Sequels

Tinsel and ChooChoo are in heaven now but they have a sequel bunny named Luna. Look how cute she is. Her feet are black like otters and her butt is tiny. In fact, I managed to accidentally read four sequels in near succession and I have already assured you that I will review them, from least to most essential to the good of man or their respective original. Some sequels are so useless that no one on Earth has ever read them, like Cosette and that sequel to Gone with the Wind. Some sequels degrade the original and one blanches to remember how one enjoyed the first, and should-have-been-only installment, like Clerks 2, My Girl 2, or Disney movie sequels. And some sequels are so much better than the original that Wishing for Tomorrow has knocked my socks off so hard I've imposed my veneration of Hilary McKay on oodles of other people, and I've gone back and cared about The Little Princess more than when I first read it. None of the sequels I've recently pursued were too detrimental or essential to the original, but they were all acceptable and made their authors' stories a little bit longer. Herewith:

King Dork Approximately. Not sure why this is a thing, but it's out there. I ordered it from the library right after I read King Dork in January before KDA was out, and then I got that e-mail saying I had a book reserved for me and there it was waiting on the shelf because those are our tax dollars that got my inter-library transfer for me. At the end of King Dork, everything was wrapped up neatly: mystery solved, villain vanquished, father redeemed, hero blow-jobbed. You can't unwrap a conclusion like that, so Frank Portman has followed it up by cramming half a new plot into a slightly longer book. Our hero is sent to another high school. That's pretty much it. No intrigue, no dead bodies, no secret codes. The hook is that he loses his virginity but that doesn't happen until the very end. It's still a good book, but Portman used up all his A material the first time round and this is just a lot of riffing, and Little Big Tom.

Smek for President. The end of The True Meaning of Smekday was all wrapped up in a neat little package and it's out now in movie form as Home. (Vaguest movie title ever.) No reason at all for Adam Rex to write an addendum novel, but he did and it's one long, zany bit of action-packed Boovery. Tip and J-Lo fly to New Boov World to appeal for clemency from Captain Smek and quickly find out that the Boovs' sojourn on Earth made them hip to Jeffersonian democracy and Supreme Boov is now an electable position. Dan Landry, the showboater who took all Tip's credit for saving Earth in the first book, jumps into the race and meanwhile J-Lo is discovered as the squealer who brought the Gorg to Earth and he's thrown in jail, so it's up to Tip to rescue him and she's on the run through a system of garbage tunnels where she meets a lonely Boov called Fun Size and there's a billboard named Bill who makes bubbles and wackiness ensues. This book is all madcappery, even more madcap than The True Meaning of Smekday. And it all works out. A million double-plus bonus points to the voice actress on the audiobook.

1493. It's the sequel to 1491 and it isn't. 1493 combines history with dire warning about the future and the successful popular historian's confidence that he can write about whatever he wants, which is mainly the globality of food resources exported from the Americas after 1492. Potatoes and malaria reshaped the world in ways we touch every day and our rubber crop is extremely vulnerable. Also, Africans outnumbered Europeans in the Americas for centuries and the Chinese gold trade with South American Spaniards jump-started global trade, plus easily preventable environmental disasters.

Lulu and the Hamster in the Night. The most important sequel is Lulu because she has her own series, and while 1493 contains vital information and almost achieved top spot for the most essential sequel, Hilary McKay beat Charles Mann by invoking proper hamster care in fun form. Because Lulu's stupid classmate can't handle her hamster so she threatens to abandon him. Lulu grabs the hamster and socializes him but at a critical juncture in his friendliness training, her Nan's birthday arrives and she and Mellie need to sleep over at Nan's for her birthday weekend. Can she sneak the hamster into Nan's house? Hamsters are social, curious, nocturnal fuzzies and Lulu and the Hamster in the Night emphasizes the nocturnal when the hamster escapes and goes on a hamster-blast adventure fun and Lulu and Mellie need to rescue him without waking Nan. Luna's full name is Luna Lulu Lovegood aLLgeyer after the Lulu books.

One Out of Three

 Three books, three worlds. One was everything, two could have been so much more. One for children, two about children. One wild, two domestic. One stunning, two lame. Two old, one new: 2015 new. I had an ARC of The Honest Truth by Dan Geimenhart and it isn't good. I was excited because The Honest Truth is an outdoorsy novel; but the trouble with a kid alone in the wilderness is that things rarely happen when one is alone in the wilderness. Dan Gemeinhart circumvents this problem by spending 175 pages of the 229-page book getting Mark onto Mount Rainier, and only a few pages on mountaineering fail before Mark succumbs to exhaustion and hypothermia and nearly dies, which is what he came to Rainier to do (spoiler: he's rescued). Mark has cancer, and Mr. Geimenhart tries to build suspense... with cancer. Teasing your audience with glimpses of hospital rooms and bald children is creepy. It's also easy to quickly figure out that the author is hinting at cancer, so by the time the big reveal happens, everyone has understood for a while and they're really uncomfortable about it. But fortunately for Mark, he has a best friend called Jessica, who turns up in flashbacks and half-chapters of third-person inner-turmoil because she knows Mark probably ran away to die on Mount Rainier and she can't decide whether to let Mark die peacefully in a snowstorm or abet the kidhunt that started several hours after he bolted. The trouble with Jessica is that their relationship is too didactic, too forced. She's a girl!, she's brown!, they're best friends!; Gemeinhart can't show, he needs to tell you! that white boys and brown girls can be best friends. (The white boy is the main character.) Every encounter Mark has: the waitress, the thugs, the tortilla makers, the bus driver, and especially the Forest Service biologist who gives Mark a ride up the mountain, is suffused with overbearing life lessons. And Mark brings his dog along: he plans for Beau to find his way down the mountain with a goodbye note clipped to his collar. But Mark doesn't bring any dog food! You'd think that in the weeks he's been planning his escape, and the day of, when he throws some granola bars and and dog treats in his backpack, that he might have thrown some dog food in a baggie; that his dog might want to eat while they're climbing a mountain, but no. There are so many little things in this book that strain credibility. So many bizarre actions and big, throbbing omissions, along with the stilted dialogue and sloppy plot. I'm sorry.

