Book reviews | Laura Billings Coleman

The Summer Before the War

Laura Billings Coleman — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 16:07:51 +0000

Book review for the March 21 edition of the Star Tribune

It’s 1914 in Helen Simonson’s new novel, “The Summer Before the War,” and while the world is holding its breath against the German invasion of Belgium, residents of the English seaside town of Rye are riveted by the arrival of the new Latin teacher, Beatrice Nash — a well-educated woman not nearly as old or as plain as she had appeared on paper.

The well-traveled daughter of a doting professor, the newly orphaned but fiercely independent Beatrice (think Elizabeth Bennet with a bike) plainly bristles at being patronized by everyone from the titled aunt who holds the purse-strings to her inheritance, to the parochial town leaders who expect her to be pleased about earning less than the unqualified male candidate ahead of her. As she confides to one of the two dashing cousins clearly intended to derail her commitment to penury and spinsterhood, “I’ve been told I have to work harder to cultivate an appropriate attitude of grateful subordination.”

Fans of Simonson’s first novel, “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand,” will be happy to find that her social comedy is just as fine-grained, filled with such delicious characters as the unctuous American novelist whose dramatic “sighing garners him three or four dinner invitations a week” and the mayor’s wife who demands her fair share of Belgian refugees (“I shall not shirk from the strife!”).

But the historic backdrop of this sprawling (and occasionally meandering) novel also allows her to spread her wings, taking readers from cozy tea parties at the start to the trenches on the French front by the final pages.

Fighting the war at home is Beatrice’s champion, Agatha Kent, the quietly revolutionary wife of a foreign minister who makes the town march to her tune with flattery, deference and strategic dinner parties. “Women like us need to demonstrate our worth, rather than demonstrating in the streets,” Agatha advises Beatrice, though students of history — or even of “Downton Abbey” — can guess that her worldview won’t survive the onslaught of loss her generation is about to endure.

For book club readers, Simonson’s tale may also inspire some interesting discussion about how the world responded to a refugee crisis a century ago, when Great Britain opened its cities and small villages to 250,000 Belgian refugees — still the largest single influx of refugees in that nation’s history.

Like her neighbors, Beatrice opens her home to a young Belgian girl, naively gratified “to have found some small connection to the war” — a connection that becomes inescapable by the end of this satisfying and heartbreaking book.

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul

Purls of Wisdom

Laura Billings Coleman — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 20:19:54 +0000

Purls of Wisdom, book review written for the November 8, 2015 edition of the Star Tribune

By Laura BILLINGS COLEMAN Special to the Star Tribune

There’s a short list of accepted truths that most knitters have to learn the hard way: Never knit for a boyfriend, don’t talk while trying to turn a heel, October’s too late to start knitting for Christmas, and no matter what they tell you at the yarn shop, metallic mohair is a bad idea.

To this list of hard-won wisdom, novelist Caroline Leavitt can add one more: When your husband expresses interest in intarsia, hire an attorney.

Leavitt (“Pictures of You”) is one of the 24 contributors to “Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting,” editor Ann Hood’s latest addition to what is becoming the increasingly crowded field of craft memoir. “I suppose you could say a knitting project ended my first marriage,” writes Leavitt, who goes on to describe how she missed all of the sure signs her marriage was unraveling, including the most obvious — her husband asks her to knit a dinosaur sweater. An adult-sized sweater with a brontosaurus on the front and back.

I feel certain that if such a foolhardy project were made known to the members of my knitting circle, we would have rallied and found her a new apartment within 24 hours. But like most of the essayists in this surprisingly melancholy collection, our heroine is stranded in unfamiliar terrain, a little lonely, a little lost, leaning on her needles like Virginia Woolf, who famously told her husband, “Knitting is the saving of life.”

Like Hood’s earlier anthology, “Knitting Yarns,” this collection (patterns included!) helps explain why knitting is so often the life sport of the literary set. Novels and Norwegian mittens require hours of sitzfleisch, and provide proof that “small amounts are cumulative,” as Anne Bartlett explains in one essay. The gentle mindlessness of handwork also unleashes fresh ways of seeing the familiar, like Jodi Picoult’s remembrance of how her grandmother’s stitches “lined up like little kamikaze pilots, would leap into the abyss between the tips one at time, making the sacrifice of the individual to be part of the greater whole.”

Though this collection includes a top-flight list of contributors including Maile Meloy, Dani Shapiro, Diana Gabaldon, Jane Hamilton and fiber “rock star” Jared Flood (if you have to ask …), it must be reported that not every selection here is so tightly woven. Soporific descriptions of old sweaters, tricky patterns and allusions to Madame de Farge abound. One that lingers is “The Italian Hat” by Lily King (“Euphoria”), who recalls how a hand-knit hat becomes a piece of personal armor for her 9-year-old daughter, struggling to find her voice in a foreign language.

Stewart O’Nan also strikes a poignant chord, reflecting on the task of knitting warm socks for faraway soldiers: “It’s both a perfect activity and a perfect metaphor for those who sit and wait. … With its calm, methodical progress, it’s a promise, in the midst of war and chaos and loss, that, somewhere, an orderly world still exists.”

