The Impossible Knife of Memory

The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson

Seventeen-year-old Hayley has been travelling with her father Andy for years now; when they finally settle down in her late grandmother’s house, his memories have a chance to catch up with him. Andy is a war veteran scarred and damaged by his experiences, and Hayley’s upbringing has left her with scars of her own.

This book deals with memories—the ones we keep, the ones we hide from others, the ones we hide from ourselves.

Andy: Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at my home.

Anderson’s characters are vivid and real, and as always, she isn’t afraid to tackle difficult subject matter. In this book, it’s Andy’s PTSD and substance abuse, and Hayley’s learning how to cope with that and when to ask for help. Who to push away and who to hold close. None of the decisions are easy, and nothing feels pat.

It sounds dark, and while the book does go to some dark places, there’s lightness in there too, with funny banter between the characters and a great, believable teen voice.

Hayley: You know how some babies are blessed by good fairies when they’re born, fairies with names like Beauty and Brains and Kindness and Laughter? I was blessed by their evil underworld troll cousins, Gawky and Awkward. I stared at him and my troll fairies whacked me upside the head with their pointy wands, making me spectacularly… gawkward.

Strong writing, a resonant story and characters you’ll be thinking about long after you’ve closed the book combine to make Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory a great read for teens and adults.

Erin Thomas writes (and reads!) books for kids and teens from her home in Whitby, Ontario. For more information, visit www.erinthomas.ca. 

The Explorer Gene

The Explorer Gene

Tom Cheshir

Imagine travelling to the top of the stratosphere or the bottom of the ocean, or circling the world in a vessel you’ve built yourself. Now imagine being the first to perform any of these feats without the advantage of an engineering background; seemingly impossible goals for ordinary people, but not the Piccards. Three generations of one family have been there and built that, making unbelievable contributions to science and setting a few records in the process. 

Auguste, Jacques, and Bertrand Piccard

Tom Cheshire’s The Explorer Gene is a true account of the Piccard family’s efforts in research, reading less like a documentary and more like a fictional thriller. The story outlines the trials and successes of Auguste, Jacques, and Bertrand Piccard, three extraordinary pioneers of inner and outer space. Page after page I found myself fearing for their lives, even though I was privy to their individual successes. Through minor explosions, weather disasters and premature obituaries, The Explorer Gene delivers not only a biography of one fascinating family, but a riveting story of three lifetimes of risk-taking, perseverance, and triumph.
 

Cheshire astutely turns historical facts into a fast-paced and unpredictably humorous read. His brief introduction piques the reader’s interest in the idea of an “explorer gene”- a section of DNA that might be responsible for novelty seeking. But Cheshire chooses not to make this the focus of the book, instead using the Piccard success as the underlying message that if something can be dreamed, it can be done. Be warned, though; The Explorer Gene may just spark the adventurer in you. 

Laura Martin's lifelong addiction to fiction took a back seat when she went to the University of Guelph for Molecular Biology and Genetics. She became fascinated with neurological conditions like Alzheimer's Disease and dementia, and is hoping to attend Dalhousie University in the spring for a Masters in Neuroscience.

The Invention of Wings

The Invention of Wings

Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful storytelling capabilities show up again in her latest novel, The Invention of Wings. When I started this book I was prepared to enjoy the story, but its structure initially put me off. I’m not a big fan of alternating chapters between one major character and then another with the eventual merging of their stories. Yet, I was won over for many reasons.

The story is based on two real life sisters in the early 1800s who were the first female abolitionist agents despite being born into the Charleston aristocracy. One sister, Sarah Grimké, becomes entwined with Hetty—the fictionalized slave character—who was given to Sarah on her eleventh birthday. At this tender age, Sarah’s efforts to free her slave have no traction in a male and power dominated culture. In spite of her intellectual capabilities that were nurtured early by her father, she finds out soon enough that intellect has no place in a Southern and well-to-do female’s life. She is devastated by her father’s firm view on this cultural norm. Having had a father who embraced my intellect and encouraged me to ‘go left when everyone else is going right’, I felt Kidd was masterful in describing Sarah’s immense disappointment.

Hetty’s development as a rebel in her own sphere of life goes hand in hand with her owner and is appropriate to her very different station in life. The social structure of how the slave community lived within that of their powerful owners is interesting and remains a powerful reminder of the not-so-long ago times that continue to influence today’s culture.

As the story unfolds, Sarah is joined by her much younger and more outspoken sister, Angelina, in what becomes a lifelong endeavour to abolish slavery. 

The Grimké Sisters

Kidd’s character development and stage-setting is superb. Their personal strengths of character and driven focus to overcome their respective challenges, invites one to feel intense empathy for both the wealthy Sarah and impoverished slave Hetty. I enjoyed the short chapters that meant I could complete a vignette at each bedtime reading.

