Since I started really applying myself to reading YA, in spring/summer 2010, one of the tropes I find myself laughing/shaking my head at a lot is the New Boy whose hair falls into his (green) eyes, who is well-liked, popular even, but still enigmatic, who has Wisdom and Knowledge, probably from Sad Experience, who recognizes the flawed/broken heroine protagonist as flawed/broken, and still cares about her, and helps her recover from whatever her particular trauma is.
This boy often has a name like Jake or Mason or Charlie or Connor. He is, as are the heroines, pretty much always white. He often has some kind of vaguely artistic or intellectual pursuit - perhaps he is always reading Russian literature, or taking photographs with an old manual SLR, or strumming a guitar. He is not a butch jock, but can often play impromptu games of basketball or baseball or soccer well, or maybe he goes for long solitary runs. His hair falls into his eyes. Possibly he has a dimple. Frequently, he loans a jacket or hoodie to the heroine, who then spends time smelling it and feeling comforted by it. Usually, he and the Heroine are at odds with each other, maybe put together by a science project or the school newspaper or an art assignment; they bristle at each other, they become reluctant friends, then of course realize they are In Love.
He's a stereotype, a trope, and I think he is the male equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - in other words, a function to change the course of the protagonist's life.
Recently, the man who coined the term MPDG, Nathan Rabin, apologized for it and wished to pull it from pop culture. I appreciated his reasons, but since I have never heard nor thought of MPDG in a positive way - it is always antifeminist, it always reduces the female to precisely a dream of the hetero male protagonist/viewer/gaze - I don't feel a need to pull it from circulation. I think it's a useful way of describing a specific trope that occurs very frequently.
I don't know what the male equivalent of this should be called - he isn't manic, he's usually quite calm and collected; he isn't a pixie (but what is the 'masculine' equivalent of pixie?); he IS a dream; and of course, he's a boy, not a girl.
He's not identical to the MPDG, either, because he plays a more serious role: he saves the heroine from self-sabotage. He doesn't bring sunshine and silliness into her life, he brings a life preserver and a solid rock to anchor it to. He is, ultimately, more important than the MPDG, because without him, the heroine would, perhaps, become suicidal, would die, would never identify the rapist/murderer who traumatized her, would never admit to, and seek professional help for, the psychological problems or mental illness from which she suffers. In other words, he saves her life - he rescues her, and he pushes her along to recovery, always standing by her side.
In a lot of ways, he's actually quite like Prince Charming or any other knightly figure who swoops in to save the damsel in distress. He's just figured in a way that doesn't make him look quite so domineering. But he has the power/agency - without him, her story would not continue. Without the Dream Girl, the hero of the story will go on - perhaps boringly, perhaps with an unpleasant wife and children, but not suffering psychological torment or PTSD.
I would like a term to identify this guy, so we can get him the hell out of there.
I like a cute, intellectual boy with hair that falls into his green eyes as much as the next hetero girl, but he's a FICTION. Very few boys OR girls are as wise and sensitive as he is while they're in high school, or as willing to stick it out over the long haul while the girl is hospitalized with an eating disorder or whatever. But this is not the worst of the problem with him -
The real problem is that still, even in books with smart, clever, interesting female protagonists, they need a Man to Save The Day. Why can't a heroine come to terms with her grief over accidentally killing her sister through a relationship with a good friend, or a mentor, or a cousin, or an aunt? Why don't any of her friends, or any of the women in her life, recognize her depression/trauma/helplessness? Why does it take the arrival of a mysterious, hot new boy for anyone to realize our Heroine is in trouble, unhappy, ill?
Why do our female protagonists still need a man, even a teenage boy, to give them a sense of value, worth, purpose, place in life?
Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Grasshopper Jungle + No Future
I'm jumping happily onto the Grasshopper Jungle bandwagon; I read it over the weekend and loved it, of course. I love Austin and Robby as characters; I love Austin's histories; I love Eden Five Needs You 4; I love that this is a book that stars a bisexual teenager (bisexuals get short shrift everywhere); I love that sperm and balls are major plot points/motifs. I love that, very late in the book, there is a wonderful small clever joke referring to a whaling accident. I love that the book manages to be funny, anxious, deeply loving, dissatisfied, and completely horny all the time. I love that everything makes Austin horny. I am dying to teach this book already, though I anticipate students disliking the - what should I call it? omniscient isn't the right word - multidimensional? view and knowledge of history that Austin has, which is one of the things I loved most about the book. Austin is writing from a kind of 360 degree view of history - the only way I can describe how it felt to me as a reader is the way that certain video games and google street view and things allow you to rotate your view in every direction. Austin sees the past, the present, the future - they are both diachronic and synchronic. Everything is always happening, everything has always already happened, everything will always have happened. It's great and a bit dizzying. Andrew Smith has knocked everyone's socks (and Eden jumpsuits) right off with this novel, and all the praise he and the book have gotten are totally deserved.
The thing I mainly want to say is that Grasshopper Jungle and Lee Edelman's No Future belong together. Late last night this occurred to me - the "no futureness" of the book, the dying Iowa town, all those lost balls and discarded sperm, the "unstoppable" everything, the fact that it is a record, as Austin tells us immediately, of the end of the world. There is a smidgen of reproductive futurity in the book, but not in a way that really makes the reader believe in that future. Grasshopper Jungle, with its gay hero Robby, and its bisexual narrator Austin, and the lurking megalomaniac Dr McKeon are all figures of non-futurity. What I find wonderful and curious is that Smith somehow makes this non-futurity seem, if not exciting or positive, then far from bleak. This is not an unhopeful book, though it is not a hopeful one, either. It is an exercise in synchronicity, in apophenia, in lines converging, crossing.
But it is not for one moment a book where Our Hero takes the Romantic Interest by the hand, and steps out into the sunshine and into the bright new future. There is something Else in Grasshopper Jungle. I don't know what it is, exactly, other than queer, though queer doesn't seem totally accurate. It's been several years since I read Edelman carefully, and I don't have time to revisit him now, but I think if you put No Future and Grasshopper Jungle alone in a room together, some kind of exciting and intriguing critical reaction will take place.
The thing I mainly want to say is that Grasshopper Jungle and Lee Edelman's No Future belong together. Late last night this occurred to me - the "no futureness" of the book, the dying Iowa town, all those lost balls and discarded sperm, the "unstoppable" everything, the fact that it is a record, as Austin tells us immediately, of the end of the world. There is a smidgen of reproductive futurity in the book, but not in a way that really makes the reader believe in that future. Grasshopper Jungle, with its gay hero Robby, and its bisexual narrator Austin, and the lurking megalomaniac Dr McKeon are all figures of non-futurity. What I find wonderful and curious is that Smith somehow makes this non-futurity seem, if not exciting or positive, then far from bleak. This is not an unhopeful book, though it is not a hopeful one, either. It is an exercise in synchronicity, in apophenia, in lines converging, crossing.
But it is not for one moment a book where Our Hero takes the Romantic Interest by the hand, and steps out into the sunshine and into the bright new future. There is something Else in Grasshopper Jungle. I don't know what it is, exactly, other than queer, though queer doesn't seem totally accurate. It's been several years since I read Edelman carefully, and I don't have time to revisit him now, but I think if you put No Future and Grasshopper Jungle alone in a room together, some kind of exciting and intriguing critical reaction will take place.
Thursday, June 05, 2014
choosing my battles
Slate.com posted an awful short article by Ruth Graham, titled "Against YA" which instructs adults to be "Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books." Graham writes many tiresome things which mainly reveal her poor critical skills and her lack of knowledge of YA lit, but the one I'm choosing to reply to is this:
One could argue that, if you consider that most YA fiction is either narrated or focalized by an adolescent, the hopeful ending is the most realistic: at age 16 or 14 or 19, most of us do believe that things will get better, than upward progress is the really the only progress or trajectory our lives can take. Lack of experience is one thing that makes this perspective possible, and Graham's reaction to the "up" ending as unsophisticated and stupid makes the old mistake - one I am increasingly annoyed with - of confusing "lack of experience" with "stupidity."
But the real point I want to make is this: a great deal of adult fiction has an up ending. Almost every piece of popular fiction - film, book, tv - ends on an up note. Even the classics, which Graham seems to regard positively, do this. Jane Austen? Courtship novels end with a wedding. They end with happy couples about to embark on their lives together. Shakespeare? Well, the tragedies and histories don't exactly leave us chortling with delight, but the comedies? End with weddings. Happiness. Looking forward to the future.
How about Charles Dickens, my own beloved? Has Ruth Graham ever read any Dickens? Our Mutual Friend, or Bleak House, or The Old Curiosity Shop? Nicholas Nickleby? The impossible coincidences, inheritances, legacies, couplings, weddings - even when they recall sorrow (Little Nell's death) it's through a haze of happiness (Kit and Barbara's pairing, Dick Swiveller and his Marchioness).
Crime and Punishment has an up ending, for heaven's sake. So does Robinson Crusoe and Paradise Lost and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Jane Eyre. I think you could make a case that The Great Gatsby has an up ending. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, undoubtedly a complex and sophisticated novel, has an up ending.
Of course there are classics that don't end happily, with all loose ends tied up. Henry James is quite the purveyor of these - Portrait of a Lady, for example. Wuthering Heights, with all those miserable vile characters.
But the stories that are popular - they don't end in wrack and ruin, for the most part. I know this because I actually really like stories that end bleakly. A friend once said "It's a good movie if, at the end, you kind of feel like you want to die." And yes! This is true! One of the greatest movies I know, and also one with the bleakest ending I can think of, is the Russian film The Thief. It is a tremendous film, and ends terribly. It's great.
But who has seen The Thief? Much more likely that you've seen Love, Actually, or There's Something About Mary, or Star Wars. And the books, the fiction, that people read: most of it has satisfying, unambiguous conclusions. The couple get together/get married/reaffirm their relationship. The criminal is caught. Justice is delivered. The world is saved. Even in stories where there's something sad/difficult/devastating - say, maybe, Armageddon, there's an up ending - because the Youth will Go Forward Into a Bright Future.
Pretending that "adult" literature is sophisticated and complex and challenges triteness at every turn is absolutely dishonest in every sense of the word. The only way you could really believe this is to never have read any books at all. "Snobbish" doesn't come close to beginning to describe what's going on, if you're trying to stake a claim for the sophistication of the endings of adult fiction as opposed to that for younger readers.
Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with “likable” protagonists. Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.A lot of YA and children's fiction end on an "up" note. There's at least a thread of hope, or hopefulness, injected into the conclusion of even the grimmer YA novels (Peter Cameron's fantastically good Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You) may be the best example. On the other hand, novels like Mockingjay inject a grim note into an *apparently* hopeful ending.
One could argue that, if you consider that most YA fiction is either narrated or focalized by an adolescent, the hopeful ending is the most realistic: at age 16 or 14 or 19, most of us do believe that things will get better, than upward progress is the really the only progress or trajectory our lives can take. Lack of experience is one thing that makes this perspective possible, and Graham's reaction to the "up" ending as unsophisticated and stupid makes the old mistake - one I am increasingly annoyed with - of confusing "lack of experience" with "stupidity."
But the real point I want to make is this: a great deal of adult fiction has an up ending. Almost every piece of popular fiction - film, book, tv - ends on an up note. Even the classics, which Graham seems to regard positively, do this. Jane Austen? Courtship novels end with a wedding. They end with happy couples about to embark on their lives together. Shakespeare? Well, the tragedies and histories don't exactly leave us chortling with delight, but the comedies? End with weddings. Happiness. Looking forward to the future.
How about Charles Dickens, my own beloved? Has Ruth Graham ever read any Dickens? Our Mutual Friend, or Bleak House, or The Old Curiosity Shop? Nicholas Nickleby? The impossible coincidences, inheritances, legacies, couplings, weddings - even when they recall sorrow (Little Nell's death) it's through a haze of happiness (Kit and Barbara's pairing, Dick Swiveller and his Marchioness).
Crime and Punishment has an up ending, for heaven's sake. So does Robinson Crusoe and Paradise Lost and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Jane Eyre. I think you could make a case that The Great Gatsby has an up ending. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, undoubtedly a complex and sophisticated novel, has an up ending.
Of course there are classics that don't end happily, with all loose ends tied up. Henry James is quite the purveyor of these - Portrait of a Lady, for example. Wuthering Heights, with all those miserable vile characters.
But the stories that are popular - they don't end in wrack and ruin, for the most part. I know this because I actually really like stories that end bleakly. A friend once said "It's a good movie if, at the end, you kind of feel like you want to die." And yes! This is true! One of the greatest movies I know, and also one with the bleakest ending I can think of, is the Russian film The Thief. It is a tremendous film, and ends terribly. It's great.
But who has seen The Thief? Much more likely that you've seen Love, Actually, or There's Something About Mary, or Star Wars. And the books, the fiction, that people read: most of it has satisfying, unambiguous conclusions. The couple get together/get married/reaffirm their relationship. The criminal is caught. Justice is delivered. The world is saved. Even in stories where there's something sad/difficult/devastating - say, maybe, Armageddon, there's an up ending - because the Youth will Go Forward Into a Bright Future.
Pretending that "adult" literature is sophisticated and complex and challenges triteness at every turn is absolutely dishonest in every sense of the word. The only way you could really believe this is to never have read any books at all. "Snobbish" doesn't come close to beginning to describe what's going on, if you're trying to stake a claim for the sophistication of the endings of adult fiction as opposed to that for younger readers.
Monday, April 21, 2014
quiet/update
Things have been quiet here for awhile; I try not to get too personal here, so I'll only say my absence has been due mainly to the sudden and unexpected death of my mother in early February. The disruption in my life this has caused has been, to say the very least, considerable. I've also been quite busy with teaching this semester; both courses meet three days a week, which makes every day except Saturday into a teaching/prep day. I've chosen to teach books that, for the most part, I've never taught before, too, so that has required more prep than usual (I also misjudged and assigned several very long YA texts for my Representing Adolescence class). I did a week of picturebooks in my Childhood's Books class, the first time I've ever taught picturebooks in such a concentrated way. I often use Where the Wild Things Are as a way to teach/demonstrate close reading, but rarely as part of the canon of children's literature (I also did Green Eggs and Ham and David Wiesner's The Three Pigs - I had a fantastic week doing prep for picturebook week). I have also realized that I am terrible at teaching Diana Wynne Jones, for all that I passionately love her books; my critical faculties just wilt in the face of her brilliance. I tried teaching Charmed Life, and they were underwhelmed. The only Jones book I have had any luck with teaching is (of course) Howl's Moving Castle. I don't know what to call it if something is both your weak spot and your favorite thing, but Diana Wynne Jones is mine. I think I can live with this.
