13. In the Grip of Winter by Colin Dann

Love these covers!

I finally have read another Colin Dann!  My good buddy brought me home two of his books in these great Beaver Books versions and I convinced my daughter for us to read it together.  It takes place immediately after The Animals of Farthing Wood.  The gang of wandering animals have found a new home in a reserve for white deer that they call White Deer Park.  Everything is looking good until winter comes, a particularly hard one this year.

My daughter pointed out, somewhat disappointingly I thought, that this book was more episodic in nature.  It is overall about the animals and their struggle with winter, but it is really made up of separate mini-adventures, including Badger getting injured and then taken in and healed by the warden, his turning on his friends, the attempts to get food to survive through the winter, the warden's sickness and poachers coming on the reserve and finally Toad instinctively trying to return to Farthing Wood (which is now a housing development).  The cover makes it seem like it is all about Badger, which I think also contributed to my daughter's expectation of a single narrative.

We enjoyed it, but it didn't grab me the way my first reading of King of the Vagabonds did.  It's still a lot of fun. It's an interesting juxtaposition and a bit of a delicate one where the hero animals are sentient and can talk as well as resist their instincts to eat each other, while the "NPC" characters are still animals (though they can also talk).  I'm curious to see how it evolves as I also have the next book, which we are reading now.  It turns out there is a bit of a Farthing Wood series.

 

12. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I read this in the context of Black History Month at work.  One of the organizers recommended it and another non-fiction book.  I fortunately got this one out of the inter-library loan service in a few days.  I am always happy to diversify my reading, and especially trying to cut down the proportion of white male authors I read (which is probably like in the high 80%s at least lol).  So I was pleased to have this book recommended.  They are going to have discussions but that is not my thing at all.

At first, I was a bit put off, as the story starts with a birth in a 19th century West African village in the Asante and Fante region, involving fire and a mean step-mother and it all felt very magical realism/literary fiction.  It did have some of that, but fortunately, as I read on I saw that it was in the service of a much more interesting project.  Homegoing is basically a narrative genealogy beginning with a pair of sisters, separated at birth in the aforementioned village.  One stays in Africa and the other is captured as a slave and sent to America.  Each chapter is then the story of the next generation down.  We get the entire connection from the beginning in Africa to two modern-day people with all the major historical stops along the way. 

It's all very narrative and story-driven as everything has to be these days, so each chapter is sort of like a finely crafted short story, though connected both to the story before and after.  The literary trappings are much more toned down for the rest of the book except the beginning and the end to tie it all thematically together.  I found myself just enjoying (though there are a lot of unpleasant moments) the story and wanting to know how each person would end up.  The inherited trauma of slavery and its fallout both in society and the individuals is woven throughout the stories.  It makes the book doubly effective as a history, in that it really shows what actually happened while also helping you to understand how it impacted and impacts the people.

The beginning was particularly enlightening for me, as it portrays the mechanics and politics of the slave trade on the Africa side.  There are only the briefest scenes of the horror of the slaves being kept in Cape Coast Castle and then put on the ships, but they are almost harder to take than the tortures of slavery in the South which I had just finished reading.  I never doubt the capacity of cruelty by our species, but it is still shocking to even read about how the slaves were treated.