For my last read of 2018, I had two novels to choose from: A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos and Half Witch by John Schoffstall. I started A Winter’s Promise first, as it has gotten more press. Written by a young writer in France, it tells the story of a world that is similar to Victorian England, except the world was long ago broken into arcs, floating celestial islands where people live. Our protagonist, Ophelia, possesses two powers: she can “read” the history of any object she touches, and she can travel through mirrors. She isn’t very pretty, and she doesn’t care about how she looks; she mostly wants to continue learning in the library of her godfather. But her parents agree to marry her to the wealthy son of another arc, and thus she is thrust into political intrigue and societal machinations.

At least, I think that was where the story was going. I didn’t get very far; I can’t really explain why, but the language just didn’t grab me, and Ophelia was more frustrating than I could deal with.

So, remembering that I am often stymied in my quest to find young adult fantasy (or any fantasy, really) that I can totally love, I set down A Winter’s Promise and picked up Half Witch.

This is a story that is also set in a world very much like ours. Like Europe in medieval times, specifically. Except, there’s more magic here. You can talk to God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, for example, when you take communion (like, literally talk to one of them). There are goblins, and crooked houses, and witches. Lizbet, our main character, lives with her father, who is sort of a scoundrel, so every few months or so they have to pick up and flee from another town. They’ve managed to stay awhile in their current town, which is at the base of the world-spanning mountains; Lizbet goes to school and has a safe place to live. Until, that is, her father, who has managed to convince everyone that he’s a magician, casts a spell that backfires: a rain of mice.

Disgraced, he is thrown in prison, and to free him, Lizbet sets out on a quest for the Margrave: find a book of magic he lost on the other side of the Montagnes du Monde, the impassible mountains. Lizbet loves her father, despite his faults, and besides, she doesn’t want to live in an orphanage, so she sets out to find the book. As with any good quest, adventures abound and new friends are discovered, most notably Strix, a teenaged witch with an unpleasant personality. For unknown reasons, she is willing to help Lizbet (albeit grumpily).

Friends, I fell right into this story. I didn’t want to put it down and only did so reluctantly, to wrap gifts and to shop for Christmas.

Partly I loved it because of the witches. They are beings made from random stuff; Strix is made of bits of wood, straw, wire, and cloth. Some of her skin is pages from books and sheets of lost love letters. Her eyes are a shell and a stone, and her feet are switched—left foot on right leg. As she tries to explain this to Lizbet, she says that witches are people who break things, and then make new things with what was broken. They have their own rules, and are not under the power or influence of Christianity, but their witch rules, which cannot be broken. (The earth witches, for example, love devouring corpses but can only eat dead bodies, not live ones.) This is both unlike and like what I think witches are. In many stories, witches are women’s power made into flesh, a deviation of women away from what society wants her to do, so society makes her power evil. These witches aren’t evil but simply themselves, but they are also powerful and, most especially, creative. They make things from what is broken.

I like that.

I also like Strix's other skill, one which all witches have. She can extract the humors from people. So, once someone dies (or, you know...is killed by being run through a juicing press, as witches do), she can reach into their bodies (through their nose) and extract humor, courage, kindness, cruelty, etc. Each of the humors has a shape, a color, a substance, and she can bottle it up and put it into other people if necessary. These humors grow important as the story goes on, and eventually Strix has to put some of Christ's divine nature into Lizbet. And then, later, other, meaner qualities. When she removes them, Lizbet says she thought she would be the same, but she isn't. "While it's in you, it changes you," Strix explains. "Everything you do molds you, and squeezes you into its shape. Your heart always has the imprint of everything you've done, everything you've been."

(Which is a really good example of why I love some fantasy, the kind that manages to resonate with me. Because just because you're reading about a world that doesn't exist, with characters who are physically impossible, it doesn't mean you won't find truth there. In fact, the truth stands out more, maybe because of the strangeness of the setting and the characters.)

I also liked how Lizbet changes. Physically, she gains some witch legs. But she also grows up: she learns (or, I guess, begins to learn) that some rules are based in real need or truth, but some are just part of culture; figuring out which is part of the process of becoming an adult. Lizbet starts out as sort of a goody-two-shoes. She wants to follow all the rules and stay away from bad things. As the story progresses, she learns what "bad" might be, and what it isn't. So, yes: A quest story mixed with a bildungsroman. Swoon.

But even more, what I loved about this story was that it is a story about friendship. As a witch, Strix doesn’t believe in friendship; it’s a human thing, made up to trick other humans in her view. But Lizbet, who is starved for friendship, teaches her what friendship is. Lizbet also learns what it is, too.

