Tag Archives: Assimilation

April 15, 2013 · 9:33 am

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

Five Star Billionaire* STARRED REVIEW
Think of Tash Aw‘s third novel as an ingenious game called “How To Be a Billionaire.” A how-to guide is interspersed with 30 rules that also serve as chapters, e.g., “Move to Where the Money Is,” “Always Rebound After Each Failure,” “Strive To Understand the Big Picture.” The playing board is Shanghai, that 21st-century city of limitless possibility; the power broker is the eponymous Five Star Billionaire. A quartet of players – all Malaysian immigrants – are revealed one by one: country girl Phoebe, real estate heir Justin, pop superstar Gary, and businesswoman Yinghui, who is about to multiply her success. Aw moves fluidly between past and present, creating a multilayered narrative about chasing, catching, and sometimes losing elusive opportunities.

Verdict: London-based Aw, who spent a year in Shanghai on a writing fellowship, has honed his experiences into a literary victory. Admirers of Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory, which won a Whitbread Book Award (renamed the Costa Book Awards in 2006) and a Commonwealth Prize and was long-listed for the Man Booker, and Map of the Invisible World will clamor to read this, his best thus far. Fiction aficionados with international tastes will surely fall in line as well.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, April 15, 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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March 25, 2013 · 9:43 am

The Language Inside by Holly Thompson

Language InsideThis might be a spoiler of sorts: The advance galley is printed with a March 12, 2013 pub date, but when I went searching for an image of the book’s cover to load here, online bookstores list a May date. Hmmm … if the latter is correct, then let this post serve as urgent advice: pre-order this book now.

I don’t know what makes my usually poetry-resistant brain so appreciative of novels-in-verse, but they definitely provide moments of blissful delight. And I’m growing rather partial to Holly Thompson‘s ethnic-blending, boundary-crossing, expectation-defying titles for young adults (check out her Orchards here).

Meet Emma Karas: while her name and face might suggest otherwise, Emma is Japanese. Culturally, anyway: she’s lived most of her life there, speaks the language like a native, and has a preference for miso and ramen over hamburgers and pasta. When she’s unexpectedly uprooted to Lowell, Massachusetts, all she wants to do is go home – to Japan.

Emma’s mother has cancer. Her treatment means Emma, her brother, and their mother will live in Lowell with her father’s mother. Emma’s father visits as often as he can from his job in New York City. Emma is torn between being the supportive daughter to her suffering mother, and feeling disloyal to her Japanese friends and their families who remain in shock and mourning less than a year since the devastating 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake.

To fill some of her longing-to-be-home hours, Emma volunteers at the Newell Center for Long Term Care, where she’s assigned to work with Zena, a stroke victim who can only communicate through her eyes. Zena is a poet, and her silent words which Emma helps put to paper have a healing effect on them both. The Newell Center is also where Emma meets Samnang, a fellow high school student with a troubled past, who works with two elderly survivors of the Cambodian killing fields.

Emma and Samnang are both cultural anomalies as defined by others’ assumptions: ” … when the language outside / isn’t the language inside,” Emma writes in a poem. Emma can’t be Japanese and yet she’s not quite American. Samnang is American and yet his Cambodian features make him forever other. Could such teenagers be anything but destined for each other?

As lyrical and effecting as Language is, it’s not read without questions, specifically about narrative choices. Why did Emma’s mother need to have her treatment in the States? Surely a country as advanced as Japan would have equivalent treatment options; additionally, given how long the family has been based in Japan, close family friends seem to be abundant in Japan, and virtually nonexistent Stateside. Why would Emma’s mother choose to stay with her mother-in-law instead of her own parents in Vermont? Why would Emma’s father work in New York when his wife is so seriously ill? As kind and thoughtful as she is, why is YiaYia so resistant about the foods that might comfort her extended family most?

The questions go on, but eventually such logistical details pale as Emma and Zena’s tender relationship develops, and as Emma and Samnang tentatively fall in love. ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ actually comes to mind. Yes, questions linger, but ultimately, those moments of blissful delight extend … and win out.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2013

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Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Poetry, Cambodian American, Japanese, Nonethnic-specific

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February 20, 2013 · 9:20 am

Author interview: Pauline A. Chen

Red ChamberA couple of days after filing my feature on Pauline A. Chen, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn’t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing.

