Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide is the brainchild of the Pulitzer-winning husband-and-wife journalistic team, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. She has roots as a business executive and he's a longtime op-ed columnist for the New York Times; together, they continue to provoke change and raise awareness for global issues. When it was published in 2009, Half the Sky incited a movement to take action against the crises women of poverty are facing in the developing world. The movement of the book went on to spark a two-part miniseries on PBS, a social media game that raises funds for change, and, most invaluably, an enduring discussion of the problems as well as the potential solutions. The crises at the fore of this women’s rights initiative are horrifying in both context and scope, but WuDunn and Kristof present them with tact and respectfulness, balancing the harrowing truths with other, more optimistic realities about how these injustices are being fought against. As a reader, I felt I had an undeniable opportunity – and, perhaps, a moral obligation – to understand the experiences women across the country are facing; and even though I read many paragraphs through the blur of tears, I know Half the Sky was one of the most vitally important books I’ll ever read. The issues Kristof and WuDunn explore are extreme violations of the rights and integrity of women, including but not limited to the atrocities of sex-trafficking, maternal mortality, female genital cutting, gender-based illiteracy, and gender-based violence and discrimination. While this all sounds – and, indeed is – very bleak, the smiling faces and mischievous stares of the women on the book’s cover represent what makes Half the Sky somewhat lighter: the stories of triumph and empowerment. Not every story has a happy ending; in fact, some truly broke my heart and left me needing to stop and absorb the sadness of what I had just read before continuing. Nevertheless, while the very real tragedies represented here are unforgettable, what I ultimately took away from the book was a feeling of hope. The stories of women overcoming their hardships and achieving seemingly impossible feats were profound examples of extraordinary courage. I call the material of the book “stories” merely because they are presented in an anecdotal format; not once did I – or will any reader, I expect – forget that what I was reading was completely, sometimes unbelievably factual.

While much of the book focuses on highlighting the works and plights of singular women, the authors do also devote some chapters to the statistical elements of the injustices. At one point, WuDunn and Kristof write that studies have shown people to be more giving and in general more responsive to stories about an individual rather than coverage of statistics and descriptions of entire peoples suffering under the same issues. I found that understandable because, while the statistics shocked me into attention, there is, I think, a certain human element related to hearing the story of one woman’s struggle. As individuals, we can relate to another individual more than we can relate to a body of people or a series of numbers. Still, though statistics are inevitably a bit less able to form an emotional connection, the effort of the authors on that aspect proves effective. (Additionally, the individual experience is timeless while statistics and other information may change; for example, at one point the authors describe the lack of women's rights representation in the UN, which seems a bit inaccurate now given the rise of UN Women.)

It’s incredibly difficult to be critical of a book with the sort of agenda Half the Sky has, though admittedly there were areas where I felt a little disconnect; there has also been some talk about certain struggles the book might present for readers (i.e. controversial views of factory work and questionable handling of the sex trade). Imperfection is inevitable; the question is, are the imperfections relevant? For myself, occasionally the narrative tone left me feeling a bit disjointed, a bit preached-to, and I sometimes sensed the authors’ restless impatience to spur society into action - but can I blame the authors for being passionate about their cause? Of course not; I doubt that anyone in the position to present this material and invoke a call-to-action on the topic would be any different. And predominantly, the importance of the issues in Half the Sky – the importance of the book’s message and its galvanization of change – transcends any subjective issues a reader might have with it. What it comes down to, I think, is that Half the Sky is a remarkable book and its message is an absolutely vital one to be taken into our global culture.

Half the Sky was my September pick for the TBR Pile Reading Challenge; it's taken me a few years to finally get to this book, but it was certainly an extraordinary read. It was also complex, as it absolutely should be, so I'm hoping I was able to capture all of the complexities in my review. Someone asked me after finishing it if I thought it should be required reading, and I said, "Definitely". While with any book there will always be elements that we won't agree on - writing is an art, and the arts are always subjective - awareness of the human rights issues that Half the Sky focuses on should absolutely be required. I also can't recommend the accompanying documentary enough; I watched that when it premiered on PBS two years ago and it was truly unforgettable - as is the book.

Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunnPublisher: Knopf/Vintage Release date: September 8, 2009

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Across the landscape of his career, author Chris Bohjalian has written novels about a murderer's plight against a privileged family in World War II Italy, about a young social worker driven into Jazz Age Long Island by a homeless man's photographs, of an American woman's love for an Armenian man in early-twentieth century Syria, and more. In his contemporary classic, Midwives, he tells the unforgettable story of midwife Sibyl Danforth and a home birth gone tragically wrong. Narrated by Sibyl’s fourteen year-old daughter Connie, Midwives is a chilling and evocative account of what one woman will endure for the sake of protecting her name and standing by her choices. When Sibyl Danforth experienced challenges in the delivery of a client’s child, she would have called the hospital and sent for an emergency rescue squad. But in a small Vermont town in the throes of a winter storm, help is an impossible distance away and Sibyl finds herself the only hope of a helpless, unborn child. After the mother has expired, Sibyl takes matters into her own hands and performs an emergency cesarean section to save the child. But what if, as the prosecutors of her court case are determined to prove, the mother had still be alive when Sibyl cut the baby from her? With the sort of harsh but deeply emotive freedom that makes his work so singularly compelling, Bohjalian unravels the story of Sibyl’s journey to clear herself of being labeled a murderer. Is she suffering vulgar mistreatment at the hands of others, or did she truly make an atrocious mistake? There’s something quiet and vulnerable about Sibyl as a character, which makes her no less vivid, but where the novel really excels in its character depiction is in narrator Connie. In Connie we see a strong, determined young woman represented with the same clarity and depth as many of Bohjalian's other memorable characters, whereas Sibyl sometimes seems to be hiding behind a smokescreen (a necessity, I think, if we readers are to form our own judgments of Sibyl's story).

Much like The Double Bind, Midwives plays very steadily on Bohjalian's knack for psychological mischief; through a fairly quiet and unhurried story he seems to know how to guide his reader into a false sense of security before sweeping revelations come in to knock us off our feet. Also as with The Double Bind, I'm left to wonder exactly how he manages to know what to put in and what to leave out. For me, Midwives worked really well from beginning to end; it had me riveted, yet never able to guess exactly how the ending would play out - and then thrown for a few final loops just when I thought I couldn't be caught by surprise.

Additionally, the level of research that Bohjalian undertook to make Midwives such an engrossing novel is quite fascinating. Not only does he explore the details of midwifery in 1980s America with astonishing acuity, but the novel’s two acts documenting the subsequent manslaughter trial include some aggressively researched and impressive court room drama. This is an interesting novel in its many assets and its many areas of strength: once again the narrative carries off of the pages to envelope the reader in the setting, and young Connie – thirty at the time of her narrative, but fourteen in her memories – is as vividly imagined as the midwife at the center of the plot. Bohjlaian has proven himself as a masterful storyteller and as particularly adept at creating multi-faceted, deeply intellectual drama, but Midwives delves also into an element of the profoundly human, glimpsing the vulnerabilities of human nature and exploring the emotional ways in which we deal with those imperfections. At times challenging, often raw in its uninhibited exploration of truth, Midwives relays much heart and determination even amid the most devastating of tragedies.

Midwives was my August pick for the TBR Pile Challenge, and my fourth overall Chris Bohjalian novel. (I've also reviewed The Sandcastle Girls, The Double Bind, and The Light in the Ruins.) I've enjoyed each of his stories so much, and it consistently impresses me how well he writes stories with so much diversity to them; I can't think of many other authors who write about such vastly different times, places, topics, and people - and make them all seem realistic to boot!

