People I enjoy!

Like a meteor, an instance of Books I’ve Abandoned flashes across the sky. I could have enjoyed the human-size cats who sometimes turn into people who run the pop coffee shop (serving coffee and solutions to your life problems) in Mai Mochizuki’s The Full Moon Coffee Shop), but the in-depth pages-long analysis of the heroine’s horoscope was a deal breaker. A closer look at the cover might have clued me in, but I was distracted by the adorable cat batting at a star.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Voyage of Consolation, the sequel to An American Girl in London. At the end of An American Girl in London, our heroine Mamie Wickreturns to America to marry her fiance. In the sequel, we begin the story with the breaking of that engagement in a quarrel over the English accent that Mamie picked up over her months in England, thus leading the Wick family to embark for Europe on A Voyage of Consolation.

The title is ironic. As Mamie says, going to Europe for consolation after a broken engagement is so old-fashioned. “Except for my literary intention, I should be ashamed to go to Europe at all—under the circumstances. But that, you see, brings the situation up to date,” she explains.

As often with sequels, this book is not as good as the original. In An American Girl in London, Mamie spends months in London, getting an in-depth inside view of English society, whereas in A Voyage of Consolation Mamie and co spend less than six weeks taking in France, Italy, and Switzerland, which would barely give them time to skim the surface even if they did speak any of the local languages, which they do not. A more superficial book, but still some very funny moments and great setpieces. I love the chapter where Mamie gets lost in the Catacombs with her childhood friend Dickie Dod and her battleaxe English aunt, who gets drunk on the medicinal eucalyptus wine she bought from the monks at the entrance.

Also Jacqueline Woodson’s Remember Us. Our heroine Sage is growing up in Bushwick in the 1970s, a neighborhood the newspapers have taken to calling “the Matchbox” because so many houses have burned down recently, and indeed Sage’s own father was a fireman who died in a fire. This may sound like a recipe for bleakness, like that other recent novel about a girl named Sage (Newbery winner All the Blues in the Sky), but somehow no matter how bleak Woodson’s novels sound in summary there is almost always hope and light and beauty shining in around the darkness.

Many of Woodson’s novels have autobiographical elements, but they seemed especially strong in this one, perhaps unsurprisingly given the title. There’s a wistful nostalgia, which is perhaps not what you would expect from a book about a neighborhood that is frequently on fire - but despite the fires, it’s where Sage grew up, where her friends lived, where she learned to play basketball and met her first best friend Freddy and got her first crush on a girl. (The book is about Sage’s confusion about her gender and sexuality the same way it’s about her father’s death: those are both important elements in the story, but it’s a story with layers and layers of elements. Sage is still grappling with these questions at the end, and that’s okay.)

What I’m Reading Now

No progress on The Romanovs this week. However, I have started China Mieville’s short story collection Three Moments of an Explosion. I’m three stories in and we’re three for three on a woman dying in every story.

What I Plan to Read Next

I saw M. T. Anderson’s Nicked on the Pride display at the library and simply couldn’t resist.