Merry Wanderer of the Night [Search results for reading attended] 

Hi Everyone,

My name is Mindy Hardwick, and I’m happy to be guest blogging today on my favorite young adult book—Homecoming. I am both a published children's writer and educator. Some of my stories and articles have been published with The Washington State History Museum’s on-line magazine, ColumbiaKids including: a middle grade story, “Tales of the Lighthouse Keeper,” and articles about Rachel the Pike Market Pig, and the Fremont Troll. I run a weekly poetry workshop with youth in a juvenile detention center in Everett, WA. You can read some of the youth’s poems at www.denneypoetry.com. You can also find a couple of my flash fiction pieces, Directions and Night Crimes, which were inspired by the detainees, on Sarah LaPolla’s blog, Glass Cases. I keep a blog at www.mindyhardwick.com

I first read Homecoming in my sixth grade reading class. When I reread the book for this post, I took a quick look at the copyright date. My sixth grade year would have been the year the book was published!

In middle school, I was lucky to have both a language arts class and a reading class. Our reading teacher, Mr Stobie, dedicated the entire hour to reading. He filled the room with young adult novels, which at that time, would have been the problem novels of the 80’s. (Young adult novels which focused on a character who was usually trying to deal with an issue such as death in Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume). In sixth grade, we spent our class time reading and journaling about young adult novels. I thought this was Heaven! I didn’t have to worry about reading under the covers with a flashlight, now I could tell Mom and Dad that I was doing homework! Later, when I became a seventh grade language arts teacher myself, I used this same classroom teaching style.

Ironically, at the same time I started teaching, my collection of young adult novels resurfaced at my Mom’s house. She even found the same yellow bookcase where the books had always been stored. I was amazed to see that the books had survived moves across the country as well as decades of being stored in boxes. I unpacked the books and used them to set up my classroom library. And of course, the first book, I found was Homecoming.

Over the years, I’d seen copies of Homecoming at the bookstore, and the cover had changed from the one I remembered. At one point, I attended a library book sale to buy books for the classroom library. That day, I found a copy of Homecoming with the same cover that I remembered. I purchased the book, and never loaned that copy out to students!

When I began taking writing classes, we often studied first lines of novels. But, to me, no first line ever came close to the line in Homecoming: “The woman put her sad moon — face in at the window of the car.” And even though I studied many young adult novels during my coursework in Vermont College’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adult program, Homecoming still remained my favorite book. I discovered that there was something about Homecoming which had never left me. Something about Dicey’s character that had grabbed me and continued to hold onto me. Maybe it was the way she so carefully dolled out money for each meal, buying apples and a loaf of bread for 88 cents, or maybe it was all those hot, dusty miles they walked along strip malls on their way to Bridgeport. But, a few years later, when I started writing my own young adult novel, Dicey’s story crept into mine. My character, Jasmine, had also been abandoned by a parent, and just like Dicey, Jasmine goes to live with an extended family member. As Dicey does in the second Tillerman series, Dicey's Song, my character Jasmine must also create a new life for herself. Later, I realized I even named one of my secondary characters, Sammy, and that was the same name as Dicey’s younger brother.

As a writer, I can look at Homecoming and see so many qualities which I try to mirror in my own work: A main character with a strong want and motive. Secondary characters that are just as complex as the main character. Description which is so neatly woven into each scene. A plot which keeps me turning the page.

But as both a reader and writer, I think what strikes me the most about Homecoming is Dicey’s determination to get her family to a safe home. It is Dicey’s determination, all these years later, still inspires me in my own life and reminds me not to give up. Dicey’s story reminds me to keep walking across the endless, hot concrete sidewalks and to keep dolling out that money for bread and peanut butter until I reach that end destination and find “home”. __________________________________________ Thank you so much Mindy! What a wonderful post! Homecoming and the whole Tillerman Saga were really life changing books for me. I loved the whole series and I love hearing what you remember about them! Dicey really is a truly amazing character! Thank you again for participating! Also — to the rest of my readers out there — If you would like to be a Memory Monday guest, in my blog for more information or send me an email! I'd love to have you!