I loved this little story. I think there will be a sequel—not everything is tied up—but it didn’t leave me in that gasping lurch that some first books do. I don’t necessarily need more of the story, but I want more of Lizbet’s and Strix’s friendship. An excellent finish to a year of some pretty great reading experiences.

I’ve listened to more audiobooks this year than I ever have before, mostly while running or hiking. (“More” being subjective, as I still didn’t listen to a TON.) I got in the habit while I was training for my marathon (I listened to the entirety of The Hunger Games trilogy), started but didn’t finish several other books, and then, at the beginning of November, I was showing a patron at the library how to download audiobooks and I chose What Should Be Wild by Julia Fine as my example.

I’d read about this book somewhere, so I had a vague memory that maybe I wanted to read it. Instead of just returning it after I had taught Overdrive to the patron, I decided to leave it on my phone and try to listen to the whole thing. It joined me for many adventures throughout the month: sewing a baby quilt, deep-cleaning and destashing my scrapbook space, a few drives to Salt Lake, and several run/walks. It’s a slightly-spooky novel, and my favorite day of listening to it was the day I went out for a trail run, on a grey and cold morning; it started to drizzle before I got back to my car, and then lightly to snow, and the narrator’s voice and the moodiness of the story matched so perfectly that I didn’t want the trail to ever end.

It tells the story of Maisie Cothay, a girl who was born with an unsettling talent: she can kill or resurrect, just with her touch. She comes from a long line of women who are rumored to be cursed; their family’s wealth and large manor, Urizon, not strong enough to protect them all. Several in her line simply vanished into the wood around the manor, under different circumstances.

Maisie’s mother died while pregnant, but a sort of living death that the doctors were able to control enough to help her act as a sort of living incubator for the baby. Her father, Peter, is a scientist. He takes the baby home to Urizon and, with the help of a woman from the village, raises his daughter. It’s not a normal upbringing; she is sequestered to the house and the grounds, undertakes a sort-of homeschooling-via-books, and Peter treats her as a sort of living science experiment: what are the limitations of her talent?

Interspersed with the chapters about Maisie’s life are the stories of the other women of her line, the ones who vanished into the wood. The seven of them ended up there through different experiences, but all for basically the same reason: being unable to bend to the rules society imposes upon women.

When she is a teenager, Maisie’s world starts to expand when Peter disappears in the wood, and she has to go out into the world, and back into the forest, to try to find him. Simultaneously, she discovers more about herself.

There were several things I really loved about this book. I know not everyone enjoys books that switch around and tell a bunch of different stories, but that is one of my favorite fiction devices. I loved the stories of the women in Maisie’s line, how each one lived in different times, how each one got into the wood, how their personalities continued to influence them in the timeless summer of the wood. I like that the story explored the idea of ley lines, and wandering around the British countryside with Maisie. (The location is a little bit vague; obviously not America, because the women have been getting lost in the wood for a thousand years; moors are mentioned, so I am guessing England, but maybe it is Ireland or Wales or Scotland.) The menacing girl with dark eyes who wakes in the wood…she was interesting, too. Maisie's mother's story, and the concept of matriarchal family lines continuing to influence us (as well as our literal mothers themselves) and just the sheer strangeness of Maisie's power.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, in fact—until the end. I can see what the author was trying to do: what should be wild is women, and women’s nature, and it is not just all light, beauty, and gentleness as society says it should be. Women have darkness, desire, sadness, anger, ambition, but society tries to squelch it. The story is suggesting that only by embracing our full selves, both light and dark, can we be complete. But the end felt to me like a firework that sparks but doesn’t explode. All of the menace of the black-eyed girl was solved too easily; the ley line wasn’t really even a part of the story, and the terror just trickled away.

Still, I really enjoyed listening to this story. There are two narrators on the audio version of the book, one who tells Maisie’s story and one who tells the stories of the other women. They are different, but not jarringly so; just enough contrast to keep them separate. The book’s atmospheric mood was perfect for a November story. Glad I decided to stick with it and finish it (even with that disappointing ending).

A s a kid and a teenager, I was an avowed Stephen King fan, from the second I read his collection of short stories. (I still think about the lawnmower man almost every time I mow the lawn!) My affection waned in my 20s and 30s, and now I will read his books that really sound interesting. His most current novel, Elevation, sounded intriguing, and it was super short (many of his novels require a significant investment of reading time), so I picked it up.

It tells the story of Scott Carey, who has a strange problem: his body is staying the same, but his weight on the scale keeps getting lower and lower. No matter what he eats, his body’s grasp on gravity—or, I guess, gravity’s grasp on his body—continues to weaken. At the same time, he’s trying to make amends with his new neighbors, a married lesbian couple that the rest of their small town is not fond of.

