Book reviews from the staff at the Ferguson Public Library! Check out what we're reading and what we think about it below.
-Julie B.
"Misery is when you find out your bosom buddy can go in the swimming pool but you can't." An illustration shows a child standing outside the pool fence, looking dispiritedly at a pool full of white children playing in the water. Each page illustrates a different such moment in the experience of a child.
This was the last book Hughes wrote not long before his death in 1967. In an introduction, the Reverend Jesse Jackson wrote a few of his own childhood moments of misery in the context of race-coded times. Some of the circumstances described in this book have since been outlawed. Public swimming pools are no longer exclusive, public education and public transportation no longer segregated. Yet we can't satisfy ourselves with a belief that discrimination and its attendant pain and discouragement no longer exist simply because laws have changed. The stubborn economic and social realities of American life ensure that moments like these are still experienced by minority children in the US. The ugliness remains; only the contexts have changed.
A few years ago, a brainy, unfailingly polite, open-hearted and academically excellent 6-year-old I worked with in a tutoring center confided sadly to me one day that "the white girls" at his school had told him he couldn't play with them because he was "mean." This was a ridiculously inaccurate description of him, and this big-hearted child was baffled very painfully by this social slight. Stark moments like this in children's lives undoubtedly happen all around us, largely unnoticed except to those on the receiving end of such careless cruelty. It's a different version of the Black misery than what Hughes and Jackson and their respective generations experienced, but no less real and perhaps no less frequent.
This short, beautifully illustrated gem of a book delivers a powerful emotional impact, enabling us to see things we ordinarily don't about the spirit-diminishing effects of the racism that still permeates American life.
-Marianne W.
I chose David Copperfield for three reasons:
1) It's over 800 pages, close to our meaty goal of 1000 pages.
2) There was a copy taking up significant space on my bookshelf, right next to similarly untouched Bleak House.
3) Virginia Woolf's blurb is on the cover calling it "The most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
I went in prepared to be a little bored. The vague sense I had of Dickens was that he was long-winded, needlessly wordy ("He got paid by the word!" people holler, as if that is deterrent rather than impressive), and moralistic. I also wondered if his books were all about miserable orphan boys who make good through steadfast kindness and surprise rich relations.
Well, David is at one point a fairly miserable orphan boy and he does make good with the help of a rich relation and his own diligence. But! I was not bored and there were only about two chapters I skimmed because they were so weepy. Occasionally it seemed Dickens popped through the veil of fiction, either through clumsy structure (a scene observed through eaves dropping that tests the limits of human understanding; a character's running commentary cringingly meant to bring humor to melodrama), whiplash character changes, or the semi-frequent interruptions of plot to state some sort of thesis on being hard-working and productive.
Overall, I was impressed with just how continually entertained I was by the storytelling. The characters are so delightfully drawn, I feel like I will carry them with me much longer than I do others. His aunt Betsey was our hero: At one point I texted my mom: "Janet! Donkeys!" and I imagine that will be a phrase we can call to each other through the years. His villains were delicious: the writhing, unctuous Uriah Heep; steely Miss Murdstone; and my favorite, the fantastically bitter Rosa Dartle. Let me just take a moment for Rosa Dartle. Take this first description of her:
She was a little dilapidated – like a house – with having been so long to let; yet had, as I have said, an appearance of good looks. Her thinness seemed to be the effect of some wasting fire within her, which found a vent in her gaunt eyes.
When she dispenses with her halting manner of speech and lets forth with the full vent of that "wasting fire within her," I could not put the book down. It was so vicious, so intense, so full of emotion and fury.
I'm satisfied with my first Dickens experience and at some point will pick up another. Probably Great Expectations, because there's a lady called Haversham I'm looking forward to meeting.
-Michael G.
