the sunday lit: October 2020

"It was one of those nights when the moon gives a faint glimmering of light through the thick black clouds of a lowering sky."

Well, happy Hallo'ween! For this special occasion I have decided to be somewhat brave and read a book that has been sitting on my shelf for quite a while. I bought this when I was still in college, working on my Wuthering Heights diploma paper and fancying myself a lover of Gothic literature. Well, I wrote my paper, graduated and still had not touched this. I was a wuss. And Emily wasn't entirely Gothic, either so....

Alas, I have reached into the depths of my being, mustered all the courage I had and finally got to reading this. It was time. And it was also the most appropriate book I had for this time of year. Now, this is not horror that I know many prefer as their spooky reads for the season. As mentioned, I do not have the guts to read scary. Or watch, for that matter, which is why it's so hard to find movies for autumn. But I digress. I found this to be good reading for some spook but not outright terror that causes feverish nightmares.

"The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn - not the material of my everyday existence - but in every deed that existence utterly and solely in itself."

But first, let us lay a foundation and establish some facts about these stories. Gothic literature was a sort of response to Victorian morals, originating in the 18th century. It deals with folklore, with mythic and supernatural, with emotional states and suspense. It was supposed to be a sort of pleasure in getting into dangerous situations, doing forbidden things vicariously through the protagonist. A majority of the stories are set at night, usually in a castle - crumbling and abandoned, with labyrinthine halls and haunted chambers - the atmosphere sets the tone so the reader knows to expect one uncomfortable surprise after another. Ghosts can be found in abundance, along with vampires, demons and other such creatures that inspired terror in the readers at the time. (And are still the inspiration for many a horror movie.) Madness is another such feature, with afflicted persons gleefully committing crimes of all sorts, with no trace of regret.

The stories contained within this particular collection are:

Sir Bertrand: A Fragment by Anna Letitia Aikin - riding a horse through a dark night, happens upon a seemingly abandoned castle
Captive of the Banditti by Nathan Drake & An Anonymous Hand - riding through the night, happens upon bandits and is almost thrown off a cliff
Extracts from Gosschen's Diary: No. 1 by Anonymous - the night before the execution, a madman confesses to a priest about killing his lover
The Parricide's Tale by Charles Robert Maturin - a hateful madman in a monastery spurns two young lovers and traps them in a cell to die
The Spectre Bride by Anonymous - a stranger comes to a castle and seduces the only daughter, she runs off with him and he turns out to be a demon
The Tapestried Chamber by Sir Walter Scott - a general comes to visit a boyhood friend after the war but has a terrible night's sleep with a spectral visitor
Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe - madness features here as an obsessive compulsion
A Madman's Manuscript by Charles Dickens - a madman enjoys deceiving people, making them think he is sane, features a lot of maniacal laughter and malice
Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by J. S. Le Fanu - a painter's love is forcibly married to a rich old man who turns out not to be quite human
Ethan Brand by Nathaniel Hawthorne - on a dark night, a man comes back from his search for Unpardonable Sin, laughing maniacally
The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell - a ghost story about being haunted by youthful sins, told by the old nurse
The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenston - anatomists exhume bodies for their laboratory work
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - a mentally ill woman fixates on the ugly wallpaper in a rental house, imagining people behind it
The Death of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce - a man asleep in the wood is haunted by apparitions, a murderer is being hunted
Canon Alberic's Scrapbook by M. R. James - an Englishman comes to a French church and buys a book that leads to a demonic encounter
No. 252 Rue M. le Prince by Ralph Adams Cram - the story of a notorious haunted house in Paris
The Lame Priest by S. Carleton - a tale of a hermit who befriends a lame priest that turns out to be more than human
Luella Miller by Mary Wilkins Freeman - a small town in New England, a woman sucks the life out of everyone that cares for her
The Bird in the Garden by Richard Middleton - a child wanders through a garden, waiting on a special bird, but then he wakes up
The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson - a young man has a recurring dream about a woman, Julia Stone, dying

"The night was wild and stormy, and the wind howled in a fearful manner."

