Fanfiction: Jane

April Lindner's Jane is a legal fanfiction AU (alternate universe) of Bronte's Jane Eyre, with Jane as a freshman in college left penniless while Rochester is a wild rock star planning his comeback tour. Although Lindner's Jane doesn't have quite the fire of Bronte's, the story still works for me as a thoughtful homage placing many of the same themes in our modern world.

Lindner skips most of Jane's childhood, choosing rather to start as Jane leaves college to find work as a nanny. Her cultural blinders help her -- Rathburn has specifically requested someone who is not a fan. From here on the parallels to the original keep right on track -- the kindly housekeeper, the sweet child with French interests, the strange drunken woman on the forbidden third floor, even the Bianca woman making a play for Rathburn.  A few differences appear -- there is no question that the child is Rathburn's, Jane's uncaring relatives are her siblings, not her cousins, and the saintly St. Johns are not distant relatives.  These were fun to read as I wondered how Lindner would echo the plot; the celebrity rock star status works well as a social divide, and there's a subtle difference in the ploys of a successful photographer (modern Bianca) versus a marriageable heiress (real Bianca).

It's a fun experiment for fans of Jane Eyre, although clearly there isn't much suspense since we know how the story will go. Apparently Lindner is now writing an homage to Wuthering Heights, which isn't quite as tempting since I didn't really like the original. On the other, she did interesting things with Jane Eyre...

I wonder if this counts as literary fiction? It takes place in Connecticut, which I need for my Where Are You Reading challenge.

Lost Kids: Shattered Bonds

Dorothy Roberts' book Shattered Bonds gives a damning description of the foster care system, describing in chilling detail how the government is willing to pay social workers to find and "rescue" neglected children, and then pay again for foster homes, but not to pay assistance to the impoverished parents to help them provide acceptable conditions in the first place. Roberts convincingly explains how the adversarial approach of child welfare followed the acceptance of Black families onto the welfare rolls; instead of supporting white widows heroically bringing up their families suddenly tax payers found themselves bankrolling Black welfare queens and their endless hordes of misused offspring, according to the new story society and the government told itself.

Racism permeates the system throughout, from judging which families need help and which get their children removed (it helps to be white to get help, but Blacks are more likely to have their children yanked). It's harder for Black families to get their children back, both in identical circumstances and because of features in the Black community; social workers tend to tread the more widespread use of relatives for childcare among Black families as evidence of parental neglect. Later, if children in foster care come in contact with the law, at every stage Black youths suffer stronger consequences.

There aren't easy answers; Blacks over representation in poverty means that they will be over represented in child abuse, neglect and other foster child situations. I can't argue that parents strung out on drugs are often dangerous to their children, but the many cases of social worker abuse and insanity make it clear that something is broken.

The book itself is ten years old, which leaves me wondering what has changed in the interval.

Bonus Wife: The Wives of Henry Oades

I really liked the first two thirds of Johanna Moran's The Wives of Henry Oades. The story of a family that ended up multiplied was inspired by a newspaper clipping, but Moran's story slips you inside the lives of Henry and Margaret as they sail for New Zealand with their children. Details such as the interaction with the well meaning and bustling friends also delineate their attitudes and affection for each other, so when they are parted, their worry and faith feel very true.

The plot allows for interesting growth, as Margaret struggles on her own in slavery while Henry fights against despair and finally gives up and moves to America to start a new life, convinced that his family is dead. He eventually marries the very young Nancy to save her, mainly because he sees in her the chance to redo the death of his first wife; instead of dying in a fire, he saves her from one. Yet they come to feel a real affection for each other, one strong enough to handle the shock when Margaret miraculously finds her way to him.

At this point, Moran stops writing the book I wanted her to write. She focuses on the legal problems of the family, as virulent anti-Mormon sentiment rages at the man caught in polygamy. Although the three main characters stay true to character, the other people flatten, from the universally evil neighbors and acquaintances to the silly and petty children. When Moran concentrates on the relationships between Henry and his old and new wives, or even better on the friendship that slowly grows between the two women, the book shines, but I had to force myself to read through the complaints about the justice system or the next turn of obvious cruelty by the system. I give this book high marks for character and emotional truth, but the plot itself played against these strengths.  Of course, I think this part is based on what actually happened, but nobody ever said truth made for a great novel.

