"When You Look at Me" by Pepper Basham

Julia Jenkins is a young woman juggling several balls in the air. The victim of date rape, she found herself pregnant and decided to keep the baby, delaying her final year of college to do so. She’s running a bakery, using her own recipes, and she’s clearing out an old Victorian mansion willed to her by her deceased aunt. The young man who raped her was tried for the crime but was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Henry Wright is an English composer; he’s staying in the town of Pleasant Gap to write the music for a movie being produced by his best friend. He’s shy and introverted; he also carries baggage in the form of a brother who stole his fiancée and a mother who believes she controls her children’s lives. 

He literally collides with Julia at the bakery door, and she mashes iced cupcakes all over him. From that inauspicious start begins a friendship that grows into a relationship. As Henry helps Julia clear out her aunt’s mansion, they discover that the aunt was not only a concert pianist, but also an American caught up in World War II espionage. And, though dead, she has a lesson for both Julia and Henry.

Pepper Basham

When You Look at Me is the second novel in the Pleasant Gap series by author Pepper Basham (the first is Just the Way You Are, and it tells the story of Henry’s actor/producer friend, Englishman Wes Harrison). It’s the story of two people, both with buried hurts but strong in faith, who slowly overcome internal resistance and fall in love.

Basham is the author of numerous historical and contemporary romance novels, novellas, and stories. Charming the Troublemaker is the second in her Mitchell Crossroads series; the first is A Twist of Faith. Second Impressions is one of two novellas by Basham involving the work of Jane Austen, the second being Jane by the Book. Basham and her family live in Asheville, North Carolina. 

When You Look at Me is a charming, easy-reading story about surviving traumatic experiences, letting down walls, and learning some lessons from the past.

Related:

My review of A Twist of Faithby Pepper Basham.

My review of Second Impressionsby Pepper Basham.

Poets and Poems: Chad Abushanab and “The Last Visit”

How does a child grow up when the father of the family is an alcoholic? How does a child respond when an alcoholic father abuses the mother? In such a situation, where does a boy look for a role model, or is the alcoholic father the role model?

Poet Chad Abushanab doesn’t ask these questions directly in his debut poetry collection, The Last Visit. But he might have, since he answers them in the poems he’s written. Many of the poem are written informal, rhyming verse, oddly heightening the sense and meaning of the poems. A formal, rhyming, metered poem about your father’s alcoholism? A poem about your mother’s split lip, and how she’d take you and your brother to buy a cheap toy after a violent episode? Or beating up another boy because you’re trying to prove something to your father?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“My Father Left Me Ireland” by Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Doughtery is the child of an Irish father and an Irish-American mother. His parents ended their relationship before he was born, and his mother returned to the United States. From that heritage of Ireland, an absent father, the Catholic Church, and a mother who saturated herself and her son in Irishness came a hunger for knowing who he was, where he came from, what had shaped his parents and, by extension, himself, and what it meant for him and his own family.

What Dougherty did was to write a non-fiction romance, My Father Left Me Ireland. In a series of eight, longish letters to his father, Doughtery tells and gradually makes sense of his story. Slowly we see what he knew and what he didn’t know. He overlays his family’s story with that of Ireland, and especially the Ireland since the Easter Rebellion in 1916. And thus a family story becomes a national story. It’s a story that applies to far more than Ireland.

As a child, Dougherty rarely sees his father, except for vary rare “parachuting in and out” type of visits. He first interprets it like any child might – that something is wrong with him that his father doesn’t want to see. Over the years, he comes to understand that the visits were framed by the complex relationship of his parents, and that much of what he understood about his father’s absence had more to do with his mother than his father.

Michael Brendan Dougherty

It’s a moving account. The pain involved is more than only Doughtery’s, which he comes to understand over time. He seeks resolution in learning Ireland’s history, reading its literature and poetry, and trying to understand the events that shaped both of his parents.

Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and formerly national correspondent at The Week. He’s worked at Business Insider, and he’s been published in such national publications as Politico, The New York Times Magazine, ComedyCentral.com, Washington Monthly, and The American Conservative. He lives in Mt. Kisco, New York.

My Father Left Me Ireland is the story of an ache, the ache of an absent parent, the ache of a vague loss of national identity, the ache of a child and a man who belong but don’t belong. That ache is never fully healed, but it is understood and lessened, and terms are reached with it. Doughtery has written what is ultimately an optimistic book about how a positive life can be fashioned from brokenness. 

