Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

The Meaning of Life, Art, and the Sea with Anca Szilágyi and Dorthe Nors

December 31, 2022 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

It’s the time of year to reflect on existential questions and lay out splendid plans to enact the lives we dream of. This makes it the perfect time to talk about books, two of which have been guiding my own thinking these past days: Dreams Under Glass by Anca Szilágyi and A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors. These two very different books took me on a tour of the struggles to make a meaningful life and the complexities of arrival in the place you think you want to be.

Dreams Under Glass

In Szilágyi’s engrossing novel, twenty-something Binnie is grinding through her workdays as an underpaid paralegal at a law firm while living a second life planning Joseph Cornell-inspired artworks in her mind. She gives up a rent-controlled apartment to spend less time commuting to have more for her artwork, but she often struggles to make the commitments to the work itself that would allow her to finish a piece (and thus potentially capitalize on some connections that could turn her fortunes). It was sometimes painful to watch Binnie’s choices, mostly because I’ve been there and the hours we spend on things besides art (hello, Twitter) are easiest to quantify and lament from the outside.

“The hot floor would contain vats of steaming black coffee, a bitter stink of burnt grounds and toner fumes. Wallpapering this floor would be documents from tobacco companies, dizzying red text printed on pink paper. Perhaps here we’d have moaning figures, neckties draped over their shoulders, parched mouths panting at the vats of coffee, unable to drink.” – Anca Szilágyi, Dreams Under Glass

Szilágyi delves deep into Binnie’s ideas, which made the inside of Binnie’s mind the most fascinating part of this book as we experience the visceral details of artworks the world may never see. Binnie draws inspiration from her struggles in a dysfunctional, capitalist workplace and from a well of knowledge about Cornell. In fact, Cornell almost becomes a character in the book as Binnie draws upon his memory while planning how to arrange her squirreled objects and I learned a lot about the artist, despite having taken a lot of art history classes back when I thought visual art was my future.

I won’t reveal the major shift that happens toward the end of this book, only that there is one and that I’ll never think of the color turquoise quite the same way again.

One of the more touching aspects of Dreams Under Glass is Binnie’s relationship to her boyfriend, Gary. Although he seems clueless about her art, he very clearly cares deeply about her. What struck me most was a moment when, after Gary met Binnie’s parents, he gently prods her about her feelings for him and then says, “You make me feel alive.” It’s a tender thought and not one I think I would have appreciated quite the same way five or ten years ago. Maybe not even a year ago, because, like Binnie, I’ve spent a lot of time striving to find inspiration and time to make art. And in the struggle I’ve missed some of the best parts of what surround me every day, like the softness around my husband’s eyes when he brings me yet another cup of tea (when he could be working on his own art).

So while Binnie was finding her way toward art, I was finding my way into a quieter view of what makes a great life. I hope I can find compassion for the Binnie in me along the way.

A Line in the World

“I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore. A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude. Healthy solitude, and I want intimacy, true intimacy. I no longer want to be anyone but myself.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

In January 2020, my husband and I were starting a lot of big discussions about how to make the life we want. The theme was being intentional in our choices. Like everyone else, our choices were very quickly limited, but this discussion is once again rising to the surface in a practicable way. Sometimes this means picking the breakfast I want (rather than eating my oatmeal default) and chewing my toast slowly so I can experience and enjoy the last bite of special jam. Sometimes it means going to the beach, because one of the small (but huge) things that makes me feel whole is being near the ocean. This is why I was pretty sure I would love A Line in the World. What I didn’t know is my choice to curl up with this book during a week of sickness and recovery after Christmas would itself be healing.

“But a vacuum is always waiting to be filled with something. In the Wadden Sea, you bring the contents with you, and the contents of a supposedly authentic life can be terrifying.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

I’ve never read Nors’ fiction, but this collection of essays written during a year traveling the west coast of Denmark (or the east coast of the North Sea) was perfect. She resists a geographic order as these essay explore everything from family history to climate change to Danish surf culture (sometimes all together in a few pages). The writing, masterfully translated by Caroline Waight, seems effortless and I’m giving myself the gift of letting this book be the last I read in 2022. I know I will return to this book again and again but right now I want the feeling of having read it to stretch into a new year, and maybe a new life.

