Book review: The Buried Book by D. M. Pulley

The fifty-first book I read in 2018 was The Buried Book, D. M. Pulley's sophomore effort following up on The Dead Key.  This book is set in 1952 in Detroit and deals with a nine-year-old boy whose mother goes missing under suspicious circumstances. 

Pulley does a decent job telling the story in the voice of a rather naive and inexperienced boy.  Unfortunately, the book of the title purports to be a diary Jasper's mother kept at the age of fourteen and is utterly unbelievable.  Does even a talented author with an eye to a contract for a memoir write her diary in the voice of a first-person narrator, complete with dialogue and eloquent descriptions of the smallest minutiae of her day?  For instance, would she, when describing arriving somewhere to make a delivery to a particular person, deliver verbatim the exact words spoken by the woman who tells her the man she's looking for is around back rather than just elide the scene with "He wasn't inside, but I found him around back?"  When does the youngest of four children on a working farm with no electricity who constantly complains about how many chores she has to do in how little time find the time to write a secret diary in such painstaking detail? 

Many of Pulley's set-pieces are evocative, particularly the brief sanctuary Jasper finds with a peep-show dancer and the school he attends while living on his uncle's farm, but the overarching mystery isn't terribly compelling.  The writing is more impressive than the plotting in this book.

Book review: Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N. D. Wilson

The fiftieth book I read in 2018 was Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World by N. D. Wilson.  Wilson is best known for his children's books, particularly the 100 Cupboards trilogy, but this is non-fiction, a book-length essay describing his worldview.

What this book most approximates is God's monologue in Job, when challenged on the matter of his justice: an overwhelming catalog of things humans can't comprehend whose ultimate end is to emphasize the smallness of man and the brevity of life over and against the infinity of God and of, well, infinity.

Wilson gets it, in a way I have criticized other Christian books for settling for smaller ends, like racial reconciliation, nuclear disarmament, or girls' education.  In the long run, all of us are mayflies: if one is crushed against a windshield rather than dying of natural causes at the end of its allotted lifespan ten minutes later, does it really matter?  Which is better: to enter Hell with an advanced degree, or to enter Heaven illiterate?  Which is not to say that the conditions experienced by most on earth are utterly irrelevant, but that people who profess to believe that everyone is stepping through a door either to eternal beatitude or eternal damnation ought, if they really examine themselves and their priorities, not to major on whether the waiting room everyone is in for a brief time has new carpeting and fresh paint.

Book review: A Stranger in Mayfair by Charles Finch

The forty-ninth book I read in 2018 was A Stranger in Mayfair, the fourth book in Charles Finch's Charles Lenox mystery series.  Lenox is newly married to Lady Jane Grey and newly elected to Parliament, but despite the wishes of his new wife and new companions, he can't quit his hobby of amateur detecting.  The mystery this time is the case of a murdered footman in the household of a fellow MP.

The mystery isn't quite up to snuff.  As soon as the victim's room was searched in chapter nine, I knew who had done it and why, though it took Lenox all the way to the end of chapter forty-six to reach the same conclusion.  Still, Lenox and his faithful servant/private secretary Graham are pleasant companions to spend the length of a book with, enough that I'm going to forgive the infelicities about to be discussed and snatch up installment five as soon as I can find it in the used book store:

Firstly, that Finch straight-facedly makes the ridiculous claim that whist was invented in London in the early 1860s, when anyone who has ever read Jane Austen knows that it was widely played everywhere in England by the turn of the nineteenth century.  Wikipedia tells me that a book on the rules of whist was published at the club in question in 1862, but the game clearly existed prior to that.

Secondly, Lady Jane Pepper-Pottses it up out of the blue, whining about Lenox's detecting and the risks he runs while indulging the habit.  Turning the new bride into a wet blanket about the very thing that makes the protagonist interesting to the reader is a misogynist stereotype.

Thirdly, Finch tries to be a little too coy and cutesy when Lenox buys a painting in Paris during his honeymoon.

"May I ask who painted it?" Graham asked.
"A chap called Monet," said Lenox.  "Rhymes with bonnet, I think.  I never heard of him myself."

Oh, ha ha, he's a famous painter to the reader but the characters haven't heard of him yet!  Except that A) if you're speaking aloud rather than writing, you don't have to tell the person you're talking to how to pronounce the name you just pronounced;  and, B) Charles Lenox is supposedly well-read, well-educated, and widely traveled so there's no way he wouldn't know how to pronounce a French name.

And, finally, the B-plot in the novel centers around Lenox and Lady Jane's emotional decision whether or not to have children.  As badly as writers of historical fiction want to believe it, people from different eras did not, in fact, under the funny clothes, behave just like modern Westerners.  In the 1860s, conceiving a child was not a decision made by the couple, like buying a house or going on holiday; the only way to ensure that a married couple did not have children was abstinence or, alternatively, some not-terribly-reliable stabs at primitive birth control.  Unless we are to believe that Lenox and Lady Jane have, during their honeymoon and upon their return to their joined homes, newly renovated to share a bedroom, not consummated their marriage, discussion after the fact is rather pointless.  When Lady Jane (*dumb spoiler alert*) gifts Lenox a pair of puppies for them "to practice on" before deciding whether to have a child, it's the most Millennial thing she could possibly have done.

Book review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The forty-eighth book I read in 2018 was Moneyball by Michael Lewis.  I was fifteen years late to this best-seller, but that fact only made it clear how very wrong Lewis (and by extension, Billy Beane) was about pretty much everything.  At the time, moneyball was supposed to be the future of baseball, as the Oakland As were supposedly right at the threshold of postseason success.  Only, of course, the As have just kind of hung around at stasis since then.  They do well for a low-budget team, but, as Beane himself is purported to assert in the book, no one is going to take him and his ideas seriously until he wins the World Series.

The success of the As alone might not have mattered so much as, when the book ends, the Red Sox are portrayed as converts to the moneyball cause and Beane acolytes J. P. Ricciardi has taken over as general manager for the Toronto Blue Jays.  While the Red Sox have certainly enjoyed great success in the last fifteen years, they haven't done it by eschewing superstars and lowering the budget but rather by using sabermetrics to help them decide whom to give their huge contracts, and the Blue Jays haven't made a big smash and have since fired Ricciardi.  What seemed like it was going to be a Big Deal in 2003 has, in fact, barely made a ripple in the business.

Reading with the benefit of hindsight really points out the limitations of Beane's approach, as he emphatically doesn't want Jeremy Bonderman (pitched in the World Series) or Scott Kazmir (three-time all-star and AL strikeouts leader in 2007),  giving instead a list of his dream pitchers available in the 2002 draft which includes only Joe Blanton as a recognizable name.  The overwhelming majority of the players which he believe sabermetrics had revealed to him as sure things never made it as far as Triple-A ball.  Which just goes to show that maybe the numbers guy isn't actually that much more reliable than the old-school scouts whom Lewis's book denigrates.

Book review: Goblins! by Richard Pett

The forty-seventh book I read in 2018 was Goblins!: The Adventure of the Wise Wench by Richard Pett.  Pett is largely known as a creator of adventures and campaign settings for roleplaying games, and he is clearly influenced here by the goblins of Golarion, the setting of the Pathfinder RPG.  Pett, in fact, wrote We Be Goblins!, a justly-famous adventure created for Free RPG Day in 2011, in which the players get to play, well, goblins (which usually play the role of easy-to-kill speedbumps in the way of player characters).  Goblins! is basically We Be Goblins!: The Novel, which means it is a great deal of fun.