The way the stories come together, and how Scott deals with his condition, was beautiful. I loved this quick read, as it left me feeling grateful for my friends and family. It is a novel about loss and how our relationships can help us through it, or make it a little less painful. Plus it has some running in the story, so that’s a great add! This is not a typical Stephen King novel. It isn’t scary or really darkly moody. It is actually fairly gentle and uplifting. I’m glad I gave it a chance.

A long time ago, when the scrapbooking world was much bigger, there was a website, dMarie, where scrapbookers gathered. I can't even remember now if they sold actual product or there was just a gallery (for sharing your layouts with others) and forums (for chatting with like-minded scrappy people). I discovered it in 1996 (when I still had a dial-up modem!) and made many on-line scrapbooking friends there. One woman, who went by the user name Red Molly (I was April Amy), deeply intimidated me. She was smart and funny and knew about books and was an inspiring writer. I admired her for a long time but didn't interact with her because she just seemed so COOL. Then she announced she got a writing gig for a scrapbooking magazine, and for a few minutes I was filled with hatred. (You know...the hatred caused by jealousy and longing.) And then I thought "get a grip, Amy!" and I set out to become her friend.

She was even cooler and bad-assier and awesome than I had imagined. We got to meet once in real life, AND I met her mom, and we're still friends on Facebook.

All of which is a very long introduction to why I actually picked up this book, The Bear and The Nightingale. When I first heard about it, my readerly self who loves fairytale retellings thought "that might be really good!" and my readerly self who is deeply skeptical of almost all fantasy thought "that has a deep potential for averageness." And for a long time my skeptical readerly self won out.

But then Molly recommended it and I thought "Well, if Molly recommended it, I must read it." So I bought a copy and took it to Colorado with me in August. And, like the person who recommended it to me, it is cool and bad-ass and awesome. My fairy tale retelling readerly self had it right all along!

The story is based on Russian myths and legends, telling the story of Vasya, who is the only daughter and youngest child of a successful merchant. Her mother, a princess from Moscow, died when Vasya was just newly born, and so she is raised by her brothers and her nurse, running wild in the countryside but always coming home to listen to stories. Her favorite is the story of Frost, who is the winter demon. As she grows, Vasya discovers she has an affinity with the house spirits and the mystical creatures of the forest, but when her father brings home a new wife from the capitol, her life abruptly changes. A devout Christian, Vasya’s stepmother refuses to allow any religious worship save that of hers. As the community turns away from their guardian spirits and turmoil begins to spread.

I really enjoyed this novel. The writing was excellent, the character development interesting and varied, and I got to delve into a mythology I don’t know much about. The otherworldly characters were vivid and creepy, even the good ones. The antagonists were varied, too, causing different types of problems for Vasya. Sometimes the strong-female-protagonist approach can feel forced, used to make a point instead of to create a character. But Arden creates an unforgettable and believable character in Vasya; she is strong, yes, and wild, and unwilling to bend completely to her stepmother’s demands. But she also has kindness, and self-doubts, and fears. There is also the familiar trope of a girl pushing against the boundaries society makes for her, but again: it feels like part of the story rather than a device. Plus, while this is the first book in a trilogy, you aren’t left at a cliffhanger. The story wraps up well, so that The Bear and the Nightingale could be enough if you wanted it to be. (I don’t! I’m just waiting until January, when the third book, The Winter of the Witch, comes out, and then I’ll read the second—The Girl in the Tower—and the third right in a row.)

Another thing I really loved about this book is that it strikes the perfect balance between fluffy and literary. Did it change my life with revelatory insight? No, but it also wasn’t fluffy at all. It was the perfect book for me to get lost in.

(PS: The author’s name is Katherine Arden. Elizabeth Arden is someone else entirely…but I keep having to backspace “Elizabeth” and rewrite “Katherine.” ha ha!)

When I was reading Circe by Madeline Miller this summer, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to tell everyone I saw, “I’m reading this amazing book, you should read it, too!”

Of course, I didn’t tell every random stranger I saw about it. But my friends, and some of my family members, and definitely people at the library (most of my most favorite librarians were also reading it, too), and as I talked about this book, I started to see a commonality.

“It’s the story of Circe,” I’d say. “Remember, from The Odyssey? She’s the witch who turns men into pigs, except Odysseus comes prepared, and they fall in love instead?”

So many of my friends and family and favorite people looked back at me with blankness, or a sort of embarrassment. “I’ve never read The Odyssey,” they’d say, and this is the commonality: it seems that apart from English majors and librarians, no one reads Homer anymore.

