Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness

Okay, I'm going to try to avoid having an "A Few Good Men" moment here, but I LOVED this book.

When I was in high school I wrote a review of "A Few Good Men" for the newspaper and you wouldn't believe how much I waxed poetic about that movie. I
went off about how good it was. I went so far as to call it the perfect movie. When I got the graded review back from my Journalism teacher she wrote, "Kind of gushy." I was taken aback. People always like a bad review more than a good one, but I remember thinking to myself, "Gushing? Is it gushing to call the pyramids in Giza magnificent?" At that moment "A Few Good Men" was the film equivalent of the pyramids to me.

Later on, I remember reading a review in People that was favorable, but also rational. It had a great line in it that I still remember: "Jack Nicholson comes awfully close to doing a Jack Nicholson impression." It also said that Demi Moore's performance was so hammed up it could have been put between two pieces of rye bread and sold at a deli. I had to admit that the reviewer was right, and I started to feel a little stupid about my review.

Sidebar [But dude, that is a good movie -- even the minor characters -- Kiefer Sutherland, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Noah Wyle? Don't get me started!]

I will try to refrain myself, because I feel like gushing about this book. I just loved it. It maybe seems more powerful to me because I didn't expect to like it as well as I did, and the subject matter is not the kind of thing I'd think I'd be into. Lest I get ahead of myself, let's start with the basics:

Some Stats:

Most important stat: It's a true story!
Year book was written: 1976
Year story takes place: 1927
Number of pages: 361
Time that I stayed up last night finishing book: 2:00 AM
Number of times I laughed out loud: 12+
Number of times I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would happen next: 3
Number of times I read Tisha while working out on the treadmill: 1
Number of times YOU should read Tisha: 1+

Plot Summary

So, all morning long I've been looking up more info about this book so that my devoted readers would have the background they've come to expect from this blog. "Tisha" is so named because it is how the Indians/Eskimos pronounced "teacher." Her name is Anne Hobbes. In 1927 she left the civilized town she was teaching in Oregon to move to Chicken freaking Alaska to teach school for a year. The story was "told to" the author, Robert Specht, although Anne Hobbes is also attributed as having written it if you look her up. She considers herself to have written the book. I'm not implying any issues between her and Robert, just saying that it was a joint effort.

This book is very well written. From the first few pages I was stricken by how lean and entirely unaffected the writing is.

It's written in the first person and it starts out with Anne talking about the four day ride on horseback from Eagle, Alaska to Chicken. Not having ridden a horse since she was eleven, the trip was brutally painful for her, yet kind of funny. You can't help but like Anne because she is so down to earth and free from vanity.

The thought of a 19-year old girl making the decision to leave a very nice job teaching in Oregon to go to a settlement so remote that it's a four day horseride from Eagle is pretty astonishing. I can't even imagine the courage that must have taken and there were a lot of women who did it.

I kind of expected a quaint little Polyanna-type story of the village and its inhabitants but it turns out to be about how mostly everyone is an asshole. Anne is extremely liberated for the time and has no prejudice against Indians. This does not sit well with the Chicken crowd -- some of whom Toby Keith may have descended from.

In the year that Anne spends in Chicken she contends with cold that makes me, a native Minnesotan, feel like a complete wuss. There are stretches where it is 57 degrees below zero for weeks at a time. There are holes in her wall, there is no plumbing or electricity and people actually get stuck on the outhouse hole. She sleeps with her potatoes so that they won't freeze.

When she allows "breeds" -- half Indians into her classroom the "school board" -- which for some reason consists of three of the most shit-kickingly ignorant people in town -- throw a fit. When she falls for a half-Indian boy it gets even uglier. Things progress until Anne finds herself caught up in an adventure that is so dangerous and suspenseful that I couldn't go to sleep last night.

Despite the fact that Anne runs into a lot of prejudice, she manages to get along with people fairly well through most of the story. The details and descriptions of the way things were and how she felt are very genuine -- Specht didn't try to sex anything up. There are some beautiful descriptions of how Alaska looked in the dead of winter. Anne wasn't the least bit afraid of going out in the middle of nowhere on skis in weather that can only be described as complete bullshit.

There is no way you can walk away from this book and not be thoroughly impressed with this girl...I think I might be gay for her.

Here are a couple of my favorite parts.

