Lift Up Your Hearts!

The Silent Swan by Lex Keating (AltWit Press, 2013)

Having found myself in the vicinity of Stephan's Kindle, I could not resist reading his copy of The Silent Swan.  Were it not for his positive review, I would have passed on the opportunity, as coming-of-age stories and romances are both near the bottom of my genre preferences.  (You can read his review here.)  However, The Silent Swan is so much more than that.  (The cover is unfortunate.  Maybe not for the author, since in my observation that kind of cover sells.  But it hardly does justice to the book.)  What really hooked me is that the story is a mystery, and I'm a sucker for mysteries.  Trying to unravel the truth kept me reading, and the ending did not disappoint.  Overall, I give the book four of five stars.  But for the romance/teen angst/school story genre, it deserves at least a ten.  Ditto for the "modern Christian fiction" genre.  The bar is really, really low in those categories, which makes The Silent Swan a standout.

It almost lost me in the first chapter.  I suppose that if a character is going to develop gradually over 580 pages, it helps to start from a bad place.  I really hate it when people do stupid things in books, and the protagonist was being really stupid.  Granted, the action takes place in a school, among hormone-laden teenagers, which is practically a recipe for stupidity ... but still.

I've said this before—in my review of Stephen Lawhead's The Skin Map—but it's equally true here:  "My least favorite [parts of the book] were the drawn-out descriptions of the physical appearance of every female character encountered, and the even more interminable battle scenes, both of which were obviously included for the more testosterone-laden among us."  The Silent Swan is clean, almost grandchild-safe (and probably better than much of what our eldest has already read), but violence and sex still sell to some segments of the audience.  I found the brotherly squabbles (and fights) annoying, even boring; and if this story provides an accurate description of what goes on in a teenage boy's mind whenever he sees a woman ... let's just say I'm feeling a lot better about burqas.  It's not porn, but even I am enough of a feminist to find it outrageously insulting.  (Yet this is 'way better than so much of what's available and aimed specifically for the teenaged audience.)

There are some points where the story stretches my "willing suspension of disbelief" too far.  It is unfathomable that in any family these days, let alone a family with a full-time employed mom, kids could grow up so ignorant in the kitchen.  Haven't they heard of cookbooks?  Or allrecipes.com?  I can see asking them to have meal responsibilities, but what parents expect so much from someone with no preparation at all?  I actually know someone who was taught to swim by being thrown into the middle of a lake—but even then the instructor was there to keep her from drowning.

The main female character is also omni-competent in so many areas that for some that will be the least credible part of the book, but I see it as a strong point:  I know teenagers can be and do so much more if allowed to break out of their media- and school-induced comas!  If she is a bit too much of a superhero, she's also the most human and reasonable of all the characters, and in her courage, perseverance, intelligence, and (non-romantic) love is a positive female figure—something I find very rare.

I mentioned that The Silent Swan is a standout in the modern Christian fiction genre.  Frankly, I don't know whether or not the author intended it to have that label.  Certainly J.R.R. Tolkien would not have accepted such a designation for his works, and they are some of the best Christian fiction extant.  But it deserves consideration, because I could see this book selling in a Christian bookstore.  Certainly the cover looks like the Christian romances I've seen there.  Yet one of its strengths is that it's a Christian novel that is hardly recognizable as a Christian novel.  It's not The Lord of the Rings, but is nonetheless infused with Christian attitudes and values while completely eschewing overt Christian language.  Stories with altar calls just. don't. work.  At the same time, it's not one of those books by postmodern Christian authors, who throw in bad language and questionable content just to prove they're "authentic" and without religious hangups.

The Silent Swan is both too hard and too easy on the foster care system, so I'll average that out to okay.

All the sibling violence to the contrary, the protagonist's family is solid, full of mutual respect and love, and with no quarter given for disrespecting the parents.  That, sadly, is a rare quality in the books that are pitched to children these days.  And if his mind starts out one-dimensional when it comes to women, he does grow considerably, and in all the right directions.  Respect for family; love as something greater than sex; the idea that life might be more serious than going to prom; basic honesty; resisting seduction; the importance of setting oneself up for success in potentially risky situations (e.g. being in a group rather than alone with your girl on a deserted beach)—these are not popular attitudes, especially in young adult books, but are presented as good, reasonable, and believable in The Silent Swan.

The Silent Swan is a well-constructed and clever take on one of Grimm's fairy tales, The Six Swans.  I won't say the writing is great, but it's good, and that's saying a lot in these days of slap-dash writing, and of editiors and proofreaders who apparently have time to do neither.  I've recommended it to our library for purchase, and I hope Lex Keating has another book in the works.

