"Anne of Green Gables, My Daughter, and Me" by Lorilee Craker

I got this book from my mom for my birthday a couple months ago.  My mom and I sort of discovered the Anne books together when I was like six or seven years old.  Maybe eight.  Anyway, a friend of hers told he we would love them, and that friend was right.  Mom read the books aloud to us, we watched the Sullivan movies over and over and over, and they generally informed my childhood about as much as the Laura Ingalls Wilder books did.  Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls were my kindred spirits.

Anyway, as soon as I learned of the existence of this book, I knew I needed to read it.  I put it on my birthday wish list and was not at all surprised when my mom decided to give it to me.  I should probably loan it to her sometime, because I think she'd enjoy it too.

Lorilee Craker was adopted as an infant.  After having two sons, she and her husband adopted a daughter.  In this book, she entwines her own childhood, her adoption of her daughter, and Anne's fictional life in a sweet, lyrical way.  She meditates beautifully on how all of us, adopted or not, often feel "bereft, left behind, and left" just like an orphan, and how our Heavenly Father fills that hollowness within us with his love.

Oh, and you know how I said both Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls were my fictional kindred spirits (or maybe spirit animals) when I was a girl?  Lorilee Craker was inspired to write this by Wendy McClure's book The Wilder Life. Isn't that an intriguing coincidence?

(From my Instagram.  Yes, that is my hair.)

Particularly Good Bits:

Experiencing true friendship after a poverty of loneliness is like suddenly having access to the treasure chest in Villa Villekulla (p. 41).

What I didn't know then was that even after you've found the one, a good and steady love, only a Father's love, on the Bread of Life, can really make you full.  Only a Father's love can make you belong (p. 59).

I want to teach my daughter how to act when someone trips her wires and that it's okay to be angry but not to sin.  I want to teach her the difference as I continue to understand it (p. 125).

In my experience, secrets hold you hostage, while the truth, though painful and scary, leads to peace (p. 184).

Through Anne, Maud speaks volumes about the desire we all have to belong and to matter to the people we love.  Coutless readers, including me and my girl, have come to understand friendship, abiding love, and the power of redemption in a more significant fashion (p. 220).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG because both the author and her adopted daughter were conceived out of wedlock, which might cause some kids/preteens angst or make them ask questions they're not ready for the answers to.  NO inappropriate scenes, bad language, or other truly objectionable content.

"A Lantern in Her Hand" by Bess Streeter Aldrich

If you dearly love this book (::cough::EmmaJane::cough::), smile to yourself and say, "Oh, good, Hamlette has read this at last.  I'm so happy for her!"  Then close your browser window, go for a swim or eat a popsicle, and leave it at that.

I'm not even kidding.

Shoo!

Sigh.  I expected to like this book.  I expected to at least enjoy it.  I mean, it's about pioneers, and I'm quite fond of pioneers.  It's about the Midwest, and I'm from the Midwest.  It's about people making do with what they have, which is a theme that tends to draw me.

And I think I could have liked this book a lot if the author hadn't kept getting in the way.  Every time the protagonist, Abbie Deal, would start to be happy, the author would drop another anvil on her, so to speak.  "Oh, Abbie is happily married?  Let's make her miserable.  Oh, she's happy to be a mother?  Time to make her miserable again.  Wait, her new house makes her happy?  Better make her miserable!  She's finally got the chance to fulfill her dream of painting?  No, no, we can't have that -- make her give it up!  She has a chance to rest a little and try her hand at writing?  Throw an obstacle at her!  She tries writing again?  Make her be bad at it!"  And on and on and on.

Once again, I am not kidding.  This author seems to have hated her protagonist.  Because she goes to extreme lengths to slowly, steadily grind this character down until I wanted to scream.  I did slam the book down on the table in disgust a couple of times.  Only the faint, wavering hope of a satisfactory ending (and the desire to figure out why some people love this book so much) kept me reading.  And the ending was okay.  At least Abbie Deal got to be happy in death, for which I am grateful, because otherwise I'd have had to find out where Aldrich is buried and go dance and spit all over her grave.