Growing Up: A Wizard of Mars

Nina and Kit have worked together for years before Diane Duane's A Wizard of Mars starts off. No longer the youngest, hottest wizards, they are moving up in their hierarchy while also worrying about grades in their more difficult high school classes. Nina's dad expects her to keep track of her younger sister, whose grief over their mother's death manifests itself in losing herself on another planet far far away studying star maintenance.

Kit wrangles with his sisters, the one at home shameless borrowing all wizardly perks to help her shop, and the one coming back from college still unsure whether his powers stem from Satanic bonds or not. But he's distracted by the lure of Mars, a research project that calls to him more and more directly. When Mars tests him with a series of projections based on Earth fantasies about the Red Planet, I was very glad that my recent viewing of John Carter helped me keep up. (I had a great time and I recommend the movie if you can still find it somewhere.)

Most of all, both kids are growing up. Everyone has been teasing them about being boyfriend and girlfriend for so long, but would it be so bad? Both approach this delicate question from their own perspective, and Kit gets a bit distracted when a gorgeous Martian princess decides he's her long lost lover. Oh, and also the Earth almost gets destroyed, but that's really just par for the course for these two.

Duane's Young Wizard books (this is the ninth) are fundamentally about real kids who just happen to have their own connection to the magic of the universe. The magic parts seem fuzzy; the books always manage to have the spell to do what needs to be done, but the kid parts are solid, so that the problems they face in the real world help keep their wizardly dilemmas important as well.

Religion in May: Neither kid draws on religious beliefs for strength, although magic involves a good One and the evil Deceiver. Kit's family attends church as a matter of course. So it's not about religion, but it's there positively in the background.

May Is Religion Month: Child of Dandelions

The cover of Shenaaz Nanji's Child of Dandelions gives very little hint about the contents of the book, and since it's been over two years since I placed it on my to-read list, I had to just trust long-ago-me and start reading. The bangles around the wrist of the girl on the cover belong to Sabine, an adolescent in 1972 Uganda, soon after the rise of Idi Amin. My memories of history in the '70s told me that he was a bad guy, but they don't actually get more nuanced that that.

The tension in this YA/older middle grade book grew quickly, as Sabine hears that the Indian community will be expelled. She and her father consider themselves Ugandan citizens and assume that the decree doesn't apply to them, but I knew they were underestimating the situation. Nanji does a good job of showing the complexity of the situation through the connections between Sabine and her ethnically diverse circle, starting with her best friend Zena, ethnically close to Amin who trusts him to restore the country and including Indian relatives and store keepers as well as the family servants, all African.

Things rapidly get worse for Sabine and her family and the mother begs to leave immediately. Secure in their wealth and citizenship, Sabine and her father laugh at the crazy orders of the government, but the danger quickly mounts as army officers shoot people at traffic stops and burst into shops demanding bribes and respect. The disparity between Sabine's wealth and Zena's poverty shows how resentment grew, and even though Sabine learns how her family has discriminated against blacks (the servants eat off separate plates, she never thought to ask after the chauffeur's real name or family), her small steps do nothing to avert society's plummet of a cliff.  Although the worst atrocities happen off-stage, Sabine sees the loss of all safety and barely manages to escape with the her life and her little brother.

I enjoyed the taste of events almost unknown to me, and the story should be exciting enough to get my seventh grader to read it as well, but the cover will be a tough sell, since the passive and relaxed arms show nothing of the dangers and actions taken by the main character throughout.

I've just read some discussion of religion in YA books; despite the prevalence of vampires and demons, apparently very few books actually show kids practicing religion. So I thought for this month I'd pay attention to see it that was try for the books I read, especially the YA and children's book.  In this one, although Sabine is a practicing Muslim, she doesn't spend much time thinking about her religion or praying; she respects the Hindu faith of her mother's friends, many of whom do pray for help. So it's part of the background but not in the forefront of her concerns.

Mean Kid: Spellbound

My family and I had enjoyed the first Book of Elsewhere, so when I saw Jacqueline West next book, Spellbound, I brought it home.  My seventh grader grabbed it and read it, and then eventually returned it to me.  The fifth grader avoided it, but he gets stressed if he has a to-read pile greater than one so he resists most of my suggestions.

