Going Underground
Wednesday, January 25
Bloomsbury 2011
Three years after a school incident turns him into a felon, can Del find love and a life outside the graveyard where he works?
Yeah, I said graveyard.
Del is seventeen, and digging graves isn't just the only job he can find that doesn't do background checks, but it gives him plenty of time to think about how he got here. With a parole officer checking to make sure he tries to get into a college, and a therapist helping him sort out his issues, you would think Del was a hellion who had gone on a murderous spree.
His crime: sexting with his girlfriend when they were fourteen.
At the time of the original incident Del was a straight-A kid, an athlete, with a good future ahead of him. And when he and his girlfriend sent each other pictures of themselves naked they thought, well, they thought they were being responsible by doing that instead of having sex. Turns out they probably should have had sex, because according to the law his girlfriend was under the age of consent (a few weeks shy of her fourteenth birthday) and that made what Del did a sex crime. As in, sex offender. As in, on your permanent record for decades.
For three years since Del, more than any of his friends, have had to deal with the taint of this offense. Del wasn't the only one participating in sexting. At an overnight event on school grounds Del and his friends were talking about the images their girlfriends had sent them when they had their cell phones confiscated. The teachers who took the phones saw the images and, by law, reported what they found to the police. The next thing they knew they were at the police station being questioned. Despite Del's parents, and his girlfreind's parents, refusal to press charges in favor of dealing with it themselves it was the local DA who was going to use this case, and Del, as an example. In the fallout, his girlfreind's parents decided to move away from the town in protest, Del's friends kept their distance, and Del was reduced to the pariah status of a predatory sex offender.
And, again, all because the kids thought they were being responsible by sending each other naked photos of themselves instead of having sex.
Del does manage to find a new girlfriend who doesn't think what he did was wrong, and he does manage to find a college willing to take a chance on a kid willing to be frank and open about his situation, but the central questions about whether what Del and the other kids was right or wrong is one the reader can mull over and discuss with friends.
Vaught's style is breezy and unobtrusive, it gets the job done without being preachy and without fully taking the stand that what Del did was okay. The story does lean toward the idea that prosecuting minors as sex offenders is harsh and underscores how much damage can be done to teens in an effort to "crack down" on bad behavior through excessive legislation. It would probably make a good stating point for a lively classroom discussion, though in places where it would probably be beneficial the book will no doubt be offensive to some adults and get a school or teacher in trouble for using it as a legitimate classroom tool.
Labels: 11, bloomsbury, cell phones, middle grade, sexting, susan vaught, teen, text messages, YA
posted by david elzey @ 8:37 AM,
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Guantanamo Boy
Monday, January 23
Albert Whitman 2011
On a family vacation to Pakistan sis months after 9/11 a teen boy is picked up as an enemy combatant and taken to Guantanamo Bay where he is tortured, all the while wondering how he got there...
This is one of those stories you want to like, want to be able to recommend, have a hard time not putting too many eggs into your basket of hope, because it's a solid idea that just dies on the page.
Khalid is a typical Pakistani-British teen boy. Okay, maybe not entirely typical, he does seem a bit naive, but down the road he's just one of his mates when it comes to soccer and all. And like many a teen boy everywhere he's very much into online gaming, particularly with his worldly cousin Tariq. When Khalid's grandmother dies his parents decide they are going to visit the family in Pakistan during Easter break. Form there it's a drawn out hop, skip, and a jump before Khalid finds himself in a wrong-place-wrong-time situation and he's in Gitmo wondering why and how he got there.
This book was a slog unlike any I've endured in some time. If I didn't already agree with the politics of the detention center at Guantanamo – or rather, if I didn't agree that Gitmo was and is a terrible violation of human rights with little to justify it – I couldn't have managed past the first chapter. Written in a stilted and distancing first-person, with characters that fall flat and a plot that has to be sifted from the silt of information this book is crammed with, I kept hoping that soon, soon, it would turn a corner and pry my eyelids open. I know there's a good, and important, book in here somewhere, but it would take a team of gifted surgeons to find it.