As good as some of these pieces are, reading about knitting is still no replacement for actually knitting. So if you give a copy to a knitter you know this holiday season, be sure to throw in a few skeins for stitching up the cute stole pattern that St. Paul’s The Yarnery contributed on page 196.

Laura Billings Coleman knits mittens and writes for magazines in St. Paul.

Of Calves and Carnivores

Laura Billings Coleman — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 16:30:11 +0000

Can you love animals and eat them, too?

Originally published in Mpls/St. Paul magazine, October 2008

Though I’ve been a meat-eater most of my life, I’ve always been squeamish about its preparation. I prefer not to touch bacon until it’s been burned to a crisp. Thanksgiving morning finds me shaking a 30-pound bird over the sink so I don’t have to stick my hand in the carcass and pull out the nasty bits. I prefer cuts of meat that have been euphemized so that I don’t have to consider where they came from – chicken tenders sound tastier than breasts, chicken drummies more desirable than thighs. While Andrew Zimmern travels the globe partaking of delicacies derived from brains, guts and goo, I would drive many miles out of my way not to.

All of this is a long way of saying I was a little out of my comfort zone one recent afternoon as calf wound its tongue around my wrist, and up the length of my forearm.

“These guys are very interested in the world –they like to check out everything,” my host, Catherine Friend, says about the four Jersey – Holstein – mix calves that seem intent on joining us for a nature walk on her farm in the Zumbro River Valley, about an hour southeast of the Twin Cities. The calves are three months old, with heads that just reach my hip. They’re the same height as my four-year-old, the reason I’m here in the first place.

A few weeks before the visit, this particular son surprised me by asking where hamburgers come from. When I told him, he wasn’t just appalled–he refused to believe it. “No way!” he said. It’s true, I told him, adding that milk, cheese, butter, bologna, and those frozen IKEA meatballs he likes so much are among the foods that come from that single four-legged source. “You mean McDonald’s?” he asked, still unable to comprehend the terrible truth.

He’s hardly alone in his blissful ignorance about where food really comes from. “It took me years, and a farm, to finally link a livestock animal’s life with my own,” says Friend, the author of several books for children and adults. In her latest book, The Compassionate Carnivore, she argues that pasture walks like the one we’re taking would be an excellent way to promote health – both for humans and the animals who give their lives for our dining pleasure.

Americans eat more meat than anybody on earth, packing away approximately 200 pounds per person in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture which forecasts that we’ll add another 20 pounds of it annually by 2016.

An unabashed animal lover, Friend is also an unapologetic animal eater who admits to having survived graduate school on a steady diet of fried SPAM. She is also a “sustainable farmer,” who along with her partner, Melissa, is responsible for the care and feeding of the 35 ewes and more than 70 spring lambs gamboling in a lovely grove of box elder trees nearby. In spite of her obvious affection for the sheep–she calls out their assigned numbers as if their first names and compares the animal’s sturdy shoulders to that of “little football players”– later this year, when they reach their full weight of about 120 pounds, she fully intends to send them to the slaughterhouse. “This is what we do for a living,” she explains. “We’re shepherds.”

The subtitle of her new book– How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old McDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoof Print, and Still Eat Meat – seems intended to reassure rather than enrage the estimated 93 to 98 percent of Americans who make meat a regular part of their diet. In fact, Americans eat more meat than anybody on earth, packing away approximately 200 pounds per person in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture which forecasts that we’ll add another 20 pounds of it annually by 2016.

The vast majority of the animals that come to our table are raised on large-scale factory operations and are not afforded the same creature comforts you’ll find at Friend’s farm, where about four dozen chickens wander freely, snacking on bugs and dozing in the sun. Ninety-eight percent of the eggs we eat come from chickens crammed several to a small cage, while 95 percent of the hogs raised in this country spend their entire life cycle indoors, according to the USDA.

Aside from the obvious ethical concerns about raising animals this way, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming are beginning to make even the most dedicated meat-eaters a little queasy. What does it mean to our own health when, as the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are used to treat healthy livestock? What do we make of the 2006 United Nations report revealing that our growing appetite for meat is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions? And just how mad are those mad cows anyway?

While recent bestsellers such as Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation have turned that kind of data into dinner-party conversation, Friend comes to the table at a slightly different angle. Unlike The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, she’s not against corn. “We aren’t huge fans of corn and we don’t feed our lambs very much, but on our farm it’s a challenge to raise entirely grass-fed lambs,” she explains. And unlike Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she’s not suggesting that we all try growing our own food. Friend’s painfully funny 2006 memoir, Hit by a Farm, makes it clear that not everyone is cut out for agriculture.

Though she’s well versed on the health and environmental concerns that come with conventionally-raised meat, Friend says that’s not why she wrote her latest book. “My main interest is in the well-being of animals,” she says, calling out to one of the three llamas that protect her flock from animal predators. “I know it seems odd, but this is how farming works–we work our butts off to keep our animals alive and healthy, and then we kill them.”