It made me stop and think: why do I love those old stories? Especially once I stop to think about them critically, with the feminist lens that usually focuses my thought. Women are treated horribly in these stories; they are raped, offered as sacrifices, slept with and then left behind (Dido in The Aenid, burning on her pyre, is an image I think of often), turned into slaves; their wisdom is ignored (Cassandra), they are valued only for their beauty (Helen) or their potential for marriage (Lavinia). They are stories of men doing brutal things, of heartless, thoughtless Gods and Goddesses making a mess of humanity.

And yet—I return to them.

And I love when authors return to them, remake them into something new even as they hold on to their antiquity. 

The witch Circe plays a part in The Odyssey: she teaches Odysseus how to get through Scylla and Charybdis. But her role in the tales of the Greeks is much larger than that, and Madeline Miller tells not just about her encounters with the Homeric hero, but her whole life. I had not noticed how much of the Greek hero tales include Circe, in fact, until I read her story all at once, but she is everywhere.

I loved this book not only because I love those old Greek hero tales by Homer and Virgil, but because I love all of the Greek mythology, the gods and goddesses, the smaller immortals. I always have. But I also loved it because it makes the Homeric tale accessible.

In fact, if you (like many of my friends) haven’t ever read The Odyssey, it doesn’t matter, because Circe is larger than just that connection It is a book, ultimately, about what happens when a woman has power. How a woman can use what a man casually punishes her with in order to gain power, and how understanding one’s identity also gives power. How anyone with power uses it well, and uses it poorly. It is about how society uses women unfairly whether they have power or not, how men can see us as dispensable, disposable. Invisible, in a sense. But also how love—when someone truly sees someone else—can transform. The difference between solitude and loneliness. The satisfaction of finding one’s truest craft and then pursuing it with relentless determination. The difficulty of being a mother, of loving siblings, of coming to peace with parents’ failure to love us as we needed to be loved but were not.

My copy—I bought the British edition because I love both the dust jacket and the cover underneath it, which is embossed with a bronze inlay—is full of underlining, almost as much as my copy of Lavinia (which this reminded me of). One of my favorite quotes is this one:

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away. True in Circe’s time. Also true in ours, although we are no longer nymphs, but women. (Couldn’t we say this about Cristine Blasey-Ford? And Anita Hill? And all other women not in the news who men have feasted on in this month, this year, this millennia?)

But the thing that impacted me most deeply on reading Circe was how she made her own life, despite what the Gods planned for her. Despite what the Gods planned. This resonated with me in my current life, as I try to decipher what is true, what is really true as opposed to what is a man telling me is true about the nature of God. I find myself no longer willing—no longer able—to listen to the voices of men telling me how to live my life, what is truth, what is goodness, what is right. As Circe also thinks, “There was something in me that was sick of fear and awe, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me.” I want to gaze on God—whatever he/she is—not with fear, or with shame at my mistakes, or with confusion at seemingly-inane rules. I want to feel that God allows me to live the life she/he gave me, with the desires and beliefs that life has brought me being a well of inspiration rather than doubt, fear, regret, wrongness.

Circe finds that. I think Odysseus finds it, too, and many of the other characters in all of the Greek tales. Maybe it is what all the old stories are about—figuring out who you are, who you are in relation to deity but also within your life itself, the world you live in. Or maybe it just what all of the best stories are about, and that we find it in tales so ancient reminds us, this is human nature, whether you are an immortal-ish nymph or a 40-something human woman.

Whenever anyone who doesn't like poetry learns that I love poetry, there is always a sort of bafflement in their response. It seems it is hard to understand, for the person who doesn't love poetry, why someone loves poetry. I assume that can be true of all things; I don't, for example, understand why people love stamp collecting, tole painting, or playing golf.

Except, I can imagine why they love it: the beauty of a foreign image or mystique of something from other countries, the pleasure of creating, the joy of moving your body outside.

But loving poetry seems to be the thing that many (most?) people have the hardest time understanding.

Which of course is something I in turn can't understand, because I cannot imagine a life without poetry. The beauty of language and the way a wise poet can tease out so many meanings in sound, imagery, metaphor, structure, rhyme...I don't understand not loving poetry.

One of the deepest and most abiding reasons I love poems is for how you can read one written by someone almost completely unlike you and yet find something that resonates deeply with you. As if that person who is not the same gender, race, nationality, who has a very different lifestyle or life philosophy, who didn't even live at the same time as you still, somehow, has a piece of you within herself. You find those pieces while reading poetry and you don't feel quite as alone in the world. 