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Thirst is Mary Oliver's 2006 collection, containing forty-three works from the poet that frame her experiences in the time after her partner of four decades passed away. While her poems always have a way of exposing the rawness of nature and freedom and love, here she sets her sights on slightly different territory: namely the nakedness of grief and the honesty of passing through it, back to the place of comfort that looks slightly different after knowing loss. Sweetly, peacefully, she faces that place with hope and courage. Some poems are decidedly more religious in context than some of her others, but with ever as much food for the secular soul. As she explores her encounters with Christianity she reveals her prayers directly while remaining faithful (as it were) to the religion that has always governed her work: the naturalness and beauty of the rustic world.

“I had such a longing for virtue, for company. I wanted Christ to be as close as the cross I wear. I wanted to read and serve, to touch the altar linen. Instead I went back to the woods where not a single tree turns its face away.


Instead I prayed, oh Lord, let me be something useful and unpretentious. Even the chimney swift sings. Even the cobblestones have a task to do, and do it well.

Lord, let me be a flower, even a tare; or a sparrow. Or the smallest bright stone in a ring worn by someone brave and kind, whose name I will never know.”

— More Beautiful Than the Honey Locust Tree are the Words of the Lord

Also in this collection is one of her most famous poems, slight and timeless, "The Uses of Sorrow" (Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand / that this, too, was a gift.). That poem serves as a breaking point, one can imagine; it calls to mind the feeling of sliding through the melancholy of memories and into the place where they evoke happiness and comfort again. With such topics as loss and grief as her muse, Oliver gives a remarkable example of the power of hope as she offers some of her characteristically whimsical and pensive lines, reminding us again of the boundless expanse of imagination.

“Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth?

How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe

Also troubled - roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?”

— Heavy

Exquisite, wise, and affecting, Thirst proves the unequivocal fact that Mary Oliver’s poems are the lifeblood of grace and harmony; and of gratitude, even in the face of great loss.

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Life of Pi, Yann Martel's Booker-winning literary achievement, tells the story of sixteen year-old Piscine "Pi" Patel, the son of a zookeeper who, at sixteen, leaves his native India with his family and a menagerie of their zoo animals on a Japanse cargo ship. The Patels are bound for a new life in Canada, but when the ship sinks Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat also carrying a dazed orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, an ornery hyena, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. As the circle of life progresses even in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Pi and the tiger are soon all that remain. What follows is a literary patchwork of magical realism, seafaring survival, and the infinite reaches of faith.

Like so many books dubbed masterworks of recent literature - or simply "modern classics" - Life of Pi is a book that draws reactions diverse in the extreme. As with any novel, some readers will regret their time spent and for others the experience will be in their blood forever. I'm of the latter persuasion; this is the sort of novel that makes me stop to celebrate the sheer magic that a good story can achieve. I certainly count Pi Patel among the most richly-imagined characters I've ever read; he and his story of a boy and a tiger in a boat, simple on the surface yet impossibly complex underneath (much like the Pacific itself), will be with me for a very long time.

Martel lays the foundation for the tale with the words, "I have a story that will make you believe in God." So much is encompassed in that one sentence; it seems to tell us in advance that the story we are about to read will either move us or frustrate us beyond definition - as religion often does - and that we will many times find ourselves at a crossroads of faith. Faith is itself a main character, a survivor on that lifeboat, but the shape it takes in here is one of the most beautiful and, I think, most enchanting interpretations I've experienced. In the early chapters of the book we learn of Pi's unconventional spiritual leanings: towards that of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. He lays his imaginative and ever-loving heart before the reader when, at the furrowed brows of his earthbound leaders – father, priest, imam, and pujari - young Pi simply says, "I just want to love God!" He does; and as his capacity for love transcends religious confines so does it transcend the hopelessness of tragedy and the chaos of desperation. In this alone, Pi and his story would be enough, but through Pi's narrative Martel explores faith and life and love even further, shifting from witty to philosophical, from real to surreal. Within this intricate tapestry of art is the power to impact a reader’s life, the sort of impact we readers quest for every time we open a book.