I was a very bad reader last week. Lots of things are to blame, it was the week before Thanksgiving break and I just wanted to relax. I did finish Philip Graham's The Moon, Come to Earth. I also attended his reading at Prairie Lights. Graham is very gregarious, I enjoyed his reading. He read three dispatches from the book though, which took quite a long time. I'm always more interested in hearing authors talk about their books than read from them.

The book that has taken up most of my time is George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I plan to finish tomorrow. If I haven't mentioned it before, I will mention it again: Middlemarch is a beast. It's a multi-plot novel with what seems like one thousand characters. It takes me a long time to read, but thanks to a couple 4-8 AM shifts at work I am almost finished with it. I'm really enjoying it too, but that doesn't surprise me. Eliot is a genius.

Today I plan on finishing The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte by Syrie James. I wasn't sure what to expect with this one, I am obsessed with Charlotte Bronte and I'm always iffy on books that make the authors the characters. I am happy to say that I have not been able to put it down. James has really done a great job researching all the Brontes and I like how she documents her research in the back of the book. There are footnotes in this, which I know have put some people off, but I kind of like them. Some are unnecessary to me because I know enough about the 19th century, but some of them are helpful and interesting. The character that has interested me most is Branwell. I knew that he was a drunkard but James creates a fully developed character out of a man that has always baffled me.

Next week I plan on reading A LOT because I will just be sitting at home anyway. Books I plan to read are The Last Great Dance on Earth by Sandra Gulland, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, The White Garden by Stephanie Barron, and Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm.

About the author:

They had her at hello. From her first moments in Charleston and Savannah, and on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, novelist Karen While was in love. Was it the history, the architecture, the sound of the sea, the light, the traditions, the people, the lore? Check all of the above. Add Karen’s storytelling talent, her endless curiosity about relationships and emotions, and her sensitivity to the rhythms of the south, and it seems inevitable that this mix of passions would find its way into her work.

Known for award winning novels such as Learning to Breathe, the recently announced Southern Independent Bookseller Association’s 2009 Book of the Year Award nomination for The House on Tradd Street, and for the highly praised The Memory of Water, Karen has already shared the coastal Lowcountry and Charleston with readers. Spanning eighty years, Karen’s new book, THE LOST HOURS, now takes them to Savannah and its environs. There a shared scrapbook and a necklace of charms unleash buried memories, opening the door to the secret lives of three women, their experiences, and the friendships that remain entwined even beyond the grave, and whose grandchildren are determined to solve the mysteries of their past.

Karen, so often inspired in her writing by architecture and history, has set much of THE LOST HOURS at Asphodel Meadows, a home and property inspired by the English Regency styled house at Hermitage Plantation along the Savannah River, and at her protagonist’s “Savannah gray brick” home in Monterey Square, one of the twenty-one squares that still exist in the city.
Italian and French by ancestry, a southerner and a storyteller by birth, Karen has lived in many different places. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she has also lived in Texas, New Jersey, Louisiana, Georgia, Venezuela and England, where she attended the American School in London. She returned to the states for college and graduated from New Orleans’ Tulane University. Hailing from a family with roots firmly set in Mississippi (the Delta and Biloxi), Karen notes that “searching for home brings me to the south again and again.”

Always, Karen credits her maternal grandmother Grace Bianca, to whom she’s dedicated THE LOST HOURS, with inspiring and teaching her through the stories she shared for so many years. Karen also notes the amount of time she spent listening as adults visited in her grandmother’s Mississippi kitchen, telling stories and gossiping while she played under the table. She says it started her on the road to telling her own tales. The deal was sealed in the seventh grade when she skipped school and read Gone With The Wind. She knew—just knew—she was destined to grow up to be either Scarlet O’Hara or a writer.

