Book Thoughts: Connections to History

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. It's a tragic event in our national history - 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, died because of unsafe working conditions. When a fire broke out in the factory at 4:40 PM on Saturday, March 25th 1911, the workers on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors found they were locked in. The fire escape tore away from the building, the elevators couldn't move fast enough to ferry the workers to the ground, and the fire department's ladders only reached up to the sixth floor. In desperation, many of the young workers chose to leap from the windows - choosing almost certain death from the fall over suffocation or burning to death.

It's an important part of history - of immigration, worker's rights, and women's rights. And yet I never learned about it in school - I was introduced to the fire through the book Ashes of Roses that I read on my own my senior year of high school. Auch's description of Rose in the fire was incredibly powerful, so much so that the book has stuck with me for almost 10 years and I've included it on my list of Feminist YA novels.

I think part of the reason I have remained fascinated by the Triangle fire is because it was the first historical event that was introduced to me solely through fiction. I've always read historical fiction - it might not be my favorite genre but I don't go out of my way to avoid it. However, I tend to gravitate towards stories that back up a prior interest - like the Salem Witch Trials or the Civil War. I picked up Ashes of Roses because of its connection to women's history, and was bluntly introduced to a tragic aspect of history that had never been mentioned in any of my history classes.


Since Ashes of Roses, historical fiction has become a much larger part of my reading repertoire. I can't say it's an absolute favorite genre because the quality can vary so much between books - good historical fiction must be well written and well researched, while a well written SF novel can entertain me even if some of the science is off. However, I'm always looking for the next story that will fill in the gaps I might not even know I have - like Between Shades of Gray and the Soviet deportations of Lituanians and other Baltic citizens, or Daughter of Xanadu and the life of a warrior princess in 14th century Mongolia.

And I swear I wasn't planning on writing this post when I posted two historical fiction reviews this week!

In commemoration of the fire and its victims, the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition has organized events both online and around the US, for this weekend. If you can't be in NYC, the official commemoration will be streamed online. In addition, two documentaries have been airing this week, one on HBO and the other on PBS (available to stream online!). I haven't had a chance to watch either yet, but I hope to this weekend.

For me, one of the greatest ironies of the Triangle Fire was that the building was toted as being utterly modern in that it was fireproof. And indeed the exterior was - the building is now the Brown Building and its used for NYU classes. Unfortunately for the 146 garment workers and their families, similar advances in technology weren't used on the interior. Today, take a moment to remember those workers, and those who came after them who fought tirelessly to try to ensure such a tragedy didn't happen again.

Review: Daughter of Xanadu by Dori Jones Yang

Found via: Reading in Color


Considering how much historical fiction out right now is about privileged Western European and American girls in the last 150 years or so falling in love with various bad boys, it's refreshing to find a novel that is so completely different. In Daughter of Xanadu, we're talking 14th century Mongolia, and while there's a certain amount of privilege present (our protagonist is a princess), the romantic story arc is relegated to the back burner. Instead, this is a true coming of age story for a young woman trying to find her place in a world that is simultaneously foreign and totally familiar.

Emmajin is the eldest granddaughter of the great Khan Khubilai. While her sister and other women of the palace are content with the life of luxury being royalty brings, Emmajin has one dream: to become a soldier in her grandfather's army. When foreigners from Christendom come to the palace on a trade mission, the Khan asks Emmajin to work as a spy and befriend the foreign man Marco Polo, and report back on everything she's learned. Emmajin agrees, hoping that her compliance, in addition to her amazing archery and horse riding skills, will ensure her entrance into the army.

Marco is utterly foreign to Emmajin. He cannot shoot an arrow or wield a sword - his only defenses are his wit and his storytelling, less than useless to Emmajin. And yet despite her best defenses, Marco's charm begins to work on Emmajin, and even as her dreams are fulfilled she finds herself questioning if the way of the warrior is truly her destiny.

One thing I absolutely loved about this is that Emmajin becomes a warrior on her own terms, rather than having to masquerade as a man. Yes, being a princess helped, but she also recognizes that in order to be accepted by the men she's going to have to be even better than they are - just as modern women often feel they have to be to compete in male-dominated fields.

