‘Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat’ (Books I Didn’t Finish)

Maybe this is how the new Miss Universe stays thin?

Title: Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat: Secrets of My Mother’s Tokyo Kitchen. By Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle. Delta, 274 pp., $12, paperback.

What it is: One woman’s theory of why Japanese women have the lowest obesity rate in the world (3 percent) and the highest life expectancy (85 years) even though the country has “millions of stressed-out, nonexercising people who are smoking and drinking their way to early graves.”

Where I stopped reading: At the beginning of Chapter 4, entitled “How to Start Your Tokyo Kitchen, or Yes, You Can Do This At Home!” (page 67).

Why I stopped: You’d need to have a more serious interest in Japanese cooking than I do to read more than I did. The first three chapters explain the Japanese philosophy of eating as seen by Tokyo-born Naomi Moriyama, who moved to the U.S. at the age of 27. And these sections are interesting and well-written, though rooted in the views of an earlier generation (that of the author’s mother). Many Americans may be surprised to learn that the Japanese love desserts, especially chocolate. “One elegant Tokyo department store now offers shoppers their own accounts in a Chocolate Bank – you buy an amount of gourmet chocolate, the store keeps it in its temperature-controlled chocolate vault, and you stop in to make a withdrawal any time you want.” But after the first three chapters, the book turns into a collection of recipes for what Moriyama calls “Japanese home cooking.” “This is not a diet book,” she says. “And it’s not a book about making sushi.”

Best line in what I read: The Japanese philosophy of eating includes the concept of hara hachi bunme – “eat until you are 80 percent full.”

Worst line in what I read: I stopped before the recipe-intensive section. But even the recipes in earlier chapters call for ingredients that might be hard to find outside big cities. Among them: dashi, kombu, mitsuba, shiso leaves and bonito flakes.

Editor: Beth Rashbaum

Published: November 2005 (Delacorte hardcover), January 2007 (Delta paperback). This site has video clips of Moriyama’s Today show appearance: www.japanesewomendontgetoldorfat.com

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

At least 50 percent of all reviews on One-Minute Book Reviews cover books by women. Except during holiday weeks, books by female authors typically appear on Mondays and Wednesdays and books by male authors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please consider linking to this site and telling others about it if you’re frustrated by how often Sunday book review sections consist mainly of reviews books by male authors, written by male critics. To my knowledge One-Minute Book Reviews is the only site that, while reviewing books by both sexes, has had from the start a publicly stated commitment to parity for female authors. Thank you for visiting this blog. — Jan

Atul Gawande Takes the Pulse of the Medical Profession

True or false: More people go crazy when the moon is full.

If you said “true,” you probably haven’t read Atul Gawande’s Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (Picador, $14, paperback), a stylish collection of essays by a Boston surgeon and contributor to The New Yorker. Gawande reviewed more than a hundred studies of how lunar phases affect human behavior after his fellow doctors warned him to expect more hospital admissions when the moon was full. He found that researchers had pored over all kinds of evidence – police logs, homicide statistics, emergency room visits and consultations with psychiatrists. The result? There’s no relation at all between craziness and the full moon. Some studies have suggested the opposite – that full moon has a beneficial effect on human behavior.

This is the kind of fascinating material regularly dispensed by Gawande, who also wrote the new Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (Metropolitan, $24). The essays in Complications deal with subjects from doctors’ mistakes to patients with terrifying diseases like necrotizing fasciitis (known, somewhat misleadingly, “flesh-eating bacteria”). Gawande often takes controversial positions. He challenges the idea – cherished by many doctors – that surgeons need “good hands,” saying the continual practice of surgery matters more. (Doesn’t the quality of the practice matter? What about education? Can practice make you a great surgeon if you went to a medical school or work at a hospital that’s a step away from losing its accreditation?) But part of the appeal of Complications is that Gawande www.gawande.com has the courage to risk saying things other doctors won’t and the rhetorical skill to give his views force. He never hides behind a cardboard shield of medical omniscience. And he deals with a wider and more offbeat range of medical topics than physician-authors like Oliver Sacks and Sherwin Nuland. So you may enjoy Complications even if you couldn’t get through The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or How We Die.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

