abandoned: taken

by David Massey
Chicken House / Scholastic 2014

Teens in peril. That's where you lose me.

I try to read books as "blind" as possible, knowing as little as I can going in so I can let the freshness of the story carry me. Sometimes, though, I get a sense early in a book that it's going to piss me off. In the past when I was a younger man and felt like I had a lifetime to read everything I'd finish every book out of a sense of respect for the author and the craft. But I'm older now, aware that I will never get to read everything I want to, and some backs don't earn that right to be read to the end.

Here's the short version: I have no patience for books that put teens in extreme peril.

That sounds absurd. Peril, imminent danger, kids at the mercy of extremely dangerous adults, this is practically everywhere. Maybe I'm just getting tired of it.

Taken starts with a young woman meeting up with a group of young war veterans -- barely adults themselves --  getting ready to sail around the world for charity. Because the crew are themselves disabled their insurance requires an able-bodied hand named Rio, who is our narrator. There's some tension among personalities, resentment over having Rio as a babysitter, and as they set sail I suddenly get a hinky feeling.

This is called Taken. What, or who, gets taken?

See, I could get behind an adventure where a crew of new adults has to deal with the elements, a damaged boat, a clash of cultures and miscommunication, a trial of character. I can't resist. I flip the cover over and discover they are hijacked by pirates, held by a militant warlord, prisoners of war. There is an image of a fourteen year old girl clutching a machine gun with a necklace made of human teeth.

I'm out.

The news is full of kids in peril. A teen girl beaten and raped for protesting the public beating of her father. Women, girls, and boys abducted by militants, adding to the hundreds of others already gone missing. Terrorists using video games to recruit teens to their efforts. This is news, not something to be reduced to "ripped from today's headlines" sensationalized entertainment.

People can write what they want, people can read what they want.

I've got plenty of other books to read.

13 Days of Halloween: In a Glass Grimmly

by Adam Gidwitz
Dutton 2012

Jack and Jill (and a Frog) went up a beanstalk to fetch a magic mirror. Along the way they outwit Giants, Goblins, a fire-breathing salamander named Eddie, and their parents. A companion to 2010's A Tale Dark and Grimm.

Lately I've been wondering if we do more harm than good by making childhood too safe. I'm not thinking about car seats or non-toxic flame-retardant materials, but a sort of intellectual safety that prevents curiosity and the development of common sense more than it protects. We would prefer to believe it is more important to teach children to fear strangers than to develop an internal sense of knowing when and whom to fear.

The problem (for those who find it a problem) is that without a hard and fast set of rules we have the dual issue of teaching the difficult (intuition) coupled with an unacknowledged root source (adult responsibility, or lack thereof). The sad thing is that there is a solution, its been with us for hundreds of years, and we take it for granted: storytelling. There's a lot that can be learned in a story, and they don't have to be overly moralistic or didactic, and they can occasionally be quite fun. Horrifying, gory, disagreeable and yet unexplainable good fun.

And the best part is that kids really like it.

For those who haven't gleaned it from the title, In A Glass Grimmly, Adam Gidwitz's "companion" to A Tale Dark and Grimm, takes as its source the folk and fairy tales once told to children back when people lived closer to a world full of inexplicable horror. Lacking medicine, much less the concept of hygiene, there were invisible things far scarier than the shadows that dwell in the nearby woods, ah, but what wonderful stories could be constructed from those shadows. As a result, though these tales were as full of the sort of caution we might dole out to our own kids these days it was done with a great deal of adventure, magic, and humorous absurdity as well.

Gidwitz begins with parallel stories about a pair of children, a boy named Jack who is a bit dim and unpopular with other boys, and Jill who is being reared to be as shallow and cruel as her mother. Actually, no, Gidwitz starts with the story of a frog, a hapless amphibian who falls in love with a vain princess, is gifted with ability to speak, and suffers for believing the princess's promises of friendship in exchange for his assistance. These three stories, variants of "The Frog Prince," "The Emperor's New Clothes," and "Jack and the Beanstalk" – all with quite a bit of modification – bind our trio of adventurers out to learn the harsh cruelties the world has to offer in exchange for obtaining the thing each wants most.

The astute reader can find within this tale any frame of reference they bring with them. Even those who might not recognize the original tales Gidwitz creates within his framework will nonetheless recognize the various hero's journeys found in other tales. There's as much Wizard of Oz as there is Lord of the Rings with all the blood and guts and foolishness of the true fairy tales of old. Meant to shock or call attention to the peril, the violence in these stories can be easy to dismiss as "once upon a time" but the cruelty, the psychological terror and abuse adults inflict on these children (and a hapless frog) are still very much real for many readers. If there can be advantage found in stories that reflect contemporary "issues" then I would argue the same for a carefully constructed epic fairy tale like In A Glass Grimmly.