Every once in awhile, the relationship between Marco and Emmajin made me a little anxious. Christendom (Europe) and Mongolia are often presented as total opposites - and more often than not Emmajin seems to be coming around to the Western view of how things "should be," so at times I was getting vibes of the Western man civilizing the wild savages of the east. Thankfully, Yang is able to thoroughly describe Emmajin's evolving ideas so it becomes clear it's not just Marco's influence. I'd have liked it if we could have seen Marco adapting a bit more to Mongolian ways so it would be more like a true cultural exchange, but the ending is left open enough that maybe Yang can pull together another book out of that!

Like I said in the introduction, above all else this is Emmajin's coming of age story. She's truly learning what it means to be an adult and have to make tough choices and learn new things about herself. Yang has done an excellent job describing 14th century Mongolia, and by including the familiar character of Marco Polo she has a seamless way to weave all of the amazing facts about this setting into the narrative while rarely dragging down the story. A refreshing change of pace from a lot of the historical fiction/romance out there today! (And a brief aside: a book with a wonderful cover! After the whitewashing controversies of the last few years, 2011 is shaping up to be an amazing year for proudly putting the faces of characters of color on covers!)

Review: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

I know it's only March, but I think we have here our first serious awards contender of 2011. If Between Shades of Gray were a movie, it would be a December-released prestige picture, an obvious ploy for an Oscar win, but one it would surely deserve.

It's 1941, and Lithuanian Lina leads a comfortable life. Her parents dote upon her and her younger brother, she has friends and family and crushes, and amazing skills with pencils and paintbrushes that are opening doors to her future education.

But that idyllic life comes crashing down around Lina late one night, when armed men break into the house and pull Lina, her mother and her brother from their beds without explanation.

And so begins Lina's journey - one that stretches thousands of miles, from the quiet suburbs of Lithuania into the frigid depths north of the Arctic circle, as Lina and her family become victims of Stalin's march in Lithuania and the Baltic states at the outbreak of World War II. Her only comforts are her family, her artwork, and her hope that her furtive sketches and notes will be passed hand to hand until they reach her father and he'll escape from wherever he's being held to come find his family.

Lina's and Lithuania's story was totally new to me. I vaguely knew that Stalin's Soviet Union wasn't a great place to be, but had no real idea about the elimination tactics that he used. It's horrifying to think that in some ways this man was our ally - and yet he was using the same tactics as Hitler. Sepetys does an amazing job portraying the dehumanizing tactics used by the NKVD (the predecessors of the KGB) - it's gut churning and horrifying.

Lina is an amazing artist and Sepetys uses her artistic eye to add some beautiful language to a story of hardship and terror. Lina doesn't draw strictly realistic - she's inspired by Munch - which gives Sepetys many opportunities for perfect metaphors, like the snakes crawling out from the neck of one particularly horrid guard's jacket.

I read this book over the course of just one day - and not even a weekend. Even when I had to take breaks, my mind was still in the book. At one point I paused to eat dinner with my husband, and I felt a bit of guilt sitting down to a full hot meal when part of my brain was still in Altai, the first camp Lina is sentenced to. And then when I could get back to reading and reached the end of the book I was crying - almost sobbing. And I don't easily cry at books.

While on the surface Lina's story isn't terribly different from any other fictional Holocaust account, I still feel it's an important contribution to the genre of WWII titles. The writing alone makes it worth a read, but it's also important to remember that in most any conflict there are indeed shades of gray - that even while we may call someone an ally, that doesn't make them (or even us) perfect examples of our ideals.

Reviewed from an ARC picked up at ALA Annual 2010. Between Shades of Gray is available today!

Review: The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen

I am so glad stories about all different sorts of disabilities have been coming out over the last few years. The Running Dream takes a slightly different twist from others I've seen though - in this case the disability is the sudden amputation of a leg after a terrible car accident. In most other stories I've seen, the disability has been something the protagonist has lived with for most/all of her life.

