Archive for the Category »Review «

May

The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rob Inglis

I have been listening to Rob Inglis’s audio recording of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring while making soap. He’s a fantastic reader, and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to him read Tolkien. In particular, Inglis does a fabulous job with all the songs in Tolkien. Case in point, I have never much cared for the Tom Bombadil section of The Fellowship of the Ring, though I did enjoy the part where he rescued the hobbits from the barrow wights; however, this time, I quite enjoyed the magical old fellow. Same with Galadriel’s songs. His voice characterizations are quite good. I think Aragorn comes off as sounding a bit too old, but I have no other complaints. Inglis’s characterization of the hobbits is particularly good.

I decided to re-read these stories some time ago, but I find I often become bogged down in the middle of The Two Towers somewhere. I decided perhaps listening to the books might work better for me, but the books have only recently become available on Audible. If you haven’t heard them before, give Rob Inglis’s reading a chance. He’s one of the best readers I have heard, and I can’t imagine that Tolkien himself wouldn’t approve heartily of Inglis’s rendition of his work.

Rating:

Category: Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Review Tags: 2013, 5-stars, book reviews, j.r.r. tolkien, rob inglis, the fellowship of the ring, tolkien Leave a Comment

May

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

Dana

I bet you thought I had given up reading for good! I admit I have been going through a real dry spell the last year or two, and it’s frustrating because the couple of years right before, I read excellent book after excellent book. I don’t see how I’ll meet my goal of reading 50 books at the pace I’ve moved this year, and much as I would like to give myself a break given that I moved last summer, I feel that at this point, I should have settled into a good reading routine. Bah.

At any rate, Arundhati Roy’s only novel, The God of Small Things, was the final novel I taught for this school year, and I finished it just a hair before the students. That is Very Bad and I Do Not Recommend It. However, sometimes, it’s all you can do to stay afloat. So of course, I knew how things would shake out, and I didn’t get to see the story unfold naturally, as I would have if I had read it for pleasure. The fact is, I am not sure I would have picked up this book to read for pleasure, and how sad that would have been. It’s a beautiful book.

One of the things folks probably say too much about this novel is that its style is reminiscent of William Faulkner’s, and it truly is. He is a favorite of mine. When I taught the novel, I urged my students to be patient. This novel is like a puzzle. You know how you put it together, and you don’t have the whole picture until you get to the end? But there is a point when you can see how it is going to come out, and you realize what it is you are putting together? That is what this book is: It begins in the middle, and the beginning is somewhere in the middle. The end is in the middle, and the middle is at the end. The nonlinear narrative may pose a challenge for some readers, but it is a worthy one.

To start with, the description of Ayemenem in Kerala, India, is absolutely gorgeous. The green trees drip with fruit and the buzzing and whirring of birds and insects fills the air. The river, the deceptively quiet river Kuttappen describes as looking like “a little old churchgoing ammooma, quiet and clean,” but is “[r]eally a wild thing” (201), as the children learn from personal experience. It seems you can always tell when an author has truly inhabited a place she writes about because the description is so vivid that you inhabit it, too, for the time while you read the book.

I admit the narrative made it difficult to follow and put events in their proper place. A timeline, added to as the reader fills in details, would not go amiss. It will take some time to fall into the flow of the nonlinear narrative. Give this one a little longer than you ordinarily might give a book before giving up on it.

In terms of characters, I found myself fascinated by Ammu, the mother of twins Rahel (from whose point of view most of the novel is told) and Estha. Her choices fascinated me. One minute I found myself empathizing with her, and the next, I hated her. Her aunt, Baby Kochamma, was also a fascinating character. She is a master manipulator the likes of which you rarely see, but she, too, has a kind of tragedy at her core, even if it is of her own device, that provokes pity.

I have to recommend this book highly, most highly to those who enjoy Faulkner and who like to read about exotic locales. If you are not either of those, give it a chance anyway. It’s quite well written—gorgeous, lush prose in the English that for some reason, only Indians can write (I have no idea why that is). Aside from that, it tells the moving story of the destruction and decay of a family because things can change in day.

Rating:

Category: Review Tags: 2013, 5-stars, arundhati roy, book review, fiction, india, the god of small things Leave a Comment

Mar

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

Dana

My students and I are reading Chinua Achebe’s classic novel Things Fall Apart over our Spring Break, and just today, I heard the news of Achebe’s death at the age of 82. He has contributed something remarkable to the world with his work. We frequently say that history is written by the victors, and so it is that the bulk of colonial literature we have has been written by white men. A recurring theme of the latter part of Things Fall Apart, after the missionaries arrive, is that white men do not understand the ways of the Igbo people they seek to evangelize, and further, they do not see them as worthy in and of themselves, which is shown perhaps no more clearly than in the book’s final paragraph.

