Rose in a Storm by Jon Katz

Rose in a Storm
by Jon Katz
Villard, 2010
240 pages

This was a fun and different quick read, good for a book club read over Christmas. It's a good winter read, too, for those of you who like reading "in season" - which is an interesting concept in itself. I generally prefer to read cold and snowy books in the winter; also I've noticed that in books set in the cold and snowy winter, the authors make the weather a big deal, not just background scenery.

For a book that wasn't terribly difficult to read it did get off to a slow start. I'd say it took me close to 50 pages to really get into it, but once I got rolling it went fast. Rose is a dog, specifically a working dog on a small farm, where she helps farmer Sam keep the animals in line and occasionally does other useful things as well. She is more of a partner than a pet, and Sam tends to see her as such; she is useful, not to be coddled. One winter, some time after Sam's wife Katie has died of an undisclosed illness (cancer, almost certainly) there is a tremendous, days-long, dangerous winter storm. It's up to Sam alone - and Rose - to keep the animals (sheep, dairy cows and some steers, chickens, a donkey) safe and alive through it as one disaster after another strikes.

The book switches easily and rapidly between perspectives - almost always Rose and sometimes Sam and occasionally a few other perspectives for a very short time. Katz knows dogs, and has done a lot of research and work in the area of dog psychology, and Rose's perspective is as close to what a dog's might be as Katz can possibly make it, while still making it readable. We still understand Rose, while recognizing that she's a different creature from a human, and has motivations and ideas and understandings about the way the world works that are different from what a human's might be. I'd say this was really successful, and while I've always quite liked dogs I came away with a lot more respect for them as separate creatures with agency and intelligence than I had before.

It's possible this was one of Katz's main aims in writing this book - and it occasionally reads like that, too.

One of the things that came home to me is just how dangerous a big winter storm can be, especially to farmers. I think it's easy to forget this, living in the middle of a city where your water pressure isn't dependent on the power being on, and your house is insulated (mostly), and the only creatures dependent on you to survive are in your immediate environs. The chances of a coyote getting in to eat your fish are small, and the most personal danger you're likely to see (except perhaps carbon monoxide poisoning) is having a heart attack from shoveling too much snow, and if you're hurt your neighbours are right next door. In short, it's easy to forget, being in a city, just how powerful and powerfully dangerous nature can be.

Even the problems I had with the ending didn't spoil the read for me. But the ending did unfortunately have some issues. Slight spoilers for the ending follow...


... ready?

This is the most blatant example of a deus ex machina I've seen in a novel in ages. I'm pretty sensitive to these, and I don't like them at all. If anything is swooping out of the snowy wild to save Rose and the farm it had better be set up well ahead of time. (Interestingly, my book club actually had significantly less trouble with this than I did: they thought the deus was clearly Katie, the deceased wife. I can see where they're coming from but I didn't see it clearly enough ahead of time to make it better, and I'm still skeptical.)

The other thing is that I don't think a rescue was necessary; I did think Katz had built up to an unsustainable level of tension and conflict, and I think if he'd dialed things back a bit before the climax he wouldn't have needed a deus ex machina, explained by Katie or otherwise, to wrap things up. He could have dialed things back without losing the forward momentum or the dramatic tension, too; things were plenty dramatic as it was. And then he wouldn't have needed something out-of-the-ordinary to rescue his happy ending.

... /end spoilers

Overall, aside from the ending, this is an entertaining and interesting book, something outside the ordinary. Recommended to animal lovers for sure, and people who like snowy rural stories. It's an easy read and a worthwhile one. I'll definitely be reading more of Katz, though I think I may stick to his nonfiction.

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp
by Kathi Appelt
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013
336 pages

This is a book that kind of surprised me. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about it, but in the end I enjoyed it very much. The thing was, when I started, I was kind of - meh. The dynamic in this book is often found in children's books with an environmental theme: little guy, loves the swamp, all good; big bad guy, inexplicably hates all nature, and is totally, almost comically, irredeemable. Little guy through dint of hard work and some luck shows up the big guy, who vanishes from the picture, never to return. Paradise is saved.

I find this plot and character dynamic really problematic for a couple of reasons, but let's flesh out The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp a bit first. The success of this book is in the details. And do not get me wrong: this book is successful. It's funny, tender, clever, creative, and hugely enjoyable. I'll get my vent off my chest first, but then I'll get to the good bits.