Hours after setting a league record in the 400m dash, Jessica wakes up in the hospital - sure that her life is over. While she survived the accident that took the life of one of her teammates, Jessica has had one of her legs amputated below the knee. Sure, it could have been worse - but until now, running has been Jessica's life, the only time she felt relaxed and comfortable.

Returning to school, Jessica feels like a freak and an outcast, even more so when her tough math teacher has her move from her usual desk - which can no longer accommodate her so long as she's using a wheelchair - to the table in the back, where Rosa, one of the special ed students with cerebral palsy, sits.

As Jessica readjusts to school and learns how to walk again with a temporary, Frankenstein-ish, prosthetic leg, her team and the community rally behind Jessica's recurring dream: to run again. Jessica knows she is incredibly lucky to have such caring friends, and she wants to repay them in some way for their kindness and support. As Rosa shows she's deeper and more insightful than Jessica had ever bothered to notice before, she expands her personal running dream: now she's going to find a way to take Rosa with her across the finish line.

Something about this book was strangely compelling - when I stopped to reflect on it I could see it's a very traditional narrative arc/plotline and both Jessica and Rosa (especially Rosa) often slip into the inspirationally disadvantaged trope, which could certainly be annoying if not downright offensive to those who have been affected by disabilities. I cringed a lot around Rosa, but found Jessica interesting, if sometimes a little too positive and chipper. Yet something made me keep coming back - I read this in one day and when i did have to stop reading (stupid work!) I found myself thinking about the book constantly. In part, I think, because I was imagining all of the complex places the book could have gone - would other racers think that a running prosthesis would give Jessica an unfair advantage? Will Jessica over exert herself and get hurt? - and anxiously waiting to see if any of my predictions panned out.

If you're the sort that loves to watch inspirational sports movies (especially the ones Disney makes), you'll find yourself in familiar territory with The Running Dream - which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Review: The Latte Rebellion by Sarah Jamila Stevenson

Found via: Reading in Color

I was super excited going into The Latte Rebellion, not only because it's one of the few YA books to prominently and proudly feature multiracial characters, but because I was also part of founding a social justice club in my high school (a Gay-Straight Alliance). I had a lot of infrastructure to fall back on in my case, as opposed to the creation of a new movement from the ground up as Asha, Carey and Miranda do here, but there were enough similarities that I was quite excited. And for the most part, the book doesn't disappoint.

It all started as a joke, really. A small money-making venture to fund a pre-college vacation. Tired of being treated as foreign and somehow "less-than" by their peers, Asha and Carey found "The Latte Rebellion" - a website with a manifesto about recognizing that people don't always fit into one neat racial, ethnic or cultural category, and lots of links to buy their T-shirts. But almost overnight, the site goes viral and takes on a life of its own. Actual Latte Rebellion clubs spring up at high schools and colleges across the country - while ironically Asha's own high school refuses to recognize them, claiming that there isn't sufficient need for a club that openly embraces multiracial students.

Undeterred, Asha continues the rebellion, along with her friend Miranda, while Carey shies away from the increasing attention and time the rebellion takes away from her homework, work and relationships. Asha is nervous herself - especially as the rebellion continues to grow and attracts undesirable attention. But she is convinced of the rightness of her cause, and even as she faces severe repercussions for her involvement, Asha  is determined that the rebellion, and herself, is recognized as a positive force.

While in many ways this is very much a story about race, it is also about much broader and universal topics like self-confidence, friendship and education. I especially enjoyed how Asha's relationships mature and change over the course of the novel, as it reflects a lot of the changes people go through during life-altering events, even innocuous and positive ones like graduating high school and just growing up in general.

What held me back from unabashedly loving this is that a lot of the plot feels like it's based on coincidences rather than moving forward organically. I wasn't quite convinced with the reasoning for the school rejecting the Latte Rebellion in the first place, and the quick jump to conclusions about the purpose of the group seemed far too fast. Just a few too many negative coincidences to keep me totally immersed in the story. While I've read of complaints about the Latte Rebellion being organized as primarily a money-making venture, the only problem I had with the idea is that Asha and Carey still planned on keeping most/all of the money for themselves even as it became clear how important people felt the cause was. It seems to me like as soon as other people started getting involved, they would have demanded to know what the T-shirt profits were going to go towards. When it was just a couple of friends goofing off with a website, Asha and Carey were free to do whatever they wanted, but once real people in their lives got involved, it seems like the plan should have changed a bit.

