Double Review: The Education of Bet by Lauren Baratz-Logsted and A Golden Web by Barbara Quick

A backlog of reviews means more double reviews, simply so it doesn't take me two months to catch up with myself. On the other hand, I would probably have reviewed these two together anyway, since they share a few elements: historical fiction, romance between students, and girls disguising themselves as boys in order to receive an education.

In 19th century England, Bet is the orphaned daughter of a maid, and has been the ward of a relative of her mother's employer for most of her life. Bet occupies a precipitous place in a society rigidly defined by class: she comes from the humblest of beginnings and has been raised in the lap of luxury, yet now belongs to neither world. What Bet longs for most, however, is an education - something denied to her and yet forced upon the unwilling Will, great-nephew of her benefactor who lost his parents to the same illness that killed Bet's mother. Will wants a life of glory in the military. Bet wants to go to school. So Bet concocts a plan: since Will is due to be sent to a new school at the start of the term, she will dress as a boy and pretend to be him, leaving Will free to pursue military service.

Away at school, Bet thrives in her classes, but finds interpersonal relationships much more tricky, as she attracts the attention of bullies and generally has no idea about how boys act when girls aren't around. To make matters trickier, she shares a room with an attractive roommate, and discovers that even the best laid plans can have holes in them (for example - in a school full of men and boys, how is she supposed to handle her period?).

A Golden Web is set much earlier, going back to 14th century Italy, and follows Alessandra Gillani, who is thought to be the first female anatomist. As Quick's author's note explains, no one is entirely sure if Alessandra existed or if she was as educated as legend says she is, but Quick paints a rich picture of her possible life. Daughter of a wealthy book maker, back when books were still written and illustrated by the hands of apprentices, Alessandra has access to a wealth of knowledge denied to other girls and women of her age. Threatened with an arranged marriage at 15 by a disapproving stepmother, Alessandra first hides in a convent, then disguises herself as Sandro and makes her way to Bologna to study with the masters of medicine and the fledgling science of anatomy, where her talents make her the enemy of a jealous fellow student, and also attract the eye and support of a handsome student who she may just be able to trust with her secret.

With so much in common, these books are actually vastly different. The Education of Bet focuses almost exclusively on the romance between Bet and her roommate, to the point where at times it hardly even seemed like an historical fiction novel, and the cross-dressing was merely an elaborate plot device to bring the two unlikely lovers together (unlikely thanks to that pesky class difference). A Golden Web spends much more time on historical details, making it totally believable why Alessandra would have to disguise herself as Sandro. And despite her younger age, Alessandra is much better equipped for an extended disguise - even though she set out before she started her period (or "flowering," which is probably the most ridiculous euphemism I've ever heard), she knows it's going to come thanks to her medical books and quickly adapts. Bet has been menstruating for awhile, and yet totally forgot to plan ahead, which struck me as ridiculous. I've been known to forget to have pads or tampons with me on a trip, but that's not because I forgot I was going to have my period, rather I was just too scatterbrained to throw extras in my bag. Bet just forgot it was ever going to happen.

Parts of A Golden Web feel slightly too coincidental to be realistic, and for awhile I wondered if this was actually going to go into a Cinderella-style story since her stepmother is just so wicked. However, I loved Alessandra's special interest in women's bodies and health, and descriptions of her visiting midwives and female healers in the unsavory part of town to learn from their traditional knowledge, handed down orally from generation to generation, and combining that with her schooling.

If you're looking for a fluffy romance, you could do worse than The Education of Bet. If you want a nuanced historical novel, A Golden Web is the book for you.

Nonfiction Monday Review: Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone... by Martha Ackmann

Found via: the Amelia Bloomer Project

The full title of this book is Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone the First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League. Can you see why I abbreviated it?

Today is Labor Day in the US, the traditional marker of the end of summer. While baseball continues for a few more weeks before the World Series, since it's considered a summer sport I thought a baseball biography would be an excellent way to finish out the season.

