Tag: memes

#TopTenTuesday Books With Inspiring Young Characters

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post. Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists. Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

This week’s topic is Books for My Younger Self. Rather than stick strictly to the topic, my list contains books (both fiction and nonfiction) that feature young people who do remarkable things. Something to educate and inspire readers of all ages.

The Boy With Blue Trousers by Carol Jones – in the goldfields of 19th-century Australia, two very different girls try to escape their past

The Girl from Vichy by Andie Newton – a young woman joins the French Resistance

The Young Survivors by Debra Barnes – five children of a Jewish family must survive the loss of their home and separation from their parents when Germany invades France in WW2

The Wanderers by Tim Pears – a young boy travels alone through the West Country

The Bird in the Bamboo Cage by Hazel Gaynor – a group of schoolchildren and their teachers endure the Japanese occupation of China

Summerland by Lucy Adlington – a young refugee has to make a life in a new country

Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton – a young girl evacuated from her home in Berlin during WW2 becomes involved in documenting the identities of the survivors of a wartime atrocity

The Hidden Village by Imogen Matthews – young Jewish children are forced to take refuge in a village hidden deep within a Belgian forest during WW2

Song by Michelle Jana Chan – a boy leaves behind his impoverished family in China to travel to Guyana in the hope of making his fortune

Queen of Katwe by Tim Crothers – a girl from the slums of Kampala becomes a chess champion

#6Degrees Of Separation: From Rodham by Curtis Sittenfield to Foe by J.M. Coetzee

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees

This month’s starting book is Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld in which the author imagines what might have happened had Hilary Rodham NOT married Bill Clinton.

Given she DID marry Bill Clinton and become First Lady, my first link in the chain is to another First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. White Houses by Amy Bloom tells the story of the friendship between Eleanor and reporter, Lorena Hickok.

A book which involves an extra-marital relationship with a future occupant of the White House, namely Dwight D. Eisenhower, is Ike and Kay by James MacManus. It’s a fictionalized account of the real-life affair between Eisenhower and his wartime driver, Kay Summersby.

Back to another First Lady, this time Jacqueline Kennedy. In her latest book, The Second Marriage, Gill Paul tells the story of the relationship between Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis.

If we’re talking multiple marriages, then we need look no further than King Henry VIII of England. In the latest book in her Six Tudor Queens series, Katheryn Howard: The Tainted Queen, Alison Weir explores the tragic life of wife number five.

A character mentioned (briefly) in the book is Thomas Cromwell, the subject of Hilary Mantel’s monumental trilogy. Like the first book in the series, Wolf Hall, its successor, Bring Up The Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize. In doing so, Mantel became the first woman to win the prize twice. (Will she make it three in a row this year?)

The first author to win the prize twice, though, was J.M. Coetzee (in 1983 and again in 1999). His novel Foe, which I studied as part of my Open University English MA (you know, intertextuality and all that) is a reinvention of the story of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

This month we’ve travelled from 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue to a desert island via some matrimonial shenanigans. Where did your chain take you?