Book Review - Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

Holt, 2009

Format? oversized paperback bought on Amazon

Why?  I'm trying to clean off my TBR shelves some this summer, this one was short and I'd read about a billion other reviews that talked about how funny it was.

What Now? After I lend it to a couple of friends, it's going on the keeper shelf.  What a hoot!!

Golden Lines

My father may actually be unaware that he is good-looking.  He is a theologian who believes in a loving God, a servant heart, and a senior discount.  Would God be pleased if we spent an unnecessary thirty-one cents at McDonald's?  I think not.

Call me old-fashioned, but whenever I see those wire-fortified ribbons, I have a secret stab of nostalgia for old-timey ribbon, the kind whose ends flop like spaniel ears.   I'm suspicious of unnaturally perky ribbon.

In the dining room we all gathered to pay homage to Deena's imaginative decor, where no surface had escaped yuletide festivity.  Its attractions included a wreath made of prodigious shiny balls, and a preponderance of more free-rolling balls the size of grape tomatoes that Deena had scattered, carelessly, among the plates and goblets.  She had also affixed a tiny silver ball to the stem of every wineglass - not that we would be drinking wine.  Mennonites tend toward militant sobriety.  But there was always sparkling apple juice for holiday celebrations.


From the kids' table in the other room came the sound of one of my many nephews whining.  There was a slap and an impatient reprimand from the oldest granddaughter, Phoebe, who was now old enough for Uggs and eye-rolling.


Once in grad school, an angry feminist who called herself Lilith but whose real name was Barb attended a swim party in an itsy bitsy swimsuit.  There was a general sense that she had done this on purpose to make everyone else uncomfortable.  From the bikini bottom exploded an epic, wiry bush.  This was pubic hair on a Richter scale, hair gone wild, hair raised by wolves.   It was hair that had taken over her entire southern region, like kudzu.


When my mother forbade me to dance in that talent show, I was actually grateful to be a Mennonite.  This is sort of like falling in love with your kidnapper.


Is it just me or is there something richly satisfying about filling jam jars as you pick up the alto to "In the Sweet By and By?"


My visit was drawing to a close, but my mother continued to surprise.  One of the greatest surprises to proximate auditors was her contribution of horatory flatulence.  Loud and astonishing were her expostulations, like the speeches of Daniel Webster.  These outbursts had become so frequent, yet so casual, that she no longer apologized.  She treated them stoically, with great inclusivity and tolerance.


Mary Loewen Janzen would have given the angelic nineteenth-century Marmee from Little Women a run for her money.

Summary

After the breakup of her 15 year marriage to a bi-polar, bi-sexual fella named Nick who leaves her for a guy named Bob and a serious car accident that leaves her without control of her bladder for months as well as terrible scars,  Rhoda Janzen decides to go home to heal.  Home is back to the Mennonite family and community that she separated herself from years earlier.  Nested comfortably within her family so she can write and earn some much needed cash, Janzen takes time to soul search.  Who is she?  What does her life mean? Where does she go from here? and What does it mean to be a person with a Mennonite background in a non-Mennonite world and vice versa?  No subject is off limits (family car trips, gassey relatives, her failed marriage to an psychologically disturbed person, faith, God, food, suicide, virtue, just to name a few)  in this deeply touching and hilarious memoir.

What I Liked 

Humor - OMG this book is hilarious.  Wait...please...this book is soooo funny!  There were a couple of parts that made me laugh so much that I was crying...I'm so not kidding.  

Rhoda's relationship with her mother - Even though Rhoda leaves the Mennonite faith, her mother, still very much within the faith, honors her wishes.  Her mother gives her the space she needs and doesn't question her choices.  Home is very much Rhoda's harbor; she is allowed to dock in the harbor when the seas are choppy and venture out into the open waters and return when she needs more strength.  

the vocabulary - cattywampus, hortatory condescension, Gatsbyesque scope, cognoscenti, malapropistic, intestinal turbulence, social rupture, hagiographic literature, solipsistic slacker, ratiocinative point of view, adiaphorous morality, pederasts and serial killers, quintessentially American bildungsroman, and on and on and on.

