#3. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

I feel like it’s unfair for me to praise this book, to insist you read it, because clearly this book was written expressly for me. Or at least expressly to the narrow window of readers that I most resemble, or something. Anyway, of COURSE I loved this book because I couldn’t NOT love this book. This novel could be a 250-page subliminal message that suggests I go on a quick killing spree or light my neighbor’s house on fire or vote Republican. Wouldn’t matter. I would still love it.

See? Not fair.

Here are the things I love: in general and about Where Things Come Back:

1. Realism I just read a semester’s worth of science fiction and fantasy. Yes, I am feeling more warmly toward this genre of the fantastic than ever before… but no. I do not love you, sci-fi fantasy, like I love realism. I feel like this makes me weird, but I am okay with that. To make matters worse, this was my first post-SFF read. Insert water+desert metaphor here. Where Things Come Back is exactly what I want from a work of young adult realism: rich cast of characters I want to know more about and their multifaceted relationships. Meaningful settings. A protagonist who hasn’t figured it all out yet, who makes questionable decisions, who speaks to you, the reader, with an understated urgency, pulling you into his world and his story.

2. Multiple Narrators Again, I think this makes me weird. I’ve heard a lot of people kvetch about novels with multiple POVs. Personally, I like them. Where Things Come Back has two: first- person protagonist/narrator, Cullen Witter, and a third-person storyline about a young missionary in Africa. And not only are these two unlikely stories intricately intertwined, they both become equally interesting and compelling reads, which is multiple POVs done right.

3. Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers  Ever since I read The Race to Save the Lord God Bird for a class on Phillip Hoose’s literary oeuvre, I have found these semi-extinct birds completely fascinating. And maybe because they are so innately mysterious themselves, I feel like whenever a Lord God Bird pops up in any form of media, I pay attention. In this novel, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is all over the place – the town where Cullen lives is the site of a potential sighting – but then again, the bird is actually nowhere to be found. Cullen doesn’t have as much reverence or curiosity about these birds as I do, but because this book has woodpeckers, it’s a book I like.

Yes, yes. I am weird. I get it.

4. Sufjan Stevens John Corey Whaley reports that the idea for this book came from Sufjan Stevens’s song, The Lord God Bird. I love Sufjan Stevens. Anyone who listens to/draws inspiration from his music is okay by me. But most impressively, Whaley is able to capture something of the same aesthetic as a Sufjan Stevens song. Major points.

5. The Cult of the Author I am susceptible to hype, impressed by literary awards and recognitions, and a fan of cute boys.

See: Blog buzz, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35, William C. Morris Award noms. I’ll let you Google Image the last one at your own discretion.

Whaley gives off some John Green vibes, yo. Give him a few years and he’ll have a legion of fan-people. You heard it here first. This book is THAT good. If you build it, they will come, etc.

#4. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Listen, guys.

If I tell you to read this one again, will you listen to me?

It will be well-worth your time, I promise.

The surface stuff:

• Wilbur is the most delightfully neurotic little animal you will ever meet. He is amazing. Every animal in the barnyard is just as full of personality and just as amusing, but Wilbur is near to my heart.
• E. B. White is the White from Strunk & White’s  Elements of Style. It shows. The prose here is just simple, gorgeous, and readable. (P.S. The edition I linked to: illustrated by Maira Kalman. How great is the world we live in that this book can exist??)
• Garth Williams!

Baby Wilbur is so cute my ovaries almost exploded.

And my classmates and I laughed a hundred times at this illustration of fat Templeton.

Genius.

The non-surface stuff: I have always been leery of books people call “classics.” This is probably me being a forever a  stubborn child who wanted to be left alone to read Babysitter’s Club and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Reading through the canon of blah-boring-European-male-long-ass-indecipherable-prose books didn’t help. One of the reasons I am so attracted to Children’s/YA lit is because it is so often NOT any of those things. It is the things I like about reading, not the things I hate.

That being said, two points –

Point A: I am even leery of “classic” children’s and YA books. I didn’t read a lot of them as a child (see: Babysitter’s Club) and haven’t read many as an adult (see: every other book I would rather read). I still just assume that I won’t like them, that reading them will be a chore.

Point B: Despite this, within the past few years, I have flat-out LOVED many of those “classics” I have decided to read. They keep appearing on these Top 10 Lists, statistically out-representing my contemporary reads.

This could quickly devolve further into a very lengthy psychoanalysis of my reading habits and history. But let me tell you that Charlotte’s Web is such a solid book, I am beginning to come around to that old idea that “maybe they are called classics for a reason.”

