July’s book is:

Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

“Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family – rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other’s trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Observing everything with the mercilessly keen eye of a child, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney. Her stepfather, Daddy Glen, calls Bone ‘cold as hell, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty, yet Anney needs Glen. At first gentle with Bone, Daddy Glen becomes steadily colder and more furious-until their final, harrowing encounter, from which there can be no turning back.”

Meeting Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009

Time: 1-3 pm

Location: Monique’s House

Please email one of us for address, directions or more details:

Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monique – moneeeq [at] gmail [dot] com

Also, we will be sure to keep everyone posted about the next 3 books, and vote at each meeting for the 4th book. As of now, here is the lineup…

August 16:

Miss Harper Can Do It

Jane Berentson (cousin of SVS local celebrity Kaylee Cole)

September 20:

Jewel of Medina

Sherry Jones

October 18:

Prisoner of Tehran

Marina Nemat

Everything is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

“With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man — also named Jonathan Safran Foer — sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.”

Feel free to discuss anything you would like about this book in the comments: questions, concerns, conflicts, confusions, etc. Please keep in mind that some of us may not have finished the book, so if your comment gives away some key plot detail, please start with WARNING: SPOILERS at the top.

If you would like to discuss Everything is Illuminated in person, please join us for our group meeting on:

May 17th (Sunday) from 1 – 3 pm

at Coffee Social

113 W Indiana Ave
Spokane, WA 99205
(509) 327-7127

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to email one of the book group coordinators:

Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monique – moneeeq [at] gmail [dot] com

]]> http://www.diamondinthebasalt.com/shrinking-violets-book-group-everything-is-illuminated/feed/ 0 http://www.diamondinthebasalt.com/shrinking-violets-society-book-club-news-update/ http://www.diamondinthebasalt.com/shrinking-violets-society-book-club-news-update/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:16:16 +0000 Becky http://www.diamondinthebasalt.com/?p=22 For our next read, the coordinators and book club members have decided to create a new list of potential reads! If you would like to nominate some new books, please add a comment to this post or email one of us.

A few new nominations include:

“The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex” by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence

“A $1.3 trillion industry, the US nonprofit sector is the world’s seventh largest economy. From art museums and university hospitals to think tanks and church charities, over 1.5 million organizations of staggering diversity share the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) designation, if little else. Many social justice organizations have joined this world, often blunting political goals to satisfy government and foundation mandates. But even as funding shrinks and government surveillance rises, many activists often find it difficult to imagine movement-building outside the nonprofit model.

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded gathers original essays by radical activists from around the globe who are critically rethinking the long-term consequences of this investment. Together with educators and nonprofit staff they finally name the “nonprofit industrial complex” and ask hard questions: How did politics shape the birth of the nonprofit model? How does 501(c)(3) status allow the state to co-opt politi-cal movements? Activists or -careerists? How do we fund the movement outside this complex? Urgent and visionary, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is an unbeholden exposé of the “nonprofit industrial complex” and its quietly devastating role in managing dissent.”

“Cure for Death By Lightning” by Gail Anderson Dargatz

“The year is 1941. For the Weeks family on their frontier farm in Western Canada, life is brutally hard, with moments of joy few and far between. Fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks narrates this coming-of-age story, which is sprinkled with recipes, home remedies and useful homesteading advice (e.g., how to kill and clean a chicken: keep it calm, since “there’s nothing as frustrating as trying to kill a panicked chicken”). Though the inventory of authentic period detail is evocative, make no mistake: this is no warmhearted tale of pioneer life. Forget square dances and barn raisings; think bestiality and incest. Beth’s tortured, demanding father, mentally ill following a traumatic bear attack and the lingering effects of a head injury he received in WWI, goes on one rampage after another. Beth, meanwhile, does her best to fight off various sexual predators, finding solace of sorts in a tentative love affair with Nora, a troubled half-Indian girl. But Coyote, a sinister shape-changing spirit, stalks them and others, infusing the plot with a weird mystical aura at odds with the hardscrabble realism of the descriptions of day-to-day life. A dysfunctional Little House on the Prairie, this bleak, violent saga is a disturbing mixture of period minutiae and grim supernatural phenomena.”

