From time to time, we review books, sometimes poetry, sometimes prose. But don't take our word for it. Read them yourself, and tell us what you think.
Remnant Population
By Elizabeth Moon
Ballantine/Del Rey, 2003, $12.95 trade paper
I'm a sucker for stories about people living alone, like "Robinson Crusoe" and "An Island To Myself" and "Tracks." So I snapped this book up when I saw it was about an elderly woman who defies the order to evacuate the distant planet she's lived on for forty years. No more moving, she says. No more cryo sleep or starting over on some new planet. She's staying right there, to live as long as the frozen food and abandoned vegetable gardens hold out, and then she'll slip away in a peaceful, natural death all by her lonesome.
Of course, it doesn't work out that way. Some local aliens come to check her out, and she ends up playing John Dunbar to their Lakota Sioux. What follows is a giddy first-contact story, with our all-too-human heroine trying to cope with more responsibility than she wants, annoyed that these aliens have busted up her quiet life, and lured -- in spite of herself -- into deciphering the newcomers' clicks, purrs, and decidedly different social customs. But it's a joyful journey, an inside look at what will hopefully be our future, from the point of view of a less-than-perfect protagonist. This John Dunbar likes to eat at regular hours, gets cranky when she doesn't, and has to use the john once in a while.
When other humans finally show up, they're thinly drawn and predictable. But as long as it's our heroine and that curious band of aliens, the story's unusual, suspenseful, and surprisingly gentle.
This is the kind of science fiction where the technology isn't important, but the ideas loom large: Can we humans overcome our impulse for domination when we encounter an alien race? Or will we view the first inhabited planet simply as another landmass to be colonized, the native population assimilated? When the time comes, if we ever get there, these will be among the great questions. This book illustrates those dilemmas in miniature, with an ordinary citizen as our guinea pig, a lady-nextdoor-in-extraordinary-circumstances who seems to have stepped out of grand master Clifford Simak's best work. I got the same flush from this book that I get every time I read Simak's "All Flesh Is Grass" -- pure, unadulterated hope.
-review by Amy Miller
Good Poems
Selected and Introduced by Garrison Keillor
Penguin Books, 2002, $15.00 paper
I'm skeptical of anthologies. No matter how much I admire the editor, I'll find fault with a lot of the choices or end up bored. Maybe I'll think the whole collection is just plain crap. And here comes Garrison Keillor. Oh sure, I listen to The Writer's Almanac from time to time and think, "OK, Garrison, nice pick there." But when I picked up Good Poems in a bookstore, I was still anthology phobic. Then I started to flip through. Page three, Thomas Lux, one of my all-time faves. And there's Jane Hirshfield with "The Lives of the Heart." Nice. The more I read, the more I liked.
I discovered some beauties by poets I didn't know (Robert Moran, Philip Appleman and Joyce Sutphen among others). This collection also has the "good-old-standbys" of great poems (Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese," James Wright's "A Blessing," Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come").
Then there's the organization. You've got the standard "Lovers" and "Beasts." (Who can exclude love and animals?) But Keillor also goes for the more unusual with a section called "Yellow." Now there's a new genre of verse. Color poetry.
Some of the entries aren't really poems at all. We've got the opening to Moby Dick by Herman Melville. And Psalm 23 from The Bay Psalm Book (yeah, yeah, you purists, psalms are poetry) with a different translation (alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter with alternating end rhyme) which uses poetic devices to drive the passage.
Overall, these poems are tight. I liked the majority. I loved quite a few. I discontinued my anthology anxiety medication prescription.
- review by Amy MacLennan
A Day, a Dog
By Gabrielle Vincent
Front Street. Inc., 1999, $16.95 hardcover
This book was such a discovery that I remember exactly where I was when I first saw it. The dog on the cover caught my eye at M Is for Mystery, San Mateo's great bookshop. I opened it to the first page, and within a minute I had tears in my eyes. By the time I'd finished it (it's a picture book - it doesn't take long), I knew that in the name of kindness and of all good things in the world, I had to buy it. This book is that profound.
In spare, exquisite charcoal drawings, Gabrielle Vincent begins with a heartbreaking image: a dog being thrown from a car. The dog chases it, but the car speeds away until he's exhausted, confused, despondent. How do we know a dog is despondent? That is the secret of this book: Vincent's remarkable ability to depict body language with a few simple lines. We follow the dog through the first day of his sudden, unwanted freedom, wandering roadways, causing a traffic accident, roaming a desolate beach, and finally skulking through back alleys. In the end, Vincent leaves us on a hopeful note (which I won't give away), and we're left to draw our own conclusions. Does the dog find happiness? I have to believe he does. Aw, heck, it makes me cry even now.
Though Vincent is known for her children's stories, this book would have disturbed me as a kid. But perhaps with gentle parental guidance, it can be a catalyst to helping children understand their responsibility toward other living creatures. For the rest of us, it's both a harsh reminder of how cruel people can be and an affirmation that compassion for animals is a gift we can -and should- offer every day of our own lives.
-review by Amy Miller
The Sweet Potato Queens' Big-Ass Cookbook (and Financial Planner)
By Jill Conner Browne
Three Rivers Press/Random, 2003, $13.95 trade paper
First, the warning: Jill Conner Browne, funny as she is, can be tough on men. Her man-bashing reaches a crescendo right in the first chapter, "About Betty Crocker," and I was afraid the whole book would be a bad flashback to the Dixie Chicks' "Earl" video. But mercifully, that part's over quickly, and Browne moves on to the good stuff-like why the South is a cool place to live. After a mudslide of recent books in which southern 14-year-olds come of age amid racism, molestation, humidity, and all manner of misery, it's nice to see that somebody likes the South. And Jill Conner Browne doesn't just like the South; she loves it, and she wants us all to come visit there-Jackson, Mississippi, to be exact.
The book is a funny, attitude-upside-the-head hodgepodge of advice for the "modrun" woman, tall tales of Browne's girlfriends (invariably named "Tammy"), and wacky recipes from her family and fleet of admirers. At its core, it's a love letter to old-fashioned southern cooking-almost every recipe features a stick of butter, a slab of cream cheese, and/or enough bacon to kill a football team. "Skimp" is simply not in this woman's vocabulary. What is in her vocabulary is a lot of great phrases like "boy hidee" and "we wield that power like an anvil on a rope." And the recipe names alone are worth the price of the book: Connie's Death Corn Five, Bitch Meatballs with Sexy Red Sauce, Mystery Mush. I can't wait to make Catshit Cookies.
Big-Ass Cookbook is an infectious celebration of being your own, silly self. Whether your idea of cuisine is a batch of Love Lard ("serves one") or Eggbeaters with tofu, this book will make you want to grab a pan and fry up something, fast. Time's a-wasting, Browne tells us. Better eat now.
-review by Amy Miller