Even though I enjoyed reading this book as a child, I couldn’t have understood it’s “specialness” until becoming an adult. So please, read this book again I mean, look at this face, will you?

How can you say no?

#5 The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

This book first caught my eye when I was working at a public library, spending many hours digging through the YA collection in an attempt to weed out enough books to counteract the books coming in. (This was a largely futile endeavor, by the way). I worked very hard to ignore my own biases when weeding – I once tried to weed the entire Chronicles of Prydain series only to find out that oh, they are somewhat historically important despite possessing tacky covers and only being checked out once in three years. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t acknowledge and remember my own biases.

I do remember spotting The House of the Scorpion on the shelf. I do remember its circs weren’t great. I do remember looking at the cover and thinking “Oh, my. That looks like a book I would never like.”

I also remember thinking. “Oh, MY, look at all those MEDALS!”

I’m still not sure how one book can be shortlisted for the Newbery AND the Printz. But moving on, I did finally read this heavily-medaled text and found my initial reactions to be incorrect. The House of the Scorpion is not the kind of book I would never like; it’s the kind of book that I do like.

And it’s probably the kind of book you like, too. This is a dystopia from before dystopias ran rampant – not a cutesy romance with a futuristic cover-plot, but a complex, painful, dark version of the future. Matteo Alacrán begins his life in a way that reminded me distinctly of the first few chapters of Room – I haven’t read the rest of the book, so maybe this is a terrible association, but the trappings of Matteo’s young life is really quite similar: a small apartment, a single female caretaker, a predictable daily routine, and he never goes outside. But when two children appear at his window,  Matteo realizes there is a greater world outside… and once Matteo himself ventures out there, he realizes that in this greater world, he is not just a bright young boy, but somewhere in between an heir to the opium fortune of a feudal drug lord and an inhuman monster.

So we have our dystopian hero. Check. Now we need a completely insane rendering of the near future that could very well happen at any time. Farmer’s future is a horrifying example of what happens when corporate interests and wealth take over government interests. The Alacrán family runs the world’s opium trade, their territory has become, simply, a country called Opium that lies between the US and what was once Mexico. Opium, then, serves as a barrier between the two countries – both of which are fairly third-world and destitute – and among other heinous deeds, the Alacrán estate has the freedom to grab at any illegal immigrants who enter the borders. The Alacráns themselves, however, live in a complete oasis – a compound of mansions with fountains, pools, delicious food, hired help, and air conditioning. The 1%, in the middle of the desert, and Matteo and the other children have little idea of what kind of corruption and violence occurs outside the walls of their compound.

I feel like I have ceased making sense, but please believe me (and the bevy of medals on the cover) when I insist that this is a complex, engaging, rewarding read. Think The Giver, think Hunger Games… and I don’t mean that in a “these are dystopias, so you will like this other dystopia.” I mean that the intensity/readability of  The House of the Scorpion will remind you of why you started liking the genre in the first place.

#6. Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

Okay. I’ve talked about a few syllabus books that surprised me by being really good reads. But you guys… I have like, 30+ books to read each semester. 95% of the books I’m required to read fall somewhere between a monotone kind of “oh, well, that was interesting. I really like x, y, z… ” and “Uh… ugh. What the heck.” I am so happy to do my reading, I swear, and think it is so essential to read outside your preferences… but the books I read for school are not, typically, the same ones I will buy for my bookshelf, that I will read multiple times, that I will love foreverandeverandever.

Amy & Roger’s Epic Detour was the first big exception. This is 100% the kind of book I love, and it magically appeared on my Realism syllabus last Spring as a selection for our “New Voices in YA” class period.

Amy is faced with one of those probably-not-likely-in-real-life-but-hey-let’s-roll-with-it scenarios: her father has just died, her younger brother is in rehab, her mother has decided to move from California to Connecticut but for some reason cannot take the family car; Amy, rocked and reeling from all this sudden change and tragedy and only 17-years-old, simply MUST drive the car across the country on her own.

(Because this makes all the logical sense in the world.)

Anyway, Amy’s mother makes up for this parental disregard for her offspring by micromanaging her daughter’s trip. She will take a thoroughly boring, quickest way from A to B route through middle America. She will only drive X amount of miles a day and stop at specific, pre-paid hotel rooms. And because she doesn’t drive anymore, Amy will be chauffeured by a friend of the family – a boy, Roger, who is going to spend his first summer back from college with his dad on the east coast and needed a ride anyway.

