Little Princes

Full disclosure:  I haven’t read Three Cups of Tea and I’m not a fan of Eat, Pray, Love.  That being said, I know how outrageously popular they are and how many people have been moved by Mortenson and Gilbert’s journeys, especially the spiritual aspects.  Conor Grennan’s Little Princes certainly fills this niche for the 2011 publishing calendar.

Grennan recounts the story of what begins as a self-indulgent trip around the world after working and saving for a few years.  He decides to justify the frivolity of the trip by planning to volunteer at an orphanage in Nepal for three months before jetting off to Thailand to travel and party with friends.  But the children of the Little Princes orphanages and their stories get under his skin and open his eyes.  Grennan learns that the children were taken from their homes after promises were made to their parents offering education and safety from the civil war raging around them.  In reality, the children were taken to Kathmandu and either used to beg for money, which they then turned over to their captors or abandoned all together.  Families left behind believed their children were dead after years of silence.  Many of the children believed they would never see their families again.  

Grennan himself helps rescue seven orphans only to find out the child trafficker who brought them to Kathmandu originally got wind of his plan and took them from their safe house.  Their loss haunts him and brings him back to Nepal and Little Princes after his world travels.  Grennan’s life is forever changed and he commits to not only living in Nepal, but to finding the seven lost orphans and creating a truly safe place for them and others like them and, ultimately, reuniting them with their families.  

I was inspired by Grennan’s clear-eyed recounting of his transformation from a guy with some money in the bank who wanted to experience adventures around the world into a man committed to helping the children of Nepal while recognizing the intricacies and limitations of the country’s culture, traditions, and abject poverty.  His personal journey is compelling and his physical journey through far-flung Nepalese villages to find the families of many of “his” orphans was a tense, but inspiring read.  Little Princes is a satisfying and (here's that word again!) inspiring book that will make you want to get out your wallet and make a donation to New Generation Nepal, Grennan's organization.

The Girl in the Garden

The Girl in the Garden is a sweet, exotic coming-of-age story set in Minnesota and India.  Rakhee is 11 years old and watching her parent’s marriage fall apart.  The speed of its demise is accelerated when letters from their native India begin arriving for her mother.  Rakhee witnesses her mother’s increasing isolation and ennui as her father continues to bury himself in his scientific research.  Rakhee’s mother begins to openly pine for India and her eventual suggestion that she and Rakhee spend the summer there set off alarm bells for both daughter and father.

Rakhee’s journey to her mother’s rural hometown is both disconcerting and strangely comforting - she feels distinctly American and is bowled over by the heat and dirt, but she also looks like everyone around her for the very first time.  While Rakhee gets to know her young cousins for the very first time, enjoying their games and teaching them American games, she cannot help but pick-up on the adult talk in the background.  Her aunts, uncles, mother, and their family friends are overheard talking about money, the family legacy, and her mother’s abrupt departure from home many years ago.  What are they hiding?  Rakhee’s anguish and confusion increases as her mother’s “old friend”, Prem begins to visit the family house, sometimes secretly at night to visit her mother.  Again, Rakhee overhears intimate conversations that hint at her mother’s life before coming to the United States.  

Secrets run through life in India like a river and Rakhee is desperate to understand how she can bring her parents back together and get over her increasing anger at her mother for taking them so far away from home.  Part of her rebellion is venturing into the forbidden jungle behind the family compound. Rakhee ventures out to find some solitude and instead finds a hidden, walled garden inhabited by, at first glance, a monster of some kind.  After running in fear on her initial encounter, Rakhee returns again to see what’s on the other side of the locked door.  She eventually finds and befriends “the girl in the garden”, which only leads to more family secrets and the discovery of how complicated and painful family loyalty can be.

Rakhee is a likable 11 year-old and her experiences at home and in India ring true - she loves getting to know her cousins and is mystified by the actions of the adults that surround her.  Where The Girl in the Garden fails is the manner is which Nair structured the novel - she begins with an adult Rakhee leaving her unnamed fiancé to fly to India.  The book itself is written as though it is a letter to her fiancé - a character the reader never knows or cares about.  Rakhee’s story stands alone well enough and this lame plot device just isn’t necessary and takes the reader out of young Rakhee’s story.  I read an Advance Readers Copy (ARC) that I received at a conference, so perhaps this will change, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, it transforms the whole tenor of the book from a coming-of-age story into more of an adult, quasi-romance story. While I liked “The Girl in the Garden” and would even recommend it to an adult book club for its luscious descriptions of Indian food, customs, and dress, it wasn’t structured and conceived well enough to endorse wholeheartedly.