But here's the biggest draw for me: it's fun to read. It's fun and it breezes by, pages flying with unbelievable twists, recognizing old tales and looking for the moments they diverge from their more traditional tellings. Gidwitz likes to break in occasionally (less than in the previous book, which was too bad, because I enjoyed those digressions) and warn the reader of what's to come. There's a wink and a nod because, as much as he's prepared us, the true horrors have nothing to do with the acts of violence about transpire. He's smart enough to trust the reader will know the purpose of these warnings is to break (or increase) tension and playfully knock the reader off balance. It makes the experience interactive, conspiratorial, and, as I said, a kick to read.

Finally, if there is a sense that readers have of "growing out of" fairy tales, as these stories being for more younger children, I'd like to suggest that the real problem comes from a progressive sanitation of these stories over time. It is easy to grow weary of happy endings that come with no larger lesson. The frog isn't turned into a prince by a kiss in the original, he is flung against the wall by the princess in a deliberate attempt to kill him, and when he is revealed to be a prince the princess is so humiliated she spends the rest of her days in his servitude. I daresay things for Frog are much worse here, though in the end he ends up the hero in a way he never was in any fairy tale previously written. If a teen guy were to give this book a chance they might find that they really do still like fairy tales.

(This review originally appeared over at Guys Lit Wire on October 10, 2012)

Going Underground

by Susan Vaught  
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.

Habibi

by Craig Thompson
Pantheon 2011

A sprawling, epic graphic novel of love and... no. Just love. But also a lot more.

Chance throws together Dodola and Zam, a pair of child slaves, and theres is an intricate story of love, admiration, and survival. It's a love that survives all the worst things that can happen to lost and forgotten children, and it is a love that seems to span thousands of years at the same time. It is an almost unwieldy story that falters adventurously where most storytellers would probably play safe, and it rewards the reader with something that feels as old-world authentic and modern at the same time.

The story begins when nine-year-old Dodola is sold as a bride to a scribe, a man old enough to be her father. Despite the forced consummation of their marriage he isn't entirely a brute and in short order begins to teach Dodola how to write. Yes, in the beginning was the word, and the word lead to the Qur'an, and to stories. These stories come to calm young Zam, a slave whom she saves and raises like a younger brother. They also save Dodola in the same way they saved Shahrazad when captured into the sultan's harem, they serve as a comfort to her when locked in jail and when she hovers near-death and is being nursed back to health by a grown Zam. Throughout the bonds of love that weave through the stories also wend through Dodola's and Zam's lives as they are separated and long for each other.

It might be easier to explain a book like Habibi if it had a traditional narrative structure but Thompson has chosen to bite of quite a huge chunk of landscape. Arabic stories and the stories of the Qur'an make their way into adventures and parables that could have come from the Arabian Nights tales. Actual religious stories and texts are part of the fabric, as is a fair deal of unashamed carnal humanity, and though it doesn't bother me in context I would be remiss in not mentioning in a review that there's quite a bit of nudity and violence in Habibi. Just like life, which I'm going to assume was part of Thompson's intent.

As a fan of Thompson's tale of first love, Blankets, I was cautious not to read too much about Habibi before I could see it for myself. But I had gleaned that some find issue with his western appropriation of Arabic stories and tropes. I am not learned enough in these areas to gauge those assessments, but I could see where a caution might go up when considering the perpetration of stereotypes and cultural biases. But I have read non-western religious texts, and the Arabian Knights tales, and creation myths enough to know that at the very least Habibi reflects much of what has been written before. Does the current global political situation make us more sensitive to these images and stories? Perhaps, but wouldn't a discussion as opposed to a condemnation be a good thing?



Habibi is strictly for teens, mature ones at that. In addition to the nudity and frank discussion of sex and reproduction the violence includes rape, voluntary castration and torture. There is also, very carefully worked into the story, an historical progression where the story seems to begin several hundred years ago but ends in the modern era. The implication that the more things change the more they stay the same may bother some, suggesting the middle east hasn't changed in a thousand years or so, but as we've seen a reactionary turn to old values cropping up perhaps we shouldn't shoot the messenger here.  Habibi is an accomplished work of art and graphic narrative that at the very least should raise the bar for what can be done with the medium.

