Post: 295: The Diviner's Tale

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow.
ISBN: 9780547382630 (Uncorrected Proof - publishes Jan. 20, 2011).

Ah, there are moments that remind me why I started this blog, bits and pieces of literature that reach out from the page and smack me in the face and say, "Yes, this happens." It's a small thing really, but Cassandra and I share some past history. After Cass's brother dies her mother goes into a pretty deep depression and in order to get her mother's attention, Cass often resorts to calling her mother by her first name. Eventually this just becomes habit and continues into adulthood. Well, I can relate to that.  My father suffers from pretty severe Depression: that's Depression with a capital D. He gets so depressed he occasionally cannot function as a human being. He is a scary person when this happens.

The first time he went through a Depression was in the mid-90's. We were in Oklahoma at that time and he was actually institutionalized over Thanksgiving or Christmas.  I was about 10 at the time and no longer remember which holiday it was, just that it was miserable and no one had a good time that year. It was also around this time I first started calling him by his first name. Part of this was probably me testing the boundaries of the child-parent relationship, as well as first recognizing that my parents even had other names besides "mom" and "dad". At this time, I only used it to annoy my father, who had started calling me fat among other things.

I thought surely my own father couldn't think so little of me, that he wouldn't want to hurt me and was calling me these names only in jest. It wasn't until my parents finalized their divorce about five years later and Christmases and birthdays went by without so much as a card or a phone call I began to realize that he really did mean them. He may have thought he was being a good parent by providing me with "motivation" to lose weight, but really all it did was make me feel even more unwelcome in my own home than I already felt. By the time we moved and left him on Guam, I was glad we were leaving him behind. My mother was miserable for a while, but I noticed an immediate improvement in our actual quality of life, at least until my brother's behavior started going downhill.

With years between any contact, it just became natural to call my father by his first name. It also made the relationship less hurtful. It was easier to accept that some man who had been living with us for 13 years had called me all those names, had "loved" me, and was now gone and wanted nothing more to do with me. If he wanted so much to opt out of the role of a father, as it seemed he did at the time, then it only made sense to revoke the title as well. He still isn't much of a dad, and so to this day I am more likely to refer to him by his first name.

My review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: Free copy received from publisher's booth at ALA 2010.

Post: 294: The Diviner's Tale

The Diviner's Tale by Bradford Morrow.
ISBN: 9780547382630 (Uncorrected Proof - publishes Jan. 20, 2011).

One of the things that Cassandra struggles with in this novel is whether or not to teach her sons the art of divining.  According to Morrow's work, divination requires an innate ability and is more likely to be present in those with parents who have it.  I think this is a very good question that Cassandra brings up, not only for herself, but for any parent working in a trade which might be seen as undesirable or weird by the community.

Since I can't answer this question for other people, I think I'll play the "if I have children" game.  If I have children I don't think I would want them to pursue a career like Cassandra's.  This has less to do with how I feel about it personally, and more of how my children would be perceived by the surrounding community.  For this same reason I wouldn't want my children to be fat or ugly or too tall or too short or too whatever is "unacceptable" in society at the time, because life is already too hard that I wouldn't want them to have to cope with everyone else's perceptions of them on top of everything else.  It shouldn't matter, but it does, and it's awfully hard to grow up into a normal and healthy person when people are saying things about your worth.  If you're lucky, they'll only say it behind your back and you'll never know.

On the other hand, some people are just drawn to naturally dangerous or "undesirable" jobs and there is nothing wrong with that.  I think if my future kid had a strong desire to be a tarot card reader I might pull them aside and say, "Look, there's a lot of people who don't believe in this kind of thing and will think that you're wacky," but in the long run I would still provide them with the tarot cards and maybe even take them to get their cards read.  Of course, this is much easier when I don't have an actual potential being who I will otherwise have to take care of for an indefinite period of time if they don't get some kind of viable career.

But why do we stop telling our kids they can be anything they want to be?  Why at the age of 12 was it okay for me to want to be a writer when at the age of 14 my mom was pushing me towards more "practical" career goals?  Why did my mother think a history degree was a more desirable fate for me than a certification in massage therapy?  I can almost guarantee you I would have my own business now if I had gotten that certificate.  Either our kids can be anything they want to be, or else we need to stop lying to them about that and start showing them the potential consequences of their choices.  You want to be a ballerina?  Okay, fine, here's what their day is like and they usually retire before the age of 45 because their bodies are ruined.  Still want to be a ballerina?  Good deal, let's make that happen and no you can't skip your lesson to go to Emily's birthday party.

Who knows, maybe our society would be better off with assigned jobs and roles.  Maybe it wouldn't be as horrible as depicted in dystopian novels.  Maybe we would all accept our roles and flourish in them.  Then again this is probably just the hopelessness in me talking, wanting someone to take control of my life and give me something to do.  Readers, how would you feel about your kids taking up the (dowsing) rod or another career looked on with contempt?

My review can be found on Goodreads.
LibsNote: Free copy received from publisher's booth at ALA 2010.