The Light In The Ruins by Chris Bohjalian

The Light in the Ruins is a historical mystery murder set in postwar Italy. The novel opens with the brutal and gruesome murder of Francesca Rosati in her apartment house in Florence. The novel contains three narratives, the first in italics is that of the killer, the second set in the past in 1943 during World War II, and the third in the present year of 1955 in postwar Italy.

The Murderer

The first narrative, set in italics is that of the murderer who describes in graphic detail how he murdered and dismembered Francesca Rosati. Thirty-nine-year-old Francesca's murder is committed during the early morning hours of the first Tuesday of June, 1955. The killer is able to easily break into her apartment building in a working class neighborhood in Florence on the Via Zara - a place he notes she would not have known existed, ten years ago. He then lies to get into her third floor apartment and kills her quickly but also removes her heart and places it on her vanity. His next victim will be the marchesa,  Francesca's mother, Beatrice Rosati.

As the details about Francesca's past come to light in the newspapers, the killer indicates that he plans to kill every surviving member of the Rosati family. Since Francesca's husband, Marco and their children Massimo and Alessia are dead as well as Antonio, this leaves Beatrice, Cristina, Vittore, his wife Guila and their two children Tatiana and Elisabetta. Cristina will be murdered last.

Shortly after the murder of Francesca, the killer murders the sixty-four-year=old marchesa, Beatrice Rosati in the hallway of the hotel she's staying at , slitting her throat and dragging her back to her hotel room. After Beatrice is murdered, he eviscerates her as he did with Francesca, removing her heart and placing it in a box atop a corner of the Florentine bridge that is in a painting. The killer then lays out how he now plans to kill the remaining Rosatis. Vittore's wife Giulia and their two girls, will be killed first, then he will kill Vittore and finally Cristina. The killer reveals that he plans to murder every surviving member of the Rosati family and that he has waited years to accomplish this.  He is patient, waiting for the right time just as he had to for Beatrice's murder. With each murder, he plans to cut out the heart of his victim and do something significant with it, as a sort of hint to the motive. 

1943-1944

At the beginning of the 1943 narrative, eighteen-year-old Cristina Rosati is watching planes as they fly over the Tuscan countryside. Cristina's brother Marco who is an engineer, is in Sicily making preparations for the expected Allied invasion, while her other brother twenty-six-year-old Vittore who is an archeologist, is safe in Florence. Cristina lives with her mother and father, Beatrice and Antonio, the marchesa and marchese of the Villa Chimera which is set in the Tuscan countryside, southeast of Siena. The family estate, Villa Chimera, overlooks Monte Volta and the vineyards and olive gardens. Also living in the villa is Cristina's sister-in-law, Francesca who is married to thirty-year-old Marco, as well as Francesca's two children, seven-year-old Massimo and five year-old Alessia. It is an afternoon in May and Francesca has just put the two children down for a nap. The planes are scaring Massimo who has overhead conversations about the war.

Cristina and her family are visited by an Italian, Major Giancarlo Lorenzetti and a German, Colonel Erhard Decher. Their appearance makes Cristina anxious but it turns out that they want to see the Etruscan tombs on the property. The ruins were discovered in 1937 and after an archeological dig, the artifacts of value including urns and sarcophogi were sent to the museum in Arezzo. Lorenzetti is an art historian who is hosting Colonel Decher. He tells Cristina that Decher has come to the Uffizi and has stated that "select artistic treasures may have to be moved to Germany for safeguarding until the end of the war." The Germans seem interested in Eruscan artifacts. Cristina realizes that since the war is going badly with the likelihood that Italy will be invaded by the Allies, the Germans are now interested in the theft of Italian artifacts. Decher was an architect before the war but he knows little about Etruscan history.

Vittore meets twenty-three-year-old Frederich Strekker, Decher's adjutant. Strekker is from Kesselsdorf, located outside of Dresden and his father is the curator of the musem there. Strekker tells Vittore that he loves Italy and that he served in Russia where he lost the lower part of his right leg. He is a well decorated soldier who has served in Greece, France and Ukraine. During a meeting one evening, Vittore tells Lorenzetti and Decher that all the artifacts from the Etruscan tombs are now in the museum in Arezzo. Decher informs Vittore that Herbert Kappler who is the SS liason to Mussolini is interested in the Etruscan artifacts. Vittore knows that a certain faction of the SS, the Ahnenerbe "is obsessed about ancestral German heritage." This is confirmed by Decher who tells him that the Reichsfuhrer, Himmler, is interested in the origins of race and believes there were Germanic tribes in this area of Italy long ago.

Meanwhile in Sicily, Captain Marco Rosati learns that the entire Italian First Army has surrendered and the battle at Tunis has been lost. His engineer, Moretti tells him that they will be next. Marco knows that laying mines on the beach will only delay the inevitable. The Allies will take Sicily and then move on to Italy.

Vittore, Lorenzetti and Decher along with Decher's adjutant, twenty-three-year-old Frederich Strekker leave Uffizi, the museum in Florence to travel to Arezzo. There they will be meeting up with the Rosati family  On the drive through Arezzo to the museum there, Cristina is shocked at the random destruction of parts of the city and the large number of corpses out in the open.  At the meeting with the Nazis, Cristina is captivated by Frederich Strekker and invites him to join her family at a restaurant while Vittore, Lorenzetti and Decher investigate the artifacts.

Frederich arranges to visit Villa Chimera after visiting Siena to poach a Simone Martini painting, on the pretext of viewing the Etruscan tombs. Frederich tells Cristina that he hopes the war will not come to Italy and that it will not be destroyed in the same way Russia was. Meanwhile the Ertuscan tombs become of great interest to the Germans, who want some of the relics to go to Rome and some to Germany while the Italians want them to stay in Tuscany. Cristina and Frederich share a mutual attraction and become romantically involved. Cristina's mother tells her that Frederich is a German and a Nazi who likely hates Jews and Russians.  

As Allies capture Sicily and begin invading Italy, life for the Rosati family becomes more challenging as their villa is commandeered by the Germans. Marco is now used as slave labour, repairing roads and railway tracks bombed by the Allies. But after five months, the German guards were lax and it was easy for him to slip away when he was southwest of Mount Amiata and walk to the Villa Chimera. There he was certain to find his wife and his beloved children. And he does but it isn't long before a group of partisans show up. They had been fighting in Trequanda and now have a badly injured teen girl who has been burned. It is the appearance of the partisans that will change life forever for the Rosati family.

1955

In the present, 1955, Serafina Bettini is the only woman investigator in the homicide unit in Florence. forty-eight-year-old Chief Inspector Paolo Ficino doesn't want to take Serafina to the Rosati crime scene because it is so grisly. However given her past he decides she can probably handle it. Serafina was a member of the partisans fighting against both the Nazis and the fascists in Italy. Her two brothers were murdered and with their deaths, having no other family, Serafina joined. 

In a battle between the retreating Nazi's and the partisans in Monte Volta, Serafina was badly injured by an incendiary grenade, her back, neck and arm burned. She remembers nothing of the time immediately afterwards, except that she was cared for a  nearby villa, but she's certain that is was not the Villa Chimera. 

Cristina tells Serafina that although she now lives in Rome with her mother, they have a villa in Monte Volta but no one lives there. She tells the police detective that the villa, which they called Villa Chimera had an olive grove, a small vineyard, cattle and a few horses. Serafina can't quite remember but she recalls that her partisan band had hidden from the Nazis in 1944. She remebers being wounded in "a brutal firefight at that beautiful villa near Monte Volta" as they tried to hold up the Germans so the British or the Americans could catch up and engage them. However, the Germans put up more fight than expected and her band had to fall back to villa. Now Serafina wonders if maybe "this woman's family had in fact been German sympathizers-- supporters of Mussolini--even as late as 1944..." Serafina remembers that there were many partisan groups in Tuscany as they all fought to defeat the hated Nazis and those who supported them. She learns from Cristina that Francesca's husband Marco is deceased as are their two children. Cristina tells her that they did not know the Germans had mined the estate and that is how Francesca's children died.

Serafina lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the south side of the Arno River with her roommate, an American banker named Milton and his gay lover who is a purser on the SS Cristoforo Columbo. Milton is her best friend but people believe he is her lover. Serafina doesn't know how her family would feel about her unusual living arrangements as she has no living family. They were all murdered when she was much younger.

After interviewing the tenants in Francesca's building Serafina is told by a widow that Francesca had seen someone she recognized and who frightened her and she asked the widow for the name of a locksmith. Interviewing Isabella, Francesca's boss at the dress shop, The Sunflower, Serafina learns that Francesca saw many men and that she was going to dinner with a lawyer from Bologna at the very elegant Il Latini. That man, Mario Spagnoli returns to Florence to tell the police what he knows about Francesca's last night. The coroner, Alberto Carli explains how Francesca's heart was removed from her chest - by someone using the tools of a surgeon.

