Review: Mistress of Spices, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

One of the great things about having a book group, or in my case a blogging buddy, is that it forces you to read and finish books you might not otherwise. Now in my case, my dear friend Col over at Col Reads - she and I often read the same books anyway, or recommend books to each other, but we do it on our own timetable. When she and I decide to blog a book together, though - that means I have to finish it.

The Mistress of Spices: A Novel was not one of those books I wanted to finish.

The story concerns Tilo, an Indian "Spice Mistress" who, after discovering her magical power on her childhood home - a tropical island - and subsequent kidnapping by pirates, is trained in the ancient ways by the Old One, and sets down in an Indian ghetto in Oakland, California. There, she inhabits a spice shop from which she is supposed to dispense help in the form of spices that will aid her customers, knowing the powers of each spice and seeing the needs of each customer. To a lonely boy, the power to make friends; to a fighting family, a spice to sooth. And so on.

It's an interesting premise and I enjoyed many of the characters who came into the store, and their stories, albeit somewhat cliche'd, were compelling enough that I wanted to know how they turned out. There was Jagjit, the young Indian boy who is bullied at school because he is different and cannot communicate with the other children. A young wife suffers in an arranged marriage and yearns for a child. A traditional Indian family fractures when their Americanized daughter starts dating outside her ethnicity. And then there is the mysterious American, who Tilo cannot work out but by whom she is captivated.

Unfortunately, Tilo is very much the problem with Mistress. First, the style of narration is very dream-like, with sing-song poetic styling that works well in the early chapters, which take place in memories and fantasy worlds. They are oddly out of place in the Oakland ghetto, and it still works somewhat, because Tilo, too, is out of place, as are her customers, thrown as they are into a different world. But after a while, the writing style becomes grating - too much deliberate vagueness, too much introspection.

Part of the problem with the writing is that it works to conceal who Tilo really is - and although one could argue that she is meant to be a mysterious character - I had difficulty understanding her motivations or caring what her outcome would be. I was interested in many of the sub-stories, but not actually the main story.

A secondary issue is that, in creating such a dreamy tone in the narration, the author has difficulty creating other voices that aren't jarring or worse - stilted. Sometimes Raven, the love interest, sounds like Tilo; other times she lapses into a voice like another character, just briefly, but so dominant is the tone that what might have been a minor flaw is greatly magnified. At other times, dramatic scenes are drained of their drama, lost as they are in the monotony of the narration.

Finally, too much is left unexplained in Mistress, and although I recognize that there is meant to be a certain amount of mystery and magic to tale, in this case what goes unexplained are key reasons for actions that drive the story. The Old One, who pops in Obi-Wan Kenobi style from time to time, at one point exhorts Tilo to "Remember why you were given your power." - which is not explained. Tilo is not supposed to leave her store, as dire consequences will follow - which is not explained. The spices talk to Tilo, and stop talking to Tilo, again not explained and unfortunately reminding me a bit of the Chuckle Patch in the Magic Garden - snickering off to the side.

Mistress of Spices is full of imagination and potential - but the poor execution takes off so much luster, it never really shines.

I read this book together with Col over at ColReads - why not hop on over to her blog and see if she liked it any better?

Review: The Coffins of Little Hope, by Timothy Schaffert

When I read the synopsis of Timothy Schaffert's The Coffins of Little Hope, I couldn't help myself: The main character is an octagenarian obituary writer? For real? That's something I've never seen before - count me in.

Coffins of Little Hope is a series of fictional constructs, buried artfully within each other, like Russian dolls or perhaps the layers of an onions. The title of the book is taken from a fictional book, around which some of the story revolves. The author of that book, in addition to creating his own book's characters and milieu, has created a fictional name and invented a persona for himself (think Lemony Snicket) - as has one of the focal characters of this book, Daisy - who appears to have invented a missing child for herself.

 The story is narrated by S Myles, a somewhat celebrated obituary writer, who, having written the summation of each life in her dying small town, now narrates the death of the town. The townspeople are, of course, fascinated with Daisy's story of Lenore, filled with poignant details and yearning but sadly short on much tangible proof that the cild existed - but who still feels real enough to provoke much discussion and concern. As the mystery of Lenore is gradually investigated and revealed, so are all of the participants in the drama revealed, each of them also living, to some degree, in a fantasy of their own invention.

 S Myles lives with her son Doc and her granddaughter Tiffany, the child of Myles's daughter Ivy, who has abandoned the child to follow her lover to Paris, imagining a great romance and being cared for forever. When her lover leaves, she remains in Paris, thinking that reinventing herself as a sophisticated Parisian will lure him back, because as Myles observes, "She'd been so enraptured by that portrait of the rest of her life, that it was not so easily reimagined." She does reimagine it, though, returning home to her child and trying to become her idea of a mother, which has little to do with what Tiff might need.

