Buxton Spice, by Oonya Kempadoo (a #diverseathon book)

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Oonya Kempadoo

When I signed in on Twitter after the exams I saw everybody talking about a discussion generated on BookTube that crystallized in a “diverse-a-thon”, meaning a week for reading “diverse” books and learn intentionally about other cultures, religions, races, sexual orientations, etc., through your reads. I didn’t have to look so far, for I had already a book from the library set in Guyana that fitted perfectly for the purpose of the event.

Buxton Spice is a coming-of-age story narrated by a pre-teen girl in a fictional village of this Caribbean country, surrounded by an atmosphere of political change and ethnical disturbances that makes the discovery of her new sexual nature even more disturbing.

I think that the main goal of the book is to describe how girls’ sexuality is developed within this community, with Lula and her friends as guides. At the beginning of the narration the girls’ approach towards sex is an amusing one; it’s something they witness on a daily basis so, even though they don’t understand it completely, they joke and play games about it. However, Lula’s encounter with one of the village’s boys, make her actually feel it, and that changes her.

The discovery of sexuality is the theme of the book, and I have to say that sometimes it is overwhelmingly so; it’s an environment in which sex is everywhere and young girls want to be part of it too because they are somehow exposed and expected to be so, but they are still so misinformed and naïve, trying to make sense of their new sensations. So if you, as a reader, have any prejudice towards this subject on books, this may not be of your liking.

Anyway, I am glad I have read the book because the author makes you take part in this community, which is so different from what I have experienced; and I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know where Guyana was in the map – such is the size of my ignorance, which was sorted out thanks to this story. However, there were aspects of the novel that didn’t like that much. For example, the narration sometimes is focused on describing certain characters and, therefore, lacking action and making the read slow and, when there are actually events happening, you don’t feel them connected. Besides, and that is my own handicap to blame, the language used in the book is that of the dialect or the accent of the people of this country, and I really had trouble in understanding some of the conversations.

Nevertheless, Buxton Spice is an interesting read with a subject not wide spread through literature in a country where most of us haven’t read books set in, and those are points to take into account when looking for diverse reads, aren’t they?

Did you participate in the diverseathon? Do you have any recommendations?

Buxton Spice
Oonya Kempadoo
Published by Phoenix (UK and Canada)
Paperback, 184 pages

My brilliant friend, by Elena Ferrante

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Elena Ferrante

The so-called Ferrante Fever reached my country some months ago with this book series titled “The Neapolitan novels”, and I decided to read it just because everybody was reading it. However, what I found was not the typical bestseller, meaning a thriller you are hooked on for a couple of days, but a slow story about a complex friendship between two girls, framed in a low-class Italian neighbourhood.

Lila is brilliant; a girl who can achieve whatever she desires to, resourceful, witty and with charisma. On the other hand Lenù, our narrator, is an introvert, hard-working and not so outstanding girl. She is very good at school and she gets to study further courses than the majority of her classmates but, somehow, Lila always seems to go ahead of her in every aspect of their lives, making Lenù fight an internal battle between trying to be better than Lila and the feeling of guilt about her disloyalty to her friend.

The narration is set in the fifties in Naples, in a society in which everything seems to be like in the past. Girls are expected to find a suitable husband, the sooner the better, a task described as the finest art in the book; the richest families will always be superior and respected; the boys will always dominate their female friends and find any excuse to start a fight… But for our young protagonists there is also the hope that you can be something else through education, which is the only thing Lila and Lenù have in common: their willingness to learn and dream higher lives for themselves. However, they both are confined within the borders of this small place they live in, whose rules are hard to break.

My Spanish edition

It took me a long time to read the book; as I told you at the beginning, this is not a page-turner, but a slow narration that takes its time but does invite you to keep on reading. I enjoyed the dichotomy Lenù faces regarding this peculiar friendship; she depends on Lila in a way her friend does not, and that makes the relationship unbalanced and, therefore, the story interesting.

The only negative thing I have to point out is the abrupt ending – a chapter is over and the story doesn’t continue, hanging on in the middle of a scene, so to speak, for you to pick up the second volume I guess… Which I will soon do.

Are you also a victim of the #FerranteFever?

My brilliant friend
Elena Ferrante
Published by Europa Editions
331 pages

The tenderest scenes in “Orphan Train”

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Christina Baker Kline

One of the books this year for my book club was Orphan train and, thanks to Allison, who sent me a copy two years ago, I have read the original version.