“Surely, to be great is to stand at the northernmost tip of the nation, right at the very top, with a foot in each sea. Can you feel the potential? This is your country, your language. Your limitations. In this moment under your jurisdiction, and only yours.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

So the struggle continues, in books and in life, and the glory, too, as we embrace the best of the lives we can make. What have you read this year that makes you see where you’ve come from, where you might want to go?

Reading All About Love and Rabbits with Bell Hooks and Kate DiCamillo

June 25, 2022 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Sometimes the books we need find us. This week I had two of those little miracles in my life as I found All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks in my to-read shelf and managed to convince my son to read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo instead of another edition of the I Survived series. Those books have had their uses lately, injecting hope as we navigate what feel like dark times (and my son loves them), but in this week of all weeks I needed something that wasn’t about an earthquake, tsunami, or hurricane. I needed to know how I am going to survive the much longer (and sometimes insidiously quieter) descent of my country into fascism.

Love as Nurture

Child of the 1980s, I grew up with a very particular view of love. If you were worthy (which as a woman meant being both beautiful and not too powerful), you would be placed upon a pedestal and cared for and worshiped as an object of great value. You would also, of course, be looking for someone to worship on a pedestal of your making. Sometimes those objects of worship needed to be reminded how lucky they were that you worship them, so you brought them down a peg (I now know to call this abuse), but as long as everyone followed these rules it was fine.

“To truly love we must first learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” – bell hooks, All About Love

Fine and empty, unrealistic and inhumane. The first realization for me in All About Love was when hooks delineated the difference between love and cathexis (the “process of investment wherein a loved on becomes important to us”). Cathexis can look like love but it doesn’t preclude hurting or neglecting the object. She separates love from simply caring, insisting that love involves nurture and that “love and abuse cannot coexist.”

“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.” – bell hooks, All About Love

The most shocking part to me about this reflection was how ingrained my acceptance of abuse as part of love was. Sometimes small abuses (remember when we thought “negging” was funny?) and sometimes large. I’m still grappling with this realization, because I can see in it how often I have not acted with love, even in the relationships that matter most to me. I can see how rarely my country (the government and citizens) acts with love toward our neighbors and compatriots. More on this later.

Patriarchy Doesn’t Work

“When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.” – bell hooks, All About Love

It took me more years than I’ll admit to see the patriarchal underpinnings of our culture. It was what I was born into and I didn’t question it (and when I did question it, my concerns were dismissed). All About Love helped me see some of the damage this system has done to me personally and to our society as a whole. When hooks references Harriet Lerner, saying “women are encouraged by sexist socialization to pretend and manipulate, to lie as a way to please… constant pretense and lying alienate women from their true feelings… [leading to] depression and lack of self awareness,” I can see the underpinnings of the quiet desperation suffered by so many women I know, even the strongest. When hooks writes “Patriarchal masculinity requires of boys and men not only that they see themselves as more powerful and superior to women but that they do whatever it takes to maintain their controlling position,” I see the hollowness of the structure on which it’s all built and why they are so desperate to keep us from questioning it.

I also see how difficult it is to build healthy relationships with anyone who is not questioning these frameworks. How can we love each other, in the way of nurturing, if we can’t even be who we are? Culture is a very strong force, but it is not immutable. We make culture every day with the decisions we make. We choose what we subject ourselves to and what we question. We choose how we let people treat us. We choose how we treat others.

“Individuals committed to advancing patriarchy are producing most of the images we see, they have an investment in providing us with representations that reflect their values in the social institutions they wish to uphold.” – bell hooks, All About Love

Again, the time I grew up in was rife with patriarchal imagery. There were glimmers of other possibilities, but they were too often extinguished. One of the choices I’m making for myself (and my kid) is about what media we’re exposed to. We can’t avoid all of it, in fact I don’t think we should, but we can make concerted choices and have the kinds of conversations that let us understand what we are really seeing and reading. Which brings me to Edward Tulane.