Outwitting Squirrels

101 cunning stratagems to reduce dramatically the egregious misappropriation of seed from your birdfeeder by squirrels 
by Bill Adler, Jr 
Chicago Review Press 1988

A very opinionated, wryly humorous approach to preventing squirrels from eating out of bird feeders, intended for serious birders, but chock full of amusing anecdotes and information about those pesky rodents.  

This might not, on the face of it, seem like an appropriate book for children, and indeed, it wasn't written originally with them in mind.  But for the teen who is beginning to take an interest in birding, and for the teen interested in learning more about the cunning of squirrels, this book makes for good reading.  Also, it's pretty funny.

When I was six I announced to my parents that I wanted a pet squirrel.  There was a coat closet under the stairs in our apartment that was under utilized and I was determined to turn it into a squirrel habitat.  Never mind that I had never seen a live squirrel in my urban neighborhood, ever, or that the closet habitat had no source of natural light, and that in my mind it would just live in the dark except for when I chose to visit it and occasionally throw it acorns I found at the park, I was determined.

Until I'd read Outwitting Squirrels I hadn't realized there was such a huge division between bird people and squirrel people, much like there are cat people and dog people.  Clearly, from the age of six, I knew which side I was on, and Adler does a pretty good job in his book proving that I chose the right side.

Adler admits to having casually set out a bird feeder, only to find it ravaged by squirrels due to easy access.  Then, like the maniacal groundskeepper Karl in Caddyshack, he purchases and mounts an increasing array of feeders designed to keep the rodents out... if he can only find the right place to do so.  Squirrels, it turns out, are true acrobats in the animal world, diving and climbing and jumping from incredible angles and dangling from various positions in their attempt at a good, free meal.  They aren't easily discouraged and, compared to birds, appear to be a lot smarter about using the tools at their disposal.  In all, Adler explains how he went through almost two dozen different feeders in his attempts to keep those furry little creatures from eating the seed intended for the winged creatures.

In studying his enemy, Adler learns and shares a great deal of information you would normally expect on a dry nature documentary.  But who would watch a dry documentary about squirrels when you could read one outrageous story after another describing how, in a matter of hours, squirrels have once again defeated Adler in his attempts to keep them away.  Then there are the casual-but-curious facts.  I had assumed (as many do) that squirrels keep a memory of where they bury their nuts.  Not true.  In fact, squirrels are communal animals, socialists if you will, who bury food for the community.  Come spring when they go rooting around for food, they are merely sniffing out the grounds where they suspect others in their community may have buried things.  They have territories, which they share, and they will chase away those digging in their food beds, but otherwise whatever they find is a question of luck, not memory.  Fascinating!

There is a rather dry section – a good middle third of the book – devoted to brands, models, and design features of specific squirrel-proof bird feeders.  The book is very serious in its subtitle.  But After reading it twice for fun I can promise that those pages about feeders can be easily skipped and the rest of the book enjoyed for its tales – unless, of course, the reader is truly interested in birding and finding the right feeder.  Then the book doubles as a valuable resource written by someone who has seemingly tested them all!

Practical, funny, short non-fiction.  Perfect for fall as the family Sciuridae is out and about, stealing from birds and acting like the socialists they are.

(This review, in a slightly different form, is cross-posted today at Guys Lit Wire.  Looking for books recommendations for boys?  That's the place to go!)

Getting the Girl

by Marcus Zusak
Arthur Levine / Scholastic 2003

Cameron is a multiple anomaly in the world of teen fiction about boys. He's sensitive, quiet, sweet, poetic, searching, and longs for a girl beyond his reach. I take that back, Cameron reads like the cliche of a sensitive teen boy caught in the shadow of his older brothers and the rough-and-tumble streets of his working class neighborhood. As Cameron drifts along from scene to scene, it is quickly clear that what he longs for and deserves he will get, and the title confirms the inevitable.

So the question is, if we learn all this quickly going in, what's to hold us long enough to care?

Zusak's language. But just barely.

The only way Zusak can pull this off is by having a main character insightful and erudite enough to convey what would be beyond the scope of most teens his age. He presents himself as awkward, but it's the shambling awkward of a teen who hasn't realized he's a king in disguise. The reader sees (and is supposed to) that Cameron is worthy of so much more than his current station in life, and all he really wants is Octavia, the one girl his older brother Ruben has cast aside (as he is wont to do every couple of weeks). But like a pauper sage, Cameron must spend time living the horrible doubt of an artist, looking at his working class dead-end family and wondering if he's good enough for something more.

