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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (Adult Autobiography)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou (Adult Autobiography)

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

Before she became Maya Angelou, she was Marguerite Johnson. When she was three, Marguerite—along with her four-year-old brother, Bailey—was shipped from Long Beach, California to Stamps, Arkansas bearing little more than an identification tag with instructions on her wrist. The pair was sent to live with their paternal grandmother and crippled uncle. It was here where young Marguerite would watch the poor Blacks picking cotton in the fields, fall in love with Shakespeare, experience prejudice and hate from people far poorer and less educated than herself, and learn her multiplication tables. In the years following, she would be shuffled back and forth between her mother, father, and grandmother while surviving rape at the age of eight, celebrating her first library card, getting her first job, and experiencing motherhood.

Angelou’s autobiography, which details her life from age 3 to 17, spent two years on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, was nominated for a National Book Award, received the Literarian Award in 2013, and yet remains one of the most banned and/or challenged books in America for its violence, racism, sexuality, childhood rape, and teen pregnancy.

Banning Angelou’s work—set in the 1930s and 40s and told from the lens of a young Black girl—because of its violence and racism is akin to banning a book on war because it’s too bloody. To measure a book set in the past using today’s racial, moral, and ethical standards is unreasonable, unfair, and unrealistic. It’s a false equivalent and no historical work, person, or idea could ever pass such a litmus test. Yes, Angelou’s book contains everything that it was banned for, but chastising these honest and true observations, experiences, and thoughts through removal doesn’t make our schools or society any better for it. How can it?

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is gritty, sobering, shocking, and compelling while being uplifting, witty, honest, and hopeful. Angelou shares memories of her first Valentine, her 8^th grade graduation, the stability a new stepfather brought to her family, her multiple scholarships to the California Labor School, the summer when she and her father took an unforgettable trip into Mexico, the month she lived in a junkyard, and being the first Black to work on the San Francisco streetcar system. At every turn, Angelou seemed to live her mother’s advice: Life is going to give you just what you put into it. And Angelou gave it her all.

Angelou’s title of her autobiography is a reference to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy”, which is filled with empathy for a bird longing and crying out for freedom. After reading Angelou’s early years, I felt that the caged bird sings because that was what it was born to do. Angelou is that bird and despite the limitations and bars placed around her, she refused to be a prisoner or a victim. She never stopped at finding a way to make the impossible possible and whenever she felt helpless or weakened, she rose above it all and sang because that was what she was born to do. Through her books and poetry, generations will continue to enjoy Maya Angelou’s song as long as we, as a society, are brave enough to keep the cage door open for all to hear.

Rating: 5/5

* Book cover image attributed to: www.abebooks.com

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My Louisiana Sky by Kimberly Willis Holt (J Fiction)

My Louisiana Sky

Kimberly Willis Holt (J Fiction)

Tiger Ann Parker was six when she realized that her momma wasn’t like other mothers—acting more like a younger sibling than a parent—and her father was no better, often described as “slow” by the men he worked with at the nursery. Tiger hated to admit it, but she felt embarrassed by her parents and often wished that her mother was more like her stylish and independent Aunt Dorie Kay. If she was, then maybe Tiger could make friends with the girls in her class. Maybe Tiger could finally fit in. Tiger’s wish may be coming true when she’s given the chance to leave her small town of Saitter and begin a new life in Baton Rouge. But is starting over really the answer that Tiger is looking for?

This is the second book by Kimberly Willis Holt that I’ve read, the first being When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, and Holt again delighted me with a cast of unforgettable characters and an immersive story. My Louisiana Sky is another period book, but this one takes place during the 1950s when the country was divided by segregation and people with developmental disorders were often institutionalized. Mirroring Zachary, Holt’s down-home and folksy writing is front and center and instantly draws the reader to her characters and pulls you into their quaint and intimate world. The story is told from twelve-year-old Tiger’s point of view and what really compelled me—apart from its strong themes of acceptance and family—was how the script was flipped a bit. Most books that deal with the subject of developmental disabilities for this age often afflicts either a sibling or a friend of the main character. For Holt to strip Tiger’s familial stability by having not one but both of her parents dealing with varying degrees of mental challenges gives the story an entirely unique perspective and instills an overall sense of aloneness for Tiger. Combine that with her having to deal with the common adolescent fare of self-esteem, body issues, and self-confidence and you can’t really fault Tiger for wanting to leave everything she knows and loves behind for a chance to simply be a twelve-year old girl for a while.