I suggest you don’t read the author’s remarks at the end of the book until you have read the story. While this background deepened my understanding of the story’s context, not knowing this at the beginning allowed my wonderment to evolve rather than immediately place it in an historical context.

Kidd’s intention was to write about two sisters. This book is a warm testament to sisters by blood and by mission- as they support each other through challenging experiences prompted by culture and mores of their era.

Jennifer Mackie has lived in Guelph for  over 40 years, is a business consultant with never enough hobby time for reading, sports, online puzzles and quilting. With her husband, Carl, they have 2 adult daughters who live in Toronto where she has the newly found joy of reading to their 20 month old grandtwins, Ella and Austin. She reads for entertainment and to discover the world of ‘curious’. Along with finding value in the story, she enjoys experiencing different writer’s styles and methods for how they entice one into their made up worlds.

A Hundred Horses

A Hundred Horses

Sarah Lean

What is it like to be abandoned over the summer holidays far from home with a tedious set of cousins on a boring farm where everything is dirty, smelly, and unfamiliar?  This is the vacation Nell is facing in Sarah Lean’s story A Hundred Horses. It doesn’t take long for the joy of living close to the land and a mysterious appearance of wild girl Angel and her special horses to ensure Nell is intrigued.

What I found so fascinating in the novel was Lean’s ability to capture that lurching feeling of confusion as Nell treads the challenging path of trying to understand who to trust and how to navigate her own feelings of loneliness and distrust of domineering adults. Angel is aggressive and terrifying, appearing unexpectedly; she is more malevolent than fairy-like and Nell is spun about in her seeking for meaning.

 

Sarah Lean

The reasons behind Angel’s strange behaviours emerge, just as they would in real life, in a chaotic and blundering kind of way with Nell misunderstanding almost every step. Behind the brave front are a heartbreaking stories of loss and a sweet story of the love of a trusted adult that balances the other story strands of desertion and unreliable behaviour.

Having grown up in a rural area where hanging out on the farms of my friends showed me it’s not all fluffy goslings and cute foals, I appreciated the mixed emotions of Nell’s experience. The land can be awe inspiring but also a dramatic reminder of elemental forces and emotions at play in our world. I can highly recommend this book, especially for those in the early tween years who are torn between doing the right thing and facing the realities of emerging understanding of more than the immediate world of family and personal feelings.

- Rosslyn Bentley

On Such a Full Sea

On Such a Full Sea

Chang-rae Lee

I keep seeing her, Fan, the protagonist of Lee`s novel On Such a Full Sea. I see her clearly for a few seconds, then she is gone behind a line of trees or row of houses. She is always moving forward, never back to the familiar, to some measure of security. Where are you now, Fan? I feel like one of your people left behind in B-Mor. I want to add to the graffiti. Your leaving us was a sign. Everything is not good here. We are not protected and we are not content.

Why can't I let go of this novel? Because Chang Rae Lee's dystopian fiction of a future America is too near. It's an unsettling vision, his declining America, with its abandoned neighbourhoods turned into self-contained labor settlements where workers are descended from “originals” who, to escape an uninhabitable China, were brought to America to cultivate fresh, unspoiled, seafood and produce for wealthy residents living  in charter (walled and gated) villages. For their contributions, workers in the  B-Mor (Baltimore) Settlement live secure and predictable lives designed for contentment, but when two of their number disappear, they are forced to recognize the discontent and violence that permeates society. Yet, it's Fan's quest for her boyfriend Reg and their unborn child that invites possibility into this dystopia; the possibility of free will acting on fate to change things, how life is lived, how we respond to what is going on around us.

Chang-rae Lee

Despite being told that it is dangerous to leave the settlement because you could be kidnapped by anarchic vagabonds in the “open counties,” Fan moves without fear and understands and trusts in “the improvisational nature of her will.” It's this quality that inspires the other characters in the book and us, as readers.

I found the most disturbing yet surprising part of the book to be about the girls who live with Miss Cathy and Mister Leo in one of the charter villages. There are seven of them living hidden, in a single room. Having arrived separately, each as a young girl, they are now in their late teens and address each other by their number—one being the first girl who started living in the room. The girls spend their days imagining their lives, which “Six” depicts in a mural on the wall.  When Fan joins them as number “Eight,” the girls become obsessed with her story and the mural expands to include greater possibilities for them all.

This is a strange book. I couldn't get into Lee's writing style at first but then the story, Fan's journey, and a feeling of the uncanny, of a here but not here, really kept me reading and thinking long after the last page.

Morvern McNie has a collection of old writing books--lined Hilroys with loose pages, several hard cover journals with flap closures--and in each you'll find a few pages of rebuke for spending too much time reading instead of writing.

