Girl Detective

I love the idea of related reading–delving deep into topics that interest me. My reach, however, nearly always exceeds my grasp. After I re-read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I reserved a number of books from the library: The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan, Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, v. 1-3, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (the latest novel by Chabon’s wife, Ayelet Waldman, whom I’ve read much about, though never read) and The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju, (a well-reviewed non-fiction book from 2008 about the censorship of comics in the fifties after their meteoric rise as a medium in the forties). I doubt if I’ll manage to read all of these before something else jumps to the head of the queue, like the Infinite Summer challenge, but I’m going to give it my best shot.

This week I read all three volumes of Dark Horse Comics’ Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, collecting the six-issue comic-book run of a few years ago. Like Brian K. Vaughan’s The Escapists as well as Chabon’s source novel, the series blends fact and fiction so the reader can either wonder (and possibly research) which parts are “really” real, or just go along for the ride. These books include stories and editorials interweaving comic-book history and material from Chabon’s fictional world, with both new and classic authors and illustrators.

Volume 1 has an introduction by Chabon, and opens with the Escapist’s origin, illustrated by Eric Wight, best known now for his comics work for the television show The O.C. It has an eye-catching cover and clever back-cover parody by award-winning cartoonist Chris Ware. I loved the Luna Moth story written and illustrated by Jim Starlin. My favorite piece, though, was the closing story “The Lady or the Tiger, illustrated by Gene Colan and written and with a preface by Glen David Gold (author of the Kavalier and Clay-esque Carter Beats the Devil).

In Volume 2, the standout was the opening story, done in the style of EC’s horror comics, written by comics vet Marv Wolfman.

Volume 3 has stronger stories than 2, I thought, with Will Eisner’s final work, along with a war tale, a noir mystery, a twisted romance and a closing story about euthanasia.

As with any anthology, the quality varies, and the presence of the work by some legends is sometimes more notable than the actual work here. But this is a top-notch production, with excellent covers, heavy paper and great art. It’s a good companion to Kavalier and Clay, and a lark for fans of Chabon’s book to see his fictive comic-book character in actual comic books.

A friend recommended Your Three-Year Old: Friend or Enemy? by Louise Bates Ames and Frances L. Ilg to me when Drake was three, Guppy was one and I was losing my mind. Time passed, things with Drake became a little less fraught, and I didn’t get around to it. But with some of the recent, frequent struggles with the previously agreeable Guppy, I decided to look up this book. I hadn’t forgotten its memorable, and apt title.

This is an honest book, as its title might suggest, though the authors are quick to answer the title’s question at the end of the first chapter: your three year old, despite evidence to the contrary, is not your enemy. It covers child development, comparing three and three and a half year olds to two and four year olds, while also acknowledging that all kids are individuals and on similar but different timetables. Three and a half, they note (the age that Guppy is closest to) is extremely difficult. Tantrums are normal, and struggles with basic routines like getting dressed, meal times and bed times are constant sources of conflict.

First published in 1985, it’s somewhat dated, but the basics still apply. Note, however, this is NOT for parents looking for detailed science, and it might offend some attachment and homeschooling families. The authors offer no magic advice, just sympathy with a dose of realism. They recommend getting support from babysitters and daycare providers so parents and kids get a much needed break from one another. Distraction at this age, is better than discipline. Above all, they note, is just getting through the day with both parent and kid as unfrazzled as possible.

Today, for instance, I signed the boys up for swim classes. 5yo Drake went off with his teachers, but 3yo Guppy got in the pool with his group, but stopped, refused to go farther, and kept hollering for me. I tried to convince him to join the other kids, as did two of the instructors. Then I gave up, and got a refund for the class. He’ll probably be ready some other time, but it wasn’t this morning. It certainly wasn’t worth a power struggle over something that’s supposed to be fun.

The Escapists by Brian K. Vaughan is one of several comics inspired by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Like that prose novel, this graphic novel plays with the boundary of reality and fiction. In it, a young man from Cleveland, Max Roth, buys the rights to a defunct comic-book character, the Escapist. He finds two friends to help create a new version of the comic book, then tries to publicize it in the manner of the character’s creators, Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier. It tells the story in real time, with flashback and pages of the fictional comic the team creates, all with different artists to distinguish the changes in story. Like the novel it’s inspired by, The Escapists is clever with sympathetic characters, a layered narrative, and a story both tragic and hopeful. A fitting, post-modern complement to Chabon’s excellent novel.

