Corrie Goes Boom!

Keeping this update on the Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club short and sweet, I boil down for you a few bullet points:

• BOOM! The Hiding Place received an average rating of 8.5 of 10, compared to poor Emily of Deep Valley's showing. Why so high, you ask? "More happened." Which answers the question of whether this small sample size of modern-day teenagers reads for character development or plots that go boom! Poor Emily's Psyche knot and frog-leg parties just could not compare with Nazis. As I've noted before, everyone loves a good Nazi.
  
• Awesome discussion of the symbolism of Mr. ten Boom's watch-repair profession and the quirky "Beje" the family lived in in Haarlem.
  
• Equally awesome discussion of the importance of point of view in the book. How would it have changed our response to the story, if it had been told from Betsie's POV?
  
• Equally equally awesome discussion of the place of moral ambiguity in the face of evil.

This time we ate at King's Chinese Restaurant on NE 20th, where I tried subtle and delicious Fish Congee for the first time.

On we go with the book club! Our final book of the summer will be Dickens' Great Expectations. Absolutely cannot wait to re-read this old favorite, and I did my best to sell its wonderfulness to the girls and bias them in its favor...

In the meantime, I finally got through Doris Kearns Goodwin's predictably wonderful and fascinating The Bully Pulpit.

I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads and mention it here, though solely to connect it to Betsy-Tacy.

Did you know that President Taft's wife Nellie advocated for women going to college in 1908-9, when Betsy and her generation were nearing high school graduation? They were the first generation of women to go in any numbers. No wonder poor Emily of Deep Valley felt so left-behind and out of touch with her generation when she graduated!

Did you know that, when Roosevelt broke off from the Republican Party to form the "Bull Moose" Party in 1912, one of his supporters was Jane Addams? As Addams was a hero in Emily of Deep Valley's eyes, no wonder Lovelace speaks of Emily's support for Roosevelt in the election!

That's all for now. If any of you out there happen to be church librarians, I hope to see you at this weekend's conference. I'll be speaking on "Raising Readers" this Friday at 4, plugging Betsy-Tacy, and signing my own books...

The Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club Rides on with THE HIDING PLACE

The inaugural Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club meeting hit a bump right away: we had settled on the new Dim Sum Factory in Factoria, only to arrive and find it was not yet open. I suppose that's what the giant "Coming Soon" in the upper right-hand corner of the homepage meant--but how was I supposed to see that when I was distracted by pictures of food?

Pic from the website, not our table

 All was not lost. We made our way over to nearby Top Gun Seafood Restaurant, where, instead of Tom-Cruise-like fish and crabs in Ray-Bans and aviator jackets and Muzaked "Highway to the Danger Zone" playing in the background, we found a shaded room with dim sum carts making the rounds. The food was fine, the ice water minimal, the requested forks MIA.

And I'm afraid poor Emily of Deep Valley received similar marks. Here's the breakdown, on a score of 1-10 overall:

Me: 7.5
Other Mother (OM): 7.5-8
My 14YO: 7
OM's 15YO: 5 (!!!)
OM's 13YO: 5.5
My 11YO: 8

For an average overall score of 6.75. O di immortales! as Betsy or Carney would say. Why the ho-hum response from Other Mother's girls? The girls were too polite to say so specifically, but OM reported that they found it "boring" because "nothing happened." Which means the scores of 5-5.5 might actually have been inflated, so as not to hurt my feelings. Waaaaaah!!! I suppose this is what a fictional diet of Divergent and The Fault in our Stars will do to you. Crap, as Betsy or Carney would not say.

The tepid response, however, did not prevent us from having a decent discussion of our prep questions. Other Mother won for most thoughtful answers, and my 11YO won for raising her hand and interjecting the most, even when urged to hold back, but a good time was had by all. Some "hot" topics: how much did Don actually care for Emily? How good were Emily's friends? What did Emily actually have in common with the people from Little Syria?
 

Anyway, onward and upward. If Emily lacked action, surely The Hiding Place will make up for that. When things get a little slow, you can always turn to WWII and the Holocaust. The same questions apply, even for nonfiction, because all stories must be constructed and framed deliberately.

They HAVE redone the cover!

Title. What are the various meanings of "the hiding place" over the course of the book?

Setting. When and where is the book set? What time period does it cover? What sort of place is Holland before the War, and how does it and its people change?

Characters. How would you describe Corrie's life, up to the War? How was her family typical of the people around them, and how was it different? How would you characterize her father, sisters, brother, and aunts? What role does Karel play?

Character Development. How does Corrie change and grow, over the course of the story? How does her faith change and grow?

Conflict. What are the conflicts, large and small, which drive the story? What is at stake for Holland, the ten Booms, and Corrie herself, as the story goes on?

Themes. What are the recurring ideas of the book? I would say they are pretty big ones: good vs. evil. Faith vs. despair. Love vs. hate. Hope vs. despair. Trust vs. fear. Order vs. disorder. Revenge vs. forgiveness. Bitterness vs. healing. Look for places where you see these themes raised.