Holiday Gift Guide: Book Club Readers

For Your Friend or Relative Who Loves a Good Book Club

Room by Emma Donoghue
I know I’m not the first to recommend this novel, which was truly the best book I read in 2010, but I’m surely the most relentless at putting it in people’s hot little hands.  Narrated by 5 year-old Jack, Room is the story of Jack and his mother and the single room in which they dwell.  Despite Ma’s best effort, the horror that keeps them in the room is always looming and readers will be literally clutching their throats at an escape attempt and its aftermath.  

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi Durrow
Rachel’s life is coated with a strange patina of violence and fate.  Rachel, her mother, and her siblings fall from the roof of their Chicago apartment building. Rachel is too young to fully remember the circumstances that led them to the roof, leaving her and those who witnessed the aftermath of the tragedy a lifetime to wonder if Rachel’s family jumped or were pushed.

White is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
This is one strange, magical book.  The narrator is a malicious house (you read that correctly) who has possibly driven three generations of Silver women mad.  Miranda Silver is the female half of fraternal twins and the heir apparent to madness.  Oyeyemi has crafted a book of malevolent magical realism that is also masterfully political.    

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divajaruni
A massive earthquake traps a groups of strangers in the Indian consulate of an unnamed American city.  As they struggle to physically survive the ordeal and pray for rescue, they also try to keep their minds sharp and prevent despair from overtaking them.  To that end, they each share “one amazing thing”.  Each story is a revelation about the characters and the human spirit.

Stuff

Stuff by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee had me on the verge of a panic attack for 290 pages.  Their examination of hoarding as a growing psychiatric disorder in the United States was a balance of legitimate scholarly study and fascinating anecdotal evidence of what may cause hoarding - PTSD; OCD; a cold, withholding parent; perfectionism; genetic predisposition; or physiological damage to the brain.  There is no clear answer, but the study alone brings hope to those who hoard and the people affected by their hoarding.

Irene, one of the first participants in their study was especially fascinating.  The authors sift through her life the was she herself tries to sift through the piles of papers, mail, newspapers, and other detritus entombing her in her own home.  Her childhood is examined, especially her relationship with her withholding father.  Additional clues to her hoarding lie in how she coped with a childhood move that left her lonely and unmoored.  Another layer is revealed when examining her college years and her inability to finish her senior thesis because the information and possibilities of her research completely overwhelmed her natural perfectionism.  Her skill and pleasure in finding and organizing information took an ominous turn during her career as a librarian.  Irene could organize and weed library materials, but nothing was ever thrown away.  Instead, she brought everything home with her, excited by the sheer possibilities of each scrap of paper.  Even divorce and the possibility of her children being taken away did not stop her hoarding.  The authors describe Irene the person and provide fascinating insight into the creation and everyday existence of Irene the hoarder.  Reading about her attempt to come to grips with her hoarding provides an understanding of both Irene and the disorder.

The authors are able to bring this same insight into each case they highlight in Stuff.  The people on the other side of the “goat trails”, paths of papers and trash created in order to move around their homes, are more than hoarders, more than their “stuff”.  Frost and Steketee do an excellent job helping readers understand what “stuff” represents for hoarders, but also for society.  Their writing style is accessible and the narrative arc created in the book ensures an interest in both the idea of hoarding and the people studied from beginning to end.

We are inundated with messages of consumption everyday and I think readers will find the individual stories compelling and horrifying. It offers a chance to think about “stuff” in a new way.  Hoarding is not about materialism; it’s about how people connect to inanimate objects and the degrees of these connections.  As an extension of that idea, Stuff will challenge readers to think about mental illness, exploring how someone can use inanimate objects as a way to cope, with larger mental health issues.

Supplementary information:

Hoarding: When Too Much "Stuff" Causes Grief on NPR'S Fresh Air

The Joy and Pain of Things by Randy O. Frost on the Huffington Post

Father of the Rain

Father of the Rain by Lily King is a story of divorce, cruelty, alcoholism, self-preservation, and redemption.

Part I is the agonizing story of 11 year-old Daley during her parent’s divorce.  Her mother swears Daley to secrecy as she begins preparations to leave her wealthy WASP husband, Gardiner.  Daley is tormented by the guilt of leaving her father at the beginning of the summer and is overcome with fear and sadness by what she finds when she and her mother return to town at the end of the summer.  Daley becomes a stranger in Gardiner’s home and witness to his functional, but explosive alcoholism.  King is masterful as she creates Daley’s world of both privilege and complete chaos.  Gardiner is incredibly cruel and careless in the way only a wealthy alcoholic can be. Page after page he manipulations Daley’s heart and mind in ways that will leave readers shaking with rage and overwhelmed with sadness for a young girl who can’t understand what happened to her family over the course of one summer.

