New Century Reading

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt is yet another YA book that gave me a lump in my throat, just like The Fault in our Stars. What's up with that? Reading never used to make me teary. Is this a symptom of perimenopause??

I think it also has something to do the author's note: "It warms my heart that most of the time the facts of the world would have fit my story just right. But on those occasions where they haven't, I've taken the liberty of tailoring them--as gently as possible--to suit." So--is this autobiographical? The Fault in our Stars had a similar disclaimer. Maybe that's what makes both books feel all too real to me.

Wolves has a 14-year-old narrator, June, a social misfit whose only true friend is her uncle, the artist Finn Weiss. But it's 1987, and Finn is dying of a newly discovered, not-much-talked-about disease. At his funeral, a man appears outside the church, much to the consternation of June's mother (Finn's sister). June soon learns more about that man when he reaches out to her and she learns that there was someone else who loved Finn and misses him as much as she does.

There's so much to like about this book. It catches that time period very well. It's a devastating portrait of a family trying to cope with homosexuality and AIDS, and all filtered through June's adolescent lens, but also through a griever's lens. Particularly striking is her relationship with her older sister, Greta, who's a bit of a golden girl. Yet author Brunt manages to describe Greta from June's point of view in such a way that even though Greta often behaves badly and says terrible things to June, and June herself doesn't understand why, the reader does.

In the end, June learns a great deal, about herself, Greta, and her mother and uncle's relationship. These are hard lessons at any time of life, but at age 14, it's even more poignant: "Then I told [Greta] everything I knew about our mother. All the jealousy and sadness. All the meanness that could come out of loving someone too much."

I think I need to create a new category for this blog, labeled "Lump-in-Throat Books".

My thanks to Dial Press for sending me a review copy.

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower

 

 

I guess this is a little bit of a carry-over from the Shelf Discovery Project this summer. I remember reading this book over and over as a kid. I didn't have my own copy, but checked it out many, many times from my school library.

Miss Happiness and Miss Flower are two Japanese dolls that have been abandoned for a while, until Nona and Belinda's Great Aunt Lucy mails them all the way from the U.S. to where the cousins live in Britain. Nona is a recent arrival at Belinda's house; she was born in India, but after her mother died, she was sent to live with Belinda's family. Nona is horribly homesick and scared of everything in England. But when the dolls arrive, they give her a purpose and something to focus on: she must have a Japanese dollhouse for them to live in, a very proper one with a garden and sliding screens and mats and tiny teacups (with green tea, because that's what they drink in Japan).

Along the way, her quest for the dollhouse draws in her older cousins, who help her research, build, and outfit the house, as well as a schoolmate whose mother provides bits of fine fabrics for the house, and even a gruff, geezer-y bookseller who takes a shine to Nona when she tells him she would never touch a book without washing her hands first.

You can probably figure out where this is all going: Nona comes out of her shell, makes friends, becomes happier to be in England. But in a nice, and likely very realistic, twist, cousin Belinda becomes very jealous of the attention Nona gets and finally strikes back.

This is just such a sweet book. I can see why I loved it as a kid: how exotic, a girl born in India who moved to England and researched a Japanese dollhouse! I'm not sure why I never asked my dad to build me a dollhouse like that, given that there are pretty explicit instructions in the back of the book. I'd also forgotten about the Star Festival, held on the "evening of the seventh day of the seventh month", which happens to be my birthday--shoot, wish I'd read this earlier this summer!

Best of all is the story of the dolls themselves, who long for someone to understand them and love them. It brought to mind this, from the wonderful Toy Story 2:

 

OK, excuse me while I go off and sniffle for a while. Anyone read any of Godden's adult books? I've only read her children's books and loved them.

Shelf Discovery Part Final

OK, I missed the last two weeks, but Girl Detective said it was the kind of read-along project where you could join in as much or as little as you want, so that's awesome. And--she might do it again next summer! Which would be even better, as there were books I wanted to read but didn't get to.

I did, however, get to this one:

And if you want to see what I thought about it--and I had a lot to say--you can see my guest post on Girl Detective's blog here.

