What I read last month, including the latest in my decade-long "Great Books through History" trek. In this installment:
Montaigne's Essays, Vol. II.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey
Nicholas Rankin, Dead Man's Chest (Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson)
Angus Wilson, No Laughing Matter
David Lodge, Changing Places
Robert Jordan, The Dragon Reborn
Brian Moore, Cold Heaven
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
...and the usual assortment of historical mysteries.
More things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy: Apology for Raymond Sebonde (Essays, vol. 2), by Michel de Montaigne
There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret the things, and more books upon books than upon all other subjects. We do nothing but comment upon one another.
See Bookpost, April 2014 for Book One, which is a lot like Book Two. Book Three will be done in November or December. As I mentioned in April, Montaigne was one of my father's very favorite authors, and his well-used two-volume set with its hidden trove of dried four-leaf clovers gets me a little weepy at times. One of the things my father loved so much is that, unlike a whole lot of Important Writers, he was not convinced of the truth of his agenda, nor all full of himself. his opinions are what things seem like to him, and open to dispute.
In fact, he tends to free-associate. His best essays are his shortest ones; the longer ones tend to ramble and go off-subject, and the "Apology for Raymond Sebonde" is by far the longest one in the set, taking up roughly 2/5 of the whole Second volume (which has 36 other essays of various lengths). It starts out as a defense of "rationalist theology" (attempting to prove the truth of the Christian Religion by reason as opposed to "because the Bible says so"), and ends up arguing that it is impossible to prove anything by reason, because our senses and psychology are so imperfect. We don't know how accurately the things we sense represent the real world. Scientists have failed in all things. A long list of ancient philosophers, including Socrates, famously doubted everything. This is the essay that cemented Montaigne's basic philosophy of skepticism.
A wonderful long section in the middle further humbles Man as the measure of all things, by presenting a parade of anecdotes about animals behaving with more rationality, intelligence and morals than most humans. This predates Freud's "groundbreaking" assertion that we are psychologically not masters in our own homes" by over 300 years.
Regarding Alex: Cold Heaven, by Brian Moore
She put the book down again, where he could reach it. He took out the thermometer, looked at it, then wrote in the book. Temp. 80. He put the book on the bedtable, lay back and closed his eyes. She could hear his harsh, painful breathing. She went to the chair and sat. At first she heard no sound but the sound of his breathing. Then a faint rumble. Was it thunder? A scrim of dark clouds obscured the bright moon, like a ghostly illustration of the twisted shapes of cypress trees. The thunder came again, loud now, warning her that the world was not the real world she had known all her life. She sat in this room like a murderer with her victim. But, unlike a murderer, she had been given a second chance.
There's a Harrison Ford movie called Regarding Henry that most of my friends find glurgey to the point of needing insulin; I'm actually very moved and touched by the story. No accounting for taste. The Harrison Ford guy is a successful lawyer and a douchegoblin (and no, that's not redundant. Shut up) who has his personality wiped due to a sudden injury and gets a fresh start. I mention this because that's where I thought Cold Heaven was going at first, and I was disappointed when it didn't.
The main character, Marie, is about to leave her husband when he suffers a fatal accident on vacation in France. Except that then his body disappears unaccountably from the morgue, and then Marie finds that his wallet and return ticket have disappeared from their hotel room. And I'm like, "OK, he's alive and amnesiac and they'll repair their marriage, right? Or else he's become a zombie and will try to eat Marie's brains. Either way, I'm good."
But it's neither of those. Marie is a lapsed Catholic, and the story gets all religious, and when she starts talking to her husband again, I wonder if it's going to turn out that he's been dead the whole time and she's either nuts or talking to his ghost or whatever. And she consults priests and nuns and I lose interest completely. Fortunately it's very short and it didn't cost me much time to see it through to the wet blanket of an ending. Not For Me, but it's considered one of Moore's best books, so it must be Right For Someone.
UGH! The Dragon Reborn, by Robert Jordan
He turned his head, wincing at the pain in his neck. The room was empty except for him. Halfmen rode shadows like horses, so the legends said, and when they turned sideways, they disappeared. No wall could keep them out. Carridin wanted to weep. He levered himself up, cursing the jolt of pain from his wrist.