I finally got a chance at it, but I confess I didn't like it as much as the first one.  It mostly isn't the book's fault -- the characters are still interesting, with the children prominent and kindly adults just fluttering in the background, but I've had a run of books with the main characters behaving badly and it's starting to annoy me. Olive, our heroine, spends most of this book being selfish and mean-spirited, partly because she falls under the influence of an evil book, although perhaps it's more accurate to say she leaps energetically into the influence; she certainly makes very few attempts to recover or struggle against it. If the book was so powerful, then she was boringly passive, and if it wasn't, she was complicit.

I have high standards for my heroes -- although they don't always have to make the right decisions, they should be aware of what right and wrong are, and should prefer to do right, even if particular circumstances make that too difficult right now. I'm glad our current car book is a Penderwick tale, because at least they admit when they besmirch their honor and don't spend paragraphs whining their way to a justification.

I'll still look for the next book in this series, but I hope Olive pulls her socks up for it.  X has no such qualms -- he thought it was a great book and is astonished that P didn't read it. His only complaint is that the third book isn't out yet.

Girl Hero: Claudette Colvin Twice Towards Justice

Rosa Parks is the famous name associated with the Montgomery bus boycott and the breaking of segregation, but she wasn't the only hero.  Phillip Hoose's Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice tells the story of Colvin's court cases, her life, and the blow to segregation in his oversized book for child audiances.  I approached figuring I probably knew all the facts and would appreciate the presentation and found that there was quite a lot I didn't know.

I had known that Rosa Parks wasn't the first to refuse to stand up; I hadn't realized that Colvin not only was the first to fight her arrest through the courts, but also went back and was one of the four names in the constitutional challenge that legally broke the back of segregation.  The bus company didn't fold in the face of the boycott -- the courts ordered them to cease segregation due to a court case that Colvin testified in to great effect. However, as an underaged single mother whose child was suspiciously "light," nobody really wanted to use her as the front of any publicity.

The epilogue was deeply moving -- pictures of Colvin speaking in front of students at Booker T Washington high school, the school which had expelled her the year after her first court case because she was pregnant.  It's a reminder that not only did she fight segregation twice in the courts, she also had to fight prejudice twice -- once as an African American, and once as a woman.

I'm posting this on a Monday so I can take part in Non-fiction Monday, hosted by The Children's War.

Kids in Space: Orbital Resonance

Jo Walton on tor.com recommended Orbital Resonance; in fact she recommended most of John Barnes's work, although she warned that much of it doesn't make for pleasant reading.  As I'm now digging up my TBR list I'm actually following through on many of her picks, and she's a good match for me.  This book fits in the genre slot as some of Heinlein juveniles and the response books to him, such as Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage -- kids in space grow up and show us their society, especially the bits that haven't firmed up yet.

Orbital Resonance takes place in a world gone seriously wrong -- plagues and environmental destruction have left the remnants of humanity huddled on a few domed cities, while hastily built giant asteroid space ships orbit between Earth and Mars providing the only hope of enough resources to keep humanity alive.  The adults all grew up in the collapsing societies of Earth, but our narrator, Melpomene, grew up in the ship and finds all the news stories about dire conditions on Earth remote and boring.  She's more concerned with her school work, which involves lots of cooperative grading and consensus building, the social ramifications of the new kid's arrival, and her brother's performance in the prestigious ship-surface races.

I like the mix of story and world building - as Walton points out, it's hard to notice the grim truth of the society since Melpomene's acceptance and approval of it resounds through the narrative.  All the children have been raised to value service to the ship and each other; competition is valued as a way to improve performance but trying to rise by pushing down other people is abhorred.  The adults in fact deliberately set out to create children steeped in these values, but they don't really understand what a society formed by the kids would look like.  Orbital Resonance catches this society as it emerges, and gives readers a chance to judge the parents who set it up.

Temple Politics, Texas Style: Which Big Giver Stole the Chopped Liver?

