The One Summer

I thought I was going to end my class blogging with a saucy fairytale bang, but then I remembered I forgot to write about This One Summer.

Which, I suppose, is appropriate since summertime is creeping up on us, and I have declared, once again, that this year's summer is going to be perfect.

This One Summer takes us all back to a time when summer was an alternate reality: a place free from school, removed from the routine of everyday life, when a family goes to a lake or a cabin, and people become free.

Windy and Rose are summer friends: they meet only in summer, at the cabins in a resort town. They're just on the edge of being teenagers, and Rose is captivated by the older teens in the town. I loved the contrast between the real drama faced by the kids in the resort town, and the transient, dreamy quality of the drama that Rose and Windy experience. Mariko and Jillian Tamaki are showing us the edge of childhood, where we realize that the alternate reality of summertime is someone else's everyday reality, and soon it won't be a true escape for us either.

For myself, I remember going to cabins as a child. I remember things that only ever happened in summer, experiences and habits and treats that were reserved for long hot days and late nights on the lake.

Then I grew up, and those all faded away. Summertime is just like any time, now.

So much of this story is told through the art. As opposed to El Deafo, where the text is very dense, much of This One Summer is without text. We watch Windy and Rose move through the space: swimming, running, dancing, and creeping around the edge of the real-life problems that have crept into their summertime space.

I loved lingering on the artwork, because I could remember glimpses from my childhood, and I could also remember snatches of things that I experienced as an adult: Walking down a hot road in my pajamas in the dark. Sitting and looking at the stars. Driving my car in the twilight. Walking along train tracks, climbing abandoned grain elevators, sitting on rooftops. We test our freedom in the summer, no matter our age. We want to be wild, with our hearts bursting and our bodies free.

I think this book is suitable for any age. Younger readers will read up, and catch that glimpse of teenage drama, not understanding it, just as Rose and Windy are confused. Older readers will perhaps remember their youth. Everyone will read it with a longing for summertime to come, and for hot evenings and sparkling water in the day.

Savor this book, when you read it. And savor your summertime.

Poisoned Apples - eat them

Poetry is one of those things that I never seek out, yet usually enjoy when it's foisted upon me.

Christine Hepperman's Poisoned Apples was one such collection of poetry, and I think it might be the second poetry book I actually buy (the first was a collection of Baudelaire, in case you were wondering).

You may recall how much I ended up liking Far Far Away, a modern fairytale. You may, if you know me a little better, know that I've become a bit mouthier about feminism in recent years, and less amused about winding up with the short end of the "Bitches be crazy" stick.

You may, perhaps, also feel this way about feminism and creepy fairy tales, and if so, you may just enjoy Poisoned Apples, all the way from the curl of your hair to the tips of your witchy toes.

The poems in Poisoned Apples are exactly that -- poisonous. We people -- both women and men -- experience poison in our (North American, first world, somewhat puritanical) society. We have poisonous ideas about how we should treat each other, how we should look or act or dress, and Poisoned Apples addresses these ills. The author says in her note that in her mind, reality and fairy tales blend together. We are all the heros and heroines of our own lives, after all, and sometimes the pain and sadness in our lives is so fantastic, it takes a fantastic, fairytale style to express it accurately.

A great majority of Hepperman's poems have to do with self-image, addressing anorexia, beauty, perfection, and existing as an object to be gazed upon and judged by others (and in the magic mirror, by yourself).

She isn't offering solutions, or stories where everything turns out alright.

She's illustrating the fantastic horror that is existing as a young woman, and doing so in the style that is most appropriate. Short, pithy, and almost cruel in snark, but always, always true.

I appreciate that truth in my poetry. I think a lot of young women, younger than myself, those who are currently living through those difficult teenage times, would appreciate it even more.

El Deafo

When I picked up my graphic novels for the week's readings, I had a choice to make: Which to read first? There was an assumption in my mind that all of them would read fairly quickly, so it was a question akin to "Which delicious candy shall I stuff in my face first?" rather than "What shall I have for dinner tonight, and then tomorrow night?"