Goblins are violent, lazy, stupid, comically-incompetent creatures, with the possible exceptions of their females, some gifted specimens of which gain the role of Wise Wench, and Urgh Tricksy, sometimes known as Upside Down Face because his head is on the wrong way, with the mouth at the top and eyes at the bottom.  Urgh is informed by the Wise Wench, who traffics with such gods as Lord Noc, Demigod of All Wind, and the dreaded Queen Quench, the Moist One, Queen of Boring, the Extinguisher of Bonfires, Bringer of Black, Lady Funless, Madam Dull-and-Damp, Mistress Tedium, the Insipid Crown Princess of Dreary, the Bore, and thus knows everything that is going to happen, that he is destined to become the village hero.

Along with his companion Sorry and Moaris the Minor Apocalypse, son of BigBad Chief Runty Miffed, a sort of goblin Lord Flashheart, Urgh sets forth on a quest to save the goblins of the forest from the invading giants, a species which has all the vices of goblins but is bigger -- and we all want to root for the underdog.  While the heroes are off on their quest, the giants must be held off by the vain King Stormgrunties, his adviser Looti Lovelilips, Head Thug Durth Dimbits, and Master Whippet by such means as an iron hamster, a giant nose, and -- worst all all -- the king's own clever ideas.

Pett leaves the door wide open for a sequel -- indeed, the Wise Wench at one point confuses this quest with one that she and Urgh will be on in the future -- and if it comes to be, I will be first in line to read it.

Book review: The Warner Boys by Curt and Ana Warner

The forty-sixth book I read in 2018 was The Warner Boys: Our Family's Story of Autism and Hope by Curt and Ana Warner.  It was an Amazon First Reads book for the month of November, and when I saw it was by former NFL player Curt Warner, I thought of the Rams quarterback.  That was Kurt Warner, however; Curt was from back in the '80's, before I had any interest in football.

Curt Warner was raised by his grandparents in West Virginia and took football as an opportunity not to become a coal miner.  He went to Penn State and then was drafted, behind John Elway and Eric Dickerson, by the Seahawks.  His life in football is covered in a few chapters, as the focus of this book is on his family, particularly on twin boys with autism.

Curt and his wife Ana alternate first-person accounts, with an interlude by their older son giving his perspective, detailing their family life.  Despite the twins Austin and Christian's symptoms reading as textbook autism today, in the late 1990s, they boys went undiagnosed until they were five.  Even after diagnosis, nothing about the situation got any easier; there was only a sense of relief that they could give the problem a name.

I'm sure it is not the Warner's intention, but this book left me horrified and exhausted.  The twins were aggressive and destructive, harmful both to themselves and to others.  They required constant supervision for years.  They did structural damage to the family's home; then, when it had just been freshly remodeled to be more resilient, they started a fire which burned it down.  While the narrative elicits greater sympathy for families dealing with autism, the relentless intensity of that life rendered me numb, not inspired to dive in and get involved but wanting to withdraw and hide from the gritty details revealed.

One thing that impressed me: Ana tells of desperate days as a stay-at-home mother, when she regularly called the prayer line of a local Christian radio station.  When they hadn't heard from her in a couple of days, the people at the station actually called her to make sure she was all right.  I have to admit, I've rolled my eyes at the "let us pray for your request" options I've heard on Christian radio, but may God bless those people for actually caring.

Book review: Killing Kryptonite by John Bevere

The forty-fifth book I read in 2018 was Killing Kryptonite: Destroy What Steals Your Strength by John Bevere.  The first thing I'll point out is that Bever changes verb tenses between the title and subtitle, going from present participle to present imperative.  The second thing I'll point out is that "killing kryptonite" is weird metaphor, since kryptonite is a mineral and can't be "killed."  And if I'm getting this pedantic this early, you know this can't be a rave review.

I picked up this book because Bevere wrote one of my favorite Christian living book(let)s of all time, How to Respond When You Feel Mistreated.  On that basis, when I saw this new release for $5 at the Mardel checkout, I was eager to give it a chance.

Unfortunately, the first part of this book is very weak, in my opinion.  It is the author's assertion that the cessation of miracles in the church is due to sin in the body, that the acts of the apostles were meant to be the pattern of the church for the last two thousand years, and that the only reason that the shadow of a passing Christian falling on a sick person isn't instantly healing them is because the local church tolerates members who are unrepentant.  His basis for this reasoning is 1 Corinthians 11:30, Paul's blaming physical illness on improper administration of the Lord's Supper.  I find this a utopian argument, difficult to square with a more holistic view of the New Testament which emphasizes that believers should not be surprised by suffering.  While Bevere disavows the prosperity gospel, his teaching, taken to its logical end, is little different.

Bevere's ultimate argument, that the church is weakened by the tolerance of sin in its membership, is convincing, and his concomitant condemnation of a cheap-grace gospel which depends on persuading people to "ask Jesus in their hearts" without an accompanying emphasis on repentance and a changed life, is worth pondering.  A personal anecdote about the Dallas Cowboys is convicting.  However, in my opinion, Bevere's argument is weakened by an overstatement of the potential consequences of following his advice.

Book review: You Might Remember Me by Mike Thomas

The forty-fourth book I read in 2018 was You Might Remember Me: The Life and Times of Phil Hartman by Mike Thomas.  Phil Hartman is largely known for four things: Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, NewsRadio, and his murder at the hands of his wife in 1998 at the age of fifty. 

Unfortunately, I have found that most (auto)biographies I have read leave me with a worse opinion of their subjects than I held in blissful ignorance.  (See: Van Dyke, Dick and Schulz, Charles.)  Hartman is no exception.  He was born in small-town Canada, but a trip to the Rose Bowl infected his parents with the Southern California dream, where they determined to relocate their family as soon as possible.  One can't help but question whether staying in Canada might not have resulted in a better outcome for their children, though it may have robbed television audiences of Phil's unquestionable comedic talent, as Phil and at least one brother became enthusiastic partakers of the 1960s celebrity culture of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll.

The Hartmanns (a numerology-influenced Phil dropped the extra N for better karma) were a Catholic family with the multiple siblings that implies, one of whom was severely disabled.  It is unclear whether it is Phil or his biographer or both that blamed his disabled sister for robbing him of the parental attention he rightfully deserved, but it's an unattractive sentiment poorly expressed.  Phil's distant and unsuccessful relationships with three wives likewise indicate an inability to connect and empathize with other human beings when it's inconvenient or upsetting, and his complaint about the "trailer parks across America" which, in preferring the Brett Butler family sitcom Grace Under Fire over the urban singles workplace comedy NewsRadio, denied him the success he felt was his due, displays a contempt for the very audience he hoped to win over.  (Full disclosure: I have watched and enjoyed both.)

In the end, of course, the story is a tragedy, not only for Phil and his fans but for his wife and murderer Brynn, whose motivations and mental state will never be fully understood but whose subsequent remorse and suicide robbed her children of both parents.  The final fifty pages of the narrative deal with the last day of Phil's life and the aftermath of the murder in excruciating detail; if you remember where you were when you heard the news, the walkthrough will answer as many questions as are answerable about what exactly happened while leaving you with the somewhat ghoulish feeling of being a rubbernecker at a crime scene.

