It's Monday and I want a nap!

I am suffering from a serious case of the Mondays this morning. I want to crawl back in bed with a book or two, but there is a very long to-do list to tackle. And of course, a toddler who seems to want to be fed and played with and cared for. Weird, right?

Is everyone signed up for the 24 Hour Readathon?? It takes place on Saturday, April 25 and you can read for the whole 24 hours or just a few! You can sign up here. I just might come visit and cheer you on during the readathon!


Read This Week:
                                                
The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy                   Shadow Scale
By Rachel Joyce                                                                    By Rachel Hartman


Posts from this Past Week:
It's Monday
Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I Want to Check In On After the Book
Reviews of Dead Wake and Almost Famous Women


This Week's Reading:
                                                                  
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography          Finding Jake
                                                                                                                By Bryan Reardon


What are you reading this week?

Review: Almost Famous Women

Almost Famous Women

By Megan Mayhew Bergman

Scribner January 2015

256 pages

From the library 

Those of us who love to read history will sometimes find people lurking in the peripheries. They are people you won't find in your high school history textbook or featured in a special on The History Channel. They are the almost famous ones and they are exactly the people that Megan Mayhew Bergman brings to life in her new collection of stories.

The women we meet in these pages are from all over history - a little girl abandoned by her famous father, twins literally attached to each other, a musician in the first integrated female swing band, and the women imprisoned at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Each story is a new experience, as Bergman flips perspectives. In "A High-Grade Bitch Sits Down To Lunch," Beryl Markham determines to ride her new horse, embracing her reputation for being tough. Romaine Brook's story, though, is narrated by the artist's houseboy Mateo. We meet many of these women at the end of their lives when they can only look back at their glory days through a fog of illness and depression.

Some of these tales seem to touch on entire lives, while others give us just a single moment told in a page or two. It would be easy for these stories to become strict homages to these women, but Mayhew takes the more honest and interesting approach. Some of these women are cruel to those around them. Others are self-destructive, ensuring their own downfall. 

My favorite story was about two females - one who had lost everything and one who never had the chance to gain an adult life. An unnamed nun forms an attachment with a girl who has been left at the convent by her father. The girl's father just happens to be the famous poet Lord Byron. Our protagonist finds a kindred spirit in the girl's anger and wild spirit. I found myself desperately hoping that these two could find some happiness with each other, but the women in these stories rarely find happy endings. These are women who didn't fit in the carefully constructed boxes prescribed by society. Their bravery is inspiring, but their fates are often tragic. 

In the notes at the end of the book, Bergman confesses that she found daredevil Hazel Eaton via Internet rabbit hole. Almost Famous Women will be that jumping-off point for many readers. The stories here serve as just enough to whet the appetite, to spark our interest and spur us on to research them further, and to give these women a permanent spot in our memories. 

Review: Dead Wake

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

By Erik Larson

Crown March 2015

359 pages

From the library 

The ship sank in less than twenty minutes. The passengers on the Lusitania knew they were traveling through U-boat territory, but they never imagined that a German captain would fire on a passenger ship. The captain received so many conflicting messages that he actually steered them into danger. The members of the crew who knew how to operate the life boats were the same people killed upon impact when the torpedo hit the ship where the luggage was being sorted for their arrival.

Dead Wake is a staggering work of research. It feels as if Larson saw one thread and pulled it and then saw another one and pulled that one too. Everything is meticulously laid out for the reader, so they can see just how unlikely it was that the Lusitania would have been sunk and how the smallest change by any of a number of people would have altered that awful day.

Larson is not content to give you as much information as possible about May 7, 1915. Instead, he goes in depth about the lives of passengers and crew before and after that day, he gives readers insight into the inner workings of a passenger line during war time, and he brings home the uncertainties of war for those fighting and waiting on both sides. We even spend time with Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, who were either too distracted by events in their own life to see the potential danger or perhaps hoped for an inciting incident like this to spur the United States towards joining the war.