My students are studying the book through a chosen anthropological lens: gender, religion, family, community, coping which change/tradition, and justice. I think this book has really interesting insights into the Igbo culture in each of these areas. On the surface, it’s easy to make snap judgments about the way that the people of Umuofia do certain things, and Okonkwo in particular can be infuriating because he seems, on the surface, so cruel to his family. Given the values of his clan, however, I can understand why he did some of the things he did. His fear of turning out like his father, or that his children would turn out like his father, drove many of his decisions, and above all, he seemed concerned about presenting himself as masculine.

I hope my students will find the journey interesting. I know I learned a lot through my own reading of the book. In the obituary I linked above:

“It would be impossible to say how Things Fall Apart influenced African writing,” the African scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah once observed. “It would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians. Achebe didn’t only play the game, he invented it.”

The obituary calls Things Fall Apart “the opening of a long argument on his country’s behalf.” Achebe said, “Literature is always badly served when an author’s artistic insight yields to stereotype and malice… And it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as your story.”

Things Fall Apart is an important book, an “education,” as Toni Morrison described it. I highly recommend it.

Rating:

Category: 2013 Reading Challenges, Historical Fiction, Review Tags: 2013, 5-stars, book review, chinua achebe, historical fiction challenge, things fall apart 2 Comments

Jan

The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, Rob Inglis

Dana

The Hobbit has long been one of my favorite books, but it only recently became available for digital download. I decided to listen to it before going to see the movie, which I still haven’t seen and suppose I will probably not get to see in the theater, despite my plans to do so.

Because I’ve read (and taught) the book several times now, it seems silly to write a synopsis and review; however, the new variable is the audio book, so this review will focus on the audio book read by Rob Inglis.

Of course, you are probably familiar with the story: Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who is rather hoodwinked into participating in an adventure with Gandalf and some dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield himself in which Thorin hopes to defeat the dragon living on top of Thorin’s rightful treasure in the Lonely Mountain. Along the way, Bilbo and the dwarves tangle with some goblins (aka orcs), and Bilbo manages to find the One Ring, lost by Gollum in a riddle game, an event which precipitates the later War of the Ring that is the focus of The Lord of the Rings.

I can highly recommend listening to the audio book version of this particular novel. The avuncular storytelling style that Tolkien himself later had to stop himself from revising is a perfect match for an audio book. Tolkien’s source material, the Icelandic and Germanic sagas and myths, would probably have been told orally, possibly near a fire in a large mead hall. As such, it seems somehow fitting that this book works so well when told aloud. Rob Inglis is a masterful reader, too. He manages to capture each character’s voice, and I enjoyed hearing his musical interpretations of the many songs in the book. His rendition of Gollum is particularly good. Most importantly, Inglis’s interpretation manages to capture Bilbo’s voice as storyteller so well that it seems perhaps the book was intended to be listened to, as read by Rob Inglis, instead of read. I know. You think I’m crazy. I’ve lost it. But you wouldn’t think that if you had listened to Rob Inglis read this book.

And….

It’s unabridged.

That’s right. No cheap, distorted chopped up abridged version. Up until very recently, you could only listen to an unabridged version of The Hobbit if you purchased a digital audio version of the novel. You had to fork over for the CDs if you wanted an unabridged version. Now you can download the unabridged book via Audible (or iTunes if you prefer) for the first time. If you are thinking of rereading it this year, why not give the audio book a go?

Here is an interview with Rob Inglis about the recording of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Rating:

Category: Review Tags: 2013, 5-stars, audio books, book review, j.r.r. tolkien, review, the hobbit, tolkien 2 Comments

Jan

Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

Dana

My book club students chose to read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, and we were supposed to be about 50 pages in by our meeting on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to devote to reading the book last week, and beyond checking the book out of my library via Overdrive, I had made no progress. I finished the book in a whirlwind over this long weekend.

