Tag Archives: Haves vs. have-nots
No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
Canadian author Deborah Ellis has harnessed the power of words to create miraculous results: her multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) has raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. With her latest title, Ellis tackles leprosy, this time sending all her royalties to The Leprosy Mission Canada. In case you had any doubt, beyond her many good deeds, Ellis also writes really good books.
For independent Valli, the “best day” of her young life happens to be the day she leaves her home village of Jharia, India. What kept her there for her first nine or 10 years – she’s not quite sure how old she is – was what she thought was her family: “You stayed with your family because they were your family and families were supposed to stick together and care for each other.” But when Valli learns that her ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’ were merely paid to take her in as a baby, she grabs her chance to escape an inevitable future – back-breaking work in the coal mines, too-large families, abusive and alcoholic husbands – that most of the village women are doomed to live. Hidden in the back of a coal truck, she drives off toward the unknown.
Valli arrives in Kolkata and narrowly escapes a life in a brothel. For awhile, she’s content to wander the streets, finding ways to “borrow” what she needs, enjoying an adventure here and there – diving for coins in the river, sleeping in cemeteries, escaping frustrated guards. Her bare feet that magically feel no pain in spite what should be debilitating injuries, keep her moving swiftly. But when she sees her future once more – city-style, this time – in the face of a begging woman with a thinly wailing baby, she realizes that she needs to find the kind doctor who tried to help her once before, even if it means facing the “monsters” in the hospital.
Once again, Ellis writes a poignant, penetrating story about the difficult challenges of being a girl in the developing world. If the Breadwinner Trilogy is any indication of No Ordinary Day‘s potential success, then sharing Valli’s story to benefit the Leprosy Mission will surely provide the real-life Vallis the much-needed chance to choose healthier, safer, more fulfilling lives.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, Canadian, Indian
On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe
Four women, living together in a house in Antwerp, Belgium, are “[t]hrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele.” They have escaped their lives in Africa, but only at the cost of their freedom; Dele, who orchestrated their immigration, now controls their bodies which each must sell over and over again in order to repay their enormous debts.
By page 30, one of the four women is dead and her murderer is bluntly revealed. Her death – ironically and tragically – is the impetus that binds the remaining three together beyond their shared address, their shared customers, their owners and handlers. Efe and the better life she will make for the young son she left behind, Ama and the hypocritical man of God who was supposed to be her father, and Joyce and her nightmarish memories of death, destruction, and desertion, will each survive. Only Sisi, unwilling to accept her unexciting life with her disappointed aging parents and her less-than-ambitious boyfriend, has paid for her dreams with her violent demise.
Chika Unigwe – whose debut novel, De Feniks, holds the distinction of being the first fiction title written by a Flemish writer of African origin – makes her Stateside debut with Black Sisters, originally published in Dutch as Fata Morgana. [Slight aside: Rather mysteriously, no translator is credited in the 2011 U.S. edition, although a note is added about a "slightly different" English translation which was published in the U.K. in 2009; no mention of a U.K. translator, either. Hmmm.] According to the enclosed PR materials, Unigwe, herself an immigrant from Nigeria, was so curious about the red-light district women in Antwerp that she donned “skimpy clothing and thigh-high boots” and spent two years researching these women’s lives, so different from her own middle-class Catholic upbringing.
With wide-open, unflinching eyes, Unigwe layers and weaves her experiences of being among the women. Beyond the unthinkable challenges the women face daily, Unigwe carefully reveals four individual, flawed, searching women who are far more than mere victims of the age-old oppressive sex trade. With their desperation, she finds small moments of peace. With their frustration and longing, she gives substance to the glimmers of hope for a different future. Unigwe finds and celebrates their humanity, even in a world so blindly determined on its very destruction.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Translation, African, European
Brothers by Yu Hua, translated by Eileen Ching-Yin Chow and Carlos Rojas
Yu Hua’s unforgettable tome requires a solid commitment in time and patience, yet your reward for finishing the final page will make your investment amply worthwhile.