I've mentioned my love of the game on here a few times, but I have a confession: I don't know much of the history of baseball. My dad knows a ton, at least when it comes to his favorite team, the Braves (boo!), but I tend to focus on the contemporary game. This is probably because a) while I enjoy baseball, my love of the game doesn't run terribly deep and b) when it comes to history, I tend to stick to women's history. Since women have historically been excluded from baseball, the means most of my baseball history concerns the AAGPBL. When I saw this book nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, I knew I had to read it, since I knew nothing about Negro League baseball, and especially didn't know they'd had a woman play!

Marcenia Lyle Stone, aka Tomboy aka Toni, grew up in Minneapolis in the 20s and 30s and loved nothing more than baseball. She worked hard to prove her stuff and with a bit of persistence and cajoling, she played throughout her childhood on neighborhood boys teams - even going so far once as to knock a decade off of her age in order to qualify for a baseball camp taught by a former pro player!

The odds were stacked against Toni, and she knew it. Not only was she a woman who wanted to play a man's game, but when she was first trying to break into just the minor leagues, baseball was a white man's game - it would be a few years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. But Toni didn't let her race or her gender hold her back, and she made it on to some of the top ranked teams in the Negro League, just as the league was beginning to die out as segregation was eliminated in Major League Baseball and their minor league farm teams.

This is an amazing biography - as I tweeted after finishing the book, Toni Stone is my new hero. Gutsy might be the best adjective for her. Determined. Tenacious. She is an excellent example of what you can accomplish if you follow your dreams, but her story also emphasizes that those accomplishments only came after years of hard work and dedication. Nothing was easy for Toni Stone.

This is also an excellent history of baseball and Jim Crow laws in the mid-century South. There's lots of anecdotes about the history of the Negro Leagues as well as stories from some of the first black Major League players like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron that are sure to appeal to any hardcore baseball fan. I had no idea that much of the Negro League play was in the form of Barnstorming matches, where a team would travel all across the country playing exhibition games, making their season stretch from April to November. It makes modern baseball look like a luxury cruise!

Toni spent a lot of her professional time in the South, first as part of her time as a Barnstormer travelling through the region and then playing semi-pro with the Louisiana Creole team. As such we get a first hand view of the terrible and ridiculous Jim Crow laws that were in place. Legal action was threatened in some states if a Negro League team played a white team - or even an integrated team (Jackie Robinson led a touring all star team, made up of white and black players). I have to admit, I never realized how much Jim Crow laws could affect whites as well. I don't say this as some sort of derailing, "racism hurts white people too!" comment, but rather as someone who is realizing in a new way just how much those laws were rooted in fear and hatred. I thought the laws were simply to keep Black people "in their place" while whites had free reign and could go anywhere and do whatever they wanted, but at least when it came to baseball, even if they wanted to play together, the law said they had to be kept strictly separate.

What a scary and terrifying time it must have been.

This is definitely a must-read for any baseball fan or sports history buff. It's an adult title but relatively short (less than 300 pages with a hefty bibliography/notes section in the back) and perfectly appropriate for high school or middle school student suddenly stuck inside for school when she'd rather be playing ball!


This week Nonfiction Monday is hosted by The Miss Rumphius Effect. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction posts this week!

Nonfiction Monday Review: I Am an Emotional Creature by Eve Ensler

Found via: Amelia Bloomer Project

I debated whether this should be a Nonfiction Monday post or not. It's poetry/monologues, but they are all drawn from interviews and writings of real teenage girls. There are no fictional characters or plot - it's a collection of writings about the real experiences of girls and young women, that have been polished by Ensler. Since Amazon includes it in two nonfiction categories and one fiction category (literature and fiction > Drama), and the Library of Congress headings don't include fiction, I figured it could count for Nonfiction Monday.

Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues was a watershed moment for women. A play that spoke frankly about the most shamed part of our bodies. While there are parts of it that are definitely applicable to women of all ages, it's generally not the sort of text you hand to a middle or high school girl. But where can these girls to turn for validation of their experiences? Ensler has filled that void with I Am an Emotional Creature. Inspired by girls all over the world, from US suburbs to eastern European brothels, African villages to middle eastern cities, the poems and monologues interspersed with "girl facts" about our bodies and our treatment around the world (child labor, sex trafficking, etc) give voice to a variety of female experiences. There's the girls at a sleepover playing "would you rather," girls experiencing first love and their "first time," and girls who were sold into slavery - or ran away from home to escape that fate.

The actor in me relished these poems and monologues, as they beg to be performed. Many of the poems are obviously drawn from the experiences of multiple girls and I am sure would be best understood if the various lines were said by different girls to build a story.

Randomly, one selection from The Vagina Monologues is included - "My Short Skirt." It's an excellent poem and definitely worthy of inclusion considering how young women are often shamed for their fashion choices, it was just slightly distracting for me as I was reading the poem and thinking "I've heard this before..." (Freshman year of college I performed in The Vagina Monologues. Unfortunately I didn't do "My Short Skirt." I got to put on my best British accent and perform "The Vagina Workshop")

This should be considered mandatory reading for every teenage girl - even teenage boys would benefit from some of these (like the aforementioned "Short Skirt"). While much of the book is about body image and sexuality, there are lots of other topics too - like child labor, from the girl who works in a Chinese factory assembling Barbies, and dating violence, like in the letter to Rihanna penned by a girl in her own abusive relationship but hasn't left, like Rihanna did. It's an excellent assortment of points of view, arranged well so you aren't overwhelmed by dark and depressing themes before a more lighthearted piece pops up.



Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by the Book Nosher. Be sure to check out all the other great nonfiction books highlighted today!

Nonfiction Monday Review: Cleopatra Rules! by Vicky Alvear Shecter

While wandering through the exhibits at ALA, I stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this cover staring out at me from a backdrop:

I just had to stop and look around and ask about that book! Luckily, the ladies staffing the Boyds Mill Press booth were more than happy to talk about it and other books they carry featuring strong women and unique takes on history with an excited blogger. Advanced copies weren't available at ALA, but they made sure to mail me a copy as soon as they were available!

I have always loved Cleopatra - when other girls had a princess phase, I went straight to the top and loved the Queen (okay, I enjoyed my share of Disney princesses too, I suppose). One of my favorite Shakespeare plays? Antony and Cleopatra. So to say I was excited about a teen-oriented biography of this much-maligned royal is an understatement.

Shecter takes the haters to task. She hammers home the point that the victors get to write history, so it's likely that much of the Roman-oriented biography that's been handed down through the generations is unflattering at best. In truth, Cleopatra was as loved by her subjects as a Greek Pharaoh could be. Where others in the line of Ptolemy ruled apart from their Egyptian subjects, Cleopatra learned their language (as well as 20+ others!) and their rites and rituals, making her well loved by her subjects.

Cleopatra wasn't a seductress - she gained her power the old fashioned way, through cunning and shows of strength. She allied herself with the most powerful men in the world - Julius Caesar and Mark Antony - to make sure Egypt could remain a sovereign nation. She built up Egypt's armies so they had a chance of defending themselves. And she was something of a book worm, ensuring that she had the strategic knowledge to use her forces in the best way possible.

This is a beautiful book, both in content and presentation. Lots of full-color photographs of Egyptian antiquities are included and there are colorful sidebars and in-sets to highlight important information. The one turn off for me as an adult reader, was that I couldn't get past the writing style. Shecter uses a very slangy voice for the book, going so far as to refer to Octavian as "O-man" at one point. Perhaps this is just what a teen or tween needs in order to pick up a book about someone who's been dead for thousands of years, but it made it a little hard for me to take the book seriously sometimes. I kept hoping I'd get used to it, but I never did.

