The Measure of Katie Calloway – Serena Miller

     In post-civil war Georgia, Katie Calloway is a young wife who has a little brother to take care of and an abusive husband to avoid. When she discovers her husband off visiting relatives at a surprisingly early hour and a booby trap set up in their barn meant to kill her, she flees. She runs as far north as she can manage and ends up in Bay City, Michigan. She falls into a job at a lumber camp that will pay for both her and her brother to stay on the run and make them nearly impossible to get to until spring. What follows is a tale of faith, determination, and pride as Katie learns to cope with life in the wilderness and deals with the aftermath of abuse. She even manages to learn to love again.

     This is a Christian historical fiction novel. I’m not the biggest fan of Christian novels merely because they seem so preachy and that one aspect takes over the entire novel.  “Bad things have happened but because you believe in god, everything is perfect now” story lines with no character growth are just bad writing. Serena Miller does not do this. She has characters that mature and learn things and struggle with faith as well as the situations in the books. When her character Katie is questioned for lying about their names and origins by her little brother, she justifies her decision instead of extemporizing about how it’s ok and god will forgive them. The author uses the characters to demonstrate that it is possible to care about other people who don’t exactly share your faith. The writing is amazing, the characters are well rounded and believable, and the Christian aspect isn’t overwhelming. This book has something for everyone. Over all this book is great and I was so impressed I’m actually rereading it already. 

Confessions of a Part time Sorceress -- Shelley Mazzanoble

Confessions of a Part-time Sorceress: A Girl's Guide to the D&D Game By Shelly Mazzanoble

     Talk about super long titles. The thing to remember before picking up this book is that this is a humor book. It has a little of the most basic information about D&D in it but it is primarily a humor book. The narrator of this little adventure is a self proclaimed girly girl who never really saw the point of playing D&D even though she works for Wizards of the Coast. She believed all the stereotypes about gamers: overweight, smelly teenage boys playing dress up in their parents basements. Her coworkers persuade her to play a game with them and those stereotypes all get thrown out the window. She puts all the character classes and races into her own little categories and defines them in an extremely girly style with quizzes to help the reader decide which to be. She does the same with equipping her character as well as everything else to do with the game.

     I really enjoyed her stories of things that happen in her games from sound effects to attempting to make her friends play with her as a sort of social experiment. The side bars have some interesting information in them; a little bit of history, some themed recipes and my favorite: a list of famous people who play D&D. Maybe it was the fact I read this right after Ready Player One and was feeling nostalgic or because I’m tying to persuade some of my friends to play the game with me but I seriously enjoyed this book for the humor and the extremely basic information and how to present it to people who’ve never played before. This book was short enough that I finished it in a couple hours and I couldn’t put it down once I’d started reading.

Call the Midwife -- Jennifer Worth

     

I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction lately, among them a series of books titled Call the Midwife. I started this series because I was fascinated with the TV show. (New season airing now!) Call the Midwife is the story of Jennifer Lee a new midwife sent to work in the East End of London during the 50s and 60s. Jenny Lee fresh out of school leaves a relationship with one of her professors to help the women of the East End without really understanding what she was getting into. From a privileged family, she doesn’t understand how poverty and the aftermath of war affect large groups of people. The midwifery practice she joins is run by a group of nuns who have lived, worked, and taken care of the people of the East End for generations. Over the course of the books, Jenny Lee discovers herself and what it means to help people who can’t help themselves. She learns to overlook poor sanitation and hygiene and look at what makes people human. She included so many stories of both tragedy and overcoming the odds that it’s hard not to be emotionally moved while reading. Knowing that it’s a biography makes the whole thing feel closer to home. This type of thing makes me want to break out a recorder and capture every story that people on the street are willing to tell me, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary.

     Comparing the book to the show is really only possible because the writers tried to follow the story while adding things to make it interesting. Good writers help TV shows and movies sell books. The show has its tense moments but with the exception of the season finales the episodes almost always have happy endings. Of course, it is best to remember it is a fictional dramatization of a biography and only follows the outline of the books. They start with the same basic main characters but as the show goes on characters get combined, new ones get made up and introduced, the history and future of the characters get left out or not explained, and events get moved around. It’s narrated by Vanessa Redgrave who I’ve always thought has the perfect voice for it. My only real complaint about the show is even when the real story ended with a bad ending, death, loss of faith, etc., the writers almost always changed it to something happy. The few sad endings that were included were the ones where Jenny learned something important from it. Some of the stories that changed were very powerful and taught a lesson about endurance and making the best of things and how people cope with tragedy but since, one of the other nurses and not Jenny learned a lesson, the story got abbreviated. With time constraints and budgets, the writers/producers have to pick and choose what gets rewritten and they did a fairly good job. Anyway, I think I’ve started rambling. If you like TV shows with depth to the story and emotional storytelling, this is a good choice despite all of the baby birthing scenes. The same goes for the book, definitely a story that needs to be read and reread to absorb the overall narrative.