Book review: Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

The forty-third book I read in 2018 was the 12th Maisie Dobbs book by Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich.  As indicated by the cover art, Winspear is finally beginning to leave World War I behind and move on to World War II. 

Maisie has at last quit moping over the deaths of her not-very-lamented late husband and  unborn child and returned to England, where recurring characters Robbie MacFarlane and Francesca Thomas recruit and train her for an undercover mission: entering Nazi Germany in disguise to retrieve a British businessman consigned to Dachau.  Concurrently (because we must have a B-plot), she is retained by the hated Otterburn family to retrieve the daughter Maisie blames for her husband's death from a dissolute life in Munich.

The Nazi angle adds a much needed sense of danger and moral purpose to the series, which has tended to focus too much on the regrets of the past.  Of course Maisie actually meets Hitler, and of course she is prescient enough to discern the Jewish heritage of a British subject in the diplomatic service and urge his immediate departure, but the Mary Sueness of Maisie takes a back seat to the actual stakes of the action in this installment.  It's a shame, given both her and her author's success in the spy genre, that Maisie ends the book by swearing off further involvement with the secret service, but we can hope that patriotism will persuade her otherwise before VE Day.

Book review: Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2018 was Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie.  Amazon is doing a series of it (apparently with a different murderer), so I thought I'd see what the original was like before perhaps looking into the (much more action-packed, judging by the trailer) update.

In one sense, I enjoyed this book a bit more than the other Christie books I've read.  It was definitely a page-turner as I was curious about the solution to the crime.  But the most awful biases against adoption are on display in this book!  From statements by a character presented as a well-meaning authority that Rachel Argyle wasn't "really" her children's mother though he'll call her that for convenience's sake to the eugenicist assertion that you can never really trust adopted children because their genetic inheritance could rear its criminal or mentally-deficient head when you least expect it (hello, Rachel Lynde), Christie makes it clear that adoption is, in her view, a foolish and selfish act.  There's a very upper-crust attitude that, yes, well, it's certainly sad that poor children are hungry and ill-educated, but you just have to nature take its course; you'll only make it worse by intervening, like trying to return a baby bird to the nest. 

Tied to that is an equally offensive view of women.  The same kindly family doctor who offers the proviso that he calls Rachel Argyle the children's mother only as a convenient shorthand compares human women to cats in heat, driven to marriage out of a biological desire for children.  Women apparently fall into two groups, those who want children and those who want men, and never the twain shall meet. 

As a mystery, I suppose the solution works.  I did suspect the correct culprit before the end, thanks again to Christie's condescending attitude toward a certain type of woman.  There are at least two or three other suspects with a compelling motive, which, I suppose, encourages Amazon to tinker.  Make it like the movie "Clue," with a different solution for each season?

The romance is tacked on and, again, border-line offensive.  You can feel Christie pushing the characters together early on, but they seem like such an inappropriate match that I wasn't sure she was actually going through with it.  I guess it's not a happy ending without a wedding?  Given the proclivities for which Jacko is universally condemned, the double standard is glaring.

Speaking of happy endings, I suppose Christie is the ur-text for the "I've gathered you all here today to reveal the identity of the murderer" ending, but it only works because her murderers are all so polite and proper, having contractually agreed to going away quietly after the summation.  The amateur detective in this case doesn't even inform anyone of the result of his investigations or have police back-up on hand.  Given that the murderer has already killed again to maintain secrecy, the assembly was remarkably lucky that they didn't all go down in a spray of bullets or an explosion.  I can't imagine that Amazon's culprit will be such a good sport.

Book review: Wish You Were Eyre by Heather Vogel Frederick

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2018 was the sixth book in Heather Vogel Frederick's The Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Wish You Were Eyre.  As indicated by the title, this time around the girls and their moms are reading Jane Eyre.

Megan's irrepressible Gigi brings home a French exchange student on the spur of the moment, and Megan is jealous of the newcomer's easy rapport with both her mother and her grandmother, not to mention all the boys at Alcott High.  Worse (and in a truly unbelievable coincidence), Sophie is related to all the British characters in Pies and Prejudice, the dreamy brothers Berkeley and Emma's nemesis Annabelle.

In other areas, Emma and Stewart's relationship gets rocky again, Jess is accused of cheating and could lose her scholarship, Cassidy is skating at Nationals and might actually like boys but she's not sure which one, and Megan's mom runs for mayor of Concord.  Oh, and Gigi has a whirlwind romance in Paris over spring break and comes home engaged.

Where to begin?  First I have to admit that I enjoyed this book more than its predecessors.  As the girls have gotten older, they've gotten more competent and less one-note (the smart one, the sporty one, the popular one -- they're like the Spice Girls).

Still, the contrivance is thick, and the connections to the classic novel seem weaker than usual.  Jess's ordeal with an unfair teacher is meant to correspond to Jane at Lowood, Sophie Fairfax is standing in for Blanche Ingram, Emma's uncertainty about Stewart's feelings parallels Jane's experience with Mr. Rochester, Cassidy's triangle with Zach and Tristan is meant to parallel Jane's with St. John Rivers and Mr. Rochester, and Gigi, well, ... reader, she married him.  Laid out like that, it seems clear, but reading the text as written, it's less obvious.

I was going to call shenanigans on Alcott High's spring break being in April rather than March, but looking up the Concord school calendar, they really do have spring break in April!  I guess there's too much snow on the ground in March up north.  In Oklahoma, Texas, and North Carolina where I've lived, spring break is always in March.

This book was Frederick's Reichenbach Falls; she intended it to be the last Mother-Daughter Book Club Book.  Which is odd because it ends with the girls in 11th grade, when senior year would seem to be a more instinctual ending.  More than that, she actually went out of her way to end the series at this point, since the girls read the whole Betsy-Tacy series in the fall of their junior year in Home for the Holidays and this book picked up right after New Year's where that one left off with them reading Jane Eyre in the spring.

I believe she compressed the last two books into one year on purpose, because two of the girls are dating seniors and going on to their own senior year would require her to take a side on Long-Distance Relationships: Yes or No.  However, reading the series, as I am, in the author's future, I know that she got roped back in for one more book, Mother-Daughter Book Camp.  It will be interesting to see what she does when forced past her intended expiration date.

You may notice that I left Becca out of the plot synopsis above.  That's because her role in the story is so peripheral and so dumb that I left it out.  But it does factor into the mad "problem play" matchmaking that goes on at the end of the book just to leave everyone paired off.  Becca goes to Mankato for Spring Break with her grandmother, as planned in Home for the Holidays, and meets a boy named Theo Rochester who keeps snakes in his attic.  Yes, really.  Also, she's suddenly interested in architecture, apropos of a random comment made by her grandmother and nothing else every mentioned in this entire series so she plans to go the University of Minnesota where Theo Rochester will be going, based entirely on knowing him casually for less than a week.  Also, she matches up Sophie with Third and Annabelle with Kevin Mullins, like the female protagonist of "The Pirate Movie."

Also, we're supposed to believe that the girls learned A Valuable Lesson about pranks when they nearly humiliate Sophie on national TV on Clementine's cooking show but fess up before it airs.  However, Emma's book making fun of Annabelle and her friends and using those friends' actual nicknames is published, and that's a great thing, and no one will ever realize that when she says Stinkerbelle, Puff, Smiles, and Buttercup, she's actually referring to a group of girls she knows who are called Tinkerbell, Puff, Smiles and Buttercup.  That is all.