Summer of Shelf Discovery

Chapter 7 of Lizzie Skurnick's Shelf Discovery is all about the supernatural. This was something I loved as a kid. Superhuman abilities, ghosts, UFOs, witches, anything that fell in the category was something I wanted to read. I still have my copy of A Gift of Magic (fortunately, so I didn't have to suffer the updated version). In fact, I have this cover, and if you look closely at the upper right-hand corner, you'll see it cost 75 cents. Wow.

A Gift of Magic is about Nancy Barrett, whose parents are divorcing and she, her brother and sister, are now living with their mother in their grandmother's home in Florida (grandma's been dead for years). Grandma had some interesting qualities, and on her deathbed she made some unique gifts: to Kirby, Nancy's older sister, the gift of dance; to younger brother Brendon (who hadn't even been born then), the gift of music; and to Nancy, who looks like Grandma, the gift of magic.

Nancy doesn't realize she even has a gift. She just thinks it's her way, how she can tell when things are going to happen, who's calling when the phone rings, that sort of thing. But when a guidance counselor at her new school picks up on her ability and wants to test her, she starts doing some research and discovers that her talent is indeed special--and something she wants to keep to herself.

But just that amount of research also leads her to try things she's never tried before--like making things happen to other people. Say to that nice man who's started dating her mother. Or to her sister, whose obsession with dance may take her away from them. And maybe things don't turn out quite the way she thinks they should.

In Shelf Discovery, Skurnick talks about this book as different from many others in the category:

"For Lois Duncan, A Gift of Magic is...all the more striking for eschewing the trademark of her many other beloved novels (namely, being fucking terrifying). Instead, it takes an ordinary character dealing, as most of us were, with the changes of puberty right alongside changes in her family. In A Gift of Magic, there's no evil twin, no menacing stranger--only a girl who can see the past, future, and present far, far away, fighting witha  power she does not yet understand or control."

Although generally I liked my supernatural novels to be scary (even though the net result was often me hiding in terrorunder the covers late at night, wondering about that sound in the attic or that skittering in the walls), I loved this one, and found it a joy to revisit. I think I set aside my desire to be scared and replaced it with "what if this happened to me?" No scares, just turmoil, confusion, and fear of a different nature.

Summer of Shelf Discovery

Another delightful entry for the Shelf Discovery summer reading project. Kit Tyler, raised on the island of Barbados, becomes an orphan and ships herself off to Connecticut to find the only relatives she has left. This is in the pre-Revolutionary War era, and Connecticut turns out to be a far cry from the life she left behind in Barbados. It is also, unfortunately, an era of witchcraft accusations and trials.I went through a period of fascination with the early witch trials when I was in my teens, re-read The Crucible over and over, etc., so it's no surprise this was an early favorite. But it's still a pleasure to read again years later, even when that particular fascination has faded.

Girl Detective, as the host of this project, wrote about this book yesterday, and I don't have a lot to add. As she notes, there were some conventional and predictable plot points, but overall, it's so well done that I don't care. And it's a bit more sophisticated than I realized, especially in terms of characterization. Elizabeth George Speare took great care in developing some of her characters, especially Kit herself and her uncle Matthew, who seems to be an awful Puritanical type, but as we get to know him, we realize (as does Kit) the stressors and disappointments that make him the way that he is.

Speare does an excellent good job of creating Kit's culture shock:

"She didn't want to admit how disappointing she found this first glimpse of America. The bleak line of shore surrounding the gray harbor was a disheartening contrast to the shimmering green and white that fringed the turquoise bay of Barbados which was her home. The earthen wall of the fortification that faced the river was bare and ugly, and the houses beyond were no more than plain wooden boxes."

I wouldn't be too excited about leaving Barbados for that either.

Definitely happy I had the chance to revisit this book, and it's definitely a keeper.

Summer of Shelf Discovery

Well, this was a much-needed antidote to the horrors of Go Ask Alice.

Chapter 6 of Shelf Discovery is all about girls gone wild--but not in the spring break dodgy video way, but in the "girls left behind, or girls experiencing the wild world of nature on their own/for the first time, or experiencing a severe change of environment."