The book was very popular when it was published and I have very little to add to the wonderful reviews I’ve read (here you can read Allison’s), so I have decided to write about the scenes I liked the most in this story and the feelings arisen while reading:

1) The comfort Vivian found in the school she attended to when living with a poor and miserable family in the country. I liked the character of the teacher, a young woman who represents all those teachers in rural areas who knew that the children were expected to little more than learning to read and write, so then they can help in the farms, escaping from the very thing that could made them live a better life: education. Despite the circumstances, they welcomed the children every day with a smile, trying to make the school a place for them to enjoy, a refuge to act as the children they still were.

2) The feeling of finding someone who knows the real “you”; someone with whom you don’t have to pretend. Vivian has lived in different places, with different families, her name changed a couple of times… But after some time she reunites with a boy from her childhood, and the bond they have makes her feel like she has finally found a place to call home. It’s very romantic!

3) These peculiar beliefs we experience regarding objects: we rely on objects that make us feel safe, when in fact we are the ones responsible for our own safety and happiness. In the book, Vivian and Molly, in the past and the present, have amulets they don’t want to get rid of because they think that otherwise they will forget their roots. It’s not possible to forget certain people or memories, but still, we hang on things which represent them.

This is a book written to be loved by the readers – a story based on true but not well known events of the past, and a lovely child as main character to touch our hearts. Highly recommended.

Orphan train
Cristina Baker Kline
Published by William Morrow Papaerbacks
276 pages

Review and giveaway: Dancing Backward in Paradise, by Vera Jane Cook

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Vera Jane Cook

Once again I’m reviewing a novel by this author thanks to Virtual Author Book Tours, just because I like Vera Jane’s stories very much.

Dancing Backward in Paradise is set in a place called Paradise, in Tennessee in the sixties, and our main character, Grace Place, is about to achieve her mother’s dream: go to New York and be an actress. Grace has just finished the high school and it’s looking for a job in order to save some money for the trip to New York; she is not quite sure about it, but she wants to make her momma happy, so she does what she is told. By the time she gets a job cleaning the house of a very odd young woman whose husband is dying of cancer, she also begins dating Lenny Bean, a handsome boy who unfortunately has dark intentions. Grace manages to make that trip to New York, but she eventually will have to come back to Paradise and face all that she left behind.

In the first half of the book we know this southern place and their inhabitants. Grace’s family live in a trailer, and people in Paradise are hard workers but they have very little culture. We have to take into account that we are in the sixties in a little village, so everybody is aware of others’ affairs and things like homosexuality are not well considered – Grace has a friend who is a lesbian and is always in trouble. The atmosphere of that place is really well described through the characters of the book; only Grace is more or less normal, but we have that bastard of Lenny Bean; Grace’s employer, who can’t be crazier; or Grace’s grandfather, a religious man who spends the days prayin with one hand on the bible and the other on his private parts.

In the second part, in New York, the change – compared to Paradise – shocks the reader as well as Grace. She lives in an apartment instead of in a trailer for a start; there are black people who are not servants of white people and who Grace is warned not to call Negros to, and nobody wants to know about your business. There we get to know other characters that strengthen the idea of her being in an absolutely different place; really comfortable one.

The plot, as always in Vera’s novels, is really gripping, but this time I would like the main character to be less naïve: Grace can’t see the things that are before her eyes; things that everybody else knows and tries to tell her about, but she doesn’t pay attention to. She becomes more perspicacious later on, but in the first part of the book she got me on my nerves several times. Apart from it, I enjoyed the story, and I keep this author as a reference for southern novels.

 

Giveaway

You can win an ebook (pdf, mobi or epub) of Dancing Backward in Paradise just by saying in the comments you want to enter the giveaway.

The giveaway is open internationally and finishes on May 15.

Good luck!

Links:

• Book on Amazon.com ♦ Book on Goodreads
• Follow the tour
• Vera Jane Cook on FB
• Vera Jane Cook on TW
• Vera Jane Cook’s web

Jenny Rat, by Martin Simons

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Martin Simons

This is the kind of book that won’t leave you indifferent because of the topics it brings up, which you can discuss over and over and not reach any conclusion at all.

Michael is an engineer; a 28 year-old boy who is very successful at work but not in his social life: he does his projects at home and rarely goes out, and the only relationship with a woman he has had happens every Saturday, when he sees a prostitute called Jacquie. One Saturday night when Jacquie is leaving, they find an unconscious, undernourished and probably drugged girl on the road; Michael looks after her while the ambulance is coming and the following days he feels worried about the girl, so he visits her in the hospital several times and they begin to fall in love with each other.