Further along in disappointing books that sucked was The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard. If you ever need rigid Protestants, humorless New Englanders, Puritans, dreary, stone-faced people who trudge through a grim half-life before taking up another space in the family plot where the past generations of people who bear their names rest at the mercy of an implacable God. Cassandra and her emo sister Veronica, she of the unlikely dialogue, were intentionally spared the fate of bearing names already carved on tombstones, but beyond that their lives are set to resemble every joyless moment of their forebearers.' The Morgesons' reviewers emphasize that women of the 1860s were groomed to be married off as soon as possible and that is why this book is revolutionary, but I didn't see it in the Morgeson household: Cassandra and Veronica are beyond their father's control, expected to do nothing but live as monotonously as possible in the unbearable silence of their parents' home. Veronica stays indoors and says things like, "Why, morning and night are wonderful from these windows. But I must say the charm vanishes if I go from them. Surrey is not lovely." but Cassandra's willingness to leave her parents' house for moderate periods of time results in three long visits to friends and relatives that punctuate The Morgesons' long, domestic non-drama. When Cassandra is thirteen, she is sent to live with her grandfather for a year. He is a dour man who doesn't believe in things like novels and walking, and Cassandra spends her year entombed, except when she attends school where all the girls hate her. Cassandra returns home, uneducated, until, at seventeen, she is invited to visit the family's cousin, so distant that they have been unacquainted with him up to this point, Charles Morgeson. Cassandra is now, somehow, an unremarkably ravishing beauty and she is popular in Charles' village and makes friends for once, becoming particularly intimate with Charles' damp sponge of a wife Alice. Charles goes all Edward Cullen, and Cassandra guesses Charles is watching her sleep when she finds cigarette butts on the floor of her chamber and is somehow okay with this. Charles has a penchant for breaking unbreakable horses and, at the apogee of their unrequited, adulterous love, he invites Cassandra for a ride on the fiercest horse in his stable, who has a thing about carriage covers. It begins to rain. Naturally, Charles assures Cassandra that his horse is broken and no longer afeared of carriage covers; Cassandra must be protected from the rain!, he puts the cover up, the horse spooks, runs into a wall, and Charles dies. Cassandra awkwardly leaves her grieving widow friend Alice, who looks to be on the verge of growing a pair, and returns to the silent torpor of her family's home. Eventually, she goes to visit her school friend Ben, who is inexplicably in love with Veronica, and she meets some cool women but nothing happens and Ben's mother hates her, so she returns home to find her own mother dead in her rocking chair and then everyone grows up and becomes slightly more self-sufficient but still ignorant and languid. I kept waiting for this book to get better and it didn't. So many morally bankrupt people I felt a little dirty at the end of it for reading all this terrible, unctuous dialogue and non-sequiturs. ("I look for a reason in every action. Tell me fairly, have you had a contempt for me—for my want of perception? I understand you now, to the bone and marrow, I assure you.") The Morgesons is a bit of a feminist tale for it's time specifically because it stars a young woman who takes a damn long time to get married, but that's no reason anyone should read it.

Which brings us to Thursday's Children which should be read as part of our greater Rumer Godden revival. I dug it out of the misc. female authors pile by the desk when I was looking for something exquisitely beautiful to read a few weeks ago. The only other adult book I've read of Ms. Godden's was The Lady and the Unicorn, which turns out to be her first and worst book, but Holly and Ivy is one of the best Christmas orphan stories of all time (Christmas orphans!) and the Japanese doll books are incredible. Thursday's Children is certainly a book for grown-ups with grown-up comments and asides, but it is about children, which makes me wonder why anyone bothers with adult fiction when it's about children half the time anyway. It's structured in an interesting way: the only other place I've seen this is The Secret Garden, where one character arc spans half the book until its resolution when another character picks up the plot torch and runs another hundred pages to the end. (Thursday's Children is without the last Hail-Mary-redemption-of-the-hunchback-father-pass that rounds out Secret Garden). Concerning the Penny family, they're a greengrocer and wife in North London sometime back when the people were simple but middle class affluence was creeping in. Mrs. Penny desperately wants a daughter whom she can groom to be a famous dancer. Four sons later, she finally gets her, Crystal, who is absolutely beautiful and everything her mother ever wanted and, while she's busy turning Crystal into Honey Boo Boo, she becomes accidentally pregnant with something she has no interest at all in and he ends up named Doone, as the parents were going to call him Lorna had he been a girl. Nobody wants Doone or bothers about him much except Beppo, the Italian tumbler who lives in the shed. Besides Beppo, with his early admonitions to keep limber and practice every day, Doone is a parasite on the side of whoever's stuck minding him, like Crystal who makes him carry her shoes when she goes to dance lessons at Madame Tamara's, where Doone is first enchanted by the ballet. Mrs. Penny is aggressive about Crystal's supposed prodigy and Doone tags along until he's accidentally noticed, and from then on Mrs. Penny makes them a package deal. Everyone hides this from Mr. Penny, who, when he does find out, can say that ballerinos are queers and he'll have none of it because this is a book for grown-ups. Doone is bereft, but his life is one of exclusion and hard knocks so any one setback isn't as shattering as a combination of all the other setbacks together. His arc continues back to ballet class and up to the school of the Royal Ballet where he's finally found his place, and Crystal's story takes over. She's bound and determined to do something but she's also a moody adolescent whose passion isn't really ballet even though she's almost as talented as Doone and she's been raised to think she's the best. She's a bit spoiled and she's also in love with Yuri the special guest teacher at the Royal Ballet. And Crystal is great. Doone remains a child to the end of the book, (he's still eleven or so) but Crystal manages to turn Thursday's Children into an awkward, early adolescent bildungsroman and it's perfect.

Next up: Sequels!

As Promised, Girl Books

 My favorite gruff dad customer was looking for audiobook recommendations for his teenager daughter.

Gruff dad: "Anything good?"

Me: "Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire!"

Gruff dad: "Where is it?"

Me: "The library."

I suck at retail. I ended up selling him The Midnight Dress because I had it marked down to a dollar. It was too formulaic for me to get through, even with an Australian accent, but one dollar. Egg and Spoon is great though! I never read Wicked, although I might now, because Egg and Spoon is utterly brilliant until it splutters out at the end but we'll just ignore that bit and focus on its reveling in Russian fairy tales and the cross narratives of a peasant and a high-born girl who accidentally switch places when Katya's private train stops in Elena's starving village. One senses a Prince and the Pauper coming on until Elena's guardians immediately realize that they have the wrong girl. Elena's village is starving, her mother is dying, and her brother is recently conscripted, so Katya starts walking with every sensible expectation that she'll meet the train coming back for her, but Elena manages to conceal her identity long enough that the butler and governess are better off abetting her than revealing their sins to her short-sighted great aunt. Then there's Baba Yaga. And the tsar. Everything about Egg and Spoon is so delicious, so fantastical, and so magically realistic. It doesn't smell Russian, but that's a lot to ask for in a novel. It's Russian enough. Bleeding good. How it compares to Binny for Short is an open question because they're two completely different books, though they (and The War that Saved My Life) all three are age-appropriate early adolescent girl books in a genre of fantastic scope. And they're all three bloody marvelous. I can't believe it took me this long to read Binny for Short. I got it on the drop date, started it, set it down to savor, and waited over a year. The thing that really sparked my reading it is that the sequel's coming out this summer. Binny isn't Hilary McKay's strongest novel, but that's like saying that North America isn't God's strongest continent. It's amazing. McKay really rocks her minimalist approach to language here which is grand, but I do love it when she's effusive. The plot is that Binny's father died insolvent, and Binny had to give up her dog and is still grieving it, but then her terrible old great aunt who was instrumental in getting rid of the dog dies and leaves Binny her crumbling English seaside semi-detached house. Let's pause here to appreciate Hilary McKay's appreciation of the seaside, as other British authors, despite never being more than two hours from the sea, tend to forget they're on a big island. So Binny is a local in this seaside holiday town and the whole book is intercut with scenes from a harrowing afternoon trying to pull a fishing net off some rocks with her best enemy from next door. Of course, seventy-six years ago, British problems weren't limited to seaside proximity and dog grieving. Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is amazing and she does World War II again, in England here. The War That Saved My Life has so much happening and it all ties so together into this compelling bundle of hope and triumph for one little girl that the best praise I can give it is to thoroughly retell the story: Ada is a club-footed ten-year-old who has never left the one room flat she lives in with her horrible mother and her six-year-old brother Jaimie. The story begins around the time Ada teaches herself to walk: she's been scooting around on her bottom her whole life. When he was a baby, Ada took care of Jamie, but now he's a kid out running around and she's alone all day. Ada went outside once, but her mother found out and beat her. So Ada teaches herself to walk all summer and Jamie hears that there's going to be a war on. All the children will be evacuated, but mum, useless slut, won't let Ada and Jamie go. Ada decides to evacuate without permission, and she and Jamie take the grueling slow walked on a club foot to the train station. Ada's never been out: she's never gone this far, never seen trees or toilets. At the small town train station where they disembark, the evacuees are parceled out to willing families and Ada and Jamie, filthy and smelly, are chosen by no one, but the posh lady who's in charge of the evacuation committee takes them in her car (first time) to the house of someone. The evacuation of the children of London, like the orphan train and other institutional child distribution schemes of the near past, depended on children being randomly handed out to anyone willing to take them and the results were thoroughly mixed. Ada and Jamie are brought to the home of Susan Smith, a depressed woman. Becky, who lived with her, died last fall and Susan hasn't done anything since then except sit in a chair and stare at her hands. It's never clear whether Susan and Becky had a Boston marriage or were just super BFFs, but they were at Cambridge together and Susan's grieving and wants no filthy children a bossy rich lady is forcing on her. As the the bossy woman drives away, Susan sighs and looks the children over and takes them upstairs for their first full bath. Ada would resist, but there's a pony in the yard. A pony! She saw a girl ride a pony once and she knows she can ride this one. The tragedy of the children's deprivation is mind-boggling as Susan takes them through the concept of sheets and underwear, to the doctor who can't understand why Ada doesn't have crutches, to illiteracy, to fruit, to "Ada's not allowed outside." She is now, but it takes a while to manage her fear. There's a lot of Ada and Jamie cowering while Susan screams, "I'm not going to hit you! I'm angry, but I'm not going to hit you!" The horse is named Butter and Ada can ride it as much as she likes. She meets the posh lady's daughter, and her stable manager, who teaches Ada proper horse things. Lots of London evacuees go back; their families miss them and their host families make sure they know they're second class children. Then the war gets real. An airfield goes up next door and Jamie knows the pilots and the planes. London's going to be bombed, then it is bombed, the bombs keep coming. German planes crash in the fields. So do British ones. The men go away and Ada helps some afternoons on her crutches at the stable. She's still a nightmare kid. There are no easy, middle class reformations here. Ada spends Christmas Eve screaming until Susan wraps her in a blanket and sits on her because it seems to soothe. Susan's trying to get hold of Ada's mum the whole time, because with her permission, Ada could have an operation on her club foot, but when Ada and Jamie's mother turns up, things get worse. I simply cannot recommend this book highly enough. For all the pain that KBB can bring to a middle grade novel, she makes it work, and it's worth it. But back to a kinder, gentler Britain and a kinder, gentler world, the kind where someone, probably Missie, left Magic Bunny: Chocolate Wishes by Sue Bentley on my hold shelf and I read it while I had the flu because it wasn't as heavy as my other books. Magic Bunny: Chocolate Wishes is a companion to the Magic Puppy, Magic Kitten, and Magic Pony books and turned out to be the third in the Magic Bunny series. Normally, I wouldn't read the third book in a series first off, but I feel confident that I was able to piece together the happenings in Moonglow Meadow from the introduction. Dark rabbits live in the uninhabitable waste next to MM, and they want to overrun MM and steal it from the white rabbits. This all sounds terribly racist, but black rabbits would be even worse. Presumably, we can't just call them evil rabbits, because, at the end of the series, all the rabbits, dark and white, will reconcile and make friends. But, for now, the dark rabbits, want to take over Moonglow Meadow by stealing the white rabbits' magic key. So, naturally, Arrow the magic rabbit with a key around his neck teleports to England where he meets a girl named Dawn who just had her first sad and lonely day at a new school. Like Binny, Dawn had a dog she loved but her parents were hit by the recession and had to move to an apartment complex that banned pets. The dog lives with her aunt now, so that's okay, but Arrow convinces Dawn to sneak him into the apartment and protect him from the dark rabbits. Because that's where a magic bunny with a magic key is safest: in an eight-year-old's bedroom. It's Easter week, and Chocolate Wishes might refer to the one time that Dawn eats a candy egg, but that's never clear. Dawn does some stupid stuff, like sneaking Arrow to her aunt's and into school. Dawn's new desk is next to a girl named Emma who loves awkward practical jokes that make people uncomfortable, and Dawn and Emma's burgeoning friendship is a thing once Emma finds out that Dawn hasn't a secret bunny. Emma has a rabbit, Blackberry, who is well cared for but lives in a shed. As a rabbit alarmist, I didn't like Dawn's keeping Arrow a secret from her parents. Kids could try that, and if the rabbit wasn't discovered immediately, which is likely, things could end extremely badly for the rabbit. Really, rabbits aren't great pets for kids and they hate being held, although reading Magic Bunny would lead you to assume the opposite. Someone in the online rabbit community was just telling the story of a kid who pulled off a rabbit's tail because the rabbit was trying to get away and the kid didn't want it to. Imagine the panic you would need to be in to run away and leave your arm behind: that's where this rabbit was. Magic Bunny does nothing for proper rabbit care, but, as a bland early chapter book it was thoroughly adequate. And, finally, I re-read The Ordinary Princess while I had the flu too, and it was great and wonderful and when I was seven I loved it and I still do.

