Book review--The Beast and the Bethany books (1-3)

The Beast and the Bethany books (1-3) are books for pre-teens that don't disappoint in terms of their subject matter. Vainglorious egoist Ebenezer Tweezer has taken care of and served the huge beast in his attic with different kinds of food for over five hundred years. The beast has rewarded him with all of the material comforts one can think of as well with an elixir that keeps him young. But when the beast decides it wants to eat a child, Ebenezer finds himself in a bind, both morally and practically. Ebenezer goes on a search for a suitable child, and when he meets the bad-tempered orphan Bethany (that not even the orphanage wants), his dilemma is solved, or so he thinks. But when she comes to live with him, all hell breaks loose. A rude, destructive Bethany and an evil beast in the attic of Ebenezer's house can only lead to trouble. A lot of trouble. 

The author Jack Meggitt-Phillips has quite the imagination, and the books are easy to read, much as were JK Rowling's Harry Potter series of books. The pages just fly by. They are also surprising books given the world we live in at present; the beast decides it wants to eat a child after having developed a taste for humans. And before it gets around to Bethany, there are several humans that disappear down its gullet. But Bethany has other plans, once she finds out what's in store for her. Books 1-3 are a fun roller coaster ride into a strange world, where people (and parrots) travel via puddle portals, where rare parrots sing beautifully and lay eggs that contain all kinds of food, where material items vomited out by the beast have minds of their own. The author has been compared to Roald Dahl, which is apt, but I also found myself thinking of Neil Gaiman's books for children/young adults (The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Coraline). Book 4 remains, and from what I can judge of the ending for Book 3, we are moving toward a beast that has begun to develop a conscience after having spent time in prison and having its memory erased; it has begun to want to be a good beast. That will be an interesting ride. 

The Giver of Stars and patriarchal societies

I just finished reading The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, and can highly recommend it. Moyes wrote a fictional novel about a group of women in Depression-era Kentucky who became the Pack Horse librarians—traveling by horse to the rural mountainous areas of Kentucky to deliver books, magazines, comic books and recipes to households wanting to become more literate. The Pack Horse library project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) set into motion by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. These women braved bad weather, treacherous conditions, brutal men, ignorant people, and despite these hindrances, pushed on, providing a much-needed service. In the process, they became friends, and that is really the book’s story. It is an empowering book for women, because it presents their daily lives and struggles in ways that any woman could understand. It also presents how the women deal with issues of race, abuse of women, unhappy loveless marriages, patriarchal attitudes toward women, feminism, self-identity, self-esteem, love, and friendship. It is impossible to read this book without becoming involved in the lives of these women; you end up rooting for them, admiring their intelligence, perseverance and cleverness when dealing with the patriarchal attitudes and threats from some of the men living alongside them in their small Kentucky town. You also feel their fears; the threats of rape and violence if they don’t toe the line or do what some of the more ignorant men in the book want them to do. Luckily, Moyes balances the ignorant and often violent men with men who are the opposite—open to learning/changing and empathic. The latter are the men who love these women and who support them, in often non-conventional ways. It is impossible to read this book and not reflect on the damage that patriarchal attitudes have done to relationships between men and women, but also between men and their children (both male and female—many of them cowed into submission to brutal fathers). It made me think about how what my life could have been like at that time. Was it just a toss of the coin that led to your being married to a good man or a bad one? Some of the parents didn’t seem to care one way or another if a man was violent to his spouse; in the book, it is not the husband who was abusive to his wife, but his own father---a powerful man in the town and a truly nasty character that you end up wishing would suffer or die or both. One might have expected that the town’s priest would support the woman rather than her father-in-law, but no, it was her duty to return to that house where she lived with her husband and his father. She does not return after she is battered by her father-in-law, and that leads to all sorts of problems for her and her fellow traveling librarians, one of whom is also a target of this nasty man, because she lives her life on her terms, and that is anathema to a man like him.

