A compendium of Austen characters, relatives, friends and neighbors highlight Hazel Jones’ look into the subject of Jane Austen & Marriage. As the book proceeds through the steps of acquaintance, engagement, marriage, and even separation, Jones fleshes out the interaction between man and woman in nineteenth-century Britain. Illustrative excerpts from the novels and primary research sources provide a well-rounded, informative basis for her walk up the garden path and down the aisle.
Examining, chapter by chapter, components of relationships, the book begins with “Choice.” We learn that both sexes could, in fact, choose to opt out of the game. Concerns over continual childbearing and the risk of death, some women made the choice to remain single. Due in part to the shortage of men on the homefront (thanks to the Napoleonic Wars), others found the choice made for them. Men in a position to marry, on the other hand, sometimes thought about their incomes and the demands a growing family would make upon it before contemplating marriage. Therefore, the idea of choice concerns much more than the selection of a life-partner.
Jones’ next chapter brings up the point of how “the question” might actually be popped: in person, via letter, via an intermediary. Sadly, she finds little — in conduct literature or letters — to indicate the “traditional” down on bended knee type of proposal. Few readers will have delved into letters and diaries from this period; the timid suitors who chose the letter/intermediary route might therefore come as a pleasant surprise.
Discussions of conduct books point up the idea that such items existed because no one conducted themselves as they “ought” to have done. By looking at the paramount examples valued by these conduct books and juxtaposing them with the reality of relationships recorded in letters, diaries, and biographies, readers realize just how much Austen’s novels were signs of their times.
Two minor points that the writer and/or editor should have attended to are the spellings of Longbourne and Lizzie in place of the standard Longbourn and Lizzy. The fault may lie with Jones’ use of the Penguin edition of Austen novels.
Jane Austen & Marriage may supply few totally new revelations, but as a compendium of love, courtship, and marriage in Austen’s era (as well as family), Jones has provided a particularly useful book. Readers will welcome the author’s friendly style of writing as well as her insight into women like Lydia Bennet, Anne Elliot, and Marianne Dashwood. Highly recommended.
Four full inkwells.
(for more on this book, see Smith and Gosling’s research blog.)
If you are looking for a fresh idea on discipleship, Neil Cole’s book “Search and Rescue” might be just what you are looking for. Cole’s book highlights his primary method of Christian discipleship called “Life Transformation Groups” or LTG’s for short. These groups of 2 to 3 people meet weekly for 3 simple practices. These include: reading scripture, confession of sin, and praying for the lost. Groups meet to ask each other accountability questions of their choosing and to discuss the reading for that week (30+ chapters of bible reading per week!) They then close with prayer for the lost friends and family that are on each person’s prayer card. That’s a simplistic view of the LTG but it’s the heart of the group. When a group grows to 4 or more (sometimes even 3 people), they are encouraged to branch off another group and continue the process. Cole advises that due to the nature of the group’s goals, small is better.
There’s a lot of material in this book. Nearly 2/3 of the content is Cole breaking down the biblical book of Second Timothy as a means of training and discipleship. The remainder of the book is a breakdown on the LTG and how it can be implemented in various churches. Throughout the text, Cole shares stories of his days as a California lifeguard as illustrations of the principles he shares in each chapter. A large appendix concludes the book with various helps to give you ideas on starting your own LTG’s in your circle of friends.
I liked Cole’s challenge to get more people reading larger amounts of scripture. So much of what is passed off as “reading the bible” these days is nothing more than a chapter or two and the hope that something there sticks. Cole promotes the idea of getting the “big picture” message of various biblical books as a means of transforming individuals. For certain, a more detailed study can and should be done of the various passages we read. Cole asserts that this will happen naturally as larger amounts of scripture are read, questions will arise that will bring this discipline about.
All in all, I enjoyed this book. For the ideas in it to work requires dedicated, praying people who will invest in the lives of others. My biggest concern is, will we make that time? It seems more and more, we see superficial connections being made in large services and a lip service small group that glosses over the message of scripture. This is what passes for serious discipleship in many churches these days. Making that personal connection and commitment is what can make all the difference in the life of a new believer. This is what Cole ultimately argues for and in that, I think he is successful.
Some may disagree with his ideas but the think I enjoyed about this book is that it made you think. That’s always a good thing.