I first read Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in the sleep-deprived, surreal days following the birth of my son Drake, now almost 6yo. He was hungry around the clock, so I nursed him lying down so I could read at the same time. I even got a book light so I could read during the night feedings. I remembered the book itself only vaguely, yet the physical act of reading it–nursing, switching sides, wrestling with the book light and an unwieldy hardcover–is still very clear.

I was surprised, then, on this re-reading, to find this book not only extremely well-written and crafted, but also so enjoyable. How could I not remember how flat-out GOOD this book was? Well, I remember it about as well as I remember Drake’s earliest infancy. THAT I don’t need or want to go through again, but this book was a delight to rediscover.

The book details the friendship and collaboration between Josef Kavalier, a WWII Jewish refugee from Prague, and Sam Clay (ne Klayman). The cousins are in their late teens, and break into the burgeoning business of comics by creating a character called The Escapist.

The long run of Kavalier & Clay–and the true history of the Escapist’s birth–began in 1939, toward the end of October, on the night that Sammy’s mother burst into his bedroom, applied the ring and iron knuckles of her left hand to the side of his cranium, and told him to move over and make room in his bed for his cousin from Prague.

The book is a wild mixture of history, fabrication, Jewish lore, metaphor, comic books, romance, and adventure, all told through a fascinating panoply of complex, engaging characters. I’m a comic book geek, so the lengthy sections on comics history were interesting to me. The book likely would be a tougher read for someone with no interest or experience with comics. Even so, there’s so much going on in this book, I’d be very surprised if a reader didn’t find something to like, even love, in this sprawling epic.

A recent reading of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s newest installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, 1910, sent me scurrying back to the beginning, volume 1. It’s a fabulous re-read, because it’s so dense with lit-geek references that I’m sure I still missed many on this, my third or fourth time through it.

A strong willed woman with a mysterious past, an ex-adventurer with an opium habit, a psychopathic invisible man–all report to a man named Bond, who works for a mysterious “M”.

Mr. Quartermain? My name is Wilhelmina Murray. Your country has need of you again, sir.

Go away.

Sir, I had heard better of you. Is there nothing left of what you were? … I see. Then may the good lord help the empire, sir, if there are no men finer than yourself… to guard her?

Mayhem soon follows. There are more favorite Victorian characters here than you can shake a stick at. Not only is it fun to read, but it also makes me want to have another go at the source material. It was this series that first spurred me to tackle Gulliver’s Travels, Wells’ Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and more. I enjoyed the series, and it made me eager to read more, and to learn more. Not many books can do that, eh?

I could have guessed what would happen. When I picked up League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910, I couldn’t get my bearings. The series, formerly at DC, was now published by Top Shelf Productions. When I started to read, I wondered, who was this character? What happened to that one? Was I confused because I’d forgotten things from an earlier storyline? Were things murky on purpose? My best guess: it’s some of both.

When I read 1910 in its entirety, including the prose end-story, more of it made sense. Like its predecessors, 1910 is a dark, entertaining romp with characters from famous Victorian literature. Many of the references I got (Virginia Woolf’s ambisexual Orlando); I’m sure more sailed over my head (Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny were two I looked up later).

Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Jr., and colleagues are in pursuit of an occult group up to no good. Meanwhile, a young Indian woman defies her father and strikes out on her own. Stories collide in a spectacular way, accompanied by a duet commentary from two other characters. It’s interesting, with many plots left dangling, which certainly makes me eager for the next installment of what is to be a trilogy.

Till then, though, I’ll reread the earlier series, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. 1.

Me: [snicker]

My husband, G. Grod: What’s so funny?

Me: A good line that mixes Austen and the Fantastic Four.

[Repeat. Repeat.]

Later:

5yo Drake: Mom, please take that book back to Big Brain!

Me: Why?

Drake: It’s UGLY!

