Ghost Moth by Michèle Forbes -
In 1969, Katherine is married to George and has four kids. But in 1949, Katherine, engaged to George, was singing the lead role in an amateur production of Carmen, and a tailor named Tom was making her costume. Katherine is mesmerized by Tom measuring her and describing how he will construct her dress (page 73). “I’ll insert the bone through the aperture of the casing, sliding it firmly upward all the way to the top of the seam. I’ll draw the bone back just a little, if I need to, so that it won’t force the material. The spring of the bone must always be right.” I can see why Katherine succumbed to this eroticism.
The rest of the book deals with what happened next in 1949, and its effects on the marriage of Katherine and George twenty years later. The story was depressing and the characters not likeable, but Forbes writes well enough that I finished the book. I have no idea how it got on my TBR shelf - I don't remember buying it or anyone giving it to me.
Although this book is set in 1969-70 (with flashbacks to 1949), I would not describe it as historical fiction, because the historical events of the time (the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast) are only touched on and are peripheral to the main story. Its effects seem to be mainly on the children, and appear in sections told from the viewpoint of Elsa, one of the daughters of main characters Katherine and George.
The title of the book refers to pale-colored moths “…that some people believed that ghost moths were the souls of the dead waiting to be caught, and some people believed that they were only moths,” according to Katherine's father (page 44). Later (page 130), Elsa asks, "'And if they were the souls of dead people,...and you caught them, would you have to hold on to them forever, or could you just let them go when you wanted to?'"
Katherine doesn't know the answer then, but by the end of the book (pages 211-212), she does.
Spoiler alert: "On their honeymoon, she had offered George a confession, in the hope that it would set her free, and he had, in turn, handed a confession back to her [that, as a volunteer fireman, he had not helped Tom before Tom drowned]. Their wedding gift to each other. A gift they had rewrapped and carried silently through their married life. They had both been frightened that talking through their feelings about what had happened would have unraveled the hurt caused, would have demanded something of them that would have been too much for them to bear. [Not two new paragraphs following, but it should be.]
Would have demanded that they look together at the frayed threads of their lives spreading out in front of them like an ancient tapestry. Each of them having to discern exactly which one was the thread of guilt and where precisely it had twisted around the fibers of their love. Each of them asking how easy it would be to find the thread of infidelity? Its silken weave so difficult to trace and capture. And which the illusive thread of betrayal? Where did it follow the warp and where the weft? Which the thread of culpability? And where the threads that had unraveled from doing nothing until it was too late?
But in the state of forever searching for the other's forgiveness and never asking, they had both kept Tom alive. The way we continually keep the dead alive in an attempt to repair the past. The way we carry the dead through life and so forget to live.
However, losing each other they had never wanted. She sees that now.
Something within Katherine is softening - whether of her own volition or not is hard to tell - as though a veil or a skin is falling from her. And it seems perfectly obvious to her now, only she just hadn't been able to see it. That holding on to her memories of Tom, burying them deep within her, detail after detail, in a vain effort to protect herself and George, had in itself been an endless infidelity. An infidelity to the here and now. Even though she had not been able to admit it to herself, she had held onto it all in her attempt to make sense of Tom's death. Perhaps make sense of the loss of a baby, too - if there had ever been one. [Katherine's period, just before Tom died, was very late.] Most of all, to make sense of of what George had done - or not done - out of love for her.
Then, since her cold encounter in the sea with the seal, since she had faced a kind of drowning of her own, all those memories of Tom had risen to the surface, risen in a bid to be released, risen in a bid to release her.
George had been tortured by his own ghosts, too, she had no doubt, interminably tortured, had turned pieces of memory over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have made things different, or possibly, even secretly, grateful that he hadn't. The pain of that keeping, she feels it now. Such a weight for him to carry. George waiting in the dusk of his life, like a child waiting for the big snow, so that it may ease the world with its white promise. Wasting himself with an ill-defined hope. Wondering how, in the eyes of the world, he could possibly justify his actions the night of Tom's death. Wondering how, in the eyes of his wife, he could possibly compete with the perfect dead."
