Lory

Reread this in 2022, three years after my first read. At that time it was an eye-opening introduction to the concept of covert male depression, something I had encountered in family members, colleagues, and even been seeing in action on the world stage without understanding what I was experiencing. The book is extremely helpful in identifying the dysfunction that plagues so many men and in articulating a path toward healing.

This path can only begin when an individual man himself decides to stop the cycle begun by relational trauma, and go a different way, a way of facing his condition rather than running from it and covering it up with addictive defenses. We can't legislate or force such a decision. But only if enough men make it – as the inspiring stories in the book show that many men are capable of doing – can our world survive, in my opinion. Among all the crises clamoring for our attention, this is THE central crisis. The others all stem from this one, especially from the addictive defenses with which men combat their depression.

During this reread I really longed for some discussion of how covert depression also affects and presents in women. Women may be more prone to overt depression, which is a more obviously disturbing, but ironically probably less dangerous form of the disease – because it has come out into the open and there is at least a chance of seeking help. However, women are also highly prone to covert depression as well, and I suffered from it for many years.

Real describes depression as a disease of “carried emotions,” emotions generally carried over from a dysfunctional parenting relationship, and I started to wonder about this in relation to the gender gap. Far from being a “women's disease,” as it's often considered, depression may be in fact a men's disease that women frequently end up carrying for the men in their lives, covertly or overtly. Men have trouble naming, cognizing, and processing emotional experience, but they are not less emotionally needy than women – if anything, they are more needy than women. Maybe their depression infects the women around them, who have more innate tools for dealing with emotional issues. And their presentation of overt depression may at least sometimes be a cry for help on the behalf of those who are too emotionally shut-down and repressed to do it themselves.

Unfortunately this often does not lead to the healing of the real, root problem, which is fundamentally one of failure to protect and nurture the fragile human core. Without awareness of what is going on, this failure gets transmitted unconsciously down the generations, and continues to compound and be strengthened. Those who present overt symptoms can end up scapegoated by others who don't want to fully confront the issues, while others with more covert symptoms are discouraged from revealing and releasing their pain. I feel as though that is what has happened in my family, with my own covert depression, and other family members who have exposed more overt symptoms and ended up as the “symptom-bearers” for those who don't want to acknowledge the hidden connection between all of us.

But I don't want to be one of the deniers any more. I really want to wake up now, and break the cycle of depression in my own family, and I appreciate books like this that are helping me. It is not about blaming anyone, but about uncovering unconscious patterns that have been controlling our behavior and harming everyone they touch. There is so much work to be done, but it is a source of hope to have a new orientation towards the problem.

Interesting result of the author's investigation into her father's life, which she wanted to understand better after he committed suicide. As his history comes slowly more into focus, along with much that can never be fully comprehended, it creates a touching portrait of a man who struggled to live well, against incredible obstacles, with an end both tragic and uplifting.

I really enjoyed this, a work of popular criticism that is perceptive, intelligent, insightful, and manages not to analyze its subject into insensibility. It brought out so many details in Austen that I had never noticed before, wrapped up as I've been in the flow of her narrative - which Mullan convincingly demonstrates is both artful and innovative. Now I want to read her again to appreciate her all the more.

After a couple of disappointing mystery reads this month, I enjoyed this one! The “secret staircase” conceit was appealing because I love those kinds of secret rooms. Character and relationship development was minimal, but the characters didn't depress or annoy me at least. I'd read another one in this series, just to see what happens to them all next.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

This was an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying approach to understanding a complex woman. Many of the writers spoke little about L'Engle or were only very tangentially involved with her. Large chunks of important experiences/allegations were gingerly glanced at, while trivialities and repetitive padding got plenty of space. I hope she will get a proper biography at some point, by a writer who can be both sympathetic and objective, and can assemble confusing and conflicting material in a coherent way.

As I am struggling with gut issues, and want to care for my brain too, this was a really interesting read. The microbiome is so important to our health, and so threatened by many modern practices (modern Western diet, the overuse of antibiotics, pesticides, and more.) It seems clear this is an area that must be further researched, and hopefully where revolutionary changes can be made to improve health in body and mind.

