Susan Richards ShreveBesprekingen

31 copies

Kids have to deal with a lot of things in their lives that they have no control over. Some of these things they understand and some they only partially understand, while others may be completely beyond their grasp. In Susan Shreve's novel, Blister, tween main character Alyssa is faced with all of the above and has to muster the resilience to make it through.

The book opens with the stillborn birth of Alyssa Reed's little sister. This loss cracks open the already fragile state of her family's life together with her mother plunging into deep depression and her father moving out (and moving on with someone else). Having to start a new school on top of the loss of the baby and her parents' separation is a lot for any one fifth grader to handle. Renaming herself Blister, she decides she's going to do things her way from now on, including stealing clothes, makeup, and jewelry from her father's girlfriend in the hopes of breaking them up, trying out for the cheerleading squad, even if it is just a popularity contest, and generally taking advantage of the neglect of her parents. She's also going to create a new persona in school. Luckily Blister has her grandmother to lean on when she really needs to and to explain in an age appropriate way the things that Blister just doesn't completely understand.

There were so many issues here, grief, depression, a mental health crisis, divorce, infidelity, cliques, neglect, and more, that it felt like a sort of pile on even though Blister didn't realize the extent of the everything. She also came across as rather precocious and unrealistic for an up to now fairly sheltered ten year old. She shows her resilience and elasticity in the end but even that felt sad on top of so much other sadness along the way. I'm uncertain if I'd hand this to kids Blister's age, not because the issues are tough but because the nuances make it more mature. Tweens probably won't recognize that baby Lila Rose was supposed to save the Reed's faltering marriage nor the depth of the neglect Blister experiences from both of her parents (her mother because of her deep depression and her father because of his affair) but that doesn't make this tale of a young girl trying to find herself in the midst of such terrible tragedy and sadness any less troubling.½

Didn't really manage to finish this and since it's a bookcrossing book, decided to release it instead of carrying it back to Europe...

Not a bad book, really, I just didn't connect with any of the characters. I remember liking a tv show they made from the book, which is why I wanted to read it in the first place. But the book just didn't hook me and I look at it like "do I really have to...". So, I decided I don't have to. Hopefully someone will find it and appreciate it more than me.

It’s 1973 and the Watergate scandal is on everyone’s lips. Lucy Painter, a children’s book illustrator and single mother of two, leaves New York and the married father of her children to return to Washington, DC, to the neighborhood where she grew up and the house where her father committed suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of her father’s death or the identity of their own father. As new neighbors enter their insular lives, her family’s safety and stability become threatened. Beautifully told, You Are the Love of My Life is a story of how shame leads to secrets, secrets to lies, and how lies stand in the way of human connection.

Bottom line. “A Country of Strangers” is an intriguing novel, made so by the writer’s imagination and skillful narration.

The characters make the novel. In varying degrees every character is flawed. Before I discuss them, I need to establish the novel’s setting.

Moses Bellows and his wife Miracle and Moses’s brother Guy and his wife Aida are tenants living on a former slave plantation in Virginia twenty miles south of Washington, D. C. The time span of the novel, not counting back stories, is August 1942 to July 1943. John Spencer, the last surviving heir of the family that had owned the property dating back before the Civil War, had disappeared mysteriously January 12, 1935. Moses Bellows, first, and then his wife, brother, and sister-in-law had henceforth lived in the plantation house as if they were the owners. Local whites were furious. In 1939 they formed a committee to find a way to have Spencer declared legally deceased so that the property could be sold and the Bellows evicted. In January 1942 Spencer was declared dead and the house and property were put up for sale. A mid-westerner named Charley Fletcher purchased it.

Moses Bellows. Aida, Moses’s sister-in-law, describes Moses early on as a man who “could make a grizzly have a heart attack on the spot if he’d a mind to.” Physically imposing, prideful, angry with his station in life, Moses, presumably, had been the last man to see John Spencer alive. Spencer had been having sex with Miracle, who suspects that Moses murdered him. Answering her accusations, Moses says that they had not yet found Spencer’s body. Until they do, Spencer is not dead. Therefore, “if he isn’t dead, I didn’t kill him.”