Tiff has formed close bonds with her uncle Doc, with whom she performs a magic act in which she, too, is a disappearing girl; she is also disappearing in a very real sense, wasting away by not eating, which her family notices a bit too slowly, because "we'd been so distracted by our own obsessing over what was best for Tiff that we'd let her drop from our sight."

The town, meanwhile, is teetering on the brink of oblivion, and in an attempt to save itself, begins to recreate an old-fashioned downtown to attract tourists, one which never existed in the first place. The townspeople are obsessed with fiction, from the "Miranda and Desiree" novel they eagerly await, to the next installment of the saga of the missing Lenore, which they also eagerly await.

Everything in The Coffins of Little Hope is an illusion, and what constitutes reality is very much a choice made by each character - and the reader. The difference between all the fictions is simply a matter of degree. Coffins is a finely crafted and thought-provoking gem of a book.

Adventures in Genealogy: On The Fritts - or, Ode to a Brick Wall, Part 2

It's a hard thing to abandon a line of research without an answer, especially when one has so many tantalizing clues; specifically, I have Susan Fritts's parents names - but I can't work out exactly which John and Mary Fritts they were. I've effectively run out of ideas on what to search, and I've gone in so many circles and smacked my forehead against this brick wall so many times, that even say for sure what I know and what I don't know about Uriah and Susan anymore. I gave up and resumed working on other lines.

Over at the family history center, I ran across an odd situation: I requested a microfilm, but they inform me that the film is "restricted," meaning that I have to go to the main library in Salt Lake City to view it. As luck would have it, my DAR chapter has a professional genealogist who makes regular trips to that library, so I shoot Janice an email inquiring if she can look up this one document for me. Since I'm writing to her, I mention that I have this brick wall that I'm stuck on, and explain the situation, and inquire if she has any ideas. She explains that there are reasons Susan might have been left out of the will of that Otsego John Fritts - maybe she was given money before she moved, for example. I pull out my entire Fritts file and mail her a copy of it. She reviews it.

She thinks that my first instinct was correct: The John Fritts who lived in Sempronius in 1830 and 1840 was my Susan's father. She comes up with a birth date of about 1770 for John based on those two censuses - meaning that the will I have for a John Fritts of Cayuga County, who died in 1869 with no children, could not possibly be the same man.

How did I overlook that?

She's hired. I'm energized!

I have some time before Janice actually goes to Salt Lake City, so I go back over some of the things I know about "R" and "E" Fritts, because I have long realized they might be helpful, but have never quite seen the connection or known what to do about it. I locate reference to Edward Fritts in a DAR GRC record, so I write away and it arrives just before she leaves: The 1815 baptism record for Edward Fritts in Milford, NY - son of John and Mary Fritts. Edward Fritts, who arrived in Sheboygan a year before Uriah and Susan, and according to the 1850 census. Edward, who lives right near John Fritts on the 1840 census in Sempronius, Cayuga Co., NY.

Janice heads off to Salt Lake and begins reviewing land records, church books, will indexes, but she, too, is confounded: Where was John before Cayuga County? Which John Fritts is he? She thinks perhaps it is the John Fritts who lived near Henry Couse and John Couse in Delaware County in 1820, and even retrieves a land record for John and Mary Fritts of Milford in 1815 - significant because we know that our John and Mary were in Milford, baptizing son Edward that year. But how is it possible this John Fritts owned land in 1815 - rather valuable land according to the deed - and yet there are no land records for him in Cayuga, and he left no will? It is oddly consoling that my Frittses have managed to confound not only me, but also a professional.

I feel like I've got a good solid lead, even if it doesn't entirely make sense, and as I'm uploading everything to a file sharing site to show my cousin Linda, who beat her head against this wall in similar fashion for many years, I run across some news articles thatLinda had located over a year ago, for John and Mary Fritts - specifically, that they defaulted on a mortgage for a property in Milford, purchased in 1813, and that the property was to be sold at auction.

And a light bulb goes off. I email the articles to Janice, who replies, "Aha!" Because what I have is a series of notices for John and Mary Fritts - showing where they lived over a ten-year period in between censuses. I also know from the deed that on this piece of property, John Fritts had a tannery.

Janice suggests I read Dorothy Kubik's A Free Soil - A Free People, about the anti-rent war in Delaware County, New York, which I promptly ordered and am currently reading. Already I've discovered a few things: apparently the abuses by large landholders in that part of New York at that time were considerable - one could own a property but still be required to pay rent on it for one thing; for another, the original landholder retained mineral and water rights, sometimes denying the purchaser water access necessary for, say, a tannery. It's a fascinating and rather sad bit of American history that I was certainly unaware of.