Nonfiction Monday Review: Sugar Changed the World by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

Wow, this book has been getting a ton of praise recently - including making the shortlist for the LA Times Book Prize in the YA lit category. So I knew I had to check it out.

Marc Aronson and Maina Budhos both have family connections to the sugar trade - Aronson's family worked with beet sugar in Russia, while Budhos' family, originally from India, worked in Guyana. This personal connection is an early indication that the story of sugar is going to take us around the globe. Aronson and Budhos trace sugar from its probably origins in New Guinea, through the Middle East to Europe, and then spend the bulk of the book looking at how sugar drove the slave trade in South America and the Caribbean. As a USian, for whom the story of slavery was tied to cotton, it was eye opening to see how slavery influenced a different cash crop.

There are also interesting facts about sugar peppered throughout the book. Sugar is the only flavor humans like naturally - we acquire our tastes for salty, bitter, and other flavors. While the story Aronson and Budhos share pretty much ends with slavery in the US (going on just a bit longer to look at the indentured servitude of Indians, as well as the Asians of many countries who were brought in to Hawaii), there are tantalizing hints that the story of sugar isn't over - we've developed high fructose corn syrup as a replacement for cane sugar, and artificial sweeteners like Splenda. I think, rather than spending so much time going over the horrors of slavery again, I would have liked to see more about the modern quest for cheap sweeteners. While slavery is certainly an important part of the story of sugar, since Aronson and Budhos say in their afterword that this is a book intended for high school students I feel like rehashing a lot of the stories of slavery that aren't too different from accounts of life in the United States, with which US students will already be familiar, dragged down parts of the book.

Another small thing that I feel is missing from the book is any account of the Caribbean natives who would have been displaced by these sugar plantations. The way the book is now, it seems like the islands were discovered as empty, pristine places, perfect for growing sugar cane. I know initially native populations were used as slaves for the Europeans - by the time the Europeans got around to growing sugar, had the native populations already been exhausted by other slave work and disease? I certainly don't know - the only mention of natives doesn't even merit a listing in the index, as they are just briefly mentioned as members of the maroon population in Brazil - communities formed outside of the plantations by escaped slaves, natives, and even some white Europeans.

There were also two small passages that dragged down the quality of the book for me, because they are phrased...awkwardly, to put them in the most positive light possible.

First, on page 39:

You might be lucky enough to be trained as a specialist - the person who watched the cane grow and who kept an eye out for when the plants were ripe and ready to be cut. Special knowledge did not make a slave any less a slave - you were neither freed or paid. But perhaps some of the enslaved people had the personal pleasure of realizing that they had knowledge that the plantation owners needed.

I checked to see if there was a note in the back explaining where this notion of pleasure in slavery came from - if there was a slave narrative that had someone taking some form of pleasure in their work, this would be a much more credible statement. But since no such note exists, it seems rather tone deaf to talk about taking pleasure in having knowledge that's going to benefit the person that keeps you as property.

Then again, on page 70:

Africans were at the heart of the great change in the economy, indeed in the lives of people throughout the world. Africans were the true global citizens - adjusting to a new land, a new religion, even to other Africans they would never have et in their homelands. Their labor made the Age of Sugar - the Industrial Age - possible. We should not see the enslaved people simply as victims, but rather as actors - as the heralds of the interconnected world in which we all live today.

I think this one is worse for me than page 39 was. The slaves in the Caribbean had no choice in their situation - they were kidnapped from Africa, and their ability to act freely was removed. The enslaved Africans rarely got to enjoy the fruits of their labor - working in sugar cane was dangerous and claimed so many lives that once the Atlantic slave trade was abolished slaves weren't reproducing fast enough to maintain or increase the slave population numbers, so the sugar workers weren't usually the ones buying their freedom and then going on to be consumers of sugar (or any other goods harvested by the hands of slaves). Edit 3/14/11 at 11pm: Author Marc Aronson has posted a comment further explaining these passages.