How to Get a Signed Copy of ‘The Accidental Bride’ or ‘Manhattan on the Rocks’

A postscript to my Totally Authorized Reading Group Guide to my first novel, The Accidental Bride, posted on Monday: I have signed many copies of this book as bridal shower or bridesmaids’ gifts. Here’s how to get an autographed copy for a bride-to-be or anyone else:

1. Send a copy the book to the address on the “Contact” page on this site or on the same page on www.janiceharayda.com.

2. Tell me how you’d like me to personalize the book. Let me know if you have a specific message you’d like me to inscribe or if you’d prefer come up with one (or just sign my name).

3. Enclose a padded enveloped with the return postage and address on it when you send me the book.

I’ll also sign copies of Manhattan on the Rocks if you do this.

I can’t speak for J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. But many – maybe most – authors will sign their books for you if you follow the steps above: Send them one of their books along with an envelope with a return address and postage on it. If you’d like to make sure an author will do this, write to the author c/o the publisher of the book. The address for the publisher may appear on the copyright page. Many authors limit the number of books they will sign this way to one or two.

Yes, publishers do forward all the mail (though it can take a month or more). We love to get those letters, which are becoming ever-more-cherished in the age of e-mail.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Virginia Ironside’s Comic Novel, ‘No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club’

An English grandmother hasn’t had sex in five years and isn’t sure she wants it

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year. By Virginia Ironside. Viking, 231 pp., $24.95.

By Janice Harayda

Is a backlash building against all those articles that say that you’re never too old to don a zip line and swing through a Costa Rican jungle? First Nora Ephron told us in I Feel Bad About My Neck that it’s “sad” to be over 60. Now Virginia Ironside writes in this fictionalized diary that the great thing about being old is that there are so many things you can’t do. “You no longer have to think about going to university, or go bungee jumping!” her heroine tells an obtuse therapist. “It’s a huge release!”

This concept could be a tougher sell in U.S. than in Britain, where Ironside writes an advice column for the Independent. Her diarist, 60-year-old Marie Sharp, calls herself “old.” How many Americans in their 60s do you know who describe themselves that way? Don’t look to Ironside to soft-soap you with you with euphemisms like “older” for “old” and “midlife” for “anywhere between 40 and death.”

If Marie is blunt, she isn’t mean-spirited. She is kind, cheerful, active and devoted to her friends and a newborn grandson who lives near her home in west London. And although she hasn’t had sex in five years, she doesn’t lose sleep over it. She’s thinking of giving it up – if a nice, rich, attractive childhood friend doesn’t change her mind.

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club isn’t as funny or polished as Bridget Jones’s Diary, or the comic masterpiece from which Helen Fielding’s novel descends, E. M. Delafield’s great Diary of a Provincial Lady. But Ironside’s book has much more to say about being old – sorry, “older” — than bestsellers like The Red Hat Club or Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman. And Marie’s opinions, if not the plausibility of the plot, give her story its own appeal.

Ironside mounts a worthy assault on many popular beliefs that were overdue for it, such as the idea that people help their survivors by planning their own funerals (and that funerals shouldn’t be funerals at all but rather “a celebration” of a life). And Marie is the rare heroine bold — or perhaps reckless — enough to question the motives of book club members: “I think they feel that by reading and analyzing books, they’re keeping their brains lively. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t.” Naturally, Viking has published a reading group guide the novel.

Best line: “I don’t think those oldies who spend their lives bicycling across Mongolia at eighty and paragliding at ninety, are brilliant specimens of old age. I think they’re just tragic failures who haven’t come to terms with aging. They’re the sort of people who disapprove of face-lifts, and yet, by their behavior, are constantly chasing a lost youth.”

Worst line: Marie makes a show of not wanting to learn Italian but seems unaware that her French needs help. For example, she thinks “Champs-Elysées” and “allô” have no accents. (My computer can’t show the one on the capital e.) Marie also quotes a French guest as saying “allô” in person. The French use “allô” only on the telephone. And isn’t credible that Marie’s guest would say this face-to-face, even as a bastardized “Hello,” when the correct bonjour is universally known. Marie also has an odd way of trying to show a friend that she knew what she “was talking about” in a discussion of AIDS. She speaks of “the HIV virus” when the V in HIV stands for “virus.”