It's a funny thing when you really nail it with a link in a genealogical chain: all the pieces suddenly fit together in a way that makes a person suddenly come alive. I know this John Fritts, or at least I know the second part of his life, when he was raising Susan, was quite an unhappy struggle. I have a glimpse into Susan's childhood.

And I have some ideas about where to look now, to fill in the missing pieces.

Adventures in Genealogy: On The Fritts - or, Ode to a Brick Wall, Part 1

If you do genealogical research, unless you are very lucky and probably royal, you eventually hit one: a brick wall - that ancestor where you stop, confounded - unable to move further up the tree.

My own brick wall is a married couple, Uriah Couse (1810-1887) and Susan Fritts (1812-1891). I connect up to them through their daughter Emily, born 1834; the family genealogy put together by my late cousin Leonard Schmidt gives Emily's place of birth as Ledyard, Cayuga Co., NY, possibly because her parents appear there on the 1840 census with their first five children, all girls. We follow the family from there to Sheboygan Co, Wisconsin, where, according to a county history, "U. Cous" arrived in the town of Scott in 1847 as one of the first residents, a year after "brothers R and E Fritts."

Uriah and Susan appear in Sheboygan Co. on Federal censuses from 1850-1880. Eventually Uriah sold his farm to one of his younger sons and moved to Orchard, Iowa, where their daughter Julia lived with her family. According to Iowa Cemetery records collected by the WPA, they are buried at Stillwater Cemetery.

It seems pretty straightforward, and of course, how hard could it be to find Uriah Couse? It's not likely there were too many by that name, especially at that time. Relatively quickly, I was able to locate an abstract of their 1829 marriage announcement: "Married - In Otego, on the 9th ult by David Blakely, Esq., Uriah Couse of Davenport, Delaware County, to Miss Suzan Fritts of Sempronius, Cayuga County." So far, so good - Sempronius is right near Ledyard, so Uriah must have moved up there following the marriage, although I took note of the fact the Davenport and Sempronius are not near each other at all - two hours by car, assuming you have one, which I'm guessing in 1829, Uriah did not.


Poking around on familysearch.org, I locate a baptism record for "Susannah Fritts," daughter of John and Mary Fritts, born Sept. 15, 1812 - very close to the birthdate I have for Susan (Sept 12) from Leonard's (unsourced) genealogy* and the church is located in Schoharie, NY - right across the border from Davenport.


This genealogy stuff is easy! I heart genealogy.


I don't have too much else to go on for Uriah, but I have parents' names for Susan. On the 1830 census in Sempronius, the year after Susan was married, there is indeed a John Fritts - I am thrilled. I am more thrilled when I write off to the County historian's office to inquire about retrieving records for this man, whose will doubtless will confirm he is Susan's father, name her siblings (presumably the R. and E. Fritts who also appear in Sheboygan), and then I can make my way up the line.


The Cayuga historian, however, returned with some unfortunate results: John Fritts did leave a will in Cayuga Co, in 1869, and it explicitly leaves everything to his brother, because he leaves no children. She provided information on Christian Fritts, who also lived in Cayuga and as it happens, also had a daughter named Susan - but she was born in 1818 and rather inconveniently (for me, at least) married a Mr. van Vleet. She included some other random items including a note that listed the parents of an Ira Fritts as "John Fritts and Mary Couse," with no further information or source.** 


She then suggested I look at John Fritts of Otsego Co., which was close to where Uriah lived, and who, according to censuses, had a daughter the right age to have been my Susan.


Oh, and by the way - their office has no mention of Uriah Couse anywhere except on that 1840 census.


I take a look on ancestry.com for "John Fritts" on the 1830 census and discover, to my dismay, that there are quite a few of them floating around the various areas of New York State where Uriah and Susan are known to have lived. But that's okay, because there will surely be a will that will explain it all and convincingly tie my Susan to one of them.


At the family history center, I review the handwritten indexes and for Otsego Co, and find that, indeed John Fritts left a will, having died in 1860. I'm especially excited about this John Fritts as, according to the 1850 census, he does indeed have a wife named Mary. But his will names four sons and two daughters, and, rather touchingly, one granddaughter who, together with her mother, appears to have lived with Mr. Fritts until his death. None of these children is Susan, though, and there is no "R" and no "E". And there are no other wills for any other John Frittses. 