Description - I'm a fan of description done well...and boy does Rhoda ever do this well as you can see by some of the Golden Lines above.  You can see, feel, touch and/or smell her descriptions.  They add to the story and keep you riveted, waiting to see what she's going to say next :)

What I Didn't Like

The Cat Who...series by the late Lilian Jackson Braun - Janzen makes fun of this series at one point in the book...I LIKE this sweet little series :(

I am not easily offended...and Janzen never offended me, but there were a few times that I winced...particularly with her easily sarcastic way of handling parts of the Christian faith.  While I enjoyed this book immensely and will and have already recommended it to many of my friends, there are a few friends I would leave out of that recommendation...friends who would be offended.  

Overall Recommendations

If you can handle a no holds barred look at the dysfunctional life of a newly divorced, ex-Mennonite woman, go for it.  I'm glad I did :):)

Book Review - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Harper Collins 2010

Format? Hardback off my TBR shelf
Where'd I get it? My mom gave me this signed copy for Christmas two (gulp) years ago.

Why?  Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter received a lot of blog time right after it was published...however, what sold me was the setting, South MS...I'm a MS girl who didn't really appreciate MS until I actually had the opportunity to leave it.  So, any chance I get to read a book whose setting is my home, I dive right in.  I do tend to be hyper-critical of MS books, Southern accents, and of course, the stereotypical ways anything about the South is represented.

What Now?  This one's a keeper...I liked this one so much that I didn't even look at the end when things began to heat up.  Anybody who knows me knows that's a big crutch of mine...a crutch for which my firstborn won't speak to me for a while after she knows I've fallen back on it :(   This one's going on the keeper shelves in the antique secretary :)

Golden Lines

The trunks were darker in the rain, some shelved with rows of mushrooms or layered in moss.  The air grew cooler the lower he went and at the bottom he brushed at his shoulders and emptied his hat, the hill tropic behind him, its odor of rain and worms, dripping trees, the air charged as if lightning had just struck, squirrels flinging themselves through patches of sky and the snare-roll of a woodpecker a few hollows over, the cry of an Indian hen.


"Can I have the rattles?" the mullet boy asked.
Silas looked at the women.
"Fine with me," the fat one said.  "His birthday's next month."  She winked to let him know it was a joke, and he bent to work cutting the dry cartilage off with the shovel and kicked it out of the snake's range.  The boy picked it up and smelled it, then ran off shaking it,  the other boys and the dogs following.


But he loved best when the Coca-Cola truck had left six or seven or eight of the red and yellow wooden crates stacked by the machine, the empties gone and the new bottles filled with Sprite, Mr. Pibb, Tab, Orange Nehi, and Coca-Colas, short and tall.   Larry relished unlocking the big red machine, turning the odd cylinder of a key and the square lock springing out.   When you spun this lock the entire red face of the machine hissed open and you were confronted with a kind of heaven.  Long metal trays beaded with ice were tilted toward the slot where they fell to your waiting hand.  The rush of freezing air, the sweet steel smell.  The change box heavy with quarters and dimes and nickels.   Taking bottles from the cases, he'd place each one in its rack, considering the order, taking care not to clink.


Twenty-five years later, his head full of the past, here in Larry Ott's kitchen, Silas stared at the photograph of his mother.  Because they'd lost their things on the trip from Chicago, this was the first picture of her he'd seen in decades, her light skin, hair drawn back in a scarf.  The smile she wore was the one she used around white people, not the one he remembered when she was genuinely happy, where every part of her face moved and not just her lips, how her eyes wrinkled, her hairline went back, how you saw every gleaming white tooth, the kind of smile he'd seen fewer and fewer times the older she got.  But this plastic smile, the photograph, was better than no picture at all.