This is a sweet little story of Elizabeth Ann, raised by spinster aunts who love her, but treat her like a fragile specimen that might shatter if tapped too gently. When the older aunt becomes ill, the younger aunt sends Elizabeth Ann away while she nurses the elder. To Elizabeth Ann's horror, she's sent to the awful Putney cousins in Vermont, a family her aunt shudders to speak of.

But of course, the Putney cousins are delightfully down to earth and the horrors that Aunt Frances referred to ("The children had chores to do...as though they had been hired men!") turn out to be a world of wonder for the rechristened Betsy. She learns she's not nearly so fragile as previously supposed, and she learns about the joys of country life. Especially school, where her lack of math skills is not a huge concern for the teacher.

It's a charming book, predictable, but the charm overcomes that. And it's an anomaly in the books I've read so far in that the author, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, regularly inserts herself in as narrator. Her fondness for the foibles of all the characters, from the well-meaning aunts to the sometimes laconic Putneys, gives the book a warm and cozy feeling, much like Betsy's kitten Eleanor.

Recommended for anyone needing a palate cleanser after a distasteful book. Yes, I'm talking about you, Go Ask Alice.

The Fault in our Stars

This would be the perfect book for an updated Shelf Discovery in a few years, in the "Read 'em and Weep" chapter.

Seriously, I have got to stop reading books that make me cry. It used to be no book ever caused tears to well up. Is it because I'm getting older? Or is it these books about kids who die are more than I can handle as a parent? I don't know, but this book required kleenex at hand, even when it made me laugh at times.

But I do have to give props to author John Green for taking a difficult subject (kids with cancer) and not giving into schmaltz and sentimentality. There were points when I thought, oh no, he's not going to go down that cliched path, is he? And he didn't. It's clear that not all kids with cancer are perfect angels, nor are all the people who mourn them online completely genuine. Hazel sees all of this, just as she says how her parents are affected by her diagnosis, emotionally and financially.

This is not just a story of kids with cancer, it's about how families cope with a terminal diagnosis, and about how kids react to it and to each other. It's also about the very human need to matter and to be remembered--a big topic for a YA book, but Green handles it admirably.

The narrator, Hazel, has stage IV cancer ("Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs"), but an experimental treatment has bought her some time--not a lifetime, but a little extra. She's got a darkly humorous personality, and having finished her high school via GED, she takes classes at a community college and has become very well read.

Still, she's weak, needs to use an oxygen tank, and has pretty much given up the idea of a social life until her mother forces her to attend a cancer support group at church. It's an excruciating exercise in seeing the positive, and Hazel begs to quit, until Augustus Waters joins the group.

It's a cliche to say that Augustus changes Hazel's life, but it's true, in unexpected ways. How he changes her life, I won't tell you--no spoilers. Let's just say that although this is a YA book, it's over 300 pages, and I read it in one day. Tears and all.

Hazel is at times a brave trooper, but other times she's overwhelmed. While visiting the Anne Frank Museum, she pores over a list of Holocaust victims:

"The book was turned to the page with Anne Frank's name, but what got me about it was the fact that right beneath her name there were four Aron Franks. Four. Four Aron Franks without museums, without historical markers, without anyone to mourn them. I silently resolved to remember and pray for the four Aron Franks as long as I was around. (Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don't.)"

There are little throwaway lines that are full of wry sadness, such as: "His mom and dad wheeled the chair downstairs...bouncing down crazily in a way that would have been dangerous if danger retained its relevance."

The other touching thing about this book, whether the author meant it to be or not, is the Author's Note at the beginning:

"This is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago: This book is a work of fiction. I made it up.

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."

An interesting contrast to the opening of Go Ask Alice, especially in light of the acknowledgements at the end, which pay tribute to Esther Earl. It's hard not to imagine this book might have been inspired by her, especially when it turns out they had a connection. This article describes Esther as having some similarities to Hazel (as well as the same middle name, Grace). But Hazel is her own character. Inspired or not, it's still a work of fiction. But a work of fiction that packs a wallop.

 

Summer of Shelf Discovery

When I started this reading project, I figured that some of the books I read were going to be as good, if not better, as they were when I read them as a kid. I figured some would not hold up as well. And I figured there was a risk that I'd run across at least one that horrified me.

