Back to the Garden

Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King

Laurie King creates a new detective, Raquel Laing, to work on a cold case murder that may be related to a string of unsolved murders. Human remains are found under the cement base when the Trustees of the Gardener Estate have a statue with a failing foundation moved. Fifty years ago when the statue was placed at the Estate, it was home to a countercultural commune.
Detective Laing has been working on a series of unsolved murders of young women whose bodies were found under poured cement foundations in the San Francisco area, all linked to a serial killer known as The Highwayman. The alleged killer is dying of cancer and she is trying to get him to help identify the remains of his victims.
With chapters titled THEN and NOW, the author delves into the backstory of the commune, leading up to the day the cement foundation was poured, while she interviews the few members of the group remaining. All the while trying to coax a dying serial killer to identifying his victims.
It is nice to see a new character emerge from the imagination of this gifted writer. Hopefully this book will become the first volume of another succesful detective series for Laurie R. King.

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King

Riviera Gold is the 16th in the Mary Russell series of mystery novels that are based around the growing relationship between the young Mary Russell and a much older Sherlock Holmes after he moves from London to a rural Sussex cottage to take up beekeeping. In this installment set in the summer of 1925, Russell takes advantage of Holmes visit to Romania to go to Monte Carlo looking for Mrs. Hudson. Hudson, who left her employment as Holmes housekeeper and did not leave a forwarding address, has gone to live in Monte Carlo to be close to her old friend Lily Langtree and to live in her favorite city. In this novel we learn a lot about Hudson's backstory before she met Holmes, including a mysterious inheritance from her father that draws Hudson and Russell into contact with Monte Carlo's underworld.
I am very fond of Laurie King's writing style and this book is a worthy addition to this long running series.

No-No Boy

No-No Boy by John Okada

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro, a Japanese-American young man from Seattle, after he is let out of prison at the end of World War II. Before the war started he was in college studying to be an engineer, but when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, he was sent to a series of Japanese internment camps for two years. At that point, he and many other young male Japanese-Americans were asked two questions by the US government: would they swear allegiance to the United States, and would they serve in the US armed forces. Those, like Ichiro, who answered no to both questions were sent to jail for an additional two years and became known as No-No Boys.
This book portrays what it was like for these resisters when they returned home and faced discrimination for their choice. He is surrounded by a Japanese community that is trying to fit back into American life and does not want to dwell on the unjust treatment they received during the war. And yet his No-No status does not allow him to put the past behind him. He needs to come to terms with it. Which is what he does in this book.
Originally published in 1957 No-No Boy was ignored by a country that did not want to come to terms with the injustice of the internment and its effect on the Japanese-American community. Only later in the 1970s did people start to take notice, leading to its republication in 1976. It has been in print ever since and is a seminal work on the Japanese-American internment and its effects on the people of Japanese heritage living on the West Coast. I bought my copy of this book during a visit to Seattle's Wing Luke Museum, which is dedicated to preserving Asian-American art and history.

Citizen 13660

Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo

After the United States entered World War II all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated to internment camps. Miné Okubo was one of over one hundred thousand people swept up from their homes. She and her brother were first sent to to the Tanforan relocation center, a former racetrack, in San Bruno, California. There they shared a horse stall that smelled of manure and given sacks to fill with hay for their beds. Eventually she was tranferred to the Topaz internment camp in the Sevier Desert of central Utah; it was a dry, windy environment with harsh winters. During the war over 11,000 people were sent there.
A professional artist, she made over 2,000 drawings in charcoal, watercolor, pen, and ink, depicting her everyday experiences in these camps.
In 1946, after the war ended, she published Citizen 13660 (her government assigned number while in the camps) which contains 206 drawings from her internment, each narrated with a short text describing what is depicted in the picture.It covers her life from the years before the war to her final day at the Topaz internment camp, showing the day-to-day lives of her fellow internees of Japanese descent as she lived it. It was the first published account of the experience from an internee and won the American Book Award in 1984. This edition includes a Preface she wrote in 1983.

