Rabbits at War: 2 Green Ember Stories by S.D. Smith

For several years, children’s writer S.D. Smith has been creating a series of swashbuckling adventure stories – all starring rabbits. First was The Green Ember, told from the perspective of two children whose lives are upended with an attack by wolves. And it is much greater than an isolated attack; the wolves are making war upon the rabbit world.

The Black Star of Kingston is a prequel to The Green Ember. Ember Falls is the second installment in the main series, and the third – Ember’s End – is due to be published next week (its publication date moved up a bit because of the general upheaval from the coronavirus epidemic). 

Smith has also published two related stories, more of novella length.

The Wreck & Rise of Whitson Mariner takes place during the great wars. King Whitson Mariner is sailing to safety, carrying a precious cargo – the royal jewels, elderly women, other women and children, and his own family, Queen Lillie and Prince Lander. Sailing on another ship with him is Lord Grimble, who might be better named Lord Grumble, a sour and resentful aristocrat who seems to believe hem and not Whitson, should be king.

And sure enough, Grimble turns out to be a traitor, in league with the feared dragons. Whitson’s ship is tricked onto treacherous rocks and is shipwrecked. Queen Lillie is kidnapped by dragons. The cargo is lost, and those aboard who are not rescued die in the water. Lieutenant Massie Brunson is ordered by the king to stay with Prince Lander at all costs. The prince, for his part, is soon seen running into the woods on shore. Massie knows he’s needed with the rescue, but he obeys the king and follows. And a great adventure ensues.

In The Last Archer, Jo Shanks is Living at Halfwind Citadel. It’s wartime, and Jo is desperate to prove he’s as good an archer as the famed Nate Flynn. But he doesn’t seem to make a very good soldier – he oversleeps, he has an unpolished sword, and his commanding officer has little use for him. But there’s an archery contest, and Jo proves his skill by not only placing but coming very close to beating Nate.

Nate needs a temporary replacement on his team of archers, and he asks Jo to fill in. Jo discovers that Nate is nothing like Jo imagined him to be. He still has trouble with the commanding officers, but he finds he’s fitting in with Nate’s crew. And then the wolves attack and enter the citadel itself.

Both stories have underlying lessons aimed at children (but equally valid for adults). They’re about obedience, mistaken impressions, trust, and having courage in the face of overwhelming odds. Using rabbits instead of children likely takes some of the immediate terror out of the situations, but children will identify with Massie, Prince Lander, Jo, and Nate. These are rollicking good stories, with good messages. 

Related:

My review of The Green Ember.

My review of The Black Star of Kingston. 

My review of Ember Falls.

Top illustration by Zach Franzen: Whitson Mariner takes up the Stone Sword of Flint. 

Poets and Poems: Tom Sastry and “A Man’s House Catches Fire”

In 2016, the then-Poet Laureate of Britain Carol Ann Duffy chose Tom Sastry as one of the Laureate’s Choice Poets. He published a well-received pamphlet (what Americans call a chapbook) entitled Complicity, which became a Poetry School Book of the Year and a choice of the Poetry Book Society. 

His first full poetry collection, A Man’s House Catches Fire, was published in Britain in late 2019. In one of those strange things that can happen, the collection fits the current moment of coronavirus, self-quarantines, and societal and economic upheaval. I had ordered it several weeks ago, long before the virus came ashore in the United States. I grew wider-eyed as I read it, and simply because it fits.

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

“Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915” by McWilliams and Steel

In 1914, Ypres was a small city in western Belgium, not far from the French border and the North Sea. It had a long history of at least two thousand years; the Romans raided it in the first century B.C. Surrounded by several small villages. The city was known for its production of cloth and especially linen; one of the most imposing structures in Ypres was the Cloth Hall. 

The came World War I. Ypres found itself the focal point of two battles, the first in the fall of 1914 and the second in April of 1915. Technically, the second battle extended into May with additional engagements, but the intense period was April 25-27. 