I've been thinking a lot about adolescence and high school and YA and YA dystopian fiction; I had the incredible good fortune to have a fantastic group in my Representing Adolescence class, and our discussions were consistently thought-provoking and intriguing. I've been working on some of my ideas about dystopian YA, and hope to post that before too much longer. I also have my dissertation to work on, as well as converting some papers and draft chapters into articles for submission. A busy summer of work ahead, which is good.
In the meantime, Jonathan Auxier has a new book coming out in May, and he is writing about becoming a writer - "After the book deal" - on blogs around the internet - check out what he has to say (he's quite smart). The book, The Night Gardener, has been getting very, very good advance buzz, and I'm keen to get my hands on a copy; I've already placed a hold on a library copy.
Thus the quietness around here, and the plans, or hopes anyway, for making at least a little bit of noise in the near future.
I've been thinking a lot about adolescence and high school and YA and YA dystopian fiction; I had the incredible good fortune to have a fantastic group in my Representing Adolescence class, and our discussions were consistently thought-provoking and intriguing. I've been working on some of my ideas about dystopian YA, and hope to post that before too much longer. I also have my dissertation to work on, as well as converting some papers and draft chapters into articles for submission. A busy summer of work ahead, which is good.
In the meantime, Jonathan Auxier has a new book coming out in May, and he is writing about becoming a writer - "After the book deal" - on blogs around the internet - check out what he has to say (he's quite smart). The book, The Night Gardener, has been getting very, very good advance buzz, and I'm keen to get my hands on a copy; I've already placed a hold on a library copy.
Thus the quietness around here, and the plans, or hopes anyway, for making at least a little bit of noise in the near future.
Sunday, August 05, 2012
O Canada
Since my fairly recent revelation that Australian YA is amazing (Margo Lanagan, Markus Zusak, Melina Marchetta, Simmone Howell, Gabrielle Williams, etc), I have been thinking about other non-British, non-American Anglophone literatures. I finally got it together and started creating a list of Canadian children's/YA books to read, primarily culled from Canadian literary awards sites like the Canadian Children's Book Centre.
My most recent trek to the library got me two titles by Catherine Austen, both of which I have now read. Walking Backward, Austen's debut middle-grade (MG) novel, was quite good, much better than its cover copy suggested it might be. The narrator of the book, Josh, is a 12-year-old whose mom has recently died in a car accident (she was distracted by a small snake in the car; she had an intense snake-phobia, and rammed her car into a tree at high speed); Josh has a four-and-a-half year old brother, Sammy, and a seemingly-absent(minded) father who is "coping" with his wife's death by building a time machine in the basement. Josh is a bright kid - his mom was a university professor of medieval literature who read him Beowulf and Grail myths when he was small - and his narrative is peppered with facts and information, often - but not solely - about religious practices surrounding death. Josh is not searching for faith, but he is cycling through the various practices, thinking about applying them to his own grieving process, while trying to take care of the house and all the "mom" things, along with consoling his little brother and himself.
Walking Backward isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but neither is it weepy-sad. Josh's sense of loss comes through loud and clear, but so do all his anger, confusion, irritation, at having lost not just the relationship with his mom, but the person in the family who ran the household. Josh's dad has always been useless, Josh reveals (he mentions, specifically, things like cleaning the cats' litterbox, and doing laundry and cooking, as well as things like scheduling Sammy's kindergarten orientation and buying new back-to-school clothes), and so Josh is picking up the slack.
Because the book is written journal-style (and is meant to be the journal "prescribed" by the psychiatrist the family is seeing), we have to do some reading between the lines to get a sense of how and what Josh really is, and those moments of revelation are particularly effective. For instance, when Josh blurts out to various people "Did you put the snake in my mom's car?" or when he notes that he wrote to the Darwin Awards people, asking (worrying) if his mom's death qualifies her for one.
Walking Backward is a fairly short book, but for all it's seemingly sad subject material, is very charming and enjoyable. Austen handles Josh's voice really well; he's smart, he's knowledgeable, but he's also 12, so he worries about his little brother being pegged as a weirdo, and whether Karen, who kissed him right before going off to summercamp, still likes him. There's a sense of humor, not exactly a lightheartedness, but something akin to it, underlying Josh's voice: he sees the odd and the interesting and the annoying and the sad and considers it all in his assessment of the world around him. There's also a great deal of serious thought about how to honor and remember the dead we love, and Josh's trial and error through the mourning practices of a number of religions until he and his brother and dad ultimately find ways to memorialize and memorize their mom that are entirely their own.
The other Austen book I read was the Canadian Children's Book Centre's 2012 Best YA - All Good Children. It's quite a good dystopic novel that manages to avoid some of the cliches and tropes we're seeing a lot of these days in the boom of YA dystopias. It wasn't until the very end of Austen's book, actually, that I realized that it's thematically (and even situationally) quite similar to Pam Bachorz's very good YA novel Candor. I'll say now that I really liked both All Good Children and Candor, and thought they share a similar basic premise - controlling children's minds to ensure obedience and a certain kind of behavior - they handle it differently, and more importantly, contextualize it differently.
All Good Children has some good futuristic quirks - fuel is so expensive that not many people own cars anymore; cars have been largely converted to "housing" for the thousands of poor people of New Middletown, where Max, his mom, and his little sister Ally live. New Middletown, it turns out, is a company town: Chemrose, a company which - among other things - runs massive geriatric housing units, one of which employs Max's mom. New Middletown is racially interesting; Max's mom is dark-skinned, and his dad (who died a few years earlier) was white. Max and Ally are definitely dark but lighter than their mom, but what's especially interesting is that - narrated by Max - "white" ends up appearing as a kind of pejorative. Sometimes non-white skin colors are described or noted, but white always is; it's a small but nice touch of defamiliarization and rearrangement of contemporary racial/social practice.
Max is a bit of a jerk - he's not quite 16, he's a bit mouthy, he loves to screw around in class - pranks, jokes, making fun of people, tormenting substitutes, graffiti (including stealing art supplies from the school). He's also not above taking advantage of Ally's "slowness" - she's not severely mentally disabled, but she's definitely slow; she's also only six years old - early on there's a scene when Max messes with Ally to steal her bag of chips on a flight home. It's not until quite late in the novel that Max realizes that his actions may be negatively affecting people; Austen's smart and clever enough not to make this some huge life-changing revelation, more a moment of "wow, I never thought of that," accompanied by a sense of some unease and slightly guilt or regret. But that's not some huge Life Lesson Max needs to learn, because basically he's a good kid who does care about his little sister (he walks her to school every day, takes her to the park, humors her quirks) and his friends.
New Middletown has started something called Nesting, an acronym for a program that involves drugging the city's children into submissiveness. All the kids, from the little ones through the oldest high schoolers, receive the shot, which is still in early phases; there are a number of rather grotesque physical and mental reactions to the shot, especially in kids who already take prescriptions. Through sheer luck - being out of town to attend a funeral - Ally has missed the first week of school, when the kids her age received their shots. Max and Ally - through their own trickery and their mom's work as a nurse - are able to avoid getting the shots, remaining "unzombiefied."
All Good Children is quite an interesting setup - New Middletown is one large section in what appears to be a significantly reordered political and geographical world. The city is essentially locked down within itself, and though we don't get much detail, it seems to be owned and run by the Chemrose company. Gradually, shady bits of information about Chemrose make their way into the narrative, along with other things: curtailed civil rights, widespread surveillance, a variety of untruths about the outside world aimed at building up New Middletown's nationalism as well as enabling the surveillance and other restrictions - and ultimately, the drugging of the children.
The novel is a great examination about the early days of a major shift in politics and policing, and control of the populace; we see all the slow-to-catch-on folks, the disbelievers, the conspiracy theorists, the resisters, the collaborators in all their many forms. Max, who has always been a bit out of control, is a perfect candidate for narrator and resister against the ultimate scheme in discipline; he's also an artist, and one of his works becomes hugely important for a variety of reasons in a super-nice touch by Austen.
One of the other aspects of All Good Children that I loved is its relative lack of romance narrative. There's a girl who Max is interested in, but she's a fairly minor character and in fact vanishes from the text by the midpoint. Max's energies are focused around himself, his mom and sister, and his best friend Dallas (who is himself a fascinating character: he's an "ultimate," an expensive genetically engineered kid who by all rights should be a golden boy, but his repulsive father loathes him, and he's on the receiving end of a good deal of emotional, if not physical, abuse. Dallas has occasional episodes of blank red rage that frighten even emotionally-mercurial Max, but then he also has moments of Golden Boy glory. He's a pretty great character in a lot of ways).
Max isn't some perfect guy out to save the day; he's essentially selfish (as is our old pal Katniss Everdeen), protecting the people he cares about the most and not worrying so much about the rest. But he is made deeply uneasy by life in the zombie world of the "Nested" kids, which does give him a bit of a sense of understanding or empathy of the larger stakes at play. Max never loses his edge of jerkishness, either; he gets angry easily, he's pissed at his mom and the world for "allowing" the drugging, he gets snarky with Ally, with Dallas, with his neighbor Xavier. But rather than pitch his story as one of overcoming his juvenile jerkishness, or one where that jerkishness saves the day, Austen wisely allows it to be one component of Max's character, one aspect that is accompanied by many others. We don't like him in spite of, or because of his jerkishness; we like him because he has a whole host of likeable or interesting characteristics, which - as in real, non-ink-based humans - help make up for the jerky moments.
All Good Children makes for a very compelling and thought-provoking read, as well as being one that's simply enjoyable and gripping for all the reasons any good dystopia is enjoyable and gripping: a plot that moves, characters that are well-crafted and engaging, high stakes, a well-developed other world (ie, the world of the dystopia), a good balance of story and philosophizing or politicizing. It was a terrific read, and a book I'd like to own (which is pretty high recommendation from me, since my book-buying budget is miniscule).
Austen definitely ranks highly on my list of Good Contemporary Authors, and I will be looking out more of her books in the future.
My most recent trek to the library got me two titles by Catherine Austen, both of which I have now read. Walking Backward, Austen's debut middle-grade (MG) novel, was quite good, much better than its cover copy suggested it might be. The narrator of the book, Josh, is a 12-year-old whose mom has recently died in a car accident (she was distracted by a small snake in the car; she had an intense snake-phobia, and rammed her car into a tree at high speed); Josh has a four-and-a-half year old brother, Sammy, and a seemingly-absent(minded) father who is "coping" with his wife's death by building a time machine in the basement. Josh is a bright kid - his mom was a university professor of medieval literature who read him Beowulf and Grail myths when he was small - and his narrative is peppered with facts and information, often - but not solely - about religious practices surrounding death. Josh is not searching for faith, but he is cycling through the various practices, thinking about applying them to his own grieving process, while trying to take care of the house and all the "mom" things, along with consoling his little brother and himself.
Walking Backward isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but neither is it weepy-sad. Josh's sense of loss comes through loud and clear, but so do all his anger, confusion, irritation, at having lost not just the relationship with his mom, but the person in the family who ran the household. Josh's dad has always been useless, Josh reveals (he mentions, specifically, things like cleaning the cats' litterbox, and doing laundry and cooking, as well as things like scheduling Sammy's kindergarten orientation and buying new back-to-school clothes), and so Josh is picking up the slack.
Because the book is written journal-style (and is meant to be the journal "prescribed" by the psychiatrist the family is seeing), we have to do some reading between the lines to get a sense of how and what Josh really is, and those moments of revelation are particularly effective. For instance, when Josh blurts out to various people "Did you put the snake in my mom's car?" or when he notes that he wrote to the Darwin Awards people, asking (worrying) if his mom's death qualifies her for one.
Walking Backward is a fairly short book, but for all it's seemingly sad subject material, is very charming and enjoyable. Austen handles Josh's voice really well; he's smart, he's knowledgeable, but he's also 12, so he worries about his little brother being pegged as a weirdo, and whether Karen, who kissed him right before going off to summercamp, still likes him. There's a sense of humor, not exactly a lightheartedness, but something akin to it, underlying Josh's voice: he sees the odd and the interesting and the annoying and the sad and considers it all in his assessment of the world around him. There's also a great deal of serious thought about how to honor and remember the dead we love, and Josh's trial and error through the mourning practices of a number of religions until he and his brother and dad ultimately find ways to memorialize and memorize their mom that are entirely their own.
The other Austen book I read was the Canadian Children's Book Centre's 2012 Best YA - All Good Children. It's quite a good dystopic novel that manages to avoid some of the cliches and tropes we're seeing a lot of these days in the boom of YA dystopias. It wasn't until the very end of Austen's book, actually, that I realized that it's thematically (and even situationally) quite similar to Pam Bachorz's very good YA novel Candor. I'll say now that I really liked both All Good Children and Candor, and thought they share a similar basic premise - controlling children's minds to ensure obedience and a certain kind of behavior - they handle it differently, and more importantly, contextualize it differently.
All Good Children has some good futuristic quirks - fuel is so expensive that not many people own cars anymore; cars have been largely converted to "housing" for the thousands of poor people of New Middletown, where Max, his mom, and his little sister Ally live. New Middletown, it turns out, is a company town: Chemrose, a company which - among other things - runs massive geriatric housing units, one of which employs Max's mom. New Middletown is racially interesting; Max's mom is dark-skinned, and his dad (who died a few years earlier) was white. Max and Ally are definitely dark but lighter than their mom, but what's especially interesting is that - narrated by Max - "white" ends up appearing as a kind of pejorative. Sometimes non-white skin colors are described or noted, but white always is; it's a small but nice touch of defamiliarization and rearrangement of contemporary racial/social practice.
