Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

 Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

In a poor, muddy village in China, Minli lives with her mother and father. Each day is spent laboring in the rice fields, and yet they never have more than just barely enough. Each evening, Minli loves to listen to the enchanting stories and legends that her father tells. She especially loves to hear about the Man on the Moon who is said to know all the answers to life's questions.  One day, she sets out on a quest to find him so that she can learn how to change her family's fortune. On her journey, Minli encounters interesting, magical creatures including a dragon who joins her in her quest. By the end of her life-changing adventure, Minli has discovered a different kind of fortune and a lesson in what maters most.

This story has won many awards, including a Newbery Honor. All of them well-deserved in my mind. It is beautiful, magical and intertwined with so many fascinating Chinese legends and folktales, this wonderful book has almost a Wizard of Oz feel to it. It would be a fun read-a-loud for the family. I loved it!

Children of Blood and Bone

 

 

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

In a world where magic is illegal, teenaged Zelie remembers how the king’s guards killed her mother 11 years prior and hates the ruler and his laws. But after Zelie and her older brother are caught up in accidentally helping out a member of the royal family escape, their lives all turn upside down. No one can return to the old way of life, and they are on the run, trying to piece together the story and lies they’ve all been told. The young group must learn to understand their differences and how to forgive old wounds, all while working toward bringing back a culture that has been in hiding and fear for over a decade...

 

Children of Blood and Bone is an African-inspired fantasy, rich with culture and imagery, and characters who are likeable and believable in their actions. Fans of Harry Potter, The Hunger Games - even Avarar: The Last Airbender - will enjoy this story due to the unfolding magical elements and the action and high stakes the characters face. This book ends well, with a surprise in the epilogue that will have to be addressed immediately in the sequel! This is the first of yet-unfinished trilogy, with lots of lore and intrigue, action, some violence and also romance, and movie rights sold to Fox/Disney, so you can bet there’s something in this story for everyone.

With the Wind

With the Wind by Elizabeth Johns

Lady Anjou Winslow was married to her childhood sweetheart, Lieutenant Gardiner and shortly after their union, Gardiner went to war in America. Years pass and Anjou’s heart continues to hope; however, her dreams are crushed when her husband is declared dead. Her soul tells her it couldn’t be true and after five years of pain, Anjou sails to America with her brother, Charles, to find her husband. She begins to conquer her fears, follow her instincts, and feel the effects of being loved without bounds. Anjou begins to find herself in the least expected places and thrive even when discouraging circumstances are thrown at her.  

This is the third book in the Series of Elements. It was so fun to watch this author progress in her writing throughout the series. This is by far my favorite book in the collection. I loved all the unexpected turns in this book and the thrills that come from Anjou’s journey. I felt like I was a part of her adventure, and I’m so glad I chose to experience it with her. 

East of Eden

 East of Eden by John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck's masterpiece, East of Eden, is a story of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and how their lives and destinies become intertwined. Adam Trask leaves the East Coast and moves to the Salinas Valley in California, hoping to live close to the land and create a good life for his famly. Things don't go as planned though when his wife comes un-done and he's left to raise their twin sons alone. Often painfully brutal, this story of love/hate and good/evil is a modern day re-telling of the story of Cain and Abel.

Is it possible to be born bad? Or good for that matter? Definitely a question that is explored in East of Eden. The characters are so flawed, so well-crafted, so real that I felt that I knew them. That is not to say, however that I liked them. This book is a heavy read, so if you're looking for something lighthearted, you may want to pass. However, if you're looking for a supremely well-written tale, I recommend giving it a try.

The Princess Saves Herself in This One

 

The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

A collection of poems divided into four parts that piece together the life of the author.  The poems explore life and all of it's love, loss, and grief, as well as, healing and empowerment.

I thought this was a beautiful collection of poems that was relatable. This book looks at the hurt a life can bring and turns it into lessons learned and strength gained. A quick read but worth it.

