Holden 2010

Every now and then I hear a yuppie call to her child by the name of Holden.  This always give me pause.  Not because I am a yuppie too.  Not because I’d love to have my own mad tofu-eating toddler running around Golden Gate Park.  But because of the name.  Holden.  Really?  You named your kid after the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye?  The kid who tells his story from an insane asylum?  The kid who gets kicked out of five schools?  Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Holden-hater.  I like The Catcher in the Rye.  But, I am an English teacher — it’s practically a requirement. The novel is an annual favorite, and it’s on every “classics” list.  It is a holy text.  Maybe that’s why South Park decided to slaughter the sacred cow on their episode: The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs.  The no-neck boys from South Park eagerly read the novel after their teacher promises that it is racy, censored and controversial.  Grossly disappointed, they decide to write their own banned book, a book that causes readers to vomit.  Vomit a lot.  

And this brings me back to my English class.  No, the students don’t vomit excessively.  I’m sure they watch South Park, but more importantly, The Catcher in the Rye was chosen by several of them for an independent-book-report-project-make-a-poster-use-the-rubric-you’ve-had-two-months-to-work-on-this-!-!-extravaganza.  Yesterday presentations began.  (My students are AMAZING!)  Does Holden still resonate with today’s teens?  Does Holden transcend the decades of teenage angst?  According to Boy-Who-Should-Wear-a-Bike-Helmet, “Holden is a whiner and a complainer.  He needs to step up to the plate and make something of himself.”  Hmmmm…What could this mean?  Has Holden fallen from grace?  Will the next generation name their sons after Atticus, not HC?!  

Upon further questioning, Boy-Who-Should-Wear-a-Bike-Helmet revealed that he doesn’t think there are any excuses for being kicked out of school repeatedly.  He thinks Holden is spoiled.  And that, no, his relationship with Phoebe does not redeem him.  Neither does anything else. 

It makes me wonder if times have changed.  Do teens identify more with the protagonist who is not an anti-hero, but a true hero?  Maybe in uncertain times, teens want to read about people who can suck it up — stiff upper lip and all of that.  Or maybe Holden hits too close to home and what some dislike about him is that he has qualities they themselves have.

Regardless, Holden lives on.  I expect to teach him — or one or three — in a few years.  

WWJDD?

Yo bro!

Beloved Nephew is only eight years old, but I am compiling YA fiction for him.  I like to plan ahead.  I picked up Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver for his four-years-down-the-line-collection.  It is the first of a series of six books (Chronicles of Ancient Darkness) about Torak, a young boy faced with defeating a hidden enemy, one hiding in the form of a monstrous bear.  Thus, begins Torak’s quest in hunter/gatherer Europe.  Along the way he acquires a wolf cub that has also lost his family.  Torak faces different challenges — surviving in general –, meets a hostile clan and makes a new friend, a girl named Renn.  She helps him as he pieces together an offering of “brightest souls” for the World Spirit.  

For the sake of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a complete sucker for The Hero’s Journey and quests, vision or otherwise, of any kind.  Metaphors for life, all of them.  I’m not surprised that I enjoyed Wolf Brother, but what stands out to me the most is the setting of the story.  Can a genre be historical fiction-ish?  Reading a story set in pre-history appeals to me, as does a forested, wild Europe.  

While I think this is a book that both boys and girls will enjoy, it is definitely a 12-14 year old “boy book.”  It is a coming of age adventure novel that expresses a boy’s worst fear — death of father, while assuring him that with courage, self-reliance and by remembering his father’s wisdom, he too can go forth into the wilds of the unknown.  

Die hard readers might enjoy visiting or becoming part of this online community for Torak fans: http://www.torak.info/index.php?categoryid=1

In 2014, I think this is a series Beloved Nephew will enjoy.