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist

Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the three most prominent suffragists of the 19th Century, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Early leaders of the movement to get equal rights for women, these three started the seminal work on the movement History of Woman Suffrage. Too Radical for her time, her research on the history of female oppression fueled the Second Wave Feminist Movement. Yet today Matilda Joslyn Gage is the least known of the three. Angelica Shirley Carpenter's biography does a lot to bring Gage's accomplishments to a modern audience. Of the three, Gage was the most radical, tracing women's oppresion to a coordinated effort of organized religion and civil governments. She was also the most scholarly, looking into the hostory of women's oppression. Her writings on this appeared in the first volume of History of Woman Suffrage, and in much greater detail in her later work Woman, Church and State
This book relies a lot on papers preserved by Gage's children who settled in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. This may explain why the book was published by the South Dakota Historical Society. The title is based on Gage's assertion that, lacking the basic right to vote, women were treated similar to criminals by society.

The Kitchen Madonna

The Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden

The Kitchen Madonna is a 1960s children's book about Marta, a middle aged female Ukrainian refugee, who has taken a job as a nanny/housekeeper for a London married cople who are professional architects. They have two children, Gregory (9) and Janet (7), and have had a series of one-year contract foreign nannies that have left Gregory introverted and shy. When Marta arrives seeking a home rather than an address in London, she becomes the secure center that Gregory has been missing. However, when Gregory finds out that Marta is not happy because their new modern home doesn't have a "good place" in the kitchen, a small shrine with an icon, candle, and flower vase, he sets out to find her a Ukrainian icon in busy, modern London. See how it all turns out in The Kitchen Madonna.
Given the current war in Ukraine and the vast number of Ukrainian refugees, this book has a special value today for understanding the good hearted nature of the Ukrainian people and their simple faith and values.

Book Uncle and Me

Book Uncle and Me by Uma Krishnaswami

Book Uncle and Me is a childrens book about a street corner librarian in India and a young girl who visits him every day to get e new book to read. When Book Uncle gets into trouble she rallies to his defense.
This is a great book for librarians to share with young readers. It shows young people how they are never powerless or too young to speak up against injustice. It also shows how important free access to books is to a community
It has great illustrations by Julianna Swaney.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I have long been a fan of movie versions of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, enjoying watching one or more versions every holiday season. This year I saw the Disney version which claimed to be the most true to the text movie adaptation made. That got me wondering what gets left out of Dickens' original work when Hollywood decides to put their ow spin on it. So this year I downloaded the text onto my iPhone and read the story as he told it in 1843. I am glad I did. I will keep watching new movie adaptations in years to come, but now I will know I am rooted in the original text.

I did find one exchange that I have never seen in any Hollywood retelling. I found this anti-church exchange between Scrooge and Christmas Present while they watched the poor people of the town bringing their holiday dinners to be cooked in the bakers' ovens, a routine activity in the 19th century for those too poor to have their own ovens.

“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, “I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,” said Scrooge, “wouldn’t you?”

“I!” cried the Spirit.

“You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”

“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.

“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

Scrooge promised that he would …

Man-Size in Marble

Man-Size in Marble by E. Nesbit

Man-Size in Marble is a short story by Edith Nesbit. It was first published in the December 1887 issue of the Home Chimes magazine. The story was later collected in Nesbit's 1893 anthology Grim Tales. This edition was published by Books of Wonder in 1997 in their Classic Frights series of short booklets with illustrations by Jeff White.
In it, a young newlywed couple seeking inexpensive lodging rent a small cottage that, unknown to them, comes with a mysterious curse. The husband hires a local housekeeper who tells him the legend of two man-size in marble prone statues of knights in a lonely country church nearby. She says on All-Hallows Eve at 11 pm the statues rise up and walk to their old home, which is the ruins on which their cottage was built. He dismisses the story as a local legend with no truth and decides to not worry his wife.
While a simple tale, it is well written in Nesbit's simple style that she developed as a children's author.
The text of the story is available in Wikisource at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Grim_Tales/Man-size_in_Marble