What I Read on My Summer Vacation

While visiting, we picked up

Kearns on the Double by Eamon McCarthy Earls

Kearns is Bill Kearns, a postman turned detective turned journalist who lives and works in a quiet town in Central MA in 1920. I am privileged to own a signed copy because the author is my sixteen year old cousin. Eamon used family legends and traditions to build his characters, but this is not a family memoir. Eamon clearly did his research and captures the era for his readers (intermediate school) as well as Richard Russo did for adults in Empire Falls. Read together, one journeys through time from a hope filled immigrant mill town just before the Depression to the despair of post-industrial America. I like Eamon’s perspective better.

As we traveled we listened to

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston – Buried beneath land rented from Native Americans, scientists are prepared to go to the center of the atom, but as they get closer, a voice they believe to be God’s begin to speak to them. At the same time, a fundamentalist preacher is manipulated into calling the experiment the beginning of Armageddon, and the Native Americans realize their land will no longer be theirs if the experiment succeeds. The triangle of conflicts led to conversations on the relationship between faith and science, and lots of guesses, whenever we stopped, which wasn’t often, as we were held spell bound by Scott Sowers reading of this novel.

Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card read by a full cast.
Ender is Ender Wiggin of Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel found on high school reading lists as a complement to Pride and Prejudice. We know from the beginning of Ender’s Game that he is being trained to save the world at Battle School. Ender’s Shadow is the story of Bean, a street child, who talked before he was one, and solved moral dilemmas by age four, who discovers when he is sent to Battle School that if Ender cannot accomplish the task, the responsibility will fall to him. Ender’s Game is a story of a child sorting out internal conflicts through action. Ender’s Shadow is a story of self-discovery through logic and analysis. As we listened, I imagined which book would be the better introduction to the series for my 12 year old relatives. Each stands alone, and together they challenge adults to appreciate the whole of a child, and encourage young people to question, question, question, and to trust their own answers - Maybe the families will get the whole set.

Library books read in the comfort of the RV
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fjorde
Chromatica is a world where the strata of society is defined by color and one must do as commanded by anyone above your color in the spectrum. Defy the authorities and you are punished … or worse. One can move up, of course – Red marries Blue and voila, Violet. The Greys are everyone’s servants/slaves. Our protagonist is Eddie Russett (a red of course) who, in an attempt find out how Jane (a grey) moves in and out of places she doesn’t’ belong, discovers the rigidity in the rainbow and the colors of his heart. Fjorde’s fantasy world is populated by the absurd, and at first feels too contrived, but when one trusts his imagination, one’s own is opened to the possibilities in our world, which is why one reads, is it not?

Day After Night by Anita Diamant – Set in the Atlit Internment camp , a “holding place” run by the British in Haifa for Jews entering Palestine after WWII, we learn of the Holocaust and the dream of Israel through the eyes of four young Jewish women imprisoned there. Diamant does not preach nor embellish the day to day lives of the women. She just imagines four of six million points of view and through their memories, or denial of them, we learn what it means to find hope grounded in a reality most of us will never experience, and we begin to understand what it means to begin again.

And “Beach Books” found at campground book exchanges
Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon (suspense) Minor in Possession by J.A. Jance (murder mystery)