So maybe I love poetry because it helps us see that in some form or another, we are all at our deepest sense the same because we are all human.

But as I read this book of poetry, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes, as I continue to think about it, I find myself doubting this reason for loving poetry, even though it has held true for the majority of my poetry-reading experiences.

I loved these poems; they shook me right down to my core poetic identity. They made me wonder: ARE we really all the same in our basic humanity?

The book is a collection of 80 sonnets, all with the same title: "American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin."  Terrance Hayes wrote them in response to trump's election, and some of them address "Mister Trumpet" himself. Many of them speak to the current time itself, to a nation who could elect such a person, to the people whose racism vibrates to the hum of trump's, as in these lines: “America, you just wanted change is all…A leader whose metallic narcissism is a reflection/Of your own.” Mostly white people made this choice; a huge swath of my demographic—educated, middle class white women—chose to vote for him.

So I started the book, and immediately enjoyed the poems (especially these lines from the first one: “My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not/Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,/And skittish, she thought her poems were ordinary.” I’d like to have a conversation with Hayes about this idea.) But I found myself thinking “but not all white people are racists!”

This thought repeated itself several times until I really started paying attention to it. Not to the actual protest, as I think this poet is wise enough to know that racism isn’t the defining trait of all white people. But to what in the poems was sparking that thought in me, and why it seemed so important that I felt like this poet writing these poems knew, somehow, that I—a white, middle-class woman—don’t believe that my whiteness, or anyone else’s, makes me “better than” in any way.

But really, what good does that do for the people who live with the effects of racism every single day?

So as I read, instead of protesting “not me!”, I just tried to absorb. I tried to take my own identity out of the reading experience, to not, this time, make reading poetry about finding pieces of myself in the poems, but about catching a glimpse and perhaps even a tiny bit of understanding of how someone else really is not like me. How not just the contemporary experience of racism affects lives, but the history of it, too. I thought about one of my ancestral lines, which was a wealthy southern family of plantation owners, and how, if I am proud of my other ancestors (the woman hanged for witchcraft, the long, solid Scottish line descending from ancient clan chiefs), I also have to claim my shame that I am a descendant of people who owned slaves.

But there I go again, making the reading about me and not about the poems themselves. See how easy it is, to slip back? See how difficult it is, to remove my white ego?

I learned something from this book, from the experience of reading this book. I am still struggling to put it into words, honestly. But it changed me. It is a thing I learned about myself, and about this society I live in. Stick with me with this analogy, but it feels like the day I realized, when I was a kid, that men’s bathrooms all have urinals. It was like discovering another world that exists in the same space that I exist in, and made me wonder how else my experiences are different from men’s.

Hayes’s book gave me the same feeling. We live on the same planet, in the same country, but our lived experiences are totally different. The fact that I think racism is wrong and shouldn’t be a part of our society doesn’t change the existence of racism. He and I don’t live in the same worlds, and this fact brings me great sadness.

The reading experience itself will stick with me, as will many of the individual poems. Images (the white woman singing along to black music), lines (“Of course/After that, what is inward, is absorbed.” “My problem was I’d decided to make myself/A poem” “Moving through the tangle of bramble on your way/To scrap with Death at the pier, remember to sing/A battle song”). There are a million pieces to be gathered here. But what I want to remember the most is coming to the sonnet on page 81, which starts “I remember my sister’s last hoorah.”

This poem, like all good sonnets, has a turn, wherein two ideas are introduced and then, somehow, connected. It starts with this line: “Can we really be friends if we don’t believe/In the same things, Assassin?” Can we really understand each other, reader and poet, white woman and black man? Is poetry large enough to make that connection? He asks “because we are dust/Don’t you & I share a loss?” and of course, the answer is both yes and no.

I left that poem knowing that, even unwilling and unwittingly, I am the assassin.

Some books you read and they're just OK. They're good, they keep your interest, they are a pleasant experience. Some books, though. Some books are just so good that to sit down and write about your reaction is fairly difficult. At least, for me it is, because (again, for me) the best books are the ones that manage to connect with me in personal ways. Sometimes it is because of actual things I've experienced in my life. Sometimes it is because of concepts or ideas that have haunted me for as long as I can remember. Sometimes it's the way the book connects to other stories that are also on my list of favorites. So to tell why I loved a book I really, really loved is sometimes complicated. There's too much back story.

Eternal Life is one such book.

I loved it so much. I read it in about three days and couldn't put it down. To be honest: I could read most books in far less time than I actually finish them in, but this is usually because I can't get everyone in my life to leave me alone for a bit and let me read. Also I've developed the habit of wondering about what's happening on Facebook or Instagram right in the middle of reading a book, so sometimes I set the book down and pick up my phone. But this book? I ignored my family for a bit. I ignored my phone. 

