CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders (20 Books of Summer #17)

My final book completed for 20 Books of Summer was a good one. I’ve been a fan of George Saunders for years, since I read his 2013 short story collection Tenth of December.  His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, completely blew me away. His first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, had lingered on my Goodreads TBR list since 2014. I’m glad I finally read it – it’s so interesting to see how a favorite writer hones his skills over time.

This 1996 collection is made up of six short stories and one novella. They are a motley, twisted assortment of near-future/slightly dystopian settings in which affable but morally skewed men and women toil away at low-wage menial jobs and screw up over and over again. America is basically a disintegrating theme park, beset by racial strife, class warfare, and environmental degradation, but somehow Saunders injects just enough notes of dark humor and decency to keep the reader from flinging the book away in despair.

My favorite story and one I think ranks with the best stories I’ve read is “Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz.” A man grieving the death of his wife Elizabeth, beset by guilt over the fight they had right before she was killed, tries to atone for his sins, both actual and perceived. He owns a franchise of something called “personal interactive holography” – basically a space in which people can pay to experience an intense virtual reality of their choosing. He’s got just a few regular customers who either can’t afford to pay him or pick rather disturbing virtual realities. But his “regular job, penance, albatross” is visiting an old, bed-ridden widow on the bad side of town with one of his headset modules and letting her temporarily experience happiness, both remembered and made-up.

In the early days of my grief Father Luther told me to lose myself in service by contacting Elder Aid, Inc. I got Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Mrs. Ken Schwartz lives in Rockettown remembering Mr. Ken Schwartz and cursing him for staying so late at Menlo’s Ten Pin on nights when she forgets he’s been dead eighteen years. Mrs. Ken Schwartz likes me and my happy modules. Especially she likes Viennese Waltz. Boy does she. She’s bedridden and lonely and sometimes in her excitement bruises her arms on her headboard when the orchestra starts to play. 

One night when he stops back by the store to pick up a module for a school group visit the next day (“Hop Hop the Bunny Masters Fractions”) he walks in on a robbery. After he subdues his attacker he scans his brain with his console and finds out that he’s named Hank, a WWII veteran who saw horrible things at Iwo Jima and never was quite right after. But something goes wrong with the scan, and our narrator realizes that he’s lifting memories from Hank, taking them out of his brain and depositing them in the module. Hank leaves the store carefree now that the horrors of war (and the first twenty years of his life) are gone from his memory. Our narrator has a brainstorm – why not edit Hank’s memories to give the schoolkids an immersive history lesson on what it was like to live in the 1930’s and ’40’s?

I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but I’ll just say that this one moved me like no other in the collection. Here I recognized the Saunders I’d already read, who is one of the most compassionate and humane writers living today. He has a knack for making the reader care about some questionable, flawed characters and celebrating what is most central to the human experience – loving and being loved.

If you’ve never read Saunders before I wouldn’t start with this. While each story certainly has his trademark black humor and originality, they weren’t as moving or polished as the stories in Tenth of December. And he has mellowed with age, treating his characters just a bit more gently in the later collection. Some of the violence and language in a few of these stories were a bit hard to stomach. I feel like his later writing is more hopeful somehow, while these stories feel harder and more cynical. Still, it was a very good collection and worth borrowing from the library for “Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz” alone. However, I would recommend reading one story at a time and then setting the book down for a day in between so they don’t run together.

So that’s it for another 20 Books of Summer challenge. I’m proud of myself for managing to read and write about 17 books from my list. It’s a new personal record. I may not participate again next year, though – sticking to a set list, even one that I create, starts to rub the wrong way about half-way through. All the others books out there start looking ever so much more appealing. (Mood reader!) But I have loved being in such good company with my fellow 20 Books people, and am grateful to Cathy at 746 Books for organizing the event again.

