Growing Up Amish

This book popped up on my Goodreads account a few weeks ago, and I decided I would check it out. I was always interested in the idea of Rumspringa--the time in Amish life where the youth run wild before joining the church as adults. Sometimes this means leaving their communities, sometimes it just means sneaking around and experiencing the outside world on the sly. The Amish believe that only adults can fully accept Christ, so people are baptized around the age of 18, give or take a few years.

Ira Wagler in Growing Up Amish runs wild for a period of several years. When he is 16, he runs away in the middle of the night from his community in Bloomfield, Iowa with his friends. They live like cowboys, working on a farm. They drink. They smoke. They meet girls. This would be the first of Ira's five trips out of the Amish community and into the world.

For the next ten years of his life, he lives in a constant state of longing. If he is in the Amish community, he longs for the outside world. For cars. For booze. For freedom. When he is in the outside world, he longs for his family and the stability that comes with the Amish lifestyle. Not even a total believer in God or the church's message, and guilt-ridden because of his many sins, Wagler also worries that he will die on the road and go straight to hell. Eternal damnation is a lot of pressure, and one of the other reasons he returns home so many times.

After returning from his third trip into the outside world, Wagler comes home and joins the church. When he is baptized he feels nothing. But he tries desperately to settle into Amish life and have what his parents have. He begins courting a girl named Sarah, and the two even get engaged. However, as life moves along, Wagler becomes increasingly aware that he cannot stay. He misses the outside world. He knows he will not be happy. So he leaves. Again. And is excommunicated

But after being out in the world, he once more wishes to return to the Amish way of life. He is also concerned with his soul. He writes, "The Amish have always taught, always preached, that once the desire to return leaves, that's when you are truly lost." Afraid of being truly lost, Wagler grasps onto his feelings of sorrow over abandoning the Amish. He attempts to return to the church. The Amish church in Bloomfield accepts him back, but he leaves Bloomfield for a different settlement, trying to create a different but still Amish life for himself.

It is on his fifth return to the Amish church he has a spiritual awakening and begins to believe in God. He also believes that God forgives him for his sins. Less concerned for his soul and the threat of eternal damnation, he starts to realize that maybe he can leave the church and not be damned forever. He decides to do this, and makes his final, permanent exit from the Amish church. He moves to Pennsylvania and joins a Mennonite church.

Growing Up Amish is moderately well-written. In writing classes you always hear, "Show, don't tell." As in, paint a picture for your reader, don't just tell them what events happened. Wagler does a good amount of showing, but sometimes he simply tells and can get a bit repetitive. These problems happened most clearly towards the end, where the book begins to get a little bit rushed. However, some of his sentences are beautiful and he turns a nice metaphor every now and then.

This book may not be highly literary, but it is highly informative and sometimes, surprisingly, relatable for those of us in the outside world. There is one scene where he discusses a boy in his school who was brutally bullied by the other children. One wouldn't imagine such holy societies to have such horrifying bullying problems (the child is beat up on a daily basis, mocked, etc.), but in that sense their schools are just like ones in the outside world. Wagler also explains all of the ins and outs of Amish life, which I appreciated. I learned a lot about a culture I didn't know much about.

I also could relate to Wagler's pull between one world and another, to a small degree at least. I often felt that way about college. When I was away at school, I missed home. Then I would go home and miss school. I know there are other boomerang generation-ers out there who know what I'm talking about. Obviously there was a lot less riding on these torn emotions. Being conflicted between home and college is much different than an Amish person being torn between their community and the outside world. When I was at school, I wasn't concerned about the fate of my soul or forever being exiled from my parents. One of the successes of this book is the fact that Wagler did a great job at making a very unique experience seem somewhat relatable.

For memoir readers out there, I definitely recommend this one.

Night Flying

Night Flying by Rita Murphy is a tiny little book, clocking in at just over 120 pages. It’s a nice book to read when you need some fast yet fulfilling fiction. I read this one a few years ago, and re-read it this week while I was waiting for a book in come in at the library. The premise is about, well, night flying.

Narrator Georgia Louisa Hansen is from a family of female fliers. Her Great-Great-Great Grandmother Louisa Hansen lost her husband and baby boy in a boating accident in the 1800s. She used to fly out across the water at night in her sleep looking for her loved ones. Thus, the flying gene was passed down but only to the Hansen women.

The Hansen women are one for rules. Only fly at night. Only eat meat. No men allowed. Do not fly alone until you are 16. No pets allowed. Fifteen-year old Georgia’s life is regimented by these rules, which are enforced by her grandmother. Her mother, Maeve, a frail woman, is not allowed to fly. Georgia learns the way of the skies through her aunts Suki and Eva. The three sisters, Grandmother, and George make up the Hansen household. George has never met her father. 

