It must be a challenge to adapt Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew for a contemporary audience. Whereas Shakespeare’s audience presumably may have found Kate’s eventual capitulation comedic, today’s audiences may rightly point out the problem with a happy ending that features a woman submitting to a man.

The 90s movie 10 Things I Hate About You managed this well, I think, by blunting the force of Kat’s capitulation. While she still does succumb to a romance with Patrick, she does so only after he serenades her in style. (Still one of the best rom com grand gestures ever, and yes, clearly I have strong feelings about this too.)

In Vinegar Girl, Anne Tyler updates the Shakespeare classic in two ways: she blunts the force of Kate’s “shrew”-ishness by making her a modern woman dissatisfied with her life, and she provides a more contemporary rationale for Pyotr’s need to date her. I have mixed feelings about both, though overall I think she pulled them off well.

Despite the title, there is little acerbic about Kate’s character. She’s blunt, particularly when speaking with her students, but in a way that feels more thoughtless than pointed, and she’s more disgruntled and grouchy than acidic. To be fair, she had plenty of reason to be grouchy. She’s stuck with a job she’s not sure is right for her, and she’s also stuck parenting her vapid younger sister and clueless scientist father. It’s no wonder her many responsibilities and lack of progress make her frustrated.

Tyler adds an interesting twist to the need to pair Kate off. Rather than the dated idea of the older sister needing to marry before the younger sister can have her shot, Tyler adds in a subplot about US immigration. Pyotr is the best lab assistant Kate’s father has ever had, so when his visa is about to expire, Kate’s father is so desperate to keep him that he schemes to marry him off to Kate so he can get a green card.

This is one instance where I wish Tyler’s approach had a bit more of an edge. There are so many complicated issues around immigration that I had hoped for a bit more skewering of a system that can force people like Pyotr to feel they have no choice but to commit such a desperate act as marriage simply their livelihood. Alternatively, I had hoped for a bit of satire around Kate’s father’s sense of entitlement, and his blindness to his own privilege. He’s basically pimping his daughter out to keep a lab assistant, and not enough characters call him out for it. Also, when so many people are so desperate to immigrate to the US for a whole range of reasons, Kate’s father’s cavalier attitude towards the process and utter confidence he would succeed is beyond clueless, and I wish Tyler had delved more into that, possibly by delving deeper into Pyotr’s emotions. There is a scene where Pyotr talks about missing home, which is possibly the point where I most liked Pyotr, and I wish we’d seen more of that.

As well, putting that kind of pressure on Kate is kind of a dick move by her father, and his logic that she shouldn’t mind because she had no romantic prospects otherwise made me wish Kate had a bit more of Julia Stiles’ fire from 10 Things. I realize she eventually made a decision on her own terms, and to an extent, I’m gleeful at how she out-smarted her father in one very significant way, but overall, I felt kind of bad for her. Her actions felt more born out of hurt feelings than a victorious assertion of self, and I just wanted to look her father and her relatives in the eye and ask them what the hell they’re thinking, treating Kate that way.

A lot of my ambivalence about the ending, I think, is because Kate and Pyotr’s relationship felt oddly emotionally detached to me. Pyotr’s a bit of an opaque character so it’s hard to know how he feels about Kate — he says random things that for the most part seems pleasant and friendly at most, but shows more passion for home and the mice in the lab than for Kate. They barely seemed more than acquaintances throughout and any potential for marriage had all the passion of a roommate arrangement. In contrast, there seemed more chemistry with a cute co-worker that Kate had her eye on, and I only wish he had a bigger role. Where is the chemistry from 10 Things or even the fiery passion from the battle of wits in Shakespeare’s original?

All that being said, one spot where I’m glad for Tyler’s gentle hand is Kate’s final monologue, which in Shakespeare’s original, raises my hackles:

[…] dart not scornful glances from those eyes
To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor.
It blots thy beauty[…]

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign[…]

I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
Whey they are bound to serve, love, and obey.

Taming of the Shrew, V.ii.2645-2670.

Tyler completely revamps this monologue into a treatise about the unfairness of gender roles and an acknowledgement of the pressures men feel to be stoic and strong. The speech felt a bit out of place within the novel, and Kate’s bringing it up felt a bit random, but I thought it struck a good balance between the level of capitulation Shakespeare’s original provided and a more modern sensibility around gender norms.

Overall, Vinegar Girl is a quick and light read. I’m not completely sure how I feel about it, but I enjoyed reading it.

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Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In a small Korean town, a hairy black mutt named Scraggly lives with the elderly junk shop owner Grandpa Screecher and his family. There are wonderful parallels between their lives as their relationship deepens over the years, and their story is a quiet meditation on love, loss and growing old together. Much like Grandpa Screecher has to bid goodbye to his son and grandchildren at the end of their visits, Scraggly can only watch helplessly as her siblings are put up for sale. Death and loss are practically constants in Scraggly’s life, and there are many scenes when I found myself emotionally enmeshed in what I objectively understand to be one of many unfortunate circumstances in life.

Hwang does a good job in making her animal characters’ emotions real. For example, when Hwang describes a mother dog yanking against her chain to lick her puppy’s wounds, we can almost feel the rough metal cut against our own neck, and when the mother howls in despair, we almost want to join her because the sense of helplessness is so strong.

