Birthday Thoughts: Graced With Another Year...(#GenFab)

The women of Generation Fabulous are out to show that the internet isn't just for kids (and their moms). I've been part of this "voices of midlife" community for a few months, and it's grown too big for Facebook to hold it any more. Founding members Sharon Greenthal, Chloe Jeffreys, and Anne Parris have just built GenFab its own little bit of online real estate, and it's opening the doors to host the group's monthly Blog Hop. This month's theme is "Aging Gracefully(?)." Since this is the time of year when I think about that particular subject anyway, I wasn't about to pass up participating, even though I really shouldn't have stolen the time to write this.

"But I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now"
    --Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"

Tomorrow is my birthday. It's not a "milestone" one, but it is one of those numbers that ends in 9 and comes right before a milestone one. I'm spending the weekend at the pop-culture and comics convention WonderCon, the smaller sibling of San Diego Comic-Con. I'll wear a costume or two, and go to panel discussions and screenings, and probably buy some ridiculous things. Twenty years ago, or even ten, I wouldn't have envisioned myself doing such a thing ever, let alone in my late forties. But after feeling like a misfit among my peers for much of my adult life, I'm feeling like I'm living just about the right life for my age.

My adulthood took off at an accelerated pace--married at 19 and a mother at 20. It wasn't exactly what I'd planned--not so soon, anyway--but with a lot of help, I was able to combine it with things I had planned, like finishing college and starting a career. By the age of 30, I was living in the conservative suburbs of a good-sized Southern city and well established in marriage, motherhood, and work. But much of the time, I felt as if I were play-acting at being a grownup, and that I was too young to have the life I had. My circumstances had more in common with those of women a decade or so older than I was, and I'd missed many of the young-adulthood experiences of other people my own age. On the other hand, my kid would be at least partly out of the house before I turned 40, so there was that.

All of us were out of that house by then, as it turned out. My marriage ended after almost eighteen years, and when my son went away to college, I moved across the country in the opposite direction; I was 38 years old before I ever lived on my own, and spent the first couple of years struggling though a delayed coming-of-age process--and dreading turning 40.

That particular milestone came and went with some mild trauma, but since then, most of the time, it's felt like I'm living the right life at the right time. I've gained and lost and re-gained weight, and I've changed my hair color a few times. I've worked on bettering my mental and emotional health. I've found a surprising new preoccupation to divert me from the tedium of more than 25 years in the same occupation. And for the last six and a half years, I've been married and raising children again (these came as works in progress when I married their dad)...but this time around I've (mostly) felt like I'm not way out of sync with everyone else.

More importantly, though, I've come to feel--more or less--in sync with myself. If I'm going to age with any degree of grace at all, I'm pretty sure that's key. I need to keep hold of it through this birthday, and next year's milestone, and whatever comes after that. Here in midlife, I've grown comfortable accommodating both the younger girl still inside me and the wise-with-experience woman I might become eventually. I don't feel like I'm play-acting at being a grown-up, or at being anyone other than who I mean to be, any more (although you will find me cosplaying this weekend--I'm new at it, but loving it). Happy birthday to me!

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Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday: "Smell the Roses"

...or whatever flowers you have handy

At "Vasquez Ranch," my mother-in-law's avocado grove, November 2012

My photos, collaged with PicFrame and edited with Snapseed

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(Audio)Book Talk: SOCIETY'S CHILD, by Janis Ian

Society’s Child: My Autobiography
Janis Ian (Facebook) (Twitter)
Audiobook read by the author
Tarcher (2009), trade paper (ISBN 1585427497 / 9781585427499)
Autobiography/memoir, 384 pages
Source: Purchased audiobook (Audible, Inc.; ASIN B0089IC1KC)
Reason for reading: Personal; 2013 Grammy Award winner, Best Spoken-Word Album; 2013 Audie Awards nominee, Narration by Author(s)

Opening lines (from the Prologue):
"I was standing alone on a stage in Encino, California, halfway through the first verse of my song 'Society's Child.'