If he thought the cover was ugly, I wasn’t going to show him the inside. In Fantastic Four: True Story, the FF jump into the world of fiction to save the world at large. The villain is so similar in looks and domain that he’d better be an homage to Neil Gaiman’s Morpheus, or lawyers are likely to be involved. This is a fun, funny story that borrows its theme from Jasper FForde’s Thursday Next series and delves into Sense and Sensibility, Last of the Mohicans, Ivanhoe, and more. Not only are there clever mash-ups of literature and comic book conventions, there are several meta moments when the FF are confronted as characters of fiction as well.

It is not good enough, though, to compensate for the terrible art. It’s clumsy, rushed-looking, and for the second half I couldn’t tell the difference between Sue Richards and the elder Dashwood sisters. This story is a lark for fans of FForde, Austen and other authors referenced in the book. But the art and story never connect in a memorable way. Disposable fun.

I wasn’t able to read Unaccustomed Earth during the Morning News Tournament of Books this year; the reserve queue for it was too long at my library. Interestingly, the book didn’t fare well in the competition, though every judge only had good things to say about it. Having read it myself, I’m surprised at its poor performance; this is an engaging, well-written book of short stories, three of them linked.

Lahiri’s characters tend to be Bengali-Americans in relationships with non-Bengalis. Her writing has an emotional resonance that crosses cultures, generations and continents. Her characters are complex, and I found it easy to sympathize and empathize with them, even those whose circumstances were worlds away from mine. But as Lahiri’s stories ably demonstrate, experiences aren’t as disparate as some might think. A few passages in the book gave me that creepy, someone’s-been-looking-over-my-shoulder feeling, as they detailed unattractive emotions and feelings often left unsaid:

Wasn’t it since his [second child's] birth that so much of his and Megan’s energy was devoted not to doing things together but devising ways so that each could have some time alone, she taking the girls so that he could go running in the park on her days off, or vice versa, so that she could browse in a bookstore or get her nails done? And wasn’t it terrible, how sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn’t it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one’s life with, after making a family with that person, even in spite of missing that person, as Amit missed Megan night after night, that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?

I enjoyed and admired these stories, even as they sometimes brought pain and sadness. The ending reminded me strongly of another novel, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, and made me curious if there might be a reason for the similarities. I’m certainly interested in reading both of Lahiri’s previous books, The Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake.

Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, in hardcover, has been sitting on my shelf since I borrowed it from my mother-in-law several years ago. I suggested it for my book group, thinking that would force me to read it; I’m very persuaded by deadlines. But since I lost my reading mojo in the last few months, I didn’t finish in time for our meeting. We still had a good discussion, and overall enjoyed the book. And, I did finish it, finally.

A young boy named Daniel comes across a rare book in post-WWII Barcelona. He loves the book, and when he tries to find out more about the author, Julian Carax, discovers a mystery that will engage him for the next ten years. This book is a heady mix of horror, intrigue, romance, coming-of-age, and bibliophilia. I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it, perhaps because of the role of women in the book. They served mostly as objects of desire to motivate the men in the story.

That afternoon of mist and drizzle, Clara Barcelo stole my heart, my breath, and my sleep. In the haunted shade of the Ateneo, her hands wrote a curse on my skin that wasn’t to be broken for years. While I stared, enraptured, she explained how she, too, had stumbled on the work of Julian Carax by chance in a village in Provence.

This book reminded me strongly of The Thirteenth Tale, also a mystery from the past that encompasses romance, murder, and love of books. That, though, was told from a woman’s point of view, and seemed to me a “girly” counterpart to this, which I felt was a “boy” book by Zafon.

I found my new hair stylist the best way–by asking a woman whose hair I admired who her stylist was. The new stylist told me another of her curly-haired clients recommended Curly Girl by Lorraine Massey, and had come in after reading it with her hair looking fabulous.

If you are even vaguely curly, there’s a lot to like about this book. It’s put together in a chatty, informational way. Testimonials from women who’ve learned to love their curls, after a lifetime of trying to tame them. Massey is a curly girl herself, who’s done the research to find the best way of caring for it, and there are some surprising recommendations. Most curly girls can skip shampoo, cleansing their hair through scalp massage with conditioner. Brushes are out, too. Massey’s tips and techniques are going to take some practice, and getting used to, but I’m already loving the increased curl and definition in my hair, as well as the ideas on putting it up and tying it back. I was a little too zealous, though, when I purged our house of shampoo. I kept some for the kids, but gave away one of mine that G. Grod used too. He was not amused.