El Deafo, by Cece Bell, is the Newberry Award-winning story of Cece as a child, growing up with a hearing aid after she lost her hearing due to illness. And let me tell you, friends, it is COLORFUL!  Flipping through my choices for the week, I was immediately drawn to the bright use of color on the pages, as well as the disregard for row after row of square panels. Cece's images completely fill the pages, or loop across them as the titular character imagines herself as El Deafo, the superhero, flying through the skies.

This is a story about children, and in some ways, aimed towards children, even though the text is very dense. The images are so vivid, and the characters -- all portrayed as rabbits -- are very relatable in their simplicity and style, and the message really focuses on the feelings of a young child who is struggling with being different.

But it's also important to remember, as an adult, that this is about a world where someone cannot hear. In this graphic novel, I really felt that the high level of detail and color in the pages was stepping in for the missing component, that of sound. How sound worked -- or didn't work -- for Cece was portrayed visually. We could see her being overwhelmed by sounds that were too loud through her hearing devices (most amusingly, hearing a giant, wet flush of a toilet), or frustrated by speech bubbles where words were over-enunciated or shouted in a misguided effort to communicate more effectively. She is saying to the reader, Look, look at how frustrating this is to read. See how this isn't helpful, even written on a page. It's not helpful when you're speaking, either. 

Even with all the color, and fun, and super-hero rabbits, there is a strong message in Bell's novel about how difficult it is for a child to be different, and how we all need to be able to find friends, and find our place in the social dynamics of school. This is a very cute story of a girl using her "super powers" of her hearing aids for good (and evil? Well, not evil, just some light mischief), and it's also the story of a child figuring out where she wants to fit within the spaces of hearing, deaf, and Deaf people.

In The Shadow of Blackbirds

I'll be honest: When I saw "Historical Fiction" as part of the set of novels for this week, I thought "Oh no."

It's not that historical fiction is bad, or that I have anything against history. I don't. I swear. It's more of the mucking around with history that sometimes grates on my nerves, just as some people enjoy mucking around with mythology, or spoofing Shakespeare. It can go really really well, or it can go terribly wrong, and it all depends on how dear to your heart you hold the source material. When we discussed the Romanov Family a few weeks ago, someone brought up a (fictional) book that written from the point of view of one of the (real) young men who had been in service to the family at the time when they were killed.

I like reading that kind of thing, as long as it doesn't take too many liberties, you know? Or tries so hard to force imaginary things into the canon of reality.

So when I opened In The Shadow Of Blackbirds and found that the heroine was called Mary Shelley Black, of course I went straight to Google to see if she was supposed to be related to the real Mary Shelley. The first result was straight from the horse's mouth -- Cat Winters says on her blog that she is not, and it is only one of her many references to Frankenstein. Happily, there are also authors notes in the book to help parse out what is real and what isn't.

A quick note about Cat Winters's blog: at the top are three book covers for her novels: In The Shadow of Blackbirds, The Cure for Dreaming, and The Uninvited. I haven't read the latter two, but I was definitely put off by the cover of Blackbirds (and I'm CRAZY for the cover of Dreaming. It's super creepy looking). The font, and the heroine wearing steam-punk goggles around her neck (even though it's not about steam-punk, but her love of aviation) was very off-putting. But then again I am not in the target age range for this book, and I did enjoy the book so perhaps I should shut up.

This novel would be terrific for anyone who remembers that Edward Cullen was dying of Spanish influenza when he was made into a vampire in the Twilight series.  Not that this is like the Twilight series, but it is a very stylized supernatural book about a real time in history. Never mind that there is rampant spiritualism mixed with emerging science, and never mind the ghost character (are ghosts real history? That's a creepy question you can answer all on your own), and never mind the gauze masks and the real war and death that is happening around Mary -- it was the spiritualism photographs that really grabbed me and creeped me out, but also gave a lot of color (in black and white) to the story and the time period. 

The mood was the strongest point for me in this novel, it was a bit spooky without being outright horrific. I was impressed with the format of the novel, with its highly stylized typeface, page decorations, and chapter headings. 