Those of you who know me, who read this blog, know that I am no fan of patriarchal societies, families, religions, or workplaces. I cannot now (and was never able to from the time I was a teenager), support policies and laws that are unjust to, exclude or demean women. The one way to guarantee that I will fight for something is for men I have no respect for tell me how women should live, work, think, or otherwise exist. If you want to fire me up, that is the sure-fire way to do it.

Firstly, it is important to mention that I respect a lot of men. I have written many times in this blog about my bosses at my first job in Manhattan and how much they supported and encouraged me in my scientific career. I’ve talked about my father and what a good man he was; he never told me directly that I could not do something in the society I was growing up in because I was a woman. We rarely talked about the difficulties I might face because I was a woman, but when we did I knew that was because he wished to protect me from some of the crap he knew I would eventually face, especially in the work world. So many times I wish he was still alive so that I could talk to him about some of the things that I’ve experienced up through the years. One of the last conversations I had with him shortly before he died was one where he told me that he just wanted me to be happy, and that meant more to me than anything else at that time. He did not say to me that I should follow the written and unwritten rules in society for how women should live and behave, he did not say to me that I should abide by the tenets of my religion when it came to my personal life (nor did my mother). He did not push me to marry or to have children or to do any of the traditional things that women were often expected to do. He left those decisions up to me. He would never have forced me to marry someone I did not love. He was no patriarch. Yes, he could be strict and stubborn at times, but he was both a smart and empathic man. He felt others’ pain, responded to it by trying to alleviate it, often at times when he had his own pain, especially as he got older. One of the nicest memories I have is when he called me at work one day just to tell me he loved me. I was lucky to have him as my father. A lot of men simply cannot hold a candle to him.

The men I don’t respect are the ones who want to run roughshod over you, the ones who dominate you in all conversations with them, who do not acknowledge that you have anything important to say, who bully women verbally and psychologically, who never fail to remind you that nothing you do is good enough for them (and of course they know exactly what you should do to better yourself). You might think that they don’t exist in 2020, but they do. They are the men who know best—ALWAYS. They know what is best for you, what you SHOULD do, who become ill-tempered or directly angry when you don’t agree with them or follow their 'advice'. They are the men who berate you for your opinions, privately or in front of others (preferably in front of others so that they look powerful and you are humiliated). They are the men who compete with you instead of supporting you as mentors. They are the men who will offer support but only when they are interested in you sexually. They are the men who make rude, nasty, or sexually-tinged remarks, the ones who think they are being funny by doing so. They are the powerful men who hold others down, women and men alike. They are the ones who work behind the scenes to keep others down, freeze others out, and destroy others’ careers if they challenge them in any way. They are the ones who pull the strings; others should just dance to their tune like the good puppets they think others are.

I want liberty and justice for all. I don’t want a continual war between the sexes, but I don’t want women to surrender in all situations just to keep the peace and to preserve relationships. Some marriages should end, rightfully so, if women and children are treated badly/abused by their husbands and fathers. There is no point in preserving such marriages, and no reason for society to support abusive patriarchy at all costs. This type of patriarchy destroys lives and costs society a lot—abused children need a lot of support to get past the trauma of their early lives, so that they do not grow up to perpetuate the pattern of abuse. Patriarchy may have served a purpose at one time, although I’m not sure what that was. That was a time when men ruled society and women and children were considered to be their property. In modern Western societies, women and children are no longer the property of men, but some of the subtle patriarchal attitudes remain in the workplace and in personal life. Why are there still discussions and surveys about who does the most housework in the home? If both husband and wife work full-time, they should be sharing the chores equally. That brings me back to my father; after a long day at work and the commute home from Manhattan to the suburbs, he had a nap before dinner, and then his evenings were spent focused on us before we went to bed. He made sure we did our homework, quizzed us for tomorrow’s tests, and helped us with different subjects. By the time we went to bed, he had perhaps an hour to read a good book before he ended up asleep in his chair. That was my dad. He enjoyed spending time with his children; he wasn’t constantly running off to pursue this or that hobby, and he didn’t complain about that, nor did my mother. Many of my friends had fathers who behaved similarly; they know their fathers loved them. So not all men who grew up in patriarchal times behaved the way they were expected to behave; not all of them bought into the hype that success meant sacrificing your family on the altar of money, greed, arrogance and betrayal.