Never Let Me Go is the story of three students, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, who attend a mysterious boarding school in East Sussex called Hailsham. In this institution, students are taught to create art, and an enigmatic woman the children know only as Madame comes to collect choice objects for her gallery, a great honor all the students strive to achieve. Tommy, upset he is unable to create quality art and will likely never have anything chosen for the gallery, is prone to angry rages and becomes the target of bullies. Kathy reaches out to him, and they become friends. Over time, Ruth and Tommy enter into a relationship, and the students finally come to accept a horrible truth about their existence—a truth that they have been “told and not told,” and that none of them “really understand,” according to one of their guardians, Miss Lucy. For the rest of the novel, Kathy reflects on this awful truth, never quite allowing herself to dream of a different life, until she eventually prepares to serve the purpose for which she and all her friends were created.

One of the reasons I like dystopian novels is that I think they show us as we might become if we entertain some of our darker impulses. This novel certainly reminded me of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but in many ways, I found it more poignant because it gave voice to a minority that Huxley’s novel lacked.

Spoiler follows, so skip if you do not wish to have the novel’s premise ruined before you read it. Highlight the text to see it.

Begin spoiler ->How would it feel to know you had been raised only as an organ farm, to have your organs harvested to cure others? To be completely stripped of your humanity because you were a clone, but to know that you were human in spite of it all? You were curious about your “possible,” the person from whom you’d been cloned. You could feel love, anger, happiness. You had a life of memories. But “normals” recoiled from you and pretended you didn’t exist because, as the children’s former headmistress says, “How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?”

One of the questions I had as I read was why Kathy did not try to run away from her fate. Perhaps there was no point, but I wanted her to try. However, all of the clones seem to accept that there is no way out of becoming an organ donor and eventually “completing.” I wondered if this was a result of nature or nurture, but all the clones we meet in the novel seemed to feel it was an inevitable fate. Why, though? Clones clearly passed for “normals.” The fact that Ishiguro leaves this avenue unexplored makes this novel even sadder—the quiet acceptance, or “going gentle into that good night,” the lack of fight, all of this resignation adds this sort of layer of martyrdom for the characters. In a way, it is a more interesting choice than the typical one—most writers of dystopian fiction choose to have their characters fight the machine. <- End spoiler

I was engrossed in the novel; once I started it, I could barely put it down, which was something one of the girls in Book Club told me she felt as well. This novel goes beyond the ethical issues it raises to ask us to consider the humanity of every person we may previously have dismissed, as the characters in the novel say, as “trash.”

Rating:

Full disclosure: I checked this book out from my library system and read it via Overdrive.

Category: Review Tags: 2013, 5-stars, book review, kazuo ishiguro, never let me go, review 2 Comments

Jan

The Last Runaway, Tracy Chevalier

Dana

Tracy Chevalier’s latest book, The Last Runaway, is a bit of a departure from her other work. I have read several of Chevalier’s books, and I can’t think of one that isn’t set in Europe. The Last Runaway is the story of Honor Bright, a young Quaker woman who decides to accompany her sister Grace across the Atlantic to America. Grace plans to marry a man who emigrated to Ohio and used to be a member of the Bridport Friends’ Meeting where the Brights worship. Honor has been jilted by her fiancé, Samuel, who throws her over and leaves the Society of Friends in order to marry outside the religious order. The voyage is terrible for Honor, who suffers from the worst bout of seasickness you’ve ever seen this side of Outlander‘s Jamie Fraser. Honor realizes that she is stuck in America because she can’t imagine being able to endure a crossing back to England. After disembarking, Honor and Grace travel to Ohio by stagecoach, but Grace contracts yellow fever and dies on the voyage. Now all alone in America, Honor must find her own way. Her sister’s fiancé, Adam Cox, takes her in for a time, but his brother has recently died, and he is living with his brother’s widow, Abigail. Before long, the Quakers frown at their unorthodox living arrangement. Adam marries Abigail, and Honor rushes into a marriage with Jack Haymaker, whose stern mother Judith is a Quaker elder who does not approve of Honor.

One of the most interesting threads in the book dealt with quilting. Honor is a quilter. Her adjustment to America is hard, and she especially does not like Americans’ ways of quilting. Her skill with a needle earns her the friendship and hospitality of Belle Mills, a milliner in Wellington. However, it also draws the unwelcome attention of Donovan, Belle’s brother and the local slave catcher. Honor quickly finds herself caught up in the American debate over slavery. Just as the Fugitive Slave Act is passed, Honor finds herself helping slaves cross to Canada as a part of the Underground Railroad. While her in-laws disapprove of slavery, they are also unwilling to allow lawbreaking in their family, and Honor has some difficult decisions to make.

