Sunday, July 18, 2021

My Blogger Blog is Ended; Long Live My WordPress Blog!

I appreciate all my Blogger followers over these thirteen years. But, I have left Blogger and moved my blog to WordPress. So, to continue to receive my posts, please head over to The Literate Quilter at https://theliteratequilter.wordpress.com

In 2008 I wrote my first posts. (Some have been deleted.) I wrote about books I had read and quilts I was working on, vintage finds and travels and outings.

In 2014 my husband retired and my son told me about ways to obtain galleys for review. I joined NetGalley, and now 623 book reviews later I am 'frequently approved,' an Amazon Top 1000 reviewer, and have social media friendships with lovely folk across America.

Thank you for making my blog a success. Help me kick start my new blog by following me!

Nancy


Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Tooth of the Covenant by Norman Lock

 

I hope to expose both the moral horror and criminal injustices of the age and to speak to their persistence in our own. ~Norman Lock interview

As a genealogist I have uncovered things about my ancestors that were meant to be kept secret, things no one ever talked about. 

There are the usual crimes--sneaking out of Russia to avoid serving in the Czar's army, marriages soon gone sour and the divorces never spoken of, children born out of wedlock. And some that are disturbing, like a beloved grandparent who admitted to a crime and was jailed, which was kept secret from his children.

I found the newspaper articles, first downplaying that anything would come of the charges, then his admission of guilt, then the ad where my grandmother sold off furniture. She moved the children to her parents home and they never knew their father spent three months in jail. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor's sins were not hidden. They were in the history books. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a Puritan judge in Salem, Massachusetts, who sent women and girls to their deaths, accused of witchery. To disassociate himself from this heritage, Nathaniel changed the spelling of his name.

Tooth of the Covenant, Norman Lock's eighth book in his American Novel series, places Nathaniel back in time, planning to arraign his ancestor and prevent the deaths. Framed as Nathaniel writing a story, using the persona Isaac Page, his journey through time alters his perception.

Salem in 1692 was a dangerous place. Isaac/Nathaniel uses his woodworking skill acquired at the failed idealist Brook Farm community to earn his bed and board on the fringes of Salem.

He drinks at taverns where men ignore the 'one and no more' mantra of the Puritans, and dangerously discusses theology condemned by the Puritans. Married in his own time, Issac/Nathaniel finds himself attracted to a pretty indentured servant. 

As Issac delays his mission, his resolve weakens, and fatally, he is able to see through the lens of the past and becomes allied to his detested great-grandfather.

We can judge the past, and yet we cannot escape it. We carry the prejudices and legacy forward, sometimes unthinking, sometimes purposefully. Our legacy insidiously skews our world view, distorts our perception.

"What are we if not our stories," Hawthorne/Lock writes early on, and he ends, "If there is witchery, it is in the stories that we tell, their power to enthrall, transform, uplift, and corrupt. A scarlet letter or a great while whale--what are they if not figures in a tableau behind which lie truths that can crack the foundation of the world and let the angels or the devils out into broadest day!" 

The American Novel series enthrall us as they break open the veneer of righteousness we sometimes claim for ourselves. We miss the log in our own eye when we think only of the sins of the past, for the past remains with us. 

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Tooth of the Covenant
by Norman Lock
Bellevue Literary Press
Publication July 6, 2021
Trade paper
ISBN: 9781942658832
Ebook US $16.99
ISBN: 9781942658849

From the Publisher

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. 

In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. 

But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.

An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.




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Sunday, July 4, 2021

The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

 It's the nature of small birds to sing their little hearts out. And it's the nature of God to hear them.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner


The Nature of Small Birds is a quiet, gentle book, the kind of read that is a comfort and a respite. Susie Finbeiner has created a family that is not always perfect, but is able to love perfectly. 

It is the story of 'hippie' couple Bruce and Linda and their three daughters Sonny, Mindy, and Holly. Readers meet the couple in 2013, in Bruce's voice, and in 1975 narrated by Linda, and in 1988 through Sonny's eyes. Each narrative voice is distinct.

Central to their story is Mindy, who Bruce and Linda adopted through Operation Baby Lift at the end of the Vietnam War. We know what she experienced by her early fearfulness, and we understand the love that surrounded her by her growth and happiness. 

Over 3,000 Vietnamese babies and children were brought to America. Some were left at orphanages because their family was unable to care for them; the parents never approved their removal. 

Adopting a Vietnamese child in 1975 created strong reactions in friends and family and even strangers. The pain of losing sons in the war was still raw and visceral. Bruce had lost a brother in the war, and his mother had a difficult time accepting Mindy.

Now grown, Mindy is exploring how to find her birth mother in Vietnam, supported by her family.

If all I've done with this one life is to be a son, husband, brother, dad, grandpa to these remarkable people, that's good enough for me.~from The Nature of Small Birds by Susie Finkbeiner

My favorite voice was Bruce, whose reflections on life, family, and aging are beautiful. I also loved Linda's recollection of early motherhood, so like my own. Sonny's life in 1988, filled with malls and Cyndi Lauper and movies like 'Big', made me recall the world I knew when our son was born. 

The story is set in a Michigan 'Up North' setting, on the "pinkie knuckle" of Michigan.


I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Nature of Small Birds
by Susie Finkbeiner
Revell 
paperback $15.99ISBN: 9780800739355
E-Book
ISBN: 9781493430468
Pub Date: July 6, 2021

from the publisher
In 1975, three thousand children were airlifted out of Saigon to be adopted into Western homes. When Mindy, one of those children, announces her plans to return to Vietnam to find her birth mother, her loving adopted family is suddenly thrown back to the events surrounding her unconventional arrival in their lives.

Though her father supports Mindy's desire to meet her family of origin, he struggles privately with an unsettling fear that he'll lose the daughter he's poured his heart into. Mindy's mother undergoes the emotional rollercoaster inherent in the adoption of a child from a war-torn country, discovering the joy hidden amid the difficulties. And Mindy's sister helps her sort through relics that whisper of the effect the trauma of war has had on their family--but also speak of the beauty of overcoming.

Told through three strong voices in three compelling timelines, The Nature of Small Birds is a hopeful story that explores the meaning of family far beyond genetic code.
About the author
Susie Finkbeiner is the CBA bestselling author of All Manner of Things, which was selected as a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, and Stories That Bind Us, as well as A Cup of Dust, A Trail of Crumbs, and A Song of Home. She serves on the Fiction Readers Summit planning committee, volunteers her time at Ada Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and speaks at retreats and women's events across the country. Susie and her husband have three children and live in West Michigan.