Her name is Jenny, she is fourteen and has had a really tough live: she had been sexually abused by her father, then he died and her mother abandoned her in the streets and she has been a prostitute mainly to get food and sometimes drugs until now. Michael feels guilty about having certain feelings towards a girl who is under-age, but it turns out that he is the only one who visits her and Jenny knows it, so she encourages him to keep on visiting and, eventually, take her to his house, which happens in the second part of the book.

What I liked about the book was two things. First of all, the relationship between Jenny and her father is rather complicated: it should have began as a child’s game of exploration at daddy’s bed – that her father didn’t discourage – when her mother went to work and ended up in a relationship between lovers in which Jenny was the dominant half and looked for it every morning, her father being the only one who felt guilty – sometimes. So Jenny never regrets it because for her it was normal, and remembers it as the best moments of her life.

This is so shocking. In fact, I have seen on Goodreads that many people gave up reading at this point, but despite the shock I think this is great for discussion owing to the controversy about what is normal and what is not in this Electra complex taken to the limit.

Besides, we have also the relationship between Michael and Jenny, which is also forbidden, but “less forbidden” than incest, and frustrates them since they feel like a couple but they have to avoid sex and they can’t explain their situation to others.

But the way the story is developed isn’t very good. The dialogues are terrible: I know that Jenny is a girl that hasn’t had an education and she has to speak like that, but Michael is an engineer; he must be used to talking with clients but every time he says something to Jenny or to the social workers he is monotonous and often ridiculous, so it sounds as if he has a mental age of ten. These dialogues make the read slow instead of adding some rhythm. On the other hand, I am really worried about the poor Australian children who are under the care of the social services of that country because, if the book is accurate, they can be left with the first stranger who seems to care for them, claiming that he loves a certain child and wants to began a relationship with her. This lack of responsibility of the social services is quite disturbing and makes the story a bit incredible.

So well, this is not a book for everyone because there is sexual content that might disgust some readers, but nevertheless this is precisely the thought-provoking part of the story. For the rest, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 17/20

The story of Sassy Sweetwater, by Vera Jane Cook

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Vera Jane Cook

I received this book thanks to Virtual Author Book Tours; I chose it because I thought it would be a delightful southern story, and so it has been.

Sassy discovers that she has a family at the age of thirteen, when the last of her mother’s partners dies unexpectedly and the woman decides it’s time to come back to her parent’s house in South Carolina. It turns out that Sassy’s family is very wealthy, so suddenly the girl begins to live an absolutely different life – she lives in a big house with lots of servants, she has a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins and she really believes that this is her place.

At the beginning, the relationship with her grandmother is not easy, but little by little she gets to fit in the family, and so does her mother, who besides has reunited with the man she has always loved: Sassy’s father. But this moment of happiness won’t last forever because there are some family secrets that have brought a lot of pain to the ones Sassy loves now and there are members of the family that Sassy still hasn’t known who are absolutely evil.

The story is set in the sixties and has two different parts: the one I’ve summarized above, and the one who tells Sassy’s adulthood after her mother leaves her alone. It is a story full of turns in which Sassy has to make fast decisions that will change her life forever.

What I liked most was how the family, especially Grandma Edna, changes along the story: at the beginning she is rude with Sassy because she wants her new granddaughter to follow all her strict rules in the house, but later they will realize both have a lot in common and even though Edna hasn’t known Sassy since she was a baby, then they love each other as any of the other grandparents and grandchildren. The behavior of Sassy’s mother is also remarkable because the reader just can’t understand that woman. It seems like she wants to get rid of Sassy wherever she finds a place, and then go away and live her life alone, but nevertheless, this is one of the points that make you sympathize with Sassy and get gripped to the book because some of the secrets hidden by the family are related to her mother.

The story is told from Sassy’s perspective and I noticed that at the beginning, when she is still young, the language of the book is simpler than later on, when she grows up, and I liked it since it makes you feel involved with the character. I also liked the different settings of the story: from a traditional southern state to the hippy era of France, with a lot of interesting characters, like Sassy’s aunts.

So all I can say is that I enjoyed the book and I recommend it if you like these kinds of stories.

• Vera Jane Cook’s web
• Vera Jane Cook on twitter
• The story of Sassy Sweetwater on amazon.com

The story of Sassy Sweetwater

Vera Jane Cook

320 pages

Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 11/20