Much of the novel exists with only Pi and the tiger (whose name, with an ecstatic sense of rightness, is Richard Parker), but through their interactions, the settings of territory and the solid language of emotion, the two pack more life into several hundred pages than I would have imagined possible. Martel heaps so much love and earnest heart into Pi’s narrative voice that the reader feels locked into this powerful, uneasy friendship of man and beast. Despite the abundance of violence between creatures (some reluctantly inflicted by devout vegetarian Pi), what struck me in the end was that I've rarely read such emotional and breathtaking writing about animals. The tremors of a ship rat clinging to safety in fear; the quiet, noble pain of the injured zebra; the gently quizzical nature of a contented meerkat; each comes to exotic life through Martel’s prose, which is fearless in its imaginative daring.

By the end of the book the reader is given a crossroads of belief, an opportunity to take a path obscured by the bramble of imagination, or one that offers the clarity of practicality. As the unforgettable narrator wisely observes, “Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love.” So it is with getting lost in a good story.

Life of Pi was my July pick for the TBR Pile Challenge, and it didn't disappoint. I've kept myself distanced from the book and it's film adaptation (something I hope to remedy soon) so I wouldn't have much to influence the experience. When I finished reading I went to its Goodreads page and browsed other reviews - it never fails to amaze me when I see such a wild fluctuation from two- to five-star reviews. Just further proof of the subjective nature of books!

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Creating a provocative sensation upon its publication in 1993 with a film adaptation that became a cult classic just six years later, The Virgin Suicides remains a persistent contemporary classic; a novel at once remarkably elusive, open to perpetual interpretation, and yet with an intensely personal resonance for many readers. It was the debut novel of author Jeffrey Eugenides (winning awards even before its publication), and in many ways it lays the groundwork for the mastery and peculiarity of a seminal artist. The story, of course, is that of the Lisbon sisters – Therese, Mary, Bonnie, Lux, and Cecilia, who range in ages from 17 to 13, respectively – and the year in which they ended their young lives. In a uniquely stylized first-person-plural narrative the unidentified boys across the street, telling the story twenty years later, explore every waking moment of their obsession with the otherworldly Lisbon sisters: beginning with young Cecilia’s first suicide attempt and subsequent completion, and carrying on fixatedly through until the sisters’ tragic dénouement. In between lies an electric, compelling portrait of a doomed search for liberation in the clutch of youthful desperation; of parental extremes warring with teenage angst; and of the grimy secrets hiding in the shadows of 1970s suburbia.

The Virgin Suicides reads like few other books, with Eugenides, then a novelist-newcomer, standing on no ceremony for the ethical or moral niceties that might stand in the way of this intrepid story. He allows the collective narrative to divulge and disturb as it will, weaving into its most grotesque and honest territories without apology. Eugenides explores these territories with perverse curiosity, as do his boy-men telling the story, poking at the short lives of the Lisbon sisters with brazen and indelible devotion. Though dialogue is often scarce, the Lisbon girls come to life, hazily and irresistibly, under the narrators’ ministrations: shimmering reflections of clever, romantic visionaries on the cusp of an unreachable womanhood, girls labeled as “troubled” or “crazy”, but only troubled by the manipulations of society and only crazed by the boundaries in their paths. Throughout the narrative they stay under the surface of the murky glass that encompasses the distance between them and the rest of the world: the narrators, as well as the readers, are never allowed within the sphere of any one Lisbon sister, never granted entrance into the realm of her thoughts and dreams – and, most aggravatingly, never allowed to understand her reasons. What results is the faded picture of five tragic figures set against the more vividly realized surroundings of suburban Michigan in the 1970s; in a way, the haziness of the Lisbon sisters, combined with the anonymity of the unnamed and unnumbered boys across the street, draws an inverted focus. There’s a kind of strangeness to this style that wonderfully echoes the bizarre, thought-provoking, and at times profane story at the heart of the book.

