This is a review in two parts.

Part #1 – Satire

I think I alluded to being a comedy sophisticate earlier this week. That was probably a lie. I probably just like the comedy I like and the comedy I don’t understand, I poo-poo. Tim and Eric, for example – supposedly quite funny according to comedy “experts” and friends alike… but I can’t stand it.

Take also for example, Penelope by Rebecca Harrington. Although almost nothing at all like Tim and Eric, I read this novel that is supposedly a biting satire of Harvard undergraduate social conventions and felt the same “Uh, I just don’t get this” feeling. Harrington’s heroine, Penelope, is a new freshman straight from the suburbs of Connecticut. Penelope’s “thing” is that she is unaware of social norms to the point of Aspergers, and she has only the vaguest, almost-academic interest in interacting with other humans. She discusses Agatha Christie novels with monied 19-year-olds at exclusive parties while accidentally drinking herself under the table, doesn’t notice her earnest neighbor’s advances but somehow allures herself into a friends-with-benefits relationship with a SUPER-monied, SUPER-elite monied playboy, and otherwise bumbles around this book seeming alternately cute and oblivious and vaguely mentally ill.

This is all supposed to be funny, but uh, I just don’t get this. If you want a top notch college satire, pick up Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons – it’s about a hundred times more subtle, complex, and compelling.

Part #2 – New Adult?

This is a book populated almost entirely by 18-year-olds. If the book had taken place three months earlier in time, this would be a YA novel. Or maybe not even that – take the 2010 YA book The Ivy. An assortment of college freshmen from various walks of life arrive in Cambridge and learn to social climb, led by one protagonist who is particularly normal and thus able to observe the absurdities of monied 19-year-olds, put these absurdities in relief, and then tug on the reader’s emotions when the protagonist loses her strong sense of self and begins to become absurd herself.

Anyway, I didn’t really like Penelope, but I liked The Ivy, I think precisely because The Ivy is YA. The Ivy isn’t a fine work of literary fiction by any means – it’s fluff, but it’s not trying to be literary. It’s satire, but it’s not trying to be satire. And also, throughout The Ivy, I actually cared about the protagonist and wanted her to succeed, even in her silly mission to oust popular mean girls and find a boyfriend. In Penelope there is this distance, like the author and the reader are just meant to observe Penelope and her silly 18-year-old self, to laugh at her, to poke fun at youth.

This is maybe the problem I had with Dare Me, except exaggerated because of the satire.

But for what it’s worth, maybe Harrington’s over the top exaggeration isn’t quite so exaggerated as I think – about halfway through the book, I observed that silly Penelope and her strange mannerisms, habits, and complete lack of self-awareness… and thought that maybe another academic observer might have thought College Jessica to be just as odd a bird. So it’s quite possible that this is a work of genius, a work of satire, and I am just a clod who likes what I like, and that is mostly young adult.

The Giver was my hands-down, all-time favorite book from the 4th grade up until I wrote 4 papers on it in 6 months. Thanks, grad school! Now that I have analyzed and criticized and studied it to death, it doesn’t hold the same exalted position on my personal Bookshelf of Life, but it is still one of my go-to recommendations, especially for adults who haven’t read kid lit since they were 9 and think YA is a dirty word. It’s a quick, tight read, engaging, and the issues at hand – personal freedom, human nature, eugenics, etc –  are sufficiently highbrow. I do believe it has earned its praise and position in the children’s lit canon.

Until grad school, I was very content to ignore the two companion/sequel novels to The Giver. But then they showed up on a syllabus, and grad school allows little room for righteous reading indignation. I read Gathering Blue and The Messenger with a certain level of detachment; the existence of these books wasn’t as pure as The Giver, they couldn’t possibly be held up to the same standard, The Giver was The Giver, but these were just books. And I think it worked – I was able to appreciate the two books for what they were – stories that were more like The Giver in theme than storyline, that took strange supernatural turns, that were at times pleasantly atmospheric and mythological.