However, my hang ups wouldn't prevent me from strongly recommending this to someone desperate for a positive look at one of the most powerful women who ever lived. Cleopatra Rules! certainly rocks as a biography.

Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Playing by the Book this week. Be sure to stop by and check out all the other great nonfiction finds this week!
Also, final reminder for NYC-area readers, Books of Wonder's Mockingjay release party is tonight! I had some uploading fail yesterday, so be sure to check out my post yesterday to see what I'll be wearing so you can introduce yourself at the party!
Review copy was sent to me by the publisher, Boyds Mill Press.

Review: Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce

After a failed attempt to read the werewolf romance of the moment, Shiver, I shrugged off the burgeoning werewolf genre as not-for-me. Then along comes Sisters Red which is pretty much a bad ass book all around. Yay, werewolf hunters!

Scarlett March has two missions in life: hunt werewolves and protect her little sister, Rosie. Luckily for Scarlett, fulfilling one mission usually involves fulfilling the other, as the Fenris hunt pretty young women like Rosie. Ever since a werewolf attacked and killed their grandmother when they were little, an attack which also took Scarlett's eye as she was even then protecting her little sister, Scarlett has been determined to exterminate the Fenris, and she has the scars, both literal and figurative, to prove it.

Rosie knows she owes her sister her life. Scarlett has sacrificed so much, even her own eye, that Rosie feels becoming a hunter like her sister is a small price to repay her debt. It isn't that Rosie dislikes hunting, in fact she's quite good at it and knows that without her many more girls would be horrifically murdered every month, but Rosie has never had the chance to discover if she even likes to do anything else. And now, back on the scene after a year away from hunting in order to visit relatives, Silas Reynolds is stirring up all sorts of complicated feelings in her young heart. Silas is Scarlett's hunting partner, or was until he left and Rosie took over, but does that mean he can never mean something to Rosie?

Silas is back just in time, as the Fenris packs seem to be congregating, concentrating their hunting efforts in a way the March sisters have never seen before. And there's whispers that they're looking for the Potential - the one man they can bite and turn into another werewolf, so long as they an find him before the next full moon. Silas and the March sisters know this is an unprecedented chance to hunt lots of Fenris at once, and maybe even learn more about how they increase their numbers - but that's about all they know. Hunting and killing werewolves is one thing, but learning how they tick might just be beyond even their formidable capabilities.

This is a book that uses the alternating POV chapters method really, really well. Rosie and Scarlett are so different that even though they're telling the same story, it's almost like we get two different genres. Scarlett's narration gives me the action and adventure story I love, while Rosie gives us a sort of paranormal-romance look at the same basic plot. I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

I also love that these sisters have a real love and affection for each other, even when they don't understand each other. Even when Silas is in the picture, and the story threatens to go into love-triangle territory, the girls stay focused on their primary mission and the importance of their relationship with eachother.

Scarlett is far and away my favorite character, reminding me so much of Rachel in my beloved Animorphs books as she struggles with her warrior identity, but Rosie is no slouch and in fact had two of my favorite moments in the book. I don't want to give too much away, but when Rosie was trying to outsmart a whole pack of werewolves, she had me on the edge of my seat and cheering for her solution. And if this ever becomes a movie, I cannot wait to see her tango scene -it's such a small moment in the book, but the visuals and the soundtrack could make it awesome.

In some ways this is a very sexual book, but without actually ever showing any sex. Pearce has taken the Little Red Ridinghood story, with its warning about girls wandering alone and implications about male sexuality, and seamlessly put it in a modern setting. The methods Scarlett and Rosie use to attract the werewolves - perfume, fancy shampoo, flowing hair and the infamous red cape - could be the jumping off point for a long thesis for a lit or women's studies major. I have to admit, after writing my review for Flow, this is one of the books I was thinking of when wondering why we don't see more periods in YA lit. It seems like when you're dealing so blatantly with sexuality, a woman's period would affect how a werewolf sees her. And the girls are so short on cash you'd think someone would bitch about the price of tampons (because I always cringe to think of how much I'm spending on something that is made to be thrown away, and I don't have to pawn off my grandmother's valuables to make rent). The book covers a whole month, so surely one of them would have had a period!

