The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence, and The Porcupine Year by Louise Erdrich

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Title: The Birchbark House
Author: Louise Erdrich
Number of Pages: 256 pages
My Rating: 4/5

This tells the story of a year in the life of Omakayas, an eight-year-old Anishinabe girl, and her family in the mid-1800s. It reminded me a lot of Little House on the Prairie and the other Laura Ingalls Wilder books in that it was basically just following Omakayas's life and spent a lot of time showing how they cooked, planted, harvested, made things, etc. All those little details of life back then. I do like that style of story, and this series is a nice antidote to the racist portrayal/erasure of Indians in the Little House books.

Title: The Game of Silence
Author: Louise Erdrich
Number of Pages: 288 pages
My Rating: 5/5

This sequel to The Birchbark House spans another year in the life of Omakayas, two years after the events of the first book. While the first book mainly focused on everyday life and events throughout the year, with little hints of coming changes due to the encroaching white population, The Game of Silence places that struggle front and center, as the Anishinabeg try to figure out why the white men have gone back on their word to let the Anishinabeg stay where they are. There is still plenty of daily life stuff going on, though, as life goes on for Omakayas despite the fear that she and her family might be forced to leave.

There were several new characters introduced, and more focus on some of the supporting characters (I love Two Strike Girl), but the focus remains on Omakayas. I think this book is actually a little longer than the first, but I found it a much faster read and enjoyed it a little more. Definitely no "middle book syndrome" here.

Title: The Porcupine Year
Author: Louise Erdrich
Number of Pages: 208 pages
My Rating: 5/5

Two years after Omakayas and her family were forced to leave their island, they still haven't found a new permanent home. The Porcupine Year follows them through another year as they make their way north.

These books just keep getting better and better. I definitely liked this one best of all. It was a lot more of an adventure story than the first two.

Apparently there will be more books in the series, but considering the author's note says the next one will be about Omakayas's children, these three do make their own trilogy.

One thing I didn't like about these books is the way the author translates some names and not others. The protagonist is Omakayas, but her brother is Pinch. Her father is Mikwam, but her mother is Yellow Kettle. Sometimes the name is given alongside a translation, but often the translations are all we get. And then there's things like how one character was called Little Bee for the first two books, but then suddenly in The Porcupine Year, is called by her untranslated name, Amoosens. I don't like when books translate names, but I like the lack of consistency even more.

The other thing I didn't like was that what I originally thought was a casual positive portrayal of a gender-noncomforming, ended up being "oh, she acts like a boy because she doesn't have a father who loves her". Ugh...

#44-46: Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ying Chang Compestine

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#44 & #45, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Ten Things I Hate About Me, Does My Head Look Big in This?:

Both books deal with Australian Muslim girls who are trying to figure out how to reconcile their religion with their lives, in different ways. In Ten Things I Hate About Me, Jamie dyes her hair blond and wears blue contacts at school in order to hide her Muslim self, Jamilah, and avoid being stereotyped. But she can't keep her secrets forever; eventually, she'll have to decide: Jamie or Jamilah? I thought the resolution a little too easy, but Abdel-Fattah provides an excellent, complex examination of passing. I especially liked her portrayal of Jamie's relationship with her traditional (what Jamie calls "Stone Age") father and her two siblings.

In Does My Head Look Big in This?, Amal decides to wear the hijab full time, in spite of worries about how others (especially the students at her school) will see her choice. I rather wish I'd read this before Ten Things I Hate About Me, because I didn't like it quite as much. It's very funny, and I liked clever Amal and her steadfast sense of herself, but I thought Abdel-Fattah tried too hard to make her points and erred on the side of preachiness. (Ten Things I Hate About Me, written afterward, was better, though.) Truthfully, I was rather more interested in the plight of Amal's friend Leila, who faces much more opposition from her parents as she tries to reconcile her religion and her gender, and the parts of the book dealing with her problems were my favorites.


#46: Ying Chang Compestine, Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party:

As Ling grows from nine to thirteen in Wuhan, China, her happy life she shares with her adored father and stern mother changes to a grim existence of survival during the last years of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. I admired this very much, especially the historical background, the elegant writing, and the beautifully handled child's point-of-view. I do wonder, though, whether it's one of those YA books that might work better for adults than kids; it's awfully grim, and I would imagine it would be confusing to a reader who knew nothing of the historical background. (Reading the afterword first might help with this, though.)

6/50: a mercy by Toni Morrison

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a mercy tells a story of a group of people all connected with slavery (slaves, slave owners, wives, free men, indentured servants) in Virginia in the 1600s. It was not my favourite of Morrison's books - I found the beginning terribly slow, some of the writing a little off, and I never ended up connecting with the ostensible lead, Florens - but there's still some wonderful parts to it, and later chapters following different characters really picked up the pace. In particular, Sorrow's chapter is quite brilliant - she was by far my favourite character - and the ending with Florens' mother, which I thought utterly predictable, still managed to move me deeply. The novel does a good job of exploring different aspects of slavery and racism while also being at its core about women and women's roles, expectations, and purpose in both the 1600s and in life in general. In sum, even a weaker Toni Morrison novel is a worthwhile and generally enjoyable read, further proving her exceptional talent.