Miracle Bellows. Dutiful, loving, given the name “Miracle” by Moses to replace her real name – “Mary” – because it was a white person’s name, Miracle had been quite young when she and Moses had met. We are told that she had given Moses a picture of Jesus “to keep him pure when she was lamb-innocent and twelve years old and he was twenty, raging with sex and fury at being too long boxed in on one farm in a small town without a future. Furious that their life together had been reduced to eating dinner together “face to face, across the table, but without a word – Miracle looking out the window with her dark sorrowful eyes as if the rest of her life had been snatched away by the absence of John Spencer,” Moses, “with an anger finally too large for the clapboard house, moved into Spencer’s house.” Contributing additionally to her melancholy is that she and Moses have not been able to conceive a child.

Guy Bellows. The author describes him early in the novel as somebody who “did not wish to behave grown-up except when he was drinking.” Inebriated, he became unpredictable, dangerous. A slow but dependable construction worker, “a simple man, easily led, essentially sweet and without complication,” Guy “wasn’t even bothered by the inner plight of being born colored in northern Virginia as Moses was. He had only one Golden Rule … He would not tolerate ridicule. That was that. Not for himself or of his wife or Moses or Miracle.” If anyone made fun of any of them, Guy had declared, he would kill him. He had his shotgun handy for that purpose.

Aida Bellows. Flighty, prone to drinking, hot-blooded, “full of sweetness and temper and trouble at the same time,” Aida “had married Guy Bellows when she was eighteen, and from the start she took charge of him, which was not difficult, because Guy Bellows had locked in step at eleven years old.”

Prudential Dargon. Thirteen-year-old Prudential, staying with her mother’s sister Miracle and Moses, is pregnant. She refuses to identify the impregnator, but narrative hints impugn her father. Miracle and Moses plan to take the child as their own after Prudential gives birth. Ulysses Dargon, Prudential’s father, “was a large angry man … so strong he had a reputation in southern South Carolina for it. But what struck everyone in Okrakan about Ulysses was the clear fact that he would do anything. He had no rules, and when he drank, which was plenty, he beat his wife.” Fiercely independent, Prudential plans to live in New York City after her child’s birth to pursue a career on the radio.

Charley Fletcher. A middle class white man whose mother had insisted that he had a great gift to provide the world, a successful Minneapolis journalist, he had been called to Washington, D. C. after the attack on Pearl Harbor to hold an important position in the newly created newspaper censorship department. Several years earlier he had married a Danish actress, Lara Bergmann, after meeting her at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Seeking a quiet life, a refuge away from the capitol where Lara and her daughter Kate, born out of wedlock, would feel secure, Charley purchased John Spencer’s property. Charley reveals himself to be an insecure liberal. Daunted that he has been turned down for service in the army (he has flat feet), he considers himself inferior to his competitive Minneapolis newspaper colleague, photographer Tom Elliott, who has been accepted into the Air Force. Shamed that he had been declared 4-F, suspecting that Lara and Tom were lovers, Charley had become, too often, impotent. Desiring a singular achievement, Charley wants his family and the Bellows to become friends, socialize, see each other as equals. Moses rebuffs him. Moses’s mother had often admonished Moses about heeding “boundaries,” rules, “how it was important to know the rules and play by them.” Moses did not want to be Charley Fletcher’s or any white man’s friend. Fletcher was violating black and white boundaries.

Lara Fletcher. Unhappy about being isolated on the newly purchased property, desirous of the social life to which she was accustomed, Lara, initially, is resentful of her changed existence. Early in their marriage Lara and Charley had been ardent lovers. She “did not know when the mischief and romance between them had faded, when the love-making had changed. First there were long lapses as if their marriage had become familiar and ordinary and then the kind of awkwardness of characters in a comedy of manners and then after Sam [their infant son] was on the way, the romance was gone altogether.” One hour each weekday while left alone in her private room she daydreamed about Tom Elliott. In her dreams she had been imprisoned by the Nazis in 1940, kept in solitary confinement “because she was beautiful and therefore dangerous.” Before she had been imprisoned, she had met Tom Elliott, a young American photographer. They had fallen in love. The war over, released, returned to Denmark, she is visited by Elliott, malnourished, ill, in need of care. She touches a scar across his left cheek. It disappears. He declares that she is magical. “He took the book from her stomach, put it on the floor, and dropped the sides of her robe.”

