In Africa, Anna is a princess in a tribe ruled by women.  In 1715 she is captured and brought to the Carter plantation in Lancaster County, Virginia.  Anna is fortunate enough to find herself working in the house and not the fields (we all know this, of course, based on movies we’ve seen).  The story follows Anna as she learns about her new country, her new place in life, and introduces the reader to many characters that would have played very important roles on a working plantation.  Sara is in charge of the kitchen and takes Anna under her wing for many reasons but early after Anna’s arrival, Sara recognizes a mark on Anna which signifies her rank as a very important person in her African tribe.  Sukey, the nurse on the plantation, has been around for a couple of generations and is well respected by both blacks and whites.  She has been known to never be wrong when she has “thrown the bones” (talking with spirits, predicting the future using bones).   Despite what seems to be an easy transition to her new world, Anna never loses sight of her origins and continues to practice as many of her old ways as opportunities arise.

Since Anna of Corotoman is a trilogy, it’s safe to report that she survives her life in America, so I won’t get too much into the details of what happens to her. Honestly though, I was waiting for some explosive, horrible, unthinkable event in the life of this new slave.  Spoiler alert – that doesn’t happen.  Anna isn’t a typical slave/master story with beatings and cruelty.  Although Anna hears about plenty that happens to other slaves, she is spared of this treatment.  And really, isn’t being a slave cruel enough?  When descendents of slave owners say “….but they were good to their slaves..”  I want to scream “But they were slaves – how good could it have been?!”    Through Anna, Ms. Frank brings us that other side of the Antebellum South, one we don’t read about often because we’ve come to expect whippings and hangings.

I asked Ms. Frank, who was very receptive to my emails, about the absence of cruelty in her novel and her response:

“The truth is there is little understanding out there of the history of slavery. It was never good, but human nature has not changed that much and there were good guys and bad, just like now.  Anna is with a master known to history as a good one, and in one of the most prominent households of the day, one looked to for example and emulation.  She suffers bitterly in any case, and loses her life, in essence — the life she was born to lead.”

Ms. Frank writes with an eloquent and poetic style.  Once into the rhythm, it’s hard to stop reading.   Although not filled with the horrors of other novels of this genre, I felt claustrophobic just reading about Anna’s description of her holding place on the ship that brought her and hundreds of others to the new world:

She willed herself to raise her right hand, then her entire arm to feel the surface above her face.  It was of a rough wood, like the place where she lay.  She calculated that if she were to draw her body into an upright sitting position, the top of her head would not quite clear the ceiling above her.  She would have to duck down and sit with drooping head and shoulders.

Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Frank doesn’t sugar coat the reality of what happened, Anna just doesn’t have a master that beats and rapes her – I suppose that he and his wife show as much respect as they could have for the time period.

I was also curious about the princess thing. Why couldn’t Anna have been just a normal girl? So I again emailed Ms. Frank who in addition to being an author, was a professor at Howard University and the University of the District of Columbia (Ms. Frank, for the record, is Caucasian).  Again, she was kind enough to respond:

“The reason I made Anna a princess probably has more to do with my generation’s experience and not with that of yours.  She had to be someone remarkable in order to demonstrate and emphasize that the society she entered had neither interest in nor comprehension of who she was.  That remained so for generations, on all counts for the most part, no matter the accomplishment or character, with early efforts on the part of slave owners to root out African customs, religion, etc., even though they did not fully succeed. I also wanted to write something for my students — the ones at Howard and at UDC — who struggled with self identity and felt they had little to look to as heritage they could either claim or understand or be proud of. My coming to know them was juxtaposed against also coming to know some of my fellow faculty members at the time who were black, but had grown up and studied in Haiti and in Cuba as sovereign people and acted like it.”

Lightbulb! This gave me a brand new perspective on the story.  Anna is based on a true story – there were African princesses that were captured.  We aren’t taught this in history class, so I had no idea.  Ms. Frank has inspired me to conduct more research on this.

Anna of Corotoman is currently only available in e-book format. If you haven’t downloaded a book yet, let Anna be your first e-book (as it was mine) .  Ms. Frank writes a beautiful story through Anna and although the subject matter remains uncomfortable, Anna is a strong girl who makes the best of her life and never loses her spirit.  I know when my daughter is a little older, she will enjoy reading about this amazing girl that could have been one of her ancestors.

I’ve explained before how I don’t like to be challenged.  I read for pleasure.  But City of Bohane was a challenge, mainly because it’s written in a completely different language.  Sure it’s English, but not the English I know.  Barry’s writing is so strong and so powerful that he can use whatever words he wants and he doesn’t care if you don’t know what they mean.  But I couldn’t resist the challenge.  So as I read through countless “y’ sketchin?” and “hoss polis” and “hoors” and “shebeens” I gradually adapted and began to understand his language.  By the middle of the book I wasn’t batting an eyelash as I encountered new slang.  Coincidentally, it’s not until around the middle of the book that you accidentally learn that this story takes place in the middle of this century — sort of a post-apocalyptic new world.

