Howling Frog Books

Quiverfull , by Kathryn Joyce I don't think that many people in my area of the world know very much about the Quiverfull movement. Lately I've been interested in understanding it, and the tragic Schatz case made me feel more strongly that this is something more of us should be aware of. Quiverfull is one term for a growing movement among very conservative Protestants, which emphasizes wifely submission, male headship, and "openness" to children, which can frequently translate to having as many as physically possible because it's a sign of righteousness. Adherents also homeschool, try to live as self-sufficiently as possible, and are usually quite isolationist. Women bear the heavy burdens that go with the lifestyle--but wives are also frequently the ones who are attracted to it in the first place and who pull their husbands in. Joyce explains some of the history behind the movement and the major players. This was very helpful to me since, as a homeschooler, I have...

The Swan Thieves , by Elizabeth Kostova Our book club chose The Swan Thieves for March, and I thought it looked interesting. The story was fairly interesting--it was just very, very slow. If it had been about 2/3 the size (or less), I would have enjoyed it much more. I was reading The Woman in White at the same time and it was a faster read. The Swan Thieves concerns Marlowe, a psychiatrist/amateur painter who gets a new patient--a well-known artist suffering from a mental illness, who has attacked a painting in a museum. The artist is obsessed with a mystery woman and refuses to speak, and Marlowe goes on a little quest to try to figure him out. The ex-wife tells her story, the girlfriend tells her story, there's a parallel story with a French woman in 1879, absolutely every character paints, there is a whole lot about painting, and the last 100 pages get interesting and finally a minor mystery is solved. Much too slow for me, and if it hadn't been a book club selection, ...

Airborn , by Kenneth Oppel   This was our January book club selection.  I'd never heard of it before, and it turned out to be an old-fashioned adventure novel like R. L. Stevenson or Jules Verne.  Lots of fun: an intrepid cabin boy, a reckless spoiled girl, airships, pirates, shipwrecks, tropical islands, exotic creatures never seen before by man, and lashings of hair-raising escapes.   Plus a new element!   The story is set on our world, but a slightly alternate history, in which zeppelins are the standard mode of air travel and airplanes do not exist.  It's almost--but not really--steampunk, what with the Edwardian styles and the airships.   Oppel gets around the whole flaming vessel of death problem by having the airships use a non-flammable gas-the unobtainium of gasses, in fact.  A fun YA read.