I was dead on. I loved Harriet the Spy and Beat the Turtle Drum (and would have loved Summer of Fear if it hadn't been "updated"); I found Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret and Summer of My German Soldier to not be quite as good as I remembered, but still worth a visit. Today, Go Ask Alice wins the dubious honor of being the book that horrified me.

Actually, pissed me off might be a better term than horrified. And pissed off at the younger me for having bought into this stinking pile of crap when I was a teen. Yes, yes, I remind myself that I was much younger, not as well read, not as knowledgeable, etc. But still--I thought this was as good as Anne Frank's Diary? What? Really, teenaged me? These two diaries aren't apples and oranges, they're apples and orangutans.

But I'm also pissed off at the publishing industry at the time for the sheer heights of manipulation. The book opens:

"Go Ask Alice is based on the actual diary of a fifteen-year-old drug user."

Um, no. And no.

I should have read Lizzie Skurnick's piece in Shelf Discovery before reading the book itself: "You are just going to feel dumb if you reread this debunked diary...BECAUSE IT IS TRULY THE WORST-WRITTEN BOOK IN THE WORLD."

It's anti-drug propaganda, horribly written, designed to try and scare kids off drugs. I guess you could say it worked with me, but that may have had more to do with lack of access. (The area where I grew up is now teeming with meth problems, but back then, drinking was the big issue.) As I read it this week, my incredulity mounted with each page. I think this may have been written by some Nancy Reagan "just say no" type who never really had a teenaged life.

There are pages and pages of lengthy descriptions of her highs, but little mention of her social life. There's a passing reference to "Guess what! I woke up as a Satanic priestess this morning", but it's never mentioned again. After trying all kinds of drugs, including LSD, she finally reaches the pinnacle she's been waiting for: pot! Best of all, after turning her life around and getting off drugs, she dies of an overdose.

Take that, you kids who are even thinking about doing drugs. No happy endings for you.

Apparently Go Ask Alice was "edited" by one Beatrice Sparks, who seems to have had considerable access to diaries of troubled teens. Besides Alice, she also "edited" diaries from kids who supposedly 1. were homeless; 2. were taken advantage of sexually by their teacher; 3. got pregnant; 4. got into drugs and Satan worship (but a boy this time); 5. were dying of AIDS. Wow, Ms. Sparks, that's some company you keep.

A horribly written book, and a book that blatantly lied to me as a teen. In recent years, the publisher has labeled it as fiction, and the library shelved it that way too, but that opening page, with its "based on an actual diary", makes me very, very angry. I don't like finding out 35 years later that a book that was so pivotal to my reading is actually a fraud. And it makes me angry that it's still in print, and still being presented as an "actual diary", even if it's shelved in fiction. Today's teens deserve better than that. In fact, I was so angry that I may have--I'm not saying I did--but I may have--used my nice black gel pen to write "Not according to Snopes.com" under the "actual diary" note.

But, if you still want to pursue it, YouTube has the full movie available. Bonus: William Shatner plays the girl's dad, and Andy Griffith is a kindly priest. I guess Beatrice Sparks saved the diary from the kid abused by a priest for a different book.

 

Summer of Shelf Discovery

This week's chapter of Shelf Discovery covered the "Read 'Em and Weep" books--books that made us cry, or at least very, very sad. I loved books like this. I was kind of a morbid adolescent, who liked to sit around thinking deep thoughts about things like death. Two books in particular stuck out of this chapter's listings, books I read over and over and over again.

I found on rereading that they held up well. In fact, they didn't just hold up, but they resonated with me on a completely different level as an adult, especially as a parent. As Shelf Discovery author Lizzie Skurnick notes in her intro to this chapter, "What we have, instead, is a bunch of straightforward works that address, head-on, the difficulty of the world--revolutionary not because they show how it's different for the young, but because they show how often it's not." Later she says, "But as much as I'm interested in pinpointing the 'lessons' of these books, these authors, thank God, are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, they are fully caught up in the narrative, in drawing characters whose actions are as surprising or disappointing to us as they are to the, who do the best they have with what's left over, the kind of redemption no one welcomes but everyone has to accept." It seems to me you could use that to describe some excellent literature for adults.

