Standing in the Light

Standing in the Light:  The Captive Diary of Catharine Carey Logan is a fictional diary by Mary Pope Osborne, written for the Dear America series.  Caty Logan is a 13-year-old girl living with her family in the Delaware Valley in Pennsylvania.  The Logans are Quakers - a pacifist religious group that began in England and spread to North America in the late 1600s, when some of them emigrated to escape religious persecution.  Quakers have been historically very politically active in the fight for universal civil rights and gender equality, although they also tend to practice modesty and humility in general behavior and appearance (at least during the time in which this book is set).

It is 1763, just after the French and Indian War, and Caty is worried because there have been reports of raids on farmers around the valley, in retaliation of the English government going back on their treaties with the local villages regarding land ownership.  Caty's father believes that their family will be safe if they show the Indians that they trust them, and has faith in the friendly relations the Quakers have had with the Delaware Indians in the past.  Despite this, however, Caty and her brother Thomas are taken captive on their way to school one winter morning; after hearing the rumors at school of people being scalped, Caty fears the worst.

After a while, Caty loses track of the days, though curiosity and what seems like admiration causes her captors to allow her to continue writing in her diary, and from the day she and Thomas are taken, the book becomes a letter to their father, in case it should ever find its way back to him.

Once the small party reaches a village, Thomas is taken away:  will she ever see him or the rest of their family again?

The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold is a story centering around a fourteen-year-old girl, Susie Salmon, who is raped and murdered near her home in the 1970s.  She narrates the story after death, as she watches over her family and keeps tabs on her killer from her heaven.  She follows each of her family members as they deal with her death, each in very different ways.  She follows Ruth, a classmate who felt her presence as she passed through a parking lot from this world to the next and whose life is never the same from that moment on.  She follows Ray Singh, another classmate who was in love with her - her almost and only romance.  And she follows the man who took her life.

Rape is difficult for me to read, and it's even more awful to me in this book because of Susie's young age and the gruesome way in which she dies afterward.  Sebold treats this delicate subject matter well, though; perhaps because she herself was a victim of rape.  The scene isn't drawn out, and we get only those details which are vital to the understanding of the story.  So to anyone wary of picking this up because of this topic, I would at least give it a go, because the reading of it isn't as bad as I anticipated.  Of course, you may end up not being able to get through it, but trust me - at least try, because it's really an extraordinary book.