C’mon Baby, Light My Fire

So, I know I’m supposed to be reading the book about wolves, Shiver.  And, I will finish it.  It just has not grabbed me yet.  Lots of smoldering thus far.  My Kindle assures me that I am 21% through the story.  Plus, at the insistence of one of the 8th Grade Chicas, I began The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  Of course, I couldn’t help but cheer for Katniss — a teen in post-apocalyptic former North America, now known as Panem.  She is “reaped” and has to participate with other young people in a competition reminiscent of the Running Man’s game show.  Katniss’ contest is broadcast to other folk in this dystopian nightmare in which people are controlled by hunger, violence and censorship.  But, rebellion against the Capitol is brewing and the “districts” might be going the way of  Twisted Sister.  That’s right, “we’re not gonna take it!”  

I can always tell when I’m reading a really, really good story because I don’t move from the couch, and my husband does my bidding by delivering Kleenex, snacks and drinks.  (Thanks, Honey!)  What is so great about The Hunger Games and the sequel, Catching Fire?  In the words of the Chica: “I don’t know.”  Incidentally, my boys love the books too.  There is nothing new about a plot that revolves around a rebel who inspires the downtrodden to rise against a tyrannical, blood-thirsty government.  But Katniss is an exceptionally tough cookie who has to balance family obligations, survival, love and killing with, well, growing up, not breaking hearts and being kind to her mom.  

In the words of selfsame 8th Grade Chica: “She won’t play the game. Katniss doesn’t want to conform.”  Did I have you at “won’t play the game”?  It reminds me of what 
a jaded, bitter person once told me: “high school is all about learning how to play the game.”  Is it all an elaborate game for our students?  For ourselves?  Perhaps.  Maybe that’s why we love The Hunger Games (third and final book, Mockingjay, out on 8/24).  We love the story of a person who fights to live an authentic life because we know that the struggle is heroic.  And since the beginning of story telling, human beings have loved heroes.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts,

Can’t even finish the game????  I love this show but this episode was just painful, every freaking moment was bleak.  Well except Tami and the coin toss, and I was so grateful for that little moment.  Please, please, I need some light.

A Crooked Kind of Perfect

The nice thing about younger narrators is the innocence and naivete they bring to the story, it makes it light-hearted even if it really isn’t.

The Book: A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Zoe, age 11, wants to be a piano prodigy to someday play at Carnegie Hall. Instead her father brings home an organ, a Perfectone D-60, complete with lessons from Maybelline Person who drinks Vernor’s Ginger Ale (my favorite) and well, seems bored (until she sees some talent in Zoe who ends up playing Neil Diamond’s FOrever in Blue Jeans on the organ – can you imagine?!?).  The real thing going on here despite Zoe’s focus on being a piano prodigy is the reason why her dad brought home the organ – he seems to have agoraphobia, a fear of being in an open or crowded space. He gets distracted and uncomfortable by noise and crowds.  He stays home and takes living room university courses.  He can’t drive Zoe places because he gets lost, lie really lost.  Like most 11 year old narrators Zoe takes this in stride and with good humor, despite the disappointments it can lead to.  But when she gets involved in Perform – o – rama she needs him to step up.  Particularly since her mom is always working.  Zoe’s life isn’t perfect, but she approaches it with good humor, and makes a few unexpected friends, particularly with Wheeler, who also befriends her dad (he needs one himself).

I liked Zoe – she was funny, and the innocence and lack of teenage angst was refreshing.

Becky liked it too.

So did Fuse 8 – you should really read this review!

The Unwritten Rule

Boy was I grumpy last night and this book is to blame….. I will explain but let me give you the set up first.

You know what the unwritten rule between girls is right?  You do not, I mean do not, steal your best friend’s boyfriend (yes connections to recent read – 6 Rules of Maybe).  You don’t crush on him, and you most certainly do not KISS him when he is still with your best friend, and maybe not even after.  Now we can debate this rule – and I suppose it has been, but it is the unwritten rule, at least of this title.

Sarah has a crush on Ryan, she has since the 8th grade, but no one really knows that, not even her best friend, Brianna.  Which might be why when Ryan turns up totally hot at the end of the summer Brianna turns her full wattage on him and now they are dating.  And since a) Sarah never said anything its not like Brianna broke that unwritten rule and b) since Sarah assumes no boy would like her over Brianna she just accepts this fact.  But it isn’t that easy, because there is something there – between Sarah and Ryan, and Ryan and Brianna may not be working out.

