I've been in a bit of a reading slump this last week or so. 99% probably has to do with this being the longest week ever as the first official full week of school, but that other 1% definitely is the books. I was saying to David a few hours ago that I had like 6 books at around 20% and just wasn't feeling it. There is a reason this site has "inspire" in the title, reading needs to be inspiring for me and sometimes that can be harder to find than expected...
Here's a quick recap of what's on the go...
Shy Girls Can't Date Millionaires - 20% complete: A YA romance about a house fire that leads to a 16 year old and her family moving into a mansion. It's ok.
Bike Riding in Kabul - 15% complete: This one is about a woman who worked in a variety of foreign countries as a mortgage specialist. Definitely touching on some global issues, but not yet very interesting....
The Orphan Collector - 13% complete: This one is about the 1918 pandemic and is great, but it is a library book and had to be returned... so I just downloaded it on the kindle and hope to get back to it soon.
Chalked Up - a little under 50% complete: Another library book - luckily this one was able to be renewed, but I had to put it down because of some blog tour books coming up.
So there's some boring, some good, but also some feelings of being overwhelmed by so much unfinished. I should be used to this, I'm a teacher after all, and nothing is every fully finished in my life! But I did manage to check one of these 20 percenters off my list tonight and it was one that was worth sticking it out!
The Bridges We Will Build by Kacie LeCompte Renfro weaves together the stories of a group of women brought together by a school which is fittingly called "The Unity School". A school designed to create a community of refugees and American-born children, The Unity School, is severely underfunded and understaffed, and has a huge population of English Language Learners. Lydia, a retired teacher, Aida, a Srebrenica genocide survivor, Sherry, a young adult volunteering with a Jesuit program and Hanan a refugee from Syria come together to work in the after school program caring for their students, and also each other.
The beginning of the story was a bit hard for me to connect with. I think it took a while for the author to make each of the stories fully fit together, because she was developing the characters and their backstories - a great strategy actually, but that first 20% was a bit tough to dig into. Once the characters started to connect with each other though the book became really hard to put down (hence the 20%-100% happening in one evening). One of the parts that kept me hooked was Aida's story of the Srebrenica Genocide and the way that the author included this story. By making connections to the Holocaust and the phrase "Never Again", at the Holocaust museum, Aida and her granddaughter discuss how the Bosnian war was also a genocide and it occurred after the Holocaust, but was also ignored and denied. For Bosnians, that hope that the world would come to their aid (especially the UN that were stationed near the town of Srebrenica) was lost in much the same way as it was for the Jews waiting for liberation or support from the Allied nations. The Author's choice to tell this (often forgotten or unfamiliar) story to a character's American-born granddaughter who is struggling with the challenges common to first generation American children, was an additionally impactful storyline.
I also connected with Lydia's story and the loss of her daughter. For decades, Lydia kept a shrine to her daughter by maintaining the state of her child's bedroom. When she is forced to tackle this room and finally accept her daughter's passing, she is able to grow into a new woman and support her community in ways she would have never previously thought possible. When discussing her grief and the mental health challenges she has overcome, I found a lot of parallels in my own journey towards overcoming my anxiety and depression. Lydia says to Hanan:"my oldest child died too, and for so long I made that my story, so much so that I almost lost everything else in the process" (Chapter 28). And later, in Chapter 31 she says to her husband Gary: "I don't want to go there again"referring to the grief and depression that came with losing her daughter and could come now that someone else she cares about has passed. I deeply relate to these two ideas. My mother's chronic illness and early death has in a lot of ways felt like my story and it is only through (a lot) of therapy and growth that I am starting to see that it doesn't have to be my whole story. It will always be a part of it, but I am more than some really traumatic moments in my childhood and adolescence and I am more than that story. I also relate to this idea of almost fearing the grief. Having both anxiety and depression, often means cycling between the two. Being worried about being sad, having sadness cause anxiety about what hasn't been accomplished, thus causing feelings of depression again. This is even more exaggerated when talking about grief. Losing someone important to you is a terrifying notion in itself, but once someone has experienced tremendous grief, the fear of the grief becomes an even bigger burden for an anxious and chronically depressed person to carry around.
Hanan's story is tragic, and while I really don't want to give any spoilers, it is an awful story but such an important one to tell. After reading The Boy at the Back of the Class by Onjali Rauf to my class last year, stories about Syrian refugees bring me back to Ahmed, the main character who is about 10 and has watched his entire family slowly disappear in their treacherous journey out of Syria and his eventual arrival in the UK. Hanan's story has a lot of parallels and it just reminds me of how awful things were and how the media was so negative! I remember working with my junior high students in 2016 to write essays about the Syrian refugees and the mixed messages they were getting in their research. That idea of "go back to where you came from", the otherness and the way people ignore the terrible things these people have experienced because they might be scary or may inconvenience them in some way is just despicable. You can't read The Bridges We Will Build without becoming emotional and passionate about this issue. If we can't help other human beings when they need it most, we can't call ourselves humanity.
Read this book, it is important.
Thanks so much to Booksprout and the Author for giving me the chance to read and review this beautiful and impactful story. I am so glad I stuck it out.