Note:  Now that I have a Kindle, buying books is a harder decision.  Susan Wise Bauer's History of the Renaissance World is still on my Amazon wish list; I would have bought it months ago if I could only decide whether to get the physical book or the Kindle version.  Unfortunately, it's not part of the Kindle Matchbook program, where you can get the Kindle version for little or nothing if you buy the printed book.  While writing this review, I decided to buy the Kindle version of The Silent Swan for myself (it's only $2.99), but then I noticed that it IS part of the Matchbook program, and what if I later decide to get the book, which at the moment is a pricey $17.99?  I would have wasted the opportunity.  Decisions, decisions.  (Amazon Prime members can read the book for free, by the way.)

Sunday, May 11, 2014  The men of our choir, plus a few others from the church, took over for the women in honor of Mother's Day.  I felt a little uncomfortable not sitting in the choir loft, but I did have a great seat: just about where the cameras were in the video below.  The men sang twice (besides the regular service music):  A version of Surely the Presence of the Lord Is in this Place (Lanny Wolfe, arranged by Elmo Mercer, Lanny Wolfe Music), which they did beautifully.  What blew our socks off, however, was  Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) (Tomlin/Giglio/Newton/Raney), Hope Publishing, C5644).  We've done it as a whole choir before, but I just love what the men did with it.

This video is courtesy of our friend and fellow choir member, Beth, who deeply regrets not getting the whole song.  It took a while for people to realize that this was a moment to be preserved.  I didn't even think of my own camera, sitting under my chair in my purse.  You may be able to see a longer—though still not complete—version if you are friends with me on Facebook.  Or maybe not; I've discovered that when I share other people's posts, sometimes my friends can see them, and sometimes they can't.  In any case, I'm so grateful to have this much for a reminder of how lovely it all was.  (Heather, you know the guy behind Dad, too.)

Sunday, May 4, 2014  One of our favorites.

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence (Gustav Holst, Galaxy, 1.5019)

I still have not read Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, recommended to me by a knowing friend, because (1) our library, which has otherwise been marvelously responsive to my suggestions for books to acquire, declined this one with the inexplicable excuse, "I'm sorry but this title does not fit our collection guidelines and we are unable to order it. It is a scholarly, university-level book."; and (2) while I expect I'll agree with much of what he says, I also suspect a sexist vein in his philosophy that would drive me nuts the way John Eldredge did.  Someday, maybe.

In the meantime, Esolen continues to fascinate me.  I can't personally say much about the new Common Core standards and all the kerfuffle they have generated, because I am blissfully beyond that stage of life in its practical application and therefore have not given the mess much attention.  Nonetheless, I harbor an automatic suspicion of anything that moves educational decisions farther up the food chain, and so Esolen's How Common Core Devalues Great Literature sounds great to me.

The Common Corers get things exactly backwards. You do not read The Wind in the Willows so that you can gain some utilitarian skill for handling “text.”  If anything, we want our children to gain a little bit of linguistic maturity so that they can read The Wind in the Willows.  That is the aim.  I want my college students to read Milton so that they can enter the world that Milton holds forth for us.  I show them some of his techniques as an artist, since they’re mature enough to appreciate them, but not so that they can reduce the poem to an exercise in rhetoric.  I show them those techniques so that they may understand and cherish the poem all the more.  I want them to become “friends” with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  I want them to climb with Dante and Virgil the glorious mountain of Purgatory.  I want them to stand heart to heart with the Geats as they watch the flames devour the body of their deceased king Beowulf.

Those are the important things, the permanent things.  If you are not reading The Wind in the Willows as Theodore and Edith Roosevelt and their children were reading it, then you should not read it at all.  If you are turning Tom Sawyer into a linguistic exercise with a veneer of intellectual sophistication, then you should not read Tom Sawyer—in fact, you cannot have understood a blessed thing about Tom Sawyer.  If you are reading The Jungle Book for any other reason than to enter the jungle with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Baloo, then you had best stay out of the world of art, keep to your little cubbyhole, cram yourself with pointless exercises preparatory for the SAT, a job at Microsoft, creature comforts, old age, and death.

Preach it, brother!

At about 4:30 Friday afternoon, I became aware of some rustling in the bushes outside my office window.  Normally this is just the grey squirrels, but our resident armadillo occasionally pokes around, so I got up to look.  It was neither.

I've said before that I love going to a church that has services every single day between Palm Sunday and Easter, and I love even more living close enough that there's little hindrance to attending them.  Beyond ordinary busy-ness, that is, which we're supposed to be giving lower priority during the most momentous week of the Church Year.  Writing this up so late, I'll no doubt miss something, but GEIBTP.

