Say Amen to Bring On the Blessings

Bring on the Blessings by Beverly Jenkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the feel-good series I’ve been searching for since March. I saw an announcement that Al Roker bought television rights to the Blessings series, renaming it Hopetown and focusing on foster kids that find their forever families. I was hoping for a combo of Mitford, Miss Julia, and Tyler Perry; I got that and more.
Here’s the setup:ex-social worker Bernadine Brown catches her husband cheating on her—on her fifty-second birthday, no less. She hires a lawyer and ends up with $275 million. Raised in the church, she knows that when much is given much is expected, so she asks God to send her a purpose.
The purpose turns out to be a town: Henry Adams, Kansas, one of the last surviving townships founded by freed slaves after the Civil War. The failing town is for sale on the Internet; Bernadine buys it.
In book one, we meet all the characters: the people of Henry Adams, including town mayor Trent July, from one of the founding families; Bernadine; and the foster kids and families that are going to move into Henry Adams and make new lives for themselves. As the series continues, we get more in-depth and meet more characters. I’ve always been a sucker for inspirational fiction, for orphan stories and found families, and these books (I’m halfway through the ten-book series now) hit just the right heart notes.
In addition to the love stories in each volume, we get bonuses of Black history, some of which I knew—there are Black towns in Arizona, too—some of which was new to me, like the Black Seminoles who did a long walk to Texas and still reside there. The July family is one of those split, like the tribes of Southern Arizona who are split across the international border.
I highly recommend these stories, told with humor and grace. There’s a long-running thread of a man who loves his pig more than anything, which was particularly funny to me after seeing the 2020 America’s Got Talent. There’s a strong current of Spirit in these books, also—both inside and outside the church.
I’m so grateful to have found these stories of faith and community that remind me that every day, people do work together and good things do happen—especially when love and kindness are applied.

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Love as Long and Deep and Wide as the Universe

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here’s why this book will be on my top books of 2020: when you read the 6 blurbs on the back of the book, they state with confidence a completely different interpretation of the book. Kirkus: what they’d sacrifice for progress. Publishers Weekly: failing to learn from one’s mistakes. Booklist: found families and lost loves. Indra Das: galactic progress and its crushing fallout. Kate Elliot: blistering commentary on capitalism and colonialism. Library Journal: emotional attachment with time travel? Did they get a prepub draft instead of a preprint galley? It goes through time, but the only real time travel is memory and frozen on a space ship-not “time travel” to most sci-fi readers.
At any rate, Simon Jimenez has reached the pinnacle of the novelist’s true dream: to speak in tongues, so that all who read get the message they need. Told through space opera; more of an intellectual and emotional space opera than the shoot ‘em up kind. The shoot’em up kind don’t usually leave lingering flute music in your dreams. Though it may inspire some martial music in your soul. Read, ponder, weep and wonder. Truly an epic.
My take? The theme is the vast, unknowable consequences of love.

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I entered a sweeps for this book because it was written for me: I’m one of those people avoiding Facebook because people I love dearly are expressing views I disagree with, and I’m afraid to have a confrontation that might devolve to yelling and loss—even if it’s virtual. I’m upset to see the same kind of unrest I grew up with in the 1970s repeating. I know the media is highlighting extremists to sell stuff, but I sputter into incoherence when talking politics—so how do I find out the reasons my neighbors might have for voting for platforms that seem deeply dangerous (to me)? I need help. The psychologist author advocates dialogue as the route to cross the divide, rather than debate or even civil discourse; that sounds doable, even for introverts. It’s worth the wade through stilted prose to read this book; it’s also a refresher on your freshman speech class. Using cousins Kevin the liberal and Celine the conservative, whose kids want them to socialize again, the author walks you through careful conversations. Aside from the clunky suggested scripts, the principles are sound, and it’s full of further resources. The first thing the author asks you to do is figure out your motivations for talking. Discourse is proving your point, debate is for conversion, but dialogue means listening and understanding. We all want the other guy to switch to our way of thinking, but that’s not realistic or useful. One party or another is going to prevail and the rest of us have to deal, so I really do want to find common ground and understanding of others—even if we do agree to disagree. That might be the true definition of democracy, after all. What I found most immediately helpful in this book were two charts: one that shows the Miserable Majority, where studies find that only 33% of us are extremists, and the other 66% of us really do just want to get along; the other shows the moral underpinnings of conservatives and liberals—and everyone I know uses both sides of this chart that references loyalty, respect, justice, and compassion. I have more hope for our country after reading this book. If I’m not quite ready to have a dialogue yet, I’m ready for the work.

On Persuasion

The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The jacket copy says that fans of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir will enjoy this book; I’m a fan of the first and not of the second, but I did enjoy this historical fiction tribute to Jane Austen and her fans. I think the book was written expressly for them; deeper familiarity with her novels would certainly enhance the reading. I’m not sure that it will convert those unfamiliar with her work; it didn’t inspire me to reread Austen, but it kept my interest because it celebrates reading.
Jenner has invented a group of characters who form the Jane Austen Society in the post-WWII village of Chawton (Austen’s historic home). In homage to Austen, she concentrates on illustrating issues of class and romantic expectations in the closed-environment Petri dish of an English village; in service to her own muse, there’s a 21st Century perspective that makes it more bearable to me than Austen’s own works. The author’s outlier characters, Evie and Adam (oh, the symbolism—but no, there’s a huge age gap and they’re never associated romantically) are the ones who made the book interesting to me. I really liked them. Adam, a village farmer, discovers Austen from the visit of an American girl on Austen pilgrimage in 1932, thereby obtaining the gift of companionship and wisdom that books can bring to a lonely life. Evie’s introduced to Austen in school by the dynamic village teacher. Though she has to leave the village school before graduation in order to work in the manor where Austen once lived, she has her master reading list and she’s able to nurture her native intelligence through access to the manor library.
Most of the other characters are flawed but sympathetic, just like real life. The village doctor, the village lawyer, and the lady of the manor all have starring roles, along with the teacher and the American—later a movie star who never lost her love for Austen—her movie producer fiancé, and a Sotheby’s assistant director of estate sales. Couples find happiness and the entwined threads all tie up nicely in the end. I’ll look forward to another book from the author, especially if she steps further from Austen’s shadow.