All along the way we see Cameron's poetic notes that he takes, an attempt to capture an emotional photograph of each transition as he experiences it. His father lives for the gruntwork of plumbing, his brother for occasional fight that has made him top of the trash heap, his sister the secretive photographer who may be his spiritual equal, and through it all Cameron serves as Frederick, Leo Leoni's picture book mouse whose gifts only bloom in the dead of an emotional winter, when it may be that he's lost the girl for good. The old Yiddish expression is that sometimes people need a story more than food; for Cameron, his words are food that keep his soul alive.

And the metaphors. I have author Varian Johnson to thank for pointing these out at a recent lecture at VCFA. Water, water, everywhere, and Cameron is there to swim in it, drown in it, ebb and flow with it. But the water is Zusak's/Cameron's metaphor for his desire, his lust, his longing and hopes. Octavia is the ocean he longs to swim in, to touch and be consumed by. It is compelling because Zusak manages to keep making references to water without downing the reader in the obvious. The metaphor is clearly Cameron's, and its in these moments that Zusak succeeds.

But when a book so clearly telegraphs its message early on and shows no hint at veering off track, then both me and the teenage boy inside me begin to get antsy. The pacing is so deliberate that it frustrates, and Cameron's poetic notes verge on the precious. With few scenes and sparse-but-poetic handling this book's 250 pages could be cut in half and not miss a thing. The first-person narration so eloquent in its observations they make actual prose-poems in Cameron's hand inserted between the chapters redundant. There is a perfect novella – the size and shape of which would attract more boy readers – trapped in this conventional-length novel, one I would have been hard-pressed to find fault with. But as is the story drags, the inevitable seems less a prize for having been held at arms-length for far too long.

Big Dumb Book: Tim, Defender of the Earth!

by Sam Enthoven
Razor Bill / Penguin 2008

Let's play a game of Mental Picture and see how things go.

First, imagine two giant monsters throwing down like a couple of WWF wrestlers in a large metropolitan city. Sort of like in a Godzilla movie, with both of these monsters a couple hundred feet tall, tossing each other into famous landmarks and obliterating the skyline. One of them is a genetically cloned T-Rex and the other is a mad-scientist- turned-humanoid-cockroach mutant.

Are you still with me?

Okay, so the city is London, not Tokyo, and both creatures are the inadvertent results of secret British government funding. There is no radioactivity involved. T-Rex makes his appearance when the funding for his project evaporates and he escapes down the Thames to the sea where he instinctively seeks the Yoda-like wisdom from a nine million year old Kraken who is the current Defender of Earth.

Have you cried uncle? But wait! When asked by the Kraken if he has a name T-Rex responds with a line pulled straight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"There are some who call me... Tim."

Oh yes, and the mad scientist. Well, he was working with nanobots that could deconstruct organic matter at the cellular level, move about as a swarming cloud under mental telepathy, and then recombine it either as it was or modified. When his project is rebuffed by the government he takes it upon himself to take his research to the field, as it were, deconstructing roaches and rats and hapless drunks in the Underground at closing time and recombining them into his own super-self, a god-like being impervious to almost anything that can be thrown at him.

And the scientist has a daughter, Anna. And she's a bit of an outcast. And she hooks up with another outcast, a boy named Chris. And Chris has been chosen to wear a special bracelet that can harness the energy of Earth, energy that can be used by Tim. And...

I'm sorry. Once you get started with a story like this it's hard to know how much is too much. Clearly the author doesn't believe in such restrictions because he tosses everything into the pot. There are times where I would say this is a bad thing because sensory overload eventually kicks in and numbs the brain to the point of boredom, but not here.

This is the book that recently helped solidify my thinking behind the Big Dumb Book. Just as there are Big Dumb Movies that you can enjoy on a purely entertainment level, so are there books that just carry you along, like surfing a wave on absurdity. As a break from all the other required summer reading -- you know, that stuff like broccoli that's supposed to be good for you -- here's a bit funnel cake from the county fair to prevent the brain from calcifying.

Bonus time! Check out this illo to be bound into the hardcovers










Do you know a teen boy who can appreciate literature, Monty Python, and comic books? Bingo, here's their next book.

NYC dystopia x2

Today, I am cross-posting with Guys Lit Wire, the blog for books aimed at teen boys.

dys·to·pi·a –noun. a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

Well, there's plenty of that going around in a pair of books I'm featuring today, both of them set in New York City but written 40 years apart from one another.

First up is the dead and the gone, Susan Beth Pfeffer's sequel to Life As We Knew It. As with the previous book, the events that follow occur after an asteroid has hit the moon, knocking it out of its former orbit. Where Life As We Knew It was set in rural Pennsylvania and followed closely the struggle for survival as seen from a teen girl's perspective, the dead and the gone shows us how events unraveled through the eyes of Alex Morales, a seventeen year old boy living in Manhattan.