Next up: Some good and not so good things.

Masculinities

 Masculinity and masculinities are a complex topic weaving cultural expectations and perceived modes of behavior by those who have male bodies with questions of presentation and gender norms versus those in human and societal behavior and what better way to approach the study of masculinity than by discussing King Dork by Frank Portman in the framework of multiple masculinities, because a single, culturally codified descriptor of masculinity isn't working out so well for Tom Henderson, who's a Holden Caulfield-esque anti-hero from the '80s in this bildungsroman that inexplicably tries to date itself to 2000 in the end for reasons that might have to do with publishability, but ignore that, it's from the '80s, back when a kid could wear a trench coat, carry around Soldier of Fortune, and talk about guns all the time and nobody would bat an eyelash. Tom echoes Holden's whines about the power structure and phoniness, with the caveat that Tom also whines about Holden because in his world, Catcher in the Rye is perpetually assigned by sensitive English teacher whom Catcher inspired to be teachers of high school English. Tom, thankfully, doesn't talk too much like Holden or the whole book would be a tedious imitation of a stunning original, and King Dork is also more plot-heavy than Catcher, by which I mean that it has a plot, because Tom finds his dead dad's copy of Catcher in a box, and it's marked up with code, and he's also in a band, solving the mystery of his dad's death, receiving inexplicable blow jobs, and being physically attacked by bullies on a weekly basis. When I was at high school, people didn't fellate other people at random, or maybe they did and I didn't know about it; either male/author fantasy takes over the book, or where being in a band WORKS. On the other point, about frequently sustaining sustained physical attacks, I must refer to our next book, Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School by C.J. Pascoe. This is one of the ones Curt was getting rid of it and one of the tiny number of books Curt owns that aren't about Britain, British country houses, architecture, British architecture, other country houses, other regional architecture, art, jewelry, biographies of British royals, biographies of British commoners, books by Curt's sister, books by my mom, and books on historic retail emporiums, the impetus of which is Curt's professional need to respond to Mr. Selfridge on PBS. Curt tried to put Dude, You're a Fag in the laundry room but I snagged it and I'm glad I did. Written in 2007, the only positive about more modern masculinity in high school is that sustained physical attacks are no longer common. Kids are more likely to throw things, or punch once; popular kids can't drag the gender non-normative or otherwise lower ranking into the bathroom and kick the shit out of them anymore. Progress! Excepting that, presentations of masculinity in high school are deeply alarming and tightly controlled. "Dude, you're a fag," and similar comments are repeated endlessly in Ms. Pascoe's impressive year of field research at a California high school. Masculinity is strictly policed by all participants in these social rituals as a set of sexualized dominant behaviors that must be maintained. Every misstep or especially gender deviation is "gay" or "you're a fag." Boys wrestle girls 'til they shriek, harass everyone and Ms. Pascoe, and engage in highly ritualized sexual banter. Ms. Pascoe records one conversation where a boy asks her if she's ever had her "walls ripped," an act these boys often boast of which is also physically impossible. Ms. Pascoe deflects the question and asks the boy how it makes him feel when he's done that, to which he becomes somewhat remorseful for something he can't possibly have done. Boys encourage each other to regard the feminine with comic aberrance. The positioning of male dominance and heteronormativity are reinforced by the teachers and administration through casual statements and ritualized public events like the Mr. Cougar Competition and homecoming. Ms. Pascoe takes time to discuss the out lesbian who was elected homecoming queen based on popularity and force of personality, as well as the "basketball girls" a loud group of hip-hop identified ninth graders who avoid the traditionally feminine appearance and second-tier status of most of the girls in this school by sheer energy and apathy, by which I mean that all they do is run around yell. Ms. Pascoe also gives time to the more self-aware gender-aware girls in the Gay-Straight Alliance, whose overt political stance, in contrast to the homecoming winner and the basketball girls, earns them censure by the administration for stepping outside of gender norms.