In this case, the "little guy" is actually played by three characters in two separate but connected storylines: Bingo and J'miah are the titular true blue Swamp Scouts, raccoons who have taken an oath to protect the swamp and serve the Sugar Man, the giant creature who mostly sleeps but occasionally wakes to eat some delicious sugar cane or deal out some mayhem to enemies of the swamp. Chap Brayburn is the 12-year-old grandson of a man by the name of Audie, proprietor of Paradise Pies Cafe, birdwatcher and swamp dweller. Audie is recently deceased. So now, enter Sonny Boy Beaucoup, our first big bad guy, owner of the swamp who is about to repossess Paradise Pies Cafe and turn the whole mess into an alligator wrestling stadium and theme park with his business partner and World Champion Alligator Wrestler, diminutive, unsavoury, and fierce Jaeger Stitch. Our second strand of big bad guys, to counter Bingo and J'miah, are the Farrow Gang, a family of big, bad, itinerant wild hogs bent on eating the swamp's delicious muscovado sugar cane. The swamp is in terrible, terrible danger from foes human and not.

Okay, so my problem with setups like this is that there are never any grey areas, and maybe for children's literature that's okay, sometimes. Kids do have a more defined idea of right and wrong in situations like this, and cut-and-dried "swamp/other undervalued natural area = good, development of said area = bad" with heroes and villains really does appeal. Heck, it appeals to adults; I felt as satisfied as anyone when Sonny Boy gets his. And I am a naturalist, I would even go so far as to call myself an environmentalist: I am all for anything that celebrates nature and the environment and touts its value. I can enjoy a wish-fulfillment fantasy where the developer who hates nature gets his ass kicked in the end.

The problem with this kind of black and white situation is that it exists essentially nowhere in reality and while it's fun to play that wish-fulfillment game, it's also destructive. Furthermore, I find it hard to believe that there are quite so many supervillainous, obsessive nature haters out there as environmentally-themed fiction would have us believe. People who don't see the value of a meadow, yes; people who want to destroy the meadow because it's a personal affront to them that it exists? Who rub their hands together, revelling in their gleeful evil plans? I am not so sure. Perhaps I am wrong.

The thing is, this black and white rhetoric isn't limited to fiction; it's been a staple of some segments of environmental movements, and that kind of rhetoric doesn't generally win friends or supporters. I did genuinely believe as a kid that people who built parking lots and malls were evil and actively hated the planet, but as an adult I can see that's not the case; they simply don't see it, I think, and sometimes they do see it but they also see jobs, economy, and yes, personal cash. (As an aside sure to win me friends, I do still occasionally wonder if the tar sands operators and their political champions do actively hate nature; I am not quite sure how they can justify what they do without some sort of pathological issue.) I can see where jobs and economy and protecting nature intersect, I can see where there are no simple solutions and where pretending there are does everyone, including the environmental movements, a disservice.

All right, so there, in a too-big nutshell, is my problem with this book, which is mostly a problem with this type of book. On the surface this is a simple, moral-heavy story with incredibly simplistic solutions. I want a little more nuance in the discussion, because I think kids can handle the nuance. I think adults need the nuance. Let's get to the parts that I liked, the parts that had me reading quickly and past my bedtime and occasionally giggling out loud.

The narrator's voice. And I know I'm not going to be joined in this by everyone who reads this book, but I really, really enjoyed the narrator's voice. Perhaps it puts me in mind a bit of a very Southern US E. Nesbit, with its empathetic warmth, the comic asides, and chattiness, and I like that sort of thing. The narration should have seemed hokey and overdone, but it didn't. To me, it added to the charm and the atmosphere of the book. And the narrator keeps the pace moving at a good clip; I can't believe how quickly I read once I got going. I didn't want to put the thing down.

Many of the sections are told from the point of view of the raccoons, and these were by far my favourites, though I liked Chap a lot. The raccoon storyline was what brought originality to the book, made it something beyond the little-guy-vs-big-bad environmental fable. It's a bit coming-of-age, a bit of myth-making, with the denizens of the swamp heavily anthropomorphized but still animals. I developed an incredible fondness for Bingo and J'miah and that could be because I do have a bit of a fondness for raccoons in general (while still recognizing they can be terribly destructive, even slightly malicious little jerks) but it's also because Appelt makes them relatable, charming, full of mischief and also full of good intentions.

