WW: Dog Days, in #JustOneParagraph

There are actually three dogs here in front of "Two Salty Dogs"--they are Auggie, Max, and Cole, they're on Facebook, and occasionally, they blog. While I can't vouch for their salt content, I can confirm that they were pretty damp and sleepy as they basked in the warm sunshine of coastal Maine on a June morning. I suspect that they'd had some playtime out in the harbor, and we came upon them during their recovery period. If you've ever lived with a sporting dog of the Retriever variety (Labrador, Golden, Flat-coat, Curly-coat) you know they can't resist the water, because they've been bred not to. And in my observation, a tired, damp black Lab is usually a very contented black Lab.

The mascots of Two Salty Dogs Pet Oufitters, Boothbay Harbor, Maine

Today's post is a twofer, with JustOneParagraph to go with today's Linked-Up Wordless Wednesday theme, "Dog Days."

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(E)Book Talk: THE AGE OF MIRACLES, by Karen Thompson Walker

The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker (Facebook) (Twitter)
Random House (2012), Hardcover (ISBN 0812992970 / 9780812992977)
Fiction, 288 pages
Source: Purchased e-book (eISBN 9780679644385)
Reason for reading: Personal


Opening lines:
"We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it.

"We did not sense, at first, the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin.

"We were distracted, back then, by weather and war. We had no interest in the turning of the earth. Bombs continued to explode on the streets of distant countries. Hurricanes came and went. Summer ended. A new school year began. The clocks ticked as usual. Seconds beaded into minutes. Minutes grew into hours. And there was nothing to suggest that those hours too weren’t still pooling into days, each the same, fixed length known to every human being.

“It still amazes me how little we really knew. . . . Maybe everything that happened to me and my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website 

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

Comments: When the gospel of empowerment and self-actualization is preached everywhere you turn, sometimes it’s hard to accept that an awful lot of what happens in life is just..life. Most of what happens around us is, like it or not, out of our control, and much of it is beyond our understanding; we just have to find ways to live with and within it. Karen Thompson Walker’s debut novel, The Age Of Miracles, derives much of its power as a story from the way it conveys this truth.

As if the changes of approaching adolescence weren’t already challenging and confusing enough for Julia, the physical world around her is changing in a way that makes even less sense. The earth’s rotation is perceptibly slowing; scientists can only make their best guesses as to the cause for it, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to reverse it. The length of an Earth day stretches from twenty-four hours to twenty-seven, then to thirty, then to forty, and keeps going, and the extremes of climate change become compressed within those lengthening days. Governments impose “clock time” in order to keep people and institutions functioning in much the way they always have, but there are pockets of resistance--the ”real-timers” who try to adjust their bodies, and their lives, to the new natural rhythms, and are pushed into fringe communities because of it. Julia’s mother becomes afflicted by physical ailments--”the syndrome”--as the slowing continues, and her father is increasingly, mysteriously absent.

I found The Age Of Miracles a difficult book to drop into a slot. It’s a matter-of-fact coming-of-age story, seemingly poised to attract both adult-fiction and YA reading audiences, set in an environment that’s familiar and unrecognizable at the same time...and Walker seems content to leave many of the mysteries of that environment unexplored. The “slowing” is somehow a both catalyst and a mere backdrop, and isn’t explained or developed anywhere near enough to call the novel “science fiction,” but I can see how it might be shelved there. Its protagonist/narrator is clearly several years beyond Julia’s age during the events of the story; it’s not stated just how much later it is when she relates them, but the voice is much closer to adult than child.

The Age Of Miracles got mixed responses from readers when it was published last summer, and I suspect that some of those reactions arose from frustration over the difficulty of categorizing it. I think that’s one of its biggest strengths, and one of the main sources of its appeal for me. I appreciated that Walker chose to focus the story as she did, and by telling it through such a young narrator, I think she made it clearer that it wasn’t about getting at the “why;” it was about adapting to and living with the not knowing why. This is an ambitious and unusual debut, and I’m curious to see what this author does next.