Palm Sunday  I miss processing with whole palm branches instead of little leaves, but at least they were still cut from the yard instead of purchased.  The best part was the music provided by our own little orchestra!  It was great being led by trumpets: we stayed together much better than we usually do while trying to sing All Glory, Laud, and Honor spread out all around the church and the parking lot. The orchestra was amazing: these are middle schoolers, some of whom just started playing their instruments this year. Great music? No. Helpful? Very much so. Inspiring? Yes, yes, yes! And I was really impressed by their endurance.  Other hymns, songs, and anthems:

Ride On! Ride On! In Majesty! (tune: The King's Majesty); A Simple Word of Grace; It Was Finished on the Cross (solo); At the Name of Jesus (tune: King's Weston); O Sacred Head Sore Wounded (tune: Passion Chorale).  Plus an anthem, which I'm pretty sure was the beautiful To Love Our God (Mark Hayes, Hinshaw Music HMC1576).

Have I made it clear enough that our church likes to be active in worship, to sing, and to feast?

UPDATE 11/5/19  Aaaaargh!  As I've pointed out innumerable times, when Flash in these posts was automatically converted to iframe, which needed to be done, between the first embedded video and the ending text all other videos (and associated text) were accidentally deleted. Normally this doen't matter much, but in a post like this, with a week's worth of information, it really hurts. Still, it will stay like this until I find time and priority to see if there's a way to recover the data.

I'm always complaining that we—and by "we" I especially mean our schools—do not expect enough of our young people.  This morning, however, while doing a Khan Academy mastery challenge, I ran into the following problem (click to enlarge):

Did you notice the grade level for this problem (in the black line, at the top)?

Fifty years makes no difference in the susceptibility to parody of elementary mathematics education in America.

Elementary school mathematics, 1964:

Elementary school mathematics, 2014:

My apologies:  I can't get the embedding to work on this Stephen Colbert video, but you can click on the link above.

My go-to example of what young people can accomplish has always been David Farragut, midshipman in the U.S. Navy at age nine, given charge of a prize ship at 12, later the Navy's first admiral.  But the Occasional CEO has provided some other examples for my list:

In 1792, the trading ship Benjamin departed Salem, Massachusetts, loaded with hops, saddlery, window glass, mahogany boards, tobacco and Madeira wine.  The ship and crew would be gone for 19 months, traveling to the Cape of Good Hope and Il de France.   All the while they bargained hard from port to port, flipping their freight several times “amid embargoes and revolutions,” naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote, “slipping their cables at Capetown after dark in a gale of wind to escape a British frigate; drifting out of Bourbon with ebb tide to elude a French brig-o’-war.”  In 1794, the Benjamin returned to Salem with a cargo that brought 500% profit to its owners.

The ship just happened to be captained by Nathaniel Silsbee, 19 years old when he took command.  His first mate was 20 and his clerk 18.

I know we expect a different sort of education for our young people today, but surely we can do a better job of helping them get it more efficiently.  No wonder today's teens are restive!

Our local Winter Park Honey folks posted this video.  I figure the grandkids, at least, would enjoy watching the bees.  The bee activity is a little slow at first, but be patient; it gets fascinating.

Upper management from the engineer's point of view.  (H/T Jon)

Congratulations to my sister and her husband, for

25 years

of blessing our family together.

Happy Anniversary!

Sunday, March 30, 2014:

Christ Hath a Garden (Gerald Near, Belwin-Mills, GCMR3271).

From Thursday's Orlando Sentinel.

Mallard Fillmore, from yesterday:

From what little I've read about the changes, there are some positive ones as well.  Still, the move to make the test more aligned with what students are actually learning, and to what they will likely encounter in general life, is part of a disturbing trend.  To my mind, the Scholastic Aptitude Test is only useful if it measures what is not taught in school, nor in "test-prep" courses.  Otherwise, it's just another achievement test.  A mastery of so-called arcane vocabulary is an indicator of the extent and quality of a student's outside reading.  Success in the analogy section, which to my chagrin was dropped long ago, was an indicator of a certain kind of mental agility.  A widely-read, mentally agile person is more likely to be successful in college, hence the putative value of the test.

Granted, an exam based so strongly on the English language puts foreign students, and those from difficult backgrounds, at a disadvantage, but that's only an argument for why the SAT should be but one part of many criteria for college acceptance, not for altering the test itself.

Except for a short lesson in proper test-taking strategies and the specific structure of the exam, I'm of the opinion that test-prep courses simply undermine the purpose of the test.  Sorry for pulling the "old" card, but in my day we went into the SAT cold, knowing that the best preparation was years of good habits.  In fact, we were told that it was impossible to study for such an exam!  Easier all around....