Bookworm: July 2024
'Half the Sky,' 'The Paris Novel,' 'The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura,' 'These Precious Days,' 'The Murder of Mr. Wickham'
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How fast summer goes by. I saw my first back-to-school ad recently. My teen’s school newsletter has popped up again in my inbox. And brown leaves are blowing around the backyard. Still, the first day of fall remains more than a month away. The hammock is still tied between two trees. I plan to spend more time reading in it in August.
Table of contents
Nonfiction: “Half the Sky,” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Fiction: “The Paris Novel,” by Ruth Reichl
Middle grade fiction: “The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura,” by author
Essays: “These Precious Days,” by Ann Patchett
Cozy mystery: “The Murder of Mr. Wickham,” by Claudia Gray
“Half the Sky”
I’ve followed the careers of Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn for so long, they seem like personal acquaintances at this point. I’ve read their work in The New York Times, attended a talk by WuDunn and edited coverage of their wine- and cider-making ventures. I interviewed the couple about their 2020 book, “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope.”
So when their 2009 book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” popped up in a nearby Little Free Library, I grabbed it. It had long been on my TBR (To Be Read) list but I’d somehow not gotten to it.
Though the book is now 15 years old, its stories of how women are abused, oppressed, marginalized and erased remain compelling and, I fear, all too current. Kristof and WuDunn depict these women’s lives with unflinching detail. At times the stories threaten to overwhelm or numb.
But these women aren’t just victims. They’re women who managed to take the initiative and turn their lives around. They often need support to do so, though. Kristof and WuDunn lean in to the “one person can make a difference” philosophy, showing how one person’s micro-grant or another person’s letter-writing campaign or another person’s micro-grant can set off a chain of events and connections that can foster economic self-sufficiency or change national law.
Not all the stories have what privileged Americans might deem to be happy endings. Some of the women profiled continue to face seemingly insurmountable barriers to basic human rights. But “Half the Sky” sounds a clear note of hope and a call to act however one can. Kristof and WuDunn remind us of the starfish parable, in which a child is picking up starfish stranded on a beach and throwing them back into the ocean. When someone comments, “You can’t save all of them, so what difference does that make?,” the child throws another starfish back and replies, “It made a difference for that one.”
“The Paris Novel”
The 2024 Paris Olympics, which began July 26 and continue through Aug. 11, combine one of my favorite television spectacles with one of my favorite cities. It seemed de rigeur to celebrate this meeting of passions with chef and food editor Ruth Reichl’s new novel, “The Paris Novel.”
Though our heroine, Stella, is 33, this is a coming-of-age story, told with Reichl’s gusto for the sensory delights of food and fashion. Stella is leading what she considers a quite satisfactory life in New York when her estranged mother, Celia, dies. Stella’s inheritance includes a one-way plane ticket to France and a note that says, mysteriously, “Go to Paris.”
What Stella always found unsatisfactory about Celia, whom she called “Celia” rather than “Mom” or even “Mother,” was her refusal to be restrained. Celia approached life as a “consummate chameleon,” playing various versions of herself even to close friends, whom she privately called “the acolytes.” Her only child — whom Celia claimed to have named after the beer she enjoyed with a handsome stranger in a bar — rebelled predictably.
Left largely to her own devices, Stella created rigid routines for herself. “It’s like living with a nun!” Celia complained to the acolytes. “All we’re missing are the bells.” She made endless fun of the calendar Stella hung in her room, each day’s activities carefully penciled in, hour by hour. Stella left nothing to chance; it made her feel safe.
Stella grows up to be a copy editor at a small New York publishing house, a safe job in every sense — at least in 1983, when this story is set. (Fellow former copy editors, please join me in pouring one out for the profession.) When the opportunity to go to Paris falls into her lap, she lets six months slip by. Finally, her boss comes across her working very late one night and orders her to take her first vacation in 10 years.
Naturellement, Stella does not indulge in Paris the way her mother did; the very thought is disturbing. She makes herself another calendar, this time to see all the tourist sights. She pines for her New York routines.
But somewhere in the back of her mind was a vague hope that if she could just figure out why Celia had sent her here, she might finally make peace with her mother’s memory.
Of course Stella does so, finding a bolder version of herself along the way with the help of a cast of quirky characters, including Reichl’s rendition of George Whitman, founder of the iconic Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. As one might expect of an author who’s a six-time James Beard Award winner, food plays a pivotal role in Stella’s coming-of-age. I set this book down with a feeling of having dined, and dined well, in the literary equivalent of a delightful bistro.
“The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura”
Author Waka T. Brown has carved out a nice niche in the always-competitive middle-grade space: stories that center the modern Japanese American experience. Her latest book, Oregon Book Award winner “The Very Unfortunate Wish of Melony Yoshimura,” mashes up a classic American conflict — a daughter of immigrant parents wants desperately to break free their strict rules so she can fit in with the other kids at school — with a classic Japanese folk tale — a shape-shifting demon called the Amanjaku senses her darkest thoughts and makes them come true in a twisted way.
“Melony Yoshimura” is about acknowledging and overcoming fears. It’s about developing empathy and giving others the benefit of the doubt, because they may be putting on a front to hide troubles or appear invulnerable. It’s about learning that freedom without responsibility is just self-indulgence that can go sideways in a heartbeat.