Alex is the second-eldest of the Morales children, his older brother Carlos is a Marine stationed on the West Coast. Alex's mom is a nurse on night duty when the book begins, possibly on her way home. His father is in Puerto Rico attending the funeral of Alex's grandmother. At home, Alex's two younger sisters wait for him to return from his night job working at a pizza parlor. The news of the asteroid's collision course is peripheral at best; most people are listening to the baseball game.

Unraveled is the best way to describe events that follow. As the shifting of the moon has profound effects on the planet's delicate ecosystem, tides have flooded the subways and knocked out all satellite transmissions. Quickly Alex moves into survival mode in order to protect his sisters and keep the family together. When his sisters ask about the safety of their missing parents Alex reassures them without hesitation that everything will be okay. Alex is as pragmatic as he is protective, shunting his emotions in order to assure their survival.

Where events felt more ominous in Pfeffer's previous exploration of this disaster scenario, here in New York City the events that unfold seem merely to hasten the inevitable. As the food shortages and flu epidemic spread, as the rich get out of town and the poor are trapped on an island left for dead, New York comes to represent the ultimate failure of the urban model of living, an unsustainable wasteland. Alex casually learns to lie and steal and, in the end, manage to get himself and one of his sisters successfully out of New York and toward a promise of a new life further inland.

Recently released for its 40th anniversary, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! gives us another version of the Big Apple in decay. The events are no less ecological, though the cause is man-made this time.

It's the future, the end of the millennium. You'll have to forgive a book written in the 1960's for getting the future of 1999 wrong, though in many ways the book does correctly understand some of the probelms we're facing today. Harrison's premise was that the US was unconcerned with population control and that short-sidedness led to a planet where the population outstripped its resources. Greenhouse gases have ruined rich agricultural farmland, food and water is scarce, New York city is under a constant heat wave. As Harrison paints it, only the date of this scenario might be wrong as we may still be headed in this direction under global warming.

I have to break the review here to interject that this book was nothing like I had remembered it to be. I had this strange sense of double deja vu because there are familiar elements in the story that echoed both a movie adaptation of this book and the sudden realization that my disappointment was the same I felt when I first read this book as a teen. The movie was Soylent Green, and the disappointment I felt then as now was that there is no such thing as Soylent Green in the book. That is to say, if you've seen the movie and you think you know what the book is about, you don't.

Harrison tells the story of a police detective named Andy Rusch who happens to land on a case of murder that was a crime of opportunity. The problem is that the corrupt politicos believe there's something deeper going on and Andy's forced to continue to follow through on the investigation beyond when it should have been dropped. There's a girl involved, a gangster's moll, who takes up with Andy once she's out of her meal ticket. And darting through the story is the thug on the lam who shows us the seamier underside of a New York Harbor clogged with decommissioned Liberty Ships used as emergency housing for the world's refugees.

What Harrison has done is graft a noirish crime story onto a New York City that has collapsed under the weight of its population. It's a dirty, ugly world with rationed water, no electricity, a black market for produce and meat, and corruption at every level of government. Where the dead and the gone gives us the quick death of NYC Make Room! Make Room! gives us the tail end of the long, slow demise. Both versions, as written, are equally plausible portraits of a city in decay.

But in a head-to-head grudge match it's Pfeffer's book hands down as the better read. Pfeffer's book continues to draw out the disaster in diary format, one day at a time, inviting the reader to put themselves in Alex's shoes in deciding whether or not he's made the right decisions. the dead and the gone deals somewhat flatly with Alex as a protector of his sisters and there is little for him emotionally. Harrison's book has a more balanced emotional story at it's heart with Andy questioning love and what it means to live in this rotten world, but in imagining the worst aspects of his world into our future he retained some ugly racial and sexist stereotypes that, while "authentic" for a reader back in 1966, detract from the story.

the dead and the gone
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2008

Life As We Knew It
by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt Children's Books 2006

Make Room! Make Room!
by Harry Harrison
Tor Books 2008

about those teenage boys...

While I sincerely doubt many of you, my fine readers, get all of your kidlit news from Yours Truly it may be possible that the following bit of news has escaped your attention in the kidlit blogosphere.

