BOOKWORM
A LAMENT FOR A LOST HOME
Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo, Alfred A Knopf, $39. Priyanka Mattoo struggles with the telling of her family’s story. If only the house had been swept away in a flood, gone up in flames or levelled in an earthquake. Because the truth behind how they lost the family home in Kashmir creates a “conversational cul-de-sac”. It also takes much longer.
That’s the truth she shares with readers in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. The story of a boisterous extended family, of strong independent women, of ties to and the longing for that sense of home.
The homes they lost forever, when “like all the other families that left that month, they travelled with a couple of suitcases and one photo album”.
She was barely in her teens when her grandparents had to flee Kashmir, but the loss affects her so profoundly that in her adult years, family holidays are always in an Airbnb, never in impersonal hotel rooms, and she always joins the local library with her kids, goes grocery shopping and does loads of laundry, seeking to make a home, even if the vacation just lasts a few days.
She listens to the songs of Pakistani singers Ali Sethi and Hasan Raheem on repeat, whose Pasoori and Joona recall their homes that were within reach of her own.
She has vivid memories and describes a visit to her father’s old school when she was about eight. Where children “learned on individual chalkboards, grasping their own stick of chalk”. Her father might have described those individual chalkboards as a slate!
Mattoo celebrates her people, their culture, music, food and language, their quirks and their stories.
But the book is not only about looking back – it’s about how the past shapes her current. About packing and unpacking and moving on. In forty years, she accumulated thirty-two different addresses. About how this impacts a young girl.
“Look at Didi,” my cousins were told. “She’s always reading – why can’t you read that much?” I wasn’t behaving, I want to tell them all now. I was dissociating.”
It’s about her courtship with her Jewish husband, the wedding ceremonies that incorporate elements of both cultures, and about raising her kids in a multi-faith home while learning to make her mother’s roganjosh on Zoom.
The story of a woman’s journey of self discovery is hugely moving and funny in equal parts. It doesn’t move sequentially, or even thematically, and I realized why when I read in the acknowledgments that portions of the essays that form the book have appeared previously in other publications. But they weave together in a beautiful, cohesive whole.
“There is a Kashmiri phrase, chhai daud te mahe adij, ‘bird milk and mosquito bones’ used when someone is describing things so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence. It comes to mind whenever I think about that little treasury of items we gathered.”
She’s talking about the items her parents gathered on their travels around the world for the home they wanted to build in Kashmir.
There are books that you just settle into with a smile of recognition – never mind if the author is generationally or geographically removed from you. Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones is one such.
IN BLACK AND GREY
The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny, Minotaur Books, $40. A Cree chief tells his young grandson that there are two wolves at war inside him. The grey wolf wants him to be strong, compassionate and forgiving. The black one wants him to be vengeful, cruel and cunning. Which one would win, asks the terrified child. “The one that I feed,” the wise man responds.
In The Grey Wolf, Louise Penny presents the tussle between good and evil, the difficulty in sometimes seeing the difference between stupidity and malice.
Louise Penny’s books aren’t your average thriller. The bestselling author covers a wide range of subjects. Her last book, A World of Curiosities, dealt with child abuse and was disturbing to say the least.
The Grey Wolf, the 19th in the Armand Gamache series, is frightening in a whole different way – bringing the threat of eco-terrorism home. Whom do you trust when you can’t trust those you thought were friends?
The Mafia, and people in law enforcement, the government and the church, may all be complicit in a widespread terror plot. Homegrown terror. To poison the drinking water of Montreal.
And Gamache, Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isable Lacoste have to follow every lead, big or small, to prevent the act of eco-terrorism with devastating consequences.
“The mafia’s own, mafia-owned, senior Surete officers. And they wouldn’t be alone. There’d be prosecutors and judges, politicians and lobbyists. Journalists. Gamache had no proof of this, it was just common sense.”
And yet, there’s an innate decency in the books, in Gamache – who is based on Penny’s husband – and in the love he and his wife Reine-Marie have for each other and their family.
When he meets a mother grieving for a son she was estranged from, he relates. He recalls the struggles with his own son. When he’s down on his knees, literally, with a gun pushed against his head, he knows he’s run out of options, yet he still has one. “He conjured up the backyard in early evening in the height of summer. Sitting with Reine-Marie. Listening to the rustle in the woods as a chipmunk scurried or a deer strolled by. On its own way home.”
Fun fact: Patel seems to have caught the imagination of writers as a last name. There was Allegra Patel in Liane Moriarty’s Here One Moment and Brother Patel from an abbey makes a fleeting appearance in this.
THE SEASONS ON OUR LIVES
Unearthing by Kyo Maclear, Alfred. A. Knopf, 34. Unearthing begins with two quotes: I can’t stop putting plants in the ground. There’s a hunger in me. And, But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things.
