Book Review of _Rain Reign_ by Ann M. Martin

Rain Reign by Ann M. Martin.

Hardcover, 226 pages

Published October 7th 2014 by Feiwel & Friends

ISBN: 0312643004  

(ISBN13: 9780312643003)

literary awards

Schneider Family Book Award for Middle School (2015), Josette Frank Award for Older Readers (2015), Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award Nominee (2016), Charlotte Huck Book Award (2015) 

 

 

I'm late to the table on this one. I got an egalley from Netgalley oh, last summer? And I was in the midst of writing my dissertation and having my personal life blow up, so in my defense even if I had read it then, I don't think I would have been able to give it the attention it deserves. That said, let's talk about Rain Reign. 

 

The buzz in education is starting to be about differently abled thinkers. If you wonder what I mean by this, look at books like The Reason I Jump and Look Me in the Eye: My life with Asperger's. We are starting to see that Asperger Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is not necessarily a disability. After all, Temple Grandin achieved a PhD and is arguably one of the top animal behaviorists in the country. I encourage you to think about ASD in different ways (pun intended!).

 

Rain Reign is the story of Rose, a girl whose mother is gone and whose father turns to alcohol to drown his feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy. At Rose's school, she has an adult who helps care for her and a teacher who is mindful of Rose and her different world view. In the ensuing months, we get to see the world from Rose's point of view, and once we get that her "strange" behaviors are the result of efforts to maintain control of her thoughts and behavior, they don't seem any weirder than taking a deep breath when we are nervous before a presentation. Rose loves homonyms and maintains a list of them, which grows during the course of the story.

 

Rose's father gives her a dog, Rain, who is the highlight of her day. She spends a lot of time with Rain while her father is at the bar, at work, or otherwise not available (which is most of the time). Rose's uncle becomes close to Rose and is her adult support and family because her father is just not able to interact in a positive way with his daughter. The story really starts when a hurricane is predicted over the area. During this storm Rose's father lets Rain out without a collar to do what dogs do, but Rain disappears and is missing for weeks. Rose is heartbroken. She figures out a way to search for Rain and eventually she does find the dog, but now there's a new wrinkle-- this dog belonged to someone else originally. Rose's father had found the dog, and neglected to check for a microchip. But when the dog arrived at a shelter, they scanned her and realized that Rain belonged to another family. How Rose resolves this and how her family takes care of her is the part of the story that to me is uplifting and hopeful.

 

This book is suitable for younger middle readers, 11-14 years old. The fact that Rose is in elementary will appeal to kids who remember what that's like. I recommend Rain Reign for middle school libraries, and for older kids Look Me in the Eye and The Reason I Jump are suitable for this topic. If you have other suggestions, please add them in the comments section! 

The Use of Color to Convey Mood

Does color convey mood? Although I feel the energy when I see orange paired with red as in this photo I took of my neighbor’s tree, enhanced to see the colors better:

I have no idea whether that is because it’s different than the summer colors, or if it’s truly because of the colors themselves.  I would have liked a little more empirical evidence than a couple of drawings in a book I read on Visual Message Design.That said, here’s a picture

from http://aroundtheedges.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/singing-the-blues/ that was drawn expressly to convey the “blues,” a music form that sprang out of a need to deal with loneliness and despair. And here’s another that portrays the individual energy of Ma Rainey, legendary blues singer:

Note the use of oranges and reds to denote the energy and joie de vivre (http://www.calliope.org/images/blues.gif).

To me, the blue-green-purple colors represent the quiet calm of undersea reef

Not really an aloofness or aloneness, maybe a calmness. A final photo might be this one:

Which conveys a sense of sorrow, hope, and relentless determination all at the same time.

I would like to know more about the use of color to convey mood. Anyone with more information, please post!

All the Wrong Places

Book Review: All the Wrong Places by Philip Connors.
First of all, I want to say that I never read Fire Season, Mr. Connors' first book. Secondly, I am glad I didn't read this during the Christmas holidays, when I was dealing with my own personal anguish. Connors writes a soul-baring book about his own struggles with his brother's suicide, but that's not the centerpiece of the book. The point of Connors' memoir is the ways in which we deal with horrible things that happen in our lives and over which we have absolutely no control.

Connors worked over, under, around, and finally, through his brother's death in ways that were both edifying and self-destructive, but the tale he tells is ultimately that we are all able to deal with even the most horrendous of situations. He talks about his losing his brother, his brother's apparent anguish, his parents' ability (or not) to cope with the loss of their son. This book is honest, brutally so at some points, but I feel that it was a catharsis for Mr. Connors to write. I would recommend this book to older teens and people 20 and up. It's a great read. It is sometimes difficult to read for sure, but a great read all the same. This is a book which has stayed on my mind months after having read it. Thank you, Philip Connors, for the strength to be vulnerable.

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 16, 2015)
ISBN-10: 0393088766
ISBN-13: 978-0393088762

Book Review: The Floating City by Sudhir Venkatesh

 
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Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy by Sudhir Venkatesh. Published September 13, 2013, by Penguin Press. 304 pages, hardcover.   ISBN-10: 1594204160 ISBN-13: 978-1594204166

   Certain authors, when they post new books, catch my attention immediately. For whatever reason, their writing seems to resonate with me, and Sudhir Venkatesh is one. I first met Dr. Venkatesh's work in Gang Leader for  a Day. In that book, he documents the underground economy of Chicago and the gangs who form a major part of it. Recently, I was privileged to read a galley of The Floating City . Although I enjoyed it, the book seemed to only scratch the surface of the topic. Perhaps this seemed to me to be this way because of Venkatesh's frequent referrals to the angst he was feeling about his career and his marriage; I felt torn between sympathy and anxiety because of my work toward a PhD and the uncertainty of this being the right thing for me as a fifty-something to be spending money on-- I see his struggles and I feel that he is brilliant! How can I hope to be successful in my chosen career path if he is having doubts, issues, and personal trials!