“People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks

“In 1996, Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna, a caustic loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in its ancient binding an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair she begins to unlock the book s mysteries. The listener is ushered into an exquisitely detailed and atmospheric past as the book s journey is traced from its salvation back to its creation. Inspired by a true story, People of the Book is an ambitious, electrifying novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity.”

Sunday, April 5th at 1 pm
Little Garden Cafe
2901 W Northwest Blvd.
Spokane, WA 99205

Please be prepared to discuss Middlesex in its entirety (or come if you are okay with spoilers). Thanks, and we look forward to seeing you soon!

Questions? Feel free to email the book group coordinators:

• Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

• Melissa – missmae187 [at] gmail [dot] com

• Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex (2002) focuses on the chronicle of forty-one-year-old, hermaphroditic Calliope Stephanides, which presents her multigenerational Greek-American family and her struggle to establish a clear sense of self. After opening with the story of her grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty, and their subsequent union, Cal traces the damaged gene that this brother and sister passed down through the generations to Cal, which causes her gender irregularity.

Cal weaves together the story of her grandparents and their descendents with her own, comparing the problems they faced in their efforts to reconcile their Greek heritage with their adopted U.S. culture to Cal’s attempts to find balance between her female and male halves. She sets her epic story, which moves from 1922 to 2001, against a historical backdrop of change, from the Turkish invasion of Greece, through Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. As her family gradually adapts to their new world, Cal is also able to find a way to accept the duality of her own experience. Eugenides’s ability to find the humor as well as the tragedy in their stories creates a compelling work that celebrates difference as well as community.

Now that the votes are in and we’ve picked this book, it’s time to get it into your hot little hands and start reading! Remember that if you go to Aunties and pre-order the book you can get a 15% discount.

The next meeting is this Sunday 22nd at the Little Garden Cafe on 2901 W Northwest Blvd at 1pm. This is a great little place and we have the entire back room!  If you plan on coming try and read at least the first half of the book, but don’t worry if you can’t finish it all in time. See you Sunday!

“The Time Traveler’s Wife is an unconventional love story that centers on a man with a strange genetic disorder that causes him to unpredictably time-travel and his wife, an artist, who has to cope with his constant absence.”

Reviews from Goodreads:

“This has become one of my favorite books. I read it for my book club. It’s an extremely intricate and complex time travel story of a man/boy and a woman/girl and those they know. A love story told through time. It can be challenging to figure this one out but it came together beautifully. I don’t want to give away any of the ingenious plot, as I found it so much fun to determine for myself what was going on.” – Lisa (5 out of 5 stars)

“I hated this book. He is a time traveler that can’t control when he time travels and so he jumps in and out of his wife’s life. It’s creepy and after reading half the book I got tired of figuring out the point of the book. I skimmed to the end and hated it even more.” – Jacqueline (1 out of 5 stars)

Feel free to discuss anything you would like about this book in the comments: questions, concerns, conflicts, confusions, etc.  Please keep in mind that some of us may not have finished the book, so if your comment gives away some key plot detail, please start with WARNING: SPOILERS at the top.

If you would like to discuss the The Time Traveler’s Wife in person, please join us for the next book group meeting:

March 7th (Sunday) at Taylor’s apartment (email us for directions) at 1 pm.

March 12th (Sunday) TBA

If you have any questions, feel free to email the book group coordinators:

• Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

• Melissa – missmae187 [at] gmail [dot] com

• Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

“Arnold Spirit, a goofy-looking dork with a decent jumpshot, spends his time lamenting life on the “poor-ass” Spokane Indian reservation, drawing cartoons (which accompany, and often provide more insight than, the narrative), and, along with his aptly named pal Rowdy, laughing those laughs over anything and nothing that affix best friends so intricately together. When a teacher pleads with Arnold to want more, to escape the hopelessness of the rez, Arnold switches to a rich white school and immediately becomes as much an outcast in his own community as he is a curiosity in his new one. He weathers the typical teenage indignations and triumphs like a champ but soon faces far more trying ordeals as his home life begins to crumble and decay amidst the suffocating mire of alcoholism on the reservation. Alexie’s humor and prose are easygoing and well suited to his young audience, and he doesn’t pull many punches as he levels his eye at stereotypes both warranted and inapt. A few of the plotlines fade to gray by the end, but this ultimately affirms the incredible power of best friends to hurt and heal in equal measure.”