Bohane is a city in Western Ireland, and this novel takes place there, combining the Irish mob with noir fiction with a dialect and culture that seem to live separate from the rest of the world.  Bohane lies on the banks of the river of the same name, and is surrounded by nothingness — including the Big Nothin’, the area beyond the city’s borders.  The story starts with Logan Hartnett, a/k/a ‘bino, a/k/a the Long Fella, the leader of the Hartnett Fancy, the mob that controls the Back Trace.  As turf wars begin to fester over Smoketown, the North Rises, and the Dunes, plots begin to unfold and conspiracies take shape to determine the fate of the city and its inhabitants.  A motley cast of characters is introduced and we learn (or think we learn) of their allegiances.  Jenni Ching, Wolfie Stanners, F*cker Burke, Ol Boy Mannion, Eyes Cusack, the Gant Broderick, Girly, Prince Tubby — the list goes on.  Each a freak in his or her own right, and each with his or her own agenda in the power struggle that takes place.

I struggle to think of a writer who struck me as so powerful as Barry.  Not perfect, mind you, but just strong and forceful prose, the likes of which I haven’t encountered too often.  It may be a chicken or egg argument, but either this book gave me insomnia or my insomnia helped me to finish the majority of this book last night between midnight and 5:30 am.

I’ve already warned my wife off of this one (not that she takes too much persuading), but it really is a guy’s book as Tim noted.  And every guy ought to read it.

Book Time with Meg: 08
[See post to listen to audio]

Most of the titles on Meg’s summer reading list come from the list 67 Books Every Geek Should Read to Their Kids Before Age 10 and the follow-up Books Geeks Should Read to Their Kids: Your Additions to Our List

Most Painful Pun of the week:  ”… a Sentence to Write Sentences:  When former pharmaceutical executive Andrew G. Bodnar pleaded guilty to white-collar crime in 2009, the judge didn’t throw the book at him—he ordered him to write one.”

Infographic of the week:  How books are born

Existential angst of the week:  what happens to your e-books when you die?

List of the week: Top 10 Historical Novels

Recommended geeky reading for daughters (or sons):  A list of stories about girls that are princess-free

When you keep using that fancy word, it’s obvious you just learned it yesterday

At Grantland, an excerpt from Justin Halpern’s new book I Suck At Girls

A company that makes novels into posters (you need to see it)

Amazon reviews just as reliable (in aggregate) as professional reviewers (in aggregate) 

Most of us who found ourselves at Bellingham had been kicked out of better schools for stealing, or having sex, or smoking weed.  Rich kids who’d gotten caught, been given a second chance, only to be caught again then finally expelled.  We weren’t bad people, but having failed that initial test of innocence and honored, we no longer felt burdened to be good.  In some ways it was a relief to have fallen.  To have fucked up only to land softly cushioned, as my dad reminded me, “by a goddam safety net of your parents’ wealth.”  Bellingham offered us sanctuary, minimal regulations, and a valuable lesson: Breaking rules could lead to more freedom.

I may be getting ahead of myself here.  The Starboard Sea is about more than the rich behaving badly.   Let’s start at the beginning.

Jason Prosper is the young man who has been saved by his father’s “goddam safety net.”  There is a dark secret in his past.  His roommate, best friend, and sailing competition partner (all the same person) killed himself for reasons that are not made fully clear into well into the novel.  Almost immediately upon arrival, Jason almost kills a classmate in a boating accident on his first day of sailing class.  Starting over, getting over the memory of his lost friend, and being accepted at this new school may be more difficult that Jason imagined.

As a social pariah (initially), Jason gets to know some of the other outcasts in the school: the nerdy townie who works in the cafeteria, an artistic girl who is rumored to have her own demons, the only black kid in the school, the desperate to be liked Southern freshman girl.   Each struggles in their own way to fit in, and each pays a considerable price.  Be forewarned, this is high school life portrayed in its most demanding and punishing form.

The novel reminded me a bit of other great campus novels like Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. It has A Secret History’s prep schooler’s fateful moral transgressions, and it is anchored by a sport – sailing – where The Art of Fielding drew on baseball.  Sailing allows the author a clearer path to Melville references (used sparingly) than baseball does, and it allows the author to paint  (not so subtle) allegories like this one:

“When you tie a piece of rope, you take a way some of its strength.  Most of the time you’re using the knot to connect two things to make them safer.  But when a rope eventually breaks, it always breaks at the bight.”

Chester picked up two coiled ends of rope and practiced the bowline knot I’d shown him… “So binding something together doesn’t make it any stronger.”

“No,” I said.  ”Not in the long run.”

Foreshadowing!

There were several parts in the novel where I prepared myself to be disappointed.  Dermont always managed to stay one step ahead of me and kept me engaged in the lives of her characters.  This is a very good book and I recommend it highly, especially if you were a fan of the books I referenced earlier, The Secret History and The Art of Fielding.  While I used those novels as handy references, The Starboard Sea stands entirely on its own merits.

