Monday, 1/29/2024 The Night I Spent with Aubrey Fisher by Christopher M. Tantillo. Moderated by Erica Smith A boy determined to die. A girl determined to save his life. After the death of his little brother, Grayson's guilt spirals his life into chaos; it's all his fault. He wants to rewind that night back. To erase the pain he's caused. So he's decided; in twenty-four hours, he'll kill himself. Then mysterious and reckless Aubrey shows up with a proposition: a "literally insane" all-night adventure that will show him the beauty in the mundane. Grayson doesn't know why the foster girl with the piercings, crimson locks, and fishnet leggings is helping, especially when he finds out she harbors dark secrets of her own. Yet as they spend his last night learning to let go of pain, Grayson may have a new choice to make. But can he ever really be happy again? Told in a heartfelt yet poignant style interspersed with quirky humor, The Night I Spent with Aubr
Parker blog response to The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom
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My local library only had a large print edition of the book, which perhaps distorted my perception -not only visually- of the novel. The book was big, much like the tale- all encompassing, full of passion, fraught with despair, a view into the heart- wrenching world of the antebellum south, where the depravity of slavery perverts and destroys and ultimately under minds the souls and spirits of those caught in its web. Yes, I know this sounds a bit ridiculous. Still, I feel as if I read a contemporary version of Alex Haley’s Roots or Sharon Drapper’s Copper Sun. The language is simple, as is the story, an assemblage of clichés’ and stereotypes, a southern spaghetti western even. I found myself creating a Flat Stanley good and bad guy list. There is no development of the characters, no subtlety of emotion. Seven-year old Lavinia is brought to Tall Oaks as an indentured servant, her servitude not being acknowledged until three quarters of the way through the novel, by the oft-absent Cap’n, who owns a Virginia plantation. This orphaned Irish lass is relegated to the care of the house slaves, her skin color notwithstanding. This is Grissom’s catalyst for allowing, taking a phrase from Tennessee Williams, “the easy mixing of the races.” The kitchen folk are kind, loving, accepting both of their lot and others, whilst the Simon Legree model overseer Rankin and the pedophile tutor Waters serve as models for evil incarnate. With the exception of Meg, who has a passion for botany and apparently wears thick glasses and limps, all the woman are forced into various levels of passivity out of the social necessity. Grissom has a twenty-year span to fill, so there are mutilations, rapes, whippings, and the eventual hanging of most-beloved Mama. Grissom covers every scenario of plantation life from the mismanaged single-crop tobacco fields to the buildings of colonial Williamsburg, from the marriages by jumping the broom to the laudanum-laced sherry and screams of Mistress Martha in the hospital.
My frustration came from never really getting to know a character. Grissom’s plot is logical. Situations evolve seemingly naturally, such as characters’ deaths from the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic, a quick search for Lavinia’s long lost brother Cardigan, the angry-child Marshall aggressively pushing his sister on a swing, so as to cause her death, or the implied, deserved demise of Mr. Boran, after he attempts to rape Lavinia. The superficial whys are explained, but the emotional context is left empty.
This would be a fine independent read for students; even a 5th grader could handle the vocabulary and syntax. There’s the soap opera emotional charge, but there are no ideas explored in depth. True controversy is implied and delicately side stepped. There is only a meager attempt to recreate dialects, after all this is not supposed to be Mark Twain. My own take is that Grissom at best distorts the social and emotional complexity of slavery in the early 19th century. But I loved the Empire fashion clothes- right out of Jane Austen.
Great comments! You should be a book reviewer...
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