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Home by Marilynne Robinson

Read: 4/20/10-5/2/10

LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Family, Dysfunction, Grace, SLOBS

This book wasn't quite satisfying to me, but I decided to share about it anyway because of a couple compelling features: first, it's one of the only books I can think of about people from a big family -- after the kids are all grown up. An obvious hole in the existing literature, for people like me... not that there are many of us, but still. I thought it might interest my siblings. In Home they're all dispersed, the book is only really about three of the family members, but the large family still changes things, affects their memories and so on.

Second, the father in this book is... growing at least a little senile. I related to that too, although I feel funny saying much about it on my blog. But for those who don't know, I, being the next-to-youngest in a very large family, have older parents than people would expect for someone of my age. Like Glory, the main character in Home (although she's actually the youngest, and there were only... eight in the family, I think). My mother... seems to be losing some of her memory.

It was weird, seeing things I've never even put into words, skillfully and even lovingly portrayed in a fictional character completely unconnected to my family. To see in someone else's character some of the things I think odd about my mother in particular, apparently a possible general feature of someone growing old, even where it's only a more extreme version of a trait that was already there. Sorry, it's not easy to be more specific.

It was a hard book to read, but I liked it; or at least some of the time I liked it. I still want to read Gilead before I come to a final verdict -- the book jacket claimed Home is an "entirely independent" work, but I'm not sure I trust it. The father in Home is the best friend of the main character in Gilead. Apparently.

Oh, by the way, as to what the book's really about, as opposed to what I personally identified with about it -- it's about a son who fills the prodigal son and rebellious preacher's kid roles, but not exactly; it's about a father and retired preacher who loves him, but is sometimes horrible; and about a grown woman who has come back home because her own dreams have fallen down around her, watching the father-son relationship, wanting to be important somehow to her big older brother she's always admired but... Um. She's not the narrator, it's in third person, but it's still from her perspective. The book's not really about her, but it is. Yeah, a helpful description, I know. Anyway. And, of course, it's about home, in all its glory or lack thereof. So many things about home. Marilynne Robinson is very, very good (in this novel, at least) at showing the ambiguities and complexities of human relationships. There aren't a lot of dramatic, earth-shattering events in Home, but she makes even a person over-analyzing a situation totally engaging. She packs a lot of emotion into very simple sentences and scenes. So yeah, I think I liked it.

"'It is an oddly patient beast, my carnal self. I call it Snowflake. For, you know, its intractable whiteness. Among other things.'"

The Patron Saint of Butterflies

The Patron Saint of Butterflies by Cecilia Galante

Read: 3/18/10-3/22/10

LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: YA, Cults, Dysfunction, Friendship, Sonderbook (click here for Sondy's review)

I was surprised by how much I related to these characters, since I wasn't raised in a religious commune like they (and the author) were. The two characters (the book alternates their first-person perspective chapters), Agnes and Honey, aren't even very much alike, although they're best friends. But just as the author put different pieces of herself into the two of them, I related to different aspects of both girls.

Agnes wants to be a saint, and the copy of The Saints' Way that the cult leader gave her on her twelfth birthday is her most cherished possession. She fasts (at twelve years old, remember) and imposes the penances of her favorite saints on herself for her sins. I remember when I tried so hard to be good and felt that I was continually failing (mostly for not following my mom's "If you can't say anything nice..." rule, and because I cared who "started it"), although fortunately I didn't live in an environment that encouraged me to punish myself so severely for my failures. I shudder to think what would have happened if I'd had the same influences as Agnes had. I felt sad for Agnes, that she didn't have anyone to separate the truth from the lies for her, to show her where the good had been twisted and broken, so that she would still follow the good after uncovering the lies. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and of course I am not going to tell you how it all ends.

Then there's Honey, the commune's only orphan. Well, her parents aren't actually dead, but her mother abandoned her and she knows nothing of her father. Honey is far more rebellious than Agnes, and it frustrates Agnes to no end that her relationship with Honey seems to force her into sinning -- lying to protect Honey, and so on. Honey is both outsider and insider -- cut off from the rest of the community enough to be a bit more sane and have a more objective view of things, but it's still where she was raised, and she can more or less understand and interpret Agnes and the rest of them to the outside world, as much as that's possible. Between my own personality strength of empathy, the oddities of my own family, and growing up in the "Christian culture," (which, due to a semi-widespread Christian attitude [maybe from fundamentalism] that's more concerned with purity and separation than with loving people and impacting culture, can be a little odd and different even at times when it's being healthy, not weird and cultish), I can definitely understand the feelings of being caught between worlds and understanding both.

The quotation at the front of the book nicely sums up the feel of the story: "In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." -Czeslaw Milosz

It's about truth and secrets, and changes which threaten to tear people and friendships apart from the inside out. Fun stuff. I recommend it, and am curious what my sisters would think of it. I know Sondy's read it, any of the rest of you?  Want to borrow my copy?

