Juxtabook

Twittering for Maternal Health

Whilst on twitter, the micro-blogging site, I "met" Ben Palmer. Ben has written a book, Friday's Child which I remember seeing reviewed last year. It is not one that I've read, but one I am going to mention anyway because the subject matter is so important and because Ben's determination, in just the 140 characters allowed per post on twitter, to raise the profile of something so vital is so impressive.

Ben lost his wife Jessica to childbed fever - a post-natal septicaemic infection - when she was just 34. Overnight Ben became a widower and a single father to two children. Since her death Ben has written the book Friday's Child to raise awareness of the problem and he has also set up Jessica's Trust to campaign for better monitoring of women after birth. He believes, and how can we not agree, that women in the 21st century should not be dying from diseases most of us thought were eliminated in the first world in the nineteenth century.

The shattering impact of sudden post-natal death can be read about here in the text of a speech Ben gave recently to a midwifery conference. For me though the crux of Ben's speech is this:

In the grand scheme of things, 18 deaths between 2003 & 2005 may be a small statistic, but the human impact is not.

What I do want to tell you is what happens when you wake up as a single parent and a widower, with small and confused children.

When I got home, broken hearted and in shock, I had to go on and on breaking others' hearts. Jessica's parents, my parents, our friends and family and my son Harry's.

When I told him that the doctor's had tried really hard to mend mummy's sore tummy, but that she was too sick and now she was in heaven with God and the angels where her tummy couldn't hurt any more, he just looked at me.

He didn't say a word. He was three - how could he understand what I was also struggling with?

Ben concludes:

Emily has never kissed her Mum, she and Harry will never have their mother there on red letter days. On Emily's first day at school last month, in her new dress, she looked at me with a sadness and simply said, "I wish my mummy could see me today."

What will she say if she graduates, or gets married?

My point is that death never goes away once it has struck...

I am mentioning Jessica's Trust and Friday's Child here as I want to support Ben's desire to raise awareness of childbed fever and also because Ben has started a petition on the Downing Street website here as part of a campaign "to ensure that every new mother has regular observations recorded on a Modified Early Obstetric Warning System (MEOWS) chart in hospital and in the community and is given clear information and advice on the recognition of childbed fever". Clearly you have to be a UK citizen to sign the petition but even if you blog elsewhere in the world you will still have lots of UK readers. By mentioning Ben's book and providing a link to the petition you are helping to raise awareness and save lives. I am hoping many people will blog or tweet about this subject. You can follow Ben on twitter here and he uses the hashtag #maternalhealth which helps people follow what is going on.

You can read an excellent review of Ben's book by Dovegreyreader, who of course is also a health professional, here.

Lastly the husband of a childbed fever survivor is bravely offering a very hairly looking leg for a sponsored leg wax to raise money for Jessica's Trust. You can sponsor him here.

Reading Round-up

For some reason I seem to have been having something of a crime-fest. Not personally you understand, I have just been spending time with some literary detectives.

First up is a new one for me: Joe Sixsmith in the utterly delightful The Roar of the Butterflies by Reginald Hill (best known for Dalziel and Pascoe). It seems strange to describe a crime novel as delightful but this really was, and it was also very funny. Whilst firmly placed in the modern world, inept private detective Joe Sixsmith is also remarkably timeless. This was like a collision between Miss Marple and Bertie Wooster spewed out in 2008 by a time machine with a mischievous sense of fun. The rather nice cover immediately makes you think of golf, aunts and P. G. Wodehouse. Despite these curious literary antecedents the odd mix really works. There is a neat enough mystery and an entertaining range of characters.

Joe Sixsmith, incompetant, broke and with poor taste in shorts, is startled by the appearance of a well dressed, wealthy, good looking young man offering him large sums of money to help him out of a fix at his exclusive golf-club. His visitor's touching faith in him, and his sports car, spur Joe into action where his better self tells him he should not go. Through a series of lucky, entertaining and occasionally excruciating bungles, Joe manages to unravel the mystery. The narrative keeps just the right side of pastiche and screw-ball; a firm hand keeps it witty, light, fun and persuasive.

Although not totally baffling the mystery does keep you fairly intrigued, but the heart of the book is poor Joe and his lucky ineptitude. Like Wodehouse Hill has created a set of characters that it is a pleasure to spend time with regardless of the machinations of any plot. The Roar of the Butterflies is a surefire winner for a summer relax.

Next on the Juxtabook conveyor belt is the last of the Shardlake series: Revelation. Like the others in the series this was a great mix of cracking historical fiction and genuinely demanding mystery. I had no complaints whatsoever though it was not quite as good as its predecessor, Sovereign. Still, it was a pleasure throughout, though considerably more graphic than the rather sweet The Roar of the Butterflies. For some reason I feel Shardlake is a winter-read crime novel whilst The Roar of the Butterflies is summer-read crime. There is probably a whole post there: attributing crime fiction as seasonal reads. Fortunately the weather was suitably, well, Yorkshire (wet, windy and cold) at the time of reading so I was properly attired throughout for the criminal conditions. Revelation itself is set in early Spring so the reading conditions are not related to the seasons within the book. Do you feel particular books have a season for reading?