Summary

Silas Jones, better known as "32" and Larry Ott are old friends from childhood.  Silas moved to MS from Chicago with his mama Alice, while Larry has always lived in MS with his mother and father.  The two become great friends who spend their time fishing, mowing grass, catching snakes, and all the other things young boys do.  Silas is a ball player, and Larry likes to read books, yet somehow their personalities compliment each other.   However, there is one aspect of their friendship that works against them, Silas is black and Larry is white in 1970's small town Mississippi where integration is new (1968) and raw.  While as young boys these differences don't make much of an impact on their friendship, by the time they are in jr. high, the two have grown apart.  Silas becomes a popular baseball player who leaves for Ole Miss on a scholarship and Larry becomes an outcast who stays behind reading his books.
During their jr year in high school a young woman disappears.  Larry is the last one to see her alive and becomes the person of interest in her disappearance.  Even though a body is never found and Larry is adamant about his innosence, the rest of the town is convinced that Scarey Larry is the murder.
After graduating from Ole Miss, Silas moves back to MS to become the constable and keeps his eye, albeit from a distance, on Larry, who has become completely ostracized from his community.  Then another girl disappears, and all eyes are on Larry again.  But, Silas knows Larry is innocent.  How he knows and whether or not he can clear Larry and come to terms with his own shortcomings are the conflicts embedded in this fast moving novel.  

What I Liked

Holy Smokes, the writing...I will be reading anything else I can get my hands on by Tom Franklin...I enjoy description done well...I am a lover of words and obviously so is Franklin.   Franklin's vivid descriptions of MS heat, kudzu, sweat, grass, bugs, pine trees, etc are spot on.  The characters themselves are so richly done that you feel like you know them.  You want to cut them some slack but then you don't.  You're sad when good folks mess up...but from a contemporary perspective, you somehow know that these were complicated times...actions that would never occur now unanswered for were commonplace even in the 1970's.

Voncille - the town clerk.  You say her name Von seal...do you know how many women I've known named Voncille?  Do you know that I've never seen the name written...anywhere?  Do you know how tickled I was to have a character named Voncille??  Tee Hee :)

"Preciate" - Do you know how many times a day I say this?? This is MS slang for the word "appreciate."  I constantly use the phrase "preciate you" or "preciate it."  We also don't "borrow" things; we "borry" them :)  There are so many other examples of dialogue like this that made me think Tom Franklin had to have grown up in the South.  

The plot - I knew who the murderer was by the time the character enters the story...but this book was about so much more than the identity of this character.  The events were intertwined in such a way that the reader truly becomes emotionally involved in the story.

The story vacillates between the present and the past...again, this book is not just about solving a murder, but it's also about who these men are, who they were as children, where they came from, how they became friends, the societal expectations that fought against their friendship, and of course, the men they each individually became.  There is no good guy, bad guy in this story...it's incredibly complicated...which in many circumstances is so very much how life is.

What I Didn't Like

Of course I don't like any portrayal of MS as a racist state...but duh.  I think history must include the pieces we're not proud of as well as the parts we want to shout to the world.  Part of what's wrong with our world today is that we've grown up with a whitewashed version of our country's history...we're proud of things that either never happened or events that have been exaggerated or strategically altered so that we always look like the good guys.  I've read and been depressed enough by Howard Zinn's book The People's History of the United States to realize the dangers of blindly filling in the blanks to fluff things up a bit.  Franklin doesn't fluff anything up; there were parts of this book that were tough to read for me...even places where I winced. But, sometimes the truth hurts.  Truth that matters, anyway.
There's also a part of this history that is simply ours as Southerners...the barefooted kids playing running around with a rattlesnake rattle, the language, the heat, the diner, the sittin' on the front porch, smokin' a cigarrette, drankin' a beer kinda stuff. ;)

The dialogue was a little over the top at times...while we all slide into the deep deep dialect at times, Franklin's characters seemed to always leave out their verbs or talk like the most ignorant people you've ever met.  That stung a little bit I think simply bc that's not my day to day experience...depending on who you're talking to, the level of education, and where they live depends on how much dialect you have to stomach.  Professional Mississippians generally speak standard English in professional situations, but Franklin's characters seem to always be in backwoods mode. I grew up and live in the rural South and do fall back into  a conversational country tone most every single day (depending on who I'm talking to, of course), but when I'm "on the job" so to speak, I am very careful and very cognizant of how I sound to others.  Of course, as I'm typing this, I'm also remembering that I work in a community college and my professional expectations are probably very different from what's expected of Franklin's characters.  The dialect is definitely something to prepare for though bc you can't overlook it.

