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.