Book Review: Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

What is the advice I receive most often from attending writer’s workshops and author conferences?   READ!  If you want to be a writer, you’ve got to be a reader.  Reading is a luxury rarely found at home, but available at the gym.  They call me the treadmill reader.  I prop my book up and start to read.  It makes my workouts fly by and I can get through the piles of books I’ve collected from thrift stores.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill; a book so eloquently written I felt like I was there and there were times I didn’t want to be.

11 year-old Aminata Diallo is young girl who loves her parents and the rituals of her tribal African homeland.  She picks mangos while her dad tells stories and helps her mother deliver babies as a midwife, but in 1745 Aminata’s parents are killed and she is kidnapped by brutal men. 

Aminata, along with hundreds from her village and thousand from neighboring communities are taken as slaves, dragged across the ruff terrain to the boarding ships headed for America.  A novel written about the horrific accounts of slavery, Someone Knows My Name opened my eyes to the horrors of a little girl left to defend herself and learn the customs of an unjust land.

Truthful and poignant, the scene that most stands out is when Aminata, now a young woman, bravely delivers her own child; a son.  Finally a family, someone she can love and call her own when several weeks after his birth, he is stolen from her in the night.  Her screams and heartache are ignored when she finds out her infant was sold at a slave auction.  She is a person treated as a nobody; she is a girl with a name no one knows.  Someone Knows My Name is a book of fiction filled with truthful history that should never be forgotten.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get out of their comfort zone and consider the oppression that still exists for so many of our brothers and sisters. 

Aminata is a fighter, a lover and a reader.  She holds onto memories like precious jewels and never forgets the love of her parents; this is what gets her through when no one knows her name.  

Book Review of A Secret Kept

 When I read Sarah’s Key by author Tatiana de Rosnay last summer, I felt like crying in my room for a month.  

     Sarah, a young Jewish French girl whose family is captured by Nazi soldiers, tells her little brother to hide in the closet, more like a crawl space behind the rock fire place, promising she’ll come back for him when the soldiers leave.  Sadly, Sarah, her mom and dad are taken by train to a concentration camp and Sarah is left wondering if her little brother is able to exit the tiny, dark locked closet.  Sarah has the key to the closet in her pocket and rubs it, praying every day her brother is not scared or hurt.  The key is her hope of getting out of the hell of what she and her family are going through.   She thinks of her little brother as the days, than months go by.  As a reader and a mother, I was in serious anxiety mode.  How I wish I could get to that little boy and let him out myself, feed him, bath him and take care of him through such a horrific time of our world’s history.

Many scenes left me bewildered, but one especially stands out: 

When separating mother’s from their children, the Nazi’s did so with clever tactics.  It pained me when Sarah and her mother were sprayed with freezing water.   Instinct kicked in and mother and child loosened their grip on each other.   This was the last time Sarah saw her mother.

Sarah’s Key, one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, left me gasping, literally, even at the last page.  An event so special took my breath away and made me hold my children closer.  When I finally read the last words, I called my sister Becky, crying and contemplating the story of Sarah’s Key.  Becky had recommended the book to me and we had been reading it together, calling every day to discuss the tragedy of WWII, the evil of a man named Hitler, the horror of hate and the despair a young girl named Sarah had to suffer.

When Tatiana de Rosnay’s new book A Secret Kept came out, I had to read it.  

Like Sarah’s Key, it is beautifully written and finds beauty in awful circumstances, even death, but unlike Sarah’s Key, the story didn’t move me.  A Secret Kept follows Antoine Rey, a middle-aged divorced father through deep childhood secrets that he has to make sense out of.  Antoine’s mother died when he was 10 and his father is a non-affectionate man who no longer feels the need to be a parent.  Antoine is close to his sister, Melanie and together, they uncover secrets about their mother’s life and unfortunate death.  I appreciated Ms. Rosnay’s effort, writing from the Antoine’s perspective, a male voice, and feel she did justice to the task, but if the storyline isn’t enticing, then nothing else really matters. 

Writing is so interesting because if you have a great character, but a slow-moving plot, then the book is flat. If you have a great story but bad writing, the story doesn’t work either.  In other words, everything needs to be flowing.  The effort is there, the writing is beautiful, I felt like I was really there in that small French town in A Secret Kept, but by the time it was all said and done, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing there.

If Jane Eyre fell in love with a rock star?

I just finished a book called Jane, by author April Lindner.

(image found here)

Jane, a book with a beautiful cover and a catchy hook:

What if Jane Austin fell in love with a rock star?

Wow!  What’s not to like about that?

Sold!

So, I bought the book and started reading it that night.

The book started like so many young adult books I read; parents recently died, girl is searching and starts on a new path in life.  Jane drops out of college and takes a job as a nanny for a famous rock star.

And here is where I start to have a problem with Jane.

She’s too perfect.

She’s not impressed by anything.

She doesn’t care what people think about her.

She doesn’t care how she looks.

She doesn’t let really important people give her a make-over.

She doesn’t want to travel.

She knows nothing about her famous employer because she’s not interested.

She doesn’t worry about her future, money or where life is taking her.

She doesn’t react.

And when she does somewhat react on very rare occasion, the story is flat because remember, she isn’t trying to impress anyone and she doesn’t care what people think about her.

I really like the rock star, Nico Rathburn; how he is smitten with Jane and wants to have her around because his life is so full of people who are trying to use him or are smitten with him or want something from him.  Jane wants for nothing, just something warm to eat at the end of the day.