When I tried to find this book at the library, it was not yet back on the shelves. I asked one of the librarians for help. I was a little abashed when I told her the title and that it was a teen beauty book. She found it, and smiled when she handed it to me. “I own this. It’s good,” she said, as I noted her salt and pepper curls pulled back prettily from her face. While the book may be shelved in the teen section, curly girls know no age boundaries.

I purchased Christie Mellor’s Three-Martini Family Vacation in advance of our first full-on family trip. I haven’t yet read her previous one, The Three-Martini Playdate, though many of my parent friends have recommended it. I found this a funny, refreshing, if sometimes guilt-inducing, tonic to the current culture of over-parenting. I read it in the car to and from the beach in lieu of entertaining my kids in the backseat. I presumed, correctly, they could manage a 30 to 60 minute drive.

Trust me, there is never going to be the “perfect time” to go on a vacation, and if you wait for the ideal moment, you will be old and gray, and too finicky to want to travel anywhere you can’t have your shredded wheat and regular “programs.” Do not wait. Go now.

Traveling with children in tow can be challenging, but so can traveling with anybody who doesn’t want to do exactly what you want to do exactly when you want to do it. It’s annoying, but there you are. You could put a rucksack over your shoulder and abscond in the dead of night, leaving your broken-hearted family to pick up the shattered remnants of their lives without their mommy or daddy, or you could give it a try, and discover that “traveling” and “with children” don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

A few of her key points:

Teach your kids manners, self sufficiency and to be considerate of others as soon as they’re able. You, they, and others will all appreciate it in the long run.

Avoid places full of children, as they tend to be noisy, active, intrusive, and lack the manners mentioned above.

Three-martini parenting isn’t about ignoring your kids. It’s about finding balance between grownup time and kid time. Play with and attend to your kids. Within reason.

As much as possible, eschew social pressure. Remember the best vacations can be simple, cheap and even local.

This is a book one shouldn’t judge till one’s read it. It’s supposed to be humorous and tongue-in-cheek–one of its points is to lighten up. Consider it as a girlfriend’s take-it-or-leave-it advice. Mellor doesn’t pretend or claim to be an expert. She’s just another parent in the trenches, who’s been there and done that.

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy just didn’t work for me. At only 167 pages, I thought I’d finish it quickly; it took me days. There were myriad ostensibly sympathetic characters, yet none of them felt deep, connected and complex enough to engage me. Morrison switches between third and first person narration among the characters; this only made me feel further alienated from this book.

Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark–weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more–but I will never again rise up and bare teeth.

and

Lina is unimpressed by the festive mood, the jittery satisfaction of everyone involved, and had refused to enter or go near it. That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees.

Morrison is a great writer; her Beloved is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. This book, which addresses some of the same issues, felt like a faint echo of that work. It’s uncomfortable not to like a work that others have praised and one by a great artist. But my reaction to it is mine, and the opinion of this blogger. YMMV.

Most reviews have been positive (EW and NYT,) and the book made many best-of-2008 lists. The Atlantic notes the anachronisms of the dialogue, among other things, a critique echoed in this mixed review from The Telegraph.

A companion to her Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead, Home is similar but different. Like Gilead, it is a thoughtful novel with lovely prose and complex characters actively seeking spiritual growth. If you’re interested in questions of faith and redemption, and if you liked Gilead, as I did in 2005 and 2007, you’ll probably like Home too. But vice versa. It is a slow, perhaps sometimes ponderous, read, often painful in its brutally honest characterizations of fallible, sad and aging people.

Home is about the return of Jack, prodigal* son of the Reverend Boughton, and namesake of John Ames, the narrator of Gilead. Similar events and characters are showed through different perspectives. I found Gilead framed around the eras of people’s experiences of God: thunderous revelation of the early Bible, quiet respect of the later Bible, and then theology in the absence of an immanent God. Home takes the progression to the next step in its examination of the flawed nature of humanity, and its characters wonder if grace is earned and whether predestination plays a role, or exists at all.

Jack and his sister Glory are deeply sympathetic characters, and reading Home made me want to reread Gilead to see the same events through Ames’s eyes. I was hurt, and moved, and buoyed as I read. Low on plot and action, this is not a book for everyone. But its still waters run deep, and it will linger long for those inclined to listen.