True confession moment: I admit I was a wee bit intimidated as the land lines connected us between DC and Cleveland – just what sort of person takes on the most canonical text in Chinese literary history (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and makes it her own (The Red Chamber)? I actually expected a Glenn Close/Cruella de Vil sort of megalomaniacal voice to pick up. Lucky for me, I could put that overactive imagination away, because really, as gutsy as her literary move has been, she’s not at all the hardened character I had dreamt up. Always good to start an interview with a sigh of relief.

Let’s begin with the basics: I understand you spoke rudimentary Chinese as a child because your parents didn’t want their native language to impede their children’s English proficiency. So when and how did you learn Chinese? Which dialect? And are you fluent now?
I took beginning Mandarin in college [Harvard], but the Chinese language program was just getting started at the time, so the classes were not terribly challenging. After I graduated, I spent a year in Taiwan teaching English and that’s when my proficiency really improved, just because I was living in a Chinese-speaking environment. One of my English students in Taiwan introduced me to 9th-century Tang poetry, which I fell in love with – until then I had never imagined that such a developed and sophisticated literary tradition even existed in China.

I came back to the U.S. and went straight to law school, but on the side, I took classes in classical Chinese language and literature. By the time I finished law school, I had realized working over the summers at law firms that I did not want to be an attorney. I went straight into a PhD program in East Asian Studies, and that’s when I began to study Chinese literature in earnest.

I’m pretty fluent in Mandarin, but my training in graduate school focused on reading pre-modern texts – mostly poetry from the fourth century to the ninth century – so I would say I’m stronger in classical Chinese. I can understand quite a bit of Taiwanese, but my attempts to speak it are usually treated with frank derision by native speakers.

You were so certain going into college that you wanted to be a writer. Where did that determination come from?
For as long as I can remember, I liked to write; I had an impulse to make up stories. And reading always gave me such tremendous pleasure. But really, I had no idea what it meant to be writer. Growing up, I never revised anything I wrote, or asked another person for feedback. I just had this dream as a child, but had no comprehension that this was something I had to work towards.

And then during your four years at college, your writerly ambitions just disappeared. How? Why?
The first reason was that at Harvard, students have to apply to get into creative writing courses, and I got into poetry, not fiction. I struggled in the poetry because then, as now, I was fascinated by poetry in other languages – I studied Latin poetry back then – but really didn’t know the English poetic tradition very well. The deeper reason was that I just didn’t know how or what to write. As a teenager I had loved Jane Austen, but at college I started to realize that emulating her style and subject matter would have been faintly ridiculous, and that I needed to find a way to incorporate my own perspective and experience into what I wrote. Years later, when I read V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, I understood that this was what he had experienced when he tried to write like a worldly, Evelyn Waugh-like sophisticate, while trying to suppress his own experience in a peasant family on colonial Trinidad. I also was too undeveloped, too uncomfortable with my own background to use it as a platform from which to write.[... click here for more]

Author interview: “Q&A with Pauline A. Chen,” Bloom, February 20, 2013

Readers: Middle Grade, Adult

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January 12, 2013 · 2:38 pm

Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey by GB Tran

VietnamericaBoth the inside and outside covers here are exactly the same: a mostly well-ordered, three-generation family tree … except for the bottom right corner in which the youngest member – the book’s author/creator GB Tran – is desperately attempting to complete the thus-far neatly organized tree. Under one arm, Tran holds his matching portrait with his initial-ized American name slightly askew, while desperately reaching out to grab the placard that bears his full Vietnamese moniker “Gia-Bao” which is falling just out of his reach. Scattered below him are unnamed portraits that don’t seem to have a designated destination in the familial constellation.