I find Perlmutter's assurance that his diet is easy to follow for everyone unrealistic. It is time consuming and resource draining, as I am finding now trying to follow a similar protocol. Not everyone has access to all the ingredients, not everyone can afford all that organic food, not everyone has time or space to make all those homemade fermented foods. No doubt everyone can make steps in a healthier direction, but it's just advertising and a demonstration of rich-urban-person privilege to claim it's going to be easy.

Perlmutter also mentioned stress, along with diet and environmental input, as a major factor influencing the gut microbiome. However, he does not follow this up, nor take into account psychological and relational influences on mood and attention disorders, which are strongly correlated with trauma and stressful experiences. This is a gaping hole in the topic that needs to be filled.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. French Rhapsody is a sly satire of contemporary French culture, set off when a Parisian doctor receives a letter, lost for 33 years by the post office, that seems to suggest that his defunct 80s band might have made the big time. He goes off on a quest to find the tape of their could-have-been hit single and track down some of the members of the band, who have gone off in quite different directions.

This opening device led me to expect that the book would focus on the doctor, but in fact it soon leaves his point of view and hops about rather erratically among the other characters who become involved in the twisted strands of the story. The main focus, if there is one, ends up being on the ultra-wealthy enigmatic man who produced that fateful demo tape for the group, and now is being primed by certain factions to become the next French president. There are some secrets in his past, though, that need to come to light before he can move forward to the next stage of his own life.

This political slant, along with another story strand concerning a band member who has become an ultra-right-wing thug, brings in some pertinent reflections on the explosive mix of celebrity, money, and extremism in today's world. The silliness of modern art also gets a dig through the medium of another former band member who's created a giant blow-up model of his own brain; and the doctor's quest ends with an ironic twist that punctures the vanity of our dreams. Overall, this was a more acerbic, less heart-warming read than Laurain's other Gallic books (The Red Notebook and The President's Hat), and it didn't hold my attention as well with its haphazard structure. Still, for some contemporary French wit, it's worth a try.

I've no idea what connection British author Rose Tremain may have with Switzerland, or why she chose it as a setting for her novel, but from my foreigner's point of view I think she did a good job at capturing some of the character of the Swiss, their strength and their vulnerability, and the conflicting realities behind the surface image that they like to present.

While I detested this author's Five Children on the Western Front (I couldn't read more than a couple of chapters because she got the Psammead so wrong), I was willing to try her again with this Victorian mystery and was pleasantly diverted. I thought she did a respectable job with the literary voice while still inserting some rather modern social commentary via the perspective of an independent-minded widow. There was rather a pile-up of Victorian lit and/or murder mystery tropes by the end (an Afterword reveals that the book is actually based on a subplot from David Copperfield), and most of the characters were fairly generic and forgettable, but I'd read another book with Mrs. Rodd in it.

I skim-read this from about halfway on. It had a little bit of what I was looking for – information on the transformation taking place in the adolescent brain – but also a lot of other stuff, notably ACRONYMS. The author loves them! I'm fine with an acronym or two, but when they're used to the extent that I no longer remember what they mean (what is COAL again?), they lose their usefulness. I would so much prefer him using the actual words.

There was also a lot of space given to mindfulness practices that I think are A. better described elsewhere, B. unlikely to appeal to teens, unless they are a captive audience like his therapy clients, C. generally very heady and cognition-based.

The case studies from his practice were strange, especially one about a sadly alcohol-addicted young woman which ended with giving her advice to go to AA (which she found “dumb”) and the attitude “we'll see what happens to her.” Was there not anything else that could have been done, given that he was treating her from the time of her earlier binge drinking in high school?

Key takeaway in terms of brain development: The adolescent brain has an especially activated dopamine reward system. The troughs are lower (that's why teens so often complain of being bored) and the highs are higher. This means the effects of drugs and alcohol are heightened and are also more appealing. Addiction is also a greater danger the earlier use is started, because the brain gets dependent on the substance to pull it out of painful dopamine lows.