The only story I have heard of, and read, before is The Yellow Wallpaper, which I've analyzed as part of an assignment in college. Of course, I've read Poe and Hawthorne's work before - but those were the well known The Raven and The Scarlet Letter. Dickens was The Great Expectations (and later, A Christmas Carol) and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. I was excited to get to this bunch too, especially since so many authors were unknown to me - and I, being a English Literature graduate, just had to expand my knowledge of old writers.

Now, to be perfectly honest, I did not enjoy all the stories. It is completely natural. There are so many writers and this is a very old-fashioned style, so the language and the writing sometimes leave a lot to be desired. There is barely any dialogue, and when a character is speaking is it usually in long paragraphs as they are telling the main story to someone, or recounting a frightful event. So be ready for that. What I did love was the atmosphere, the descriptions of dark nights and strange noises, situations that would make me lose my mind if I ever found myself in them. So, though sometimes a bit tedious, there is something to be gleaned from these stories. If nothing else - you'll have read some Gothic classics, and learned a bit about the origins of horror. That's something as well.

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"Wildness in women does not mean autonomy and freedom; their wildness is instead an irrational fever."

lithereal, book review, the word for woman is wilderness review,

What a title, right? I picked up this book mostly because of it, just vaguely aware what the book is actually about, so intrigued by what it meant to be wilderness. What was the author trying to say? And yeah - the premise is a girl going on an adventure a la Into the Wild's Chris McCandless - "a female quest for authenticity" - stepping out into the world and finding herself. Or something else.

"The young always leave. At least the male young of the species always does. My leaving would have been a casting out, an initiation ritual, had I been a boy. Women who leave always abandon. Imagine the pinnacle form of this, the mother who leaves her children to her husband. Unnatural! Monstrous! And the man who does it? My bet is he ends up smug with a younger wife paying minimal child support."

A lot of the book is ruminating. Erin, our daring protagonist, spends an inordinate amount of time mulling over the aspect of conquering wilderness and the maleness of the whole deal. She rightfully points out that wilderness, nature - they both have an undertone of femininity, they're both a she that a man is pitted against, sent to conquer. A lot of tv shows about Mountain Men insinuate that there is something important to access in nature, something valuable to learn, but it can only be accessed by men, with a rare woman tagging along as his companion. Because women are too fragile to go it alone.

The issue of feminism is also a big theme of the novel, which is what made me continue reading through some more questionable paragraphs (read: boring). She mentions being a survivor of sexual abuse, when at 14 she worked at a restaurant where the owner would harass all the girls, even going s far as putting his hand in her panties. But they were all silent, because that's how it was when you're a woman, that's your burden to bear and why would you complain and inconvenience someone with it... Also, she encounters so much sexism along the way, with some really creepy and garbage men, which enraged me. Women really can't go anywhere without being targets for sexual assault, huh?

"Men just love to stick their flags in places. North Pole, South Pole, on the seabed underneath the North Pole, on the tops of mountains, on the moon. Like territorial animals pissing on things."

Erin goes on to point out how this new hyper-masculinity is simply a reaction to modern feminism. Women are liberating themselves from the shackles of patriarchy and men are fighting to put them back. Because they're manly men. When they do a woman a favor they expect her to return it sexually, otherwise she is an "ungrateful bitch". Even men you think of as friends, avuncular types can manage to be creepy and presumptuous.

We also learn a lot of interesting facts and the book makes you think about certain things that may have never crossed your mind, or might not have lingered if they ever occurred to you. She mentions NASA's space program that had female astronauts better prepared to take the flight to the mon - but they couldn't very well have women be the first people in space. How the issue of carling about the climate change, environmentalism is considered to be feminine because it's equated with hysterical, oversensitive women's maternal instinct waking up when they see stranded animals; they're less important issues, the whole thing is melodramatic.