Book review: Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2018 was another two-in-one: Betsy and the Great World and Betsy's Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace.  These are the ninth and tenth, and the final, books in the Betsy series.

Unlike the Harry-at-Hogwarts pacing of the previous four books, each of which covered a school year, Great World opens two and a half years after Betsy's high school graduation.  What we learn of the intervening time in quick summary does not cover her with glory: Just like in high school, she goofed off in college, majoring in the social scene, and not only dropped out but started dating someone else after Joe transferred to Harvard and broke up with him again, after the interminable will-they-or-won't-they of their high school career.

Because Betsy must always land on her feet, however, her father has arranged for her to spend a year traveling in Europe.  This book is much less a story and more a travelogue, based as it is on Lovelace's letters home from a similar trip of her own.  As it stands, some of the text is cringeworthy, like Betsy's distaste for the Muslim neighborhoods she visits and her horrified sympathy for little girls wearing veils. 

World War I breaks out before Betsy's grand tour is over, however, and it becomes the only truly successful part of the book, casting a bittersweet pall over the futures of all the European friends Betsy has made and (natch) prompting Betsy to make apologetic overtures to Joe.  Unfortunately, the swoonworthy item in the Personals section of the London Times that brings her home -- "Betsy. The Great War is on but I hope ours is over. Please come home. Joe." -- is an anachronism.  World War I didn't begin to be called the Great War until October 1917 so Joe was quite prescient to have termed it such in August 1914.

Wedding leaves the troubles in Europe behind for most of its length, being interested rather in Betsy and Joe's brief engagement, wedding, and setting up housekeeping.  Unfortunately, it also leaves unaddressed many dangling plot threads from the previous books.  The fates of Betsy's European acquaintances?  Silence.  There's no indication that Betsy even attempted to correspond with the friends she made in Great World.  More annoying is Carney suddenly turning up married to a fellow named Sam in Minneapolis, after going off to Vassar with a place in her heart still reserved for Larry Humphreys.  Whatever happened with that?

One part of Wedding that definitely works is when Joe's Aunt Ruth asks to come and live with the newlyweds.  Having been widowed and sold the store she and her husband ran, she is lonely and wants a place to stay for a while.  Joe, having been taken in by her as a child, cannot refuse, but Betsy's inner rebellion at the idea of sharing her love-nest with an outsider is entirely believable and well-portrayed. Her grudge poisons the happiness of the young marriage until she is able to let go of her resentment, and her submission is well-rewarded in many ways.  Later, when Aunt Ruth decides to move to California to be near other relations, it's a real wrench, both to Betsy and to the reader, for her to leave. 

While the Betsy books are based on Maud Hart Lovelace's real life, one strand of fiction running through them is Joe.  In actuality, Maud didn't meet the man she would marry until 1917.  She wanted to depict his story too in the series, but I can't help but feel that, in writing Joe in Betsy's life so early rather than giving his childhood a separate book as Laura Ingalls Wilder did with Farmer Boy, she did some violence to their story.  Betsy and Joe are delightful in Wedding, but the will-they-won't-they through the previous five books turn them into a proto-Ross-and-Rachel.  It's hard to feel that they will be good for each other when she gives them such an extended backstory of misunderstanding, callousness, and over-sensitivity.

An aside: These two-fer editions boast introductions by female authors and back matter delineating the real-life basis for the story.  The back matter is excellent, but I have a bone to pick with the introductions.  Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself had an introduction by Laura Lippman, a name that was vaguely familiar to me though I have no idea what she has written; Betsy Was a Junior and Betsy and Joe was introduced by Meg Cabot who spent her pages advertising for her Princess Diary series and admitting that while it was sweet for Betsy to say that she didn't want any boy but the right one to kiss her, logically there was no way for Betsy to know who the right boy is unless she went around snogging all of them on offer (and you can see where that slippery slope is headed).

Betsy and the Great World and Betsy and Joe, however, has an introduction by Anna Quindlen, which I must call out for intellectual dishonesty.  Quindlen's thesis is that Betsy is a feminist series, ahead of its time, and that without Lovelace's series, she would never have known that being an author was an option for women.  In the first place, she herself lists Jane Austen as one of her favorite authors, a woman who was a successful author long before Lovelace's time.  Beyond Austen are the Bronte sisters and Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey and Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Laura Ingalls Wilder and dozens of other very well-known female writers. 

Her complaint, however, seems to be that these other authors didn't write books about fictional girls who wanted to be writers.  Well, except for Louisa May Alcott and L. M. Montgomery, whom Quindlen discounts because Jo was "punished" for her ambition by not marrying Laurie and Anne "had" to support herself and thus didn't make a choice to pursue a writing career but was forced into in be necessity.  This doesn't really scan with my impression of the Anne series, and I wonder if Quindlen realizes that Alcott wanted Jo to end Little Women a single woman with a successful career and was forced by her publisher to marry her off -- or the implied insult to Alcott that her failure to marry is something to be mourned.

Not to mention that Wedding would be denounced as retrograde rather than feminist today, with Betsy's insisting that she must learn to cook and keep house for Joe instead of accepting the public relations job she is offered in the course of the book.

Book review: Home for the Holidays by Heather Vogel Frederick

The thirty-third book I read in 2018 was the fifth book in Heather Vogel Frederick's Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Home for the Holidays.  This time around, the girls tackle the Betsy-Tacy series, though they talk their moms down from the entire ten-book series to only Betsy's high school years: Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy Was a Junior, and Betsy and Joe. 

This installment in the series is notable in that it marks the first time Becca, Chadwickius frenemus, gets to narrate point-of-view chapters.  It's also different in that it encompasses only half a school year -- and most of that is in a quick flashback; the actual narrative covers only Thanksgiving through New Year's, that is, the "holidays" of the title. 

Speaking of the title, no one actually is "home" over the school holidays.  The Chadwicks and the Wongs have booked a cruise together, a plan that gets fraught with complications when Becca's dad loses his job; Jess and Emma spend Christmas with Jess's aunt and uncle in New Hampshire; and Cassidy travels to California to visit her older sister Courtney and explore the possibility of her family moving back to LA for good.

While the club members are split up, their moms have arranged a Secret Santa gift exchange, only thanks to Jess's mischievous little brothers, all the gifts are switched, leading to bad feelings all around.

The contrivances and misunderstandings around the Secret Santa gifts are a little much, as both Jess and Emma and Megan and Becca spend the holidays getting mad at one another over nothing.  Jess and Emma in particular grate, as they've been BFFs for so long that their being torn apart by petty lies spread by strangers rather than actually talking to one another is fairly unbelievable.  More annoying is Frederick's decision to make the dreamy cruise ship captain's son speak French, when she's not actually fluent in the language.  Philippe makes his way through a crowd with Becca by saying "Let's excuse ourselves," rather than "Excuse us," as Frederick no doubt intended. 

Book review: The Great Quake by Henry Fountain

The thirty-second book I read in 2018 was The Great Quake: How the Biggest Earthquake in North America Changed Our Understanding of the Planet by Henry Fountain.  Like The Great Influenza, this book tells a story that ought to be compelling but in the end ... isn't.