The Why Axis

The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life

Uri Gneezy and John List

The field of economic forecasting is often the butt of jokes, being called the modern-day equivalent to soothsaying. Economists read the entrails of Chicago school professors, together with anecdotal evidence, mixed into a pot with abstract theories and a large portion of wishful thinking, attempt to predict the behaviour of markets in order to better make business decisions. Needless to say, it's about as effective as it sounds. Even those within the industry are aware of the faulty methods used, as even Goldman-Sachs' chief economist Jan Hatzius was quoted as saying that “Nobody really has a clue [what's going to happen].” In The Why Axis, John List & Uri Gneezy attempt to rectify this problem by getting out of the lab and into the field, designing innovative experiments to get actual, empirical data on how various incentives motivate behaviour in order to solve real-world problems. They study a variety of issues, including the influence of patriarchal culture on individual competitiveness (dispelling the notion that women are intrinsically less competitive than men), how best to reduce inner-city school absenteeism caused by the threat of violence, and how to get people to donate more to charitable causes.

The thing that surprised me most about List & Gneezy's book was how fun it was to read. While their methods are both well-laid out and scientifically sound, The Why Axis reads more like a travel journal. The process of recording scientific observations is interspersed with the wild stories, like the time Uri attempted to cash $60,000 worth of traveller's cheques in rural India, or John's harrowing journey into Chicago's projects (where the number of gun-related deaths rivals the literacy rate) to get parents to sign consent forms for their previously absent children, so they could take part in beneficial programs. The two have a flair for not sacrificing methodology for accessibility, and the ease of prose with which the book is written makes it a great read for audiences from many backgrounds.

The Why Axis is also an important book for numerous reasons. First, it challenges the rolling train of hegemony present in the way many businesses are run. Data is gathered and decisions are often made a certain way simply because “that's how it's always been done”, and with a company's bottom line, well, on the line, those in charge are frequently resistant to a changing methods. Gneezy & List challenge long-held assumptions across the board, from hunches about what motivates people, to wider beliefs regarding the antagonistic relationship between altruism and capitalism. The latter is a persistent theme, as Gneezy & List work with individuals like the founder of Smile Train (a non-profit that provides cleft palate operations for children in third-world countries), and the founders of hedge fund giant Citadel, Kenneth and Anne Griffin, to tackle problems in health and education. Just getting to hear the stories of these self-made millionaires working for something greater than their bank balance is refreshing amidst the howling cynicism that surrounds the wolves of Wall Street. All in all, Why Axis is an uplifting read that offers new perspectives on a number of fields, and demonstrates the important point that a lab coat and pocket protector are not required to engage in science.

Vincent Smith is a taoist, aspiring writer, and dyed-in-the-wool psychology geek at the University of Guelph. You can find his writing on video games, comics, movies, and all things geek over at The Rogue's Gallery. Check out his FB page, Vincent Smith: Writer, Scholar, Gentleman, for more musings from the dark corners of the internet. Plus the occasional cat photo.

Little Failure

Little Failure 

By Gary Shteyngart

Contrary to the self-deprecating title, Little Failure is a true account of the trials and successes of a Jewish Russian immigrant, settling in America with his well-meaning but rigidly frugal parents. Gary Shteyngart turns a lifetime of exclusion and longing into a heartbreakingly hilarious memoir as he takes the reader through a failure-by-failure account of his inimitable life.

From his humble beginnings as a sickly asthmatic child to his drug-induced education and the hazy working years beyond, Little Failure captures Shteyngart’s struggles to maintain a sense of self while simultaneously shedding an immigrant image. You can’t help but sympathize with the skinny kid from Hebrew school with a talent for story-telling and a tendency toward bullying. 

The need to please seemingly loveless parents, the failed relationships born of self-hatred, the bittersweet introduction to illegal substances, and most startlingly, the repressed memory of the Chesme Church; each painful admission from the author captivates the reader and provides a rare and candid glimpse into the life of a successful writer. Gary Shteyngart is flawlessly open in his midlife memoir, effortlessly evoking humour from the best and worst moments of his life.

If you’re struggling with an identity crisis or desire to fit in, or if you’ve enjoyed any of Shteyngart’s acclaimed fictional novels, you won’t want to miss Little Failure. You’ll laugh and tear up and relive each moment alongside Shteyngart. It may even inspire you to write your own life story.  

Laura Martin's lifelong addiction to fiction took a back seat when she went to the University of Guelph for Molecular Biology and Genetics. She became fascinated with neurological conditions like Alzheimer's Disease and dementia, and is hoping to attend Dalhousie University in the spring for a Masters in Neuroscience.