Paolo interviews Beatrice who is also with her daughter, Cristina. They tell Paolo that Francesco was not well liked as she was opinionated and direct, that she was angry and judgemental after the deaths of Marco and her children. Beatrice had not seen her since Christmas of  1950. Cristina is not so convinced that Mario Spagnoli is innocent since his alibi is not convincing. That night at dinner with Milton, Serafina wonders if Francesca's murder is somehow connected to the war. Her own memories of what happened near Monte Volta are vague: she only remembers being treated for the horrific burns on her scalp and down the right side of her back. In questioning Cristina, Serafina learns that there were three men who worked with Vittore at the museum; an Italian, Major Giancarlo Lorenzetti and a German, Colonel Erhard Decher. Cristina omits the name of Frederich Strekker but states that they had been coming to the villa for a year - since 1943. Paolo is puzzled as to why someone would wait eleven years to kill Francesca, unless perhaps they were in jail. After visiting Monte Volta and talking to people who knew the Rosatis including a young man who worked on the estate, Serafina learns that Cristina was involved with a German soldier, Frederich Strekker. It also appeared to the people in the village that the Rosati's were collaborators with the Nazis. This leads Serafina to suspect that Cristina may now be in danger.

However, as she's leaving Monte Volta, the smell of mushrooms at a restaurant makes Serafina remember that this smell was what she encountered earlier in the day at the Etruscan tomb on the Rosati's villa. She returns to the tombs but it is not the mushroom smell but the images on the walls of the tombs that bring back her memory: it was in the tombs, after the British had taken Monte Volta that she was hidden and treated for her terrible burns.

As Serafina investigates Francesca's murder, and then Beatrice's murder, it becomes clear that someone is targeting the Rosati family. As she interviews Cristina and the neighbours in Francesca's apartment house, she becomes convinced that the key to the murders lies in the past, in something that happened during the latter part of the war. With her own memories of what happened to her on Monte Volta during the German retreat mostly lost, Seraphina begins to wonder what really happened at the Villa Chimera eleven years ago.

Discussion

Chris Bohjalian has crafted a masterful piece of historical fiction that weaves three narratives together, incorporating two timelines that of 1943 and World War II in Italy, and the postwar period in 1955. These narratives, at first seemingly loosely connected become interwoven into the revealing climax. Readers should be advised that this is a very gruesome novel with some very graphic descriptions of murder and corpses.

The three narratives are masterfully woven to a suspenseful reveal and a satisfying ending. Both the narrative of the killer and the 1955 timeline occur over the span of several days, while the timeline of the past describes the events during the years 1943 and 1944.

The killer gives clues throughout their narrative that they know the area around Florence very well. It seems they might know the family well, at least they do know who of the Rosati family survived the war. These are not random murders. The murderer knows the tragedies the family experienced in 1944, that Francesca struggled with depression. They state that Beatrice Rosati was not named for Dante's muse, Bice de Folco Portinari but after her aunt who lived in Pienza. It's been eleven years since the fall of Italy which suggests that for one reason or another the killer has not been able to exact their revenge until now. As Paolo suggests, this person may have been in jail.

The 1943-1944 narrative presents the tragic story of the Rosati family during the latter part of the Nazi occupation of Italy and during the invasion by the Allies. The Rosati villa was once a thriving estate, but by 1943, most of the cattle have been confiscated by the government. The appearance of the Nazis at the Rosati villa is not welcomed by Antonio or Beatrice or their daughter-in-law, Francesca who is disgusted at the Germans. Soon more groups of Italian and German officers visit Villa Chimera to see the Etruscan tombs, believing they hold a clue to early Germanic and therefore Aryan history. By this time, against the advice of Francesca, Cristina has become romantically involved with a Nazi officer Frederich Strekker whom she doesn't consider to be like the other Nazis. Francesca warns her that he is no different from the others - he is a Nazi. In November 1943, as the battle up the boot of Italy rages, Francesca prophesies,  "My family, .. is commingling with the cowardly angels. We will pay. We will all pay."  By 1944, the grounds of the Villa Chimera are mostly destroyed, its grape arbors gone. The villa had been home to the tents, jeeps and guns of the Nazis who are now leaving with the British and Americans on their heels.  

When the partisan's arrive, with a very seriously injured girl, Beatrice immediately works to help her. Enrico, the leader of the partisans confronts Antonio who tells him that he had no choice but to work with the Nazis, and that the last few weeks they have been prisoners, stating that he is no blackshirt. However, the unexpected return of the Nazis and their discovery of a British rifle used by the partisans leads to catastrophe for the Rosati family.  Believing Marco is a partisan, they torture him, beat Antonia and learn that the partisans are hiding in the tombs. This sets in motion  a series of tragic events on the villa that ripple down eleven years later to 1955.

In the present, 1955, as Serafina investigates the murders of Francesca and Beatrice she comes to believe that their murders are somehow connected to the war years. Initially Serafina doesn't believe she was near Monte Volta when she was terribly injured. However, Serafina gradually regains her memories of those fateful days when she was badly burned by an incendiary grenade when she visits Villa Chimera. She remembers being inside the Etruscan tombs where she was ministered to and has vague memories of the paintings on the tomb walls. These memories are confirmed during an interview with Cristina and Vittore who tell her that initially she was taken to the kitchen of the villa. There Beatrice brought the last of the villa's olive oil and Francesca's face cream to help treat Serafina's burns. The Germans were fighting near the villa and then returned to the villa with the British in pursuit. The marchese and marchesa had Cristina take Serafina and the partisans to hide in the tombs. The Rosatis want the partisans to leave but the leaders of the partisans, Enrico and his wife Teresa believe the injured girl will not survive being moved and so they hide in the tombs. Only Serafina and Enrico will survive.

Bohjalian weaves each of the narratives to its inevitable conclusion; the 1943/1944 narrative reveals what really happened in the closing days of the Italian campaign, as the Germans retreated through Italy, pillaging and murdering, sparing neither the Rosati family nor their beloved villa. The 1955 narrative reveals both the connection to the 1943 narrative and the identity of the killer.

The author effectively captures the moral dilemmas people often encounter during war. This is done through several characters,  including Antonio, Francesca, and Cristina.  Antonio knew what the Nazis were but he cooperated in the hopes that he could protect his family and his villa. By 1944, with his villa in ruins, he regrets his choices and he is filled with self-loathing and wonders what he has done. " He had let this one soldier into his daughter's life. Then he had allied himself with the men his second son worked with in Florence. And suddenly he had found himself giving a personal tour of the Etruscan tombs to the Gestapo chief in Rome...Herbert Kappler. He had come to Monte Volta with an entourage that filled three staff cars. He'd spent the night in the guest room overlooking the swimming pool. Dined with the marchese's family on the small plenty that remained at the Villa Chimera, while SS troopers stood guard outside the villa..."  In some respects it appears Antonio is in denial. Herbert Kappler, Head of the Gestapo in Rome during the war, would likely have been well known to Antonio, Beatrice and Vittore. He was responsible for the deportation of Italian Jews to Auschwitz and later on for massacre of three hundred thirty-five Italians in the Ardeatine Caves. And Antonia held a ball in April for the Germans and Italians who worked at the Uffizzi. Even his son, Vittore saw that this was wrong and refused to attend. Although he tells Enrico Tarantolo, a partisan, he's no Blackshirt, it's not surprising that to the villagers, Antonio would have been considered a collaborator.  In the end Antonio finds that it did not save his villa or his family; attempting to appease evil never succeeds. 

Francesca also dislikes the Nazis and knows they are evil. She advises her sister-in-law, Cristina against becoming involved with a Nazi officer. When Marco is accused of being a partisan after the discovery of the British rifle at the villa and is tortured, it is Francesca who reveals where the partisans are hiding in the hopes of saving her beloved husband.  "Deranged by terror and loss and simple exhaustion, the abyssal descent into compromise, she found herself murmuring the answer in her head and trying to understand what would happen if she said the words aloud. In her mind's eye, she saw the captain pulling down his gun. Ordering his men to the tombs. And then...

Then what? Would Muller bother to ask her or her parents why the partisans were here on their property? And if he did ask, would he listen when one of them explained that the partisans had arrived the night before and there was nothing -- nothing at all -- the family could have done? " 

In desperation, Francesca reveals the partisan's hiding place but it does not save Marco. In an act of unspeakable cruelty, Captain Mullers brutally murders Marco in front of Francesca and their two young children. Her attempt to save her husband and her children results in the deaths of the partisans. The trauma of these events lead Francesca to a life of promiscuity as a way to cope. It is clear she is drowning in self-loathing, grief and pain. And sadly her betrayal of the partisans lead years later, to her own brutal murder and that of her mother-in-law. She is a truly tragic figure in the novel and demonstrate how compromise and capitulation can play out in war.

