BibliovoRX: Cinco de Mayo!

Despite what many non-Mexican-Americans believe, Cinco de Mayo isn't Mexican Independence Day.  Mexico actually declared its independence from Spain on September 16th, 1810.  Nor is Cinco de Mayo an American holiday, although many will be celebrating Mexican culture today here in the States.  What Cinco de Mayo commemorates is the day that General Zaragoza led 4,000 Mexican soldiers into battle and dealt a crushing defeat to 8,000 of Emperor Napoleon III's Legionnaires at Puebla, Mexico, in 1862.  This was the first defeat that any of Napoleon's soldiers had suffered in over 50 years.  The defeat kept the French from furnishing the Confederate Army with weapons and supplies for another year, which provided the Union Army with a much needed edge.

Did this one battle in Mexico save the United States of America?  Perhaps not.  But military history is something of a house of cards: when you're missing even one, the whole house looks entirely different.  So rather than go with the disturbing trend of xenophobia endorsed by Tom Perry, Jan Brewer, Tom Tancredo, Pat Buchanan, and others on the right, I'm going to have to go with offering our neighboring country to the south a sincere "Thank you, and happy Cinco de Mayo!"

This batch of books is about all things Mexican-American.  Below, find Chavez and the UFW, luchadores, "mod Mex" cuisine, and the intersectionality of race and mental illness.

Viewpoint: Searching for Tina Turner by Jacqueline E. Luckett

Lena Harrison Spencer did everything "right": she married a charming and upwardly mobile man, she put her dreams on hold to support his career, and she gave birth to two beautiful children.  Despite having achieved the outward appearance of the perfect upper middle class family, however, Lena's personal life is far from ideal.  Her husband Randall is both distant and controlling, her teenage daughter Camille doesn't respect the sacrifices Lena made to be a stay at home mother, and her son Kendrick has developed a drug addiction while away at college.  Lena knows that something needs to change about her life, but when Randall gives her an ultimatum -- be happy with the status quo or expect a divorce -- she begins to wonder whether she can continue to put other people's wants and needs before her own.  When she decides to make her own happiness a priority, the divorce, though painful, provides her with the tools she needs to believe in her own agency to act without Randall's power plays informing her every move.  With Tina Turner's strength providing inspiration along the way, Lena finds that she's stronger and braver than she could have ever imagined.

It's difficult to write this next part without resorting to flailing at the keyboard in a mad fit of unprofessional glee, but I'll do my best.  Here goes nothing.  I loved this book.  Loved it.  I wanted to run to my friend's nearby apartment to bang on her door, brandish this book at her, and yell, "This is what an awesome female protagonist looks like!"

And it's exactly like what an awesome female protagonist looks like, because Lena Harrison is really and truly an amazing woman.  I love that when Lena is told she is indomitable, it's a fitting description.  I love her passion for photography.  I love how she grows more self-assured and able to stand up for herself as the novel progresses, and I love that this self-assurance culminates in her measured and well-reasoned puncturing of Randall's obnoxious belief that he'll be so easily forgiven.  I love that Lena, Cheryl, Harmon, and Bruce discuss race, patrimony, and stereotypes from both an American and a French perspective.  I love being able to read about how Lena and Cheryl, as single black women in a foreign country, experience a different side of traveling abroad than I ever have, and I love their different ways of handling the ignorant and sometimes downright creepy behavior.*  I love that Lena's eventual response to "What's Love Got To Do With It" is "'ME...THAT'S WHAT LOVE HAS TO DO WITH...EVERYTHING!!'"

In American mainstream literature, there has been a dearth of books published in the last several years about both middle aged female protagonists and protagonists who are people of color. Perhaps it's a symptom of authors not writing these characters because they feel there's no market for them.  Maybe it's the result of manuscripts with protagonists who are graying women in their fifties, or men, women and trans people of color who don't fit the W.A.S.P. mold for interests, backgrounds, and behaviors being rejected for publication for aforementioned lack of marketability.  Regardless, finding good mainstream literature by American authors with these sorts of protagonists can be difficult, and when the two are combined -- a middle aged female person of color -- the search becomes that much harder.  Enter Lena Harrison, fifty-four year old woman of color and passionate, lively, indomitable protagonist of her story.  Have I mentioned how much I love her?