Reclaiming the best parts of ourselves

Getting older is about reclaiming the best parts of ourselves, the parts that we discovered as teenagers but then buried for fear that they might be ridiculed or destroyed. Or possibly because we felt sure that no one would understand us if we expressed them. Because the world that we grew up in, while less intense in terms of social media pressure compared to today's world, was every bit as intense when it came to ‘fitting in’ or ‘assuming’ personalities that were acceptable to society. Some of those personalities included career woman, feminist, wife, mother, successful man, husband, and father—all of the things that we had to deal with and make choices about in our 20s and 30s. But I remember my teenage years; they were about self-discovery and about wanting to find the path inward to my soul after reading St. Teresa of Avila’s book The Interior Castle or The Mansions. She described seven different rooms that a person had to move through in order to find God. Those years were about intense emotions, strange new feelings, spiritual exploration and even an interest in the mystical; questions about life’s meaning, our purpose on this earth, and our place in the universe. But after I left those years, I entered another world, one that required that I fit in, work for a living, contribute to society in one form or another, and be responsible. I have done and do all those things still. But I long to clear the decks, to make room once again for the young woman trying to find her way in the world, discovering new areas inside herself, before responsibility, duty and work took over.

That young woman was a writer; she wrote poetry on a daily basis, as well as short stories. She was a reader; she loved sci-fi and crime novels, English literature and poetry. She wanted to be like her father and mother, both avid readers. She talked to them about what she read, and they in turn did the same with her and suggested books for her to read. She read Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure (her father was a Thomas Hardy fan and she became one too), and cried at the end of that novel when Jude died alone. She remembers wandering into the living room where she found her father to share that sadness; that memory stands out because he understood how she felt, like he understood so much of who she was when she was young. He always listened to her; that was his gift to others—the ability to listen well. Her female friends loved him as he always made them feel welcome and accepted. He understood that life was unfair (because he had experienced it himself) and that Thomas Hardy was able to write about that unfairness in a way that appealed to him and to her. Her father died when she was 29 years old; he died too young. She remembers driving home to the Bronx the evening he died, a wall of grief all around her. It almost seemed real, as though the car that she was driving would smash against it. That too is a memory that she recalls clearly all these years later. He never got a chance to see the woman she became or the woman she is now. The woman who is returning to her literary roots, planted by her parents, who were gardeners of all things literary. She is returning to her roots in other ways as well—as a proud American with a new interest in American history, trying to sort out all that makes America a great country. She loves returning to her hometown where she was born and seeing the changes as it moves on without her. She is not nostalgic for the past. Yet so much of Tarrytown remains the Tarrytown of her memories—the Tarrytown Lakes, the Hudson River estates, the river itself, Rockwood State Park—all the places that left their imprint on her heart and soul when she was a teenager. She spent a lot of time alone as a teenager, and understands only now the purpose for that. That solitude was a gift to her in the midst of much that was sad around her--her father’s illnesses, family crises, unemployment and uncertainty. It became something to seek after when she entered her 20s and 30s, knowing full well that she would not find much of it during those years. Even in her 40s, there was little in the way of solitude, because each waking minute was occupied by daily home and work routines. But when she entered her 50s, her world changed, for reasons she is still not quite clear about.  The need for solitude re-emerged, stronger than ever. Solitude became something to fight for, to defend; it became a meaning for living—a purpose. It was suddenly very important to ‘have a room of one’s own’ so that solitude could be ensured. That meant being firm about the need for that; it meant not giving in to what others wanted immediately. It meant being selfish in a good way; putting one’s ideas, dreams and wishes first, for once. It meant not sacrificing what was important to oneself. Because without solitude, there is no chance to discover or rediscover oneself, to examine one’s life, to find the special meaning in one’s life. It was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. She understood that as a teenager, and now again as a woman moving toward her 60s.