Cristina seems to have few reservations about her relationship with a Nazi officer during the war. She is young and her attraction to the young Frederich Strekker leads to a relationship that labels her in the village. Her actions so offend her brother Vitorre that he brawls with Frederich in Florence and confronts her. "Cristina, don't you see what the Germans are? They are even worse than our Fascists!... They are taking over the country, they're stealing our art. They hate us -- they hate everyone who isn't one of them! Who knows what they're really doing to the Jews, who knows what...."  But Cristina is convinced that Frederich isn't a part of that. Vittore tells Cristina that he and Marco do not have a choice but are forced to work with the Germans, while she has made the choice to associate with a Nazi. But Cristina isn't willing to consider that what she is doing is "collaborating". It seems that Cristina has suffered little consequences as a result of her actions during the war. There is no mention of any public shaming, although she had been living with her mother Beatrice and had not married. Although she never knew his fate after the war, Cristina never gave up hope that somehow he survived the war. 

Two German characters, Captain Oskar Muller and Colonel Erhard Decher portray the brutality of the Nazis. Muller brutally tortures and eventually kills Marco Rosati in front of his wife and children because Marco refused to reveal that the partisans are hidden on the villa grounds. Colonel Decher is similarily cruel and depraved: he orders the massacre of the villagers and their priest as a reprisal, having them bayoneted and then their bodies blown up. Hoping to escape responsibility for this war crime, he steals the dead Frederich Strekker's dog tags, replacing them with his own and his pay book so that the body will be identified as his. However, it is later revealed that Decher meets his end in a most fitting way in Budapest, although his body is identified as Strekker's.

The heroine of the novel is Serafina Bettini. Serafina's parents were murdered because her father was assistant to Dino Grandi who had led the failed coup against Mussolini in July 1943. Grandi was a Blackshirt and a supporter of Benito Mussolini but he did not support Italy's racial laws nor its involvment in World War II. Chairman of the Grand Council of Fascism, Grandi was able to engineer a vote that desposed Mussolini but soon after he escaped to Spain. It was after this that Serafina's parents were murdered by the Nazis. Serafina and her brothers fled north from Rome and ended up with the partisans. For five months they stayed with them but Serafina became separated from her brothers when the Nazis began search the area around Mount Amiata. She survived by hiding with two men in a shed on a tenant farm but her brothers did not. Serafina believes the villa they were on was near Trequanda. 

After joining up with the partisans, Serafina was badly burned during a battle and taken to the Villa Chimera. Against all odds she survived, badly scarred on her right side of her head, neck and back. Serafina is unable to raise her arm above her head. In the post-war she changed her name to Serafina and was able to be hired on by the Florence police. She lives with Milton, a gay man who treats her with tenderness. It is also obvious that Seraphina is traumatized by her war experience, as she frequently self-harms. Although her partner,  It is Seraphina who quickly and astutely begins to consider that the murders of the Rosati women might somehow be related to the war. Eventually she confronts the killer, almost losing her life in the process.

The Light In the Ruins is a masterful piece of fiction that especially portrays the brutality of war on a personal level. This novel had its genesis after Chris Bohjalian read Iris Origo's memoir, War in Val d'Orcia which describes life in Tuscany during the Allied invasion of the Italian mainland. While the village of Monte Volta is fictional, as are many of the characters, some like Herbert Kappler (who was famously challenged by Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty), and Dino Grandi are not. 

Well-written, suspenseful, fans of Chris Bohjalian will enjoy this historical mystery.

Book Details:
The Light In The Ruins by Chris Bohjalian
New York: Doubleday Publishers    2013
320 pp.

The Milk of Birds by Sylvia Whitman

"Peace is the milk of birds."

This novel is a truly heartrending fictional account of the terrible situation endured by the people of Darfur, especially its women in 2008.
 
Milk of Birds contains two narratives, that of Nawra bint Ibrahim, a fourteen year old girl in a refugee camp in Darfur and Katherine (K.C.) Cannelli, a young girl struggling academically in her first year of high school. Their stories are told in a series of letters exchanged between the two girls, which highlight their profoundly different life experiences and culture. Each girl also has her own story which informs the reader of the reality of their lives.

K.C. lives in Richmond, Virginia with her mother and older brother, Todd. Her father and mother are divorced and he has remarried. She is still trying to come to terms with what has happened to their family.

K.C is having difficulty in school. Her marks are poor and she has trouble concentrating. Her mother signs her up to be a part of the Save the Girls nonprofit organization working with refugees from Darfur, Sudan. They send a donation each month, part of which goes to the girl in a refugee camp who then sends letters back to her sponsor. Save the Girls matches a girl refugee with a sister in America so they can correspond. 

K.C. is matched with Nawra bint Ibrahim who is living in a refugee camp in Darfur. The two girls are to correspond, but K.C. gets four letters from Nawra which she doesn't respond to. K.C. doesn't respond, mainly because she has difficulty writing but also because of a kind of indifference. ...Life sucks for this Nawra person.  But what am I supposed to do about it? I can't even pass the practice test in world geography."  K.C. reveals to Nawra  that she is the oldest in her class and was held back in school when she was younger. While Nawra isn't able to go to school, K.C. wishes she didn't have to. School is hard for her and it seems to take her a long time to finish assignments. Finally her mother decides to get K.C. tested to see if she has a learning problem.

As K.C. continues to write to Nawra and receives her letters, she begins to understand just how difficult Nawra's life is and she wants to do something. Contact with Nawra expands her world, shows her that people everywhere have problems and helps put her own problems in perspective.

Eventually KC decides that she wants to form a new club at her school, The Darfur Club, to educate people on the situation in Sudan and to raise money to buy fuel-efficient stoves and donkeys. For K.C. it's about making a difference. With Mr. Nguyen as their faculty sponsor, K.C. and her best friend, Emily and her classmate Parker (whom she is crushing on) organize a major project to raise money for the refugees, to buy them things that will make their lives easier and help them get a new start. This project highlights one of K.C.'s strengths - that of thinking outside the box.

In complete contrast to K.C's life of physical ease and comfort, is Nawra's struggle to live with even a bit of dignity in a world torn apart by war, greed and fear. Nawra lives in a camp for displaced refugees (Internally Displaced Persons - IDP) after fleeing from the janjaweeds (outlaws hired by the Sudanese government) who murdered everyone in her village, Umm Jamila. Only Nawra and her mother, who is in such shock she is mute, have escaped. Nawra finds herself pregnant as a result of rape, dishonored and like "spoiled meat". The camp is crowded, dirty and smelly. There is little food and poor sanitation. Still the refugees know that life must go on and a school is formed for the children.  There she meets a young girl, Adeeba  from a well to do family, who is educated, but also now a refugee. Together the two girls help one another.  "When a tree leans, it will rest on its sister." 

When the Save the Girls representatives show up, Nawra is encouraged to join, so she can have some extra money. Nawra who cannot write, dictates her letters to Adeeba, who acts as a scribe.  As we read the two girls' correspondence, it becomes apparent that despite the cultural divide and the geographic distance, both K.C. and Nawra have some similar problems.

Like K.C., Nawra's family is"broken", but not by choice, but by violence and murder. For K.C. she understands how Nawra feels "spoiled" or as K.C. puts it, "defective"  with her inability to do school work. Like K.C., Nawra also has difficulty writing but it is because she is illiterate. Despite the huge cultural differences as evidenced by what each girl writes about, both girls can find something in their letters that resonates with them. Nawra encourages K.C. to persevere and to respect her mother, while K.C. is deeply touched by Nawra's struggle to simply survive and she encourages her to keep going. Both girls stories end with a measure of hope and both begin to find their own way in their world.

Discussion  

The Milk of  Birds  begins slowly but Whitman is simply setting the stage. Readers are encouraged to persevere because there is an important story to be told and it is worth reading. Whitman did a great deal of research in order to create Nawra's voice and make it authentic. She also educates her readers through Nawra's narrative but also by using K.C.'s mom, who gives her daughter some background information on how things came to be in Sudan.

Nawra is from Dafur which is located in southern Sudan. At the time of the events in the novel, Sudan was divided into two regions: the north which is predominantly Muslim and the south with a Christian and animist population. Civil war resulted when the Sudanese government based in Khartoum in northern Sudan, led by General Omar al-Bashir decided to impose a Muslim state on the mainly Christian southern region. 

The predominantly Muslim Darfur region is characterized by two ethnic cultural groups: ethnic Africans who live a pastoral life and Arabs who are nomadic herders. Armed militia groups of ethnic Arabs who came to be known as "Janjaweed" would follow up after government attacks, burning villages and systematically raping women. This genocide resulted in at least four hundred thousand deaths. The purpose of the genocide was to rid Darfur of Black and non-Arab people. The ongoing war has resulted in thousands of people who have been displaced by the war, forced into refugee camps. In 2011, Southern Sudan became a new country.  The Milk of Birds is set against this backdrop of war, genocide and trauma.

There are many issues explored in this novel including rape, female circumcision, AIDS, forced marriage, the concept of honor in Sudanese Muslim families, the role of men and women, identity, education for girls, learning disabilities, environmental destruction, and global social responsibility. While that might seem like far too many, really all these issues at inter-related, especially in the African state of Sudan, and in Nawra's culture. And the this issues are often only obliquely mentioned but yet they are interconnected.