The women never have to worry about money. Georgia’s great-grandfather created a special part that makes flushing a toilet easier, and the women live off of the inheritance, or as they call it the “toilet money.” Georgia’s grandmother threatens banishment from their estate and the seizing of their “toilet money” if the sisters or Georgia break any rules. Georgia’s Aunt Carmen was banished from the family after she broke the rule—Georgia has never been clear on the details.  

But when the week of Georgia’s sixteenth birthday rolls around, Carmen flies into town (literally), and family secrets begin to creep out of the Hansen sisters. And a rebellion against Grandmother’s rules slowly starts.

There are a few gaps—for example, I would have liked to understand the grandmother’s relationship with her husband. What happened in their marriage? Was he banned from the premises? The grandmother refused to let any of her children have a man around—for fear they will challenge her authority—but how did she have four kids with the same man? He must have been around for at least a few years.

Night Flying is a wonderful little piece of young adult fantasy, and a great piece for the young feminist reader. It’s about strong women, making their own rules, and fighting oppression (in the form of the grandmother character). In some ways, it appears very radical—with the “no men allowed” rules and all. However, as the book goes on, those old rules begin to dissolve and the reader is left with strong women who are not anti-man, but anti-authoritarian. A quick google search finds Night Flying on many lists of young adult feminist books, like this one. I definitely recommend this one for a quick, thoughtful, feminist read. 

Wayward Saints

Wayward Saints by Suzzy Roche (of the folk band the Roches) follows the lives of Mary Saint, lead singer of the once indie-famous band Sliced Ham, and her friends and family. Mary left her home of Swallow, New York as a teenager, leaving behind her mother, Jean, and abusive father, Bub. She travels the world with Sliced Ham. The band starts to grow in popularity, but they become weighted down by drugs and liquor. Her lover and fellow band mate, nicknamed Garbagio, falls intoxicated from a balcony and dies one night. Sliced Ham peeters out from there, and Mary slips into depression and alcoholism. She recovers, eventually, and moves to San Fran. There, she meets a tranny named Thaddeus at a homeless shelter, and the two move in together. It is then that she gets the call from her mother, asking her to return to Swallow to play a show at the town’s high school.

Jean has been living on her own since she checked Bub into a nursing home after he suffered a stroke. When the English teacher at the high school approached her about contacting Mary to do a show, Jean was hesitant but complaint. Throughout most of the book she anxiously awaits her daughter’s return, trying to understand her abusive relationship with her husband and distant relationship with Mary. She coincidentally meets Garbagio’s father—his wife is in the same nursing home as Bub—and the two strike up a friendship. Jean is also incredibly devout, and much of the book focuses on how she grounds herself with her faith.

There is a cast of secondary characters that float in and out of the book, but Mary and Jean are the staples that keep the novel propelling forward. Although the book is told in the third-person omniscient, I found most of the closer looks at secondary characters to be a bit unnecessary. I was always most interested in Mary and Jean.

Wayward Saints is Roche’s debut novel, and it is somewhat uneven because of that. For example, Mary seems very authentic and her character is fully conveyed to the audience. Somehow, she doesn’t fall into the stereotypes of “alternative rocker chick” and manages to seem fresh and interesting. However, there are other parts of the book that are less realistic or fleshed out. The conversations between Jean and Garbagio’s father are ones I know are supposed to be meaningful but felt a little trite to me. Whenever I was reading the dialogue, I kept thinking that their conversations needed to go a little deeper, and the word choice needed to be a little more original. The dialogue itself felt flat, even though I cared about both of the characters and their relationship. “This is exactly how I would expect older people to interact with each other,” I found myself thinking.

Another place of unevenness was the theme of religion and faith. The references to religion and the characters’ attachment (or discord) from God are constantly present throughout the novel. However, Roche needed to expand the theme a little more. When Mary was a child, she thought she was visited—and fondled—by the Virgin Mary.  Mary finds this memory to be somewhat of a comfort, and states the Virgin gave her the strength to sing. Her devout mother finds this vision appalling. By the end of the novel, I couldn’t quite understand what we were supposed to feel about religion. Is it a support system? A fantasy? A crux? All of these things?

I did appreciate the way the book looks at the music industry. It is critical of it (for its drugs, money, alcohol) but also encapsulates the magic of a good live show, which can be a quasi-religious experience in itself. I think in the future Roche will be able to flesh out her novels a bit better. I was reminded of when I reviewed High Fidelity. One of the things I loved about that book was that it was equal parts a wonderful book about music and a wonderful book about relationships. Wayward Saints is a wonderful book about music and an ok book about relationships. More than anything, the book just had the feeling of being published a draft too soon. But the prose is beautiful, clean, and descriptive. And I have faith that Roche’s second novel will be even and masterful.

