Book #64: Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA

Title: Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA
Author: Julia Alvarez

I must admit, I had never even heard of a quinceanera (a celebration of womanhood, usually taking place on or near a Hispanic girl's fifteenth birthday) until about five years ago. I went to high school with lots of Latinas (predominantly Puerto Ricans), and although my Jewish friends were getting bar and bat mitzvahed all over the place, I don't recall any of my Latina friends having Quinceaneras. Or maybe I just wasn't invited. In Once Upon a Quinceanera, Julia Alvarez explores the root tradition of quinceaneras, takes the reader through one girl's celebration, discusses the issues of materialism and sexism and cultural adaptation inherent in the celebration, looks at the at-risk-ness of Hispanic girls, and talks a lot about her own experience of growing up as a Latina.

I first picked up Once Upon a Quinceanera because I've read several of Julia Alvarez's works in the past, and really enjoyed them. Everything I've read before has been either a memoir or a novel, based on her life. I was excited to read this book, because as a work of non-autobiographical non-fiction, I thought I'd get to see her tackle a subject other than herself. I now think she's incapable of talking about someone other than herself. For the first few chapters, I got what I expected to get-- an explanation of the celebration, the reasons behind the celebration, interviews with quinceaneras, their families and the behind-the-scenes people. But then the book turned into (once again) Alvarez's own story. It was an interesting story, but not necessarily one that belonged in this book.

And just to show how twisted my perspective has become...

As I previously mentioned, Isaac had his PICC line pulled yesterday. Afterwards we went to Target and bought him a hot chocolate (which he spilled) and a toy to celebrate. We came home and he spent the afternoon happily and freely bouncing from couch to couch and down the stairs. Then, after an hour or two of bouncing, he sat back on the couch to watch him some Noggin, and when he tried to get up, he couldn't walk.

Gone are the days when I'm relaxed about Isaac's health. Two months ago, I would have shrugged it off, but since this is how his osteomyelitis presented in the first place, I was on the phone with the pediatrician immediately, sure that MRSA had come knocking again. I had horrendous visions of spending another two weeks (or longer) in the hospital. I was wondering how we'd explain to him that he missed Christmas (explaining away a missed birthday party and Halloween was hard enough). My mind was racing with the implications of long-term antibiotic therapy and chronic osteomyelitis. The pediatrician told me to relax and bring him by in the morning if he still couldn't walk. I put both of our moms on standby to fly down in case he was going back for more surgery. My sister-in-law organized a family fast. In short, we were on the verge of a full-scale panic.

This morning, Eddie took him to the pediatrician, who sent us to an infectious diseases specialist. He had more blood drawn and more x-rays taken. His infection rates looked ok, but they saw something weird on the x-ray and sent him to see an orthopedic surgeon. It turns out that in all the joyful bouncing yesterday, Isaac got a hairline fracture in his femur. The bone already had a hole drilled in it and was weak, so I guess it was more prone to fracture than it otherwise would have been.

If you had told me two months ago that I would be happy to hear that my kid had a broken leg, I wouldn't have believed you. But today, I accepted that news with a smile on my face. Yeah, it sucks, but the alternative could have been so much worse.

The bad news is, no cute pictures of Isaac sledding and skiing in Utah at Christmas. The good news is, we can still go to Utah for Christmas.

Running buddies...

This fall, I've had two of the best running buddies ever. They don't talk too much, don't whine too much, and occasionally get so relaxed that they fall asleep. The bigger one likes to take along "guns" to protect us from dogs. This morning our gun was a hair curler. The smaller one just goes along for the ride. Here they are, with Isaac showing off his crazy hat head:

Can you understand my reluctance to leave the baby phase behind when you see how Eddie and I create sweet faces like this?

Free at last, free at last....

...Tomorrow at 9:15 in the morning, Isaac will be free at last. Or at least his arm will be. The pediatrician called today to say that after consulting with his friend in infectious diseases, he's decided that it would probably be best for Isaac to stop taking the IV antibiotics. His immune system is becoming more and more compromised each week (and yeah, Annie has a hacking cough-- we're trying to quarantine her), so they think that it's more important to keep some of his white blood cells alive than to continue the drugs. I'm glad. He's been on the meds for more than six weeks. Tomorrow he's getting the PICC line pulled and I'm going to come home and run him a big bubble bath. Six weeks is a very long time for a three-year-old to go without a bath. Since baths and PICC lines aren't compatible, we've developed sort of a middle ages approach toward bathing around here. His hands and face get washed occasionally, we wash the hair before church on Sunday, but most of his body has not had a good scrubbing since before Halloween. I don't think he smells. But maybe I'm just so used to his funk that it doesn't bother me anymore.

Getting my head in the game

Those of you without older kids might not recognize the High School Musical reference in my title, but we've been listening to HSM and HSM2 for months around here, so I have the dorky songs in my head more often than not. Anyway, I think I've got my head back in the running game. Isaac's illness threw my training for a loop, but I'm back on track. I did 15 miles two Saturdays ago, 20 last Saturday, and twelve today. I have another 20 planned for next Saturday and 15 for the next Saturday, and then I'll be just two weeks away from the race. How did it get here so quickly? The funny thing is that twelve miles now feels like a short run. I can hardly believe that one month today I'll be slapping that 26.2 sticker on the back of my van and driving it with pride.

