A Room of One's Dead

A small, quiet dimly lit room. The walls adorned only by the portraits of the dead. This is the place Viji slips into first thing in the morning before her triplets have awoken, or her father-in-law has peed on her roses, or her professor husband has left to flirt with the undergrads he teaches.

Shanthi Sekaran's The Prayer Room examines the life of Viji and George Armitage. After meeting in an art history class in India, they marry a short time later, and find themselves on a plane back to George's home in England. After a tense stay with George's parents, they soon board another plane to the land of pudding pops and flip-flops.

Viji and George's triplets are eleven the summer George's widowed father Stan comes to Sacramento for an extended stay. They are soon won over, as are the neighborhood women, by his British charms. Viji , alone, is not amused and spends even more time cleaning her prayer room. However, Stan's presence attracts the visit of an Indian expatriate neighbor, Kamla. Soon Viji's laughter is again filling the kitchen over cups of tea with her new friend. Kamla's friendship also gives Viji the confidence to take her children for a long-put-off visit to her sister in Madras. Viji's absence proves taxing not only to her marriage vows but to her own self-perception.

If you've shooed your own on-summer-vacation kids out into the backyard, and are looking forward to a few moments of quiet, somewhat dark, contemplation, The Prayer Room may just be the refuge you seek. No dusting required.

In the Spring

Some of my regular readers ("Hi, Mom!") might be wondering if I stopped reading two months ago. The short answer is no. The long answer, well, it all started with Toronto. Despite reservations at the Downtowner and an afternoon crying while watching a Canadian-Irish film, I did enjoy the parts of the trip I spent reading. I hadn't planned on reading that much, and set out early on Saturday to see the sights. However, as most of the Toronto shops didn't open until 11, I hunkered down in the Second Cup and took out the novel I had packed, Jeffrey Lent's In the Fall.

Divided into several generations of stories, In the Fall lent itself well to the sporadic timing of travel reading. A few minutes on a metro here or several hours in the park across from there and I was back in Vermont with the Pelhams. I opened to the point where Norman is walking home after the Civil War with his new bride Leah.

Later that afternoon, on a long bus ride to here, I began the part where Norman's youngest son Jamie leaves home and tries to make his way as a bootlegger.

The next day, after I had passed through customs and "turned my change into GOLD" for the Canadian ski team, I ended up at my gate several hours too early. I welcomed the wait, though, since I had also arrived at the most gripping part of the book. After Jamie dies, his son Foster finds a stack of letters from an aunt he never knew about. Foster meets his aunts and learns that his grandmother was a runaway slave. He has just knocked on a door in Sweetboro, North Carolina to confront a man about his grandmother's past. So after arriving home and sitting down to write a reaction, I succumbed to a bout of writer's block. Who wouldn't after reading a writer like Lent? But then all blogging got shelved for a funeral, a disheartening parent-teacher conference, a box of Bob books, 72 final exams, a job offer in Ann Arbor, a graduation, an uninvited house guest or two, and a potty-training toddler. We'll see what happens in the summer.

Grids Gone Wild

For those of you with preschoolers, the summer looms long with relentless requests for snacks and hulu cartoons. In order to thwart the boredom (and get my 4-year-old ready for kindergarten), I've been researching different ways to review (and expand) her math, reading, and writing skills. Here are three resources I'm counting on for math.

Much More Than Counting: More Whole Math Activities for Preschool and Kindergarten by Sally Moomaw and Brenda Hieronymus

In the 48 hours since I checked this book out from the library, I've created about 10 different grid games (hence the post's title). A grid game consists of two pieces of card stock marked with 16 (more or less) squares. You fill in the squares with stickers or pictures related to a children's book or theme. For example, for the book The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble and Steven Kellogg, we filled in our grid with pictures of t-shirts. Then, the first player rolls the die and picks out that number of markers (in this case mini-clothespins). The player then places the markers on the grid (or not). Once you begin playing with a preschooler, you realize why the authors didn't include more rules. My next obsession? Path games.

Math Detectives: Finding Fun in Numbers by Ricki Wortzman and Lalie Harcourt

Are you a square or a rectangle? If you didn't guess already, I'm a square. This book points out that numbers are all around us if we just take the time to look. From figuring out how long is a minute to mastering the basics of playing Nim, this book can be adapted for younger kids but seems geared toward older ones. It includes illustrated directions for each household activity and a notes section in the back gives additional information for those so inclined.