The Year of Magical Thinking

I am not sure what I can say about Joan Didion’s non-fiction book The Year of Magical Thinking that hasn’t been said before in a review. The book is famous, a masterpiece even, for a reason—it is complex, masterful, reflective, and beautifully sad. Instead, I wish to offer more of a reading guide to the piece. 

If you haven’t read the book, here’s what it’s about: Writers and couple John Dunne and Joan Didion watch their only child, Quintana, develop pneumonia and septic shock several days before Christmas in 2003. She is admitted to the hospital in critical condition and falls unconscious. A few days later on December 30, 2003, while Quintana is still comatose, John is struck at the dinner table by a massive coronary. He dies instantly. After several weeks, Quintana regains her health. She travels to California with her husband Gerry where she collapses in LAX. She is rushed to the hospital where she is diagnosed with a massive hematoma. Quintana, once again, falls unconscious and gravely ill but later recovers.

Didion attempts to make sense of these events, and attempts to understand death. She researches death and the medical problems her loved ones suffer. She turns to the literature. She is a smart, grounded woman, but a part of her still expects John to come back. It is this expectation of his return that she refers to as her “magical thinking.”

Clearly, this book is a rough book to read. It has been on my list for about two years now, as I am quite a fan of Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking is a book that people always talked about in my writing classes in college. It’s an important book in terms of style—Didion never falls into being overly sappy or sentimental, which is a challenged giving the subject matter. (Who could blame her if she did get sentimental or sappy?) If you are going to write a book about death, this is a model of how to do it effectively.

But, like I said, all of this has been said before about The Year of Magical Thinking, so I am going to give two pieces of advice to the reader of this book, based on my own experience. First of all, read it when you must, when it fits for your life. There were other times in my life when The Year of Magical Thinking could have been of use to me, but I decided to pick it up now. The book made me scared of all of the terrible things that can possibly happen. I think if I had been reading this at a rougher period in my life, I could have related to the book more. But instead it just made me nervous. I read the book quickly, trying to get through it so that I could escape the parts of it that made me uncomfortable.

Which brings me to my second piece of advice: Read this one slowly. Read it carefully; absorb it; pay attention to how Didion copes through language. I remember in “The White Album” she writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is what Didion is doing in The Year of Magical Thinking. She constantly puts the events of John’s death and Quintana’s illnesses into a story, into a timeline. She slows down. She takes the time she needs to make sense of the events in her life. So when you read it, don’t power through it. Take it nice and slow.

In summation, read The Year of Magical Thinking when it is necessary to your own understanding of your own circumstances, and read it slowly. Do not read it like I read it—fast, wanting to know what happens next but also trying to escape the difficult subject matter of death that Didion forces her reader to confront.

The Weird Sisters

The Weird Sisters is one of those novels that you think about a lot while you read it. The premise involves three sisters—Rose (Rosalinda), Bean (Bianca), and Cordy (Cordelia)—who move in with their parents because of their own various failures and problems. However, they all make the transition back to the nest under the guise of helping their mother who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The book doesn’t leave you in the time between when you are reading and when you are not. I found myself thinking about the novel throughout the day: Which sister was I the most like? Responsible, homebody Rose? Sneaky, party-girl Bean? Free, gypsy-esq Cordy? 

All of the girls move home with secrets—Rose is too afraid to leave her hometown and move to England with her fiancé, Johnathan. She uses the excuse of her mother’s cancer as a reason to move back in with her parents and avoid following Johnathan to his new, one-year job in London. Cordy is pregnant and returns to her parents’ house where she tries to keep her situation hidden. Bean has just been caught stealing from her job in New York. Penniless and indebted to her former employer, she trots back to Ohio.

This book isn’t heavily plot driven—most of the plot points are a bit predictable. However, the interesting part of the novel is watching how the three sisters grow as individuals and as a family. The nature of the novel constantly comes back to questions of identity: Is it possible to define yourself and your personality in a vacuum? Does your role in your family play a part in your self-definition?  For example, Bean is often left feeling self-conscious because she is neither the responsible Rose nor the loveable Cordy. Similarly, Cordy has always been the baby of the family and has a hard time seeing herself as an adult who is about to have her own child. The girls come to realize that they can be defined separately from their family while still having a connection to their roots. 