Max is a bit of a jerk - he's not quite 16, he's a bit mouthy, he loves to screw around in class - pranks, jokes, making fun of people, tormenting substitutes, graffiti (including stealing art supplies from the school). He's also not above taking advantage of Ally's "slowness" - she's not severely mentally disabled, but she's definitely slow; she's also only six years old - early on there's a scene when Max messes with Ally to steal her bag of chips on a flight home. It's not until quite late in the novel that Max realizes that his actions may be negatively affecting people; Austen's smart and clever enough not to make this some huge life-changing revelation, more a moment of "wow, I never thought of that," accompanied by a sense of some unease and slightly guilt or regret. But that's not some huge Life Lesson Max needs to learn, because basically he's a good kid who does care about his little sister (he walks her to school every day, takes her to the park, humors her quirks) and his friends.
New Middletown has started something called Nesting, an acronym for a program that involves drugging the city's children into submissiveness. All the kids, from the little ones through the oldest high schoolers, receive the shot, which is still in early phases; there are a number of rather grotesque physical and mental reactions to the shot, especially in kids who already take prescriptions. Through sheer luck - being out of town to attend a funeral - Ally has missed the first week of school, when the kids her age received their shots. Max and Ally - through their own trickery and their mom's work as a nurse - are able to avoid getting the shots, remaining "unzombiefied."
All Good Children is quite an interesting setup - New Middletown is one large section in what appears to be a significantly reordered political and geographical world. The city is essentially locked down within itself, and though we don't get much detail, it seems to be owned and run by the Chemrose company. Gradually, shady bits of information about Chemrose make their way into the narrative, along with other things: curtailed civil rights, widespread surveillance, a variety of untruths about the outside world aimed at building up New Middletown's nationalism as well as enabling the surveillance and other restrictions - and ultimately, the drugging of the children.
The novel is a great examination about the early days of a major shift in politics and policing, and control of the populace; we see all the slow-to-catch-on folks, the disbelievers, the conspiracy theorists, the resisters, the collaborators in all their many forms. Max, who has always been a bit out of control, is a perfect candidate for narrator and resister against the ultimate scheme in discipline; he's also an artist, and one of his works becomes hugely important for a variety of reasons in a super-nice touch by Austen.
One of the other aspects of All Good Children that I loved is its relative lack of romance narrative. There's a girl who Max is interested in, but she's a fairly minor character and in fact vanishes from the text by the midpoint. Max's energies are focused around himself, his mom and sister, and his best friend Dallas (who is himself a fascinating character: he's an "ultimate," an expensive genetically engineered kid who by all rights should be a golden boy, but his repulsive father loathes him, and he's on the receiving end of a good deal of emotional, if not physical, abuse. Dallas has occasional episodes of blank red rage that frighten even emotionally-mercurial Max, but then he also has moments of Golden Boy glory. He's a pretty great character in a lot of ways).
Max isn't some perfect guy out to save the day; he's essentially selfish (as is our old pal Katniss Everdeen), protecting the people he cares about the most and not worrying so much about the rest. But he is made deeply uneasy by life in the zombie world of the "Nested" kids, which does give him a bit of a sense of understanding or empathy of the larger stakes at play. Max never loses his edge of jerkishness, either; he gets angry easily, he's pissed at his mom and the world for "allowing" the drugging, he gets snarky with Ally, with Dallas, with his neighbor Xavier. But rather than pitch his story as one of overcoming his juvenile jerkishness, or one where that jerkishness saves the day, Austen wisely allows it to be one component of Max's character, one aspect that is accompanied by many others. We don't like him in spite of, or because of his jerkishness; we like him because he has a whole host of likeable or interesting characteristics, which - as in real, non-ink-based humans - help make up for the jerky moments.
All Good Children makes for a very compelling and thought-provoking read, as well as being one that's simply enjoyable and gripping for all the reasons any good dystopia is enjoyable and gripping: a plot that moves, characters that are well-crafted and engaging, high stakes, a well-developed other world (ie, the world of the dystopia), a good balance of story and philosophizing or politicizing. It was a terrific read, and a book I'd like to own (which is pretty high recommendation from me, since my book-buying budget is miniscule).
Austen definitely ranks highly on my list of Good Contemporary Authors, and I will be looking out more of her books in the future.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
NPR YA poll/survey
NPR is polling for best YA novels; leave your five top choices in comments (annoying login required; it's relatively quick and painless).
You can list an entire series as one choice (ie, Hunger Games trilogy), or just a single title from a series (Mockingjay).
I "voted" for Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak, and Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride. This is almost a random selection of the recent YA titles I love best; I couldn't pick an absolute top 5 of all time.
I think it would be awesome to do a bit of culture jamming and push some really fantastic titles through the poll, not just the most popular titles (ie, Twilight, Hunger Games). Chaos Walking would be my pick for culture-jamming title of choice, followed by I am the Messenger (based on personal preference and literary quality). But I'm curious to see the results of this survey, and I think everyone with an intelligent, informed opinion should vote.
You can list an entire series as one choice (ie, Hunger Games trilogy), or just a single title from a series (Mockingjay).
I "voted" for Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger, Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta, I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak, and Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride. This is almost a random selection of the recent YA titles I love best; I couldn't pick an absolute top 5 of all time.
I think it would be awesome to do a bit of culture jamming and push some really fantastic titles through the poll, not just the most popular titles (ie, Twilight, Hunger Games). Chaos Walking would be my pick for culture-jamming title of choice, followed by I am the Messenger (based on personal preference and literary quality). But I'm curious to see the results of this survey, and I think everyone with an intelligent, informed opinion should vote.
Friday, May 25, 2012
the color of YA lit
Kate Hart has done an astonishing amount of research and compiled some impressive and disturbing charts with the results. She looked at over 600 covers of YA lit from 2011 (and of course missed some titles which would alter percentages, but this is a sample study she did on her own initiative; it would require serious time and funding for a truly comprehensive study). She includes a few graphics of YA book covers by color - actual color of the jacket or cover of the book, irrespective of skin colors of characters - and those are quite fun. When she moves on to the analysis of racial representation, it gets deeply depressing.
Broad roundup: 10% of book covers featured characters of ambiguous race/ethnicity. 90% featured white people. 1.4% featured Latino/Latina; 1.4% featured Asian; 1.2% featured Black characters.
90% white.
Hart includes a list of links at the end of her post to other writers on the topic of race and representation, many of which I have read at one point or another. This is a topic worth keeping an eye on; as I've said before, representation matters. It matters deeply. There's been a lot of fairly offensive racist ballyhoo about the newly-release statistic that more than half of all babies born in the US now are not white; how about they get some books with people on the covers who look like them? Better still, with people in the pages who look like them?
Last year there was a lot of talk online, including some posts from authors detailing their experiences (links to which unfortunately I do not have), and in general it seems that a lot of the publishing world, especially the big publishers, are pretty uninterested in protagonists of color. And by "uninterested," I mean they return manuscripts suggesting they be re-written with white protagonists instead.
Along with continuing to write characters of color, it's important that we, as book-buyers, book-readers, book-teachers, etc, make conscious efforts to consume books with non-white protagonists. I know for a fact that I don't do enough of this, and it needs to be rectified promptly. Since this is meant to be Dissertation Lockdown Summer, my extracurricular reading is limited, so reading more YA of color may be a project for the fall. But it will be a project, and an ongoing one, until - I hope - reading characters of color becomes as simple as plucking books from the shelves at random, instead of having to seek them out in hidden corners.
because 90% white?
we can, and should, do SO much better than that.
Broad roundup: 10% of book covers featured characters of ambiguous race/ethnicity. 90% featured white people. 1.4% featured Latino/Latina; 1.4% featured Asian; 1.2% featured Black characters.
90% white.
Hart includes a list of links at the end of her post to other writers on the topic of race and representation, many of which I have read at one point or another. This is a topic worth keeping an eye on; as I've said before, representation matters. It matters deeply. There's been a lot of fairly offensive racist ballyhoo about the newly-release statistic that more than half of all babies born in the US now are not white; how about they get some books with people on the covers who look like them? Better still, with people in the pages who look like them?
Last year there was a lot of talk online, including some posts from authors detailing their experiences (links to which unfortunately I do not have), and in general it seems that a lot of the publishing world, especially the big publishers, are pretty uninterested in protagonists of color. And by "uninterested," I mean they return manuscripts suggesting they be re-written with white protagonists instead.
Along with continuing to write characters of color, it's important that we, as book-buyers, book-readers, book-teachers, etc, make conscious efforts to consume books with non-white protagonists. I know for a fact that I don't do enough of this, and it needs to be rectified promptly. Since this is meant to be Dissertation Lockdown Summer, my extracurricular reading is limited, so reading more YA of color may be a project for the fall. But it will be a project, and an ongoing one, until - I hope - reading characters of color becomes as simple as plucking books from the shelves at random, instead of having to seek them out in hidden corners.
because 90% white?
we can, and should, do SO much better than that.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
A New Favorite: Australian YA
I seem, in the past year or so, to have read a goodly number of YA novels by Australian authors. Simmone Howell, Markus Zusak, Margo Lanagan, Melina Marchetta, Craig Silvey, Gabrielle Williams - I'm sure I'm forgetting some, too. With the exception of Silvey's Jasper Jones, they've all been books I've really enjoyed. Some, like Marchetta's Jellicoe Road and Zusak's I am the Messenger, became instant classics, books that just knocked my socks off, made me cry, made me think, dazzled my brain. I'm beginning to suspect that Australians do some rather excellent YA fiction, and I'm considering becoming a full-fledged Fan of Australian YA. [note: I'm not sure what this will constitute, other than me saying "I'm a fan of Australian YA," and continuing to seek them out from the sadly understocked libraries. I am fairly certain there is no badge, certificate, or secret handshake that will mark me out as a member of an elite group of Australian YA fans]
I read Lanagan's Tender Morsels in February, and was awestruck. It was an amazing book, so smart and original and otherworldly and grim. I'm still trying to sort out how exactly I feel and think about it (beyond simply thinking: WOW!!!!!). The conclusion thumped the wind right out of me; there's a very grotesque and troubling event, and then a heartbreaking one in very quick succession, and then the book ends. But there's also fabulous writing, complex plotting, unusual and intriguing characters; there's the wonderful, ingenious issue of what someone's personal heaven would look like. There's a banquet of food for thought in Tender Morsels, and I'm definitely still working through it all.
Right after I read it, my Australian online acquaintance (via the listserv) and facebook friend posted about going to the book launch of Lanagan's newest title, Sea Hearts. I looked the book up online, decided immediately that I NEEDED to read it, and soon, and then mentioned how envious I was that she got to attend the launch. Then I checked online again and realized the book won't be available in the US (and under a different title; I hate when they do that) until the fall. Autumn. Six months and more away. I mentioned my dismay - I really felt crushed, because I had just read Lanagan's book, and Maggie Stiefvater's Scorpio Races, and I was absolutely primed for another wonderful book set on an isolated island.
Fast forward a few weeks. I'm shuffling around in a misery of bronchitis made worse by taking medication that made me seriously dizzy and woozy. But look! A package at my mailbox! I retrieved it (slowly; I have to go down a series of steep wooden steps to get to the mailbox; I have fallen down those stairs on numerous, painful occasions) and saw Australian postage and a customs declaration.
I opened it up, and like in a movie, a bright light seemed to emanate from within the packaging - because there, in all its thick shiny glory, was Sea Hearts. And a note written on a very cool Australian notecard. Because I am a huge nerd about books, and just that kind of person, I actually hugged the book to myself when I realized what it was. I flipped it open and saw - oh my gods! - an inscription, to me, from Margo Lanagan "so she won't have to wait."
Maybe it speaks to some kind of profound naivete, or an entanglement with celebrity culture, or something equally un-boastworthy, but I am still at a stage of life when I am thrilled (in every sense of the word) at signed books. And personalized inscriptions in a signed book? Over the moon! I don't have many such books, and the few I do have are treated with great reverence and love.
I had to wait a bit to read it, though; between being sick, and having a stack of grading, and several books to read for teaching, I simply didn't have time and energy to read sea hearts.
But finally! At long last! I have read it.
And again - just knocked out by its amazingness. Lanagan is such a skillful and evocative writer; I got thoroughly caught up in each of the different narrators' sections. I found myself empathizing with all of them, even when they were at odds with each other. The premise of the book - that this island has on it a witch who can release the human girls from within seals - is fantastic. The seals are semi-selkies, I suppose, but they also work a bit differently. They are far more seal than human girl; the witch, with the wonderful, witchy name Misskaella, sees what she variously describes as seeds, bits of light, particles within each seal that she can manipulate to create the human girl. And she does this, for a variety of complex reasons, for all the men of the island who ask for a sea-girl. Because, like mermaids, the sea-girls are instantly bewitching to the men who behold them. It's an unintentional bewitching, simply an aspect of their natures once they are made human, but it's deep and effective just the same. And because of this bewitching quality, and because they are all beautiful with silky black hair, all of the men of the island seek out Misskaella to get them a sea-girl for a wife (even the men who already have wives and children).
The novel moves through a series of narrators over time, so we see, ultimately, Misskaella from her very earliest years of life and witchery, to the very end of her life. We see the generations of people on the island; we see how, before too very long, there are no human women left except the witch. Nothing but sea-brides, their island-man husbands, and the children they have - all sons, a sinister detail which is explained late in the novel.
We see the situation from the inside - from the bewitched men, from the children, from the witch, from the displaced island women, from true outsiders - but never from any of the sea-girls themselves.
As in Tender Morsels, there is a deep, and deeply felt, vein of feminism running through this book. It's knotty and gnarled and complicated, but it is there and it - as the narrative grows and branches and builds - becomes more and more pressing and prominent. One of the captivating things about these sea-brides, we are told, is that they are "born" bewildered, compliant, and bond instantly with the first human they see. The sea-girls are fully-grown women, and they are clearly adults, but they also have a childlike dependence on and commitment to the men who have purchased their "release" from the seals. They are every straight man's fantasy - the beautiful, beautiful woman who is utterly devoted and dependent and compliant, who is unencumbered with friends or family or interests or a life outside of the life made for them by their husbands and children. And gracious but they have a lot of children....
