All posts by Karen

About Karen

Karen (she/hers) is a Culinary Literacies Specialist at the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre library. When not in the kitchen, she can be found knitting, reading, and repeating.  |  Meet the team

Of Maggots & Men

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Book cover of Super Fly by Jonathan Balcombe

If you were to find yourself with a nonhealing wound and had some dead tissue that needed excising, would you entrust yourself to the care of maggots or to a knife*? Personally, the maggots sound pretty tempting. Between reading about the gruesome history of surgery (see below) and then about the positive outcomes for folks with wounds infested with a serendipitous pile of wriggling maggots (especially in the earlier days when the risk of infection made surgery very much a last choice – though Maggot Debridement Therapy is making a comeback for various reasons), I’d wager you might give more consideration to the humble maggot!

And here’s a glowing review of the maggot by surgeon William S. Baer, during World War I, as he treated a soldier who had been left quite injured for several days on a battlefield – not the most sanitary of conditions – with “compound fractures of the femur and large flesh wounds of the abdomen and scrotum” (Balcombe, 254). At the time, compound fractures of the femur were just short of a death sentence: 75-80% died. By the time this soldier was found, having had no food or water during that entire time and in spite of his injuries, fever-free, Baer remarked:

“there was practically no bare bone to be seen and the internal structure of the wounded bone as well as the surrounding parts was entirely covered with the most beautiful pink tissue one could imagine.”

qtd. in Super Fly, Balcombe, 254

And to what could this “most beautiful pink tissue one could imagine” be credited? Maggots. Yes, before he could see all that lovely healthy healing tissue, Baer had had to remove thousands upon thousands of maggots from the wounds. Honestly, I adore this quote about “the most beautiful pink tissue”, because the evident awe and appreciation present in this quote – as applied to the tissue, sure, but surely also somewhat sideways in praise of the maggots – gets me every time. That’s a 5-star (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) review right there, and I would humbly suggest it gets pinned as Most Helpful wherever people go to read about maggot debridement therapy.

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The Monkey King

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Do you ever revisit characters or series from your childhood, rewatching them or taking in new adaptations of them as they’re released? Besides that apparently being a sign that I might be anxious, I’m always a bit surprised by the hit of nostalgia when I do encounter certain things I grew up with*, like Sun Wu-Kong from Journey to the West. I remember watching the Hong Kong adaptation as a child, though I don’t actually remember it all that well, so when I saw Girl Giant and the Monkey King on the shelves this year, I knew I had to read it.

Eleven-year old Thom has been having a bit of a rough start to her new life in Georgia, between being one of two Asian kids at the otherwise all-white school and getting bullied by a few girls in her grade (which posse the other Asian girl belongs to), but that’s not even all: she also happens to have superhuman strength that she hasn’t quite gotten the grasp of controlling. As in, she fractured someone’s ribs when she kicked a soccer ball and the goalie tried to block it kind of superhuman strength. Aaaand she might have accidentally freed the Monkey King from the legends when she and her mom visited a temple. Her mom absolutely refuses to acknowledge her developing supernatural strength (ignoring the car door handle Thom accidentally wrenched off, the cup she squeezed too hard…) and avoids any and all attempts to talk about Thom’s father, who’s not in the picture, so despite his penchant for mischief, the Monkey King, Sun Wu-Kong, quickly worms his way into her life as her only true friend and ally, listening to her and helping her accept and control her incredible strength. But is the Monkey King really her friend, or is he just using Thom for his own plans?

You don’t need to know anything about the legend of the Monkey King to read Girl Giant and the Monkey King, as Hoang weaves the mythology in seamlessly. You don’t need to know the gods, goddesses, and heroes of Heaven in order to see the parallel between their snotty bubble and that of Thom’s middle school, and Sun Wu-Kong’s character is fleshed out well, allowing for the shades of grey that define him neither as a good guy or a bad guy, but a complex character that may be looking out for himself in ways, but is not immune to friendship and loyalty. For anyone who read this in record time as I did, look out for the sequel, Girl Giant and the Jade War, by Van Hoang, which is on order now!

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Though Poppies Grow

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Book Cover of The War to End All Wars by Russell Freedman

Every year on Remembrance Day, we remember the sacrifices made in World War I. I’ve written about it several times before with children’s picture books: The Eleventh Hour by Jacques Goldstein (reviewed here), Why? by Nikolai Popov and Terrible Things by Eve Bunting (reviewed here), and Once a Shepherd by Glenda Millard & Phil Lesnie (reviewed here), all titles I still recommend for all ages for Remembrance Day and beyond. But truth be told, I’m not much of a history buff: I didn’t pay that much attention in grade 10 Canadian history, and it kind of only came to me this year that I don’t actually know/remember what the causes of WWI were (yikes, I know). I remembered that there were several underlying causes that made the conditions ripe for the explosion of war with one event (though what that event was, I had also forgotten), but the details were lost to me. So if you, like me, weren’t paying attention in Canadian history class back in high school, let’s revisit the causes that led up to the Great War together as we remember those who lost their lives to the war.

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