The door opened, and Sharbon hurried in, a plump man with a basket in his arms. He stopped to stare at Carridin. "Master, are you all right? Forgive me for not being here, master, but I went to buy fruits for your---"
With his good hand, Carridin struck the basket from Sharbon's hands, sending withered winter apples rolling across the carpets, and backhanded the man across the face.
"Forgive me, master," Sharbon whispered.
"Fetch me paper and ink," Carridin snarled. "Hurry, fool! I must send orders." But which? Which? As Sharbon scurried to obey, Carridin stared at the gouges in the tabletop and shivered.
See Wheel of Time entries from the past two months. The Dragon Reborn is more of the same. Seems to me, if the author hasn't grabbed you in the first 1800 pages, it's just not going to happen. That many words with so little to say is an insult to the reading community.
UPDATE: Thankfully, it didn't get the Best Novel Hugo, and I don't have to read any more. It was my fifth choice. Ancillary Justice, which did win, was my close second choice after Neptune's Brood. I'm content. If Wheel of Time had won, I might have had to track down voters and kill them.
The Tudor Murders: Dissolution, by C.J. Sansom; The White Rose Murders, by Michael Clynes; The Saintly Murders, by C.L. Grace; The Lammas Feast; Nine Men Dancing; The Midsummer Rose, by Kate Sedley
"I alerted them," Brother Eadwig replied. "I heard your shouts and saw the fiery pieces of parchment being dropped as I approached. I hurried to the Prior's chamber, then ran across here. Mistress, there was no one."
"Oh yes there was," Kathryn declared, "and I want to make sure that he doesn't return." She fought back the tears, got to her feet, and turned her back on them. "As I said, Father Prior, this is a place of murder and mystery. But I will find the truth, and you shall help me!"
--from Saintly Murders
But my eyes were immediately drawn to the table in the middle of the room. The remains of a meal were scattered in all directions, and lying across it, face down, was the body of Jasper Fairbrother, a black-handled knife sticking out of his back on the left hand side. The eyes were open and staring, and the hard, mean features still retained a look of surprise, as though Death had caught him unawares.
---from The Lammas Feast
In my dream there are none of the long preliminaries; no long prayers, no speech from the scaffold by Queen Anne beseeching all to pray for the life of the king. In my dream, she kneels down at once, facing the crowd, and starts to pray. I hear again her thin, harsh cries, over and over, "Jesu, receive my soul! Lord God, have pity on my soul!" Then the executioner bends and produces the great sword from where it had lain hidden in the straw. "So that's where it was," I think, then flinch and cry out as it swings through the air faster than the eye can follow and the queen's head flies up and outwards in a great spray of blood. Again I feel a rush of nausea and close my eyes as a great murmur comes from the crowd, broken by the odd "hurrah". I open them again at the prescribed words, "So perish all the king's enemies," barely intelligible in the executioner's French accent. The straw and his clothes are drenched with the blood that still pumps from the corpse, and he holds up the queen's dripping head.
--from Dissolution
My mind was full of all that I'd been told that evening, but, for the moment, the facts were like bits of flotsam bobbing around on the incoming tide of sleep. Suddenly, however, I found myself sitting bolt upright, asking myself a question that seemed, on the face of it, utterly absurd, but which had popped into my head as sharp and as clear as the chime of a blee. What did the disappearance, last September, of Eris Lilywhite have to do with the murder of two men over a hundred and thirty years ago?
--from Nine Men Dancing
So you want to hear about Murder? So you shall. Bloody, horrible deaths. Murder by the garrotte, by the knife, by poison. Murder at the fullness of noon when the devil walks, or in the dark when that sombre angel spreads his eternal black wings. Murder in palaces. Murder in rat-infested hovels, in open country and in crowded market places. Murder in dungeons, assassination in church. Oh Lord, I have seen the days! I have seen judicial murder; those who have died at the hangman's hands, strung up, cut down half-alive, thrown on the butcher's block and their steaming bodies hacked open. The heart, entrails and the genitals slashed and plucked out and the rest, God's creation, quartered and thrown like cold meat into refuse baskets. I have seen women boiled alive in great black vats, and others tied in chains and burnt above roaring fires at Smithfield.
