I can never quite decide if I like travel memoirs. I am not a world explorer. I have no grand designs to traipse across the world with nothing but a backpack and a passport. I’m not opposed to world traveling, but it just doesn’t call to me like I think it calls to others. Those Others tend to be the ones writing travel memoirs, so I think I am intrigued by the premise of many travelogues but then feel put-off because I don’t quite understand the kind of of unspoken zest that runs under the text.

However, a specific narrative voice sometimes sucks me in. Mock me if you will, but I adore Eat, Pray, Love. Maybe I’m more interested in the memoir than the travel?

I couldn’t quite decide if I liked To Timbuktu: Nine Countries, Two People, One Story, but ultimately, Scieska’s story and voice endeared me. Scieskza has the zest for travel – just out of college, she wants to teach in China, revisit her study abroad locale of Morocco, and has landed a Fulbright to spend a few months researching education systems in Mali. But she also has a zest for Steven, who she met while in Morocco. Since then, they’ve been maintaining a long-distance, nascent-romance, and what better way to start a Real Relationship than by traveling, working, and living together around the world?

What I ended up liking about this book was Scieska’s earnestness, her honesty. This is not about the romance of travel, but the excited optimism of being young and running around the world, taking it all in. This is not about the romance of two lovers shacking up overseas, but about the romance of getting to know each other when you share a dusty apartment with no appliances and the air conditioning stopped working and it’s 100+ degrees outside and you have some kind of traveling sickness.

Scieska writes the text here, so it’s mostly her story, but her partner, Steven, contributes charcoal-y illustrations.

I wonder where they are traveling to now?

In one of my first grad classes, we read every book written by a few different authors. We read them in order. This is actually a really fun way to read, especially authors that have a lot of books and are still writing. It gives you a unique perspective on each successive book.

I had never read Jacqueline Woodson before, but in 5 weeks or so I became a veritable Woodson expert. One thing I really enjoyed about Woodson’s works is that they could be considered “issue books” or “problem novels.” Interracial relationships. Child sexual abuse. Teen pregnancy. Being in the Witness Protection Program. Foster care. Being orphaned. But the thing is, Woodson’s books never *feel* like they are books about these issues. They feel like you’re reading damn good writing.

In Beneath a Meth Moon, the issue is drug abuse. Crystal meth. Laurel is new in town, still recovering from the loss of her mother and grandmother in Hurricane Katrina. She wants to make a new friend, so she joins the cheerleading squad. She wants someone to kiss after basketball games, so she starts dating the team co-captain. She wants to feel good, feel happy, so when her new boyfriend offers her a taste of what they call Moon, she takes it, and she likes it. Not long after, she’s under its spell.

Books about teen drug use easily slip into that *PROBLEM NOVEL!!* trope. As much as I love Go Ask Alice for being ridiculous and campy and awesome, other books about teen drug abuse tend toward the Afterschool Special, or focus not on the descent but on rehab. Woodson, instead, captures Laurel’s unintentional slips, her small decisions and desires that led her down a bad path, and how her grief weaves through her every move.

As usual, Woodson’s prose is lyrical and the story slim, just under 200 pages. She flies under the popular radar sometimes, but Woodson is a proven talent. I don’t think you have to read all of her books to appreciate Beneath a Meth Moon as much as I did but once you’re done you might want to.

Once upon a time, I used to love dystopian fiction. But ever since The Hunger Games rolled into town, I haven’t been able to stomach many of them. THERE’S JUST TOO MANY! And, like the first bandwagon ever to be jumped upon, the longer the dystopian trend rolls on, the more really bad dystopias are allowed into existence. I have no desire to sift through the detritus when I’ve already read plenty that I’ve loved.

That is a bad reading attitude, but there it is. However, my syllabus occasionally beckons me back to dystopia-land. This semester, I read Divergent by Veronica Roth, which I’ve surmised is quite popular. I expected to run screaming from yet another plucky, anti-establishment teenaged protagonist, yet another set of fascist adults running the gov’ment, yet another allegory about global warming and overconsumption.

However, Divergent wasn’t all that bad. Things I liked:

• The dystopian premise was straightforward and unique

The future in Divergent is based on a restructuring of society based on personality traits and deep belief in the benefits of certain behaviors. Inhabitants of this post-disaster-y future Chicago live in five factions. Those who live in Candor value honesty and clear motives. Members of the Erudite faction believe that knowledge is the most important asset and focus their lives on acquiring more. Amity is for the peaceful and kind, Dauntless for the brave, Abnegation for the eternally selfless. The factions keep separate living quarters but join together to go to school, run the government, and other daily-living type situations.

• There wasn’t too much explaining

With all these strange societal divisions, the reader is left asking “Uh…. why?” And instead of over-explaining the entire history between our present and this future, Roth does a good job of letting the narrative unroll the details little by little. But more importantly, I liked how the theory behind these societal divisions naturally led the reader to reflect on how and why the changes occurred. Were the factions formed to promote each value within society – to enforce the importance of honesty, knowledge, courage, etc? Were the factions formed to ensure a balanced society, where at the very least five different worldviews are incorporated in decision-making? Or were the factions formed in opposition to each other – is one seeking to win out over the others? All of these questions are hinted at but never answered, which I think is a hallmark of a Good Dsytopia.