Blackbirds, and Chasing Shadows (which I have yet to review, sorry!) both grabbed me by incorporating mixed media in with the novel. Photographs reminded me also of the Family Romanov novel -- in those types of historical nonfiction novels, I'll always flip to the photo section in the middle first, to help get a visual grasp of what I'm reading. 

 Are you like that?

It's not just children who need pictures you know!!

How It Went Down

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon was published in 2014. Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in 2012. I wouldn't have been surprised if this story took place before Trayvon Martin.  We just weren't paying attention before then. Not like we should have been.

At the Native American panel that I attended a few weeks ago, I asked blogger Debbie Reese about why we were only really publicly seeing the outrage now, in the age of social media. Why is it that these issues of white people shooting minorities and people of color, of racism in our children's books, has taken so long to be a daily part of discourse?

It's social media, she said. Social media is huge in giving people voices, in making complex issues into retweetable, bite-sized chunks that can be quickly disseminated. It keeps the conversation going.

While reducing huge issues like this to little bites is problematic, it's important to have that conversation be a part of our everyday. Especially when your everyday doesn't include a bunch of racism directed straight at your face, because you are in a position of power. I'm at a certain disadvantage because I'm a woman. I'm at a huge advantage because I'm white and it's important to be aware of where you stand. Of who you're standing on to be where you are.

In How It Went Down, Tariq Johnson is shot and killed by a white man as part of a small misunderstanding. We never hear his voice, but each chapter is told in the voice of someone who was there, or who was connected to him, or who will profit or be ruined by his death. Some are touched only tangentially, some directly. There is, unfortunately, but honestly, no resolution for Tariq. Nobody goes to jail. No justice is served. Nobody is shown as escaping the neighborhood, or becoming any better or worse despite having the entire community in upheaval. Magoon shows how such a terrible can change the hearts of many people, yet the system will continue to roll onwards.

We are reminded to be suspicious of other's motivations, but also kind. We are all trying to do the best in our lives, to take care of ourselves and our families, given the opportunities that we can see. The characters in Magoon's story are very realistic in how they speak, act, and think. It's an appealing book because of this. The language is very close to that in street lit, but with more distinctive voices than the street lit that we read, and more realistic reactions to the events.

One of the key moments for me, which I think would touch some young readers as well, was the interaction between Will and his stepfather, who had "risen up" out of the bad neighborhood, and taken Will and his mother with him. He expects Will to do the same, and to dress nicely, and attend a good college. Will is smart, and wants an education, but spends his nights tagging and making street art in his old neighborhood. He knows where he came from, and doesn't want to forget or lose that part of his history. He tells all these reasons in his narration, and is trying to explain his actions and the pull that he feels after Tariq's death, and you have to trust his narration. His narration is all that you have until you hear his stepfather's voice, when his stepfather looks at Will and realized that what Will has been trying to say all along is "This could have happened to me".

This could happen to any young black man.

That's a truth so deep, so ingrained, it can't be said.

Will knew it so deep in himself, it couldn't be expressed in words. It was his truth. It's the truth for so many young men.

Fat Boy VS The Cheerleaders

We had author Swati Avasthi in class this week, talking about her book Chasing Shadows, however, similar to Carrie Mesrobian, Swati spent a lot of time talking with us about the issues brought up over the course of writing her books, in her case, gender and racial bias.

Author talks are fast becoming my favorite part of the class. They are unbelievably fascinating.

When we were talking about Perfectly Good White Boy and Sex and Violence, we had all agreed that we loved the character development, but speculated that most young adults wouldn't be quite so keen on books where nothing much actually happens. Swati, however, described for us the time when her young son slowed down on his reading intake, but didn't give up, and is still a strong reader. He reported that he was kept interested in reading because of books like The Hunger Games, that had female main characters, because although sports and action and "boy" books were fun to read, books starring girls would talk more about emotions, and he could relate to them.

This made me rethink my analysis of "They might not like it", because the male protagonists of Perfectly Good White Boy, Reality Boy, and Geoff Herbach's Fat Boy VS The Cheerleaders basically never shut up about their emotions. And, to their credit, in the latter two books, there is quite a fair amount of action and plot.

