I am back. Not sure what the last summer posting hiatus was about, but here I am again. So far this summer I have read two books (along with about 1, 750 AP poetry essays at the AP grading in Louisville, KY): Aiming for One Hundred by Sara D. Toney and Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet. Wow, I hadn't really thought about it before writing the titles together, but these two books are worlds apart. Worlds.
Aiming for One Hundred was written by my mother-in-law's friend, Sally Toney. Sally will be 102 this fall. Yep, 102. She is still sharp and walks every day. This book is a collection of stories, poems, essays that she wrote in the 1980s for a course titled "Finding Your Voice." She tells stories about her childhood, her experiences as a student and athlete at Pembroke College, the women's college of Brown University, and her adult married life. What made reading Sally's musings so poignant for me was that she is the same age as my grandmothers if they were alive. Although, Sally led an amazing life that was much different than the world my grandmothers experienced, witnessing how Sally navigated those times provided a new perspective of the past. Sally certainly has lived an extraordinary life, forging an intellectual path when it was difficult for women to so. Her life was not without trials -- one of the most devastating being the memory of her mother's "lovely face in the dark carriage smiling gently as she rolled away from [her]" This would be the last time Sally saw her mother who died after surgery. If you are interested in the past, wanting to glimpse into one woman's interesting life, this little gem of a book is for you. The vignettes aren't long, easy to fill 10 or 15 minutes of time you might have to savor a morsel of Sally's life.
The second book I burned through. Kelly Braffet is the daughter-in-law of Stephen King. I had not heard of her until I listened to an interview on "Fresh Air" with her brother-in-law, Joe Hill who highly recommended her books. I ran out to purchase Joe Hill's Fireman (my next read I plan on beginning tonight) and grabbed her Save Yourself along with it. I don't even know how to describe this novel. First of all, Braffet's writing is so damned satisfying. Let me see if I can deconstruct why. Her sentence structure is varied in a way that follows a pattern of thought. For instance, I just opened to a random page:
"In the end, Karen Hensley retired. A week later Layla came home from school with her lovely hair chopped to her chin and dyed jet black. Her wardrobe quickly followed suit. Soon she was haunting the dinner table like a snarling, sarcastic ghost. The rapid transformation left Mother and Dad hurt and angry--they called it concern, but it felt like hurt and anger to Verna--and the members of her father's home church baffled. Everyone blamed Layla's new attitude on the corruption of the secular world. But now it seemed that even the secular world disapproved of her, and Verna didn't know what to think" (31).
Look at those sentences -- the varying between the long and short and they seem to follow Verna's thinking, the widening of her thinking about her troubled sister.
What also kept me reading is the satellites of conflict Braffet mounted. There are several characters, but the narration follows Verna, Patrick, and Caro. Although there are strange intersections of their lives, I could not figure out what was going to happen--what all the tension was leading toward. Braffet did not let me down, and she grapples with topics that have been rolling around my brain lately given the tragedies in Orlando last week.
These characters also lead lives that I fear living, but that I have been privileged enough to avoid. It also provides a perspective into the lives of young people that we adults are too stultified by the world to see or too much in denial to recognize. Braffet tapped into that pain of not being seen, listened to, understood, considered -- all things that I should keep in mind as a mother and a teacher.
I also have to say that Braffet also knows to write about the raw and gritty. She does not shy away from the darker sides of human nature. That voyeurism also kept me turning the pages.
