Guest Review: The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman

The Light Between Oceans by M. L. Stedman
Published July 2012 by Scribner

My mom sent me a text the other day and asked if I wanted a review of this book. Of course, I told her. I don't think I know this one. And then I saw the cover and realized that I have seen this book on some of your blogs but, for some reason, I must have skipped right over it. Reading my mom's review, I can see now that it was a big mistake. Here's what Mom thought of The Light Between Oceans:

Tom Sherbourne is a returning Australian WWI veteran who carries with him a lot of baggage from the war and from his childhood. On his arrival home, he is fortunate to get a job as a lighthouse keeper and because of his fine work, he is given a promotion and sent to Janus Rock on a temporary basis. (We later learn much more about his childhood and how it impacts him as a husband.)

On the boat on his way to western Australia, he prevents a fellow passenger from being raped. He thinks it is the end of the story. Keep this in mind. While he is in Point Partegeuse waiting to go to the island, he meets a young girl (Isabel) who is highly attracted to him. It is a brief encounter and he soon sets off to perform his duties. Janus Rock is 100 miles off shore; remember that this is 1916 and it takes about seven hours to reach the island by boat. No one lives on the island except the lightkeeper. A supply boat comes only every three months and the men stay only briefly as they unload the supplies. When the first boat comes, a letter from Isabel is enclosed and thus begins a sporadic correspondence. When Tom’s stint is up, he is given shore leave, he goes back to Partegeuse and marries Isabel, and they take up their solitary life on the island–Tom has proven his abilities and is given a permanent position.

 Life seems to go along well and they seem to love their life on this island. They learn to cope and to adjust and to adapt to married life. Isabel becomes pregnant and has a miscarriage which causes her great grief. Soon she has another miscarriage and later she carries a son for seven months before he is stillborn. She is devastated. (Imagine being alone during these events.)

And then one day life takes a dramatic change when a small boat washes on shore carrying a dead man and a very young live baby. Isabel convinces Tom to not report the incident much to his unrest. He finally gives in, buries the body, and Isabel who is still able to nurse the baby adores her, names her, and Lucy becomes a part of their life. It is a wonderful life for all of them until their three years are up and they go home on shore leave and learn the story of the man and the baby.

From this point on the story becomes extremely intense and the reader is torn in what should be done. Tom’s conscience becomes bothered, Isabel becomes more possessive of Lucy, and tension develops. Things come to a head after Tom and Isabel head back again for shore leave and Lucy is baptized.

To tell more would spoil the story for the reader. Suffice to say you will be conflicted in your feelings and you will come to know the characters so well that when you finish the book, you are not ready to put these people out of your mind.

This is Stedman’s first novel and she has done a superb job of writing the plot. That would have been enough to make the book one that you would not want to put down. In addition, she has a wonderful way of using descriptive words and phrases–example: The thunder became frustrated when it could not keep up with the lightning. Stedman is from Australia and she has done an excellent job of injecting native flora and fauna and describing the landscapes.

It is probably obvious that I loved this book and am eager for Stedman to write another. It would make a wonderful book club book as there is so much material for a very deep discussion.

Thanks, Mom! Mmmm, maybe we'll have to think about this one for next year's Omaha Bookworms multi-generational book.

Top Ten Tuesday - Rewind

This week for Top Ten Tuesday, the ladies at The Broke and The Bookish are letting us pick a topic that we missed or to which we want to add a second round. Well, since this is only the second time I've done a Top Ten Tuesday, I got to choose from all of the previous topics. I've chosen to collect the Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I've Never Read, in no small part as a reminder that it's time to get around to them. In no particular order, here are the books I really need to make time for:

1. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway: This one has appeared in so many movies that I've loved. If the authors of the screen plays thought the book was important enough to include, it's probably something I need to read. Although, I must admit, it makes me a bit nervous.

2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: When I was in junior high, I read a couple of things by Ray Bradbury and loved them. How, then, to explain me never having read his manifesto against censorship? I have no answer. Ryan, of Reading In Taiwan, reminded me in a Banned Books Week post last week, why I need to make time for this one.

3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: I've seen numerous adaptations of this one and love the story. I like Dickens, even when he challenges my patience (as he so often did as I read Bleak House).

4. The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins: As much as I love books of this era, it's inconceivable that I've never read anything by Collins.

5. The Pillars of The Earth by Ken Follett: Historical fiction + blogger recommendations + Mini-me's best friend's recommendation = why have I not read anything by Follett yet? 

6. Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi: This one was sitting on my nightstand for four years but somehow never managed to work its way to the top of the pile. In the meantime, I've read a lot of books about the women of Afghanistan and Iran and I'm constantly drawn to books in this region of the world; this is obviously a book that is right up my alley.

7. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers: I think the title says it all. How could you not want to reading a heartbreak work of staggering genius?

8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Alice Walker (The Color Purple) said of this novel, "There is no more important book." 

 

9. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton: You're all probably very aware of how much I love Wharton (lord knows I've told you often enough!), but I've never read this one. It comes highly recommended to me by JoAnn of Lakeside Musings and I trust her taste implicitly.

10. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt: I'd never heard of Byatt before I started blogging but as soon as I did, this one started being one of "the" books that is universally loved by bloggers.

Fright-Fall Readathon

Final update: I finished Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber during the the week of FrightFall Read-a-Thon, although I sure didn't get as much reading done as I wanted to. I also managed to get 80 pages of The Little Stranger read which got me well into the book now and I feel like I'm not going to be able to put it down!

Sunday Salon - October 7

Greetings from chilly Omaha! I hate it but we've had to turn the heater on already. It's going to be time this week to pull out the flowering plants and put away the pots for the year; the potted herbs have already come inside. I'm not getting as much reading done as I'd hoped to during the FrightFall readathon but there's still today, right?

Here's What I'm:

Listening To: The Center of Everything by Laura Moriarty which I picked up for $2 at my library's weekly book sale. I didn't even know until this week that they had books on CD. There weren't a lot there that I was interested in but with an ever changing selection, I'm betting there will be at least one more I want when I'm done with this one.

Watching: "Legally Blonde: The Musical" at the playhouse in my hometown. We usher there several times a season and they put on some really terrific shows.

Cooking: Bruschetta with the last ripe tomatoes we're going to get out of our garden this season. It's gotten so cold; we had our first freeze last night. We have a brown grocery bag full of green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper that should ripen for us for a couple more weeks but they aren't quite as good as the one picked at just the right time.

Making: A mess in my basement as we continue to work on major rearranging, settling Mini-him back in, and decluttering. I'm definitely not the garbage man's best friend right now but the Goodwill is loving me!

Grateful for: The beautiful fall foliage. I'm working hard to enjoy them this year; the past few years I've only been able to see them as the harbinger of months of brown bleakness.

Happy about: That I have a good vacuum. We're loving these cats but if I'm going to be able to keep them, I'm going to have to be able to keep the hair cleaned up. And, dang, there's a lot of fur!

Looking forward to: A trip to Half-Price Books. I was planning to go on Thursday but we had to switch vehicles and the books I had ready were in my vehicle on the other side of town. Say, do they have audio books?

Fairy Tale Fridays - Names To Know

 Over the past two years, we've talked about some names to know when you're serious about learning more about fairy tales. We've talked about some of the artists, some of the compilers, some of the authors, and once, an academic, Maria
Tartar.

Today I'd like to introduce you to a few more of the who's-who in the academic world of fairy tales and folklore. Like so many of these posts, this one was not at all on my radar when I sat down to write a post. As I was reading some of my go-to blogs for fairy tale news, I chanced to discover that a Fairy Tale prize had been awarded in Europe which got me to wondering, "just how many people are out there still trying to learn more about fairy tales and to spread the word?"

I suppose if any continent were going to have a Fairytale prize it would be Europe.The 2012 winner of the prize is Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont. Mieder says the explosion of fairy tales in movies, books and series may actually be diluting the tales potency. With so many tales available, one of the things that carried fairy tales through the centuries, "the connecting element is lost." It's good to know that Mieder does have hope for the tales, although he seems to lament the fact that the tales are no longer passed orally. "If you ask someone on the street to tell a fairytale, very few people could do it. Even though we know fairy tales, we're no longer used to telling them."

"In fairy tales, age-old problems - normal, day-to-day problems people have - are allegorized in a poetic, symbolic language. We can identify with one another across boundaries," according to Mieder, who has been studying fairy tales for over 40 years.To learn more about how fairy tales address modern problems, check out this article at DW.

Jack Zipes, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota, agrees that fairy tales are still relevant. "They are a means of communicating about serious problems, such as rape (Red Riding Hood) and abandonment of children (Hansel and Gretel)," according to Zipes. He does believe that the symbolism of fairy tales can make it difficult to see how "remarkably they comment on society." It's this challenge that seems to make the study of fairy tales so rewarding.

Here on Fairy Tale Fridays, we've talked before about the sanitization of fairy tales. Zipes is wholeheartedly against it. "The sanitizaton process and political correctness can be very dangerous because they lead to censorship, police states, radical fundamentalism, etc." I think we can safely assume, as we celebrate Banned Books Week, that Zipes is also opposed to the banning of books.

Ruth B. Bottigheimer, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, is a lady who is raising eyebrows in the field of fairy tale studies. It's her contention that fairy tales were not handed down orally but were, instead, passed down in print. "Literary analysis undermines it [oral tradition], literary history rejects it, social history repudiates it, and publishing history (whether of manuscripts or of books) contradicts it." She specifically points to the Cinderella-type tales as an example, stating the "economic conditions and legal restrictions" of mid-16th century Venice led to this type of tale and collections of tales from this time are the first record of this type of tale. This is bound to be a hot topic of debate among literary scholars. In the world of fairy tales, it's akin to the first scientists who said that no, in fact, the world was not flat.

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
Published September 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher and TLC Book Tours

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe , co-owners of Brokeland Records, a used vinyl record store in Oakland that serves as a gathering place for the community, are struggling to keep their dream alive. Former NFL star Gibson Goode is coming to town and bringing his own record store, a three-story behemoth that is certain to put Brokeland out of business. But it's tough to fight a guy who's beloved as a hero and savior of struggling African-American neighborhoods and Goode is not the only pressing problem the men are facing.

