My son and I were enjoying See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng when somewhere towards the second half of the novel about a precocious boy wanting to send his Golden iPod to space on a rocket suddenly took a turn that surprised us both. I won’t give it away, except to say that the book, already enjoyable as a read-aloud, went deeper still as Cheng’s protagonist, Alex, learns more about life than we would have expected.

The novel is told mostly in the voice of Alex, an 11-year-old who narrates his world into the voice recorder of the Golden iPod, which he hopes to send into space on a rocket he intends to build, in order to emulate his hero, Carl Sagan (also the name of his dog). References to Carl Sagan (the scientist) and the movie, Contact, abound.

Alex hopes whatever life in space finds his iPod will come to understand the Human Race. Meanwhile, listening in, we come to understand Alex, and the constellation of his family (both known and unknown), and the way that time and space fold in on us in strange and unexpected ways.  Alex is an innocent but attentive observer of the world.

See You in the Cosmos a beautiful book, full of voice and compassion and complexity. You’ll cheer Alex on, and wonder if maybe we, the readers, aren’t the very life forms he is writing to, reading the transcripts of his life, in order to understand the beings on Planet Earth.

Peace (here and there and beyond),
Kevin

Music. Writing. Art. Love. Resistance. Revolution.

These ideas all swirl around in the majestic novel by Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. Set mostly in China during more than one revolution, the novel’s scope is large but its attention to characters and details makes it feel intimate as well.

We find ourselves drawn into the lives of one woman trying to find the stories of her relatives, and her own father, through their lives during the Cultural Revolution that uprooted thousands of families and the Tiananmen Square protests that turned violent.

Music swirls around the story, as the main characters are composers and musicians, and writers, and the concept of story itself as the central tenet for how we live our lives with meaning and love surfaces over and over again, as it should.

I found myself wondering more and more about Chinese society and culture, and how we often lose track of the lives of the people among the news of the politics and economics. So many Chinese families have paid the price for Revolution, for change, in such a relatively short time period, too.

Thien reminds us that the role of the novelist is to both peel back the layers of complexity, to show us the stories of people in the midst of that change. Yes, there is much suffering here, but there is also love and family and the desire to rise above your surroundings to create art that means something.

There is hope here in Do Not Say We Have Nothing. That’s a powerful message, always. Hope that days of turmoil and uncertaintly will get better, and that art – music and writing — will allow us to be remembered, and not forgotten. One can hope.

Peace (between the pages),
Kevin

 

 

This collection of short essays by writer Peter Orner had me thinking a million thoughts about how we read and how we write. Wow. I picked up Orner’s Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live by chance — it was on the library shelf next to something else I was looking at. I picked up Orner, and didn’t want to put it down. So I didn’t.

Orner, a novelist (but one I have not read or even heard of before), writes from a very different slant of reader. First of all, his eclectic tastes in authors and books gave me little center of gravity, but that wasn’t a problem. I wanted to know who these writers were that I didn’t know. I reveled in his stories of finding books in corners of used book stores. I wanted to know the stories of the stories, and the stories themselves.

Orner’s brilliant approach to these essays is to use various novels and writers and stories as a “way in” to think about his life, and life in general. Literature as a lens on our life. It’s hard to explain his technique in this book but Orner’s perceptions and voice are so strong here, it’s as if you pulled up a milk crate in his garage studio, plucked a book from his stacks and stacks, and started to talk over coffee about literature and life.

Even as you read about Orner’s connection to texts, you will begin to ponder your own. Or, at least, I did. That makes for a powerful and personal reading experience.

Peace (between the pages),
Kevin

 

Middle school seems to make most students feel like wandering aliens on a strange and unforgiving planet full of odd customs and interactions. Novelist Michael Merschel uses that concept to full effect in his first book, Revenge of the Star Survivors. Our protagonist, Clark Sherman, moves into a new community when his father gets a new job and then immerses himself in Festus Middle School.

The narrative voice of Clark is that of an alien space explorer, as if he were not some middle school boy but rather an astronaut on a mission. Someone who has landed on some unknown world, gathering information about life forms and culture idiosyncrasies for his commanders (ie, his parents). His favorite television show — Star Survivors — gives his first-person narrative a frame.

This storytelling technique could easily get old, quick, but Merschel wisely moves us into emotional territory, creating a landscape of quirky characters set up against the concept of middle school bullying and confusion. As Clark navigates the unfolding middle school drama, he is both a target and ultimately, a protector. The story gets deeper and richer as it unfolds, and comes to a satisfying conclusion with heart and wisdom.

“I like to think that with real friends, hailing frequencies are always open.” — Clark

This novel would be a nice fit for middle school classrooms, but also for upper elementary readers looking ahead to what awaits them in that strange galaxy of the unknown.

Peace (here and beyond),
Kevin

PS — Michael Merschel sent me a copy of Revenge of the Star Survivors to review after I responded to something he wrote over at Nerdy Book Club. I made no promises about the kind of review I would write, nor did he ask.