Fire

Fire by Kristin Cashore
Read: 10/31/09-11/1/09
LibraryThing tags, if I had put this on LibraryThing: Fantasy, YA, Romance, Beauty, Family, Dysfunction, Sonderbook (click here for Sondy's review)

This is a companion to Graceling, and can be read before or after, although it seems to me one mystery in Graceling would be a touch easier to solve after reading Fire. The ease of solving that particular mystery isn't integral to the enjoyment of Graceling anyway.

They take place in the same world, but Fire is set in the Dells, which are separated by almost impassable mountains from the countries in Graceling, so the culture and world are rather different. Most importantly, instead of Gracelings, the Dells have monsters. "Monster" has a very specific meaning in this world. "It was their unusual coloration that identified them as monsters, because in every other physical particular they were like normal Dellian animals. They had the shape of Dellian horses, Dellian turtles, mountain lions, raptors, dragonflies, bears; but they were ranges of fuchsia, turquoise, bronze, iridescent green. A dappled gray horse in the Dells was a horse. A sunset orange horse was a monster." The herbiverous monsters, the mouse and rabbit monsters, are harmless; but the carniverous ones are much more dangerous than their animal counterparts. "They craved human flesh, and for the flesh of other monsters they were positively frantic." In addition, monsters are so beautiful that they have the power to stun and control the minds of those without the experience and training to resist them. Monsters come from monsters. They can breed with the non-monsters of their species, but the babies are always monsters.

The main character, Fire, is the last known remaining human monster (with bright hair and eyes), with all of the baggage that suggests. She may be gorgeous, but she has to deal with people loving her for that instead of for who she is, or wanting to possess her, or just out and out hating her for it. Monsters are a bigger threat and danger to her than to anyone else, since they're crazy for the flesh of other monsters. And she has to figure out how to deal with her power. Her first impulse is not to use it at all, because Fire's father was a monster--both in the Dellian sense of the word and in the more metaphorical sense. As you might guess, that's an important theme to the book.

As my sister pointed out in her review, there's quite a lot of casual sex in the book; not on camera, but still, be warned. While there certainly are some issues with that, and I think the consequences would sometimes be different than what Cashore portrays (affairs can actually be quite traumatic for those cheated on, something I almost forgot until I read Sondy's review, since it's not a side of things much explored in Fire), it makes some sense for the story, too, as the book concerns at least three bad fathers and the legacy they leave their children, including how their sons and daughters deal as they grow with love, sex and parenting children of their own. So, although not all of the extra-marital sex is portrayed as a Bad Thing, not all of it is portrayed as Good, either. And some of it is mixed, which fits with themes about the mixed nature of good and evil people, that none of them are all good or all bad (although some are certainly more evil than others!).

So with that caveat, Fire is, like Graceling, powerful, heart-breaking, beautiful, entertaining, thought-provoking and romantic. Enjoy!

“The city folk adorned themselves with even more monster trappings than the court folk, and with much less concern for the aesthetic integration of the whole. Feathers jammed randomly into buttonholes; jewelry, quite stunning really, necklaces and earrings made of monster shells, worn by a baker woman over her mixing bowl and covered in flour dust. A woman wearing a blue-violet wig from the fur of some silky monster beast, a rabbit or a dog, the hair short and uneven and sticking out in spikes. And the woman’s face underneath quite plain, the overall effect tending to an odd caricature of Fire herself; but still, there was no denying she had something lovely atop her head.”

A Live Coal in the Sea

A Live Coal In The Sea by Madeleine L'Engle
Read: 5/25/09-6/1/09
LibraryThing tags: Identity, Redemption, Grace, Family, Dysfunction, Suffering, SLOBS

Madeleine L'Engle was born in 1918 and this book was published in 1996, making her 78 years old at the time (or 77 more likely -- she was born late in the year, like me), and it shows -- in a good way. I have never before read a book that dealt with so much family melodrama, dysfunction, and pain in such a calm, level-headed, mature way. It was truly impressive. It's contemporary adult fiction by the way, a little rare for her. But unlike most contemporary adult non-genre fiction I've read, it's actually worth reading! It's easy to tell from what I've read of A Circle of Quiet and what I've heard about Madeleine L'Engle from other people that there are large autobiographical elements, although it's certainly fiction still. The wisdom and experience of her 77 years (or however many when she was actually writing it) permeate the pages. I noticed some of the reviewers on LibraryThing didn't like the ending, which irked me a bit, since I thought it was beautiful and the book would probably have become meaningless without it. I can sort of see why some people might not -- one element, or at least the foreshadowing and preparation for one element, seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. But in general it was masterfully done.

I loved the title. Don't read this part if you're a stickler about any kind of spoiler, because you don't discover the meaning of the title until 167 pages in. On the other hand, it is the title, it's from a fifteenth-century quotation, and if it were me, I probably would have placed the quotation as an epigraph at the very beginning of the book. But the process of discovery of the meaning of the book is certainly interesting too, so I can see why it's on page 167, and maybe you shouldn't read this. You decide; here it is, quoted from William Langland: "But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea." Isn't that beautiful?