Rating: 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

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Weekend Recap, in #JustOneParagraph

On Sunday, we rested. Well, we rested a little. We went to the movies in the morning (Who goes to the movies at 10:30 AM? Oh yeah, we do). Later, during the warmth of the afternoon, I couldn't quite muster up the mental energy for reading books or writing reviews about them (I have Monday for that–a medical appointment in the morning, but no work for the day!). Instead, I played games and read blog posts on my iPad–at five PM, it held no unread posts, and it stayed that way for just over an hour (because I put down the iPad to have dinner with my family and didn't refresh it again until just before 6:30). (And by 10 PM, it was at zero again–a clean slate for Monday morning!) During the time in between, we cleared out shelves and cabinets, loaded boxes, and made stacks. The books that will be guests of honor at my giveaway party next weekend are piled all around, and the ones that will move with us are being packed away. One group is ready to travel to their new home next door, while I hope many members of the other group will be welcomed into the homes of my book-loving friends.

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The Boys and Me, in #JustOneParagraph

It occurred to me, as we went out to dinner last night, that I'll soon be the only female member of my household for the first time in fifteen years…and yes, that's counting the dogs. There was even a nearly five-year period when the girls outnumbered the guys around here, although we've been at parity since we lost Gypsy in 2010. But now, as three of us get ready to move next door, our girl is preparing to move to the opposite corner of the country, and it will soon be just the boys and me again. They're not the same “boys” with whom I shared my life and home fifteen years ago; I was seven years and nearly two thousand miles away from meeting them (and no one had met the younger one, since he didn't yet exist), but as I contemplate this next stage, I have a feeling of coming back around. I hope we'll be able to add a dog back into the mix before too long, too.

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Saturday, in #JustOneParagraph

So, after doing my customary Saturday-morning runaround, I will return home today to…watch paint dry. Our front door is supposed to be painted at noon–assuming the painters saw the note–and then it has to be left open for four hours to dry, so we'll have to stay home with it. If they haven't seen the note, we may be waiting even longer to see if they actually show up to paint it at all; considering that they painted the building almost two weeks before the schedule said they were supposed to, we're not sure what to expect here. Then again, an excuse to lounge around the house on a Saturday afternoon probably isn't a bad thing.

 



 

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TLC Book Tour: THE VIRGIN CURE, by Ami McKay

The Virgin Cure: A Novel
Ami McKay (Facebook) (Twitter) (Pinterest)
Harper Perennial (July 2013), trade paper (ISBN 0061140341 / 9780061140341)
Fiction (historical), 352 pages
Source: Hardcover provided by publisher
Reason for reading: TLC Book Tour (to support the paperback edition)

Opening lines: “I am Moth, a girl from the lowest part of Chrystie Street, born to a slum-house mystic and the man who broke her heart.

“My father ran off when I was three years old. He emptied the rent money out of the biscuit tin and took my mother’s only piece of silver--a tarnished sugar bowl she’d found in the rubble of a Third Avenue fire.

“‘Don’t go...’ Mama would call out in her sleep, begging and pulling at the blanket we shared as if it were the sleeve of my father’s coat. Lying next to her, I’d wish for morning and the hours when she’d go back to hating him. At least then her bitterness would be awake enough to keep her alive.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website
One summer night in Lower Manhattan in 1871, twelve-year-old Moth is pulled from her bed and sold as a servant to a finely dressed woman. Knowing that her mother is so close while she is locked away in servitude, Moth bides her time until she can escape, only to find her old home deserted and her mother gone without a trace. Moth must struggle to survive alone in the murky world of the Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow freaks, and prostitutes. 

She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietress of an "Infant School," a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for "willing and clean" companions—desirable young virgins like Moth. She also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling against the powerful forces of injustice. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"—the tragic belief that deflowering a "fresh maid" can cleanse the blood and heal men afflicted with syphilis—which has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls. 

Ignored by society and unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.