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Mini-Reviews – The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui and Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

My book group’s pick for July was Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir.  It was an excellent choice both for reading and discussion. Bui recounts her parents’ personal histories growing up in Vietnam before the war as well as the story of their harrowing escape (she was a toddler and her mother was heavily pregnant) from the country after the fall of Saigon and eventual resettlement in America. She weaves in her own story of becoming a mother for the first time, all the anxiety and doubt about being responsible for a new life and wondering if her family’s tragic history will be a burden to her son. It is a marvelous exploration of trying to relate to one’s parents, trying to understand their own pain while trying to forgive them for the mistakes they made along the way as parents. Plus, it’s an excellent chronicle of the lead-up to the Vietnam War, the complexities of the situation and what it was like to live there. I feel like I learned a lot reading this and it certainly moved my heart. The artwork is amazing, only shades of white, black, and an orange-brown color that contains multitudes.

I highly recommend this if you are interested in graphic memoirs, Vietnam history, or moving stories of family dynamics and immigration. (4 Stars.)

(This is the 14th book of my 20 Books of Summer list.)

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal was a pleasant surprise for me. It had been on my Goodreads TBR list for quite some time, mainly because I had read good things about it. Filling one of my “reader’s choice” slots for 20 Books of Summer, this book was the perfect choice for pleasurable summer reading. It’s essentially a book of linked short stories, all orbiting around the character of Eva Thorvald is some way, from her birth and childhood to her adulthood as a famous chef in Minnesota. Foodies will certainly find a lot to love here, with enticing food writing, but for me the real pull was the way Stradal wrote about people and relationships, with gentle humor and heartfelt insight. This was a book that I didn’t want to put down. I grabbed it at every spare moment, and some moments that weren’t spare at all, ignoring my family in order to read a few more pages. For pure enjoyment of reading I rated it 5 Stars.

(This is the 15th book of my 20 Books of Summer list.)

 

 

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim (Classics Club #4)

She wanted to ask her if she had seen the advertisement. She did not know why she wanted to ask her this, but she wanted to. How stupid not to be able to speak to her. She looked so kind. She looked so unhappy. Why couldn’t two unhappy people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business of life by a little talk – real, natural talk, about what they felt, what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope? And she could not help thinking that Mrs. Arbuthnot, too, was reading that very same advertisement. Her eyes were on the very part of the paper. Was she, too, picturing what it would be like, – the colour, the fragrance, the light, the soft lapping pf the seam among little hot rocks? Colour, fragrance, light, sea; instead of Shaftesbury Avenue, and the wet omnibuses, and the fish department at Shoolbread’s, and the Tube to Hampstead, and dinner, tomorrow the same and the day after the same, and always the same…

I thoroughly enjoyed my fourth read for The Classics Club, Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 novel The Enchanted April. I read it back in June so forgive me if my impressions are a bit foggy. But I want to write a little bit about it before any more time passes.

Lotty Wilkins, Rose Arbuthnot, Mrs. Fisher, and Lady Caroline Dester are strangers to one another when Lotty first sees the advertisement in the paper while at her ladies’ club on a dreary day:

To those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times.

Lotty and Rose go to church together and belong to the same club, and when Lotty sees Rose reading the same page of the newspaper and staring dreamily into the distance, she seizes the moment to ask if she’d like to go in together on renting the castle. After persuading husbands and putting their own advertisement in the paper for two more ladies (the young and beautiful Lady Caroline Dester and the elderly widow Mrs. Fisher) to join them and share the rent, they make their way to Italy.

What I loved about the book was that each lady underwent a transformation of sorts – they all had things they wanted to escape from back in England, or maybe things they weren’t even aware they were escaping from until they actually left. Feeling underappreciated and overworked, awkward and painful emotional distance between a wife and a husband, feeling unloved, or being loved and desired for the wrong reasons… each woman gained clarity and insight through distance and fresh surroundings. Old wounds were healed, new friendships were cemented, and the beauty of Italy was the catalyst for everything.

She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this… to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this… She stared, lips parted. Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she were washed through with light. 

What a delight! There is a freshness and a sense of humor to the writing that makes this classic novel feel much more modern. This is my first book by von Arnim and I am curious about the rest of her works. I can definitely see myself reading this one again when I want a comfort read. I watched the movie (1991) and it was a faithful adaptation – solid performances, beautiful scenery, makes for a pleasant evening’s entertainment. But if you need a breath of fresh air in your reading life and want to take a trip to Italy, I highly recommend reading The Enchanted April.