The story takes place somewhere in Georgia in the 1930′s, and it starts with a downright Of Mice and Men feel to it, beginning with two deaf-mutes who live together, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos; Singer is the calm, rational one, and Spiros is the big clumsy oaf.  McCullers has a nice, simple prose style — reminiscent of the other southern literature I’ve read — and I was drawn in instantly.

Then things just went off the rails into boringtown.  I am sad to say it, given the universal praise this book seems to have garnered, but it bored me to tears.  After the first chapter ended and we moved on to some other characters — Mick Kelley, the young tomboy, Biff Brannon, the cafe owner, Jake Blount, the loudmouthed laborer, and Dr. Benedict Copeland, the up-in-arms African American doctor — I just got bored and lost.  I was plodding through, just waiting for the story to take an interesting turn, or for me to start caring about any of these characters, and it just didn’t happen.

I would speculate that when this book was written in 1940, when McCullers was 22 years old, much significance was given to her age and her attempt to portray the various dynamics of the old south and the alienation that its inhabitants felt.  But that was just lost on me.  Call me a modernist, or hearken back to my short attention span; either way, the struggles and challenges of these characters didn’t resonate and I was thoroughly disappointed.

• We used excellent hard-cover blank books from McSweeney’s/McCMullens Author-Illustrator Starter Kit to better withstand the rigors of an active little brother.
• We started the book (after the title and dedication pages) with this excellent super hero ABC graphic.
• We closed the book with this nifty picture of the Avengers drawn in the style of Maurice Sendack

Book Time with Meg: 07
[See post to listen to audio]

Broward County, Florida removes Fifty Shades of Grey from their library shelves in response to the SNL skit. (I’m guesssing.)  So does Gwinnett County, GA.

Omnivoracious has book ideas for mom that don’t involve Fifty Shades of Grey

An infographic with the top 10 most read books in the world. Ever.

A less fun infographic on illiteracy in America.

New York Times shows Tumblr its “morgue”

Top 10 Pseudonymous Books

Flowchart: What is weird fiction?

Plan your next trip to Westeros with these Game of Thrones travel posters

The tone of the novel is set from the start:

Whatever’s wrong with us is coming off that river.  No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river.  This is the Bohane river we’re talking about.  A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

Bohane is a jumble of insular neighborhoods that generally range from bad to worse.  They are ruled over by a lawless gang, the Hartnett Fancy,  headed by the Long Fella, Logan Hartnett.  The criminals in this Irish coastal town are nattily dressed and pass the time listening to old ska and calypso records.  It is a surprise to learn well into the book that the action takes place in a future Ireland that pines for The Lost Time of peace and prosperity (more or less now).  In this future Ireland, electricity is not a given on any particular day and violence is generally brought about by fists and knives.  Were it not for a few anachronistic features, the novel could just as well have taken place at anytime over the past 200 years.  It has the feel of a timeless story and that has to be by design.

The tension in the novel comes with the sudden reappearance in town of the Gant, the previous gang leader of Bohane who had been long exiled to “the Nation Beyond.”   There is a history.  Hartnett replaced Gant as the underworld leader, and he married The Gant’s old flame.  The entire city is instantly on guard.

Gant is remembered in his youth:

The Gant was a slugger of a young dude and smart as a hatful of snakes.  Sentimental, also.  He had washed in off the Big Nothin’ wastes, the Gant, and it was known in Bohane there was a good mix of pikey juice in him.  A rez boy – campfire blood.

See him back there:

A big unit with deep-set eyes and a squared-off chin.  Dark-haired, and sallow, and wry.  The kind of kid who wore his bruises nicely.

The descriptions in this novel are solid gold.  ”Smart as a hatful of snakes…”  What does that even mean?  Barry let’s us know that the Gant “washed in from the Big Nothin’” the same as the Bohane river, the source of the city’s badness.  He’s not a man to be trifled with.

As the plot thickens, plans are made, sides are taken, challenges accepted and met, bribes paid and received.  Intrigue a’plenty.  The very future of Bohane is at risk, and everyone has a stake in its outcome.  Plot twists and surprises abound as the struggle for Bohane plays out.

One may wonder why everyone wouldn’t just pack up and moved to a more civilized part of the country.   The civic pride that runs throughout Bohane is very much of the “this place may be a cesspool of violence and danger, but it’s our cesspool”-variety:

Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.

It’s as though we can say…

Now!

D’ye see, now, what it is we are dealing with.

As you may have gathered, Barry writes the story in a tough guy argot that takes a few chapters to get a handle on.  It’s the language that sells the story and sets the novel apart.  (I’ll again compare it The Sisters Brothers in this specific regard.)   This novel completely kicks ass, but it is also sentimental and completely charming.  And literary, too.  It’s almost too much to ask for.  I couldn’t put it down.

Sherlock Holmes: Punch me in the face!

Dr. John Watson: Punch you?

Sherlock Holmes: Yes, punch me in the face! Didn’t you hear me?

Dr. John Watson: I always hear “Punch me in the face” when you’re speaking but it’s usually subtext.

Episode 1 is available to stream on Netflix if you need to get caught up.