The opening paragraph begins with the end: “Baldy Li, our Liu Town’s premier tycoon,” sits contemplating his life on his “gold-plated toilet seat” and realizes he has little left of value in spite of his massive wealth. Covering four decades and almost 700 pages, Yu Hua gloriously captures a family saga woven through what will certainly be considered one of the most tumultuous periods of modern history – China’s transformation from the deprivation of the Cultural Revolution into an unparalleled 21st-century capitalist powerhouse.
Baldy Li and Song Gang become brothers as young boys when their respective widowed parents marry. Baldy Li, one year younger, is brash, selfish, and virtually fearless; Song Gang is gentle, caring, and painfully thoughtful. Opposites here attract, and their bond is immediate, cemented by brutal events, bearing witness to their parents’ suffering. As they mature, Baldy Li’s obsession with the town’s beauty, Lin Hong, will eventually estrange the two brothers, but their mother’s dying words will never separate their fates.
Brothers is tortuous, comical, condemning, celebratory, horrific, wrenching, and so much more. The tiniest moments of humanity are intensely disturbing next to gestures of senseless cruelty. The head-shaking disbelief alone will keep you reading, from Baldy Li’s preadolescent sexual discovery, to his wedding gift vasectomy, to fortunes literally built on garbage, to traveling salesmen peddling hymens, to a virgin beauty contest without a virgin in sight, to cosmetic surgeries of the jaw-dropping variety.
“OMG” can’t begin to describe Yu Hua’s gritty, unapologetic, ‘bull-in-a-china-shop’ epic.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Translation, Chinese
Drifting House by Krys Lee
* STARRED REVIEW
Krys Lee, whose peregrinations originated and are currently paused in Korea with formative stopovers in the U.S. and England, infuses the nine stories of her breathtaking debut with the consequences of dislocation – whether forced because of war, or chosen by virtue of immigration.
The continuing aftermath of Korean partition sends three starving North Korean siblings on a brutal journey to find their runaway mother in the title story, while a fractured North Korean family struggles to create a new American life in “At the Edge of the World.” In a brave new post-war Korea, a lonely accountant diligently supports his wife and children living overseas in “The Goose Father,” while across the ocean, a Korean divorcée marries a stranger in order to search for her missing daughter in “A Temporary Marriage.”
Verdict: Like Daniyal Mueenuddin, National Book Award and Pulitzer finalist for his debut collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Lee, too, enters the literary world fully formed. Readers in search of exquisite short fiction beyond their comfort zone – groupies of Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth, The Interpreter of Maladies) and Yoko Tawada (Where Europe Begins) – will thrill to discover Drifting House.
Review: “Short Stories,” Library Journal, November 1, 2011
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Korean, Korean American, North Korean
The Devil’s Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea‘s 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction reads like a heart-thumping thriller, complete with big cars and big guns, desperate men and boys, waiting women, and an enormous body count. That the story is true instantly turns it into a modern tragedy of epic proportions: keep in mind as you read about what happened in May 2001 that the border wars continue and the death toll keeps ratcheting up and up and up …
With a year’s worth of exhaustive research that filled “four leather-bound notebooks of about 144 pages each,” Urrea reconstructs the brutal odyssey of 26 Mexican men and boys who crossed the border into southern Arizona and got lost in the worst desert region possible. So deadly is the stretch mythologized as the Devil’s Highway that Urrea includes 500 years of its horrific history. Of the original 26, 12 survived (barely).
Detail by gory detail, step by excruciating step, Urrea carefully explains how these 26 sojourners decided to leave their homeland, by what means they arrived at the border, what they sacrificed to get there, the inexperienced still-teenager they relied on to lead their journey, and how they each became a statistic – both dead and alive.