Symbolism/Foreshadowing. Even in nonfiction you can find these devices. Why is Mr. ten Boom's profession an appropriate one? What does it symbolize, in terms of his outlook on the world? What happens to the watch shop as time goes on? Can you find other examples of symbolism or foreshadowing as you read?

And finally, the paragraph-writing question (pick one):

1. What is the significance and symbolism of the ten Boom house "the Beje"? Why does the book go back into the history of the house and the family who lives there?

2. "We have a woman's watch here that needs repairing. But I can't find a mainspring." In Chapter 7, the book describes this "code" the family and network use to discuss Jews being hidden. How is this code both appropriate and symbolic? What do watches represent to the family? How might this reflect how God views people?

Have fun reading! I sure did at my recent bookstore event, from which I leave you a couple pictures:

The Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club

So a friend asked if I would help her just-graduated-eighth-grade daughter with "Literary Analysis." It seems the girl garnered low marks in that category on a recent assignment, and I was to be the possible solution. Could you think of anything more unpleasant than getting together with your mom's friend to be grilled on "Literary Analysis"? I can--being the mom's friend who has to do the grilling!

Since we both have daughters around the same ages, I suggested instead that we just get together casually and talk about a book. Better yet, we pair my favorite thing--reading--with my very-close-second-favorite thing: eating.

Presenting the Mother-Daughter Dim Sum Book Club! Why dim sum? Because it's awesome and also because, a couple years ago when I asked my teenager if she wanted to do a mother-daughter book club, she said unhesitatingly, "No way." I haven't been her mother for 14.75 years, however, without knowing that she, like me, will do just about anything for food.

That's what I'm talking about

The picture above is from our most favoritest dim sum place in the whole world: the Great Mall Mayflower Seafood Restaurant in Milpitas, California. If you go there, may I recommend the seaweed salad, the turnip cakes, the pork dumplings, the char siu bao, the stir-fried broccoli rabe with oyster sauce, and the little custard tarts. My mouth waters as I type...

There's no Mayflower up here, sadly, so it is my friend's duty to locate the nearest wannabe Mayflower. Then, and only then, will I impart my vast and inspiring knowledge of Literary Analysis and How to Go About It. Everyone has their price.

The fun thing today was picking the books and giving them a quick re-read/skim. They had to be appealing to teenagers. They had to have some of the goodies Literary Analysts look for: setting, character development, conflict, a little symbolism/foreshadowing, and something to discuss and debate. They had to be, for my personal sanity, NOT dystopian YA fiction where the girl spends her time kicking a**, being ordinary yet somehow unspeakably amazing, and fighting off whichever element of the love triangle she was not currently into.

That left three books.*

*Kidding. But it did narrow the field considerably.

The victors?

Dreadful cover, I admit. Would you want to read such a book, if you were a teenage girl with any aspirations to hipness? But don't judge a book etc. etc.

If you've read my blog at all, you know Maud Hart Lovelace is one of my absolute most beloved authors of all time, so much so that I dragged my kids on a Literary Dream Tour last year to her old stomping grounds of Minneapolis and Mankato, Minnesota. The Betsy books are my favorite, but Emily's tale lends itself to more Literary Analysis. Emily is a high school grad for whom college is not an option, despite her hunger for knowledge. Instead, she has to watch her friends and cousin head off to the Next Stop in Their Exciting Lives, while she stays home to keep house for her grandfather. Depression ensues. But not for long. Soon Emily finds she can continue to grow and learn and blossom. So we have a conflict. We have character development (big time). We have symbolic setting. We have even a significant allusion to another literary work. Hooray!


Then comes another cover in profound need of an update. Ha! I'd better tell the daughters to get these books on Kindle, or I don't know if even the dim sum will hold them.

Teenagers have to read lots of WWII nonfiction in high school, for good reason, but they'll never be assigned Corrie ten Boom's awesome memoir because it's too Christian. However I think her voice is as valid as any other survivor's, and she has moving, powerful, thoughtful things to say that are still applicable in our world and time. Interestingly, she is a contemporary of Emily of Deep Valley, only she lives in Haarlem, the Netherlands, and this story takes place in her fifties.






Finally we will tackle

Yes, it's long, but I first read an abridged, textbook version my freshman year of high school, and even an abridgement holds up remarkably well. We lose a few--okay, a lot--of symbolically heavy descriptions of things, but there's enough left that there's still PLENTY to discuss. That is, I'll let the girls choose to read either the full tome or a decent abridgement (i.e., not a graphic novel or an I Can Read version). And we can celebrate finishing by watching a movie version (after our requisite dim sum)! Win-win-win.

Anywho, if you'd like to follow along yourself or with your own daughters/cousins/nieces/neighbors/friends, I'll post questions and points here as we go along. I figure we'll get through the first two books in July and the biggie in August.

One last, unrelated tidbit: University Book Store Bellevue has posted the details on my upcoming event here. But if you don't feel like clicking on the link, I'll be reading from The Naturalist and signing both it and A Very Plain Young Man on Saturday, June 28, at 5:00p.m. Hope to see you there!