This second battle became famous for many things, including the first time a colonial army (the Canadian) ever stopped a European army (the German) on European soil. But it is best known for how it started – with the use of chlorine gas by the German army, attempting to break through the Allied lines of defense. Against almost overwhelming odds and chemical warfare (the Germans ignored the Geneva ban), the Canadian, French, and British troops first gave and then regained their ground. Like so many other battles on the Western Front during the war, it subsided into stalemate.

First published in 1985, Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915 by J.L. McWilliams and R. James Steel tells the story of the Second Battle of Ypres. And it tells the story almost hour by hour, from the first plans by the Germans to the eventual end. 

It’s a thrilling, fascinating account.

• The Germans would come close but never quite manage to capture the city of Ypres itself. They did do their best, however, to shell it into destruction. 
• Both the British and the French had first-hand reports, from German deserters and spies, that the Germans were preparing to use gas. Disbelief and incompetence prevented the knowledge from being acted upon. 
• German commanders had no reluctance to use the gas to force a breakthrough. They also had no reluctance to send their own troops too soon into the dissipating clouds. So eager and desperate they were to break their stalled plans to drive to the sea.
• The top commands of the Allied armies were already demonstrating the prodigious incompetence they became known for. Located far to the rear of the fighting and in relative luxury, the generals and their staffs rarely grasped the reality of what was happening during the actual battle. 

Allied soldiers blinded by the chlorine gas

The use of gas would backfire on the Germans, and in two ways. First, the Germans had to wait for a countervailing wind; normally, the winds in the area blew west to east. Second, using the gas freed the Allies from any ethical constraints on their own use of poison gas, and they had the advantage of the prevailing wind direction. Over the course of the war, more German troops would be afflicted with poison gas than what was attempted on the Allies. The Germans had tipped their hand too early and in too an unfavorable position.

McWilliams and Steel are also the authors of The Suicide Battalion: One Remarkable Battalion’s Journey Through the First World War and Amiens 1918: The Last Great Battle.

Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915 reads like a well-filmed documentary, placing the read right in the middle of all the key events. It’s also a story of the common soldier, who, despite the villainous use of gas by the Germans and the incompetence of their own top generals, stopped what could have easily been a German victory.

Top photograph: an aerial view of the gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres.

Letters

After Romans 2:12-29

The letter of the law

matters most when

it becomes the practice

of the law, the serving

implied by the law,

the obedience made

obvious by the law,

the carving of the law

upon the heart so that

it lives within

and lives without.

Photograph by Mikhail Pavstyuk via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads

I take a walk, or I look outside my window, and everything looks exactly like it looked a week, a month, six months ago. But I look more closely, and I notice how much time passes before a car goes by on the street, or I see the deserted center of my little St. Louis suburb when it should be thronged with cars, shoppers, and people dining out, and how many people are walking – singles, couples, and families – and smile and nod as they swerve broadly around you, unless I swerve first.

It’s a strange time, perhaps the strangest I’ve ever experienced, and we’ve only just begun. Tim Challies suggests we consider newspaper headlines in their context, and reminds us that preparation is not panic and confusion is not chaos, no matter how much we want to politicize the moment. E.J. Hutchinson at Mere Orthodoxy has a different take on what we can learn from COVID-19; he looks back to C.S. Lewis in World War II. And American expat Seth Lewis writes about how different St. Patrick’s Day looked in Ireland this year – and St. Patrick knew a thing or two about calamity himself.

More Good Reads

Poetry

One chilly March morning – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Beyond the Lines: Frost's "Fire and Ice" – Adam Sedia at The Chained Muse.

Three Poems – Paul Brooks at Fevers of the Mind Poetry Digest.

‘Brave Soldiers We’ and 'A Very Old Tale' – Beverly Stock at Society of Classical Poets.

Safe – Paul Tripp.

Faith

The Catholic Artist in a Neo-Pagan Age – James Matthew Wilson at Church Life Norte Dame.

A Liturgy for Those Flooded by Too Much Information – Doug McKelvey at The Rabbit Room.

