The Inheritance of Loss

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted.  Truth be told- I was sick with Lyme disease.  There are some great Lyme books out there, but right now I’m going to talk about a good piece of fiction:  The Inheritance of Loss by Kirin Desai.

I chose to take this book home based on the name of the author, which I think is beautiful.  But I found the book is beautiful too, and sad, and transporting.  It takes place in the Kalimpong section of India near the Himilayan region. A young orphaned girl, really maybe nearly a woman, is sent to live with her retired, reclusive for less grandfather. 

 The book starts off with a robbery and a description of how their once wealthly house and manor, Cho Oyu, is falling apart: leaking roof, few possessions of worth, little outside contact.  The young woman, Sai, falls in love with her tutor who joins revolutionary forces and becomed disgusted with the Western influences to Sai and grandfather.  The tutor betrays Sai’s family by disclosing their possession of several antique guns and liquor which are robbed. 

 A parallel story follows Biju, the grandfather’s cook’s son who is working in restaurants, illegally in Manhattan.  He winds up working at an Indian restaurant for less than minimum wage, sleeping on the tables at night.  After suffering a crippling accident he returns home with all the riches his small savings can garner.  On his way to Kalimpong, he is robbed and left penniless and naked.  This is how he arrives at Cho Oyu and you can’t help but wonder if Biju and Sai become a couple.

 Some of the wonderful things about this book are the relationships of the people which although foreign to me because of cultural differences, feel so tangible.  In addition, the scenery is vivid, the swelling forest around Kalimpong, the wet dripping weather, the hot flashes of social unrest.  At certain points reading the Indian English, I was actually hearing Indian voices in my head.

 If you want an escape that’s not too uplifting, I recommend.

tea parties

Maybe you’re not the tea party type.  I know I’m not.  But, alas, with a 5 year old girl in the house, I’m likely to be pulled into these things grudgingly.   Now for our three-year-old’s birthday I find myself turning to The Tea Party Book by Lucille Recht Penner. 

This book consists of recipes and craft ideas for themed tea parties including Teddy Bear Tea, Valentine Tea, Tea by the Sea, A Japanese Tea Party, Royal Tea Party, Full-Moon Tea Party, Garden Tea Party, Tiny Tea and Rainy Day Tea.   We’ve tried the Valentine Tea.  We made heart shaped sandwiches and pink pudding.     The sandwiches were creamcheese and strawberry and they were disgusting.  I recommend creamcheese and jelly instead. 

Tomorrow we’re making Tea by the Sea for Ulysses.  It recommends lemondade with lemon slices, mini hot dogs and icecream sandies and some other trappings like fishbowl centerpieces.  We are going to add an indoor kiddy pool for a winter swim but we won’t be going through the extensive shenanigans to create the indoor fishbowl.

 So, like all good recipe books, you must pick and choose.  I find that the themes are good to a point, after that you have to improvise.  But the book is well-organized and easy to flip through for a child.  It’s nicely illustrated so it’s fun for a kid to look through and pick out ideas.  If anything the difficulty will be keeping them to one or two good ideas and then following through.  I recommend the book for any family with a child or as a gift, perhaps with a teaset accompanying it.

picture books for grown ups

Lately we’ve seen quite a few books that cover very difficult, complicated adult subjects presented in the form of a picture book.  The first of these to come to us was The Arrival, by Shaun Tan (2006).  This 9×12 hardcover addresses immigration from the perspective of an immigrant father who comes to the New World to start a new life and bring his young wife and child over from the Old Country.  It is largely based on images and ideas from the mass immigration from Europe during the early 1900s, with hints of modernity if not a future world.  But the message is the same whether the past, present or future: immigrating to a new country is entering an alien world with different language, civil space and even food.  This book portrays the difficulty of entering the New World through beautiful black and white drawings without the complication of text which brings home the immigrant’s isolation in a land with a foriegn language

The next picture book to come was Peter Sis’s The Wall: Growing Up Behind The Iron Curtain (2007).  This 9×12 hardcover book appears as a variety of cartoon-like images and full page art interspersed with text throughout.  The reader is instantly transported to Budapest during the 1960s seeing the world through the eyes of Sis as a teenager.  The juxtaposition of the horrors of facism and the beauty of art during beginning in free love 1960s and continuing until the triumphant fall of the wall in 1989.  This book is a pleasure. 

The last book in this description is Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir by Martin Lemelman (2006).  I haven’t read this smaller format hardcover 7.75×11 book yet so I can only describe my anticipation of it.  The book contains drawings of Lemelman’s mother Gusta telling the story of her family’s tribulations during the Holocaust.  The art is absolutely beautiful and the wonderful pen and ink drawings are interspersed with real photos that bring the reality of this true story home.  I can’t wait to read it and I will update you soon.

First Posting

So, we were standing in the dining room and I said to my honey (the heart and mind of the Inquiring Minds Bookstore) that The Last Treasure was a really good chapter book.  He said that it’s not considered a chapter book, it’s really young adult.   I told him that we really should start a blog and he said do it. 

So here I am doing it.  The purpose of this blog will be to highlight the books we read in our large, eccentric family. 

 The Last Treasure, Janet S. Anderson (2003) is a story about two cousins who never met being reunited in the hometown of their family history.  They spend a summer bringing family members who’ve grown distant together and they uncover a hidden family treasure.

 Both my 5 and my 8 year old enjoyed this book.  But, more importantly, as the adult reading–I also enjoyed it.  So, we can can give this book a rating of recommend with enthusiasm.