Family Saga with Complications

Hello Beautiful 

by Ann Napolitano

“We’re part of the sky, and the rocks in your mother’s garden, and that old man who sleeps by the train station. We’re all interconnected, and when you see that, you see how beautiful life is. Your mother and sisters don’t have that awareness. Not yet, anyway. They believe they’re contained in their bodies, in the biographical facts of their lives.”   ― Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful


This is a novel that explores themes of family, love, trauma, and healing. The book is about the connections between family and love, and how loyalty and honesty can cost and power.

William Waters was raised in a tragically silent home where his parents could barely bear to look at him, much less love him. When he meets Julia Padavano in his first year of college, it's as if the world has suddenly come to life for him. Since she and her three sisters are inseparable, Julia also brings her family with her. Sylvie, the family's dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is an independent artist; and Emeline patiently looks after them all. William finds new happiness with the Padavanos; there is loving anarchy all the time in their home.

Then, however, shadows from William's past come to light, compromising not only Julia's meticulous plans for their future but also the sisters' unwavering love for one another. A devastating family rift results, altering their lives for future generations. Will the ties that previously bound them still be strong enough to bring them together when it counts?

Some say the book is a moving and propulsive work that mirrors real life and inspires readers to address challenges in their own relationships. Others say the book is a beautiful story about family bonds and love. But ultimately, it is an elegant homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic Little Women, paints a powerfully touching picture of what is possible when we decide to love someone not despite who they are but because of it.

Top Ten Tuesday

 

The selection criterion this week is “Top Ten Favorite Character Relationships”.

I have chosen the following from my reading over my personal reading lifetime, so some of these are from books that have been favorites for many decades, while other are somewhat more recnt reads. Here are ten of my favorites in no particular order. 

Top Ten Tuesday is sponsored  by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl

1. Young Harvey Cheyne and the fisherman Manuel in Kipling's Captains Courageous. 

This book is one I have read and reread over my lifetime and one reason is the development of Harvey under the tutelage of the Portuguese fisherman Manuel in this adventure tale.

2. Frog and Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.  Here are two friends who are always there for each other. Frog is enthusiastic and laid back, while Toad is more cynical and uptight. 

3. Achilles and Patroclus in Homer's  The Iliad. 

The friendship between these two warriors is one of the highlights of Homer's epic poem.

4. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

The different personalities and strengths of character make this a memorable literary relationship.

5. Frodo and Sam in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. 

Sam is portrayed as both physically and emotionally strong, and sometimes carries Frodo when he is too weak to go on. 

6. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Don Quixote by Cervantes. 

This pair of Knight and friendly sidekick are one of the main reasons this novel has enchanted readers for more than four centuries.

7. Frankenstein and his creation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  

The world of speculative fiction has seldom seen a duo of this nature in the decades since a young Mary Shelley told her story.

8. Levin and Oblonsky in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  

These two characters were my favorites for their humanity and sincerity. Oblonsky and Levin have a relationship that works because Levin has no one else.

9. Lee and Cal in East of Eden by John Steinbeck. 

This is my favorite Steinbeck novel and one of the reasons for this is the relationship between these two characters. Lee is intelligent, thoughtful, well-read, and kind, while Cal takes Lee's advice that each individual has the power to choose between good and evil in life. 

10. The father and his son in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Of all of McCarthy's novels these two characters demonstrate the best in humanity while facing the most difficult of times in McCarthy's novel of a dystopian future.

A Lesson Learned

Captains Courageous 

by Rudyard Kipling

"Over and above the darkness and the mystery of the procession, Harvey could feel the land close around him once more, with all its thousands of people asleep, and the smell of earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a switching-engine coughing to herself in a freight yard; and all those things made his heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the foresheet. . . somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a role, and they made fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds full of warm emptiness, and lay there without a sound."

Although Captains Courageous is not a particularly complex story, it is nevertheless rife with concepts that serve as a foundation. It reflects the author's moral philosophy as well as his way of thinking about life. The relatively short novel focuses on 15-year-old Harvey Cheyne, the sole child of an American business magnate, as he grows up. Harvey, a once-pampered youth, learns what the American dream is via his interactions with unspoiled nature, hard work, and common guys, and he prepares himself to achieve it.

The book illustrates enduring American values while being on one level a sea adventure with a joyful ending. Harvey gains respect for hard effort, honesty, and social equality via his exploits. He also develops a sense of adventure, self-reliance, and pride in a task well done. As a result, he is ready to participate in the developing American drama. This is a great work to read as a young boy, but also warrants rereading when you are no longer quite so young. It bears the telltale signs of the great novelist who would go on to write Kim. one of my favorites.

The Hidden Code

The Lost Books of the Odyssey 

by Zachary Mason

“As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.”   ― Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a fascinating and seductive debut book. It retells the traditional Homeric tale of the hero Odysseus and his arduous return trip following the fall of Troy. In it the Trojan War is retold alongside flashbacks as Odysseus travels from Troy to Ithaca. The chapters flow with witty turns or neat bows, more in the style of a short story writer. 

The book is a deft and subtle translation of Greek literature for the present day. Personhood, storytelling, memory, and self-awareness are some of the subjects it examines. According to how much light the story decides to shed, Mason's characters can change shape and become elusive, just like the ones in Homer's original.

The traditional Homer stories are transformed into new episodes, fragments, and revisions using beautiful prose, a vivid imagination, and stunning literary skill. When read as a whole, these additions expose the timeless Greek epic to countless resonant interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is  It is laced with wonderful wit, elegance, and playfulness. 

I found that it was worthwhile, but only for those who have already read Homer's original epic saga.

Poem for Today

 "The Makers"

By Howard Nemerov

 I frequently draw inspiration from writers of different genres, especially those who write outstanding books. However, in order to convey a message that has significance for readers who value the written word's creators, poetry may occasionally be necessary. The poem, "The Makers" by Howard Nemerov, makes a stronger argument for this.

We can never locate that initial item that got us going, that initial spark that spans generations. In his poem "The Makers," Howard Nemerov strives to trace the history of poetry and comes to the realization that what counts most is that all of those concrete, physical feelings are transmitted throughout time through poetic tropes and pictures. It makes no difference who the first poets were or the specific tree, rock, or star that was first mentioned. What matters most is that we can relate to each other through these descriptions. The repetition of these sensory cues reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition.

                "The Makers"

Who can remember back to the first poets,

The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?

No one has remembered that far back

Or now considers, among the artifacts,

And bones and cantilevered inference

The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,

So lofty and disdainful of renown

They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue

Worded the world, that were the first to say

Star, water, stone, that said the visible

And made it bring invisibles to view

In wind and time and change, and in the mind

Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world

And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers

Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned

To interval, relationship, and scale,

The first to say above, beneath, beyond,

Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,

Who having uttered vanished from the world

Leaving no memory but the marvelous

Magical elements, the breathing shapes

And stops of breath we build our Babels of.