I loved how human ephemera plays a roll in the ecology of the swamp. Bingo and J'miah live in an old Chrysler De Soto, and J'miah discovers some treasures in it - to tell what they are is to spoil it, and part of the joy of the narration is the way it hops around, lighting on things and connecting them, bit by bit.

And - slight spoiler - I loved that Appelt felt that the existence in the swamp of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, that elusive but perhaps still-extant dweller of the deepest parts of the swamps of the southern States, could remain a question mark. That kind of ambiguity and subtlety is missing from the overall plot and I would have liked more, but I am happy with what I got.

Recommended and I'm really looking forward to hearing what the parent-child book club has to say about this one. If the cut-and-dried environmentally-themed narrative with bad guys and good guys doesn't appeal to you, this will probably irritate you on some levels, and if you're not a fan of folksy narrators this book will drive you up the wall and likely over it. People who have problems with anthropomorphized animals will also want to steer clear. But if you're curious about an original story, steeped in atmosphere, told with warm humour and charm, this is a good choice. If you like an environmental message and like it when people get their nature facts right, this is also fun. If you like rattlesnakes, if you wish the bad guys would just be unsympathetically bad and lose a little more often, if you want to believe that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is still there somewhere in the deepest, darkest part of the swamp, pick this one up. Many thanks to Cecelia for bringing it to my attention in the first place!

The Dog Who Thought He Was Santa by Bill Wallace

The Dog Who Thought He Was Santa
by Bill Wallace
Aladdin Paperbacks, 2007
184 pages

You may have heard this refrain from me before, but jeebus I really should read the books I pick for kids' book clubs thoroughly before assigning them. Last time it was kind of a lucky break, with Spud. I even started a fad among eleven to thirteen-year-old boys at the local elementary school for reading that series, and got some questions from parents but never any flack.

I was lucky in this case too, or have been so far. Everyone I have talked to has been very understanding, and generally quite positive about the book in general. There were, unless I hear differently, no major disasters or even minor ones.

This is not a bad book. It's pretty reasonable, actually; better, in some ways, than I expected, and it grew on me as a story though the writing is very workmanlike. But the age group that this book is recommended for, that I assigned it to for my parent-child book club, is by-and-large not entirely ready for the "Is Santa real?" discussion. In the past couple of days as I frantically tried to get in touch with the parents in the group to warn them, I was told that most of the kids in my group between the ages of seven to twelve are still believers. (The ones who weren't never were in the first place.) Ten or eleven is not too old to believe in Santa Claus.

In the third chapter, one of the characters, six-year-old Susan, gets into a fight on the playground on the last day of school before Christmas break because one of the other children has told her that Santa isn't real. That was a kick to the gut, because I was Susan. At that age and at that time of year, and in a situation that was almost exactly what she experienced. Apparently I am still traumatized by that experience, as evinced by how abjectly horrified I was when I realized what I'd done after finally reading the entire book myself. I've been told I was really a fair bit more upset than the situation justified. Weird, isn't it, how some things stick with you long past the time when they really should?

It is pretty clear throughout the book that Don, the main character (he is eleven or twelve and Susan's older brother), and Frank, the other main character (he's a dog) and the parents are not believers either. In fact, it's a very touching story about the family rallying around Susan, trying to figure out what she wants from Santa Claus and trying to figure out how to get it for her without tipping her off. In other words, they're trying to keep Susan believing, even just one more year. We, as readers, are privy to this, though it's never stated in so many words.

The book ends very ambiguously: the existence of Santa Claus seems quite probable, in fact, given the ending of the book, which for kids who are already believers will be comforting and ring true. Though one of the believers in the group stated quite clearly that she was sure it was Frank who had saved the day, even if Frank himself quite clearly stated he had nothing to do with it.

Aside from the grief it caused me this book is pretty charming. It starts out slow, but as I said above, it grew on me, because I liked the way the family really did stick together. Mom and Dad are present and accounted for, and supportive as Don and Susan are both starting to deal with their own particular issues. The writing, as above, is workmanlike; it does what it needs to without fanfare and occasionally errs on the side of clunky. But both narrators, Don and Frank, have their own special charm. Frank is surprisingly believable for a very anthropomorphized dog. I shouldn't have bought into his character, but I did.