To critics who wonder why she hasn’t become a vegetarian, she argues that meat-eaters have more impact on the lives of farm animals by “remaining at the table” and using their muscle as consumers to force more humane farming practices. After all, she says, the increase in vegetarians–about 5 percent of the US population, according to estimates she cites– hasn’t decreased the demand for meat which has grown by almost 25 pounds per person in the past 25 years.

“But as carnivores, because we’re responsible for [the animals’] deaths, we’re also responsible for their lives,” she writes. It’s a paradox, she adds, that most people seem to appreciate. A 2004 Ohio State University survey found that 81 percent of respondents believe the health and well-being of livestock animals is just as important as that of pets.

Improve farm animals’ lives in the following ways, Friend says, and the positive side effects will also include improved health for those who eat them:

First, she says, “pay attention.” Though clever marketing tries to convince us that protein springs fully formed from the freezer section, there is carnage involved: almost 8.9 billion animals (not including fish) are butchered every year to feed us. Since that number may be difficult to grasp, Friend, a former economist, performs a rough calculation in her book, dividing that number by 300 million Americans (minus the 5 percent who don’t eat meat) and then multiplying the results by 80 years, and arrives at 2,500–the number of livestock animals butchered for each meat-eating American in his or her lifetime. Eating less meat wouldn’t kill us–or nearly as many of them. As Friend points out, the 16-ounce steak that’s common in many restaurants is in fact 300% larger than the serving size recommended by the USDA.

Second, she says, “Waste less.” According to Friend’s research, Americans throw 22.5 million pounds of meat in the garbage every day–the equivalent of 15,000 cows, 36,000 hogs and 2 million chickens. “No one–no one–can feel good about these numbers,” she says.

Perhaps predictably, Friends suggests replacing some of that factory-raised meat on our plates with the lamb chops and chicken breasts raised on sustainable farms like here—though she’s not the only one making this suggestion. Various sources from the Sierra Club to New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman have been promoting this sort of change, and the menu options are improving apace. Even a small but growing number of fast food chains such as Chipotle and Burgerville have been eschewing factory-raised meat in favor of animals raised without hormones or antibiotics.

Less predictably, Friend suggests going meatless more often, a campaign the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has promoted since 2005, when its “Healthy People 2010” report showed that vegetarians typically weigh less than meat-eaters and suffer from lower rates of type 2 diabetes and other diseases.

I quite enjoyed my visit to Friend’s farm, and when I got home I was still ruminating on what I saw there. The little calf that nipped at my backside nipped at my conscience a few days later as I stood in the grocery meat aisle, comparing the conventionally-raised sirloin at $4.99 a pound with the grass-fed variety priced at $10.99. I swallowed hard and thought about how happy that calf and his buddies looked. So I bought the expensive stuff, but less of it than usual. It was, I must add, delicious.

Something similar happened on a rotisserie-chicken weeknight, after my family had picked through the breast meat. Holding the bird’s rib cage over the garbage can I thought of the chickens I’d seen on Friend’s farm, and as I paused to consider what I was doing, I realized there was still food attached to the bones. I believe it’s called “dark meat.” Chicken salad the following evening was great– plus it was practically free.

My farm tour helped me connect the dots between where animals live and where I do. This month while we’re taking in the last of the fall colors, I plan to take my kids on a pasture walk of their own at one of the growing number of sustainable farms that are glad to sell their products directly to people like me. It’s time to teach my kids what McNuggets look like when they’re still on two legs.
This article was originally published in Mpls/St. Paul magazine, October 2008

Astonish Me

Laura Billings Coleman — Wed, 07 May 2014 13:02:46 +0000

Book review in today’s Strib

“Love in a ballet is something that does not exist and then suddenly does, its beginning marked by pantomime, faces fixed in rapture, a dance,” Maggie Shipstead explains in the opening act of her new novel, “Astonish Me” (Alfred A. Knopf, 257 pages, $25.95).

Watching from the wings as her former lover, Arslan Rusakov, takes the stage with his newly defected fiancée, Joan finds reason to celebrate what she knows will be her final performance. A secret pregnancy is about to tip her balance toward marriage and the suburbs, and her relief at leaving behind this rarefied world is palpable. “After, when they are hidden in the wings, or behind a curtain, the dancers will grimace like goblins, letting the pain show.”

Ballet may be infamous for its bodily punishments, but Shipstead finds even better material in the psychic costs of an art form fueled by creative rivalries and the relentless pursuit of the fleeting. “The ideal that lives behind the mirror makes teasing, flickering appearances but never quite shows itself, never solidifies into something that can be looked at and not just glimpsed,” the company’s coke-sniffing soloist Elaine muses as she edges near 30. “She might surprise it as she whips her head around, spotting during pirouettes, or catch it flitting through one hand or foot. But it never stays.” For the dancers who stay with it for life, “futility has become an accepted companion.”

