Death of a Schoolgirl by Joanna Campbell Slan

This book is a continuation of "Jane Eyre", one of my all-time favorite classics.  Jane has given birth to a son, and is very happy in her marriage to Rochester.  But his ward,Adele, who is attending a private school in London, writes a strange letter, and Jane is sent to find out what is going on.  Of course, there's a big mystery - well not really, it's actually a little mystery but the author drags it out like crazy and by about 2/3 of the way through you're just crazy for it to be over.

No one does Jane Eyre like Charlotte Bronte, I guess.  I did like The Flight of Gemma Hardy, though, which is a re-writing of Jane's story - this is a continuation.  Two stars.....

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh ✔✔✔

This is the story of a young woman who, because she was taken away from her mother at a very young age, is not able to form relationships. She's gone through many foster homes and is usually removed from most of them because of her behaviour, until she comes to live with Elizabeth.  Early on, the reader knows that she has not continued to live with Elizabeth because on her 18th birthday when the book begins, she becomes homeless.  However, she has developed a close relationship and understanding of flowers, and it is this that ultimately - but not without lots of hurdles along the way - saves her.

This was a quick read and entertaining enough.  The best parts are the flowers, and their meanings, and at the end of the novel there's a dictionary of flowers with their meanings.  For example, red carnations mean "my heart breaks", daisies mean "cheerfulness". Holly means "foresight".
Roses:  orange is "fascination",  pink is "grace", red is "love", white is "a heart unacquainted with love" and yellow is "infidelity"  Hmmm - I love yellow roses!  Who am I being unfaithful to, I wonder?

An Unquenchable Thirst by Mary Johnson ✔✔✔✔

I heard Mary Johnson interviewed on Tapestry and decided I would enjoy reading her story. Mary Johnson spent 20 years as a nun in the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded and led by Mother Teresa.  It's sub-titled: "one woman's extraordinary journey of faith, hope and clarity".

It was an unrelenting 20 years of following The Rules as laid down by Mother - as she was called - sisters were not allowed to even touch each other, they lived in poverty as they lived in community , worked long, hard hours, and were told that suffering endeared them even more to Jesus.

Sister Donata - the name Mary was given as a novice - finally left in 1997, just before Mother died.  She had been given some authority over the years, but could never reconcile herself to The Rules and their harshness, even though she "took the discipline and chains" every day, since she believed they made her a better nun.  Despite her many contributions to the order, she was never thanked, and very late in the story, she reveals that Mother never once even called her by name.

Here are some quotes and such that really struck me:

Mother Teresa wore shoes that were several sizes too small for her.  She believed that by doing this, she pleased God and saved souls "I couldn't think of any time Jesus deliberately tried to make life harder for the sake of making it harder"

Sister Dolorosa, the novice mistress, calling out in the night: "I need a man.  I need a man"

Sister Donata was constantly reminded that her doubts and questions, even her dreams, were the devil's work. She would double the strokes of discipline and the hours she wore chains.

There were lots of interesting stories in this book - and people - Father Tom, with whom Mary had a very close personal relationship, Sister Niobe, who was a sexual predator, Sister Frederick who was as nasty as could be all the time, and even Mother herself, who visited quite frequently.  Mary was mostly stationed in Italy, incidentally.

Now, Mary lives in the US, has married, and never goes to church.  "The stories about God no longer ring true...physics and literature and music feel so much more honest than theology.....I've learned to be content with mystery, that the universe and its secrets excite me.... Living mindfully, trying to do good while avoiding harm, works better than keeping the Rules ever did".

There is an extensive video on Mary Johnson on You Tube, and her website, www.anunquenchablethirst.com is very interesting.

See also her "dare to be different" meditation at Location 7427 on my Kindle.  She wrote this after she was condemned by other sisters for holding a young nun who had suffered some mental problems.

The Secret Piano by Zhu Xiao-Mei ✔✔✔✔✔

Zhu Xiao Mei was born in post-war China to middle-class parents.  Taught first by her mother , she showed unusual talent and was just 10 yrears old when she began intensive studies at the Beijing Conservatory of Music.  In 1966, when she was 17 Mao's Cultural Revolution began and life changed forever. Her family members were scattered and sent to prison or labor camps and three years later, Xiao-Mei was sent to a work camp in Mongolia where she spent the next five years in horrific living conditions.  She - like all the others there - were brainwashed and she truly believed she was helping the Revolution by informing on her prison mates, renouncing her family, and submitting to self-criticism, a very important aspect of life in the prison.  But still she kept her passion for music, and when the Revolution finally ended, it was her piano and her music that helped her to heal.

