boxofdelights

I just hated The Berry Pickers, the first book I finished this year. It has a good topic: A very young Canadian First Nations child is stolen by a white woman who wants a child, and the next fifty years are narrated in alternate chapters by the stolen child and her brother. I appreciated the author's choice to make the kidnapper parents ordinary people who did their best to be good parents; it makes it clear that stealing a child is a monstrous act that damages everyone it affects, even if you don't pile more child abuse on top.

But the writing is just sentimental and dull. It doesn't deserve to be hated. I should have just put it down when I realized it wasn't for me. But this is for book group. I refused to read the books this member chose in previous years, which were also sentimental, melodramatic, and dull novels about worthy topics, so I had made up my mind I was going to push through and finish this time. Mistake.


The other book I'm reading is a delight:

The baby plant root has forty-eight hours after it decides to emerge to locate water and nutrients, and then push out a leaf or two and begin photosynthesizing, before it runs out of resources and dies. The first green parts of any plant are folded preassembled and waiting inside the seed. This preassembled plantlet bears little resemblance to the plant itself; it consists of one or two cartoonish green lobes on a short green stem, the manifestation of the plant emoji, and it is entirely temporary.

From The Light Eaters, by Zoe Schlanger.