We mostly follow Scraggly through her life, as she faces conflicts against the old cat next door, some territorial neighbourhood dogs and most especially a thieving dog breeder. The dog thief is a particularly dark and emotional subplot, since it’s the one that makes clearest the limitations of communication between dog and man, as Grandpa Screecher is unable to understand Scraggly’s warnings about the thief, and Scraggly’s anger leads her to turn against the human she most loves. I particularly liked Scraggly’s contentious relationship with the old cat, partly because as a cat person, I admittedly sympathized with the cat despite one horrible thing she did. But also partly because of the way the relationship evolved as both animals got older and the cat became more in need of companionship, even if it had to be from a dog.

The cat also says something that I think somewhat encapsulates the story as a whole:

“The young grow up and the old become exhausted. Only if you live through winter do you understand what it’s doing. Winter has many secrets.” [p. 39]

And indeed this book is a story of winters. Not that it’s a sad book necessarily, but there’s an inevitable movement in its series of changes and of seasons. I didn’t absolutely love this book, mostly because after a while all the various stuff happening to Scraggly just got a bit depressing to read about, and I felt that each minor uplift of hope came with a corresponding dip in fortune almost immediately after. But it is a sweet little book, and the illustrations are beautiful in their simplicity.

The tone of hope does ramp up towards the end, particularly with a couple of significant reunions. The ending is bittersweet at best, but it’s still been a lovely ride. The final few chapters are beautifully evocative, involving a winding staircase, an old cat who’d become a friend, an old man who wanted to help his grandkids pluck persimmons from a tree, and a loving scraggly mutt who has weathered many storms.

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Thank you to Hachette Book Group Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

This Fall, I received a promotional sneak preview booklet of the first two titles from Simon and Schuster’s new children’s book imprint Salaam Reads: The Gauntlet by Karuna Riazi and Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan. Both are middle grade titles to be launched in March 2017, and from these excerpts, I highly recommend adding both to your Goodreads “To Read” list. These are both books I can imagine reading and loving as a child, and I definitely enjoyed reading the excerpts as an adult.

The Gauntlet by Karuna Riazi

The Gauntlet starts off with the same basic premise as Jumanji. Farah Mirza receives a board game from her aunt for her birthday, and when her younger brother Ahmad touches it, he disappears into the world inside the game. To save him, Farah and her friends must enter the game themselves and play by its rules. The excerpt had me glued to the page and excited to see how it turns out.

According to the press release, Salaam Reads aims to “share the stories of Muslim children, in all their diversity.” In The Gauntlet, we not only have a Muslim protagonist and meet her family, we also have a scene at Farah’s birthday party where her mother serves chakphati (“chickpeas and egg and plenty of delectable, generous spices”) and Farah’s classmate Jeff calls it “disgusting” and asks for fries or pizza instead.

Jeff, who couldn’t pronounce Iran and didn’t know how many pins it took for Farah to keep her scarf out of his overly inquisitive fingers, but would insist up and down that Farah’s curry in her lunch box was gross-looking and her plain yogurt was no better than baby spit. [p. 8]

Riazi’s description of Farah’s mother “just [standing] there, smiling and nodding and wringing her hem between her fingers” and Jeff’s mother “[laughing] nervously through her teeth” is particularly vivid. I felt such a layering of emotion I can’t even begin to explain, but it’s a beautifully crafted scene, and I can only imagine its impact on young readers who may relate to the experience. I somehow hope a real-life Jeff will read this too, and realize how hurtful such thoughtless comments could be.

Amina’s Voice by Hena Khan

Amina’s Voice is a completely different genre of story, which is awesome because this imprint will then attract a larger range of potential readers. Amina Khoker has a beautiful singing voice but is too shy to perform in public. When she starts middle school, she notices her best friend Soojin Park is hanging out a lot more with one of the “cool” kids, Emily, whom both Amina and Soojin pretty much hated throughout elementary school. To top it all off, Amina’s uncle is coming from Pakistan for an extended visit and her father wants everything to be perfect for his more traditional brother, which includes signing up Amina and her brother for a Quran competition. The blurb at the back of the book mentions that the local mosque Amina’s family attends is vandalized, so the story just keeps ramping up from there.

I can totally see myself reading and loving this book as a kid. I realize that the story is mainly about Amina, but I absolutely love that one of the main characters is Korean, and even better, that her family is still waiting for their citizenship! There are a lot of stories out there about immigration, but not usually (in my experience at least) treated in this way, where the character is just like any other school girl and her main conflicts are about friendship and popularity, and she just happens to mention in passing that her family is about to take their oath of citizenship. It seems a minor thing, but as an immigrant myself, it means a lot to see this story told in this way, and I don’t know if I can even fully explain why.

I also love that Soojin sees her citizenship as the opportunity to change her name to something more like “American” like Melanie or Jessica. Amina doesn’t quite support the change, because to her, Soojin changing her name is akin to Soojin changing to a more “cool” and popular version of her old friend, and I just love seeing the dynamics between the two in what, ultimately, was a very brief and casual conversation.

There is so much realness going on in just the first few chapters, and I am so excited to find out how things turn out for Amina and Soojin! I’m even curious about Emily, as it would be so easy to paint her as a typical mean girl but from what I’ve seen of Khan’s storytelling so far, she seems to eschew easy stereotypes and create highly textured characters that practically breathe on the page. I’d love to see this happen in Emily’s case as well, and am both concerned and curious about how Amina’s family and her community will respond to the vandalizing of the mosque.

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NOTE that any quotes in the above are from the uncorrected Advance Reader’s Chapter Sampler, and so may be edited for the final copy.

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Thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada for a sneak preview of The Gauntlet and Amina’s Voice in exchange for an honest review.