A California subdivision in the 1980s is the setting for Joan’s second act, running a dance studio and raising a son with her high school boyfriend-turned husband Jacob. But her glamorous past as the getaway driver during Rusakov’s defection from the Soviet Union never fades from the family mythology, and soon begins to fascinate her son Harry, who grows to be a talented ballet dancer himself. Why did the mercurial Russian star choose a girl from the corps as his means of escape? How long can a person carry a secret before it stops mattering?

Shipstead’s sinewy prose here is well matched to her tightly wound characters, but fans of her often hilarious debut, “Seating Arrangements,” will have to rely on one of the story’s only carb-eating characters (a neighbor lady who allows herself to be groped on a Disney kiddie ride) for comic relief. Even so, by the time these two generations meet on stage in the final pas de quatre, Shipstead’s operatic denouement is just the right spin.

–Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

Heart of a Historian

Laura Billings Coleman — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 14:39:11 +0000

Margi Preus profile in today’s Strib

Middle-grade writer Margi Preus inspired by history

Article by: LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN , Special to the Star Tribune
Updated: April 28, 2014 – 3:25 PM

Duluth writer Margi Preus has made a name for herself by turning history into award-winning novels for kids.

Only halfway into a full day dedicated to promoting her new book, “West of the Moon,” Duluth writer Margi Preus was undeterred by reports of a pending spring snowstorm threatening to trap her in the Twin Cities area.

“If I get stuck here, I suppose I could do some research,” Preus mused while recovering from a classroom visit in Minneapolis and preparing for an evening appearance at the Dakota County library in Lakeville. “Do you have any idea if there’s a dojo around here?”

That line of inquiry should come as welcome news to fans of “Heart of a Samurai,” her fictionalized 2010 account of a real Japanese boy shipwrecked and rescued by American whalers in 1841. An NPR book club pick, her first novel for young readers also earned a Newbery Honor Medal, starred reviews as a “stunning debut” and a nice bump from President Obama, who bought a copy while Christmas shopping with his daughters in November.

Even so, classroom questions from her target audience of middle-grade readers tell Preus the story may have fallen short in one critical area: “samurais whacking people.”

“Putting the word samurai into a children’s book title and then not delivering? This next book is definitely going to need some sword play,” said Preus, 58, who is at work on another novel set at the end of Japan’s shogun era, a historical period she dove into headfirst when a ski injury confined her to the couch. “Of course, if I’d known anyone from Japan would read it, I’m not sure I’d have had the chutzpah to write it.” The book also won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Children’s Literature.

That her growing profile as a writer is being built on her great eye for historical detail comes as something of a surprise to Margi Preus (pronounced MAR-ghee with a hard g; Preus “like Rolls-Royce”), who admits she never much cared for history as a student. As she told a group of elementary students at Seward Montessori in Minneapolis, she got her start as a playwright, penning her first work in kindergarten after failing to win the lead role in “Sleeping Beauty.”

“I realized that if I wrote the plays, I could star in them, too,” said Preus, who continues to create work for Colder by the Lake, the Duluth comedy theater where she served as artistic director for 25 years.

“It’s always the story of the character that interests me first, and the need to round out the character is what drives the historical research,” she said. “When I get stuck or I don’t know which direction to go, I do research and often something just goes pop. It’s kind of a cure for writer’s block.”

A world of research

To flesh out 14-year-old Espen, the hero of her second novel, “Shadow on the Mountain,” Preus traveled to Norway to meet Erling Storrusten, then in his 90s, who told her about his role in the clandestine resistance movement spying on the Wehrmacht headquarters in Lillehammer.

For her most recent release, “West of the Moon,” she found source material closer to home — a few lines in a published diary written by her great-great-grandmother Linka Preus, a Norwegian immigrant who traveled to America in 1851 on a ship called the Columbus.

“My aunt kept pestering me that I should write a novel about her, so I was dutifully reading the diary,” said Preus, whose Norwegian ancestors helped to found St. Olaf and Luther colleges. When she found a short passage describing a young girl traveling alone, with no prospects in the New World, “I looked up the passenger list from that ship, and sure enough, there was the girl, Margit. I got kind of fascinated with what would propel a girl to make this trip all on her own — and I figured it had to be bad.”

The way Preus imagines it in “West of the Moon,” the girl is escaping treacherous relatives and a lecherous goatherd — a story that springs from fairy tales and Norse mythology, but lands on the cusp of adulthood. “There’s something really wonderful about having one foot in childhood but this awareness that the world is about to get much bigger,” Preus said. “That’s why I love writing for this age group, because they’re right on the cusp, and ready to make that big step into adulthood and all the choices that come with it.”

Looking toward the future

Preus writes in a small outbuilding her husband and two grown sons built for her in the back yard, where she keeps a slip of paper with a quote from Graham Greene within arm’s reach. “It says, ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’ I refer to that quote a lot because that’s what I’m going for, that moment when a young person steps into their future — a moment that usually involves a choice about how they’re going to handle what’s being thrown at them.

“The other reason I like to keep it handy is that for lots of kids, that future may come to them in the form of a book,” the way it did for Preus when she read the book that made her want to be a writer, “Harriet the Spy.”