This strange island community of seals, and sea-brides, and children who are part-seal deep inside, and men who are quite literally entranced by their wives, is utterly compelling and fantastic (in every sense of that word). It's magic, but not magical; there is a very sharp edge to the world of this novel, and to the narrative that unfolds. I couldn't put the book down, once I really started reading; I was almost late to teaching because I couldn't tear myself away from one of the narrators' stories. I often get caught up in what I'm reading, and often put books down with reluctance, but truly being unable to break away from the narrative? That happens far less frequently, and it's a good gauge of how convincing and absorbing and emotionally engaging a text is.
Sea Hearts is all of that and more; it presents a world, a vision of magic and gender and generational progress, that is unique; I have never encountered anything quite like it. There are many threads being woven in the narrative, some more personal, some more political, some more literary, and so there are many points of access to the text. But at the novel's close, Lanagan adds a final bit, she gives another turn of the screw (so to speak, if you're Henry James) that literally took my breath away. I inhaled, and forgot to exhale as I stared at the last empty page of the book. When I started breathing again, when my heart restarted in a regular pattern, it still took awhile for me to be able to read the acknowledgements and about-the-author pages.
These are the signs of a good book, by a good writer - and delivered to me by a good friend (one I've never met).
Sea Hearts will turn up in the United States as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the fall - September 11, in fact, according to amazon.
I am sure that, by then, I will have read it at least once more.
I read Lanagan's Tender Morsels in February, and was awestruck. It was an amazing book, so smart and original and otherworldly and grim. I'm still trying to sort out how exactly I feel and think about it (beyond simply thinking: WOW!!!!!). The conclusion thumped the wind right out of me; there's a very grotesque and troubling event, and then a heartbreaking one in very quick succession, and then the book ends. But there's also fabulous writing, complex plotting, unusual and intriguing characters; there's the wonderful, ingenious issue of what someone's personal heaven would look like. There's a banquet of food for thought in Tender Morsels, and I'm definitely still working through it all.
Right after I read it, my Australian online acquaintance (via the listserv) and facebook friend posted about going to the book launch of Lanagan's newest title, Sea Hearts. I looked the book up online, decided immediately that I NEEDED to read it, and soon, and then mentioned how envious I was that she got to attend the launch. Then I checked online again and realized the book won't be available in the US (and under a different title; I hate when they do that) until the fall. Autumn. Six months and more away. I mentioned my dismay - I really felt crushed, because I had just read Lanagan's book, and Maggie Stiefvater's Scorpio Races, and I was absolutely primed for another wonderful book set on an isolated island.
Fast forward a few weeks. I'm shuffling around in a misery of bronchitis made worse by taking medication that made me seriously dizzy and woozy. But look! A package at my mailbox! I retrieved it (slowly; I have to go down a series of steep wooden steps to get to the mailbox; I have fallen down those stairs on numerous, painful occasions) and saw Australian postage and a customs declaration.
I opened it up, and like in a movie, a bright light seemed to emanate from within the packaging - because there, in all its thick shiny glory, was Sea Hearts. And a note written on a very cool Australian notecard. Because I am a huge nerd about books, and just that kind of person, I actually hugged the book to myself when I realized what it was. I flipped it open and saw - oh my gods! - an inscription, to me, from Margo Lanagan "so she won't have to wait."
Maybe it speaks to some kind of profound naivete, or an entanglement with celebrity culture, or something equally un-boastworthy, but I am still at a stage of life when I am thrilled (in every sense of the word) at signed books. And personalized inscriptions in a signed book? Over the moon! I don't have many such books, and the few I do have are treated with great reverence and love.
I had to wait a bit to read it, though; between being sick, and having a stack of grading, and several books to read for teaching, I simply didn't have time and energy to read sea hearts.
But finally! At long last! I have read it.
And again - just knocked out by its amazingness. Lanagan is such a skillful and evocative writer; I got thoroughly caught up in each of the different narrators' sections. I found myself empathizing with all of them, even when they were at odds with each other. The premise of the book - that this island has on it a witch who can release the human girls from within seals - is fantastic. The seals are semi-selkies, I suppose, but they also work a bit differently. They are far more seal than human girl; the witch, with the wonderful, witchy name Misskaella, sees what she variously describes as seeds, bits of light, particles within each seal that she can manipulate to create the human girl. And she does this, for a variety of complex reasons, for all the men of the island who ask for a sea-girl. Because, like mermaids, the sea-girls are instantly bewitching to the men who behold them. It's an unintentional bewitching, simply an aspect of their natures once they are made human, but it's deep and effective just the same. And because of this bewitching quality, and because they are all beautiful with silky black hair, all of the men of the island seek out Misskaella to get them a sea-girl for a wife (even the men who already have wives and children).
The novel moves through a series of narrators over time, so we see, ultimately, Misskaella from her very earliest years of life and witchery, to the very end of her life. We see the generations of people on the island; we see how, before too very long, there are no human women left except the witch. Nothing but sea-brides, their island-man husbands, and the children they have - all sons, a sinister detail which is explained late in the novel.
We see the situation from the inside - from the bewitched men, from the children, from the witch, from the displaced island women, from true outsiders - but never from any of the sea-girls themselves.
As in Tender Morsels, there is a deep, and deeply felt, vein of feminism running through this book. It's knotty and gnarled and complicated, but it is there and it - as the narrative grows and branches and builds - becomes more and more pressing and prominent. One of the captivating things about these sea-brides, we are told, is that they are "born" bewildered, compliant, and bond instantly with the first human they see. The sea-girls are fully-grown women, and they are clearly adults, but they also have a childlike dependence on and commitment to the men who have purchased their "release" from the seals. They are every straight man's fantasy - the beautiful, beautiful woman who is utterly devoted and dependent and compliant, who is unencumbered with friends or family or interests or a life outside of the life made for them by their husbands and children. And gracious but they have a lot of children....
This strange island community of seals, and sea-brides, and children who are part-seal deep inside, and men who are quite literally entranced by their wives, is utterly compelling and fantastic (in every sense of that word). It's magic, but not magical; there is a very sharp edge to the world of this novel, and to the narrative that unfolds. I couldn't put the book down, once I really started reading; I was almost late to teaching because I couldn't tear myself away from one of the narrators' stories. I often get caught up in what I'm reading, and often put books down with reluctance, but truly being unable to break away from the narrative? That happens far less frequently, and it's a good gauge of how convincing and absorbing and emotionally engaging a text is.
Sea Hearts is all of that and more; it presents a world, a vision of magic and gender and generational progress, that is unique; I have never encountered anything quite like it. There are many threads being woven in the narrative, some more personal, some more political, some more literary, and so there are many points of access to the text. But at the novel's close, Lanagan adds a final bit, she gives another turn of the screw (so to speak, if you're Henry James) that literally took my breath away. I inhaled, and forgot to exhale as I stared at the last empty page of the book. When I started breathing again, when my heart restarted in a regular pattern, it still took awhile for me to be able to read the acknowledgements and about-the-author pages.
These are the signs of a good book, by a good writer - and delivered to me by a good friend (one I've never met).
Sea Hearts will turn up in the United States as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the fall - September 11, in fact, according to amazon.
I am sure that, by then, I will have read it at least once more.
Look What I Found!
I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned it here, but I didn't read a lot of YA fiction when I was its target demographic. Partially this is because there wasn't quite as much range of good YA available to me in the early to mid 1990s; partially I was attempting to be a Sophisticated Reader who was done with all that Youthful Nonsense; partially it was because I am younger than my sister (my only sibling) by three years, and often the books she read would sound interesting to me, or would come my way by being left around the house, and I'd read them.
Of the few YA books I read as a young adult, I remember even fewer, but one of them is Stephen Maines' The Obnoxious Jerks. It's the book where I first learned what a gyro is (ain't nothing but a sandwich, of course). I remember a bit when the club of Obnoxious Jerks try to spell it out, but somehow the "R" is missing; thus they are, when assembled, the Obnoxious Jeks.
It was obviously not emotionally affecting or life-changing (other than the gyro thing; language/knowledge acquisition is always good). But still, I have fondly remembered it for many many years.
So how happy was I when, at a local library book sale, I saw this masterwork lined up with a bunch of other forgettable 80s teen fiction?
So happy that I actually squeaked out loud. Possibly I even squealed. I certainly exclaimed loudly enough to draw the attention of the moms and book scouts scanning the children's/YA section of the booksale. Their attention may have been drawn by me hopping up and down in ecstatic delight. It's hard to know. Regardless, I snapped that sucker right up and its purchase was probably the best 50 cents I spent that day.
I don't know if I'll re-read it; I'm a bit worried that I'll be mortified at its awfulness, and wonder why I've spent the last 20 years recalling this book at odd moments.
What if I love it? What if it suddenly becomes emotionally affecting and life-changing? Will I have to confess that my Favorite Book is called The Obnoxious Jerks and was published in 1987?
None of these scenarios seem likely. Rereading will almost certainly result in some slight disappointment, but for now, the serendipity of finding this book, and the happiness I feel now at owning it, far outweight my trepidation about what's actually between its covers.
Monday, May 16, 2011
keeping pace
I've been on a YA-reading jag since the semester ended (with a detour to re-read the unbelievably great Kraken by the equally great China Miéville). I've been adding them to my Goodreads library, giving them stars as they deserve them, but other than that, I've just read too much to break it all down in any more detail. A few deserve mention, though.
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer by Lish McBride. Mainly because my loathing of Twilight is so strong, I've steered clear of Paranormal YA. But McBride's novel was suggested by a child_lit member, and since I was trying to read broadly and deeply in the YA world, I added it to my pile of books. I'm glad I did - it was quite terrific. I know it's even better than I thought while I read, because it's burrowed into my brain - I find myself thinking about it semi-frequently since I finished it, and I usually take that as a very good sign. McBride gives narration to our necromancer protagonist, Sam, but alternates with third-person narration focalized around various other characters. There are werewolves, necromancers (good and evil), witches, various forms of post-dead spirits and undead, a couple of very good mortal human friends and some clever dialogue. Each chapter is titled with a song title (and the novel itself is a play on, of all things, a line from Elton John's song "Tiny Dancer" - "hold me closer tiny dancer"). It feels very contemporary without feeling forced; it was funny without being absurd. The intrusion of the paranormal/supernatural into Sam's "normal" world was handled very, very well - there was a good mix of "wtf?" reactions along with very nonchalantly blase reactions (sometimes from the same character). The novel's conclusion felt rushed, and a few chapters from the end, I felt VERY much like I was being set up for a sequel, but by that point, I was charmed enough with the book and its characters that having the prospect of a sequel dangled in front of me was very welcome.
I don't like the romantic-comedy genre (except, of course, for My Most Excellent Year), but Gabrielle Williams' Beatle Meets Destiny was just enough of the quirky and angsty to break the veneer of ick that usually accompanies the rom-com. I liked Williams' writing style especially - it's self-referential but only occasionally; it's cinematic, in a way that felt intentionally amateurish - like a very skillful but totally amateur making his first documentary, maybe. The characters were all flawed as people, which made them better characters. One of the claims inside the jacket copy is that everyone in the book does the wrong thing, and that's about right: in some ways, it's a romantic-comedy of errors. Again, enough quirks in the characters, the plot and the style to keep it from shlock.
Incarceron by Catherine Fisher has been on my radar for awhile - we got an ARC of Sapphique at the bookstore when I still worked there, and I flipped through it a bit. A friend of mine mentioned it recently as one she's considering teaching in the fall, and so I decided to bite the bullet and read it. And frankly, I don't know what I think of it. I have Sapphique from the library as well, and I'll be reading that soon - perhaps it will help me organize my thoughts? I felt vaguely irritated as I read Incarceron - it had all the "right" elements of your basic dystopian fantasy, but it somehow didn't quite work. The beautiful, privileged girl who rebels against her fate! The guy with mysterious powers/knowledge/wisdom and an unknown background, who is able to see the chinks in the power structure! The roguish, unpredictable friend! People with names like Keiro and Attia! One of the things about the current spate of YA dystopia that's irking me are the names: lots of Ks, lots of Ys, lots of unusual vowel arrangements for names that end up sounding mostly like names in current usage, but like they're spoken through a mouth of mush, or written phonetically by a child. I think Peeta is my worst and best example - though I love Collins' books - and the character - what kind of dumb name is Peeta? It's a snooty-British pronunciation of Peter (Peetah, as Wendy says in Disney's Peter Pan), or it's an alternate spelling of flatbread (Pita), and either way, it's goofy.
But I read Incarceron through to its finish, and I'm curious enough to read the next book, so it can't have been all bad.
Hidden Talents and True Talents by David Lubar, also recommended via child_lit. My editions were in a typeface, and with cover designs, that reminded me strongly of the YA books I pilfered from my sister when I was a kid - so mid-to-late 80s aesthetic. It made me feel like I was reading much older books than I was, which was weird. I quite liked Hidden Talents, actually - I liked it a lot. True Talents disappointed - I think taking the characters out of the school was a mistake. It scattered their identities too broadly, or something - it made them less of a team. Because of the 80s look of the books, it threw me everytime computers and the internet were referenced, or iPods; this was a good lesson in the importance of typography and design - and why physical books convey a different experience than e-books.
And finally, Natalie Standiford's Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters. I LOVED How to Say Goodbye in Robot - really, one of the best YAs I've read in the last year or two - so I was keen to read more from Standiford. Sullivan Sisters was good, but very different from Robot - if I'd never read the latter, I probably would have like Sullivan Sisters even more. The novel is three letters from the three sisters, "confessing" to their behavior/actions of the last couple of months, which - they believe - is why their family has been suddenly disinherited by their (still-living) grandmother, the incredibly wealthy, snobby and imperious Almighty. The three sisters are interesting, and different from each other in lots of ways. Most interesting, maybe, is that their stories overlap, narrating essentially the same span of time but from their three different perspectives. Things Norrie never mentions are central to Sassy's confession; Jane goes into detail about things Norrie brushes off as insignificant; Sassy offers new perspective on both girls' representations of Almighty. It was very well-crafted, and the characters - and family - Standiford created were very appealing to me - so much so that I wish there were more Sullivan books (there are six children in the family, in age from 21-year-old philosopher-poet St. John to six-year-old Takey). My one big quarrel with the book is Norrie's relationship with Robbie: Norrie is a 17-year-old high school senior. She meets Robbie in an extension education class on Speed Reading at Johns Jopkins. He turns out to be a 25-year-old grad student.