Reading group guides: A Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide to this book was posted on One-Minute Book Reviews on May 29, 2007. You can find the Penguin guide in the reading groups page at http:us.penguingroup.com/.

Published: April 2007

Links: www.virginiaironside.org

You may also want to read: Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck (Knopf, 2006), reviewed on this site on Oct. 14, 2006, and archived with the October posts: www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2006/10/page/1/.

Janice Harayda is an award-winning critic who has been the book columnist for Glamour, book editor of the Plain Dealer and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle www.bookcritics.org. She also wrote The Accidental Bride (St. Martins, 1999), a comedy of Midwestern manners, and Manhattan on the Rocks (Sourcebooks, 2004), a comedy of New York manners www.janiceharayda.com.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

A Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide to Virginia Ironside’s ‘No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club’

10 Discussion Questions for Book Clubs and Others
No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year

 

This guide for reading groups and others was not authorized or approved by the author, publisher or agent for the book. It is copyrighted by Janice Harayda and is only for your personal use. Its sale or reproduction is illegal except by public libraries, which may reproduce it for use in their in-house reading programs. Other reading groups that wish to use this guide should link to it or check the “Contact” page on One-Minute Book Reviews to learn how to request permission to reproduce the guide.

Marie Sharp refuses to learn Italian or take up paragliding now that she’s 60. She thinks that the great thing about her age is that there are so many things you can’t do. “You no longer have to think about going to university, or go bungee jumping!” she writes in this novel in the form of a diary. “It’s a huge release!” But if Marie is blunt, she isn’t mean-spirited. She is kind, cheerful, active and devoted to her friends and a newborn grandson who lives near her home in west London. And although she hasn’t had sex in five years, she doesn’t lose sleep over it. She’s thinking of giving it up – if a nice, rich, attractive friend named Archie doesn’t change her mind. As she tries to fathom his intentions, she pours into her diary her thoughts on age-related topics from “senior moments” to whether or not people should plan their own funerals.

Viking has posted a readers’ guide to No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club at http://us.penguingroup.com that you may want to use at a starting point for your discussions. But like most publishers’ guides, that guide is part of a publicity campaign designed to sell books. It does not encourage criticism, cite negative reviews or suggest that you compare the novel to similar books. For these reasons, the Viking guide may have less depth or promote a less lively conversation than you or your group would prefer. The following Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide is not intended to be comprehensive but to raise questions not covered by the Viking guide.

Questions for Readers

1. Author Virginia Ironside www.virginiaironside.org has spent more than 30 years as an “agony aunt” for newspapers in England. What, if any, evidence of her work do you see in her novel?

2. A theme of No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club is that the line we’ve been fed about being old – that anything is possible at any age – is a fairy tale. Marie believes that the great thing about being 60 is that “so many things are impossible.” [Page 8] For example, you no longer have to think about going back to school or taking up bungee-jumping. Do you agree? How well does the novel support this point of view?

3. Does this novel seem to be trying to refute some fairy tales about being old while perpetuating another? What, if any, fairy tales does it promote?

4. Marie Sharp spurns some activities that might stimulate her mind, such as joining a reading group. She writes of book club members: “I think they feel that by reading and analyzing books, they’re keeping their brains lively. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t.” [Page 42] Yet Marie tells us that she takes lots of fish oils: “If fish could improve Jeeves’s brain, they can improve mine, too.” [Page 109] Do these passages seem contradictory? Why or why not? Does Marie ever seem to be cherry-picking her mental stimulants without owning up to it? How does this affect the novel?

3. Similarly, Marie thinks that “sex only brings trouble and misery.” [Page 139] She tells us so little about her past relationships, especially her marriage, that it isn’t clear exactly what she means by this. But near the end of the novel she’s sure that she can have a “sexy and loving” visit with a male friend. [Page 231] Based on what has happened to her in the book, is this transformation credible? Why or why not?