But still. Just books.

I knew that Son would be different. It had been so long since The Giver and its sequels were published, it would be the final installment, and I knew it would be about a birth mother. Ms. Lowry was returning to the community where she began – Jonas’s community – and she would have to pull out some stops to both satisfy original readers as well as justify some of the wackier storylines in the two sequels.

And despite mixed professional reviews, I think Lowry did just that. The novel’s protagonist, Claire, is a very young birthmother whose birthing career is cut unexpectedly short when her first delivery is deemed unsatisfactory. Instead of returning to community life in the fish hatchery, though, Claire becomes obsessed with keeping tabs on her child – a child we quickly learn is baby Gabriel who plays such an important role in The Giver. Without giving too much detail, Claire eventually leaves the community and spends the rest of her life in the supernatural, barely-civilized, liminal world of Kira and Matty, trying desperately to be reunited with her lost son.

This is not a tour-de-force, not a book that will stand next to The Giver in my mind or in the canon. I probably won’t hand it to friends and family. However, I don’t think it’s Just-A-Book. Lowry manages to combine the realistic and the fantastic in a way that feels more fable or fairytale-like, rather than an awkward mash-up of world-building. Claire is an interesting case study in cultural conditioning vs. human instinct, of the way deprivation of knowledge can make a person, a people, vulnerable and desperate.

And of course, there is the delight in realizing that Claire’s story is being told in concurrence with Jonas’s story, allowing the reader a coveted second perspective of that fascinating community that Lowry sucked us all in with on that very first page of The Giver – the errant plane, the spinning bicycle wheels, and “NEEDLESS TO SAY, HE WILL BE RELEASED.”

Maybe that’s what I wanted from a Giver sequel all along – to be indulged.

One nice thing about last week’s mood: I got a lot of reading done. Three mini-reviews, commence.

I probably don’t need to tell you what Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief is about because it was published in 1996. In 1996 I was too busy reading Phyllis Reynolds Naylor and Caroline B. Cooney to read fantasy. Lucky for me, The Thief was still enjoyable 10+ years later, and even luckier, it’s one of those fantasies that barely qualifies. You’re not quite sure it is a fantasy. In fact, you’re not quite sure of when or where the story is even taking place – you’re uncovering the landscape and the social structure and the culture as you read. But that is a lot of fancy-talking for a book that is, fundamentally, an exciting little adventure story starring one of the most endearing protagonists I’ve met in a long time – Gen, a feisty, braggy thief-boy who has landed himself in the King’s jail who ends up on an indentured, cross-kingdom adventure to steal something mythological.

And, hey, hey! One more summer reading book – done! That brings my total to three. Yeah, baby.

I generally like Books for Adults that feature teenage characters, even teen protagonists. However, I have seriously mixed feelings about Books for Adults that are about Teenagers and Teenage Culture. Ever see the movie Thirteen? Books for adults that expose the secret lives of teenagers always seem super sensational, inherently exaggerated. Megan Abbott’s Dare Me is full of naughty Varsity cheerleaders, content to lord over their peers, teachers, and half the world on the virtue of being young and sexy. Their parents are invisible, they cheer while hungover and in between binge & purge sessions, they run rampant and unchecked… until a new coach rolls into town and upsets the social order between Super-Popular Beth and her right-hand-man, protag Addy. The girls battle subtly, psychologically, while a murder mystery reveals itself, and Coach alternates between teaching the girls to become true, athletic, throwing and jumping and flying cheerleaders… and inviting the girls over for wine. Is this attempted reality, or shock value?

And while I will avoid spoilers, let me just say this: in stories about intense, problematic female friendships, there is a certain plotline that shows up again and again and again, and I spent the entire book thinking about Beth and Addy and saying to myself “Man, every other book would explain this by XYZ, but I’m glad that Dare Me doesn’t seem to be going in that direction.” Then, on the last 3 pages, it did. Dammit.