Tran’s pictures throughout this extraordinary graphic memoir speak proverbial volumes. As the only U.S.-born member of his scattered Vietnamese family, he is clearly the ‘odd man out,’ attempting to bridge his American ‘GB’ self with his inherited ‘Gia-Bao’ heritage. Thirty years after his family fled their war-torn country, Tran joins his parents on his first journey to his ancestral home. Packed into his luggage is a high school graduation gift his father gave him – a book about the Vietnam War that got tossed in unread with his comics and PlayStation controls – inscribed with a dedication quote from Confucius: “A man without history is a tree without roots.” Now in his late 20s, death convinces Tran to meet his surviving extended family after both his grandmothers die within months of each other, each on either side of the world. “There’s a lot about your parents you don’t know,” his paternal grandmother had warned shortly before her passing. “And they won’t be alive forever to answer your questions.”

Page by page, Tran pieces together his extended family’s violent, brutal past on both sides of a moving border that divided a war-torn Vietnam and what they had to do to survive, how his parents, three older siblings, and grandmother were able to narrowly escape the devastating Fall of Saigon in April 1975, all the while interweaving his own challenging youth as the youngest son of refugee immigrants who began uncertain new lives in South Carolina and his eventual adulthood as a culturally disconnected young artist. His return ‘home’ to a country and family he’s never met is a revelatory experience, eloquently expressed through vivid, spirited panels filled with memories, dreams, regrets, hopes, and a few answers. Halfway through, Tran’s drawings are interrupted by a single page of collaged photographs that offers a momentary glimpse of his parents’ lives before they were his parents: still-young lovers who have endured so much but seem contentedly unaware of the difficulties and challenges yet to come …

So remember the identical inside and back covers mentioned above? That sameness won’t be an option by the time you reach the final page. As you read from one cover to the other, the portraits at book’s beginning will stop being of strangers from whom you can turn away …  after sharing Tran’s illuminating journey, they’ll be just like family, too.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2010

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Filed under .Graphic Novel/Manga/Manwha, .Nonfiction, Vietnamese American, ..Young Adult Readers, ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, Vietnamese

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January 3, 2013 · 2:22 pm

The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau

Book of JonasNeed the verdict first? READ THIS.

Stephen Dau‘s The Book of Jonas is one of those rare, shattering, lingering, breathtaking-at-unexpected-moments debut novels that arrive so perfectly formed you’re left both haunted (wondering what you could possibly read next to dispel the terror) and grateful (utterly so, that you were provided this literary gift).

The Book is actually not a single story, but three: Jonas, who reinvents himself from a sole survivor of his unnamed Middle Eastern (as written on the inside book jacket) or Central Asian (seemingly Afghan by description) village into an American-in-the-making; Christopher, a U.S. soldier stationed far from home, both taking and saving lives, who confesses his wartime actions in a hidden leather journal; and Rose, Christopher’s mother who still waits, if not for her son, then for some semblance of answers. To tell you more of the sparse, intricate narrative would surely be an injustice to your own discovery …

That said, might I share a few suggested details that might enhance your reading … although, I also encourage you to go directly to the book (via the page or stuck in your ears, so elegantly voiced by audible favorite Simon Vance) – I won’t take your redirection personally.

The title clearly indicates the importance of names: “Jonas” is a form of Jonah – as in ‘ … and the whale’ – and is as an Anglicization of the Arab name Younis/Yūnis; Christopher is the patron saint of travelers who protects against accidents and sudden death, usually depicted with a child in his arms. The good book is presented not unlike the religious text it suggests, its chapters marked from “Processional” to “Recessional,” with “Communion,” “Confession,” and “Benediction” in between.

The so-called “inerrant word of God” is filled with “internal inconsistencies,” and “the writings themselves live in metaphor, that they seek not to convey factual information, but to reveal larger truths.” The same might be said of the best fiction.

“‘Unfortunately … our country sometimes has a habit of making a mess with its left hand and cleaning it up with its right.’” Or at least tries to … except that in war, the question of ‘how’ gets impossibly blurred as collateral damage exponentially multiplies.

Pay attention to forms: “For everything he needs to do, there seems to be a corresponding form. …[T]he average person living in America will spend six months filling out forms.”

But be wary of easy labels: Victim, perpetrator, terrorist, refugee, criminal, man, boy, human, alien, arsonist, fireman, archivist, vandal, outsider – ”He can neither place himself into context, nor can he be placed.”