Beat the Turtle Drum by Constance Greene was my first book of the week. Spoiler alert--if you didn't already guess it from the theme of this post--there's a major death in this book.

The death is of Kate's younger sister. Kate is almost 13, Joss just turned 11 when she falls from a tree to her sudden death. I'm trying to think of how to describe this slim (119 pages) book. It's told very simply from Kate's perspective. She wants to be a writer and so, like Harriet the Spy, she writes down as much as she can. Unlike Harriet, she's mostly kind in her assessments, but like Harriet, she doesn't make excuses for people.

Two-thirds of the book is in the month leading up to Joss's birthday. She's saving her money to rent a horse. Kate details their summer together, their interactions with other kids, Joss's devotion to setting up the garage just right for the horse she gets to keep for a week. Everything is told in a very straightforward way. This is just an average family, going about its average life. Then Kate says: "For the rest of my life, if ever again I'm totally happy, which is doubtful, or completely sure I'm immortal, I'll be afraid that something terrible is about to happen. Because that's the way it was that last week with Joss."

And that's when my personal bout of waterworks began. I never cried when reading this as a kid. I think I romanticized the idea of death. I'd been to funerals, but they were all of old people, mostly people I didn't know very well. Now, as an adult who's had to attend funerals of people who died far too young, and with kids of my own, this story devastated me. In reading about the author, it seems the story drew from personal experience with her sister. There's no happy ending here--how can there be?

The title comes from  a poem by Ian Serraillier: "O dance along the silver sand,/And beat the turtle drum,/That youth may last for ever/And sorrow never come."

I think this is a book that should be read by all ages, and especially for tweens/teens who have experienced a similar loss.

Hey! That's Kristy McNichol on the cover! Remember her? I'm sure I saw the movie of this, but I don't remember it. The book, though--it's another one I read a thousand times as a kid. I can't honestly say it held up quite as well as Beat the Turtle Drum, though.

Patty Bergen is a Jewish, 12-year-old misfit whose parents really don't seem to like her. She lives in a small town outside of Memphis during WWII. A bunch of German prisoners of war are brought to a nearby work camp. One of them escapes, and Patty finds him, and in him, the friend she never thought she had.

However, being a German POW in a small US town, the chances of him escaping entirely are not that good, and there you have it.

What seemed like a romantic, noble tale when I was 12 at times now seems melodramatic and manipulative. There's very little subtlety in this book. Patty is long-suffering; her parents are simply awful (there's one scene that's supposed to explain her father's behavior, but it's soap-opera-ish at best); the family's black maid, Ruth, is the stereotypically loving black maid; and Anton, the German escapee, is just about impossibly good, really wanted no part of the War, kind of in a "why can't we all just get along?" kind of way.

It is certainly interesting that we have a WWII story featuring a Jewish girl harboring a German military escapee, who doesn't seem to have any grudges against Jews. In Lizzie Skurnick's discussion of the book in Shelf Discovery, she says: "Patty--and Ruth, and Anton--all have a funny kind of courage that is never recognized, the kind that never gets anyone the kind of medals brandished by the soldier herding the POW prisoners into the truck. Like the Jews in the concentration camps, they're not persecuted for what they do--they're persecuted for what they are. But somehow, horever much they are hated, they are still not people who can hate." I agree with this assessment, but wish the complexity implied in it had been one of the book's greater strengths.

With both books, I think as a kid I romanticized them, but as an adult, they're horrifying for different reasons. Beat the Turtle Drum is, of course, every parent's nightmare. There's nothing worse than the thought of your child dying. Summer of My German Soldier was more horrifying in a literary sense--as in, "I loved this back in the day? Really??"

Verdict: read--if you can--Beat the Turtle Drum. Summer of My German Soldier, well...I'm not as enthused.

Summer of Shelf Discovery

Well, this week's book threw me for a loop, and not for any reason I'd ever have imagined.

This is a 1970s classic. Lois Duncan wrote several books about teens and put them in danger, sometimes physical, sometimes supernatural. I devoured her books as a young adolescent. I loved being terrified, and she was darned good at it.