I wanted to read The Future of Us when it was published because A) Carolyn Mackler is on my perpetual Authors-To-Read list and B What a concept! Two teens discover Facebook ten years before it exists and see their future lives – as a child of the 90s,  I was sucked in. However, the book fell off my radar (as books are wont to do when you are in grad school) and if it hadn’t been a book club pick, I likely never would have read it…. and maybe it would have been better that way. This book annoyed the crap out of me. First of all, according to Mackler and Asher, the 90’s was a time and place when life looked identical to the way it does now, except every few minutes you put on a Green Day album, put on scrunchie, or noted how strange this new concept called “Caller ID” seemed to be. Basically, it read like heavy-handed faux historical fiction full of those nostalgic in-jokes we children of the 90’s love, but are probably irrelevant/annoying to all others. This book also suffers from horrible pacing (50-60 pages of the two protags trying to prove to themselves that this Facebook thing is real… the disbelief is timely for teens who can barely comprehend the Internet, of course, but THE READER KNOWS IT IS REAL BECAUSE IT IS A STORY AND WE HAVE TO BELIEVE SO PLEASE CATCH UP THIS IS BORING). Also, Emma is so, so unlikeable, but not even in an interesting way. Book club members had a point – maybe teenage girls are boring, wishy-washy, and yes, unlikeable… maybe I have outgrown the truly authentic teen protagonist? Or maybe Emma was just annoying and her character development kind of crappy.

This might be my last foray with fiction, so from here on out, look forward to nonfiction reviews aplenty. Let me tell you a little bit about tuberculosis….

Every day, for his/her existence, A wakes up in a different body of someone nearby of the same age. For that day, A can access that person’s memories, sleeps in their bed, kisses their girlfriends or boyfriends (or not), and then at midnight, a new life. Each chapter is a day, and each day has more meaning when for the first time, A falls in love and can’t help but use each subsequent day-in-the-life to reach out to Rhiannon.

I have two things to say about David Levithan’s Every Day.

1. I am super-duper excited that this book is Levithan’s long deserved day in the sun, what with full-page Entertainment Weekly reviews and the attention of the mainstream reading community. He has been writing excellent YA for years and is deserving of praise.

I enjoyed Every Day a great deal, especially how effortlessly Levithan creates the worlds of so many varied teenagers in so few pages. However, I think that some of Levithan’s other books explore the nuances of young relationships and love with a bit more subtlety. If you are new to Levithan and looking for more, might I recommend Are We There Yet?, Marly’s Ghost, or my absolute favorite, The Realm of Possibility.

2. So, about that Day 6025.

The short of it (not news for most of you), on Day 6025, A wakes up in the body of an obese teenager. A has never been obese before, never existed in a body of that size, and he reacts with immediate negative, offensive language. This is not a flattering or sensitive portrayal of life that is reality for many, many Americans and young people.

However, I can see the literary purpose of Levithan’s choice to set A against his body – this is a point in the novel when A wants to make a relationship work with Rhiannon, but in this less attractive body, Rhiannon finds it harder to see A inside, to see why it’s worth the effort to date a non-bodied entity. A is scared of this potential hurdle from the get-go – he/she is always A, but he has no control over any given corporeal appearance. And the feeling of being in a body that doesn’t feel the way your body should feel is uncomfortable. I get that.

But I don’t think this excuses the level of vitriol in Levithan’s language. It really was jarring even for me – a generally sympathetic, easy-going reader. I don’t know if it’s the author’s responsibility to make artistic changes in order to please every subset of people, but it seems that this chapter could have been written to the same effect with maybe half of the negative language, without the stereotypical perceptions of overweight people. It sucks that this one chapter has ruined the reading experience for so many.

Earlier this year, I had a short conversation about my YA reading preferences with a children’s-literature-professional-someone. After a few “yes, I loved that”s and “no, that’s not really my thing”s, she had me pegged. “So you like gritty, huh?”