--from The White Rose Murders
It was the seaman who fell, stabbed to the heart by the expertly wielded short-handles, long-bladed dagger produced in a flash from the woman's blue skirt. Eamonn Malahide, if that were indeed his real name, dropped with nothing more than a grunt and was patently dead before he hit the floor. At the same time, I saw the first woman stoop and pick up my cudgel again. I divined her purpose without much effort and made a further frantic attempt to get to my feet. But it was hopeless. My knees buckled under me and I was violently sick just a moment before she dealt me another stunning blow to the back of my head, on almost exactly the same spot as before. For the second time that morning, I was knocked unconscious.
--from The Midsummer Rose
I'm beginning to tire a little of Grace's Kathryn Swinbrooke, Medieval Healer, mysteries. They started out promising; now she and Murtagh (who are married by the end of this volume) are almost interchangeable detectives without the personality. In Saintly Murders, we have an interlocking set of crimes involving a friar with a sinful past who dies under apparently saintly circumstances (easily solved; I'm a cynic); a rat infestation (again, easily solved), and an English spy murdered in a locked room by a traitor, with a cryptic clue left behind (which I did not solve, but found the solution improbable). I didn't care much for any of it.
Unlike Grace, Kate Sedley still has ten or so more volumes to go, the last of which is a Christmas murder, so I'll probably soldier on and wrap it up in December. They vary in quality. the arc plot changes dramatically at this point, with Roger chapman married and with three kids and a dog, and things happening in his home city that will make a difference in further stories. I imagine there will be a lot less wandering and that characters introduced here will continue to appear as supporting characters. The Lammas Feast is one of the good ones--it fooled me in parts but not completely, and something suspicious that looked like a clue was left unexplained, but the plot was a good one, with four crimes and an excellently drawn supporting cast of suspects. A universally disliked town miscreant is killed, and the prime suspect is a stranger in town who might be a Lancastrian spy and so law enforcement is quick to just pin the crime on him. Only Roger pokes further, and as usual he digs up several nasty secrets. Nine Men Dancing tries and fails to base a plot on Nine Men's Morris by including a game unrelated to the crime and having Chapman intuit that he must "put the three pieces in a row" to find the murderer. In fact, there are two sets of three characters who, juxtaposed, could furnish the big clue, but Sedley instead chooses to make it three pieces of evidence. There are also two crimes, one set six months before Chapman's arrival, and the other over a century ago, and Chapman keeps insisting that the two crimes are related. Spoiler alert; no they aren't, though Sedley acts as if they are. Finally, if there's a mysteriously missing person and you want to keep the reader guessing, do not have the main character discover an abandoned well in chapter one and have his mind keep going back to it for no apparent reason throughout the book. Finally, The Midsummer Rose begins with Chapman witnessing a crime and almost losing his life, only to come to and discover that no evidence of the crime or the dead man's ever having existed is to be found, and no one believes his story---except the killer.
With this month, my set of historical mysteries finally enters the 16th Century with a pair of writers who set the Henry VIII Administration as the scene for some killings. C.J. Sansom's first book draws a bit from Cadfael and a bit from Umberto Eco while exploring King Henry's policy of breaking up monasteries to enrich the crown. Beginning right at the time of the death of Jane Seymour, wife #3, it follows a hunchbacked law clerk named Shardlake who is sent by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the death of a previous king's councilor who had been in turn investigating the affairs of a monastery in need of breaking up. More murders, a missing relic, and some unbalanced accounts and even more unbalanced monks ensue. I'm beginning to tire of the "Church with evil secrets" trope where shadowy figures are unrecognizable because they all have identical cowled robes, but this is a good one and I anticipate a good time with the remaining books.
Another new series to me is the "Roger Shallot" series by Michael Clynes, also set in the days of Henry VIII (or more accurately, in Elizabeth's time, with Shallot looking back on old adventures, just as Sedley's Roger Chapman looks back from Henry VIII to his youth among the Yorkists), of which The White Rose Murders is the first. Shallot is the first "Watson" narrator I've come across in a while, acting a servant to Cardinal Wolsey's nephew, Daunbey, who actually solves the crime. The crime itself is stupid, and depends on solving the "baffling" riddle, Three less than twelve should it be, or the King, no prince engendered he (Go on, even out of context, I'll bet some of you can tell what great Royal secret is threatened by the meaning of it); the sleuths themselves, other than being startlingly clue-impaired about how 12-3 might apply where engendering princes is concerned, make an appealing team, with Shallot self-describing as an unabashed, impulsive rogue, always filching silver from rich houses and coins from corpses "for distribution to the poor" whenever the pious, slightly naive but clever Daunbey has his back turned. Shallot also claims to be a contemporary of one Will Shakespeare, discussing cases with him and dropping such handy turns of phrases as "doth protest too much" into the playwright's lap during tavern conversation and telling the reader, Just wait, he'll manage to slip that into one of his plays, mark me words!. It's fun enough to overlook the ham-fisted prose and just roll with it.