I am a fan of Tracy Chevalier’s books. I especially liked Remarkable Creatures and The Virgin Blue, which was one of the first books I reviewed for this blog. I was interested in reading this book because some of my own immigrant ancestors were Quakers. I imagine they came to America to worship more freely, but they were quite different from the Quakers of Ohio. Within several generations, at least in my own line of the family, they had abandoned their faith for various other Protestant denominations, but my 7th great-grandmother Elizabeth Clark Anthony was the mother of fifteen children and after her husband’s death, she became a Quaker missionary who made four trips between Virginia and Georgia on horseback and lived to be 103 years old.

Perhaps because I was hoping to see a glimpse of what my own ancestors’ lives were like, I really wanted to like this book. I was underwhelmed, however. I found Honor hard to like. She seemed to feel quite sorry for herself a lot of the time, and while it’s true that she was living in difficult circumstances, she created a lot of them. Her attraction to Donovan was inexplicable. I thought Chevalier did everything she could to make him odious, and it was impossible for this reader to understand Honor’s feelings for him. Honor’s disdain for the American way of doing just about everything was trying as well. I understand she was a fish out of water, but for a Quaker, she was terribly judgmental. Almost every chapter closed with a letter from Honor to her family or friends. I found the transition from third person to first jarring in some cases, though I wished more of the story had been told in first person. Though I didn’t like Honor much, I found her voice in the letters to ring true.

Rating:

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Category: 2013 Reading Challenges, Historical Fiction, Review Tags: 2013, 3-stars, book review, historical fiction challenge, netgalley, the last runaway, tracy chevalier Leave a Comment

Jan

The Woman Who Died A Lot, Jasper Fforde

Dana

Jasper Fforde’s latest and seventh book in the Thursday Next series, The Woman Who Died A Lot, picks up Thursday’s story in the year 2004. Thursday is recuperating from an assassination attempt, and she is looking to run SpecOps 27, the Literary Detectives division, the agency responsible for dealing with forged or stolen manuscripts and works of literature. Meanwhile, she has other problems. Her son Friday has received a letter detailing his new future, now that the ChronoGuard has been disbanded and he will no longer be saving the world from destruction by asteroid HR-6984. Instead, he will murder Gavin Watkins the very week during which the book is set and spend the rest of his life in prison. Meanwhile, her daughter Tuesday is feverishly working on an Anti-Smite Defense Shield to protect Swindon from the wrath of the Global Standard Deity (GSD), who has enacted “a series of cleansings” all over the world “mostly as a warning to His creations that messing with the Big Guy’s Ultimate and Very Important and Unknowable Plan was not going to be tolerated.” Thursday’s brother, Joffy, supreme head of the Church of the Global Standard Deity, is taking a stand against the GSD and means to be in his cathedral when the smiting occurs, but Goliath, the large, evil corporation bent on running the world, has plans to lure the GSD’s smiting away from the city center by gathering together a large collection of unrepentant evildoers with the idea that the GSD will smite them instead. Goliath is up to new tricks, replacing Thursday with synthetic “day player” versions of herself. Aornis Hades is on the loose again, and the mindworm about having a daughter named Jenny that she implanted in Thursday continues to wreak its sad destruction. Thursday, older and and not up to her previous physical abilities, must contend with a rival who manages to push her out of her desired position in SpecOps, relegating her to the deceptively tame-sounding job of Chief Librarian of the Wessex Library Service. But this is Jasper Fforde’s world, where “many frustrated citizens who weren’t selected … to train as librarians … will have to console themselves with mundane careers as doctors, lawyers, and lion tamers.”

If it sounds like there was a lot going on, believe me, I have barely scratched the surface. Fforde’s plot had so much going on that it seemed even he was having trouble containing it, and I admit I gave up trying to follow it and just went along for the ride. I think Fforde is at his best when he lures his readers into the BookWorld, the fictional realm of literature in this series. I haven’t enjoyed the last few books in the series as much as I had enjoyed the first few. The story in this particular book doesn’t really ever come together until close to the end, and at that point, I was already so confused, I had forgotten some of the important details from earlier in the book. However, it’s Jasper Fforde, which means fun and hilarity will ensue. While I didn’t laugh out loud as often as I have while reading his earlier books in this series, I did enjoy the whimsy of Jasper Fforde’s alternative world, just as I always do when I visit it. And I will probably read the promised eighth Thursday Next book, too.