'Come to my door, baby
Face is clean and shining black as night
My mama went to answer
You know that you looked so fine
Now, I could understand the tears and the shame
She called you "Boy" instead of your name'

"The problem had begun with a lone woman screaming out the words 'N**** lover!' Then the people sitting around her had joined in, chanting as though they were at a religious service. They were even chanting in time to the song.

"'N**** lover! N****lover!' beat beat beat beat N**** lover! N****lover!' beat beat beat beat

"It was difficult to concentrate on keeping my own time.

"The chant degenerated into yelling, twenty or thirty people in the sold-out concert hall. I peered to the left, where the sound came from, and saw some of them beginning to rise. They were shaking their fists in the air as the rest of the audience looked on in stunned silence.

"I was having a hit record.

"I was singing for people who wanted me dead.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
Janis Ian was catapulted into the spotlight in 1966 at the age of 15, when her soul-wrenching song "Society's Child" became a hit. An intimate portrait of an interracial relationship, "Society's Child" climbed the charts despite the fact that many radio stations across the country refused to play it because of its controversial subject matter. But this was only the beginning of a long and illustrious career. 

In this memoir of her more than 40 years in the music business, Ian chronicles how she did drugs with Jimi Hendrix, went shopping for Grammy clothes with Janis Joplin, and sang with Mel Tormé, all the while never ceasing to create unforgettable music. 

In 1975, Ian's legendary "At Seventeen" earned two Grammy awards and five nominations. Her next two albums brought her worldwide platinum hits. But after seven albums in as many years, she made a conscious decision to walk away from the often grueling music business. During this period, she struggled through a difficult marriage, which ended with her then husband's attempt to destroy her, and a sudden illness that very nearly cost her her life. The hiatus from music lasted for close to a decade until, in 1993, Ian returned with the release of the Grammy-nominated Breaking Silence. Now, as she moves gracefully into her fifth decade as a recording artist and writer, Ian continues to draw large audiences around the globe. 

In Society's Child, Janis Ian provides a relentlessly honest account of the successes and failures - and the hopes and dreams - of an extraordinary life.

Comments: I sometimes forget that the terms "memoir" and "autobiography" aren't precisely interchangeable, and that when I say that some of my favorite guilty-pleasure reading is "celebrity memoir," most of that reading is proper celebrity autobiography...and some of the celebrity autobiography I've enjoyed most has been either rather light, or very specialized, in the "celebrity" quotient. For example, if you were born much later than the mid-1970s, you may never have heard of singer-songwriter Janis Ian, let alone have any interest in her life story. I don't think she's had a big hit in this country since I was in middle school, and if the audio version of her autobiography, Society's Child  hadn't won the 2013 Grammy Award for "Best Spoken Word Album" and snagged an Audie Awards nomination in the "Narration by Author" category, it probably wouldn't have caught my notice either.

Society's Child takes its title from Ian's first single, released in 1966, a controversial song about an interracial relationship that she wrote and recorded when she was barely fifteen years old. Years of steady work--writing, recording, touring (lather, rinse, repeat)--followed, and by her late twenties, Ian was a seasoned veteran of a music industry that was changing direction away from her strengths. She's changed direction as well, many times over the last few decades, and is well into her fifth decade of a career where she's now managing her strengths on her own terms.

The ups and downs and winding roads of Ian's career offer an interesting capsule of the music industry's evolution over a half-century, but her personal life may have had even more ups and downs and winding roads. Starting her career so young caused Janis to mature early in some ways and to lose ground in others. While she seldom doubted herself in matters related to her creative work, the practical issues surrounding it--management of logistics and finances--were often challenging, and the aspects of her life and personality that didn't involve her work were even more so. Struggles with identity and self-image, along with the aftereffects of childhood molestation, her parents' divorce, and her mother's chronic illness, led her into and out of therapy (with varying degrees of success) and relationships with both men and women. While Janis realized early on that she was attracted to women, she effectively spent her early adulthood living as a bisexual, and through a disastrous marriage.