She eventually fled to Hong Kong, from there to the US, where she found it very difficult to live and function, although she had a wonderful piano professor.  She then went to Paris, where she still lives.

Her philosophy of music is all tied in with her way of living - Taoism is very strong here.  I downloaded her recording of the Goldberg Variations and it is truly amazing.  She's a very inspirational woman.

I downloaded this book because it was cheap and also as a further study towards our Book Club theme of China from 1885 to the present.  I didn't expect it to be so musically inspirational! As a matter of fact, after I read Part One I fooled around with the idea of not continuing, but the remainder of the book was even more interesting.

The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay ✔✔✔✔

Now this one I really enjoyed!  I read The Birth House by the same author, so I snatched this one up when I dropped into the library last week.

The Virgin Cure is set in New York City in 1871, and the narrator is Moth, the daughter of a gypsy and a father who early on deserted the family.  When she is 12, Moth is "sold" to a Mrs. Wentworth  and becomes a lady's maid, which basically means she has to endure regular beatings and humiliations at Mrs. Wentworth's hands.  After fleeing the Wentworth mansion, and failing to find her mother, Moth becomes homeless and then is taken to Miss Everett's home and begins training to become a whore.

The Virgin Cure refers to a myth among men of riches at the time who suffered from syphilis and believed that deflowering a virgin would cure them.  When this happened, the young girl often died a painful death from syphilis herself.

This was a very colorful story - the mansions, vaudeville theatres, the back alleys of New York, the Bowery and all.  It's a good recommendation for our Mother-Daughter theme as well - despite the fact that her mother rarely held her, that she exploited her and finally sold her then disappeared herself - Moth truly loves her mother and stays in a terrible situation simply because she doesn't want to disappoint her mother.

Hangman's Blind by Cassandra Clark ✔✔

I downloaded this title to my Kindle because it was a mystery about a medieval nun named Hildegard - sounded interesting.  There's a fair amount of description about life in those times - castles, convents,abbeys, small villages,festivals, jousts and all - and that was quite interesting, and the mystery itself was intruiging enough to keep me reading, although I really wasn't terribly  taken with the novel on the whole. As I write this, I'm not even sure who the murderer was, and I don't care!

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See ✔✔✔✔

I copied this summary from Book Browse
Lisa See continues the story of sisters Pearl and May from Shanghai Girls, and Pearl's strong-willed nineteen-year-old daughter, Joy. 

Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, and anger at her mother and aunt for keeping them from her, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father - the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the communist regime. 

Devastated by Joy's flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy's and Pearl's separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China's history threatens their very lives. 

Acclaimed for her richly drawn characters and vivid storytelling, Lisa See once again renders a family challenged by tragedy and time, yet ultimately united by the resilience of love.


I found this a little slow-going at first, and somewhat unbelievable - we're not told why Joy suddenly flies to Hong Kong to eventually enter Red China, only that there has been a big upset between Pearl and May, at which time Joy discovers that May is her real mother, not Pearl, who is in fact her aunt.  Upon arriving in Shanghai, it takes Joy all of 30 minutes to find Z.G.!  Certainly Joy is quite idealistic - a typical 19 year old who has a high opinion of herself and refuses to listen to common sense, but we see as the novel moves on why she was presented this way in the beginning.


Her experiences at the Green Dragon commune are horrific - the constant loudspeakers spouting out propoganda, the communal living and social interaction.  Oh, I forgot to mention when Joy arrives in Shanghai the immigration officer throws out her bras - they are considered a Western abomination!


Then there's Mao's Great Leap Forward, how everything has to be "faster, bigger, better" than the enemies', specifically the USA, and how this results in a terrible famine where the families at the commune are restricted to 1/4 of one person's ration to feed the whole family, how they eat leaves, roots, rats, mice  anything to stay alive and of course many of them die terrible deaths.


Lisa See writes well and thoroughly and I ended up learning a lot from this novel.  Our Book Club theme for September is China from 1885 to the present, and this will certainly be part of that discussion.