"Sometimes when I was little I wished I was an orphan because they always had the fun lives in the stories. They had no familial tires keeping them bound with guilt."

As she travels, Erin meets Indigenous peoples of both Greenland and Canada, and it strikes her how different their lives are. She is a woman, yes, and that carries danger, but she is white where they're not and this does enable her to leave, to travel. Naaja, a girl from Greenland and Sam, a boy from Canada, cannot leave because they're bound by their culture. Their way of life is disappearing and they're barely holding on. Staying behind is the only option they have if they want their culture preserved, and even that might not be enough.

They're the people who live in harmony with nature, they take what they need and they give back. But our greedy capitalist world is encroaching on everything, digging on their sacred sites, ruining their habitats, preventing them from living in accord with their customs. Climate change affects them as well, dumping our nuclear waste - our most enduring time capsule - it all goes back to them.

"It is funny that, how a woman denying her biological breeding function is abhorrent, yet men like Thoreau or the virginal Isaac Newton denying their biological breeding function are chaste, as though theirs were an admirable choice. What this says is that a woman's body is not her own to choose to keep from a man."

When she finally gets to a cabin in Alaskan wilderness, somewhere under Mt. Denali, Erin begins to finally figure some things out. Caught in a week-long downpour, she is stuck inside, all alone with her thoughts she has nothing for company save a few books. During her time in Denali, she goes exploring, she follows a reindeer, she climbs a peak - if something was easy it would not be a challenge and if it is not a challenge then it is not meaningful.

Erin realizes that the documentary she was going to make about her excursion doesn't matter because she doesn't need the proof. It would be to prove to others that she could do it, but she proved it to herself She did what the Mountain Men did, but does not want to emulate them - to make a shrine of herself, to stake claim - because that was the wrong way. The self-willed man stakes claim to his freedom, not caring about anyone else's and she doesn't want to encroach on nature. It's not hers to claim but it would always be there and she can always come back should she choose to. What matters is that she knows she could do it.

"My Olympus, my castle in the sky, and down below my queendom all poured out."

The message of the novel really touched me, and I would be lying if I denied having dreams of adventuring on my own as well. I just never had the guts to set out, and probably never will. But women can commune with the nature, they can explore but they don't have to stake claim to it, to stick flags in the ground and write their names on the walls. The quiet exploration seems more meaningful because of its intimacy and authenticity. It's not done to make you famous, but to make you yourself.

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"For the fields were eternal, our life the only way of things and I would do whatever was required of me to protect it. How could it be otherwise?"

What to say about this book? First off, I did not particularly enjoy it, though it was not bad. It may be that I have simply read it at the wrong time - after a few truly great books with impressive feats of imagination, this story is grounded in the fields of rural England. Part a coming-of-age story, part a cautionary tale of the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism, it struggled to hold my attention, but I persevered. The dangers of nostalgia and looking at the past with rose-colored glasses is also one of the main themes of the book.

Edith Mather - Edie, is a fourteen-year-old farmer's daughter. Living at Wych Farm with her parents, a grandfather and an older brother, with her sister married off, she is used to the hard labors required to run a farm and make a profit one can live off of. Born after the Great War, it is now 1933, she doesn't remember it, but had heard stories of loss and decay, of men that never came back from the front. It's like the event still casts a shadow over their little village. With no friends, Edie finds company in books, and is the only real reader in the family. She can be so lost in a book and a story she starts making one up of her own. Full of little superstitions, she only stops reading on a sentence of seven words. She also traces the daisy-mark (or a witch-mark) in her room, later tracing it on her stomach or her palm.