Love is Work

“In patriarchal culture, men are especially inclined to love as something they should receive without expending effort.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I had no idea what to expect when I opened The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. I’d bought it because our (wild) backyard bunnies are one of the things that have sustained me through the pandemic. I did not know the book was about love. I did not know this was the exact right book to read with All About Love. Edward is a ceramic rabbit who is loved and doted on by a little girl. He receives this as his due until her grandmother tells them a story about someone who could not love and Edward is very quickly thereafter lost. Edward sees many kinds of love in his journey and eventually learns how privileged he was to have been loved and have had the opportunity to love at all. He grows and he changes, he suffers and he is redeemed.

I love my little boy deeply. Both his father and I are committed to nourishing his spirit until he becomes the wild free adult he will probably grow into. I am also committed to the work of undoing some of the programming he will get from our culture and this book was a part of that. Because I adore him and I dote on him but I also want him to grow into a person who knows the work of love—the energy put into seeing himself and the people around him for who they are and nurturing those he chooses to love. And to let them love and nurture him.

Hooks writes about “how little support men received when they chose to be disloyal to patriarchy” and I have seen how in generations before mine this knee-capped the men who may have wanted to change. I see more men in my generation trying to do things like be primary parents and treat women as equals and how hard our culture (including the people around us, intentionally or not) work against them. I see men still younger having some success with allyship and personal growth but I fear for how fragile that could be without a larger movement. So I’m trying to give my son the strength to be part of that next generation who maybe, I hope, can live in a world where equality across genders, races, orientations, ability, and anything else you can picture is normal. A world filled with love.

The Aftermath of the Dobbs Decision

Yesterday was not a good day in many ways. We knew the decision was coming, but I still felt disbelief and paralysis that my human rights were wiped away with one decision by an institution I’d been brought up to revere. This is abuse. This is not love. And I know this is not out of character for our country, but I want it to be.

“Changing our thinking so that we see ourselves as being like the one who does change rather than among [those] who refuse to change.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I do not have a lot of power in this world, but I can take responsibility for what I do have. Yesterday I made some choices. I sat with my feelings rather than trying to push them away. I reached out to a dear, loving friend for the community I needed. I invited someone I wanted to get to know better over to my home, again to build community. I spoke up when someone was treating me as less than equal (no matter how inadvertent the gesture). And I gave money, because I could.

I don’t know what happens next. I hope that this cannot stand. I see how far we’ve slipped toward fascism in the last decade. I see the people who have worked hard against it. I wish the Democratic Party made up more of that group. I see how much work there is yet to do, not to get back to where we were, but to get to where we could be if we choose to believe in the inherent value of others.

How I’m Moving Forward

“When we hear another person’s thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I am trying to move forward in love.

I will continue to speak up for my rights and the rights of others. I will continue to listen to the stories of those others, including reading and rereading books about the radical power of love by bell hooks and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

“While emotional needs are difficult, and often impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill.” – bell hooks, All About Love

I will build community where I can. I will donate as much money directly to abortion funds as I can rather than spending it on useless items that do not actually salve my pain.

“The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are” – bell hooks, All About Love

I will try to know and love myself because I deserve it and so that I can love others better. And I will especially work to be a more loving parent and partner.

And you? How are you getting through? Are you ready to change the world through love?

Racing Through Mick Herron’s Slow Horses

June 19, 2022 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I say I’ve been in need of an escape lately, I don’t think I’m alone. And while I’ve been reading throughout the pandemic, the main escape for my exhausted brain has been streaming whatever fits in the few minutes between my kid’s bedtime and mine. My husband and I quickly run through the good stuff, so many nights are spent wishing for better as we switch between interfaces (I miss channels, they loaded so much faster), which is to say that it was a huge relief to run into Slow Horses on AppleTV.

