Books like The Song of Hartgrove Hall

An epistolary novel written as a letter from an elderly German man explaining his time as a soldier on the Eastern Front to his grandson. The novel has both the immediacy of a wartime narrative and the introspection of a memoir. “Eat now, sleep now, march now, follow your leader — that’s what they’d demanded of us; we’d followed, and they’d led us into disaster,” the narrator says as he describes his own predicament, but it serves to explain the horrors of the regime as a whole. It resonated for me personally, highlighting the silence and shame that surrounds the experiences of so many Germans who were young adults during WW2. Starritt is half-Scottish and half-German, and We Germans was inspired in part by his grandfather’s time on the Eastern Front. The novel was the recipient of the Dayton Peace Prize.

Let's get 'RE&AL' about grandparenting is the mantra of The Grandparenting Effect: 'Relationally Engaged' and 'Always Listening'! Well-documented research, thoughtful advice, engaging stories from a wide variety of grandparenting situations, helpful chapter summaries, ideas for grandchildren from toddlers to adults--plus prayers and bridge stories as well as timely help for conversations with grandchildren about race and cultural differences--this is an insightful and practical book for grandparents (volunteers, too!), pastors, and church educators to bridge the generational gap with wisdom and joy!

An antique Chinese mirror transforms the lives’ of two women. Shay Garrett lives in the modern times and her grandmother lives in 1900. On the eve of their marriages, both women find themselves transported from one era to the other. I love this epic time-travel tale of suspense where one young woman contends with love, and identity, and knowing too much in a society far removed from the loud, freer modern times she grew up in, and another young woman deals with the confusion of a raucous world where decorum doesn’t exist, nothing makes sense, and her granddaughter's handsome fiancé is someone she hasn’t got the strength to resist.  

I love mangos. I love to eat them, and I love them in smoothies! So, I was immediately drawn to this book. I found it to be beautiful and evocative. My own grandmother used to tell me about all the different fruits they ate in Cuba but she only told me the Spanish names for them as she said they didn’t exist in the US. 

I love how the abuelita shows her granddaughter–who insists she doesn’t like mangos–all that the mango brings us and that we must remember to be thankful. I really love this lesson of how we have to listen to the earth and she will give back to us–a thoughtful introduction to the importance of caring for the world around us.

I love that this story teaches us to count the blessings in life and to slow down and appreciate them. I found the illustrations to be… show more.

This book reminded me that families change and evolve. Jillian is getting a third grandmother, and she’s not sure she needs one more till they embark on making some matzo ball soup. The illustrations in this book are delightful and make the characters come alive.

This is a beautiful book that encourages children to use their own imagination. It tells the story of a little girl, Nora, who explores her grandma’s garden  — and her imagination, to look for a tiger that supposedly lives there. The illustrations are colourful and detailed and hold hidden clues for the younger readers to look for.

A badly disciplined, poorly educated gang of young Nepalis, part of a separatist guerrilla insurgency, reminded me of my militant leftist former comrades.

If the Nepali boys' self-image borrowed from action-hero films, ours took inspiration from political tracts (and movies), perhaps more literate but no less cartoonish. (A real insurgency in Nepal, in the 1980s, failed. Ours, in the U.S. in the 1960s and '70s, failed too.)

The guerrillas provide one of the novel's interconnected story lines and sympathetic sets of characters. The place is a dreamily lush Himalayan locale. But the "inheritance," the legacy of colonialism—class division, poverty, alienation—renders it grim and all of its inhabitants' dreams perpetually frustrated. 

A non-fiction recommendation this time, and a recent release.

Hennigan’s essay collection is a beautifully written account of the final years, and opaque recollections, of her grandmother Phil, who spent much of her life in various psychiatric institutions.

I have been interested in this theme for years – Ireland, in the first decades after independence from Britain, has some of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world: prisons, borstals, orphanages, magdalen laundries, and psychiatric hospitals both provided employment and regulation and also kept a whole population of ‘problem’ people out of sight).

This fact, and its repercussions in culture today, fascinate me, and Hennigan’s gentle and loving consideration of Phil’s trauma, loneliness, mania, and the maternal lineage it involves (her own mother was institutionalized) is also an angry illustration of just how badly women and the working class have been treated here.

I absolutely love the magical, fantastical, and treacherous world that Brand Mull created in this book. The story of Kendra and her brother Seth being shipped off to their grandparents, who they hardly know, in a very strange place they've never been and rules that don't make sense, creates that perfect recipe for discovery, mishap, and victory.

We've seen this format before, but this time it feels different. I especially love the way the siblings work together, each with special gifts that get them both in and out of trouble along the way, not to mention the way the creatures in this book are portrayed with creativity and a little darkness that's very unexpected and incredibly entertaining. 

There is a dark undertow to this book that I didn’t detect in its early pages. Once I was a third of the way through, I was hooked. It’s the story of Wendy, a trans sex worker living through a bracing Winnipeg winter, but it’s also a uniquely queer examination of trauma and abuse offset by the value of family and community.

Her chosen family is produced by circumstance, but it grows its own unique qualities. Meanwhile, her attempts to have a relationship with her father eschew cliché as she reimagines that connection on her own terms. She’s bright and gloomy at once, humorous, curious, and imperfect. Her story is a visceral one; she stuck with me well after I finished it.