He is used to being new because of his father’s profession and is perhaps somewhat better equipped with skills to survive his crime of being different. Just as in the play, the day begins calmly but rapidly accelerates into chaos and tragedy. This novel could be very useful for students in Year 11 Advanced English in Year 11, not to explain the plot of the play which is quite straight forward but to highlight the important concepts and ideas, one of which is the enduring presence of prejudice.
Matchmaking for Beginners
Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson was the perfect accompaniment to the early, shell-shocked days of the summer holidays. It is set in Brooklyn and Florida and is about the friendship between Blix,an older, delightfully eccentric woman and a much younger, apparently conformist girl-woman. They meet at a party thrown for a handsome man, Noah, who is introducing his fiancee, Marnie, to his quite fearsome family, dominated by his fearsome mother. Marnie makes blunder after blunder at this event, culminating in one involving welsh rarebit. Despite this, she and Noah do marry - for two weeks after which Noah leaves for Africa. When Blix dies, she leaves Marnie her brownstone house in Brooklyn but with conditions. Marnie has to leave her parents’ home in Florida, her happily nesting sister and a second engagement. Of course, there is method in Blix’s inflexible conditions and the last third of the novel is about her posthumous powers. This is a gently amusing novel and sure to delight the hopeless romantics amongst the students who were always demanding MORE love stories.
To Die in Spring
I did wonder why I was choosing to read To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann at a time when I was tending to sob very easily. However, it is an excellent novel set in the last months of World War II in Germany. In a way, it is a version of All Quiet on the Western Front, about a different war but with a similar message. Walter Urban has left school and is hopeful that the war will be over before he is called up. He loves his job as a dairy man and is proud that his work is productive and positive in a world of chaos and ruin. However, he is manipulated into “volunteering” for the Waffen-SS, along with his best friend, Friedrich. There were pages in this part of the novel I had to skip because of the horror wreaked on the civilian population of Hungarian Germans by the soldiers in his unit. It is worse for Walter’s best friend who is sent to the front and finds the horror so unbearable that he deserts. He is captured and Walter is one of the firing squad that has to execute him. Walter gladly surrenders to the Americans - the Russians are quite rightly dreaded as captors - but when peace comes, he returns to a changed world. His dairy skills are replaced by machinery, his violent father seems to have acted heroically in Dachau where he was a guard and his mother has formed a pragmatic new relationship. The novel is framed within the comments of the adult Walter so we are told what happened next. Much as there were moments of horror, there is also a fascinating glimpse of what life was like for ordinary young Germans at the time and how that affected the rest of their lives, and once again, we come to the conclusion that the sacrifice of so much life and joy is rarely justifiable.
Everything I’ve Never Said
Everything I’ve Never Said by Samantha Wheeler is particularly poignant because the narrator is a young girl with Rett Syndrome. Wheeler’s second daughter has this condition, so the story is told from her deeply experienced viewpoint. Rett appears mainly in girls from the age of two as a result of a genetic mutation. One of its symptoms is the lack of speech. Ava speaks to us through most of the book but is unable to speak to her beloved parents and older sister. The book is set somewhere in Australia and part of the incredible stress on the family is trying to access any support or help. When Ava’s father has a stroke, chaos takes over: Hospital, bureaucracy and bureaucrats, paper work, grief and worry and the need to provide Ava with constant care. It is only when the family serendipitously finds a wonderful support worker, that there is a break through which might allow the completely intelligent Ava to communicate at long last with those who love her most. This is an excellent way of educating us about what it is like to live with a child with a severe and misunderstood disability.
Priestdaddy
I had read the title of Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood on so many lists of the Best Non-Fiction for 2018, I made foolish assumptions about its contents, thinking it would be about some Irish story of a hidden scandal. Instead it is the chaotic story of a larger than life man who was an atheist until he enlisted in the U S Navy and was assigned to work on a nuclear-powered submarine. While on duty, he and his shipmates watched The Exorcist over fifty times. In response to this experience, Greg Lockwood became a Lutheran, then a pastor in that church, and married. However, he converted to Catholicism and became a priest, using a small loophole that allows married converts to become priests. One of his daughters, Patricia, is the author of this memoir, which is often wildly hilarious as well as being very sombre. Her father is eccentric, selfish and a very dutiful shepherd to his various parishes in the Mid-West of America. He is full of contradictions and fads: He worships expensive electric guitars so much so that when Patricia is ready for university, the family has no money to finance her education because her father has just bought a guitar owned by one of The Beatles. His devoted wife is equally individual, obsessed with impending disasters, subscribing to magazines that report on awful tragedies of the more bizarre kind. Patricia meets a man on the internet and then marries him; her mother fears he is a serial killer but he is revealed to be saintly in the face of the Lookwood family en masse. Patricia spends ten years writing and submitting poetry until some of it is accepted and published in The New York Times, the paper her mother most hates because it prints “lies”. When dreadful illness strikes Patricia’s husband and the couple is forced to move back into the current Lockwood rectory, she finds the experience an impetus to write about her childhood. This is 'Trump country' where her father bellows “PROPAGANDA!” when he notices that two of his daughters are watching Bambi on television. Needless to say, Greg Lockwood owns and lovingingly cleans a number of weapons, enough to satisfy a minor warlord. There are much sadder chapters about how the author, at the age of four, was taken to a violent 'Right to Life' protest outside a clinic. She reflects on her young beliefs on this topic as well as her developing and changing opinion. The book, especially in the second half, is at times as sprawling as the lives it describes. It does indeed cause the reader to snort-laugh from time to time but at other times, wonder at how such a narcissistic man can be so loved, even as he is endured for his unfortunate love of wearing boxer shorts and only boxer shorts when he is not performing his pastoral duties. It is a fascinating insight into mid-west life and helps to explain, to some extent, the popularity in some groups of the current American President.
Floored
Floored is a novel written by seven currently very popular UK YA authors. It begins in a lift with seven young people who just happen to be there at the same time in a television station. They are all heading to the ninth floor. Their apparently uneventful journey is briefly delayed by a sweating delivery man with a trolley who gets on halfway through their journey. Then he dies - in front of them. Their reactions to this event begins to introduce us to each character. Some weeks later, they attend this man’s funeral because a number of them feel they contributed to the man’s death. They are shocked to discover they are the only people attending. As a sort of homage to the friendless man, they resolve to have an annual reunion. So we trace their gradual maturing, in some cases their spectacular transformations and developments. Some of the reviews of this book claimed there was not much action. Really? What is more exciting than stories of growing up and finding out your purpose? This is most definitely a book for Senior students but I think it could be one for them to reflect on their own “lift” moments.
Reviews by MS SUZANNE O’CONNOR