rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: tarshis lauren

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.

I Survived the Great Molasses Flood, by Lauren Tarshis

The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!

My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton

A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.

This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.

This is not one book about a particularly unlucky immortal, but four books in a series of short, easy-read middle-grade novels about kids surviving disasters. I bought them because I needed to fill a particular ecological niche in my children's books, which was easy-read middle grade novels which 1) would appeal to boys as well as girls, 2) are not fantasy, 3) are not Hatchet or Wimpy Kid.

I read one to see what they were like and was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. I ended up reading three more for sheer enjoyment and will no doubt work my way through the entire series. I'm not saying they're great literature, but they are A+ at leaning into their premises - they promise a kid surviving a disaster, and they give you a kid surviving a disaster - and they are much better than they need to be.

I particularly like how each one features both a disaster and some personal problem, and how the personal problem ties into the disaster but in a non-obvious way. My favorite in this line is that the hero flees Pompeii with his father not because of Vesuvius, but because they're runaway slaves - and then goes back to try to warn the city because his dad's former (now deceased) owner was basically an early scientist and so his dad recognized the signs of an impending eruption. But I also enjoyed the Japanese-American boy using his recently-dead father's stories from the Air Force to help hum survive the tsunami, the American Revolution kid worrying about the young woman slave and her toddler that he left behind, and the medieval peasant girl trying to retrieve her church's stolen chalice from a corrupt sheriff.

The historical details are pretty good, the action is exciting, and while the kids and the people they love the most all survive and get reasonably happy endings and there's nothing too graphic, Tarshis doesn't pull many punches within those constraints. The tsunami aftermath is pretty brutal, and she's very clear that the American Revolution meant freedom for only a very limited subset of Americans. There's an afterword to the plague book which says she got a lot of requests for it, and she thinks it's because of covid. She suggest that kids who lived though covid write about it for posterity.