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

“Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American nurse’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. Coauthor Relin recounts Mortenson’s efforts in fascinating detail, presenting compelling portraits of the village elders, con artists, philanthropists, mujahideen, Taliban officials, ambitious school girls and upright Muslims Mortenson met along the way. As the book moves into the post-9/11 world, Mortenson and Relin argue that the United States must fight Islamic extremism in the region through collaborative efforts to alleviate poverty and improve access to education, especially for girls.” You can read more about the schools started by Mortenson at the Central Asia Institute.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

“As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: “Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, ‘Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.’ ” The “me” of that sentence, “Cal” Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book’s first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and ’30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal’s story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents’ upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her “crocus” as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal’s gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton’s growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides’s ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It’s difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender.”

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

“Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive “theory of mind” by which most of us sense what’s going on in other people’s heads. When his neighbor’s poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes (one of his favorite characters) and track down the killer. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents’ broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. In the hands of first-time novelist Haddon, Christopher is a fascinating case study and, above all, a sympathetic boy: not closed off, as the stereotype would have it, but too open-overwhelmed by sensations, bereft of the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings. Christopher can only make sense of the chaos of stimuli by imposing arbitrary patterns (“4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I don’t speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and don’t eat my lunch and Take No Risks”). His literal-minded observations make for a kind of poetic sensibility and a poignant evocation of character. Though Christopher insists, “This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them,” the novel brims with touching, ironic humor.”

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

“This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah’s harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he’s brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. The process marks out Beah as a gifted spokesman for the center’s work after his “repatriation” to civilian life in the capital, where he lives with his family and a distant uncle. When the war finally engulfs the capital, it sends 17-year-old Beah fleeing again, this time to the U.S., where he now lives.”

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

“After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men’s Journal, retraces McCandless’s ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless’s death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods.”

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

“It’s difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said,A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini’s compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.”

Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture by Maria Buszek

“Weaving commentary from academia with testimony from such sources as Salt N Pepa and sex worker Annie Sprinkle, Buszek’s authorial debut shows how the evolution of the pin-up is inextricably tied to the femenists movement, for better and worse, providing formal and (as she demonstrates) well-deserved appreciation to an art form that’s rarely given much respect. The term “pin-up girl,” though popularly associated with a particular time period (pre- and post-WWII) and image (buxom and half-naked with a come-hither expression), had its first incarnation in the early days of photography. In using burlesque performers as subjects, pioneering photographers subverted the straightforward portrait form in the 19th century, well aware-along with their subjects-that they had the power to challenge ideas of what it means to be a woman. Drawing on a large body of research and commentary, Buszek smartly focusing on individual contributions and landmarks rather than sweeping claims. An academic, Buschek isn’t afraid to dig deep into her subject, but she tempers her treatise with healthy doses of wit, grace and rhythm, and rarely falters.”

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

“With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man — also named Jonathan Safran Foer — sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer’s bestselling Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor, jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist. Like the second-language narrator of Illuminated, Oskar turns his naïvely precocious vocabulary to the understanding of historical tragedy, as he searches New York for the lock that matches a mysterious key left by his father when he was killed in the September 11 attacks, a quest that intertwines with the story of his grandparents, whose lives were blighted by the firebombing of Dresden. Foer embellishes the narrative with evocative graphics, including photographs, colored highlights and passages of illegibly overwritten text, and takes his unique flair for the poetry of miscommunication to occasionally gimmicky lengths, like a two-page soliloquy written entirely in numerical code. Although not quite the comic tour de force that Illuminated was, the novel is replete with hilarious and appalling passages, as when, during show-and-tell, Oskar plays a harrowing recording by a Hiroshima survivor and then launches into a Poindexterish disquisition on the bomb’s “charring effect.” It’s more of a challenge to play in the same way with the very recent collapse of the towers, but Foer gambles on the power of his protagonist’s voice to transform the cataclysm from raw current event to a tragedy at once visceral and mythical. Unafraid to show his traumatized characters’ constant groping for emotional catharsis, Foer demonstrates once again that he is one of the few contemporary writers willing to risk sentimentalism in order to address great questions of truth, love and beauty.”