Of course, young men who are presented with a single idiom of highly sexualized masculinity grow up, and hopefully learn that man cannot live on a single idiom of highly sexualized masculinity alone. StrengthsBasedLeadership by Tom Rathman subverts the notion of a single leadership model in a thoroughly limp-wristed yet effective way. Basically, the point of SBL is that you are not Abraham Lincoln. Nor are you Sun Tzu, Geronimo, Lee Iacoca, or any other great man of history/business about whom you have read a book encouraging you to emulate. You are you, and you should not try to be Abraham Lincoln, but you should acknowledge your own strengths and build a team of others with a diversity of strengths, which is what Abraham Lincoln did, but you're still not Abraham Lincoln. That's the main point, but how to fill the other two hundred pages? Actually, the salient point of the Strengths franchise is not the book but the internet personality quiz at the end of the book. The book itself is just padding. Nicole wouldn't let me buy one of my other textbooks because she said it was too dumb to own and she tried to prevent me from purchasing SBL,but I explained that I needed to deflower the book of its unique internet quiz access code and must therefore own it. The test itself is meh. It presents you with paired statements like, "I like to give thoughtful gifts./ I buy everyone soap and gift cards," and you choose which statement reflects you and how strongly you agree with each statement. But then you have statements like, "I am thrifty./ I am generous." Whaaat? I'm obnoxiously thrifty but I give people my damn blood. Those are not contradictory. "I love my family./ I like to learn new things." Eh? "I am outgoing./ I eat puppies." Help. My strengths are Input, Intuition, Adaptability, Strategic, and, and Learner. The first thing you'll notice about my strengths is that only some of them are adjectives, which reflects SBL's reading level. The explanation for my strength of Intuition defined "assuage" and "glean" for me. Those aren't big words. I hope I'm not too smart to earn an MBA because I would like to earn more than these low assuages I earn in the retail sector. What? The paragraphs in SBL had gaps between them. Books for first graders don't leave gaps between the paragraphs. But it does make SBL look proper book length, when the reading bit is a paltry 100 pages that's mostly the biographies of four questionable executives who were willing to talk to the authors. Secondly, my strengths mean I'm bookish. That's the personality quiz equivalent of telling me that I have brown hair. The best part of the book are the paragraphs explaining how to leverage your strengths and that I am a palm tree; basically, people will come to me for information because I gather it. So, strengths found, expectations of a single masculinity destroyed, we continue on our journey to that ultimate beacon of healthy masculinity, His Grace, His Excellency, The Duke of Ankh; His Excellency Sir Samuel Vimes. This is another Discworld book, from later in the series than where I think I am, although it directly precedes Monstrous Regiment. Pratchett is fantastic, a bit over 400 pages but no senseless riffing, just a lot of long, thoughtful, persuasive passages about the nature of justice. And it works. Samuel Vimes is catapulted back in time thirty years from the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the 25th of May in a major temporal shattering, along with a serial killer. Picked up after curfew, Vimes is jailed for the night and convinces the Night Watch commander that he is John Keel, the newly arrived policeman from Pseudopolis who taught young Sam Vimes character and is now dead because of the serial killer. Young Sam is what Sir Samuel doesn't remember of a wet behind the ears little twerp who joined up for the pay and the meals and he idolizes John Keel. Vimes must play Keel's part through the days of spring when Ankh-Morpork rises up to throw off the shackles of a mad patrician and a secret police that's now hired the serial killer. The important thing, though, is that honor and justice make better men of us all.

Next up: Girl books.

Merry Days of Childhood and Others

 

My poor sad readers. My sympathies to all of you and the loss that you must have felt, because I read Abbie Farwell Brown's The Christmas Angel and forgot to review it in my last blog. How did none of you clamor to ask me my thoughts and opinions on this middling tale of holiday orphans? Maybe you knew already. Maybe you already read The Christmas Angel and you sadly shake your head and wonder what kind of a derisive, vulgar old maid I will turn out to be every time I utter a "fiddlesticks." That's Miss Terry's swear word. 

 Miss Terry is spending Christmas evening sorting through a box of the quaint old toys that she and her brother used to play with when they were children, and when I say sorting, I mean burning them in the fireplace. Burning her childhood memories becomes tedious and Miss Terry devises an experiment: She will put each toy on the sidewalk and watch what happens to it. She appears to be in New York circa 1910 so there's ample foot traffic: "... a good many people passing, but they seemed too preoccupied to glance down at the sidewalk. They were nearly all hurrying in one direction. Some were running in the middle of the street. 'They are in a great hurry,' sniffed Miss Terry disdainfully. 'One would think they had something really important on hand. I suppose they are going to hear the singing. Fiddlestick!'"

Miss Terry is, of course, hiding behind the curtains waiting for someone to notice her Jack-in-the-box. Finally, two Jewish boys pick it up and beginning brawling for the owning of it. Miss Terry, thoroughly disgusted with humanity, sets out a manky Noah's ark. It's soon spotted by a poor mother with two ragged children they make to grab it, but a rich woman in a fur coat swoops it up and won't let the poor family have it. A Canton flannel dog, the Flanton dog, is seized by a child who is so excited he runs into the road and gets hit by a car, and Miss Terry's old doll is picked up by a little girl who perceives it's accidentally been left on the doorstep by its owner and that she, the little girl is stealing it. She steals it anyway. Miss Terry, her suspicions confirmed, makes to burn the Christmas angel that used to sit atop the Christmas tree when she and Tom were little. She and Tom don't talk anymore because he was a Christmas jerk once upon a time but he wrote her a letter last week... She sets the angel on the mantelpiece and everything goes wuzzy. In a Dickensian way, the Christmas angel speaks to her and shows her what has happened to all her toys. The Jewish boys fought over Jack because they both wanted the honor of presenting it to a little invalid child; the rich woman's child died recently and she had a temporary fit of hating all surviving children but repented and gave the poor family a Christmas dinner; the car accident had the double effect of humanizing the driver and helping the poor child and his mother financially; and the little girl wrestled with her conscience and decided to bring her found doll back to its own little girl, Miss Angelina Terry, as the tag on its neck said, the very next day. Her parents were dead, you see, so she had nothing nice of her own and wanted a doll so badly, although this wasn't hers to keep.

"'Will she bring it back?' asked Miss Terry eagerly, when once more she found herself under the gaze of the Christmas Angel. He nodded brightly.

'To-morrow morning you will see," he said. "It will prove that all I have shown you is really true.'"

In anticipation, Miss Terry orders a fine Christmas dinner, reconciles with Tom, adopts the girl, and never says "fiddlestick" again. There's nothing like a sweet Christmas story with orphans as presents. Reading stories like this, you can see where the modern "orphan crisis" myth has its origins. Pity, by 1910 advances in public health, a consistent policy of keeping bastard babies with their mothers, and rising wages already had cut the number of darling orphans wandering the streets, although Charles Loring Brace's orphan train continued running 'til 1929 in the last decades he was mostly shipping babies. Aside from fantastical elements, A Christmas Angel is sweet and could be read at Christmas next year.

On another topic entirely, 1916 and All That isn't entirely all that. "A history from back then until right now," by C.M. Boylan, it fits right on the bookshelf between other tomes of historical parody like 1066 and All That and America: The Book, but 1916 isn't all that funny, not even the parts about the potato famine.