Searching for Tina Turner is creative, inspiring, sexy, beautiful, and an absolute and unequivocal delight to read.  It's a book that I will definitely read again.  This fantastic novel is only the first of what I hope will be many more to come from Jacqueline Luckett.  Her formidable talent (and the teaser for her next book) has left me desperate for another.  Until then, I'll be rereading Searching for Tina Turner and wishing I were back in Paris.

ETA: *And by "love reading about issues POC face on vacation" I mean I love having my eyes opened and being asked to reexamine my privilege from yet another angle that I have, as a white woman, not previously given any thought to because my privilege has given me that freedom, and have taken for granted that when I'm on vacation in Europe I'm not going to be treated as the object of anyone's lustful fantasies simply because my skin color makes me exotic.  The sentence in question is vague and somewhat condescending in retrospect (shades of "hey, oblivious white girl gawking at the diversity"), and I hope I didn't fail too hard.

Viewpoint: The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson

What happens to a companion pony when its racehorse suddenly dies?  The analogy is a running theme in Jandy Nelson's young adult novel The Sky is Everywhere, a story about the grief sixteen year old Lennie struggles with when her older sister Bailey unexpectedly passes away.  In the days and weeks following Bailey's death, Lennie's search for her own sense of self leads her down a path filled with poor judgment and selfish decisions.

Nelson's dual Masters of Fine Arts served her well in the writing of The Sky is Everywhere.  She is an extremely talented writer, and very capably handles the subjects of death and mourning.  Her main character reads as a realistic teenager, and her supporting characters are all interesting, lively people that I'd be thrilled to have as acquaintances in the real world.  The relationships between the members of the Walker family are portrayed beautifully, with the absent relatives as much a tangible presence as six feet tall Gram and pothead Lothario Uncle Big.  However, I felt immensely conflicted over this story from near the start, and remained so until the last page. 

The source of my contention with The Sky is Everywhere lies with Lennie, the realistic teenage protagonist.  Lennie compares herself to a companion pony (and her sister Bailey to a racehorse) several times over the course of the novel.  She doesn't want to come in first, and even goes so far as to throw the audition for first chair in the high school orchestra so that she can continue to play clarinet in the position of second chair.  She doesn't believe she's anything approaching above average in looks, although the handsome new student thinks she's beautiful.  She's had sixteen years of practice being the mirror held up to her sister's bright light, and reflecting someone else's confidence, charm, and beauty has been satisfying enough.  With Bailey gone, there's no light to reflect, and she's floundering.

Moreover, Nelson resorted -- as many authors of books geared toward teenage girls do -- to using a classic novel as shorthand for her protagonist's erudition, intellect, and emotional depth.  It's always interesting to come across novels where this device is employed, as the classic novel referenced often acts as a litmus test for the female protagonist's personality, and for how she interacts with the male romantic interests in the story.  When Pride and Prejudice is the favored book, the protagonist is typically smart, headstrong, outspoken, independent, and interested in romance but not to an absurd degree.  When the book is Anne of Green Gables, the protagonist is quirky, outgoing, a free spirit, and a dreamer.

In The Sky is Everywhere, Lennie's favorite book -- the book she's read twenty three times -- is Wuthering Heights.  Nelson's use of Wuthering Heights is no doubt intended to indicate that Lennie is fond of classic literature, that beneath her quiet exterior lies an insatiable romantic core, that Lennie will always be in pursuit of the ideal passion-filled romance, but that's not how it reads to me.  Wuthering Heights is a novel about a woman who chose pragmatism over passion, and how the abused boy she tried to protect became an abusive monster fueled by thoughts of revenge not only on his lost love, but on her husband and her children.  Not sexy, not romantic.  Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff, and Cathy are mentioned approximately thirty times over the course of the novel, and every time it's a reminder to me that the book that Lennie has read nearly to the point of memorization is the same one that showcases one of the most unhealthy and obsessive romances ever written.  Near the end of the book, Lennie and her Gram destroy the well-worn copy of Wuthering Heights with Gram's garden shears, and I let out an impromptu cheer in the privacy of my living room -- but alas, a few chapters later, Lennie declares passionately to her love interest, '"I want to be with you forever!"'  As Lennie says, 'You can chop the Victorian novel to shreds with garden shears but you can't take it out of the girl.'  More's the pity.