Although, as I say, it is late spring in Revelation, the weather it unseasonable cold. Shardlake is shocked to find the body of a dear friend partially covered with ice in the fountain at Lincoln's Inn. This death and Shardlake's usual tenacity keep both him and plot moving through a series of gruesome events. Shardlake is chasing a serial killer. One of the strengths of this series is Shardlake's everyday qualities: his desire for a quiet life and a his dislike of Tudor politics. He is scared and yet keeps his very difficult promises and sees matters through to the end. His gut wrenching desire to do the right thing in the face of a wholly sensible degree of cowardice is balanced nicely by a good deal of nosiness. The right thing and curiosity always win out, but one feels for him often. He is one of the most real and sympathetic of fictional sleuths.

Lastly I have just finished The Torso in the Town by Simon Brett, one of the fluffy Fethering series of mysteries. I have a love-hate relationship with these. Whilst I enjoy them when I am reading them I find it very hard to turn my critical faculties off and eviction bells keep ringing. I don't know why Fethering  does this to me because I normally have a strong over-ride for my more high-brow side and have prided myself that I can turn it off and just enjoy a Dan Brown, say, for what it was. Maybe because the writer is too obvious, too in control, and just too damn present in the text. At least Dan Brown has the sense to stay out of the way of his plot, but Simon Brett keeps peeping through, and he is just too clever by half. Fethering for example is next to Tarring.  All the titles alliterate a body part or mode of death with a place. It is like he is saying: you know and I know that this is too gentle for real murder, we're not going to bother with gritty, we'll just wing it with a more winsomely neighbourly semi-detached and window-box kind of murder.

Having said all that, if I manage to quell the inner voice that say this is overly-knowing pastiche, I do quite enjoy it, and Brett gets away with it because his leading ladies, Carol and Jude, are interesting and in Carol's case both believable and often rather touching. Jude is rather more of a device, being a mystery in herself. Brett does skate on thin ice but with more staying power than he has any right to manage, but my mild dissatisfaction with this series was thrown into relief by the much more successful The Roar of the Butterflies: gentle crime at its best.

I also have two new crime works on the to-be-read pile, the first of which is Sister Morphine by Catherine Eisner. This is her first novel and it is presented as a series of case notes by a psychiatric nurse. A clever device and I am looking forward to it. It is published by Salt so if you have noticed the campaign to keep Salt going and felt like supporting them but didn't fancy buying poetry or short stories then this might be the answer.

Secondly, and most deliciously, I have got my very eager paws on an advance copy of Angel with Two Faces by Nicola Upson. At the century mark mystery is already piled on mystery and I can't see where it is going at all: which is just how I like to be at page 100. Moving from the London of the first in the series to Cornwall this time Nicola Upson again evokes place beautifully but her strength is in her ensemble work. In An Expert in Murder she brought together the personalities, egos, and complexities of the theatre world, here she evokes village life in the thirties: the big house, the estate, the church, and all caught on the cusp of a world that is changing fast. The family tensions and gentle characterisation reminded me of something this afternoon, and I have been racking my brains during the evening meal to work out what it was. It only on sitting down here I realised: it has the atmosphere of Brat Farrar. Upson is not Tey, but she has begun down a clever and elegant tangent and I'm following closely.

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The book links above all go to Amazon UK but if you would rather use The Book Depository with their free international delivery you can do so here.

More Blood, More Sweat & Another Cup of Tea

Open publication - Free publishing - More tea

Not normally the sort of book I mention on here but the free availability of the above is so odd as a publishing phenomenon that I couldn't resist. I have read and enjoyed the first thirty pages or so. Tom Reynolds as an ambulance man has to put up with the sort of bonkers stuff teachers had to put up with in my "challenging" school. With more blood.

 

If you want to host the book on your own blog then have a look here. If you want a physical copy of your own it is available on Amazon here and the Book Depository here.

Book Sale

Tripping over uncatalogued boxes of books in the book room this morning has determined that the long over due sale that I have been promising myself will now be happening! I have reduced all prices on my own website by 20% and I will keep them like that till the end of June. I am also offering all followers of Juxtabook on the blog or twitter an extra 5%. The 20% reduced price is what you see (for June) on the site, then if you buy anything either put the code jux0609k in the relevant box when you go through the checkout, or tell me (or my husband) when you ring or email, to get the extra discount.

We don't stock much fiction but there is a little. Along side the purely academic literary criticism we have a lot of literary biography, some poetry, some history, some drama, some art history, and a small amount of collectable items. There is an advanced search page or you can browse by category.