I love spy stories and the performances by Gary Oldman, Kristen Scott Thomas, Rosalind Eleazor, Saskia Reeves, Christopher Chung, Jack Lowden, Dustin Demri-Burns and company were outstanding. The writing was so sharp and I really appreciated the fact that this isn’t a story about a group of crackerjack super spies who are besting the world. Instead, this group of “Slow Horses” has found themselves at Slough House because they screwed up. Deeply. That doesn’t mean they are not without their merits, but something about people inching through their days until they face a challenge where they are very much starting from behind suits the world of today. So when I say that unwrapping a Mother’s Day package with the first three books of Mick Herron’s series (on which the show is based) made me feel both seen and loved, you might guess how much.

The trouble was, I couldn’t stop reading the books. That was the intent, of course, of my husband’s ordering them for me, for me to get some time on my own to just recharge. But I don’t think he expected me to get halfway through the first book, Slow Horses, in a bath on that first day. I was glad to have watched the series because the writing was faster than my brain and it took me a little while to fully understand their world, that said, the first book and the first season of the show are nearly identical, though I’m not sorry I experienced both. And the casting of that series is perfect enough that I’ve carried the images of the actors through the books as I’ve read each one.

Stack of Mick Herron's Slough House Books — I read every single book in the series within a month

Truth is, I got so into the series that I read everything I had at hand in the first week. But before I finished the third book another package arrived. My husband had ordered the next three. And so on it went as I raced through every single book, including the accompanying novellas. I got sick one week and spent an entire day reading in bed with the fireplace on during the rainiest spring ever over here. I was reading the books so fast I couldn’t even keep up with my own progress on Goodreads.

Mick Herron Pulls No Punches

As much as the series is one strong continued story line, I’ve loved every book in its own way. I won’t go into details on the stories because I want you to experience them for themselves, but regular, beloved characters die often in this world of intrigue. And sometimes they die ignominiously. There aren’t a lot of rays of sunshine in these books except in the sheer fortitude of these characters going forward to face another day with whatever they have at hand, even if it’s aged technology and a rotting building.

The series is still being written and I appreciated the way that Herron wrote in contemporary events like Brexit, the pandemic, and Jeffrey Epstein without bogging the story too heavily in them. I hope this is something that happens in more books going forward (once we’ve had some time to process anyway), an acknowledgement of some of the heaviness of the last decade as the action of life continues on.

Can A Spy Novel Be Feminist?

The characters are beloved and the characters are awful. Sometimes they are both. One of my favorite depictions is of Roddy Ho, the resident hacker, because Herron does such a brilliant job of inhabiting scenes from Roddy’s stunted (at best) point of view as he cyberstalks women he’s certain are gagging for his love. Spoiler alert, they are not, but the way Herron takes us into his head we understand Roddy better but are not forced to have sympathy for his worldview.

I was jarred when I read the word “tits” in book two or three because the descriptions of the female characters don’t veer into the woman as object trope (thankfully) except when seen from the eyes of specific characters. There are women I fell in love with in these books and women I hated. Mostly they get to be people with good traits and bad. I loved that.

Jackson Lamb, the ostensible caretaker of the whole bunch is easily one of the most offensive characters of the bunch, treating his employees awfully and saying often (“in jest”) things that should not be said. Even he gets complicated, though, as he will go to the ends of the earth for his “Joes” (at least when the threat is coming from outside the office). Gary Oldman was especially beautifully cast in this role.

The Pacing of Slow Horses is Exceptional

One of the tricks Herron employs exceedingly well is constructing the books almost entirely out of very short scenes (one to two pages) that end with small cliff hangers. Each scene is then followed by one from a different point of view that ends with another cliff hanger. The writing and reading feel breathless (in a good way) as a result, and it’s hard to put the books down. Even at bedtime.

A careful reading will show, too, that the cliff hangers are not always what they seem and it’s worth reading as slowly as you can to see exactly what Herron wrote, not what he’s led you to want to read into it.

What Made Me Sad About These Books

There was only one thing that I regretted when reading these books—that my Baba and Djiedo weren’t alive to share them with. My shelves are filled with their old books (see that Bob Hope lingering in the back of the photo above?), and their mystery and spy novels are especially cherished. These Slough House novels are books I very much would have sent to them to share. But I’ve sent them to my dad for Father’s Day instead. The first three anyway, and if he loves them as much as I did then maybe I’ll keep sending them until he’s all caught up. Because the best part of a good book is sharing it.