Urrea trails the Coyotes and rides with “La Migra” Border Patrol in their air-conditioned oases through their inferno jurisdiction. He tracks the bodies to the morgue, hospital, prison, and courts. He follows the 14 body bags home – “their first and last trip by airplane” – welcomed with surreal fanfare as returning martyred heroes. He quotes the U.S.-based Mexican consul who accompanies the grisly delivery as she calculates the real cost of the $68,000 spent on the 14 one-way tickets: “What if … somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?”
Urrea’s startling etymology lessons alone are a must-read. In Border Patrol lingo, “wets” are “[i]llegal aliens, dying of thirst,” while “tonk” is derived from “calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.” How about “pollo” as in “has been cooked” – by the brutal conditions of illegal crossing? Plus, you’ll probably never think of “hilarious Chi-Cago” – as in “”‘Piss.’ And ‘I Sh*t’” – quite the same way again. Leave it to Urrea to entertain, even as he shocks and exposes.
For the full Urrea experience, the audible version is without parallel: Urrea himself reads his revelations, plus you get an additional Q&A with Urrea not available in print. With Urrea turning the harrowing pages, the effect proves ever more eerily absorbing.
For other Luis Alberto Urrea titles posted on BookDragon, click here.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Nonfiction, Latino/a
The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine by Somaly Mam
Before you open Somaly Mam‘s astonishing memoir, you need to be prepared to bear witness to some of the most horrific acts a human being can commit against another, especially helpless young girls. Once you begin, the frank, unmitigated writing will not allow you to turn away. Once you’re finished, Mam’s miraculous resilience will draw you in to join her fight – for life.
Somaly Mam doesn’t know when she was born. She doesn’t remember her birthparents, who left her to be raised by her maternal grandmother in a remote forest village, home to “an old tribe of mountain people” – an ethnic minority group in Cambodia. At 9 or 10, a man claiming to be her grandfather took her away, eventually arriving at what he claimed was her father’s ancestral village. ”Grandfather” proves to be cruel and abusive, keeping her as his servant slave.
But in the new village, Mam finds temporary refuge with the kind village schoolteacher who tells her that she is his brother’s daughter. He is the person who gives her her name: ‘Somaly’ meaning “The Necklace of Flowers Lost in the Virgin Forest,” and ‘Mam’ because he claims her – and, unlike almost everyone else, always treats her – as his valued, respected, true family.
In spite of a bond with the Mam family that remains strong even today, Mam’s childhood respite does not last long. At 12, she is sent to be brutally raped to pay Grandfather’s debts. At 14 she is married off to a violent soldier with whom she experiences only misery. When he disappears, Grandfather sells her to a brothel where submission in the only way to survive the endless hell.
A Swiss humanitarian worker is the first to help Mam out of sexual slavery; while Mam writes about him with nothing but admiration, the fact that he initially hires her as a teenage prostitute is one disturbing fact impossible to overlook. Through sheer will and impossible energy, Mam not only gets out … she miraculously helps many, many others to freedom, rehabilitation, and new life.
Mam wrote this book in hopes that “it will stop me from having to tell my story over and over again, because repeating it is very difficult.” In it are people, places, memories that she “never want[s] to have to talk about … again … [i]t makes me vomit.” And yet because “one day I may no longer be here … I want everyone to know what is happening to the women of Cambodia.”
She insists, “My story isn’t important. The point is not what happened to me. I write my story to shed light on the lives of so many thousands of other women. They have no voice, so let this one life stand for their stories. On their behalf, I would like this book to serve as a call to the governments of the world to get involved in the battle against the sexual exploitation of women and children.” Join her call to (open, waiting, hopeful) arms: www.somaly.org.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2008 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Cambodian, Cambodian American
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Having been so enthralled by MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Yiyun Li‘s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, then her novel, The Vagrants, I admit I held off on this, her latest collection, for over a year. I seem to have difficulty immediately reading the newest book of certain much-admired authors knowing that future titles will mean a long, long wait. But then I’ve been on a short story roll this past week … so how could I resist a genius any longer?