Guys Lit Wire, a new site launching in June, promises to provide you with everything you need to know in the world of literature for teenage boys. Colleen of Chasing Ray has been been spearheading the effort which she described on her blog yesterday thusly:

There will be book recommendations, author interviews, literary commentary, a rant or two (I'm sure) and lots of other good stuff. The goal is to cover a ton of different types of books from across the literary spectrum so we can become a good resource to actual teenagers as well as anyone seeking to find books for teen boys. (And if the girls want to visit we are happy to have them, but boys are our target audience.)

I am happy to announce -- nay, honored and privileged -- to be participating in this new blog and sincerely hope I can hold up my end when it comes to adding my voice to the community. I haven't got a clue what I'm going to debut with but that deadline's behind a few others I have for school right now so it can remain fuzzy. But I promise you, it will be brilliant. Both my post and the new blog!

Right now the group is shy a few contributors, and we could really use a few more guys. C'mon, out of 21 of us there are only 3 males reading and writing about books for teens? That can't be right, can it? Consider this a call to action. If you or someone you know wants in contact Colleen directly (colleen(at)chasingray(dot)com). And if you'd rather just support the effort please feel free to pass this news along to others.

For my part, if any of you have ideas or suggestions of some teen-boy-reading topic you'd like to see me mangle address, feel free to get in touch via comments. Let me know if you'd rather communicate off-blog as well and we'll make it happen.

I'll keep you posted as June 1st looms.

The Plain Janes

by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg
Minx/DC Comics 2007

On a casual spring day in the big city Jane is suddenly thrown to the ground when a bomb in a nearby trash can goes off. In the wake of this her parents decide to move out of the city and into the safety and peace of the suburbs.

Jane's fish-out-of-water attempts to fit in at her new school are coupled with her desire to create something meaningful in a sketchbook she recovered at the scene of the bombing, property of a comatose John Doe at the hospital who was also there. It's her desire to bring together her two worlds, her private "art saves" world and her very public attempts to start her life anew, that allows her to gravitate toward a cafeteria table of outcasts who share versions of the name Jane. With a little effort and some careful scheming Jane manages to bond with the others and create an activist group dedicated to bringing the people of their small town "People Loving Art In Neighborhoods", the P.L.A.I.N of the The Plain Janes.

Naturally it's the adults in town who can't tell the difference between guerrilla art and guerrilla warfare and they fear what they've long since closed their minds to; the idea that you can question what goes on in the world around you, that you don't have to accept every mini mall as inevitable, that life consists of fun and play as well as work, and that fear doesn't need to rule your life. When the Jane's New Year's Prank is busted, and the comatose artist awakens and returns to his native Poland, the outward appearance is that everything has ended but Jane knows she's found her tribe and that the Jane's will continue to thrive and create. Jane has come out the other end of her long ordeal understanding that the future is hers to create.

When I heard that DC was starting a girl-driven line of graphic novels I found myself not as excited as I wanted to be. The problem being that DC has made its fortune knowing and catering to the male-dominated worlds of fantasy, superheroes and action -- Batman, Superman, the entire Justice League, those folks. Not that this isn't a legitimate world for girls to explore, but when you aim your sights at a specific demographic that is generally the opposite of what has been your bread and butter for almost half a century there's lots of room for error and miscalculation.

Additionally, this isn't the first time the comic book world has attempted to corral the female market. Few would consider the romance comics of the 60's and 70's little more than attempt to capture the romance novel crowd, complete with their stereotypes of weepy wallflowers, silently suffering secretaries, and wasp-waist whiners... and important issues of the day like finding a suitable husband and occasionally dealing with the serious issues of having a child out of wedlock or falling for the dangerous type, occasionally also a married man. There was only one "correct" ending for these stories, generally involving a white dress, with everything else a morality play about what could happen if you, gentle reader, made the wrong choice.

Things have changed, the world has changed, and from the looks of things perhaps comics for girls have changed. A little. It was a shrewd choice to pick Castellucci for this initial offering and to deal with a story celebrating freedom of expression amongst teens (and girls especially) who often feel their voices squeezed out of the equation. Castellucci has a good feel for the outsiders and by casting the story in an age of post 9-11 security anxiety she is able to give these girls an opportunity to show us both how much and how little things have changed. Girls are still getting locked down for their own safety (ironically from themselves in this case) and that the Jane's acts of public expression are less confrontational than they are nurturing hints both at the changes and challenges ahead in graphic novels for girls. I'd like to see girls get a little more fierce without getting too hard, not to turn into boys but to definitely take the reins and challenge the status quo both in the world and in the books.

