The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison

read by Angela Dawe

Earth Abides meets Children of Men with a little Parable of the Sower thrown in for good measure in this post-apocalyptic tale about a midwife wandering a world in which almost everybody has died of a plague, very few of the survivors are women, and childbirth has become universally deadly.

The conceit here is that a professional midwife from San Francisco falls sick with an illness that has been killing a lot of her patients and wakes up in the hospital an indeterminate number of days later to find that everybody is dead. (Walking Dead, anyone?) But not quite everyone, it turns out; there are a few survivors roaming around. The vast majority of this handful of survivors are men, and this is not good news for the small number of women and even tinier number of children who are left.

Our midwife, who never gives out her real name, keeps a journal of her travels. The beauty of this book is the way the journal is written. Not that it’s beautifully written; on the contrary, it’s full of irrelevant asides and repetitive typographical quirks. It’s also very convincing—you feel, as you read, that someone you know might have written it. The world she comes from is ours, and the world she lives in is recognizably what our world would probably become in the wake of that particular disaster.

As the story progresses, this sense that the protagonist is a very real person just gets stronger. She’s strong, but not superheroically strong. She’s tough in some ways but fragile in others, like we all are. She’s smart enough to avoid making stupid horror-trope mistakes, but not so smart that we can’t identify with her perfection. We believe in her, which makes the trauma she goes through every single day matter. And what she does about it matters, too.

The most moving post-apocalyptic story I’ve read in a long time. Highly recommend.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, Book 2) by Seanan McGuire

Note: though this book *could* stand alone, it’s not really meant to; it’s a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, which is fantastic and should be read first. It’s the story of a very special school: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children. It’s for children who, like Alice Liddell and Coraline Jones and the Pevensies kids and so on, went through some kind of magical doorway to an improbable realm whose rules (of manners, logic, and even physics) were not our own—and then returned to the real world.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is the backstory of two of those students, Jack and Jill (or as their extremely rigid parents insist that they be called at all times, Jacqueline and Jillian) Wolcott. They’re twins, born to an emotionally-stunted couple with extremely firm and inflexible views about how children in general and each of their daughters specifically should behave.

Roles are assigned—Jacqueline is the “girly” one, always dressed in frilly dresses and terrorized into keeping them perfectly clean (and into a shyness and timidity that isn’t really natural to her). Jillian, who seems the more physically active of the two, is designated the "tomboy," encouraged to go outside and get muddy and given appropriate clothes for that, whether she likes it or not. Each resents her own role and her twin’s occupation of the role she thinks she’d prefer, and over the years they grow to dislike one another.

They do have a loving grandmother who cares for them and encourages them to love each other and to be exactly who they are, rather than who their parents want them to be. But she’s banished from their lives on their 5th birthday, never to be seen again. The girls are encouraged to think their beloved grandmother didn't love them enough to stay, and they grow up living with that terrible "knowledge."

Once the story gets properly going, the girls find a magic staircase in what should have been an old trunk full of dress-up clothes. Of course they go down it—hundreds, or maybe thousands, of steps down into the earth. At the bottom they find a door labeled “Be sure.” One twin is definitely more sure than the other—but nevertheless they open it and step through, and find themselves on a dark, rolling moor. They pick a direction and start walking--and anything more than that would be a spoiler.

Let’s just say the world they find themselves in is deeply creepy.

I loved lots of things about this book. The world building is definitely its strength, the language is drily quirky, and you can’t help but empathize with these poor kids. However, it’s too slender a book. And it gets that way by skimping on what would, to me, have been the most interesting part: the process by which each girl learns and grows into her new role in their new reality.

If it had been up to me, the book would have been twice as long and included a chapter apiece, for each twin, on each of the five years spent in The Moors that are covered in this book. The twins are such interesting characters, and the Moors are such a fascinating place, that it’s a real disappointment not being able to spend sufficient time with either.

Lacking that, though, it’s still a beautifully-written little story, with numerous archly humorous lines that had me laughing out loud. If you’re a fan of Every Heart a Doorway, you’ll definitely want to read this.

A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle

read by Jennifer Ehle

Here’s another book review that has to start with a confession: I was never especially fond of A Wrinkle In Time. It was a good book, in my opinion, just scary enough and with some interesting science-fictiony concepts and scenes in it. I get why people love it so much. But it never really did it for me. I only ever read it once, until I had a kid of my own and read it to them. And I only read it even that one time, as a kid, because it was by the same author as A Wind in the Door.

I *loved* A Wind in the Door. I lived it, over and over and over again. I absorbed it. It became part of me in a way that books just don’t do anymore once you’re past your formative years. Reading it again, now, for the first time in decades, I was struck by how certain scenes and even certain phrases, though I didn’t consciously remember them, struck such a chord of familiarity and happiness that it was almost like reuniting with a long-lost and much beloved grandparent. The characters felt like long-lost family. Rereading this book was an intensely emotional experience—surprisingly so.

