Book Review: "Once Upon a Wardrobe" by Patti Callahan

Patti Callahan's new book is utterly magical and beautiful.⁣

⁣ I’m a firm believer that sometimes whether or not we like a book depends on what’s going on in our lives and where we are emotionally, as much as anything else. And sometimes a book comes along at just the right time.⁣

⁣ The latter was the case for me in reading Once Upon a Wardrobe. I recently found out that one of my closest friends had decided to end his fight against multiple illnesses and go into hospice. That news, and subsequently saying goodbye to him, hit me hard. This book was just the balm to help with those emotions.⁣

⁣ Megs Devonshire is a fiercely intelligent young woman on scholarship at Oxford. She loves figures and equations, but she loves her younger brother George even more. Eight-year-old George has been ill since he was born, but the doctors don’t expect him to see his ninth birthday.⁣

⁣ What George loves more than anything is a good story. He is utterly captivated by a brand-new book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and he dreams of being transported to a magical land like that. When he learns that the author of this book, C.S. Lewis, teaches at Oxford, he convinces Megs to seek the man out and ask where Narnia came from.

⁣ ⁣ When Megs connects with the man and his brother, “Jack” Lewis regales her with tales of his childhood and the magical places they created. But while he never quite answers Megs’ question directly, what he gives her and her brother is something even more special.⁣

⁣ I loved this so much. It’s sad but hopeful and just utterly beautiful!!⁣ ⁣

Book Review: “The Girl with the Louding Voice” by Abi Daré

Abi Daré's The Girl with the Louding Voice lives up to all the hype and praise, and then some!!

Adunni is a 14-year-old girl growing up poor in Nigeria. Her mother recognized Adunni’s intelligence and fought for her to get an education, but that ended when she died. Regardless of what she wants from her future, because of their poverty, her father sells her into marriage as the third wife of an old man desperate for male children.

“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice. I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping."

Marriage, the demands of a husband, and the cruelty of one of his other wives are almost too much for Adunni to bear. And when tragedy strikes in her new home, she must flee, although she knows as a young woman most view her as nothing but property.

She winds up being taken to Lagos and is sold into servitude to a rich, cruel woman. She is treated horribly aand beaten routinely, but she tries not to let this woman or her philandering husband steal her dreams or make her believe she is nothing. It takes two people—the household chef and a woman in the same social group as her employer—to help try and save Adunni, but will it be too late?

What a book this was. It was brutal and emotional and utterly beautiful, but Adunni’s spirit is a shining light. She is honestly one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever read about. At times this is difficult to read and at times her broken English is distracting, but as she works to better herself it becomes easier to understand her.

Daré has created a masterpiece. The Girl with the Louding Voice is truly one of the best books I've read this year.

Book Review: "The Secret of Clouds" by Alyson Richman

It takes a talented storyteller to get you completely hooked on a story even if you can pretty much predict everything that is going to happen. It takes even more talent to make you get all choked up even when you know what is coming.

In her new novel, The Secret of Clouds, Alyson Richman proves she has exceptional talent, because even though the plot moved as I expected it would, I was hooked on this book from the very start, and I found myself sobbing late last night as it ended.

Maggie Topper is a teacher with a true passion for what she does. She loves the feeling of reaching her students, of making connections with them, and inspiring them. She looks at each school year as a new challenge, and tries not to fall prey to the cynicism that often plagues her fellow teachers.

At the start of a new school year, Maggie is asked by the principal to take on an extra task—to tutor a student, Yuri, whose heart problem hampers him from being able to attend school on a daily basis. Maggie is reluctant at first, because the thought sparks painful memories from her own childhood, but she realizes that Yuri deserves to be inspired and challenged just like every other student she teaches.

Yuri at first rebuffs Maggie's attempts to connect with him, until she realizes she may be trying too hard. She finds the key to Yuri's intellect and his heart is through baseball—even though he cannot play the game, he is a diehard Yankees fan like his father, and has tremendous passion for the players and the stats. Little by little, she realizes how much wiser and more insightful he is than a typical sixth-grader, and he opens Maggie's eyes to the need to live life to the fullest.

Maggie and Yuri's relationship deepens, and she begins to understand just how his parents, Katya and Sasha, who emigrated from the Ukraine in the mid-1980s following the Chernobyl disaster, are torn between wanting to protect him and wanting him to be a "normal" kid, between believing he will get better and fearing for the worst. But Yuri seems to give everyone the strength he so desperately needs for himself, and touches people in ways they never quite expected.

"We can't be so afraid of experiencing pain that it interferes with the things we love."

The Secret of Clouds is in many ways, a love story—romantic love, the love between friends, parental love, the love of baseball, and above all, the love of life. Richman has created some beautifully fleshed-out characters and tugs at your emotions without being too maudlin (most of the time). Maggie's mother also is supposed to be an amazing Italian cook, so it's best not to read this on an empty stomach! (She does provide a recipe along with the acknowledgments at the end of the book.)

You may not be surprised by the book's plot, but I hope you'll be moved, and that you'll think about these characters long after. I know I will.

Book Review: "Educated: A Memoir" by Tara Westover

Wow.

Harrowing, heartbreaking, and ultimately triumphant, Educated is at times difficult to read and not at all what I expected, but I couldn't tear myself away from it.

"Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go. But I didn't ask. There was something in the hard line of my father's face, in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront to all he'd sacrificed to raise me."

