Eccentric Islands: Travels Real and Imaginary

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Island is both thing and metaphor. Without the weight of things, metaphors turn vapid, sour, empty, fly off into space and connect with nothing.... Islands are good to think on if a man would express himself neatly." Poet and essayist Holm (Coming Home Crazy; The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth) offers an eloquent meditation on beauty, genius and isolation. From the metaphorical islands of pain (both physical and spiritual: "You are not a human being. You are not you. You are pain. You have been islanded") and the piano ("the piano, though a public instrument, is, for those who love it, a private world") to rock-solid islands like Molokai in Hawaii, Holm's ability to link the specific and the broad is both beautiful and wise ("We have always needed lepers. Someone has to be unclean. Leprosy--or AIDS--becomes thus, not a disease, but a profession, even a vocation in the religious sense"). The author, whose surname, appropriately, means "island" in Icelandic, also makes two journeys, one in 1979 and another in 1999, to the homeland of his forefathers, where he celebrates the Icelanders' resilience and language. Like a modern-day Thoreau, Holm convincingly "downsiz[es] the universe in order to get a better look at it." These essays are replete with pith and humor; for all his observations, Holm's willingness to poke fun at himself will reassure thoughtful readers that he is both as ordinary and extraordinary as they are. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

VOYA

With so much media focus on the topic of adoption, teens are becoming curious, especially those who were adopted or know someone who was. Harrar's fictional yet amazingly realistic journey of one boy's struggle through the adoption system is sure to satisfy their curiosity. Ten-year-old Andy believes that although his birth parents are the pits—his mother is an alcoholic and his father is a thief doing ten years in prison—he will have them forever. This illusion is shattered when his birth mother decides that he is nothing but trouble and hands him over to the state. Now Andy must deal with his social worker, life at the home, and attending so-called adoption parties. By the age of twelve, he has been kicked out of eight foster homes. When at yet another adoption party he meets a couple, Jeff and Laurie, he thinks that his luck finally might change. Harrar deftly takes readers inside Andy's head as he tries to please his new foster parents while still being the one in control. Unlike in many teen novels, the adults are likeable characters who truly care about Andy, despite his behavioral problems. His father's appearance at the end of the book shakes things up, but Harrar manages to avoid clichés and leaves readers feeling that Andy is on the road to a better life. Fans of books such as The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson (HarperCollins, 1978) are sure to gobble up this humorous and touching novel, $6.95 Trade pb. VOYA CODES:4Q 4P M J (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses;Broad general YA appeal;Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8;Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9). 2001, Milkweed Editions, 320p, $17.95. Ages 11 to 15.Reviewer:Shari Fesko—VOYA, December 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 5)

From The Critics

John Donne said, "No man is an island," but Holm is one to refute that statement. His name means "small island" in Old Norse, and that fact fuels this essayist's wayward journey to five physical islands—Iceland, Madagascar, Molokai in Hawaii, Isla Mujeres off the Yucatan Peninsula, and Mallard Island in Minnesota—and three illusory, man-made islands of Pain, Imagination, and Music.The essays on "real" islands are better at anchoring the reader, most engagingly when Holm visits tropical Molokai, "Island of Lepers." There he unravels the history of Father Damien, a missionary who devoted his life to leprosy victims in the mid-nineteenth century, and uses it to discuss the fear humans create and propagate by banishing the ill, infirm, and lower class. In another essay, "The Island of Pain," Holm touches on similar material when he writes about how physical and mental pain can island a person from those who offer help. Although Minneota, Minnesota, is Holm's hometown, Iceland is the home of his ancestors, and the bulk of this book recalls his journey as a "backward immigrant." He survives a ride aboard a freighter, labors with the language, discovers an Icelandic obsession with genealogy, and volunteers to work on a family farm in the countryside, always employing his merry sense of humor. With a nod toward Henry David Thoreau, himself an islander in Holm's sense of the word, this part travelogue, part treatise also explores the philosophy of man and nature in modern society. For example, upon returning to Iceland in 1999 as the leader of a student expedition, Holm champions his students' disobedience when they opt to stay awake all night and bask in the arctic summer twilight. He favors the eccentricity island life seems to breed, and he warns, "Continents love prudence, the favorite virtue of puritans, but it is always overrated. It gains you nothing but a drudge job and a long slow death." Sprinkled with poetry and his musical musings, Holm's essays pay homage to all the great island literature—that of Swift, Stevenson, and Defoe. Now a professor at Southwest State University, he has amassed travel experiences by teaching abroad, filling up eight books, and this thoughtful collection.

Kirkus Reviews

An expertly wrought memoir of journeys to islands real, metaphorical, and imagined.