The best of this collection of nine bookend the book. The first,”Kindness,” more novella than short story, is a wrenching look into the sparse life of 41-year-old Moyan, who lives alone without a single attachment left in the world. The funeral announcement of her former unit commander – a woman just a few years her senior who Moyan has not seen in over two decades – triggers distant memories of her disconnected past: her mismatched parents, the older woman who introduced her to the world of English novels, the married flutist, the young girls in her work unit, and even the now-dead Lieutenant Wei who once asked, “‘Why are you unhappy … Tell me, how can we make you happy?’” Decades later, such questions remain unanswered.
In the eponymous final story, appearances are at jarring odds with reality. The “gold boy” and “emerald girl” who populate a long-ago wedding picture with “their matching good looks,” represent anything but a happy union. Forty-plus years later, three isolated souls find their lives intertwined: the ‘emerald girl’-wife who wished for her own widowhood, her single son who cannot live his life openly, and the chosen daughter-in-law who keeps herself apart even from her widower father who raised her. Together, the leftover trio “would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.”
In a world crowded with so many billions, loneliness is the one somber detail exquisitely, painstakingly woven throughout Li’s stories. Everyday lives continue, connections fray and disappear, individuals are ignored and become lost … little by little, distance and isolation become the absolute norm.
From the old man who never married, to the couple who lost one daughter and devise an elaborate plan to have another, to an older woman who shelters suffering younger women and girls, to a group of six older women who ferret out cheating husbands, Li’s stories haunt and elucidate, giving permanent space to the overlooked, the forgotten who in their own longing ways try again and again to connect.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Short Stories, Chinese, Chinese American
Habibi by Craig Thompson
Since Craig Thompson‘s Habibi hit shelves last week (official release date was last Tuesday, September 20), I guess the secret of its magnificence is out … in some inexplicable fit of utter possessiveness, I’ve been holding on to the galley which arrived in June (and was consumed without pause upon receipt).
So awestruck am I that only clichéd phrases spurt forth: the sweeping sands of time (always wanted to use that one!), timeless love story, larger-than-life, epic journey. Indeed, Habibi is all that, but minus the babbling clichés. With gorgeous panes in constant flowing motion over almost 700 pages, Thompson creates a shocking, unforgettable original for sure.
Truly less is more here, so a few early details are all I will divulge (I don’t want to be responsible for ruining your personal discovery). At 9, a girl is sold in marriage to a much older man who teaches her to read and write, then witnesses his murder. Three years later, she’s living in an abandoned boat in the desert, mother to a little boy clearly not hers by birth. Their stories will eventually separate – and each will live through so much – and unexpectedly intertwine … and then repeat.
Thompson superbly weaves in the overlapping narratives of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (subtle, yet effective reminders of a shared heritage that should unite, not divide), and the everyday power of storytelling, from bedtime tales to fanciful myths to lifesaving epics. He’s also got a few things to say about gender inequality, slavery and other examples of man’s inhumanity, and the cruelty of uncontrollable circumstances.
History, religion, sociology all effortlessly combined with a ‘larger-than-life epic journey of a timeless love story’ … oh … and all that ‘set amidst the sweeping sands of time.’ HA! Got to say that twice!
The secret is most definitely out: Habibi is not to be missed.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Her Country’s Children by Melissa Fay Greene
Melissa Fay Greene first arrived last spring in my mailbox via her latest book, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, and made me cry. But she also left me tickled with joyous laughter at the antics of her sprawling, multiplying, multi-ethnic family.
While Biking made me cry, this one made me weep … and because I couldn’t turn it off (in spite of hard-to-recommend Julie Fain Lawrence who reads the book with alternating bouts of near hysteria and soap-opera gravity), I found myself showing up at appointments suspiciously red-eyed and puffy. But then public embarrassment is well worth risking to read this book.