Sharon Kahn's Which Big Giver Stole the Chopped Liver showed up on my TBR list, although I haven't the foggiest memory of how it got there, or who recommended it.  Perhaps I saw the title and found it outlandish enough to investigate.  Of course, it turns out to be one in a series of cosy mysteries featuring Ruby, the rabbi's wife, although technically she's no longer the rabbi's wife since she's a widow and they found a replacement.  Now I think she does something involving a bagel restaurant.

Anyway, she's still friends or enemies with most of the bigwigs at the temple, including the new rabbi and both the major donors, who are throwing a huge reunion event as part of an enormous fund-raising event. Most of the attention is on Ruby's life, her friendships, courtships, and family, with occasional glances at the murder victim found face down on the chopped liver platter.  Ruby's courtships help with these glances, since one beau is the detective and the other a hungry news reporter.

As a cosy, it was entertaining, with small but sharp glimpses into Ruby's microsociety.  As a mystery, it lacked suspense, because even though this book is the middle of a series it was obvious which characters would be coming back and so were ineligible as suspects.  So the arrow of guilt was fixed before any clues appeared, and the final action sequence was as incoherent as it was illogical.  I probably won't seek out the rest of the books about Ruby, but if I find myself trapped in a hotel room with them I won't complain.

Replaceable Dads: The Romeo and Juliet Code

I admit that the cover of Phoebe Stone's Romeo and Juliet Code baffles me; the modern day sneakers have absolutely nothing to do with this story of a British refugee staying with her distant relatives in Maine.  But I have a fondness for WWII stories, so I started to get into the story of the ever-so-English girl adjusting to life without her parents and with her quirky Maine family.  But little things kept niggling at me.

First, the twee sound of Felicity/Fliss's voice.  I'm sure there really were English kids who constantly said "ever so" and other huge sign posts so nobody forgot they were British, but they tend not to appear in the British books about World War II that I read.  Also, she immediately gets a crush on the only local boy, Derek, and I find crushes ever so terribly boring. But in spite of all this the book moves along well, with a touch of mystery as the kids try to figure out the secrets the adults keep and meanwhile Fliss finds that she now has a real family, unlike when she lived with her parents who of course neglected her because her mother worked.

But the end really bugged me.  I can accept that Felicity expected all the adults to keep secrets from her; after all, no one even told her in even the vaguest terms why her parents never wrote, so of course she didn't bear a grudge about this even though I did.  But the final secret, the one that made Felicity radiant with joy that she truly belongs in the family, was one that I would expect most kids to receive with a bit of ambivalence -- her uncle is her biological father.  When Fliss receives this news with unmitigated delight, I lost all respect for her.   And I guess now we are supposed to hope that her parents get killed in action, so that there's no awkward moment when she has to go back to living with her mother and her dad? Or maybe since Fliss is also the kind of kid who had no objection to this new family saddling her with the nickname Flissy this sort of emotional confusion would be beyond her depth.

This book is already overdue, so I can't offer it to my kids.  I suspect they'd like it more than I did, though.

Ugly Lies: The Big Kahn

I actually remember how this book arrived on my TBR list -- unshelved comic has a Friday feature of recommending books they've been reading with explanations of why it's a good read.  Their enthusiasm often lures me into seeking out their choices such as The Big Kahn, a graphic novel by Neil Kleid and Nicolas Cinquegrani.

Rabbi Kahn, nee Donnie Dobbs, died as the respected head of a New York Jewish temple, leaving behind a grieving widow, a rabbinical son who expected to inherit the temple, a selfish and rebelling daughter, and a younger son who never quite fit in.  He apparently figured that his love and affection only lasted until death, because in his will he revealed that he was as Jewish as the pope and had kept up the lie ever since he fell in love with his wife while running a criminal scam with his brother.  The family found out the story at the funeral before the will was read, where Kahn/Dobbs' brother showed up and roughly revealed the truth.  This is a great scene that first reveals the brother's depth of faith and the sister's self-centered nature before cracking open the lie of their father's life.

The knowledge tears apart the children; the older son finds his faith in God teetering with his faith in his father, while the temple he grew up in firmly rejects him.  The daughter finds justification for her wild ways but the sight of her brother's pain brings her back towards piousness, and the younger son finds genetic backing for his love of cards and gambling.  The pictures blend well with the text, although again I find my cluelessness with comics a hindrance -- I kept missing flashbacks or confusing the daughter with her roommate.  It's an interesting, adult take on a comic book where the art moves the story along quickly so the book has the strength of a novella, with the complex emotions of a family built on sand.