There are so many positive lessons to be learned from this book, but the reader who is fighting against circumstances beyond their control and struggling to be accepted by their peers is going to feel the deep connection to Tiger Ann Parker. Most of us can remember wanting to be part of a clique and recalling the sting when confronted with rejection. We feel Tiger’s anguish when she cries out, “It’s not fair. I didn’t do anything to them,” and appreciate the wisdom of Granny’s words when she tells Tiger, “Perhaps those girls don’t deserve your friendship.” It’s true when they say that it’s not what we have in life, but who we have in our life that matters. For Tiger, all she needed was a best friend who loved baseball, a father who had a talent for listening to the earth, and a mother who loved to dance in between the sheets drying on the clothesline under a bright, blue Louisiana sky.

Rating: 5/5

* Book cover image attributed to: www.goodreads.com

The Dry Grass of August by Anna Jean Mayhew

The Dry Grass of August

The Dry Grass of August

Anna Jean Mayhew (Adult Fiction)

In August of 1954, we took our first trip without Daddy, and Stell got to use the driver’s license she’d had such a fit about. It was just a little card saying she was Estelle Annette Watts, that she was white, with hazel eyes and brown hair. But her having a license made that trip different from any others, because if she hadn’t had it, we never would have been stuck in Sally’s Motel Park in Claxton, Georgia, where we went to buy fruitcakes and had a wreck instead. And Mary would still be with us.

It’s 1954 and Jubie Watts, her mother, brother, sisters, and their maid, Mary, are embarking on the ultimate road trip from Charlotte, North Carolina to Florida. They’re traveling without father and there’s talk of the Klan in Georgia. “We’ll be fine,” Mama assured. She needed this trip and nothing was going to change her mind. So with that final word, the six of them headed out in the family’s Packard for a journey that would have unforeseeable impacts on them all.

Several reviewers noted that fans of Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help (I read it and count myself as a fan) would also enjoy this book. “A must-read,” one went so far as saying. But other than the story being set in the South during segregation, the parallels stop there. Mayhew’s story does deal with the atrocities of racial and social injustice, but—through the Watts family—she also delves into the darkness of infidelity, alcoholism, and physical abuse. This is a story about both a country and a family being torn apart from the inside out. The ugliness of racial disparity and the effects of substance abuse are on full display and is authentic in their depiction and raw in their detail. What’s perhaps most disturbing is the fact that in this place and time in American history, these behaviors were indeed the status quo and viewed as socially acceptable.

In the back of the book, there is an author Q&A section where Mayhew is asked if her novel is young adult fiction given that her protagonist is thirteen years old. Mayhew answers, “My novel is literary fiction; however, I hope young adults will read it, because it’s set in a time long before their lives and can give them a look into history through the eyes of someone of their age.” I searched Penguin Teen for iconic YA heroines and pulled up such descriptions as “sharpshooter, ancient beast tamer”, “futuristic Resistance fighter”, “post-apocalyptic survivor”, “female gladiator”, and “dress-wearing demon destroyer”. After reading The Dry Grass of August, it was refreshing to see just an ordinary young girl standing up for principles she feels are worth defending and standing beside people she feels are worth protecting. Jubie Watts is such a person and a heroine that any reader—young or old—can learn a thing or two from.

Rating: 4/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

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The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

Heidi W. Durrow (Adult Fiction)

Rachel Morse is eleven years old and living with her paternal grandmother in Portland, Oregon. Born to a Danish mother and an African-American GI father, she finds herself caught between two very different worlds and struggles to find a place somewhere in the middle. However, it is the early 1980s and Rachel is often forced to choose between black and white: “I see people two different ways now: people who look like me and people who don’t look like me.” She builds her world around “last-time things” (like speaking Danish or saying Mor, which means mother) and “first-time things” (like feeling shame or excluded) and lives each day storing her anger and hurt inside an imaginary bottle. Fighting against a tragic past and facing an uncertain future, will Rachel have to give up one part of herself in order to embrace the other?

