It's Monday! What are you reading? (Holiday week edition)

 

It's a short week around here, which gives me a little more time for reading. I'm feeling ambitious. Here's what I'm reading this week:

In the car on audiobook: The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant.

On my iPod: On Folly Beach by Karen White.

For review (coming soon): 

The Awakening of Miss Prim: A Novel by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera (in time for its publication date July 8)

Wedding in Provence: A Novel by Ellen Sussman (publication date July 15)

And pulled from my stack that I've been looking forward to reading:

Hiding Edith by Kathy Kacer

Call me Zelda by Erika Robuck

Guests on Earth by Lee Smith

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

What are you reading?

This event is hosted by Sheila from Book Journey. 

Book Review: A Different Sun by Elaine Neil Orr

A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa by Elaine Neil Orr

Published by: Berkley Books

Published on: April 2, 2013

Page Count: 388

Genre: Fiction

My Reading Format: Paperback

Available Formats: Paperback and Amazon Kindle e-book

My Review:

Emma Davis knows she is called for something special. It's something different from the life her sister Catherine is sure to lead, and different from what her father expects of her. As a young girl growing up on a Middle Georgia plantation, her closest confidant, a slave named Uncle Eli, encourages her to follow her heart. Emma knows to do her life's work she must leave her comfortable life, and she's able to do that when she meets and marries a handsome missionary on leave from his work in Nigeria. Emma and Henry Bowman's married life begins with a journey across the ocean to a Yoruba village.

During her young married life, Emma is constantly out of her comfort zone but leans on her faith to navigate a new culture, household, language and customs. Emma learns the differences between the antebellum South of her girlhood and her womanhood in Africa. Perhaps her biggest challenge is learning to let her husband operate as the head of their household, even when she believes she knows other, better ways to live their missionary life. Through challenges, heartbreak, love and success, Emma learns much about herself as an individual and a wife, and how she can manage to be both.

With beautiful imagery, Orr paints a vivid, complicated picture of Africa and its people, with Africa being a mysterious character in the novel. Orr skillfully creates mounting tension between Emma and Henry, and Emma and Jacob, an native and Henry's missionary helper. And, the author conveys the deep pain and emotional struggle with Emma that she must bear alone. Emma's journey is both an interior and an exterior one, and both are defined by her life as a missionary in a place where she will always be an outsider. Emma's faith, though it waivers at times, sees her through it all.

This is a novel that will give readers reason to consider what freedom is and what one's religion means, timeless ideas that will always resonate with us. 

**Note: Elaine Neil Orr was one of my professors at NC State University when I was working toward my masters degree. Her workshop course in creative nonfiction and thesis direction were of great importance for writing my thesis and the writing coaching and editing work I've done since. I'm grateful to her and honored to review her first work of fiction.

Four out of five stars

If you like A Different Sun, you'll probably like State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and O Pioneers! and My Antonia, both by Willa Cather.

Holiday Book Club 2011

Last night my book club met for our last meeting for 2011. The book up for discussion was rated by all who attended as a fantastic read. I have not been able to put down Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. Now that I've finished it, I'm sorry I don't have more to read about this American missionary family with four daughters in 1960s Congo.

I'm still turning the book over in my head. It's a dense one, filled with literary references (I made some of my own comparisons as well), clever plays on words and invented words, politics, cultural misunderstandings and a family with the kinds of complication relationships that just seem to me to be so difficult to navigate, yet throughout everything the family presses on. We know it's not going to be a pretty story from the get-go. Each awful thing that happens to the family was a blow to me as the reader but kept me hanging on for more.

Well, that is, until the last 75 pages or so. I was all set to give this book one of the few five star ratings on Goodreads that I've had all year. If only the book had ended before I'd had to read too much about the sisters' adult lives! A couple of book club friends agreed with me that if we each read this book again, we'd stop reading at the exact place we felt the book should end and skip the rest so we get out of it exactly what we want next time. Have you read this book? What was your reaction?

As a side note, last night was the second Christmas book club party where we celebrated by making mandarin lanterns (a bit blurry, but still festive). Here's mine:

Happy holidays!

Animal Dreams and Erin Brockovich

I'd been wanting to read Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for a couple of years before I finally did recently. And I've known I should read some of her other stuff too, as I've been told she's a fantastic writer and storyteller. I think the first time I knew of her was when Oprah chose her book The Poisonwood Bible for her book club in 2000. During my book club's December meeting we exchanged used books Dirty Santa-style and I ended up with Kingsolver's Animal Dreams and I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago.

I really enjoyed it. It turned out to be one of my favorite kinds of stories, the kind when a female character, in need of a life change, takes a chance and good things come about. While all that was going on, the main character, Codi Noline, who graduated from medical school but never became a doctor, discovered while wading around in a creek with her high school biology students, that the living microorganisms that should have been flourishing there aren't. She sounds the alarm and gets the women from the local Stitch and Bitch Club riled up and they all start doing something about it.

It reminded me so much (in a good way) of the movie Erin Brockovich that I ordered it off Netflix and watched it the other night. The same kind of thing is going on. A mom, desperate for a job, begs for one at a small law firm, and is both pushy and likable enough that she both convinces her boss to keep her and convinces the residents of Hinkley, California, to trust her to help hold the nearby corporation that was ruining the environment and their health. She even earns the respect she deserves from this evil corporation, its attorneys and anyone else who doubted her from the get-go.