The jarring HIV/AIDS statistics alone are unfathomable – and Greene is certainly thorough in providing well-researched, vigilantly documented numbers. What is even more shocking, however, is how the history of AIDS in Africa is so intertwined with the so-called developed West and its irresponsible behaviors in the name of humane aid. Children are, not surprisingly, the most tragic victims: in 2005, Ethiopia’s population of 1,563,000 AIDS orphans was the second highest concentration in the entire world.
Amidst the pandemic, one woman, Haregewoin Teferra, refused to abandon the children. When she lost her husband far too early, she mourned. When she lost her eldest daughter, who was then just a young mother herself, Haregewoin lost her own will to live. “‘There is no me without you,’” went the lyrics of a pop song. Indeed for Haregewoin, “A child cannot live without a mother and father. A mother or father cannot live without the child.”
What brought Haregewoin back to life were children. As the AIDS pandemic claimed countless lives, the orphaned, abandoned, unwanted children had nowhere to go. Haregewoin, bereft, was alone in her empty house. One, another, two more, then more and more kept arriving on her doorstep. Haregewoin’s care was almost always the last chance for a child to survive.
Greene captures Haregewoin’s odyssey – interspersed with data, public policy, politics, and history – with eyes wide open. As inspiring and loving as Haregewoin was in her efforts to mother hundreds and hundreds of children, she was not a saint, or even faultless. She was extraordinarily heroic, but also deeply flawed … and yet she did perform more than a few miracles.
Greene herself is not above creating her own brand of magic, conjuring unforgettable faces of suffering, surviving, and ultimately thriving. Helpless Ababu, grieving Mekdes and her brother Yabsira, resilient Meskerem, Baby Menah, adored Nardos, clever Henok … and so many others who were given a chance at life because of Haregewoin’s inability to say ‘no.’
Read the book (skip the audible). Be prepared with fistfuls of kleenex. Be ready. Get set. Go.
Published: 2006
Readers: Adult Continue reading
Filed under ...Absolute Favorites, ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Biography, .Nonfiction, African, Jewish
The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
With a long list that spans over four decades of critically lauded, award-winning novels, plays, and children’s titles, Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta is undoubtedly one of the pioneering women’s voices in African literature. She writes with simple strength, without embellishments; her uncomplicated, accessible prose is quiet, direct, and resonating.
Aku-nna and her younger brother Nna-nndo are surprised to come home from school to find their father waiting in the family’s small Lagos apartment, announcing that he must go the hospital to deal with an old World War II injury. He promises to come home in time for their evening meal, but instead dies weeks later, having never returned. The children’s mother, Ma Blackie, has been away seeking fertility treatment with a village medicine-man, but rushes back to care for her grieving children.
Without a means to support themselves, Ma Blackie and her children must follow the expected tradition of 1950s Nigeria, and join the sprawling household of her late husband’s older brother in the family’s village far from the capital. She becomes his fourth wife, her children his children. But because Aku-nna and Nna-nndo had been educated in the big city, they are allowed to continue their schooling; Aku-nna is exceptionally unusual to be granted such permission.
Attractive, fresh to the community, although not yet a woman, Aku-nna is carefully watched by the village young men and their families as a highly desired future bride; her uncle is already counting her inflated potential bride price. Aku-nna’s heart, however, is almost immediately won by her local schoolteacher, handsome Chike, the son of a wealthy family whose roots trace them to slaves.
Family ties, social structures, class limitations, gender expectations, tribal traditions are all pushed, challenged, and eventually broken … and tragedy mixed with fleeting moments of joy take the story to an inevitable end: “So it was that Chike and Aku-nna substantiated the traditional superstition they had unknowingly set out to eradicate … reinforc[ing] the old taboos of the land.” Emecheta’s clear, firm prose, however, does not depress but illuminates, inserting important momentum toward equity, especially for girls, refusing to merely accept age-old traditions that violate and punish without just cause.
Readers: Adult
Published: 1976 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, African
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