For example, the issue of AIDS and rape are related, not just because a woman can contract AIDS from rape, but also because of the belief by the men in Nawra's culture that sex with a virgin can cure them. Although there is only a mention of this in passing in the novel, this is a prevalent belief that medical field workers must counter. It leads to the violation of very young girls. Rape is also often used as a weapon of war, to destroy a society, weakening family bonds, and demoralizing and marginalizing women.

Although there is quite a bit of violence in the novel it's not done in a graphic way, but told simply using Nawra's understated narrative. The beautiful cover only enhances the prospective reader's desire to open the cover and learn more. 

Book Details:
The Milk of Birds by Sylvia Whitman
Toronto: Atheneum Books for Young Readers    2013
363 pp.

A Soldier's Secret by Marissa Moss

Marissa Moss has written a captivating account of the true story of Sarah Emma Edmonds, a Canadian girl who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Moss's account is well researched

Sarah Edmonds fled her home in New Brunswick, Canada when her father, an abusive man, arranged the forced marriage of Sarah to a much older farmer. Sarah did much of the work on her father's farm, as her brother was weak and sickly, with the expectation that someday she would take over the farm. However, when she saw the life she as being sold into, Sarah fled. The circumstances that led to her running away are told in a flashback later on in the novel.

At first she did odd jobs but when she arrived in Hartford, Connecticut she was able to get work as a Bible salesman for a book seller by the name of Mr. Hurlbut. When the war starts, Sarah who now goes by the name of Frank Thompson enlists and becomes Private Frank Thompson in Company F, Second Michigan Volunteer Infantry of the Army of the Potomac.

Frank is assigned a tent with Damon Stewart and together the two of them train in city of Washington. Sarah has lived as a man for three years prior to enlisting but being in the army proves to be more challenging because she will be living with men in close quarters. However, Frank manages to hide her feminine attributes by binding her breasts and making sure she is not seen relieving herself or changing her clothing. She makes sure she belches and passes wind, scratches her crotch and tells ribald jokes, all to make herself appear more masculine.

Frank and Damon, as part of the Army of the Potomac march to Centreville, Va to meet the Confederate Army in what will be the first battle of the Civil War. They join General Samuel P. Heintzelman's Third Division and fight in the first Battle of Bull Run which turns out to be a rout by the Confederates. For Frank Thompson it is a terrible initiation into war, as thousands of Union soldiers are killed or wounded. Frank works as a nurse, assisting doctors in the hundreds of amputations, treating patients with dysentery and comforting the dying.

Sarah Edmonds as Frank Thompson

In a field hospital at Washington, Frank meets Jerome Robbins from Matherton, Michigan. They soon form a friendship that for Frank develops into a blossoming friendship and then unrequited love. But when Jerome asks his sweetheart in a letter to marry him, Frank confesses to Jerome her secret identity and her love for him. Jerome is horrified and disbelieving. Frank expects him to turn her in, but Jerome doesn't and keeps Frank's secret. Through the next few years, Sarah in her role as Frank Thompson struggles with her love for Jerome, knowing he will never love her and that he is not attracted to her in any way. She is careful not to touch him or to share her feelings with him again.

Frank has many adventures while a soldier, working as a nurse, a mail carrier, an orderly carrying messages during battles and also as a spy. As Frank Thompson, she also takes part in battles and carries out her duties with great courage. During the Virginia Peninsula campaigns in the Virginia swamps, Frank contracts "swamp fever" or malaria which eventually grows worse over time causes her to desert the army to get treated.

Discussion

It was amazing to read how resourceful and intelligent Sarah was as she remained undiscovered as a woman soldier for several years. It was only when she fell desperately ill with malaria that she had to relinquish her identity as a man and live again as a woman. Her love of horses and skill as a horseman, her master of disguises, and her quick thinking make her an endearing hero(ine). What was interesting was Sarah's view of being a woman in 19th century America. She found everything about the role of women in society to be stifling. She wanted adventure and the freedom to choose her life, the man she would marry, and even what to wear. To live the way she wanted,  cost her dearly as it meant giving up her family and sometimes led to her feeling very lonely. She saw the men of the army as her true brothers and her family and she resolved to help them after the war was over.

Moss has written a very informative account from the perspective of  Frank Thompson that gives the reader a great sense of what it was like as a soldier during the Civil War. Moss portrays the horror of the battles, how the soldiers viewed the war and why they were fighting, how battles were fought, and the roles of men and women in 19th century America.

Sarah Edmonds as a woman.

The back of the novel contains a section entitled The Story behind The Story which  tells about Sarah Emma Edmonds and what happened to Sarah after she left the army. Moss used Jerome Robbin's diary as well as letters and journals of other soldiers who served with Frank Thompson to recreate this incredible story.  Unbelievably, there were over 400 women who dressed as men to fight in the Civil War. Most of these were following relatives or husbands into the war. Sarah Emma Edmonds also published her own memoir in 1864 titled, Unsexed, or the Female Soldier.

There is also a section on Union Army Officer Biographies and a Civil War Timeline, and a Selected Bibliography.

Fans of historical fiction will truly enjoy this well written and researched novel.

You can read a good summary of Sarah Edmonds' life at the Civil War Trust website:https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/sarah-emma-edmonds

Image credits:
Sarah Edmonds as Frank Thompson: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Emma_Edmonds#/media/File:Sarah_Edmonds.jpg

Sarah Edmonds as a woman:  https://www.nps.gov/people/sarah-emma-edmonds.htm

Book Details:

A Soldier's Secret: The Incredible True Story of Sarah Edmonds, A Civil War Hero by Marissa Moss
New York: Amulet Books     2012
387 pp.

Serendipity and Me by Judith Roth

Serendipity and Me is a sweet, touching novel in verse that tells the story of a young girl and her father trying to cope with an unimaginable loss. 

Sara who is in Grade 6, lives in Central California with her father who is a college professor. Her mother passed away three years earlier as a result of a car accident. The story opens with Sara rehearsing for a play that her class will put on the following Saturday. She is Wendy and a boy she is crushing on, Garrett, has the role of Peter Pan. However, four days before the performance, Sara becomes very ill. When it becomes apparent that she will not recover in time, the part is given to another classmate. This is devastating to Sara.

While her father works at the college across the street, Sara who is home sick is cared for by a neighbour, Mrs. Whittier, and also one of her father's students, a young woman named Jocelyn. Despite Sara not knowing her, she tells Jocelyn about losing her part in the play, how much she misses mother and how sad her father has become over the loss of his wife. When Jocelyn sees all the cat pictures in Sara's room, she asks why Sara doesn't have a cat. Sara tells her that her father has repeatedly refused her a cat. But Sara desperately wants a cat because a cat will give her something warm and soft to love again.

Then on the Saturday of the play, when Sara is at her lowest, knowing the play is going ahead without her, someone rings the doorbell and leaves a little white kitten on her doorstep. Her father is adamant that the kitten will not stay. Sara manages to convince her father to let her keep the kitten until the morning and then for a week, by lying to him about her best friend Taylor's mom considering taking the cat. Sara has one week to try to convince her father that what she really needs and wants is this little soft kitten.

I think --
         No is not a fair word
         when you're a kid
         without a mother
         and you need something soft
         to hold on to.

The following week Sara returns to school and tries to find ways to change her father's mind about the kitten. But Sara also tries to get her father to open up about her mother. Every time she broaches the subject her father retreats. When Sara has to bring a picture of her family into school for an assignment, she cannot find one of her with both her parents. This leads her to hunt for a box of pictures that she knows her father has saved and when she finds it, the pictures in the box  provide some clues about her mother, but also lead to more questions. Sara knows she needs to confront her father about her mother and why she can't keep the lost kitten.

Her father, seeing that Sara is beginning to want to know about her mother and their family,  gives her a book that Sara's mother gave him when they first met years ago. The book is copy of poems by Sara Teasdale which her mother, Aislinn, gave to Sara's father, when they were in college. This combined with a box of pictures that Sara finds and a CD her mother made of her telling Sara a bedtime fairytale, help Sara to learn more about her mother and to begin to deal with her grief. But her father's resolution of his grief seems impossible. And it appears more and more that his unwillingness to have a cat in the house is tied to the loss of Sara's mother. Will Sara ever get her father to confront his grief and allow her to express her own?

Discussion  

Serendipity and Me is a short novel that explores the themes of loss and grief. Sara and her father are grieving over the loss of her mother. 

Roth's poetry is simple yet expressive, conveying a young girls deep loss of her mother and her father's intense loneliness and grief. Sara's father's grief is so intense that he cannot talk about it. However a little white kitten named Serendipity brings father and daughter together to talk about a person they both loved and lost. The poems are free verse and tell the story from Sara's point of view. Sara discovers that her mother loved poetry and also wrote poems and so this leads Sara to try her hand at poetry too.