(This is the 4th book reviewed from my Classics Club list and the 9th book reviewed from my 20 Books of Summer list.)

Dear Martin and Shadowshaper (20 Books of Summer #4 and #5)

Regular readers of my blog know I don’t read a whole lot of books aimed at teens. I’ve tried some in the past, with middling success. The ones I tend to like are either books with a social justice angle (think Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give) or something totally out of left field (for me) like a paranormal mystery or fantasy (like Maureen Johnson’s Shades of London series.) I often think most of these books just aren’t aimed at me, a middle-aged woman. And that’s totally fine! But I do continue to want to give YA a try, if only so that I can recommend a few every now and then to a library patron. I have recently read two for my 20 Books of Summer list that I enjoyed and wanted to share a few brief thoughts.

Dear Martin by debut author Nic Stone was a fast-paced, engaging story that I read quickly (just over 200 pages.) High school senior Justyce McAllister is near the top of his mostly-white private school student body and heading to Yale University next year. The book opens with an incident where he is trying to help his drunk girlfriend get home from a party and ends up handcuffed for hours by a cop who mistakenly sized up the situation. The incident rattles Justyce and he starts to write “letters” to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a way to process his emotions and thoughts.

Last night changed me. I don’t wanna walk around all pissed off and looking for problems, but I know I can’t continue to pretend nothing’s wrong. Yeah, there are no more “colored” water fountains, and it’s supposed to be illegal to discriminate, but if I can be forced to sit on the concrete in too-tight cuffs when I’ve done nothing wrong, it’s clear there’s an issue. That things aren’t as equal as folks say they are.

The novel alternates these letters with every day conversations in Justyce’s classes and his regular high school life. Some of his white friends and classmates demonstrate an appalling lack of sensitivity, and some do things that are out-right racist. However, when Justyce and his white classmate SJ start becoming more than friends, Stone doesn’t shy away from writing about how Justyce’s mother would be uncomfortable with him dating a white girl. Later there is another incident with an off-duty police officer that it even more traumatic and serious for Justyce and one of his friends, and it really makes him question everything, including the value of following Dr. King’s non-violent teachings. While I was engaged by the story, I didn’t love it because I found the writing to be lacking in complexity, but perhaps that’s the thing that might make it sing to a 13 or 14 year-old. Stone has delivered a highly relevant and emotionally affecting story that will speak to a lot of young people today. (3 stars.) 

Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older is a bit of a departure for me as I don’t normally read much fantasy. But I’m here to say I really liked it! When I do read fantasy I prefer it to be set in a world that’s similar to the real one, with maybe just a few wacky things different. In Shadowshaper, you’ll recognize Older’s portrayal of current-day Brooklyn, NY – except maybe for the murals on buildings that move as if alive and the corpses that become reanimated with evil spirits!

From Goodreads: Sierra soon discovers a supernatural order called the Shadowshapers, who connect with spirits via paintings, music, and stories. Her grandfather once shared the order’s secrets with an anthropologist, Dr. Jonathan Wick, who turned the Caribbean magic to his own foul ends. Now Wick wants to become the ultimate Shadowshaper by killing all the others, one by one. With the help of her friends and the hot graffiti artist Robbie, Sierra must dodge Wick’s supernatural creations, harness her own Shadowshaping abilities, and save her family’s past, present, and future.

The writing was lively and vibrant, sometimes funny, and Sierra felt like a believable character to me. I loved this exchange when she worried over her belly to her best friends before a date:

“What if he doesn’t like my ponch?”

“Your what now?”

“My little belly ponch.” Sierra patted her tummy.

“Oh lord, Sierra, really? Everybody has a little gut, and plenty a’ dudes go crazy for ’em. Stop fretting.”