And a note by the author:
The Japanese traditionally record the seasons in twenty-four sekki or “small seasons”. I have borrowed the names of sekki as section titles to offer a different way of thinking about the ever-changing ground of our stories.
These should lay the ground for what readers can expect from this exquisite memoir which reveals a long-held family secret interwoven with a personal botanical history.
What gets planted and what gets buried? Can the act of tending a garden provide common ground, and even joy, for an inquisitive daughter and her reticent mother?
JUSTICE DENIED
Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey, Doubleday, $39.95. Police grab a suspect, convince themselves they’ve got the right guy, congratulate themselves for being so clever, then ignore conflicting evidence while embracing anything that will support their hunch...If evidence undermining their theory surfaces, they simply discount it.
John Grisham and Jim McCloskey recount ten cases of dramatic, hard-fought battles of exoneration. The stories are of Americans who were innocent but found guilty, and forced to sacrifice their families, friends and decades of their lives – while the guilty parties remained free. Racism, police misconduct, corruption in the court system and flawed testimonies played a big role in these instances of gross miscarriage of justice. Jim McCloskey’s Centurion Ministries played a major role in freeing the wrongfully convicted. John Grisham serves on the board of Innocence Project.
Framed is a deep dive into the injustices that plague America’s justice system told with page-turning suspense as only Grisham can.
A CUPPA TEA?
The Way of Chai by Kevin Wilson, Tarcher Perigee, $$29.99. “For Sathyanadan Anthony Mathew, my grandfather. You toiled in the tea estates so that I could have a better future. One day I’ll tell you what we did, and you won’t believe me.”
You have to love this dedication. And the fact that this book on “recipes for a meaningful life” is divided into chapters such as Thirst: Satisfying need through justice and Wait: Resting as a revolutionary posture, accompanied by recipes for Kenyan Ginger Chai and Vanilla Chai, respectively.
Kevin Wilson, dubbed the CEO of Chai by Bon Apetit magazine, also shares his signature chai in the bittersweet chapter, Grounds: Journeying through grief. In which he describes ways in which he processes the loss of loved ones. And that one can use tea grounds and leaves to nourish plants, reminding readers that endings can lead to new beginnings.
WHAT THEY TELL US
The Living Wisdom of Trees by Fred Hageneder, Watkins, $26.95. Fred Hageneder, a leading author in ethnobotany, the cultural and spiritual history and meaning of trees, guides readers to a whole new way of seeing and experiencing them.
Focusing on 50 species around the world, he looks at their botanical characteristics, their place in world myth, magic and folklore, their healing properties and their practical contributions.
These include trees like banyan, eucalyptus and pipal, that many South Asians think they know from back home. I did, until I learnt how much I didn’t know!
TO THE RESCUE!
Batman and Robin, Father And Son by Joshua Williamson and Simone Di Meo, DC, $25.99. Batman and Robin, Father And Son takes readers (kids and their parents who were raised on the older versions!) behind the scenes to the dawn of the dynamic duo.
DO IT YOURSELF, KID
Electronics For Kids by Oyvind Nydal Dahl, No Starch Press, $28.95. Electronics For Kids demystifies electricity with fun hands-on projects. Such as how to make a battery out of a lemon or build an alarm clock triggered by sunrise.
The perfect book for tech-savvy kids who know more about your electronic devices than you do!
FUN PROJECTS
Funtastic by Amanda Kingloff, Hearst Home, $30. Design the perfect sock puppet, make a mask or grow your own garden. Packed with fun projects for 7 to 12-year-olds, this book is the can’t-put-it-down-need-it-now kids activity book.
TEEN REVIEW
By HIMANSHI GARG
Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue, VIZ Media LLC, $15.99. Suspense, emotions, sadness, and nostalgia... a sci-fi thriller book? Nope, just a feel-good sports manga!
Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue, is about a hopeless romantic high schooler who chases after a girl but finds himself pursuing things he hadn’t even thought he could do. Our main character might not have his game up in his love life, but he sure makes points on the court.
Slam Dunk has 31 volumes, and the first has nine chapters. Each chapter feels like a page, giving the sensation of being right there on the court; it feels like a memory from our high school years rather than merely drawings in a book.
So, is this just a book about romance and basketball? I don’t even like basketball or know anything about it! It’s much more, with emotion-filled games that have irreversible effects on the characters. Each game is like an eventful fight between a villain and a hero.
Even if you don’t play basketball, you’ll learn so much about basketball after reading this book! This book will leave you feeling ready to play basketball even if you haven’t ever played. This book has things from education on basketball to emotional plot twists and development that will leave you in your feels.
• Himanshi Gargis a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.