Now, the college boy who dates the high school girl is a fairly regular trope in YA, and baffles me then - my own experiences as a college undergrad was that high schoolers lost all interest as anything but objects for the boys to ogle (if even that); the few guys I knew in college who were still dating their old high-school-aged girlfriends got massively teased for it. Querying my undergrad students this spring, they mostly seemed disdainful, uneasy or outright contemptuous at the idea of college students actively pursuing high schoolers.
Now ramp that up another notch: a grad student? pursuing a 17-year-old? REALLY? No. I just can't buy it, even if the inability to buy it is a plot point. Norrie's interactions with Robbie's grad-school friends is awkward - they clearly are contemptuous and disdainful and laugh at Robbie, calling him cradle-robber in front of Norrie - but it's eased when Norrie reveals herself to be much more cool and intelligent than expected. But still. There was never a moment when I really believed in Robbie's interest in Norrie. Any 25-year-old grad student guy who wants to pursue a high schooler, even a very smart and pretty high schooler, is a HUGE red flag to RUN THE OTHER WAY.
This may make me an appalling snob, but there it is. At the very least, a 25-year-old guy should have more sense than to go after a girl who is still just 17. Most of the 25-year-old guys I have known would be lustfully regretful if presented with their own version of Norrie - but they wouldn't ask her out, or pursue a relationship with her, if only because of fear of 1) jailbait and 2) social recriminations from their friends.
But other than this, Standiford does a great job with all of her characters - as I say, she makes them so interesting and vivid that I am left wanting more.
I'm working on another stack from the library - currently about to give up on Andrew Smith's The Marbury Lens, because it's actually just too creepy for me to read. I rarely - almost never - have this happen, but I've tried several times today to read it, and each time I feel excessively disturbed by the book. Maybe another time, because I can see that it's good and smart and doing very interesting things.
But I have a number of books left that shouldn't give me profound heebie-jeebies, so that should hold me for the rest of the week. Besides, I requested a ton of books via the public library's interlibrary loan system, and I just got notified that Moon Over Manifest has come in for me.
Monday, April 25, 2011
most excellent
The semester is almost over; classes ended last week. I'm in the lull before the grading storm - my students will turn in their finals at the end of this week, and I'll be grading like mad until 4 May, at which point grades are due and I will be free from this semester, which has been one of the most difficult, frustrating and work-overloaded of my life.
As a reward for finishing classes, I checked out two large bags full of YA books from the public library. I pestered the wonderfully brilliant and helpful child_lit listserv for recommendations, particularly asking for LGBTQ books, and books that adolescent boys actually read.
One of the suggested titles was Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, a book and author I had never heard of before.
I read it yesterday.
Picked it up in the late afternoon; kept reading until I was finished, late at night.
Normally, I am not very sentimental, and my preferences tend to veer away from romance-driven plots, or any book featuring adorable small children. But somehow, Kluger's book (which is about both romance and an adorable small child) just worked for me. It is delightful. It was a joy to read. At one point, fairly late in the book, I had to go get some food; as I set the book down, I said [out loud, to an empty room] "I love these people!"
When I begin referring to characters as people, I have been won over.
As a reward for finishing classes, I checked out two large bags full of YA books from the public library. I pestered the wonderfully brilliant and helpful child_lit listserv for recommendations, particularly asking for LGBTQ books, and books that adolescent boys actually read.
One of the suggested titles was Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, a book and author I had never heard of before.
I read it yesterday.
Picked it up in the late afternoon; kept reading until I was finished, late at night.
Normally, I am not very sentimental, and my preferences tend to veer away from romance-driven plots, or any book featuring adorable small children. But somehow, Kluger's book (which is about both romance and an adorable small child) just worked for me. It is delightful. It was a joy to read. At one point, fairly late in the book, I had to go get some food; as I set the book down, I said [out loud, to an empty room] "I love these people!"
When I begin referring to characters as people, I have been won over.
Kluger's book is cleverly - if not originally - constructed as a series of interpolated texts: diary/essay excerpts from the three protagonists - Augie, TC and Alé, written, in their junior year of high school on the theme "My most excellent year"; chat messages; emails; newspaper articles, etc.
The plot is fairly simple, really: TC and Augie have been friends since first grade, since right after TC's mom died. The two boys adopt each other as brothers, and incorporate each other's families into the larger blend - to the point that the boys refer to each other's parents as "Mom" "Dad" or "Pop." TC's family, going back generations, are devoted Red Sox fans; TC and his Pop share their obsessive love of baseball, specifically the Red Sox. Augie is an American-born Chinese, the only child of a delightfully progressive set of parents: mother writes entertainment reviews for the Boston paper - reviews which are the thin mask of her political activism - and Dad owns a bookstore/cafe. Augie is also gay, though he "doesn't know it" at the book's beginning (though everyone else does, as we see from TC's writings, and from some particularly affecting emails between Pop and Augie's Dad). Enter Alé, fiercely smart and politically active daughter of the now-retired Mexican ambassador. Alé is beautiful and fierce and well-connected due to her parents' devotion to the diplomatic corps; she fails to ingratiate herself with her new classmates by mentioning attending functions with celebrities and "Bill and Hillary," who actually come to dinner at Alé's family's home. TC - cute, charming, likeable - falls for her right away. She takes one look at his cute, charming, likeable self and settles into disdain, dislike and contempt. She sits with Augie at lunch on her first day at the new school; he wants to pick her brain about encounters with such divas as Judi Dench and Liza Minelli.
Most of the book circles around the problem of TC trying to win over Alé, and Alé trying to resist his charms (which are, evidently, many; every character who gets to narrate in this book, with the exception of TC, swoons for him. I swooned for him before too long). But Augie also has his own set of problems, in the form of Andy - the growth of their relationship is fascinating and adorable and a little painful to watch. Augie's out, eventually, to his totally unsurprised family and friends, but Andy's definitely in, and the push-and-pull of Augie's truly flamboyant outness and Andy's considerably less flamboyant personality is great to watch.
One of the things Kluger does really nicely in this book is something approaching subtlety, though this is hardly what I would call a subtle book. But the three protagonist-narrators reveal, repeatedly and throughout the novel, how their views of themselves are at odds with others' views of them. For instance, Augie tells us early on how all the boys copy TC's attitude and "look," turning their shirts backward when TC shows up one day with his worn backward. Many pages later, TC refers to this moment of unintentional, and unconscious, trend-setting; he recalls the day all the boys turned their shirts backward, worrying that they were making fun of him.
Using multiple narrators to reveal different things about characters is not a new trick, but what Kluger does that I really admire is leave those things alone. They don't become plot points, they don't become Heartfelt Discussions Between Friends. We get Augie's version; we get TC's version. There's no further discussion, no further commentary. No talk from anyone about "gosh, I never looked at it from that perspective before."
Kluger uses this same trick to do a narrativized version of he said/she said, too, with TC's and Alé's narratives: each will comment on the same moment, with wildly varying interpretations. We get TC, bemoaning something he said, sure it's set him back months with Alé; pages later, we learn, from Alé, that those very words were the thing that finally broke her resistance to him.
Because a student recently wrote about this, I was probably more aware of this than I normally would have been, but the relationship between Augie and Andy opens so smoothly, with so little comment, that it's almost shocking. My student wrote about the obnoxious plotline of "we're the only two gay guys here, let's fall in love" that often crops up (cf, Kurt and Blaine in Glee). Augie and Andy's relationship isn't at all staged that way; neither boy is openly gay at first (though Augie's a confessed diva who ends up directing and staging the freshman-year talent show). And there are no awkward discussions about "are you?" or "when did you know?" there's just two boys who totally have crushes on each other, hanging out, being awkward and shy because neither yet knows the other reciprocates, and because neither has had any experience with relationships yet.
The most sentimental twist is the introduction of adorable Hucky Harper, a six-year-old deaf orphan (I know, right?!) who somehow conceives a passionate hero-worship of TC. This happens around a baseball diamond, because nothing in this novel gets far from either musicals or baseball (a delightful pairing, really) - Hucky watches from the sidelines and shakes his head yes/no at TC, telling him when he should swing the bat. TC ends up with an unreal batting average for games at which Hucky is present. Eventually, the two form a friendship - TC frantically begins learning American Sign Language, seeking extra help from a teacher whose mother was deaf, and who is thus fluent in ASL. There's not a lot of goopiness around Hucky in the text, either - he's adorable and knows how to use his adorableness to his advantage, getting extra hot chocolate and toys by pulling the sad face. The older kids are at once charmed and exasperated - they can see through his ploys, but fall to them anyway.
Hucky is another moment when Kluger allows us to see TC and Augie differently, without making a fuss over it. TC tells us that Hucky reminds him of Augie, when TC first met Augie - off on the sidelines, alone, lonely. Much later, Augie mentions how strongly Hucky resembles TC right after TC's mother died. Each older boy is motivated partially by his sense of affection for his friend, a friend they see replicated in little Hucky. But they never discuss this with each other, or anyone else; it's simply a dribble of insight that Kluger releases into the novel for the reader to hold in her head.
TC never once does anything but take Hucky absolutely seriously. He doesn't spend much time "poor little tyke"ing; instead, he hangs out with Hucky, and works his ass off to learn ASL. Eventually, a plot unfolds around Hucky's love of Mary Poppins, and his devout wish that Mary Poppins will come and live with him.
By the novel's end, a number of highly implausible things have happened, through the auspices of some rather deus-like characters: Clint, a secret service agent and one of Alé's closest friends from her childhood, and TC's Aunt Ruth, a member of the House of Representatives. Both Clint and Aunt Ruth are introduced and given personalities from the get-go; neither is dropped in miraculously when needed, so I give Kluger some credit here.
But when the implausibles start piling up, rather than spoiling the novel, it somehow nudges it right to the line of magical realism, rather than unbelievability. And I think this, more than anything, is what I loved about this book: it has a definite aura of the same kind of almost-magic that good works of magical realism have. It's realist fiction, but there's just a faint flavor, an undertone, of the kind of fantasy that I'd call "fairy tale" in the most benign or positive sense of the word. But this magic is never made cloying or obnoxious; instead it feels like you're watching an improbable set of coincidences and circumstances naturally mesh together to produce a fantastic outcome. And sometimes, though rarely, these kinds of things do happen.
My Most Excellent Year most reminded me, and strongly, of the equally wonder-full Will Grayson, Will Grayson, though for slightly younger readers, maybe. When the audience full of Will Graysons stands up to appreciate Tiny Cooper, you know, you just know, there's no way that could ever happen. Except for the tiny part of you that says: But why not? and knows that, really, there's nothing to prevent it from happening. And the larger part of you that says: this is wonderful, and I don't care if it could happen in real life or not.
My Most Excellent Year is not the most literary, cerebral book I've read this year. It's not the best-written, or the most original, or the most shocking. It's not tackling huge social issues (although in a way, it is, quietly, without making a noise about doing so). But it is a fantastic read. The characters - all of them, TC, Augie, Alé, Lee, Andy, Pop, Hucky, Mom & Dad, Lori - are all complex and likeable and funny and kind and thoughtful without ever being so perfect as to be unbelievable or unlikeable. Even TC, who is so highly regarded by everyone (even, eventually, Alé), is saved from being planted on a pedestal by his own narration, which reveals him to be far more complex - insecure at times, wildly overconfident at others, occasionally arrogant, often baffled, a steadfast friend, a devoted baseball enthusiast, a very smart kid with a political bent, a 14-year-old boy with a massive, mostly unrequited, crush on a great girl.
The adjectives I keep coming back to are charmed and delightful - and those are no bad things to feel after reading a book.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
teenage boys
I have never been a teenage boy. I do not regret this, but it does mean my own empirical evidence for male adolescence is fairly limited. I'm dependent on second-hand, after-the-fact anecdotal evidence from males of my acquaintance, evidence of the kind that would never stand up in a court of law.
There's a common belief out there that Boys Don't Read. I know this is bunk. Yet! When it comes to YA fiction, I'm becoming more and more concerned that perhaps, in fact, teenage boys don't read YA lit.
The question arose last fall, in Representing Adolescence, and it stumped me: What do adolescent boys actually read? Which books?
When I was in high school, the guys of my acquaintance (if they read at all) were into Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Maybe James Patterson, maybe Thomas Harris. Maybe the early, errant John Grisham. One or two standouts read Robert Jordan (in particular, a boy I sat next to in AP European history, who somehow managed to read Robert Jordan almost every day in class yet still pay attention, respond to the teacher, and get staggeringly high grades on tests. In that nerdy way I had and have, I was smitten).
These seem, still, to be the go-to books for teenage boys; at least, at the bookstore where I worked from 2008-2010, Patterson, King, Clancy were still in high demand. The only YA titles I remember any male readers asking for - aside from ones assigned for school reading - were Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak.
So what ARE teenage boys reading? Or, more accurately, what YA books are they reading? Or, more to the point: Where are the really good YA books for YA boys?
Because of my own interests, I know some of the titles and authors that gay teenage boys read; those tend to deal with LGBTQ issues, which - alas for our culture of compulsory heterosexuality/homophobia - are not likely to be picked up by straight teenage boys.
There's something really girly about a lot of YA fiction that's out there, even the good stuff. I try, whenever I can, to resist gender normativity and all that, but the fact is: the publishing world thinks in terms of male/female, and they go all out for the girls in the YA department. All those miserable supernatural romances, all those fancypants girls with scads of money serials, all those books about friends and trauma and first loves and music - all have a girl-oriented feel to them. It may be just in packaging - Natalie Standiford's mind-bendingly great How to Say Goodbye in Robot, while narrated by a female, is not an overly girly book. Yet some jackass decided to give it a vivid bubblegum pink dustjacket, thus dooming it to a life of female-only readership.