An event that will change their village and her life forever is the arrival of Constance FitzAllen to their sleepy corner of the world, a writer on a quest to publish a book about the rural life, the lost ways of doing things that were better than the progress being made. At first, people are reluctant to accept her, but her sweet talk gets everyone to open up and soon she is publishing a column in a newspaper about them. What draws Edie to the young woman is her worldliness - she wears trousers, comes from London, she goes into the local pub (only men can go in there!) and she talks farming and politics with her father! The fascination grows over time but you can feel something bubbling beneath the surface.

Another thread we follow is the relationship between Edie and neighbor Alfie Rose. It is pretty clear that the relationship is not really consensual, with the girl opening up her blouse, hoping seeing the bare flesh of her breasts would make him be gentler and not pinch her as well as letting him have sex with her. No one says the actual word abuse or rape but you can infer that's what it was. On more than one occasion she avoids being alone with him, says she never wants anyone to touch her again and sort of disassociates when her kisses her. Edie feels she must do what he wants and it just fueled my rage as I read the book. I found it truly grueling to read those passages.

And of course - the final thread, the madness. There are hints throughout, with Edie's paternal grandmother being committed to an asylum, as well as the girl's quite strange beliefs of being a witch. The climax is sort of left open, with the mention of the aftermath. The story is being told fifty years later, by an elderly Edie who is preparing to leave the soon-to-be-closed institution she had been living in and rejoin the society of her hometown of Elmsbourne.

"There's no sense in women getting angry, child. It changes nothing or it changes everything. And neither's any good."

I am uncertain about my feelings about the story. It is heartbreaking - with the tale about the women who were committed to these institutions for the tiniest infractions (just being plain tired, being a bit different, having a child out of wedlock) and never being allowed to leave, as well as the personal relationships between Edie and Alf (he later writes a letter telling her he remembers her ardor and passion - quite imaginary, dear Alf - and this comforts him when he thinks he might have been too forward with her), or even between Edie's parents - Charles beat Ada when she voted and in a conversation says the next time she votes it will be when he lets her and who he tells her for. Just a lot of bad men that made me enraged.

I don't know whether to recommend this book. Be warned that there are long passages about farming and wheat and barley, lots of waxing poetic about country life (I live in a village, it's not romantic) that I found plain annoying. So, proceed with caution. On the covers of my edition there are lots of quotes proclaiming this "the book of the year" (published in 2018) so I must assume I should have been English to appreciate it more and grasp its impact upon these reviewers. I just don't quite see it.

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lithereal, gods of jade and shadow review

"Some people are born under an unlucky star, while others have their misfortune telegraphed by the position of the planets. Casiopea Tun, named after a constellation, was born under the most rotten star imaginable in the firmament."

I have always been interested in the stories of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. I love their music, their way of dress, the cultures and traditions and have always hate the fact that so much of it has been lost in the Europeans' conquest of the New World. And still, buildings like the Mayan Temple in Mexico, El Castillo in Chichen Itza are still there, reminding us of the rich history and advanced lifestyles of these persecuted peoples.

What remains are a few buildings, but more important than that are stories. Myths that are passed down through generations, beliefs that still color people's world views - those are the bonds that remain, that anchor the old times when the Mayans, in this case, prospered, living on their land, taking what they needed from it and giving it back what they could. Living in harmony with the nature and weaving the rich tapestry of culture, of myths, legends, deities...

On the Mexican peninsula of Yucatan, where El Castillo is, Casiopea Tun lives in her grandfather's house, more of a servant than a family member, ruminating on the stars and the curse of her being born under and especially unlucky one. Her mother had married a man of Indigenous origin, a marriage that was not approved by the family, and so when her husband died she had to come back to her father's house - disgraced, no longer his favorite. Casiopea has an especially tough time of it, having taken after her father in her looks, and being taunted for it by all her cousins., especially cousin Martin.

