Tag Archives: California

The Monday Book – Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave

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Guest review by Janelle Bailey, avid reader/ever-an-educator/lifelong learner…and also now 7th grade teacher and part-time bookseller

Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave

Though not new (2015 publication), this book’s themes are classic: family and relationships and love and commitment, as well as vineyards and winemaking are all complex and hard work…heart work.

Georgia and Ben are to be married very soon and at her home, her family’s vineyard, about 500 miles away from where they now live. But a pretty big secret prompts Georgia to flee there sooner, only to find things a bit of a mess there as well.

It’s a tangled web they all–we all??–weave and live, and in the de-tangling of this one, relationships are questioned and their truths revealed, painful in processing. And due to the family vineyard and winemaking business, a reader learns much about that as well. Subtle connections between the complexities of grape growing, and even the soil mattering, to “growing” a family and building relationships mattering from the ground up were also detected by this reader. Knowing the history and building the “story” of it matter to both. Living through the tough times and persevering matter, too.

I enjoyed the visit to The Last Straw, the family vineyard established in 1979. For this reader who happens to appreciate as favorite beverages, water, tea, and wine, learning how important the first two are to making the third well at this vineyard was additional and educational enjoyment.

And I appreciated the focus, also, on synchronization, simultaneity, rhythm…and how little we understand as it’s happening why things are exactly as they are but seemingly are…as they are to be.

I say read it! I think you’ll be pleased that you did.

The Monday Book: THE FREEDOM WRITERS DIARY edited by Erin Gruwell

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This floated into the bookstore and I grabbed it to take to Chile; Jack and I like to take books we’ll both read to keep down weight, and swap during our travels.

The book is entries from students keeping journals for a school project, and it has that overtone of worthiness one remembers from previous books like it: Dangerous Minds, et al. But it’s also got some lovely moments; in the background of student entries shines their erudite observations of how the project was allowed to flourish despite bureaucracy and the jealous nature of any professionals being outstripped by a colleague. Some of the entries are as simple as “crap, I wish I’d made the basketball team” and others are about students realizing they’re not the only ones with abusive fathers–which they learn from reading each others’ entries, editing them for the book.

If you teach writing, if you like to write, if you teach high school at all, you’ll see all sorts of evidence of the careful editing process of peer and professional review, which made the book even more interesting to me. Gruwell has been very careful to both keep her project in close view of very senior officials, and keep it as organic as possible for the students–a process that is about as hard as squeezing cheese curd from rocks, and for which I salute her big time.

And I flat loved reading the entries, so carefully stitched together to actually make a narrative arc out of something that could have been very piecemeal. It isn’t a story story, but it’s got a story running through it. I enjoyed this approach tremendously.

Well done, Freedom Writers!