I think I probably said, “ehh sure i dunno ah i guess” or something similarly professional. I like fluffy, girly romances. I like smart books with a sense of humor. I do not like YA books about murders or child abuse or domestic violence or regular violence or divorce. I do not like gritty.

Except for when I love books about drug addicts and eating disorders and prostitution and whups, I guess I like gritty.

Kat Rosenfeld’s Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone is a gritty murder book after my own heart. It begins with one of those ominous beginnings – I don’t have the book handy, but something like “A girl (whose body would be found on the side of the road by small town cops) died not too far away from me while I was doing XYZ, can you believe that?” Spooky, creepy etc. But the XYZ, for Becca, is having uninspired sex with her boyfriend in the back of his pickup truck the night of her high school graduation, and then getting dumped before what was to be their last summer. Now you got me.

Rosenfeld’s debut novel is equally split between Amelia and Becca. Becca is a smart girl in a small town in rural Massachusetts, counting down the days until she can escape to college. But yes, she’s in love, with James – one of those boys who has a sad story to tell, who needs a little fixing. But when Amelia’s body is found and James changes his tune on their relationship, Becca’s grip is rattled – she drinks too much, gets sucked into the small-town Whodunnit drama, and starts to second-guess her decision to leave town.

Many reviews have called Rosenfeld’s language “lush” and “vibrant,” and I would have to agree – this is a book that takes language seriously. The evocative descriptions of Becca’s hometown capture both the visceral details of the setting and the stories that create small-town mythology so essential to understanding the town’s inhabitants. With language and form, Rosenfeld allows Bridgeton to become a character.

That being said, after 200 pages of “lush” and “vibrant,” I, personally, begin to skim sentences, and adjectives such as “flowery” and “overwritten” come to mind. However, this could just have been my body fighting with my brain, wanting to read faster to more quickly reveal secrets and see where this is all leading, to see if Becca will leave or stay, if she will stay with James,  if anyone will figure out what really happened the night Amelia died. If your reading has been feeling a little too fluffy lately, then this might just what you ned.

Rebecca Stead, who are you? Where did you come from? You are the Middle-Grade Whisperer, the master of the quiet-yet-somehow-filled-with-tension chapter book, the Patron Saint of urban children.

I loved When You Reach me and I loved Liar & Spy. Georges is similar to When You Reach Me‘s Miranda – sensitive, observant, New Yorker mired in the social horrors that arise during that tender time that between childhood and the teen age. Georges has lost his close friend to a crowd of popular bullies and lost his house with a customized lofted bed made from a real fire escape. His parents move him into an apartment building in his Brooklyn neighborhood and he meets a family of mildly-eccentric homeschoolers, two of whom run various espionage operations around the building. There’s no supernatural mystery in this story, but Georges slowly realizes that nothing in his new life – his friends, his classmates, his family – is quite what it seems. Details unravel at a quickening pace, lies are revealed, and the pages will flip by before you know it.

I may have almost cried when this book ended. Maybe.

Liar & Spy is getting a bit of awards-season buzz, but I’m not sure it will be get as much attention as When You Reach Me – it’s not quite as complex, as intertextual, as fresh, as historical. But what Stead does here, again, is show off her seemingly growing talent in portraying the heartbreaks of childhood without resorting to tragic shock story lines; in capturing the everyday problems of her sympathetic characters, she does so much more. I wish you could bottle up a little bit of Stead and sprinkle it on every children’s book. This book may have turned me into a bonafide fangirl.

Every week, I make a little note in my planner to Write a Book Review. However, this implies that I should have, each week, read a book that I would like to review.

I am not reading as much or as often as I should, so here I am, Writing a Book Review… of a book I didn’t read.

Granted, it’s not really a review. My non-review will be brief and reflect only the material I have read, and despite my misgivings, I might continue to read it.

