The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

Charles Blackman, Children Playing

(April 24) Riveting account of what it’s like to be raised by two free-spirited, 1960s-style full-blooded hippies, who aren’t going to follow society’s rules, work for the man, poison their bodies, compete with fellow human beings, etc. -- they were going to use their genius to make their fortune and live self-sufficiently and high-mindedly ever after.

Andrea recommended it -- but she was horrified by the story because she is a mother with young kids, and she can’t imagine exposing children to the danger, deprivation and instability that the Walls kids experienced.

I on the other hand was kind of swept up in the romanticism of their life -- the kids got to do a lot of amazing things and developed some really amazing skills -- and they weren’t really in a lot of danger a lot of the time. LOL. They certainly all turned out well.

It’s clear that Jeannette Walls herself is bitter about the way she grew up -- in telling the story, she belabors certain hardships, quotes her parents as ironically as possible and is proud to have ultimately led the charge to escape from the parents. In fact, it’s kind of a case study of how kids turn out exactly opposite to their parents.

Later on, though, the parents seem less creative and more self-serving. The mother lost me when she hid a chocolate bar from her starving kids and the father when he stole the kids’ hard-earned escape money.

Also, I feel bad for ever suspecting in school that kids who took food from the garbage cans were gross and / or pigs. How can we ever have thought of them that way? They were starving children, for god’s sake.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Blue Shoes and Happiness, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, Alexander McCall Smith

Susana Van Bezooijen, African Woman

(April 10, April 12, April 21) These are the sixth, seventh and eighth in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. I read the first five all in a row a few years ago, and really liked them. Liked them so much I bought the books, and tried to get other people to read them.

So this is coming back to an old favourite after a long hiatus. Of course it's going to be different. There is so much activity in the newer ones, sigh. One of the charms of the early ones was that very little happened -- the small cast sat around and thought a lot -- and yet profound answers to minor mysteries would suddenly erupt and you would be charmed and surprised by the solutions.

Now there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and they are often getting into quite dramatic scrapes that leave less time for sitting and thinking.

I'm also now seeing them through the lens of the Isabel Dalhousie series, and realizing that the two series are not opposite ends of a spectrum like I first thought. There are a lot of ethical issues in Precious Ramotswe's life -- she’s just not as Zen about them as Isabel. Both series have lots of domestic detail, lots of eating and drinking and looking at countryside. Same big issues and same small scales, just different countries.

I was kind of stunned recently by someone's off-hand remark to the effect that "McCall Smith's Botswana books are patronizing." This never occurred to me when I read the first five, but -- duh -- I can see now that even just the fact of a white Brit writing light-heartedly about black people in a former colony would arouse the suspicions of the politically sensitive. And then the language is very plain and simple, and the people address each other as Mr. So-and-So and Mma Such-and-Such in a kind of Dr. Seuss-y way -- it would be very easy on a superficial level to assume the Batswana are being infantilized.

But I read the books in the usual way (lol) and never saw any demeaning or belittling going on -- the books are warm and fuzzy, and even cute, sometimes, but they also have the thrill of the exotic and the wisdom of ancient fables. The humour is never at the expense of the main characters or their values. And I never took the style as a sign of a superior attitude. It reminded me from the beginning of reading the English version of a García Márquez novel... like McCall Smith was trying to create a "translated voice," which I find interesting.

To me, it was always simply that McCall Smith had created a new style of detective novel ...and a weird and wonderful one, too.