Durrow gives us a haunting and heartbreaking coming-of-age story about a biracial girl desperately trying to find her place in the world. Like Rachel, Durrow’s mother was Danish, her father was a black serviceman, and she possesses a set of piercing-blue eyes. We can see what Durrow must have dealt with as we see Rachel longing to fit in and be accepted. Rachel’s backstory is tragic and unimaginable and one can only imagine the inner strength our young heroine possesses in order to avoid a fate like her mother’s. The beginning of the book is a little confusing as Durrow floods the reader with several characters in various situations across different points in time. The storyline eventually smooths out, but then you begin to understand the meaning behind the title. This launches the story in an unpredictable direction and the pace never slows from there.

Perhaps the most distressing storyline belongs to Nella, Rachel’s mother. A Danish immigrant, she is unused to the treatment her biracial children face in America (her marriage was generally accepted in Europe). As a mother, she loves her children unconditionally and vows to protect them at all costs. She is broken by the injustices thrown at her children and wonders why people are unable to see her children as she does: “My children are one half of black. They are also one half of me. I want them to be anything. They are not just a color that people see.”

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky is haunting and harrowing. It is not one of those feel-good books that is wrapped up in a pretty bow. Instead, we are given a story that is raw and poignant and uncomfortably ugly but honest. Under anyone else’s pen, the reader might be left with a sense of hopelessness, but Durrow is, in a sense, telling us her own story which, at its very core, is a story of survival. A story where a girl refuses to be boiled down to simply this or that. She is more than just the sum of her parts and her acceptance of this is enough to give us a relatively satisfying ending. As Rachel says, “I’m not the new girl. I’m not the color of my skin. I’m a story. One with a past and a future unwritten.” And with that, the girl who fell from the sky realized that she had wings and could fly.

Rating: 4/5

*Book cover image attributed to www.amazon.com

The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman

The Inn at Lake Devine

The Inn at Lake Devine

Elinor Lipman (Adult Fiction)

“It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel; they didn’t want Jews; we were Jews.”

In the summer of 1962, Natalie Marx’s mother mailed about a dozen inquiries to various cottages and inns along Vermont’s Lake Devine. All came back with the standard rate card and cordial note. All, that is, but one. “Our guests who feel most comfortable here, and return year after year, are Gentiles” was neatly written on textured white stationery. This act of blatant and brutal honesty ignites young Natalie’s quest to seek justice and acquire vindication and understanding.

This book was an engaging read, but seems to fall victim to its own misleading marketing. On the cover, it’s touted as a “witty romantic comedy”. While there are spots of flirtatious frolicking, describing it as a Romcom might be a bit of a stretch. Also, in the synopsis, we’re led to believe that Natalie encounters “a small bastion of genteel anti-Semitism” at this particular lakeside inn. In reality, it is only one individual who openly exhibits this prejudice. Ironically, we find out that Natalie’s own family is not immune to their fair share of prejudice, which proves to be far more damaging to Natalie than what she experienced at Lake Devine.

Lipman gives us a charming book with enough plot twists and interesting characters to keep the reader’s interest. However, don’t expect “a tale of delicious revenge” as one reviewer stated on the back cover. Rather, The Inn at Lake Devine is a light read, which can be made even more enjoyable if sitting in an Adirondack chair overlooking a lake.

Rating: 3/5

* Book cover image attributed to http://www.goodreads.com

Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall (Adult Fiction)

“Whistling past the graveyard. That’s what Daddy called it when you did something to keep your mind off your most worstest fear…”

Starla Claudelle is nine and growing up in 1963 Mississippi. At the age of three, she is abandoned by her mother, who is busy chasing dreams of country music stardom in Nashville. Her father works months on end on an oil rig in the Gulf, which leaves the responsibility of her care and upbringing to her strict and overbearing paternal grandmother, Mamie. On the fourth of July, Starla decides to run away from home—convinced that if she locates her mother, she will have a real family once again. Along the way, she gets a ride from Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white infant. Together, they embark on an extraordinary road trip that will change both of their lives forever.

Not since Francie Nolan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith) have I delighted in a literary heroine so thoroughly. Starla is sassy, plucky, loyal, reckless, and fearless. Because of her youth and naiveté, she often makes decisions based on her heart rather than her head, ultimately leading her into some precarious situations. However, Starla’s spunk and spirit are endearing and allow the reader to readily forgive her of these seemingly foolish transgressions. The story has a nice and steady pace, the main characters have heart, and Starla’s narration is full of honesty, humor, and charm. A truly enjoyable read that will undoubtedly find a spot on our Best Of list at the end of the year.

Rating: 5/5