Abandoned: SkateFate

by Juan Filipe Herrera
HarperTeen 2011  

A teen journal, mostly in verse, of a boy ironically nicknamed Lucky as he picks up the pieces of his life following an accident that leaves him in a wheelchair.

It isn't a hard and fast rule, but when I come across a novel in verse, or one that purports to be the inner most thoughts of a teen, I kind expect it to blow me away. Otherwise, why bother with either format?

I've listed this as an "abandoned" book because I didn't finish it and didn't feel compelled to finish it, but I nearly labeled this a "failed" review because of its inability to grab me. But I pulled back at the last minute because I wondered if the failure was partly my fault. See, poetry is one of those areas where I feel you know what does or doesn't when you read it. And my "work" I mean for the individual reader. Not all poetry is meant to be understood and appreciated by all people. I do think people should have more poetry in their diet, but I don't think they should convert to all fiber, if you know what I mean.

The problem for me here was that I didn't get Lucky's voice. I didn't get where he was coming from, and since its an indirect journal full of allusions to details presumably to be filled in later, it was difficult to see where he was going. Basically, the writing didn't carry me along far enough to make me wonder or want to care what was going on in Lucky's life. That's a pretty heavy problem when the book is (apparently) about a skater who ends up in an accident that puts him in a wheelchair, kills his friend, and shoves him into the foster care system because his mother has died of cancer.

There may be a good and compelling book in SkateFate, but I couldn't find it in time to not set it aside.

Legacy

by Thomas E. Sniegoski
Delacorte 2009

At the risk of repeating myself, and stating the obvious, I cannot fathom for the life of my why anyone would seek out a superhero novel. Movies have made the idea of superhero stories vogue, and comics have long perfected and delivered the superhero story in an economical and vibrant format, but I am still unconvinced there is any sort of hue and cry for superhero fiction.

Lucus is a high school drop out in a dead-end desert town working the auto shop. His mom works the local diner. They live in a trailer park. After work he drinks himself drunk and sleeps it off.

The day after he miraculously and instantaneously heals from a knife wound inflicted by a local thug Lucas is visited by a mysterious man claiming to be his father. More, this mystery man who needs a cane to walk turns out to be billionaire Clayton Hartwell, and the old man can kick his ass in a fight. Turns out Lucas is his long-lost deadbeat father and...

Wait. I have to pull this joke: "Lucas, I'm your father! Search your feelings and you'll know this to be true!" Love the George Lucas/Luke/Star Wars reference. Really makes me want to take things seriously. Okay, where were we.

Oh yeah, so dad drops in to say (a) he's dying, (b) that he's a famous superhero named The Raptor and (c) that it's Lucas's legacy to take over. Lucas refuses and wants to confront his mom, but the minute she admits that it's true the trailer park is under attack and, after a fiery inferno takes the place down but leaves Lucas unscathed, he finally accepts who he is and is drugged into a deep sleep.

So we get the billionaire crime fighter with a secret identity, a mansion full of high tech gadgets, a flying suit... he's like Ironman and Batman rolled into one. But not just any Batman, but the Dark Knight who must be convinced that Seraph City (seraph = angel, so I'm guessing Los Angeles) is worth saving. Then again, Hartwell is a little like Ironman's Tony Stark who has decided to use his money and access to technology for good, so he's a conflicted Raptor.

Anyway, once Lucas accepts his fate, or legacy, or whatever, dad puts him through rigorous training whith I have to say is a bit sadistic. Seriously sadistic in some cases. Actually, every life-or-death struggle Anakin puts Luke.. er, I mean that Hartwell puts Lucas through is a pass-fail exam where success is measured by not getting killed. In the end Lucas has to decide whether the old man has gone bats, and whether he's going to take over the family businesses, and be the upholder of vigilante justice in the name of a city he never really loved the way his father allegedly did.

Here's where comic books get superhero stories right and novels, especially novels for teens and middle graders, get things wrong. In comics there is usually some crime and action scenes establishing the superhero and maybe a brush of backstory along the way toward catching the bad guys. Once the comic is established, and the readership solidified, they'll take a breather and give the superhero origins story. By then reader interest is piqued and they want to know who this person is and how they got there. But in novels you don't get several (dozen) stories to build a readership before giving the backstory, and as a result the superhero novel always has to begin with the origin, which slows things down, is tedious, and basically isn't why the reader has picked up the book in the first place.

The reader wants action, and battles, and an evil that must be fought, and they don't want a bunch of inner dialog and pondering to get in the way. With Legacy we even get something worse: an entire novel-length origin/rebirth story. This might make a good story ten or so issues in on a comic line, but in novel form it's just deadly. I kept thinking "Okay, once we get past this father-son ordeal we can get into the nature of crime fighting, or the problems of having to sort out the subtleties of good and evil when you're only 18 years old, but no. Just dad torturing son who he keeps threatening with the old "not good enough" guilt trip line.