Overall Recommendation

This is a great story and a honest look at life in a small Southern town...two friends, two races, other differences and societal expectations concerning those differences.  It's also about how stereotypical ideas can hurt the innocent while covering up guilt...and I'm not just talking about black and white.  

Book Review - The Book Thief

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

Borzoi Books, 2005

Format? oversized paperback given to me by a Secret Santa two Christmases ago

Why?  The first year I blogged, every. single. blog. I read sang the praises of this book.  I try not to get too wrapped up in hype bc I want there to be a little bit of distance between what's covered in the media and my own true thoughts.  I put the book on my Christmas list, received it, and then let it sit on my TBR shelves for over a year.  I needed a book this past spring for my hybrid class...a class with which I read a novel for the first time...The Book Thief was it.
What Now?  I will and have recommended this one to anybody and everybody.  My firstborn has already read it, and my boss gets it next.  I will probably buy a hardback version of this one and then put it in its rightful place on my keeper shelves.

Golden Lines

It's the leftover humans.
The suvivors.
They're the ones I can't stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail.  I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprise.  They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs.

***SOME FACTS ABOUT STALINGRAD***
1.  In 1942 and early '43, in that city, the sky was bleached bedsheet-white each morning.
2.  All day long, as I carried the souls across it, that sheet was splashed with blood, until it was full and bulging to the earth.
3.  In the evening, it would be wrung out and bleached again, ready for the next dawn.
4.  And that was when the fighting was only during the day.


You could argue that Liesel Meminger had it easy.  She did have it easy compared to max Vandenburg.  Certainly, her brother practically died in her arms.  Her mother abandoned her.
But anything was better than being a Jew.

Life had altered in the wildest possible way, but it was imperative that they act as if nothing at all had happened.
Imagine smiling after a slap in the face.  Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.
That was the business of hiding a Jew


The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet.  They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder.
They breathed.
German and Jewish lungs.

"Gentlemen," a stout referee in black pants and a blue shirt began.  A bow tie was fixed to his throat.  "First and foremost, we want a good clean fight."  He addressed only the Fuhrer now, "Unless, of course, Herr Hitler, you begin to lose.  Should this occur, I will be quite willing to turn a blind eye to any unconscionable tactics you might employ to grind this piece of Jewish stench and filth into the canvas."  He nodded, with great courtesy.  "Is that clear?"
The Fuhrer spoke his first word then.  "Crystal."


You hide a Jew.  You pay.  Somehow or other, you must.


In all honesty (and I know I'm complaining excessively now), I was still getting over Stalin, in Russia.  The so-called second revolution - the murder of his own people.
Then came Hitler.


As if often the case with humans, when I read about them in the book thief's words, I pitied them, though not as much as I felt for the ones I scooped up from various camps in that time.  The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance.  That basement was not a washroom.  They were not sent there for a shower.  For those people, life was still achievable.


"When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the living room was open just a crack....I could see outside.  I watched, only for a few seconds."  He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months.


They watched the Jews come down the road like a catalog of colors.  That wasn't how the book thief described them, but I can tell you that that's exactly what they were, for many of them would die.  They would each greet me like their last true friend, with bones like smoke and their souls trailing behind.


No, thought Liesel as she walked.  It's my heart that is tired.  A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this.