I loved it.

It tells the story of Rachel, a young woman growing up in Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago. She falls in love with a priest's son, but Jewish law would never let them marry, so she marries someone else, even though she is pregnant with the priest's son's baby. When this child becomes mortally ill, she makes a vow, along with the priest's son, in the Jewish temple, that if her baby is spared, she will give up her death. She has no idea what that vow means, and doesn't care, because she wants her son to live.

When the Romans burn down the temple in Jerusalem, she learns what it means, however: she cannot die. She ages slowly, and she can "end" her life by burning, but she always wakes up to the same age she was when she made the vow: 18.

And, she eventually discovers, the vow applies to the person who also made it—the man she now both loves and detests—Elazar, the priest's son.

"Eternal life" seems like it would be a blessing. Not having to die, to suffer with old age. To never leave this world, to live through all of history. But, as Rachel learns, it is death that gives life meaning, in a sense. Unless everyone you love also doesn't die, then you have to continue to lose everyone you love, over and over.

Throughout the 2000 years the book encompasses, Rachel creates many lives for herself. Eventually she must end them and start again. New husbands, new lovers; new babies. She loves them and cares for them, and she notices patterns, how faces or personalities or stubbornnesses repeat. How there is not much new to learn.

The book alternates between her history and her current life, which is set in our current time. She is an old woman, 80-something, although she doesn't look that old, and she has a strong relationship with one of her granddaughters, Hannah. Hannah is, ironically enough, a scientist who is trying to learn how to extend human life, while Rachel is feeling like she is at the end of this current life. Not just this one—she is tired of being alive at all, of living the same patterns, of losing people over and over.

The book moves through several different experiences, but the uniting thread is: what gives life meaning?

By the end of the novel, I was sobbing. Because really: It is just not fair. One life is not enough time. One family is not enough experience. But at the same time, I ached for Rachel to be able to stop losing her relationships with people she loved.

Plus there is this thought, which is one of my favorite things I’ve read about motherhood: “What does a mother think of when she thinks of her first child—especially a child who has grown up, even grown old? For a first child is more than just a child. Other children get to be blessings, gifts, burdens, even, occasionally, people. But a first child is something else: a witness, an opportunity and, above all, a test. … Does she have the imagination to think of him beyond the body that contained him, to think of some essence of the person that exists beyond the baby, the boy, the man, the corpse? Or does she not think of him at all, but of herself, and wonder whether she passed the test?”

To explain what that means to me would take so many words.

But she does it over and over again: puts into words what I have felt about motherhood. “New parents think of each day as a cascade of beginnings: the first time she smiled, the first time she rolled over, her first steps, her first words, her first day of school. But old parents like her saw only endings: the last time she crawled, the last time she spoke in a pure raw sound unsculpted into the words of others, the last time she stood before the world in braids and laughed when she shouldn’t have, not knowing. Each child died before the person did, a small rehearsal for the future.”

And too many other beautifully worded ideas to include.

I want to keep writing about why I loved this book, but probably almost 1,000 words are enough. I have added it to the group of books that have deeply impacted me, and about which I will continue to think for as long as I can think.

Ever since I read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I’ve had fantasies about through hiking a long trail. (I am 100% sure that I am not alone in this idea. In fact, I’m certain that many people HAVE attempted the Pacific Crest Trail since that book’s publication and especially since the movie, which, by the way, I didn’t see. I am less and less willing to see the movie version of books I love.)

Let’s face it: I will likely never be able to do the whole Appalachian Trail or all of the PCT. But I’ve continued to fantasize about through hiking the John Muir trail. It’s much more approachable, at about 220 miles. Doable in a month.

(I read about it a lot. Next to a chartered hike in the Alps it’s my favorite hiking desire.)

So I had to read The Other Side of Lost, which is a young adult novel about a girl who hikes the John Muir trail.

Let’s just start with my objection: I don’t care how young you are. No one should attempt to backpack 200+ miles without first training for it. I really had to suspend my disbelief that the main character, Mari Turner, can just, you know. Decide one day to hike that far (carrying a backpack that likely weighs 30-50 pounds) after only doing some yoga every once in a while, and her only problem is sore muscles and some blisters. All while wearing boots that someone else has broken in. That’s just not how hiking works.

But I went with it because I wanted to hit the trail with her.