If you try out the Slough House books, drop me a line and let me know what you think.

My Favorite Books of 2021

December 29, 2021 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Now that Christmas is over, I can safely reveal which books I loved the most during this past year without ruining any gift surprises. Reading is always an escape for me, and in 2021 this escape was especially welcome. I found myself using books as a way to explore other realities in a way that was both unintentional and also much needed. Of the 106 books I’ve read so far in 2021, here are the five I most loved, books that I think you might enjoy if you need a new reality for a few precious hours or days at a time.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

“[D]eath and time are both illusions because we and every stone are made of the same ever-shifting particles. If we live, it’s only because some distant galaxy lent us its dust for a while.” – Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

This is the book I’ve most recommended on Twitter threads this year because reading The Thirty Names of Night was such an immersive experience. This gorgeous book slides lyrically between locations (Syria, New York and Michigan), time periods, and genders as it explores themes of identity and belonging as a trans boy seeks answers about the fire that killed his mother and about a Syrian artist who disappeared. Joukhadar’s language is stunningly poetic, the characters are rich and compelling, and the action of the story is well-paced. I was a little hesitant about finishing this book because I’d loved it so much that I wasn’t sure that the ending could live up to the rest of the book. Reader, it did. If you want to get lost in a beautiful book, The Thirty Names of Night is my top recommendation for the year.

“[H]ow a person is supposed to know what they love to do by how time blurs when they’re doing it.” – Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

My six-year-old son also loves getting lost in a good book. And while we enjoyed Beyond the Bright Sea by Lauren Wolk and the Vanderbeekers series by Karina Yan Glaser very much, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is the perfect book for him right now, which makes it one of the most enjoyable books for me, too, because (when he isn’t bouncing back and forth on the bed) he’ll lean in close to me and put his hand across my wrist as I hold the book, an intimacy that’s already becoming rare.

He’s been obsessed with the Marvel character Shang-Chi since he found a Lego set at the toy store earlier this year and that led to a general fascination with China. This book, which my cousin picked out for him, details a journey by a young girl to find and consult with the Old Man in the Moon. The story arc and characters are strong, and it’s also filled with short renditions of Chinese myths. Some of my favorite moments so far are when we found the story of a goldfish trying to reach the top of a waterfall to become a dragon (a story that he’d had emblazoned on a shirt he wore for years) and the moment he told me the critical detail about why a dragon’s eyes weren’t painted in—something he’d learned from a series he’d been reading on his own.

The illustrations are beautiful, the print is mercifully large and the quality of the paper lends a tactile pleasure to reading this book. If your kids are as curious about the world as my little guy, particularly China or mythology, I highly recommend Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

My own interests in Asia tend more toward Japan and Zen Buddhism and I am a longtime fan of Ruth Ozeki regarding both. So when I found myself in a fiction drought toward the end of November, my husband mercifully and lovingly laid this tome on my bedside table to tide me over until Christmas.

Ozeki’s books are getting more and more mystical and I’m very much enjoying following her on this journey. At first The Book of Form and Emptiness broke my heart, reading the story of a family of three trying very hard to make it by when the father dies terribly may not have been my first best choice while my husband was healing from an injury during a pandemic, but maybe I needed that cry. I also needed the fantastic way Ozeki wove the different points of view together, from an adolescent boy trying to mourn to his mother who’s doing her best to cope to the voices of the books themselves, everyone had a different contribution to this story and every word contributed to the delicate balance of this wonder-filled book.

“‘Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.’ He sighed. ‘In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems there would be no poems.'” – Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

The Book of Form and Emptiness delves into grief, hoarding, mental illness, and the process of healing torn books and I’ll gladly read it all over again the next time I need a reminder that suffering is only part of the story.