  I also appreciated Older’s handling of the gentrification of Sierra’s friend’s neighborhood:

The place Sierra and Bennie used to get their hair done had turned into a fancy bakery of some kind, and yes, the coffee was good, but you couldn’t get a cup for less than three dollars. Plus, every time Sierra went in, the hip, young white kid behind the counter gave her either the don’t-cause-no-trouble look or the I-want-to-adopt-you look. The Takeover (as Bennie dubbed it once) had been going on for a few years now, but tonight its pace seemed to have accelerated tenfold. Sierra couldn’t find a single brown face on the block. It looked like a late-night frat party had just let out; she was getting funny stares from all sides – as if she was the out-of-place one, she thought. 

And then, sadly, she realized she was the out-of-place one.

This was an exciting, original adventure full of magic, art, and mystery. I ordered the second book in the series, Shadowhouse Fall, from the library and hope to read it in the next few weeks. (4 stars.)

Do you read YA books? If so, have you got some recommendations for ones I shouldn’t miss?

(These are the fourth and fifth books I’ve featured from my 20 Books of Summer list.)

 

The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (20 Books of Summer #3)

Beyond her front garden with its windblown grass and broken blue fence there is nothingness. Just miles and miles of marshland, spotted with stunted gorse bushes and criss-crossed with small, treacherous streams. Sometimes, at this time of year, you see great flocks on wild geese wheeling across the sky, their feathers turning pink the the rays of the rising sun. But today, on this grey winter morning, there is not a living creature as far as the eye can see. Everything is pale and washed out, grey-green merging to grey-white as the marsh meets the sky. Far off is the sea, a line of darker grey, seagulls riding in on the waves. It is utterly desolate and Ruth has absolutely no idea why she loves it so much.

Elly Griffiths came to my attention through a couple of bloggers I follow, Cleo at Cleopatra Loves Books and Fiction Fan at FictionFan’s Book Reviews.  I love a good mystery, especially one set in the UK, and this one was right up my alley. The Crossing Places has a great sense of atmosphere, a likeable heroine in forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway, and even a bit of believable romantic tension. I’ve mentioned before how mysteries are my bookish “palate-cleanser” and my go-to escape genre, and this one was an absorbing read that made me eager to read more in the series. I read it in two days!

From Goodreads: When a child’s bones are found on a desolate beach nearby, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson calls Galloway for help. Nelson thinks he has found the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing ten years ago. Since her disappearance he has been receiving bizarre letters about her, letters with references to ritual and sacrifice.
      The bones actually turn out to be two thousand years old, but Ruth is soon drawn into the Lucy Downey case and into the mind of the letter writer, who seems to have both archaeological knowledge and eerie psychic powers. Then another child goes missing and the hunt is on to find her. 

Besides the descriptive sense of atmosphere, where the Norfolk-area marshy landscape is practically a character in the book, I liked that Ruth was a fairly level-headed, smart, competent woman, late 30’s, good job, happily living with her cats in a fairly isolated area. The only thing that bothered me really were a couple of comments about her weight. She discloses early on that she’s 12.5 stone and I Googled that – being an American I have no clue what a stone is! It translates to 175 pounds, which IS NOT THAT BIG. It certainly wouldn’t preclude a woman from being able to fit in a car or being able to walk a couple of miles to a marshy crime scene without being out of breath (both little comments made in the story.) I’m sensitive about this issue, I admit, but honestly I don’t think she’s big enough to even make mention of it for character development’s sake. Oh well. One good thing is that it didn’t seem to stop her from enjoying the attention of men – thank goodness for that! (There are a couple of men interested in Ruth – I won’t spoil anything but things do get a bit messy and I’ll be interested to see how things develop in later installments!)

Not much in-depth analysis of this one, really. I didn’t mark many places as I read  – I was turning pages too quickly! It was a realistic feeling mystery that wasn’t too gory or gruesome – a delicate balance in this genre, I find. Appealing characters, absorbing mystery, and I didn’t guess the “whodunnit” until very late in the game. I have the second in the series, The Janus Stone, checked out and sitting on my bedside bookshelf. I don’t know when I’ll get to it but I may make it one of my two remaining “Reader’s Choice” picks for 20 Books of Summer.