Kate Fletcher. Upon arrival at the Spencer property, Kate wants to become acquainted with Prudential. Repeatedly scorned, Kate matches Prudential’s combativeness. An incident at the Quaker private school that Kate attends seals Kate and Prudential’s eventual friendship. Pole Trickett, a male classmate, had pulled Kate behind a bush on the school grounds. Covering her mouth with a hand, he had exposed himself. She had bit him. A day later the principal, responding to Pole’s mother’s complaint, had called her into his office to answer for her behavior. Kate had stated that Pole “took his sticking-out penis from his pants and tried to put my face on it.” The principal, offended by her use of the word “penis,” had washed her mouth out with soap. Encountering Prudential on the way home, Kate declares that she is quitting the school. She states the reason. “I had no idea that kind of misfortune could happen to a white girl, “Prudential comments. Kate responds: “Then you don’t know much. Misfortunes happen to everyone. Even in America.”

Even though they are fully developed, interesting to analyze characters, I dud not empathize all that much with Susan Shreve’s characters. The exception was Prudential. Victimized more than the others by circumstances beyond her ability to affect, she is not afraid to strike back against injustice. While a crowd of whites waits outside the plantation house to witness the Bellowses vacate John Spencer’s house prior to the Fletcher family’s arrival, Prudential leaves through the front door, advances out toward the crowd to the sign near the road that reads “Elm Grove, 1803,” brings it back into the house, paints on the back of the sign “Skunk Farm, 1942,” takes it back close to the road and repositions it, her relabeling faced toward the road. Several months later, having sought him out on the private school’s grounds, she throws Clorox in Pole Trickett’s face.

The author’s writing is solid, in places lyrical. The characters are authentic, imaginatively conceived. Susan Richards Shreve is indeed a professional writer. As I continued to read, however, I became increasingly impatient. Where is this story going? I wondered. It depicts the gulf of understanding between blacks and whites, yes, but any novel that involves the races particularly at that time depicts that. What else? What large purpose? The author chooses a climax. Consequences follow. The end. All of it, I felt, a bit contrived.

This is a story of a middle school boy named Jonah and his struggle with trying to process the emotions and adjustments to life with a newly-single mom, new school, new friends, and his desire to become a famous TV talk show host. It is a story of how one boy reinvents himself, and a little bit of the world with him.

I got this book at a library book sale because I really enjoyed the cover. This is the first book I've read by Shreve, but not her first -- I'm surprised I haven't heard of her sooner, but I plan on reading more of her books.

I got this book at a library book sale because I really enjoyed the cover. This is the first book I've read by Shreve, but not her first -- I'm surprised I haven't heard of her sooner, but I plan on reading more of her books.

(32) Strange little book. A Kindle Lender's Library freebie from the Nancy Pearl Book Lust rediscoveries series. Books from the fairly recent past that are out of publication that have been re-released with her endorsement, introduction, and discussion questions. I have had read a few of this series and for the most part they are pretty good.

The imagery was actually quite haunting - An American ex-pat family are traveling through Italy. The parents of 4 small children just happen to be in the lunch car of the train when a random terrorist bomb explodes there leaving the children orphans. This is the story of what happens to those children as they grow up under the ever watchful eye of the oldest brother Sam who was seven at the time and the only one with permanent memories of their parents and the accident. It is a great premise, but then the book takes an odd turn. The children grow to adults and actors in a comedy series loosely based on their absent parents. Their adult lives seemed a bit surreal and much of the poignancy was lost for me.

