July 2019 Books

This was my book club's July pick, based on her excellent third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I had just read last month, and the fact that it won a National Book Award and. While the writing was excellent, and the story riveting, it was just about the worst book for four dog lovers to read. One of the main characters (Skeet) has a pit bull (China), which gives birth to a litter of puppies about 10 days before Hurricane Katrina hits the Southern Mississippi town where they live. Everything that can go wrong with the family and the litter of puppies does, and while none of the humans die, I can't say the same for the puppies. I think I would have loved this book if the author had simply eliminated everything about the dogs. The rest of the story was a heart-wrenching story of a family that sticks together through every type of adversity: losing their mother, hunger, poverty, an alcoholic father, etc. They try to prepare for Katrina, and go through hell when their house is flooded and begins to float off of its foundation. But the saga of the pit bull and her puppies ruined the book for me. I found myself hating Skeet when he decides to enter China into a fight just a week after giving birth; I was actually shocked at the animosity that I felt when I read those passages. While there is some judgment shown in the book about the cruelty of dog fighting, it was primarily in the form of disapproval of fighting China so soon after having puppies. Otherwise, it was presented with no value judgment at all. I have a hard time accepting that someone can show the love and affection they feel for a dog, and then voluntarily put it into a situation where it is likely to be seriously injured or killed. I don't know why this plot element was necessary at all; it would have been a great book otherwise.

 I enjoyed this collection of poems collected by the U.S. Poet Laureate. The most interesting to me was "38" by Layli Long Soldier, which tells the story of the Dakota 38, a group of Native Americans who were executed in 1862 for attacking and killing settlers and traders. After losing their land, they couldn't hunt; payments for the land weren't distributed; they were starving, and the traders wouldn't extend credit to them to purchase food. According to the poem, this is the largest "legal" mass execution in U.S. history.

This is a heartwarming story of the friendship between Arthur, whose wife has died, and Maddie, whose mother died soon after she was born. Picked on at school and with no friends, Maddie hides out in the cemetery during school lunch hour, where Arthur visits his wife's grave everyday. Soon they begin to rely on one another, and with the addition of Arthur's lonely neighbor Lucille, they learn that you can create your own family from the people you love.

Great collection by funny cartoonist Scott Hilburn. Reminds me of the quirky The Far Side comics.

This was the most ludicrous plot I've ever read. I picked it up at the 2019 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC, as an advance reader's copy; it won't be published until later this year. I thought it would be a good distraction from my pre-vacation stress (trying to get too much done in too little time), and I was right, but it's really nuts. Also, I wasn't very impressed with the underlying religious proselytizing.