Two books that also aren't worth mentioning at great length are The Story of My Childhood by Clara Barton and Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days by Annie L. Burton. I listened to these both on Librivox while I was doing Christmas iStore. Ms. Barton wrote her memoirs of childhood as an elderly woman after schoolchildren wrote to her persistently asking her about her younger days. Mrs. Burton wrote her memoirs while attending a night school in Boston. Ms. Barton's stories are all about growing up as the oops child of a prosperous New England farm family and being taught everything by four siblings who were already teenage schoolteachers. Mrs. Burton had worse origins, obviously. She still had time to roughhouse in the woods and poke at interesting things with sticks, but she didn't have any food. All the slaves left the plantation during the Civil War, including Mrs. Burton's mother, who went to set up a better life for her children, and Mrs. Burton and her siblings remained in the big house for a year until her mother came back for them. Ms. Barton attended the Civil War and says she would rather face the cannons at Antietam again than speak at public meeting. Mrs. Burton tells about the first night in her mother's cabin with a small hoe cake to divide between mother, a brother and a sister, and some other children, when a white woman and her children knocked cautiously at the door and asked if they could stay the night, because they are displaced by the war. Mother shares the hoe cake and young Annie is happy when they go so she won't have to share her food again. Meanwhile, Clara Barton's friend's horse runs away. Mrs. Burton grows up and moves north, works a series of jobs, and opens a couple restaurants. There's not a lot of childhood or slavery here and the books falls to a litany of employers. Ms. Barton's keeps the anecdotes coming. Being forbidden to ice skate, fever, crippling shyness. In the end, one of the leading lights of American phrenology stays at her parents' house while he's on the New England lecture circuit and he tells Mrs. Baron, "Clara will never stick up for herself, but she'll stick up for other people. Get her a school." So Ms. Barton is quickly trained up as a school teacher and rousingly successful at it. Founding the Red Cross isn't mentioned at all. Both books are worth the two hours it takes to listen to each of them.

I'm still floundering about in the beginning of Discworld and I finally got to Interesting Times which is fabbity fab fab fab. It's one of the ones with the wizards and I haven't gotten into those so much. It's the sequel to Sourcery, which I haven't read. In this one, Rincewind is requested on the Counterweight Continent (which bears a striking resemblance to Asia) and becomes unwillingly embroiled in a Red revolution. The title comes from a local curse, "May you live in interesting times."

Next up: matriculating men and multiple meanings of masculinity.

I'm Behind Quick Review Round-Up

 Being a bit behind, I will go quickly:

The Slow Regard of Silent Things is so carefully written, so sparse and brutal and bare. It is beautiful. The Slow Regard of Silent Things will not make any sense if you haven't read the King Killer trilogy, which you should do immediately. A spare novella of Auri with hints but no stories, back or otherwise, only Auri and the Underthing.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden by Gertrude Holbrook Gerzina: It is important to put The Secret Garden in the title of every FHB biography (like Beyond the Secret Garden by Anne Thwaite), otherwise, nobody will know whom you're talking about. I can't help comparing the two because they were really damn similar but Beyond the Secret Garden has more zip. This FHB: TULotAofSG is perfectly fine, but goes over the same material with few new insights, except on her son Vivian's death and the extremely tentative good qualities that FHB's second husband may have had buried deep inside. On the other hand, Ms. Gerzina discusses A Lady of Quality without warning people not to read it and flies past most of the books in favor of Mrs. Burnett's social circumstances.

Aid and Other Dirty Business:An Insider Reveals How Good Intentions Have Failed the World's Poor deserves more attention than I will give it. The only appropriate amount of credit to give this is to read it, and that is mandatory. Giles Botton gives a distressing account of the troubles in Africa by presenting you, yes, you!, with your own African country for the duration of the book. Your country, Uzima, is blessed with natural resources and incoming tax revenues beyond the dreams of the president of, say, Uganda, but still squarely in the middle of sub-Saharan African economies. Your liabilities are massive, and you lack the most basic infrastructure. As well, you lack an educated workforce from which to hire more government functionaries to meet with all 90 or so governments and and NGOs who want to bestow aid upon you. Compounding that, many governments and NGOs only commit to project aid, rather than direct assistance. The USA only invests in project aid and spends a flipping 47% of aid money on consultants. Beyond that, our food aid resembles a combination of dumping agriculture surplus and propping up our wimpy shipping sector. Meanwhile, the US and Eurozone subsidize their own farm products to a point where no small farmer in the Ivory Coast can possibly break into the international market. Add unfunded Western promises and the new Chinese development with strings and then fix your country, Mr. President.

Missie will hate Miss Cayley's Adventures for the same reasons she hated Name of the Wind. Miss Cayley is too damn good at everything. But Name of the Wind was funny, there was real swashbucklement, the plot moved forward, it wasn't racist. Missie recommended Miss Cayley's Adventures to me based on this glowing Toast article: http://the-toast.net/2014/09/03/lois-cayley-adventuress/ and it is a whole hell of a lot better than most New Woman literature, but that's not saying much. Miss Cayley shoots one tiger, but mostly she relies on her extensive wits and serendipity to travel around the world. On the train to Germany, she foils a jewel thief. The old lady with the jewels provide Miss Cayley's start-up capital and Miss Cayley is fallen in love with by the lady's rich nephew Harold. Miss Cayley wants to be not an adventuress but an adventuress so she refuses Harold's hand and continues her travels by winning a bicycle race and becoming a commissioned sales agent of a piston-action bicycle company. After foiling another plot by the jewel thief brigand, she and her friend set up a typing shop in Milan. Bicycles and typewriters are both extremely modern inventions to be embraced by the New Woman. In Egypt, she rescues a white woman from non-white people, and in India she meets a young potentate with the manners of a European and the soul of a dusky savage. With trouble brewing between Harold and the villain who's dogging her, Miss Cayley heads to Vancouver on a steamer, crosses Canada by express train, and disembarks at Quebec in time to take the speedboat back to London, thus ignoring North America in her round the world adventure, and foiling the villain once and for all in a clever courtroom maneuver. Miss Cayley's Adventures is not at all a bad book but it's not a good book either. It's "better than," if I may damn it with faint praise. Better than so many books of its era, but if you want overt, bad-ass, 1890s feminism, read The Shuttle. (And for globular circumnavigation Around the World in 80 Days is the obvious choice.)

For some reason, In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson always seemed daunting, nay, forbidden, to me as a child. It looked interesting, but it was on display at the library and the librarian and my mother would notice if I touched it, so I obviously couldn't. Nowadays, it's stuck in the corner of the audiochapterbook section of the library, where I found it when I needed an audiobook I could get through in three days before I went to Boston for Thanksgiving. ItYotBaJR has Themes. I rather felt like I was reading a mine of lesson plan ideas for a fourth grade combined English and Social Studies class. We've got immigration, race, friendship, inclusion, baseball, Chinese customs, honesty, integration, New York, and dreams. There were some funny situations and sticky situations and it all ends happily.

Then I read another Discworld book while taking a hiatus from something boring. Maskerade has the witches out of Lancre and into Ankh-Morpork where they solve an opera house mystery roughly based on what I assume is Phantom of the Opera, because I haven't read it. Perdita is in this one, which makes me want to go back and read all the Discworld books chronologically. Good stuff. Bloody hilarious, really.