An Excessive Crispe and Much Burnte: The New Organon, by Sir Francis Bacon
The human understanding is moved by those things most which strike and enter the mind simultaneously and suddenly, and so fill the imagination; and then it feigns and supposes all other things to be somehow, though it cannot see how, similar to those few things by which it is surrounded. But for that going to and fro to remote and heterogeneous instances by which axioms are tried as in the fire, the intellect is altogether slow and unfit, unless it be forced thereto by severe laws and overruling authority.
It was interesting reading Montaigne and Bacon at the same time; they're like two sides of the same coin, with Montaigne's skepticism contrasted with Bacon's quest for rational certainty, and both of them drawing on the same sources as evidence for opposite conclusions while rambling a bit more than the modern reader has patience for. I got the conclusion that neither was quite ready to have their work published when they passed on and left it behind; Bacon continually refers to matters he intends to discuss later yet never does.
The New Organon (pointedly intended to replace Aristotle's Logical tracts/Organon (see Bookpost, May 2011) is part of the "Great Books" set, but as far as I can tell, no longer really studied in humanities courses the way, say, Locke and Descartes are, nor discussed by anyone I know. Also, for someone so concerned with objective truth and disdainful of abstract attempts by sophists to create a map of the universe, he seems to do a lot of what he speaks out against, as his system seems every bit as arbitrary and capricious as Aristotle. His buzzwords like "Idols of the Tribe" have either not caught on or been discarded, and are now pretty much used only in philosophy exams.
So that you don't have to, I'll point out that "Idols of the Tribe" means biases that appeal to human emotions and are supposedly common to most or all humans; "Idols of the Man-Cave Cave mean individual biases such as tending toward the liberal or conservative view; "Idols of the Marketplace" are the biases we now get from people repeating ridiculous shit over the Internet (that in Bacon's time was repeated in taverns and the like), and "Idols of the Theater" is propaganda served up by churches, nobles and important pundits in suits. Those are supposedly the four sources of errors in thinking, and I invite you to join me in being underwhelmed. Logic and definitions of fallacies have come so far since then that it's hard for me to even make sense out of Bacon much less decide that we're standing on his shoulders.
The primary value of the New Organon is as a precursor to the Scientific Method and a turning from theoretical to applied sciences. Bacon was maybe the first to urge that, instead of just drawing conclusions from experiments, scientists and philosophers should use controls, duplicating any experiment while changing one variable so as to be more certain that that variable is what causes a given result. In my day, we studied that concept and did controlled experiments in 7th grade science classes; nowadays, America appears to have given it up altogether in favor of "Idols of the Dumbass", and denounces scientists as snooty elitist know-it-alls if they actually study and experiment on anything.
A Mostly Pleasant Trek: Travels With a Donkey, by Robert Louis Stevenson
They told me when I started, and I was ready to believe it, that before a few days I should come to love Modestine like a dog. Three days had passed, we had shared some misadventures, and my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my beast of burden. She was pretty enough to look at; but then she had given proof of dead stupidity, redeemed indeed by patience, but aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness. And I own this new discovery seemed another point against her. What the devil was the good of a she-ass if she could not carry a sleeping-bag and a few necessaries? I saw the end of the fable was rapidly approaching, when I should have to carry Modestine. Aesop was the man to know the world!
Like Mark Twain, Stevenson got his start writing non-fiction about his real-life experiences. Travels with a Donkey was his first book.