“So I take it seriously what I’m doing. This story could have a big influence on whoever is reading it, and so I want it to be a great experience.”

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

West of the Moon

Laura Billings Coleman — Sun, 13 Apr 2014 00:14:36 +0000

My review in today’s Strib: http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/254786241.html

In the Norwegian folk tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” a white bear bargains for the hand of a poor girl, soon revealing himself to be a handsome prince with a well-stocked refrigerator and rather sizable real estate holdings.

No such luck for 13-year-old Astri, the dreamy but sharp-elbowed heroine of Duluth author Margi Preus’ latest release, “West of the Moon.” Sold off by her scheming aunt and uncle to a hunchbacked goatherd named Svaalberd, Astri soon discovers he’s even more disgusting than he seems. Held captive on his property is a strange yet familiar girl, who spins wool all day and never speaks a word.

Preus, who wrote the Newbery Honor Book “Heart of a Samurai” (2010), is a clever yarn-spinner herself, using a journal entry written by her great-great-grandmother Linka Preus as the springboard for this rollicking middle-grade adventure.

Setting her book against the “America fever” sweeping Scandinavia in the middle of the 19th century, Preus provides plenty of historical context for young readers — including a fascinating explanation of rickets helpful for any fan of fairy tales. But her attention to historical realism never overshadows her story’s mix of magical realism and Norwegian myth, or a damsel who proves quite capable of saving herself. (Note to parents and librarians: Though the cover reads younger, this story includes a whiff of sexual assault and much-deserved manslaughter some chapters later. Be warned.)

Threatened with a trip to the altar, Astri makes a break for it, rescues her younger sister Greta, and they lie, cheat and steal their way onto a ship bound for America. While these questionable actions often cause Astri to doubt the essential goodness of her character, readers won’t share those concerns. She may not go straight to heaven, but chances are good she’s going to find her way to Minnesota someday.

LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN

This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage

Laura Billings Coleman — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:22:05 +0000

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

(Harper Collins, 320 pages, $28.99, 320 pages)

“I was always going to be a writer. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything,” Ann Patchett declares in her new collection of personal essays, and she’s got the gold-plated publishing resume to prove it: degrees from Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Guggenheim fellowships and Yaddo residencies, meaningful personal references from such mentors as Allan Gurganus, Grace Paley and Russell Banks, not to mention an independent bookstore of her own that gets even more ink than Garrison Keillor’s.

Given Patchett’s well-charted c.v. as a literary over-achiever, there’s one award that may surprise—the pin she earned “for being the first person … to receive a perfect score on the written waitress test” at the T.G.I. Friday’s near her mother’s house, where she retreated after a short and disastrous early marriage. “I was required to wear a funny hat. I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled,” she writes in a painful and funny essay titled “The Sacrament of Divorce.” “I did not die.”

Patchett’s gift for getting the best material from the worst of times is one of pleasures of This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a cleverly repackaged collection of essays published between 1996 and 2012. Though most were written on assignment for venues as varied as Vogue and The Wall Street Journal, each piece advances the arc of the author’s own story as she introduces us to some of the loves of her life—the state of Tennessee, a dog named Rosie, the nun who took the time to teach her to read, and eventually her husband Karl, a Nashville doctor she took more than a decade to marry.

Readers will recognize he’s the one in “My Road to Hell Was Paved,” in which the on-again/off-again couple embark on a 1998 RV odyssey of the American West, winding up at Yellowstone (“which is to Winnebagos what upstream is to salmon,” Patchett explains.) Postponing marriage is her plan to keep breaking up at bay, but she finds a flaw on her strategy while flying through a blizzard to be at his bedside at Rochester’s Mayo Clinic. “By not marrying him, he would never be lost to me. Now I could see the failure of my imagination. I had accounted only for the loss I knew enough to fear.”

Before she hit the bestseller list with novels like Bel Canto and State of Wonder, Patchett paid her dues working as a freelancer for Seventeen, an experience she credits with honing her work horse writing habits, which she explores in several essays aimed at aspiring MFAs. “I would always rather knock off an essay than face down the next chapter in my book,” she claims, but all of the periodical pieces collected are finely polished, worthy of their new packaging between two hard covers.

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

Reading Against Type

Laura Billings Coleman — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 20:14:07 +0000

What happens when a young chick-lit reader falls in love with the ultimate boy book?

My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier has one of the worst spoiler titles in all of juvenile fiction, which may explain why I let it sit so long, hoping the book report would simply write itself.

An early devotee of what might be called “pre-chick lit,” I preferred reading about other girls–Pippi and Heidi, Ramona and Beezus, the March sisters, and Margaret Simon, whose daily pleas to God were being read out loud to a growing group of fifth grade girls, giggling in the bathroom of Widsten Elementary School in Wayzata. That’s how I knew Sam wasn’t my type. The front cover featured a boy in pilgrim-buckle shoes and a bayonet. Worse, there was a Newbery Honor medal attached to it, a sign librarians would love it, while eleven-year-olds like me would hate it.