But seriously, awesome book, and I can't recommend it highly enough! Two companion books are on their way, riffing off of different stories (Hansel & Gretel and the Little Mermaid). I hope to see more of Rosie and Scarlett (ESPECIALLY SCARLETT), but I'll take what I can get!

Review: Enlightened Sexism by Susan J. Douglas

Found via: Amelia Bloomer Project nominee

I wanted to love this book so, so much. In high school I read Susan Faludi's Backlash for my AP American Lit class. After seeing the summer reading list was made up entirely of male authors, I asked if there were going to be women included in the actual class before I would agree to actually taking the class. The teacher assured me there would even be feminist literature as an option for our big mid-year report. When it was time to actually choose books for that report...they were all by men again. I basically asked the teacher what the hell, and she said I could read Backlash, warning me some of her positions might be "a little extreme." I ended up loving Backlash, even though it made my project much harder than it should have been (everyone else got to work in groups on fiction novels, so clearly there were some "separate but not-really equal" issues going on here), and when I saw Douglas cites Backlash often in her introduction, I was hoping this would be the early 21st century version of that book and, as it's nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list, some frustrated girl back in Holland might be assigned this more contemporary book instead.

Douglas' theory of enlightened sexism holds that it "is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism - indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved - so now it's okay, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women" (9). It "is more nuanced and much more insidious than out-and-out backlash. As Susan Faludi amply demonstrated, backlash involves a direct, explicit refutation of feminism as misguided and bad for women. Enlightened sexism is subtler" (11). All well and good so far.

Douglas then goes on to painstakingly dissect what has happened in popular culture since Backlash was first published in 1991, focusing primarily on magazines and television programming, with a little bit of music critique thrown in (she wasn't happy when her daughter was a Spice Girls fan in the 90s, uncomfortable with the group's attempt to pass off their sexuality as a girl power/feminist message). Xena and Buffy are upheld as feminist TV standards. The original 90210 and Melrose Place, which aired at roughly the same time, were an anti-feminist wasteland when it came to portrayals of women, but feminism had clearly influenced the men as they were softer and more affectionate than previous generations of TV men. Shows like Murphy Brown were a grey area, showing a powerful woman successful in her career, but also bringing with it a lot of embedded feminism, as Murphy's achievements were presented simply as "part of the cultural landscape" and it was never mentioned how much she would have had to struggle to achieve such a position in the real world (9). Then Ally McBeal and reality TV came along and this was the beginning of the end.

Magazines for women and men are also skewered, women's magazines for their contradictory advice ("love your body!" on one page and "New miracle diet!" on the next) and male-gaze-centric advice (ever notice how all of those lurid headlines for better sex are about improving his pleasure?), men's magazines (primarily Maxim) for their soft-core porn views of women. She also focuses a lot on the celebrity tabloid culture that has arisen, including how even CNN was focused for days on the non-story of Anna Nicole Smith's death.

I have to admit, I found all of this interesting, but I also had a healthy feeling of "this is nothing new." I don't want to put another nail in publishing's coffin, but I wonder if books like Douglas' are going to be on their way out soon, because almost every topic has already been covered by blogs - and they've even taken some of her reporting farther. In the last chapter Douglas looks at motherhood and how stories of women "opting out" of the workforce have been greatly exaggerated, and the new books and blogs that rising showing women truly struggling with motherhood, not even trying to keep up the veneer of "having it all," and being celebrated for it. Well, that last bit sounds an awful lot like the bad mommy genre that was the talk of the blogs in May 2009 (Enlightened Sexism was published in March 2010). While the book gives a name to a lot of subjects I've thought about before (I particularly liked embedded feminism), for anyone who's been following the conversations on the major feminist blogs, all of this is old news. It's nice having everything in one location, but in the age of blogs, are books like this redundant?