Appleseed by Matt Bell

I don’t always read the right books at the right times (or do I?), having read Station Eleven in the weeks immediately preceding the pandemic’s early days in Seattle and Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods while pregnant, so you might want to find your own right time to read this post-apocalyptic delight. But I do think you should read it. I liked it enough to buy out the copies at my local independent bookstore (in hardcover) and send it to the people I most wanted to read it. Like The Book of Form and Emptiness, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and The Thirty Names of Night, Appleseed weaves several stories together to create one greater whole. In this case it’s the story of a fawn who helped bring apples to homesteads across the U.S., a man who is fighting to wrest the country from a company controlled by his ex during a global climate disaster, and a creature who is exploring the icy surface of what used to be this country many years after the culmination of that climate disaster. The luscious characterizations and world-building recalled the best of Ursula K. LeGuin and the fully imagined ramifications made me look hard at dangers percolating in the world right now, politically and scientifically.

I wish I could share a particular quote from the book, because Bell’s sentences are so well constructed, but I was so wrapped up in the plot that I failed to underline a thing.

Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I already wrote about Undrowned here, but it’s the perfect real-world counterpart to Appleseed and the focus on the radical power of love and the importance of caring for ourselves and our environment is a good step forward into the future, whatever it may bring. Read it for yourself, read it for the ones you love and the ones you don’t. This book can only enrich your life and your relationship to humanity as a whole.

“What are the boundaries that we choose and do not choose? What are the distances we need and what are the walls that will isolate and destroy us? How can we discern the differences between generative boundaries and destructive borders? Are we ready to move towards nourishing forms of adaptation?” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned

I’m hopeful for 2022, not because I have any idea what will happen next, but because hope is my coping mechanism and because I’m sure (at the very least) I will find new books to love. What did you most love reading in 2021 or what’s on your list for 2022? Please share recs in the comments and help me build my birthday list. In the meantime, I’ll be over here shoving books at my shelves during an end of year cleanout, hoping I don’t actually have to let go of any of them.

Finding Home in The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

July 31, 2021 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly made you who you are today, but one of the joys of motherhood for me is rediscovering the books that shaped me as I share them with my son. I first noticed this on re-reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and finding the beginnings of my socialist tendencies there. The few times my son has been interested in The Story of Ferdinand, I’ve remembered where I first felt the peaceful pull of sitting in the grass beneath a tree, sniffing the flowers. But nothing has smacked me as hard in the “OMG is that where I got that?” as The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. And while this is partially because the book speaks to some tendencies I probably already had as a fourth grader, it’s also a deeply artful book, which I think might have cemented forever my worldview.

Looking for Home

Not a lot of nineteen-year-olds dream of owning a house, but when I moved to Seattle so many years ago, I knew I wanted a big enough house with a fireplace and a yard and that was where I would live and eventually raise a family. I was lucky enough to have the family resources (a down payment and a co-signer) to get started on that dream and this summer we finally paid the house off. Was that why I picked up The Velvet Room when suggesting books for my son? It might be, but not consciously. He’s in a spooky place and I remembered there was a mystery and talk of a ghost and I thought this might be my chance to share this book with him during our early morning hammock reads in the grass beneath our cherry tree.

Robin Williams wants a home more than anything. Her large family has been traveling for the last three years, picking up whatever field work they can. They’d once had a home, but the Depression and her dad’s health robbed them of that security and now they live in whatever workers’ housing is available (sometimes resorting to sleeping in the family car). When their car breaks down in front of Las Palmeras, an abandoned mansion on an apricot farm in California, she is smitten. Already in this first chapter, the die are cast.

When I read of their itinerance and how deeply Robin longed for a home where they could stay, I felt a deep kinship. We didn’t move a lot when I was a kid, just an early move a few blocks from an apartment to a house, one year abroad in elementary school and another in high school. Still, I’ve always longed deeply for the feeling of being settled, preferably someplace quiet where I felt like I could be myself. Maybe Snyder felt the same way, maybe fourth-grade me drank the values of this book in, but it was jarring how much I still relate to this book.