The goal of brain development is integration, the ability to allow different parts to play their appropriate roles without reacting out of chaos or rigidity. Key to developing this are healthy relationships and secure attachments.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration. This is no way influenced the content of my review.

Just in time for Christmas, the wonderful folks at David R. Godine, Publisher have reprinted their edition of Elizabeth Goudge's story I Saw Three Ships. In this brief tale set in the West Country of England a couple of centuries ago, we are introduced to the irrepressible orphan Polly, who knows she has heard angels climb the stairs on Christmas Eve; her very proper maiden aunts, Dorcas and Constantia, who yet harbor secret dreams and longings; and three wise men of a rather unexpected sort. How they all come together is Christmas magic of the very best kind.

As fans of Elizabeth Goudge may expect, there is a marvelously evoked historical setting, with a lovably mischievous child character, adults of varying degrees of eccentricity, and a contented cat. There is charm and mystery and humor, and a hint of something beyond the everyday world. At appropriate moments, the old English carol named in the title enlivens the text with its jaunty tune – a different one than most Americans may be familiar with, so it's good that words and music are included at the end. The numerous pen-and-ink drawings by Margot Tomes capture the early-nineteenth-century atmosphere perfectly, and Godine's usual fine production values enhance the book's appeal even further. A small paperback (about 5 by 7 inches large and 60 pages long), with a heavy, durable matte cover and French flaps, it would slip nicely into a large stocking. If you're looking for a gift for an older child – or adult! – who enjoys historical fiction by the likes of Joan Aiken or Leon Garfield, this would be a fine choice.

At a time when hysteria both for and against vaccines seems to be at an all-time high, I was educated (inoculated?) by Eula Biss's extended essay, to understand that such feelings have a long and far-reaching history. They touch on themes of war, immigration, poverty, and the troubled relations between our minds and bodies, which allow us to swim in a sea of false ideas just as we bear a weight of microbes that are (or are they?) “not us.”

Humans are fragile and fearful creatures. It increasingly seems to me that our fears and concerns for our bodies mask the even greater threats that reside in our inner lives and souls, but those are threats we cannot so easily see and control. Instead, we obsess about a physical world that is already in the process of dying. We are encouraged to equate health and life with the survival of the body. But will this end up being a metaphor, one that we need to learn to read, or perish out of literalism?

While wondering about this question, one can read Biss's thoughtful, measured and eloquent meditations on life, motherhood, science, and metaphors, which concludes “However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space – a garden we tend together.” I'm grateful for her help in thinking both more clearly and more artistically about the fears that plague our common mind today.

Originally reviewed at www.emeraldcitybookreview.com

Start with an intriguing opening: a mouldering, uneaten feast, seen through the eyes of a hapless young man in search of his runaway sister. Add some piquant ingredients: the voices of servants, with their own lives and thoughts under the genteel surface imposed by their aristocratic employers. Take both servants and masters on a journey from northern England to Tuscany, mixing well along the way. Result: a thoroughly entertaining historical mystery, with a culinary slant.

In this tale inspired by and incorporating a collection of antique recipes, it's natural enough that the main narrative belongs to an energetic young cook, Biddy Leigh. Biddy's distinctive first-person voice provides much of the charm of the novel, and her enthusiasm for gastronomic adventure is contagious. When torn from her familiar surroundings by the seeming whim of her mistress, taken on an increasingly puzzling journey through France and over the Alps to Italy, she loses no opportunity to learn and benefit from her expanded horizons, and sharing her experiences is a treat for us as well. But when the game becomes deadly serious, can she cook her way out of this turn of events?

Although the components of this novel were splendid, the last stages of their assembly left something to be desired. Biddy's mistress asks her to take part in a deception that requires her to act and talk in a way that is not truly believable for her character, and that also caused her to lose much of her distinctive “flavor.” An overly hasty love story and an unnecessarily melodramatic twist also marred the final chapters. Like cooks, novelists must beware of too many ingredients, too eagerly flung together. However, An Appetite for Violets is in the main a delicious concoction, full of historical details that don't bog down the story but provide many delightful moments to savor.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

This was an above average middle grade historical, well written and with good atmosphere. Marjan immediately has our sympathy, the slow reveal of her story is skillfully played out, and the humanization of legendary figures is also believable. I liked the underlying message of the power of stories to shape our lives.

