Shelter-in-Peace
Quarantine—or Shelter-in-Place—has meant many things to many people. Most people are scrolling Facebook incessantly. I’ve done a bit of that, but no more than usual, which is still too much. The memes have been great, but the complaints I have found unusual, even though intellectually I understand them.
My mother is an extrovert, so I am accustomed to inexplicable loneliness in others when they are left to their own devices.
I’ve been poor, so I relate to the sudden lack of income and the terrifying limbo of not knowing where your provision will come.
I’m curious to a severe degree, and I can comprehend boredom, even though I usually manage to find a way out of it fairly easily…
You see, I am an introvert who was more than happy to have a good excuse to cancel all my plans. Being a non-essential worker—a bookseller—I have lost my nearly thirteen year stint, and I’m actually happy, relieved, and overjoyed to be home every day. As a homeschool mom, my one desire was to spend my days trapped on my property with my kid reading books and right now, I’m living the dream.
Since Corona virus has hit, all we’ve done is actually live our best life.
We’ve spent hours in the garden literally watching the lilies bloom, observing the shockingly not-so-slow metamorphosis of caterpillars to butterflies. We’ve read an obscene number of books off the Mensa reading list for kids, are digging deeper into our Latin studies, memorizing new spelling and vocabulary words we never had time for before, and relishing the fact that third grade math wasn’t just learned, but mastered.
I’ve spent copious hours on ancestry.com, wikitree.com, and prowling books and resource materials here at home learning about my family history. I’ve had the pleasure of baking whatever I want whenever I want (key-lime cupcakes, anyone?). I’ve almost completed a short story anthology for my book series, I’m nearly done with a granny square blanket out of old forgotten yarn, and the only thing I’ve failed to do is maintain my blog and my workout schedule because I’ve been so busy enjoying everything else and it’s hard to share the living room.
The gist of it is: I’m a weirdo who is loving being forced to stay home.
Since my last post, I finished a biography on Margaret Thatcher, a summation of the demise of classical education, a fascinating biography on Amerigo Vespucci as well as some of his original writings, another installment of Cahill’s armchair history series, a terrible account of a transition from “protestantism” to Catholicism (written by a guy I’m convinced was in cults and not a protestant denomination at all), an essay on magnetic currents, several of my favorite children’s chapter books (The Pushcart War never gets old), and one of Prebble’s brilliant histories of the Scottish clans. (Please, take a minute to follow me on Goodreads.)
I suppose my point is this: I know it can be scary… pandemics, shady governments, untrustworthy reporting, not knowing what’s next… but there’s something beautiful about actually stopping to—watch the lilies bloom (and, of course, read a good book).
The Wild Girls – A Review
Title: The Wild Girls
Author: Pat Murphy
Publisher: Speak (an imprint of Penguin Group)
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 288 pages
Dear Publishing Companies,
Allow me to tell you something you probably already know: Take a book, add a matte finish to it, trace some swirly-like-ivy lines about, and add a garden or forest scene – I will most likely take the book home on the spot.
At least that’s what happened with Pat Murphy’s The Wild Girls. And despite having an equally girly and gardeny looking book on my night stand (The Distant Hours
Even if the cover had not been so fabulous, the first line is:
“I met the Queen of the Foxes in 1972, when my family moved from Connecticut to California.”
How do you pass up a first line like that?
It’s a story about twelve year old girls for twelve year old girls, but at twenty-nine I was still dying to know all about the Queen of the Foxes and how interesting a girl would have to be to have the honor of meeting her.
My own wild girl, running, after we read in the park and took a boat ride, but before we had our picnic in the grass.
Joan meets Sarah in the woods behind an old orchard and immediately takes to her even though Sarah is malicious and contemplating throwing rocks at her. She can hit a kid dead on from about thirty feet away, too. Soon the girls are fast friends with woodsy aliases Newt and Fox, telling and writing stories together as they each escape their lives in the comfort and enchanting beauty of the woods and its wildlife.
In the spirit of Bridge to Terabithia (without the inevitable water works), The Secret Garden (without the invalid), and a dash of How to Buy a Love of Reading (or writing), The Wild Girls is a great coming of age story for girls harboring an inner Josephine March (Little Women).
I loved it. I read a lot of it to kiddo outside and she loved it as it served for a great book to welcome spring. I can’t wait to read it again when she is older and see what she thinks of it then.
In the mean time, I’m looking for more Pat Murphy titles, reading Kate Morton, and writing a novel.
The Forgotten Garden, an Overlooked Book
Over and over again, I saw Kate Morton’s House at Riverton lurking on the general fiction shelves at Half Price Books. I never picked it up, the cover just wasn’t right. Book jackets are magical things. Between the author, the publishig company, brilliant marketing people, and the perception of the onlookers – a book jacket tells all. The House at Riverton just wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear. Then one day, my boss waves The Forgotten Garden in front of my face. “This is amazing.” It looked amazing. The antique cream color, the ivy, the fairies, the magical nostalgia of a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel… I desired it immediately. I was dumbstruck to realize it was the same author.
The Forgotten Garden is beautiful. Twins, secrets, best friends, a family saga, England, Australian, painters, storytellers, an authoress, spooky deaths… It was the perfect mood follow up to The Thirteenth Tale. It was an amazing read. It took me too long to discover it due to the terrible marketing of the author’s previous book. Thank God, the publisher’s finally gave Morton’s writing her book cover art due.
If you are wondering, I have broken protocol and abandoned my book cover instincts for the sake of reading Morton’s previous work – I bought The House at Riverton and its horrible cover. I plan to read it around Christmas, a review to follow. Her third book, Th Distant Hour is scheduled for me to read Spring 2012.
Anakalian Whims 