So Then: With a Single Spell

Years and years ago (well, in 2010) I saw Jo Walton's review of Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar books on tor.com, and she made them sound light and fun so I stuck them on my new Goodreads TBR list, which I then ignored for ages until the past few months when I started more systematically working my way through it.  My goal is to be only 12 months behind, but I'm about twelve months behind that goal.  This requested-reading fast probably won't help much, either.

Anyway, Walton is right in that With a Single Spell is a frothy read that is easily sipped in a few hours.  It's about a young man figuring out how to have make a living without any skills beyond the single spell he acquired in his short apprenticeship, preferably a living that doesn't require a lot of work because he admits he's rather lazy.  It's the kind of book where you just hang out and see what happens to a character for a while; there doesn't seem to be a unifying thematic arc where the writer ties up stuff with a bow -- if we are lucky (if the author does it right), we meet up with the character just when things start getting interesting, and then leave when we aren't terribly worried about anything that is still going on.  Watts-Evans does it just right, with Tobas traveling a bit to show off his world and society, worrying just enough about what to do that I saw what the options are in his society.

When Stephen Gould does this, the characters usually display impressive ingenuity and intelligence, using the doo-dad or spell to maximum capability.  Watt-Evan's protagonist isn't as ambitious, being willing and persistent but not especially perceptive.  On the other hand, the book itself is perceptive and snarky and enjoys puncturing cliches about fantasy worlds with wizards and dragons and princesses.  If I hadn't waited to read this book until it was overdue, I'd offer to my fantasy-fan seventh grader to read; maybe he'll have a chance at the next one.  I've stuck some more of Watt-Evans' books on the TBR list.

Self-Definition: The Man Who Would Be King

Recognizable as the title of both a Rudyard Kipling short story and a movie derived from it, The Man Who Would Be King by Ben Macintyre traces the life of Josiah Harlan, who probably inspired Kipling's story.  Harlan left his Pennsylvania Quaker home in the 1820's in search of adventure, and he certainly found it, wandering first through India and then disappearing into the wilds of Afghanistan to involve himself in the civil wars and international maneuvering familiar to me as the Great Game that Kim plays in Kipling's later novel.

Macintyre became interested in the topic when he found hints of Harlan during journalistic trips to Kabul, but little information remained until a lost manuscript of Harlan's planned book about his exploits surfaced.  Using this as the basis and searching out related texts, Macintyre meticulously traces Harlan's transformations from sailor to "doctor" (well, he read a few medical texts) to soldier (he was a medical officer for a few months) to adventurer and king.  Unfortunately, most of the excitement is left to the imagination of the reader -- Macintyre describes the situations and players with exacting detail, but rarely brings the events to life.  I found myself slogging through chapters, but when I stopped at the end to review what happened, I'd realize that Harlan had again faced more stunning adventures and dangers.

I'm not sure how this book ended up on my TBR list, but I'm glad I read it, even though actually reading it wasn't nearly as much fun as I hoped.  I'm clearly a very shallow person.

High and Tight: Absolutely American

Once again I have no idea how this book wondered into my TBR list, but I found David Lipsky's Absolutely American engrossing.  Lipsky spent four years embedded into West Point, watching the kids in their classes, training, and career planning.  His last year included the 9/11 attacks, which put everything the cadets did into a vivid reminder of the reason the country has military academies.

Lipsky focuses both on superior and lagging examples of West Point virtues.  The worst one spends four years dancing on the edge of dismissal, coming within seconds of failing various physical tests and never moving much past probation in academics.  The only lesson he seems to absorb into his bones is the creed that a cadet never gives up, although the various officers who practically beg him to resign don't see the benefit of that.  Meanwhile other cadets also wrestle with the meaning of duty, of what it means to commit to the army, of whether they are trading a free education for five years of duty or whether they intend a lifetime of service.