And I went back to the first Kate Milford I read, to remind myself of how The Raconteur's Commonplace Book was related to it. It was fun to discover again the snippets included, impressively worked into a complete story collection - slash - novel in the RCB. I assume they were not complete stories at the time GGH was written!

The book is most enjoyable for its atmosphere and characters; the mystery element is mild. I want the Pines for my innkeepers, they are so solicitous it would be like having a second family. Milo is a lucky boy but his mixed feelings about his ancestry and birth parents are understandable. I like how he uses “role playing” to help him break free of his mental limitations.

Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle

A review of the new biography of Louise Fitzhugh inspired me to hunt this one out again. I'd read it a long time ago and remembered being impressed, but no details. It was not one of the two I reread over and over again in my childhood, Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret.

So this was almost like a first read for me. And I was startled by the punch that Fitzhugh packs in this little story. As in the books centered around Harriet and Beth Ellen, the strength is in the main characters, Emma and Willie – they leap off the page (literally in the case of Willie, the dancer). In intimate details of their inner and outer behavior and thinking, their idiosyncrasies and flaws, they become real to us, we become invested in their dreams and identify with their plight. The adults are more distant and caricatured, almost just props to bring out the theme of the book, which is the powerlessness of abused children and the fight for their rights.

What is most unusual here is that the children themselves are the ones who are fighting. And Emma, in particular, has to go through a difficult process of finding her true goals and her hidden strength, and rejecting “help” that would reduce her power and agency. The story ends just where I rather wish Fitzhugh would have gone on to write a second half. It would have been so interesting to see what developed once Emma made connections with other girls who wanted to create change in their lives. But maybe she couldn't write that part because the history hadn't happened yet. I think it's happening now.

I really love Rohr's core message in all the books I've read. I do wish he would resort less to emotionally-charged assertions and sweeping generalities and ground his argument more in well-developed, thought-through particulars. In this case, I think one could better pinpoint what “second-half-of-life” spirituality really involves. What he's talking about does not happen exclusively after middle age, nor is it an inevitable development – it is possible to age and not mature, while there are young people who are wise beyond their years. And what exactly is it about the process of aging that brings us to the challenging point of transformation? Once more, I find much more satisfying explanations in the ideas of anthroposophy, which give a thorough picture of the different “members” of the human being and of how their relationship to each other and the outer world metamorphose through life. On the other hand, Rohr's compassion, humility, and heartfulness are refreshing, and much needed in order to enliven more cerebral considerations. I wish these two streams could come together for a powerful, fully effective approach to the desperate spiritual needs of our time.

A memoir by a woman who fell in love with the tiny mountain country and ended up spending her life there. Interesting as an outsider's perspective, though it would be good to read more from a native-born writer.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. After watching the 1952 movie of Scaramouche, with its brilliant fencing matches between Mel Ferrer and Stewart Granger, I became curious to read the book. How would the author deal with these exciting action sequences? And would the book give more context and background for the historical and political aspects of the plot? I had seen several swashbuckling films based on the works of this well-known historical novelist, but never read any of his books. How would they hold up today?

I was pleased to find that Scaramouche is not only just as exciting on the page as on the screen, but also features some wonderful bits of dialogue that didn't make it into the film, and has a much more sensibly constructed plot. Where the movie mixes up and muddles the three aspects of hero Andre-Louis's life — as a lawyer in the French province of Brittany, as a member of a traveling Commedia dell'Arte troupe, and as a swordsman working to improve his art and confront his aristocratic nemesis — the book divides these into three sequential parts and focuses on one at a time. The initial conflict, in which the evil Marquis kills Andre-Louis's friend makes much more sense too, as do his relationships with the two women in his life. And the ideas and events of the historical setting, during the years leading up to the French revolution, are naturally able to be developed more fully in a full-length book. The result is a historical romance that is entertaining without being empty, an adventure that might also make you think.