But redundant or not, the most damning part of Douglas' book is...her tone. Okay, I totally cringe to use that word in a discussion of a feminist work, but I'm not sure what else fits here. Basically, Douglas sets up a lot of her arguments as an "us vs. them" battle - and I'm not talking men vs. women. No, for Douglas the "us" is older women (or "vintage females" as she bizarrely refers to herself throughout the text) and the "them" is every one younger who is implicitly held responsible for the popularity of tacky magazines and preposterous reality TV shows. In her conclusion, Douglas presents two possible scenarios of the future, one where a feminist grandmother is surrounded by ridiculous things like potty-training thongs for her granddaughter, who she's caring for while her daughter tries to figure out how to handle going back to work after 6 weeks unpaid maternity leave, and another future in which the feminist grandmother is part of a movement where all older women have risen up and renewed the consciousness-raising strategies of the 70s to revolutionize American culture. In both cases, women of my generation (mid-twenties), are left out of the solution.

I felt similarly about Flow when I reviewed it two weeks ago - how are these books getting nominated for the Amelia Bloomer list? Both are definitely feminist books, so they fit the list's first criteria, but I can't imagine any young woman willingly reading either of these and feeling like she was represented. Both books focus on the experiences and attitudes of women who are at least a decade past their teen years, and the Amelia Bloomer list's charge is to find feminist titles for young readers ranging from birth to 18. There's nothing here keeping a high schooler from reading Enlightened Sexism, and I think the average high schooler could learn a lot, but first she would have to get past Douglas' apparent bias against young women, and that just might be too tall of an order.

Review: Every Little Thing in the World by Nina de Gramont

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 3/1

When Blogging for Choice day hit earlier this year, I wanted to write a thematically appropriate blog post, looking at YA books where characters have had or considered abortions.

The list was ridiculously short. Thus, no blog post this year.

Discussing this with a friend at the time, we concluded that a big part of the reason there were fewer books "about" abortion was because it's seen as undramatic - with a story of a young girl going through a pregnancy, you have nine months of drama, while abortions are short and quick.

Every Little Thing in the World has found a brilliant way around this problem: send the girl off into the Canadian wilderness for the first month of her pregnancy!

Sydney's life is a mess. Her parents are divorced and seem bent on making life hell for her - her father lives on a remote farm and eschews as many modern conveniences as is physically possible, while her mother constantly complains about what a burden Sydney is and how Sydney doesn't appreciate any of her sacrifices. So when Sydney discovers she's pregnant after a brief fling, she doesn't know where to turn. And when she and best friend Natalia try to track down said boy, they end up in the middle of a party busted by the police. Before Sydney can gather the guts to tell her parents she's pregnant (and probably wants an abortion), she and Natalia are shipped off for a month long kayaking trip through the Canadian wilderness.

Sydney tries to keep her pregnancy a secret, discussing it only when alone with Natalia, who is dealing with mother-issues of her own. During the month long trip, Sydney goes back and forth on her decision about the pregnancy several times. Thanks to her family issues, Natalia begs Sydney to keep the baby, despite her initial support for Sydney's decision to abort.

Sydney isn't the only camper with secrets, however, and the supporting characters are lively with colorful secrets of their own, including the TV star with a crush on another camper; a "youth at risk" with a shady history; and the flighty, giggly girl who might actually be enjoying this trip more than she's willing to tell anyone. And the counselor who is violently opposed to actually cooking any of the food they brought along, leading to meals of raw bacon and cold baked beans and tuna fish.

Short version of my review: I really, really loved this book. It honestly looks at the realities of having an abortion or become a teen mom. Sydney has a lot of reasons to go either way with her choice, and I really didn't know until the end of the book what she was going to choose. I did know that I would be satisfied with whatever her choice was, because Sydney clearly took the time to weigh the multiple options and would be making an informed decision.