I spent weeks complaining about the miserable injustice of the assignment, while my parents, both English teachers, ignored me. Having finally run out of excuses the weekend before the report was due, I took my place on the living room couch and with a heavy sigh resigned myself to turning the pages.

The first few started out breathless enough, as sixteen-year-old Sam Meeker arrives at his family’s Connecticut tavern after a thirty-mile hike from New Haven, wearing a uniform designed by Benedict Arnold. Like the father he butts heads with, Sam is cocky, hard-headed, and, of course, utterly irresistible–think James Dean with a cause and a tri-cornered hat. When he steals his father’s musket to go fight the Brits, his younger brother, Tim, is torn between his love for Sam and loyalty to his father.

Though we know which side will eventually win the Revolutionary Ward, the hardships endured by soldiers and civilians make it clear that war is hell no matter which side you’re on. And as the troops march ever closer to the Meeker family, I found myself turning again and again to the title page to see if there was any way to avoid the terrible ending it predicted. There wasn’t. Even so, Sam’s execution in the final pages of the book came as a violent shock–one of the reasons it still ranks high among the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 most challenged books, more than thirty years after it was published.

It was the first book that made me cry–but it was more than that. It seemed to mark the moment in my reading life when I was no longer just skimming the surface, comforted by characters who were just like me. The unfamiliarity of the story and setting seemed to have forced me to read deeper. And in doing so, I felt deeply discomforted, unsettled, full of questions. I also wanted to keep reading.

In the thirty years since I read My Brother Sam Is Dead, I’ve often heard reports that books are chosen for classrooms based on the fact that boys will only read books about boy characters, while girls will go along with whatever is given to them. And though this is often cited as an example of how girls are given short shrift, I sometimes wonder if the harm doesn’t fall harder on boys. Leaving your comfort zone–not to mention your gender chromosome–is one of the great pleasures of reading. You try on another person’s life and leave a book with the feeling that you have been somewhere you could not have visited on your own. This is why I have a copy of My Brother Sam Is Dead on our bookshelf, waiting for the day my three sons are ready to read it. It’s also why I will ignore all their complaints when a good teacher requires them to read Little Women.

Published in “Raising Readers: An Anthology for Early Literacy” 2009

Beach Bag Reading

Laura Billings Coleman — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:36:45 +0000

My round-up of summer paperbacks for today’s Star Tribune.
“Vengeance,” by Benjamin Black (Picador, $16)

When business titan Victor Delahaye shoots himself during a sailing excursion off the coast of Ireland’s County Cork, the obvious suspect pitches the pistol overboard — a plot point that muddies the waters only briefly in this mild, midcentury whodunit. For readers, the more compelling mystery in author John Banville’s pseudonymous franchise is the character of Quirke himself. With a weakness for bad women and good whiskey, the impenetrable Irish pathologist continues to puzzle, while the fluid prose raises it a few notches above the better-plotted competition.

“By the Iowa Sea,” by Joe Blair (Scribner, $16)

After setting out on an “Easy Rider” fantasy with his girlfriend Deb, reality hits hard when the author runs out of money in Iowa, gets hitched and has a family of four — including one son with an autism diagnosis. This bruising but hopeful memoir got its start as a Modern Love essay in the New York Times, and it covers everything from marital infidelity to HVAC repair and the meaning of life with brutal honesty and hard-won wisdom.

“Circles of Time,” by Phillip Rock (William Morrow, $14.99)

You can’t help wondering whether “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes cribbed a bit from this family saga, the second installment of the “Passing Bells” trilogy published in the 1970s and reissued for the generation still reeling from Matthew Crawley’s car crash. The great house of Abingdon Pryory is the pivot point for plenty of Jazz Age angst, where the titled Greville clan is riven by World War I, climbing hemlines and crumbling social codes. It’s the perfect summer reading while you wait for Season 4.

“The Uninvited Guests,” by Sadie Jones (Harper Perennial, $14.99)

Sterne is the name of the Torrington family manor, falling into ruin and ready for a cash infusion that may yet come from an advantageous marriage for Emerald the ingénue. But just as the servants are preparing for her 20th birthday party, a passel of third-class passengers from a nearby train wreck arrive to wreak havoc, pushing what starts as a pleasant Edwardian comedy of manners into more ghoulish, Edward Gorey territory. Clever plotting and smartly observed characters (like the widow and second husband who meet “in the far-down places between grief and sex”) make for a highbrow page-turner.

“The Suitors,” by Cecil David-Weill (Other Press, $16.95)

Even more rarefied real estate is at stake in “The Suitors,” where the Ettinguer sisters contrive to save L’Agapanthe, the family villa on the Côte d’Azur, by seducing a billionaire to pay for it — or perhaps courting one so vulgar their parents take it off the market. Like a French Nancy Mitford, Cecil David-Weill (daughter of a former chairman of Lazard Freres) is at her most interesting when she’s parsing the manners of the super-rich, explaining why offering a Jet Ski as a hostess gift is simply never done.