Brown also discusses the nature of hometowns—how they can be hard to leave and hard to come back to. The duality of hometowns is something that has always been a favorite topic of mine in my own writing, and I really admired Brown’s discussion of the subject. Each sister represents a stance on their hometown of Barney: Rose never wanted to leave. Bean moved somewhere else and made that her home. Cordy never wanted to have a home at all and lived a wanderer’s life. However, by the end of the book, the sisters’ views on hometowns/homes shift. At one point Cordy says, "We all want to become something better than Barney, but we won't" (313).

The together/separateness of the characters in the novel is mirrored by the point of view in which Brown writes. I have never read a book with this exact style. It is told in the first-person plural (think The Virgin Suicides), with the sentences focused around the sisters as the collective “we.” However, much of the book breaks away from the collective mentality and focuses on a specific sister with the third-person voice. The book will discuss just what Cordy is doing at the moment, for instance.

The book is aware of its own literary prowess. The characters often talk in lines of Shakespeare, because of the sisters’ father being a scholar on good ole Bill’s work. The Weird Sisters are a reference to Shakespeare’s witches in Macbeth and the girls are individually named after characters in various plays.

The Weird Sisters is great for two kinds of readers: those who enjoy a unique point-of view narration and literary allusions, and those who like stories about people going through changes and transitions. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it. 

The Cabinet of Earths

So I've been writing for Yahoo! Contributor Network, and I reviewed this children's book for their site. Not what I usually review, but check it out anyway! It was a cute book. Also, I will be writing a review of Eleanor Brown's The Weird Sisters within the next day or two, so check back!

My review of The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet. 

The Sex-Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not really an adventurous person. I’ve lived a pretty typical American life, and I’ve never been out of the country. Reading The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift In the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost is almost like reading a fantasy novel of another realm. Whereas I’ve never even seen the countries that border the US, author Maarten and his wife Sylvia travel to the Kiribati, a country consisting of a series of atolls spread throughout the Equatorial Pacific.

After finishing grad school and flitting around through random temp jobs, Maarten doesn’t really know what to do with his life. Sylvia is in a similar boat, and the two of them begin searching for jobs in remote parts of the world. As someone who is in a similar stage of confusing unemployment, I can't help but admire Sylvia and Maarten for being so brave. I won't even contemplate moving out of my state, and these two apply to move halfway across the globe. Eventually, Sylvia gets an offer to join a development team on Kiribati’s capital atoll Tarawa, and when the two arrive Maarten assumes the role of homemaker on an island known for its subsistence living.  Sylvia’s predecessor told them that the island was hell, and Maarten and Sylvia begin the adjustment process.

This is what Tarawa is like: It is hot. So hot. So hot that when one I-Kiribati (the name for people native to the island) went to Hawaii, he returned complaining how bitterly cold the trip was. Water is hard to come by on the atoll, and the only real type of vegetation is coconut trees. Fish are the main staple of the Kiribati diet. The average I-Kiribati consumes over 400 pounds of fish per year. There are no seasonings to put on the fish, and many of the types of fish that surround the atoll are toxic. Disease is common on Tarawa. Maarten and his wife suffer from all kinds of illnesses during their stay. But somehow, the island becomes their home, and they are more than a little bit shell-shocked when they return to America two years later.

The book is full of funny and terrifying anecdotes. For example, at one point, Maarten attempts to create a garden. He builds a fence for it, only to discover that the piece of plastic he plucked out of the reef to use as a latch is actually a hospital IV full of blood.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals is a really fantastic travel book, but also one that is great for the reader interested in international development. Maarten takes ample time in the book to discuss the pitfalls of the international aid industry and developmental politics. He goes into the complex history of Tarawa and Kiribati while also describing the internal politics of the country.

As someone who studied politics in college and has read many books and articles on the international aid industry, The Sex Lies of Cannibals stands out as a more relatable exploration of the issues that plague the developing world and the aid industry. The book is a personal look, written by someone who has seen the aid industry at all angles.

After returning from Kiribati, the Troosts are strapped with debt. Maarten says to Sylvai at one point in the book after they return from Tarawa, "Remember that meal we had in Annapolis three years ago? Well, after three years of interest and late fees and finance charges, that meal is going to cost me $1,500" (266).

Their unfortunate financial situation pushes Maarten into accepting a job with the World Bank, where he receives a large pay check but eventually becomes the kind of person he used to hate. Maarten's experience with grassroots development projects like the ones Sylvia started on Tarawa, and his knowledge of the projects the World Bank starts makes him a reliable source. He has seen both, and knows that the large-scale ones created by international institutions are out of touch with the reality of the places they claim to help. But he also understands that even at a grassroots level changing a society is no easy feat.

The book is hilariously and masterfully written, while also being educational and illuminating. This is a must-read. And if you're an inexperienced traveler like me, the book offers a lens into a world that is both foreign and engrossing.