The teenage-culture world seems to skew heavily female, in ways that strike me as troubling. There are junior-girl versions of lots of things; magazines make this most vividly clear. You have Teen Vogue and People, Seventeen, and that host of tweenybopper magazines (Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc). But there's no comparable set of junior versions of magazines for teenage boys; there's no Teen GQ, no Teen Esquire. The concerns and interests of adolescent boys are imagined to be identical to the concerns and interests of adult men. How can this be?
It used to be that girlhood and womanhood were collapsed into each other (and in many ways, still are), while boyhood (short pants! living in the nursery!) and manhood were two distinct things. Now there's a "training" stage for girls as they grow up into adult women, a phase of life when clothes, makeup and boys are all the rage (as reflected by the teen-girl magazines). This is distinct from women's periodicals mainly by the absence of home decor and organization from the teen mags; women's magazines are mainly concerned with clothes, makeup, Your Man, and your home. Teenage girls get juniors magazines, junior clothes, junior makeup, even training bras (training for what? it's not like training wheels on a bike, or training a plant to grow in a certain way - is the "training" just a weak effort at desexualizing fairly young girls' foundation garments?). But there are not similar "training" things for teenage boys. Why? Is the teenage boy meant to be read, meant to be, identical to the adult male?
There are heaps of great books with male protagonists; M.T. Anderson's excellent Feed and Octavian Nothing books; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Frank Portman's King Dork; K.L. Going's King of the Screwups and Fat Kid Rules the World. But it is not at all clear to me that teenage boys are reading them unless forced to by a teacher.
Among my undergrads, when I ask what the (sadly few) boys in the class read as adolescents, mostly they say - Clancy, King, Patterson. A few read fantasy: Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman. In the YA world, only two authors get mentioned: one boy was passionate about Neil Shusterman, and several had read and enjoyed John Green's books.
So what's going on here? Where is the abundance of good YA books for guys? Where are the YA guys to read those books? Why is YA somehow the province of teenage girls?
There's a common belief out there that Boys Don't Read. I know this is bunk. Yet! When it comes to YA fiction, I'm becoming more and more concerned that perhaps, in fact, teenage boys don't read YA lit.
The question arose last fall, in Representing Adolescence, and it stumped me: What do adolescent boys actually read? Which books?
When I was in high school, the guys of my acquaintance (if they read at all) were into Tom Clancy and Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Maybe James Patterson, maybe Thomas Harris. Maybe the early, errant John Grisham. One or two standouts read Robert Jordan (in particular, a boy I sat next to in AP European history, who somehow managed to read Robert Jordan almost every day in class yet still pay attention, respond to the teacher, and get staggeringly high grades on tests. In that nerdy way I had and have, I was smitten).
These seem, still, to be the go-to books for teenage boys; at least, at the bookstore where I worked from 2008-2010, Patterson, King, Clancy were still in high demand. The only YA titles I remember any male readers asking for - aside from ones assigned for school reading - were Darren Shan's Cirque du Freak.
So what ARE teenage boys reading? Or, more accurately, what YA books are they reading? Or, more to the point: Where are the really good YA books for YA boys?
Because of my own interests, I know some of the titles and authors that gay teenage boys read; those tend to deal with LGBTQ issues, which - alas for our culture of compulsory heterosexuality/homophobia - are not likely to be picked up by straight teenage boys.
There's something really girly about a lot of YA fiction that's out there, even the good stuff. I try, whenever I can, to resist gender normativity and all that, but the fact is: the publishing world thinks in terms of male/female, and they go all out for the girls in the YA department. All those miserable supernatural romances, all those fancypants girls with scads of money serials, all those books about friends and trauma and first loves and music - all have a girl-oriented feel to them. It may be just in packaging - Natalie Standiford's mind-bendingly great How to Say Goodbye in Robot, while narrated by a female, is not an overly girly book. Yet some jackass decided to give it a vivid bubblegum pink dustjacket, thus dooming it to a life of female-only readership.
The teenage-culture world seems to skew heavily female, in ways that strike me as troubling. There are junior-girl versions of lots of things; magazines make this most vividly clear. You have Teen Vogue and People, Seventeen, and that host of tweenybopper magazines (Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, etc). But there's no comparable set of junior versions of magazines for teenage boys; there's no Teen GQ, no Teen Esquire. The concerns and interests of adolescent boys are imagined to be identical to the concerns and interests of adult men. How can this be?
It used to be that girlhood and womanhood were collapsed into each other (and in many ways, still are), while boyhood (short pants! living in the nursery!) and manhood were two distinct things. Now there's a "training" stage for girls as they grow up into adult women, a phase of life when clothes, makeup and boys are all the rage (as reflected by the teen-girl magazines). This is distinct from women's periodicals mainly by the absence of home decor and organization from the teen mags; women's magazines are mainly concerned with clothes, makeup, Your Man, and your home. Teenage girls get juniors magazines, junior clothes, junior makeup, even training bras (training for what? it's not like training wheels on a bike, or training a plant to grow in a certain way - is the "training" just a weak effort at desexualizing fairly young girls' foundation garments?). But there are not similar "training" things for teenage boys. Why? Is the teenage boy meant to be read, meant to be, identical to the adult male?
There are heaps of great books with male protagonists; M.T. Anderson's excellent Feed and Octavian Nothing books; Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy; Frank Portman's King Dork; K.L. Going's King of the Screwups and Fat Kid Rules the World. But it is not at all clear to me that teenage boys are reading them unless forced to by a teacher.
Among my undergrads, when I ask what the (sadly few) boys in the class read as adolescents, mostly they say - Clancy, King, Patterson. A few read fantasy: Douglas Adams, Neil Gaiman. In the YA world, only two authors get mentioned: one boy was passionate about Neil Shusterman, and several had read and enjoyed John Green's books.
So what's going on here? Where is the abundance of good YA books for guys? Where are the YA guys to read those books? Why is YA somehow the province of teenage girls?
Wednesday, March 02, 2011
Popularity: I really want to know about this
omehow, today's planned discussion of Speak devolved into a weak conversation about popularity and unpopularity in adolescence. Since this is one of THE MAJOR themes of lots of YA realist fiction, it's worth talking about. It's also, as far as I can tell, a major theme among high schoolers.As I have in past classes, I asked this gaggle to put up hands if you considered yourself popular in high school. A goodly number raised their hands; I wasn't surprised by any of them. I asked who would identify themselves as distinctly unpopular, and got a few hands (I always put mine up for this as well; the older I get, the more relieved I feel that I wasn't well-liked by my classmates). So I tried to get them to analyze what it means to be popular. Is it being well-known? Well-liked? does it have to do with class? Why are so few people ready and willing to cop to being popular in high school? I have some thoughts of my own on all of these subjects, but I really am extremely curious about this as a topic, and I was hoping to get some decent responses from my students.
As usual, they mostly just sat there and looked vaguely at me, or possibly into space, or "secretly" at the phones in their hands, "hidden" under their desks [industry secret: those desks have no fronts. i can SEE your phone in your lap]. A handful responded with various things, some more thoughtful than others, some more anecdote-laden than others.
The idea of popularity as relational came up, as did the phrase "people who would talk to you," which, when extracted from the high school context, kind of sounds awful. The point being made there had to do with proximity. Take random Popular Girl A. Put her in, say, English class without her normal Popular friends. Who will she talk to? A hierarchy organizes itself then, based on that class; Girl A may talk to you in English, but she won't sit with you in lunch when her other friends are there. This really needs to be mapped visually, but I don't have the time or talent for it now, but it makes a lot of sense.
But what I really want to know - and I sincerely, devoutly hope that people, someone, anyone, will post a comment about this - is how popularity was defined or organized in YOUR high school experience. One remark that was mentioned today - and affirmed by about half a dozen students in this class - was the "everyone in my class was friends, we all got along, no one was unpopular." I have heard this remark before, and every single time I hear it I want to shake my head and sigh. I suspect this often means "No one I knew was unpopular," or "None of my friends was unpopular." Because there's a swath of kids in every high school, I imagine, who are largely invisible. They might just be quiet kids; they might be weird, they might just be so average as to disappear. Maybe they don't join any clubs or sports; maybe they work two jobs, or have some weird out-of-school hobby. Maybe they simply don't fit into any readily identifiable archetype or social group and thus, uncategorizable, become invisible. There are people like this in every environment I've ever been in - high school, college, grad schools, workplaces - people who seem to never be talked about, never seem to draw attention. People who fade in and fade out and have very little to do with anyone as far as you can tell (and when you ask your friends about that person, often many of them don't really know who you mean; or maybe one does and has a tiny tidbit of information, like: he eats lunch in fourth period, or I think he used to work in Communications.
I just cannot believe in the existence of any high school in America where everyone's friendly and kind to everyone else. Where there's no one who's the weirdo loser. Where there's no small band of uber-nerds, clinging together for safety, but generally the butt of everyone else's jokes. Someone who no one likes. ALL group environments seem to resolve themselves into hierarchies of some kind, even hippie quasi-communes like my undergraduate institution. There's always at least that one kid that no one you know has ever seen speaking to anyone.
One girl, in class today, put forth the intensely troubling idea (especially in the context of Speak) that anyone who isn't "friends with everyone in the class" has brought it on themselves. That they don't want to be happy. That they don't join things, or "put themselves out there." Implied in her remarks was a negative judgment: if you don't join in, then you kind of suck. But then I think of Melinda, in Speak, and her silence and what it conceals and reveals. I think of all the troubled fictional teenagers who have no or few friends because of a perceived issue that is actually a symptom of some truly grave problem.
I know the terms popular and unpopular are simplistic and reductive and possibly not useful. What I mean, I think, is whether you perceived yourself to be unpopular, or popular, in high school. Not what other people thought of you; not what you think of other people. But how you felt, or feel, as a high-schooler.
Two easy criteria: were you ever picked last, or nearly-last, for teams in gym class? Did you ever have to eat lunch alone because you had no one to sit with?
And a third, a corollary of these two: Did you ever have to worry about the likelihood of either of these things happening?
Thursday, September 23, 2010
What just happened - LIAR
I finished Justine Larbalestier's LIAR today. It's a book I feel like I've heard about a lot, but - weirdly - knew nothing about going into it.
*************THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY**********************
and seriously, you don't want this one spoilered. to spare your eyes I will provide a cute image to fill some space. see, here is a kitten diligently reading a book, maybe even LIAR. But probably actually reading Rotten Ralph or If you give a cat a cupcake.
Coming out of it, I'm not sure I know much more.
It was a terrific book. Micah's voice is utterly compelling and real and intriguing. The structure of the novel - in sections of varying degrees of truthfulness - worked wonderfully, and presents some very interesting and provocative (and unanswerable) questions about truth-telling. The whole premise of lying, actually, as both theme and narrational device, is inspired.
I was perplexed, at the library, hunting for this book. Larbalestier's other books are in the fantasy genre, and I'd always thought Liar was strict old everyday realism.
And then, werewolves.
And then, lying.
And oh - there are more puzzle pieces at hand than there are in the finished picture, but how do I know which to discard? Larbalestier says the book is intentionally vague - clearly haunted by the ghost (or IS it a ghost?) of Henry James's Turn of the Screw. Or intentionally multiple, would be a better way to rephrase it. I can imagine this book driving my students insane.
So we don't know, and we can't know - not for sure - what the truth is here. Micah's our narrator, and she is totally, completely and always unreliable. Except maybe when she's not. Does she ever tell us the truth? What about? Does it matter?
Whatever the "truth" or Truth or truth is - how Zach died, whether Micah's brother exists, existed, where or what or if upstate and the farm are, if Micah has the family illness, and if that illness is in fact lycanthropy - there are some thematic truths here that struck me repeatedly.
This book is about Betwixt and Between, to borrow Barrie's phrase. It's about being some of more than one thing. It's about being a third in a binary world. It's a totally queer book, in a lot of ways.
Micah is biracial - and this assertion never changes. She lies about being a boy, at the beginning of high school. She is a werewolf, by definition a being that is neither fully human nor fully wolf. She is liar, except when she's not, which is when? She is attracted to Tayshawn and Sarah, almost equally. She is not anyone's girlfriend, except when she is.
She lives in a world that demands everything be resolved into binaries, and Micah is neither one nor the other. You could say the book operates this way as well: is it a fantasy about werewolves, or a very chilling story about an extremely mentally unbalanced girl? are the pills birth control, or are they antipsychotics, or are they some kind of sedative?
There are no answers to these questions. All possibilities remain open; Micah, in both her lying and her truth-telling (which we cannot distinguish from each other) refuses utterly to foreclose on any of them.
LIAR, and Micah, break binaries at every turn. Fantasy or psychological realism? wolf or girl, straight or lesbian, sane or insane, only child or sibling'd - there are no clear answers and - more importantly - no way to resolve any of these. The answers simply cannot be had, because part of the point of the book (as I read it) is to refuse to provide them. We are meant to be on shaky ground. Because it forces us to look at possibilities, at multiplicities - to think beyond binaries. To stick with binaries is to be endlessly frustrated with this book, and with Micah. To stick with binaries is to, in some ways, obliterate Micah. She cannot be resolved into one thing OR the other.
And so everything we think we know about narrative, about truth-telling, about werewolves and detective stories and YA romances and desire and family and Micah is blurred and opened up on itself. This is a book that generates multiplicity and possibility, and in that, it is absolutely brilliant, and revolutionary.
Our inability to know is put on huge display in this book. No one within the text knows anything for sure; none of us reading know anything for sure. This resonates with me particularly along gender-identity lines: the queered body, unknowable as male/female, straight/gay, resolutely and perpetually resisting and refusing to be known and categorized. There's a huge amount of power there, but there's also a huge amount of power being challenged.
This was a staggering book to read. I had to put off my planned errands for the day until I'd finished the last 70 pages or so; I couldn't not know. But of course, there is no knowing here. This isn't a smug or smarmy poststructuralist endless delay of meaning - there's almost a flat-out assertion that there is no meaning to get to. This is a kind of gauntlet-throwing in the face of all systems of classification and knowing.
