In which your faithful Library Mama learns, once again, that battle scenes are not quite her thing. This audio series is on loan from my dear brother-in-law. My love and he both listened happily to the whole series. But, since they don’t write book reviews, here are my thoughts on it.
The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by Jack Campbell. Narrated by Christian Rummel. The Lost Fleet is a science-fiction series based on two interesting ideas: What if a long-lost hero of legend, one whom people always said would come back at the hour of greatest need, really did come back? And what if what he came back to was not an immediate stunning victory, but just trying to rescue the shattered remains of a battle fleet from the middle of enemy territory? John Geary was in suspended animation in his escape pod for a hundred years before he was picked up by another Alliance vessel. While he slept, the war with the Syndics or Syndicate Worlds that was just beginning when he was last conscious built into a constant way of life. And, his final actions grew into the legend of Black Jack Geary, the best commander ever, whom the Living Stars would send back to help the Alliance some day. Soon after he awakened, the Alliance Fleet suffered a crushing defeat near the Syndicate home world. The Syndic CEO murdered the Alliance leaders in full view of their troops, unwittingly putting Captain Geary back in command of the fleet. He then vows, against all odds, to get the fleet back home again. The book has a lot going for it – an intruiging premise, interesting reflections on the cultural changes that might happen with a culture at war for a century and Captain Geary’s clashes with that culture. There are the politics of Captain Geary both not wanting to believe in himself as a legend and needing to use that reputation to lead the fleet, much of which is inclined to distrust him. Campbell has a good theory of space movement and, as a former Navy man himself, a good command of tactics which he is able to translate well into three-dimensional space. This is plot-driven fiction with a good setting and decent if not terribly nuanced characters. Christian Rummel’s narration sounds somewhat harsh to me, but suits the military nature of the book well. If closely-fought space battles with some politics float your boat, this series is for you.
Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
The Andrews Sisters The Andrews Sisters If you’re looking for some bright and cheerful music to match the spring weather (or maybe make it feel like spring even if the weather isn’t cooperating), look no further than the Andrews Sisters. Their two most famous hits are “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen”, both great songs. The tight, three-part harmony and the swingin’ style carries through the whole album, though a hint of old-fashioned racial attitudes are unfortunately apparent in “Rum and Coca Cola.” This particular album could also be improved with some liner notes – I had to go to 
Cleaning Nabokov’s House by Leslie Daniels Barb has left her controlling husband. Now she’s stranded in upstate New York in a town where everyone knows and loves her experson and could care less about her. She’s lost custody of her children. She’s jobless and homeless and holding on to sanity with a very tenuous grip. This could be the beginning of a serious work of Women’s Fiction, the kind that Oprah would want to talk about and which would require boxes of tissues. Instead, Barb’s journey to pulling her life together and getting her children back is hilarious. It’s still women’s fiction, just not the depressing kind. Barb’s first step towards getting her footing back is selling her reliable car (keeping the unreliable one) to make a down payment on a small house which turns out to have belonged to Nabokov. In this house, wedged behind a drawer, she finds a manuscript which might or might not have been written by Nabokov. Her efforts to get this published start pushing her back towards sanity, making her friends in the process. She also comes up with a scheme to make enough money to win her children back, a scheme that I totally did not see coming and which gives the book both its silliest and most serious moments, a scheme to make more of the women of the small town where she now lives happy. It’s sexy without being explicit, and Barb’s feelings run true even as the plot runs towards the unbelievable comedic. It made for excellent hospital reading for me, as we were once again stuck there, but I’m hoping that you, dear reader, can enjoy it under more pleasant circumstances.
Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente One of my favorite books growing up was a collection of Russian fairy tales – translated from the French, it turns out, with beautiful illustrations by Zvorykin (here, Koschei the Deathless carrying off Maria Morevna, the beautiful Tsarevna). And any regular Library Mama reader will know how I love a good fairy tale turned novel. Well. “Koschei the Deathless”, more or less, set in early twentieth-century Russia, and told from the point of view of Marya Morevna, rather than the more usual Ivan. (For those not familiar with Russian fairy tales, Ivan usually plays the role of a Jack.) It’s a darkly beautiful tale, filled with sex, blood, suffering, and, oddly, birds. 