In the Country of the Young by Lisa Carey

“This gorgeous, compelling, heartfelt story is everything a novel should be. On Halloween Eve, Oisin, a middle-age recluse living on an island off the coast of Maine, finds a child ghost in his house who, at his touch, is given life. Aisling had died as a child on the shores of the island, a victim of a shipwreck and a debilitating voyage to escape the potato famine in Ireland. She awakens in Oisin his own longing for his long-dead twin sister Nieve. As Aisling grows up at a frantic rate, the two must face their pasts and origins, who they were and are, as well as the special relationship between them.

If the plot sounds maudlin, the novel is anything but. In Carey’s capable hands, readers are guided through the intricacies of these two lives without sentimentality or melodrama. The lyrical prose is infused with the ache of longing, and the story finds the perfect balance between the past and the present, with a fully realized nineteenth century Ireland contrasting with a contemporary Maine.”

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder

“At the center of Mountains Beyond Mountains stands Paul Farmer. Doctor, Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, world-class Robin Hood, Farmer was brought up in a bus and on a boat, and in medical school found his life’s calling: to diagnose and cure infectious diseases and to bring the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most. This magnificent book shows how radical change can be fostered in situations that seem insurmountable, and it also shows how a meaningful life can be created, as Farmer—brilliant, charismatic, charming, both a leader in international health and a doctor who finds time to make house calls in Boston and the mountains of Haiti—blasts through convention to get results. ”

Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn

“Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a literary competition intended to foster works of fiction that present positive solutions to global problems, this book offers proof that good ideas do not necessarily equal good literature. Ishmael, a gorilla rescued from a traveling show who has learned to reason and communicate, uses these skills to educate himself in human history and culture. Through a series of philosophical conversations with the unnamed narrator, a disillusioned Sixties idealist, Ishmael lays out a theory of what has gone wrong with human civilization and how to correct it, a theory based on the tenet that humanity belongs to the planet rather than vice versa. While the message is an important one, Quinn rarely goes beyond a didactic exposition of his argument, never quite succeeding in transforming idea into art.”

Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

“Set in the rural South, this tale centers around the Boatwright family, a proud and closeknit clan known for their drinking, fighting, and womanizing. Nicknamed Bone by her Uncle Earle, Ruth Anne is the bastard child of Anney Boatwright, who has fought tirelessly to legitimize her child. When she marries Glen, a man from a good family, it appears that her prayers have been answered. However, Anney suffers a miscarriage and Glen begins drifting. He develops a contentious relationship with Bone and then begins taking sexual liberties with her. Embarrassed and unwilling to report these unwanted advances, Bone bottles them up and acts out her confusion and shame. Unaware of her husband’s abusive behavior, Anney stands by her man. Eventually, a violent encounter wrests Bone away from her stepfather. In this first novel, Allison creates a rich sense of family and portrays the psychology of a sexually abused child with sensitivity and insight.”

Anthem by Ayn Rand

“Anthem is Ayn Rand’s classic tale of a dark future age of the great “We”—a world that deprives individuals of name, independence, and values. Written a full decade before George Orwell’s “1984,” this dystopian novel depicts a man who seeks escape from a society in which individuality has been utterly destroyed. Rand expertly shows how collectivism (including social programs in the United States) destroys freedom and individuality. Her philosophy is simple: “planning” is a synonym for “collectivism,” and “collectivism” is a metaphor for communism and tyranny. This important book should be read by all who are concerned about the role of government in modern life.”

The River Why by David James Duncan

“David James Duncan’s first novel has gained an increasingly wide audience over the years–some might even call it a following. This coming-of-age tale of Gus Orviston’s search for the Pacific Northwest’s elusive steelhead, a metaphor for Gus’s internal quest for self-knowledge, appeals to all who cherish a good yarn and memorable characters. Uncle Zeke’s colorful rendition of Gus’s conception on the banks of the Deschutes River is itself worth the price of purchase.”

