Book Review: The Secret of N'de

Being an author myself, I hate to write a negative review. However, I think I owe this cautionary note to the parents of voracious readers who don't always have time to pre-read a book before recommending it to their teens.

I've become a little more cautious in approaching our reading. I've been burned a couple of times, regarding book recommendations. I'm learning to consider the source. Not everyone has the same taste. (What a boring world it would be, if they did?)

For example, a friend recommended I read The Time Traveler's Wife.

Now, this friend writes some incredible fiction that she publishes online, and I've greatly enjoyed reading her stories. However, when she recommends books to me, I have to keep in mind that the website we both write for is somewhat censored, in that there are standards and ratings (something like the movie rating system in theaters). There are specific things that are not allowed on that site, which oddly enough allows a certain freedom in reading.

...coming back to my point -- she really enjoyed that book, and I found it was not to my taste. In the reading (and I was not able to finish that book, just could not force myself to keep reading), I remembered that while my friend writes wonderful stories even within constraints, there are times when I've found our conversations about real-life interests disturbing. (Let's face it. There's a lot in real life that can be disturbing.) I still love to read her stories, but I approach book recommendations with some caution.

Lately I've been investigating Christian fantasy, or maybe you'd call it allegory. A lot of teens of my acquaintance have a taste for the genre. Books have been published to feed this appetite, alternatives to secular fantasy that can be disturbingly graphic in depictions of sex and violence. These books are written for the Christian market, many with spiritual themes. Such books include 100 Cupboards, The Light of Eidon, The Bark of the Bog Owl, The King of the Trees, and their sequels. (The books I've named are examples of well-written fiction. I have also read some horrible books that were touted as "the Christian alternative to Harry Potter." I won't dignify them by mentioning their titles here.) The Mirror of N'de was the latest in the Christian fantasy genre to appear on my radar.
 

I just had this niggling need to pre-read it before recommending it to our teens. I'm so glad I did that! Definitely not right for them. They don't need to add those vivid images to their storehouse of nightmares. This morning I am still haunted by some of what I read.

Here is the publisher's description, from Amazon.com:

In the mythical city of N'de lives thirteen-year-old Hadlay and her people, the Ramash. Scorned and abused by the unloving and absent Emperor, the Ramash are poor people, placed second to the ruling class of the Oresed. Young but bold, Hadlay rages against the injustice in her city. When she is chosen for the honor of serving the Prince in the Tower, she hopes to find a way to right the wrong . . . but soon discovers that things are worse than she believed.

And here are some pull-quotes from the back of the book, also from Amazon.com:

"This book is a fine choice for young fantasy readers looking to delve into a creative new allegory with a fascinating storyworld, magic, symbolism, and a few neat surprises."
- Jill Williamson, Christy Award-winning author of the Blood of Kings series.

"Fantasy, by definition, is different. The Mirror of N'de is outside of any labeled box. L.K. Malone has written a surprising book of fun and truth. A must-read for every Christian family."
- Donita K. Paul, author of the DragonKeeper Chronicles.


Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? However, I learned my lesson the last time I gave a book to one of our teens, a book that had been recommended as "well written, and a gripping read." Yes, the book was well-written, and yes, it was a gripping read, so much so that the teen couldn't put it down even as it splashed graphic images across her brain and seared her memory with mental pictures that kept her from sleeping for some time after. I'm so sorry about that. You see, once you read a book, you can't go back to where you were before you read it. It leaves an impression on your heart and your brain.

I stayed up way too late reading this book. I couldn't put it down! It's a book that grabs you, draws you in and keeps you interested, but the evil is so very evil... You know, come to think of it, the Bible has a lot of mention of evil, but not terribly descriptive. For example, Jezebel was thrown down from the window, there's just enough detail to get the gist, but not a whole lot of description. The descriptions in The Mirror of N'de are pretty mild if you're used to watching body-count movies or if you play violent video games, but if you haven't seared your sensibilities and built up mental calluses to depictions of gore, you might find the book disturbing.

(Don't get me wrong. I've been there. In my younger days I enjoyed a "good" body-count movie. Examples I can think of include Speed, the Die Hard series, the Lethal Weapon series, Cliffhanger, Under Siege. I even watched the first in the Alien series, though it scared me spitless. I used to read graphic murder mysteries, too, and books by Stephen King, but it's been a long time since I left those habits and my calluses have worn away.)

I wonder if a book written today has to be graphic in its depiction of evil in order to sell, even to Christians?

Love what you do

"Love what you do." The phrase jumped out at me during this week's discussion at the high school history co-op. (Well, it's "moral philosophy" and not just history, but that's a topic for another day.)