She decides so abruptly to hike the Muir Trail because her cousin—who was once her best friend—had planned on hiking it, but then she was killed while doing a training hike (as one does for long hikes. OK, I’ll stop). On the same day as her cousin’s birthday, Mari, who’s somewhat of an Instagram star, realizes that her online life is a sham. When her aunt sends her the pack and boots her cousin had prepared for her JMT thru-hike, Mari posts a teary farewell video and then hits the trail.

I liked quite a bit of this book, those non-realistic hiking approaches aside. Mostly what I liked was watching Mari change as she hiked. She learns how to be a hiker, the rhythm of a trail. And she gets to see so many parts of the trail that I would like to also see. (In other words, it fed, rather than squashed, my desire to also hike the JMT; how would I change?)

I also really liked the relationship development that happens in the story. There's a little bit of romance, but not much. In a sense, the relationship that develops is the one Mari has with her cousin, even though she isn't exactly there. She left a trail journal, though, and its existence is sort of like her presence being there. The ending felt a little bit rushed, but overall, I enjoyed this YA novel.

Novels about running (and hiking) create mixed feelings in me. I want authors to write about running to understand running, probably in a way that only runners (ie, people who run) can; I also want the details to be right. (I also feel this way about books that include gymnastics, libraries, Mormons...) They don't always do this, and then I find I can't enjoy the story as much because the lack of understanding (or small details that are wrong) pushes me right out of the narrative.

But when writers get it right, novels about running are books I love.

A Heart in a Body in the World by Deb Caletti is a book that gets the details about running right. It tells the story of Annabelle Agnelli, a high school senior who lives in Seattle. After some sort of trauma—you slowly learn the details of that part of the story as the book progresses—she is triggered by the obnoxious behavior of some boys at a fast-food drive-in, and starts running. When she stops, she finds she's miles away from home, on the shores of Lake Washington, with an idea: she doesn't want to stop running. She wants to keep running, all the way across the country.

In the first pages of the book, my immediate problem with this idea is resolved. No one just picks up and runs 13-ish miles, even if they're upset. No one decides to run across the country if they aren't already a runner. (Or if they do, they'll be walking fairly soon.) But Annabelle is a long-distance runner for her high school team, and she's run a couple of marathons.

So while running across the entire country would be incredibly difficult, at least the story starts with a person who could, in theory, and with a lot of bandaids and help, accomplish it.

I find I am having a hard time writing about this book. I keep writing and then backspacing. This is, I think, because I don't want my words to represent it. It also could be because despite the fact that I don't really love the title, A Heart in a Body in the World? is one of my favorite YA novels I've ever read.

Because, yes. It's a novel about a runner. It gets the details of running exactly right. And it's about how running can sometimes be the only thing that can save you. Or at least—how it feels like running is the thing that saves you, but really, who's doing the running? The runner is. So running is about saving yourself, sometimes. 

But I loved it for other reasons, too. I loved it for Annabelle's voice, and for her mother's reactions, and for the way her grandfather took care of her. For the people she meets along the way.

Also for the issues the novel explores, and how it does it. If I wrote about what those issues are, I think it would ruin the experience of reading the book, because coming to understand what happened to Annabelle is a thing that unfolds with the story—you start to know what happened as Annabelle is starting to really deal with what happened.

So even if you're not a runner, I think you will love this one, too. But if you ARE a runner, or a person who experienced trauma in adolescence, or a person with a heart (hearts themselves matter in the story, too), I think you'll also love it.

Let me know your reaction if you read it!

My responsibility at church for the past three years has been teaching about the scriptures. I have a complicated response to this responsibility. On one side, I love teaching. I love having the opportunity to explore more deeply ideas that I only have vague concepts about. I love having thoughtful discussions with different members of our congregation. I have learned so much about the scriptures and the life of Christ.

On the other hand, there is a moment in nearly every lesson I have taught—sometimes more than one moment, but several—when I find myself deeply buried in frustration, disbelief, annoyance, and incredulousness. Not only have I learned more about Jesus and the Bible, I have learned many things about Mormonism that have troubled me. I think this comes as a result of having grown up in a family that looked sort-of Mormon, even though we rarely acted very Mormon, or did Mormon-y things. (You can read more HERE about what I mean if you're interested.) I look like a life-long LDS person, but really I am a convert, but since I don't seem, on paper, to be a convert no one noticed just how little I actually knew about Mormonism.

Myself included.

So many times during the last year, while I've been preparing my lesson, I will reach a point of exasperation when I cannot believe that this is what my faith believes. An extreme example: the moment I realized that many people think the story of Noah is a literal historical fact, a thing that actually happened. (Give it two seconds of critical thought and you start to see that while it's a great story you can learn quite a bit about faith from, it cannot be literally possible.) This is likely a belief that's found in many Christian faiths, though, if not all. I've also bumped against many, many supposed "truths" that LDS people believe that I simply do not. My life and my holy experiences have taught me other things.