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Post-Apocalypse Hope

A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The current crop of apocalyptic sci-fi books shows clearly that fiction is a form of thought experiment and that science fiction is really about the present time. I’ve got at least 4 books stacked by my chair that I’ve had to put down because the authors picked pandemic for their apocalypse and I don’t want to read about them. Chen was coming to the Tucson Festival of Books so I started reading his book with its hopeful title in March, having forgotten—if I knew—that he picked pandemic, too. I was able to keep reading this one. Chen’s book centers around people, not ideas, and that’s why it’s readable and hopeful in the current situation.
A decade after a global pandemic wiped out most of the planet’s population, the survivors are rebuilding the country, split between self-governing cities, hippie communes and wasteland gangs. The poor, as always, are stuck in one place or the other. Tensions are rising again, along with the threat of new outbreaks. The plot centers around Moira, a former child star voice artist who’s been hiding from her domineering stage dad for years; Rob, a single dad who has to keep proving to social services that he deserves custody of his daughter Sunny; and Krista, an event planner with a big heart and radical friends. Their challenges are both personal and communal, with society in such flux, but people of good heart usually find a way to achieve their dreams, especially with a little help from friends—and they do.
There’s definitely a difference between the newer sci-fi authors and the Boomers; Chen is definitely new school. The real feat that Chen pulls off is to embed his hopefulness in an engaging plot, with likable characters, and to keep the politics offstage and out of total war, through compromise. Usually in these books there are clear winners and losers; Chen has written a way into the future that is workable and believable because the only thing that works in our lived reality is compromise: nobody wins everything but nobody loses everything, either. If only the politicians would quit living in the fantasy worlds of total domination and move into the world where the rest of humanity resides. Books like this remind us of what’s really possible. Recommended.

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Science Doesn't Kill People...

Sea Change by Nancy Kress
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sea Change is a fast, exciting read that highlights climate change instead of pandemic as its apocalypse generator. In 2022, GMOs were banned. A biopharmaceutical caused the Catastrophe: worldwide economic and agricultural collapse, and personal tragedy for lawyer Caroline Denton and her son. Ten years later, reinvented as Renata Black, she is living in Seattle and a member of the Org, an underground group of scientists hunted by the feds. But the Org’s illegal food-research might just hold the key to rebuilding the world’s food supply.
This is another original take in the genre of apocalypse, with the focus on banning a particular type of science. There’s so much material out there floating in cyberspace conspiracy theory that has not been used yet in traditional fiction publishing, and this book is a good example of how one fiction can inform another. With its near-future setting and secret science labs, I was reminded of the spy shows of the 1960s (in a fun way). The book’s main theme, of course, is that science isn’t bad; it’s the way science is used that can be problematic. In other words, “science doesn’t kill people...”.
In the end, though, what makes this such a good novel isn’t plot, but character. Renata has always been an activist, but she’s not in the Org because of food science, but because of another project, connected to her son. Through Renata/Caroline’s story we discover no matter how much we wish the world were run by reason (particularly our own reasons and rationales)—our living into the future is propelled by our responses to our loves and losses. This may be both humanity’s greatest strength and weakness; if we could harness the power of the human heart—or set it free—that would be the greatest breakthrough of all time. This is a near-future thriller worth reading.
Recommended. (Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-galley for review.)

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Garden Inspiration

Emily Dickinson's Gardening Life: The Plants and Places That Inspired the Iconic Poet by Marta McDowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reader finds hope and solace in troubling times through both nature and literature, so what better book to try than this combination of both. I’d checked the book out of the library before deciding whether to add it to my personal collection, so extended checkout has enabled me to decide. Exploring Emily’s gardens in Amherst is also a bit of fantasy reading for desert rats, since many of the mentioned plants do not thrive here, and snow blankets boggle the mind. Hollyhocks are August blooms for Emily, but April blooms for us, and plants that sleep for winter there thrive beautifully here and want to drowse through summer’s heat instead. There’s still lots of gardening inspiration and rumination to be had.

The author is a prodigious gardener herself, wrote Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life before this, and was the Gardener-in-Residence at the Dickinson Museum in 2018. She does a lovely job combining Dickinson’s life, poetry, and gardening, weaving the story through the seasons—and the half-seasons we gardeners know so well, those transitions when gentle warmth lets tender blooms meet, mingle, and say farewell—not forgetting the sudden harsh times when everything disappears in storm.

Illustrated with botanical prints, images of pressed flowers, and Emily’s words from letters and poems, the book is a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. Mostly focusing on ornamentals, as Emily did herself, we still get a glimpse of the family’s vegetable plot, and lessons on over-wintering outside the conservatory. From 1865:



With us, ‘tis Harvest all the Year

For when the Frosts begin

We just reverse the Zodiac

And fetch the Acres in-

(1036)



I had forgotten that all of Emily’s poems are not equally great; the author chose them for their illustrative, not literary qualities. Most work quite well, though some are difficult to parse; our common language has changed so much--and the landscapes of the country. Where Dickinson can be obscure, McDowell can wander to overly florid descriptions that miss the mark; for the most part, however, the language sings with apt observation and the gardener’s vision shines through.

All in all, this is a lovely addition to any gardening or poetry library; the gardening is forefront, with tips and admonitions from the author. Recommended.



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