Twain had it better. He got to meet a bunch of cantankerous characters from frontier America and observe colorful episodes. Stevenson pretty much had his donkey for company on a 12-day, 120-mile journey across the Cevennes in Southeast France (maybe comparable to hiking the Maryland panhandle), and other than the donkey, the main character is the scenery, along with a goodly procession of once-ons by peasant farmers and clergy, most of whom stare as Stevenson walks by.
fortunately, the short book is filled with illustrations. Old pictures of the area. Modern pictures showing that the area hasn't changed all that much. Pencil drawings that Stevenson made at the time. Stevenson's route is well-documented; the locals commemorated it as the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail after the book was published, made it a tourist attraction, and celebrate the route the way Dubliners celebrate Leopold Bloom's route on Bloomsday. And speaking of pilgrimages to Stevenson...
Travels With An Author: Dead Man's Chest (Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson), by Nicholas Rankin
A South London travel company that specializes in walking tours, Waymark Holidays, sent John Sheringham to scout out the original route and find suitable inns and hotels along the way. Waymark Holiday 252, "Travels With a Donkey" began in 1979, and over five hundred people have subsequently walked the route with them in groups of a dozen. Stevenson is the theme and the selling point of the holiday; the volunteer leader carries a copy of the book and so do most of the middle-aged people who go on the fortnight's trip. The route is exactly Stevenson's wherever possible; the holiday is not expensive; you could go yourself one summer.
Stevenson's gift is to strike up a personal relationship with the reader, sharing every experience, even down to the glow of his night-time cigarette reflected in the silver ring on his hand. He is a palpable self in the darkness; an immediate living presence throughout the book. RLS has also become a Pied Piper with the power to make others follow him. And those who pursue another writer have to grapple with more than one self as they write their travels.
Rankin, in 1982, decided to go on a Stevenson pilgrimage by visiting all the places Stevenson lived--and there were a lot of them--and springboard from locations to a biography filled with quirky facts. The result is reminiscent of books like Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, but without the hipness and modern cultural explosions.
Rankin begins with a prologue in which he converses with Jorge Louis Borges, a fellow Stevenson fan, and then recounts Scotland, Britain, France, America, Europe again, and finally various Pacific islands--the journey of Stevenson's life.
It works on three levels. First, as a biography of Stevenson; second, as a review of most of his books; and third, as a travel journal--all three mixed together. Possibly on a fourth level, in that he writes not only about what various locations looked like in the late 19th century, but how they look now (e.g., while philosophizing about all the allegories inherent in Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde, Rankin serendipitously happens to run into a foof of Bournemouth drag queens, bringing on a whole new set of reflections on otherness and hidden selves). Highly recommended.
The Fault of our Star Charts: The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
Walter Moody, despite his reassuring countenance, and despite the courteous detachment with which he held himself, was nevertheless still and intruder. The men were at a loss to know how to persuade him to leave, without making it clear that he had intruded, and thus exposing the subversive nature of their assembly. Thomas Balfour had assumed the task of vetting him only by the accident of their proximity next to the fire--a happy conjunction, this, for Balfour was tenacious, for all his bluster and rhapsody, and well accustomed to turning a scene to his own again.
This huge, 830-page tome got a ton of well-deserved literary attention in 2013. It blew me away and left me wishing for more, it did so very much. To my mind, it is a literary achievement comparable to Middlemarch or The Magic Mountain. On one level, it reads like a frontier adventure novel set in New Zealand in 1865 and 1866. On another level, it is one of the most carefully structured pieces of literature this side of Ulysses, with the distinction that what happens is immediately coherent.
Catton took a set of star charts that actually reflect the planetary alignments of the historical months depicted in the novel, created twelve characters to represent the signs of the zodiac and eight more representing the Sun, Moon and planets Mercury through Saturn, and---who knows how an author's mind works? Maybe she looked at the saw how the planets aligned with the various signs over time and wrote character interactions based on that; or maybe wrote the characters and plot first, or some combination. The effect is the appearance that all of their destinies are directed by fate, by the planets, by God, and that they're just along for the ride. If Mars appears in Gemini at a certain time, then a criminal will go to the newspaper office and tell a lie while taking out an advertisement. If the sun later appears in Gemini, then in a subsequent chapter, another character will visit the same newspaper office and unwittingly say something that makes the newspaperman suspicious about what "Mars" had said.
Further, the twelve chapters are progressively shorter, mirroring the phases of a waning moon; the first chapter is roughly two fifths of the entire book; the last chapter is a single page.