Book #63: New England White

Title: New England White
Author: Stephen L. Carter

While I was reading New England White, Maren picked up the book and dropped the corner of it right on my big toe. It bled, and a week later it's still bruised. It's a big, deep, heavy, satisfying book. I guess it would be classified as a mystery, since the mystery of who killed economics professor Kellen Zant runs throughout the novel, but it's also an exploration of upper-middle and upper-class African American culture, the saga of the Carlyle family, and a weather log (the book starts with the first snowfall in November and wraps up with the spring thaw, and it snows more in this book than I ever saw in 18 years of living in New England).

Readers at amazon.com complained that the novel was too long. It is long. But it's more than just a mystery. I expect that if Carter cut 200 pages (what several reviewers felt should be done), we would have lost much of the cultural backdrop. I loved the story, but I really felt like I got an education in how a whole group of people lives and thinks in America, warts and all (the positive and negative aspects of African American social clubs were especially interesting). What I liked best about the novel was the story of Julia and Lemaster and their children, especially as Julia gains a backbone through her investigation of Zant's murder. Definitely worth reading and persisting.

Book #62: The Devil's Feather

Title: The Devil's Feather
Author: Minette Walters

Connie Burns is a woman who has seen it all. As a child, she and her white family were run off their farm in Africa when the government took it over. As an adult, she has been a war correspondent in Sierra Leone, war-torn Asia, and Iraq. In Iraq, she meets a man from her past, who she thinks may be a serial killer. Shortly after beginning to research the man (she's looking into him despite his assurances that he'll kill her if she does), he kidnaps her, makes it look like a politically-motivated killing, and rapes and tortures her for three days. Upon her release, she makes a break for a deserted old house in the English countryside. A house with a past. A house without DSL or cell phone service. The perfect place to soothe your frayed nerves when a deranged man who has already raped you and now wants to kill you is on the loose.

Despite the "girl in peril" idiocy Burns showed (it reminded me a little bit of those dumb girls in horror movies who go into darkened rooms when they know a killer is on the loose), I really enjoyed The Devil's Feather. It was quick-paced, kept me reading late into the night, and resulted in a very messy home. It also has some good girl-power scenes where Connie and her neighbor reenact some Thelma and Louise style buttkicking.

Book #61: The Life of Pi

Title: The Life of Pi
Author: Yann Martel

We read this book for the November meeting of our book club. Unfortunately, I wasn't done with it in time to attend, but Eddie and his mom and I had an impromptu discussion of the book at home instead. Eddie's mom said that she loved the first half of the book, where Pi Patel is living in India and exploring different religions. He was raised Hindu, but also adopts Christianity and Islam, and finds no contradiction in actively practicing all three at once. The first part of the novel seems like sort of a traditional bildungsroman, where the young protagonist comes of age. In this case, he grows up the son of a zookeeper, who like many Indians in the 1970s, decides to emigrate to Canada, which is where the book gets really interesting.

On the ship to Canada, his family and the contents of his father's zoo on board, Pi survives a shipwreck. For nearly a year, he lives on a lifeboat. At the beginning of his time on the lifeboat, he's living with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a large male tiger named Richard Parker. The hyena, zebra and orangutan quickly meet their ends, and Pi and Richard Parker must learn to survive with each other. Eddie loved this part of the book. I'm not surprised-- it was sort of like Survivor on steroids. Survivor with a tiger, of course.

The last chapter is where both parts of the book come together. The reader must decide if Pi is telling the truth about living with Richard Parker, or if he's made a myth, styled after religious myths, in order to help him make sense of his experience on the boat. Am I, as an active believer of the LDS faith allowed to admit that I believe that myth is an important part of Christian (and even Mormon) religious history? Myth helps us understand and process truth in a way that's accessible to us. Alone on a boat, Pi may have died or gone insane. With Richard Parker, real or imagined, he was able to live to tell his story.

Book #60: The Poe Shadow

Title: The Poe Shadow
Author: Matthew Pearl

In The Poe Shadow, Quentin Clark, a young lawyer living in Baltimore, gives up love and livelihood in an obsessive search to lift Edgar Allan Poe's name out of the gutter after he died in embarrassing circumstances. Clark's travels take him to Paris, where he finds not one, but two men who consider themselves the inspiration for Poe's famous detective, Dupin. Clark and the two Dupin's work against each other to solve the mystery surrounding Poe's death.

Pearl's novel The Dante Club was released to high acclaim several years ago. I haven't read it, but picked up The Poe Shadow based on its reputation. His second novel was pretty good, but it was a slow read. Pearl did such a great job of tapping into the loquaciousness of the 19th century novel, where writers were paid by the word (Huck Finn or Great Expectations, anyone?) that it seemed hard for me to believe at times that The Poe Shadow was written in the 21st-century. Overall, the story satisfied-- it even ended in a relatively predictable scene of Victorian-era domestic bliss, but the pace seemed more suited to a horse-drawn carriage than a modern minivan.

Book #59: The lost book

I was reading something when Isaac got sick. Something I finished while he was in the hospital. Something that I can't remember at all right now. Should I remember it in the future, I'll post about it.