Karen’s work has appeared on the South East Independent Booksellers best sellers list. Her novel The Memory of Water, was WXIA-TV’s Atlanta & Company Book Club Selection. Her work has been reviewed in Southern Living, Atlanta Magazine and by Fresh Fiction, among many others, and has been adopted by numerous independent booksellers for book club recommendations and as featured titles in their stores. This past year her 2007 novel Learning to Breathe received several honors, notably the National Readers’ Choice Award.

In addition to THE LOST HOURS, Karen White’s books include The House on Tradd Street, The Memory of Water, Learning to Breathe, Pieces of the Heart and The Color of Light. She lives in the Atlanta metro area with her family where she is putting the finishing touches on her next novel The Girl on Legare Street.

You can visit Karen White's website at http://www.karen-white.com/.

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My Review:

When Piper was six years old, she helped her grandfather bury a box given to her by her grandmother. This box is forgotten until, after her grandparents death, she seeks answers regarding her families history that no one is able to answer. Piper retrieves the box, and inside she finds aged scrapbook pages, a faded newspaper article about an infant that was found dead, and a gold charm neckace. In a search of her grandmother's home she also finds a secret room containing a baby crib. After reading several of the scrapbook pages, she becomes determined to track down a woman that was very close to her grandmother, mentioned as being one of her closest friends as a child. Yet, her grandmother has never mentioned her name. Her grandmother suffered from Alzheimers, and Piper experiences a great deal of remorse at not knowing or discovering more about her grandmother while she was still alive. He vows to stop at nothing to find out more about her grandmother's past. She soon discovers that there is a past that has remained hidden for some time, and individuals that want it to remain this way.

THE LOST HOURS takes the reader on a trip through several generations. It highlights the importance of family, and taking the time to know and maintain ties to older generations. It grabs and takes hold of your heart from the very beginning. You become a character in the book, you experience the things the characters experience. It takes hold of your emotions like very few books do. I treasure the time I spent reading this book, and regret the moment when I read the last few pages.

This book really hit home for me. My grandmother has been experiencing bouts of dementia for the past several years. Oftentimes she doesn't remember her husband and often has flashbacks of her childhood. She's not the Grandma I remember as a child, and I regret not taking the time to learn more about her life. I hope I still get the opportunity to do so, if not with my grandmother, then with the other members of my family.

I really enjoy writing and I like to read what other people think about their writing practice, so when I saw Views from the Loft: A Portable Writer's Workshop

available on Netgalley I decided to try it out on my nook. This book is a series of short essays and interviews by authors who have attended the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. I gather that these all came from a literary journal the Loft publishes under the same title. A lot gets covered in this book, including several genres within nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Most of my favorite essays were about memoir writing, and particularly enjoyed reading writers thoughts about fair representation in memoir writing.

If I read the interviews in a magazine, I might have enjoyed them more, but it seemed like a lot of the same questions were asked of the writers and several of them gave similar answers. I think the pacing in the book could have been a little bit better, with similarly written things spread out a little more... or perhaps omitted. My biggest problem with this book was that it was really too much information all together. After finishing it was hard for me to come away with the book with any real clear ideas on how I could improve my writing or for things to try. I think this book is better for dipping into from time to time, rather than to try and read straight through.

I do think this book is worth a look if you love to write. I wouldn't recommend it for a reader who just wants to hear about writers writing. And if you love to write, I would recommend this book as inspiration and not as a guide to read cover to cover. Find a topic that interests you, there are some nice subject divisions in the book, dip into that subject for awhile and then turn to writing with those ideas in mind. If you get stuck, come back to the book if you want.

I give this book a C.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog. I received this book from the publisher through Netgalley.

