Howling Frog Books

 House of Glass, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer It's the last of the Buru quartet!  Toer wrote these novels while he was imprisoned at the Buru Island detention camp.  They were published in the 1980s, but banned in Indonesia until 2000.  Here are the previous three titles: This Earth of Mankind Child of All Nations Footsteps Together, these tell the life story of Minke, who was loosely based on Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880 - 1918), a native Indonesian journalist who criticized the Dutch colonial government. At the end of Footsteps , Minke is exiled from Indonesia. House of Glass actually moves away from Minke during his exile and is narrated by Jacques Pangemanann, a Native police officer who admires Minke, but also possesses a talent for explaining Native movements to the Dutch government.  Pangemanann has always wanted to be a Good Guy, keeping the law and bringing down the Bad Guys, but his long-awaited promotion dumps him into a much more complex world.  Now he's...

 The Girl and the Ghost, by Hanna Alkaf  This is a lovely (and exciting!) story for, say, middle grades and YA, that not only features a lot of scary ghosts, but also explores the meaning of friendship and love, and the very complicated feelings around them. The ghost is an evil spirit who works for a witch, but the witch is dying.  He can only belong to someone of the same blood, so he searches out the witch's daughter and granddaughter.  The little girl is just five, and welcomes her new friend.  Of course, he needs a name, so she names him...Pink.  Because she's five.  Pink watches over little Suraya, who is a curious and active little girl, and he saves her from myriad dangers. Pink can't save Suraya from other kids, though.  Somehow she just doesn't fit in.  And when she goes to a fancier school in town, it gets much worse.  Pink's dark nature makes him long to exact revenge on the other girls.  Then a new girl, Jing, moves in ...

 The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, by Nick Joaquin I really like this wonderful cover image, which illustrates one of the stories.... Nick Joaquin (1917 - 2004) is, as far as I can ascertain, a fairly major Filipino writer.  His full name was Nicomedes Joaquín y Márquez, and he also wrote as Quijano de Manila.  Although his first language was Spanish, he wrote his stories in English, and he wrote for 70 years.  These stories were written over time, with the earliest in the 30s and others in the 60s.   Joaquin started off wanting to be a priest, but decided that his calling was to be a writer.  These stories are suffused with Catholicism both cultural and faithful, but not conventional.  In fact none of Joaquin's characters could be described as conventional; they seem to exist in order to upend expectations. The first stories are set in the days of Spanish colonialism, and are indeed Gothic in tone.  A girl meets ...

Footsteps, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (vol 3 in the Buru Quartet) My Spin title is actually the third in a quartet.  You can see the previous two books:  This Earth of Mankind , and Child of All Nations , in which Minke, who is very privileged for a Native in Dutch-controlled Indonesia, starts to get a grip on what colonial control has meant to his country.  At the close of the second volume, I commented: This volume is pretty well entirely about coming to understand the workings of colonialism, but Minke seems to need even more knowledge before he can begin to act. And at this point the story takes something of a turn.  In Footsteps , Minke learns more and does indeed start to act.  It's also at this point that the story becomes clearly modeled on a real-life person: Tirto Adhi Suryo, an Indonesian journalist who started the first Native newspaper .  Here, we cover the years 1901 - 1912.  At the start, however, Minke is just beginning medic...

The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera I was pretty excited when I spotted this novel on the donation table; it's currently not that easy to find in the US.   It's also shorter than I expected!  This cover make it look kind of like a kid's book but I would say that it is maybe more YA.  It's one of those novels that kind of defies age categories, really. The story is told in two interlocking parts: one side is mythic, about the far past and about the whales.  The other is narrated by a young Maori man, and it's really about his niece, Kahu.  She is the first-born of her generation, and the family patriarch, Koro, is extremely displeased, because he expects a boy to be the chief and carry on the family heritage -- they are descended from the legendary whale rider.  Kahu adores Koro, and spends her childhood following him around, bouyantly ignoring his indifference.  When an entire pod of whales beaches near the village, Koro believes that it's a w...

Child of All Nations, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer Last summer I read the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru quartet, This Earth of Mankind .   I thought it was great, but it still took me a whole year to get to this second volume, which is also great.  I'm definitely planning on reading the next two as well -- do I keep them for summer roadtrips, thus continuing the trend but taking four years to read the quartet, or do I go a little faster than that? At the end of the first book, Minke's wife Annelies is forced to travel to the Netherlands; the Dutch colonial court has ruled that she is the ward of her father's Dutch relatives, and they want control of the extensive properties that Annelies' mother, a Native and a concubine, controls.  Minke and Ma are left to mourn and wait for news from their employee who has secretly followed in order to encourage and watch over the despairing Annelies. Annelies dies, ignored by her 'guardian,' and Minke is s...

Witi Ihimaera: His Best Stories , by Witi Ihimaera I was not familiar with Ihimaera's name until I came across this collection of short stories.  From what I can tell, he's pretty famous as a Maori writer (Wikipedia says he was the first published Maori novelist).  He's mostly written short stories, which are mostly about living as Maori in a Pakeha-dominated world.  This collection was selected by Ihimaera himself and contains 24 stories, so it's really packed.  The stories are arranged in chronological or thematic sections, usually in threes, and he introduces each section with a short explanation, which is great.  Since I didn't really know anything about his writing, it was nice to get some background right along with the stories. The stories about Maori life tend to fall into three generations; some of them are set a ways back, and others are more modern.  I particularly liked "The Seahorse and the Reef" and "The Halcyon Summer" from the...

Marshall Islands Legends and Stories, coll. by Daniel A Kelin II I lifted this title straight from Ann Morgan's project list , since there aren't a lot of Marshallese writers.  But I was extra-excited about this one anyway.  For one thing, I just like collections of folktales.  They are pretty well irresistible to me.  (Possibly this is a thing for most librarians?)  Plus, one of my very good friends lived in the Marshall Islands for a couple of years at about the same time that these tales were collected, in the early 1990s.  She speaks Marshallese and I'm going to lend her this book tomorrow, now that she's done with the semester and has some time to indulge in fun reading.  I think we're both sort of hoping that she'll recognize one of the storytellers as somebody she knew, even though that isn't really very likely. In the Marshall Islands, storytelling is sort of an official calling.  You have to get permission from the iroij, the chief, ...