     Nonetheless, the book was a great read and a way to understand how people in poverty-stricken areas make their way through the world. It also uncovered ways that bright young people with no outward reason to delve into the dark world of crime find themselves taking part in it. I felt that the personal revelations in the book made it difficult for me to understand what Dr. Venkatesh's original intent actually was. It seemed as though he was using the desperation and deprivation of the people whose behavior he was trying to document as a participant observer to delve into his own needs and shortcomings. Since I can't feel that my knowledge about his personal issues would be at all helpful to him, I'm not sure why it was included in the book and made it more difficult to follow the thread of the narrative.
   
     I believe this book has a place on high school and public library shelves and would recommend it to anyone who would like to understand New York, sociological research, or big cities in general-- both how they differ and how they are alike.

Book Review of Detroit: An American Autopsy

Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff. Hardcover, 304 pages

Published February 7th 2013 by The Penguin Press HC

ISBN 1594205345 (ISBN13: 9781594205347)

 

I finished this book in two days. It was like a train wreck-- I couldn't look away. I have been reviewing quite a few books about Detroit and the issues surrounding the every day life of people who live in the D. This title has a combination of witty prose, hearfelt pain, and a canny understanding of the people who have shaped and made Detroit the city it is today. LeDuff claims with evidence that Detroit has been a corrupt political landscape for at least a hundred years, and the common "line in the sand" that is 1967 rebellion was only a convulsion of a larger disease. He delves into many headline stories from Detroit's recent history, and tells us "the rest of the story." It is a well-researched book. Some might say that it is over the top reportage. However, LeDuff is outraged. He has every right to his anger, and shows us why he is so upset with everything that has happened in the city. The types of stories he tells are about the politicians, police, firemen, victims and criminals that are Detroit, as well as the people who have been left behind while the multi-national companies take their bailout money and move their factories elsewhere. Yes GM, Chrylser, and Ford have survived. They haven't shared any of their good fortune with the city of their birth.

LeDuff paints vibrant pictures of Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers, just two of the crooked politicians and the most recent of the steaming piles that is Detroit politics. The book was a great read; I believe it is an accurate picture and a heartfelt howl of rage and pain that many Detroiters feel but cannot so eloquently express.

Book Review: Detroit: a biography by Scott Martelle

 

Detroit: A Biography by Scott Martelle. Published April, 2012, Chicago Review Press, Incorporated. ISBN-13: 9781569765265, ISBN: 156976526X

 

Scott Martelle's in-depth look at Detroit is an enlightening read. He talks about the history of the city, from the earliest days until the very recent past, and the story he relates is at times painful to read. This is not, however, because of the writing; it is because the story of Detroit could have been so different! He relates what he feels are the main issues that caused the city to come to the place in which we find it, mainly the well-known fact that Detroit has basically only had one main industry for about a hundred years, and there was no cultivation of any other means of support for the city. However, the other little-mentioned fact that also hurt Detroit was that, after World War II, the "arsenal of democracy" stayed focused on automobiles, rather than trying to get a piece of the defense market on a larger scale. No one ever took another step toward diversification, while the auto companies themselves moved away and out of Detroit, leaving many without jobs and the city without revenue.

 

Martelle dwells quite a bit on the racial issues that have plagued the region, really, not just Detroit. These ways that people have been wrongly treated also help explain the downfall of a great city.  He lays out the entire saga, starting with the people who moved to Detroit from the southern states, because even the racism they encountered in Detroit was not as bad as staying in the South. However, it was bad enough. He describes the riots and their influence on the outcome of events in Detroit.

In the book Detroit: a biography, Martelle helps us understand the sheer size of the problem that is Detroit's reality with the use statistics from census data, historical records, and real estate. It is staggering to know, for instance, that housing values are a small fraction of what they were worth only ten years ago. This loss of valuation also impacts the property taxes that the city can receive and other revenue streams that have dried up just because of the huge amount of people who no longer live within the city limits. The problem is not all gloom and doom, but Martelle is more interested in giving a historical perspective to the issues surrounding the city of Detroit. This book was less entertaining than, say, Detroit City is the Place to Be, but my reading of it helped me understand just what is going on in the city of Detroit, and how it came to be this way.

Book Review: Detroit City Is the Place to Be

Detroit City is the place to be : the afterlife of an American metropolis / Mark Binelli. New York : Metropolitan Books, 2012.

1st ed.

ISBN: 9780805092295, 0805092293

There is a tenacious optimism rampant throughout the city of Detroit. Artists, Internet start-ups, and many other players seem to feel that Detroit could be the new Brooklyn, according to Mark Binelli, a native Detroiter who spent a year in the heart of the city. In this extremely readable narrative, Binnelli brings to light quite a few of the many counterintuitive realities of the city. For instance, many do not know that Matty Maroun, the owner of the Ambassador bridge linking Canada and the US, makes about 60 million dollars a year on the tolls he charges for the use of the bridge. It is unthinkable that the bridge, which carries a fourth of the commercial traffic between Canada and the US, is privately held. One would assume that this link is held in the public trust. Or that the Detroit Public Schools would even consider closing the Catherine Ferguson school, a school for pregnant and parenting teen moms with a graduation rate of 95%.  Through all of the stories and interviews, Binelli shows why there is such optimism in this city, even when there seems to be no evidence that this mindset is even realistic, let alone warranted. This book was a lot of fun to read, and I learned a lot about my home town that I never knew. It was good to walk the streets of Detroit with Binelli. He is a great guide, and the city itself is fascinating. This title is recommended for those who are interested in the renewal of urban areas or who love Detroit and would like to know more about it.