Fountain does try.  The book opens with geologists flying in to Anchorage two days after the disaster to examine the damage and learn what they can from the Good Friday 1964 quake.  From there, Fountain jumps back in time to describe the towns and residents that were to be irrevocably changed in the quake.  He alternates these chapters with background about his main character, a geologist named George Plafker who was his main source of information.  It's not until about halfway through the book that the quake hits; the remainder of the pages deals with the casualties and survivors and the lessons scientists drew from the quake.

Unfortunately, few of the stories of those who lived or died are detailed enough to draw the reader into their tragedies.  In large part, undoubtedly, this is due to the sheer passage of time between the event and the writing of the book; not enough of the bereaved could be contacted to tell their own or their lost loved ones' stories.  Also, due to the sheer destruction, many of those who lived through the quake left the immediate area afterward and started over elsewhere, making them harder to track down.  In addition, there is a language and cultural barrier with the Native Americans whose villages were some of the hardest hit which might have dissuaded them from sharing their experiences.

Whatever the reason, the dead are hard to empathize with.  Due to the small number of families of one of the villages destroyed by the quake, many of them had similar or identical names, which makes it hard to keep track of who survives and who is lost.  Also, Fountain is limited by who he has been able to interview all these years later.  One of the most haunted deaths is that of a woman in Anchorage whose car is crushed by a stone facade which fell off of a department store; Fountain relates the story of a woman who witnessed this death, but the identity of the woman who died, what she was doing before the quake, and who mourned her after her passing remain untold. 

As indicated by the long subtitle, a major focus of this book is on the confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics which resulted from the study of the Good Friday quake.  It's interesting that plate tectonics was vehemently rejected by reputable scientists after Alfred Wegener proposed it, in large part merely because he was a meteorologist and geologists bristled at the concept of anyone but themselves coming up with such a breakthrough.  Like the initial vitriol directed at Hoyle's Big Bang theory, it puts the lie to the fiction that science, at least as personified by scientists, is objective and disinterested.

Book review: As You Wish by Cary Elwes

The thirty-first book I read in 2018 was As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes with Joe Layden.  Drop the "Inconceivable" (or, perhaps, use it as Vizzini did), and it's pretty much what it says on the tin: a behind-the-scenes from the movie, at least as remembered by the participants nearly three decades later.

On top of being one of the most delightful, most well-written, most well-cast, most well-directed movies ever made, "The Princess Bride" is also notable for preserving in amber, at the absolute height of their attractiveness, two of the most ludicrously good-looking people in the history of the world, Elwes and Robin Wright (later Robin Wright Penn, later just Robin Wright again).  Frankly, were I one of them, I'm not sure I could harbor unadulterated good feelings toward the film, in that it endures as a living testament to the truth that neither one of them is as good-looking as they used to be, but I guess that's an occupational hazard of being a film actor.

I already knew some of the "inconceivable" tales, but not by any means all.  For example, that Mandy Patinkin and Elwes tried to one-up one another in fencing practice rather like Doug and Kate battling to get on the ice first in "The Cutting Edge."  That Westley was originally supposed to jump into the lightning sand feet-first to save Buttercup but Elwes didn't feel like it looked cool enough so he come up with the much-more-dangerous head-first dive.  That Wallace Shawn is scared of heights and was terrified during the Cliff of Insanity scene.  That most of Billy Crystal's and Carol Kane's dialogue was improvised.  That Elwes broke his toe before shooting the final scene with Buttercup in his Dread Pirate Roberts guise and was both in great pain and desperately trying to conceal it from Rob Reiner in the fear he'd be fired and the part recast.  That Christopher Guest actually did knock Elwes out hitting him with the butt of his sword. 

Sadly, the lackluster release of the film led all involved to fear that their labor of love had been in vain.  It was the video release that led to the widespread popularity of "The Princess Bride," and if VHS did nothing else for the world, that is enough.

Book review: Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself by Maud Hart Lovelace

The twenty-eighth book I read in 2018 was really two books, an omnibus edition of the fifth and sixth books in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy series, Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself.  As a child, I was never a fan of Lovelace; I recall trying to read Betsy-Tacy and quitting, unutterably bored.  Betsy never found a magic wishing coin or traveled through a wardrobe into another world or met a witch or even, like Laura Ingalls Wilder, took a covered wagon out west and dealt with Indians and blizzards and wildfires.  She was just a little girl going about everyday life in a small town, and I couldn't have cared less.

The next book in the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, however, is based on the Betsy series, particularly these last books dealing with her high school years and past, so I thought I'd give Betsy another try and see if she got any more interesting as a teenager. 

More interesting, yes, but likable, not particularly.  In what is now a trope (hello, Harry Potter), each of the next four books in the series deals with one school year in Betsy's life.  In the first book, Betsy is getting ready to start high school as a freshman.  The family moves away from her childhood home across the street from Tacy's house on the Big Hill and into a larger, more modern house nearer the center of town.  Between her older sister Julia and Betsy, they make the Ray house a frequent destination for school friends, both boys and girls.  In the second book, Betsy is a sophomore and travels to Milwaukee over Christmas to visit Tib, who moved away since the childhood books.

There's not a great deal more action than in the books chronicling Betsy's childhood years; instead, the narrative focuses on Betsy's ambitions for popularity.  Tacy is firmly sidelined in favor of more typical high school girl friends, not only by Betsy, but also by the author: although Betsy seems to "learn her lesson" a time or two over the course of the stories and spends time with Tacy, Lovelace glosses over that time off-screen, clearly preferring to depict the popular girls.  While morally questionable, it is this very choice that makes the books interesting today, in their portrayal of a very different style of adolescence: shirtwaists, pompadours over rats, putting on powder with a chamois skin (acceptable for decent girls) and putting on rouge with a rabbit's foot (the behavior of actresses and loose women), dance cards, a school teacher openly courting a senior girl, etc. 

While I have decried Sweet-Valleyism in the Mother-Daughter Book Club, these books serve as prototypes.  Each can't resist an early description of Betsy's slim waist and peaches-and-cream complexion, in prose little different than each installment of Sweet Valley High's description of the physical perfection of the Wakefield Twins, right down to Jessica/Betsy twirling around in front of a mirror and complaining about her physical flaws.

Betsy is decidedly boy-crazy, not in the sense of falling for any particular boy but more longing for the power which she discerns in her older sister Julia of being able to lead one around on a string and then drop him for a new model when she gets bored.  Her obsession with popularity leads to her failure, in each book, to achieve the academic goals she has set for herself.  One presumes that this will culminate, in her senior year, with academic triumph.

Book review: The House of Unexpected Sisters by Alexander McCall Smith

The twenty-seventh book I read in 2018 was the eighteenth installment in Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, The House of Unexpected Sisters.  There's actually no paying job in this book, as Precious and Grace take on a charity case (literally!) and turn down a client at the end of the book because they don't agree with her motivations.  Perhaps McCall Smith is getting Mma Ramotswe confused with his other protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie, for whom money is no object.

The pro bono case the agency takes on is that of Charity (get it?) Mompoloki, a widow with young children who lost her job at an office furniture store for what she insists are unfair reasons, but the real meat of the story deals with Precious Ramotswe's discovery of a secret which casts a shadow over her memory of the daddy, the late sainted Obed Ramotswe.

