Little Princes

Little Princes, by Conor Grennan

In search of adventure, 29 year-old Conor Grennan traded his day job for a year-long trip around the globe, a journey that began with a three month stint volunteering at the Little Princes Children's Home, an orphanage in war-torn Nepal.

Conor was initially reluctant to volunteer, unsure whether he had the proper skill, or enough passion, to get involved in a developing country in the middle of a civil war. But he was soon overcome by the herd of rambunctious, resiliant children who would challenge and reward him in a way that he had never imagined. When Conor learned the unthinkable truth about their situation, he was stunned: The children were not orphans at all. Child traffickers were promising families in remote villages to protect their children from civil war - for a huge fee - by taking them to safety. They would then abandon the children far from home, in the chaos of Nepal's capital city, Kathmandu.

For Conor, what began as a footloose adventure becomes a commitment to reunite the children he had grown to love with their families, but this would be no small task. He would risk his life on a journey through the legendary mountains of Nepal, facing the dangers of a bloody civil war and a debilitating injury.

I am completely biased when it comes to this book. Almost three years ago now, in 2008, although I can't actually believe it's really been that long, I spent the summer working in Kathmandu, attempting to do my part to help Nepal get back on its feet after the ten year civil war between the Maoist rebels and the monarchy debilitated the country. I have many fond and less than fond memories of my time there, including the time I attempted to find the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction despite not knowing any Nepali. If you're in need of some excitement in your life, I recommend trying to get into a guarded compound in a foreign country which has just recently had a civil war, where you don't speak the language and have to make your way around by showing random people a piece of paper where you've written what you really hope is the right name for this place and not just some random phrase that was on the website, in whatever mangled mess you've made of their alphabet. True story: one time I tried to cheer up my roommate by writing "Happy Birthday" in Russian, and she told me later that she thought a child had written it. Writing in a foreign alphabet is hard.

P.S. Isn't that website great? I love the picture of the old Ministry. I have no idea why the old Ministry was in the middle of what appears to be in a forest, on a mountain, but I appreciate their moving it into the city, because otherwise it would have been a much longer walk from my hotel.

Anyway, this is all beside the point, which is not unexpected, so whatever. The book. Little Princes is one of those books which is not so much about the writing as it is about the story and the problem, and the shedding of light on a previously dark corner. It's like Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea (and the sequel Stones into Schools), which is also about helping children in a war-torn, mountainous region in Asia. Unsurprisingly, I like both of these books, although obviously, Little Princes was more evocative to me, since I have not been to Afghanistan or Pakistan, nor do I have plans to visit in the near future, as it is very dangerous, and I would be scared to go.

In Little Princes, obviously, the problem is child trafficking and it is a heartbreaking story. Grennan does a good job of pacing the story and relating how each new circumstance brought forth the next one - from a short volunteering stint, to a longer one, to finding out the children's parents were not dead, to the discovery of the new children, and the promise made to them which was severed by the escalating violence and disruption. The book does slow down a bit towards the end - Grennan loses the urgency that powered the first three quarters of the book, and he spends a bit too much time dwelling on his burgeoning relationship with a sympathetic penpal who later becomes his wife.

What Little Princes does very well is describe the myriad and conflicting factors which surround child trafficking, and any solutions which may be attempted. Part of the problem was obviously the ongoing war, which has stopped, as have almost all acts of violence. However, during the war, getting the children back to their parents was problematic because of the risk of movement, and because parents would only want to send them away again to avoid conscription. Grennan also puts his finger on another issue: because these particular children wound up being cared for and educated and so on, the risk paid off. I would never want to be a parent and have to make that choice - to say, I can send my child away and perhaps they will be starved and left to fend for themselves or perhaps they will be found and taken care of, or I can keep them close, and perhaps they will be taken away to fight, or perhaps they will not. I can understand a parent who says: in both of those scenarios, in the worst case, my child could die, but in the best case, with me they would have to eke out a living, but in Kathmandu, they could make something of themselves, and then send them away. There are other reasons why reuniting these children with their parents does not go as smoothly and quickly as Grennan first assumes it will - the cost of travel, of having another child to feed, of reuniting after years apart.

Little Princes is poignant, as it illustrates very how just how messy war is - there are no easy choices made in this book, and even parents who send their children away with a child trafficker have your sympathy. The situation in Nepal goes unknown and unremarked too often (as is often the case with poorer countries which are not in the grips of an extraordinary violence). One of my Nepali contacts, a lawyer working with a NGO, said that things were better in 2008, yes, but that she'd seen peace before, and didn't know if it would last. I love Nepal, and perhaps if you read Little Princes you'll understand why. Or maybe you just have to go there.

(this little girl is judging you if you do not like Nepal)

For your further education:

Timeline of Recent Events

Next Generation Nepal (the organization founded by Grennan)

Pictures of Nepal (There's a menu on the left hand side of the page. I did not take these, nor do I know the person who did. But I love them, they remind me of being there. The Nepal ones basically go from Apr. 11, 2008 to Aug. 19, 2008)

Plain Kate

Plain Kate, by Erin Bow

Plain Kate lives in a world of superstitions and curses, where a song can heal a wound and a shadow can work deep magic. As the wood-carver's daughter, Kate held a carving knife before a spoon, and her wooden charms are so fine that some even call her "witch-blade" - a dangerous nickname in a town where witches are hunted and burned in the square.