And, if you got this far, heed the final word: READ.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Middle Eastern, Nonethnic-specific

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December 24, 2012 · 10:10 am

Astray by Emma Donoghue

Maybe it’s the craziness of the season, but I’ve really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from Emma Donoghue – the author of the phenomenal Room – is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ historical background that both explains and enhances her fictionalized narrative. Each is part of a centuries-old immigration journey, grouped together in three sections: “Departures,” “In Transit,” and “Arrivals and Aftermaths,” and in the final ”Afterword,” Donoghue – herself Irish-born, British PhDed, currently Canada-domiciled – explains “why, on and off, for the last decade and a half, I’ve been writing stories about travels to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada.” [If you choose the audible version, you'll get a full cast of effective narrators, but the best reward comes at the end when you get to hear Donoghue herself read the "Afterword" – that leftover lilt is just soooo inviting.]

Like Donoghue who has “gone stray, stepped off some invisible track [she] was meant to follow,” her characters begin in one place and are driven out, run away, move to, or search out somewhere else. In “Man and Boy,” two “self-made prodigies” are willing to accept “[w]hatever Barnum offers” – yes, as in P.T. – and prepare to sail from London in 1882 across the Atlantic toward waiting audiences. A young woman living in 1854 London in dire circumstances in “Onward” finds a surprising benefactor (I hope you’ll be as tickled as I was to learn his identity!) who offers the possibility of a reinvented life in the new world. In “Last Supper at Brown’s,” a slave and his missus flee 1864 Texas, leaving the master “facedown in the okra” (not my favorite veggie, either!).

In “Counting the Days,” plans for reunion between a waiting husband in Canada and his Irish wife and young children are tragically thwarted. A lawless woman of the Wild West captures a wayward prospector, and acting as her own “judge and jury,” decides to return him to his family with a few adventures along the way in “The Long Way Home.” In “The Gift,” a destitute new mother gives up her daughter in 1877 and spends the rest of her life trying to reclaim her. The private lives of a 1639 Cape Cod community are transgressively revealed, then recanted in “The Lost Seed.” And, in my personal favorite, “Daddy’s Girl,” a young woman learns the true identity of her father only upon his death.

Harnessing her own searching spirit, Donoghue ventures through centuries and continents, across oceans and cultures, to present a unique collection of peripatetic characters, each ready to confront, challenge, or flee what life presents next. Be assured: Going rogue never read this good.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Canadian, Irish, Nonethnic-specific

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December 5, 2012 · 3:05 pm

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger

Here’s my ‘why-I-read-this-book-scenario’: a 21st-century equivalent to the mail-order bride from Bangladesh, her middle-class white American engineer sponsor hubby, the suburban New York life they attempt to share … presented by one of the more lauded, fellowship-granted, award-winning (non-ethnically Asian) writers of the Net Generation. Nell Freudenberger’s high-profile youth and beauty also seem to be enviously newsworthy, engendering one of the most clever pun-ish variations of a name: schadenfreudenberger. [Surely that deserves at least an appreciative smirk!]

Amina is an educated young woman, although not as degreed as she had wanted to be, due to her parents’ financial limitations. At 24, she’s old enough to dream of something more than tutoring wealthy children to help them get the education she couldn’t have. When she’s unable to secure entry into an American university with a full scholarship, she takes the next best option (inspired by a Voice of America radio broadcast!) and registers with AsiaEuro.com to get her MRS. On the other side of the world, in a Rochester suburb, George – so aptly named Stillman, as in ‘still a man,’ and ‘still waters run deep’ – wants to find a “‘straightforward’” woman who “did not play games, unlike some women he knew.”

Their online relationship has a few interruptions, but eventually George travels to Dhaka with a family heirloom ring in hand – although he doesn’t go for the “down on one knee or anything like that” – and Amina is soon making the arrangements for her transcontinental move. Marriage happens, although in a town hall rather than the Muslim temple Amina promised her parents before her immigration. The new couple settles into their culturally-crossed life together … but being virtual strangers, their emotional intertwining is more challenging, especially since both have deeply held secrets, one that’s happened and one that has yet to occur.

In a Q&A with the New Yorker (where Freudenberger once worked as an editorial assistant, where she was named one of the covetously regarded “20 Under 40” in 2010), she reveals that Amina is “loosely based” (with permission) on a friend she met on an airplane, who was also an internet bride from Bangladesh on her way to meet her American bethrothed.