“An Uncommon Education,” by Elizabeth Percer (Harper Perennial, $14.99)

In this coming-of-age novel set at Wellesley College, earnest narrator Naomi Feinstein overcomes her isolation when she’s initiated into the Shakespeare Society, a Seven Sisters secret that’s not nearly as sexy as it sounds. Equal parts “Prep” and “Dead Poets Society,” this elegant debut novel might have benefited from a little more Donna Tartt drama.

“Gossip,” by Beth Gutcheon (William Morrow, $14.99)

Miss Pratt’s, another exclusive single-sex school, serves as the starting point for this sharp and poignant novel about the triangle of friendship between scholarship student Loviah French, and the more privileged Dinah and Avis. Combining art world glamour, Upper East Side mores, big secrets and steady patter about what to wear, this novel is far more stylish than its shapeless title.

“The Distance Between Us,” by Reyna Grande (Washington Square Press, $15)

For eight years, Reyna Grande dreams of being reunited with her parents, who have left their children with abusive grandparents in rural Mexico so they can set down roots for a better life in America. But their eventual reunion is no happy ending in this affecting memoir about the Mexican immigrant experience and the author’s search for home.

“The Lost Saints of Tennessee,” by Amy Franklin-Willis (Grove Press, $15)

RC Colas and Moon Pies permeate this very Southern debut novel, which sees Ezekiel Cooper’s suicide plans sidetracked on a trip from Clayton, Tenn., to Virginia horse country. Burdened by the drowning death of his fraternal twin, divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughters, there’s a pleasing “Prince of Tides” quality to Zeke’s midlife turnaround.

“American Ghost,” by Janis Owens (Scribner, $16)

Hendrix, Fla., is a town of “listing cracker dog trots and trailers” where the giant oak tree in the square is missing a limb — the result of an infamous 1930s lynching. The crime has painful ripple effects six decades later for Jolie Hoyt, daughter of the town’s Pentecostal preacher, and a graduate student named Sam, who may be investigating more than he lets on.

“That Deadman Dance,” by Kim Scott (Bloomsbury, $17)

The “friendly frontier” of western Australia is the setting for this award-winning novel that explores the intersection between the Noongar people and the European settlers who soon alter the aboriginal landscape. Jumping through time, much of the story is told through the eyes of Bobby Wabalanginy, a welcoming third culture kid who comes to see that the cultural exchange of colonization works in only one direction: “We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want ours. ”

“Seven Locks,” by Christine Wade (Atria Books, $15)

When her wastrel husband sets off in a huff and never returns from the wilderness around their Hudson River Valley farm, the narrator in this debut novel has to make her way with two young children and townspeople convinced she had a sinister hand in his disappearance. Set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War, this compelling historical novel takes its inspiration from a sleepy Washington Irving tale.

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

Gulp, Belch, Fart and Flush

Laura Billings Coleman — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 21:45:45 +0000

Devotees of Walter the Farting Dog, a broad fan base ranging from the current White House Chief of Staff (who is said to keep a copy in his office) to my three little boys, will be relieved to learn their favorite pooch still hasn’t run out of gas. Though the fifth volume, Banned from the Beach (by William Kotzwinkle, Glenn Murray, and Elizabeth Gundy and illustrated by Audre Colman, Dutton) relies on the very same joke employed by the previous four, canine flatus, like first love, may be a theme that never loses its punch or pungency. In this volume, Walter reaches new heights of virtuosic gassiness, farting at turns “sadly,” “guiltily,” and even “philosophically.” With one especially rancid explosion, brought on by digesting “a tropical fruit that should have been thoroughly cooked,” Walter manages to part the sea, shake coconuts from trees, and find buried treasure.

“Charlotte’s Web” it ain’t, and yet, as my own family focus group continues to make clear, bodily functions are endlessly fascinating and often laugh-out-loud funny. In fact, Walter’s explosive rise up the bestseller lists may be credited (or blamed) for a new wave of children’s books that share that series’ refreshing frankness and matter-of-factness about the strange, appalling, and yes, even heroic things our bodies can do.

Walter’s explosive rise up the bestseller lists may be credited (or blamed) for a new wave of children’s books that share that series’ refreshing frankness and matter-of-factness about the strange, appalling, and yes, even heroic things our bodies can do.

Consider Poop: A Natural History of the Unmentionable by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Neal Layton (Candlewick Press) a tidily-packaged volume, no bigger than a cow pie, that lives up to its attention-grabbing title and chapter headings. For instance, “Sloppy or Ploppy?” explores how the water content in different animals’ feces accounts for the varieties in shape and consistency of scat. Elsewhere, we learn how scientists pick apart poop in the laboratory to learn how animals live in the wild, and why some predators will eat the droppings of their prey to smell more like the animals they plan to attack. (This evolutionary hold-over explains why some dogs eat their own poop—and could serve as an interesting plot device for a future Walter the Farting Dog book.)