The world created is rich and the words on the page paint a perfect picture of oppression and misery in your head. The year is 1927 "but it might as well be 1807" as, despite the more secular movement in Mexico, Yucatan is still in the grip of Catholic church and priests still run things. The eye every woman suspiciously, blaming each and every one for Eve's sin, waiting for a chance to pounce. Casiopea must wear a long skirt, cover her arms and wear a head scarf, lest anyone see her in an immodest edition. The rest of the world is gripped by the Jazz age (well, the large cities, at least) but in the sleepy little town in Yucatan, time seems to have stopped some hundred years ago and progress have passed them by.

Despite her modest upbringing, Casiopea remans a dreamer, reads poetry when she can, learns the names of stars and constellation in stolen moments of solitude, and dreams of a life away from the village when she inherits the modest sum of money her grandfather Cirilo promised to leave her upon his death. During the day she's trying to please her impossible grandfather, a mercurial and cruel man, while trying to navigate the traps set by Martin who behaves as if being a man made him inherently better, automatically worthy of respect and thus Casiopea's superior in every way. Her unwillingness to submit to him, her fearlessness, the defiance in her eyes and the steel in her voice when she talks to him chafe him greatly and he cannot understand her, thus aiming to crush her.

After one such encounter with her insufferable cousin, Casiopea is left home alone to mend shirts, while the rest of the family goes on a day trip. In a rage and of a mind to set herself free, she opens the chest at the bottom of her grandfather's bed - a chest that has expressly been forbidden to be touched, let alone opened. Hoping to find gold in it, something she can take from her cruel relation and run, she instead comes across human bones and the disappointment only fuels her anger. Must everything go wrong for her?

And then, as if in a dream - the bones are gone and a naked, very handsome, man is standing in front of her. Through a haze, Casiopea hears him tell her his tale of woe - he's Hun-Kame, the god of Death, and has been imprisoned here for half a century, following the betrayal of his brother, Vukub-Kame, helped by her grandfather (that's how he came by his riches). Due to a glitch that had her bound to him, he ceremoniously bestows upon her the honor of being his servant and following him on a quest to recover some body parts he's missing. (They're all perfectly innocent, I promise.)

"-Dreams are for mortals.

-Why?

-Because they must die."

What follows is an adventure Casiopea has been longing for, a trip away from her sleepy, backwards little town, a taste of life, of freedom. She travels by train and by a boat, sees towns and cities across Mexico, tries different foods, sleeps in luxurious hotels, cuts her hair in a short bob, wears modern clothes... It's like her dreams have knocked on the door and told her they are waiting...

But something bad is lurking in the shadows as well. The link to the god of Death is keeping him alive but draining her of life essence. He must find all the missing pieces and complete himself in order to ascent the throne of Xibalba again, but his clever brother Vukub-Kame, has many traps set up - and Casiopea must give and give of herself to surmount them. The two are on the same path - to claim the person they truly are, but also on opposite journeys - he aims to collect the missing pieces of himself while she keeps giving them away.

I adored the lush descriptions of the surroundings, of the people and the way of life. I could see it all in my mind's eye and it was beautiful. The main characters weren't flawless and that was great - although it took some getting used to. I'd scream at Casiopea when she did something I knew would lead to danger, but then I just reminded myself that she's an eighteen-year-old, and wouldn't I , almost a decade older, react the same way to all this divine nonsense? So, yes, the heroine is perfectly human and her strength is even more impressive given that.

Taught by a life of misery at her grandfather's house, Casiopea refuses to hurt anyone, to be manipulative or cruel, even to people one would argue deserve it. She remains nice and understanding, she grows in confidence but not so much to appoint herself the superior power and feel the right to rule over someone's life. What is most admirable bout her, through all the trial and tribulations she remains the same in her core and defends herself to Hun-Kame with the words: "And life may not be fair, but I must be fair." And she does remain true to her principles, to the very end.

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"Anyone who says you must hurt yourself primarily wishes to see you hurt, regardless of rationale or supposedly beneficial outcome."