While the basic storyline is sad, Roth incorporates a hint of a blossoming crush between Sara and Garrett. She also demonstrates how acts of kindness on the part of neighbours and classmates can go a long way to comforting those who are going through a difficult time in their life. Despite the tragedy Sara and her father have experienced and the difficulties they have faced, the novel ends with a hopeful, positive tone.

This beautiful story makes an excellent choice for a Mother-Daughter book club.

Book Details:
Serendipity and Me by Judith Roth
New York: Viking Press 2013
312 pp.

Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown

In Thousand Words, well known author, Jennifer Brown, takes on the controversial subject of sexting.The novel opens in the present, with seventeen year old Ashleigh Maynard relating her current situation of doing 60 hours of community work, while telling in flashbacks, how she came to send her older boyfriend a picture of herself and what happened after.

The story of how this happened opens with Ashleigh going to her best friend, Vonnie's, annual end-of-summer party. For the past year Ashleigh has been dating a senior, Kaleb Coats. Their relationship has not been a sexual one but has consisted mainly of talking, doing things together with friends. But this summer, Kaleb and his friends last one together, he has been preoccupied with hanging out with his friends, playing baseball. Kaleb tells Ashleigh they will be together forever, but Ashleigh wonders how their relationship can continue once Kaleb is in college. How will Kaleb view Ashleigh after being with college girls?

When Vonnie pressures Ashleigh about Kaylebs in her life, another friend, Rachel suggests she send Kaleb a nude picture of herself. Feeling insecure about her place in their relationship and worried that she will lose Kaleb once he goes to college, Ashleigh decides to do it. At first there appear to be no repercussions. Kaleb goes off to college and becomes involved in life on campus, while Ashleigh returns to high school as an upperclassman. Although Ashleigh accepts Kayleb decision to break up with her, her friends think he's wronged her and set out to even the score. But it doesn't end there because Kaleb decides to share Ashleigh's picture, bringing humiliation, chaos, and a crisis of astronomical proportions into both their lives.

Thousand Words is a very timely novel considering the recent incidents in both the United States and Canada involving teens who sexted, then were bullied and eventually driven to commit suicide. The title takes its name from the adage, "A picture is a thousand words."  Brown deftly creates the situation that leads Ashleigh to sext her boyfriend and then shows her readers the consequences of this act. Ashleigh is suspended, kicked off the cross country team and is charged with creating and sharing child pornography. Her actions not only affect her and Kaleb, but the many students in the school who receive and pass along the image. Even her parents are affected as her father almost loses his job and her mother who works with children at a preschool, see her business affected.

The characters in Thousand Words. are for the most part, believable. Ashleigh is a typical teenager - immature and unaware of the consequences that follow risky behaviour. Infatuated with her first boyfriend, she wants to please him but is insecure in the relationship. As teenagers are apt to not do, she doesn't think through the consequences of sending a nude picture of herself to Kaleb. Of course a big part of the problem is that she is drunk when she makes her decision to take the picture. Ashleigh trusts him to keep the picture private, never dreaming he might someday use it to hurt her. Like many young women who have their first boyfriend in high school, Ashleigh believes that she and Kaleb will be together forever. Naively she believes Kaleb when he tells her this but doesn't pick up on how his actions demonstrate otherwise. She is shocked and deeply hurt when he breaks up with her but humiliated, angered and feeling betrayed when he shares the picture.

"I'd never have us back, not the way we used to be. It wouldn't be possible after everything that had happened. I wanted to have that innocence back -- the kind of innocence where I would never believe that a boy I loved would hurt me."

Ashleigh grows throughout the story. At first she can see only the wrong done to her by Kaleb, but eventually she begins to accept that many people were responsible for what happened including herself. She takes responsibility for what she has done and decides that she will no longer be a victim, but will try to move on in her life.

Kaleb too is quite immature and a very typical teenager, but he seems much different from Ashleigh. He recognizes that his actions have harmed people, but mostly he seems self-centered and concerned about trying to mitigate the consequences, which are more severe for him. In this regard, Ashleigh finds she cannot accept his apology because she feels it was insincere.

Mack is the true hero of the story because even though he has suffered tremendous loss in his young life, he is not wrapped up in himself and he doesn't judge Ashleigh for what she's done. His quiet, steady ways allow Ashleigh to reach out and befriend him. The fact that he didn't look at her picture gives her hope. And allows her to begin to heal.  He listens to her story and helps her realize that no matter how Kaleb apologizes that won't change a thing. Mack is most responsible for Ashleigh taking the long road towards healing.

This was a reasonably good effort at tackling a difficult subject but sometimes the characters lacked the intensity required for certain situations. Ashleigh's experiences in school post-sexting seemed quite tame and her parents response when they learned of her involvement in the sexting incident were surprisingly subdued.

Nevertheless, Jennifer Brown has a knack for taking a difficult issue and showing a bit of both sides. This allows her readers to think critically about the issue. Thousand Words is a well-written novel that does just that. There's a short Author's Note at the back of the novel, along with the transcript of an interview with Jennifer Brown.

Book Details:
Thousand Words by Jennifer Brown
 New York:  Little, Brown and Company     2013
276 pp.

Requiem by Lauren Oliver

In the final installment of the Delirium series, Requiem recounts the fate of the Portland rebels and of several people within the fortified city of Portland, just before a critical confrontation between the resistance and those committed to developing a society devoid of love. The story is told in the alternating narratives of Lena who is traveling with the "Invalids" (those who are not yet cured of amor deliria nervosa) and her childhood friend, Hana Tate, who is living in Portland, Maine, which is controlled by the "cured".

Lena is with approximately two dozen uncureds, who have traveled north from New York city. This group includes Raven, Tack, Julian Fineman, Danie, Gordo, Pike and Alex. They meet up with Hunter, Bram and Lu just south of Poughkeepsie. Alex and Lena are no longer speaking, their relationship having deteriorated for reasons Lena doesn't quite understand. Meanwhile Julian has fallen in love with Lena who is not sure how she feels about him. Lena still loves Alex but he has changed. Alex was a prisoner in the Crypts, left to die, then tortured. Despite her pleas, Alex tells Lena that what they felt for each other before is gone.

After much discussion the group decides to travel to Waterbury "where there are rumors of a successful resistance movement and a large camp of Invalids flourishing in safety." However two things happen before the group reaches Waterbury. First, they take in a new girl named Coral who is exceptionally beautiful whom Alex seems to fall for and second, the group is ambushed by Regulators - troops who have now pushed into the Wilds looking for Invalids and killing them off. Barely escaping with their lives, and having lost all their survival gear, the group arrives at Waterbury and is stunned at what they see.

Meanwhile Hanna's narrative recounts her preparations as she gets ready to marry her pair, Fred Hargrove. Fred's father was killed in the Incident that saw the Crypts breached and many uncureds and rebels, including Alex and Lena's mother, escape into the Wilds. Fred is quickly installed as Mayor of Portland, a position he plans to use to exert an iron control over the people by denying them electricity if they do not conform.

Hana begins to feel some emotions despite being cured. She is confused about the cure which she initially believes has saved her. The cure was supposed to make everyone similar but Hana discovers that this is not necessarily the case, especially regarding her husband, Fred.

"Fred isn't Fred -- at least, he's not the Fred I thought he was. And I'm not the Hana I was supposed to be; I'm not the Hana anyone told me I would be after my cure."

Hana soon discovers that Fred has a very dark side. Fred threatens Hanna in a veiled manner that is accompanied by physical abuse. Referring to his first wife, Fred tells her that if she doesn't support him and if she asks too many questions there will be trouble. Hana also begins to experience guilt over her actions regarding Lena and Alex. So when she learns of the extreme poverty of Lena's cousin, Grace, Hana begins sneaking food to her family, at great personal risk.

As preparations for her wedding continue, Hanna tries to find out what has happened to Fred's first wife, a beautiful girl named Cassandra O'Donnell who disappeared three years earlier. Cassie and Fred were married for more than seven years. Since divorce is unheard of now, her disappearance is highly suspicious, yet no one seems to know what really happened. Hana discovers that Cassie who also went by her middle name, Melanea, is a prisoner in the Crypts. A surreptitious visit to the Crypts by Hanna confirms what she already suspects.

In Waterbury, Lena and her fellow rebels discover a teeming mass of Invalids, who are disorganized, disheveled and starving. Located just outside the city walls, the camp is run by mob rule. Lena, Raven, Alex,and Julian meet up with one woman, Pippa, who seems to have formed an organized camp within the mob. When the river adjacent to the camp is dammed, effectively cutting off the water supply to the camp, Pippa organizes a small attack on Waterbury with the intention of blowing the dam up. However, this fails miserably due to the fact that one of their group is an infiltrator who tells Lena that the camp will be wiped out in a few days when ten thousand soldiers arrive. Pippa helps Lena, Raven, Julian, Tack, Hunter and Bram to leave and tells them they will meet up later on.