The challenge for me is who to recommend it to. Knowing what I know now, I would never recommend this book to a kid unless I knew for sure which side of the red-suited-man-line they are on. I would, however, recommend it to parents who are starting to have to answer those difficult questions. Either to read it to get a bit of perspective, or to help them think of how to answer, or to read aloud to gently open those lines of communication. Everyone who came to book club did end up really enjoying the book; we had no dissenters, which is somewhat unusual. Even the believers seem to have found what they needed in the book to confirm their belief, or are at least content to leave the questions lie for now. So, for the right kids, a pleasant, quiet, sweet, often funny Christmas story with a lot of heart and a lot of gentleness.

Bird Sense by Tim Birkhead

Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird
by Tim Birkhead
Bloomsbury, 2012
265 pages

I have absolutely no excuse for taking over a month to finish this book, because it's really fantastic. It should be no surprise to anyone that I might like this book; it's a popular science book about birds. Written by a scientist who really knows how to write in a way that makes the science intelligible to outsiders but not patronizing. Written by a man who really, really loves birds. This is the perfect kind of book for me.

The central question: how much do we know about a bird's senses? How do they see? Touch? Hear? Taste? Smell? How do they navigate using the earth's magnetic field? What role, if any, does emotion play in the life of a bird? Birkhead is basically giving us a sense-by-sense overview and synthesis of the research, from as far back as Aristotle to the most recent (as of publishing) fMRI studies of birds' brains. He does so in a fairly informal but also rigorous way, adding his own personal anecdotes and opinions where appropriate and necessary, but always (as any good scientist should) hedging his bets. It's essentially a massive literature review written with an eye to convincing and enlightening the layperson.

An example, though this is a fair bit more chatty than much of the book:

There is an apparent contradiction here: on one hand I'm saying that the bird's beak is much more sensitive than is generally supposed, but on the other you may be wondering about woodpeckers using their bills as an axe. How can a beak be simultaneously sensitive and insensitive? The answer is: our hands work in exactly the same way. Formed as fists, our hands become weapons, but opened flat they are capable of the most sophisticated sensitivity -- exemplified by Wilder Penfields' hugely handed homunculus. A woodpecker hacks wood using the sharp, insensitive tip of its beak; it doesn't use the much more sensitive inside of its mouth. My concern is for those wading birds like the woodcock and kiwi whose bill tip is relatively soft and incredibly sensitive. What happens if they inadvertently hit a rock by mistake when probing in the soil? Is this the human equivalent of banging your funny bone?

And there is a pleasant surprise here: Birkhead uses his opportunity to tell his audience how science works. His audience is likely fairly specific -- generally those already interested in birds, mostly, or zoology in general, or possibly psychology -- but they're not universally scientifically-minded, so he breaks down the scientific process, explicitly, in the introduction. We're also reminded constantly that scientific "truth" is, as he puts it, more accurately "truth-for-now" while we wait for someone to upset our current understanding of the world. This becomes abundantly clear as we move through examples; the chapters on birds' senses of taste, touch and smell are particularly full of "we thought this, then we thought this, and then someone did this and now we're starting to realize this..." All of this is, of course, as applicable to any other field of scientific study as it is to ornithology.

Even just applicable to ornithology, though, it's a wake-up call. I don't know how long I've been perpetuating the myth that birds, outside of a few exceptions, can't smell. Apparently this is quite far from the truth, at least for significant numbers of species. Birkhead even discusses the fact that some sea birds, like albatrosses and petrels, probably use a sort of "scent landscape" to help them find their prey -- meaning that those birds, at least, have a far better sense of smell than humans. Ravens and vultures have no problem finding fresh carcasses -- and knowing when they are past their delectable prime. Most birds likely have at least some rudimentary sense of smell, or are able to smell an extremely selective set of things. I can take some comfort in the fact that there are textbooks and field guides still published with the "birds can't smell" fallacy in them, but really. It's been known since the 1960s that birds can smell things. So there's a lesson in how long a particular piece of incorrect trivia can hang around.

