This year we decided that HBB would participate in the Eco Libris Green Book Campaign. In an effort to encourage and support responsible “green” publishing, 200 bloggers will review 200 books on one day. All the books featured in the campaign are printed on recycled paper!
None of our local publishers were participating in this event so I had to read and review a book by Modern History Press, a small publisher out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The book is The Blue Fairy and other tales of transcendence by Ernest Dempsey. The Blue Fairy is a fictional book of twenty five short stories, some of them very short, that deal primarily with themes of death and dying. Dempsey uses language beautifully and is quite good at crafting juxtaposed imagery. Some of the stories are sad, a few of them were touching, but most of them are so abstract that it’s hard to feel anything for the characters much less grasp what has actually happened to them. Still, the book is universal in that we all experience and deal with death. While I appreciate, creatively, what he sought to accomplish in this book, it wasn’t really something I would read by choice. Sometimes I’m delightfully surprised by books that I’m forced to read, and even if I don’t particularly enjoy their subjects I still feel enriched somehow for reading them. Not so much with this one. Yay for recycled printing though. *waves a small green flag*
**Even though she wasn’t a part of the Eco Libris campaign I have to give a shout out to local author and publisher Tiffany DeEtte Santos of Contemporary Publications. She wrote and published Contemporary Hawai’i Woodworkers, a book we reviewed here earlier. For every special “green” edition of the book sold, a new koa tree will be planted. How awesome is THAT!?