You see, it all started on the green line, a fresh new library book in my bag calling my name (see also: why I can’t finish reading a book). A few pages into James Wood’s How Fiction Works and I was smitten. Writing instruction merged with pop-literary criticism, emphasis on structure? Oh, baby, oh baby. And Wood writes in these intoxicating little idea bits, every few paragraphs numbered, clearly distinguishing between ideas. This is all the pleasure of studying literature without any of the parts that hurt your brain.

Still on the green line. Wood is discussing the many advantages of free direct discourse, summoning memories of creative writing classes past, and his example on page 12? Make Way For Ducklings. Children’s lit being acknowledged in a lit crit book for mainstream adult audiences. I am basically making out with this book at this point. Fellow train passengers are looking at me strangely.

Then, page 13 happens:

“What happens, though, when a more serious writer wants to open a very small gap between character and author?”

Really? Really!?

I hang out with so many kid lit champions that I sometimes forget how easily this genre that I love can be dismissed. Boo on you, Wood, for writing this, boo on any FSG editors who let this completely superfluous phrase that adds nothing to Wood’s larger argument to remain on the page.

And boo for me for submitting to the temptation of something shiny when I could have cracked open one of the other books in my bag. Perks of Being a Wallflower or Dying to Know You.

Kid stuff.

File this post under: How A Children’s Lit Degree Destroys Everything You Love. Ask me sometime about how I wrote 4 papers on The Giver in 9 months…

Let me tell you this about my grad school experience… early in 2009, I was putting concerted effort into “reading widely across genres.” I gave myself 10 “slots” for books each month, and tried to fill in the first five with different genres – YA Fiction, Juvenile Nonfiction, Adult Fiction, etc. By April, I had set my academic course (aka wrote some deposit checks) on a path towards a children’s literature degree. By April, I’d also become weary of “reading widely.” It was hard. Uncomfortable. I would rather just read and re-read my favorite books and authors, ya know?

So one of the things I found exciting about a children’s lit degree was the prospect of a Syllabus! I longed for someone to tell me what to read (see also: Marriage). And although I watched new releases pass me by for three years, and every semester I reached a point where all I wanted was to read ANYTHING that wasn’t 19th century/realism/taking place on Mars, I discovered so many genres and authors that I never would have given a second chance otherwise.

See: Historical Fiction. If you had asked me in 2009 if I would like to read a book about teenagers in Scotland in 1952 (that starts with 50 or so pages detailing THEIR parents’ and grandparents’ heritage and history), and that can also legitimately classified as a book ABOUT the Cuban Missile Crisis? I would have certainly laughed mightily, either in my mind or later after you left the room. Perhaps I would discredit your future book recommendations completely. Who knows, it was 2009, I was ruthless back then.

However, it is 2012, and I just read Mal Peet’s Life: An Exploded Diagram and I loved it I loved it I loved it so much. It is everything I described above, yes, but don’t be afraid. The family heritage bit is actually pretty brief, and mostly humorous. The historical retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis is actually interesting, especially for me, who felt suddenly shamed to realize that even after XX years of history courses, I knew NOTHING about this incredible moment in US history. The narrator is a likeable, knowledgeable, and cheeky guide through this all.

But what wraps it all up in a delicious package is The LOVE STORY. Oh, there is a love story, a first love story, that is so evocative, so touching, and at times, downright steamy. Peet knows what he is doing when he alternates chapters here, teasing you into being interested in JFK because you know there’s another chapter of romance when you finish.

And the ending. Agh, the ending! This is a terrible review, I realize, but after you read this ending, you will think that every other novel’s conclusion was more of a lame fizzle, a drag-out, a ramble on. Peet? He has written here an Ending, capital-E-, practically Hollywood worthy, throw your book down and gasp-worthy.

Gush gush gush glow glow glow, please drop what you are doing and pretend like you are desperate to learn more about JFK’s early presidency so you will not waste another moment of your life not reading this book! Consider it your syllabus for the month.