Brown has created a wholly relatable and likable character in 12-year-old Melony, who struggles to balance her parents’ expectations with the outside world’s temptations.
“Do you like your presents?” My mom’s question interrupted the daydream of what it would have been like to have my wish come true.
My parents’ hopeful faces waited for my response.
“Thank you very much,” I told them, like the good girl they expected me to be. Like the good girl I want to be, I thought as I tried to feel grateful instead of disappointed.
I understood Melony to my core. In an author’s note, Brown describes how her parents raised her, and she could have been writing about my parents:
There were many aspects of the US that they enjoyed; however, there were also many that were suspect, because “that would never happen in Japan.” Anything that was “too American” in their eyes was viewed as a possible corrupting influence.
Brown adds that she “identified with the Amanjaku and its ability to shape-shift, in a sense, to fit the ideas and expectations of others around us.” She’s describing code-switching, a behavior all of us engage in to a degree, but that has particular resonance and impact for those of us who are switching between highly disparate contexts.
“These Precious Days”
After reading a number of Ann Patchett’s novels (I particularly like “Run” and “Tom Lake”), I wanted a better sense of what makes her tick. Her essay collection “These Precious Days” was just the ticket.
In “Three Fathers,” Patchett writes about her biological father, her two stepfathers and their influences on her.
From each of the fathers I took the things I needed, and then I turned them into stories — my father gave me strength, Mike gave me adoration, Darrell gave me acceptance.”
In “The Paris Tattoo,” she writes about traveling through Europe at age 19 with another 19-year-old woman, and how both of them became enamored of the tattoo they saw on a French waitress. “We are not the girls you knew before, is what our tattoos would indicate to the world.” They use a French-English dictionary to figure out how to ask the waitress where she got her tattoo.
She made a little back-and-forth movement with the pad of her finger. “Rub-on?” she said, with a heavy, questioning accent, as if those were the only two words in English that she knew and we shouldn’t try to ask her anything else.
In the title essay, the longest at 66 pages, Patchett writes about contributing a blurb for actor Tom Hanks’ story collection “Uncommon Type,” then being invited to interview him onstage as part of his book tour. This was delightful to read, because I too interviewed Tom Hanks as part of his “Uncommon Type” book tour, though not onstage and for the paperback edition. I settled in, expecting a fun tell-all.
It was a tell-all, but it was not entirely about Hanks and it was not exactly fun. Instead, it was about the unexpected friendship that sprang up between Patchett and Hanks’ assistant, Sooki. It began as an email exchange about Hanks’ recording of the audiobook version of Patchett’s novel “The Dutch House.” Through various novel-esque twists and turns, Sooki ends up living with Patchett and her husband for several months during the pandemic’s lockdown phase. They all become very close. Sometimes Sooki tries to give Patchett money for her expenses. Patchett refuses it.
That was when her eyes would well up. Sooki, bareheaded, her silver earrings dangling down her neck. “I have to feel like I’m contributing. I can’t always be the one who’s taking everything.”
But of course I was the one who took everything. Why couldn’t she see that? The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you. I was taking in every precious day.
“The Murder of Mr. Wickham”
Having read “The Late Mrs. Willoughby” last month, I had to read its predecessor, “The Murder of Mr. Wickham,” the first title in Claudia Gray’s Mr. Darcy and Miss Tilney Murder Series.
This one truly takes a page out of Agatha Christie, with the entire cast of characters, all drawn from or inspired by Jane Austen’s novels, conveniently trapped by horrid weather and impassable roads in the home of Emma (nee Woodhouse) and George Knightley, They’re all there for a house party, a type of gathering previously unknown to me — apparently, it involves inviting guests who stay not for a few hours but for days or weeks. (Gulp.)
The Knightleys’ somewhat haphazardly curated guest list is marred by the unexpected appearance of George Wickham, whose sins have expanded to include that of loan sharking. He’s somehow sniffed out that a number of his victims are gathered in one place, and he’s arrived to collect. So when he suddenly meets a violent demise late one night in the Knightleys’ gallery, the suspects are many.
Gray’s amateur detectives are Jonathan Darcy, son of Elizabeth (nee Bennet) and Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Juliet Tilney, daughter of Catherine (nee Morland) and Henry Tilney (I really must re-read “Northanger Abbey”). In a modern twist, Jonathan is clearly neurodivergent, and has suffered socially for it. Juliet, meanwhile, chafes against the rules binding the behavior of proper young people of her and Jonathan’s class. It’s risky enough for Jonathan to write Juliet a note. It’s downright scandalous when his father catches them meeting alone at midnight. Nevertheless, they solve the murder, and the answer to who did it sets up the next novel nicely.
There’s a third novel out now. Reader, I will be getting my hands on it,
A couple of things: I remember back in the 1970s that Nick Kristof was an intern at The Oregonian.
As for modern takes on Jane Austen, I recently ran across a bizarre one: Unleashing Mr. Darcy, about a woman, Elizabeth, who is learning how to show her little dog, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Mr. Darcy is a breeder and dog-show judge based in London. I wouldn’t rush out and buy this book. It’s a Hallmark romance that’s been made into a TV series.