What surprises overall is that Sniegoski is a comic book writer as well as an author, and I would have expected him to know better than to recycle a bunch of tired tropes and types that are easily identifiable. If the argument that the book is intended for a younger, less-familiar audience then I find that insulting. Sniegoski is also the creator of the Billy Hooton, Owlboy series aimed at a middle grade audience, another title that suffers from this misguided notion that kids go into bookstores asking for books about superheroes they've never heard of. Newsflash from a former bookseller: they don't! Not only that, the boys who do mention superheroes as an interest are looking for comics and give booksellers the stink-eye if you pull one of these titles on them.

Given the lead time on books I'm going to be optimistic and hope this is just one of the last entries in the superhero bandwagon that publishers jumped on a few years back. Yeah, that's it. Once the economy tanked and they looked at sales they realized that there's just no way Barnes & Noble is going to install a Superhero section in their stores and have stopped accepting new superhero manuscripts. Probably one or two more like this and the "genre" will be officially dead.

Lets hope.

Kin

The Good Neighbors, Book 1
by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh
Scholastic Graphix 2008

The set-up for this graphic novel is about as generic as you an get: mopey teenage Rue's mother has disappeared and her father is suspected of murder. Of course, like every teen novel where a parent is accused of murder, the teenage protagonist knows it can't be so, and in searching out the truth that other inept adults cannot fathom (and adults always have to be clueless for this type of story to work) discovers a family truth, a secret buried and kept from our teen hero who is coming to terms with who they are in the world.

Now, since this is author Holly Black's world that hidden element needs to be something a little more... fantastical, shall we say? So the truth is that Rue's mother is a faerie, and her disappearance has to do with a betrayal by her father that has sent her back into the faerie realm. Rue now has to navigate finding her place in two worlds, and all sorts of mortal and immortal conflicts must be quelled. Eventually.

I don't think I can say flat out that fantasy is not my thing, but I can say that I'm a little tired of vampires (or vampyres), and this reminds me of nothing less than a vampire story swapped out with faeries (or fairies). I suppose there are those deeply invested in the milieu who will berate me for failing to appreciate the subtleties between these two worlds, but here all I can see is another story of "otherness" that pits a halfling between parallel worlds. With the waning of vampires (who took over when interest in boy wizards dropped off) we're seeing the crest of other fantasy elements vying to take over, and faeries are going to have it out with zombies in the very near future of YA literature. I suspect the unicorn contingent (and I mean brutish, violent unicorns, not those My Pretty Pony poseurs) will no doubt follow.

Personal preference aside, I never cared for Rue, never felt like I could relate to her. Maybe it was a double-blind on my part -- a brooding girl AND a faerie halfling -- but whatever, Black never gave me a well rounded portrait of a character I could latch onto. I didn't buy the handling of the murder, or her father's arrest, or their family "friend" who may be at the root of why Rue's mother disappeared. Never mind Rue's ability to go unseen and the fact that her invisibility and disappearance seems to go unnoticed by others around her, or that her friends are flatter than the pages they're drawn on.

Visually, the illustrations felt stiff. It's something I'm noticing more and more, perhaps it's always been there and I'm just now seeing it, but it feels like graphic novels aimed at teens are drawn in a very lifeless way. I find myself looking for the traditional action lines in the characters and the compositions, something that givens them life. A still from a Bugs Bunny cartoon is more expressive, and in the end with graphic novels aren't visuals half your story? If you want a reader (okay, me) to buy into a fantasy world you're going to have to convince me that it's something more that shrouded bunches of trees and creeping ivy. It has to live and breath under its own rules, but it has to express some sort of movement. Even the cheap-o animation of the 1950s had some of the best and expressive backgrounds created in the history of cartoons. You can't tell me it's impossible to achieve the same effects in a black and white graphic novel fifty years later.

Oh yeah, this book lingers in the back of my throat like acid reflux.

As this was one of the finalists for the Cybils in the YA graphic novel category I felt like I really had to make sure I put all these emotional responses at bay and come to terms with whether or not I felt it best represented what was available this past year. The most compelling reason I felt it didn't deserve the win was that the story really is only the first part of a larger story. Too many untied threads, to much left up in the air, ultimately not a stand-alone title. It's unfortunate that every year series titles are pushed through the Cybils because invariably the consensus is that they don't hold up against stand-alone titles and take up space in the final panel that could really make for more of a contest and less a process of elimination.

In the end it hardly mattered, the judges were near unanimous in their decision on Emiko Superstar.

13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson
Harper Teen 2005

I sincerely doubt that I could possibly add anything to the din of reviews that have been generated over this book in the past couple of years. That said, I did read it, and this is what I'm thinking.