So grumpitude….. here is the thing about the story.  Brianna is both casually mean and totally fragile.  She has pretty much destroyed Sarah’s self esteem over the years, although Sarah’s personality allowed that to happen.  And it wasn’t on purpose.  The situation with Brianna’s parents (bitter divorce, working all the time, and casually and not so casually mean themselves) has left her self esteem pretty f’ed up too.  Sarah has the loving family that Brianna has slowly become a part of, but Brianna has all the attention.  The constant “brush your hair” or “we can find you a freshman to date” are what I mean by ‘casually mean’.  So you hate Brianna just a bit, but you also feel sorry for her.  And while the inevitablity of the ending is obvious to the reader, it is going to hit Brianna like a freight train, and because ultimately she is fragile you feel a little sorry for her.

I had this friend.  She could make you feel like the coolest, most important person in the world one minute, and like nothing the next.  She had unwritten rules she wasn’t afraid to break, but Lord, you didn’t want to be the one to break them.  And the thing is for a vast lot of people I don’t have an identity separate from that relationship, and frankly we haven’t talked in 20 years but I am still guilty/angry/sad/insecure about all of that.  So reading this book just dredged a whole lot of crap up – hence, grumpitude.

I am not sure what this book is – romance? well sort of.  friendship? yes that too.  Finding yourself? yep.  Families in all their glory and horror?  Oh yeah.  I’ve been reading mean girls lately (here for example) so it was interesting to read a mean girl who wasn’t intentional, at least at first.

I really like Elizabeth Scott, and in some way this reminded me of The Boyfriend List in similar theme.  The casual meanness, the girl relationship, etc. but boy was I grumpy.

Others thoughts:

The Bookologist liked it.

So did Insanity of Writerhood

An interview:

Vampires: A phase or eternal?

I have been waiting for today ever since I pre-ordered the final Sookie Stackhouse story to download directly to my Kindle…two months ago.  Unlike my friend, I am obsessed with vampiric fiction.  It is shamefully trendy, I know!  From Vampire Diaries to Cirque du Freak to Twilight, I am a vamphile.  I was excited to see the Eclipse trailer on a friend’s Facebook page.  That’s where I am at the moment. 

When considering this entry, I’ve racked brain: what is the metaphor?  (I was destined to be an English teacher).  What do vampires represent?  Why the vampire-mania?  In Buffy’s time, vampires were only good for slaying, but now, they are objects of desire — undead heroes that cause females to swoon and swear undying love. And yeah, the pun is intended.  Because, according to one of my 7th grade girls, some girls are just obsessed with Edward Cullen only and some are obsessed with the idea of him: the idea of true love lasting forever and forever inhabiting perfect, youthful bodies.  

And maybe that’s what they represent: youth, beauty, love and reliability.  At the moment, I think it’s fair to say times are hard and that those universally admired attributes seem to be in short supply.  Have you read CNN today? Oil slicks, teacher strikes, car bombs and the ever-present missing woman, presumed murdered by boyfriend or husband.  Unlike real life, when you snuggle into the couch with popcorn, a diet 7-Up and a novel with a dashing vampire, you know what you are going to get.  You can count on them to stick around because they never die.  Remember, the good vampires, Stefan and Edward, don’t kill humans.  They are noble and self-sacrificing.  They struggle with the moral implications of being the undead and just need a good woman to love ’em up!  

Vampire fiction is cheesy, predictable and a little embarrassing, and it gives readers the means to escape into the dream of true love forever and ever and ever.  And they lived happily ever after, forever, and never grew old. The end.

The 6 Rules of Maybe

1. Respect the power of hope and possibilities. Begin with belief.  Hold on to it.

Perhaps it should say don’t fall in love with your sister’s husband, because that is what Scarlet does, and when that happens all the anger, and hurt, and confusion of her life comes pouring out in some not so attractive, but entirely understandable ways.   The thing is I get that Scarlet is angry at her sister for a while lot of reasons but I am not so sure she treats her all that well for someone who is supposedly a caretaker, and this may be the part that Caletti didn’t quite capture me with in this novel.  That said I love Deb Caletti’s novels (The Nature of Jade is my favorite).  She writes literary romance quite well.