Distracting only slightly from the compelling singularity of the novel and the enchantress-like mystique of the otherwise ordinary Lisbon sisters is Eugenides’s magnetic prose, which soars throughout the narrative with delightful flair and a dry, darkly humorous edge. His ability to weave through the intricacies of language and emerge with art is just beautiful; his writing is rough-hewn and elegant all at once. With inimitable style and boldness, The Virgin Suicides is fascinating and disturbing, drawing an arresting line between the constraints of sexual repression and the inevitability of mortality.

The Virgin Suicides

was my June pick for the

TBR Pile Challenge

; I've been meaning to read it since before I can remember, and it was certainly worth the wait. There's something so incredible about this novel to me; I can't really put my finger on it, but hopefully I gave voice to it in some degree above. This is one of the rare occasions when I saw the film adaptation before seeing the book, but it didn't hinder my experience at all. (Actually, everything just seems to look a little more ethereal overlaid with Sofia Coppola's wonderful imagery, doesn't it?)

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Manju Kapur’s debut novel, Difficult Daughters, is the powerful story of a young woman’s search for independence in a time when the path of a woman’s future was anyone’s decision but her own. Virmati is a young Punjabi girl, born to a high-minded family in Amritsar; the oldest daughter of an ever-growing brood, Virmati spends much of her youth taking care of her siblings. With encouragement from her father and grandfather, Virmati’s dream of pursuing an education becomes her greatest passion, much to the dismay of her mother. As far as Kasturi is concerned, a good marriage is a woman’s destiny and Virmati is merely flirting with disaster. One of the first of the novel’s distinctive qualities is the author’s way of exposing elements of the plot out of order: we are first met with Virmati’s daughter as she reflects on her mother’s death, and we reconnect with her throughout the book as she researches in order to learn more about the life Virmati was loathe to share with her. Additionally, the narrative takes us back as early as the beginning of the 20th century where we briefly witness Virmati’s mother, Kasturi, as a young girl. It’s through these quiet, almost indecipherable shifts of focus that Kapur delivers a clever examination of how three generations of women rebelled against each other in much the same way. Her writing is beautiful and assured throughout, dispersing at will to connect the reader with all manner of information – intense descriptions of the history, nuances of the Indian lifestyle, introductions to innumerable interesting characters – while maintaining a steady focus on the heart of the story, the life of young, determined Virmati.

The narrative follows Virmati’s life through World War II and Partition as her studies are interrupted by an illicit love affair with a neighboring professor – a married man – whose passion for her begins to take the shape of an obsession. Virmati finds herself torn between her love for the professor, her obligations to her family, and her unyielding desire for independence; her life is soon in upheaval as she’s thrust about by the opinions and desires of those around her. With a striking command of language and a natural eloquence, Kapur weaves a story at once heartbreaking and impressively thought-provoking. Her female characters are all fiercely rendered, each fascinating in her own way – from the professor’s disgraced first wife to Virmati’s activist roommate – and each fascinating despite her flaws. No one is without shortcomings in the story, including Virmati, whose devotion to the professor readers may not be able to fully grasp. Virmati’s father is perhaps the most progressively drawn of the male characters here, while the professor seems at first a starry-eyed intellectual evoking compassion before developing into a decidedly selfish, maudlin source of frustration. This, though, feels like quite the unconventional portrait of a romance that Kapur intended to draw, and as the novel progresses it makes Virmati’s story all the more poignant.

First published in 1998, Difficult Daughters went on to win the 1999 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book in the Europe and South Asia region. Reading it, one is quick to forget that the novel was, in fact, Kapur’s debut: her style of writing is risky but beautiful, her confidence steady, and her characters richly developed. Her inclusion of small, consistent details that color the daily life of her Indian women works to bring the authenticity of her India to larger life, even for a foreign reader who may not be familiar with the native terms Kapur is quick to utilize. This is one of the many charms of Difficult Daughters, the way it confidently offers its roots and the road to its present. In her examination of the search for female identity, Kapur puts forth an illuminating novel full of power, honesty, and grace.

Difficult Daughters has been newly released in ebook format alongside Manju Kapur's four subsequent novels by Open Road Media.

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