Forgotten Books From Childhood

I have been spending a lot of time on book search websites lately, the ones where people post the vague, half remembered pieces of stories and others try to ID them so that we can all reclaim our childhoods. It's similar, but more often the opposite, of what I always enjoyed on The Onion's Ask the AV Club, which was mostly people asking for brief fragments of nightmares so that they could rewatch the movie/reread the book and make the horror go away by realizing how silly it is now. In both cases, the answer is Ray Bradbury or William Sleator 90% of the time. I read Sleator's House of Stairs almost purely because of this.

On the side of regaining childhood memories, I have very few of these. So many people post multiple messages on the book finding boards, trying to recreate whole libraries, I am pretty sure that I'm not in this situation because I 1)have a pretty good memory 2)am a rereader, so that memory is more likely to be firm and clear 3)I hung onto most of my books BECAUSE I am a rereader. Even now, if I had to pay money, even fifty cents, for every single book I read, I would go broke. I would need another hobby. I get books from the library, from netgalley, free online from Project Gutenberg or publisher/author deals. Galleys from work or conferences, cheap books from used book stores, free for me books from used bookstores when I go out with my Dad and he insists on paying. As a child, I couldn't get every book I wanted, or enough to fill my need to read (and I was a notoriously irresponsible library user at a very small library. My brother and I both read through everything in that branch, and this is back in the dark ages of the 90s, before requesting from other branches was as easy as it is now). So, when I was tired of my books and/or my Mom made me clear out some of my room's clutter, I would pack up the books and they would go in the basement, waiting for the day several months later when I would open the bag or box and see a stack of books that were almost as good as being completely new. It was brilliant.

I still have a bookshelf full of books in my room in my Dad's house, and likely boxes of books throughout the house. I haven't had a chance to forget them because they are still there. My Redwall collection, my Tanith Lee, The Giver, Number the Stars, the Phantom Tollbooth, everything I have reread over and over again. For me to forget a book or only have wisps of the memory, it would have to be pretty inconsequential in my life.

Then I thought of one I wanted to remember. It was a painful book, one I didn't want to reread because I hated it. Perhaps the first book I read where the bad thing HAD to happen, it was the point and the character had to learn to live with it as well as the reader. Perhaps other children have a similar reaction when Beth dies in Little Women. All that I could remember was that the book was about two sisters, very Beezus and Ramona -like in personalities. The part that I could remember strongly was something that I wasn't sure was the focus of the book, but that the young girl had a stuffed elephant that was her beloved comfort animal, and she gave him away to charity by mistake, but her mom sat with her and helped her come to peace with giving the elephant away, rather than the ending, I-as-a-child wanted, which was to say that it was too big of a sacrifice and to give something else.

This devastated me as a child. I clung to my Danny bear, the best bear in the world, and railed against a world that would tear apart a girl and her stuffed elephant. I remember discussing the book and the ending with my Mom, sitting on my bed and just talking about a book. The kind of insignificant nonsense that only means anything once you have lost that person and you are desperate to cling to every piece of her and every single tiny memory you can grab. I don't want to reread this book, I just wanted to know what it was, what author hit me so hard that I, at 25, spent an hour or two googling "stuffed elephant". I finally hit on using Google Book search, and it was too easy from there. I only needed that phrase, because the elephants name was Stuffed Elephant. The book was Oh, Honestly Angela! and it doesn't appear to be any great work of literature.

The second one was a fragment of memory from when I was young and obsessed with wanting a cat, but my Dad hated cats. This book was tailor made for me, about a little girl who wanted a cat but her mom was allergic. As I thought, memories came back that I didn't know I had. She found a cat, yes, but I knew for sure that it was a Siamese, possibly even a blue point siamese. I remembered her taking the cat and hiding, then I remembered that she hid in this sort of room under the porch in her house, she could hear all of the comings and goings of the search team, her mom crying, and her mom sneezing from the cat. I don't remember the ending. I did a google books search and found only an excerpt from Library Journal or similar with a review, gave the date as 1971 and the girl's name as Millicent, but no author or book title due to what google books lets you read. So I went to WorldCat, set the date, language, and juvenile, used cat as a keyword, and slogged through 400 results until I saw "The Easter Cat" and thought...that could be it...I didn't remember Easter at all. Amazon gave me the cover and a description and yes. This is my book. This one, I am pretty excited to find, and I have it on order from the library right now.