My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

In the mid 1930's, Louisa Durrell, a widow living in England, sells her home and moves with her four children to the Greek island of Corfu. In his memoir, youngest son Gerald, recounts the family's often hilarious escapades during their five year adventure on Corfu.  For Gerald, who grew up to become a world famous naturalist, it was an idyllic time of collecting specimens, studying the local fauna, amassing an impressive collection of pet creatures, and laying the foundation for his life's work.

For me, this book was a pure delight. Eccentric would be an accurate term for every single member of the Durrell family and their antics never cease to entertain. Reading this book made me long for a wonderful adventure myself, the descriptions of daily island life were so vivid and inviting. My family and Other Animals is just a wonderful memoir and fascinating look into another time, place, and a truly remarkable family.

The book is available as an ebook as a part of The Corfu Trilogy.

Gods of Jade and Shadow

 

                                               Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

With the Jazz Age roaring across the country, Casiopea Tun is fed up with her small-town life in southern Mexico, stuck under the control of her wealthy grandfather and lazy cousin, Martin. Casiopea's life is turned updisde down when she discovers the key to the locked chest at the foot of her grandfather's bed.  Opening the box, she releases Hun-Kamè, the ancient Mayan god of death, who forces her to assist him in reclaiming his throne from his deceitful brother.  Facing creatures from stories she used to believe were just myths, and avoiding her cousin who has been tasked with chasing her down, Casiopea finds herself on a cross-country adventure unlike any she could have imagined.  Success promises the life she has always wanted, but failure means the end of her life, completely.

This is such a unique book and yet offers massive appeal to a wide range of readers. Mythology enthusiasts, historical fiction fans, or those just looking to expand their reading experience and learn more about another culture-all can find what they're looking for in this book.  Setting the story in 1920's Mexico (a place rarely explored in literature thus far) and mixing it with Mayan culture, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has created a fantastic love letter to her heritage, filled with complex characters and exciting action that readers wil love to explore.

Broken Stars

Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, translated and edited by Ken Liu and published in 2019 by Tor Books. 

Last year I read Ken Liu's earlier anthology of Chinese science fiction, Invisible Planets. This collection is somewhat larger, having sixteen stories by fourteen different authors and three essays about Chinese science fiction. On the other hand, although many of these stories are good, there were none that had the impact on me of, for example, "Folding Beijing" in the earlier book.

The collection opens with Xia Jia's "Goodnight, Melancholy", which alternates a story about an AI therapeutic doll with (somewhat fictionalized) sections about the life and work of Alan Turing, one of the founders of modern computer science. The second story, "Moonlight", is by Liu Cixin, the best-known science fiction writer from China, who wrote the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, which is available in the Library.) This story considers alternatives to fossil fuels, and ironically concludes that we could destroy ourselves whatever technology we choose. The title story, "Broken Stars" by Tang Fei, is about a high school girl from a dysfunctional family, and I'm not sure why it is considered science fiction at all, though it was an interesting story. There are two quite short stories by Han Song, "Submarines" and "Salinger and the Koreans": the latter is a satiric story about an alternative world in which North Korea under its illustrious leader Kim Il Sung liberates the entire world and creates a golden age of socialism; J.D. Salinger, the author of Catcher in the Rye, appears as a dissident. (Many of these stories have literary allusions.) Cheng Jingbo's early story, "Under a Dangling Sky", is a folktale-like story about a talking dolphin.