So in a sense (a very large sense, in fact), this teaching of the scriptures has been damaging to my faith as a Mormon person. I ask myself every time I prepare a lesson: why am I doing this? And I am not sure: is that why referring to the lesson itself? or Mormonism in general?

But then, with almost every lesson I prepare, I also have learned more about Christianity in general. While I am far from a learned scriptorian, I have gleaned some knowledge that has helped me in personal ways. A few weeks ago, I taught a lesson based on Jeremiah 29 and 31. One of the sections I read and discussed has continued to stay with me; it was one of those rare lessons when I could totally overlook what the Mormon take on the scripture was in order to have my own spiritual experience with it.

We started by discussing the idea of having God's truth written on our hearts. The lesson guide suggested that we illustrate this when we do things like dressing modestly, reading "good" books, and listening to appropriate music. This idea made me frustrated, as for me, God's truth that has been written on my heart is far, far deeper than external proof or cultural rules.

What having God's truth written on my heart made me think of, actually, was a scene from American Gods. When I read it in the novel, it impacted me, but when I saw it on the TV show? I literally had to walk out of the room I was crying so hard. In this scene, an elderly woman, after dying while cooking dinner for her family, is taken by the Egyptian god Anubis to a place where her heart would be measured. If it is light as a feather, she has made a good life and can choose how her afterlife is spent; if it isn't light enough, she is banished.

This made me cry so hard partly because dying while I cook dinner for my family seems like a good way to go, but mostly because I could picture myself in her place, kneeling in the sand, my beating heart being measured. I thought of all of the ways I have failed to be good, the kindnesses I have withheld, the way I have buried the light of whatever talents God gave me, the mistakes I have made as a parent, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend. Were it my heart on that scale, it would never be light enough. 

As I thought about that scene and my reaction to it, mixing it with the concept of God’s law being written on my heart, I started to imagine what, in fact, my heart might look like at the end of my life. Both the literal heart shape and the metaphorical “heart”—my personality, my goodness, my self in its totality. I saw my heart as a giant, weighty thing, with the knowledge I have gained inscribed deep into the flesh, some sections wild, meaningless swirls, others intricate and beautiful fleur-de-lis patterns. And what was it, what made those etchings like scars and paths and tattoos on my heart?

The sacred experiences of my life. Not the times I followed the rules, but the times I made the right choice. Or the times I made the wrong one and learned something. The times I forgave and the times I was forgiven. The simple, sweet moments: laughing with my children in our backyard, pushing a baby in a swing at the park, talking with a friend, holding my husband’s hand. Sitting on the floor of my kitchen eating pizza and watching the snow fall. Moments when time seemed to stand still while I was deep inside the creative process. Falling asleep; waking in a comfortable bed to a new day.

Is that God’s law written on my heart?

Maybe some would disagree, but I think it is, and here’s why. Chapter 29 of Jeremiah is a letter he wrote to the Jews who had been exiled to Babylon. In this letter, he writes something that reveals an important thing about God. He said that God has “caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon” these Jewish people. He allowed it to happen, for them to have to leave the city of their nation and to live somewhere strange, with new customs and people they haven’t known for decades. God allowed them to be banished.

But he doesn’t say “sit there and weep.” Instead God says: build houses, live in them, plant gardens, create families. Make a life.

This: this is what is holy. This is what matters. Making our lives. Living our lives we are given. We are all of us eventually or occasionally exiles in our lives. We all find ourselves banished, in some form or other. That God lets this happen is, I believe, one of God’s laws. Horrible things happen everywhere to everyone. And even in the midst of these sorrows, God wants us to still work on creating our lives.

It is through these acts of creation that our lives gain meaning.

And it is through these lives that God teaches us the individual things we must learn, each in our own lives. It is through these things that we come to know God, that his law is written in our hearts.

I felt this thing, and I tried to express it in my lesson, although I’m not sure I did. But a few days later, I had what I had tried to say, what I knew was true but couldn’t find the exact words for, put into the exact words I was trying to find. In a novel, Eternal Life by Dara Horn:

“Many days and years and people had passed before she understood that the details themselves were the still and sacred things, that there was nothing else, that the curtain of daily life itself was holy.”

The curtain of daily life itself is holy.

I don’t know if my heart will ever be light as a feather. I don’t know if I will ever be good enough, or understand exactly what is right. I know I will continue making choices, the right ones and the wrong ones. I know that this is what is sacred, what is holy, what is God’s law inscribed on my heart: live my life.