The camp is attacked but some are saved and the two camps join together at Portland where they become part of the larger Resistance. At this point both Hanna and Lena's narratives effectively merge as they describe the same event from two different viewpoints. This event will now change both their lives once again, hopefully allowing both girls to make their own choices, to live their lives as they choose.

Oliver has written a suspenseful, interesting third novel for the Delirium trilogy. She gradually weaves her two storylines, that of Hanna and Lena together. This allows the two young women, on opposites side of the war, but with similar dreams and hopes, to finally confront each other. Hanna requires Lena's forgiveness for turning Lena and Alex into the authorities. But she is also given an second chance to do the right thing and she chooses it. Meanwhile, the means for Lena to get revenge is now possible, but she too chooses another path - that of giving her friend a chance to save herself.

I found Hanna's story  more interesting than Lena's. This is partly because Hanna is beginning to realize some truths about the world she lives in and the people around her. The cure doesn't make everyone the same or perfect and her life isn't going to be what she thought it would be. Oliver has Hanna gradually develop a creeping sense that she is about to marry a very cruel man who cares little about others. This realization is driven home to Hanna when she meets his first wife and even more so when she really notices the painting in his study. The picture titled The Myth of Bluebeard is a reference to the the French fairytale of Bluebeard. In the fairytale, a nobleman is suspected of having murdered his previous wives and the current wife tries to avoid the same fate. Although Hanna doesn't know the fairytale, since most literary works in her world have been altered, she understands the meaning of the painting all too well. She comes to the understanding that Fred is not what she thought he was.

Overall the ending to this novel, and therefore the series, was unsatisfying. It felt like Oliver was asked to produce a book within a 400 page limit and this made her race to the final chapters. There are plenty of loose ends which the reader is left to deal with. Unresolved is the fate of Hanna and Fred, Alex and Lena, and the fate of the cities which are now in full revolution. We learn that there is resistance in many other cities through America which lends an aspect of hope to the finale. It was a shockingly disappointing finish to what was truly a very, very good novel that had plenty of suspense, some romantic tension, and some great redemptive moments. Read it, but expect to be disappointed with the rushed ending.

Book Details:
Requiem by Lauren Oliver
New York: Harper Collins Childrens Books 2013
391 pp.

The Day The Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt

This hilarious picture book sees the crayons from Duncan's box write him a batch of letters complaining about how they are used. Red, purple, beige, gray, white, black,green, yellow, orange, blue, pink, and peach crayone all set out a list of grievances about how Duncan either doesn't use them enough, uses them improperly or too much. This of course, sets the stage for Duncan to rethink how he uses his each of his crayon colours!

The Day The Crayons Quit contains the crayon drawings of award-winning illustrator, Oliver Jeffers, whose favourite color is striped. Each drawing is set opposite a letter written by a particular crayon colour, showing how Duncan normally uses the crayon. Jeffers who is from Belfast Northern Ireland is the author of numerous picture books including  The Incredible Book Eating Boy, The Great Paper Caper, and more recently, This Moose Belongs To Me. Author Drew Daywalt is also a writer- indie film director some of whose work fits in the horror genre. So The Day The Crayons Quit is just a little different from what he typically does.

This hilarious little picture book encourages children to think outside the box (no pun intended!) and to try different things - not only in their art but also throughout their lives. Step off the cliff, put out into the deep, be yourself, be innovative, creative and different. 


Book Details:
The Day The Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt
Philomel Books: An Imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group    2013

Documentary: Banaz: A Love Story (2012)

"I think the fact that honour is a total misnomer. There's no honour in any of this. The law has a word for it - it's murder."

Banaz: A Love Story is a documentary produced and directed by Deeyah about the 2006 honour killing of Banaz Mahmod in Britain. Honour based crimes are not new to many cultures, but have been going on for centuries and span various cultures and religions. This documentary tells the story of one victim of an honour killing in London, England, using some of the police video footage and as such it is Banaz's story in her own words.

Banaz Mahmod was born in 1985 in Iraq in to an Iraqi Kurdish family. She had one brother and four sisters. Her family emigrated to Great Britain in 1995, as refugees from Saddam Hussein's Iraq when Banaz was ten years old. They lived in a flat in Mitcham, south London. Banaz's teachers spoke highly of her, saying that she often mothered younger children.

Problems with assimilation soon made themselves evident in the Mahmod family. The family was very isolated and after Banaz's disappearance it became evident to investigators that she had no friends and no social network. They tried appealing for friends to come forward on facebook, but received no response. Diana Nammi, Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organization indicated that in this society, the control of women and of their sexuality is paramount.

Banaz's older sister, Bekhal ran away from home when she was fifteen years old. Bekhal who testified against her family in her sister's murder trial, told how all the older sisters suffered through genital mutilation at the hands of their grandmother while living in Iraq. (Female genital mutilation is done to prevent women from experiencing any sexual pleasure.) For Bekhal, she began to run into serious conflict with her father over small things that teenage girls are interested in; long painted nails, plucked eyebrows and the use of perfume - all of which were banned by her father. She left home several times and suffered through many beatings.

Joanne Payton of the Honour Based Violence Awareness Network explained that for men, coming over from these cultures entails a loss in social status. Bobbie Cheema, Prosecutor explained that because of this the men take refuge in cultural morality which they use to control their women. Mahmod soon lost control of his daughters and therefore lost face. In 2002 the family tried to restore its lost honour with an attempt on Bekhal's life. Bekhal survived and went into hiding.

Against this background, the tragedy of Banaz played out. She was married at age 17 to an illiterate immigrant from Iraq. After two years of marriage Banaz went to police and told them in a taped interview how her husband, Ali, abused and raped her. In an attempt to document her abuse, Banaz took pictures of her injuries and kept a diary - all of which were destroyed when Ali learned of their existence. Despite pleading with her family to let her out of the marriage she was sent back time and again to be a "better wife".  Finally Banaz decided to leave the marriage after a severe beating. She returned home.

In 2005, Banaz met Rahmat. What was initially a friendship turned into a romantic relationship where they would text every morning and evening. Banaz felt she was being followed so she went to the police. When she asked police what they would do she received an vague indication that they would act on her case. They never followed up. Banaz and Rahmat attempted to keep their relationship a secret, however, the two were seen kissing in December 2005. This triggered a family council in which Banaz's uncle, Ali, who was the strong personality in the family, ordered the murder of Banaz.

Banaz Mahmod

After a first attempt on New Year's Eve did not succeed, Rahmat reported Banaz missing on January 25, 2006. Not a single person in the Kurdish community helped police, despite, as lead investigator, Caroline Goode indicated, literally hundreds of people knew what had happened to Banaz. Goode indicated that at least fifty people were involved in the murder in some way. All reminders of Banaz's existence were removed from the family home and not one family member showed concern or called police to learn about the status of the investigation.

However, two things helped police in their investigation of Banaz's disappearance; they learned of Bekhal's situation and Banaz had sent a letter to police in December of 2005 naming the three men, cousins who were prepared to do the job of murdering her.

Caroline Goode and Andy Craig, a detective with the Metropolitan Police were able to locate Banaz's body. Both her father and uncle were arrested and one cousin, Mohamed Hama were arrested, tried and sentenced to life. However, the other two cousins, Mohamed Ali and Omar Hussein, fled to Iraq. Determined not to let these two men go free, especially after they were seen bragging in Iraq about raping and murdering Banaz, Goode was able to see justice done. Today Bekhal remains in hiding and Rahmat is under the witness protection program.

Discussion

Banaz: A Love Story is so titled because of Caroline Goode and her staff's desire to become surrogate parents to Banaz and to love her and honour her memory. "We loved her and we still do." Goode stated in the documentary. Goode was relentless in pursuing Banaz's killers and her work led her to receive the Queen's Police Medal in 2011. Caroline's narrative in the documentary was extremely touching. It was evident that she was profoundly affected by the murder of Banaz Mahmod. At the beginning of the documentary, Caroline Goode expresses how these honour based murders make her feel:

"...I just find that I love these women. I don't know them. But I loved them. And because they haven't been loved by the people that should have loved them, should have cared for them, should have protected them, I feel that I want to take the place of whoever should have done that."

Banaz: A Love Story was produced and directed by Deeyah Thathal, a Norwegian artist/singer/director who has been at the forefront of raising awareness about honour based violence. Deeyah founded Memini, which is Latin for remembrance, a digital remembrance webpage that honours the memory of those who have lost their lives to honour based violence.  In 2012, Deeyah co-founded the Honour Based Violence Awareness network (hbv-awareness.com) with Joanne Payton. "A one of a kind international digital resource centre, HBVA is a learning, information and training tool created for front-line professionals, from teachers, health workers, social services to police, politicians, and others who may encounter individuals at risk. HBV estimates that there are a minimum of 5000 honour based killings worldwide each year. Honour based violence has been going on for centuries and across the world in various cultures and religions."

The entire documentary has been placed online and can be watched on YouTube.