Math-terpieces by Greg Tang and Greg Paprocki

This beautifully illustrated book focuses on grouping. How many ways can you combine Cezanne's citrus, Seurat's circles, and Picasso's features to add up to the target number? It would be helpful to own this one, so younger ones can cut out the pictures and practice combining. If I can't find it at Half-Price, I may just have to attempt a little forgery.

Lent

This is not about giving up chocolate. It's about sacrifice, mourning, and forgiveness. And a cello.

Jeffrey Lent's After You've Gone tells the story of Henry and Olivia. And Henry and Lydia. And Henry and his cello. Henry takes us from his childhood in Nova Scotia, to his marriage and professional career in New York, and finally to a sabbatical in Amsterdam. But not in that particular order.

Having read Lent's works A Peculiar Grace and Lost Nation (in that order), I braced myself for tragic clashes, piercing descriptions of setting, and even bloodshed or rape. However, this story seems mellower, though it does contain its fair share of heartache. Before reading this novel, I've never had a particular desire to travel to Amsterdam. If anything remains of Lent's account of its 1920s beauty, I probably should add it to my list.

I'm still mulling over the ending. Not to give anything away, I'll just say it was all wine and roses - and even chocolate- in none of the right places. But since it's Lent, all is forgiven.

A Homemade Life

The library finally had a copy of Molly Wizenberg's A Homemade Life. I've only begun the introduction, but I'm already as charmed as I was by her blog.

A Cultural Revelation

In 1979 China, it's a fresh torment at every turn in Muddy River.

First we follow Teacher Gu. His daughter Shan has been sentenced to die. Gu seeks help from the Huas to give her a proper burial.

The Huas, having lost their own adopted daughters, cannot help Shan, but they try to help the crippled girl Nini when they can.

Nini, twelve, eats wall paste to ward off hunger. She is being courted by nineteen -year-old Bashi.

Bashi woos Nini with a roasted hedgehog and poisons a dog called Ear just to see if he can.

Ear's master, Tong, attends a memorial rally for Shan coordinated by Kai. Tong signs his father's name to a petition.

Kai is the voice of Muddy River's radio station. She is married to Han, the son of a well-connected political family.

Han moves out with their son Ming-Ming.

Ming-Ming doesn't attend the denunciation ceremony of his mother Kai.

Yiyun Li's The Vagrants will not lift your spirits. It will not serve to pass the time waiting in the dentist's office. Instead, the novel demands constant vigilance. Your first seemingly watertight impression of either place or character will soon be found flawed. And therein lies the humanity of Li's characters.

Berne by Berne

I first heard of Suzanne Berne last November. Although The Ghost at the Table is about coming home for Thanksgiving, it proves timely no matter what the season.

Cynnie lives on the West Coast writing historical fiction for girls. Her latest book is about Mark Twain's daughters. Her sister Frances (decorator/homemaker) lives back East. Their father has recently suffered a stroke and their step-mother no longer wishes to care for him. Cynnie agrees to visit for Thanksgiving to help her sister transport their father to a rest home.

Through Cynnie's eyes, the author takes us from her arrival on Frances' doorstep back to her teenage years and her mother's illness and then returns us to a train wreck of a holiday. As the novel progresses, I found myself trusting Cynnie's version of events less and less. And as the drunk Cynnie tells a devastatingly sad tale of Twain's treatment of his family, we find ourselves revising our own opinion of Cynnie from the sad, charming cynic to just sad cynic.

Taught my lesson not to trust appearances, I turned to an earlier work of Berne's called A Perfect Arrangement. Mirella is a lawyer. Howard is an architect. Their house is a mess, their son Jacob's not talking yet, and their daughter Pearl frequently throws hair brushes. In short, they need a nanny.

Randi arrives on their doorstep, entices Howard with visions of home-cooked meals, and has Jacob talking in no time. She even cleans out the cellar. But as we follow Mirella, Howard, and Randi through their days, we realize that (in no particular order) false references, unwanted pregnancies, and intern affairs will soon knock the perfect balance out of whack again.

Berne achieves an admirable level of suspense that will keep you reading -leaving your own kitchen a shambles. But you'll be thankful for the mess.