Druhastrana is "an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographical location" as per Wikipedia. (Also, sound so similar to druga strana, which is my language means the other side. I'm sure it's intentionally taken from a Slavic language, especially with the connection to the Czech Republic.) But for Harriet, it is a very real place, a place she and her mother escaped from via a cargo ship and a place she does not want her daughter Perdita to visit.

The main story of the novel is told in a single night, as Harriet tells her daughter and her dolls the tale of her leaving Druhastarana for England. And yes, Perdita is a seventeen-year-old who still has dolls, but to her defense they have literally grown up with her, are very protective and good company. If this seems strange, bear in mind this is a Helen Oyeymi novel. Magical realism has been a part of everything I have read from her.

Anyway, Oyeyemi has taken gingerbread as a focus because of its use in many fairytales and children's stories. Harriet's friend from Druhastrana is even called Gretel, if you were harboring any doubts as to whether this had any root in cautionary tales. I found the novel a bit creepy, but not to the horror-type level, there is suspense and magic, which makes is a perfect October/Halloween read for my tastes.

The gingerbread recipe is passed down through Harriet's father's side of the family. Her mother, an heiress, chose to marry her farmer father and hard work with little to no payoff is what she gets. Baking gingerbread is how she apologizes to the neighbors for disturbing them with her and her husbands rows, how she gives strength to the men to work the fields. After many lean years, she comes in contact with Clio Kercheval, a distant cousin and "the theoretical person who limited at least four families' ability to thrive" as she's the one who actually owns the farm they're working. She ends up taking Harriet and a few other girls from the village to work for her in the city, baking gingerbread.

"Everything has changed except the gingerbread, which is both trick and treat."

The next part takes on the terrible working conditions, where the so-called Gingerbread Girls are exploited and live in bad conditions. When Harriet somehow manages to win the only legitimate lottery in the country (there are many scammy lotteries, the most famous one ran by her maternal grandfather) she and her mother get in contact with Kerchevals of England and leave Druhastana behind forever. Thus start the romantic (or well, Romantic) exploits of Harriet and Gabriel Kercheval which do not end well, but result in the birth of Perdita. The story of struggle leads to a fairly comfortable life and good careers for both Harriet and her mother Margot.

There are also ghost stories, haunted houses, mysterious friends and of course, the magical gingerbread. The story is told so well, that after a time, you don't really feel as if you're reading something different. It's normal for Harriet to go to a Parent Association meeting in school and then come back and talk to Perdita's dolls. The magical elements are still somehow grounded in realty that everything seems feasible. I absolutely love this novel.

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"Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another."

The Starless Sea is an oasis, a haven for "those who feel homesick for a place they've never been to". Our story begins once, a very long time ago, when Time fell in love with Fate. The stars were worried about how this would impact everyone if, by chance, one of them was to get a broken heart. So, they conspired with the Owl Counsel and decided to separate them, by ripping Fate apart, quite literally. Everything of Fate was destroyed, save for the heart, which a mouse saved. But "Fate builds itself up again and Time is always waiting." This sad tale of romantic woe is just one of the stories we get to read, but it is the central one, the driving force; everything else is a version of it or works in service of it.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune-teller, twenty-four, is a game design master's student and loves to read. He finds himself at the university library with regularity and, though not overtly social, he still loves spending time with Kat, a fellow student who pulls him out of his shell. One day he pulls out "Sweet Sorrows" from the library shelf, a book that isn't in the system, has no information on the author or the year it was published but he finds it intriguing. And thus his adventure begins.

Truthfully, the whole thing began when he was 11, standing in front of a mural of a door. Yes, just like that story of that boy in "Sweet Sorrows". Zachary is stunned and in disbelief that a story about him is in an authorless book he just checked out from the library. Or it may have begun even further back than that. But "a boy at the beginning of the story has no way of knowing that the story has begun." The what-if start haunting Zachary, the feeling of missing out on an opportunity of a lifetime is like an acute pain in his entire being. Because behind that door was an entryway into a magical underground world filled with all the stories ever.