In this scene Nancy, a no-nonsense older girl who is living with Anne and helping her out with the class, gets into it with Evelyn, the daughter of the biggest asshole in town. Evelyn has inherited his racist ways and is picking on an Indian kid. Where Anne is never really able to do anything about the snot-nosed brats in the class, Nancy is under no obligation to be cool.

"They must have washed Chuck's face with snow because it was all red and wet. None of them saw me, so I figured I'd let Nancy handle it. She was toughter than all of them put together.

'You keep your hands off this kid from here on,' Nancy said to Evelyn, putting a mitten on Chuck's shoulder.

'You don't have any right to tell us what to do,' Evelyn sneered.

'I'm not tellin' you what to do. I'm just tellin' you that if you lay your hands on this kid again I'm gonna bash your head in.'

They left Chuck alone from then on.

Sweet.

I think this is a really interesting passage because it never occurred to me that anyone would LIKE winter...

"Now I realized what the North was really like. It was made for winter because winter was when everything went on. You could ski any place you wanted to and get there twice as fast and twice as easily as you could before there was snow. People went out and brought in the trees they'd cut for firewood and left lying until they could use sleds to haul them. The whole country just opened right up."

Although Anne is pretty non-confrontational, she gets pissed off at one point in the story. I like this speech, even though it's sort of depressing.

"You asked me before why I came into this country. I'll tell you the truth. I thought I was going to find something wonderful here -- everything I ever dreamed about. Maybe that's stupid but that's what I thought. Well I found out one thing. People here aren't much different from the ones back in the States. The only difference is that here they can do anything they want, which means acting just about as mean and selfish as they can."

It is pretty messed up how people can just get away with anything -- both because it's the '20's when no one really cared about how bigoted and violent people were, and because they're in the middle of frickin nowhere. I mean, it would have been cool to have been a criminal there, but not so much a schoolteacher.

When the mail guy, Mr. Strong, comes to town a couple of times a month the school closes early, people get "dressed up" and stand outside waiting for him to get there. This is the kind of detail that makes the story ring true -- it's just cute.

"Jimmy and the rest of the kids were busy piling snow up at the edge of the settlement. They did it every time Mr. Strong was due in, built a barrier a few feet high just so they could watch Mr. Strong's horses kick it to pieces when they went through it."

Kids are so retarded.

Review

I can't say enough about the writing. Robert Specht was from New York City and he graduated from CCNY at the late age of 32. There he won "top awards in both short story and essay competitions." Well earned, I'm sure, Mr. Specht.

There is an honesty in Anne's perspective that feels timeless. She was clearly a strong and open-minded person, intelligent, infinitely compassionate...sexy. The book really conveys her humanity and she's easy to identify with even though the circumstances she's in are not. I don't want to give too much of the book away because you should read it for yourself, but the book has a definite story to it and you'll be sucked in right away, I'm sure.

I am reminded of Julie of the Wolves, another book about a girl in Alaska that knocked me on my ass -- it was so good. Maybe this is my new thing, books about girls in Alaska. Seriously, it's one of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking books I've read in a long time.

Anyway -- guess how many Ampersands Tisha gets!? That's right! The coveted FIVE Ampersands!!! & & & & &

Stay tuned for my next book -- "How Green Was My Valley" -- Tisha will be a hard act to follow. Just like A Few Good Men.

Definitely NOT on the list

Since the age of about 8 I've had a penchant for trashy novels. Yeah...eight. My mom was not one to censor my reading choices. I remember reading Flowers in the Attic when I was in fourth grade. It's still one of my favorite books, but let's face it -- the main focus of that series is on a sexual relationship between a brother and sister. Needless to say, I did not acquire Flowers in the Attic through the scholastic book order.

Anyway, the point is that I still read romance novels from time to time. They're escapist, steamy and usually hilarious. Unfortunately, much of the actual "romance" is gone for me. I realized by the age of ten that 99% of romance novels are as formulaic as a Kate Hudson movie. Romance novels basically run on templates. There are maybe 15 to choose from, especially in the genre I read -- "historical" [he he] romance. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The Lady is a Tramp: Breathtakingly beautiful virginal woman gets lost in a bad part of town and is mistaken for prostitute. She is presented to a dashing, strapping, well-endowed man who has his way with her...romance ensues.

2. The Lying Lover: Impossibly handsome rake who has quite the reputation with the ladies spies astonishingly beautiful virgin (often at a ball doing something quirky like spying on someone or stealing food) and decides he must have her. For whatever reason he cannot be straight forward with her so comes up with a ruse to make her his(frequently he says he's helping her find a husband - not himself.) Romance ensues...and how!

3. Lady in Drag: A virgin girl of unparalleled beauty dresses like a boy for some reason. Really, this happens ALL the time. A man with impossibly wide shoulders, chiseled features and the seductive powers of 10 men is at first annoyed by her/him but then realizes that he's a woman, baby. She never knows he knows and there's inevitably an awkward scene where he's trying to make out with a "boy." Romance ensues.

4. Terms of Endearment: Either the virginal girl with the body of a woman and porcelain skin or the toweringly tall man with a chest like a brick wall who smells of soap and manliness, gets very sick. The one nurses the other back to health. In so doing they invariably learn the other's life story through his/her delerious (yet surprisingly lucid and thorough) muttering. Ex: "No, no -- don't take advantage of me Uncle John Smith," or "Dammit Martin, my only brother, why didn't I take that bullet during the war?" The nurse bathes the other's naked body throughout the illness. This causes the woman who was bathed to blush "to her roots" and if it's the man, he smiles arrogantly/seductively. Romance ensues.

On the heels of the depressing Kristin Lavransdatter I turned to Johanna Lindsey -- a very prolific American romance writer. Here are some of the ACTUAL titles of her books:

Savage Thunder
A Loving Scoundrel
Warrior's Woman
The Devil Who Tamed Her
Captive of my Desires

How awesome are they?!? A trend that has begun in the last 20 years in the genre is to tell the story of not just one lucky, gorgeous couple, but of all of the siblings and friends of that lucky couple. For example, in the first Lindsey book that I read -- "Tender Rebel" we meet James Malory and Georgina Anderson. "Tender Rebel" mixes templates, as only the best novelists do, using both "Lady in Drag" and "Terms of Endearment." Anyway, there are NINE offshoot books about James's and Georgina's brothers, nieces, nephews, friends etc. My favorite is "Tender Rebel" (Lying Lover, The Lady is a Tramp) which tells the story of James' brother Anthony and his Scottish lass Rosalyn. Rosalyn says "och" a lot -- especially when she's being expertly aroused by Anthony.

But like any series, the more there are, the weaker and more watered down they get. The one I happened to pick up after Kristen Lavransdatter - "The Magic of You" attempts to spice things up by going outside the template, and also by marrying a distant Malory relative to one of Georgina's brothers -- Warren Anderson.

In order to abandon the template, Lindsey also had to abandon all illusions of being historically accurate. Amy Malory has, for reasons never explained, decided she wants to marry the dangerously handsome Warren. She throws herself at him shamelessly -- more Carrie from Sex in the City than 17-year-old 18th century English maid, and he grouchily turns her down over and over again, to the detriment of his frustrated, throbbing manhood.

This book is - so - bad. My favorite parts are when Lindsey tries to provide exposition through dialogue that is so unnatural you can actually feel the paper its written on cringing. Below are a couple of examples from a conversation that is happening between two cousins.

"When Uncle James gets in a fight, the poor victim doesn't usually walk away. My friend, Nick, found that out first-hand and nearly missed his wedding to our cousin Reggie because your father laid him up in bed for a week."

In real life the response to that would be, "No shit, moron, he's my dad. I was THERE. And you don't need to call our cousin Reggie "Our Cousin Reggie" -- I KNOW she's our cousin.

Another example:

"But I thought it was only Nick's wife, Reggie, whom they took such a personal interest in. They didn't bother with Amy's older sisters, Clare and Diana."

That would be like me having a conversation with my husband and saying, "Honey, your mom and dad, Louise and John, called and they wanted me to let you know that your older brother, Pat, and his girlfriend, Amy, are going to be coming over to their house on Malibu Drive in Edina tonight."

Men in these romance novels are usually monstrously huge -- even in 18th century England. They're super tall and if you touched them you'd think they'd been carved from granite. Everywhere. (If you know what I mean, wink.) For example, the description of Georgina's brothers, who have traveled all the way from America for the birth of her first son...cause I'm sure people back then made that kind of a trip all the time for such things...

"They did come inside, a veritable mountain of men filing past her. Two of them were just short of six feet, but the other three topped six feet by a good four inches... And all of them were too handsome for a young girl's composure to last very long."

As for the story, it's got your typical 10% background, 60% filler and 30% love scenes. The plot is skimmable, like all of them, but this one really gets an A for effort. There's something about an ancient vase, and Warren and Amy end up being captured on a boat owned by Chinese people. That part is awesome:

Chinese person who captured Warren: "Time is of no importance."
Warren: "How fortunate for you, but the rest of us live our lives by the clock. No deal, Mr. Liang."

I think Lindsey might have read a pamphlet written in 1948 about Chinese culture as her research, because her descriptions are pure cliche and outdated.

"The first meal, a bowl of rice and strange-looking vegetables in a tangy sweet sauce, had been delivered by a cheerful little fellow who called himself Taishi Ning. He was a stringbean of thinness (The metaphor of stringbean to indicate skinniness is particularly vivid and fresh) in his loose trousers and belted wraparound tunic, his thick black braid nearly as long as he was. Like Li, Taishi was no taller than Amy (Warren must tower over them!) How hard could it be to overpower him with the assistance of her rice bowl? Not hard a'tall."


I repeat:

"How hard could it be to overpower him with the assistance of her rice bowl?"

She tiptoes the line of racism occasionally, too:

Taishi: "Lookee what Taishi bring, little missee. Big-time good stuff. You no likee, I chop off cook's hand lickety-split. Big-time promise."

WTF???

In the end, our hero and heroine declare their mutual love for each other, with scenes of invading tongues, burning hardnesses and aching breasts sprinkled throughout. Amy and Warren (Amen? Like Brangelina?) are married and live happily ever after...yay!

And the Next Book is...

A request from a very special reader is the reason for this very special post. This little red-head has made several requests that I post what book I'm reading so that she can follow along.

I encourage everyone to do so!

But before I make the announcement, a side note.

My library is about the size of my microwave. It contains every vampire, cat detective and Judith Kranz novel every written along with about 15 copies of the Grapes of Wrath...and nothing else. I literally looked for twenty different books from my list and there was not one of them available. Imagine my huffiness!

My point? LoLo does not actually "choose" which book she will read next, but rather the pierce county library system chooses for her, by deciding which of the dozens of books I have on order they ship first.

And what book has the Pierce County library chosen for LoLo next?

Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaska Wilderness

And for those of you who like to plan ahead, it looks like the next book I'm going to get is:

How Green Was My Valley...

Read it and we can chat virtually about it! How warm and wonderful that will be :)

Kristin Lavransdatter

Kristin Lavransdatter Review

Kristin Lavransdatter takes place in 13th century Norway. This is not a time period, nor even a country about which I have given much – any? – thought before. I was really excited to read it because I tend to dig historical fiction and mostly because of the truly glowing review that the Book of the Month Club gave it –

“We consider it the best book our judges have ever selected and it has been better received by our subscribers than any other book.”

I mean, that’s high praise.

So, they call the book Kristin Lavransdatter on The List but it is actually a trilogy of books, none of which is called Kristin Lavransdatter. The first book is the one about which I am talking today, since I haven’t read the other two. It is titled The Bridal Wreath.

Bridal Wreath Statistics

Year written: 1923
Number of pages: 272
Gender of Author: Female, though I didn’t realize that for a while because her name is Sigrid – does that sound masculine to anyone else?
Number of Nobel Prizes that Sigrid has: 1
Nobel Prize Fun Fact: Sigrid won the NP for literature for the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy as well as two other books. I didn’t know they gave out Lifetime Achievement awards – I thought it was just for one book…Discuss…
Number of times Sigrid fled Germany because of her opposition to Nazis: 1
Number of children Sigrid had: 3
Number of minutes I spent on Sigrid’s Wikipedia page: 7
Most exciting part: Someone tries to poison someone else…with leprosy!
Number of times I laughed out loud during Bridal Wreath: Zero

Bridal Wreath Review

This book started out pretty slowly for me. It took me awhile to get through the first 70 pages, and then I finished the last 200 in just a couple of days. It starts out with her as a very little girl and ends with her marriage to a total D-bag at the age of about 20. The book does a great job of painting a portrait of the social morals of the time. You are so entrenched in them that you begin to feel truly scandalized that Kristin would have dared to accept a gift as fine as a cloak from her lover, or break her betrothal to Simon.

I’m totally unaccustomed to such an unhappy story for the lead character and for a lead character who is herself so unlikeable. It took me off guard because I’ve been conditioned by Jane Austen to expect that the girl will retain her honor and live happily ever after. Kristen is stupid, naïve and – above all – stubborn. Her father, Larvans [sidebar, it took me a really, really long time to figure out that her last name, Lavransdatter means Lavrans’ daughter] makes a marriage match for her with a decent enough guy. He is young and not terribly attractive and Kristin’s reaction to him is pretty lukewarm. A semi-scandal happens and her name is besmirched, through no fault of her own. For this reason she is sent to a convent for a year to reflect and also to give the scandal time to cool off.