Quite apart from carefully popping myths, Birkhead loves the history of ornithology. This is clearly a passion. He's written an entire book on the subject, The Wisdom of Birds, which I'll be on the lookout for. He knows an incredible amount about the historical research and attitudes, regularly bringing ornithologists from the 1800s or earlier into the discussion. Some of them are well-known -- Darwin, Audubon -- while others are more obscure but important. I was particularly taken with the story of Betsy Bang, the medical illustrator in the 1950s who started to really feel that we had the whole smell thing wrong, based on the drawings she was doing to accompany her husbands' scientific papers.

Anyway. I could keep going. The book isn't entirely perfect; though interesting, I felt that the final chapter, the one on bird emotions (if they have them; like Birkhead, I am inclined to think they do in some form or another) to be relatively weaker than the others largely due to less research and therefore less for Birkhead to discuss. While I understand the reason for the order of the chapters, it doesn't end the book well. The postscript goes some way to addressing that, because it's quite strong, but it's not long enough to satisfy. But really, other than that small nitpick, I loved this book. I'll be watching for other Birkhead books, and I'll be buying this one for my collection. I'm rather hoping he does a second edition in ten years, so we can find out what else we've been wrong -- or right -- about in the upcoming decade.

I'll leave you with a bit about guillemots, which I've always liked, but which may now be some of my favourite birds thanks to Birkhead (a hide, for those not versed in British birding terms, is also known as a blind):

While conducting my PhD on guillemots on Skomer Island I constructed hides at various colonies to be able to watch their behaviour at close range. One of my favourite hides was on the north side of the island where, after an uncomfortable hands and knees crawl, I could sit within a few metres of a group of guillemots. There were about twenty pairs breeding on this particular cliff edge, some of them facing out to sea as they incubated their single egg... On one occasion a guillemot that was incubating suddenly stood up and started to give the greeting call -- even though its partner was absent. I was puzzled by this behaviour, which seemed to be occurring completely out of context. I looked out to sea and visible, as little more than a dark blob, was a guillemot flying towards the colony. As I watched, the bird on the cliff continued to call and then, to my utter amazement, with a whirr of stalling wings, the incoming bird alighted beside it. The two birds proceeded to greet each other with evident enthusiasm. I could hardly believe that the incubating bird had apparently seen -- and recognised -- its partner several hundred metres away out at sea.

Birds? Amazing.

The End of the Beginning by Avi (and some book club prattle)

I may have a spate of book club reads coming up here, but I make no promises. Many of my book club reads over the past two months have been getting cursory glances, a scan-through, a detailed reading of first, middle and end chapters at best. At worst (oh, the shame) I've been reading Wikipedia summaries. If any members of my three library book clubs read this blog, I'm sorry: now you know the truth. It's not that I don't want to read the books we've chosen, it's that my reading attention span has been so limited lately that I've had to go for the books I'm in sweet love with, not the books that I think are probably quite interesting and good.

But a change is in the wind, I feel it, with The Hunchback Assignments by Arthur Slade coming up for my 9 - 12s, and Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat for my parent-child group, and I'm even really quite keen to get started on Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen for my adult genre book club.

The End of the Beginning

by Avi

Harcourt, 2004

143 pages

And then, as a prelude to spring, I jumped ahead and read The End of the Beginning by Avi, which is my parent-child group's March read. This may prove to have been folly, as I'm not likely to remember everything I need to for an in-depth discussion with razor-sharp children, but there we go -- it's read and out of the way. And it was a charming little detour.

Avon Snail reads a book a day, and becomes quite depressed because he is sure he will never have adventures like the ones he reads about. A gentle prod from a passing newt encourages Avon to begin his adventure as soon as possible, and as Avon is leaving, he encounters a chatty ant named Edward. The two become fast friends and set out together. This little book is an exercise in realizing that everything can be an adventure if one has the right mindset, that endings are just beginnings, and heroes and heroics come in many different shapes and sizes. It's also full of plays on words, simple but profound little philosophical nuggets, and silly advice that shouldn't work but somehow does.

I'm really looking forward to discussing this one with the kids. I rather wish I had one to read it to (or to read it to me, as I know some of the kids in the group do with their parents). I am sure that they're going to get different things out of it than I have, and that they're going to have strong opinions on Avon and Edward and the experiences the two have. This is a book that is best discussed. As a read-aloud, I think it would be superior, and delightful. The illustrations throughout are whimsical and lovely, accompanying the whimsy in the text perfectly.