I read Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee

as a companion to To Kill a Mockingbird for the 50th Anniversary. Harper Lee doesn't give interviews anymore so this biography was done entirely from interviews Charles J. Shields did with people who knew Harper Lee and from information he could find from the time period involving her. It was also, basically, done without Harper Lee's permission although the fact that the book is out shows me that she doesn't have a huge problem with it. The biography is made up of ten chapters that begin with Harper Lee's childhood to the point where she quit giving interviews and some more present day stories of her. When I first started the biography I was surprised by how novel-like Shields managed to make it. He did a great job setting up the scene of Harper Lee as a child living in a small town called Monroeville, Alabama. While most of the images were probably created by Shields himself I think there was still some truth in them.

What really amazed me about this book was how much of To Kill a Mockingbird is based on Harper Lee's own life. Her father was a lawyer and the character of Atticus is loosely based on him. Scout is really based on Harper Lee herself, who was a tomboy and had a quick mouth as a child. Dill is based on Harper Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote who was also handed around to relatives like a bowl of mashed potatoes and was a bit eccentric as a child. What I gathered from the book is that the case in the book is based off a couple of cases and experiences Harper Lee had as a child. It was really interesting for me to finish To Kill a Mockingbird and then move on to this book because I saw where so many of the ideas came from. Shields also pulls out quotes from the book and since I'd just finished it I could remember exactly where the quotations came from which gave them a little more context in the biography.

Harper Lee attended University of Alabama where she was a writer and editor on a school publication called the Rammer Jammer. While this section was interesting because I got to see some early writing of Harper Lee's I think it dragged on a bit too long. There is also a section about Harper Lee's involvement in the research of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which at first is fascinating but turns into a big yawn rather quickly. It's 45 pages! The book is only 280-some pages! I felt like I was reading about Truman Capote and not about Harper Lee for 1/5 of the book. I think that chapter was necessary but really needed to be weeded down. The portrait I came away with was not very different from the portrait I had going into the book, but it was nice to read the story of how To Kill a Mockingbird came to be. There is one point in the biography where Shields makes the suggestion that Harper Lee might be a bit of a one-trick pony. She was asked to submit a short story to a magazine and wrote what sounded like a short story version of To Kill a Mockingbird. He uses this as a possible suggestion for why she has never published a book since To Kill a Mockingbird. I thought this was an interesting idea although I think a lot of authors write similar stories in multiple books.

I give this biography a C.

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you make a purchase using one of my links I will earn a small percentage which will then go back into this blog.

This weekend I'm joining over one hundred blogs in the Got Books? event where we are all giving away some books to our lovely readers, new and old. This is really my first book giveaway and I put a lot of thought into the books I wanted to give away. One of them is a book I continuously talk about even though I've never reviewed it here and the other is a book I read when I first started blogging and it's one of my favorite books I've read since I started blogging. So what books am I talking about?

The first book is Notes From No Man's Land by Eula Biss. This is the book I haven't reviewed on here since I read it over a year ago before I even had a blog. I have talked about one of Eula Biss's essays though, The Pain Scale. This is a fantastic book of essays that I think a lot of you would enjoy. It deals with race, gender, human differences, and America. I mean, I read it over a year ago and I'm still talking about it, so that has to tell you it's pretty good right?

The second book I'm giving away is another work of nonfiction, The Moon, Come to Earth by Philip Graham. This is a book that came out of Graham's McSweeney's dispatches from Lisbon, Portugal. It's a travel narrative, but different from a lot of travel narratives I've read because it's about Graham's experience traveling with his family. The story actually really comes away from being a simple travel narrative and becomes more about the experience of being a parent. I posted a review back in November when I was still trying to figure out this whole blogging business. It was the tenth review I ever wrote on here! How crazy is that. Anyway, I also posted about a reading of his, which I attended.

If you'd like to enter (and I really hope you do!) just fill out the form below. You can enter for one book or both. The contest is open until Sunday, July 25 at MIDNIGHT Central Time. You can earn extra entries by being a follower or by tweeting, but you don't need to be a follower to enter the contest. This is only open to U.S./Canada.

This giveaway is closed! Thanks for entering!

This giveaway is closed! Thanks for entering!