Sydney's relationship with her mother is one of the weak points here - Sydney can get really whiney about how unfair life is and how unreasonable her mother is. And legitimately, her mother sounds pretty unreasonable (is it really a wise choice to tell your child she's a burden to you?), and some amount of whining would be reasonable and expected of a teenager, but she went a little overboard. However, since her mother is only in the first few chapters before Sydney's whisked away to the parent-less camp, we don't have to put up with that for long and can get along with the main story.

There are a lot of supporting characters, some better defined than others, but all interesting and give a great background to the camp experience. Meredith and Brendan, the girl who learns to love camp and the TV star, respectively, were probably my favorites. Mick, who joined the camp as part of a "youth at risk" summer program, has the deepest and most complex back story, but I was never comfortable with him and didn't quite buy how accepting of him Natalia and Sydney grew to be. The counselors are fun, but it's not hard to see how their "hands off" attitude towards a lot of things leads to the dramatic climax of the plot.

I highly recommend this one for anyone who's looking for a book about teen pregnancy that provides a realistic look at the options a young woman has. It's a much needed addition to the teen pregnancy genre!

Review: Borrowed Names by Jeannine Atkins

Found via: Read Roger

More poetry! But I'm not too bothered I couldn't fit this in to National Poetry Month, as this collection is all about mothers and daughters. Well, three specific pairs of mothers & daughters: Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane, Madame C.J. Walker and daughter A'Lelia Walker and Marie Curie and daughter Irene Joiliot-Curie. A perfect post-mother's-day book!

1867 was apparently a banner year, as that is the year the three mothers highlighted in this collection were born. The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one mother/daughter pair, chronicling the daughter's life as she grows up, watching her mother, learning from her mistakes, and gaining inspiration for her own life. For the daughters are no slouches either: Rose Wilder Lane was a journalist and a biographer before helping her mother turn stories of her childhood into the Little House series; A'Lelia Walker used the fortune she earned as part of her mother's company to support the Harlem Renaissance; and Irene Joliot-Curie joined her mother as a WWI X-Ray technician, saving countless lives, before earning her own Nobel Prize, following in her mother's footsteps by studying radioactivity.

The poetry is well done, as is the biographical content. While I'm no expert on any of these women, Atkins doesn't pull any punches and shows both the ups and downs in these women's lives, including a troubled marriage for Rose and the sexism of the Nobel committee. This bit stuck out for me:

She remembers them taking a train to Sweden
where a woman might earn the Nobel Prize
but would be kept from speaking on the stage

Borrowed Names page 149
It's subtle but spot on, in the way that only poetry can be.

This is the sort of book I would have loved to have available for Ada Lovelace Day. Maybe someone else will pick it up for review next year. While I don't think this would be a replacement for a full biography on any of these women, it's certainly an interesting supplement, and really breathes life into these families in a way a standard biography never can.


Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Picture Book of the Day. Check out other great non-fiction posts going up today!

Review: Mare's War by Tanita S. Davis

Winner: 2010 Coretta Scott King Author Honor

This one managed to stay under my radar for awhile. I have no excuses - if it's been under yours as well, consider this your wake up call to get a copy for yourself ASAP!

Octavia and her older sister Tali are under strict orders from their parents to look after their grandmother, Mare, as she takes them on a road trip from California to a family reunion in Alabama. Neither sister is very enthusiastic - Mare isn't your ordinary grandmother, from her name to her long painted finger nails, to driving like a maniac. She's an embarrassment more than anything else.

But the long drive leaves plenty of opportunities to talk (and talking is something Mare loves to do). She regales her granddaughters with stories from her long life, from working as a maid and helping raise her sister in Alabama...to joining the Women's Army Corp in World War II! Mare was a member of the 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-female, all-African-American battalion to serve in WWII. Mare tells of the extensive training she underwent, the harrowing journey across the Atlantic to England, and serving her tour of duty overseas, where attitudes towards blacks were far, far different from in the US.