In Emily Bronte's world -- and through the lens that Lennie views the book -- Heathcliff is a sympathetic character, though outside of a fictional universe the cruel acts that he commits would have landed him in prison for an extended stay.  This is not a book that teenage girls need to be looking to for inspiration on their love lives, or for examples of healthy and functional romantic relationships.  Wuthering Heights is consistently at the top of my list of books that I cannot stand, and to see it mentioned with such frequency in The Sky is Everywhere that it practically qualified as a character was highly problematic for me.

It is entirely possible that I am being too judgmental.  Wuthering Heights is a book that brings out a knee jerk negative reaction in me.  I was busy reading and rereading Mariel of Redwall and all of Tamora Pierce's books in elementary school and middle school, and not one of those characters was ever obsessively, overwhelmingly focused on romance -- and none of them ever used Wuthering Heights as their playbook for romance, either.

In brief: the supporting characters were fantastic, and Nelson has a tremendous way with words.  However, Lennie's obsession with Wuthering Heights was an insurmountable problem, and I wish that Nelson had made her protagonist a little less ordinary and a little more awesome.

BibliovoRX: a spoonful of sugar makes....

We've had a long, weird month of freedom to run around and to do our best to embody the saying, "mad as a March hare."  We've worn shorts to work, celebrated (or lamented) the passage of the health care reform bill, slept without blankets on the bed for the first time this year, contemplated women's rights and achievements, and griped our way through adjusting to Daylight Savings Time.  In short, we went a bit nuts.  To get us back to a more secure state of sanity, it's time for the experimental trials to start up again. 

Don't be shy.  Whether you side with Eliot and think that "April is the cruelest month," or take Chaucer's stance that "April with his showers sweet" will spur you into taking a pilgrimage, there is a book here for you.  Below, a backwards thriller, an endearingly different schoolboy, unsympathetic protagonists, and devout monks.

Women's History Month: historical fiction

Brigid of Kildare: A Novel by Heather Terrell

The history of Saint Brigid is largely apocryphal.  A 5th century Gael and one of three of Ireland's patron saints, her biographers agree on little, but the few details of Brigid's life that can be agreed upon are quite interesting.  The daughter of Dubthtach, a pagan king of Leinster, and Brocca, a Christian Pict and slave, Brigid's exposure to her parents' differing religions shaped her approach to converting the Gaels upon taking her vows.  She founded Kildare Abbey around the year 470 AD.  When a bishop in his waning years, Saint Patrick -- whether intentionally or not -- performed the rite of consecration of a bishop.  As Abbess of Kildare Abbey, Brigid had administrative authority equal to that of a bishop.

Heather Terrell takes this handful of tenuously agreed upon facts and weaves them into a fascinating tale of a bold, intelligent, fiercely independent woman whose unorthodox methods of worship were looked upon with stringent disapproval by the men in power at the Vatican, who believed that women should be relegated to a role of silent and submissive passivity in the Christian faith.  Her Brigid, while perhaps not historically accurate, is -- as the wonderful character Sister Mary puts it -- "one very impressive woman."

In the 6th century, Brigid, daughter of Dubtach, the king of the Fothairt people of southern Gael, and Broicsech, his formidable and outspoken Christian wife and queen, forges her destiny as God's instrument in Gael.  While open to hearing her mother teach her of Christianity, she grows increasingly frustrated and disturbed by the lack of strong and educated women in the Gospels.  Why, she asks, should she adopt her mother's chosen faith when it affords women none of the respect and positions of authority that druidism does?  To prevent Brigid from turning away from a life of Christianity, Broicsech gives her daughter access to the recently banned Gospel of Mary, and Brigid finds in its pages her missing heroine.  Mary is a strong-willed, brilliant, educated woman with a close bond to her son the Messiah.  Brigid decides to devote herself to a life of religion, and vows that the Church will someday recognize Mary's role in the Christian faith once more.