6. Marie makes few comments about Americans, but they are all unflattering. (You can’t count the Bob Hope joke that she likes because Hope was born in London.) She hates “a frightful, raucous American voice.” [Page 204] She cringes at the sort of “wretched” asexual woman with a “weird” haircut who has the “American-woman-in-art-gallery” look. [Page 132] She thinks the local Starbucks is “horrible.” [Page 204] If you’ve lived in the U.K., you may recognize these as examples of the British stereotype of Americans as loud, rude and unattractive vulgarians who are polluting the world with their toxic culture. How do you think Marie would react if you told her that her views of Americans were stereotypes? Would she listen? Or would she say that Americas are loud, rude and unattractive?

7. No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club has many amusing lines. One is: “Did you hear that grandchildren are the reward you get for not killing your children?’ [Page 205] Another is that “the five ages of man” are “Lager, Aga, Saga, Viagra, Gaga.” [Page 49] What are some of your favorites? How does Ironside manage to make serious points while keeping her novel funny?

8. Marie was young in the 60s and claims she “slept with a Beatle.” [Page 7] Yet rock ’n’ roll has almost no role in her diary. Is her apparent lack of interest in the music of the 60s believable in the context of this? Why or why not?

9. England has given the world many wonderful novels in diary form, far more than the U.S. has. The best British diary novels include E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady, Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. Why do you think England has produced more great diary novels than the U.S. has? If you have read any of them, which do you like best? How would you compare them to No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club?

10. Ironside says in an interview on the Penguin Web site that she has never belonged to a book club “and would certainly not wish to read books dictated by a group.” Dictators, what would you say to her?

If you dare:
11. Marie has found that the “clitoris was a much-overrated part of one’s anatomy, which never really lived up to the rave reviews it received over the last twenty years.” [Page 178] Is Marie nuts? Everybody in the group who thinks so, raise your hand.

Extra:
12. Novelist Jane Gardam wrote in a review in the Spectator (Oct. 14, 2006) www.spectator.co.uk “This is the sketchy diary of a 60-year-old woman with an amusing, runaway pen, written over 19 months. She is scatty, impulsive, open-minded and living cheerfully in Shepherd’s Bush, which never ceases to intrigue her (‘Today I saw a man standing on his head in the middle of the pavement’).” Do you agree with the characterization of Marie as “scatty” and “impulsive”? How would you characterize Marie? (You can read Gardam’s full review by searching for the title of the book on the Spectator site.)

Vital statistics
No, I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year. By Virginia Ironside. Viking, 231 pp., $24.95.

A review of No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews on One-Minute Book Reviews on May 29 2007, and is archived with the May posts and in the “Novels” category.

Your book group may also want to read:
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. By Nora Ephron. Knopf, 137 pp., $19.95. In this essay collection, Ephron offers a different view of being in her 60s than Marie Sharp does. Your group may want to compare their attitudes toward the same topics, such as sex, children, friendship and their homes. I Feel Bad About My Neck was reviewed on One-Minute Book Reviews on Oct. 14, 2006, and is archived with the October posts: www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2006/10/page/1/.

Janice Harayda www.janiceharayda.com is an award-winning critic has been the book columnist for Glamour, book editor of The Plain Dealer and a vice-president of the National Book Critics Circle. One-Minute Book Reviews does not accept free books from editors, publishers or authors, and all reviews and guides offer an independent evaluation of books that is not influenced by marketing concerns. If this guide helped you, please bookmark One-Minute Book Reviews or subscribe to the RSS feed and forward a link to others. Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guides appear frequently but not on a regular schedule.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

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A Totally Authorized Reading Group Guide to ‘The Accidental Bride’ by Janice Harayda

10 Discussion Questions
The Accidental Bride
A Comedy of Midwestern Manners

Note: Because of the holiday, I’m taking the day off from reviewing and posting this readers’ guide to The Accidental Bride, my first novel. This differs slightly from the other guides on this site, because I haven’t reviewed the book and am instead using some of the material the publisher sent out when the book came out in hardcover. A guide to my second comedy of manners, Manhattan on the Rocks (Sourcebooks, 2004), appeared on March 14, 2007. You can find it by clicking either on the March posts archive or the Totally Unauthorized Reading Groups Guide category (although the guides to both of my novels, unlike the others on this site, are totally authorized). Jan