The phrase had made me stop short while listening to Dr. George Grant's lecture on guilds in the Middle Ages, but I'd been busy with something-or-other and didn't really process the thought. I'm often folding laundry or picking up while we're listening to lectures, and the girls are scribbling (or typing) notes, and we don't always pause the lecture to discuss a point.

But here we were in class, and the students were engaged in a lively discussion, along with a couple of the dads who'd come to class to facilitate and guide the discussion time. Love what you do.

All of a sudden, it hit me. The state of our home is a testimony to how much I love (or don't love) what I do.

Don't get me wrong. I say I love what I do. I do love it; I'm privileged to be able to stay at home, to raise my own children rather than turning them over to professional strangers (or strange professionals? ...tongue in cheek; please, hold the rotten tomatoes), to homeschool, with all its many advantages. (And that's a topic for another whole post, or series of posts...)

But I don't do like I love it.

My mom was "stuck" at home. She hated being a homemaker. She was meant for better things. Higher things. She raised her daughters to be professionals. We'd have careers, and we'd make enough money to be able to afford someone else to take care of our homes and our children.

Even though I've chosen home, I'm still following her example, in attitude at least. (Let me just say in her defense that the house I grew up in was well-kept. Not spotless, but the kitchen floor was washed every day, just for one example, and there were never piles of clutter and stuff in the main living areas of the house, and she was always after me to clean my room.)

Love what you do. That's a thought worth pondering, a motto worth adopting. If I were a mantra-chanting type, I think it would make a good one. I have been saying it over to myself periodically through the day, to remind myself where I've chosen my priorities to lie. It's tough to dig out from a lifetime of bad habits. But I think I've found a handle to grab onto.

Eeeew

I was shopping at Target in the girls' clothing. Though we do a lot of thrift store shopping, we still buy a few things new, now and then. It's been my Christmas tradition to buy each of the girls new footie PJs, a present they can open on Christmas Eve. I was so glad to see a goodly supply, and not all of them splattered with peace signs (something that makes the girls cringe -- a peace sign is a reversed cross with broken arms, did you know? Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory is the knowledge that it's an occult symbol. Maybe from Walter Martin's writings? I used to listen to The Bible Answer Man on the radio every day, though I got out of the habit some years ago and don't know if the program still exists. In any event, regarding peace symbols: We try to avoid them. Peace itself is a good thing, if you're talking fruit of the Spirit.).

Anyhow, one of the girls and I were walking down the aisle, exclaiming over cute things. (imagine girlish squeals. well, not quite, but we were having fun enthusing.) I started to remark on something that looked pink and pretty, at first glance... until I realized that the pretty pink decorations on the pale background were in the shape of... have you already anticipated me? am I behind the times? I never would have imagined "girly" decoration to be ... skulls.

I recoiled in horror.

Skulls. Pink, sparkly skulls. On a little girl's shirt. Maybe a dress or jacket? It doesn't matter. It was repellant.

I'm resigned to skulls at Halloween. But for everyday, or maybe even holiday fashion?

*sigh* Even the girls' department is now a minefield where I must tread carefully, simple pleasure set aside, for I must be wary lest I purchase skulls or other symbols of death and hatred all dressed up in pink and sparkles. I'm not exaggerating. That cute little shirt, there, shocked me partly because I was reaching for it to pick it up, take a closer look, maybe even put it in my basket before I realized that those shapes weren't some sort of stylized horses or puppies or kittens. It shocked me because I wasn't on my guard when it came to "pink and pretty" and fairly modest (as opposed to Madonna-clone or Lady Gaga "style" -- and I use that term loosely) clothing.

I'm on my guard now. And shopping is not as fun. (Not that I've ever been that much of a shopper, but I'm even less now. Perhaps my pocketbook will thank me.)

Talk about living in a culture of death.

Update: Saturday night. Just got back from Target once more, getting another footie PJ to complete the set. I was less than thrilled to see that one of the designs on the girls' rack was a blue or blue/green with white skulls. Evidently popular, too, as there was only one of those left on the rack, and quite a few panda bear or monkey or peace symbol designs.

Nasty bug

It's a good thing I had my Gluten-free Tuesday post scheduled to publish itself automatically on Tuesday. You see, on Tuesday I wasn't in any shape even to think about food.

There's a nasty stomach bug going around, and Middlest and I came down with it this week. You're miserable and feverish for a day or two, with tummy-bug symptoms, and then after the fever breaks your stomach remains unavailable to all appearances. (As in, not hungry, knowing you need to eat something but nothing sounds good, nothing tastes good, and nothing feels quite comfortable staying down once you eat it.)