In Fat Boy, Gabe has a running, first-person narrative as he describes to his lawyer the events that led to him being arrested in front of Cub Foods (yes this is a Minnesota book -- although Google informs me that Cub also exists in Illinois). He's a funny, honest, reflective, and occasionally sad in his narration, and I wish I had listened to this as an audio book because it's perfect for that medium. As it stood, I took barely a day to read it. The pacing was quick, and the story interesting and compelling.

My favorite thematic part of the novel was that it validated everybody. The cheerleaders weren't demonized because they wanted to cheer and dance around -- Gabe wants them to cheer, and wants the band kids to do band stuff, and the jocks to play sports, and everybody to do what they're passionate about, without feeling bad, or lesser.

It's a common theme with kids: observe any siblings bickering in public, and it's usually along the lines of one kid deliberately destroying the happiness of the other kid, simply because the first kid is unhappy/bored/can't stand seeing their annoying kid sister be happy for getting to hold onto a stupid shopping basket. Gabe recognizes that style within his father -- that anything where his father gets involved will be "ruined", because his father want to get involved, and will then bring it down, back to his level. It's unclear if this is intentional or not, but over the course of the book I really did believe that his dad was using the "my wife left me" card as a pass to be really emotionally abusive. The problem with that sort of emotional abuse is that there is no evidence. It's so subtle that it flies under the radar.

 Herbach shows us a model of kid recognizing that the happiness of two separate groups are not mutually exclusive. That you don't have to tear someone else down in order to bring yourself up, and that's a super powerful message for kids, especially those who are in high school -- and since kids read up, this book would be perfect for middle-school age kids, who are just getting ready to do battle with their high-school years.

Perfectly Good White Boy & Reality Boy

Busy couple of weeks, pals.

Next on the chopping block is Carrie Mesrobian's Perfectly Good White Boy. Let me preface this all by saying that Carrie came to speak to my class, and she was brilliant, and super real, and I am super into her approach to young adults, and people in general, and how life can be kind of sucky and how our approach to sex is totally misguided and weird. ALSO, I won a copy of Sex and Violence in a drawing we had, so let's just say I'm pretty biased in Carrie Mesrobian's favor.

Reigning it all back in, however, I can still say with complete neutrality that Perfectly Good White Boy is a perfectly good read indeed.

...which is interesting to say about a story where not much happens. There is no big plot arc. No mission, no saving the world or fighting The Man. According to the inside jacket flap, it's a "powerful and wrenching portrait of a teenage boy on the precipice of the new American future". I think if I was to take this novel, and also my other recent read (Reality Boy) as indicators of the future of America, I would say this: America has gotten to the point where it doesn't need to strive in any particular direction, and so we are all standing about. All that extra time we have on our hands, thanks to robots and microwaves, only serves to illustrate the fact that we have no idea what the hell we are doing.

It's one thing to look at life and see opportunities. It's another thing to be told you have so many opportunities, and to to realize that if it doesn't matter what you choose, then all those opportunities and possibilities are, to borrow from the jacket flap yet again, "disposable".

Oh, I've made myself depressed just writing that.

At any rate, in the story of a Perfectly Good White Boy, not much happens. The White Boy in question, Sean, attends his final year of high school, where the only "What will happen??!" plot line was if he was going to successfully join the Marines without his mom finding out (spoiler: she doesn't find out until he tells her). There is an absent, alcoholic father, but he doesn't cause any trouble. There is a wedding being planned throughout the whole novel, but it goes off without a hitch. The characters do drugs and have sex, but nothing really bad happens because of it.

The best part, for me, was the relationships that Sean and Neecie have. Sean hooks up with a hot girl over the summer, but she dumps him with the "possibilities and unknown future" speech right before she goes to college, but then continues to sleep with him on the DL when she's at home, depressed. Neecie is the secret side piece for a popular jock, and it makes her feel terrible because of how he treats her, but she can rationalize it with the idea that she "knows him" and he's "opened up to her". I should mention that these are not quotes from the book, but lines that you will hear over and over again from women who have become emotionally and sexually entangled with a man who, while he may indeed be vulnerable and in need of her compassion, is also treating her like he's ashamed of her outside the bedroom, and making her and her needs feel unimportant and unloved. But she'll keep coming back to him.