Art

The Spiritual Mechanics of Labor and Rest – Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

Edward Hopper: The Loneliness Thing – Laurence Fuller. 

American Stuff

About Those Self-Evident Truths…What are we without them? – Myron Magnet at City-Journal.

Remember You Will Be Buried: Tracing the American cemetery from the colonial age to the Gilded Age – Allison Meier at Lapham’s Quarterly.

Common Soldiers Writing Song: “Oh, How Do You Like the Army?” – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.

The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, Part 1 and Part 2 – Eric Sterner at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

British Stuff

Plague and Pestilence – Barb Drummond at Curious Historian.

Writing and Literature

The Haunting of America: Russell Kirk’s Ghostly Fiction – Ben Reinhard at The Imaginative Conservative. 

How J.R.R. Tolkien Blocked W.H. Auden From Writing a Book About Him – Emily Temple at Literary Hub.

T.S. Eliot’s Animus – Adam Kirsch at New Criterion.

Why Robert Stone Went to Saigon—And Came Back With Dog Soldiers - Madison Smartt Bell at CrimeReads. 

A Catholic Reading of the Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – M. Shawn Copeland at Church Life Notre Dame.

John Piper Reads Romans 8

Painting: Old Man Reading the Paper, oil on canvas by Louis Charles Moeller (1855-1930).

The prosecutor speaks

After Romans 2:12-29

The prosecutor stands, casting

his voice at the accused,

those who know but don’t act,

those who believe but don’t do,

those who speak the right words,

make the right claims,

teach the right precepts,

espouse the right behavior,

boast in their belief but

do none of it,

break all of it.

The prosecutor casts his voice

and pronounces the crime

of uncircumcision,

the judgment of condemnation.

Photograph by Ben Rosett via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“True Blue Detective” and “Criminal Instinct” by Vito Zuppardo

Zach Nelson is a retired New Orleans police officer. He’s been living with his son and daughter-in-law; his wife was murdered many years before during a robbery. Family circumstances require a temporary move to a retirement home. Zach, irrepressible on a bad day and exuberant on a good one, soon makes friends – and an enemy in the retirement home’s administrator. 

The home is a place where strange things happen, strange as in untimely deaths. While Zach and his friends are trying to figure out what’s going on, the reader knows – the doctor who owns the home has a gambling habit, and he needs money for both gambling and paying off debts owed to unsavory people. So he arranges an accident for a retirement home resident and magically produces an organ donation agreement. The organs are sold to a shadowy figure who flies in and out of the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

True Blue Detective is the first of several in the series of the same name by Vito Zuppardo. There are currently six in the series, most of them featuring New Orleans Police Detective Mario DeLuca (True Blue Detective does not). This one is alternately horrifying and funny; the craziness of the life depicted in this retirement home almost boggles the reader’s mind. The book includes a host of memorable characters who seem to walk right out of the New Orleans culture. There’s also a great chase scene up St. Charles Avenue that ends on the River Road.

Criminal Instinct is a prequel to the series (likely written after the series was underway). It’s a novella featuring Detective DeLuca, who is sitting with his girlfriend at a restaurant while watching a diner staring at a couple dining nearby. DeLuca recognizes what is about to happen – the diner is going to shoot one or both of the people he’s watching. 

The detective intervenes, stops the shooting before it starts, and finds out what’s going on. The woman is the diner’s sister, and the man is a drug pusher, woman abuser, and general low life. DeLuca makes a promise to bring the low life down. And DeLuca always keeps his promises.

Vito Zuppardo

Zuppardo retired from the casino business in 2003 and began writing full-time. His the author of nine police novels in the True Blue Detective and Lucy Voodoo series.

If you like police stories packed with action, True Blue Detective and Criminal Instinct are for you. Along with underlying (and sometimes overt) humor and bodies – lots of bodies. 

Top photograph: a view of the New Orleans business direct from Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, by Ben Dutton via Unsplash. Used with permission.