky as a result. The prose styling is often more utilitarian than anything else and sometimes actively bad. She never lets a scene speak for itself, always feeling a need to underline what it’s meant to illustrate. Now for a thornier issue. Being written from a Palestinian perspective, it is unsurprising that the book is anti-Zionist. There has been criticism of the book as anti-Semitic as well, which I think has some basis in fact. There are positive portrayals of Jewish characters, but those characters are minor and appear at the beginning of the book, before the establishment of Israel (one of them re-appears near the end). Virtually all Jewish/Israeli characters introduced thereafter are depicted negatively as cruel, callous, and often violent. The criticism expressed through the text does not seem to be focused on Israel as a country or its government and policies, though that is of course a part of it, but felt to me as a reader rooted in an idea that Israelis are inherently brutal. The events that the book highlights makes it understandable that someone whose exposure to Israelis is limited to encounters that are hostile at best, who experiences agonizing sorrow as a result of Israel’s actions, would understand the people who make up the populace of that country and who elect the leaders who perpetrate atrocities in their names, as fundamentally unsympathetic. But the warning bells of anti-Semitism aren’t entirely going un-rung here.
• A Darker Shade of Magic: I’ve always found the idea of parallel worlds intriguing, so this book’s setup (there are four Londons, which used to intermingle freely until magic corrupted one of them, and now not even a handful of people have the ability to cross between worlds) had me interested from the start. Fantasy novels are often trope-heavy, which makes them comfort reads in many ways (at least for me), and there are plenty on display here: a plucky lass in disguise as a boy, malevolent twins, the dangers of blood magic. Overall, I found this a refreshingly engaging read. Author V. E. Schwab paces her book well, giving some time to establishing the world, its magic system, and its two central characters (Kell, one of those rare people who can go back and forth between Londons, is raised in a balanced magical world, where he is essentially a ward of the royal family and Lila, from our own world, who turned to thievery to survive when she was orphaned and dreams of piracy and adventure) before letting the plot rip. It occasionally feels a bit rushed, but mostly it’s propulsive and easy to get caught up in. There are some breadcrumbs laid for a romance to develop in later entries in the series, but the focus is mostly on adventure and skirmishes, magical and otherwise. Despite being the first book in a series, it feels like a complete narrative. I will definitely be reading on in this one and found it quite an enjoyable book!
• Don’t Worry, It Gets Worse: The late 2000s/early 2010s were a heady time to be on the internet as an introspective 20something. Tumblr! Blogs! THOUGHT CATALOG! One of my favorite blogs to read was one called The Frenemy (sadly vanished from the internet unless you use the Wayback Machine). I loved Alida Nugent’s writing, which was funny and relatable and felt like it overlapped so much with my own thoughts and feelings about the world. So when she published a book in 2013, I put it on my to-read list. And a couple years later, I actually bought a copy. And now I have finally read it. Here’s the thing, though: the writing that speaks to you when you’re 27, or even in your early 30s and not quite fully settled yet, is very different than the writing that speaks to you when you have a mortgage and a child and a stable professional career. I read it feeling a pang of fond nostalgia for my 20something messy self, trying things out, feeling the simultaneous thrill and terror of not really knowing what you’re doing or where your life is going to go. Nugent’s writing in this essay collection is still clever and compelling, but I’m just at such a different place in my life that it couldn’t possibly have the impact on me that it might have if I’d read it ten (or even five) years ago. Alas.

In Life…

• Springtime!: In true Reno fashion, April has brought both days in the 70s and measurable snowfall. It’s also brought a resumption of swim lessons for my little guy, which went much better than our first try at them about five months ago…at least until an ear and sinus infection knocked us out. Toddlers are the most adorable disease vectors.