Meg Murry is our protagonist; she’s a bright, argumentative, and complaint-prone high-schooler who lacks confidence in her looks and is intensely loyal to friends and family (though she constantly questions everything they say). She’s the oldest Murry child; the middle kids are a pair of socially well-adapted twins, Sandy and Dennys, who play fairly minor roles in this book, and her baby brother, Charles Wallace, around whom the plot revolves.

Charles Wallace is a genius, the brightest of a very bright family. At age 6, he has a better vocabulary than most adults. He gets beaten up regularly at school because he’s so different—and it turns out he’s also seriously ill, with a disease that, coincidentally, his microbiologist mother happens to be studying.

Proginoskes is a singular cherubim, a creature not of this plane who materializes, when he does, as a great ball of hundreds of wings with winking eyes set amongst them, emitting the occasional spurt of flame or puff of smoke. He's haughty and pedantic—but so would you be, probably, if it were  your job to know the name of every star in the universe. His unbelievable appearance on the Murry property (they seem to live on a tremendous plot of rural land, though in other parts of the country their acreage is probably pretty standard) is what sets events in motion.

Meg, Charles Wallace, Proginoskes, and Meg’s personable and protective friend, Calvin O’Keefe, are soon united as students of a Teacher, an enormous and all-knowing humanoid being named Blajeny. For me, the biggest surprise of this reading was that I’d completely forgotten about Blajeny, as he directs the kids and sets them their tests and basically moves them all like somewhat-willful chess pieces. He’s hugely important to the plot—and yet he’d gone completely out of my mind.

My theory is that this is because he isn’t really a character—he’s more of a god-like force. He doesn’t seem to have much personality, other than an idealized-but-dim fatherliness. He matters tremendously, but he doesn't really feel real.

In any case, our intrepid protagonists discover the nature of Charles Wallace’s illness, and that it threatens not only him but, somehow, the entire universe. So of course they set out to save the world. Hijinks ensue.

I’ll stop here so as not to spoil the plot for you. I will say that this is metaphysical fiction on par, for its intended audience of tweens, with the Narnia books and with Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The nature of free will, the meaning and importance of love, the unimportance of time and distance—all that is discussed, at length, in terms any 5th-grader could understand. There’s a lot more religious content here than I realized when I was the target audience, but it’s thoughtful and life-affirming.

If you’ve never read this book, you should. Either to your kids, if you have them, or to yourself. It’s definitely aimed at a young audience, but it’s magical and scientific and universe-spanning enough to enchant almost anyone. 

Circe by Madeline Miller

Narrated by Perdita Weeks

When I was about 14 years old, I read Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis and it changed my life. It was the story of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s older sister. I’d always loved Greek mythology, but under Lewis’ skillful hand, this story and the world it’s set in came vividly to life. Suddenly these were real people with real flaws dealing with, yes, problems on a more-than-human scale, but in a very human way. It was like that moment in The Giver when Jonas begins to learn to see in color. If the people in this story were really human, maybe the people in other myths were, too—maybe they were all human stories, about people not so different from me. All a question of perspective, and mine had shifted, permanently.

Then I reread it as an adult with adult critical faculties—and was deeply disappointed by it. The misogyny that runs through it is so deeply ingrained in the plot and the characters that there was no ignoring it, no compartmentalizing it or separating it from an otherwise beautifully-written book. The whole premise of the thing was that Psyche’s older sister was ugly, and the fact that her younger sister was beautiful and got all sorts of goodies for it—adventure, romance, the attention of the gods—twisted her insides up so badly that she became as ugly on the inside as on the outside. And this was just natural: of course any ugly woman would be so twisted with envy and hatred for any attractive woman that her life would be one big bitter pill. Even if it was her baby sister.

I may go back to it a third time. Maybe I’ve mellowed enough with age to appreciate its virtues as well as its faults. Maybe.

But I don’t have to. Madeline Miller has written Circe, and I so, so wish I could go back in time and hand it to 14-year-old me. It would have blown her mind in exactly the same way as Till We Have Faces, but without the nasty misogynistic-garbage aftertaste.

There’s not much to say about the plot of this book if you’re at all familiar with Greek mythology. Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ crew into swine (and well they deserved it); she’s the one who turned the nymph Scylla into the hideous sea-monster to whom we unwittingly refer when we say “between a rock and a hard place” (the original rock being the one Scylla lived in, and Charybdis, another sea monster or maybe a whirlpool nearby, being the hard place—it was apparently not an easy thing to navigate safely between the two); she’s the goddess of magic, or maybe her daughter; she’s a nymph; she’s a misfit; she’s a mother of heroes; she’s the daughter of the mighty titan, Helios.

What’s wonderful about this book is the way it takes all of these disparate identities and scraps of legend and weaves them into one complex but utterly believable being. I mean, aren’t we all a little complicated, and, once we’ve lived enough of life, wouldn’t the people who knew us best at one point in our lives hardly recognize us based on descriptions of us from people we knew in other eras?

