He was Pretending to be a What?!

The other night I was in our living room with the 6 week old Bug, while Luke and the 2 year old Panda Bear were getting ready for bed. I heard a strange noise coming from the audio baby monitor and so I switched on the camera to see what on earth they were doing, and this is what I saw:

The cat was trapped under the big girl bed, and the dog was anxiously standing guard in the doorway making sure the cat couldn't leave the room. Getting the cat out was exactly what my husband was trying to do, so he was pretending to be a vacuum cleaner to evict the cat (she hates vacuum cleaners). Meanwhile, the 2 year old was jumping up and down on her bed throughout the whole thing because it was just so much fun.

It had been Luke's first day back to work after his paternity leave, so needless to say it wasn't the best day any of us had ever had. I'd had some not-great mom moments that I wished had never happened, and I while there were also some mom wins, I was still feeling guilty about the bad moments.

But, guys, seriously. My husband was pretending to be a vacuum cleaner. My child was clearly unscathed by my harsh words borne out of frustration earlier, since she was thrilled to be jumping on the bed through the commotion (no, she's not supposed to jump on the bed).

Did I mention he was pretending to be a vacuum?

We all survived. We were all mostly dressed, mostly fed, and mostly diapered/potty-d. There were tears, there was frustration, there were regretful words, but there were also snuggles, stories, and laughter. My girls got to love on each other and I got to love on them. It took a grown man imitating a major household appliance for me to realize that, all-in-all, it had been a pretty good day.

Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman

Dark at the Crossing tells a story of war, love, and second chances.The story begins with main character Haris landing in Turkey and traveling toward the Syrian border to join the Syrian rebels fighting against the Assad regime. From there the book recounts Haris’s movement forward toward joining the regime, and also flashes back to show how he came to this decision. Born in Iraq, he earned American citizenship by saving an American soldier, Jessica Lynch-style. He then worked with the U.S. Army in Iraq also to earn citizenship for his younger sister. When they move to the U.S., his sister flourished as an American college student and Haris, attempting to provide for her, worked as a janitor at the same college. Unsatisfied with this life, and his past role in the war in his own country, Haris waited for his sister to be provided for by way of a marriage engagement, and then left to join the rebels in Syria.

Haris has contacted a “fixer” to take him across the border and connect him with the rebels, but things don’t go as planned, and he meets Amir, a Syrian native living and working in Turkey for a think tank studying the Syrian conflict. Even more important than the connection with Amir, Haris also meets Amir’s wife, Daphne, who has a scarred back and sleeps with the light on. The relationships that develop between Haris, Amir, Daphne, and also the relationships which are explored through flashbacks with Daphne’s daughter, Haris’s sister, and an American soldier acquaintance of Haris from Iraq, explore different ways that people can love each other, and the lengths we’ll go to for a second chance.

This isn’t an own voices book- Ackerman is a white man from the U.S.- but although he isn’t from Iraq like his character Haris, he was a U.S. soldier and spent a significant amount of time in the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters and currently writes about Syria. This familiarity with conflict and soldiering is apparent in the book. The reader is left with the sense that Haris, and the other characters, are based on people known to Ackerman, rather than being pure inventions.

Haris isn’t endeavoring to fight in the war because of any particular convictions, religious or political, and in fact “he believed in the war but not as a cause. He believed in it as an impulse, the way a painter paints, or a musician plays, a necessary impulse.” The Syrian conflict is a second chance for him- he is unhappy with his role in the war in his own country, and thus Syria is an attempt for redemption. The book further claims that “[a] true cause, meaning an honest cause, must be personal, specific.” We see this in both Haris and Daphne’s desire to return to Syria.

This book felt true to the conflict, for me. Syria isn’t at all my area of specialty, but Haris’s experiences and feelings came across as complicated and messy, not  a neat and tidy black and white package. The book wasn’t much about Syria in specific, but rather more about conflict in general in this day and age, and the toll it takes on survivors. It really shows well that escaping the physical fighting is only one part of survival.

Full disclosure (and possible spoiler): I like reading about wars (both fiction and non, in fact one of my masters degrees is in Diplomacy and Military studies), but I truly dislike reading fiction that doesn’t have a happy ending or a redemption arc or some kind of tie-up at the end. That being said, this book had none of those things, and I really enjoyed it.

Questions for further discussion:

Part of the book is an examination of belonging through citizenship or sense of place. What is the role of being an American for Haris? An Iraqi?

Some of the auxiliary characters in this story are intriguing. What could we gain by looking more into Haris’s sister, Amir’s boss Marty, or the child Jamil who also journeys into Syria with Haris and Daphne to join the fighting?

The Strays by Emily Bitto

The Strays follows a young girl, Lily, in Australia, beginning with her childhood during the Great Depression and then concluding with an adult retrospective. Lily is an only child and when she begins at a new school, she befriends the vibrant Eva who lives with her parents and two sisters. Eva’s parents, particularly her father, are artists and their house becomes a gathering point for many other Australian artists and their bohemian lifestyle.

Lily, although she feels disloyal, vastly prefers Eva’s family to her own, and her time with them forces her to examine her own ideas about growing up, family, friendship, and the complexities of isolation and togetherness.

I think I would have read this book differently had I not been a mother. My heart ached for both Lily and Eva, neither of home received the parenting that they deserved, and for their mothers who were simply unable to provide things for their volatile teenaged daughters. I had a hard time relating to either Lily or Eva- relating instead to the mothers who were more auxiliary characters. The mothers were, to me, more compelling characters than the daughters.

Maud by Melanie J. Fishbane

Maud, a young adult historical fiction novel, tells the story of the teenage years of L.M. Montgomery. The story follows 14-15 year old Maud as she is shuffled between family members from Prince Edward Island to Saskatchewan, while she strives to cultivate and maintain her sense of self and ambition.

This book shows, in particular, how many of Maud’s experiences led directly to the creation of Anne, and consequently at times (particularly in the beginning), it was difficult to separate the two. As the book went on, for this reader at least, it became easier to distinguish Maud’s experiences from Anne’s.

While I’ve heard this book, and therefore Maud’s life, described as ‘heartbreaking,’ it felt accurate to me for the time period. A difficult time for women, Maud didn’t have a head start on much of anything in life- but yet she was able to persevere and I think one of the strengths of this book was showing just how difficult that perseverance was. It captured her need for the act of writing to provide a release from the drudgery and hardship of everyday life. It showed that while family may not have always supported Maud in the way she would have liked, she was able to make valuable friends who became her allies in the most difficult situations.

Knowing the end of the story (as one does with the story of L.M. Montgomery), did a couple things for me. Perhaps knowing of her ultimate success made it easier to read about the early hardships and rejection. But certainly it made the book seem unfinished. While *I* know that L.M. Montgomery eventually because a successful author, the reader of Maud never got the satisfaction of seeing that come about. While this certainly was outside the scope of the project at hand, it left me wanting more from the story.