Overall, this was an interesting, fairly well-written read. There was much about it that I liked and certain haunting contextual details that were well done. I wish the novel had went in different directions; it had much more potential in my humble opinion. The books in this series so far have been good, light reads (and the price [free] is right) through Amazon Prime!

Not as heavy/ serious as I expected (def. ok to be shelved as Juv rather than YA). ?�Ellie's parents are sometimes amazingly insightful, and other times implausibly dense. ?áFor example, they keep leaving Ellie home alone, when she just turned twelve, with nothing to do... *of course* she's going to get into mischief. ?áThe ending is simple, too. ?áEverybody wins. ?áFine.

Some good writing. ?áFor example, we can tell Ellie is coming into puberty, because even though she has a reputation as a cheerful person, she's been sad lately: Nothing bad happens to me but the sadness comes creeping over my shoulder like an insect. ?áSometimes it just floats away, and other times it hangs out driving me crazy until I do something. ?áGo on a bike ride... or call up my friend...."

And for some reason I realized something from this book that I never had before, at least not fully. ?áThe popular girls in school, in their clique, are to be pitied not only because they have to play the mean games to try to stay 'on the inside' but they also have to totally subsume their own identity: "The popular girls in the sixth grade dress alike in tight jeans and little T-shirts with flowers in full bloom painted on the back and clunky shoes." ?áIt's not (in any school, in any era) necessarily an outfit they'd choose for themselves, but a uniform saying 'I'm imprisoned by my desire to be a member of this clique.""½

Shreve sure packs a punch in her short books about tween kids. ?�She doesn't waste time with exposition or explication of inner lives, she keeps the focus on the kid and so we don't understand more about the adults than what they share with the kid, and yet there's a lot hinted at, a lot of stuff that could be discussed.

I'd love to discuss this with kids. ?áDo they think it was wrong for Alyssa to steal Tamara's things? ?á(probably) ?áWould they cut Alyssa some slack, given what she's dealing with? ?á(I don't know...)

Do they understand why cheerleading is such a big deal in fifth grade, and why it's a popularity contest? ?áAssuming they don't think it should be, do they have suggestions for reform, esp. given that the teachers and staff are in on the scheme?

Note the different covers between this and Under the Watsons' Porch. ?áThis is cartoony, pink, simple; the other is subtle, almost somber, photo w/no ppl. ?áI think publishers aren't sure how to market Shreve's juveniles. ?áThe kids get in trouble, in more trouble than I did when I was a teen, but still they are kids and, ultimately, it's manageable kid-sized trouble. ?áThe books dance on the edge of being noticed by righteous community censors, but I don't think they cross anyone's line. ?áI will continue to look for more by Shreve.½

I loved that the teacher had a life challenge of her own.  I loved when Joshua's best friend sneakily 'threw' the ball game (read the book to find out how and why).  Joshua's family is nice, but not absolutely perfect.  I also love how the bully gets a come-uppance.  Sure, the theme is obvious, but it's still a wonderful story.  I think young readers who are struggling will empathize and enjoy the story, and as a woman about the age of the teacher, who would be delighted to tutor motivated children after school, I found it absolutely darling.  And it's concise - it gets to the point, tyvm.

As a kid growing up, I relished the twice-annual Scholastic Book Fair. Ghost Cats was a purchase from this fair, probably when I was nine or ten. I had few pets and thus didn't relate as well with the loss of them, but this story of family and change was one that stuck with my nine-year-old self... enough so that at 26, I still have this old paperback sitting on my shelf.

Very well written, disturbing story½

I loved the connections in this story and everything that happened within it. I never lost interest throughout all the women's lives.

The book is about a girl who want to do better then boys on soccer, and actually she did after her effort. It is a nice book for young girls.

This book follows the story of a friendship of a hearing-impaired girl, Lucy, and her average friend, Eliza. As soon as they get to enter middle school Eliza begins to realize how much she is changing and becomes very self conscious while Lucy doesn't feel any different at all. When auditions for a play come around, Eliza, is too self-conscious to participate while Lucy, who has no idea what her voice even sounds like it is enthused and enthralled about auditioning. This story follows the friendship of these two girls through the middle school trials and tribulations.