Home is up against Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions, which I read and appreciated last year, this Wednesday, 3/18 in the 2009 Morning News Tournament of Books.

*NB: Prodigal means wasteful, not “someone who ran away and came back.”

Mark Sarvas’ Harry, Revised, one of the contenders for this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books, is a great example of why I don’t recommend a book or not until I’m finished. When I began it, I didn’t much enjoy it. The main character, Harry of the title is such a sorry specimen it’s easy to wonder, as he does to his wife:

“Oh, honey. Why did you marry me?”

As I was wondered whether to continue, the final line of the first chapter took me by surprise; I’d read little about this book and hadn’t bothered with the jacket copy. The end-of-chapter twist was so deftly done I thought, “I’m in.”

As I continued to read, though, Harry and his bumbling were often more painful than funny. I was reminded of the cringing feeling I get watching some of the “Michael Scott” episodes of the US The Office. The best episodes get the tricky balance between painful and funny, and manage to portray Michael as clueless but well meaning and likeable. I worried that Harry might end up like Michael in the off-balance episodes: clownish and pathetic.

I found this book got better and better toward the end, bringing each of its subplots to closure. Harry’s coming of middle age is believable and sympathetic. I found the novel all the more impressive because its structure is non-linear, and details are regularly withheld then revealed. Yet the story unfolds easily, even with the back and forward shifts in time. Sarvas is the author of the well-known litblog The Elegant Variation. Harry, Revised is his first novel, but it doesn’t read like a first novel, if you know what I mean.

This is a sweet, sad well-written book with a redemptive, earned ending. It wasn’t always easy to read, but the whole made me feel well-rewarded for engaging with it.

Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge, a novel about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, is a contender in this year’s Morning New Tournament of Books. Piazza opens with two quotes, one from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which this book is an homage to. Like that American classic, City of Refuge tells of a forced US migration, both through the eyes of those experiencing it, and with journalistic interludes that further fill in the details. I thought I knew what happened there. City of Refuge showed me I hardly knew a thing, and more compellingly, helped explain why.

On Monday, though nobody knew it yet, the water had only just begun to rise; it would keep rising until that Thursday, from more than a dozen breaks in the levee system, which let water gush and roll in from Lake Pontchartrain to fill up the bowl of New Orleans.

The novel switches between two families, one black, one white, and their experiences during and after the hurricane. I sometimes thought Piazza gave too much detail, and veered into the didactic, problems I also had with Grapes of Wrath. Like that book, though, this is a chronicle of a national tragedy, and the government ineptitude that made things worse. Like that book, City of Refuge is a novel about social justice. It educates, inspires empathy, and fosters outrage. The writing style wasn’t always to my taste, but the scope and power of the story, and the character of SJ in particular, are such that I’d recommend City of Refuge to almost anyone.

Thorina Rose’s Heartbreak Diet is a comic-book memoir of the breakup of her marriage. Both in words and illustrations, it’s wry, sad and easy to sympathize with. It begins with a simple exchange:

Thorina (holding toddler): Where are you going?
Her husband, X: I’m going running.

Rose illustrates her husband in a runners stretch, with a focus on his ass, in a sly visual dig. Throughout, he’s shown in shadow, and mostly from behind. It’s an effective way to characterize a man on his way out of their marriage. Rose’s art, black and white and shades of grey, is striking and accessible. The story is a pastiche of events, imaginings, advice she receives, and things she does, or tries to do, to get through the unraveling of her marriage. I enjoyed reading about her journey, both in pictures and in words. She narrates her anger, sadness and bewilderment, but her story is never weighed down by them, but buoyed by hope.

Blue Iris is a collection of poems and essays, most previously published, by Mary Oliver, winner of both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It was this month’s selection for my book group, and because I am a reluctant reader of anything but fiction (a tendency I’m trying to expand out of), I dragged my feet. The book, though, is lovely, both in form and content. Van Gogh’s famous image of irises adorns the covers, and the interior is sprinkled with black and white photos of branches, leaves and flowers.

The poems and essays focus on love and respect for flora, with particular attention to flowers and trees. Oliver’s poetry flows easily, without rhyme, and her essays are infused with the same fluid wordplay.