Over fifteen hundred years later, Alexandra Patterson finds herself called to Kildare to provide her services as a medieval relics appraiser.  Sister Mary Kelly, the efficient and practical nun who "keeps" the history of the relics, wants to sell their oldest and most valuable relics to fund the order's efforts to educate the populace about the woman behind the myth, and she believes that Alex is the person for the job.  It isn't long before Alex discovers that the chalice, paten, and reliquary she has been commissioned to appraise aren't the only treasures at the Madonna Chapel -- secreted away inside the reliquary is an illuminated manuscript the likes of which she's never seen before.  Could it possibly be the rumored lost Book of Kildare that Saint Brigid commissioned in the 6th century?

Writing historical fiction takes a deft touch and a keen sense of how much fact and fiction to blend together.  Heather Terrell's Brigid of Kildare is a perfect blend of history and fantasy, and her cast of fictional characters -- in particular Broicsech and Sister Mary Kelly -- are all a delight to read.  The amount of research that went into writing this book was certainly not insignificant.  Readers will learn plenty about the early days of the Catholic Church, and about the enigmatic religious leader who would one day become Ireland's Saint Brigid.

Women's History Month: women's rights

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching by Chrystal N. Feimster

The most widely recognized -- and widely reviled -- portrayal of the postbellum South is a silent film by D.W. Griffith.  Premiering under the title The Clansman, we know it today as The Birth of a Nation.  In the film, Griffith shares an intensely racist and heavily romanticized narrative of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist group founded in 1865 as a means to terrorize the black population in the South into submission.  In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith employed several archetypal characters that, due to a sustained campaign of fear-mongering and violence, became firmly entrenched in the mythos of the post-War South: the avenging white knight, the chaste and delicate Southern woman, the treacherous mulatto woman, and the brutish ravaging black man.  It is these archetypal characters that provided white Southerners a means of justifying the widespread and horrific practice of lynching black men, women, and children.

In Southern Horrors, Chrystal N. Feimster explores this dark period in the history of the United States through the lens of what the postbellum South and the practice of lynching meant for women, and in particular what it meant for Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ida B. Wells.  They could not have come from more different backgrounds -- Felton, the daughter of wealthy slave owners, was raised to be the mistress of her future husband's plantation, and Wells was born into slavery the year before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was delivered.  Despite their differences, and despite their differing approaches to what each of them saw as the solution to the problem of lynching and mob rule, they had quite a lot in common.  They were both suffragists, journalists, and activists, and when they saw how precarious the safety of women in the South had become, they took up the banner of the cause and didn't set it down until the day they died.

In the years during the war and immediately following it, Felton saw the practice of raping women as something that all women needed protection from, regardless of social class or skin color.  When her "radical" views proved damaging to her husband's budding political career, however, she shifted her focus for the sake of expediency to focus only on seeking protection for white women.  Felton, an unabashed white supremacist all her life, was not afraid of invoking the nightmare figure of the fictional "black rapist" if it bought her cause popular support.  In a now infamous speech made in 1897, Felton claimed that women left alone on rural farms were in imminent danger from roving black rapists and murderers, and that the only solution was to lynch "a thousand a week if necessary."  The corollary, white men raping black women, was popularly thought to be the fault of the black women's loose morals and base natures, and Felton had no qualms about using this imagery either.  In the years that followed, however, her views on the nature of rape -- and the appropriate response to accusations of rape -- swung back toward the progressive end of the spectrum, and over twenty years after her lynching speech, she wrote an impassioned article decrying the disparities in sentencing and punishment between black and white offenders.  By calling lynching an "atrocity," she placed herself firmly in the anti-lynching camp, and re-embraced her previous view that the greatest danger to southern women of either race was white men.