I knew I would love this book when Hallie was not-breaking-up-breaking-up with Sean just after sex, with a really shitty "It's not you it's me and don't you see" speech, and instead of being present or engaging in her little fantasy of emotional detachment, he was fantasizing about what she would do if he just pushed her out of the car and drove home. And what would it be like if he left her with her shoes, or should he take her shoes? But he would probably leave her phone, because he wanted her to suffer, but not come to real harm. And so on... I laughed out loud, because I have definitely had that moment, when I was trapped in a space with someone, and they decided that would be the perfect time to say something awful and hurtful in a kind way, and I just had a rage-blackout fantasy about doing something really extreme in response.

Hahahaha, I'm still laughing. It's like the scene in Silver Linings Playbook where Jennifer Lawrence decides she isn't going to sit there in the diner and listen to Bradley Cooper judge her and tell her she's crazy, and so she just destroys the table and storms out.

Spoiler: Sean doesn't leave Hallie on the side of the road, he drives her home like he's supposed to.

I think a lot of high school age and early college age kids would find these relationships reflected in their own lives. At least, that's what I said in class, mumbling down into my lap at the end about "Don't we all continue to make these really shitty choices because we're starving for affection?" Maybe it's just me, but I don't think it is. Also, I'm nearly 30, so that should speak to the longevity of this type of story. I kept forgetting that I was supposed to be reading about a White Boy. This was about Perfectly Good Humans (even though to the best of my knowledge, all the characters were white. Whiteish. Or unknown). I think making crappy choices and having sex are two things that people do almost universally when they are young. And old. Carrie was big on the idea that we can have sex without being bad people, and that we deserve happy relationships and that the two don't always go hand in hand like we want them to. It's not the Demon Sex that makes you sad, it's the non-relationship that makes you sad. Sex is never going to be as damning nor as redeeming as media and religion want you to believe.



The other book I read recently kept getting confused with Perfectly Good White Boy in my head, although the main bits of the story are unlike each other. In A.S. King's Reality Boy, Gerald has had severe anger issues for most of his life, possibly stemming from the fact that his eldest sister is a legitimate psychopath and has literally been trying to kill him and his other sister for most of their lives. The three siblings were stars of a Nanny-fixes-the-problem-family style reality show, and he has been immortalized on television as the kid who expressed his anger by pooping on everything. And now he is 16 and trying as hard as he can to distance himself from his evil sister, and his mother who doesn't love him or his good sister.

All the action, and relationships in this book were a little less realistic than Mesrobian's, but they didn't step too far away from reality. The love interest, Hannah, has her own family problems, which cause her to act almost as weird as Gerald, and causes the two of them to inadvertently hurt each other. But at the same time that they're fighting, she still needs a ride home. Have you ever had to do that, give someone a ride when you've both just been fighting? Sometimes you do it because you're a doormat. And sometimes you do it because you're still friends under all the personality conflicts, and a deeper part of you recognizes that.

I really enjoyed how the flawed characters showed how much they were trying to hold it together, but without hiding the fact that they are flawed people. Gerald and Hannah really are victims of their families, and they are also still children -- desperate to do right and be good. They embrace the fact that they are different, and hold on to the things that are important to them, but like all humans, they are reaching out for a connection to someone else despite the quirks that might get in the way.

Also, I devoured this book because I was anxious to see if the evil characters would get their comeuppance. Spoiler: they don't really, but it was more gratifying to see the good characters escape and be granted their own lives, rather than to see vile punishments get doled out.

Grave Mercy

part of me hopes that "Robin LaFevers" isn't a pen name, because it's pretty awesome. 