Flush! The Scoop on Poop Throughout the Ages (Little, Brown) covers some of the same gastrointestinal terrain, but from a more anthropological angle, using rhyming verse and historical insight to rise above mere bathroom humor. A section on Roman bathroom habits explains that a stick and sponge kept in a communal bucket of sloppy water once did the job we now assign to Charmin. Another recounts the English court’s less than enthusiastic reception for Sir John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, credited with inventing the world’s first mechanical flushing toilet back in 1596. (Who knew?) Author and illustrator Charise Mericle Harper waits until the last page to bring the word “poop” into the rhyme scheme, a show of self -restraint that nearly matches that of Mij Kelly in Have You Seen My Potty? Barron’s) For pages and pages of this rhyming picture book (sweetly illustrated by Mary McQuillan), poor Suzy Sue must fight the call of nature while asking the farm animals around her if they’ve seen her missing red potty chair. Though we are reminded with increasing urgency that Suzy Sue has “something very important to do,” the author never stoops to alternating this with the perhaps too-obvious Number Two. This is an unfortunate oversight, says my five-year-old, who thinks the story would have been more dramatic if Suzy’s problem had been stated more clearly.

(In the pre-K Potty-Theme Genre, he and his younger brothers much preferred Aliens Love Underpants by Claire Freeman and Ben Cort (Barron’s), a science fiction fantasy which proposes that aliens visit earth to pluck underwear from clotheslines, and Pirates Don’t Change Diapers, Melinda Long’s sequel to How I Became A Pirate, in which Braid Beard and his motley crew –hilariously illustrated by David Shannon–are forced to babysit for Jeremy Jacob’s little sister and change nappies with the extra burden of hooks instead of hands. Arrrgh, indeed.)

Moving a little higher up the digestive tract, there’s The Gulps, a picture book by Rosemary Wells and Marc Brown (of Max and Ruby, and Arthur fame, respectively) about a super-size family that can hardly make it down the driveway without stopping at the drive-thru.

Moving a little higher up the digestive tract, there’s The Gulps, a picture book by Rosemary Wells and Marc Brown (of Max and Ruby, and Arthur fame, respectively) about a super-size family that can hardly make it down the driveway without stopping at the drive-thru. When their extra wide loads are too much for their vacation RV to haul, they’re forced to make friends with the Spratts, a lean and green farm family who teach them how to pull weeds, peel carrots, and lighten their load. While the benefits of a high-fiber diet are only hinted at by the Gulps, they are illustrated in glorious and graphic detail in Chewy, Gooey, Rumble, Plop!: A deliciously disgusting plop-up guide to the digestive system, by Steve Alton, illustrated by Nick Sharratt (Dial Books for Young Readers). The book starts with the notion that humans are essentially hollow—“just a tube, with a hole at each end”—and follows the passage of a bite of apple from one end of the tube to the other, through a cheerful and inventive series of “plop-up” illustrations (the complicated path from the small to the large intestine is particularly well-mapped), culminating in a climactic bathroom scene rarely depicted in pop-up form. We learned many interesting things from this book (fun fact: humans swallow 13,000 gallons of spit in a lifetime), the most important being that you should be sure to keep the plastic shield that covers the eerily life-like rubber tongue that sticks out of the book’s front cover. Without it, the tongue gets stuck to things—Legos, dog hair, and squealing, freaked-out parents.

Of course, the gross-out factor is a big part of the appeal of body-function books, and one title that really delivers is Ouch!: How Your Body Makes It Through A Very Bad Day by Richard Walker (DK). Using computer-generated and frequently gory close-up images, Ouch! reveals how the human body respondsto a host of assaults, from a bee sting, to an insect in the ear canal, to a bleeding cut. The accompanying CD allows you to watch in 3-D animation as the contents of an upset stomach come hurtling out the upper end as vomit (“Cool!” pronounced my almost 4-year-old), but does not include one of the highlights of the book, the pus-filled explosion of a pimple—an oversight one assumes the publisher will fix before the second edition. Any one of the slings and arrows outlined in Ouch! would make a book of its own, a notion amazingly well illustrated in Sneeze! by Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel (Charlesbridge) which uses beautiful and horrifying colorized electron micrographs of pollen grains, dust mites, and mildew to show how these irritants can trigger an involuntary reflex second only to farting when it comes to entertaining the elementary school crowd.

But what about those more embarrassing body functions older kids have to cope with? They might find comfort and answers to their commonly asked questions in Changing You! A Guide to Body Changes and Sexuality by Dr. Gail Saltz and illustrated by Lynne Avril Cravath (Dutton), which assures young readers that pubic hair and breasts that grow a little faster on one side than the other are “all very new’’ and “all very normal.’’ Boys with more pressing questions may prefer The Boy’s Body Book: Everything You Need to Know for Growing up YOU by Kelli Dunham (Applesauce Press) which covers much less amusing bodily functions (at least, when it’s happening to you), such as bed-wetting, voice-cracking, and wet dreams. It’s worth noting that both of these books do mention the word “scrotum,” a word that caused quite a stir when it appeared on the first page of last year’s Newbury Medal winner. Fans of Walter the Farting Dog and others on this list may be disappointed to learn the word is used entirely in context, and not for its comic potential.

This review appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune 9/24/07