Call Your Daughter Home by Deb Serpa

CALL YOUR DAUGHTER HOME by Deb Serpa is a work of historical fiction set amidst the rural poverty and segregated society of 1924 South Carolina. Three women share the storytelling: Gertrude Pardee, Oretta Bootles, and Annie Coles. Gertrude, forced to marry as a teen, has four young daughters and an often drunk and abusive husband.  She can barely afford to feed the family until she is offered a job at the Sewing Circle.  That business is owned by Annie through her own family legacy, although her husband Edwin is an influential plantation owner dealing with the cotton crop’s destruction by the boll weevil and trying to make money by converting to tobacco. Retta lives in Shake Rag, with her ailing husband and other former slaves or their descendants. She has long worked as housekeeper for Miss Annie’s family and is a kind soul who often helps others, including Gertrude and her girls. CALL YOUR DAUGHTER HOME is filled with conflict between family members, especially mothers and daughters. There are questions of morality, faith, guilt, and retribution which are adeptly handled and woven throughout the story. At one point, Preacher quotes Ephesians 6:11, “put on the whole armor of God” in order to stand “against spiritual wickedness in high places.” In addition, these women, two of whom have lost children, have to rely on their own mothers’ words (“Mama used to say if you don’t ask for help, nobody will know how to give it”) and the concern they develop for each other. Each experiences both physical and emotional pain and questions her own abilities, as expressed in reflections like: “I wasn’t a good mother, that much is fact, but I was the only kind I knew how to be” or “I can’t see what is to come. … I fear I will stumble over the edge without knowing, and tumble to the sharp rocks below, too late to save my own soul.” In a note on “A Bit of Background,” Serpa explains how her own grandmother and great-grandmother influenced this book, including details like the peach cobbler recipe. She says that she was “humbled and inspired by the ferocity of their motherhood.” Book group members, especially readers of titles like Delia Owens' Where the Crawdads Sing or Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, will certainly empathize with the characters in Serpa’s debut novel which was a LibraryReads selection in June. This title might work for Junior Theme; Booklist recommended CALL YOUR DAUGHTER HOME for teens, too, due to the “complicated mother-daughter relationships.”

Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki

BEAUTY IN THE BROKEN PLACES by Allison Pataki is my favorite book of the year so far. And when you realize that it is the story of Pataki’s youthful, athletic husband having a major debilitating stroke at age 30, you may wonder why. Pataki has written a moving, inspirational book, as she says, “a Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience.” Expecting a baby in Fall 2015, the couple left O’Hare on June 9th for a “babymoon” in Hawaii.  Instead, Dave Levy’s in-flight stroke precipitated an emergency landing and trip to a hospital in Fargo, North Dakota.  There, Levy (then a third-year resident in orthopedic surgery at Rush) regained consciousness, but a totally new journey had begun for them.

Pataki continues the story over the next year, discussing a range of emotions – fear, frustration and joy – as Dave begins the recovery process and daughter Lilly is born. Pataki shares “Dear Dave” letters which she began to record daily events and progress, alternating those sections with chapters about their life together in college, their wedding and early career years. The couple have a strong, caring relationship and supportive network of friends and family, providing a solid past from which to fight for their future together, but it was still an extremely difficult process as Pataki points out.

I found the faith and frankness that Pataki expressed to be very moving. In addition, I liked the local connections to Rush and RIC (Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, now called Shirley Ryan AbilityLab). There are numerous reviews online (like these from NPR and The Today Show), plus you can greet Allison Pataki in person since she is coming to The Bookstall on May 15 at 6:30pm.  I am really looking forward to meeting her – in part to talk about this book and in part to learn what exciting new projects she plans to pursue. 

Grunt by Mary Roach

Fabulous!  Mary Roach, a perennial student favorite, has done it again!  Her latest work is titled Grunt and deals with all things military.  With chapters on clothing and climate, Roach continues to surprise and fascinate readers with facts about the 22 pages of button specifications for the military or the tests on a treadmill in 104 degree heat inside the “cook box.” Continuing to appeal to reluctant readers, Roach also stays true to her modus operandi by covering the particularly bizarre, even including one chapter she herself labeled “It Might Get Weird: a salute to genital transplants.”

As her subtitle notes, she is exploring “the curious science of humans at war” and takes readers behind the scenes to the labs where tests and trials are run on “everything a soldier wears, eats, sleeps on, or lives in.” I particularly liked the section where she writes of the courage of the scientists themselves who during tests either flew blindfolded and upside down, were injected with cobra venom, or volunteered to test experimental equipment.  As Roach says, “Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that’s braver than it sounds.”

Like those in her previous works (Stiff, Gulp, or Spook), Grunt‘s stories, stats and humor will be popular with our students.  Mary Roach’s Grunt was selected an Amazon Best book June 2016 and received starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal.