Howling Frog Books

The Lost Wife , by Alyson Richman In Prague, in 1938, two young people fall in love and get married just as war is about to destroy everything they know.  Separated by events, they each believe that the other has died, until a wedding many years later, when they recognize each other. That's not a spoiler because it's how the novel opens.  You read the story to find out how it happened.  Lenka tells her story from the beginning, while Josef tells his backwards.  It's a gripping novel, and I quite enjoyed it, though it is a little toastier than I really prefer. Richman writes well, and she actually based her novel on a real-life incident she heard of through a family connection--two people really did meet at a wedding and recognize each other as their long-lost spouses. It's also, as you might expect, a really, really tragic novel.  As Jews, Lenka and her family are shipped out of Prague and end up in Terezin (Theresienstadt) for most of the war.  Jos...

The New Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption , by Kathryn Joyce I thought a lot of Kathryn Joyce's previous book, Quiverfull , and so I hoped to get this new title as soon as possible.  Here, Joyce takes on the very very emotionally and politically fraught topic of international adoption, especially as influenced by American evangelicals. Adoption has become a huge topic in the evangelical world over the past decade or so.  Logically enough, pro-life Christians want to put their money where their mouths are and obey the Biblical commandment to care for the needy, especially widows and orphans.  Told that there are millions of orphaned children living in institutions in poverty, good and well-meaning people want to bring those children into families.  But the reality is not so simple; there are not, in fact, millions of orphaned children with no family to care for them.  There are a lot of children living in poverty, but very ...

Tales of Mystery and Terror , by Edgar Allen Poe Lately I have been reading a lot of really, really tragic non-fiction.  Then I read a novel that was really tragic.  I needed to cheer myself up, so I decided to get into the Halloween and Gothic spirit by reading Edgar Allen Poe's famous collection of scary stories. I've never been much of a Poe person; I was assigned several of these stories to read in 8th grade and couldn't make head or tail of them.  Reading them now, it doesn't surprise me.  We read "MS Found in a Bottle"--no one explained what an MS was, and the story is practically incomprehensible anyway!   We also read "The Pit and the Pendulum," which was better, though I don't think I knew what the Inquisition was supposed to be, and "The Cask of Amontillado," but without knowing what Amontillado or Masons might be.  Maybe the teacher did explain and I just wasn't listening. I had read almost no Poe since that time, e...

Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea , by John Everard I ran into this title a little while ago at the library and had to read it right away.  Folks, this is a book about life in North Korea, written by the former British ambassador, and while the other books I've read about North Korea have been about life in the countryside or in prison camps, this is the first time I've run into a book about how the wealthier classes live. "Wealthier" being a very relative term, of course.  Here, it means the middle- and upper-class people in Pyongyang, who have approved family backgrounds and decent jobs, but it's nothing that you or I would recognize as wealth, because the whole country is slowly crumbling.  Even these people worry about food, and though they get rice every day (while for the poor, rice is a once-a-year treat), they mainly live on rice and kimchi, with some beans sometimes. Everard had little interaction with the really elite gove...

In the past few months I've mentioned a few times that I've been working on a group blog project that will focus on classical homeschooling.  Well, it's finally here!  It's still an infant blog, but I hope it will grow and become a helpful resource.  If you're interested, please hop on over to From Sandbox to Socrates and check us out.  And if there's any homeschooling topic you'd like to learn about, please ask and we'll see if we can write a post about it!

When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, by Elaine S. Abelson This is a fairly academic-style discussion of the rise of the great department stores in the late Victorian era (but in America only; no UK here).  Shoplifters were immediately a serious problem, one that was very difficult to address for many reasons. Abelson starts off with a thorough description of department stores.  She is really good at describing how incredible and tempting they were!  No one had ever seen anything like it before in the United States; everyone was used to little, dark dry-goods stores with a limited selection of goods, and suddenly there are these huge buildings crammed with wonderful stuff all over the counters.  People were dazzled.  Abelson describes the rise of plate-glass windows to give light and then the idea of elaborate window displays, the evolution of shop counters from heavy wood to light glass (which both showed of...

Cool cover, no? Around the World in Eighty Days , by Jules Verne My daughters are doing modern world history this year, which means 1850-present, which means we start with the British Empire and imperialism.  They've been reading books like Things Fall Apart (the 13yo), Just So Stories (the 10yo), and Around the World in 80 Days (13yo again).  And since I have always neglected the works of Verne shamefully, I took the opportunity to read it too. Phileas Fogg, a wealthy London gentleman whose love of routine, precision, and accuracy makes Hercule Poirot look sloppy, suddenly enters a bet that he can circumnavigate the entire world in 80 days.  This is a feat that has only just become possible in theory, and practically no one thinks it is actually possible.  The least delay--a missed voyage or train, a storm at sea--could derail the whole project.  Mr. Fogg and his new servant, the Frenchman Passepartout, set out that very day.  And hot on their ...