Come in and Cover Me by Gin Phillips is a novel about an archeologist named Ren who is 37 years old and has been living with the ghost of her brother since he died in a car accident when she was 12. The novel takes Ren into the canyons of New Mexico where she unearths pottery sherds and begins to see even more ghosts of the women who lived in the canyon thousands of years earlier. Ren falls in love…
Encountering the Self is a little book by Swiss Waldorf teacher Hermann Koepke, that is based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner, and addresses what he refers to as the nine year change. I have mentioned Steiner often in this blog and his teachings continue to inform my life. This book deals with the change a child goes through in their 9th year, as they are experiencing themselves for the first time as truly separate individuals, different from everyone around…
The Garden of Happy Endings by Barbara O’Neal tells the story of Reverend Elsa Montgomery of the Unity Church. After a shocking tragedy shatters her community in Seattle, Elsa loses her faith and retreats to her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado where she tries to recover by working in a soup kitchen and starting a community garden. She is also reunited with her best friend and former fiancee, who is now a Catholic priest. This book delves deeply into the issues…
Drawing on decades of experience as a teacher, performer and therapist, Cynthia Hoven brings the world of Eurythmy alive in her new book Eurythmy, Movements and Meditations-A Journey to the Heart of Language. Eurythmy is a movement art created by Rudolph Steiner in the early 1900’s in which the sounds of language become visible through movement and gesture. Eurythmy is most often done as an accompaniment to music or poetry and has been known to have healing effects on millions…
Isabel Allende is one of my favorite authors. I was surprised to see that she had written a book about Zorro, but also curious. In her hands his story is reborn, as Allende imagines the early life of Diego de la Vega, before he becomes Zorro. Allende is a master storyteller, and she takes us into the world of late 18th/early 19th century California, populated by Indians and Spaniards.Young Diego is a product of this world with an Indian mother…
Wonderstruck is the new novel by Hugo Cabret author Brian Selznick. It is a novel in words and pictures, for young and old alike. My daughter insisted I read it after she finished it. There is one story happening in fabulously detailed black and white drawings and another in words. By the end, the two converge. It is an exploration into Deaf culture, family, museums, and much more, all beautifully woven together by a master storyteller. Selznick’s novel soars.
World and Town by Gish Jen is a novel that tackles big subjects with tenderness and grace and humor. At the heart of the novel is Hattie Kong, a retired science teacher who is a descendant of Confucius. Now in her late 60’s and living in a small New England town, she gets a chance to start over-possibly with her long ago love that she hasn’t seen in over 30 years. Jen enters the tricky territory of science vs. religion,…
The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson is part historical fiction, part adventure story, part family saga, set in Jamaica during the late 40’s-70’s during turbulent times when Jamaica was trying to find it’s own identity as a newly independent nation. The starting point for the novel is Errol Flynn’s arrival in Jaimaca in 1946, where he fell in love with the place, bought an island, and stayed. Cezair-Thompson then imagines his affair with a beautiful local girl, who has his…
Alexandra Fuller’s first memoir that came out ten years ago, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, was a truly astonishing account of growing up in Africa. Her follow up is the recently published Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness. This book goes back to tell the lives of her parents and how they came to be who they are. Fuller celebrates her parents eccentricities, their madness, generosity, courage and dignity in this book. We might not always agree…
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry is a wild ride of a mystery set in present day Salem, Massachusetts, full of witches, religious fanatics and other eccentric characters. The story is told by Towner, also named Sophya, who has come back home to Salem after 15 years away in California, escaping from her troubled youth. We learn about the mysterious death of her twin sister and try to unravel her memories, which are muddy at best, and told in an…