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give the peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

This is a brief, accessible book, especially for those, like me, suspicious of poetry. Oliver quietly contemplates the natural world, and conveys its wonder and beauty.

The fifth installment of the wildly entertaining Scott Pilgrim YA graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, finds our hero battling not one but TWO of girlfriend Ramona Flowers’ evil ex-boyfriends.

Ramona: Is he OK in there?

Kim Pine: C’mon. He’s Scott Pilgrim.

Party Host: A tiny robot is kicking this guy’s ass, if anyone wants to watch.

Scott not only has to battle robots, but deal with Ramona’s reaction after a revelation from teen nutcase Knives Chau. Silliness and sadness ensue. Scott continues to be an endearingly clueless and inept hero. The aura of mystery surrounding Ramona grows both figuratively and literally. And the next book sounds like it will wrap up the series.

O’Malley notes at the end that this is the only book so far he’s gotten in by deadline. I also think it’s the best-done to date–the plot is tight, as is the art. Nothing feels rushed or sloppy. I hope O’Malley can maintain the momentum for a strong ending to this story. Scott deserves a good ending (one I’m thinking won’t have him dating Ramona), even if not a happy one.

News on the upcoming movie, directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) with Michael Cera playing Scott: parts of the film may be animated, which should make the fight scenes really interesting, as well as provide some of the wacky whiplash that helps define these books.

Hailed by many critics as one of the best books of 2008, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle fit nicely into my informal self-teaching Shakespeare unit that began in earnest last year, and shows no sign of stopping. (Kinda like that last sentence. Heh.) I was disappointed when it didn’t earn a slot at The Morning News 2009 Tournament of Books, but decided to read it anyway. I’ll compare it when I do read those candidates. Like the Oscars, sometimes the best works don’t get nominated.

Edgar is a mute boy whose parents own a small dog-raising farm in Wisconsin. His story closely follows Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Edgar is named for his father, who is married to Trudy, and has a ne’er-do-well brother, Claude. Wroblewski departs from a strict homage,though, because the dog farm is more than a metaphor for a kingdom; the dogs are characters in themselves, and some of the most complex, loveliest-drawn I’ve read. Though her passages were few, Edgar’s companion Almondine had some of the most insightful and touching chapters in the book.

Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and mot important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. (195)

While the book closely follows the events of the play, it’s the character of Edgar, so much more sympathetic than that of Hamlet, and the details of the dog training and personalities that make this book stand on its own, not just as an homage. I was struck by the many similarities between raising dogs and raising boys:

She didn’t think that the lessons of dog training always transferred to people, but it was just the nature of things that if you punished anyone, dog or boy, when they got close to a thing, they’d get it in their head the thing was bad. She’d seen people ruin dogs too many times by forcing them to repeat a trial that scared the dog or even hurt it. Not finding a variation on the same task, not coming at things from a different angle, not making the dog relish whatever it was that had to be done, was a failure of the imagination. (298)

Edgar and his story challenged me to think of some of the events in Hamlet in different ways. More important, and less tangible, was how engaged I was with the book. I’d be doing errands, or away from the house, and I would miss the book. I’d wonder what the people and dogs were doing within the covers. It’s not often a book so inveigles itself into my life.

I saw The Golem years ago, but passed by it because of its imposing cover, even though it was by one of my favorite artists, Trina Schart Hyman. But the concluding essay in Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, “Golems I Have Known,” reminded me of it, so I sought it out.

This is definitely a book for older children, not only in length; it’s 94 pages, divided into chapters, each one an individual story. But it’s quite dark and sad, dealing with themes of the extreme prejudice of Jews that prefigured the Holocaust. In Rogasky’s version, Rabbi Judah Loew creates a man of clay, the Golem, whom he names Joseph. Joseph is a protector of the Jews of sixteenth-century Prague. Each tale shows Joseph’s strengths and limitations, and how the relationship between him and the rabbi develops.

The introduction to one of the chapters does a good job of describing the book:

The story here is one of blood and murder. Hatred is its root. In hatred there is evil, and in evil there is madness. That is the lesson, if there is one. And that is why the story will be told.

Hyman’s illustrations are detailed, beautiful, and appropriate to the complex subject matter. This is good stuff for older children, but too scary for young ones.