Determined to find out more about the origins of the book, Zachary goes to New York, where he meets a woman and a man at a literary charity ball. The story spins out of control, the narrative can barely contain everything that's happening and you feel as if you're holding pages that are full to bursting with stories, just waiting to get them out to you. As Zachary's adventuring progresses, we get more stories, more books, more characters... Everything is connected, but you just have to look closer, pay attention. The book itself points this out to the reader: "If you provide enough to see hopefully they can piece it together for themselves." So, yes you, dear reader: pay attention, it will all make sense.

This book doesn't follow a straight narrative. We jump from character to character, from story to story, from time to time... It's a labyrinth, or a puzzle you are given all the pieces to, you just have to stand back and see the bigger picture. I absolutely loved getting lost in the prose, the author's words pulling me into this make-believe world I wish were real. It's a feast for the senses and I am absolutely certain that anyone who loves reading and does it so completely that the books become part of their being and they cannot get back into the "real world" right after finishing it - well, they'd love this.

Reading along, the stories are given textures, smells, tastes. Everything feels so real and tangible. And since the stories are so well realized, so are that characters. Each one is fleshed out - some are more mysterious than others but I could picture each one and I knew what they wanted, what they craved. At times you are told a story about a character you have met without realizing right away that it's that same person. Threads of the narrative start to weave a story but it constantly escapes you, there's only a lingering feeling of knowledge that everything is linked - the names and phrases taste familiar in your mouth - yet the overall story remains elusive and out of reach practically till the end. I felt like I was playing a game, as well as reading, which is appropriate since the main character, Zachary, makes video games.

This is a book about books, about reading and readers. It's a series of stories within a story about stories. It is technically a fiction adventure but it reads like a meditation on reading, on the importance of books and the stories they contain within. The driving narrative is there, pulling the story along, but I found it less important than the overall message of simple, honest appreciation of written word, of endless possibilities. The book acknowledges that everything is a story and everyone has a story. The life we live is, after all, a story too.

"We are all stardust and stories."

I feel like I am simply not in possession of words that can adequately describe my affection for this book. It has transported me into its pages, into a world that felt so real as I was reading that I feel bereft of it now, wishing I could somehow see a door painted somewhere, turn the lock and step into this magical portal where all the stories are, where there's so much knowledge, so much imagination. Where there are comfortable rooms, reading nooks, armchairs, the scent of paper and an atmosphere of calm and studiousness.

Honestly, I wish I could have come up with something like this, though the enormity of it baffles me still. Morgenstern has such vivid imagination that everything she describes is so fantastic, yet her words make it seem so real. The sheer scope of the world she's created is dizzying but I feel the need to thank her for she has given us plenty of space to go lose ourselves in when our lives seem bleak, a lot of corridors to wander down when we feel restless and cozy corners to just sit in and drink tea when we feel sad. The Harbor on the Starless Sea will always be there, welcoming storytellers, storylovers and storykeepers alike.

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lithereal, book review, homegoing book review,

"Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves."

Slavery is not something I think about a lot. I know it is terrible, I know it is immoral and so, so wrong. I know that the African people brought to the US were treated as animals (and worse than animals) and the inhumanity of it makes my heart hurt. But I'm not from a country that has any ties to it, it is not a part of my history and I thus have the privilege to simply not think of it. And then this book made me think about it, made me tear up. The first chapters are the most harrowing ones and I had to read it over several days instead of my usual one-day binge. Another amazing book on the subject that shook me to my core is Octavia E. Butler's "Kindred" which I read back in college.

This is a story at once universal and deeply personal. It's a story of the tragedy and atrocity of slavery that forces you to see the individual pain of these persons, not just the generalized black people that have been brought to American soil to work the plantations of rich whites. And it also reveals the shackles that the people that remained in Africa wore, though they were technically free - the chains of cultural and economic oppression that sought to destroy everything that made them unique. Anything different than what the English gentlemen were used to was deemed savage and unworthy and so they sent teachers and missionaries to instill their language and their religion among the tribes.