Book review: Pies and Prejudice by Heather Vogel Frederick

The twenty-sixth book I read in 2018 was the fourth book in Heather Vogel Frederick's Mother-Daughter Book Club series, Pies and Prejudice.  The girls are entering ninth grade, and their book for the year (clearly) is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. 

But the girls aren't all entering ninth grade together.  Jess already abandoned the public school last year when she moved into a boarding school dorm, despite living in the same town the school is in; this year, Emma and her family are spending the school year in Bath since her father sold the novel he'd been working on.  Technology to the rescue, as Mr. Wong hooks up videoconferencing equipment for book club meetings.

The Hawthornes work a house swap with a British family with two sons, one of whom is handsome and charming while the other is distant and arrogant ... and I'm sure you can see where this is going.  There's a lot of boyfriend stuff this time around, as Megan falls for Bingley, uh, Simon, Becca goes to the Spring Formal with Zach Norton, Jess and Darcy finally get together, Stewart breaks up with Emma, and the author rips off pays homage to The Cutting Edge with Cassidy and the Darcy-stand-in, Tristan.

Frederick sprinkles the background with Austen Easter eggs, like the choir director Mr. Elton, the teacher Ms. Bates, and Emma's Knightley-Martin School.  The rather ham-handed title is derived from a baking business the club begins to pay for an airline ticket for Emma to fly home for spring break (which, coincidentally, is the same week as spring break at Alcott High and Colonial Academy), which in turn follows a sudden and convenient passion to learn cake decorating on the part of Jess and her mom.  It's pretty out of left field.

The Sweet-Valleyism is a given with this series by now, but my main concern was mean-spirited actions of the girls seemingly being condoned by the author.  Megan finds her niche in high school by publishing an anonymous "What Not to Wear" blog, trashing the fashion choices of her schoolmates.  She is eventually found out, and her mom forces her to apologize; but she receives considerable positive affirmation for her exploits from a magazine publisher who implicitly tells her to wait until she's 18 and then she can make fun of others with impunity for a paycheck. 

Emma's father's novel (besides being awful -- Frederick really shouldn't have posted a supposed excerpt) contains thinly-disguised caricatures of people he knows, prompting a feud with Mrs. Chadwick, whose doppelganger is particularly unattractive.  (And I've read reviews of the series who point out that continually mocking a character for the size of her posterior is hardly a feminist undertaking.) 

And Emma herself has a story published in the Knightley-Martin school literary magazine mocking a group of girls at the school before flying back to the US consequence-free -- a public shaming for which her father and one of the girls' relatives congratulates her.  Emma (with Frederick) excuses herself with the assurance that no one but the girls being made fun of will know it's them and they deserve it, but given that the bad fairies in the story have the exact same nicknames as the four girls in real life, it's a ridiculous conclusion. 

For a series that has gone out of its way to redeem Becca Chadwick and Savannah Sinclair, it's petty to dump on Annabelle Fairfax and her satellites.  And for a series based on celebrating female characters, to condone mockery of (other) female characters for their weight and fashion choices is backwards. 

Book review: Game On! by Dustin Hansen

The twenty-fifth book I read in 2018 was Game On!: Video Game History from Pong and Pac-Man to Mario, Minecraft, and More by Dustin Hansen.  I was the last reader in the household to read this book, as the kids found it at Half-Price Books and Tommy read it after them.

Unlike Tristan Donovan's subtitle, this one has an accurate range: Hansen starts with Pong in 1972 and works his way chronologically through important, innovative and successful games, ending with Overwatch in 2016, the book's publication date.  The explanation of why I was the last in the family to read this book might lie in the confession of how many of these games I haven't played.  Pong, yes, on the Atari 2600; Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and E.T.  the Extra-Terrestrial, ditto.  I never played Zork, although I did play a later text-based game by Infocom, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Tetris, yes; Myst, yes.  Pokemon Yellow I played a few times on my nephew's GameBoy.  And Wii Sports.  That's it.  Eight out of thirty-nine "games that shaped us all," in the author's words.

While my experience with the particular games Hansen singles out obviously skews early (and Atari-centric), I have a hard time accepting the validity of any list of great video games that doesn't include Baldur's Gate.  To me, the author's list is console-heavy.  In completing his history up to the present day, he sacrifices a bit of perspective.  Will Angry Birds and Overwatch really go down in history with similar impact to Pong and Pac-Man?  Who's to say?

The text is explicitly aimed at kids -- the epilogue says that "today's gamers -- that means you, gamer -- are going to school to become the game developers of tomorrow," and a discussion of video game ratings begins to describe the content of Adults-Only-rated games and breaks off, "...well, how about we cover that when you're an adult." -- despite the author's celebration of games like Farmville expanding the definition of gamers beyond adolescence.  As such (and probably because Hansen works in the industry and doesn't want to burn bridges), the text is very rah-rah, with no negative details about anyone or anything mentioned.  For example, Toys for Bob, the studio that would eventually create Skylanders, had been focused on making video games of kids' movies, but "[m]ovie games started to get a bad reputation.  Gamers were tired of buying games based on movies they loved, only to be disappointed when the games didn't deliver the experience they expected."  Was Toys for Bob putting out uninspired, cash-grab games?  You'll never know from this book.

Tristan Donovan, of It's All a Game, has a book of his own out on video game history.  Hansen's book makes me want to read it to see some of the warts he has undoubtedly excised.

Book review: Jane Austen Cover to Cover by Margaret C. Sullivan

The twenty-fourth book I read in 2018 was Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers by Margaret C. Sullivan.  This is a lovely little coffee table book with full-color images of the covers of various editions of Austen's novels over the years, from first editions through movie tie-ins to mash-ups.  Some are lovely; some are laughable; and a great multitude are anachronistic, particularly when it comes to fashion and the current standard of beauty.

Some gleanings:

The famed Peacock Edition of Pride and Prejudice was published in 1894 and was so iconic that, despite peacocks not being mentioned in the text, many later covers revert to the theme.

Northanger Abbey wins the category of most inappropriate cover art, with many illustrators and marketers taking at face value the Gothic trappings Austen was parodying.  (Sample cover blurb from the 1965 Paperback Library edition: "The terror of Northanger Abbey had no name, no shape -- yet it menaced Catherine Morland in the dead of night!")

There is an e-book which manages to misspell both the title (Sense and Sensibility) and the author's name on the cover.

Oldcastle Books published a faux-pulp edition of Pride & Prejudice, featuring a Colin Firth portrait with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and the cover blurb "Lock Up Your Daughters... Darcy's In Town!"

This book definitely stirred up my never-very-dormant collector's vibe.  One disappointment, however, is that Sullivan often discusses the interior illustrations of a particular edition but provides no images.  I suspect that the rights might have been expensive and/or unavailable, but I'd frankly rather she didn't bring them up than talk about them and leave me hanging.

Book review: Empire by Steven Saylor

The twenty-third book I read in 2018 was Empire: The Novel of Imperial Rome by Steven Saylor.  The sequel to his Roma, it picks up with the Pinarius family where the previous book left off, in the reign of Augustus.

Despite being a thicker book than its predecessor, Empire covers only 127 years, whereas Roma encompassed a millennium.  This is, in large part, due to the much wider historical basis for the early years of the empire versus the comparative lack of documentation for the founding, kings, and early republic.  It also necessarily narrows the focus on the Pinarius family to four generations.  In theory, this ought to allow for more characterization, but the Pinarii are a literary conceit: they exist as witnesses to history rather than as active participants.