Part II chronicles Daley’s successful life, free from her father’s alcoholism and dysfunction.  At the pinnacle of young professional success, Gardiner manages to pull her back with the promise of reconciliation and the restoration of their pre-divorce bond.  I risk giving too much away by summarizing the plot in Part II closely. King creates such an atmosphere of oppression and hope that the reader is sure to literally yell at Daley through the pages as she makes herself vulnerable to a continually cruel and unstable Gardiner.  I can only imagine that the child of an alcoholic could understand how far down the path to hell they are willing to travel in order create a non-alcoholic, loving version of their parent.

Part III is essentially the aftermath of the situation Gardiner created which drew Daley back home.  King’s incredibly nuanced adult Daley is a revelation – stronger at the broken places, but still capable of responding to the needs of her father even if it could leave her broken again.  The question asked in Part III is whether she can stay safe and healthy while he is so sick.

Lily King has created an incredibly evocative novel in Father of the Rain.  It literally evoked a veritable avalanche of emotions from me as I read it – sadness, anger, frustration, happiness, profound relief, and contempt.  The novel is both a testament to how low people can sink as a result of alcohol abuse, the degree to which they are able to lie to themselves, and the innate goodness and strength that all humans possess, regardless of economic advantages. 

Father of the Rain would be an excellent choice for a book club.  The themes of familial obligation, fidelity, parental responsibility, alcoholism, and abuse run throughout the book.  Clearly, Oprah agrees with me, as the novel was included in her 2010 list of Summer Reads and a Reader's Guide was created.  

Amandine

Amandine by Marlena de Blasi is an epic tale of an orphaned baby secretly sent to live in a French convent by her grandmother, the Countess.  The baby is the bastard daughter of teenage Andzelika and the brother of her father’s mistress (A sordid start, to be sure). Yet the child, Amandine, is raised surrounded by love and protection by a lay guardian, Solange, and the convent’s religious occupants.  However Mater Paul, who oversees the convent, cannot overcome her own jealousy over the unconditional love she witnesses, the polar opposite of her own traumatic childhood. She grows to hate Amandine and spends years neglecting and, finally, damaging her. As a result, Amandine and Solange are thrust from the convent just as the French surrender to the Nazis. They are in great peril, but also find unexpected reserves of strength and cunning as they become involved in the French Resistance.  Amandine’s mother and grandmother are intertwined throughout the story, as they go on with their lives, the existence of Amandine erased from the official record, but not their minds. 

De Blasi writes beautifully and deftly weaves first-person chapters from Solange, Mater Paul, The Countess and Andzelika, creating the net that supports Amandine’s tale. There is an element of Jane Eyre at work, as Amandine is treated cruelly by Mater Paul and her fellow convent school students. But De Blasi doesn’t take the easy way out with this orphan tale. Amandine is reared with love by Solange and all of the nuns and priests that surround her everyday.  She is also raised to love and appreciate the natural world. De Blasi’s description of the French landscape, as well as the food, is sumptuous. The book is infused with a large dose of sadness, especially in relation to mother-daughter relationships.  Amandine’s evolving feelings about her mother and the mother figures that surround her are extraordinary in their maturity and, many times, incredibly sad.

Despite the title, Amandine is really not just her story.  The subplots involving the Countess, Andzelika, and Solange are fascinating and are solidly tales of women - their choices and relationships - and how their choices helped create Amandine.  I enjoyed this book a lot and will have no trouble hand selling it to adult women or to my library book club.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is magically real, really magical, and magic realism. It is the story of Rose, who can taste the emotions and secrets of the person who prepares the food she eats. She becomes so attuned to food that she is eventually able to taste the actual origin of each individual ingredient. This ability is rarely a blessing and usually feels like a curse, as she learns more about the inner secrets of her family, as well as complete strangers. As Rose moves from childhood and into young adulthood, she develops coping mechanisms around food and eating, in order to protect her own heart and mind.

But Rose is not the only gifted member of her family. Her brother is brilliant and aloof, hiding his own haunting gift from those who love him. Both her mother and father struggle with their own preoccupations and desire and Rose is all too aware of their emotions as they share meal after meal. I loved Rose’s voice – it changes and matures as she goes from a happy 9 year-old to a teenager dealing with her anger and ultimate outsider status and into her young adulthood, where she begins to figure out the blessings involved with her gift and finally deal with the vulnerability and isolation it has brought.

Bender creates not only an authentic, beautifully crafted character in Rose, she also builds a truly nuanced, extraordinary family in the Edelsteins. Each member is struggling to find their own gift, protect their own happiness, and love each other in the best ways they know how and it is heartbreakingly real. Other family members are as gifted as Rose, in both magical and real ways, and their journeys are amazing to experience through Rose’s eyes. Bender paces the emergence of Rose’s ability and the inner upheaval in her family perfectly. She emerges a young adult for which the reader feels the pride, relief, and worry of a parent.