I blasted through Robin LaFevers' Grave Mercy in 2 afternoons. It was one of those books that dances on the edge of being really silly or unbelievable, and toes the line of cheesy young lady romance books. Don't hate, but I love that sort of thing. I love that the heroine is obsessed with killing everybody, but only if her Saint commands it. I love that she hates the hero and keeps hoping for an excuse to kill him, until the inevitably end up making out, because duh, why else have they been thrown together? When I haven't got anything better to do with my mind or my imagination, I live for that cheap thrill, that tension of two prickly and likable characters trapped in a situation that forces them to work together and then make out. Typing that makes me laugh, but it's true.

I love that it takes place in the Brittany region of France, where the story of Saints and mysterious convents with magical powers and poisons is just believable enough in a medieval setting. Let's face it, that sort of "Gallic/Roman religious & political conflict starring a young woman with magical powers" story has been done to death, but when you remove everything to France, you can at least breathe one last gasp of interesting breath into it. And people get to swear in French all the time, which is fun.

This was a refreshing book because it was a reminder of how I felt devouring books as a child -- understanding that they were not high literature, but enjoying them just the same. Knowing that it would be all over in an afternoon, but racing along for my own satisfaction.

Fangirl

by Rainbow Rowell

You may be thinking to yourself, didn't we just talk about Rainbow Rowell?

Yes, gentle reader, yes we did.

Rainbow Rowell is fast becoming one of my favorite authors.

Rainbow Rowell gets it, gentle reader. She really captures what it is like to be young, or younger, or perhaps just a human at all. I'm trying very hard here to distance myself from the fact that I identified very personally and strongly with Cath, the the heroine, and focus on how realistic the dialogue and situations were. There was a scene in particular where Cath meets a girl in the library, and it turns out that the girl is reading her fanfiction online, and they have a geeky little laugh over fanfiction and how much they enjoy it. There is nothing particularly deep or plot-moving in the scene, but it so perfectly captured the quiet, honest, geeky moments of joy and instant camaraderie that form when two nerds meet.

The cover art is by Noelle Stevenson, who is a prolific artist on tumblr, often posting fan doodles of geeky fandoms such as Lord of the Rings and The Avengers. Her art is, I feel, a perfect choice. Additionally, the layout of the "Encyclowikia" page, and the online fanfiction pages within the novel leant a sort of credibility and realness to the experience of reading Cath's story. Although the novel was not written in a diary format, I felt as though I was reading someone's blog, with links to fanfiction pages as they were relevant to the blog entries. It's a style that is really appealing and easy to digest.

Cath is absolutely one of my favorite characters so far, battling for position number one with Siobhan from The Story of Owen. Both of these characters are strong and focused on their passions, dedicating themselves to their crafts while cultivating relationships with people around them. They stay absolutely true to themselves. In fact, the one criticism I have of Fangirl is that the romance was absolutely unnecessary. It was executed well, but it didn't add anything to Cath. Cath was just as interesting on her own. She was just as successful on her own. It did, however, make me smile to see her beau, Levi, taking such an interest in her passions. I loved how he would tell her to go write, how he would leave her time to write, how much he valued her happiness and her spirit.

Fangirl reminded me of being young and in college, of feeling optimistic and in love and ready to write and create. I think for a younger reader, they might have those feelings too, even if they are still in college or high school. That youthful passion doesn't have to be a memory at that point.



On a personal, reflective note, these are two places I marked in the book, where I had to set it down for a bit.

1. "I don't just kiss people. Kisses aren't.... just with me. That's why I've been avoiding you. That's why I'd like to avoid you now." (p 223)

2. "I don't trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more I care about someone, the more sure I am they're going to get tired of me and take off."
Levi's face clouded over. Not grimly, she thought -- thoughtfully. In thoughtful clouds.
"That's crazy," he said.
"I know," Cath agreed, feeling almost relieved. "Exactly. I'm crazy." (p 281)

Fangirl  is definitely on my list of books to buy in September!

Grasshopper Jungle

There is no image for this book, because I am too sick to bother to take one.

by Andrew Smith

Grasshopper Jungle made me horny.

No, wait. It didn't do that. It did the opposite of that. 

