Discoveries

Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World

Beth Kephart

W.W. Norton: 192 pp., $23.95

This book is about the power and necessity of imagination and how to nurture it in children. It stops readers dead in their tracks -- the getting-ahead track, the raising-high-performance-children track, the achieving-for-the-approval-of-others track. Name your rut. To write a truly effective book about imagination requires equal parts restraint and desire. Beth Kephart loves reading, writing and being with children. “I want to raise my son to pursue wisdom over winning,” she writes of her only child, who is 9 when the book begins.

First, Kephart tells a few stories about nurturing curiosity: “Curiosity bolsters knowledge, and knowledge feeds intelligence, and intelligence helps us navigate our lives.” When we can formulate questions, she writes, we can “tap our way toward knowing.”

Kephart’s writing is so clear, so nonpreachy, that you just want to jump in and join her. She writes about teaching the Junior Great Books to her son’s third- and fourth-grade classes and about starting a writing group, a community of writers for her son and his friends that lasts through high school. She writes about having an only child and about how to know the difference between being lonely and being alone, about when not to intercede in your child’s life.

Kephart describes the transition from reading aloud to reading alone. She offers ideas for teaching the names of plants, for encouraging the art of memory, for the ergonomics of reading (“setting up” to read), for starting to let go. “[I]t has been my job to help him define himself, it is my job now to let him be himself.”

*

No Ordinary Matter

Jenny McPhee

The Free Press: 256 pp., $23

“In this world, the extraordinary was commonplace.”

This is the world that Jenny McPhee has crafted in her novel about two sisters: Lillian, a beautiful neurologist and Veronica, a subwriter on a soap opera. Veronica, three years younger, was 8 when her father took her for a drive to meet someone mysterious. He was killed when the car crashed.Twenty-five years later, the sisters, who meet the first Monday of every month at the Hungarian Pastry Shop across the street from their alma mater, Columbia, hire a private detective to uncover their father’s secret life.

Lillian is a “sperm bandit,” a practical girl who finds the physical specimen who would make a suitable father for her baby and seduces him. Little does she know that her sister has fallen for the same guy. Oh, and there’s that young girl that Lillian ran over while riding in a rickshaw in Sri Lanka. Unfinished business moves this novel forward, up and over the edge.

“Guilt is like gravity,” the private detective tells the sisters. “The only direction it can pull you is down.”

*

House on the River: A Summer Journey

Nessa Rapoport

Harmony Books:

144 pp., $19.95

Nessa RAPOPORT grew up in Toronto and left in the ‘70s “to inhabit a world more operatic than placid Canada.” But at 44, pregnant with her third child, she finds herself “a tentative pilgrim to the prospects of tranquility.”

With her two children, ages 9 and 5, her uncle, aunt and mother, Rapoport rents a houseboat and travels through the locks of the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario to the little town called Bobcaygeon where she spent more than 20 summers in her youth.

The trip is an effort to recapture the feelings of happiness, pure love and even sensuality that she experienced during those summers. It is also a kind of farewell to a place that has changed, thanks to developers, population growth and technology, since she was a young girl swimming in the river or walking into town to sit and read in the library.

We see an imaginary hand reach out from Rapoport’s talent to try to grab a feeling that shimmers just beyond reach as we get older. The river, long afternoons, the dock, a book. Summer.