I think if this had strictly been Mare's story, we'd be hearing this talked about in the same breath as Flygirl - two very different stories of African-American women in WWII, but similar in some respects. However, Mare's War feels a bit didactic at times; after any major revelation in Mare's story we need to cut back to Tali and Octavia reacting in horror that people were ever so uninformed. There are reaction chapters for everything from the implied abuse Mare and her sister suffered from their mother's boyfriends to racism in Europe to the revelation of a lesbian friend. While I appreciated the inclusion of these details in Mare's narrative, I felt like we were being hit over the head with the message that people in the past were Wrong (which they totally were, but did we need that message repeated with every injustice Mare faced?).

I absolutely loved Mare, both as a young woman and as a grandmother. I would have loved to have her as a grandmother when I was growing up. Well, I probably wouldn't have liked being dragged on a road trip, but other than that I thought she was just awesome. It's because of her characterization that I'm including this book in my list of books read for the Women Unbound reading challenge. Defining fiction books that fit into the challenge is a little trickier than non-fiction, but as this is a look at an important and interesting aspect of women's (and African-American) history, I feel it counts. Plus, an individual woman doesn't get more unbound than Mare!

Cover comments: Not one, not two, but three African American women on this cover!

At the book jacket literary cafe, the art director from Simon & Schuster mentioned that they'll often go with illustrated covers for books that are intended more for academic markets - books that fit in well with various bits of curriculum. The cover, combined with the occasional heavy-handedness on the Messages in the text, makes me think there was probably a big push to get this into classrooms and libraries.

Review: When Everything Changed by Gail Collins

I loved Collins' previous book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. It's a great look at all sorts of women who helped form America. Collins has a great narrative style: the big changes are illustrated through the stories of individuals. When Everything Changed picks up where America's Women left off - covering the last half of the 20th century, and is quite current, as not only are Hillary Clinton's and Sarah Palin's historic campaigns covered, but also the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act at the beginning of President Obama's term.

For covering a much shorter period of time, When Everything Changed is a much longer book, exhaustively covering a dizzying variety of women's lives. In some ways, the society Collins describes at the outset of the book feels like an alien world - women were chastised in traffic court for wearing slacks and married women couldn't be in control of family finances. Women were fired for getting married or having children and patronizing limits on how long a woman could work crippled women's abilities to provide for their families.

I'll admit, I knew a lot of those stories. But it's one thing to know that our country used to be so outwardly sexist, and another to read the first hand accounts of women who suffered under such indignities.

In light of today being a celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's work, I also want to highlight that there is an extended section on the civil rights movement, and the great efforts women put in to ensure equality not just for their race, but for their gender as well. Some of our country's best known equal rights activists have been men, but Collins highlights how that was, at least in part, because the women in the movement were still expected to be subservient, just as women throughout America were expected to be subservient to men in general. However despite the lack of public recognition, women insisted on being part of the civil rights process at every turn, from planning rallies to participating in sit-ins that always carried the risk of violent attacks, helping to create the model that future generations of civil rights activists would follow.



Also important to note today: over the weekend it popped up on the blogosphere that Bloomsbury, the publisher that infamously whitewashed the cover of Liar, has done it again with Magic Under Glass. I wrote about it in the early hours of yesterday, and Ari at Reading in Color is collecting links related to this latest incident of racefail. Please check it out and think about what you can do to encourage publishers to accurately portray their characters of color on their covers.

Reading Challenge: Women Unbound

Late in '09 I found out about the existence of reading challenges, where you set a goal for yourself to read a certain number of books about a certain topic within a time frame. I like the idea of having another way of keeping track of what I'm reading, and sharing those books with a community of like minded people. Women Unbound is my first one!

Probably the best part of this challenge for me is that, even though I'm starting a few months late, I really don't think it'll be difficult for me to complete the suffragette level - read eight book, at least three of them non-fiction. Books that meet the qualification are those that can fall under the banner of "women's studies."

This is going to be fun!