Summary

German Liesel Meminger is left with foster parents Rosa and Hans Hubermann in a town called Molching on a cold winter night; her brother is dead, having died on the train, and her mother, unable to feed and care for her children anymore, is gone.
Liesel settles in with the Hubermanns, grows accustomed to Rosa's sharp tongue and Hans' gentleness and understanding and discovers a best friend, Rudy Steiner.  Life in Hitler's Germany is tough even for non-Jewish Germans...their food is rationed, there are no extras of anything, there are strict rules to follow and family members may be taken away at any time to serve Hitler in whatever way he so chooses.
The families do everything possible to keep life as normal as possible.
Hans begins to read with Liesel each night when she wakens from her nightmares, first from A Gravediggers Handbook that Liesel, "The Book Thief," recovered after it was lost in the snow by an apprentice gravedigger at her brother's burial and then from books Liesel steals from the mayor's wife's library.  She later continues her reading and writing lessons in the basement with a Jew named Max (the son of an old friend of Hans) who shows up one night needing help.
Life gets tougher on Himmel Street; the war begins spiraling out of control, Jews are marched down the street of Molching on their way to concentration camps, air raid sirens become part of normal life, Rosa loses many of her washing jobs bc of prejudice, and the family is frightened for their lives 24/7 if Max is found in their basement.
Is it even possible for this story to have a happy ending?
Should it?

What I Liked

Death, the narrator - foreshadowing - I could almost hear music...you know the kind that comes on while you're watching a scary movie...the killer is around the corner...if only the heroine could hear the music, right??  That's when everybody starts screaming, "Don't you go in there, Girl!! Just don't do it!"  Even when you've seen the movie before, you still hope that she won't go in there...that's how this story felt to me.
I knew how it would end.  We all do.  

Liesel - in the past when someone mentioned the name Liesel, I would think of the older sister in "The Sound of Music"...that won't happen anymore.  This Liesel is unforgettable.  Her strength, her soul, her ability to adjust to her surroundings, her ability to pick up and keep moving, her ability to love, her ability to see the world around her realistically...all of that and more...nevermind the fact that this child is only 9-13 years old throughout the story.

Format - I'm sure there's a word for this type of structure, but I don't  know what it is...The narrator, Death, goes back and forth in time as he pleases and interrupts the flow with comments and/or bolded newsflashes of sort.  I would think the danger of this kind of format would be a chopped up feel, but there is none of that here.  Quite the contrary, the most effective flashes and context seem to be incorporated seamlessly this way.

Death complaining about having too much on his plate - Most of us see Death as that hooded creature with the scythe...it's a Hollywood version that's become ingrained in our brains.  But, Death as the storyteller in The Book Thief doesn't seem to be a frightening thing at all...the way he gently scoops the victims up in his arms and takes them away, the way Death truly mourns over the lives of worthy humans, the way Death sees all that's happening in the world as a waste, but not something he can stop almost endears him to the reader.  I could go on and on about the symbolism here...how mankind hurts itself over and over, etc. but I'll let you experience that for yourself.

The humor - both Death's sarcastic remarks and Liesel and Rudy's attempts to carry on conversations with adult words tickled me from time to time.  I appreciated the ability to have a rest every now and then from subject matter that weighed so heavily on my chest.  The German curse words were my favorites :)

The History - once again there are things here that I never even knew about...scores of Jews escaped Germany while they were able and ended up in Australia...hence, Zusak's (an Australian) interest in the Jewish families who survived and the members/branches of those families who were left behind and essentially wiped off the face of the earth.

Hans Hubermann - how the heck do you not like a man like Hans?

What I Didn't Like

There is literally nothing about this novel that I didn't like, except of course, the subject matter.  How in the world this part of our history exists completely baffles me.  And, then sometimes it doesn't; I can look around at the world we live in today and see some of the same mindset that guided the worst genocide in our nation's history, and I get scared.  Really.

Hitler was one man.
One of the statistics Death brings out in this novel is that at one point in history 90% of Germans backed Hitler.
90%.
Out of every 100 people, 90 of them believed what Hiltler proposed was right and/or believed that his strategies/actions had to happen in order to create a powerful German human race.

Even as I type those words, it seems so stupid...like something we'd all snicker at and say the person needs psychiatric help.
But, time and time again, things happen that we think never would.
How did this happen?
90%.
It's called blind conformity.
It's a disease, and...

This book is a classic.  

Overall Recommendation

Everybody needs to read this book.
The End.