Until she was 17 years old, Tara Westover never went to school. Her father was convinced that the government was out to get them in every way, so his children got their education at home—not through books and studying, but through preparing for the End of Days by making survivalist kits, canning endless jars of fruit, and being prepared for a siege at any time.

Tara's mother was a midwife and healer, so she helped her mother prepare the various tinctures and remedies she used. At other times she worked in her father's junkyard with her siblings, salvaging scrap metal and dealing with the various injuries that came with this work, because her parents didn't believe that doctors or hospitals could heal better than herbs and the Lord's power. The problem was, they were so isolated that there was no one to help ensure the children learned any actual facts, or protect them when behavior turned violent.

When one of Tara's older brother's left the family compound in Idaho to study at Brigham Young University, for the first time Tara realized there was a world outside her father's blustery preaching. Despite having never set foot in a classroom, she began to study for the ACT exam, teaching herself enough math, grammar, and science to achieve the score she needed to attend BYU herself. But this decision didn't please her father, who believed college professors were liars and hypocrites sure to take Tara down a blasphemous path.

In Educated, Westover shares her story about being caught between loyalty to family and God, and the desire to find your own way, to learn things on your own. She touches on learning about things like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement for the first time, and how difficult she found being on her own, dealing with the disapproval of her father.

While this book deals with the educational triumphs Westover ultimately achieves despite all of the obstacles thrown in her way, this is a tough story to read as well, because she also shares what it is like to constantly have your self-worth undermined by those who claim to love you and want what's best for you. How can you ever truly believe you deserve a life in which you don't have to worry about abuse, humiliation, and degradation, when it is your own family causing these things? Where do you find the strength to say you've had enough when you know doing so might cost you your family?

I'm late to the party in reading this, and I will admit this wasn't quite the book I expected, as I thought it would focus more on Westover's education than her upbringing and the emotional and physical abuse she endured for years. Obviously, this, too, was part of her education, but at times I found the continuous pattern of behaviors really difficult to keep reading about. I realize that those around her must have felt the same way—just when they thought she might be making a breakthrough she let the same things happen to her over and over and over again.

Even though this wasn't an enjoyable book per se, it was written so skillfully, and Westover's story was so compelling that I read the entire book in a day thanks to a flight and a long car ride.

This is an important, poignant, thought-provoking book which demonstrates how one woman found the courage to achieve despite being surrounded by those who told her she shouldn't or she couldn't. What a punch this packed.

Book Review: "In the Fall They Come Back" by Richard Bausch

Ben Jameson is fresh out of graduate school when he lands a teaching job at a small private school in Northern Virginia, Glenn Acres Preparatory Academy. It doesn't matter that he didn't pursue education as a course of study while in college, and never really thought of himself as a teacher—the school needs an English teacher and he needs a job. He doesn't think this is what he'll want to do for the rest of his life, but he's fine with that.

He finds the atmosphere at Glenn Acres a little unorthodox, but that doesn't bother him, because his teaching methods aren't quite by the book, either. (At one point the head of the school has to remind him that he needs actual lesson plans, because the state mandates students learn some specific things, not just participate in discussions about writing.) Ben is tremendously idealistic, it's not long before he thinks this job may be a noble calling of sorts, one that will allow him to make a difference in young people's lives.

When Ben is told by his colleagues that one of his students is being physically abused, and encouraged to watch over him, Ben cannot sit idly by and allow this to continue to happen. Even though his colleagues tried unsuccessfully to intervene in the past, Ben believes he must get involved and he must save this boy. Instead of helping, he makes even more of a mess of the situation, causing trouble for the school, and causing him to have to act contrary to what he feels he should do if he has any hope of keeping his job and keeping the student in school.

This idealism happens a few more times for Ben, once in the case of a withdrawn, mute, and psychologically damaged student, and another time in dealing with a precocious troublemaker who is over 18, but is bound and determined to graduate anyway, even if she hasn't to date. In each case, Ben feels compelled to do the right thing, even if he has no idea what the right thing really is, and even if his blundering actually makes things worse rather than better.

"This is not a story about teaching. Nor is it about education, or school, although most of what happened started in a school. This is a story about caring a little too much; or maybe about not caring enough. I really don't know which. The only thing I know for certain is that I wish a lot of it did not happen."

Reading other people's reviews of Richard Bausch's In the Fall They Come Back leads me to wonder if I completely missed the point of the book, because I really didn't like this at all. While I saw the point he was trying to make relative to the fact that the best of intentions is often not enough to change things the way we want to, and how idealism can sometimes be a harmful thing, I found much of this book tremendously predictable, and many instances in which if people had just said what they meant, or what needed to be said, chaos in some cases might be avoided.

I also found the description of the school and its administration to be very far-fetched; while this private school might not have had to hew to all of the same rules and regulations public schools did, I found it hard to believe that a school which allowed two aged dogs to do their business in classrooms would actually be able to operate. I found many of the characters to be unlikable, even the main character, whom you just couldn't believe could be so stupid over and over again, yet his desire to give, to make a difference, blinds him.

Bausch is a storyteller with a strong body of work, yet I found this book to be one of his weakest, plus it runs far longer than it should. However, since many other reviewers have loved this book, you may want to see if you hew closer to their opinions than mine, which might be the mark of a clueless reader rather than an astute one.

NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!