I'm thinking about how, when you're a kid with a creative or artistic bent, you keep hoping you've got some secret benefactor that's going to send you on a journey of discovery; or how a patron is magically going to hone in on your secret inner thoughts and just know what it is you need and give you all the tools necessary to achieve total inner success and happiness; or about how no one understands you but maybe someone does out there and, despite any discomfort, they'll not only be able to call you on your faults but give you the inner strength to actualize your inner butterfly;

Or perhaps you've reached the end of high school and you've earned your jaded cynicism and you know that, no matter how "perfect," answers to the questions you have about your future don't magically get solved in the course of a single trip abroad; how you get to that point where you become a "realist" in the sense that, as nice as the fantasy is, the underlying truth is that no one is ever really given that chance to freely explore their young adult world without developing homesickness or at the very least becoming bored because -- let's face it -- there's nothing romantic about being 18 and aimless;

And for the sake of argument, even if you read a book where a crazy dead aunt left you envelopes with instructions to retrace her final footsteps, and despite your inner cynic you sort of find yourself wishing you could follow on a trip like that yourself; and even if you gave in and ignored all the chance and allowed for the possibility that you'd come out okay in the end, you still secretly hope that the protagonist falls apart in the end and settles for a dull "no place like home" scenario even though you know that would be sad and wrong;

And after all that, no matter how old and crusty you may be, or how young and idealistic, you still might not want to admit to certain bone-deep truths.

Like how much you enjoyed the book.

Joker

by Ranulfo
Harper Teen 2006

On the surface Shakespeare's Hamlet contains all the elements necessary for great Young Adult fiction. There's a remarried mother, a devoted-yet-tragic girl, a sadistic vengeful boy, the haunting of the dead, meddling friends and families, in-jokes and meta-drama, double-crosses and, yes, even multiple premeditated murders. Perhaps the murder isn't a necessary element for YA when a good suicide will do (and Hamlet has one of those as well) but it does add a bit of spice to the mix.


But at it's core Hamlet is a tragedy, and one of the most tragic of all the Bard's works. In drama the tragedy concerns itself with an individual driven to self-destruction through their own fate or character flaws or some other overpowering force. Hamlet's father is dead, we later learn (from his father's ghost) murdered by his brother, Hamlet's mother remarries said brother, and the young prince is urged onto a mission of revenge against all parties. He plays at madness as part of his vengeful scheme and though it pains him on some fronts to take down innocents along the way, the collateral damage of is a necessary part of his single-minded determination. Hamlet correctly draws out the guilt of all parties and the bodies pile up as emotion grips the court. Hamlet pays for all this righteousness with his own life.

No such luck here with Joker, and if that counts as a spoiler then it should also serve as a warning that the book isn't so much an adaptation of Hamlet as it is a relatively bloodless variation on a loosely-based theme.

I think it's safe to say that wearing the skin of a bear does not make the person a bear, nor does it empower that person with any bear-like qualities. Wearing a necklace of shark's teeth neither gives the bearer the bite nor the ferocity of a killer. So it follows that fashioning a costume of modern dress over the amateurishly assembled fossil remains of Shakespeare does not necessarily guarantee a fully engaging tale of teen angst or feigned madness, much less anything resembling great literature.

Particulars need to be rearranged for our modern age. Apparently we can teach school children the blood and guts of Hamlet but we could never tell the same story in a modern setting for fear of offending. We open with Matt -- our modern Hamlet -- reeling from his parents divorce. No, his father is not dead just drunk and broken from having been fool enough to let this cypher of a Gertrude slip away from him. The interloper in this case isn't even a relative but some smooth-talker from the sales department at dad's company. The dead party in this case is Matt's best friend Ray who died off-stage in an arson fire set at a hostel. Matt may be feeling some guilt over this because it was a holiday trip he backed out of, but his feelings are a bit muddied here. Already, by splitting up the death-and-remarriage, and by making that death a random act on another character rather than a personal loss integral to the plot, Ranulfo has drained the story of it's potency.

In an attempt to bring out Matt's inner demons Ranulfo has created the character of the Joker, a demonic free spirit who, if removed entirely from the book, alters nothing. Serving as alter ego and as inner devil, the book's title character does little to convince us of Matt's internal suffering or of providing Matt much in the way of wayward guidance. At best Joker seems a literary contrivance aimed at convincing readers of some dark, sinister force at work behind the scenes. Sorry, no such luck.

Ophelia -- Leah -- is as much the clinging girlfriend as she is in Hamlet. Here a modern retelling might have shown us the greater reason for her devotion, or better mirrored what Hamlet/Matt was once like before the great tragedy came. There's a fine line between undeveloped and under-developed being trod here, neither being a great position to take.

And on and on it goes. Hamlet's journey abroad with Rosencranz and Guildenstern is a mere blip of self-exile at a trailer parked along the beach, with the messenger's bloodshed replaced by dropping out of society to join the circus. The play-within-a-play becomes Matt's attempt at social commentary through artistic expression -- an abusive retelling of the musical South Pacific -- and not the thing wherein he captures the conscience of a king. Finally, where bodies should be piling up, Ranulfo has Matt running away to the big city for an encounter with anti-WTO protesters that leaves him feeling like he needs to return home.

Home to what? On the bus ride home Matt dream all his possible futures (well, a handful at least, and only the most extreme versions) but in the end comes back to Leah, to his senses, and mostly to the conclusion that love beats anger and vengeance any day.

And that's just not Hamlet.