At the start of the book, all twelve zodiac men (the newspaperman, chemist, banker, hotelier, Maori gemstone hunter, Chinese opium addict, brothel keeper, etc.) gather to share the separate bits of information they know about the disappearance of a prospector with a rich mining claim; the apparent suicide attempt of a whore; the possibly mysterious death of a recluse; the disappearance of a shipping crate, and other happenings. Subsequent ever-shorter chapters take place earlier or later than this meeting, and eventually, the truth is revealed.
The Luminaries is both entertaining and intellectually heavy. It is one of those books destined to become an instant classic, and to be read and studied by future generations long after our generation has passed away. Very highest recommendations.
Western Culture Shock: Changing Places, by David Lodge
Euphoric State had, by a ruthless exploitation of its wealth, built itself up into one of America's major Universities, buying the most distinguished scholars it could find and retaining their loyalty by the lavish provision of laboratories, libraries, research grants, and handsome, long-legged secretaries. By this year of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of decline--due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to counter-pressures exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie actor. But such was the quality of the university's senior staff, and the magnitude of its accumulated resources, that it would be many years before its standing was seriously undermined. Euphoric State, in short, was still a name to conjure with in the senior common rooms of the world. Rummidge, on the other hand, had never been an institution of more than middling size and reputation, and it had lately suffered the mortifying fate of most English universities of its type (civic redbrick): having competed strenuously for fifty years with two universities chiefly valued for being old, it was, at the moment of drawing level, rudely overtaken in popularity and prestige by a batch of universities chiefly valued for being new. Its mood was therefore disgruntled and discouraged, rather as would be the mood of the middle class in a society that had never had a bourgeois revolution, but had passed directly from aristocratic to proletarian control.
Between this one and The Luminaries, I really lucked out in terms of books that I read cold, with no idea what to expect. I enjoyed P.G. Wodehouse as a kid, and Lodge evokes a similar kind of humor.
Changing Places has a simple premise: An American professor from a thinly disguised 60s-era Berkley and a tweedy British professor from a probably disguised version of some British university participate in an exchange program where they are to teach at each other's respective schools for six months. Comic culture shock hijinks and improbable scenarios ensue, the two profs find themselves more suited to their new environments than they had been to their old ones, and become the heroes of the respective student uprisings in their areas (The American version of which looks a lot like the "People's Park" protest of 1969 Berkley). they even find themselves in one another's houses, romancing one another's wives.
Though the book is mostly whimsical, it made me wistful for the days in which higher ed students had a degree of autonomy and wanted more, and when California believed in funding its Universities, which used to be among the best in America. It also uses the protagonists' status as English professors to comment on its own text; for example, in one chapter composed entirely of letters to various characters, one professor's wife writes about a textbook, saying, "There's a whole chapter about how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody's done that since the eighteenth century?" Highest recommendations.
British Novel Bingo: No Laughing Matter, by Angus Wilson
Well, I'm sure Will's family have done all they can, Miss Rickard. I was only too happy to take on dear Quentin's fees at Westminster, of course. No one looks smarter in his topper, I'm sure. Though I do wish we still has Hopkins, Will. What a sheen he used to put on your father's hats. But there we are; we can't talk about valets on an annuity, can we? I'm lucky enough to have Edith and Cook and Colyer. Though I do all I can for everyone, I must say.
It's hard to read. Just check off the tropes as they come. Children of a once-rich family now fallen on hard times, having to give up privilege in a way presented as if dear little lambs are being pushed into a cold slaughterhouse. Thoughtlessly tyrannical stiff-upper-lip parents. A cockney servant who keeps her real thoughts to herself. The snooty teen who, prior to WWII, decides that Hitler has the right idea, wot-wot. A character gambles away money entrusted to her, at a devastating loss to those who entrusted it to her, and the important loss is supposed to be about her own guilt feelings and the tragedy that she has to go to jail.
The best parts of the book are chapters written in the form of plays, with the siblings as characters talking to one another while play-acting the adults. It communicates the bond between them and how the grown-up behavior comes across to the impressionable young minds. The worst part consists of a triggering episode early in the book, in which the adults drown a litter of kittens behind the backs of the kids who have adopted them.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/...