• Action, romance, tension, etc

It wasn’t boring. Roth understands all that plot nonsense that keeps you flipping pages.

Things I Didn’t Like:

• The Classic, “I just don’t fit in!” Dystopian narrator

This is probably Lois Lowry’s fault. That moment in The Giver when Jonas realizes he’s not going to move on into life like the rest of his friends? I’ve seen that moment in so many dystopian books, and it’s here in Divergent, too. I realize it’s a powerful narrative tool, but even powerful narrative tools get tired.

• The Ending

I don’t want to spoil anything, but the ending is a bit “AND THEN ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE!” Things get suddenly out of control, violent, and mayhem-y. I didn’t feel prepared for this turn of events, and it seemed a little like a ploy to get you intrigued because….

• It’s part of a trilogy

I. Hate. Trilogies.

I almost don’t want to read the sequels out of spite.

~

This has got me all riled up on the topic of dystopias. I used  to have so much love, I really did. But in my YA lit library class, we are constantly talking about Trends That Teens Like, and by golly those teens like dystopias. I have even been working on a little Pinterest board that features Dystopias with Male Protagonists (any suggestions?). I think I will have to write again on this topic again soon, but for now, I will return to Not Reading Them.

(Unless they are written by Megan McCafferty)

There are books that you know are right up your alley, and they don’t disappoint. There are books that you love like you love your friends or your family and that you read once a year to make you happy. There are books that you are in awe of, but you will probably never pick up again because you got everything there is to be had in one read. There are books that you finish and immediately want to pick up and read again.

I am not talking about any of those. I want to talk about the kind of book that, inexplicably, sticks with you. The book you pick up for no particular reason – maybe a good review or a recommendation, but not much more – and you read without expectations, but you are so very subtly blown away by what you find inside that even if you never read the book again, you will just always remember that book.

Summer of 2006. Summer vacation at my Grandpa’s house in Myrtle Beach. Randomly selected assortment of beach leisure reading.

Patricia McCormick’s Sold.

Sold is a book about a horrifying, systemic, human rights issue: young girls sold into sexual slavery in Nepal and India. The book attempts to bring awareness to this issue occurring, silently, across the globe. It explores the complex economic and social issues that allow such atrocities to occur. And it gives you an emotional punch in the face by telling the story, in verse, from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl who has been sold to a brothel.

Kim Purcell’s new novel, Trafficked, takes on the same challenge: to expose, explore, and personalize the experience of teens from Moldova – a particularly impoverished former Soviet nation – who are trafficked illegally into the United States. Purcell alludes to the fact that many of these girls are, indeed, being sold into prostitution. This fact alone, is brutal: right now, in your country, there are girls living in situations similar to those in McCormick’s Sold. However, the protagonist in Trafficked – Hannah – is not a  teen prostitute.  Hannah is a Moldovian girl – orphaned after a terrorist attack kills both her parents – who is trafficked into America so she can work as a live-in nanny for a wealthy Russian-American couple, ostensibly so she can live with few expenses and send her modest paychecks home to her ailing grandmother.

What Purcell does well here is keep the reader on the same, anxious level as Hannah. Even though the narrative follows Hannah’s every move, both she and the reader never quite figure out how it is that Hannah and other girls are making their way out of the country; all we know is that it’s beyond shady, dangerous, and someone somewhere is making a tidy sum off of each transaction. And once Hannah arrives in her new home, there is the constant threat that if Hannah makes a wrong move – or even if her employers simply have no more need for her – she  may be sent home, sent to jail as an illegal, or to a local brothel run by a friend of the family.

Purcell also characterizes the unique experience of a trafficked young girl, powerless almost beyond comprehension. Although Hannah’s employers are wealthy and show her some kindnesses, they are also controlling, demanding and randomly cruel. Hannah submits to their demands on the threat of being tossed to the streets, but every day she seems to realize more and more that she has become nothing more than a slave to these people.

However, I don’t think Trafficked will ever stay with me in the way that Sold did for the simple reason that Purcell lets her narrative diverge from the focus of human trafficking. Hannah begins to suspect that her nannying position was not as random as she believed: that she was, perhaps, targeted by this particular family. She sneaks around her employers house looking for clues, eavesdrops on conversations, and slowly, this plot becomes the main interest of the book.

The anxious tension that feels so powerful as the novel begins devolves into the territory of any typical thriller or mystery. The book, then, becomes a story about a specific, exceptional situation rather than about human trafficking.

Maybe McCormick set my standards too high, but I was ultimately disappointed. I found the book interesting and fairly engaging, but it lacked that emotional punch-you-in-the-gut quality that I hoped for.  Ultimately, I considered the book to be just another mediocre action plot wrapped in a sensational package.

Nothing that will stick.