I wouldn't have made it a week at West Point, so it's an alien world that I'll only see through a writer's eyes, and Lipsky's descriptions made it seem vivid and clear.  He also seemed to keep himself out of the way more; he reported on kids who never doubted that their lives belonged in the military and on people clearly there for the career opportunities and cheap education with equal respect.  This contrasted with Army 101, where the author never seemed to get past his bemusement that anyone could choose the military for any reason other than to escape a gun-torn ghetto.

Library Returns Today!

A shelf of books had to go back to the library today because of tedious things like due dates and other people's holds.  And then I went off to Utah for vacation.  But here are some swift reactions to the books they got back.

Book From My TBR List:

• Don't Be Such a Scientist, Randy Olson.  Written by a marine biologist turned semi-successful movie producer, this polemic against boring attempts at persuasion looks at traditional ways of conveying information and laughs with scorn.  Too often scientists use the same protocols for public speaking that they do for research proposals, sometimes salted with contempt for their audience and general arrogance.  Olson suggests this may not be as effective as they seem to think.

Books From Reading My Library:

• Border Crossing, Maria Colleen Cruz.  Twelve year old Cesi Alvarez would be a good friend to Keeper, since they both have the common sense of a newt.  Apparently no one ever told her that Mexico is a different country than the US.  It tries to be a cute story about a girl understanding her heritage, but it relies heavily on willful and strident stupidity from Cesi.  Luckily she sits next to her long-lost cousin on the train, much as a mermaid steers Keeper home.  But it completes North America for my Global Challenge!
• Liberty Porter: First Daughter, Julia Devillers.  Nine year old Liberty looks forward to her new life in the White House, but first she has to straighten some things out with her dad's PR tool.  Cute and bouncy story that I think my fifth grader would like.  Also doubles as a location book for Washington DC, SCORE!

State Books:

• How Tia Lola Ended Up Starting Over, Julia Alvarez.  A blended family starts a B&B (or C&C&C) in VERMONT.  I liked the way the two families and their extended friends interacted and the conflict from the mysterious ill-wisher kept things interesting.  The sudden U-turn in the last few pages threw me violently out -- why suddenly tell me this is a book from a library and the characters aren't real?  I mean, I KNOW that...
• Popcorn Days and Buttermilk Nights, Gary Paulsen.  City living has poisoned Carley, so that he intermittently erupts in meaningless acts of violence.  His mom ships him to northern MINNESOTA to spend time in the country, where he learns about beauty and hard work and grinding poverty that gets alleviated with genius and more hard work.

Vampire Literature Books:

• The Vampire Defanged, Susannah Clements.  A review of vampire literature from Dracula through Sookie Stackhouse, looking at how Christian themes first dominated the literature and then gradually become replaced with more secular interests, paralleling the change from horrible monsters to sexy man-friends with an edge.  Clements thinks the genre would benefit from a return to a harder edge, which would also allow the Christian themes more room to thrive.

Books From My Favorite Authors

• I read Tempering of Men by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear just as the news of Anne McCaffrey's death come out, and it's an interesting homage to the Dragonrider books.  These men bond with their wolves, but the wolves are the dominant end of the equation, and the men adjust their lives to accommodate the wolves more than vice versa.  Sex gets complicated, for example.  And just as in later Pern books, these men are also facing the results of success -- they have beaten back the main threat that led to the pairings, so are they even necessary?  And what happens if the man you love doesn't love you back?

Space Wars: Pluto Confidential

The tensions over Pluto's demotion still run high in many hearts, although luckily violence rarely breaks out.  Laurence A Marschall and Stephen F. Maran sit on opposite sides of the Pluto-Planet debate, but still managed to amicably write Pluto Confidential, a history of planet definitions and controversy.  After starting with a description of the organization and meeting that created headlines with its Plutonic decision, they back up into a description of the discovery of each planet and how the planets got names and reputations.

Other planets have been listed and then demoted, stripped of the right to call themselves planets.  I like using terms like that, because after all, every planet is just a hunk of matter spinning around in space where no one can hear it scream, let alone complain about naming rights.  Hunks of matter don't have volition, let alone vocabularies!  Anyway, the sun used to be a planet, but when scientists established that there had been a heretical misunderstanding and it didn't revolve around the earth, it was slapped with the label "star" and told to hush up.  The moon also lost planetary status, but it took it well.

