All the Ms: Malane to Malerich

Donna Malane: My Brother’s Keeper starts with a private investigator accepting the request to find a daughter from the mother who tried to kill her. Not my cup of tea. But–wow! 

Sally Malcolm: Rebel: An Outlawed Story is a M/M love story at the time of the American Revolution. I enjoyed it, though I thought the internal conflict for one of the characters was resolved too quickly.

Torrey Maldonado: What Lane? is a kids’ book about boys in sixth grade. They have a range of backgrounds and race. The book contains a lot of dialog on the topic of racism. I kind of sighed at first. I get tired of books that raise complex topics but don’t dive into that complexity. And present information without the main character even questioning that  information--as if human beings are robots. I questioned just about everything as a teen, including the sacred cows of my own culture, and I was not a particularly rebellious teen. In fact, I wasn’t rebelling at all. I was just thinking for myself. (And in never occurred to me that adults were right since so many of them seemed kind of fatuous. Again, not rebelling! Simply, what I prayed about to God was intensely my business, no one else’s, and it never occurred to me that my brain belonged to anyone else in terms of how I should think.) 

Back to the book: In terms of writing, I was impressed that the author focuses the topic by making it about relationships: the main character Stephen’s relationship to other kids in his class. It’s a story, not a lecture, which is something to applaud. 

C.S. Malerich: The Factory Witches of Lowell is about factory girls striking in Lowell. Witchcraft is involved. From what I could quickly surmise, the books is technically fantasy, which I thought unfortunate since I don’t doubt that the strikers in that time period did, some of them, believe in witchcraft.