So this story is out there, still, waiting for someone to tell it so that young readers can see what's really been going on in the name of The War on Terror. This book simply isn't it though.
Labels: 11, anna perera, guantanamo, terrorism, war, whitman, YA
posted by david elzey @ 8:38 AM,
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Shelter
Thursday, January 19
A Mickey Bolitar Novel
Putnam 2011
When his girlfriend goes missing, and no one else seems to notice or care, Mickey begins to dig around and finds himself caught up in a web of... human sex trafficking!
His dad is dead, his mom is in rehab, his girlfriend of three weeks has gone missing, and the neighborhood crazy lady has scared the pants off Mickey... all in the first sentence of this mystery. The details will come in short order, but what is clear from the very beginning is that Coben isn't pulling any punches when it comes to ratcheting up the tension in what looks to be the promising beginning of a new mystery series for YA readers.
Mickey isn't some kid who starts out with aspirations to become a detective or with any particular skill-sets that tip of he's something special, he's just a typical kid who's been forced to bum around the world with his parents while they did their various humanitarian missions. But with his dad killed (under not-so-accidental conditions as Mickey will learn) and his mother in rehab over the loss, Mickey's been foisted onto his uncle in his dad's old home town where the family name draws ire in some quarters. Being the new kid, befriending the heavy goth girl because he's the only one with some decency, finding himself with a nerdy sidekick, and not taking any crap from the bully-jocks sets Mickey up for the reluctant anti-hero mold, but things don't start rolling until his girlfriend of three weeks – also a new kid in town – goes missing without a trace. With a little deviousness, and a lot of chutzpah, Mickey suddenly discovers that no one in the town is who they seem, not even his parents.
That Coben takes us from local to global by making the mystery at the heart of the story about human sex trafficking is, I think, a bold recognition that teen readers looking for mystery stories don't talk down to them while maintaining their human scale. There's real danger involved as kids are dealing with scary gun-toting adults but there are no unbelievable super-heroics and no sense that the story elements are really that far-fetched. It also doesn't hurt that Coben knows how to dump twist after twist into the story, including turns that you had no right to expect out of the middle of nowhere. It reads faster than a lot of adult beach reads and is twice as smart.
In the recent trend of adult writers who dip into writing for middle grade and YA, Coben is the first I've read who really seems to understand the value in creating books that build an audience base. Just because you like Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books or Lemony Snicket doesn't mean you're going to like those author's adult books. Even Elmore Leonard, who I thought would make a perfect crossover writer, didn't get it, but Coben does. It's a smart move, because any teen who likes this can probably jump to Coben's adult titles pretty quickly.
This is how you do a YA to adult crossover.
Labels: 11, harlan coben, human trafficking, mickey bolitar, mystery, putnam, sex, YA
posted by david elzey @ 8:16 AM,
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Mister Creecher
Tuesday, January 17
Bloomsbury 2011
The creature walks the streets of London, with the Artful Dodger, hunting down the mad doctor! No, Boris Karloff does not make an appearance.
The scene is London, 1918, and there in the darkened, fog-damp streets is Billy, pickpocket and petty thief. Billy starts off in a spot of trouble with the local thugs when is hide is saved by an enormous monster of a man who Billy comes to call Mister Creecher. An odd and uneasy bond develops between them as Mr. C convinces him to come along on a bloody (literally) little trip to the country in search of the true monster, the man who made Mr C what he is, one Doctor Victor Frankenstein. While in the country Billy sees a bucolic side of life, something better than being a street rat, and he pretends to be a poet to win a young lady's affection. Ah, but the good Doctor has his eye set on creating a new creature, a companion for Mr C if you will, and suddenly all paths converge in a way that sends Billy back to the comforts of London's rough and tumble street. It's there that he'll start to go by his grown name of Bill... Bill Sikes.