On repeated readings the flaws in the storytelling show their rough edges and I'm going to give Castellucci a pass here because writing for visual media is a whole different beast. It's primarily pacing and scene-setting I have issues with, places where I think more time or more explanation or even a simple "look" might have made a huge difference. I buy into the opening scene and the jump from that to Jane's family moving to the suburbs because I am conditioned to accept action at the beginning of a story (novel, comic, movie, play, etc) in exchange for details that will come later. But later I'm left wondering how Jane emerged from her trauma relatively unscathed, how this transformation into her mature self actually differs from who she was before. I'm also not entirely convinced of her transformation at the hands of Art, as much as I personally believe in it.

What is interesting, and perhaps totally unplanned, is how with a little shift in details this story could have been set during the cold war in the 1950's. The US government was widening streets (anything called a Boulevard in this country) and creating highways in order to mobilize armies and process huge evacuations in the event of war with the Soviets. Fear was as palpable as our terror levels today and people fled to the 'burbs (and later built gated communities) in order to affect a level of peace and security for themselves and their families. This shows itself in The Plain Janes most obviously in the way the older generation accepts the fear they blindly accept (or run from) while the younger generation is more occupied with questioning their world in an effort to find their place. To make the then-to-now transformation complete Jane and her cohorts would have to take on the more confrontational elements of the Beatniks and their art (poetry in public places?) but otherwise the stories are the same.
Minx has a couple more titles I'm hoping the check out -- the time warp that is Good as Lily, the family drama of Confessions of a Blabbermouth and the strangely compelling girl-meets-shark tale of Water Baby, in case anyone from Minx is interested in sending me a care package -- and with any luck it will be DC who gets the head start on graphic novels for middle grade and teen readers done right, not just for girls and not just as comics but as literature.

Summer Reading, Part Four: Shorts

Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works.

I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more and more wondering how others would answer the following question:

What collections of short stories, sudden fiction, or essay collections would you recommend to a summer reader as a nice, occasional pick-me-up?

I already feel that regular readers know that were it not for my discovery of Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House when I was in my early teens I might not have been the reader I am today. But that wasn't my first brush with the single-author short story collection. No, that honor goes to Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun, a book I remember toting around with me in the fifth or sixth grade. I couldn't tell you where it came from or honestly say I remember the stories it contained (although many of the titles are deeply familiar in some way) and this book is among others on my NTR (Need to Re-read) list.

(Speaking of Mr. Bradbury, apparently we got it all wrong when we've read Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-censorship book; looks like it's an attack on television. Add another book to the NTR pile...)

There are, of course, collections aimed at middle grade and young readers that aren't half a century old that are widely available and enjoyed by kids. Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels) is only a quarter century old! Schwartz is a collector of folklore and his tales represent those that are often told aloud and by necessity short enough to be memorized. I would consider these stories essential for campfires and slumber parties -- in fact I remember many of them from campfires when I was young, a testament to their lasting power. The stories themselves don't scare the reader as much as they might a listener as a large number include directions at the end for grabbing someone while screaming the last crucial line.

On the quieter side of things there's Cynthia Rylant's collection Every Living Thing gathers a dozen short stories where an animal plays an integral part in changing a person's life. I have to admit that the stories caught me a little off guard at first because they have an almost "adult" feel to them. "Planting Things" tells of an older retired couple, a man who likes to work the garden for the joy of it while his wife is housebound with illness. A jay makes a nest in one of his flower pots on the porch and while he delights in watching the fledglings grow and leave the nest his wife is content to stay in her bed and hear his second-hand tales. When the birds have flown off he collects the nest with the intention of setting it out the following spring to "grow" another family of birds.

And when I finished I couldn't help wondering "What would a kid make of that story?" Indeed, what do young readers make of stories that don't exists to push a happy ending or solve a particular riddle but instead celebrate small, changing moments in life. It's thoughts like this that lead me down a trail of optimism that the revival of the short story is immanent.

Another fine collection aimed at the middle grade reader is Richard Peck's Past Perfect, Present Tense, a brilliant title for a short story collection if ever there was one. Peck's collection begins with an introduction that briefly explains how short stories work. He then provides an introduction to his first-ever published short story including what his assignment was and how he approached it. Many young writers will appreciate the insight as much as they will the humorous story that came out of his thinking. Like many good teachers, Peck shows and tells giving his voice authority without scaring readers away. Each of the books sections contains an introduction that explains their grouping or origins. I wish there were more books like this.

Or are there?

This is where I wanted to open up the floor for discussion. What I like, what I am attracted to, are stories by a single author because I can see the breadth and variety of the author's thinking. If I like an author's style I'll want to read more, and while I understand the benefit of a story collection by many hands if a particular story doesn't catch me I might not search out that author to see if something else does.