I check land records in Cayuga and Otsego: Nothing. I search through the Schoharie baptism records, looking for other children of this John and Mary: Nothing. I write to Schoharie County, who tell me to write to  Montgomery County, who tell me they'll happily look at each and every will they've got for $90 apiece (um, thanks?). I lose track of how many counties I've looked in and what exactly I've looked at. 


I remember a sage piece of advice that I was given about how to research genealogy effectively: Start with the present and move backward - or in a case such as this, start with the deaths and work earlier into the lives. I note that I am missing two key pieces of information: Gravemarkers and death certificates for Uriah and Susan.


I go to both Random Acts and Find A Grave and put in requests for pictures of Uriah and Susan's gravemarkers from Stillwater Cemetery, Mitchell Co, Iowa. I receive no response from Find A Grave, but a very kind volunteer from Random Acts emails me to let me know she walked the length and width of Stillwater Cemetery on my behalf and could not locate any gravemarkers. I have slightly better luck with Mitchell County, who do have death certificates on file and only want $5 apiece for copies - which they tell me up front do not contain any parents' names.


I move earlier in their lives: I contact the library which houses the newspaper from which their marriage announcement was culled for that book of abstracts, and receive in the mail a copy of the newspaper page, which contains no more information than the abstract did, but is still nice to have. Another $40 gets me a search of all the library's remaining resources, which turns up nothing. DAR library: same result. 


I stop tracking what resources I've checked, and try to block out what this is all costing me. I stop writing letters. I begin to accept that some questions to not have answers, and some lines simply cannot be tracked. I start telling people that some of my ancestors sprung from the head of Zeus, fully armed. 


In short, after 18 months of beating my head against a brick wall, I give up.


(Yes, there's a Part 2 ... )


*Not to put too fine a point on it, but please - cite your sources. Someone, someday will thank you profusely for it.
**I really just can't stress the whole "cite your sources" thing enough. 

God knows when you don't tip - Pike Place Market, Seattle, Washington

Wordless Wednesday.

Review: Tomatoland, by Barry Estabrook

I have a confession to make: I hate tomatoes.

Mind you, I eat them all the time, but in some sort of processed form. Most often, they take the form of pasta sauce, but often arrive on my plate as ketchup. But fresh tomatoes? If I've forgotten to tell the waiter to leave them off my plate, I offer them to my dinner companion or push them as far away as they will go from the rest of my dinner, lest it become contaminated.

So when I ran across Barry Estabrook's "Tomatoland: How Modern Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit," I thought, Aha! Maybe the problem isn't me - maybe it's the tomato.

Estabrook seems to agree, and takes the reader through the various stages of modern agriculture that result in the perfectly round, red, yet hopelessly bland tomatoes that find their way into the average supermarket. They are frequently grown in Florida, where they are bred to certain standards of color, size, shape, and smoothness of skin. Taste is not a consideration.

While growing, tomato plants must cope with an environment that "would be one of the last places in the world where tomatoes grow." They evolved in coastal deserts and later thrived in the dry Mediterranean heat.  Florida, however, is humid, and its sandy soil lacks needed nutrients. The end result is that the fields must be pumped full of artificial fertilizers and the plants must be doused liberally with herbicides and pesticides - many of them known carcinogens.

Not surprisingly, all this comes at a high cost in dollar terms, so the growers cut the only cost they can - what they pay  the people who pick the fruits and tend the plants. The resulting human cost is tremendous: Workers who are sprayed with toxic chemicals, live in slumlike conditions, are denied basic legal rights, and in the worst case, find themselves trapped as modern-day slaves.

The resulting fruits must be hardy enough to withstand being transported to the supermarket, so they are picked while still green and unripe and gassed to a cheerful red.

The research that went into Tomatoland is thorough and the stories are disturbing at best and harrowing at worst. The territory is very similar to that covered by Fast Food Nation and, by now, countless other books and magazine articles.

Tomatoland really takes off, though, in the second half - in which Estabrook examines some of the success stories in correcting the industry's ills. In one example, a farmer in the northeast began raising heirloom tomatoes that are now sold to some four-star restaurants, as well as directly to consumers at the greenmarket - who don't seem to care as much about the tomatoes' looks as they do about their taste. Another chapter examines a model farmworker community that was built in Florida after Hurricane Andrew destroyed the shoddy trailer park communities in which migrant workers are typically housed at exorbitant rates.

It's disheartening to think about the poor quality of what we are eating and how much suffering results from it - both to those who produce the fruit and those who eat it. I enjoyed Tomatoland for not only describing the ills, but also for illustrating the solution so carefully and poignantly, and so clearly demonstrating that both economics and basic decency both argue in favor of producing a more palatable - if uglier - tomato.