While Koschei the Deathless is usually a flat-out villain, everything in this book is painted in murky in-between shades. Koschei is still cruel, yes, still a seducer of beautiful young women. But he is also the embodiment of Life, engaged in the eternal struggle against his brother, Death. We will say that the beginning of the last century in Russia was a particularly rough time for Life. And there is metafiction, too, as Marya Morevna knows the old stories of Koschei. Evan as she loves him and struggles to complete the tasks set to be able to marry him, she knows that in her story, one day an Ivan will come to tempt her away from Koschei. It’s more about the difficulty of the choices that we make than the simple morality of the classic tales, and that makes it a fairy tale for those able to deal with the ambiguity of life.
Magical Tales from Many Lands Retold by Margaret Mayo. Illustrated by Jane Ray I’m always on the lookout for good stories to read curled up with my son. Key features would include stories that work well read aloud, hopefully short enough to read at bedtime or before little sister becomes indistractable, and good pictures. I’ve loved Jane Ray’s work in Berlie Doherty’s Fairy Tales for years, but only recently found this earlier work. I still love Jane Ray’s style, folk-art like with lots of gold highlights. In this book, she blends her disctinctive style with elements of the art of the culture she’s representing to create work that’s both cohesive throughout the book and reflective of the culture each story is from. The stories are Arabic (“The Lemon Princess”), Japanese, Chinese, Russian (a slightly less frightening “Baba Yaga Bony-Legs” than I’m used to), African (a version of “Unanana and the Elephant,” a story I remember from one of my favorite childhood storybooks of feminist folk tales.), African-American, Native American, French and more. It’s a good mix of cultures, and while the collection doesn’t feature all women, there are enough stories of strong women that the collection never feels bogged down with outdated attitudes about women. They are well told, with lots of the repetitive language that works so well for story-telling. Although perhaps less interesting to children, I really appreciated her notes on each tale, explaining the source or sources and her deviations from that version. It’s from 1993, so currently out of print, but still available used for reasonable prices and of course free from libraries.
Cold Magic by Kate Elliot Catherine, known as Cat, is a young woman of impoverished good blood attending University with her cousin Bee, with whom she has lived since her parents’ death when she was seven. It’s the Industrial Revolution (one could call it steampunk if one wished, though there is not so very much steam power in it); today’s lecture is on the science of air ships, one of which will be available for viewing that evening. That was the plan, anyway, until a cold mage arrives at their house with a claim on her, the oldest Hassi Barahal daughter. From there, things heat up, despite the cold surrounding cold mages. Cat is forced to leave her family and make several discoveries: family secrets that leave her wondering if she can trust anyone, the unpleasant plans the cold mages have for her, and previously unknown relations. It’s an alternate earth with a lovely deep culture. The cold mages are a union of Celtic and Mande African formed a few centuries back when the Mande nobility were forced to leave Africa because of a plague of ghouls, while Cat is of Phonecian heritage. Now the cold mages are the upholders of the current powers, opposed to science and industry and opposed by a growing populist movement. Cat is a delightful character, prickly enough not to set off goody-two-shoes alarms, yet not so headstrong as to make the reader want to bash heads against the wall in frustration. And the plot took enough twisty turns that I was frequently surprised at what happened next. As is typical for the genre, this is the first in a series, so you can choose to wait to read the book until the rest are out or be impatient with me. 
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. Read by Cassandra Campbell with Bahni Turpin.
The Blue Jay’s Dance by Louise Erdrich In this book, Erdrich, author of several authors focusing on Native Americans and prairie life, writes about the first year of her daughter’s life. Although she says the baby in the book is a composite of all three of her daughters, in the book it sounds like she is writing about the youngest of her three daughters. It’s poetic and reflective, honest about the difficulty of parenting a baby while at the same time stunningly beautiful. It doesn’t hurt that Erdrich lives in a cabin in the woods, and the baby’s stages are mixed in with large doses of the natural life outside their window and the woods through which they walk. She writes, as an example of the tough times, of how hard it is to keep a sense of self apart from the baby, how easy suicide seems after weeks of sleepless nights – only her self is so absorbed in the baby that she feels that she has no self of her own left to kill. On the plus side, she writes about breastfeeding, how many great romantic writers’ deep inarticulate longings were really for that feeling of unity and transcendence that breastfeeding brings. Despite the poetry and deep thoughts, the book is slim enough to get through easily, an important consideration for sleep-deprived new parents. The saddest part for me was knowing that the happy blended family described in this book fell apart just a few years later, giving the already fleeting pleasures of a baby and the changing of the seasons an even more ephemeral feeling. 
Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein Why are girls only allowed to wear or use pink anymore? And why are girls of preschool age suddenly obsessed with Disney Princesses, in all their sparkly but bland glory? Journalist Orenstein sets out to investigate these questions in this fast-reading book which nevertheless has some good scholarly underpinnings. Many of the ideas are not new – the fine line, for example, between telling girls that they are pretty and that they need to be pretty. But Orenstein’s exploration gets everything nicely together in one place, and her personal explorations are entertaining. She talks to Disney executives and visits the American Girl store in Manhattan, noting the dichotomy between the affordable glitz of the Disney and the hugely expensive old-fashioned simplicity of American Girls. She visits the Toy Fair and talks with toy marketers who make everything in pink, and say they are just “honoring play patterns”. She visits child beauty pageants and talks to parents there. She reads unsanitized fairy tales to her daughter and watches for nightmares. The chapter “From Wholesome to Whoresome” examines the sad fate of former tween stars, following which she looks at the on-line culture and teens’ place in it. Parents of girls of all ages will pay almost anything for the illusions of innocence and protection that are marketed in varying aspects to girls of all ages. Although many of the major arguments were familiar, I did learn some new and interesting if troubling facts: Kindergarten girls when asked to write a sentence in which they pretend to be something limit themselves to one of four choice: princess, fairy, ballerina or butterfly, where boys’ choices are much more varied. Toy choices, we know, seem quite hard-wired to gender, even across species, but there is nothing else but mate selection that is as tied to gender. I was really disturbed to read that recent studies asking teens and college girls about their own sexual feelings have gotten answered with how the girls think they look, with no consciousness of their own possibility for arousal. And while I knew that “tweens” as an age group was a recent invention of marketers to create a new market, I hadn’t realized that toddlerhood started the same way a century ago. There are more problems and pitfalls pointed out here than hard-and-fast solutions. I still hope for balance for my daughter and for other girls, for the confidence to be themselves, embracing aspects both traditionally feminine and masculine, and yet still to fit in well enough not be as isolated as I felt especially during my teen years. This is well worth reading for parents and anyone else interested in modern girls. 
Natural Hospital Birth by Cynthia Gabriel Even though I feel quite done with having children, I am fascinated with birth, and I definitely want to be able to recommend good recent books to friends who are having babies. I had pretty low expectations of this book when I picked it up off the waiting-to-be-cataloged cart. The introduction hooked me enough that I checked it out and took it home as soon as it was ready. Gabriel starts off by talking about why people who want to give birth naturally might choose a hospital, even though American hospitals are quite inexperienced with natural births right now. The part that hooked me is that what she tells women is that she aims for a natural birth because she loves it. But, she has excellent creds for writing the book. She’s an anthropologist who worked in Russian hospitals where epidurals are rare, and a doula who attends births in Ann Arbor and therefore, unlike an OB, sees lots of births from start to finish. She advocates using doulas or home-birth midwives to help find the most natural-birth-friendly hospital practice you can, then building support rather than fighting by doing things like bringing in a natural birth story and talking about your hopes for a natural birth each visit. She strongly recommends that unless you are a health care professional yourself, you argue the emotional benefits of a natural birth over the health risks of a medically assisted one. She goes into some depth over writing a birth plan, recommending three separate ones: one for just you, describing your not-reality-tethered dream birth; one for your birth team (husband, doula, whatever friends you invite to help with your birth) detailing what they can do to help with that, such as turning off lights when staff members leave and answering questions on your behalf; and one short, sweet and positive one for the medical staff. Be sure, too, she says, to take a birth class out of the hospital, to help prepare for the tough realities of labor rather than just be educated on the hospital routines. She has sections detailing lots of individual snags you might run into, and longer sections for the tough cases of abuse survivors, multiples, and VBACs. The book is filled with positive birth stories and lots of encouragement. This is a very solid book, highly practical for anyone planning a hospital birth.
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