River Secrets and Forest Born, by Shannon Hale

  

I loved that River Secrets is written from a male's point of view. There is not enough good literature for young men out there. Razo seems to have a good head on his shoulders and learns many valuable lessons in the course of the story, despite his not being in possession of one of the amazing gifts that grace Shannon Hale's world of Bayern. A girl does straddle him with no good intentions, but he is uncomfortable and works his way through the situation.

Razo's sister, Rin, narrates Forest Born. The book is not what I expected. The gift works differently than anyone expects and creates a more beautiful balance in Rin's life than any of the other gift-bearers will be able to enjoy.

At one point some women are traveling without many supplies and they enter a house with fresh-baked bread. "That was the smell of home, and her ma, and the warm cottage when rainstorms seethed outside. It was a hard, hard thing to lose a home full of bread and Ma."

Later Rin and Razo have a tough decision to make, and Rin decided "She would risk herself. It was her gift to give." That is a beautiful statement of selflessness and is very characteristic of the woman Rin is becoming.

One of Razo's comments also struck me: "I'm not the smartest boy, I know that. Maybe that's not such a bad thing--smarts seem like a load of fancy clothes that you have to wear all the time, and they're heavy and rip easily even though you're supposed to keep them clean. A hassle, that's what that is." There are different kinds of 'smart' and Razo has his own, as he proves in the following sentences, but the idea that smart people feel they have to 'put on' for others is an interesting one to ponder. If you are smart there are things you can draw from that, and if you feel you are not, there is also a valuable lesson in that.

I felt that Forest Born was not quite as well written - there were a couple cheesy moments and a few crossed facts, but the core knowledge that Rin gains through the events in the book are a powerful and long accepted truth that will better any young adult who reads about it.

Spoiler alert: Rin learns that the trees act like a mirror, reflecting herself to her. When something ugly is in her soul or has marred her actions, she cannot find peace in the trees because she does not have peace within herself. She learns that she must repent to find peace again. This is important is a complex and powerful way. Where much is given, much is required.

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

A beautiful, ugly, and moving story of "real life." Jeannette details the fun of her childhood, moving from town to town, leaving the creditors behind. When she and her siblings started going to school they figured out that life for most people was not like the game their mother played with them (ie: "Our new home was one of the oldest in town, Mom proudly told us, with a real frontier quality to it.")

Jeanette Wells tells an incredible story that takes their family across the nation and through the depths of poverty. She eventually becomes a NY Time Bestselling author, and the story of her journey into the real world is incredible enough to be almost unbelievable.

There is some moral depravity in the book, but it is discussed in a matter-of-fact way, and in such a way as to be valuable to those who might be embarking on the world for themselves. There is a plentiful amount of swearing from the father throughout the book.

Spoiler alert: don't read the remainder of this post if you don't want the plot revealed.

I understand that there are many people who live in poverty because they have to. I was disgusted that the mother allowed her children to paw through the school garbage to find food their friends had thrown away, when she had inherited land that she chose not to sell. Even if it is a Family Law that land doesn't get sold, you sell your land to shelter, feed and clothe your children. It's just what you do. Even if you don't know how much land there is, where it is, or what it is worth, you find out and sell it.

I struggle, as does Jeanette, to understand her mother, who had no comprehension that motherhood is a divine calling and one of the most important, rewarding, and fulfilling things that can be done on this earth. Mother would rather paint (and invest in paints, mind you) than care for or attend her children. I personally am all about children being independent and learning to do things for themselves. Half of her behavior toward her children when they were little was not shocking to me at all. But during that time they at least had food in their tummies and a warm place to sleep. The way she abandoned them when they were old enough to scrounge for themselves was appalling to me. That she ate food herself instead of sharing it with her children, slept in a warmer, drier room, and quit the job that was their only sustenance because she wanted to paint more - just made me ache for the children, ache in the depths of my heart and soul.

The climax of the book, to me, occurred when Jeanette was in college. Her parents had followed the four kids to New York. The kids all worked and lived in real apartments and cared about the younger ones enough to help them get started in their lives there. The parents were homeless and liked it that way.

"You can't just live like this," Jeanette told her mom.
"Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure." And they stayed that way, despite their children offering to help them in various ways.

Then Jeanette had the following experience in class:

One day Professor Fuchs asked if homelessness was the result of drug abuse and misguided entitlement programs, as the conservatives claimed, or did it occur, as the liberals argued, because of cuts in social-service programs and the failure to create economic opportunity for the poor? Professor Fuchs called on me.

I hesitated. "Sometimes, I think, it's neither."

"Can you explain yourself?"

"I think that maybe sometimes people get the lives they want."'

 Professor Fuchs questions her further, and she says that if some people just worked they would be fine.

Professor Fuchs walked around from behind her lectern "What do you know about the lives of the underprivileged?" she asked. She was practically trembling with agitation. "What do you know about the hardships and obstacles that the underclass faces?" 

The other students were staring at me.

"You have a point," I said.

At the time I read it, I was infuriated that she was too worn out from her life to argue the truth of her stance. But she took care of it - she has argued it in a much more powerful way through this eye-opening, heart-rending, bestselling novel.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce

If you're not a big fan of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, this book may not be for you. It's a very inside-his-head portrait of the high school and college years of this young man. It includes his fall into moral sins, those of masturbation and fornication, and the deep despair his Catholic school drives into him about the peril of his soul. There are some gratuitous descriptions of his feelings during his encounters. He repents and forsakes his sinning, but later also forsakes God.

There are many bits of wisdom to be gleaned. On page 76 he remembers "Even that night as he stumbled homewards along Jones's Road he had felt that some power was divesting him of that sudden woven anger as easily as a fruit is divested of its soft ripe peel." The power of exercise and nature to relieve our negative emotions and draw us closer to God.

There is also a fascinating discussion of aesthetics and beauty near the end of the novel, including this description of 'the enchantment of the heart':
The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the estheic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

Though I don't recommend the entire book, the discussion of aesthetics was decidedly engaging to me and I recommend it to any who enjoy such discussions. It began on page 198 in my copy of the novel, with the statement "Aristotle has not defined pity and terror," and ends on page 209 with "The rain fell faster." I don't agree with the conclusion drawn of this discussion in the book, but the discussion itself was enlightening.