Freedom Soup - early reviewer, picture book - This picture book is about passing cultural traditions down from one generation to another. Belle's Haitian grandmother, Ti Gran, teaches Belle to make Freedom Soup for New Year's, and about the history of the soup and the Haitian Revolution. Author Tami Charles learned to make the soup from her husband's Haitian grandmother, and she provides a simplified version of the recipe at the end of the book. The vibrant illustrations by Jacqueline Alcántara were done in pencil, marker, and gouache, and assembled digitally.
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, is historical fiction set in Italy during World War II. It's about Italian Catholics and Jews who were part of the Italian Resistance and who hid Jews both from Italy and elsewhere. A list of characters at the front of the book includes 45 people (one of which goes by four names in the book), which was too many characters for me to track. I had purchased my copy at a used book sale, and the previous reader had torn out this list of characters and used it as a bookmark - I can understand why. It probably didn't help that I read most of this book right around the time my mother died - I was pretty tired and distracted. While I learned a lot from this book, reading about so many deaths was depressing, and I'm not sure I would read it again.
Lux by Elizabeth Cook - weird early reviewer advance reader edition. I was somewhat disappointed by this book. It started out promising - a retelling of much of the Biblical books of Samuel (from about 1 Samuel 4:15 through about 2 Samuel 17:20), including the stories of Israel's loss of the Ark of the Covenant and its eventual return (one I hadn't remembered), and of David killing Goliath, becoming king, and his lust for Bathsheba and his arrangement for the death of her husband Uriah in battle. I'm no Biblical scholar, but I enjoyed pulling out my old study Bible and reviewing these. The book includes multiple third-person viewpoints in this section (including Uriah and the prophet Nathan), and the parts of the story told from Bathsheba's perspective were particularly good.
That was the first 161 pages. The next 100 or so were a letdown - David's seven-day fast in isolation to try to save the life of his illicit son with Bathsheba, and all his thoughts during that time, some expressed in psalms. Author Elizabeth Cook may be a poet, but I found this section tedious and boring.
To me, the only real connections between the first two thirds of the book and the last third - which is set in King Henry VIII's time and focuses on poet Thomas Wyatt - are the set of tapestries Henry acquires that tell the story of David and Bathsheba, and the fact that Wyatt translated psalms supposedly written by David during his repentence.
In an article called "A Blaze of Light," Cook said, "I had long known that I wanted to write about the 16th-century poet, Thomas Wyatt...This novel began with one word, the title, Lux. I wrote it, in capitals, at the start of a new notebook late in December 2000. It was the name of Wyatt’s beloved falcon and plays on the Latin for 'light' and also on the 'luck' which Wyatt only occasionally experienced in the course of a turbulent life." Given this, I was surprised so little of the book (132 pages out of 403) was about Wyatt. I learned a lot about the poet, but for me, the book ended abruptly.
In an article called "On Taking Time," Cook said it took 17 years for her to write this book. Perhaps I lack the patience she has.
© Amanda Pape - 2019
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