What? How did Dickens end up in all this?
For a new take on Frankenstein's monster this is an interesting idea, the blending of two fictional characters in one setting. But if you have a familiarity with Frankenstein and Oliver Twist it's hard to see the mash-up without your thoughts getting trapped in a corner of literary logic. How could these two worlds exist at the same time? Worse, I found while reading that I was starting to hear bits of the musical Oliver! play in my mind while scenes played out like an old 1930s movie staring Boris Karloff. Which is to say that Priestley does a good job catching the mood but the mood in this book feels borrowed at every turn. I did like that Creecher was articulate, almost aristocratic in bearing, and he makes an interesting "mentor" if we are to believe that this particular Billy will become, in manner at least, like his Dickensian namesake.
So for the idea in general, I like, but I don't know that it's going to stick with me over time.
Labels: 11, bloomsbury, chris priestley, dickens, frankenstein, horror, mash-up, middle grade, shelley
posted by david elzey @ 8:34 AM,
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Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor
Monday, December 12
Originally published in Country Life magazine 1939
published in book form by Macmillian 1967
reprinted by Candlewick 2001
The Captain and his oddball crew settle in on an uncharted island where they encounter a creature the color of butter and then... do nothing?
The good Captain is a bruiser who has run through his share of crew. His ship, The Black Tiger, has lost many a men to sharks and the plank leaving only five bizarre scallywags for company. One day they spot an uncharted island and go to investigate, finding among the unusual flora and fauna a pan-like creature the color of butter. "Just exactly the sort I've been wanting!" the Captain says cryptically. Entranced, the Captain quickly spends all his time looking at, doting on, dancing with, and generally hanging out with the Yellow Creature, so much so that the crew are reduced to doing little more than acting as servants or a bored audience. The Captain is so happy with his new life on the island that he finally decides to give up pirating for good. His crew (presumably with the ship) have long departed, and to this day the Captain and his Yellow Creature are there on their island, eating exotic fruit and watching the sun set and dancing hornpipes whenever they please.
 |
| he looked like this |
As for the story itself, my modern reader's brain wants to know a whole lot more about what Peake's intentions were. The Captain has clearly been running through men in search of something, seeking out some unknown something that has driven him at the expense of others. But then when he finds the Yellow Creature the effect is identical to that of falling into a blind, fawning love. The Creature's coy, almost fay expressions seem to acknowledge the Captain's stirrings and perhaps indicate the feelings are mutual.
Is this crazy? A story about a pirate captain at the end of his career finally deciding to retire on a remote, deserted island and setting up home with an exotic native?
 |
| l'après-midi d'un faune? |
By modern standards, what's wrong is that there's no real character development and little plot conflict to speak of. The Yellow Creature is an enigma. There's almost something menacing about his silence and manner, with facial expressions that can be read as innocent or seductive or duplicitous, and understanding his intentions might confuse younger readers.
Or maybe not. Kids don't question an owl and a pussycat sailing to far away lands and getting married by a pig, they don't think twice about forests full of bears who live in houses and sleep in beds and eat porridge, and pirates are simply cool.
Another curiosity no longer in print, though still available in libraries and worth a peek.
Labels: 01, 1967, 30s, basil wolverton, candlewick, macmillan, mervyn peake, out of print, pirates
posted by david elzey @ 8:01 AM,
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Nursery Rhyme Comics
Monday, December 5
introduction by Leonard S. Marcus
First Second 2011
Fifty timeless rhymes! From fifty celebrated cartoonists! At least forty-nine excellent classic nursery rhymes in a cartoon format!
There are a number of ways to approach nursery rhymes. You can either take them at their most surface story level. You can interpret them literally or figuratively or historically. You could also enjoy them strictly for their sound, for the way they roll with linguistic cadences. And with subjects like animals behaving oddly or inanimate objects coming to life or simply reveling in the absurdity of fairy tale-like imagery it is easy to see why nursery rhymes endure: they are wide open to interpretation and imagination.