Three Lines in a Circle: The Exciting Life of the Peace Symbol, is a colorful picture book about the development and evolution of the emblem of the peace movement. Simple text is appropriate for the target audience of young children, while a more detailed history of the peace symbol in the afterword and a timeline of its use make the book usable by older children. The author,
Michael G. Long, is a former Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and is the author or editor of many books on civil rights, peaceful protest, religion, and politics. The vibrant illustrations by
Carlos Vélez Aguilera appear to be done in his favorite media of "
colored pencils, watercolours, and graphite." Advance reader edition, Early Reviewer, picture book, children's, nonfiction.
Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn, was published in 2001, but is still timely twenty years later. While my paperback copy had the simple subtitle of "A Novel in Letters," the original subtitle on the hardcover was "a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable." While I knew epistolary meant the story was told via letter-writing, lipogram was a new word for me. A lipogram is a written work composed of words selected so as to avoid the use of one or more letters of the alphabet.
Ella Minnow Pea is a resident of Nollop, an independent (fictional) island off the coast of North Carolina, formerly called Utopianna, whose citizens are "elevating language to a national art form" (from the front matter). In 1904 the name of their country is changed to Nollop, to honor an early resident who devised the well-known "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" pangram (a sentence that uses all letters of a given alphabet at least once).
The phrase is immortalized in tiles on a monument to Nollop. One day the letter Z falls off. The country's leaders think it is a sign from the dead Nollop, and decree that letter is no longer to be used. As more tiles fall, more letters are banned, and citizens have to get creative with their vocabulary (and eventually spelling) in their written and spoken communications to each other. Much of the story is told through letters between Ella and her parents, cousin Tassie and aunt Mittie, and others.
The country loses population as people move away either voluntarily, or via banishment after three offenses of the rules. Ella and a visiting American, Nate, try to convince the leaders that the tiles are falling off due to bad glue, but only succeed in getting them to agree to withdraw the rules if, within a limited time, they can come up with a 32-letter pangram (shorter than Nollop's by three letters - thus eliminating the obvious possibility of just changing one "the" in his sentence to "a"). Down to the deadline and with just five letters left in the alphabet (L, M, N, O, P - get it?), Ella finds a solution in a surprising place.
I really liked this clever book. SO many quotes appropriate for today (substitute Trump for Nollop). Keep in mind that the most of the quotes avoid the banned letters of the moment, so as the page numbers increase, the letters available to use are decreasing.
p. 52: "We must...make our decisions and judgments based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense - a commodity absent for too long from those in governmental elevatia, where its employ would do us all much good."
p. 87: "Nollop's whole life was a construct not only of such lust for power, but of an unnatural craving for outright worship. Yet the man was without any merit, any virtue - holy or otherwise - whatsoever."
p. 128: "To leave or not to leave. To waive claim to our homes. To renounce our mother soil. To give up everything to those who warrant only our lowest contempt - to those who aspire to reign in outright tyranny, who misperceive Nollopian thoughts in service to rapacious intentions. Can they not see that we see what is happening here? Are we to them only silent, witless nonessentials - prostate irrelevancies to step over in their march to own, to expropriate, to steal everything in sight - even our very tongues!"
p. 133 (from Ella's father, just before he is expelled, so he is ignoring the rules): "Like a retarded robot I go into the the preprogrammed mode, placing my brain on high alert to avoid these Nollop-frowned-upon devil letters....Satan is alive and well, right here in all his z-q-j-d-k-f-b, jumpy-brown-fox-slothful-pooch-quick-and-the-dead-glory - right here upon this devil's island of hatred and anger and unconscionable, inconsolable loss."
p. 151: "...the state operates now only to relate the next letters to omit. There are no other magisterial assertions. The thug-uglies arrest, thrash - then expel. The high priests generate their alpha-elisions, then return to their lairs to east what tasties were put there, while praying to Nollop, paying homage to Nollop, stooping, prostrating, salaaming to Nollop. Ignoring all humanity in their Nollop-apothesis.