Ida B. Wells, by contrast, was born a decade later into an unstable and tumultuous atmosphere.  She came of age in the time of Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs, when accusations of rape and attempted rape made by white girls and women in the morning were enough to have the accused strung up in a tree and riddled with bullets by the time the sun had set.  Wells saw firsthand the deplorable condition that former slaves and their children suffered under in a post-slavery Mississippi.  Former slave owners no longer had reason to value the black man or woman as a commodity, and as a direct result vented their spleen in increasingly violent and disturbing ways upon the people who had once been their "property."  The lynching of three of Wells' friends in Memphis in 1891 set her on the path that would become her life's work.  After moving to Chicago, she published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that explored the motivations behind the lynching of black men.  Wells quite rightly surmised that the explanation given for most lynchings -- to avenge the honor of white women raped by black men -- was a tale spun from whole cloth to hide the true intentions behind the violent act: to continue the disenfranchisement of the black race.  Black progress threatened white supremacists' ideas of black inferiority.  Wells exhorted black men and women to defend themselves: "The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched."


Change would not be seen until the very end of either of their lives, and the fight for both racial and gender equality would continue long after their deaths.  But they both made significant contributions to the anti-lynching crusade -- Wells through investigative journalism, political activism, and as a founding member of both the NACW and the NAACP, Felton by taking her enormous political cachet and standing as a wealthy white woman to work for reform from within.

Women's History Month: juvenile fiction

Newsgirl by Liza Ketchum

In Newsgirl, Liza Ketchum delivers that rarest of birds: a strong, plucky, stubborn, enterprising, headstrong, brave, likable, and above all believable female protagonist in twelve year old Amelia Forrester.  Fresh off a steamship from Panama, Amelia, her mother Sophie, and Sophie's partner Estelle Duprey have taken a chance at starting a new life in the rough and tumble setting of gold rush era San Francisco.  Sophie and Estelle have high hopes for their future as businesswomen in a city where the men vastly outnumber the women -- they have talent, they have a plan, and they will make things work.  Amelia's greatest hope is that the whispers and the horrible nickname that followed her around school in Boston have been left behind for good.

After putting most of their savings toward passage to San Francisco, the Forrester-Duprey family needs to keep a tight hold on every coin they have until their fledgling business begins to turn a profit.  Eternally curious Amelia notices when they disembark that a ragged looking group of boys seem to be earning top dollar for newspapers from Boston that are months old.  She immediately decides that the best way for her to contribute to her family's financial wellbeing is to start selling newspapers herself, but even with her mother's grudging approval, she runs into a major stumbling block: girls can't sell newspapers -- at least, not if the boys from the dock have any say in the matter.  Out of desperation, she takes a pocketknife to her hair in an impulsive move to convince Julius and Nico, the ringleaders of the newspaper boys, to take her on, and Estelle sees to it that she's properly kitted out with boy's clothing when she finds out Amelia's motives behind her drastic act.  Thus disguised, "Emile Duprey" enters the lucrative newspaper business.

Her career barely has time to start before she's quite literally launched in a new direction when she and her young friend Patrick decide to investigate an aeronaut's exhibition of his hot air balloon.  After being invited to provide ballast in the basket while the aeronaut readies the balloon for launch, things go awry, and she and Patrick soon find themselves stranded in the gold fields of northern California.  Separated from her family and adrift in a world where competency is prized above strict adherence to gender roles, Amelia realizes that it's time for her to be true to herself, and decides that if she makes it back home to her mother and Estelle, she'll work in the newspaper business on her own terms -- and under her own name.

While Newsgirl is not without its flaws -- it seems a little fuzzy on exactly when the climax of the story takes place, leading the last fourth of the book to feel alternately rushed and sluggish in places -- Ketchum's strength lies with her strong and fully developed female characters.  She draws the relationships between Amelia and her mother, Amelia and Estelle, and Estelle and Sophie with care and true affection for her characters.  Although the hardships of their new life take their toll on Sophie's relationship with Amelia, their disagreements don't diminish the strength of their bond.  And though Amelia is almost paralyzed by her fear of being recognized as and labeled a bastard for her lack of a father, it doesn't detract from her love for Estelle -- and the scene in which Amelia claims Estelle as her mother is perhaps the most touching one in the entire book.  Their unconventional family provides unconditional support for one another through thick and thin.

Set in a period of time when women lacked suffrage and many other rights, Newsgirl is about one small family of women generously endowed with a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality. Even in this day and age, when we can take it for granted that girls can sell newspapers and women can own their own businesses, it is still an excellent book for a young girl to read as she sets off on her own journey to discover her inner brave, stubborn, enterprising, strong, plucky, headstrong, likable self.