When Nico Rathburn, a famous millionaire gorgeous single rock star reaches out to Jane, she doesn’t react how I think she should.

She closes up, she shuts down, and she isn’t impressed.

Sure, she falls in love with him, but in a very controlled concise way. In one scene, she actually stops to make a cup of coffee before going upstairs to be in Nico's arms.  Where's the passion in that?  Maybe passion for coffee, but passion for the man she loves feels neutralized.

And I just don’t get that.  It feels flat.

If I were Jane.

I would be so excited to be the nanny of a rock star.

I would be a wreck because my parents are dead.

I would try to look hot around the rock star. 

I would dress to impress.

I would take advantage of all the amenities of working for a millionaire and living in a mansion.  I would jump on my bed, eat ice cream until midnight, swim in the gigantic pool, request a few amenities that would make my stay more comfortable and I would accept generous cash advances when my employer insisted I take them.

I wouldn’t sulk, turn down opportunities to travel and insist I do everything on my own dime.

Now, I realize author April Lindner is following the same plot as Jane Eyre, so I respect that.

But, I just wish Jane was a little more fun.

Case in point?  A great book cover and hook can sell a book.

But characters trying too hard to always be in control are boring.

Julie and Julia and how blogging made Julie Powell famous

I’ve been going to bed too late.

My little baby girl has been waking up too early.

She learned to crawl out of her crib at the ripe old age of 22 months. 

This morning, my 9 year-old son Payson told me at 11:30 last night, his little sister crawled out of her crib and into the kitchen, where he was getting a drink. "Did you put her back in her crib?" my husband asks. "No, she just walked back into her room and shut the door," replies Payson. Interpretation? My baby spent the night sleeping on her floor.  Payson has also been lectured on the idea that although his sister can crawl out of the crib, she cannot crawl back in.

She was up at 6:30am.

Let’s just say, she’s not doing to well and I might have a few bags under my eyes too. 

I’m reading Julie and Julia, by Julie Powell and am enjoying every minute of it.  

It’s a bit vulgar, but if you look through the muck it’s a really clever story.  The counselor and I saw the movie Julie and Julia several years ago and it was a catalyst in starting My Dear Trash.

In the book Julie and Julia, Julie Powell writes about the year she spent cooking all 526 of Julia Child’s recipes from the cook bookMastering the Art of French Cooking.  I am not much interested in the cooking aspect of the book as I am in the idea that she wrote about her experience.  She took ordinary every day task and made them readable, exciting and even suspenseful.  Her take on eggs is especially entertaining.

She contemplates the diary of Sam Pepys (1633-1703), an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept.  She writes “What I think is that Sam Pepys wrote down all the details of his life for nine years because the very act of writing them down made them important, or at least singular.  Threatening to kill his wife’s dog for peeing on the new rug might have made him feel a bit sheepish and mean, but write it down and you have a hilarious domestic anecdote for the centuries.”

I too find everyday experiences become most interesting when written down.  For example, humor evolves where there was none, a hero appears out of the blue or an idea erupts into a solid life change.  Contemplating this idea, I considered exploring each of the following topics:

How when I eat trail mix, I have to have at least one M&M in every bite or it doesn’t taste like a treat.  Why is that?

Or how the Kardashian are the most famous people because they film their everyday experiences.  Amazing how compelling it is.

Or how my husband gets thrilled when he finds an image of a face in something he is eating.  Somewhat juvenile or totally adorable?  You know what this writer thinks.

Or how I’ve recently discovered Ezekiel bread and it’s changed the way I feel about carbohydrates.  

Or how Reef’s little friend threw a fit when I gave him a drink in a sippy cup.  Apparently, this 3 year-old only accepts liquid if it comes in a big boy cup.

When Julie starts her blog, she emails the link to family and friends, so the first time she receives a comment on her blog from a total stranger, she’s a little freaked out.  Eventually, she feels a commitment to write every day “for her readers.”  What does her husband Eric think about this?

“I think the dozen people who click onto your Web site while they take their coffee breaks will manage to carry on it they don’t get to read about you sautéing thorny vegetables in butter for one more day. (pg. 82)” 

I have to admit, I’ve had that self-propelled pressure, the write for “my readers.”  Silly, but true; however, I think the pressure to blog comes more from the idea of a commitment to writing, to sharing our experiences with anyone who will slightly care in any way possible.

Through the year, Julie’s following grows.  When she has the opportunity to be interviewed by Christian Science Monitor, she writes about the ups and downs of blog writing again, saying “I had an audience, disembodied and tiny though it might be.  I wasn’t much afraid of writing something that would make me look pathetic or incompetent, nor of getting myself sued.  But I didn’t want to look, you know, conceited.  Because under the sheer terror, I was felling pretty damned proud of myself.” 

I find it interesting that Julia Child did not endorser the Julie/Julia project.  Julia Child's editor, Judith Jones, said in an interview: "Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn't attractive, to me or Julia. She didn't want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt. She would never really describe the end results, how delicious it was, and what she learned. Julia didn’t like what she called 'the flimsies.' She didn't suffer fools, if you know what I mean."

Man, I think that statement would have made me cry.  Even without Julia Child’s endorsement, the idea that Julie started a blog, landed a major book deal and eventually a major motion picture is a wonderful success story.