Victory on the Walls is a satisfying retelling of the book of Nehemiah as well as an entertaining plot-driven story with a hint of peril. Bani, as the nephew of Nehemiah, gets to give an insightful perspective on the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls. After reading this middle grade novel, I have a better understanding of why Nehemiah’s mission to Jerusalem was so important for Jewish history. The author did a great job of writing a novel that felt authentic. It feels like she did extensive research to make the novel as accurate to the times as possible. She managed to do so, however, without the novel feeling like a research report.

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Interspersed with the hints at which books he is reading — like Alice and Wonderland, Treasure Island, and others — are his own memories of the people and events that were shaping his life as he had first read those books. Thus reading the library books is like reliving his childhood. He wasn’t lonely because he had his books. The library and the books were his world, and Miss Adams the librarian was “Mrs. God.”

“And it was finished, all the books were placed, the outer ring of his selves and the inner ring of remembered faces, deathless, with summer and autumn names.”

“Exchange” is a reminder and testament that reading stories is a formative experience, one in which the reader’s life is changed and changing. We remember who we were when we read the story. The librarian and William decide that the Thomas Wolfe phrase “You Can’t Go Home Again” is wrong. William had felt he was in a foreign place in revisiting his home town. But no, William feels he’s come home again in visiting the books at the library. Books bring him home again, as they can all of us too.

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Garram must flee his village when he is suspected of manufacturing a plot against his father, the tribal chief. He flees to a city where he must learn their language and about their religion (Islam). He is able to build trust and positive reputation with the people of the town. When he returns to his village he is able to prove his loyalty as well as bravery from attacks by rival tribes. Through it all, Garram is a hero. It is the traitor, Menud, who must face the consequences. He has framed Garram and ultimately betrays the whole tribe.

I didn’t like this book at all. Although it was short, it dragged a lot. I didn’t like any of the things happening. I felt it was improperly drawing a stereotype of a foreign (to me) civilization. It was written by a white man for a white audience, that much was clear. The foreign-ness was apparent as the story was told. The author emphasized Garram’s black skin time and time again. In other places, the city’s belief in Islam did not feel respectfully portrayed. In fact, the people were afraid of a pig in one scene, which made the Muslim leaders seem ridiculous.

As a whole, the novel Garram the Hunter just gave me an icky feeling. It was a story of bravery but only as much as it illustrated a “foreign” world of tribes and poisoned arrows and warfare. Wikipedia suggests that the author wrote it as inspired by his time in pre-colonial Africa as a civil servant; it read as if it were meant to show the tribes and culture as foreign and uncivilized. Is this how Nigerians would have wanted to be portrayed 1930? Is this a portrayal of the past that Nigerians would accept as OK today?

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The Toll-Gate becomes a dark mystery, with highway men, hidden treasure, and even murder. Although other books by Heyer have aspects of mystery (such as The Talisman Ring, reviewed earlier), this book lack lighthearted humor to balance the mystery and darkness. There is a romance but since the two characters essentially fall in love at first site, it’s hard to see that as a balancing impact either. I enjoyed parts of The Toll-Gate and the characters were in general were relatable and compelling, but as a whole, the book was lacking.

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I was a little concerned as I began the novel. In the first section, 1921, Elsa is bored after reading Edith Wharton, and so manages to wander the streets at night, meet a young man, and get herself pregnant. But then, the scene jumps forward to the dust bowl, and her real story begins. The novel follows Elsa and her two children as they navigate the dust storms of Texas, travel to California, face work discrimination, and get involved in worker’s strike arguments. I make a list of these subjects, but each of them is well fleshed out and intense.

Elsa’s story is intertwined with that of her daughter, Loreda, who shares third person narration with Elsa. It’s not just Elsa’s story but Loreda as she becomes a young woman in the midst of these trials. How will she react? I love that the daughter was also a key part of the American Dream exploration, for it is the next generation who must deal with the aftermath of the present.

I did not like the end of the book, but it says something about the book that I still really enjoyed it. The characterization is so fantastic, the storylines so intense and real, and the evocative descriptions so heart-warming and heart-wrenching that I enjoyed the book even though I did not enjoy the ultimate resolution. The Nightingale is still my favorite Kristin Hannah (I never reviewed it yet), but The Four Winds one is very strong on its own.

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I loved the world-building in this novel. Sai’s world, with the class distinctions and neighborhoods, the royalty and traditions, felt realistic and modern. In Sai’s world, men and women are equal; the only barriers are those of economic class and family history. Sai longs to have a “lineal,” which would show that she comes from a long heritage of people. But, her world does not allow social climbing. The Mangkon theme, “The tail is the teeth,” reinforces this idea. (We are the past; the past is the future.)

The book begins with a map, to make these island nations come even more to life. Appropriate, since the main characters are mapmakers. It was hard to imagine twelve-year-old Sai being as good at mapmaking and using the navigational tools as is the elderly Paiyoon, but that was easy to excuse in this novel for kids that age. I’m sure they know how capable they are! The ultimate resolution and twists at the end of the book were fantastic and kept me reading. I wanted to know how it all resolved! It was very satisfactory, and such endings are why I enjoy reading middle-grade novels so much. There is peril and intensity and then there is a resolution that feels just right. I greatly enjoyed reading The Last Mapmaker, and it is well worthy of it’s 2023 Newbery Honor.

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The character of Tula was likeable. She had understandable PTSD about her mother’s diving death, and her anxiety was therefore relatable. If anything, she got over it too quickly in the book! But, it has been seven years chronologically, so it probably was reasonable. The characters from 1942 were complex, and the author left enough unknowns in the story that, even though we know the Oceanus is going to be bombed, it still felt a bit of a question as to who and what would happen.