Although she's not widely recognized for it, Janis Ian was a pioneer--as a musician, as an admitted and acknowledged lesbian, and as an independent artist making use of the Internet to connect with fans and market her work. All of that gives her story continued relevance. And the personal tragicomedy of it--the romantic drama, the associates who proved untrustworthy, the vindictive IRS agent who pursued her for years over back taxes--makes it fascinating reading.

I found that I needed to remind myself of the distinctions between autobiography and memoir more than once while listening to Society's Child  While it may take off on tangents, memoir usually is structured around a central theme that drives its narrative; autobiography is less organized, and therefore, more like the life it portrays. That quality caused me to have trouble with Ian's chronology at times, and I needed to remember that while a story has to be told in some sort of sequence, some the events in that story may be occurring concurrently...and I just didn't need to fixate so much on what happened when and in relation to what else. That ended up not being so difficult after all, though, because Janis Ian drew me into her story beautifully. Each chapter of Society's Child is named for one of her songs, and most open with her performing a fragment of that song; this is a definite plus of the audio presentation, and made me want to add some of her music to my library (although I haven't gotten around to it yet). And when she's not singing, her style is intimate, conversational, and very engaging. I didn't know much about Janis Ian before reading her autobiography, but she's well worth knowing, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to get acquainted with her.

Rating: Book 3.75/5; Audio 4/5

 

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Sunday Salon: Marching Out...on Birthday Week!

I think I bit off a bit more this month than I should have, reading-wise. My Little Women re-read has stalled around Chapter 12. There are a few reasons for that: I've been surprised to discover how much of it I still remember more than 30 years after last reading it, which has lessened my sense of urgency to get through it; in all honesty, I'm finding Harriet Reisen's biography of its author, Louisa May Alcott, is holding my attention better than the novel right now; and I realized that March was speeding along and putting me behind schedule on April and May reviews for Shelf Awareness, so I needed to juggle my calendar. and my books, a bit.

I'm even behind on reviews here, which doesn't happen all that often--I still haven't written up an audiobook I finished more than a week ago! If I'm feeling ambitious, I may try to knock that out today. Or not. I'm not officially participating in Bloggiesta this weekend, but I may tackle a couple of the mini-challenges just because they sound fun (and useful). I'll see whether I feel more like reading, or writing, or blog-maintaining...or I may feel more like watching a movie than doing anything else. The Hobbit came out on DVD this past Tuesday, so there may be a Sunday matinee playing on our TV this afternoon.

My current audiobook-in-progress is part of a trilogy, and I'm not planning to write it up till I finish all three. It may take a while, though; my 13-year-old stepson Spencer and I are listening to it together during our drives to and from school, and I'm only listening to it when he's with me. We've both read these in print before, and so far, we're having a good time reading them by ear together.

shown in reverse order

This will be my first re-read of Life, the Universe and Everything since college, and since it was my least favorite of the original trilogy I'm curious to discover whether I'll like it better this time around. We're about 2/3 through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy right now, and I'm appreciating being reminded of just how much influence it's had on the sensibilities (and sense of humor) of a couple of generations of geeks.

I think it may be another slow week of blogging, but it's Birthday Week--if I gift myself with a little break, I hope y'all won't begrudge me! The day itself is this Friday, the 29th, and I'll be celebrating it in Anaheim with Tall Paul in genuinely geeky style.

The last time we got our geek on in public, it looked like this. It may again next weekend (or some of next weekend, anyway.)

Hope you're having a good first Sunday of Spring!

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Not Here Today--I'm Lost in Books!

March is Women's History Month, and Becca at Lost in Books is hosting a Women's Lit Event all month long as part of the celebration. I'll be dropping by there twice--I'm making my first visit today, with a review of a modern feminist speculative fiction classic. 