Perhaps because Freudenberger tells someone else’s intimate real-life story is why the novel never feels quite convincing. Her characters are smart, layered, and occasionally, welcomingly unpredictable, especially Amina who is much more than the wide-eyed new bride in a strange new land than she lets on. While Freudenberger’s writing is certainly admirable (George’s mendacious lost-soul cousin has some of the best lines, and is also especially richly-voiced by narrator Mozhan Marnò), too much about the story feels distanced, as if we’re watching practiced actors rather than getting to know real people. Yes, it’s a novel, but you still want to believe …

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Bangladeshi, Nonethnic-specific

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September 26, 2012 · 9:33 am

Soul Calling: A Photographic Journey through the Hmong Diaspora by Joel Pickford, foreword by Kao Kalia Yang

Joel Pickford‘s titular journey took him through an 8,000-mile trek to some of the most remote villages in Laos, five years of interviewing Hmong refugees, and five years of reading Hmong history and ethnography. The result is a gorgeous, startling, intimate portrait of an ethnic community on opposite sides of the world, connected by centuries of culture and history, scattered by decades of conflict and war.

“The story Joel Pickford tells,” notes Hmong American author Kao Kalia Yang (The Latecomers: A Hmong Family Memoir) in her foreword, ” … is a story of how a people starved by war search for food in a nation whose history has never included them.” That ‘nation’ is multiple nations: centuries ago, China pushed out the Hmong south to Laos; during the Vietnam War, the U.S. military recruited and trained Hmong in Laos to fight the North Vietnamese Army, then virtually erased them as part of a so-called “Secret War” which the U.S. government denied for decades; post-war communist Laos persecuted and further displaced the Hmong; Thailand mistreated then expelled Hmong refugees. Today, the U.S. is home to the largest diasporic Hmong population in the West, yet their migration here has been challenging at best, sometimes tragic at worst.

“This is a document of human experience across blue oceans and the expanse of generations,” Yang continues. “The time for neglect and forgetting is through; may the Hmong spirit find its way on the long journey home to the places where our bodies are seen and our souls’ cries are heard.”

Pickford’s camera sees with acuity, records with empathy. His testimony begins with “The New Arrivals, 2004-2006″ in Fresno, California, which already has an established Hmong American community that began with the first refugee influx in the mid-1970s  following the 1975 Communist takeover of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Pickford captures their uncertainty and their hope, their survivor scars and their future dreams, their traditional ceremonies and adaptive improvisations. Ironically, tragically, as his photographic journey moves from recent refugees to established Hmong Americans, Pickford comes to realize that the Hmong who have been in the U.S. longer actually “practice a purer form of Hmong culture” because the majority of the newer arrivals have survived the last two decades trapped in Thai camps, denied access to what was once their familiar, familial village lives.

From Hmong America, Pickford travels to Laos, visiting various mountain villages, often accessible only on foot. At 6’4″ and carrying some 45 pounds of photographic equipment, Pickford certainly stands out. In one especially remote area, he is the first falang (foreigner) whom the villagers have ever seen. Time seems to have stopped in many of these rural destinations, untouched by electricity, machinery, even roads. As he considers his Hmong American friends back in California, Pickford contemplates the vast differences between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ He “seriously consider[s] spending the next year of [his] life in [one] remote village,” in order to “really figure out what life in this village is all about.” No longer sure how much he “really understand[s],” he offers these complex, story-filled images as guides …

In addition to this magnificent book, Pickford’s photographs will be featured in a major exhibition: “Soul Calling” opens at the Fresno Art Museum this Friday, September 28, and runs through January 6, 2013. If you’re anywhere near, don’t miss it. “I have a vision of photography as an imperfect two-way mirror, through which people from different cultures attempt to look at one another but, to a large extent, see only themselves,” Pickford writes. Indeed, this is not someone else’s story, this is all our stories.