As a read-to-my-adult-self, it is charming. It occasionally slips past charming into too twee, but one might expect that from a book subtitled "Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant)" and I was in the mood for twee. It is not long, and any longer would be too long. A larger flaw, from my perspective, is that neither of the characters seem to grow or change fundamentally from their experience, which is a bit of a surprise in a book that is a gentle parody of the heroic journey. That said, I think it must be purposeful -- Edward never gets his comeuppance, really, and Avon doesn't seem to learn anything -- so that the reader can notice this and think about it and discuss the dissonance. Because I certainly expected Edward (who is a great little character, flawed and bossy and daft) to get a comeuppance at some point, and I expected Avon to learn a little something. But they're both as bright as a sack of doorknobs, and that doesn't change. Edward even has a bit of a selfishly mean streak, to match Avon's selflessly kind streak, but nothing ever comes of it in the story, which is where I think discussion comes in.

So, yes. Overall, as a read for an adult -- perhaps not my first choice. But as something to read and discuss with kids who are reading about others' adventures, and thinking about the meaning of life and friendship and starting to figure things out, I think this is a great little story in the grand tradition of animal fables. The language is something that early readers will be able to understand and the chapters are short. The humour will definitely appeal to kids' sense of the absurd (a worm who can't figure out which end is head and which is tail, or a cricket who sings to himself about cheese), and some of the jokes that will be above their heads will be easily explained by a parent. I am looking forward to hearing about what the group has to say.

The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary

So, the book club saga continues. This was the book our child-parent book club was reading this month. I suggested it because, not having read it myself mind, it seemed like something about the right age level and a fairly safe choice. I'm not always going to pick safe choices for this group, but it's the first meeting I'm leading and I want to get my toes wet gradually.

Ralph is a young mouse living in the Mountain View Inn in California. It's a small, out of the way hotel, a little shabbier than it had been in its hey-day. Ralph and his family live in room 215, and as the story opens, a boy takes up residence with his parents for a few days. This boy brings with him a number of toy cars -- including a motorcycle just right for a mouse. This is an opportunity far too good for adventurous Ralph to pass up. And Ralph is about to get at least as much adventure as he hoped for.

Since I've already done a fair bit of thinking following the Deconstructing Penguins roadmap, I thought I'd just post my own answers to some of the questions the Goldstones suggest. When I wrote out my thoughts for the book club, the result was four pages long. I'm only going to include the things we touched upon during the book club discussion.

Incidentally, the book club didn't work perfectly; there were only four participants, two kids and two parents, and one of the kids dominated the group. I did my best to try and find some balance, but what I need is a bigger group. We managed to get to my big "point of view" discussion, and I think that got some attention. So that was good.

Who is the protagonist? What action are they trying to move forward?

Ralph strikes me as the most likely protagonist. He wants to have adventures; he wants to go down to the first floor; he wants to ride the motorcycle. In short, Ralph wants to grow up. However, at the beginning of the book at least, he doesn't understand that growing up is about more than size and ability -- it's about responsibility and consequences, too.

Who is the antagonist?
If Ralph is the protagonist, his mother (not the most obvious choice, as she really isn't a main character) is the antagonist. She's not terribly effective as an antagonist; Ralph doesn't listen to her. But she definitely represents the forces trying to hold Ralph back from growing up.

Knowing the protagonist and antagonist, what is this book actually about?
Personally, I think it's about growing up, and about how growing up is more than just getting older. It's about being mature enough to understand how your actions affect others, and how when you're given privileges, you're also given responsibilities. If you don't live up to those responsibilities, people aren't going to respect you as an adult. But if you do live up to those responsibilities, people will take notice of that, too.

That was about as far as we got on the roadmap. I only have an hour and we kept getting sidetracked by the colours of markers I was supposed to be using. Sigh. I did manage to squeeze in a discussion I wanted to have that didn't exactly follow the Deconstructing Penguins plan, but was something I thought was pretty important to think about: point of view. It's brought up in Deconstructing Penguins for sure, but not in quite the same way.