Worldbuilding as Art

The second thing that struck me while reading this book was how well Snyder helped us see the world through Robin’s eyes as she sets up the hierarchy of the farm, starting with the second and third chapters. The family is buoyed when her dad gets a job at the ranch and to learn the job comes with a house! They climb in the back of the foreman’s truck for a quick ride to their new home. And Robin keeps watching for that home as they pass first the large, modern home of the owner, peeking out from behind a hedge. It’s the tease of a real house Robin could dream of, but it’s too big, too fancy to be theirs, she daren’t hope. Then they pass a lawn and an immaculate stable. After the horses comes a white picket fence and “a neat little house sat securely on a patch of green lawn.” She knows it isn’t theirs either, but hope lingers. The road turns from gravel to deep dirt ruts and they keep driving to Palmeras Village— “It had been right then that Robin found out about despair” as she realized they were about to unload into one of the worn two-room shacks where the workers lived.

Snyder continues to use distance, architecture, and landscape as mechanisms to tease out Robin’s desires (and ours). Everything has meaning and history, from the large stone and adobe (yes, the mix is intentionally weird) mansion of Palmeras house to the little Irish cottage behind. As Robin navigates the idiosyncrasies of the place, we learn about the history of the family who has lived there for hundreds of years. We are also constantly reminded about the differences between what Robin has and what Robin wants as she traverses the distances between. Eventually Robin is given secret access to the sanctum santorum, a fully stocked library inside the otherwise abandoned Palmeras House where she can linger and read. It is here that Robin is truly at home, to the extent that she’s content even dusting the tables. Writing these words in my small office with custom-built (by my husband) floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a lifetime of tiny objects and pictures around me, I feel deeply Robin’s peace at having found a place where her desires are satisfied, even for a few hours at a time.

Introducing My Son to Inequality

I am very aware of how lucky I am to have this home I can now call mine. I am also deeply aware that the city I once dreamed of is now wildly unaffordable to most working families, and it’s something I want to talk to my son about so he doesn’t grow up with a narrow vision of the world. The Velvet Room has helped us have those talks and more.

Snyder uses personal relationships to illustrate the divides between classes on the farm almost as well as she uses architecture. The best example of this is Robin’s relationship with Gwen, the owner’s daughter. Gwen is a winning girl, the kind of blithe, darling creature people are attracted to and don’t know why. Gwen is also completely unable to see her own privilege. This makes for a fascinating push-pull between her and Robin, who likes Gwen but who is unable to forget the differences between them. Gwen’s mother lingers in the background with a tight smile to remind us that Robin is not imagining the gap, she is a picker’s child who is accepted only to the extent that she nudges Gwen toward taking her schoolwork and music studies more seriously.

Snyder’s use of Theresa, daughter of another worker, is less artful, and I’ll admit I cringed while sounding out the heavily accented Spanish. Snyder gets the sounds of the accent right, but the character is unfortunately never full enough to make her anything but a stereotype. We haven’t finished the book yet, but I think I recall the Caucasian/Hispanic divide being an issue in the resolution of the mystery, and while Theresa as an alternative to Gwen echoes some of that, she’s not a realized enough character to properly pull that weight.

I have been grateful for the way Snyder takes us into the apricot pitting shed. It’s been hard to explain to my son (who I probably over-indulge with every part of my heart) that Mommy has meetings he can’t always sit in on and that sometimes I need to work to pay for our home and his roomful of toys. Reading about the pitting shed and the fact that all the children who are able to help help, whether they are old enough for a work permit or not. And that the smallest children who cannot help are left to entertain themselves at their mothers’ feet for more than 12 hours a day. To be clear, I don’t want that for anyone, but I do know that it was like that for centuries and still is in many places. And while I do not expect him to take up my copy editing (and would, in fact, prefer he not read Slack over my shoulder), it is important that he see work and understand different ways of working and that what we have comes from something—even the apricots he picked out at the store this week.

When fourth-grade me set aside The Velvet Room for my someday kid to read, I had no idea the experience would be this rich. That I would learn so much from the book all over again and that it would give me tools for teaching my son. But I’m grateful. Are there childhood books that you’ve held onto (either physically or in your heart) that you’ve learned from as an adult? Please tell me everything.