Unfortunately, Saylor's perfunctory treatment of female characters persists, including one who turns out to be more literally a Woman in a Refrigerator than one would believe possible so many centuries before household appliances.  More common are women who simply drop out of the narrative, never to be mentioned again, or die off-screen.  A characteristic examples is the final Pinarius wife of the book, Apollodora, who is introduced as the object of the protagonist's desire, serves the matrimonial purpose of allying the fictional protagonist with a historical personage, gives birth to a son and heir (but no other children, despite the couple's sex life being presented as vigorous), pops into the plot again when her (historical) father is put to death, and then ... nothing.  Her last appearance in the book is to silently nod to a comment her husband makes and then go off to bed, unallowed by the author even to express an anodyne opinion on the events of the day.  

Empire suffers from the defect, common in quasi-educational fiction, of having one character explain to another events with which he should already be familiar for the benefit of the reader ("As you know, Marcus....").  There also seem to be more small errors in this book than in its predecessor: missing prepositions, "tale" in place of "tail," etc.  

My other complaint is that Saylor is perhaps too trusting of contemporary historical accounts; if Suetonius or Plutarch or someone said that this or that out-of-favor late emperor performed a particular feat of debauchery, by golly, it must be so (not to mention the novelist's benefit that it makes for racy purple prose).  In Roma, Saylor demytholigized the legend of Hercules and Cacus; it's disappointing that here he reports on Apollonius of Tyana at breathless face value.

Church camp 2018

I have two, TWO, campers at youth camp this year!  (Insert Count Von Count cackle with impeccably-timed lightning flash.)  I have already learned that the house makes all kinds of noises that are not usually audible over the sounds of two children.

Book review: Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

The twenty-second book I read in 2018 was Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance.  The book caused a big stir when it was published in 2016, and it's been on my radar for a while; but I only now got around to reading it.

Vance tells the story of his own dysfunctional family, which is not at all unusual in the memoir genre, but he also claims, as indicated by the subtitle, that, contra Anna Karenina, that his family was unhappy not in its own way but in a way that indicts the culture in which he grew up: in his case, diaspora Appalachians. 

While media attention around the book has focused on Vance's "up by the bootstraps" ending, the vast majority of this book deals with the dysfunction which he has (so far) escaped.  The meat of the story begins with his Mamaw and Papaw leaving Kentucky for a shot at a better life in Ohio.  His grandparents' marriage was intensely dysfunctional itself during their childrearing years, but by the time J. D. came along, they had reconciled into the only safe haven he would know as a boy.  His mother, herself traumatized by the violence of her childhood home, descended into addiction, serial monogamy, and worse, leaving J. D. and his older sister to depend on their grandparents and each other.

The first thing I must say about this book is that the language is vile.  To the author, it may be unremarkable: he emphasizes that his family, especially his beloved Mamaw, was unusually vulgar, and he went from there into the Marines, where one expects that the language is hardly suitable for children.  As a professional, however, Vance might realize that such language is inappropriate in some instances -- I doubt he uses it with a new client -- and in my opinion, the book is harmed by his choice to use it, not only in direct quotation but in his own narrative voice.  While his story is moving and his analysis thought-provoking, the incessant obscenity prevents me from recommending the book to people I otherwise might.  (See The Martian, which eventually got a bowdlerized classroom edition.)

The book aspires (I think) to be heart-warming and life-affirming, but some aspects of it leave me troubled rather than reassured about J. D.  His affection for his grandparents is understandable but seems to lead him to condone actions that seem to me reprehensible.  "Mamaw did it, and everything worked out," is not equivalent to "Mamaw acted wisely and in the best interests of the children involved."  Many of the situations described in the book could just as easily have ended in tragedy as triumph and, in other families, have.  In addition, I find his descriptions of the networking and connections that reaped him great rewards once he got to Yale Law to be revolting, verifying that it's not what you are capable of but who you know that weighs more heavily on the scales of success: once you are accepted into Yale Law (and learn which utensils to use in which order at a fancy restaurant), the rest of your professional life is set, which is nice unless you're not fortunate enough to be accepted into Yale Law. 

Book review: It's All a Game by Tristan Donovan

The twenty-first book I read in 2018 was It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan.  The subtitle is misleading, as the overview actually starts well before Monopoly with games of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.  From there it travels through chess and backgammon before jumping ahead to the game of Life (which admittedly has a longer pedigree than I'd assumed), Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Scrabble, Mouse Trap, Twister, the Ungame, Trivial Pursuit, Pandemic, and (as advertised) Settlers of Catan, with a pair of digressions on the use of board games to help POWs escape during WWII and the rise of AIs in chess and go.

There are a lot of interesting facts on parade here, including what exactly a "rook" is, how many games got their start in Canada before crossing the southern border, and exactly how convoluted the origin story of Monopoly is.  The book could have used another editing run: Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson is consistently referred to as Dave Arenson, and the culprit in Clue is dubbed a "gentile" rather than genteel British murderer.  Still, this was an interesting read.  I learned some things and made a mental note of a few games I might pick up for our family to enjoy.

Book review: The Explorers: The Reckless Rescue by Adrienne Kress

The twentieth book I read in 2018 was the second book in the Explorers series by Adrienne Kress, The Reckless Rescue.  The kids and I greatly enjoyed the first book in the series, The Door in the Alley, so my hopes were high for this sophomore effort.

Unfortunately, this installment of the story left me fairly flat.  Picking up right where the first book left off (literally mid-sentence, which is good for a chuckle), the narrative sees Sebastian and Evie separated, and they stay separated for the majority of the book.  This might have been okay, except the bulk of the plot seems to be filler, desperately vamping to keep the pair apart until the Exciting Conclusion.  There's an interminable K-pop storyline that seems to go next to nowhere -- except that I'm sure that in the final volume all the friends the pair have made along the way will show up to help save the day.  It's that kind of story.

Kress seems to have committed herself to the pair discovering a new member of the disbanded Filipendulous Five in each installment, which means we're looking at two more books before Evie finds her grandfather in the fifth book.  She is going to have to come up with some more interesting adventures to keep me reading that long.

Book review: The Glass Forest by Cynthia Swanson

The nineteenth book I read in 2018 was The Glass Forest by Cynthia Swanson.  I loved her debut novel, The Bookseller, and was excited to read her sophomore try. Unfortunately, I didn't find that lightning struck twice with this particular author.

Like The Bookseller, The Glass Forest is set in the past: the "present day" portion of the novel in 1960, with flashbacks covering the previous twenty years.  It is told from the point of view of three women, whose lives are affected by a pair of handsome and charming brothers, Paul and Henry Glass.  The book opens with Angie, Paul's  young wife, answering a long-distance call from Ruby, Henry's teenaged daughter, delivering the message that Henry is dead and her mother, Henry's wife Silja, is missing.

The book is a definite page-turner -- I started and finished it on the same day -- but I wasn't far into it before I had the suspicion that this was one of those books, like Wuthering Heights, where everything interesting has already happened before the narrative began but everyone's life is going to end up ruined in a delayed reaction anyway. 