Allende's first novel is the one that put her on the literary map, a semi-autobiographical tale of a Chilean family in turbulent historical times, written in a dreamy, fanicful style known as “magical realism”. I actually enjoyed her memoir My Invented Country more, as it revisits some of the same settings and people as the novel but with a personal (and non-fantastical) perspective.

Beautifully written, character-rich exploration of life and love and death. Only four stars because it was too short! (Note: It's hard to believe that Wilder was only 26 years old when he wrote this.)

After some dense and somewhat heavy books Esperanza Rising, a well-received children's book about migrant workers, was a much quicker and lighter read that also tackled some difficult issues. The title character (based on the author's grandmother) is a young girl displaced from Mexico to California during the Depression, and having to adjust to the loss of wealth and family. This is a thoughtful, beautifully observed book for young readers that will help them understand some of the difficulties faced by immigrants.

I read this to accompany one of my English language students and also as a follow-up to Prairie Fires, the biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder that places the reality of her life in fascinating juxtaposition with the way it was transformed in her fiction. I highly recommend the combination.

Originally reviewed at www.emeraldcitybookreview.com

In Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather departed from the prairie narratives for which she is most well known to write a historical novel about late seventeenth century Quebec. Her central characters are a French apothecary who longs to return home, but is bound by love of his patron, Count Frontenac; and the apothecary's young daughter Cecile, who feels deeply connected to the new country of Canada. Around them come and go a wonderful array of characters, from Frontenac himself, to the two very different bishops who rule the spiritual life of the Catholic province, to an intrepid young trapper, to a prostitute's child that Cecile has befriended.

At the risk of gushing, I'll say that I simply loved everything about this book. I loved the descriptions of the city, and the details of an apothecary's life and work in this long-ago time. I loved Cecile and her father and sympathized with their dilemma of whether to stay in the new country or return to the old. I loved the glimpses into other characters' lives, whether in cloister or trapper's hut or castle. I savored every moment spent with them and was sorry to leave them at the end.

Don't go into Shadows on the Rock expecting anything in the way of an exciting plot. The novel generally follows the course of a year in the city, starting from the significant time in late autumn when the last ships leave for France and the colonists are left on their own for the winter. It meanders from one character and incident to another, in a series of vignettes that together build a rich portrait of a place and time. Another book by Cather that I also read recently, her final novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl, followed a similar pattern but with sometimes awkward or clumsy results (perhaps due to the author's health problems in later life that made it difficult for her to write). In Shadows on the Rock, on the other hand, I felt that Cather was absolutely in control of her material, creating a integrated if impressionistic work of art in which no word is wasted or out of place. Passage after passage moved me with its beautiful language that lifted the novel into the realm of poetry:

She put the sled-rope underneath her arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbors' houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one's own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.

I was reminded of a book I also love, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which also deals with a Catholic settlement in the New World (Spanish colonists in Peru), and has an equally luminous writing style. It's ironic that Wilder's book was a highly-acclaimed blockbuster, while Cather's received tepid reviews, although it still sold well. In the four years between their publication dates (1927 and 1931) the Great Depression had hit, and socially engaged fiction was the fashion, not quiet, undramatic novels about backwaters of history. From a vantage point of years, though, Cather seems to me to be one of our most understatedly brilliant writers, and Shadows on the Rock one of her most masterful works.

This is also a frontier story, and gives insight into a part of our North American history that is worth knowing about. I'm eager now to visit Quebec City, that “rock” in the St. Lawrence river that became the foundation stone of a nation, and learn more about its fascinating blend of the old world and the new. After reading Cather's magnificent novel, I feel that I have already been there in spirit.

See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Though McKillip's early novel has become a classic of fairy-tale-flavored fiction, a favorite genre of mine, I've somehow managed not to read it until now. I'm so glad I finally did, thanks to a new, beautifully designed paperback and e-book edition from Tachyon books. This is a lyrical, thoughtful exploration of love and power, pride and forgiveness and freedom, rich with evocative imagery and resonant language. I've already read it twice in a row, and I'm sure I'll be returning to it again.