Please visit me over there, and join the conversation at Lost in Books!

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Wordless Wednesday: Spring

Winter's just about over, y'all, and we're celebrating Spring for this week's Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday!

Spring is nature's time of new life and rebirth--or in my family, just "birth." March is Birthday Month for my clan, and my nephew kicked off the festivities a few weeks ago with a Hobbit-themed party to celebrate turning 13. (It always seems springlike in the Shire.)

The beautiful--and delicious!--cake was custom-made by my sister, and you can see more of her creations in her Facebook album Teresa's Cakes.

My photos, collaged with PicFrame and edited with Snapseed

Posted with Blogsy

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Sunday Salon: Now We Are Six!

This weekend, The 3 R's Blog turns six years old! (And it's not the only one--Happy Blogiversary to my same-age blogging siblings It's All About Books and Word Lily, too!)

My fifth blogiversary was a three-post extravaganza. This one's a bit more subdued, and comes at a time of major reassessment for the blogiverse-at-large. You've probably heard this about this in many places over the last few days, but just in case you've managed to miss the news, Google Reader will be shutting down as of July 1.

If you're a blogger, odds are you're a big reader of blogs too, and since no one has time to hop around the internet visiting their several hundred favorite sites every day, Google Reader (or something like it) has probably been a big part of your life. It's definitely been part of mine, and it's all about to change, so get ready! (In all honesty, it may not change as much for me; I've been using "alternative" RSS reader Feedly for quite awhile, and they seem to be making preparations to carry on without using GReader as source material. Fingers crossed!) 


There's an argument that Google Reader is based on an outdated model and has outlived its usefulnesss, but I've seen some strong disagreement with that premise over the last few days. That said, it may be the end of an era, but it's not the end of the world, and change can be reframed as opportunity. This is as good an incentive as any to assess how you consume and create content in blogging and social media, and determine if it's all really what you want to be doing.

This much I know, at this point in time:

• Blogging is my favorite way to partake in social media, and my preference is to have blogging come to me, via a feed reader.
• For those who share my preference, this blog has an RSS feed (in original and mobile-friendly flavors!)
• If you prefer to have content come to you, but you don't use a feed reader, there's always the e-mail option. (I really doubt e-mail is facing extinction.) This blog offers three e-mail subscriptions.

1. all posts
2. reviews only
3. photos only (for Wordless Wednesday fans)

(There's a "subscribe" button in the left-hand sidebar--one click will give you all of your e-mail and RSS options.)

• If you've moved on to newer forms of social media or don't want to flood your inbox any more than, all posts are linked at the blog's Facebook page--if you "like" the page (and set your FB preferences appropriately), you can get new posts and other content right there. 
• My own social-media reassessment includes Twitter, but I'll still be linking to each new post there too.

At this point, I'm not contemplating any big changes for the upcoming 7th year of The 3 R's Blog. I expect to continue my current posting pace of 2-3 times per week for the foreseeable future, including the Sunday Salon, Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday, and...something else, to be determined by what I've been reading and what's on my mind.

As of today, I'm 135 short of 2000 blog posts, and I see no reason right now to think I won't get there. That particular milestone may spur some bigger changes around here! (Or not.)

My plans for today--Happy St. Patrick's Day, by the way!--are to write reviews for two books I finished this past week (one for the freelance gig, one to post here), do some housecleaning, read a bit, and see what else comes along to fill the day.

Have a great day, and whether you've been reading this blog for six years or six days, thanks so much for joining me here!

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Thoughts on Thursday: So Much Social Media, So Little Time...

My sixth blogiversary is this weekend. I'm not planning a big blowout for this one, but I'll be marking the occasion in the Sunday Salon. I hope you'll stop by then to share some reminiscing and reflecting with me!