One of the most fascinating things to read about is military service on a submarine. Some chapters deal with the terrifying nature of that life, as crews were cut off from everyone else and had to surface without knowing what they would find. But most fascinating is Larson's research into the captain of the U-boat that sunk that Lusitania. By all accounts, Walter Schwieger was a great guy. He even rescued puppies from a ship that they torpedoed and kept one on board as their mascot. But he was also a ruthless commander, determined to sink the most tonnage of any German submarine.

When I finish reading a book by Erik Larson, I always feel as if I have learned a great deal. He has a gift for making history come alive and sending readers to do further research about the people and events they discover in his books. Each chapter is full of detail about the way people lived and the place and time that they lived in, but the story is never bogged down by too much information. Even though we know how the story will end, the tension builds as decision after decision move the blissfully ignorant passengers of the Lusitania towards a terrible moment that will forever change their lives and the course of world history.

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters You Want To Check In On After the Book

1. The O'Malley Family

The O'Malley series is one that I fell in love with way back in junior high. It follows six orphans who took the same last name and became a family. Each of them of course has a cool and interesting job (hostage negotiator, firefighter, forensic pathologist) that allows each of them to have a book focused on them and one of their cases. My favorite part, though, was watching these adult siblings care for and interact with each other. Towards the end of the series, something major happened that changed the shape of the family. I would love to peek in and see how they are doing afterwards! 

2. Todd and Viola (Chaos Walking Trilogy)
A lot of stuff happened to Todd and Viola during the three books in the Chaos Walking series. But I would love to know what they did after the events in the last book. Ness leaves things a bit ambiguous and I want to know!!

3. Sergeant Lester Ferris (Tigerman) 

Lester is one of those characters just begging for some more backstory or a peek into his adventures after the story ends. It began, of course, with a man trying to live a quiet semi-retirement. When that doesn't happen, you know that Lester himself is nowhere near ready to live an orderly and expected life. 

         

4. Millie, Karl, and Agatha (Lost and Found)

If you haven't heard my rave about this trio yet, consider this your invitation to pick up Lost and Found! Millie is a precocious little girl who wears red boots and Karl and Agatha are the elderly pair who end up on a zany adventure with her. I would love to read about their further exploits. 

5. Anna Wyatt (Girl Before a Mirror)

This protagonist grew a lot during this book, but I would definitely pick up a sequel so we can see the amazing things she can accomplish and how her new relationship works out!

6. Havva (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)

If I'm being honest, I'm having a difficult time distinguishing between wanting to check in on a girl who lives in the most precarious of places and times and just wanting another book by Anthony Marra already. In fact, I just have to take a little detour over to my bookshelf right now and look at the book. I'll be back...in an hour or two! 

        

7. Ari (After Birth) 
After Birth follows Ari as the mom of an almost one year old. But what does Ari look like when she has been a mom for two years or five? I want to know!

8. The whole bunch from Castle Waiting 
Apparently, Linda Medley intended to write the further adventures of the residents of Castle Waiting. But then there were some disputes with the publisher, so she didn't write any more. But what happens next, Linda, what happens next?!?

9. The Traveling Symphony and the keepers of The Museum of Civilization (Station Eleven) 
Mandel created such an interesting story by jumping forward and backwards in the lives of the survivors of a global pandemic. I would be just fine finding out what happened after the book finished (or even getting some more backstory)!

          


What are the books that make you want to check in on the characters after reading?

It's Monday! How was your Easter?

Hi there, literary gals and guys! How were your weekends? Lots of good Passover and Easter celebrations? Fun time with families? Too much food?

We had Easter baskets on Sunday morning, followed by church. Then we headed to my parent's house for a big Easter lunch, annual family pictures, and an egg hunt for the kids. We got home late last night and this gal was tired, so I'm only now getting to the Monday blog post.