Meanwhile, in my car, I was reading Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick, which won some stuff. Billed as a "Cloud Atlas for teens," Midwinterblood has nothing to do with teens except, possibly, its novella length. Eric and Merle are two souls reuniting seven times backwards in seven narratives, some beautiful. My problems were that a) the two stories at the end, taking place in 1000AD and before time begins (circa 800AD), were the weakest and the book ended on a drier note than it would have otherwise and b) Sedgwick takes the lazy historian's way out: Eric and Merle are reincarnated in 800AD and 1,000AD, their love then skips a millennium to rekindle five times in slightly over two centuries. Eh? Yes, any romances on the Isle of the Blessed between 1000 and 1848 probably would have been circumscribed by a lack of off-island transportation and a sheep-based economy, but try. Also, the audio was terrible. Julian Rhind-Tutt, the book actor, drops his voice at key moments so I was listening to a lot of, "The old man bent his head towards Eric and murmured, "I have something important to tell you. It will cut you to the very slow. Listen carefully: *inaudible whisperings*'" Me: Turns up volume on car stereo to 40, skips back forty seconds, goes deaf, gleans general gist of cryptic whispers, switches to MPR.

Lady Audley's Secret gets referenced quite often on certain internets so I was excited to read it and it's damn good. I assumed it would be more of a tale centered on Lady Audley, but it's mostly Robert Audley, Lord Audley's laconic nephew, trying to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his friend George Talboys. Lady Audley's Secret adds strong support to my theory that pre-World War I England only had 500 people in it, as if you needed more proof. George Talboys disembarks a ship from Australia and bumps into his old Eton chum Robert Audley twenty minutes after landing. Mr. Audley has probably bumped into nine or ten old Eton chums already that morning, but Talboys is in need of a beard trim so Mr. Audley takes George to his apartments in the Temple where they discover a newspaper announcement that Mrs. Talboys is dead. George grieves in Mr. Audley's apartments for a good year and a half (and an inexplicable winter in Saint Petersburg. Why would British people winter in Saint Petersburg?), until Lord Audley invites them to Audley Manor for the hunt. At Audley Manor, we begin to suspect that Mrs. Talboys is not, in fact, dead, but has married not any uncle in the world, but Robert Audley's uncle, who is probably the only uncle in England, by my tiny population estimates. George Talboys disappears that afternoon, and was last seen strolling the lime walk with Lady Audley/ne Lucy Graham/ne Mrs. Talboys/ne Miss Maldon. Robert Audley spends months traveling from Southampton to Northfordshire in a single day, popping home for a shave, to the further proof that England is much smaller than its citizens believe. Is George Talboys dead? in Australia? down a well eating rats? in California? even deader? Solid sensationalist literature full of scandal and bigamy.

Finally, I read/listened A Christmas When the West Was Young while I was doing iStore yesterday. A good example of the hagiographic literature dedicated to the early pioneers, two cheerily unnamed young archetypes struggle manfully (and womanfully) to establish their little farm on the prairie. A baby is born, but it dies, and the man (in a blizzard) stumbles upon an immigrant wagon torched by drunken Indians. Reminiscent of Fanny Kelly's, "Why are you trying to kill us? We just want to kill every single one of you" attitude, but so it was. The man brings the orphaned baby home on Christmas Day and it replaces the dead baby, probably. On Christmas!

Empire and Its Spoils

Define an empire by its destruction. How many people must die? Hundreds? Thousands? How many cities destroyed? How much culture lost? The Hagia Sophia rumbled into dust by the nip of a single flea, and... No. Hagia Sophia is still there, in mosque form. So is Constantinople. (Istanbul, not Constantinople.) This is the problem with Justinian's Flea by William Rosen. Mr. Rosen argues that the bubonic plague was a significant contributor to the downfall of Rome in late antiquity. Okay. That was one sentence. What about the other nine hours? (I listened to the audiobook.) We begin with Justinian leaving a hick town in the Balkans to join his uncle in Constantinople and, after a jump, and he's emperor. His wife Theodora ascends from theatrical prostitute to empress along an equally obscure path. There's loads of topics: the rise of Christianity, the Aryan heresy, the Hagia Sophia, Goths, and Justinian's Code, which is a founding pillar of modern law and the second best part of the book. But tying it all together in a relatively short book with a plague-based thesis doesn't work well. If I was already on cuddly terms with late antiquity, Justinian's Flea would be a new perspective on an old friend, but this is the first time I've read up on the Roman world circa 450 and all I got were brief sketches on huge topics, until the plague fells a third of everybody. Yes, it contributed to social and economic instability and population movements already exacerbating the problems of a crippled empire, but Rosen doesn't have much to say about its direct effects.

The best part of the Justinian's Flea is two discs devoted to the science of the plague flea: from the evolution of bacteria to the flea's mad need to bite anything as it starves to death. In the last third of the book, the plague is rarely invoked as Justinian's reign winds down. The plague was a factor in the decline of a declining empire, but few conclusions are drawn, unlike in 1491, where Charles C. Mann compellingly argues that the arrival of Europeans and their diseases in the Americas likely killed off twenty percent of Earth's human population and reduced the descendants of urban and farmer MesoAmerica to a culturally impoverished wanderings in the newly unmanaged wilderness, where Europeans assumed they had been since the dawn of time and tried to genocide these survivors. Kathleen Born mentioned this book, and then Edward referenced it, so I knew it must be good. Highlights: Peruvian cities contemporary to the rise of Sumer, many cities in Southern Mexico, big urban complex at Cahokia. Extensive farming, extensive burning, extensive land clearing, extensive soil maintenance techniques. The Amazon may have been densely populated and managed as orchard. Also, Native Americans did not walk from Beringia to populate the Americas between an anomalous gap in the glaciers; they probably had boats. Everybody has boats. The Europeans were hopelessly filthy and undereducated and they had boats. Mann occasionally takes the popular archeological writer's low road and recaps the archeological spats of the 1800s. Archeologists spent whole decades and scientific journals sniping at each, and their exploits are more easily chronicled than people whose only surviving records are stones and pottery. But Mann cleverly uses the egos of archeological discovery to demonstrate how extremely likely theories of the pre-Columbian Americans were ignored for decades after being shot down by grand old men who disagreed with them. Reading 1491 is both excellent and mandatory. The effects of successive European plagues on the people of the Americas were, of course, compounded by waves of European colonizers, violent and otherwise, but to clock the effects of European colonization on an indigenous population not decimated by Old World diseases, we must turn to South Africa and The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner (reinvented as the 2004 film Bustin' Bonaparte, the movie that inspired whiners on Amazon to give it no stars because it's not about talking animals). My pen pal Peter recommended the pants off this book and I am deeply sorry that I didn't like Story of an African Farm as much as he does. As soon as he recommended it, I downloaded it off Librivox, and started listen-reading. It does have merit, but it also has rough patches and serious issues. The book opens on a bleak landscape of red dirt and stunted shrubs that is, somehow, also a working farm. Three children are playing hide and seek in the emptiness of the vast African plain, and over the next few chapters the reader slowly realizes that farm's isolation is relative to the dozens of farm employees of who live onsite but are native Africans and don't count. The farm is an indisputable hole and the people who live on it are bound by poverty and notions of their own superiority. Em and Lyndell are English children. English being the best race. Lesser in ethnic virtue are Otto, the kind Christian farm manager, and his son Waldo. Tant Sannie is a fat Boer who owns the place and is inferior to other white people, but she is better than the Hottentots, who are better than Kafirs, who aren't allowed indoors. Lyndell is the mind, Em the body, and Waldo the spirit.

