Banned Books Week

Celebrating the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, I picked up Nasreen’s Secret School by Jeanette Winter. According to the American Library Association, this one was “challenged” in a Wisconsin school district because it “contains an Islamic prayer.”

Based on a true story, Winter tells the story with the voice of a grandmother living in Afghanistan. When the woman’s son and daughter-in-law disappear, she tries to find ways for her granddaughter Nasreen to cope. Discovering a secret school for girls, she enrolls Nasreen. Months go by. Nasreen never smiles. Finally, after the winter recess, a classmate reaches out to Nasreen, and she smiles for the first time since her parents’ disappearance.

With books, “Nasreen no longer feels alone…Now she can see blue sky beyond those dark clouds.”

The Animators

Think of The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker as a grittier Fangirl (by Rainbow Rowell). Or perhaps a more sharply focused take on The Interestings (by Meg Wolitzer).

While I was reading it, I kept picturing a cartoon sequence from the (amazing) Amazon series Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street.

In Episode 7 (season 201), bongo drums start playing a 70s beat as one of the main characters, Ranger, ruminates on puberty. “If nature puts you at the back of the pack, you do anything you can to get to the front.” He adds, “First you get the hair, then you get the power, then you get the respect.”

In Whitaker’s work, Mel and Sharon meet in a college arts program. Discovering a mutual affinity for drawing and a love of obscure comics, they begin collaborating. When their film of Mel’s coming-of-age story becomes a word-of-mouth sensation, they begin pondering their next project. An unexpected stroke forces them to pause. 

During her recovery, Sharon opens up about a traumatic event she experienced as a child. When she is well enough, the two make a trip to Kentucky to introduce Mel to her family and the surroundings that shaped her. The two begin animating Sharon’s story. However, in some ways, the project will prove to be even more damaging than her stroke.

Through Mel and Sharon's stories, Whitaker examines the intersection of memoir, truth, and fiction. Does the storyteller, regardless of medium, have the right to reveal the lives of others central to the story? She also looks at the healing process. When our identity is tied to what we do, what happens when our abilities are changed in some way?

Read an excerpt here.

“After the initial kerplunk”

This week’s challenge was to read a collection of stories by a woman. Having loved her novel and memoir, I picked up Thunderstruck and Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken.

In the title story, Wes and Laura worry their pre-teen daughter Helen is growing up too fast. The family decides (as one does) to take a spur of the moment summer trip to Paris. “The plan was to disrupt their lives, a jolt to Helen’s system before school started again in the fall…Perhaps the problem all this time was that her soul had been written in French.” And it appears it has, as Helen discovers an ease in communicating with taxi drivers and food vendors in the French she has learned in school.

The family slowly starts to relax into the rhythm of their days and the parents begin letting their daughters venture out on afternoon excursions by themselves. However, they learn they’ve let their guard down too soon when the phone rings in the middle of the night. A nurse tells them Helen is in the ICU.

Days turn to weeks, and eventually the family decides to send Laura and their youngest daughter back to the States. As Wes watches his daughter slowly, painfully recover, he turns to art as therapy. And we are left wondering who needs more healing.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the interview in the back between the author, McCracken, and Ann Patchett. Writers and friends, the two discuss memoirs, the thought process behind organizing the collection in this book, and book prizes.

Find suggestions for more story collections here.

Serafina's Promise

Today is a repost in honor of #internationalliteracyday and the storms ravaging the Caribbean.

Serafina's Promise by Ann E Burg

Serafina's chore each morning is to collect water for her parents and grandmother:

"One foot forward-

stop.

The other foot forward-

stop." 

This is only the first of many chores she faces growing up in rural Haiti.

After meeting the young doctor that takes care of her baby brother, Serafina decides that she too wants to become a doctor when she grows up. First, she must figure out a way to ask her parents to send her to school. She approaches her father and together they make a plan. However, nature decides to throw several obstacles in their way. 

Told in verse, the story drums with the beat of the parade Serafina watches with her father, rushes with the waters of the flood she flees with her mother, and shines with the hope she sees in the stars. 

After my daughter and I both read the book, we discussed it using the questions we found here. We both admitted to crying through most of Part III of the book. And we both agreed that we are very fortunate to be able to go to school. As Serafina says, "Education is the road to freedom." My daughter interpreted that to mean, "If we go to school, we can be whatever we want."

One foot forward.

Then the floods came

One morning I was awakened by a knock on my door. I opened it to find some very serious officials wearing rain gear. Grabbing my passport and purse, I accompanied them up the hill to the community center. Torrential rains had caused the river to flood the first floor of my apartment building my second week in Japan.

At the community center, I clumsily tried to make onigiri with the women of the town, who were tasked with feeding the volunteer firefighter brigade. At one point, later that evening, one of the women motioned for me to come with her. She invited me to her house for tea, and we eventually worked out her sons were students at the junior high and elementary schools where I was to be an assistant English teacher.

I was allowed to return to my apartment, picking my way through the mud that now filled the foyer. It would take weeks for the clean-up, but in the meantime Junko and her family checked up on me and helped introduce me to others in the community.

As the waters recede in Texas and Louisiana (and Bangladesh, India, and Nepal), and recovery proceeds, my hope is those communities are  strengthened, not torn apart. And strangers who encountered each other by happenstance and tragedy become neighbors.

Although there have been plenty of real-life Houston heroes in the news this week, here’s a list to direct you to some fictional ones as well.