I HAVE to teach this book. It will break everyone's minds, and that's exactly what needs to be happening.
*************THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD, MATEY**********************
and seriously, you don't want this one spoilered. to spare your eyes I will provide a cute image to fill some space. see, here is a kitten diligently reading a book, maybe even LIAR. But probably actually reading Rotten Ralph or If you give a cat a cupcake.
Coming out of it, I'm not sure I know much more.
It was a terrific book. Micah's voice is utterly compelling and real and intriguing. The structure of the novel - in sections of varying degrees of truthfulness - worked wonderfully, and presents some very interesting and provocative (and unanswerable) questions about truth-telling. The whole premise of lying, actually, as both theme and narrational device, is inspired.
I was perplexed, at the library, hunting for this book. Larbalestier's other books are in the fantasy genre, and I'd always thought Liar was strict old everyday realism.
And then, werewolves.
And then, lying.
And oh - there are more puzzle pieces at hand than there are in the finished picture, but how do I know which to discard? Larbalestier says the book is intentionally vague - clearly haunted by the ghost (or IS it a ghost?) of Henry James's Turn of the Screw. Or intentionally multiple, would be a better way to rephrase it. I can imagine this book driving my students insane.
So we don't know, and we can't know - not for sure - what the truth is here. Micah's our narrator, and she is totally, completely and always unreliable. Except maybe when she's not. Does she ever tell us the truth? What about? Does it matter?
Whatever the "truth" or Truth or truth is - how Zach died, whether Micah's brother exists, existed, where or what or if upstate and the farm are, if Micah has the family illness, and if that illness is in fact lycanthropy - there are some thematic truths here that struck me repeatedly.
This book is about Betwixt and Between, to borrow Barrie's phrase. It's about being some of more than one thing. It's about being a third in a binary world. It's a totally queer book, in a lot of ways.
Micah is biracial - and this assertion never changes. She lies about being a boy, at the beginning of high school. She is a werewolf, by definition a being that is neither fully human nor fully wolf. She is liar, except when she's not, which is when? She is attracted to Tayshawn and Sarah, almost equally. She is not anyone's girlfriend, except when she is.
She lives in a world that demands everything be resolved into binaries, and Micah is neither one nor the other. You could say the book operates this way as well: is it a fantasy about werewolves, or a very chilling story about an extremely mentally unbalanced girl? are the pills birth control, or are they antipsychotics, or are they some kind of sedative?
There are no answers to these questions. All possibilities remain open; Micah, in both her lying and her truth-telling (which we cannot distinguish from each other) refuses utterly to foreclose on any of them.
LIAR, and Micah, break binaries at every turn. Fantasy or psychological realism? wolf or girl, straight or lesbian, sane or insane, only child or sibling'd - there are no clear answers and - more importantly - no way to resolve any of these. The answers simply cannot be had, because part of the point of the book (as I read it) is to refuse to provide them. We are meant to be on shaky ground. Because it forces us to look at possibilities, at multiplicities - to think beyond binaries. To stick with binaries is to be endlessly frustrated with this book, and with Micah. To stick with binaries is to, in some ways, obliterate Micah. She cannot be resolved into one thing OR the other.
And so everything we think we know about narrative, about truth-telling, about werewolves and detective stories and YA romances and desire and family and Micah is blurred and opened up on itself. This is a book that generates multiplicity and possibility, and in that, it is absolutely brilliant, and revolutionary.
Our inability to know is put on huge display in this book. No one within the text knows anything for sure; none of us reading know anything for sure. This resonates with me particularly along gender-identity lines: the queered body, unknowable as male/female, straight/gay, resolutely and perpetually resisting and refusing to be known and categorized. There's a huge amount of power there, but there's also a huge amount of power being challenged.
This was a staggering book to read. I had to put off my planned errands for the day until I'd finished the last 70 pages or so; I couldn't not know. But of course, there is no knowing here. This isn't a smug or smarmy poststructuralist endless delay of meaning - there's almost a flat-out assertion that there is no meaning to get to. This is a kind of gauntlet-throwing in the face of all systems of classification and knowing.
I HAVE to teach this book. It will break everyone's minds, and that's exactly what needs to be happening.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Jellicoe Road
or - where have I been for the last couple of years, that word of its greatness somehow passed me by?
I read it - the entire book - today. I should not have devoted the whole day to it, but that's what books will do to me, especially good books.
And Jellicoe Road is an amazing book. I cried. Repeatedly. What an absolutely gorgeous and unexpected story....the intersecting and bisecting and intertwining stories and characters are so wonderfully, vividly crafted. I really did not know, for the first 50 or 75 pages, where this book was going; the shifts in tone and plot happened so naturally and subtly that I don't even know when it crossed over into emotionally gripping and mysterious - all I know is, at some point I couldn't put the book down. When I tried to, the characters swarmed my brain; I could see them even when I closed my eyes.
I don't think I have anything profound to say about this book, not yet anyway, just that it took my breath away (almost literally). Having read Looking for Alibrandi and Saving Francesca within the last ten days, and then coming to Jellicoe Road, I was simply not prepared for the depth and complexity of the story and emotions of it. Which is not to say that Marchetta's other books are shallow - they aren't. But their themes and concerns are, in some ways, very different from those in Jellicoe.
I will give Jellicoe Road the absolute highest recommendation I possibly can give. And I will have to acquire it for my very own, read it again, and think think think about it.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Like the Red Panda - mixed feelings
On the recommendation of the wonderful Charlie, I read Andrea Seigel's Like the Red Panda.
And frankly, I do not know what to make of it.
Reviews online keep referring to the narrator's - Stella - and the author's humor and wit. But I didn't see a lot of this. Some, sure, and enough to make me think of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which still makes me laugh, even after a dozen or more readings.
But there's almost too much weirdness in Stella's life, and a lot of it feels contrived and unevenly handled. Even the deaths of her parents - from coke cut with heroin - felt somehow odd. And the characters, even the quirkiest ones, felt flat. I have no idea who or what the foster parents, Shana and Simon, are. The ex(?) boyfriend Daniel - confusing. Ashley and Ainsley - irritating and perplexing. The grandfather, Donald - almost unbearable.
Stella's apathy is creepy. Once she makes her decision to kill herself, it becomes apparent that she's never made any effort in any of her interpersonal relationships, with the possible (but only possible) exception of Daniel. Everyone is a stranger to her, and it feels like Stella's fault. And not in a way that makes me feel sympathetic; in other ways, she's a very sharp, astute and self-aware thinker and observer. But she doesn't even seem to realize that she may have been able to change the relationship between herself and her foster parents, or kids at school, or anything. She rigorously over-achieves academically, and wears a collection of (very short) plaid skirts, but otherwise, Stella feels like a cipher. I don't know why she wants to kill herself, not really, except the more-or-less stated reason that she feels like she's peaked; that she's done living. But what this means and how one might know it at age 17 is not clear.
Ultimately, I ended up feeling angry at Stella, primarily on Ainsley's behalf. Poor Ainsley, the invisible girl - finally, she has a friend who seems to value her for herself and not because of her proximity to Ashley, finally someone seems to understand Ainsley - and within weeks, that someone intends to be dead. Likewise Daniel, who - whatever it actually means or consists of - seems to genuinely care about Stella; he'll be waiting at Del Mar for her, while she never shows (and instead, Ainsley will be showing up, an almost-nasty twist that Stella designs).
At the end of this book, I felt most annoyed with Andrea Seigel, a fact that was not helped by a visit to her website. My sense of the book is that Seigel wanted to write a book that would shock! people, not that she had something she wanted to say. There's a quality of hipster self-satisfaction that comes from both the book and Stella, and makes it hard for me to connect with or like either.
Like Jay Asher's catastrophe 13 Reasons Why, this book never made me really feel or understand why Stella wanted to die. Neither she nor Hannah (the suicide of Asher's book) came across as particular suicidal, particularly unhappy or ready to die. Stella instead feels a little bit clueless, a little too into herself. The way she chooses to stage her suicide is particularly telling. She researches the "warning signs," and devises a program of exhibiting them; she writes the entire book as a document to leave behind. She's incredibly interested in being seen, in performing Suicidal Teen Girl Who is Smart And Quirky (witness: plaid catholic schoolgirl skirts).
It's this performance that bothers me, I guess, because it feels like it comes from the author and from Stella. I get the feeling that Seigel is saying "Hey! LOOK AT ME! I WROTE THIS INTENSE, MEANINGFUL BOOK ABOUT SUICIDE WHICH WILL SHOCK YOU! I AM SO DEEP!"
and I feel like Stella is saying the same thing (and the same thing as Holden Caulfield): Look at me, I am so much deeper and intense than all the phonies around me.
While this is very much a part of teenage life (which I know from firsthand experience), it's also a pose, a stage, a performance, a phase.
Seigel doesn't back it up with anything that makes me believe in Stella's pose; I don't think she's particularly deep or insightful (though smart, and certainly more aware than many of her classmates).
Ultimately, I don't buy Stella as a girl who actually wants to kill herself. I don't think she's as interesting as she thinks she is, or as Seigel thinks she (stella and Seigel) is.
All the same, there is something about the book that is appealing, that did draw me in to a degree. I find I feel perplexed, more than anything, by the end of the novel - perplexed, and extremely anxious and sad on behalf of Ainsley. I care what happens to Stella because I care about Ainsley - and I think this is a failing of the book, and not a success.
And frankly, I do not know what to make of it.
Reviews online keep referring to the narrator's - Stella - and the author's humor and wit. But I didn't see a lot of this. Some, sure, and enough to make me think of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, which still makes me laugh, even after a dozen or more readings.
But there's almost too much weirdness in Stella's life, and a lot of it feels contrived and unevenly handled. Even the deaths of her parents - from coke cut with heroin - felt somehow odd. And the characters, even the quirkiest ones, felt flat. I have no idea who or what the foster parents, Shana and Simon, are. The ex(?) boyfriend Daniel - confusing. Ashley and Ainsley - irritating and perplexing. The grandfather, Donald - almost unbearable.
Stella's apathy is creepy. Once she makes her decision to kill herself, it becomes apparent that she's never made any effort in any of her interpersonal relationships, with the possible (but only possible) exception of Daniel. Everyone is a stranger to her, and it feels like Stella's fault. And not in a way that makes me feel sympathetic; in other ways, she's a very sharp, astute and self-aware thinker and observer. But she doesn't even seem to realize that she may have been able to change the relationship between herself and her foster parents, or kids at school, or anything. She rigorously over-achieves academically, and wears a collection of (very short) plaid skirts, but otherwise, Stella feels like a cipher. I don't know why she wants to kill herself, not really, except the more-or-less stated reason that she feels like she's peaked; that she's done living. But what this means and how one might know it at age 17 is not clear.
Ultimately, I ended up feeling angry at Stella, primarily on Ainsley's behalf. Poor Ainsley, the invisible girl - finally, she has a friend who seems to value her for herself and not because of her proximity to Ashley, finally someone seems to understand Ainsley - and within weeks, that someone intends to be dead. Likewise Daniel, who - whatever it actually means or consists of - seems to genuinely care about Stella; he'll be waiting at Del Mar for her, while she never shows (and instead, Ainsley will be showing up, an almost-nasty twist that Stella designs).
At the end of this book, I felt most annoyed with Andrea Seigel, a fact that was not helped by a visit to her website. My sense of the book is that Seigel wanted to write a book that would shock! people, not that she had something she wanted to say. There's a quality of hipster self-satisfaction that comes from both the book and Stella, and makes it hard for me to connect with or like either.
Like Jay Asher's catastrophe 13 Reasons Why, this book never made me really feel or understand why Stella wanted to die. Neither she nor Hannah (the suicide of Asher's book) came across as particular suicidal, particularly unhappy or ready to die. Stella instead feels a little bit clueless, a little too into herself. The way she chooses to stage her suicide is particularly telling. She researches the "warning signs," and devises a program of exhibiting them; she writes the entire book as a document to leave behind. She's incredibly interested in being seen, in performing Suicidal Teen Girl Who is Smart And Quirky (witness: plaid catholic schoolgirl skirts).
It's this performance that bothers me, I guess, because it feels like it comes from the author and from Stella. I get the feeling that Seigel is saying "Hey! LOOK AT ME! I WROTE THIS INTENSE, MEANINGFUL BOOK ABOUT SUICIDE WHICH WILL SHOCK YOU! I AM SO DEEP!"
and I feel like Stella is saying the same thing (and the same thing as Holden Caulfield): Look at me, I am so much deeper and intense than all the phonies around me.
While this is very much a part of teenage life (which I know from firsthand experience), it's also a pose, a stage, a performance, a phase.
Seigel doesn't back it up with anything that makes me believe in Stella's pose; I don't think she's particularly deep or insightful (though smart, and certainly more aware than many of her classmates).
Ultimately, I don't buy Stella as a girl who actually wants to kill herself. I don't think she's as interesting as she thinks she is, or as Seigel thinks she (stella and Seigel) is.
All the same, there is something about the book that is appealing, that did draw me in to a degree. I find I feel perplexed, more than anything, by the end of the novel - perplexed, and extremely anxious and sad on behalf of Ainsley. I care what happens to Stella because I care about Ainsley - and I think this is a failing of the book, and not a success.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Reading Girl Books
Since early July, I've been on a mission to find suitable girl-protagonist novels to teach in my Representing Adolescence class. I decided early on that I would use Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, because it is amazing and because it always gets good reception when I teach it. Then I read E. Lockhart's The Boy Book, and decided to teach that, because it seemed to be realistic and fairly well-written, and had several things worth talking about. I'm also interested in the way that both Melinda and Ruby end up as outsiders, exiled from their groups of friends for dubious (at best) reasons. And The Boy Book will make for good discussion about gender.
And then came the true Mission: finding a realist novel from the last 25 years or so, with a female protagonist, that wasn't a Trauma Novel, and/or wasn't about Boys.