When I started doing my thing here, Facebook had only recently opened up to people who weren't still living in dorms, a "tweet" was the sound a bird makes, and all "the kids" were on MySpace. Most internet users who weren't "kids" kept lists of their favorite websites bookmarked in their browsers and visited them regularly to check out what was new, and if we wanted to share news or jokes or photos with friends and family, we sent e-mails.

(It sounds so quaint now, doesn't it? Especially the MySpace part. We still have e-mail, though...and more of it than ever, as the Postal Service slowly withers and becomes just another package-delivery service.)

Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For some people, now Facebook is the Internet: a source of news, entertainment, games, and almost-effortless sustained contact with friends and family. For others, the Internet exists in links and quips of 140 characters or less on Twitter. Tumblr and Pinterest and Instagram translate a thousand words into pictures. Smartphones have reshaped and expanded the online experience, putting it literally into the hands of millions.

Blogging, one of the first forms of social media, has meanwhile ebbed and flowed and occasionally been pronounced dead at the hands of the later arrivals. Those of us who are trying to keep it alive have gotten the message that we can't do much without aligning with social media; we can't beat 'em, so we'd better join 'em--Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and whatever else comes along--and think in terms of our "platforms" and "brands" and other marketing buzzwords.

I started a Facebook account in November 2007, but did very little with it for months afterward. I've really only used it actively for the last couple of years, mostly because of several groups I belong to there and my FB page for this blog. I get e-mail notifications from the groups, and I peek in at my news feed for other updates--sometimes a few times a day, but sometimes not for days at a time.

I joined Twitter in May 2008 as user #14,664,530, and really enjoyed my first couple of years using it; it was a great space for conversations. Occasionally it still is, but I'm not usually involved in them these days unless someone specifically mentions me (and I get a notification)--I'll jump in then. Maybe I follow too many people (I'm working on changing that), but the flow of the Twitter stream doesn't engage me the way it used to. I share links there a lot, because Twitter is some people's feed reader, and I'll tweet along with everyone else if there's a big event in progress, but I rarely just "peek at the feed" there any more.

As far as other spaces go, I've opened, and shut down, a Tumblr. I'm active in spurts on Instagram; I discovered last year that I enjoy photo memes, but taking and selecting and editing pictures for posting means I'm not reading and writing for posting. My activity in other social-media spaces--Pinterest, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Google+--is a strange blend of specialized and unfocused.

My husband doesn't blog, but he's staked out some social-media real estate. It's on a smaller scale than mine, and he'll sometimes tell me he "doesn't know how I keep up." Here's my true confession: most of the time, I don't keep up, and I'm OK with that. And I finally figured out why it's OK:

My favorite social-media space is my feed reader*. My favorite social-media outlets are blogs.

This is where it started for me, and I care more about reading blog posts than about tweets or status updates. Reading the (long-form) thoughts of those I've come to call my friends, and writing my own posts--sometimes in response to those I read--engages my mind and my heart more than anything else online. And while I don't plan to close out my social-media accounts, I'm reconsidering how much I want to invest in them.

(*And wouldn't you know it--as I was in the process of drafting this post, Google was announcing that it's shutting down Google Reader at the end of June. Time to investigate the alternatives, or at least make sure that Feedly will keep working for me...)

How are you investing your time online, and are you satisfied with the returns you're getting from it?

Posted with Blogsy

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Wordless Wednesday: Going Green

The Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday theme this week is "St. Patrick's Day." I'm featuring Mother Nature in her wearin' o' the green.

Ojai, California, September 2012. My photo, edited with Snapseed

Please check out the ways my Wordless Wednesday co-conspirators are interpreting this week's prompt, too!

Posted with Blogsy

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Sunday Salon: So Many Books, So Little Time......

