The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit

After finishing Journey to the Centre of the Earth, I was still in the mood for a some good adventures. I remembered a copy of The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit that I'd picked up years ago at a library sale. How is it that I completely missed out on Nesbit in my youth? I suppose my hometown library just didn't have them. Well, I've now completed five of her books and loved all of them. This one ranks right up at the top of great classic children's fantasy, right up there with the Wizard of Oz books and the entire oeuvre of Roald Dahl.

Published in 1904, The Phoenix and the Carpet is the second in the series of that began with Five Children and It. Instead of a magical sand fairy, the a family five children find both a magic carpet and a magical bird, a legendary phoenix. By a series of mishaps (well, basically, they decide to try out fireworks inside the house) they have to get a new carpet for the nursery. Their parents buy a second-hand carpet which, when unrolled, is found to include a strangely glowing egg. The children attempt to return it, but no go. After the egg accidentally rolls into the fireplace, it hatches and out comes the phoenix, who explains that the carpet is also magic, and can give them three wishes a day.

If you're looking for serious high fantasy, this isn't it. Although the children are occasionally transported to faraway places, their adventures are pretty tame, though humorous. As in Five Children and It, the children quickly realize that wishes don't always work out quite like you plan. Of course it's a children's story, so most everything comes out right in the end, but Nesbit's chapters are cleverly plotted, so I really wasn't sure how everything was going to shake out. And the writing is both wry and witty, with a few sharp observations. It's both entertaining and funny as the kids get in and out of scrapes. My only quibble as that in some their adventures, they encounter "savages" who are quite obviously people of color, and the racism that tinges these episodes.

Cover of the new Puffin Classics edition

Overall, though, it was quite a delightful read, and tI'll probably include it among my favorite books of this year. I'm counting it as my Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Dystopian Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman

The Cookbook Collector is described by the publisher as a "modern take on Jane Austen."  Le sigh.  As I have mentioned in previous postings, I am not a huge fan of authors borrowing plots and characters from classic lit.  (Or contemporary lit, for that matter, but I don't see it much due to copyrights).  In fact, I probably would have avoided The Cookbook Collector like the plague, except that A) the title includes the word cookbook, which always makes me perk up my ears since I adore food fiction; and B) -- and this is the real shocker -- my husband mentioned that he wanted to read it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My husband is a wonderful person and a loving and supportive spouse, but contemporary lit is not his cup of tea.  Apparently he was listening to a review on NPR that compared it to Dostoevsky.  Well!!!  I marched right over to the computer and put my name on the library's hold list.  Sadly, this book bears little resemblance to Jane Austen; I haven't actually read Dostoevsky (he's on my to-read list, I swear), but I'm guessing not so much like his writing either.  Not that it's a bad book, but if you're looking for Jane Austen's trademark wit, you're out of luck.

Note:  if you have not read Sense and Sensibility, there may be spoilers below.  If you have read it, then there may be spoilers for The Cookbook Collector.   

To her credit, Ms. Goodman doesn't really stick that closely to a Jane Austen plot.  The two main characters are very loosely based on the Dashwood sisters from Sense and Sensibility, but just in that the older sister, Emily, is practical, like Elinor, and younger sister Jess is emotional and passionate like Marianne.  That's pretty much it.  Well,  Jess does have an older man who is attracted to her, and she does have an unhappy relationship with a young environmentalist, but it's really very little like the romance between Willoughby and Marianne like in S&S.  Jess, a graduate student, has a part-time job working for a rare book dealer, George.  The title of the book comes from an appraisal job George and Jess are working on, a collection left to a slightly eccentric woman by her even more eccentric uncle, who has a basically priceless collection of old and valuable cookbooks.  As Jess begins to explore and research the amazing collection, she discovers deeper feelings for George, and we all know how their story ends.

The Emily story was much more disappointing.  I suppose I would have liked it more if I hadn't expected it to be remotely related to Sense & Sensibility, which it really isn't, just that Emily is level-headed and practical like Elinor.  She's a dot-com millionaire!  How is this related to Jane Austen???

Seriously, the whole idea of a modern update of Jane Austen is really a stretch for me.  One of the dominant themes in every one of Austen's works is that women had to marry well because they had no other choices, and that just doesn't apply any more, at least not in Western culture.  Now, if you moved the action to the Middle East, I would probably find it much more believable.  Back in Regency times, if a woman of Jane Austen's class didn't have a dowry and couldn't find a rich husband, she was faced with few choices: marrying beneath her; becoming a governess; or becoming a spinster dependent upon her family's charity.  Nowadays women can pull themselves up by their high-heeled Manolo bootstraps and be pretty much anything they want, despite the glass ceiling.

This book also has a bunch of side stories about the dot-com bubble, backstabbing corporate politics; September 11 (again, not a spoiler if you notice that this book is set in the late 1990s); Judaism; long-lost relatives and family identity.  I really wish this book had focused more on the cookbook collector plot, since to me it was the most interesting part of the book -- not just the food-related aspects, but the relationship between Jess and George.  Of course, I also have a library degree, so I found the research into the rare books fascinating;  it's making me contemplate a return to school for classes in preservation and rare-book handling.  In general, I just think there was just too much going on, and not really Austenish at all. If this book hadn't been described that way, I probably would have liked it a lot more.