Still is. Summer of Fear holds up very, very well by itself. In a nutshell: Rachel and her family (parents, two brothers) live a comfortable and happy life in Albuquerque until Rachel's aunt and uncle die suddenly, and their only daughter, Julia, comes to live with them. Everyone but Rachel adores Julia. Which is why no one but Rachel suspects there's something not quite right about Julia, something sinister, something deadly...

Awesome, right? It's a page-turner, even for this adult.

But.

This edition? Made me want to cry. It's a 2011 reissue, and apparently Duncan has decided that she should update several of her most popular titles to be more current with today's technology, etc. Be more relevant to those mod, groovy kids. And so this edition has forced-in references to email, cell phones, digital cameras, Photoshop, and Harry Potter.

The problem with this is that it's done in a very half-assed way. It's as if Duncan thought that if she sprinkled a few quick references here and there, voila! Twenty-first century novel. But it doesn't work that way. Let's face it--changes in technology have affected our lifestyles in profound ways, affected our thinking, the way we socialize with each other, the way we work in the world.

Even though these things now show up, they stick out for how out of place they are, and seeing them just raises additional questions. If the primary characters in this book are ages 15-17, why don't any of them mention the internet? Google? Facebook? No one has a Facebook page???

At one point, Rachel mentions her mom took her cell phone away. Like that would stop any enterprising teen--good grief, they *all* have cell phones. When she begins to suspect that Julia has otherworldly powers, what does Rachel do--Google it? Oh, no. Nope, she goes to the library and checks out some books. Because that's totally what a 15-year-old today would think to do first.

Three teenage girls go clothes shopping at the mall, and not one of them sends a text. Heck, none of them even receives a text, because none of them seem to have a cell phone. Ever seen a gaggle of teen girls at the mall? What are the chances at least one of them isn't going to be glued to her phone?

You know what else they do with their phones? They take pictures. Photos play a major role in this book, and ignoring today's cell phone camera culture is ludicrous. I have a vision of a 16-year-old girl today reading this book and coming upon Rachel's suspicion that Julia won't show up in a photo because she's a witch. I think the first thing that girl is going to say is, "Well, look her up on Facebook! Take a picture with your phone!"

My disbelief was so far from being suspended that I cast a jaundiced eye on Rachel's mom, supposedly a professional photographer with an extensive career working with magazines the likes of Seventeen and (another late addition) American Girl. But with a jaunty "Rachel's mom doesn't like digital cameras" dismissal, all of her work is done with film and negative and developed in her darkroom before being mailed to the magazines. Why do I have a really hard time buying that in 2012?

There's a short interview with Duncan at the end of the book:

"The biggest challenge in updating these stories and bringing them into the present day was the dramatic change in technology since the time they were written...I had to find ways of getting rid of those communicative devices in book after book."

Mrs. Duncan, it is not so simple. To really make this book be set today, you would have to do more than toss in a couple of tech tools and then have someone's mom take them away. You would have to change the plot significantly. There's no way Rachel would turn to the public library first. She'd be online, researching. Or even if she went to the library, if her family didn't have a computer (not likely, given that the family seems pretty progressive and well to do), she'd start with a computer there. She would text people. She would try to find Julia online, look for her via Facebook. And oh, what Julia could do with Facebook!

Which leads me finally to the question of: why bother? Great books hold up regardless of when they were written. I don't hear a great outcry for Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca to be updated to 2012. Harriet the Spy works just fine without additional gadgets. You know why? Because the characters and plot are so interesting that we're willing to go back in time. GIve today's teens some credit--I think they might be interested in comparing and contrasting Rachel's actions in 1976 with how they'd handle it today, and honestly? It's scarier to think of Rachel having no cell, no internet, no Facebook to help her cope with the sinister Julia. It's a glimpse into another time and place, but with a situation that's timeless in how scary and frustrating it is.

If this book didn't belong to my local library, I would have heaved it across the room with all my might, so great was my disappointment. Thank goodness I still have my childhood copy of A Gift of Magic to read in a couple of weeks.