TSoaAF is divided into two parts: Childhood and sort of a bildungsroman, divided by a looooooooong, second person meditation on a child's religious awakening. Childhood is mostly the story of a bad man named Bonaparte Blankins who turns up on the farm and bamboozles the adults into thinking he's an English peer and relative that other Bonaparte. The kids are onto him, but he's only busted when Tant Sannie's younger, prettier niece turns up and he proposes to her while Tant Sannie is stuck in the attic, because she's fat.

In the second, less frustrating, part of the book, everyone is in the later stages of adolescence. It took me a while to notice that Em wasn't the cleverest ostrich in the ostrich camp because I am always rooting for Em people, but Em is fat and sad now. There's apparently tension between the African appreciation for the voluptuous woman and the English antipathy towards it. In any case, Emma is huffing and puffing and hoping someone will turn up and marry her. Waldo goes off to seek his fortune and remains a steady moral compass and a person of simple beauty and compassion. Lyndell has been away at school and then comes back with new ideas about womanhood and rights and oppression. She has a lot of dialogue. There's one moving feminist speech, in particular, which completely blows apart when she compares something to a Hottentot with no ability to see beauty, or think. Yikes. Lyndell refuses to marry the man she wants to marry out of principle and fornicates, thus slowly dying from complications related to childbirth. The new farm manager, who also loves her, travels to the veldt and spends months cross dressing to nurse her. So there. It's not a bad book if you can get over the appalling racism. South Africa didn't get over its appalling racism until the 1980s. There were many moments of wonder. Waldo and his father are beautiful souls. I learned more about South Africa than I knew before, although I did meet the director of the Capetown Y once. Also, South Africa has penguins. Olive Schreiner does not mention penguins. The atheist declamations may have been a little to much for audio; it might be better to read this in paper book. The story of childhood on the barren outskirts of the British Empire is night and day to the childhoods of middle class British because, "A British nanny must be a general. The future empire lies within her hands. And the person that we need to mold the breed is a nanny who can give commands." I hated Mary Poppins, the book, so much. A customer has been calling every week asking for Mary Poppins on Cherry Tree Lane and the other, later ones in the series that nobody ever gets to. We don't have any, but she keeps calling, because someone told her once to keep calling and they may come in eventually, which is strictly true, but for the much harder to find titles, you're going to save yourself years by ordering them online. So I started complaining about Mary Poppins by P.J. Travers because I'm still traumatized, and Missie said, "Another British nanny book... Nanny McPhee movie... Emma Thompson... on the shelf," and the next thing I knew, she was bringing it to me. So I had to read Nurse Matilda. It is not in any way called Nanny McPhee, but it is quite good. Basically, the Brown children are very naughty so Mrs. Brown hires Nurse Matilda to sort them out. When she arrives, they are being simply horrid, and Nurse Matilda thumps her stick and they all have to keep doing whatever naughtiness they're doing until it becomes simply awful and they're immune to doing it again. For example, they eat too much porridge and jam and buns and bad-for-you things at breakfast, and Nurse Matilda thumps her stick and the children keep eating and eating until their insides are filled with porridge and they all have stomachaches. There's an impossible number of children, big ones, little ones, and the Baby. Nanny McPhee does become prettier as the book progresses, but doesn't marry a widowed Colin Firth, which Missie says is a thing in the movie. I tried reading the next book in the series because the book Missie handed me was three Nurse Matilda books in one volume, but you can't read the same book twice in a row, deserving though it may be.

And our final book on empire is about the gays, because they're taking over. Gay marriage is legal in Minnesota now, and I'm single. Coincidence? I think not. Laura, who is gay and married, recommended The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher on audio and I took her up on it because she has good taste when she's not reading hillbilly incest threesome erotica. The titular family Fletcher happens to have two dads and four kids who happen to be white, black, East Indian, and of the Irish race, respectively. TMotFF does a good job of not beating the reader over the head with an inclusivity stick; it's more an ensemble piece on the travails of late elementary school. Sam is cool, but he wants to be in the school play. Jax's best friend turned cool and left him behind. Eli is going to the smart kids school but he hates it. And Frog has a friend who everyone thinks is imaginary. Plus, Jax needs to interview a veteran for his school project and the grouchy Vietnam vet next door hates all of them, probably because they're a multiracial, rainbow family, but also because they're loud and their balls keep knocking over his daffodils. Minus points for occasional, inexplicable sexist comments, but overall solid middle-grade book.

In conclusion, our shared legacy of twined empire and bondage rages in our breasts, in the endless conflict between government and governed, citizen and state, bread and circus, master and slave. What threads can we unravel from the sweater of time? What conclusions can we draw from reading five books?

Disease is fatal for empire. (Justinian's Flea)

Disease is benign to super for empire. (1491, Nurse Matilda)

Europeans are historically racist but can improve. (1491, Misadventures of the Family Fletcher, Story of an African Farm)

Empire brings civilization to the savages. (The Story of an African Farm, Justinian's Flea)

The savages had civilization and you ruined it. (1491, The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher)

People die. (The Story of and African Farm, The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher)

Lots of people die. (Justinian's Flea)

Everyone dies. (1491)