Apart from Angie and Silja, the characters are rather flat and two-dimensional.  Ruby is something of an enigma to the very end, undoubtedly a conscious choice by the author to build tension, but the pay-off falls flat to me.  The Glass brothers, too are opaque: Henry goes off to war and comes back utterly changed: why exactly?  Never explained.  Paul has an affair with a woman demonstrated by every other part of the story to be not at all his type: why?  Likewise no explanation of his behavior.  The bad guys are of the black-hatted, moustache-twirling variety.  Why do they do the awful things they do?  Apparently just because they're bad guys.  I kept expecting some sort of revelation in backstory or explanation of their motives that would elucidate their character, but they stubbornly remained cardboard cut-outs with no apparent goal other than sociopathy. 

Book review: Hidden in Plain View by Lydia McGrew

The eighteenth book I read in 2018 was Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts by Lydia McGrew.  This book argues for the reliability of the New Testament by comparing accounts between the books.  The four gospels famously tell the same story, and many of the epistles overlap with the events of Acts; McGrew believes that, by examining the same events as recorded at different times by different authors, we can be reassured that the events in question actually happened and are not a fictional account.

I found the first section, covering the gospels, a little dry, perhaps because I am already very familiar with the story, but the second part, which covers Acts and the epistles, was full of details I hadn't noticed before, probably because, in the church, we tend to treat Acts and the various epistles separately.  When I hear a sermon on part of Jesus's life, it will almost always reference the same event as recounted in the other gospels, but a sermon from an epistle tends to treat the letter as a discrete literary whole and almost never refers back to Acts for the context in which it was written.

This is an extremely valuable resource that has added multiple notes to my Bible.

Book review: The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud & Ned Johnson

The seventeenth book I read in 2018 was The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, PhD, and Ned Johnson.  Stixrud, a neuropsychologist, and Johnson, a tutor, encourage parents to back off and let their kids take responsibility for their own choices in life.

It's a positive message, no doubt, but the book is crippled by the authors' blindness to the upper-middle-class bubble in which they live and move and have their being.  I'm sure the upwardly-mobile professionals of Washington, D.C. must find their advice helpful, but I can't be the only parent in flyover country who reads tips like "let your child call an Uber to get around" or "if he's not into team sports, suggest fencing lessons" and wonders what planet they're living on.  It's a planet where Duke is a second-tier school where you can be assured your child can get a perfectly fine education even if they aren't accepted at an Ivy, I'll tell you that much.

It's also not a planet where homeschooling exists.  Their emphatic advice to parents is never to mention school or homework and make the home a safe haven where academics don't intrude.  The clear message is that a child's education is a matter best left to the experts and upon which a parent shouldn't trespass.  They evenly approvingly quote a mom who wrote a letter to her daughter abjectly apologizing for asking what grade she got on a math test and promising to throw her report card away unopened because it's none of her business how her child is doing in school!  Even if I weren't homeschooling, I'd find that notion appalling.  The reason it's called a report card is to report a child's academic progress to his or her parents or guardians.

The overall impression with which I came away from this book was a feeling of extreme gratitude that I am not an upwardly-mobile professional in D.C.  They all sound miserable, stressing out about whether a poor grade or the fact he doesn't play sports or a musical instrument will mean their child will suffer the ignominy of having to attend a state school and, thus, being relegated to failure and shame for the rest of his life.  The authors repeatedly stress how unhealthy an atmosphere is cultivated in many schools, how bad it is for children and teenagers to be under constant pressure to succeed while simultaneously failing to get necessary sleep, and yet the one piece of advice that never seems to occur to them is to step off the treadmill. 

Book review: Dandelion Fire by N. D. Wilson

The thirteenth book I read in 2018 was Dandelion Fire, the second book in N. D. Wilson's 100 Cupboards trilogy.  The story picks up pretty much where 100 Cupboards left off, with Henry and his family dealing with the aftermath of the events of that book as well as Henry's parents' reappearance and the threat of their imminent arrival to take their son back to the sterile life he knew in Boston.

Before he is taken away, Henry is determined to do more exploring in the cupboards, a clandestine plan that is derailed by (literally) a bolt from the blue.  Henry's electric experience attracts the unwelcome attention of a wizard named Darius obsessed with the secrets of Endor.  When Henry escapes his clutches, Darius travels through the cupboards himself, scooping up Henry's aunt, uncle and cousins, his friend Zeke, an unfortunate police officer named Ken Simmons, and the entire Willis farmhouse and sending the whole lot of them on a desperate journey between worlds to reunite the family and save the multiverse from the life-drinking evil of Nimiane.

The childish selfishness of Henry and his cousin Henrietta in the early chapters of this books is grating, though, in the characters' defense, they aren't as aware as is the reader of the dangerous stakes of the game they're playing.  The backstory of the Willis family's history with the cupboards is fleshed out more satisfactorily in this volume than in the first installment, where I found the supposed connections between the worlds sketchy.  Ken Simmons is a welcome and worthy addition to the cast of characters, as is Caleb, an ally discovered on the other side of one of the cupboards, and the entire race of Faeren, both villains and heroes.  Raise a gambler for Tate.

Book review: The Story of Reality by Gregory Koukl

The ninth book I read in 2018 was The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How It Ends, and Everything Important that Happens in Between by Gregory Koukl.  Koukl is an apologist, and this is a worldview book, and a good one.

Worldview asks the question 'why': why is everything the way it is?  Koukl answers the question from the Christian perspective in five words: God, man, Jesus, cross, and redemption.  He is fair, in my opinion, in evaluating other worldviews, which he clusters into Mind-ism and Matter-ism, and rejects them on the basis that they fail adequately to respond to the problem of evil. 

This is an evangelistic book which, at its culmination, delivers a clear call to decision.  It is well-written and theologically rigorous and represents a good starting point for those who question whether Christianity, or theism in general, is intellectually defensible.

The thrill of victory after the agony of defeat

Celebrating our first Upward basketball victory today, 26-22!  We may be 1-3, but we won't be winless this season!

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Ripped from the pages of today's Star-Telegram is the latest example of how following the rules gets you nothing.  Fort Worth ISD wants to reduce truancy so they have decided to issue bribes to achieve that goal.  From the lede, I was wondering how they were planning to afford to give "skullcaps, IPods, and hoodies" to every kid who meets their attendance goals, but it turns out that the prizes only go to those who improve their attendance, i.e., those who haven't been following the rules.  The kids and families who have been living up to the standard all along receive absolutely nothing.  Even the school district appreciates a bad boy more than a nice guy.

Clearly, the intelligent student will immediately begin skipping school in the spring so as to reap the benefits by showing up slightly more often in the fall; those who are the most shrewd ought to be able to keep the gravy train rolling for years by alternating their attendance patterns.

I like how the administrators go out of their way to emphasize that truants are not to be seen as in the wrong but merely as "dealing with complicated social issues" which make them so much more valuable and worthy of attention than the kids who do the right thing.  Of course, there's no social issue so complicated that it can't be solved by the generous application of skullcaps, IPods, and hoodies.

And skullcaps and hoodies?  Really?  I mean, I get the appeal of shiny new electronics, but why skullcaps and hoodies?  "Hey, attending school doesn't have to make you look like any less of a thug than your buddies who skip classes!"

This year's best Super Bowl ad

No one puts Baby in a corner.

Birthday girl

Today Faith turned 15.