Then new planets were found -- Uranus (aka Herschall), Ceres, Neptune (or Leverrier), Pallas, Vesta, Flora, Iris, Vulcan -- what? what? I'm not listing them in order from the sun, just in order that I remember them.  Some of them later got transmogrified into asteroids, and Vulcan was relabeled a figment of the imagination.  Yes, Vulcan disappeared completely without survivors.  And then Pluto.

I like reading about the partnership between mathematicians and astronomers, because mathematicians are just cool.  Gauss figured out the orbit of Pallas with basically two sightings and a paper clip.  John Adams sent accurate predictions of Neptune's orbit to Britain's Royal Astronomer, who ignored him because Adams had a proletarian accent, thereby ceding Neptune's discovery to the FRENCH.  Oops.

Why are Marschall and Maran on opposite camps? Marschall is comfortable with the IAU's definition of planets, which acknowledges Pluto's non-unique Kuiper belt status.  Maran points out that the main reason there the IAU has a definition of "planet" is to figure out how to name new objects, which is not an issue with Pluto, and that astronomers never get the final word on what to call things anyway -- things end up with the name everyone uses, which is why no one has heard of Hershall or Leverrier and why Jupiter's moons aren't named after the Medici's.  Both are right, and both agree that the name isn't really that important but wow isn't it great that people get so excited about this?  Science is fun!

Electric Wind: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba grew up fearing magic and ghost planes while working on his father's farm.  He planned to start working hard at school as soon as he made the secondary grades, but unfortunately this meant his grades on the selection exam were poor and he was assigned to a low rated school.  Since Malawi is a poor country that struggles to supply even the top rated classes, this meant few textbooks and crumbling facilities.  When famine struck the farmers in 2002, school fees became impossible as the family gave up eating more than once a day or the chance of growing a cash crop.

 Refusing to relinquish his dreams of an education, William turned to a local library in hopes of learning at home until he could return to classes.  Finding books on electricity, he decided to build a windmill to provide power to light his house, and eventually to bring irrigation to his family's farm.  Enduring ridicule as he picked through junk yards and trash heaps for materials (even a few feet of copper wire overpowered his minuscule budget) he slowly assembled both the windmill (never before seen in his village) and the generator to transform the wind into electricity.  Soon his household was the only one with a steady source of light, and his cell phone charger because a neighborhood attraction.  Fame and (very modest) fortune followed a TED conference appearance; the last few chapters detail the difference this has brought to his family and village and prospects.

Brian Mealer helped write The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (William barely spoke English as he taught himself physics from a British science book), but the voice sounds authentically young.  Brian's website talks about how he worked to bring William's story to life, even mentioning how he took notes and charged his laptop with the titular windmill. The story of William's Edisonian efforts to find scraps to fit the needs of his invention is inspiring and real, making look at my own slacker kids with jaded eyes.  (Good thing I can't look at myself with those eyes!)

Can't See Me: Dazzled and Deceived

How does camouflage work, and who invented it?  Is a history of camouflage a military history or a Darwinian narrative of biology and genetics?  Well, if Peter Forbes writes that history (which he did in Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage), it's both.

He traces the discovery of butterfly mimicry and its importance in the development of the theory of evolution, from Darwin's ideas through the controversies of the 1800's and early 1900s, and then turns to the artists who pioneered the ideas of camouflage in World War I.  From there he moves back and forth between soldiers, artists and scientists, following the various attempts at human and vehicle disguise through World War II into the modern day, the fight for precedence and credit for that work, and the theories and counter-theories of animal appearance as the understanding of genetics deepened.

Forbes isn't afraid of going deep into a topic.  The chapters on genetics worry at individual chromosome traits; chapters on naval painting trace which committee listened to which similarly declaiming expert and who officially gets credit for each new technique.  Sometimes the crannies he delves into leave me skimming, while other times I'm willing to follow his interest every step and hope he keeps drilling down.  It's a strange mix of a wide subject, which indicates a more popular touch, and a willingness to bore down into the fine details of the topics of each chapter.  Mostly it works, although I doubt my seventh grader would be interested enough to stick with it.