Comments: I’ve had Ami McKay’s 2012 historical novel The Virgin Cure on my radar since it was originally published, so I jumped at the chance to read it for a blog tour tied to the paperback edition. The novel’s premise was simultaneously fascinating and repellent to me: it’s the story of a young girl on her own in 19th-century New York City who ends up as a prostitute-in-training...because, really, how many other options might she have, outside of the streets and the orphan trains? In addition, it sounded like it shared some elements of time and place with something else that landed on my radar around the same time, BBC America’s Civil-War-era, Lower-Manhattan-set police procedural Copper, which featured a girl in similar circumstances during its first season. And while I’ll admit that the TV show did help me to visualize Moth’s world in my mind’s eye, McKay’s story did take me to a very different place.

Moth Fenwick escapes servitude to a wealthy but very unstable woman--a position she was sold into be her own mother--and returns to the Bowery slums to discover she is now both parentless and homeless. Driven into the streets, she meets Mae, a bold and seemingly prosperous girl just a few years older. Mae lives in the house of Miss Emma Everett with four other young women--three of whom are popular and established prostitutes, while Mae and Alice are “whores-in-training”--and assures Moth there’s room for one more. The comfort and companionship of Miss Everett’s house draws Moth in, but she’s uneasy with what she’ll eventually be expected to do in order to remain there...and so is “Dr. Sadie,” the woman physician who tends to the girls, and who is all too aware of a special danger to those new to the trade. Miss Everett can obtain a high price for a girl’s first time, but if the girl is chosen to provide “the virgin cure” that’s believed to cure syphilis, she’s the one who ultimately will pay it.

The Virgin Cure is told through Moth’s first-person narration, and I loved the voice that McKay gave her--it didn’t feel anachronistic to me, but it was modern enough in style that my reading just sailed along. And I loved the character Moth had, too--observant, determined, and resourceful, but never to a degree that strained credibility. I also appreciated that many of the other characters displayed shadings and dimensions that the supporting cast in a first-person narrative doesn’t always receive; for me, the richness of the novel came primarily from the characters themselves, and less from the setting and plot. However, on that note, the book is strewn with framing devices--newspaper clippings pertinent to plot developments, snippets and quotes from publications and pamphlets of the time, and entries from Dr. Sadie’s journals--that enhance its effectiveness as a document of its time and place, although I’m not clear how much of this material is culled from actual historical documents. (That said, Dr. Sadie is based on a real person--McKay’s own great-great-grandmother, who worked with the pioneering women physicians Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. In the Author’s Note at the end of the novel, McKay mentions that her original inspiration for The Virgin Cure was her ancestor’s story, but she clearly ended up shifting direction.)

The Virgin Cure goes to some dark places, but I went along with it quite willingly. It’s one of the most fully-absorbing, fully-realized works of fiction I’ve read this year, and I say that as a reader who isn’t a great fan of historical fiction as a sub-genre. That said, virtually spending a few days in the world of nearly 150 years ago can serve as a good reminder that some things in the world really have gotten better...and that for many, especially women and the poor, a return to the “good old days” wouldn’t be good at all.

Rating: 4 of 5

Other stops on this TLC Book Tour

Tuesday, July 2nd: Life in the Thumb

Wednesday, July 3rd: BoundByWords

Saturday, July 6th: Doing Dewey

Tuesday, July 9th: Becca’s Byline

Wednesday, July 10th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, July 11th: Kritters Ramblings

Monday, July 15th: A Reader of Fictions

Tuesday, July 16th: BookNAround

Wednesday, July 17th: Melissa Firman

Thursday, July 18th: West Metro Mommy

Monday, July 22nd: Peppermint PhD

Thursday, July 25th: From L.A. to LA

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Waiting For...#JustOneParagraph

He wasn't the first or last to say it, but he did say it with music, and Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part. It's hard when you've been assured that you've done all you can do and that the outcome will probably be what you want and expect–you just don't know when to expect it. It'll come when it comes...and when it does, it won't even be the end. You're waiting for the thing that will start everything else. While you 're waiting, you can start on some of the everything-else, but there's only so far you can go with it before you have to set it aside…and wait. It's the hardest part.

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