Book of the Day Roundup: December 12-16, 2022
Plain
A Memoir of Mennonite Girlhood
Mary Alice Hostetter
University of Wisconsin Press
Hardcover $26.95 (168pp)
978-0-299-34040-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Plain, Mary Alice Hostetter chronicles her formative years within a Mennonite family and her later quest for personal independence.
In Pennsylvania, Hostetter and her siblings worked on her parents’ farm. She also helped with household chores and attended church services and gatherings. Leisure time was rare, and individual needs were regarded as secondary to family and community.
Nonetheless, Hostetter enjoyed moments of quiet rebellion, like sneaking off to a wheat field to read in blissful solitude. As a teenager, she worked at Plain and Fancy, an Amish-themed restaurant and gift shop. She gave most of her wages to her parents, but kept any tips she received for herself.
Plain is filled with engrossing details about midcentury Mennonite life. Unlike their Amish contemporaries, Hostetter and her brothers and sisters could drive cars, use telephones and electricity, and had vocational freedom. Still, there were conventional expectations, with women in particular encouraged to become wives, with the other option being spinsters, or the more euphemistic “unclaimed blessings.”
After college, Hostetter pursued a teaching career and moved to West Virginia. She came to the gradual awareness that she was a lesbian. Years later, after her mother had passed away, Hostetter and her gay older brother both wrote formal coming out letters to their father. By then in his nineties, their father reasoned that, despite the traditional Mennonite Church’s outrage against homosexuality, being gay wasn’t a sinful abomination, and surely no reason to tear families apart.
While Plain recounts Hostetter’s emergence from her upbringing, the memoir is balanced by its innate appreciation of Mennonite culture. The focus on craftsmanship and hard work, the communal caring for the elderly, and even the daily journals Hostetter’s mother kept for decades indicate a devout and distinct collective purpose.
Engaging and reflective, Plain is a complex memoir about moving beyond the Mennonite faith while maintaining an integral connection to its lessons.
MEG NOLA (October 27, 2022)
The Thorn Puller
Hiromi Ito
Jeffrey Angles, translator
Stone Bridge Press
Softcover $18.95 (300pp)
978-1-73762-530-8
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Hiromi Ito’s novel The Thorn Puller, a woman cares for her aging relatives across two continents while trying to maintain a life of her own.
In Japan, Ito’s parents rely on her to provide them care as their health fails. Meanwhile, back in California, her relationship with her husband faces pressures, including his own health problems. There is little humor in her struggles, but she manages to find some anyway, plucking wry observations from even the most tragic circumstances. All the while, she draws strength from family stories, folk tales, and religious rituals. She especially relies on Lord Jizo, a deity with the power to take away pain.
With ruthless honesty and wicked humor, Ito exposes the frustration and inconvenience of being a caregiver, juxtaposing it with the sorrow of watching a loved one deteriorate. She focuses as much on life’s beauty as on its ugliness, describing road trip landscapes and her parents’ incontinence with the same sharp eye.
In the midst of all, Ito has her own personal crises, from health scares to the death of a pet. Yet her duty to her family is always foremost in her mind: if something happens to her, no one else will care for her daughters, her husband, or her parents. Despite resenting her many responsibilities—from accompanying her parents to endless doctors’ appointments to keeping her youngest daughter’s Tamagotchi alive—she fulfills them, often with only Jizo for support. Her observations on life, death, and the in-between make for a fearless look at what every adult in every country must face: growing older as their loved ones do too.
The Thorn Puller is a darkly humorous semiautobiographical novel in which a woman attempts to remain strong in the face of immense responsibilities and inevitable losses.
EILEEN GONZALEZ (December 2, 2022)
Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Monique Gray Smith
Nicole Neidhardt, illustrator
Zest Books
Softcover $17.99 (304pp)
978-1-72845-899-1
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In 2013, Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer released the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass, a blend of scientific study and memoir that proposed complementing Western ecological ideas with Indigenous ideologies and practices. Monique Gray Smith adapted this pivotal text for younger readers in Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults.