Grasshopper Jungle is a really difficult book to read when you're sick in bed, largely because of the grotesque imagery and the giant bugs and the terribly sad descriptions of small-town Iowa. Not the quaint small towns that are inhabited by old people. Picture a dying strip mall from some realist film that was gunning for a hipster Oscar. There. That's the sad small-town I'm talking about. Lots of piss and grime.

It's a difficult read when you're sick in bed because, aside from the bits where I had to slog through everyone's cigarette butts, this book made me really excited. I read it at rapid-fire pace, because I had to, I had to know what was coming next, and what the deal was with the bugs, and who was going to get eaten, and when the characters were going to put the pieces together. I had to shoot through all the extraneous "historical" details presented by the main character. I wanted the meat, dang it, just like a giant hungry mantis wants to tear off your mandible and eat it. 

Grasshopper Jungle kept up an excellent pace, with just enough little hints and sideways deviations from the plot to frustrate me, but not so many that I got annoyed and stopped reading. I actually quite enjoyed that the main character, Austin, was such a historian, but without over-thinking his compulsion to record events, or being particularly nerdy about it. 

The pace was a good metaphor for teenage sexuality, really, especially for Austin. All these things are dangled out in front of him, making him inexplicably horny, forcing him to act. It's not that he wants to have sex with everything, just that he has no real outlet for his various emotions, other than to keep ploughing forward while looking ever-backward on this super-creepy giant-bug adventure that descends on him. That's how we, as humans, try and sort out all the crazy stuff that is happening to us, either internally, or externally. To continue my developing pattern of only being able to explain characters by relating them to other characters, Austin is much like Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert's Dune, the way he talks about seeing all the lines and clues and key events cross his desk as he writes his histories. Austin says that the why of everything is not his concern, only the what. But I think he was searching for what next? in his own personal life by examining all those clues and converging pieces of history. 

Far Far Away & The Story Of Owen

It's inevitable, when you read two books side by side, that one is going to capture your attention and your imagination more than the other. And this is not fair, because both may be equally valuable, equally enthralling. But I've always held that each book has its own mood, and if my mood doesn't match the book, then even if I love it, I can't read it properly at that time.

It was interesting to me that when I came to class to discuss these two books, I had picked a favorite -- or rather, there was one I preferred over the other. And yet, during discussion, I ended up criticizing and challenging parts of the book I favored, while acting very fondly towards the other one.

I won't tell you which is which, but see if you can guess.

By Tom McNeal

In Far Far Away, the characters live in the town of Never Better, which is a pretty sly way of pointing out that you can very easily get caught in one of two mindsets when you live in a small town: The first being that there is nothing out there that is better than your little village, and the second being that nothing ever gets better, or changes, in fact.

Never Better is a town a bit like Brigadoon, or a Wes Anderson film -- it exists in what we assume to be the modern day, yet things like cell phones and the internet are conspicuously absent. And I enjoyed this book for the very reason that I enjoy Wes Anderson films (I'm rather ambivalent about Brigadoon, to be honest): the world navigated by Jeremy Johnson Johnson and Ginger is very stylized and smudged. It is at once picturesque, and creepy. This setting is especially effective as the progressive levels of creepiness and horror within the story unfolds.

Make no mistake -- this is a scary story, as all my favorite fairytale and fantasy stories are. The settings: an isolated village, a cabin in the woods, a hidden dungeon, familiar enough to be extra scary when things start to go wrong. Everything was normal, and cozy enough that when the villain was revealed, it was a surprise to me. That, I find, is extremely satisfying storytelling, at any age. As children, we like to look for the secret hidden in a story. As we grow up, continue to ferret out the plot twists, but because we are older and craftier, we are better at it. Any book or story that surprises me as an adult gets a good review from me.

By E. K. Johnston

There is a sequel coming to in March, and I am very much looking forward to it. The Story of Owen took on the fantasy trope of dragons in a way that was very refreshing. Johnston's dragons are not fantastic, or awe-inspiring, or meant to be studied or conversed with or ridden. They are just dangerous jerks who fly around, eating carbon-emitting objects and setting things on fire. The tone of the book was so droll, that at first I was afraid Johnston wouldn't be able to keep up the tempo for the whole story. This sort of cheeky world-building can sometimes distract from actual plot and character development, but luckily, Johnston is Canadian, and I'm fairly certain they watch more BBC comedies than we do here in the States. Whatever the reason, she manages to provide both realistic and interesting characters and a nice, brisk plot, without losing any of the humor of her world and her storytelling style.