I have been finding myself drifting back in my memories lately, trying to recover something else that I can hunt down. Now that I have stalked my prey, I either want new, or I will have to settle for helping others find their own lost books.

Book Review: Scandal of the Year

Scandal of the Year by Laura Lee Guhrke

There are very few romance authors who I will automatically read based just because they wrote it. There are plenty of names I recognize, plenty I know I have enjoyed in the past, but that will just get me to read the back, not through it in my pile of library books or even actually purchase it. Off the top of my head, I think Laura Lee Guhrke might be the only contemporary one. I will buy any Betty Neels that I don't already own (although that is difficult to do since I can't tell them apart), and any Georgette Heyer is worth having, but those are such special cases. With Ms. Guhrke, I know that the topic might not be my favorite, and the characters might not be the type I normally like, but the ride will be fun and it's always worth reading.

In "Wedding of the Season", the first book with these characters, you knew that Beatrix didn't belong with Aidan. He was clearly the "Baxter" of the situation, he was so straight laced and stuffed shirt-ed and everything. But you still liked him. He was sympathetic. So, while many romance heroes are just "the perfect guy and anyone would be lucky to be with him", this one definitely shows you why some people belong together. Aidan is paired with "wacky" Julia, and while I rather disliked her in Wedding of the Season, here she is rounded out so that the reader understands why she acts the way she does. Her scandalous behavior is not just her being ignorant of social mores, but neither is it a giant middle finger to society. It is protection.

The straight laced guy and manic pixie dream girl with secret pain combo has been done a million times, but this never once falls into those cliches. Julia doesn't bring Aidan out of his shell or anything, because he doesn't need it. Aidan doesn't provide Julia with stability and a calming influence because she doesn't need that. What they need is somebody that they can show their true selves to, and I was caught up in that like no other. My one complaint is that I wanted more time of them together happily at the end. Liking both of those characters made me want to see how they acted together and who they became when they had an every day life of happiness together and I felt a bit cheated at not sing that. If this series continues, I have hopes that Julia and Aidan will be side characters in other books and I can get some of their happy ending that way.

Book Review: The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell

Temple has made the best of her ragtag adolescence. Nomadic lifestyle, caring for Malcolm (her maybe-brother), and fighting the living dead.

I picked up this book because of the beautiful cover and the hauntingly cryptic title (It is a bible verse). I kept reading for the zombies and because of the quick and easy love the reader gets for Temple.

Bell uses beautiful, lyrical language to describe this torn up world full of danger, showing us why Temple thinks it is still so beautiful. Many apocalyptic horror books have characters discussing why or how this could have happened, and what it all means. Temple is more matter of fact, she shrugs her shoulders. After all, she was born ten years after it all changed. This isn't a broken world, this is just the world to her. And yeah, maybe there's a lot of bad, but she has sure seen some real good out there too.

In many ways, this novel reminded me of The Road, rather obviously for the apocalyptic road trip aspects, but also for the somewhat sparse writing. They both leave many things unanswered, but not unsatisfied, and they both show that one or two people's stories may not be all that important in the grand scheme of things. These two would be good read-alikes for a book club, especially as they are both short. I devoured this book in a weekend day, even though it is not at all my usual sort of book.

There is violence and gore, sex as well, but at no point did it feel exploitative or too much for me. There are plenty of moments of action and of tension, but they take a backseat to the character development and writing style; so much so that I feel strange characterizing it as horror, although I don't know what I would call it otherwise. There are some absolutely brilliant ideas that I (not being a big horror buff) hadn't been exposed to before, little things that seem natural like the creatures having regional nicknames. Temple calls them meatskins and slugs, another character flat out calls them zombies, and Temple is surprised to hear other characters have other names. The lack of infrastructure makes communication between humans difficult, but it is emphasized that there are a lot of humans in this world, a lot of food and resources left for anyone wily enough to get them. Ever since 28 days later, zombies in the media have gotten fast and smart and more terrifying, but these slow and stupid zombies work perfectly with showing how to someone like Temple, they are just a part of life that she wouldn't know how to live without.

All in all, Temple is a wonderful character that the reader wants to cling to and defend. As another reviewer said, her treatment of "the dummy" is a little hard to read sometimes, but I felt that her affection quickly shone through and the harsh words just reinforced her desire to have no attachments in this world that takes everything from you, sooner or later. The style of writing is so unusual from my usual that I had to force myself to read slower and be engulfed in the language, but once I did so, it was beautiful. The kind of writing that has you speaking and writing slightly strangely after wards. I think that is a sign of great writing.