One month before her fairy-tale wedding to the third richest man in the second largest city in Ohio, Lily Blair is beset by doubts. She appears to have a charmed life – a budding newspaper career and a five-carat engagement ring from a wonderful man – but can’t decide whether to plunge headfirst into the security of married suburban life or follow her career dreams alone to New York. Her family and friends keep nudging her toward the aisle. But Lily has qualms about a wedding her mother wants to stage like a full-scale military operation. Amid the plans, Lily looks to Jane Austen for inspiration. Can she find what she needs in novels like Pride and Prejudice? The answer doesn’t emerge until the last pages of book that Publishers Weekly called “a witty and wise comedy of manners that pays homage to Jane Austen.”

Questions for Book Clubs and Others

1. Each chapter of The Accidental Bride begins with a quote from Jane Austen. How do these quotes relate to the plot? Do they serve different purposes in the individual chapters and in the novel as a whole? What are the purposes? You may want to compare The Accidental Bride to Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club.

2. Many reviewers noted that the humor in The Accidental Bride is satirical. What are some of the things the novel is satirizing? Does Janice Harayda satirize some of the same things that Austen does?

3. Satire can take many forms. For example, it can be gentle or biting (sometimes both in the work of the same author, as in Austen’s novels). How would you describe the satire in The Accidental Bride?

4. The first sentence of The Accidental Bride reads: “One month before her wedding to the third richest man in the second largest city in Ohio, Lily Blair awoke in the middle of the night and realized that she did not want to get married.” The author doesn’t name that “second largest city.” But you may know that it is Cleveland. (The largest city is Columbus, the capital.) Why you do think the author didn’t name Cleveland? Do you think she did this for legal, literary, or other reasons? How might your reactions to the novel have changed if the author had named Cleveland in the first line?

5. Lily, the heroine of The Accidental Bride, doesn’t want to see a psychiatrist because she doesn’t think many therapists are as wise as writers like La Rochefoucauld, who said, “In love there is always the kisser and the one who gets kissed.” What does this saying mean? Is there a “kisser” and a “one who gets kissed” in The Accidental Bride?

6. Lily also admires another writer who says “love is an agreement on the part of two people to overestimate each other.” Do you think that writer was being serious or facetious or both?

7. A critic for The New York Times wrote in her review of The Accidental Bride that “Harayda is an astute social commentator.” That is, she is saying some things about our society in addition to telling a story. What are some of the things you think she is trying to say?

8. In novels about women in their twenties, the men are often cads. That’s especially true of the heroines’ boyfriends. Lily’s boyfriend, Mark, is different. He is a kind and thoughtful man who is trying to understand the woman he loves. How does this affect the plot and other aspects of the story?

9. Mark is trial lawyer who is forced to defend a company accused – with good reason – of age discrimination. Do you see any parallels between Lily’s situation and that of the older people in the lawsuit (called “Geezers” and “Geezerettes” by their employer)?

10. The Accidental Bride belongs to the genre known as the “comedy of manners,” which consists of fiction that tweaks the customs of a particular group (often a group that is — or sees itself — as upper class). The humor in this genre tends to involve wit and charm instead of slapstick or physical comedy. A classic example is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. What are some other plays, movies, or novels that are comedies of manners? Why do you like them?

Praise for The Accidental Bride
“Satire with heart … In a style that careens from Austenesque to Corporate Memo-ese, Janice Harayda has written a farce that dissects the farce of the matrimonial ceremony. Lily is a charming character.”
— Olivia Goldsmith, bestselling author of The First Wives Club

“A thoroughly entertaining first novel.”
— Joyce R. Slater, Chicago Sun-Times

“Sparkling with wit and humor, this is a story that charms.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“Harayda’s first novel has plenty of snappy, witty dialog, humorous scenarios, and sexual innuendo.”
Margaret Ann Hanes, Library Journal

“A frothy comedy … Harayda is an astute social commentator.”
— Maggie Galehouse, The New York Times

