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Nancy Pearl Book Reviews for 4/16/2007

04/16/2007

Nancy Pearl reviews two novels, one takes place in 19th century Iran and the other in Cape Canaveral during the 1980s.

One of the great gifts of literature is that it can entertain us, while at the same time expanding our world. A case in point is Meghan Nuttall Sayres's young adult novel, Anahita's Woven Riddle (Abrams, 2006). It's the story of high spirited Anahita, a teenager who lives with her family, a tribe of nomadic weavers, in 19th century Iran. Needless to say, her father's plan to marry her off to the khan, or leader of the tribe—a much older man whose two earlier wives died under mysterious circumstances—doesn't thrill her in the least. Disdaining tradition (as teenagers are wont to do, even in 19th century Iran) she wants to choose her own husband, and devises a plan to do so. She will weave a riddle into her wedding carpet, and the man who comes closest to solving it will win her hand. Despite the faraway setting, contemporary readers will identify with Anahita's relationships with her parents and her friends, as well as her strong desire to have a say in her own future. Sayres skillfully interlaces a lot of Persian history and culture, including information about the daily lives of nomads, Sufi poetry, and carpets and carpet weaving into Anahita's story. This is a good choice for readers 12 and up.

Like many kids growing up around Cape Canaveral in the 1980s, with parents employed in one capacity or another at NASA, Dolores is obsessed with space travel. For years, she's kept notebooks filled with information about everything to do with NASA and the various space programs, especially anything connected with her idol, Judith Resnik, one of the first women to train as an astronaut. As the shuttle program heats up and then comes to a terrible end with the Challenger disaster, her mother moves out of the house, leaving her father, her younger sister Delia, and 13–year–old Dolores Gray to fend for themselves. Dolores is determined to understand the reasons behind both events. In Margaret Lazurus Dean's beautifully written The Time It Takes to Fall (Simon & Schuster, 2007), the first time novelist successfully blends the personal experiences of the Grays with the public tragedy of the Challenger explosion, and in the process gives us an appealingly sensitive narrator in Dolores, and a peek behind the scenes of NASA.