Andrew Peterson is a singer, songwriter and poet who in recent years has emerged as the legitimate heir to the legacy of Rich Mullins in Christian music. His thoughtful, theologically-saturated lyrics set to acoustic guitar-driven melodies are compelling and tend to stay with you long after you physically hear them. That is most evident in his Christmas masterpiece, Behold the Lamb of God, but is also true for The Far Country and his most recent recording, Resurrection Letters, Vol. 2.
Peterson is an artist by vocation who is willing to use his considerable creative gifts to express his faith. In recent years, he has been the hub around which a community of like-minded artists (Jill Phillips, Andrew Osenga, Ben Shive and others) have gathered to encourage each other’s work and collaborate on projects. (Check out The Rabbit Room). He has also begun to write in long form through a series of fantasy tales under the broad them of The Wingfeather Saga. The first volume, On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness was published a couple of years ago, and today Book 2—North! Or Be Eaten is released.
North! Or Be Eaten (Waterbrook, 2009) is a rollicking tale, a page-turning adventure that will be a joy for anybody, but just begs for parents and their children to read it out loud and together. It continues the tale of the three Igiby children—Jenner, Tink and leeli—who are heirs to a legendary kingdom, are running for their very lives after an attack by the dreaded Fangs of Dang, and must get to safety in the north on the Ice Prairies. There are chases and betrayals, monsters (toothy cows and a Bomnubble!) and sea dragons, trap doors with secret passageways and forest-dwelling people who are not merry at all, kind-hearted hags and the evil Overseer who steals children, and even an sled ride on ice. This is simply a great story.
Peterson has created another world, much like Lewis’ Narnia or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It has a unique geography and place names, unique animal and plant life—things which are familiar (seas, waterfalls, forests), but are yet different. It has a specific history, with events and kings or enemies in the past that shape the present. It even has a language and stories or art that are unique to this place. So, to enter the story it to be lost in another world, which is the best sort of storytelling. It invites us to bring our own imaginations into the moment of reading..
North! Or be Eaten is clearly built around a quest, a journey of heroic proportions. But on the journey, in the relationships and the challenges, virtues emerge that can shape a heart and a life. Things like courage, sacrifice, respect, forgiveness, wisdom, fidelity, responsibility, tolerance, servanthood and more saturate the story. The masterful thing that Peterson does, however, is that they are integral to the story and not stand-alone moralisms wedged into the story. They seem natural and authentic to the characters. No Bible verses are quoted, no behavioral application is given; the characters merely live and these virtues are evident in them.
That means of character and plot development reveals an interesting choice that Peterson made as author. This is not a point for point allegory, like Pilgrim’s Progress. It does not have a blatantly identified Christ-figure, like Aslan. Peterson merely tells a story that is immersed in Christian, Biblical thought, so that you get it almost without realizing it. That’s what makes this sort of story so attractive to people of deep faith or people of no faith. This is not a book merely for the Christian subculture, that subtly speaks “the code” of our accepted themes, language and emotions, etc. It is a book for everybody, a great example of art by Christians that has moved beyond Christian art.
Let me point out a couple of other interesting aspects of North! While the story does center around the three children, this is not a Narnia rehash. The three children are set in a larger family with a widowed mom, a grandfather, an eccentric older friend named Oskar and an uncle who is odd, if not crazy. The intergenerational aspect of the quest is refreshing and important. Old and young are both valued and seen as necessary to the quest. There is listening and respect that flows both directions. The children learn from the wisdom of their elders. The older people delight to see the emergence of the younger. There is even a modeling of the need to serve those who are disabled—the young girl Leeli walks with a crutch, the grandfather has a wooden leg and the older friend often struggles to keep up, but the family always find a way to bring everybody along.
Peterson does not shy from the dark side of life. There are genuine threats, real tears and fears—and they are not sanitized for the kiddies. The Black Carriage driven by the Overseer comes to steal children from their parents. The parents go literally insane from the loss of their children. The older boy is punished by the Overseer by being placed in a closed coffin for days. The younger is placed in a cage from which there is no escape. Some moments are a bit intense—and in reading seem more so than the villains of some recent Disney movies. But the intensity of the threat makes the necessity and heroism of rescue even more poignant. I’d just say to be aware of that when reading with your children—sometimes it might be better to read this long before bedtime!
