NO COMMON GROUND: Confederate Monuments and the Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox looks at how following the end of Reconstruction, Southern women began pushing and fund-raising for statues that would memorialize the Lost Cause and show black Southerners whose version of the war, and of racial relations, dominated. Putting a statue on the courthouse lawn, for instance, said which race dictated justice.
Cox does a good job showing the history of these monuments, the black protests against them, the ham-fisted attempts at compromise (We have a statute of MLK next to a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, isn’t that good enough?) and the renewed enthusiasm for toppling or removing them since Black Lives Matter became a thing (the NC State “Silent Sam” statue above got taken down). Unfortunately there’s very little new information to me so while it’s not a bad book, it’s not one I could get into (The Confederate Battle Flag worked better).
P. Djeli Clark’s RING SHOUT is an ethnogothic reminiscent of the Bitter Root graphic novels in that the three female leads are battling a literally demonic KKK in the 1920s — there’s the human but monstrous Klan and the “Ku Kluxes,” demons in human form, both drawing inspiration from the racism ramped up by the infamously racist classic film Birth of a Nation. Now the Klan is plotting to screen the film at the Stone Mountain monument as part of a ceremony to unleash something worse — can our heroes stop them when the narrator, Maryse, is haunted by trauma from past racism? This one was very good.
As my Genre Book Club’s theme for this month was “coming of age” I revisted Diana Wynn Jones’ first novel of the enchanter Chrestomanci, CHARMED LIFE. Our protagonist, Cat Chant, is an orphan with a sister, Gwendolen, who’s a powerful enchanter in a vaguely Edwardian English setting (with magic common). When Chrestomanci takes the Chants into his home to tutor Gwen — and Cat, though he has no magic — it’s a big deal. Except Gwen soon gets fed up Chrestomanci doesn’t appreciate her awesomeness and transports herself to another world in their multiverse, leaving Jane, her counterpart from our world, in her place.
Cat is terrified to tell Chrestomanci about this because Gwen’s bound to come back, right? And she’ll be punished sooo hard … But can they hide the truth about a girl who can’t work magic and thinks the continent of New Atlantis is named North America?
This was the first story by Jones I read and it blew me away. Having reread all her books about 15 years back, I’m not quite so blown away: she got better as she went along and parts of this are too much like the earlier The Ogre Downstairs. Still it’s a fun novel and the top-lofty, intimidating Chrestomanci (“He walked out of the room, a very long procession of one person.”) would return many times (he has a lot in common with Howl of Howl’s Moving Castle though Howl, as Jones once said, is more of a drama queen).
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