Let us say Nollop were all-hallow preeminent Omnipotentate, why - still - shut out all those with whom one shares this planet? Were we put here on this earth only to worship? Exalting Nollop is to erase all that is non-Nollopian upon this isle. To utterly erase an upright, meritorious people. Genoerasure."
Things get worse as more letters fall.
p. 166: "Other news: last night my sister's man was stanting pheneath the senotaph when a new tile plonge. The tile with the letter X. It hit him right on his het. The priests are there pronto pronto to get the tile. They see my sister's man lying there, eyes not open. They gather the tile peeses. They stroll away, not ephen looging at him. Totally ignoring ingert man. He meant nothing to them."
and
p. 169: "Mannheim is mort....he yoose an illegal letter in interphew aphter poleese see him ant Tom going threw wintow into yew-niphersity hall - trespassing. He yoose the letter, then when the poleese go to tie his hants to transport him to Pier 7, he ant Tom try to phlee so teporation will not happen. The poleese shoot him. They shoot him in the het. He is immediately tet."
And after a 32-letter pangram is found, Ella writes:
p. 201: "...any one of us could have come up with such a sentence. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters. Like Nollop. Nollop, low-order primate elevated to high-order ecclesiastical primate, elevated still further in these darkest last days to ultimate prime A grade superior being. For doing that which my father did without thinking. Think about it."
The Third Mrs. Galway by Deirdre Sinnott - This book is set in 1835 in Utica, New York, shortly before the
convention there that led to the founding of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society. Although slaves had been freed and slavery abolished in New York state in 1827, runaway slaves from other states could still be recaptured in and sent back from there.
Helen O'Connell Galway is a young woman, orphaned as a child and a recent graduate of the local finishing school, newly married to Augustin Galway, a widower many years her senior and a member of the
American Colonization Society, formed in 1817 to send blacks to Liberia in Africa rather than emancipate them in the United States. Helen discovers two escaped slaves, the pregnant Imari and her son Joe, hiding in the shed, and, despite her misgivings, decides to help them. Her husband is laid up with a broken leg, but his unscrupulous doctor and the long-time housekeeper Maggie, a free black woman, have their eyes on Helen. The title of a book is a teaser that is revealed near the end of the 332-page book.
Deirdre Sinnott is a historian who is an expert about the American abolition movement and the Underground Railroad centered in her native Utica, but this is her first attempt at published fiction. There are a lot of details about the history, and I learned a lot, but the (too many) characters are thinly developed (or are caricatures), and the romance felt forced. In the afterword, Sinnott states she has an "upcoming nonfiction book" about another incident in the Utica abolition movement, and I'd be interested in reading that.
Flight by Sherman Alexie -
Zits is a fifteen-year-old in the Seattle foster care system with a bad case of acne. His Native-American father abandoned his Anglo mother shortly after Zits' birth, and his mother died of cancer when Zits was six. He's had dozens of foster homes since, and routinely gets into trouble. He meets another boy in a holding cell who later gives him a real gun and a paint gun.
Zits goes to a bank intending to shoot people there, and seems to get shot and die, but instead starts experiencing a weird series of reincarnations and time travel. He becomes a white FBI agent confronting Native Americans on a reservation in the 1970s; a mute Native American boy at Little Big Horn, a older white tracker leading the U. S. Army to a Native American village in the late 1800s, a white pilot who inadvertently trained a terrorist, and his own alcoholic father. He knows that he has changed, but he has no control over the actions of the person he embodies. With each change, he learns some things that ultimately change him when he returns to his (still alive) true self.
I didn't like this book as much as Alexie's
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (and note that review #1052 is a reposting of this review). While I don't think Sherman Alexie intended this to be a young adult novel (I can't find a current website for him), I think it would work for very mature teens who can handle the violence and swearing. The paperback copy I had of
Flight had 44 discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.
© Amanda Pape - 2021