The longest and probably the best story in the book is Baoshu's "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appear", in which history runs backwards from the present to the Second World War, with tragic results for the protagonists but a lot of fun allusions for the reader. Sartre is one of the characters. Hao Jingfang's "The New Year Train" is another short work, based on the averaging over many paths approach to quantum mechanics. Fei Dao's "The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales" reminded me of Lem's robot stories in the Cyberiad. Zhang Ran's "The Snow of Jinyang" is a time-travel story of a particular subgenre of Chinese science fiction. Anna Wu's "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Laba Porridge" is the first in a series of stories she has written set in the restaurant famous from Douglas Adam's novel; it is full of inside jokes about Chinese writers, some of which I got and some of which I didn't. Ma Boyong's humorous story "The First Emperor's Games", starts from the premise that the first emperor of ancient China was a video gamer, and all the ancient Chinese philosophers present him with video games (which all happen to be popular games of today.) Some of the allusions are quite funny. Gu Shi's "reflection" combines Buddhism with quantum theory; Regina Kanyu Wang's "The Brain Box" is about recording memories.The last two stories, "Coming of the Light" and "A History of Future Illnesses", are by Chen Qiufan, whose novel Waste Tide is available at the Library.

The book ends with three essays on the history of Chinese science fiction and the academic study of it. I won't repeat what I said about the differences between Chinese and American science fiction in my review of the first collection; one difference which was obvious here is that exactly half the authors here are women.

Watch Me Disappear

 

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown

A year after the disappearance of Billie Flanagan, while hiking alone in a remote area, her family is still struggling to come to terms with her loss.  As they face the upcoming hearing that will finally declare Billie legally dead, questions begin to surface: is she really dead, or could she actually be alive somewhere? Was she abducted, or could she have left of her own free will? As new information comes to light, husband Jonathon and daughter Olive are faced with a web of secrets and left with the disturbing question: "Did we really know her at all?"

Watch Me Disappear was an interesting read that kept me guessing right up to the end.  It is a compelling portrait of a family dealing with grief and tragedy, and what happens as the sands of what they thought they knew, begin to shift beneath their feet.  Believable, well-crafted characters brought this story to life. I enjoyed it!

Mary Crow Dog

Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman, published in 1990 by Harper Perrenial.

 

Lakota Woman is the autobiography of Mary Crow Dog, the wife of Leonard Crow Dog, a traditional Sioux medicine man who was the "spiritual leader" of the American Indian Movement at the time of the Wounded Knee Occupation.

Born Mary Brave Bird, she grew up in a one room shack without indoor plumbing or electricity, raised largely by her grandparents as her father abandoned the family before she was born and her mother worked in another city. As a child, she was taken like many other Native Americans to a Catholic-run boarding school, where she was mistreated and indoctrinated with Christianity until she finally ran away in her teens. She wandered a while with groups of other "lost" teenagers, drinking, doing drugs, and living by shoplifting, until she ran into the American Indian Movement and discovered her ancestral religion. She participated in many of the well-known actions of AIM, such as the Custer Courthouse fight and the takeover of the BIA offices. She had her first baby at Wounded Knee during the siege.

Later, she married Crow Dog, and had to adapt to life as the wife of a prominent medicine man. Shortly after their marriage, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for his role as religious leader of the Occupation, and for defending his home against invasion by some drunken whites (who it later turned out had been sent by the FBI as a provocation). While he was imprisoned she developed into a leader and speaker in her own right, touring for his defense committee. He was finally released on appeal after three years. As in many books about AIM, Mary Crow Dog describes the extreme lengths to which the FBI and even the military went to destroy the organization and its leaders, and the illegality and corruption of the South Dakota and even Federal courts when the defendant was an Indian, let alone a militant one.

As Crow Dog's wife, her perspective on AIM is quite different from those of Dennis Banks and Russell Means, whose autobiographies I have also read (Ojibwa Warrior and Where White Men Fear to Tread, both available in the Library). She sees the struggle less as a political than as a religious one, essentially as a struggle against religious persecution. Of course, one of the surest ways to destroy a native culture is to supplant its religion, and Native American ceremonies were outlawed by the government and suppressed by the Christian missionaries for over fifty years in an attempt to force the Indians to convert to Christianity; they are still subject to harassment to the present day. Leonard Crow Dog played a role in reviving these ceremonies, and organized the first Ghost Dance in almost a century at Wounded Knee. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the description of the Sun Dance, Ghost Dance, and yuwipi ceremonies.