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Hmong, Hmong American

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August 15, 2012 · 10:22 am

Ru by Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman

* STARRED REVIEW
The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Award (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of tears, blood, of money” in French; in Vietnamese, it’s a “lullaby, to lull.” Made up of spare vignettes that flow through decades, this autobiographical narrative reveals a girl’s journey from wealthy privilege in Vietnam; her reinvention as a war refugee in Canada; her return to her birth country, where she is considered “too fat to be Vietnamese” – not because of her stature, but because “the American dream had made me more substantial, heavier, weightier”; and her own overwhelming motherhood.

Verdict: Interwoven with glimpses of cousin Sao Mai who was Uncle Two’s princess, of a father “who always inspired the greatest, most wonderful happiness,” of Aunt Seven’s mystery son raised by Aunt Four, and of young cousins and what they innocently did on the streets to survive, this is much more than another immigration story. For readers in search of intricate, mesmerizing narrative, Ru will not disappoint.

Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, August 15, 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012 (United States)

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Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Memoir, .Translation, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

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August 5, 2012 · 12:02 pm

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

I haven’t picked up a Geraldine Brooks title since her 2001 debut novel, Year of Wonders, which promptly became an international bestseller. I definitely had that sense of ‘wow’ when I finished, but then I inexplicably ignored the rest of her titles … until I recently noticed Jennifer Ehle’s name on the audible version of Brooks’ latest (if you were lucky enough to see Ehle on stage in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, you couldn’t resist her narrating allure; her controlled, even narration doesn’t disappoint here for sure!). My iPod’s now loaded with the rest of Brooks’ novels, although I can already warn that People of the Book should be read, not listened to (narrator Edwina Wren grates incessantly with caricatures of various European accents).

Oh, but I do digress. But bear with me for just another second: when you start reading Caleb’s Crossing, ignore all urges to research any of the book’s characters or their history. What little information is available is enough to diminish the pleasure of discovery. Trust in Brooks’ most excellent storytelling to reveal the story. Address any curiosity only after you’ve finished the novel’s final page; Brooks’ “Afterword” also offers plenty of post-novel information.

Here’s a minimal overview: The Australian-born and bred Brooks, now a resident of Martha’s Vineyard, came across a few facts about one of the Vineyard’s 17th-century Native residents, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, who was a member of the Wôpanâak tribe of Noepe (now Martha’s Vineyard), and was Harvard’s first Native American graduate in 1665. “The character of Caleb as protrayed in this novel is, in every way, a work of fiction,” Brooks explains in her opening “Author’s Note.” “I have presumed to give Caleb’s name to my imagined character in the hope of honoring the struggle, sacrifice and achievement of this remarkable young scholar.”

Crossing is told through the perspective of Bethia Mayfield, the daughter of the minister of a small colonial population living on the island. She is an inquisitive, intelligent girl, daring to steal an education during a time when women were systematically denied access to knowledge. Quiet and determined, Bethia learns quickly the Wampanoag language of the island’s native residents, and the Latin her father struggles to impart to her less-than-talented older brother Makepeace. She meets young Caleb when they are still children, virtually unencumbered with the expectations of their respective communities. Their mutual love of their island – and their deep respect for one another – bind them for life.

When Caleb shows great promise as a scholar, he is sent to the mainland for further study in Cambridge with Makepeace and Joel Iacoomis, another native son, to prepare them for a Harvard education; Bethia, perhaps most brilliant of them all, ironically accompanies them as a servant at the boys’ school. There, Bethia’s sharp, caring eyes are witness to Caleb’s crossing – not only from his home, but from his community and his culture – into a less-than-welcoming, challenging new life.

While the title honors the pioneering, real-life Caleb, Bethia is undoubtedly the hero here. Her unwavering determination to feed her mind despite her 17-century constraints is a timely reminder to her 21st-century readers of the absolute need for access to education for every girl around the world.

Tidbit: This much I need to share from my post-read google-ing: Last year, in May 2011, Tiffany Smalley became the first member of the Wampanoag (spelling different, yes) tribe of Martha’s Vineyard since Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk to receive a Harvard degree. Also, while Brooks was researching her novel as a Radcliffe fellow, archeologists began excavating the foundation of Harvard’s Indian College. Brooks is quoted in a 2011 Harvard Magazine article: “My dream is, they find a shard of pewter with CC carved in the bottom of it.” Oh, if only!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Australian, Native American

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