That said, I was troubled by a few things that seemed to be taken for granted in both the story, and the world building (though it must be said that I am not Canadian, and may have just stumbled culturally, not literally). There was a militarism built into the social climate that wasn't familiar to me, and confused my interpretations of probably future actions for the characters. For example, after banging on for ages about Tradition and the hierarchy of Dragon Slaying and how these activities are mandated by policy from the Oil Watch, Lottie and Hannah are able to convince two town councils to give free reign to a handful of people in the matter of killing off a whole pile of dragons. I understand that there is a socialist message behind this book, however, sometimes that message seemed forced in between the plot points, making some parts of the story a bit unlikely. It did, however, move the plot along quickly so we could get to the exciting bits.

There was also the concept of a Dragon Slayer's Bard, which seemed a bit odd -- just because history has been rewritten to include dragons doesn't necessarily mean that the entire field of public relations fails to exist. I'm happy to grant allowances for books that show me a good time, but if the humor and pacing and characters of this book weren't so strong and engaging, I think that even as a teenager I would have been critical enough to toss it aside, unfinished.


With both of these books, I enjoyed fantasy and fairytales in a different way. The Story of Owen appeals to my sense of humor, and while I found Far Far Away slow going at times, the excellent craft of it is just right.

Eleanor & Park

by Rainbow Rowell

"Hey," he said. It came out hard and frustrated. "I told you to smile because you're pretty when you smile."
She walked to the bottom of the steps, then looked back at him. "It'd be better if you thought I was pretty when I don't."
"That's not what I meant," he said, but she was walking away.
When Park went inside, his mother came out to smile at him. "Your Eleanor seems nice," she said.
He nodded and went to his room. No, he thought, falling into his bed. No, she doesn't.

-Eleanor & Park

Eleanor is described as being good, honorable, honest, but not nice. She is the opposite of nice, whatever it is that nice is supposed to be. Nice usually means clean, polite, agreeable. It's interesting to note that Eleanor is all of those things as well -- she is clean, she is polite, and she wants to please people. But because she is honest, she lacks the smooth distance that would codify her as being a nice girl. 

Though hailing from a completely different genre, Eleanor is reminiscent of Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series with her "knack of speaking uncomfortable truths" (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). I love that she challenges Park's motives, and forces him to clarify and own up to his feelings for her -- both his love for her, and his unconscious resistance of fully embracing her and her strangeness. She doesn't let him get away with hurting her during his period of adjusting to her, and she doesn't pretend that she isn't hurt when she is. She doesn't sacrifice her feelings and her integrity for the sake of his, and I find that part of her admirable honesty, and her strong sense of self. I wish I had been that honest and sure and brave when I was young. I wish I was that honest and sure and brave today.

Eleanor can see that each time she gives Park a nugget of her true, broken self in the early part of their relationship, it takes him a moment to get over his aversion to things that aren't nice. 

"I hate meeting new people," she whispered.
"Why?"
"Because they never like me."
"I liked you."
"No, you didn't. I had to wear you down."

How painful for her, and for anyone learning to trust and to open up, to have those honest pieces of yourself inspire an unconscious flinching and a subtle rejection. This is something we all face, especially as teens, when we first start taking the risks involved with forming deeper relationships with people outside of our family circle.

Eleanor & Park is one of those novels that touches you again as an adult because we can remember that first time we felt so passionate about someone. It would touch you as a teen as well, because you're experiencing that passion for the first time. The realism of this novel lends it credibility. The book jacket says that Eleanor and Park are "smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts," but what really happens is that this is never discussed, never considered until the inevitable end. Park is blind to this reality, and Eleanor understands all too well that she will be alone again in the end. Really, the only person "smart enough" is the reader, although we all read in hope, and that keeps us ripping along right up to the end.