Fox Forever by Mary E. Pearson

Fox Forever picks up the story of Locke Jenkins who is on his way to Manchester where Gatsboro's labs are located to make sure that there are no other copies of him in the labs. However, he is waylaid by Mr. F, who works for the Resistance and told he needs to come with him to complete the favour that Father Andre mentioned they might request in The Fox Inheritance. Father Andre had told Locke that in return for being freed, the Network might want him to return the favour.

Locke is traveling with a fake ID as Nate Smith courtesy of the Network. He and Mr. "F" travel to Boston where they meet two others, Carver and Livvy. Mr F's name is Xavier. The favour they are asking is no ordinary one; to help a special Non-pact.

Carver, Livvy, and Xavier have learned that the Secretary of Security is holding someone in a special detainment area at an undisclosed location in Boston for the past sixteen years. That someone is believed to be Karden Sanders the leader of the Resistance and Meisha Derring's husband. Karden Sanders was the a leader in the underground Non-pact Resistance sixteen years ago. His group fought for those on the fringes of society and those who had no rights - the Non-pacts. Meisha Derring married him even though it was illegal to marry a Non-pact. They had a daughter named Rebecca. They moved and changed names frequently until one day the authorities caught up with them. While Meisha was out, their house was firebombed, and Karden and Rebecca were killed. Meisha spent 11 years in prison when she was finally released.

Although Meisha believed her husband and daughter were killed when their home was firebombed years ago, it now appears that Karden, at least, may be alive. Karden is thought to have stolen a huge sum of money - $80 billion from government contractors who provided the security systems against Non-pacts. That money was hidden in a secret account, the location of which Karden only partially disclosed. Carver and his team want to save Karden and gain access to the money before the grace period for dormant bank accounts expires. If it does, the money will be lost and Karden will be killed by the government which no longer needs him.

Locke owes Meisha, because in addition to her being Locke's only very distant living relative that he knows, she helped him escape from Gatsboro. But getting involved may mean ending up back in prison. Can Locke take such a risk? Locke has been chosen partly becuase of his physical attributes. Locke's body is eighty percent bioengineered human, twenty percent composites which is illegal. He has the ability to read lips and can also read faces meaning he can determine the emotions a person is feeling. Locke's BioPerfect heals his body quickly and he can see in the dark, although his 260 years spent in a cube have made him afraid of the dark.

The plan is to embed Locke in a group, a Virtual Collective - a sort of high school group, which contains the Security Secretary's daughter, Raine. Locke is to use Raine to help him locate Karden. At first, Raine is cold and wary of Locke. But Locke's first meeting with the Secretary at a party scores him an invite to the select group. During this party Locke meets, Han, Raine's gold Bot and bodyguard, as well as LeGru, the slimy assistant to the Security Secretary.

One night Locke unexpectedly discovers that Raine frequents the roof of the building she lives in and often leaves her apartment during the night to explore the city. Initially, he uses this to get to know Raine better and as part of his mission to find the missing bank account numbers and the location of Karden. However, their relationship soon develops into much more. Locke makes an astonishing discovery of who Raine is (although reader's probably won't be surprised) and uncovers the events of that fateful night sixteen years ago. With time running out, Locke must deal with betrayal, injury, and conflict to save both Karden and the future of the resistance.

Fox Forever is a fitting conclusion to the Fox Series. Well written, this novel focuses on a new plot that ties together the lose ends of Jenna and Locke. Pearson doesn't really go into much detail about the science behind Locke, nor much about the future world that he lives in. Although the United States is now two countries, we don't really know much about the resistance, except that with the capture of Karden, came its collapse. Likewise when Locke's mission is successful, Pearson doesn't really delve into the consequences of the resistance coming into a huge amount of money. Instead, that is briefly mentioned in a chapter titled Thirty Years Later.

The novel's focus is more on Locke's relationship with Raine as well as his relationship with Jenna Fox. It turns out that both Raine and Locke are quite similar - both have a mysterious past and both are not who they appear to be. As such, this novel deals with the quintessential questions of identity; who am I? and how do I belong? The same questions face Locke with his changing relationship with Jenna. Although initially Locke believed he loved Jenna, he begins to understand that they have both changed, just as Jenna tried to explain to him in The Fox Inheritance. Jenna has lived a life the past 260 years, working for the resistance, marrying and having a child, while Locke has been held captive in a cube. These experiences have changed her. She is no longer the seventeen year old girl Locke remembers.

The ending of the novel is sad but hopeful. The reader is left with the impression that Locke has come to terms  to some degree, with what has happened to him and his existence in the future. There's an interesting theme of religion and sanctuary throughout the series. Jenna and then Locke, and finally Locke and Raine are given sanctuary by Catholic priests. Locke and Raine meet often in a church where they spend time just being together. And Locke remembers his days as an altar boy, when he was fully human, 260 years ago.

Overall Pearson has written a good series that explores what it means to be human, with a bit of action and some romance.

Book Details:
Fox Forever by Mary E. Pearson
New York: Henry Holt and Company   2013
288 pp.

Documentary: Smile Pinki (2008)

In India today, there are 35,000 children born each year with cleft palate. Many of these children never receive any treatment for what is an easily correctable facial defect that is believed to occur sometime between the 4th and 12th week of development. Many children with this defect are from very impoverished families in India and it is thought that poor nutrition may be responsible. But a charity, Smile Train is working to change that.

This documentary short, filmed in 2008, follows two children as they journey from a life of shame to one of hope. The documentary opens with its workers traveling throughout India, spreading by posters and personal contact, the information that children who have this facial deformity can be helped. "Do you know anyone who has this?" is the question often asked.

Social worker, Pankaj Kumar Singh, travels rural India, talking in markets and schools to get the word out about cleft palate and to tell people that there is nothing to be ashamed about and that the cleft palate can be repaired for free. Knowledgeable and friendly, Pankaj is direct and persuasive with reluctant parents, carefully explaining the process to families desperate for help. He makes the children he visits in schools promise to spread the word.

While at one school, Pankaj learns of a little girl named Pinki Kumari Sonkar who has cleft palate. They travel to her family's village in Mirapur District and meet with Pinki's father, Rajendra. Pinki's parents believe that she was born with a cleft palate because of an eclipse that happened while Pinki was in her mother's womb. Pankja invites her parents to bring her to G.S. Memorial Plastic Surgery Hospital in Banaras for free treatment. They agree to do so. They will be responsible for transportation to Banaras and will have to pay for their food. Other than that, all medicine and surgery costs will be covered. Pinki will have to stay in the hospital for seven days.

Despite having to walk over three hours to the nearest village, Rajendra agrees to take his daughter. Like parents everywhere, these desperately poor people want the best for their children. Many worry how their sons, but especially their daughters will marry. In some cases, the mother is held responsible for the child's situation and is told to leave the family. In other situations, mother and baby are completely abandoned or the child is killed.

There is 11 year old Ghutaru Chauhan, who has a cleft palate and cannot speak properly. Because his speech has been affected, Ghutaru no longer attends school. Although the documentary focuses primarily on Pinki, Ghutaru situation is very moving. The documentary shows both children before and after their operations and the results are staggeringly wonderful. Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh was the surgeon who operated on these children. Ghutaru, who had a gaping upper palate had this repaired.

Since 2004, CS Memorial has operated on 6000 patients, however, the hospital now sees at least 3,000 patients per year. In India there are over a million children with cleft palate, likely due to poor nutrition and also genetic factors.

Smile Pinki is a touching documentary that educates viewers on what is a relatively rare facial deformity in the developed world by showing us the faces of real children who have cleft palate and allowing us to experience a little of their lives. Isolation, abandonment and even death can be the norm for these children. Our faces are so important to all of us because they are what we use to show ourselves to others, to the world. Directed by Megan Mylan, Smile Pinki won an Oscar in the Documentary - Short category.

Smile Train was brought to the forefront today in Great Britain during the championship match at Wimbleton, between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic, when Pinki, now a beautiful eleven year old, did the coin toss.

Documentary: Detropia

No one needs to be told the devastating effect the loss of manufacturing overseas has had on American (and Canadian) industry, workers and ultimately North American society. In Detropia, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady film local residents to profile the economic decline of the city of Detroit, demonstrating how Detroit is representative of the effects the shifting global economy has had and continues to have on North Americans.

Ewing and Grady focus on three citizens in particular, George McGregor who is President of the UAW Local 22, Tommy Stephens owner of the Raven a blues nightclub, and Crystal Starr a video blogger.

McGregor's insights focus on the automobile industry which made Detroit a prime manufacturing city in the early half of the 20th century. As he drives by the abandoned Cadillac assembly plant, McGregor reminisces about how large the plant was and how now it is being used to store dumpsters. After the plant was relocated to Mexico, with the workers unemployed, the neighbourhood left too.

Similarly, American Axle has now outsourced 2000 jobs to Mexico. It offered its employees the option of wage reductions to make the American plant "viable". They refused and American Axle closed the Detroit plant. In the past ten years, the state of Michigan has lost 50% of its manufacturing jobs - 50,000 factories have closed and 6 million workers have lost their jobs. Of course this trend is not restricted to Michigan or the United States, as Canada has seen similar closures and job losses.