The mark of Simeon

After Luke 2:22-38

Aged, and aging still,

each day I feel the creak

and rub and grind of bones, 

infirmities of growing old,

but not yet old enough, hair

fading and gray, back

beginning to arc into stooping,

but not yet old enough,

not yet ready to be embraced

and wrapped by the shroud,

not yet, not until I see

the one, the king, not

just another baby or child,

but the One.

It was promised.

Photograph by Omar Lopez via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

World War I, or what was then called “The Great War,” toppled four empires – Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power from a weak provisional government in Russia, and the communists came close to grabbing power in Germany. The war also had powerful effects on the combatant least physically affected – the United States. Mark Malvasi at The Imaginative Conservative writes about World War I: War as Revolution.

It’s been many weeks since the first at Notre Dame Cathedral, and everyone’s still waiting for the billionaires who pledged financial aid to deliver. Many words have been written about the cathedral, how it should be restored, and how the fire likely started. But the fire and its aftermath can be seen as a kind of morality tale, and Sean O’Hare at Mere Orthodoxy tells that story in A Call to Remembrance: Notre Dame and the Internet Age. 

In April, the deputy editor of Britain’s New Statesman Magazine tweeted a series of what he described as racist quotations by Sir Roger Scruton, an unpaid advisor to the British government, author, philosopher, and one of the finest minds of our age. The Tory government immediately fired Scruton from his unpaid job, which tells you a lot about the Tory government. What the staffer, George Eaton, actually did, however, was pull statements and fragments of statements out of context. Eaton, in turn, was outed by defenders of Scruton, and the magazine undertook an investigation. It’s now publicly issued an apology to Scruton, and (possibly) demoted the staffer. Douglas Murray at The Spectator says there are still three unanswered questions about the hit job on Scruton.

More Good Reads

Culture

You Are Not Too Old for Lullabies – Kaitlin Miller at The Rabbit Room. 

Jeffrey Bilbro: Wendell Berry exemplifies sustainable life – Faith & Leadership.

9 Essential Points on the Theology of Work – Dr. Art Lindsley at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

Farmers and Humanists in an Age of Crisis: Technology, Death, and Resurrection – Tessa Carman at Mere Orthodoxy.

Faith

Fr. Jerzy Popieluzsko’s Long Road – Rod Dreher at American Conservative.

Art and Photography

The Importance of American Art – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.

Poetry

Asperges – Martha Serpas at Image Journal.

British Stuff

The Foundation of Britain's Feudal System – Eifion Wyn Williams at English Historical Fiction Authors.

American Stuff

A Harvest of Death: The Days After Gettysburg – Paige Gibbons Backus at Emerging Civil War.

The Gerrymander: A Gift from the Founding Fathers – Eric Stermer at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

Writing and Literature

Giving him his due: Claire Lowdon on why we should still read John Updike – The Times Literary Supplement.

She’s Always a Woman – Fyfe Dangerfield

Photograph of man reading by Kyle Wagner via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Contradiction of Guilt

The deeper I get into The Scarlet Letter, the more I wonder who the novel is really about. It may be less about Hester Prynne and more about the drama unfolding with Roger Chillingworth, the wronged husband on his quest for vengeance, and Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister who’s fathered Hester’s, out-of-wedlock baby.

Chillingworth, in the guise of the trusted doctor, is gradually pushing Dimmesdale toward a crisis or breakdown. He occupies an interesting position in the story – associated with neither the Puritan church and culture nor the Romanticism of Hester and her daughter Pearl. He interacts with both but acts more like a free agent, outside church and conscience.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Image of Dimmesdale, Hester, and Pearl on the platform is from the 1878 edition of The Scarlet Letter.

No distance management here

After Ezekiel 34:11-24

A choice: direct the search

for scattered sheep, assemble 

the team and give each member

an assignment, a territory, directions,

a deadline,

or

go out with the search,

find the places of scattering,

secure the valleys and hillsides,

and look with self for lost sheep.

That was the choice:

two possibilities becoming

two paths becoming

two doors.

He chose Door #2.

Photograph by Swaminathan Jayaraman via Unsplash. Used with permission.