reading notes

by Brady Udall
ISBN: 9780393062625

This giant sprawling novel (it goes on for well over five hundred pages) should be ridiculous on its face: a lonely polygamist? Really? That the blurb on the back cover seems to give too much away (grief, an affair, yes the main character is going to literally be a polygamist) doesn’t really help matters much.

Except. Except the name of the author is Brady Udall. He wrote The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, which I loved so much I’d read any book with Udall’s name on the spine.

It would be easy to think I’d have no reason to like this book, this giant polygamist Mormon family. These characters are just so… different, strange… so (and here Brady works his magic) just like real people.

The surprise for me was in how normal the characters’ lives could feel. Because if we’re honest, we can admit that normal can mean lost or lonely or struggling or wishing to be saved, to be a hero, be noticed, and have somebody love you.

Yes, there’s poverty, the privation not privacy in the children’s lives, the baffling choices that go into being a plural wife, and yet Udall kept me turning pages. I kept kept turning pages, getting involved, even though it was a train wreck, I always knew it would be a train wreck, how could it be anything else?

On one level, of course this story is unbelievable, with its classroom-sized group of siblings, brothel construction, the dark obsessions of a misunderstood boy, and a seemingly evil ostrich. Only it is believable, oddly so, because as you read, you recognize the bits that are about any life, and you identify with those feelings, and not the parts that are most crazy and different.

Who doesn’t recognize — because you’ve been there or been struggling with someone who is in that space — the craving for someone to tell you what to do, even when the person calling the shots is supposed to be you? Who hasn’t worried about making excuses or making compromises?

So the book is big and rambling (like the Richard family) and their choices can seem mystifying, and there’s a sense that not as many make it out as want (need?) to, yet the book doesn’t have a throw it against the wall in frustration ending. It isn’t exactly happy, but it makes sense given the logic Golden Richards has chosen to live by.

by Oliver Jeffers
ISBN: 9780399247491

This was the third book for Jeffers, but the fourth of his I’ve read. (I started with The Great Paper Caper, then Lost and Found, and couldn’t wait to get my hands on his latest The Heart and the Bottle — reading in order isn’t necessary.)

The humor and absurdity is more overt in this book, the emotional resonance not nearly as strong. That’s okay; it’s fun. The artwork is unmistakably Jeffers, with his odd noses, textural collage details, but not quite this time penciled legs. This may be the best book to start with if you are sharing his work with an actual little kid, especially one who is not how interested they are going to be in books just yet.