Additionally, I am curious to know if anyone out there can recommend essay collections for children. I have seen in the past chain bookstore attempting to push David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day on their Teen Beach Reads table and scratched my head. In the beginning, Sedaris' essays were funny but they don't leave a lasting impression and I never said to myself "Teens would really love this!" Still, as I said, I am curious to know if anyone has encountered collections of essays that would be enjoyed by younger audiences.

I will add that as far as non-fiction goes I think there could be better coverage of collections on music, politics and general interest. The Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Non-required Reading, and the Da Capo Best Music Writing anthologies, among others, are totally acceptable for teens but what's out there for the younger reader, the pre-teen who might be interested in general non-fiction topics but wants something more substantial than a collection of factoids? Any ideas?

* * * * *

Our story thus far...
Episode One - Low Humor
Episode Two - Non-fiction?
Episode Three - Trash
Episode Four - Shorts
Stay tuned for the final episode in the series: Part Five - The Index to Periodical Literature

The Dangerous Book for Boys

by Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden
HarperCollins 2007

Do not be fooled into believing this is a cute title appended to a harmless book. This book is for boys and it is dangerous. Here is your proof, from the tiny type on the copyright page:

Note to parents: This book contains a number of activities which may be dangerous if not done exactly as directed or which may be inappropriate for young children. All of the activities should be carried out under adult supervision only. The authors and publishers expressly disclaim liability for any injury or damages that may result from engaging in the activities contained in this book.

In other words: If you have a boy, be a parent and raise them in ways that make legal disclaimers like this unnecessary.

Seriously though, boys by their very nature are curious and like to explore their world on their own terms. Yes, parental supervision is good, but so is a boy who knows how to cautiously explore the edges of his abilities. It can be a great thing for a boy and a parent to bond over, say, the building of a tree house or a go-cart but it is a greater joy for a boy to go out and learn how to master his own world.

This book is an update of the kind of American Boy's Handy Book that was published at the turn of the century, and much of what is in here wouldn't have been out of place a hundred years ago. Here's a sampling from the table of contents:

• The seven wonders of the ancient world
• Five knots every boy should know
• Making a bow and arrow
• Famous battles
• U.S. Naval flag codes
• Navajo code talker's dictionary
• Understanding grammar
• Girls
• Making cloth fireproof
• Secret inks
• Navigation
• The Declaration of Independence
• Dog tricks
• Coin tricks
• Seven poems every boy should know
• How to play poker
• A brief history of artillery
• The Ten Commandments
• Common trees
• Five pen-and-paper games
• The game of chess
• Books every boy should read
• growing sunflowers

That these topics are and have been of interest to boys speaks to their evergreen nature. Did I mention that was a partial list?

I have a couple of favorite little things about this book. First, it begins with a list of essential items a boy should have. A pocket knife is first, and the book is modern enough to point out that pocket knives can still be carried on checked luggage at the airport. A little further down the list a pencil and paper are recommended in case "...you see a crime and want to write down a license plate number or a description... or a shopping list." Just that someone out there is planting the seed of a child always having something to write on is enough to help spawn a more literate generation, or at least one that copies down the latest fart jokes they've heard.

A little further down the list is a magnifying glass "for general interest. Can also be used to start a fire." Exactly. Don't pretend we don't know why boys love these essential tools. Sure, the could try to make flameproof cloth and then try to burn it with a magnifying glass. They might even lob off one of their fingers in the process with a pocket knife. But, again, there is little to fear if they have been raised properly.

I have to admit, I was a little surprised by the selection of poems every boy should know. Most of these I was forced to memorize in the 7th grade and I can't say it was always a pleasant experience. Following each poem there is a paragraph explaining the poem and it's importance and provide an opportunity to help round out a boy's street education with something a little more refined. The poems?

IF by Kipling
Ozymandias by Shelley
Selections from Song of Myself by Whitman
Invictus by Henley
Vitae Lampada by Newbolt
The Road Not Taken by Frost
Sea-Fever by Masefield

Pretty deadly stuff for boys, perhaps even dangerous, no? Personally I'd have liked to see maybe a Robert Service poem, or something with a little swash and buckle. I have buried in the archives a book entitled Songs of Men and there's some sea chanteys and other rugged bits of verse that would have easily fit it. Maybe a cowboy ballad.

When my girls are a little older I'm probably going to let them have a go at this book as well. We'll build a tree house and make bows and arrows and catch bugs in old jars. After all, what might be dangerous for boys is perfectly harmless in the hands of a girl. That's probably the best way I can spin that.