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Warning:  I know a lot of people loved this book, but sadly, I wasn't one of them.  If you are, feel free to skip this review.  For an opposing view, see Amanda's review here.

To me, this book has all the trappings of a book group fad:  a quirky African lady meets people from all walks of life due to her little business and solves all their problems.  Sound familiar?  That's because it's been done before, and actually done well. It's probably wrong of me to compare this to another book, but I think it's inevitable -- this is undoubtedly going to be compared to the far superior No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith.   Both books are about busybody African ladies of a certain age and certain size, and both are fairly short books.  But that's where the comparison ends.  I found this book a poor copy of that charming series; it's didactic, preachy, contrived, and frankly, the writing isn't that good.  This book was a huge disappointment from the first chapter.

McCall Smith has written ten books in his series about Botswana, and though they're starting to feel repetetive, they're still warmhearted and appealing.  His characters are well-developed, his descriptions of the everyday life of Africans seem realistic (since, sadly, I've never visited), yet he's able to include subtle messages about African problems without using the sledgehammer approach.  Kigali, on the other hand, is less than subtle.  Our angel, Angel, the baker in the title, segues from a sales pitch about her fantastic cakes to lecturing an Ambassador's wife about the official denial of AIDS in Tanzania on page 9!  It's so heavy-handed and obvious:  "This book has an important message.  Things in Africa are bad!!"  Well, duh.  But of course, Angel is quickly able to make this woman see the light.  Uh huh. 

Even her name is sort of a McCall Smith ripoff.  His character is called Precious (which is both endearing and ironic, since her first husband beat the crap out of her), Parkin's is Angel -- is she the selfless Angel of Kigali, sort of like Mother Teresa?  I will admit, this may be common in Africa.  But it comes off as cutesy and annoying here.  Before the third chapter she's convinced her landlord to change the water bill of two feminist volunteer workers in the building, who were massively overcharged because they're considered Wazungu, rich white foreigners, and convinced a woman to change her infant girl's name from Goodenough (parents disappointed because she wasn't a boy) to Perfect. 

However, Angel, she supports a couple's decision to marry and spends an awful lot of time planning their wedding and raising money for said couple -- despite the fact that the husband doesn't decide to marry the bride until his other girlfriend gives birth -- and finds out if the new baby is a boy or a girl.  [SPOILER ALERT!!] See, the first girlfriend, who runs the convenience store, had his first child, and it's a boy, so she's already ahead.  The writer mentions that it's sort of unfair to celebrate this union because of the disadvantage of the second monther, but pretty quickly she's forgotten -- besides, the chosen wife is from a rival tribe, so it's all about overcoming prejudice.  What about the prejudice the unwed mother and this fatherless baby girl will face for years?  Too bad, so sad.  Angel arranges an enormous cross-cultural shindig and involves all the other characters. The first couple are going to be in the papers!!

And I was really annoyed by a little anecdote about a dentist. [Disclosure:  my husband is a dentist, so I'm a little sensitive about how they're portrayed in the media.  Ignore your teeth, and they'll go away.  Okay, back to the story].  In chapter 8, Angel takes her grandson to the dentist.  Excellent, great to hear that they have dental care in this war-torn country.  However, as a reward, she buys him a soda -- immediately after the omniscient narrator explains that the dentist lectured her about feeding the grandchildren sweets.  See, Angel doesn't necessarily believe him, because after all, he's from some island far away, and because he's a Seventh Day Adventist.  So, if you don't agree with someone's religion, you should ignore his/her medical advice.  So why is she paying her hard-earned money to go to this dentist in the first place??!!? 

Besides this hypocritical annoyance -- since this book is all about tolerance and how all races and religions should tolerate each other -- this books crams too many characters in too fast, many of whom never show up again, and I just didn't buy the story of how this Tanzanian woman is in Rwanda baking cakes fancy cakes for people, despite being surrounded by poverty and unreliable utilities.  The appeal of McCall Smith's books are the slices of life of the Botswana native, and most of the characters in this book are expats that just aren't that interesting.  And the explanation of how she's able to procure supplies to make sophisticated cakes is a pretty contrived.  Plus, Angel keeps repeating the same tragic back story about her family's losses over and over.  The author crams in tragedy after tragedy -- there are so many, I won't even list them.  I'm not trying to belittle the pain and horrors of Africa, believe me.  I see enough of it on the news.  But trying to package them as a charming book isn't going to help Africans.  "Charming" and "genocide" just don't belong in the same paragraph.  I'm not saying readers shouldn't learn about some of the horrible things that have happened there.  I just don't think you can mix the two successfully.  There are plenty of books about the Holocaust and they sell like crazy, but nobody ever tries to package them as charming. 

Overall, I get the impression that this author, inspired by Mcall Smith's literary success (and HBO series), thought, "Hey! I lived in Africa! I can write a book about it, and get rich, too! I'll just change the main character to a woman who bakes cakes. . . and change the setting to Rwanda, so I can add all kinds of political stuff and teach oblivious Americans to pay attention to Africa! And I'll write lots of sequels and get a movie deal, too! Easy-peasy!" Or else someone at Random House thought so, and went out and found an author in Africa to compete with McCall Smith. Either way, it's pretty annoying. I really hope I don't see this as The Next Big Book Group Selection.