In The Mouse and the Motorcycle we have two very obviously different points of view: the mice, and the humans. So it was (relatively) easy to get the group to understand what I meant by "point of view." We did it by demonstrating the difference in the way the mice and the humans view the phrase "mice are pests." Then we talked about how, from the point of view of a mouse, people might be the pests instead. This is supported by several things that happen in the book, which is important. One doesn't want to be conjecturing about what the author meant to say without any evidence to back one up.

So we had two clear points of view -- and then we talked about whether or not it was possible that Ralph and his mother maybe had different points of view, too. They were both mice, but they didn't see things the same way. We were just starting to get into the whys of that when one half of the group had to run to swimming lessons, so it was cut short; but I think there was more fodder there for discussion, for sure.

This particular book club is breaking now until October. The summer's too crazy for me to keep working on that, and the kids are pretty busy too, with sports and friends and so on. So I've got some time to do some advertising and some planning, and I feel cautiously optimistic that this might be a really fun program to run.

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, translated by Anthea Bell

As I've mentioned in a few places, I had not planned to finish this book so quickly. It didn't seem to be going that fast. And I had other things to do that day, like dishes, and gathering garbage, and general tidying, and running errands, and... ... and very little of it got done, because this book did.

The reason this surprises me so much is that I hadn't really thought of Three Bags Full as being a gripping read. I didn't feel like I was barreling through it. But perhaps my clue should have been that nagging restlessness I felt when doing dishes (I did get some things done), wondering what would become of the sheep, and worrying that one of them would find himself too close to the butcher for comfort, or under the not-so-loving care of a villain...

Three Bags Full is what I would call a pleasant read, but it's not something to just breeze through. What pushes it past a breezy read is that every once in a while a sheep will look at something a certain way, or say something in a sheepy way, or something will happen and be interpreted by the sheep in a completely odd way, and the reader will feel that maybe humans aren't as smart as we like to think we are, because darn it, that sheep is right. And it's a little embarrassing to be brought up short by a fictional sheep.

The basic plot, upon which these sheep-driven epiphanies hang, is that one morning the flock finds their shepherd, George Glenn, lying on his back with a spade driven clean through him. And since he was their shepherd, and most other humans seem to be somewhat useless, the flock decides that the solving of the mystery is up to them. They're lead by the intrepid Miss Maple, the smartest sheep in Glennkill and possibly the smartest sheep in the entire world, who gets help when she needs it particularly from three others in the flock: Othello, the only black sheep in the flock and a former circus performer; Zora, who thinks deep thoughts and quite likes heights; and Mopple the Whale, the memory sheep -- Mopple can remember anything.

As I write this down, I feel quite fondly towards each of them. I was trying to pick a favourite character, and I couldn't; every sheep in the flock (and outside, too) is an important character, and they all have their endearing qualities. Swann's gift here has been creating characters that would possibly be stock characters in any other context, but as sheep they're charming and well-realized. I enjoyed, too, that the whole flock was integral to the plot -- each member had something to bring to the table, and not always in a contrived way.

And this book really is a mystery, a mystery that does slowly get unravelled, revealed to us through the flock's collective memory and observations, through conversations overheard by the sheep and actions observed by the sheep -- conversations and observations the sheep don't always interpret in the same way a human observer (the reader, for example) might be tempted to interpret them. But often their interpretations fit just as well. In the end, the solution was somewhat unexpected, but fit, and I was left feeling quite satisfied if a little melancholy. George Glenn, seen through the sheep's memories, was someone who deserved an awful lot better than he got. This is one of the strange things: because of the way this story was told, the reader ends up identifying with and feeling for George far more than one often does for the victims in other crime novels.

To understand what I mean about the difference of perspective between Swann's sheep and a human, here's night from the perspective of a sheep:

Melmoth was trembling, but only with exhaustion. He heard everything, everything. The whining of the dogs and their slobbering heartbeats, the clink of moonlight on the cold ground, a night bird's wings beating, even the velvety sound of the night itself slowly moving on.

The last note I want to make is of the translation. Not able to read this in the original German, I still want to compliment Anthea Bell on her translation. It's seamless and lyrical, and I presume quite close to the original, unique voice that Leonie Swann writes with. As always, I struggle with how close a translation can possibly be to an original text, but this one just feels right.

Pick this one up if you're in the mood for something a little different, something that will make you think just a little, something to savour. Enjoy the odd feeling of looking at the human world through the eyes of a fictional sheep, and listen to what those sheep say. Because they just might be right.