Entertainment for the Whole Family

Book Review: You'll Like It Here (Everybody Does) by Ruth White

The Blues are a typical American family. Mom is a single parent, a university professor who really wants to do the best by her kids. Her father, who everyone calls Gramps, likes to paint and does his best to fill in the gap left by his late son-in-law. The children, Meggie and David, like going to school and making friends. They live on a small farm in North Carolina, grow some of their own food -- life is good.

Good, but not perfect. The Blues aren't from around here. Like many Americans, English is their second language. And its possible they are not in this country legally. They came to the U.S. seeking refuge; not political asylum but ecological asylum. The environment in their native land is actually dangerous to their health. Oh, and sometimes their hair turns blue.
The Blues REALLY aren't from around here.

In You'll Like It Here (Everybody Does), Ruth White puts us into the lives of aliens not just from another country, but from another world. In doing so she gives us some basic lessons in tolerance and cultural awareness, and a view of an alternative world where uniformity is literally the rule.

Forced by an unruly mob to flee their comfortable North Carolina lifestyle, the Blues end up in Fashion City, a town in a parallel America. Everyone likes Fashion City, or so it seems. The 'Fathers' provide everything: housing, jobs, security. The price is conformity and the sacrifice of those basic rights that even the alien Blues regard as ... well, inalienable.

Author Ruth White confesses, "This book is unlike anything else I've written." It is unlike anything else I have read. While it contains thematic links to adult works ranging from Stranger in a Strange Land to 1984, it does it in a way accessible to kids, using emotions and ideas my 12 year-old daughter could understand. Without being preachy, You'll Like It Here underscores the true value of friendship, loyalty, and individuality through the eyes of a child, and reminds us as parents how simple yet profound those truths really are.

The Loneliness of Being Human

Book Review: Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes

It actually takes more skill to write a good short story than one might think. It takes a fair amount of linguistic skill to pack a complete story into a small space. It is not simply a matter of condensing a novel, a la "Reader's Digest"; such stories read like book reports and are about as enlightening. Other authors appear to simply lift a chapter from an incomplete novel, starting you off in the middle of a story and then leaving you there as well.

I suppose the best analogy is that if a novel is the equivalent of a full color oil painting, then the short story is a sketch; all the main points are there - the subject is clear, but the background details are left to the reader's mind to fill in. The rest of the picture is suggested, but not fully drawn.

Barbara the Slut and Other People supplies several examples of short story writing at its best - if not yet at a master level then certainly a skilled apprentice. We are presented with ten sketches of individuals, mostly young women, who are doing their best to cope with the demands of the lives that they find themselves in. In some cases these are the results of choices they have made, and in others simply the circumstances of life.

In either case, the subjects of Ms. Holmes' literary efforts must make the same choice we all must make: accept their lives as they stand, or make an attempt to change them. Therein lies the crux of the human dilemma, the "to be or not to be" that is the source of, as Ms. Holmes puts it, "the loneliness of being human." For all the guidance we may get, for all of the well-meaning advice from family and friends and books, it falls upon each of us individually to make that decision.

Despite this common theme, the examples in Barbara the Slut are as different as they can be, providing a cross section of individuals from various backgrounds, and they each deal with their individual circumstances in individual ways. A solid debut work.