North! Or Be Eaten is a delightful, well-told and beautifully crafted story. It is not merely a children’s book. It is a story that many people will find thoroughly engaging and engrossing. There’s only one problem—I have to wait for Book 3!
You’ve probably noticed that book reviews devote much pagetime to not talking about books. An article from last Thursday’s Economist assures us that this trend lives. It also begs us to wonder why.
The first paragraph, the read-me-this-way paragraph, embarks from Marx’s renewed relevance and Engels’ rearward burner placement. The last sentence introduces a book that discusses their interlaced lives. Give it a look:
WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit.
The preceding narrative bits, not the last sentence, are the real segue into the story. It’s a story about Engels, not his ink-arnations. It’s about biography, not a biography, hopping next to the Capital co-writers’ first encounters, Engels’ involvement in the family’s business, then in two paragraphs tells us how Marx and Engels managed to complete their magnum opus. Here the story pauses, remembering that this material came from an actual book:
Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with.
But this is an aside. We return to Engels, this time as summary, spinning the foregoing narrative into a more packaged reflection, a sort of epitaph condensed into a phrase in the last paragraph:
When Engels died in 1895, he eschewed London’s Highgate cemetery where his friend was laid to rest. Self-effacing to the last, he had his ashes scattered off England’s coast at Eastbourne—the scene of happy holidays with the Marxes.
How effective is the book in question? We’re left with a handful of unsupported adjectives: ‘A new biography [...] makes a good case,’ ‘Mr. Hunt does a brilliant job [...].’ Any demands for an account of methods or mechanisms turn up empty.
But does the review really want to critique the book? That is what we’d expect after a jaunt through Rotten Tomatoes. But reviews also summarize, put us in the crow’s nest. And I learned something about Engels. The review isn’t about a book, then. In a way, it is the book, or at least tries to whisk us through.
When bad things happen to people is it because they deserve it? When bad things happen to you do you say to yourself “What did I do to deserve this?” The whole concept of action and consequence is brought into play… At least in your mind. In the case of Michael Marshall’s protagonist in Bad Things it seems that the very ultimate in bad things has happened, his four year old son has died. As an indirect result of this tragedy his marriage has ended and his legal career waylaid.
When we meet John Henderson he is living in coastal Oregon and working as a waiter in a seaside restaurant. His is a solitary life with little to no contact with his former wife and remaining son, or, for that matter, any of his former friends or co-workers. Then one night he receives an ominous e-mail message that reads “I know what happened”. John himself does not know what happened even though he was a witness to his son’s death. Naturally he follows up the message by returning to Black Ridge where he once lived and where the tragedy occurred.
Black Ridge is depicted by Michael Marshall with an ominous sense of foreboding reminiscent of the early works of the master Stephen King. An eerily real, small Pacific Northwest community surrounded by a menacing forest with local inhabitants who seem chillingly distant and a prominent town family who seem to have local authority figures and all the townsfolk under their power. The setting in this novel is as much a ‘character’ as the human characters.
Once there, John meets up with the sender of the email message, Ellen Robertson. She maintains that the death of John’s son has eerie similarities to the death of her husband. She intimates that she is being watched and that her emails and phone messages are being monitored. John recognizes her sincerity and decides to remain in Black Ridge to discover if there is any basis to her paranoia.
John is not the only person to have recently returned to Black Ridge. Kristina has been away for a decade, but has now returned. She doesn’t like the place and doesn’t understand herself why she has made her way back to her home town. John also reunites with a former co-worker who has remained in the area, and whose history seems tied to John’s buried past.
The mounting suspense and the revelations of the plot culminate in a page-turning climax where John’s past is explained and he is temporarily reunited with his ex-wife and son. The periphery characters are tied into the revelations in a satisfying way.
More of a supernatural thriller than a mystery, this novel evokes a sense of imminent evil. The reader wonders if this is all in the mind of the protagonist somehow brought about by his sense of guilt for past wrongdoings, or whether the evil is an entity unto itself. The ending leaves the reader with just the right amount of unease and a feeling that the evil encountered in the pages of the novel could resurface at any time to dishevel someone else’s world.
I will read more of Michael Marshall’s fiction even though his novels do not follow the criteria for the mystery genre which is my favourite. After reading this novel I have become a fan of his writing style. Written with a flair for stating profound wisdoms making the reader nod his/her head in agreement, while at the same time evoking a sense of looming dread, this novel is a masterwork of supernatural suspense.