For Kate and her village have fallen on hard times. Kate's father has died, leaving her alone in the world. And a mysterious fog now covers the countryside, ruining crops and spreading fear of hunger and sickness. The townspeople are looking for someone to blame, and their eyes have fallen on Kate.

Enter Linay, a stranger with a proposition: In exchange for her shadow, he'll give Kate the means to escape the town that seems set to burn her, and what's more, he'll grant her heart's wish. It's a chance for her to start over, to find a home, a family, a place to belong. But Kate soon realizes that she can't live shadowless forever - and that Linay's designs are darker than she ever dreamed.

Okay, confession time: I have been reading, I swear, only I am trying to finish all the books I still have going on before starting new ones. This is a spectacularly bad plan for several reasons:

1. I am in the middle of like, five books, so it's going to take me awhile.
2. I am in the middle of these books (and not finished with them) mostly because I don't want to read them. (Warning sign #1).
3. I keep cheating and starting (and sometimes finishing but sometimes not) new books anyway. My bad.

So, here's the thing: I have been trying very hard to read A.S. Byatt's Possession (ironically, this book has taken over my life, but in a really bad way, like the way debt creditors take over your life) but only, not really trying, because I hate it so much, I can barely force myself to crack it.
So I can't read it, and at the same time, can't not read it, so other books have been kinda getting the short straw as a result. Luckily, Plain Kate was like, two hours of nonsense, so it was a very small detour on the Possession takeover of my life.

Verdict: It was okay. I guess part of the problem was the summary I read in the NYT got my hopes up, because it sounded interesting and adventurous, but it was a lot of Kate, wandering around being stubborn, and people beating up on her. She leaves town after a mob comes after her with axes, then falls in with gypsies, ahem, Roamers, then they find out she sold her shadow, so they try to set fire to her, and then she gets "rescued" again by Linay, who then bleeds her periodically so the ghost of his dead sister can live. She takes a lot of abuse, is what I'm saying. So at least part of the issue is that I didn't empathize with her. Mostly I was just irritated by her somewhat hapless meanderings. She sort of goes through the book like a pinball, bouncing against barriers and changing directions only to hit up against something else. She's not at all a "take charge" kind of person, until maybe, maybe at the very end, but I wasn't invested in her at that point, so it was wasted.

I think, looking back, that that was my biggest peeve: honestly, after I finished it, I was like, nothing happened in that book, but really, stuff did happen, only it never felt immediate to me, I never got into the scene. It was as though I was watching the action from behind a dirty dirty window - I could see, but the effort of looking to the other side meant that I couldn't really focus completely on the immediacy of the events.

The book does "pick up" (and again, let me say, stuff happens in the first 4/5ths of the book, but it made no impact, so for me, it was very blah for awhile) at the end, but it's a bit of a jumble. FYI, total SPOILER ALERT.

First Kate's talking cat offers to die for the Cause, and they decide against it, then Linay totally wrecks havoc on this town in the name of vengeance, and then Kate tries to kill him, but he actually just commits suicide, but then his formerly dead sister comes back and then Kate's talking cat dies, and then the sister decides to die, and the cat comes back to life. But then it can't talk anymore! Phew. I will be honest, the only character I cared about was that talking cat. Rule #1: Kill all the people you want, but god forbid you kill a single dog or cat! So I was pleased that the cat lived. But in killing him and then bringing him back, it ruined the sorrow that the death had created. And perhaps Ms. Bow thought to make it a bittersweet reunion because the cat came back, but only as a dumb animal rather than as the friend it used to be, but I was just glad it came back, and cats don't generally talk anyway, so it failed on that level for me.

The setting. . . was okay. It is "clearly" set in Russia (as the dead sister is a rusalka until she comes back to life) but like, the same way that Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are set in Europe: barely. I would have liked more flavour to the setting, more infusion of that specific time and place, more because I like reading about things I don't know very much about and learning something new than for any need to have cultural trappings in this type of tale. Although at one point Kate calls her cat a "panther" and I was all, "Did they even have panthers in Russia?" and spent like, twenty minutes on wikipedia looking at leopard habitats.

Plain Kate wasn't terrible, it just doesn't really sock you in the gut. The saddest part for me was the acknowledgments, and let me just say that if you all don't read the acknowledgments and similar in books, you are totally missing out. They're great, sort of like how previews are to movies. Anyway, that's why it was just okay.


P.S. Panthera is a genus that contains tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars. Most people (or possibly just me) think black South American jaguars when they think panthers, but those aren't really a whole separate cat, they're just jaguars, which only live in South and Central America. Panther could also mean black leopard, and leopards are currently only found in like, sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, but they used to be all the way up to Mongolia and Korea parts. Snow leopards also live in Russia a little, mostly in the areas by the Himalayas, although I don't know if those ever get black. Also, they are FUZZY, and don't really make me think of "panther" when I see them. And because panthers are not a separate cat, but are just odd colorations of jaguars and leopards, you can have white panthers, too, although these have not been bred like the black ones have, even though it's harder to live in the wild as a white panther than a black one. The More You Know!