My blog post about this book is at this link.

This was a nice story and very much suited for the middle school student. I read it first before passing it along to my 11-year-old daughter because it is designated a Youth Romance and...I....just...wasn't...sure, you got me? Turns out it is fine for the preteen because it is more about two kids who bond over a summer and become best friends. It has the youthful twinges of romance and if they were a couple years older the story would turn out differently, but as it is, it is very innocent. I actually enjoyed this very much and was intrigued by the boy's story. Even though he was dubbed the troublemaker, I actually liked him better than the female protagonist. Hmm. Go figure.

This book surprised me in that I began thinking it would be a romance, but, in the end, it turned out to be more about relationships in families and neighborhoods. It seemed to have developed the theme that everyone looks great from afar, but, up close, we all have flaws. Lucy is the unmarried mother of two children, Maggie and Felix, entangled in an affair with a married man, Reuben. She returns to her hometown and the house in which she found her father's body when she was twelve. The neighborhood women meet daily for coffee and sweets and everyone thinks they know one another, but they all have their secrets. Zee is the woman who seems to be the one person who can take care of everything, but even she has a something that she is hiding. Lucy must work through her relationship with her children, especially Maggie, and Reuben, as well as a budding friendship/romance with her neighbor, August, who has secrets of his own. This book was an examination of relationships and the public and private faces that people have. I received this book as a Good Reads Early Reviewer book, and enjoyed reading it.

Despite the real life origins of the tale, a lot of this story just didn't ring true to me. The dialogue was often stilted, and the characters a little one note. It does read fairly easily, however, and the fantasy of going to Europe and having special attention shown to oneself is one to which lots of readers can relate.

This novel tells the story of an insecure young lady who needs something beautiful made just for her to build her confidence and has a loving, outgoing mother who has the perfect plan. I would use this book for independent reading suggestions for middle school proficient readers to compliment a lesson based on self-esteem and confidence and overcoming adversity. These are the Central issues addressed.

Yes, picardyrose, that's about it; but well enough written for me to finish it in two or three sessions, "to see what happens". Will seek out more of Shreve. Enjoyed finding and reading this one in Myopic Books, on a great holiday in Chicago, November 2010.

Opera singer married to nasty man in a wheelchair follows an Irish actor disguised as a priest, seeking revenge for his brother's death. True love conquers all.

This is one of the most thought-provoking books about polio that I have read, and I read a pile of polio books a few years ago while researching a book I was writing. But Shreve's book cuts to the heart of how children afflicted with the dread disease were often isolated from their families, and hospitalized for months and sometimes years, undergoing operation after operation, "stabilizing" joints and "transplanting" muscles. Shreve herself endured some of these surgeries, taking for granted that they would help, although the truth is most of these surgeries were experimental in nature and probably were not all that useful. Shreve does not dwell on that part of her time at FDR's "polio haven" though, choosing instead to remember how she coped, between the ages of eleven and thirteen, with being on her own and wrestling with feelings of sexual awakening and homesickness. She chose to be optimistic and useful for the most part, but she also was something of a rebel, gaining a reputation as someone who stirred things up on the sprawling hospital campus. It was during the endless hours of waiting, treatment and healing that she first discovered the pleasure of her own imagination and decided to be a writer. She also considered larger questions - flirting for a time with conversion to Catholicism, partly perhaps she had a crush on the priest who was the chaplain at Warm Springs. Shreve somehow survived her long internment at Warm Springs, and perhaps it even made her a stronger person, although this is a question she still wrestles with, as she continues to speculate on her relationship with her long-gone parents. I stayed up late last night to finish this book. There is much to be learned from Shreve's account of her time at Warm Springs, and not just about polio. For this is a book about growing up, and about finding your place in an often confusing society. Shreve is now a very respected writer and teacher, the author of dozens of books for both adults and children. I admire her tremendously for all these accomplishments, but particularly for finally writing this book.