Women's History Month: real role models

It's March!  March, that lovely month during which the weather in San Antonio turns from "occasionally really cold" to "occasionally really warm."  When flowers no longer need to fear frost, when I begin to never leave home without sunglasses, when the sliding glass door is wide open all day, when we put away our pants and sweaters in favor of shorts and t-shirts until September rolls around--that's March!  It's also the month we celebrate the fifty-one percent of humanity born without a Y chromosome.  You know who I'm talking about.  They're the ones who invented beer (Egyptian priestesses), developed the theory of radioactivity (Marie Curie), founded Rhode Island (Anne Hutchinson), reformed mental institutions (Dorothea Dix), invented the Gothic horror genre (Mary Shelley), championed the cause for equal rights (Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Jane Addams, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimke sisters), and put cracks in every glass ceiling they came across.

THESE are role models.  Not the actresses on the idiot box who land in the tabloids for wild drinking binges in between seasons.  Not the singing tween sensations who've grown up so fast they missed out on childhood entirely.  Not the women on the covers of Elle and Seventeen, airbrushed to within an inch of their lives.  THESE are role models.  Pioneers.  Trailblazers.  Heads of State.  Suffragists.  Muckrakers.  Scientists.  Mathematicians.  Poets.  Philosophers.  Astronauts.  Scholars.  Philanthropists.

We have no end of awe-inspiring women to look up to and be inspired by.  Our younger sisters, nieces, friends, and daughters share in the gifts of the amazing women who came before us.  It's our job to ensure that the next generation knows that there are far, far better role models for them to emulate outside of Hollywood.  To end the month in style, I'll devote an entry a day to a noteworthy book that celebrates the history -- and the future -- of women in one way or another.

BibliovoRX: a remedy for your love bugs

Valentine's Day as we know it now is a day for romance, love, extravagant displays of affection, playing "who loves me best" with suitors, picking up lonely single people at bars, "singles awareness," gorging on chocolate, sneezing over roses, and drowning in a sea of over-commericalized pink, red, and white hearts everywhere you look.  Before Hallmark put its unique spin on the day, the Feast of Saint Valentine, or Martyr Valentinus the Presbyter, was intended to be a day honoring the martyrdom of a Christian priest during the reign of Claudius II in ancient Rome who was put to death for marrying Christian couples.  Many historians give Geoffrey Chaucer (a many greats-grandfather, I'm proud to say) credit for inventing the saint, as it was during the 14th century that February 14th became associated with romantic love.

I'm personally not a fan of the modern day interpretation of Valentine's Day.  Some might say I'm simply not romantic enough, but truth be told I just don't see why we as a society accept the idea that one day out of the year we should conform to societal (and debt-creating) standards of romantic gestures, e.g., truffles, Michelin-starred restaurants, and jewelry, when on the other 364 days we're perfectly happy to accept that cooking together, running errands for one another, having running inside jokes, and laughing until our ribs hurt are equally valid and undoubtedly more meaningful ways of showing love and affection.

Whatever your opinion, and whatever your unique situation, I have a book for you, O bookworm.  Timeless romantic poetry, how-to manuals, and guides to drinking away the holiday in style, under the jump.

What I have learned from books recently

It's been mentioned to me before on more than one occasion that my interests in books is, well, eclectic, to say the least.  I will read the latest winner of the Pulitzer or the Man Booker prize with gusto and great enjoyment, but I won't turn my nose up at the dog-eared James Patterson book lying around the hotel lobby when I'm on vacation.  It's a book!  It's a lovely, beautiful, fabulous book, and I want nothing more than to immerse my consciousness in the pages of whatever book is in front of me for an hour or two.

That said, I've come to find out that as wide and diverse and multifarious as my reading list is, my book preferences share a common theme.  I like to learn new things.  Yes, I am one of Those People -- the ones who read to have their horizons broadened and their minds opened.  Whether it's something grounded in reality (such as a new technique for preparing couscous) or entirely fictional (I'm desperately curious as to the other four exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration), the new, the novel, the unique, and the unexpected make reading a pleasure that words don't capture adequately.

Find out what I've learned after the jump!