The novel follows two branches of a bloodline. A family tree is presented on the first page so you can easily reference it to make sure of the generation or relation between the characters. It all starts with Maame who is a slave in Africa and has two daughters - one with a Fante Big Man (Effia) and another with an Asante Big Man (Esi). When Effia was born, Maame started a fire and ran away and so the baby was left with Cobbe's wife, Baaba, to raise. Baaba hated Effia, beat her for every little thing while she was growing up, and arranged for her to marry a white man when she came of age - James Collins, a British officer at the Cape Coast Castle, just so she wouldn't have to look at her again. On the other hand, Esi grew up with her birth mother who loved and pampered her, feeling secure and at home. She is betrayed by a house girl and ends up a slave in the Cape Coast Castle. It is in this terrible, horrible place that the two sisters are in the closest proximity to each other they will ever be - yet in such different circumstances and completely unaware of each other.

As time goes on, Effia has a son, Quey, who is educated in England, and Esi a daughter, Ness, who is a product of rape by an officer and is raised on a plantation. Quey goes back to the Fante village where his uncle makes him a Big Man and arranges a marriage for him, while Ness is married to Sam and suffers terrible pain at the hands of her master. After that, Quey's son James decides to follow his heart, wash his hands off slave trade and marry for love, while Kojo, Ness's son, lives in Baltimore with his big family and works on ships. The next generations follows Abena - James the Unlucky's daughter - as she is shunned from the village and gives birth to a daughter; as well as H - Kojo's son who grew up as a slave on a plantation and is trying to make a better life for himself in the wake of abolition of slavery. Abena's daughter Akua seems to be cursed as she keeps dreaming of a firewoman who is looking for her two children, she brings great tragedy to her family and is shunned as H's daughter Willie lives in Harlem in pursuit of being a singer and is married to a white-passing man. Yaw teaches history and lives a lonely existence due to a facial scar his mother inflicted upon him while on the other side of the Atlantic, Sonny falls prey to the call of drugs and becomes an absent father. And the last strand of the bloodline are Marcus, Sonny's son, who is at Stamford getting his Ph.D in Sociology, trying to trace back his lineage as all knowledge of their ancestry has been lost and Marjorie, Yaw's daughter who grew up in Alabama but loves Ghana fiercely and visits her grandmother every summer, listening to her stories.

Each of the characters get a chapter to tell their stories and then we also find out some things about what happened after their chapter ended from the stories of their children. I found it most fascinating how different the lives of the contemporaries were just based on where they were living, how much different America and Africa are. That's not to say that either of the strands had an easy life. All of the characters suffered - the Americans went through slavery, Jim Crow laws, incarceration, racism, segregation, the drug epidemic; as the Africans battled with the guilt over being involved with slavery, old superstitions, shunnings, supernatural dreams...

It was a tough book to get through, I won't lie. I took my time but there were still parts of it that made me tear up, made my blood boil, made me want to scream, made me wonder just how cruel and heartless one can be. The idea of someone thinking themselves superior simply based on the color of their skin and the customs of their country is so baffling to me. It's unfathomable that a human being would sell another human like an animal, like a thing and think it's ok. I've struggled with these thoughts since I learned of racism and how it was that the black people originally came to America. Reading something like this just makes me sadder and angrier, makes me think of the lives and potentials lost and, honestly, makes me hate white people, even though I'm one of them. And to think it's still going on, so many years later in a society we call "modern", "civilized" and "democratic". I have too many thoughts on this subject, and not enough adequate words to express them, so I'll stop here.

Just promise me that you'll read this book.

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About Me

I blog from time to time about things that inspire me. Lately, I have been getting back into the habit of reading, and my posts reflect that. I'm also always trying to take pretty photos, with varying degrees of success.

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