Mother Goose and other nursery rhyme collections tend toward the cute, or the sweet, or at the very least, non-threatening. Most collections settle for a single image or two that illustrates some element of the story and leaves the rest out. For the truly young the story and the image become linked, forever lodged without explanation or the desire to even understand. It's a marvelous and sometimes bizarre thing to plant in a young mind the image of a Jack and a Jill tumbling head-first down a hill simply for doing their chores.
Enter sequential storytelling.
Sequential visual narratives strive to tell a story not only in the pictures but between the panels. Like picture books, they extend the characters and the narrative from one to the next, each panel like a page unto itself, each transition like a page turn. Structurally, comics and graphic novels make for great transitional narrative for readers as they are dialog driven and tend to build scene upon scene. Add nonsensical nursery rhymes and the interpretation of cartoonists and you've got quite a wild ride. How many times have you heard or read Humpty Dumpty? How does it end? It ends in tragedy, like Shakespeare, inevitable and unchangeable. Ah, but cartoons have a long history of the punchline, the change-up at the end, a twist that turns everything on its ear. What if the Egg Man fell, cracked open, and out sprang a half dozen smaller versions of himself? This is precisely what Gilbert Hernandez does in his retelling, and in doing so transforms the familiar into the new.
In other rhymes the narrative is subverted for a parallel story not even hinted at in the original. Little Boy Blue remains a farm boy shirking his duties, but here the barnyard animals are the ones who are featured. Bob Flynn has the sheep in meadow throwing Frisbees, and the reason no one is willing to wake him is because the animals have a pretty good poker game going on.
On the historical front, leave it David Macaulay to turn London Bridge into a lesson about all the different architectural forms the bridge has taken in its time. From rickety wood to stone and steel, Macaulay manages to erase the notion that the rhyme is only suited for playground games where some unlucky sod gets caught in the gated arms of classmates (usually some boy trapped between two girls). The collection of cartoonists involved is fantastic. Personal faves include Jules Feiffer, Eleanor Davis, Craig Thompson, Sara Varon, Marc Rosenthal, Kate Beaton, Tony Millionaire... a collection too numerous to mention. Most I have encountered somewhere along the way, either in alternative comics or picture books or graphic novels, and with the exception of a single artist whose style I just don't care for I find them all to be equally suited to the task.
For most families with children I would say this shouldn't be the first or only collection of nursery rhymes. But for those who might want a second book this might make a great addition for the family with a new reader looking to read nursery rhymes to younger siblings. It'll make them the hip and cool kid who introduces their kid brothers and sisters into the joys of reading, storytelling, and the slightly subversive world of comics.
Labels: 11, chris duffy, collection, comics, first second, graphic novel, leonard s marcus, mother goose, nursery rhyme
posted by david elzey @ 12:05 PM,
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Around the World
Wednesday, November 30
Candlewick 2011
Three remarkable journeys made by a trio of intrepid adventurers – Thomas Stevens, Nellie Bly, and Joshua Slocum – on the eve of the 20th century, rendered in graphic novel format.
As a prologue, we begin with the wager that sets up Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. It seems an impossible (and almost arbitrary) goal to set, but fantastical enough to build an entire narrative around. Obviously Verne chose the time limit based on what was possible back in 1872 but it was enough to fire the imaginations of many a would-be adventurers. With this as a backdrop Phelan proceeds to take us on three journeys whose reasons and purpose were as unique as the people who ventured out.
First up is Thomas Stevens, a Colorado miner who's destiny is changed the moment he first sees a high-wheel bicycle. Sensing that bikes are "the future," and with no desire to spend his life in a mine, he decides to do what no one has ever done before; he intends to circle the globe atop a one of these unusual bikes. He isn't determined to break any records – how could he at something no one has ever done before – but does it almost in the spirit that has driven many to adventure: because it is there to be done. Stevens' journey is a travelogue with only a few minor hitches along the way.