“Harayda is quick with a quip and merciless at sniping at an unnamed Ohio city … Residents of that city may not find this funny, but everyone else will.”
— Michele Leber, Booklist

“Vigorous wit, playful homage to the winsome heroines of great nineteenth-century novels, and a charming, irresolute heroine make this tale of a woman who doesn’t want to get married an unusually filling trifle.”
— Karen Karbo, San Francisco Chronicle (“Recommended” book)

“Harayda’s sense of the humorously absurd, combined with her gift for timing and fun, make this book readable and fun … Did I ever put it down? No. I read it at breakfast, at dinner, in the bubble bath. I got to liking Lily and wanted to find out what would happen.”
— Wendy Smith, San Diego Union Tribune

“The former book editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Harayda has made Lily a displaced reporter. This gives the author a wonderful chance to skewer newsroom types … half the fun for the reader is helping Lily sort out her misgivings [about her wedding] and figure out which are real and which are only flutters.”
— Kit Reed, St. Petersburg Times

“The Accidental Bride is a worthy counterpart to … Bridget Jones’s Diary [Harayda’s] hand at social satire rivals Austen’s … Lily Blair is a charming heroine … The reader is pleased to go along for the ride.”
— Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“Nicely skewers today’s over-the-top weddings and the whole wedding industry.”
— Linda Brazill, The Capital Times (Madison, WI)

“The Accidental Bride is a delightful romp of a book, both funny and wise and very much a story for our times. In Lily Blair, Jan Harayda has created a contemporary character who outdoes the best of Jane Austen’s most memorable women. When feisty Lily comes to terms with one of the biggest decisions of her life, the reader can do nothing but cheer.”
— Ruth Coughlin, author of Grieving: A Love Story

“True laughs and true lover abound in this galloping romanic comedy. Jan Harayda goes after the smug assumptions of suburban weddings and the absurdity of ‘mandatory’ matrimony. The wit is civilized, the heart is romantic, and the wisecracks are indeed wise.”
— Steve Szilagyi, author of Photographing Fairies

“The Accidental Bride is a charmingly witty, modern-day satirical tale of a woman trying to keep her balance as she teeters on the edge of matrimony.”
Charles Salzberg, co-author of On Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place

Vital Statistics
The Accidental Bride: A Romantic Comedy. By Janice Harayda. St. Martin’s/Griffin, 304 pp., $13.95, paperback.

To invite Janice Harayda to speak to your book group in person or by speakerphone, please use the e-mail address on the “Contact” page of www.janiceharayda.com and write “Book Club” in the subject heading of your note.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Babette Cole’s ‘Princess Smartypants’

A motorcycle-riding princess foils her parents’ plans to marry her off to repulsive suitors

Princess Smartypants. By Babette Cole. Putnam, 32 pp., $6.99, paperback. Ages 4–8.

By Janice Harayda

Suppose that you – oh, enlightened parent – want to read your daughter an antidote to all those princess books that encourage her to wait passively for Prince Right. Suppose that you wanted to give her a book that says it’s actually fine to be single. What could you read her besides Barbara Cooney’s beloved Miss Rumphius?

You could pick up Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants, a revisionist fairy tale that has been making children – and their parents — smile for two decades. Princess Smartypants is a motorcycle-riding royal who wants to control her own destiny. Or at least her own ring finger. So when her parents order her to find a husband, she devises tests for hapless suitors like Prince Compost and Prince Vertigo. Only Prince Swashbuckle passes, and she turns him into a toad “so she lived happily ever after.”

Cole raises this story to a higher power with pictures witty enough to delight even children who don’t get all her plays on words. When Princes Smartypants orders Prince Grovel to take her mother shopping for underwear, the queen holds up a pair of oversized bloomers as a clerk tries to tempt her with bikini briefs with a heart on them. One critic has called this book a feminist taming-of-the-shrew tale in reverse. It may remind you less of Shakespeare than of the moment at the start of the movie of Bridget Jones’s Diary when extra-large underpants flash across the screen.