This is a worthwhile book for those interested in another aspect of the dark history of slavery - I just had to point out those two instances because they left me feeling uncomfortable. In both instances I get the points that Aronson and Budhos are trying to make - I just think they end up falling a little short of their goal, as both of these passages almost seem to soften the tragedy that slavery is.





This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Chapter Book of the Day. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

Sci Fi Friday Review: XVI by Julia Karr

This has probably been one of my most-anticipated books of the year so far. What wasn't there to love about it? Dystopian SF that is actually feminist? So perhaps some of my ultimate disappointment comes from high expectations, but I'm pretty sure even if I'd gone in blind I would have come to a lot of the same conclusions.

All Nina Oberon wants is a totally normal, ordinary, boring life. Unfortunately, Nina is mere weeks away from turning 16 - an age all of her friends are eagerly waiting for, since they will receive their government-mandated tattoos and finally be "sex-teens," free to have sex whenever they want.

But Nina doesn't want to have sex. She doesn't even want a boyfriend. She wants to live in peace with her mom and little sister, and avoid her mom's skeevy boyfriend. But when her mother is mysteriously murdered, all of Nina's carefully laid plans are thrown out the window. With her dying breath, Nina's mother makes her promise to deliver a baby book to her father. The only problem: Nina's father died the night she was born. The truth about her father is one of many mysteries Nina must unlock, while trying to avoid her mother's evil ex, meeting a mysterious new boy, and trying to counter her best friend Sandy's increasingly sex-teen ways.

While the premise here is sound, it totally falls apart in the execution by committing one of the gravest sins in speculative fiction - failing to define the new world the readers are dumped in to. Many of the important aspects of this future society are left unexplained - most egregiously the importance of the titular XVI tattoos. Why on Earth is the government so invested in the sexual goings-on of teenage girls? And while I can easily come up with half a dozen reasons the tattoo is mandatory for girls but apparently not for boys, I'd really like to have seen at least the government cover story for the tattoo. Another under-explained point were the Female Liaison Specialists, or FeLS - we know it's really the only way for lower class girls to rise in rank and that they must be virgins, and we end up learning what the real purpose of the organization is, but the cover story is foggy.

Almost as bad, is the fact that I couldn't stand the protagonist. Nina is the worst kind of dystopian protagonist: the one that not only recognizes she lives in a dystopia, but coincidentally holds 21st century values and isn't afraid of telling us and anyone else that will listen why she is better than everyone else for her enlightened views. I don't know why she and Sandy put up with each other - Nina clearly is contemptuous of everything that Sandy finds important. Why would Sandy not only put up with that disdain, but consider Nina her best friend? Nina is also conveniently open minded about people from all classes - she doesn't have a classist bone in her body and goes out of her way to help homeless people, even when it means putting herself in great physical danger. Noble indeed, but very little textual support for having such a counter-cultural attitude.

Slang is a tricky part of any YA novel, and most SF in general, but Karr comes across as quite tone deaf when she makes one of the most-used slang words in the novel a 21st century slur against transgendered people. Really, there was no better way to refer to transportation as "transports" which is then shortened into "trannies"? It was especially disturbing when, before it was made clear what trans/trannies was short for, a character who's been in a fight is asked if he "kissed a trannie." It just made me really uncomfortable and kept pulling me out of the book (which happened quite often because damn do these kids talk about the various transportation options a lot). Please folks, if you're going to make up words for your book, do a quick Google search to make sure it's not associated with something else (do not Google "trannies" while at work - the first several hits are porn sites, which should be the first clue this wasn't the best word choice).

There's lots more I could critique here - including the mystical Asian healer stereotype and this being another entry in the trend of dystopian stories eliminating/ignoring homosexuality - but I think we'd be here all day.

The novel wraps up rather neatly, so I don't think this is going to be part of that growing trend of releasing dystopian stories in trilogies. On the one hand, there's clearly a lot of worldbuilding that could be expanded upon in a sequel, but on the other, all of the major storylines were wrapped up so neatly that there's very little actual story left.