When I sent out the plea for WWR entries last week, books about home, place, and a place to call home were on my mind. A few of my colleagues at School Library Journal and LJ responded with housey reads; others did not. No matter where you live and read, it’s all good in the WWR neighborhood!
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Mahnaz Dar, Associate Editor, SLJ Reviews
I’ve written about Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (Random) many times before, and here I go, again. “But Mahnaz!” I foresee the careful reader crying out. “Rosemary’s Baby is a classic tale of horror. What does it have to do with housing?” Why, everything, gentle reader. Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse are motivated by something that will resonate with nearly all New Yorkers: the quest for the perfect apartment! But their troubles begin when they move to the gothic, Dakota-esque Bramford. But it isn’t paper thin walls and neighbors who throw garbage out with the recycling that they have to contend with.
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Kate DiGirolomo, Editorial Assistant, LJ
Here’s a thing you should know about me: I’m obsessed with the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers—like thoroughly, wholly obsessed with it. To quickly summarize, it follows the true story of a company of soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division during the European theater of World War II. My admiration and affection for the men of Easy Company has only grown since the show first premiered in 2001, and as a result I’ve amassed several memoirs and biographies written by or about the real-life guys and their experiences. My most recent purchase in this vein was Marcus Brotherton’s Shifty’s War: The Authorized Biography of Sergeant Darrell “Shifty” Powers, the Legendary Sharpshooter from the Band of Brothers (Berkley). It is an odd duck in my Easy Company collection—it’s written as first-person narrative, but technically not penned by Shifty himself, as he had already, sadly, passed away. However, as Brotherton explains, he wanted to preserve the very unique and very Southern way Shifty spoke, so he pulled from interviews with the man himself as well as friends and family to construct his voice. Readers get to hear about Shifty’s humble beginnings in the mining town of Clinchco, VA, his courageous decision to leave the comforts of home to join up with the Airborne (which, by the way, was a new and innovative branch of the military at the time), and his time with Easy Company from its formation at Camp Toccoa to the invasion of Normandy to VE Day. I don’t think I will ever truly be able to wrap my mind around what these people endured (for instance, Brotherton recounts a time during the Battle of the Bulge when the men were forced to drink from a stream that was filled with the bits of brain of a man who had been killed there because there was no other water source to be had), but I will read about these men again and again to keep their histories and sacrifices known.
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Liz French Senior Editor, LJ Reviews
While apartment hunting in New York City—which is basically a contact sport, not for the faint of heart, crazy, etc., etc., blah blah blah—I enter a world of possibilities with every location we visit. Who would I hang out with in this neighborhood? Which cafés and bars would I frequent? Would my dog play nicely in the dog park? Where is the dog park? What about the nearest library?
All this moving mishegas got me thinking about books that I love about houses and homes and distinctive places that inform a story line. There are zillions, of course, but I’m especially fond of ones about crumbling mansions and houses with secrets (Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) or places that function as portals to another time (Jack Finney’s Time and Again, in which the protagonist goes to the Dakota—not the “Bramford”—to transport himself to 1890s New York; Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand). I dream of living amid arched hallways, lavish libraries, moats, secret panels, gothic windows, garden gazebos, creepy attics, tiny alcoves, cozy kitchens…. But then reality intrudes and I come back to earth—or what some people refer to as Brooklyn.
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Etta Verma, Editor, LJ Reviews
I’ve written here about being absorbed by John Boyne’s latest book, A History of Loneliness (Doubleday). I’m now reading The Absolutist (Doubleday), his 2011 novel featuring a young man who has returned from World War I to England and is now on a mysterious trip to the country to meet someone. I’m only at the beginning of the book, so I’m not sure yet why he’s there or whom he’s meeting, but it’s all very ominous. The young man seems to have what we would now recognize as PTSD, and his experiences staying in a rundown boarding house where the proprietor’s son is obsessed with asking veterans about their time overseas are not helping.
It’s not all books for me this week though. Last night I took a break from all pages and watched a movie, Thanks for Sharing. IMDB describes the 2012 film as a romantic comedy, but to me it’s anything but a comedy; it’s a rather dark drama, with shades of romance. It stars Mark Ruffalo and Tim Robbins as recovering sex addicts and Gwyneth Paltrow as the Ruffalo character’s first girlfriend since he got into a recovery program five years earlier. I enjoyed the story and the performances, but if you’re looking for something uplifting, this is not it!
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Ashleigh Williams, Editorial Assistant, SLJ
Since I didn’t participate in the St. Patty’s day festivities last week, I thought I’d make up for it with three recent reads that I can’t stop thinking about. The book room has been on quite the lucky streak with our recent graphic novel arrivals, particularly those with kick-ass female protagonists. I just finished Cherie Priest’s I Am Princess X (Arthur A. Levine: Scholastic), an engrossing mystery in which 17-year old May discovers that her best friend Libby might not have drowned three years ago, and that the only way to help her is to follow neighborhood clues left by Princess X, a katana-carrying hero the girls created when they were kids. The night before, I stayed up reading Volume 2 of Ms. Marvel (Marvel). Geeky, goofy Kamala Khan has stolen my heart—any girl who will boldly tell Wolverine to his face that she writes fanfiction about him (and that it was second most upvoted online) is a true heroine in my book. Lastly, there’s Nimona (HarperTeen). I don’t know if there’s words enough to describe how fantastic Nimona is, and my WWR entry is certainly too long already, but Noelle Stevenson has such a knack for packing wit, action, comedy, and tenderness into her work. I am simultaneously enraged and enamored. How does she do it, and can she please, please continue?! Up next is Miss Lasko-Gross’s Henni (Z2 Comics), the plot of which I’m not exactly certain, but on the cover I see a young woman dressed as a cat holding…a weapon, perhaps? So, I’m immediately sold.
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Down Under and High in the Sky(scraper)
Speaking of being far from home, Australian women’s fiction author Fiona McCallum (fionamccallum.com) came all the way to New York on a bit of a junket promoting her latest U.S. release, Return to the Adelaide Hills (Mira: Harlequin). LJ Managing Editor Bette-Lee Fox and I met with her at Harlequin’s offices high in the gorgeously retro neo-Gothic Woolworth Building (talk about real estate lust—and luxury apartments are available for a mere seven million, so says the New York Times).
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Fiona was a charmer, with an Aussie accent that took a bit of getting used to for this uncaffeinated American (a cup or two of coffee helped me acclimate). She told us about her life in Adelaide and other parts of Australia; her many jobs before becoming a full-time author; an ex or two and how she now luxuriates in the single life; growing up as more of a daddy’s girl than mommy’s pet; her nine-year path to publishing (“I’m proof that dreams come true”); and how important books are and were to her.
“You can never be lonely when you’re reading a book,” she said, adding that she’d like to write a mystery or crime novel at some point in the future. She spoke admiringly of J.K. Rowling’s path to publication (“J.K. was in the back of my mind; I thought, if she can do it, I can do it!”) and bravery for publishing under the pseudonym “Robert Galbraith” (The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, both of which McCallum enjoyed).
For her long trip back home, McCallum was looking forward to reading Marian Keyes’s latest novel, The Woman Who Stole My Life (coming in July from Viking in the United States; published last year by Michael Joseph in the UK and Australia).