Gwen Stallings and Aviva Roth-Jaffe are the Berkeley Birth Partners, midwives trying to earn the respect of the medical community in 2004. The pair are highly successful until complications during a home birth result in legal problems that threaten the business. Gwen is very pregnant and very pissed at a husband who can't remain faithful. Aviva has lost respect for her husband and doesn't understand her quirky, gay son.

The eccentric denizens of Brokeland neighborhood, a father Archy wishes would just disappear, and a certain senator from Illinois all serve to propel Chabon's novel of race, gender, class, and commerce forward. it's both a supremely ambitious and yet oddly small story.

Having read Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I had high hopes for Telegraph Avenue. The man's a genius with the written word, there's no doubt about it and, as before, his writing is impressive here. Is there any other author who would attempt a twelve-page sentence? Seriously, twelve pages. One sentence. An entire section of the book that incorporates every major character in the book. I'm still not sure if it is a work of brilliance or pure arrogance.

At 200 pages in, though, I still was not able to connect to the story. It felt disjointed and I was not connecting with any of the characters. Certainly the characters are complicated but how am I supposed to care about Archy when he is an unfaithful husband who has abandoned his son? At 250 pages, I was ready to follow Archy's lead and abandon the book. But I pressed on, from a sense of obligation and the hope that Chabon would still be able to draw me in as he did so well with his other books.

Unfortunately, he never did and I was left wondering if I just didn't get it, if I was just not smart enough to understand what Chabon had done. If that's the case, I can take solace in knowing that I am not alone. I've read a number of reviews where readers had a similar ambivalence about Telegraph Avenue. Then I read this from "Library Journal:"

"VERDICT Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, here's a rare book that really could be the great American novel. Highly recommended."

This is clearly a book that may very well be great...or maybe not.

"...Chabon’s preference for retro—the reader is seldom a page away from a reference to Marvel comics, kung fu movies, or a coveted piece of ’70s vinyl—quickly wears out its welcome. Worse, Chabon’s approach to race is surprisingly short on nuance..." - Publishers Weekly

Thanks to TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour. For other opinions on this one (which are bound to be varied!), check out the full blog tour. Salon.com has a great interview with Michael Chabon about Telegraph Avenue which actually may explain some of the problems I had with the book. For one thing, it was originally intended to be a television series. I think I would have liked that better.

Banned Books Week

Happy 30th anniversary, Banned Books Week!

I get parents' desire to protect their kids, I do. I understand that, particularly with teenagers, you can't always be with your kids and it's possible that they'll get their hands on books you might not want them reading. Thanks to Sheila, at Book Journey, for hosting "Jump On The Banned Wagon!"

In the 1980's I railed against Tipper Gore's and the Parents Music Resource Center's fight to put parent advisory labels on record albums. I cheered as first Frank Zappa, then Dee Snider, and finally even John Denver testified before a Senate committee against the labels and censorship.

Little more than a decade later, I found myself grateful to have those warning labels in place. Mini-him was a handful, CD's are small, and earbuds make it possible to listen to music without having your parents hear it. Knowing that he couldn't buy the CD's with the warning labels on them himself and that I would know whether or not I need to pre-listen to a CD before buying him one with a label, made my life easier. I got to choose what he listened to - sort of. I couldn't stop him from listening to music I objected to when I wasn't around and I had no control over what earned the advisory. And I still had a problem with that.

Just as I have a problem with one person or a small group of people determining what is available to my kids, or me, to read. When it comes to books, the people who challenge books, who want them banned, are not content simply to place an advisory label on them. They want them entirely unavailable.

One of my boys' favorite books growing up was Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, one of the most commonly challenged books (in this case, the entire series was challenged) in the very decade in which they were reading it. It was, obviously, challenged because it's scary. Well, duh. It tells you that right in the title, parents. If you see your child reading this book, it should be immediately obvious that this may be a book you'll want to check for yourself to see if your kid is mature enough to read it. You certainly shouldn't need someone else to do that for you. By the way, the stories really are scary, hardly toned down at all from the original folklore from which they are drawn.

Anyone out there ever gone camping? What is the number one thing kids want to do when they go camping? Well, after they eat enough s'mores to make themselves sick. They love to tell scary stories around a campfire. Did the same parents who challenged this book also ban their children from going camping?

There are a lot of ways in which I am not a "cool mom." I monitored the movies my kids watched, the video games they played, the places they went. My seventeen-year-old still has to give me the phone number of the friend she is with just in case I can't reach her at her number because I will be checking up on her.

I have also keenly been aware that I could not protect my children forever; sooner or later my children would need to be making their own decisions. In fact, it was one of my most profound duties as a parent to teach them how to do that. So, while, I monitored what they were exposed to, I also allowed them to watch things, to listen to thing, and to read things that would allow us to talk to them about more mature subject matter. As the parent, I decided what those things would be. Even though my children are all grown up now, I will continue to insist on a parent's right to make those decisions for themselves.