Employing multiple narrators, Heather Gudenkauf weaves a suspenseful novel about two young girls who go missing from their beds early one summer morning.
In the pre-dawn hours of an August morning in Iowa, seven-year-old Calli Clark is violently dragged into the woods against her will. Her fear is palpable, but Calli can’t call out for help because she suffers from selective mutism. Nearby, Petra Gregory, Calli’s best friend and voice, is lured from her own bedroom after spying something from her window. Does she see her friend or is it someone more sinister?
As the novel progresses, the narrators shift with each new chapter. We take in the story through the eyes of Calli, her mother Antonia, her older brother Ben, Petra’s dad, and Deputy Sheriff Louis. Through each of their narratives, we get the backstory about Calli’s mutism, the family dynamics of the Clark household, life in the Gregory house, and Antonia’s relationship with Louis.
Gudenkauf gives Calli a voice as a narrator despite the fact that she doesn’t speak, while Petra, Calli’s mouthpiece in life, remains silent–her perspective of the story untold. Anxiety builds as the novel progresses and suspicion is cast on several characters. Compounding the fear is the local unsolved murder of another little girl who went missing from her bedroom. Will Calli and Petra meet the same end?
The Weight of Silence is such a page-turner–I read it in one night, staying up until the wee hours to finish it! The novel is rife with symbols–the woods, the yellow house, the music note chain–and themes of family, friendship, substance abuse, and loss. This book would be ideal for a book club selection and comes with discussion questions at the end of the novel.
Thanks to TLC Book Tours for the opportunity to review this book!
Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday makes this brilliant observation ” It is novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping youself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire and old fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling“. Poetry has a form and capacity to make an impact on the reader and elevate him beyond ways that he can anticipate and understand. In my mind, this aspect of poetry is beyond debate. While presently, I am not a great poetry aficionado, through my own erratic reading of poetry, I have experienced this elevation time and again. In the recent past I have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s (RLS) “Child’s Garden of Verses” and was taken in by the utter beauty and appealing aspect of his poetry. For a man whose pen produced such adventure classics like “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped” and macabre horror classic like “Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde“, this collection struck me as an unusual deviation. Tender, touching and with full of love, longing and nostalgia, the poems are a wonderful tribute to childhood – a childhood as recollected by an adult
RLS has this wonderful ability to string together very simple words yet produce a depiction of reality which is extraordinary. Consider the poem, The Hayloft
Oh, what a joy to clamber there,
Oh, what a place for play,
With the sweet, the dim, the dusty air,
The happy hills of hay!
Look at the way the air around the hayloft is characterised: “sweet”, “dim” and “dusty” — I wonder if there can be a more accurate description! Alternately look at the poem: Bed in Summer
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?
Would this not be the universal lament of all the children living in countries where in summer the daylight extends well past ten in the night and they having a desire to play till the daylight extinguishes? There are many poems in this collection that demonstrate this extraordinary ability of RLS to depict sharply observed objects or situations with a clarity that is effortlessly elevated. As I read through the collection, I also observed that RLS recreates a world that is completely extinct. Consider how well Leerie the lamplighter and his ritual of lamplighting is recreated:
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky.
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street
…………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………
For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
And oh! before you hurry by with ladder and with light;
O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!
One also gets to see this ability to recreate a bygone age in the poem “Farewell to the Farm“
Probably the most endearing quality of this collection is that all the poems without exception lend themselves brilliantly to a sing song rendition and there by transform themselves into near perfect substitutes for lullabies. Consider the poem Singing
Of speckled eggs the birdie sings
And nests among the trees;
The sailor sings of ropes and things
In ships upon the seas.
……………………………………………
……………………………………………
The children sing in far Japan,
The children sing in Spain;
The organ with the organ man
Is singing in the rain
or the poem Nest Eggs
Soon the frail eggs they shall
Chip, and upspringing
Make all the April woods
Merry with singing
As I soaked in this enormously joyous read of mine, I could not help recall Kahlil Gibran’s thoughts on children “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself…..You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts……………” . While this is utterly true, I think that RLS is probably that rare artist who came quite close to capturing the thoughts of children in a way no other artist did. For anybody interested in the complete collection it is available on the web at the following link: http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/collections/childs_garden_of_verses.html