...and yet, I keep adding to the stacks. For those of you who are interested in that sort of thing, the current count of inmates in TBR Purgatory stands at 517. I think that number is overstated, to be honest, because I'm reasonably certain I've purged some books without taking them out of my LibraryThing catalog...but I can't say exactly how overstated it might be. One of these days (it may require two, or even three, to be honest) I really need to take a physical inventory of the books in this house, but that's one more thing there's so little time for.

Oh well. We went to the bookstore yesterday in search of some new reading material for my 13-year-old stepson, who is in the unfortunate situation of being between books right now; he didn't really find what he was after, but I came home with four books from my wish list:

There Is No Dog by Meg Rosoff

The Lifeboat: A Novel by Charlotte Rogan

The Orchardist: A Novel by Amanda Coplin

New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 by Teresa Carpenter

I have no idea when I'll get to any of them, but at least I know they'll be waiting. Meanwhile, here's what I am reading currently, and all but the first are non-required reading. After a very scheduled February, I'm really appreciating that!

for review (elsewhere first. here later)

Little Women is for the #marmeeon read-along; the Louisa May Alcott biography is supplemental material (and is being liberated from TBR Purgatory after two years in residence)

Listening to this memoir, which caught my attention when it won the 2013 Grammy Award for Best Spoken-Word Recording

The audiobook is on hold for the weekend, since I only "read" those in the car, but I'm looking forward to devoting some time to each of the other books today. What are you reading this week?

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When in Doubt, List; or,Ten Things on Thursday

I haven't had time for proper post-composing for the last couple of weeks, but I'm killing some time staying late at the office on Wednesday before leaving for a meeting at a location in between work and home, so you'll end up getting this stream-of-consciousness listy thing on Thursday.

1. This blog will be six years old nine days from now! Because March 16 is a Saturday, and I don't post on Saturdays as a general rule, the official blogiversary observation post will probably be the following day's Sunday Salon. Assuming I can make time to write such a post, that is...
2. ...because writing time has been very hard to come by lately. February was a big required-reading month that didn't leave many opportunities for writing that wasn't associated with said reading, and Busy Season at Work is still on for at least another month.
3. But my only reading commitments in March are for the freelance-reviewing gig and Softdrink's Little Women read-along, so I'm breathing a little easier already. I've started a new audiobook and am hoping to finish a couple of e-books I began reading in January, but put aside when last month's deadlines loomed.
4. April's reading calendar looks pretty similar to March's right now--that is, not very structured aside from freelance reviews and another read-along. That one will be Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, with Kim (who watched me geek out over a galley at BEA last year, and was quite surprised that I hadn't read it yet!).
5. Speaking of Book Expo America, the BEA Bloggers' Conference, and related matters: This is my official declaration that I am not going this year. I will miss the fun of being with my tribe face-to-face--and at this point, I'd be going more to hang out with friends than to get books--but I'm taking a break from that particular cross-country excursion in 2013.
6. BUT...we ARE planning a family trip to New England in June! We're working out specifics right now, but the current scenario has us starting and ending in Boston, driving up through New Hampshire and into Maine

   

   A political and geographical map of New England (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

   . I grew up in Connecticut and Boston is one of my favorite cities, but I haven't been there for almost 15 years, and the entire region will be new to my native-Californian family. Got any suggestions about things to see and do? My husband is especially interested in likely places to see moose.
7. Speaking of travel, I was on a work trip in Sacramento last week. Despite the fact that it's not exactly a buzzing hive of activity, I didn't end up with as much time to catch up on reading and writing as I'd hoped.
8. I have a huge collection of articles on Readability that I want to revisit and write about, but when I look at all the other things I have going on right now, that doesn't always seem like the best way to spend my limited time. That said, I get restless and edgy when I go for too many days without writing.
9. I also get edgy and restless when too many days of unread blog posts pile up, and have found that I actually prefer the momentary guilt that "mark all as read" produces to that particular source of tension, and feel that after a while, it's easier to start fresh than play catch-up...especially since we're not exactly talking about episodic drama here. Which reminds me--have I missed any big episodes of blogger drama lately?
10. I did photograph some interesting things in Sacramento, even I didn't find much else there very interesting. Here's one of them.