This book depressed me.  I've been in a bitter, angry mood for two days while I strove to just finish the blasted thing off already.

Sure, my reaction is partly because I'm a mom, I have dreams, I have the desire to write, and seeing someone similar to myself get beaten into the ground made me furious.  I don't have the patience and meekness that Abbie Deal had to simply let go of things she desired -- I'm a fist-shaker and a foot-stomper.  And after awhile, that patience and meekness got irksome too, until she started becoming boringly saint-like.  Sigh.  Oh well, I'm done with it, and that's some comfort.

If This Book was a Movie, I Would Rate It: G.

This is my 41st book read and reviewed for the Classics Club and my 10th for the Women's Classic Literature Event.

"Ina May's Guide to Childbirth" by Ina May Gaskin

My friend Julie recommended Ina May's Guide to Childbirth to me when I was pregnant with my first baby. Reading it prepared me for giving birth more than anything else I read or watched or was told during my entire first pregnancy. Naturally, I turned to it again while pregnant with by next baby to refresh my memory. If you or someone you know is pregnant right now, even if you're/they're not considering a midwife-assisted birth, I strongly recommend this book as an excellent preparatory tool.

Ina May Gaskin is widely recognized as the nation's premier midwife. She's attended more than 1,200 births, so I think you'll agree she knows what she's writing about here. In this book, she guides the reader through the birthing process with a friendly, knowledgeable style.

The first 120 pages are filled with birth stories told by many, many mothers from all walks of life and spanning decades. Some of them gave birth in a hospital and had a later child with a midwife, while others turned to midwives right away. I especially found this first section to be helpful because it illustrates how different every birth is, and how following your body's signals and doing what it seems to need can lead to a quicker, easier birth.

The rest of the book is a guide to pregnancy and birth, from advice on how to choose a practitioner that's right for you, to a step-by-step explanation of the stages of childbirth, to a discussion of modern midwifery.

While this is definitely a pro-midwifery book, it does not take the stance that all hospitals are bad places to give birth. Not all mothers are suited to natural childbirth, and at-risk pregnancies are generally better off at a hospital with emergency medical intervention at hand if needed. But for someone like me who wants to have natural births, a midwife-assisted birth is definitely a sound option.

(Originally posted on The Huggermugger Blog on Mar. 3, 2010.)

"A Gift from the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It's hard to describe why this book has impacted me so strongly. I really feel like I need to read it again -- or for a first time, technically, since I listened to it as an audio book on the way to a friend's house. But for now, let me just say that I think the things I got from this book are what my writing prof was trying to teach me by having me read "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf. That didn't really speak to me very much, or maybe I wasn't in the right place in my life to listen to it. But this book did touch me in some pretty profound ways.

I've been a fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh ever since I read Bring Me a Unicorn for my Creative Writing class when I was a college sophomore. Her letters and diary entries reminded me of myself, in a way, a young girl growing up not exactly lonely, but apart somehow. That book crossed my path right when I was ready for it, ready to look back at my childhood and adolescence and think about how it had shaped who I was becoming.

A Gift from the Sea also crossed my path at a rather perfect moment. As my baby grows and stretches my tummy farther and farther, thoughts and curiosities and fears about motherhood occupy a slice of my mental life. Will I still be able to find time to write? Will I want to? Should I want to? Will my need for alone-time, now fulfilled in the one night a week my husband works that I don't, decrease? Will I still need time to myself, but feel too selfish to take any? Lindbergh discusses this exact issue from her vantage point as a mother of five and successful author, and the things she said resonated with me and the ways I expect to feel in the coming years. If nothing else, her words assured me that I'm not the only woman who needs alone time, who needs to create things to feel more complete, be they stories or books or afghans or pumpkin pies.

That's about all I can say about this book right now -- I definitely need to read it again. I'll probably put it on my Christmas list. But if you're interested in women writers and their perspectives, find this book.

(Originally posted on Inscriptions on Jun. 20, 2007.)