The Sky Beneath Her was not written extreme well. It was very straight-forward and dull. I also did not like the narration style for the characters in 1942. Supposedly, modern-day Tula is reading a mysterious manuscript about the people on the Oceanus, but it doesn’t feel like the 1942 narrations are this document. It felt awkward that the narrations shifted among the characters. While it was nice to get different perspectives, it didn’t feel like a coherent novel.

The Sky Beneath Her was a nice impulse read, but I wouldn’t read it again, and I didn’t find it extremely memorable.

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Although the structure was not as I was expecting, nor what I would normally enjoy, the content of Snyder’s volume was eye-opening and informative. He gives five qualities of freedom and connects how those five aspects contribute to continued freedom. In general, his main argument is that freedom is positive, not negative. In other words, for one to be free, they must have freedom to something rather than freedom from something. In other words (in my own ridiculous example), being free means free to choose your clothes for the day, not freedom from someone telling you what to wear.

Snyder’s five main positives of freedom are Sovereignty, Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality, and Solidarity. Sovereignty means one is in control of oneself. You are your own boss to choose what you do. This is the most basic form of freedom. I’d suggest that most democratic countries give their people sovereignty. A five-year-old has more sovereignty than a one-year-old, and a ten-year-old has more than that. I consider how much sovereign my 14-year-old has compared to my soon-to-be 19-year-old child.

Unpredictability means that people can choose different things. We don’t know what someone will choose when they are given a particular choice. My example: When a teenager is able chose what to do on Friday night, he or she will be unpredictable, unless their freedom has been curtailed. If they are not free to leave the house, there is predictability. If they are free to leave but must stay within 10 miles of home, their is a little unpredictability, but the options are still fewer than if they are able to go anywhere to see anyone. As a person gets older, their unpredictability becomes greater. In terms of government, we are free to be unpredictable in our republic. When the government curtails this ability by law, we lose freedom. Even reducing hospitals could be curtailing unpredictability. I think of it that way, and I do see ways we’re becoming less free (see the overturning of Roe v. Wade).

Mobility, factuality, and solidarity are the points in which I start to see American freedoms being reduced significantly. Mobility means not just able to move from one place to another but to move from one bracket of society to the next. Because of changes to economics in the United States, we have fewer chances to move from poor to middle-class to wealthy. Healthcare costs restrict us, high taxes for all but the wealthy keep us in our place, and less reliable employment, inflation, and so forth all keep us down rather than mobile. Obviously, we have more mobility than in some countries of the world, but I would rather focus on the changing freedoms here. From the 1940s to 1960s or so, there were lots more chances for mobility due to the societal supports for families after WWII, including the GI Bill and taxes on the wealthy rather than the poor. The crux of the New Deal was that the policies would help lift people from one sphere into another by giving a crutch to help. Mobility has been severely curtailed because of the dismantling of the governmental social services that help lift up the less fortunate in society. Some may rejoice in the reduction of government. I see it much as Snyder does: a way to limit and reduce freedoms for those less fortunate from day one of their lives.

Factuality is certainly questioned in this age. We should have the freedom of facts, but in so many ways truth is being skewed and hidden from people in American society. Further, solidarity suggests that all agree on what freedom means — not necessarily agreeing on basic concepts but that we are all there for each other, that we are on the same side of freedom. Now our society is wholly divided into “us” and “them” in many different ways. The President has encouraged the lies and divisions rather than encouraged solidarity and factuality. Our society is becoming less free as a result.

I left off reading On Tyranny with a feeling of unease that our nation is leading toward tyranny. I finished reading On Freedom with an unease and certainty that our nation is becoming less free. There are plenty of political discussions in the book and some will disagree with his take on things, of course. But overall, it is a philosophical examination of a concept I’m fascinated by. The mix of personal story, historical examination, philosophic comparison, and political discourse was not what I was expecting, but On Freedom is a strong treatise on an important concept. It is a work I will need to reread to better understand.

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In some respects, her Nobel Prize was a delayed gratification for the process, CRISPR, that was developed and reported on in 2012. She didn’t get the reward until 2020, when many other discoveries and developments had been made in the process. But, it is only in retrospect that the significance of her discovery of the process is. For, during the pandemic, gene editing became an essential process.

Her story, however, is packed full of scientific explanations, scientific meetings, and comparison of additional processes to the original. It was not clear to me. I could not follow the gene processes and how it actually worked. How could one change DNA at such a microscopic level? I believe this is my own failing, however, and not one of Isaacson’s book. I am simply an old dog who cannot follow this kind of science with my limited biology education. As such, I admit that most of The Code Breaker was outright boring to me. I’m glad I attempted the Young Reader’s Adaptation instead of the original. I cannot imagine reading of these things in even more detail!

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The glimpse into the explorers gave nice historical context in this historical fiction book for kids. It would nicely align with any lesson on the early search for new ways of trade. It gives suspense as the reader joins Conti and the others in waiting for de Gama to return to Lisbon. Has he found a way around the Cape? Because of the terrible storms around the Cape as well as a deep competition for a route to the spices, Nejmi calls the route “the devil’s cave.” She shutters as she recalls the violence she faced in Arabia as people competed for spices. Will de Gama return, or has Venice kept a hold on the spice trade via the established land route?

The reader knows the answer, but the author still manages to keep up a feeling of surprise and suspense, since Conti and Nejmi’s story is wrapped up in the real one. There is exposure to Nejmi’s Muslim faith, background provided as to the Jewish exclusion and “reformation” in the Iberian penninsula, and the background to the competition for a route to gain wealth from spices. All together, Spice and the Devil’s Cave is a good Newbery Honor-winning historical fiction novel for young readers with no recognized content issues.

Get the kindle version of this public domain work.

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