Best line/picture: “Because she was very pretty and rich, all the princes wanted her to be their Mrs.” Princess Smartypants is definitely not beautiful in the usual princess-y way. She has big red nose, ping pong ball eyes and flyaway hair. So the subtext of this line is: You’re pretty if you think you are. It tells girls that there are many kinds of beauty, and the kind shown in most princess tales is only one of them.

Worst/line: Princess Smartypants tries to hide her laughter when Prince Fetlock is thrown from a horse. You might see this as sadistic. But it’s clearly intended as slapstick, a form of humor that appeals to its age group and that in context is obviously not intended to be taken as a model for real-life behavior.

Published: 1987 (Putnam hardcover edition), 1997 (Putnam reprint).

Furthermore: Cole is an award-winning English author and illustrator who has written many other popular books for children. They include Prince Cinders (Putnam, 1997), a revisionist Cinderella, that is as amusing as Princess Smartypants.

Links: www.babette-cole.com

You can follow Jan on Twitter by clicking on the “Follow” button in the right sidebar.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Coming Soon to One-Minute Book Reviews

Coming soon to One-Minute Book Reviews …

More of my favorite books and reviews of these and other new books …

No! I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a 60th Year. A comic novel by Virginia Ironside.

Without Title. Poems by Geoffrey Hill, one of the most admired poets of our time.

Princess Smartypants. A revisionist princess tale by the popular children’s author Babette Cole.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Robert Cording’s Poem “Pentecost in Little Falls, New Jersey’

A reminder for anyone observing Pentecost (Sunday, May 27) …

Robert Cording’s eloquent collection Common Life: Poems (CavanKerry, $16, paperback) includes the poem “Pentecost in Little Falls, New Jersey.” A review of Common Life appeared on this site on April 5, 2007, and is archived in the “Poetry” category and with the April posts. You can find more information on Cording, a professor of English at Holy Cross, at www.cavankerrypress.org. Click on the “Reading Room” page on that site to read his poem, “A Prayer to Adam,” the first poem in Common Life.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

David Matthews Looks Back on Straddling a Racial Divide in ‘Ace of Spaces’

The son of a black father and white mother writes of the confusion he felt while growing up in Baltimore in the late 20th century

Ace of Spades: A Memoir. By David Matthews. Holt, 302 pp., $24.

By Janice Harayda

Ace of Spades has a blurb on its back cover from Paula Fox, and its coolly detached prose in some ways resembles that of her Borrowed Finery. But you wish that the book had more in common with the work of such an elegant writer.

David Matthews affects the elevated diction of a Victorian triple-decker in this memoir of the racial confusion he felt while being reared in a Baltimore ghetto by his black father after his white mother abandoned him in infancy. His words clash repeatedly with his stories of living in a rat-infested house and carrying a Beretta when a friend needed backup on a drug deal – “perforce,” “peradventure,” “vouchsafed,” “surfeiture,” “temerarious.” The problem isn’t that he’s sending people to the dictionary – something I’m all for — but that his mandarin prose makes no sense in context. If he’s trying to show that he was once, as he puts it, “the shallowest sort of aesthete,” why keep it up after that phase passed?

You get the sense that, through such language, he’s less interested in telling the truth straight up than in creating a “character” who will interest readers or movie producers. This impression becomes especially troublesome near the end of the book when he searches for facts about his mother, who he learns died after abandoning him. He gets the name of a psychiatrist who treated her for schizophrenia and finds that — “miraculously,” he says – the doctor is still alive and living, as he is, in New York. The psychiatrist agrees promptly to meet with him, then pours out the details of his mother’s personal and medical history. Far stranger stories have appeared in memoirs, and everything in Ace of Spades could be factual, apart from the few “names and identifying characteristics” that Matthews says he has changed. Still, you wish that Matthews had, as he might have put it, “vouchsafed” the proof.

Best line: Matthews says that in college he developed an “intellectual anorexia” common among black men when he saw any display of intellect as “uncool, which is the definition of white.”

Worst lines: “… he aimed his fifteen-year-old phallic trebuchet at the college coed/divorcée/cocktail waitress set.” Matthews also writes that in middle school he had “an incipient though feckless concernment with the opposite sex.” Yes, “concernment.”

Editor: Vanessa Mobley

Published: February 2007

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.