If I were to dissect Scarlet – I’d point out that falling in love with Hayden is the easy way out, no risk taken.  Like her sister who won’t fall in love – no risk.  I get that falling in love with your sister’s husband is not ‘safe’ but it is because Scarlet can’t act on it, not really, and it keeps her from truly engaging with the world around her – recognizing the obvious in people her own age.

This is of course Caletti’s point – no risk, really no possibilities of truly experiencing love, hope, even life.  So sometimes you have to leap, move to Africa to start a cocoa plantation you bought over email, say no to the marriage proposal so you don’t settle, let yourself fall in love with the father of your child, and kiss the boy who you hadn’t thought of kissing before.

You know I said Scarlet isn’t engaged with the world around her, and that isn’t really true – she cares about her neighbors, to the point of creating something wonderful for one of them.  And she sets up a couple at school (with some serious consequence) but all of that is a bit of not engaging with herself you know, not noticing the friend that takes advantage, or the source of why she is really pissed off, and how to respond to that.

It has taken a bit to write about this – I wasn’t totally sure about what to say.  It was a hard book to get my head (and my heart) around.  Caletti does that for me sometimes, but ultimately I end up respecting the story, and fundamentally the writing.

Letting Go of the Knife

So despite some loud epithets and book throwing (spoiler at link)I finished The Knife of Never Letting Go.  What is 120 pages right?

It wasn’t really my cup of tea – set in some unnamed future on some unnamed planet.  Men, boys, and animals thoughts are broadcast, but interestingly enough not women’s or girl’s.  They call it noise, and while some secrets can’t be hidden, some can. In  Prentisstown only men exist, and on your 13th birthday you become a man – in some mysterious way.

Todd is forced to flee shortly before he becomes a man, running though a forest away from an army  and a mad man with a strange girl.  Viola is not the only surprising thing Todd discovers, as he had thought New Prentisstown was all there was on the new world, and that girls had long ago died off.  Along the way he learns the horrible secrets of the men he had always been surround by, including the fate of Prentisstown women.  It is fast paced, adventurous, overloaded with ‘stuff to talk about’, included the nature of good and evil, information overload, colonization.  But despite all of  that I had to force myself to finish and found myself getting bored.  This is because it isn’t my reading preference, not because it wasn’t plotted well with enough character development.  I would book talk it, recommend it particularly to middle school kids, but I won’t read Book 2 or 3.

Really cheekyreader? Really?

O.K. so I have welcomed cheekyreader to Libr*fiti. I did this for 2 reasons – this first is that as my life has taken a turn from where I was when I started the blog and I am not keeping up in a manner that I would like, and I figure that another contributor will help. The other reason should be evident by her introduction – we don’t always have the same take on things and I thought it might be an interesting dynamic to have on this blog.

That being said – Good girls don’t have sex?!? Really?!? You are going THERE?!?. There is nothing more annoying than moralizing in a book or t.v. show in an after school special kind of way. You know – Quinn is pregnant, EBC is well, evil, etc. In fact I thought Glee’s choices in who went through with it and who didn’t was a cop out and stereotypical. I am not so sure we should be so hung up on sex in that American puritanical kind of way. Shouldn’t we take a more healthy approach, which admits that good girls not only have sex, it doesn’t have to be a negative thing?
Also I am pretty sure Las Chicas are not entirely representative of all girls that age. Particularly since the teen in my life announced it was a boring episode because nothing happened…… Read into that what you will. Then again like the chicas, the more singing the better.

And of course all of this has particular resonance in terms of YA, it has taken a while to break the problem novel model of ‘punishing’ those who have sex (girls) with pregnancy, abortion, hell even death but I feel it necessary now to remind everyone of Forever – meeting ‘Ralph’ didn’t ruin the girl’s life. What does it say that I remember the penis name but not the name of the girl? So there – good girls do have sex.