Circe is no angel, and this novel isn’t an attempt to reform her. Thank the gods. Nor, however, does it romanticize her dark deeds, and neither does it wallow in them. What it does is create a portrait of an immortal life drawn from many, many strands, setting that life in an ancient Greece where magic is very real and the gods are all too manifest, and this portrait is clear and believable enough to seem like a window we could almost walk right through.

We see the court of Helios with its bickering nymphs, pitch-black and frozen by day while its lord is away and brilliant but brittle when he is in residence, through the eyes of his most neglected daughter. We see her exile to Aeaea, beset by wild beasts and worse sailors, as something she loves and hates in turn, and which in the end facilitates her coming into her own power and protecting her son. We see a person and a life in all of their facets. And maybe, if we’re women of a certain age, we see a little of ourselves.

But you don’t have to be any particular age or gender to be thoroughly ravished by this book. Five out of five stars.

Protector of the Small: First Test by Tamora Pierce: #tbt review

This is another book that my kid fell in love with when I would have thought they were too young for it, because I was listening to it in the car. With hindsight, I can see that they loved the heroine's strong sense of justice and her refusal to fit into prescribed gender roles.

Plus Tamora Pierce has done a great job of world-building here. If you're a fan of fantasy but you haven't read any of her books yet, you should—and this one would be a great place to start. It comes after the Song of the Lioness series and makes numerous references to storylines and characters from it, but someone who hasn't read that first (as I hadn't!) won't be at all lost.

As this novel begins, because of the pioneering work of the great Lady Knight, Alanna the Lioness, girls have won the right to go into service as pages and become knights. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Keladry of Mindelan is the first one to attempt it, and she learns very quickly just how stacked against her the deck is.

Not only is the system itself unfair, but on top of that, she immediately ends up on probation because of the actions of a bully. She has to work so much harder and overcome so many more obstacles than any boy… it would be so easy to give up. 

But she’s always wanted this, and it seems at least one person in the world believes she can really do it: a mysterious benefactor keeps sending her expensive gifts that are exactly what a page needs. Plus, Kel has never been able to abide a bully. Something has to be done about this one, or he’ll be able to get away with hurting her friends, too.

This is basically the story of the first girl going to a West Point-type military academy, only in a fantasy setting. Keladry lives out the maxim that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be considered half as good. It’s a good introduction for middle-grade kids and younger teens to this sort of story, and Kel is a compelling character—she makes mistakes and has bad days but her determination and her unwavering protectiveness of those who are taken advantage of by others who are stronger keep her going.

The author, Tamora Pierce, originally studied psychology with an eye toward doing social work with teenagers. But she became a full-time writer instead in 1992, and I'm glad—I'm sure she has reached a lot more teens with her writing than she could have as a social worker.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman: #tbt review

Full disclosure: I love this series so much that I'm planning to get an alethiometer tattoo when I'm feeling a little more flush. (After the scarlet A and the Deathly Hallows symbol, that is.) My second time through the series (I've read it three times now) was on audio CDs in my car when my kid was 5 years old, and even though it was far too advanced for them at the time, they fell in love with it too. I wrote this review after my second reading but before the third, and long before the prequel was published.

So:

In this alternate universe where people’s souls have a physical reality and manifest themselves outside people’s bodies as animal-shaped “daemons,” and the Magisterium (think of the Catholic Church during the days of the Inquisition) rules politics, morality, and, as far as possible, people's minds, Lyra is an orphan who lives at Jordan College, Oxford. She is being raised haphazardly amid the benign neglect of the professors there and has a good, if chaotic, life.

Then a mysterious relative appears and Lyra saves his life; she ends up with a unique artifact called an alethiometer (the eponymous Golden Compass), in her possession; her friend Roger is disappeared by the much-feared Gobblers; and she is taken to live with the beautiful, self-willed Mrs. Coulter, whom the Jordan scholars obviously fear. Now Lyra needs to learn the nature of the relationship between all of these events, and what they have to do with Dust, a substance whose very existence is inimical to the Magisterium, and which nobody is supposed to know about--least of all a half-wild young girl.

This is an incredibly beautiful metaphysical work (I can't just call it a work of fantasy, though it is that) about the nature of truth and the soul, along the lines of the best C. S. Lewis books--but written by someone with a deep distrust of organized religion and of anybody who withholds important truths in order to control people.

The protagonist, Lyra, is a liar, a teller of tales, and the product of a society based on lies, brought up not knowing the most basic facts of her existence. But she is also intelligent, resourceful, intensely curious, and deeply loyal to her friends. This gets her into trouble, of course, but it may also be, along with her boundless ability to love and her fierce determination to find her disappeared friend, what ultimately saves her and her world.

Five out of five stars. At least.