Rating:

Category: Review Tags: 2013, 3-stars, book review, jasper fforde, review, the woman who died a lot, thursday next Leave a Comment

Dec

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

Dana

Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel Flight Behavior opens as Dellarobia Turnbow, unhappily married at the age of 17 after a pregnancy scare, is on her way to meet up with a telephone repairman with the express purpose of cheating on her husband. Before she reaches her destination, she is confronted with the arresting sight of trees aflame with monarch butterflies. Spooked by the vision, which she considers a sign, she returns to her mother-in-law’s house to pick up her children and go back home.

Others in her small town view the strange butterflies as a sign of God’s providence. The butterflies’ appearance sparks a national news story. Monarch butterflies are, of course, native to Mexico and unheard of in the small town of Feathertown, Tennessee. What could be driving them to Appalachia? Scientists visiting the town set up a lab in the Turnbows’ barn, pulling Dellarobia further into their work. The scientists discover that the monarchs’ appearance is the result of global warming, but the populace of Feathertown doesn’t believe it. Over the course of the novel, Dellarobia’s life in Feathertown is reflected in the butterflies’ existence. Dellarobia wonders, “Why did the one rare, spectacular thing in her life have to be a sickness of nature?”

Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors. She has a way with words that is frankly gorgeous. I marvel at her writing. However, I had trouble getting into this book. I didn’t find myself too interested in Dellarobia. I think Barbara Kingsolver has a gift for character development, and I could clearly see Dellarobia as a real person. I didn’t relate to her in the same way I have other characters she has created. The Poisonwood Bible is one of my favorite books, and The Bean Trees is another I enjoyed quite a lot. I also appreciate Kingsolver’s purposeful use of symbolism and metaphor to convey much larger ideas (brilliantly executed in The Poisonwood Bible). This book starts kind of slowly, but the beautiful writing and description should keep readers going in spite of the slow start.

Rating:

Learn more about Barbara Kingsolver at her website and connect with her on Facebook.

Barbara’s Tour Stops

Tuesday, November 6th: A Reader of Fictions

Wednesday, November 7th: Dolce Bellezza

Thursday, November 8th: The Blog of Lit Wits

Monday, November 12th: Caribousmom

Tuesday, November 13th: Bookish Habits

Wednesday, November 14th: 50 Books Project

Thursday, November 15th: Unabridged Chick

Monday, November 26th: Book Snob

Tuesday, November 27th: What She Read … – joint review

Wednesday, November 28th: Becca’s Byline

Thursday, November 29th: A Patchwork of Books

Wednesday, December 5th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Thursday, December 6th: The 3 R’s: Reading, ‘Riting, and Randomness

Tuesday, December 11th: Man of La Book

Wednesday, December 12th: Tina’s Books Reviews

Thursday, December 13th: Seaside Book Corner

Monday, December 17th: 50 Books Project

Friday, December 21st: Much Madness is Divinest Sense

Category: Literature, Review Tags: 2012, 4.5-stars, barbara kingsolver, book review, flight behavior, review, tlc book tour, tlc book tours 2 Comments

Nov

How the French Invented Love, Marilyn Yalom

Dana

Marilyn Yalom’s book How the French Invented Love is an interesting look at the French attitude toward love from the Middle Ages to today. Yalom’s source material is the body of French literature produced over time.

As a fan of medieval literature, I particularly enjoyed Yalom’s examination of the letters of Abelard and Héloïse, whose story should fascinate anyone interested in true love. I thoroughly enjoyed the long chapter on courtly love and wished I were teaching the concept in a course again, as I have done in the past, because I think Yalom’s ideas would help me break down the idea in a way that would be easier for my students to understand. It has traditionally been a difficult concept for me to teach. I loved seeing the references to Guinevere and Lancelot. I always found it interesting that the French invented perhaps the most famous Arthurian knight—Sir Lancelot (I have always been more partial to Sir Gawain).