The Memory Keeper’s Daugher by Kim Edwards

“Edwards’s assured but schematic debut novel (after her collection, The Secrets of a Fire King) hinges on the birth of fraternal twins, a healthy boy and a girl with Down syndrome, resulting in the father’s disavowal of his newborn daughter. A snowstorm immobilizes Lexington, Ky., in 1964, and when young Norah Henry goes into labor, her husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. David Henry, must deliver their babies himself, aided only by a nurse. Seeing his daughter’s handicap, he instructs the nurse, Caroline Gill, to take her to a home and later tells Norah, who was drugged during labor, that their son Paul’s twin died at birth. Instead of institutionalizing Phoebe, Caroline absconds with her to Pittsburgh. David’s deception becomes the defining moment of the main characters’ lives, and Phoebe’s absence corrodes her birth family’s core over the course of the next 25 years. David’s undetected lie warps his marriage; he grapples with guilt; Norah mourns her lost child; and Paul not only deals with his parents’ icy relationship but with his own yearnings for his sister as well.”

Go Ask Alice – Anonymous

“The torture and hell of adolescence has rarely been captured as clearly as it is in this classic diary by an anonymous, addicted teen. Lonely, awkward, and under extreme pressure from her “perfect” parents, “Anonymous” swings madly between optimism and despair. When one of her new friends spikes her drink with LSD, this diarist begins a frightening journey into darkness. The drugs take the edge off her loneliness and self-hate, but they also turn her life into a nightmare of exalting highs and excruciating lows. Although there is still some question as to whether this diary is real or fictional, there is no question that it has made a profound impact on millions of readers during the more than 25 years it has been in print.”

The Second Shift by Arlie Hochschild

“Hochschild’s book is a superb description of what so many of of us live but barely understand. She examines the demands of work in the home and outside, the gender identities that shape our feeling toward work, the goals that shape our chices and the intentions that define our commununication about responsiblity. The author validates the struggle of working women, without bashing men and talks about how to resolve the “stalled revolution” of shared responsibility both at home and in the workplace. Most importantly, Hochschild illuminates how our methods of dealing with the second shift, not the second shift itself per se, negatively impact our children.”

Say You Are One of Them by Uwem Akpan

“Nigerian-born Jesuit priest Akpan transports the reader into gritty scenes of chaos and fear in his rich debut collection of five long stories set in war-torn Africa. An Ex-mas Feast tells the heartbreaking story of eight-year-old Jigana, a Kenyan boy whose 12-year-old sister, Maisha, works as a prostitute to support her family. Jigana’s mother quells the children’s hunger by having them sniff glue while they wait for Maisha to earn enough to bring home a holiday meal. In Luxurious Hearses, Jubril, a teenage Muslim, flees the violence in northern Nigeria. Attacked by his own Muslim neighbors, his only way out is on a bus transporting Christians to the south. In Fattening for Gabon, 10-year-old Kotchikpa and his younger sister are sent by their sick parents to live with their uncle, Fofo Kpee, who in turn explains to the children that they are going to live with their prosperous godparents, who, as Kotchikpa pieces together, are actually human traffickers. Akpan’s prose is beautiful and his stories are insightful and revealing, made even more harrowing because all the horror—and there is much—is seen through the eyes of children.”

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani

“This is the tale of a 17th-century Persian village girl who makes her way with her mother to a rich uncle’s house in the city of Isfahan. As poor relatives, they are treated as servants. The uncle, a master rug maker for the shah, grudgingly teaches her his trade, his love and respect for her increasing with her perseverance and obvious talent. His greedy wife convinces him to accept a three-month “marriage” contract for the girl with a rich horse trader. She learns how to please her “husband” (and herself) sexually, but also learns that he has no intention of making her his permanent wife as she has no money. She vows to make beautiful rugs on her own, and thus ensure her and her mother’s financial security. She is banished from her uncle’s house when she tells her friend about the marriage contract. She trusts a foreign merchant with her rug and he steals it. Now she must beg and find shelter and a way to begin a new rug. Like Sheherazade, the heroine’s mother is a master storyteller, telling tales within this tale that Amirrezvani tells so magically.”

Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America by Lisa Gray-Garcia

“Eleven-year-old Lisa becomes her mother’s primary support when they face the prospect of homelessness. As Dee, a single mother, struggles with the demons of her own childhood of neglect and abuse, Lisa has to quickly assume the role of an adult in an attempt to keep some stability in their lives. “Dee and Tiny” ultimately become underground celebrities in San Francisco, squatting in storefronts and performing the “art of homelessness.” Their story, filled with black humor and incisive analysis, illuminates the roots of poverty, the criminalization of poor families, and their struggle for survival.”

]]> http://www.diamondinthebasalt.com/svs-book-list/feed/ 4