So what's been going on with you lately? You don't have to share ten things, but I'd love to know at least one!

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Linked-up Wordless Wednesday: Happy

I was just happy to have all of them together. They were happy to goof around when we just wanted to get a rare photo of all of them together.

This week's Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday theme is "Happy."

Original photo by Paul Vasquez. Edited with Snapseed.

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Shelf Awareness Book Talk: WHERE THE PEACOCKS SING, by Alison Singh Gee

Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince, and the Search for Home
Alison Singh Gee (Facebook)
St. Martin's Press (February 2013), hardcover (ISBN 0312378785 / 9780312378783)
Memoir, 288 page

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (February 26, 2013). Shelf Awareness provided a galley for review purposes and payment for the review.

Opening lines: “I never knew peacocks could fly.

“I never knew they could do much of anything. As a child growing up in Northeast Los Angeles, I only ever saw them at the botanical gardens in Pasadena or roaming the zoo. They were stunning birds, with their built-in tiaras and show-off coloring. But let’s face it: They seemed pretty useless. Waddling across manicured lawns, admiring flowers, plopping their fat stomachs onto grassy patches in the shade, these pampered birds only broke a sweat when the garden groundskeeper rang the dinner bell. Peacocks were charming but relatively pointless, flashing their plumage like a socialite working her best fur and jewels, and that’s all.
Or so I thought.

“My understanding of peacocks was about to take a quantum leap.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
Alison Singh Gee was a glamorous magazine writer with a serious Jimmy Choo habit, a weakness for five-star Balinese resorts, and a reputation for dating highborn British men. Then she met Ajay, a charming and unassuming Indian journalist, and her world turned upside down. Traveling from her shiny, rapid-fire life in Hong Kong to Ajay’s native village, Alison learns that not all is as it seems.

Turns out that Ajay is a landed prince (of sorts), but his family palace is falling to pieces. Replete with plumbing issues, strange noises, and intimidating relatives, her new love’s ramshackle palace, Mokimpur, is a broken-down relic in desperate need of a makeover. And Alison wonders if she can soldier on for the sake of the man who just might be her soul mate. 

This modern-day fairytale takes readers on a cross-cultural journey from the manicured gardens of Beverly Hills, to the bustling streets of Hong Kong and finally to the rural Indian countryside as Alison comes to terms with her complicated new family, leaves the modern world behind, and learns the true meaning of home.

Comments: By the time Alison Singh Gee established herself as a Hong Kong-based entertainment journalist, she’d traveled more than halfway around the world from her Los Angeles roots and her big, chaotic Chinese-American family, but her busy, glamorous expat life seemed to be missing something. She’d have to travel a bit more before she found it in a decaying family estate in northern India.

Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince, and the Search for Home is Singh Gee’s recounting of her unexpected romance with fellow journalist Ajay Singh--a relationship that began over e-mail, flourished when he left his base in Delhi and moved to Hong Kong to be with her, and was challenged almost from the beginning by cultural and socioeconomic differences. As a child, Alison had read about and dreamed of Indian palaces and royalty. She was stunned to learn that Ajay actually was Indian royalty. But when he took her to visit Mokimpur, his family’s beloved, decrepit hundred-room palace, she may have been even more stunned to discover both how much the lives of modern Indian royalty have changed from those books she read as a girl, and how slowly some things about Indian life change at all.

While its settings are exotic, SIngh Gee’s experiences of finding one’s place within the family and the world at large are near-universal. Where the Peacocks Sing is a charming memoir with cross-genre appeal to fans of multicultural literature and women’s fiction. It's the story of a woman who finds her prince...and discovers that his palace is in need of a lot of upkeep.

Rating: 3.75/5

Other bloggers' reviews:
Sophisticated Dorkiness

 

    

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