Another section I enjoyed was the chapter on George Sand and Alfred de Musset. I encountered George Sand’s journals about her relationship with de Musset in college, and I developed an interest in Sand that endures to this day as a result. Like Yalom, I adore the English Romantics (one of my best ever dreams was about having tea with Byron, Shelley, and Keats), and Yalom begins that chapter with a comparison between English and French Romantics before focusing more narrowly on George Sand. As Yalom notes, Sand gave her entire “heart and soul” to whatever “enterprise” with which she was concerned, whether it was writing or an affair. Her journals about the end of her relationship with de Musset are so heart-wrenching, that I wondered how she ever recovered from the loss. Yet, she went on to have other affairs, notably with Frederic Chopin. That she could recover and love again speaks to resiliency of the human heart.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject, but particularly to literature scholars. I enjoyed the narrow focus of the history of love in French literature. One quibble I had with the writing style was Yalom’s propensity to insert herself in the thread of the book. It made the book feel more anecdotal and perhaps less formal, which may have been Yalom’s goal, but it’s not typical of other nonfiction of this type (or at least not that I’ve noticed), and I found it drew my focus away from what she was saying—each time I encountered it, I was rewriting the sentence in my head to remove the personal reference. I can’t explain why it bothered me, particularly, but it did.

At any rate, this was an interesting read, and anyone who enjoys literature, especially Francophiles, will enjoy it very much. I would definitely read more of her writing.

Rating:

About Marilyn Yalom

Marilyn Yalom is a former professor of French and presently a senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. She is the author of widely acclaimed books such as A History of the Breast, A History of the Wife, and Birth of the Chess Queen, as well as The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds, which includes a portfolio of photographs by her son Reid S. Yalom. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband, the psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom.

Website

Marilyn’s Tour Stops

Tuesday, October 23rd: The Year in Books

Thursday, October 25th: Unabridged Chick

Tuesday, October 30th: Doing Dewey

Wednesday, October 31st: Take Me Away

Monday, November 5th: Sophisticated Dorkiness

Tuesday, November 6th: Dreaming in Books

Wednesday, November 7th: Bibliophiliac

Thursday, November 8th: Book Hooked Blog

Friday, November 9th: BooksAreTheNewBlack

Monday, November 12th: missris

Wednesday, November 14th: Oh! Paper Pages

Wednesday, November 28th: Much Madness is Divinest Sense

TBD: The Written World

Category: Literature, Nonfiction, Review Tags: book review, how the french invented love, marilyn yalom, review 2 Comments

Oct

Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya

Dana

The tenth grade curriculum where I now teach includes Rudolfo Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima. I had never read the book before, and I managed to stay right with the students as we read. There is something to be said for reading alongside students instead of in advance. On this particular occasion, I did it out of necessity rather than design. I usually try to read in advance, but constraints on my time have made that hard. I enjoyed the novel very much, and it was a nice segue from The Catcher in the Rye, which we just studied, to Macbeth, which we will study next. For this particular novel, it was nice to experience the unfolding of the story right alongside the students.

Bless Me, Ultima is a semi-autobiographical novel (something Anaya admits), so my students and I used a biographical lens to study the novel. Like Anaya, Antonio was a young boy living in New Mexico. He feels a great deal of conflict over his path in life. Should he become a vaquero and wander the llano like his father’s family, the Márez? Or should he become a farmer, like his mother’s brothers, the Lunas? His mother wishes for him to become a priest of the Lunas. Or does his path lay on a completely different road? At his mother’s insistence, the family takes in the elderly curandera Ultima, who was present at the birth of Antonio and his siblings. She is a wise healer, and she shows Antonio her healing ways. The two grow close, and he helps her as she is persuaded to use her healing arts to cure victims of witchcraft. Antonio discovers much about the mysteries of life, God, and magic over the course of the two years Ultima lives with his family.

One of my favorite parts of much literature in this genre, and in particular, Chicano and other Latino literature, is the magical realism. I feel that the magical realism in Latino literature is almost always more seamlessly executed and accepted by the characters (and, as a result, the reader) than it is in other types of literature. As I read this novel, it wasn’t hard to accept the notion that of course witchcraft was real, and there were those who used their powers for good, and others who used their powers for evil. And of course, there was a magical Golden Carp who might be part of Antonio’s religious destiny. And of course, small children were religious philosophers who pushed Antonio’s thinking through their clear conclusions about God and the Golden Carp.

Anaya has no trouble bringing his New Mexican llano to life. I grew up in Colorado, and I have been to New Mexico many times. The flat llano was easy for me to picture even without Anaya’s help, but he brings the setting to life through his descriptions of the flat land, the scrubby cacti and yucca plants, the big sky, and the river. There are elements of a traditional shoot-em-up Western, too, as the Márez vaqueros ride in and the evil Tenorio chases people in his quest for vengeance. But what ties all of it together is Ultima and Antonio’s respect for the beauty and utility of the land.

This novel was chosen as a Big Read selection, and here is a video that might interest you. I love Anaya’s bolo tie and tennis shoes. Cute!