Next up is Nellie Bly, intrepid girl reporter, who previously feigned insanity in order to be admitted to an asylum and report back the abuses she found to her newspaper, The New York World. Her hook is that she's confident she can beat Phileas Fogg's fictional record of 80 days and do the trek in 74 days. Traveling light, Bly's adventures hit occasional bumps along the way including a necessary audience with Jules Verne and the news along the way that another newspaper has sent a female reporter to beat her to the record. In the end she not only succeeds but beats her own goal by making the trip in 72 days.
Finally we come to Joshua Slocum, a retired naval officer looking to sail around the world alone on a 36-foot boat. A quiet man who keeps his intentions to himself, he sets a course east toward the Mediterranean only to discover the threat of pirates which sends his course westward around the world. Along the way he stops to visit the grave marker of his first wife and fellow adventurer who died in Argentina some years earlier. Then come the treacherous waters of the cape, becalmed seas, and a lot of time for Slocum and his thoughts. He returns to port as quietly as when he left and eventually publishes his journal of the trip. Then, almost 15 years later, he returns to the boat and sails away, never to be heard from again.
Phelan notes at the end that while he had intended to illustrate simply the narratives of their adventures he realized there were inward as well as outward journeys taking place. Everyone has their reasons and they aren't always as clear as a simple wager against time. Phelan also admits to having to read between the lines and though I don't fault him for the conjecture there were times I wish he made his interpretations a little more clear.
It is easy to understand why a miner might want to achieve something other than a life underground, but what drove Stevens to such a leap as to see the bicycle as the future, much less believe he had the stamina and determination to undertake a trip around the world? With Bly, perhaps the best documented story of the bunch, it is easier to see that she was an active part of the women's sufferage movement, but what were the personal reasons driving her in all she did? And with Slocum we see what is, perhaps, the most melancholy adventure ever presented as it appears he has undergone the trip because he feels some lasting guilt or remorse over the loss of his first wife. That his second wife "refused" to take this trip with him may be something of a ruse: he offered her passage knowing she would refuse, she refused knowing he was still obsessed with his first wife. But did Slocum say all this in his ship's diary, or is this the result of Phelan's line reading?
In fact, Phelan has forced the reader to read between the lines (or panels in the case of this graphic novel) and ask "Why that choice, why that decision, why that reaction?" Though I hardly would have wanted him to put words in their mouths I think its still possible to let us know how and why these adventurers chose to behave as they did. We're working in pictures here, its just as easy to show us some of this conjecture just as it is to draw a representation of an ocean liner without having to research the exact ship they might have taken, to choose a color and pattern of clothing of the era whether or not they cut and style were 100% accurate. In that, Slocum's story is the closest to showing us what's driving him, but damn, is it depressing.
While I like Phelan's loose gestural stylings, I found large sections of Around the World that looked more like dummy sketches than finished work. I can appreciate the amount of work involved in coming up with hundreds of pages of illustration for a graphic undertaking this size, but with many panels featuring only the subject surrounded by a light color wash there isn't a sense of time or place in the panels, which not only flatten out the images but the story as well. They suggest more than they depict, and with an historical narrative this would be the equivalent of a steampunk story without any of the greasy-geary details that bring the world to life. There is minimalism, and then there's minimalist illustrations that leave me feeling like I would have been better of with just the text. Around the World sits right there on the fence tottering toward a text-only narrative.
On the plus side, the book did leave me hungering and wondering about all the other trips undertaken in order to beat records and prove something. For every attempt there had to be at least one failure. Around the World makes me curious about those who tried and failed, which all things considered, is rather fitting curiosity to be left with.
Labels: 11, adventure, bicycling, candlewick, graphic novel, joshua slocum, matt phelan, nellie bly, sailing, thomas stevens
posted by david elzey @ 8:56 AM,
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