Just Jennifer

What the Waves Know by Tamara Valentine

When Izabella Haywood was six-years-old she lost her father and her voice on Tillings Island off the coast of Rhode Island.  Eight years later, in 1974, Iz’s mother, who has tried to bring Iz’s voice back with the help of doctors and social workers makes one last attempt at helping her daughter by bringing her to the island where it all began.  Once on the island, Iz knows the answers are here, and even suspects that the people who live here know something, but it remains out of her grasp.  The arrival of Izabella’ bohemian grandmother, the island’s annual Yemaya festival and anger all that has built up for years within Izabella all converge, threatening to send her everything out of control---including Iz’s carefully controlled mother---unless maybe that is what is needed for Iz to learn the truth, forgive her father---and herself---and regain her voice, her past, and her future.  First time novelist Valentine tackles a lot: mysticism, love, mental illness, selective mutism, mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters, yet handles it deftly without the narrative feeling overstuffed or overwrought.  She uses natural imagery to great effect as foreshadowing, almost personifying the creatures, especially the fish, giving powers to rocks from special places.  As Iz learns what she needs to know to regain her voice, she learns about her father and her mother as parents, as individuals and as a couple, and her mother as a daughter and faces what has been hidden for so long and how to deal with the past and not let it dictate the present or the future---and most importantly, Iz learns to forgive, especially herself. 

Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and The Great War  

This group of nine stories by a variety of authors focuses on the effects of World War I not only in the days and months leading up to the armistice being signed, but the longer last effects in the second part of the twentieth-century and even into modern day, not just in Europe, but on several continents.  In modern day Dublin, a photograph almost one hundred years old helps heal family strife as Birdie’s children gather with her to commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of the 1916 Uprising, one of the children with a surprise announcement that will lead to the revelation of long kept family secrets.  One story, by best-selling author Lauren Willig begins in 1980 Kenya and crisscrosses the Atlantic and the decades as a lost love is finally realized.  Some stories are told with letters, some poems; one story from the point of view of a nurse in Belgium and several set in post-war Paris.  These stories can be read in order or at random, but taken as a whole is a gorgeous collection of stories.