As far as reading goes, I only read one book last week. It wasn't incredibly long but it was very thought-provoking. I had that rare experience (for me anyway) where I wasn't itching to pick up my current read every possible second, because I was still digesting the part I had read before. D is off from school this week, but I am still hoping to get some reading done and hopefully catch up on some reviews!

Read This Past Week:
             
Welcome to Braggsville
By T. Geronimo Johnson


Posts from this Past Week:
It's Monday
Reviews of The Arm of the Starfish, The Legacy of Lost Things, and After Birth
March Wrap-Up


This Week's Reading:
                                
Shadow Scale                                           The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
By Rachel Hartman                                  By Rachel Joyce


What are you reading this week?

Review: After Birth

After Birth

By Elisa Albert

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt February 2015

208 pages

From the library

Ari is a new mom and her son Walker is about to reach his first birthday. Motherhood has been very difficult for her, ever since the actual birth went against every plan she ever had for it. Ari is angry and depressed and very. very lonely. When very pregnant Mina moves to the neighborhood, Ari sees a chance for connection, a possibility that someone could understand the things that she is feeling. The two women begin to bond over motherhood, but will it be enough?

After Birth is going to be a very divisive book. If you are the kind of parent who had a beautiful birth that went exactly as expected and now spends their days in perfect bliss with your kiddos, this is not a book for you. But for the rest of us? This is the story for the woman whose birth experience was nothing like she imagined. This is for the mom who was terrified when she didn't adore her new baby right away. It's for the stay at home dad who feels devastatingly lonely. It's for the woman who tried to keep a brave face while battling postpartum depression. This is a battle cry for the mothers who wonder why we don't talk about the difficult and painful side of birth and motherhood.

Our protagonist Ari will fall squarely in the column of "unlikable characters." (Feel free to research the problems with that category just about anywhere on the internet.) She adores her son and her husband, but neither of them can help her through her depression or the monotony of caring for a small child. She doesn't know how to get past the emotional pain and loss of control that resulted from her c-section. Ari is angry and lonely. She has no one to teach her how to be a mother, since her own mother is long dead and only visits her as a very nasty ghost to mock her decisions. Her loneliness is probably due, in some great part, to her abrasive nature towards other women. She encounter them already on the defensive, in spite of desperately hoping for connection. But she is in a self-destructive cycle where she hurts other women and then feels abandoned when they leave her behind.

I read posts like this one from Training Mummy and I fear that we are not helping each other prepare for what birth and those first tough years are really like. I worry that we downplay women's very real fear, anger, and disappointment in an effort to make motherhood seem like constant butterflies and rainbows. We need to be having a conversation about just how difficult parenthood can be for some of us, probably for all of us at one time or another. Books like After Birth are not fun to read, but they can open our eyes to the realities of parenting - it can be painfully hard for us to give up control over our bodies and then spend years of our lives caring for others. "Anyone who says differently is selling something." 

March Wrap-Up

Does anyone else feel like they just wrote a wrap-up post for February?!? March was one of those months that seemed to go by quickly, but the days themselves were pretty long and dreary. Part of that was probably because our whole family got sick in the worst way possible...one at a time.

Reading and blogging-wise, I think we did o.k. I stuck pretty consistently to reading two books each week. David returned to talk about some of his favorites reads, I read a great book that reminded me why I loved some of my favorite childhood heroines, and I joined up with a bunch of bloggers to do a "Day in the Life" post.

I am looking forward to good things in April. The sun is out and spring seems like a real possibility. Easter is one of my favorite holidays and I'm so happy that my whole family will be home for a week or so. And at  the end of the month is my birthday (hooray!).

           

            


Books reviewed in March: 10
Pages read: 3,024
Fiction/non-fiction: 7/3
Male authors/female authors: 8/2
My books/library books/books for review: 1/4/5
Most-read March review: The Thing Around Your Neck 
My favorite March read: Vanessa And Her Sister


What was the best book you read in March?