I wonder how long it lasts? It's inconvenient to be less-than-100% during the holiday season. We're not really on holiday yet, either. Midterms are coming up next week and promising to be challenging even for healthy minds in healthy bodies.

At least I don't have to worry about gaining weight from Christmas goodies at present. They don't appeal to me at all.

Nook versus Kindle

It's been a frustrating week.

I was seriously thinking about buying the new Nook Simple Touch on Friday (it was marked down to $79 for a special Friday price). Maybe even two. I took my Nook to Barnes and Noble on Friday afternoon -- I'd promised Middlest that we'd spend a couple hours there, we try to do that once a month or so, to check out the new books. Anyhow, they had this promotion that you could get some free gourmet chocolate if you showed your Nook at the B&N Starbucks on the weekend after Thanksgiving. So Middlest could read for a couple of hours, I could check out children's holiday books for review purposes, I could pick up a Nook (or two) @ $20 off for each one, and I'd get free chocolate.

Kill two birds with one stone, as they say. Maybe a flock of birds. Not that I want to kill birds, mind. I rather like seeing them out the window.

Anyhow (pardon my Monday-morning scatteredness), I came very close to buying at least one more Nook for school purposes. The girls are all over my Nook, constantly begging to read on it. (They love old-fashioned books that come as free downloads, Horatio Alger for instance.) I also bought an ESV Bible back when I first got my Nook, and over the weekend I also bought and downloaded a Strong's Greek and Hebrew dictionary for the Nook. I also discovered how to transfer library books to the Nook. The portable library is growing! Except...

I've been terribly frustrated, though, in looking for a decent Koine New Testament for my Nook. I have a great version on my desktop Kindle reader that I bought from Amazon. For $1.99, it does everything I want it to do. Most importantly, it has all the little markings and doohickeys that we're learning in our Biblical Greek class (accents, mostly).

We're supposed to be reading Greek out of the Bible a little every day as part of our homework, so it really helps to have a Koine Bible. I'd love to have it on the Nook, part of my portable library.

I have spent several hours over the past weeks searching for a Koine Bible that I could use on the Nook. You wouldn't believe all I've tried. I looked for free versions first, of course. They're old texts, evidently digitized using OCR software, and the text shows up on the Nook as gobbledy-gook. I bought a Koine Bible from the B&N Nook store, and yes, all the letters are there, but no accents. I need the accents! I even tried converting the Kindle etext to an EPUB format -- looks fine on the desktop but the Nook doesn't like the looks of it and puts question marks all through the text.

I spent some time at Target on the weekend talking to someone who worked in the electronics section, finding out what she could tell me about Nooks and Kindles (Target sells both). She owns a Kindle, and sang its praises. She also mentioned that for the Kindle (now this is hearsay -- I haven't checked the facts) there are thousands of e-books available, she might even have said tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, it was a large number and I'm somewhat number-challenged. The important thing she said was that Nook readers have only a fraction of that number of titles available.

After my Koine NT search, I'm inclined to believe her.

One reason I was thinking about getting another Nook or two was that I'm told we can share our Nook books between up to six devices all keyed off the same email account.

However, if I can't get the books I need, there's no point.

I noticed that the simplest Kindle is $79, same as that highly touted special Nook sale price at B&N.

If I do manage to scrape together the price of a new e-reader for our homeschool and pleasure reading, it's looking more and more like a Kindle...

Lessons learned

I don't remember his name, but I think of him at this time every year, when the leaves are falling.

He came by with a rake; a boy somewhere around twelve or thirteen, I think. While we almost always rake our own leaves (our small front yard takes about 20 minutes to clear), we were impressed with his entrepreneurial spirit. He was raking lawns at $5 each, he said.

Though money was a little tight (when is it ever not?) we wanted to encourage him, so we agreed, he raked, he got paid.

After that, he came back every week and raked the lawn (our big old trees shed a lot in the fall), collected his $5, and promised to be back. He was faithful, and we were impressed with his efficiency -- he took less than my usual 20 minutes, yet he was thorough.

One day we were heading out the door when he came, so my husband gave him the $5 in advance. He'd been reliable and dependable, after all, and there would be several more weeks of raking that season.

When we came home, the yard was not raked. We never saw the boy again.

For a "free" $5, he gave up at least six times that much in future business (at least from us -- don't know if he worked for neighbors down the block, or not), not to mention the possibility of lawn mowing the next summer, and more raking money the next fall. We knew a man who built a landscaping business starting in much the same way, ending up with a decent full-time income. It's not that the work was all that arduous. He could probably make $15 or $20 an hour, which is more than I made as a temp secretary, if he had a number of lawns lined up going down the block.

But he took his fee in advance and took off.

I wonder if he learned some kind of lesson.

I know we sure did.