This week I was faced with deadline reading. My book club was meeting, a friend sent a new book, a review was due and I wanted to finish another book. It was a great reading week!
This was the March selection of the Fact & Fiction Book Club:
The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.
The first part of our discussion was, what defines science fiction. But all members were glad to have read Kindred no matter what the classification. Octava Butler writes about the the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.
" Octavia Butler is a writer who will be with us for a long, long time, and Kindred is that rare, magical artifact…the novel one returns to, again and again, through the years, to learn, to be humbled, and to be renewed. Do not, I beg you, deny yourself this singular experience.”—Harlan Ellison
After reading Octava Butler, I received a copy of a new paperback:
By March 4, 1865, the Civil War had slaughtered more than 700,000 Americans and left intractable wounds on the nation. After a morning of rain-drenched fury, tens of thousands crowded Washington’s Capitol grounds that day to see Abraham Lincoln take the oath for a second term. As the sun emerged, Lincoln rose to give perhaps the greatest inaugural address in American history, stunning the nation by arguing, in a brief 701 words, that both sides had been wrong, and that the war’s unimaginable horrors—every drop of blood spilled—might well have been God’s just verdict on the national sin of slavery.
Edward Achorn reveals the nation’s capital on that momentous day—with its mud, sewage, and saloons, its prostitutes, spies, reporters, social-climbing spouses and power-hungry politicians—as a microcosm of all the opposing forces that had driven the country apart. A host of characters, unknown and famous, had converged on Washington—from grievously wounded Union colonel Selden Connor in a Washington hospital and the embarrassingly drunk new vice president, Andrew Johnson, to poet-journalist Walt Whitman; from soldiers’ advocate Clara Barton and African American leader and Lincoln critic-turned-admirer Frederick Douglass (who called the speech “a sacred effort”) to conflicted actor John Wilkes Booth—all swirling around the complex figure of Lincoln.
Having just discussed Kindred and the issues of slavery, Every Drop of Blood gave a good historical review of the war and times in 1865. Insights into this national crisis resonate in our own time.
New books for The Missoulian On the Bookshelf column include:
Cloudmaker by Malcolm Brooks
The summer of 1937 will be a turning point for fourteen year old Houston “Huck” Finn. He is building an airplane, a fact that he hides from his mother. But there are signs that he is doing the correct thing. First good sign, his cousin Annelisle comes to live with his family, she has had flying lessons. Then he and a friend discover a rare Lindbergh flight watch on the body of a dead bank robber. The news is full of the flight and disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Plus summer brings a carnival and a tent revival to further distract Huck and his friends.
Huck’s plane starts out as a glider, with an early morning test flight on Main Street that ends in a crash that brings the local sheriff. The descriptions of innovations Huck makes to his plane and each new flight are some of the best parts of the book---all leading to an amazing life-saving flight during a thunderstorm at the end of the book.
Cloudmaker is part coming-of-age, part adventure, part gangster melodrama, with bits of Montana history that make an engaging and entertaining book.
Click to listen to a fun interview with the author presented by MBF+ (Montana Book Festival+)
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is chosen by the governor to accompany Steve Price a Silicon Valley CEO on an elk hunting trip. Price steps off the plane with far too much luggage, including tech equipment to record and post all the details of the living off the grid hunting trip. As they head into the woods, a man-hunter seeking revenge is also tracking Price’s every move. Finding himself without a weapon, a horse, or a way to communicate, Joe must rely on his wits and his knowledge of the outdoors to protect himself and his companion.
In the battle of basic knowledge versus modern high technology—Joe also relies on his librarian wife, Marybeth with her many non-internet connections to information. There are shout-outs to the writing of three Montana authors—Smoke Elser, Steve Rinella and Walter Kirn and appearances of Nate Romanowski, and his own daughter Sheridan learn of the threat to Joe’s life and follow him into the woods. Fans will not be disappointed!
The book I wanted to finish (and glad I did) was:
November 1917. William Moreland is in mid-flight. After nearly twenty years, the notorious thief, known as the Ridgerunner, has returned. Moving through the Rocky Mountains and across the border to Montana, the solitary drifter, impoverished in means and aged beyond his years, is also a widower and a father. And he is determined to steal enough money to secure his son’s future.
Twelve-year-old Jack Boulton has been left in the care of Sister Beatrice, a formidable nun who keeps him in cloistered seclusion in her grand old house. Though he knows his father is coming for him, the boy longs to return to his family’s cabin, deep in the woods. When Jack finally breaks free, he takes with him something the nun is determined to get back — at any cost.
Set against the backdrop of a distant war raging in Europe and a rapidly changing landscape in the West, Gil Adamson’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Outlander, is a vivid historical novel that draws from the epic tradition and a literary Western brimming with a cast of unforgettable characters. I had not read The Outlander but now it is on my ever-growing list of books to read next.
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