I still have not settled on my third title. I skimmed bestseller lists and some blogs (teenreads, etc), always eliminating the Twilight related crap (it's fantasy, after all) and used that, plus my knowledge of what teenage girls buy at the bookstore to compile my collection of titles. Here, in no particular order, are the Girl YA books I have read since July:
Greengage Summer - Rumer Godden
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Fly on the Wall - E. Lockhart
The Boy Book - E. Lockhart
Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Hexwood - Diana Wynne Jones
The Boyfriend List - E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys - E. Lockhart
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
Pop Princess - Rachel Cohn
The A-List - Zoey Dean
The Clique - Lisi Harrison
Keeping the Moon - Sarah Dessen
Sweethearts - Sara Zarr
Cracked Up to Be - Courtney Summers
Story of a Girl - Sara Zarr
Chasing Boys - Karen Tayleur
Getting Lost with Boys - Hailey Abbott
I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader - Kieran Scott
None of these satisfy me. the Judy Blume is, admittedly, a classic, but I felt mortified reading it - all the talk of bras and periods! ook. NOT my cup of tea, and almost certainly guaranteed to make everyone in my class uncomfortable (I have a lot of freshmen). On top of that, I don't know, really, what to DO with it, and it feels outdated. I don't want to spend half my life explaining tiny details about being alive in the 70s and grappling with my students' protests of "it's not relatable!!!"
Cracked Up to Be was surprisingly good, but was a whanger of a Trauma Book. Keeping the Moon was all right, and not a trauma story (not really, though in part it was about getting over Being Fat). It's just not as meaty as I'd like it to be. I'm contemplating a Dessen novel, though, because they're very popular, and while they are often about Boys, they are also (in my limited experience) also about friendships and family and self-discovery.
Tam Lin was incredible, absolutely fantastic, and helped me to (finally) truly understand and appreciate Fire & Hemlock. Both are out of the running due to length and complexity, and the fact that the source text(s) will break brains.
The A-List, The Clique and Getting Lost with Boys were absolutely reprehensible. Appalling. Badly written, hideously plotted, full of nasty unpleasant characters. Grrrrross.
I wanted to like Nick & Norah, but I felt irritated by it instead. I thought Norah was kind of a bitch, and Nick oddly emptied of personality.
The rest were all mediocre to middling. Chasing Boys wasn't especially about chasing boys, and that ended up making it relatively decent. Sweethearts was very odd and more than a little creepy; Story of a Girl was depressing, but valuable in that it concerns lower-class protagonists (which, frankly, after the A-List and the Clique, I was happy to encounter).
But there are certain formulae, certain tropes, that show up over and over and over and over, even in the best of these books: a New, Attractive Boy shows up, the protagonist fights with friends, the protagonist relocates and is the New, Attractive Girl, the protagonist struggles over some mysterious past trauma that is revealed slowly in flashbacks, or not until the very end of the book. The Journey Of Self-Discovery, in all of these books, happens through relationships - friends and Boys, occasionally formerly-estranged parents - with very little introspection. The characters live through events and dialogue, not through narration (think of Speak, then imagine the opposite).
By contrast, the Boy books I've read seem to focus much more on that interior monologue introspective narration. Events are important, and people are important, but it isn't through their relationships that the boys really change or learn anything. I hate to say this, and I hope I am making a gross generalization, but the Boy books seem more intellectual, while the Girl books are more emotional.
So I'm now reaching the end of my rope. I've read scads of mostly-terrible books, I've encountered way too many cute boys with hair falling into their eyes, eyes which are always blue or green (as are protagonist's eyes, when described), boys who somehow manage to be wise and caring and empathic and helpful to Protagonist girls with serious Issues. Often the boys are named Jake, or they have slightly more hip or nontraditional names: Tyler, Noel, Ethan, Cameron, Dylan, Liam. It's a fluke or a freak when a nice normal Paul or Daniel or Jason turns up.
I can rattle off Trauma scenarios in my sleep, I can identify love triangles before they've been formed, I can spot the Boy Who Turns Out to be A Jerk from a mile off, I can spot the Nice but Nerdy Boy who Turns Hot over a summer from several miles off. I know the Girl Heroine will learn to have Self-Confidence, will Patch Things Up with her siblings/parents/step-parents, will learn valuable lessons about living in the today because of her dead sibling/parent/friend, will stop drinking or cutting or skipping school, will, with the Love of the Nice, Cute Boy whose hair falls into his eyes, turn an eager, happy face to a shining future of awesomeness.
PUKE PUKE PUKE.
Obviously, these very cliches and stereotypes are worth thinking about, and it's making me root for Dessen, though frankly, Cracked Up to Be was probably the most interesting/best written of the list.
But this experience has made me think seriously about the bildungsroman, and its maleness; male protagonists come of age regardless of the relationships around them. Girls come of age because of those relationships. I also felt a tiny bit of shock when I tried to think historically, pre-1900, of representations of adolescents. Other than the occasional Little Women, or The Daisy Chain, the single strong protagonist bildungsroman seems to be a very exclusively male genre. Even Little Women and The Daisy Chain track the progress of a group of siblings, not a single strong character. But teenaged women go from child to debutante/wife in a turn of a page - they don't get their own bildungsroman, they just figure in someone else's.
I have a lot more to say on this subject - in fact, I could go on forever - but I'll draw my line now. Maybe I'll flip a coin to decide my third Girl Protagonist book - between Cracked Up to Be and a Dessen.
And then came the true Mission: finding a realist novel from the last 25 years or so, with a female protagonist, that wasn't a Trauma Novel, and/or wasn't about Boys.
I still have not settled on my third title. I skimmed bestseller lists and some blogs (teenreads, etc), always eliminating the Twilight related crap (it's fantasy, after all) and used that, plus my knowledge of what teenage girls buy at the bookstore to compile my collection of titles. Here, in no particular order, are the Girl YA books I have read since July:
Greengage Summer - Rumer Godden
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
Fly on the Wall - E. Lockhart
The Boy Book - E. Lockhart
Tam Lin - Pamela Dean
Fire and Hemlock - Diana Wynne Jones
Hexwood - Diana Wynne Jones
The Boyfriend List - E. Lockhart
The Treasure Map of Boys - E. Lockhart
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist - David Levithan and Rachel Cohn
Pop Princess - Rachel Cohn
The A-List - Zoey Dean
The Clique - Lisi Harrison
Keeping the Moon - Sarah Dessen
Sweethearts - Sara Zarr
Cracked Up to Be - Courtney Summers
Story of a Girl - Sara Zarr
Chasing Boys - Karen Tayleur
Getting Lost with Boys - Hailey Abbott
I Was a Non-Blonde Cheerleader - Kieran Scott
None of these satisfy me. the Judy Blume is, admittedly, a classic, but I felt mortified reading it - all the talk of bras and periods! ook. NOT my cup of tea, and almost certainly guaranteed to make everyone in my class uncomfortable (I have a lot of freshmen). On top of that, I don't know, really, what to DO with it, and it feels outdated. I don't want to spend half my life explaining tiny details about being alive in the 70s and grappling with my students' protests of "it's not relatable!!!"
Cracked Up to Be was surprisingly good, but was a whanger of a Trauma Book. Keeping the Moon was all right, and not a trauma story (not really, though in part it was about getting over Being Fat). It's just not as meaty as I'd like it to be. I'm contemplating a Dessen novel, though, because they're very popular, and while they are often about Boys, they are also (in my limited experience) also about friendships and family and self-discovery.
Tam Lin was incredible, absolutely fantastic, and helped me to (finally) truly understand and appreciate Fire & Hemlock. Both are out of the running due to length and complexity, and the fact that the source text(s) will break brains.
The A-List, The Clique and Getting Lost with Boys were absolutely reprehensible. Appalling. Badly written, hideously plotted, full of nasty unpleasant characters. Grrrrross.
I wanted to like Nick & Norah, but I felt irritated by it instead. I thought Norah was kind of a bitch, and Nick oddly emptied of personality.
The rest were all mediocre to middling. Chasing Boys wasn't especially about chasing boys, and that ended up making it relatively decent. Sweethearts was very odd and more than a little creepy; Story of a Girl was depressing, but valuable in that it concerns lower-class protagonists (which, frankly, after the A-List and the Clique, I was happy to encounter).
But there are certain formulae, certain tropes, that show up over and over and over and over, even in the best of these books: a New, Attractive Boy shows up, the protagonist fights with friends, the protagonist relocates and is the New, Attractive Girl, the protagonist struggles over some mysterious past trauma that is revealed slowly in flashbacks, or not until the very end of the book. The Journey Of Self-Discovery, in all of these books, happens through relationships - friends and Boys, occasionally formerly-estranged parents - with very little introspection. The characters live through events and dialogue, not through narration (think of Speak, then imagine the opposite).
By contrast, the Boy books I've read seem to focus much more on that interior monologue introspective narration. Events are important, and people are important, but it isn't through their relationships that the boys really change or learn anything. I hate to say this, and I hope I am making a gross generalization, but the Boy books seem more intellectual, while the Girl books are more emotional.
So I'm now reaching the end of my rope. I've read scads of mostly-terrible books, I've encountered way too many cute boys with hair falling into their eyes, eyes which are always blue or green (as are protagonist's eyes, when described), boys who somehow manage to be wise and caring and empathic and helpful to Protagonist girls with serious Issues. Often the boys are named Jake, or they have slightly more hip or nontraditional names: Tyler, Noel, Ethan, Cameron, Dylan, Liam. It's a fluke or a freak when a nice normal Paul or Daniel or Jason turns up.
I can rattle off Trauma scenarios in my sleep, I can identify love triangles before they've been formed, I can spot the Boy Who Turns Out to be A Jerk from a mile off, I can spot the Nice but Nerdy Boy who Turns Hot over a summer from several miles off. I know the Girl Heroine will learn to have Self-Confidence, will Patch Things Up with her siblings/parents/step-parents, will learn valuable lessons about living in the today because of her dead sibling/parent/friend, will stop drinking or cutting or skipping school, will, with the Love of the Nice, Cute Boy whose hair falls into his eyes, turn an eager, happy face to a shining future of awesomeness.
PUKE PUKE PUKE.
Obviously, these very cliches and stereotypes are worth thinking about, and it's making me root for Dessen, though frankly, Cracked Up to Be was probably the most interesting/best written of the list.
But this experience has made me think seriously about the bildungsroman, and its maleness; male protagonists come of age regardless of the relationships around them. Girls come of age because of those relationships. I also felt a tiny bit of shock when I tried to think historically, pre-1900, of representations of adolescents. Other than the occasional Little Women, or The Daisy Chain, the single strong protagonist bildungsroman seems to be a very exclusively male genre. Even Little Women and The Daisy Chain track the progress of a group of siblings, not a single strong character. But teenaged women go from child to debutante/wife in a turn of a page - they don't get their own bildungsroman, they just figure in someone else's.
I have a lot more to say on this subject - in fact, I could go on forever - but I'll draw my line now. Maybe I'll flip a coin to decide my third Girl Protagonist book - between Cracked Up to Be and a Dessen.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
comparative YA
I'm bingeing on YA novels this week, in a mad effort to read, or re-read, everything in order to plan my syllabus and get my book order submitted for my Representing Adolescence class. It's very hard to decide how one wants to represent Representing Adolescence, and I have far more ideas than I do weeks in the semester. Winnowing out, and developing some coherence from what remains, is the real challenge.
I just finished The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, which is and is not a YA book, but certainly does represent a certain kind of adolescence. I enjoyed the book but don't plan teaching it; other considerations aside, I know my students would just fall apart at all the British slang (and this despite the American edition "glossary" in the back of the book).
Not much to say about Adrian Mole at the moment except the experience of reading it was very like my experience of reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The britishness, yes, the split-parents sideplot, but more than anything, the painfully naive narrators. Any book where the reader knows more than the narrator - or rather, understands more than the narrator - is both endlessly fascinating to me, and intensely painful. it makes me feel dreadfully sorry for the narrators, because it's so clear that they don't get what's going on, and everyone else around them does. And so the narrators become unwitting butts of every joke imaginable.
Cringe-worthy and empathy-inducing. But still good, and fascinating, because of all the codes and nuances that the reader must be able to decipher to produce the effect of the unknowing narrator. These kinds of books are maybe the clearest example, to my mind, of the way that both author and reader construct the novel - because the effect of the book depends on the reader knowing more than the narrator. If she doesn't, if she and the narrator are precisely in the same place, then the book is entirely different.
amazing, amazing. But now I have to scurry into reading some girlie girl books - I have The A-List and The Boyfriend Book on tap. I'm learning an awful lot about YA and gender: books with boy protagonists are all about the boy protagonists; books with girl protagonists are all about boys, in one way or another. This is obviously not an absolute, brightline categorization; but it does seem to be an awfully substantial trend. We'll pick it apart in class. I'm so excited about teaching this class it is almost pathetic.
I just finished The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend, which is and is not a YA book, but certainly does represent a certain kind of adolescence. I enjoyed the book but don't plan teaching it; other considerations aside, I know my students would just fall apart at all the British slang (and this despite the American edition "glossary" in the back of the book).
Not much to say about Adrian Mole at the moment except the experience of reading it was very like my experience of reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The britishness, yes, the split-parents sideplot, but more than anything, the painfully naive narrators. Any book where the reader knows more than the narrator - or rather, understands more than the narrator - is both endlessly fascinating to me, and intensely painful. it makes me feel dreadfully sorry for the narrators, because it's so clear that they don't get what's going on, and everyone else around them does. And so the narrators become unwitting butts of every joke imaginable.
Cringe-worthy and empathy-inducing. But still good, and fascinating, because of all the codes and nuances that the reader must be able to decipher to produce the effect of the unknowing narrator. These kinds of books are maybe the clearest example, to my mind, of the way that both author and reader construct the novel - because the effect of the book depends on the reader knowing more than the narrator. If she doesn't, if she and the narrator are precisely in the same place, then the book is entirely different.
amazing, amazing. But now I have to scurry into reading some girlie girl books - I have The A-List and The Boyfriend Book on tap. I'm learning an awful lot about YA and gender: books with boy protagonists are all about the boy protagonists; books with girl protagonists are all about boys, in one way or another. This is obviously not an absolute, brightline categorization; but it does seem to be an awfully substantial trend. We'll pick it apart in class. I'm so excited about teaching this class it is almost pathetic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