The two set off on their journey, stopping in different cities and meeting all variety of local characters. Between CA and CT, Amy confronts her grief and her relationship with her mother while slowly falling for Roger. Of course. Sorry if you thought that was a spoiler, but it wasn’t. This is a classic contemporary YA romance – Sarah Dessen on the highway, if you will – but very well done, well-written, etc. There’s a bit of multimedia going on with this book as well – Roger’s mix CDs, scraps of tickets and receipts, etc. I usually find this gimmicky, but Matson uses it sparingly, like an accent rather than a substitute for content.

And I do love me a good road trip. Next Saturday, I set out on my own Epic Non-detour between MA and MI, and even though it is a long-ass, boring-boring drive through some long, horizontal states… I still get a little excited planning for road snacks and stocking my iPod, and thinking about what kind of epic conversations I might get into. Matson really captures all of this classic road trip excitement and made me want to hop into my car and go.

#7 Hush by Eishes Chayil

Question:

How many young adult books did I read in 2011 that featured a young person committing or attempting to commit suicide?

Answer:

8

In Hush, our protagonist must deal with the personal and social aftermath of her best friend’s suicide. In fact, her dead friend still seems to haunt her, six years after the event. Although emotionally gripping, this is not exactly a fresh story formation. In fact, Nina Lacour’s Hold Still – which I read within the same month as Hush and talked about last week– is basically the same concept. I was going to blame Jay Asher’s immensely popular 13 Reasons Why, maybe even Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls,  but even just looking at my own 2011 reading, this is a historically common YA theme. Heck, even Forever… took a break from all the sexy-sex for poor Sexually-Confused Side-Character Artie to attempt to kill himself! As if that book were not overly dramatic enough…

Hush, however, made me forget about the rest of the bunch. Protagonist, Gittel, lives in a highly secluded Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, and everything about her life revolve around her religion and her society – her world, her grief, and the circumstances surrounding her best friend Devory’s death.

Gittel’s pain is just as complexly rendered as any surviving character in these suicide narratives, but Hush is also engages in an examination of the societal factors that led an 11-year-old girl to kill herself, and keep Gittel from fully expressing and understanding her grief. The author, Chayil, is herself a member of a Chassidic community, writing with a pseudonym and recalling actual events that occurred within her community. Realizing this fact while I read had two effects. First, and most obviously, the tragedy had much more impact knowing that this is, actually, not the stuff of history but a pattern that occurs today in these communities. But second, I found myself more engaged with Gittel’s struggle, imagining that this is how many young women in Chassidic communities must feel. Gittel wants to understand and talk about her friend’s death, but she also wants to live up to her role as an Orthodox woman – to marry and have children – and to earn respect from her community and God. Gittel can’t speak up without bringing shame to herself and her family, but she can’t forget what happened to Devory.

Chayil also recently un-pseudonymed herself in The Huffington Post: from this article and reading the book, I think Chayil wrote this novel as a way to grapple with her own conflicts as a Chassidic woman and expose some of the dangerous patterns that the community would otherwise keep under wraps.

So fascinating, so heartbreaking, and I basically couldn’t put it down.

#8. Out Of My Mind by Sharon Draper

I don’t read a lot of truly “children’s” books for fun. This probably makes me a terrible student of children’s literature/future children’s librarian-type-person… but I’m really just in it for the YA. So it’s probably bizarre and inaccurate of me to be so shocked by how amazing of some of these books for younger readers are, but I did not expect Sharon Draper’s Out Of My Mind to keep me tethered to the couch the day I picked it up. It was one of those books you speed through, finish and say…

“woah.”

(Note: my book reactions for this round of reviews are getting closer and closer to irrelevant. I acknowledge this.)

So, the premise/protagonist/amazingness of Draper’s novel is Melody. Melody is eleven. She’s amazingly smart with a photographic memory, she has synesthesia which gives her this multisensory passion for old country music, and she was born with cerebral palsy. She’s this awesome little girl who can’t express her awesomeness. Her parents believe in Melody – in her capacity to learn and improve and participate – but with work and her baby brother, they don’t have the time or money to explore her condition medically or socially. But when Melody gets the chance to sit in on the “regular kids” fifth grade class, she realizes all that she is missing – learning, friendship, etc – she starts devising ways to get more attention, so that maybe she can participate with the real world.

I don’t want to give much more away because I enjoyed some of the plot surprises here, but trust me – there is a surprising amount of plot in this book. Although Melody’s cognitive capacities are speculative (as far as I can research and as far as Draper acknowledges in interviews), Draper paints Melody with such a rich inner life that I didn’t care. And the ending? Hearbreakingly ridiculous.

Again:

“woah.”