Knowing that cimate change has become one of the foremost concerns for younger generations, this adaptation speaks to those discouraged by the acceleration of the climate crisis and the inaction of those empowered to curb it. It offers a new perspective and renewed hope. Gray Smith retains much of the original content from Wall Kimmerer’s text, but with the addition of digital, sketchlike illustrations and colored text boxes that pull out definitions or quotes for added emphasis and easier at-a-glance comprehension. These adaptations, along with prompts for discussion questions and resources for further reading, make the text ideal for the classroom.
The Indigenous lore and rituals described are among the most compelling aspects of the text; Nicole Neidhardt’s beautiful illustrations, particularly those accompanying a story of the formation of Turtle Island and the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, enhance these elements. There are recountings of basket weaving, salmon ceremonies, and the experiences of young adults at a remote biological station, where the bemoaning of lost cell service gradually gives way to an appreciation for simpler subsistence.
Wall Kimmerer’s personal essays are moving in their reverence for the land and its offerings. Her prose is lyrical, as in her description of the scent of sweetgrass: “the melancholy smell of summer slipping into fall or the smell of a memory that makes you close your eyes for a moment and then a moment longer.”
Urging a look toward history and tradition to teach us how to answer the questions of the future, Gray Smith adapts Wall Kimmerer’s wisdom for a new, hungry audience.
DANIELLE BALLANTYNE (October 27, 2022)
Wake Up, This Is Joburg
Tanya Zack
Mark Lewis, photographer
Achal Prabhala, contributor
Duke University Press
Softcover $28.95 (368pp)
978-1-4780-1870-4
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
In Wake Up, This Is Joburg, photographer Mark Lewis and writer Tanya Zack document stories about people getting by on the fringes of Johannesburg. These pieces are sometimes sad, sometimes inspiring, and add up to a complicated picture of a city of contradictions.
The biggest city in South Africa, one of the country’s capitals, and one of the continent’s commercial centers, Johannesburg also has a reputation for danger. It’s “a place of reeling…where making a living can be messy.” That’s quite true of the book’s opening story, “S’kop,” which focuses on an underground operation of men who butcher cow heads and sell the unregulated meat. The photo essay is gruesome and bloody, while the text focuses on the thin margin by which the butchers live and the challenging logistics of their business.
“Master Mansion” tells the story of Indian immigrants who began a successful hat-making business in the early twentieth century and lived in the building, and of how later generations live today. The photographs in this case include both vintage and current images and do a nice job of showing the beauty of the hats produced in the building. And one of the most memorable pieces is “Bedroom,” which tells the story of Birthial Gxaleka’s bedroom. Eleven mattresses fill the room, with a few times that number of people living there at any given moment. Gxaleka talks about taking in anyone who needs it, and how her opening her home serves as a stepping stone to help visitors find work and begin new lives.
Wake Up, This Is Joburg tells its range of interesting stories well, through on-the-ground reporting, with ample interviews and context, letting a variety of people around Johannesburg talk about both the struggles and successes of everyday life in the inner city.
JEFF FLEISCHER (October 27, 2022)
La Rata
Colección Animalejos
Elise Gravel
NubeOCHO
Hardcover $11.99 (36pp)
978-841859963-7
Buy: Local Bookstore (Bookshop), Amazon
All are invited to observe the species-specific, fabulous qualities of the common rat: bigger than a mouse, wily and wise; capable of slipping through tiny holes and bouncing on its strong tail; and happy to chew through tough surfaces. The illustrations of this informative Spanish-language picture book play to children’s funny bones, featuring goofy rat ballerinas and the polite introduction of one Rattus Rattus to his rodent cousin. Learning about a maligned species has never been such silly fun!
MICHELLE ANNE SCHINGLER (October 27, 2022)
Barbara Hodge
