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.”

A Pure Heart by Rajia Hassib

A PURE HEART by Rajia Hassib received well-deserved starred reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus. This is the contemporary story of two Egyptian sisters.  One, Fayrouz, chooses to be called Rose and is an archeologist who marries an American journalist, studies at Columbia University and eventually works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The other sister, Gameela, is more obviously religious (for example, she wears a hijab), harbors a number of secrets, and is killed in a suicide bombing. Hassib uses flashbacks to develop the characters and motivations of both sisters. She deftly weaves in questions of fate and identity: [Rose] “thinks that maybe there are multiple versions of her, too, just as there are multiple versions of him and multiple versions of Gameela, and that her different Roses will have to learn to co-exist, that Gameela’s sister and Mark’s wife cannot go on believing they are enemies …” and of faith: “so much of faith as she [Gameela] understood it lay in a constant struggle to improve oneself, in the true meaning of jihad as an ongoing striving to be better, to do better, to let go of egotistic, selfish notions….”   A PURE HEART is very informative about Egyptian culture and history; plus, this novel explores so much more, including family relationships, sibling jealousy, dissent, poverty, privilege, religion, the role of women, guilt, after-life and death. This would be an excellent title for our Global Voices students as well as adventurous book groups.  

Appalachian Reckoning - a region responds to Hillbilly Elegy

APPALACHIAN RECKONING: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy is edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll.  Describing this as a “book born out of frustration … a book born out of hope,” the editors set out to gather essays, images and poetry to respond to J. D. Vance’s bestselling (and soon to be movie) Hillbilly Elegy. Harkins is a professor of history at Western Kentucky University and McCarroll is the director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College. Both have written extensively about Appalachia, but this collection is a bit uneven, ranging from overly scholarly responses to personal stories. Harkins and McCarroll split the book into two sections, with the first part offering selections “directly assessing or commenting on the words and impact of Vance’s influential work.”  Part II is titled “Beyond Hillbilly Elegy” and they say, “there is no singular focal point to part II other than the shared idea that there is no consensus about Appalachia.” 

Still, this collection deserves a look, especially as many of our students read and discuss Vance’s work for class assignments. For example, Robert Morgan (who teaches at Cornell and is a best-selling novelist and poet) is amongst the many contributors who are described in brief bios. This text strives to offer new perspective - like William H. Turner’s (Prairie View A & M) commentary on African American Appalachians – a group he says “Vance ignored.” Other writers contend that Vance reinforced stereotypes and, like Lisa Pruitt (UC, Davis), note that while his is “a tale that affirms our nation’s core values and aspirations,” it “does not foster understanding or empathy for those Vance left behind; rather it cultivates judgment.” Also thought-provoking is “public historian” Elizabeth Catte’s contribution exploring Hillbilly Elegy’s use as an instructional text.  APPALACHIAN RECKONING received a starred review from Kirkus.