Have you read anything by Elly Griffiths? Do you like your mysteries on the cozier side or the more realistic side?

(This is the third book I’ve written about so far from my 20 Books of Summer challenge list.)

 

 

 

 

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel (20 Books of Summer #2)

Lilia knelt by the side table between the beds, extracted the hotel room Bible from the top drawer and opened it to the Sixty-ninth Psalm, fumbled in the drawer for a motel pen. She wrote fast and scrawling over the text on the page, I am not missing. Stop searching for me. I want to stay with my father. Stop searching for me. Leave me alone. She signed her name and her hand was shaking, because there were still people in the world who wanted her found: she had been leaving this message in motel-room Bibles for so long now, so long, and the messages were reaching no one. It was like throwing messages in bottles in the ocean, but the bottles were drifting far from shore.

I’ve had Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal on my TBR list for four years now, ever since I read Station Eleven (still one of my favorite books.) It was her first novel, published in 2009. It felt like a first novel to me. Parts of it were gripping, parts of it were lovely, parts of it made me roll my eyes. Overall I enjoyed it and the last half made up for some of the flaws of the first half.

The novel opens with Eli, a perpetual student working on his unfinished and overdue thesis. He is gradually realizing that his girlfriend, Lilia, has left him for good and not just slipped out to get the newspaper as she had said on her way out. We learn more about Lilia and Eli, how they came together, and then we dive into Lilia’s past. It turns out she’s been leaving places and people for a very long time, ever since she was a little girl and she left her mother’s house in the middle of a snowy night, running into the arms and waiting car of her father. A life spent growing up on the road, pretending to be home-schooled (while actually getting a pretty good education; her father cared deeply for her and quizzed her, took her to libraries, bought her books, taught her languages.) She has been moving for so long it’s all she knows. She doesn’t know how to put down roots in a city or in a relationship for more than just a few months.

While we travel along with young Lilia and her father from hotel to hotel, there is another person traveling not far behind: a private investigator her mother has hired, named Christopher. He’s in a crumbling marriage and he and his wife are in the running for Crappiest Parent of the Year. His daughter, Michaela, becomes just an afterthought as he gets more and more obsessed with Lilia’s case. In turn, Michaela becomes obsessed with the young woman who has taken away her father’s attentions. The past becomes present as Eli and an adult Michaela become acquainted during Eli’s desperate hunt for Lilia.

I liked elements of this story very much: the scenes from the road with Lilia and her father, the scenes of the night she ran away from home (or was she kidnapped? We find out more as the story unfolds.) There’s a bit of a mystery to the beginning of Lilia’s story (Why is there broken glass in the snow? Why does Lilia have scars on her arms?) And the hunt for Lilia at the end, with Eli and Michaela coming closer, that part’s interesting. Michaela is a compelling character, so wrecked by the neglect of her parents and her own obsession with Lilia.

What I didn’t like was a certain preciousness to the characterization of Lilia – she was a “manic pixie girl” who bewitched Eli.  (Her hair was dark and cut unevenly, in a way that he found secretly thrilling; he knew that when it got too long she cut it herself, fast and carelessly, not necessarily in the presence of a mirror.) And the scenes of Christopher’s family life when Michaela was younger were annoying and ridiculous. He and his wife met because their parents were in the traveling circus together (?!?) and he wouldn’t confront his wife when he finds a stranger cuff link and TIE in his bedroom(!?) I couldn’t buy the extent to which he abandoned his daughter in pursuit of Lilia either. I just didn’t believe it.

All in all, though, this was an entertaining book, especially the second half. Michaela is playing with Eli to get some information he has on Lilia’s past, and she won’t tell him where Lilia is until she gets it. Yet they seem to form an oddly moving bond with one another. I have to say that the ending surprised me. Mandel plays with multiple time frames and perspectives in this novel as she did so brilliantly in Station Eleven, so I can see the seeds of her later style here.  While flawed, I’m certainly glad I read Last Night; I intend to read her other two novels written in between this and Station Eleven.

Have you read this or any of Mandel’s novels?

(Last Night in Montreal is the second book I’ve reviewed for my 20 Books of Summer reading challenge.)

Gather Together in My Name by Maya Angelou (Classics Club Review #3; 20 Books of Summer #1)

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I realized that Maya Angelou had written more than one memoir (her most famous one, the one most likely assigned in school, is the first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.) And then somehow I started reading them out of order – me, the person who is a stickler for reading mystery series in order! So I’ve read the first, many years ago, and then the third and the fifth more recently. Gather Together in My Name (published in 1974) is the second of her memoirs, and it takes up where Caged Bird leaves off. It’s post-WWII San Francisco/Oakland and teenage mother Maya (Marguerite, shortened to Rita for a short-lived job as a Creole cook) is determined to make her way in the world  with as little help as possible from her mother. In doing so she finds ways to make money that are surprising to say the least.

This is a slim book and covers a lot of ground for a time span of just a few years in her life. Maya/Rita has lived more lives than any one person ever really should – here she is a cook, a waitress, a dancer/entertainer, a madam (yes, you read that right!,) a prostitute, a chauffeur, and nearly enlists in the Army. She also goes back to Stamps, Arkansas, the tiny place where she grew up with her grandmother, on the run from her time as a madam. (Things are a little different in Stamps between whites and blacks, to say the least, and she ends up getting quickly sent back to California for her safety after offending a white store clerk.)

Gather Together is a darker volume than the third and fifth books. I had to keep reminding myself that Maya was a 17 year-old single mother, with the judgement/naivety of a 17 year-old. She keeps falling in love with men who aren’t good for her, and she has the mentality (probably common in the late 1940’s) that a man is going to rescue her and  her child and allow her to be a homemaker.

He would be a little younger than my father, and handsome in that casual way. His conservative clothes would fit well, and he’d talk to me softly and look at me penetratingly. He’d often pat me and tell me how proud he was of me and I’d strain to make him even prouder. We would live quietly in a pretty little house and I’d have another child, a girl, and the two children (whom he’d love equally) would climb over his knees and I would make three-layer caramel cakes in my electric kitchen until they went off to college.

With all of her travels, adventures, and lucky escapes, one thing that struck me was how her son, Guy, was passed around from caretaker to caretaker, and she left him for long stretches with women who she paid to look after him. During her time as a prostitute, she leaves him in the care of a woman named Big Mary. After an extended absence caring for her mother and brother Bailey, Maya returns to collect Guy only to find that Big Mary’s house is boarded up and she’s moved to parts unknown with Maya’s baby in tow. A neighbor watching from her house tells Maya that Big Mary has a brother in Bakersfield. With only that as a tip a distraught Maya manages to track down her Guy, who by this time is three years old.

He took a fistful of my hair and twisted and pulled, crying all the time. I couldn’t untangle the hair or pull my head away. I stood holding him while he raged at being abandoned. My sobs broke free on the waves of my first guilt. I had loved him and never considered that he was an entire person. Separate from my boundaries, I had not know before that he had and would have a life beyond being my son, my pretty baby, my cute doll, my charge. In the plowed farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand the uniqueness of that person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself.

Poor Guy! I am glad that I read this because I want to read all of her memoirs, but this one wasn’t one of my favorites so far, probably because young Maya is an unappealing  combination of naive, snobby, and headstrong. She gets herself into some insane situations by virtue of ignorance, misplaced self-confidence, and desperation to be loved.  As usual, the writing is elegant and thoughtful, if a tad detached. For me it wasn’t as captivating a read as the third (Singin’ and Swingin’ And Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas) and fifth (All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes.) But of course Maya is older in these books and has more about herself and the world figured out, and they both are set in interesting locales all over the world. I was shocked to read about the things young Maya did, knowing what we all know about the dignified, insightful, talented writer and poet she became, the lady who read poetry at President Clinton’s first inauguration. It’s a remarkable testament to the power of people to learn, grow, and change over the course of their lives.

(This is the third of my reviews for my Classics Club list and the first book of this year’s 20 Books of Summer Challenge.)