While at the convent Kristin happens to meet a man of very questionable morals and intelligence who is also hot. His name is Erlend (not to be confused with Elrond the elf, though that would have been awesome.) He has two children by the wife of another man. Though he is close kin to the King he has been disowned by the court and excommunicated from the church. Kristin is a moron and this doesn’t bother her too much. He sort of half-rapes her which of course means that her only salvation is to marry him. Plus she loves him even though he half-raped her.

As the year goes on she gets in deeper and deeper with Erlend who sets up trysts for them at a brothel. Simon eventually finds out and he puts an end to their meetings. He ends up proving himself to be a very honorable person.

At this point things just get ugly. This is not a happy story. Kristin and Simon break their engagement. Kristin’s father understands that she’s fallen in love with a cad, but doesn’t know that she’s “no longer a maid.” He refuses to let her marry him because all of his inquiries into his character prove him to be a D-bag. The standoff between her and her father literally lasts like 3 years, until finally – after some serious drama and despair – he gives his consent for them to be married.

At almost the exact moment that her father allows the marriage you get the feeling that Kristin is wondering what the hell she’s been so adamant about. Erlend continues to put Kristin at risk by insisting on meeting and having sex with her. The inevitable happens – she gets pregnant.

There really is quite a bit more to the plot, and it moves along at a reasonably good pace. I sort of lost all enthusiasm for the story when I paged ahead and realized that, yes, she really does marry Erlend and is with him – unhappily – throughout all three novels.

I appreciate that Sigrid doesn’t romanticize, but starkly tells what was probably a pretty common story for these poor 13th century Norwegian women. I think it’s kind of funny how much authors like to romanticize history when there wasn’t much to celebrate about the lives of women. If The Tudors has taught me nothing else, it’s that even the wealthiest, most powerful, prettiest women lived a life that would be intolerable to a modern US woman. This is a bleak story, which makes sense considering it won a Nobel Prize. I haven’t read a lot of Nobel Prize winning stories, but the ones I have were similarly grim and…hopeless.

Passage that I thought was cool or interesting:

After Kristin has surrendered her sacred chastity to Erland she starts to find that she really enjoys hearing about the sins other people have committed. When she goes to confess to her buddy the monk he tells her of a time that he got really pissed off at a guy who had destroyed the religious stone panel he had been carving and he threw a hammer at him. She thinks this is awesome –

“Ay, now you smile, my Kristin. But see you not that ‘tis not well with you now, since you would rather hear such tales of other folks’ frailties than of the life and deeds of good men, who might serve you as a pattern…?”

I just thought this was a pretty astute observation about how much humans suck.

And Another Thing

You find out at the very end that Kristin’s mother was “no longer a maid” when she got married either. And you find out that Simon knew about the brothel Kristin was at because he – without incurring any dishonor at all – had frequented it. So, here are a couple of observations:

1. Okay for men to have sex outside of marriage
2. Not okay for women to have sex outside of marriage – but doesn’t seem to stop them
3. Everyone is having sex outside of marriage but women are severely punished if they are found out
4. Because it’s acceptable for men to have sex outside of marriage, this means that they must be having sex with women who are outside of marriage and only the woman is looked down upon…in other words men totally fine with sacrificing women’s honor in the most hypocritical way.

Now I know these are hardly groundbreaking observations but what the hell. Did NO ONE call shenanigans on this absurd double standard???

It seems that if women could have been given the same freedom as men a whole lot of agony could have been avoided. Despite the proclamation of valuing a woman’s chastity more dearly than gold, women were “compromised” a lot – at least in Kristin’s village. And I daresay Kristin’s village was a lot like every other village in 13th century Norway.

Anyway…I don’t think it’s fair for me to judge Kristin Lavransdatter until I’ve read all three books in the trilogy. However, I will give this book a tentative && - Two Ampersands…I have to return the book to the library now so I’ll probably read something else before getting back to it. Stay Tuned…

P.S. Thanks to all of the well-wishers about my root canal. I had the second part of the procedure performed and it went well. And no, that was not my actual X-ray, though it must look a lot like what you would imagine my tooth X-ray would look cause several people asked (only CSL noted that the X-ray’s tooth had a ‘nose ring’ – hee hee)