With the loss of its manufacturing base, the population of Detroit has moved on and away. In 1930, the city of Detroit was the fastest growing city in the world. Today it is the fastest shrinking city. The 2010 census shows Detroit's population dropped to 713,000 - the lowest in 100 years. The population loss means large areas of the city are under-inhabited.

Because of the shrinking population, the city of Detroit can no longer afford to service these largely abandoned areas. The city is 139 square miles with 40 square miles of potential vacant land. This has led Detroit Mayor, David Bing, to bring in urban planners to help the city decide how best to restructure land use.  This means rethinking the way a city normally uses its land. Bing proposes that residents in neighbourhoods that are dying, be relocated and the empty areas be used for urban farming. However, this plan did not sit well with residents who accused the mayor of  "downsizing" the city. Detropia captures their reactions at meetings and individually.

One of the most engaging parts of this documentary is Tommy Stephen's visit to the Detroit Auto Show. At the show he views many of GM and Chrysler's newest products. The big three automakers are finally on the rebound, after a US government bailout and new employee wage cuts. Stephens goes over to investigate the BYD (Build Your Dream) booth, a Chinese automaker at the show marketing its competition to the Volt. The BYD retails for $28K while the Volt sells for $40K. When Stephens confronts the Chevrolet showmen, they don't have an answer as to why there is such a price difference. A year later, Chevrolet announces it is moving its Volt factory to China, in exchange for sharing its intellectual property.

Of course the answer to this question which is never openly expressed in the film but only hinted at by George McGregor, is that American industry throughout the first 80 years of the 20th century, following the business models set out by Henry Ford, paid its workers a "living wage" - creating a middle class who brought the products made by other manufacturers and who were able to buy a home, educate their children and so forth. China, with its huge human capital, has no need to invest in such policies. Instead, workers are poorly paid, live in company dorms, eating in company cafeterias. The pertinent question then becomes, "Should we lower our standard of living to compete with the Chinese?"

As this documentary demonstrates, the city of Detroit is an example of what many opposed to the NAFTA agreement in the 1980's maintained all along - that free trade would not only lower worker's wages and cause the serious job losses as companies flee to areas with lower labour costs, but  would also eventually lower the standard of living in North America. Detroit, along with many other cities in North America, has seen exactly this happen with the development of the global economy. Instead of bringing poorer countries up to our standards of employment, workers are gradually seeing hard fought rights being whittled away in the name of profit-taking. Meanwhile, abuses are rife in countries like China, Bangladesh and India.

The two most compelling voices in this documentary are Tommy Stephens and Crystal Starr. Stephens is eloquent and understands that the problem is complex with no easy solutions. Starr takes viewers on a journey through some of the abandoned places in Detroit, speculating on their past glory and on the people who might have lived there or passed through. The absence of a narrator leads the viewer to extrapolate and make his/her own conclusions.

The documentary got its title from the merging of the words Detroit and Utopia, the later word was graffiti on an abandoned auto parts building in which the Auto Parts sign was changed to utopia on the basis of missing letters and painted in letters.

The poster image for the documentary shows two artists, who make their home in Detroit, wearing gold painted gloves and gas masks in front of an abandoned mansion. It is a allusion to the fact that people can survive and adapt to life in Detroit. The people who seem to be doing so are young people who see the city as providing the freedom to experiment.

Detropia is a informative and thoughtful documentary worth watching.

Boy Nobody - I Am The Weapon by Allen Zadoff

"My life is one continual assignment. I move from world to world as I've been trained to do, leaving nothing but bodies behind me. With each assignment comes new challenges, new complications, new excitement."

Taken from his family at twelve, "Boy Nobody" is trained to become an efficient killing machine, sent in to take out specific targets. The usual method of operation sees him befriend the mark, usually the child of his intended target, which allows him access to the family. Once in the family, he kills the target which is the parent of the child. Efficient and deadly.

Zadoff starts this thriller off with Boy completing his recent "assignment", the killing of a Chinese CEO of a high-tech firm. Boy is friends with Jack Wu and on a visit to his home, while alone with Jack's father, he stabs him in the forearm with a pen. This pen is really a syringe that injects Mr. Wu with a powerful drug that stops his heart in seconds. And then he waits while the police and EMS arrive and simply walks away and onto his next assignment.

Boy is part of something called The Program. He was taken from his family when he was twelve by an older boy named Mike and given the option of either dying like his father and mother, or being part of The Program. He asked to be killed but instead was trained into a operative of The Program. The Program is about finding and removing enemies of the United States. Boy was trained by The Program who gave him a "Father" and a "Mother". His "Father" coordinated his life and his "Mother" appeared often to check up on him. Boy did all of his high school in two years plus he completed special training in weapons and tactics, psychology and strategy. His "Mother" oversees each assignment and is in charge while his "Father" sends him the next assignment. Everything - clothing, fake ID, where he will live, money is pre-arranged for the next assignment and any contact with Father and Mother is encoded.

Boy soon learns that his next assignment is to kill the Mayor of New York, Jonathan Goldberg. This assignment however is unusual for a number of reasons. First he must complete his assignment within five days. Boy is disturbed because he has never been given so little time to enter and integrate before completing an assignment. His mark is Samara (Sam) Goldberg, the mayor's daughter. Boy doesn't like to deal with girls whom he finds complicated and who bring emotion into play.

He is inserted into a famous (unnamed) private school, which Sam attends, on the Upper West Side. Boy immediately attracts the attention of Sam who invites him to a party she is having at her father's apartment where she lives. Her mother was killed in an accident several years ago while visiting her home country of Israel. During the party, Boy manages to wander into the mayor's private area providing him with the perfect opportunity to fulfill his mission. However, Boy is caught off guard by the mayor's personable character and the resemblance to his father which brings back memories of his childhood. Because of this, Boy does not take the opportunity to kill Goldberg.

From the beginning there are complications leading Boy to begin questioning his mission. He suspects he is being followed, which is soon confirmed and results in a deadly confrontation. It also becomes evident that some of the people around Sam are not whom they seem either. Boy begins to have strong feelings for Sam and they become romantically involved, just when the parameters of the mission begin to change. And Boy is left struggling whom to trust, his "Mother" or Sam and her father?

Discussion  

There's no doubt Zadoff has written a chilling novel about a boy turned into an special operative who takes out American enemies and traitors. He's a sixteen year old killing machine who assassinates without conscience. Boy is trained to not to ask questions and not to think about the effect the murder has on the family of the target. There's no way to describe the sanitized murder at the end of the book except as brutal, despite Boy assuring his "target" that dying won't hurt. It's a tragic end that seems wrong on so many levels.

It's evident that Boy is extremely intelligent. He completed all of his high schooling by the age of sixteen. Mature beyond his years, Boy is situationally aware, calculating and emotionally distant. Despite being pulled from society and subjected to rigorous training, Boy is extremely socially intelligent, something that is perhaps incongruous with his past.

But Boy, who finally has a name at the end of the novel, is changing. He has been challenged from his first encounter with Sam to consider who he is. "Do you ever wonder where you belong?" she says. "Like maybe life made a mistake and put you someplace you weren't supposed to be?"   She also questions what he believes in.  "...'You're the boy who doesn't believe in anything. We're different that way. I not only believe, I'm willing to back it up with action.' "

When the mission changes, Boy is conflicted as to what to do and about what he has been told. For the first time, he seeks to find out and he chooses Howard, the techie weirdo from school to help him. He's not so willing to simply accept what "Mother" tells him. He needs proof and Howard helps him get that proof.

Also for the first time after a mission, Boy feels intense grief - "a deep chasm of grief" as he describes it, which he finds unbearable and buries deep within himself. And while he originally thought he was one of a few operatives, he's now beginning to suspect that there are many others just like him who maybe have different jobs within The Program. Armed with a new piece of information about his family from what was supposed to be a deadly encounter with Mike, and with Howard secretly working with him, Boy intends to find out.

Zadoff has done a very good job of creating his characters - they are both realistic and multi-dimensional. Sam is a complex character - as Boy predicted- whose suffering after her mother's death was largely ignored by her father. Sam's father never allowed her the time or space to grieve, resulting in Sam's alienation from her father and resulting in her being able to be recruited by her Israeli soldier and lover, Gideon, into a terrorist cell.

Howard, the techie geek/weirdo is a brilliantly crafted character who is very disturbing. The classic bullied boy, intelligent and different, who can't seem to find his niche in society, pushed further into its fringes.

Boy Nobody contains several murders, a great deal of physical violence and some sexual content  but none are described in detail or graphically. Readers will be left with a ton of questions which leaves this novel leading nicely into a second book.

Update: Please note that the author has retitled this first novel to I Am The Weapon, the first in The Unknown Assassin series.

Book Details:
Boy Nobody by Allen Zadoff
New York: Little, Brown and Company     2013
337 pp.