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.

The Girls' Guide to Rocking

How to Start a Band, Book Gigs, and Get Rolling to Rock Stardom
by Jessica Harper
Workman Publishing 2009

I'm really torn over this book. On the one hand, this book is a perfect tonic for all those girls (like the author) who were told or felt that the world of Rock & Roll and all it has to offer is a secret club populated by boys who insist that "Stairway to Heaven" is be-all, end-all in rock. To every girl told that their hands are too small to play bass, or that girl drummers aren't powerful enough, or that girls just don't know how to rock, this books sets out not only to dispel these notions but serves as a how-to guide for overcoming all obstacles. Grrl Power! Rawk out!

On the other hand, if I saw a book like this directed to boys I would worry about the viability of Rock & Roll as having any relevance in the world. It's not necessarily a gender thing but a recognition that a particular era in popular music had reached a point where it can be sanitized and taught to tweens and teens in the same way one might package a book on puberty or hygiene or on dealing with peer pressure. It takes some of the spirit out of rock's rebellious nature to say "Here, a step-by-step guide on how to be a rebel! Urgh!"

Hopper gets off on the right foot by focusing on the instruments, with clear nuts-and-bolts information on everything from how to shop for gear to how to achieve specific sounds from the classic instruments. There's a nod to playing what you know, meaning that any instrument (except perhaps the tuba) can rock, and that a good part of what's involved is attitude and experience. It isn't written down in an insulting way, just straightforward here's-what-you-need-to-know-to-get-started.

The next sections cover putting a band together and learning how to gig, how to move on to recording songs, the basics of playing live, and the business end of things including how to book tours. The appendices include a list of influential artists of both genders, movies centered around music, and some basics for using GarageBand software. It's a well-rounded package that could yield some decent results if taken to heart.

My hesitation is two-fold. First, there's no way for me, as an adult male, to actually follow this book and gauge its success. Second, a good deal of what makes Rock & Roll is the drive and desire that cannot be taught. And worse, in today's climate where over-produced, flaccid American Idol-style pop rules the airwaves, when a package deal like Hannah Montana is a role model for girls, it's difficult to believe there are many book-reading girls who might be driven to start something as quaint (they might say 'antiquated') as a Rock band. Besides, why go through all the trouble to pay for equipment and lessons, taking the time to form a band and struggle with that dynamic, spending years to stand in front of an audience to rock out badly when all you need to do is invite a few friends over and have them watch you flail on RockBand? Why spend months, maybe years, learning how to play classic rock at someone's backyard party when you can wail within minutes?

Still, as I remain conflicted, The Girls' Guide to Rocking does provide a solid foundation in the fundamentals and includes a lot of inspirational sidebars about the women of rock who have made their mark over the past 40-plus years. For some girls it might just be the sort of eye-opening they never realized they needed to see beyond the commercially-produced haze of contemporary music.

Savvy

by Ingrid Law
Dial / Penguin 2008

Ugh.

It has taken me days to try and sort out what bothers me about this book. I think it's the mixture of pseudo-magical realism and corn-pone storytelling. The narrator won't shut up, isn't very bright (none of the kids in this story are), and is the mouthpiece for the author's ham-fisted "everybody is special in their own way" message.

On their thirteenth birthdays the Beaumont's receive their "savvy," that special something they possess that no one else does. For Mibs, on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, the question is what form will her savvy take. Will it be the the quiet kind, like her mother's ability to do everything perfectly, or like her grandmother's ability to capture radio waves in mason jars like lightning bugs? Or will it be like her brother's, one who can harness electricity and another who creates hurricanes whenever he's near a large body of water?

Sadly, Mibs birthday plans are interrupted when the author decides to drop an obstacle in Mibs path: her father is involved in an accident on the highway and is laid up in a hospital to the south. Convinced by the lamest of evidence that her savvy involves "waking" objects previously believed to be permanently inert, Mibs in convinced she can bring her daddy out of his coma. But how to get to the hospital when she's been left behind by her mother?

That's right, stow away in the back of a traveling bible salesman's bus. And while you're at it, why not make it you and two of your sibling. And a couple of preacher's kids. Got it? That's five kids who think it's a good idea to stow away on a stranger's bus. The fact that he's a bible salesman is supposed to make you feel safe about it all.

Once they discover they're headed the wrong direction they prevail upon said salesman to deliver them where they need to go. He agrees that he can take them there eventually, but has his stops to make first.

Yeah, I've got a vehicle full of stowaways and I think I'll just drive around with them for a bit while they sort things out among themselves. No one's going to ask me down the road what the hell I was thinking, driving them around for days without anyone knowing...

Oh, and Mibs gets her savvy. And I have to ask: is this a metaphor for getting your period, or having ritual circumcision, or a bar mitzvah? Anyway, she gets it. Her savvy is being to hear what people are thinking but only through whatever ink happens to be on their skin. Even a temporary tattoo is able to speak to Mibs who figures this out several chapters after the reader has and is falling asleep.

I'm sorry, I can't seem to give a straight summary here.

Here's where you first lose me: The character's name is Mississippi but her younger sibling can't pronounce that and calls her Mibs. Okay. But that's what everyone calls her? She lets teachers and strangers and friends and enemies call her by her family name? No, I don't think so. But that's a quibble.

Next wrong fork in the road: stowing away on a stranger's bus to get someplace. Uh huh. You don't first admit knowing it's wrong, then try to lay a claim that you believe the driver to be safe, all the while exhibiting a failure to understand your own critical facilities. A history of bad judgment in a character shouldn't allow for safety to prevail at its most crucial point. Kids get into trouble all the time thinking they know enough to stay safe, make bad decisions, and trust people they shouldn't as a result. Here we have not one but FIVE kids who all fail to do the right thing, believing there's safety in numbers while they are on a bus headed in the wrong direction with no one knowing where they are.

Yeah, yeah, don't give me that stuff about the news bulletin on the TV throughout and the police looking for them. That's all after the fact (and worse, it is there to tie up a loose end concerning he paternity of one of the kids!). The fact is dumb kids + dumb decisions should not = positive results. We don't live in that world, and even if we lived in a world full of people with secret "savvies" it would strain credulity to believe that these are the actions of smart, savvy people.

Lastly (for now), if you want a main character to spout the curious homilies and expressions of a Southern Carl Sandburg at least make them sound like they're coming from a kid and not an old lady. Kids will incorporate the language they learn and know, but not with such abundance and variety as they do here. Yes I get that it supposed to take on the feel of a tall tale, all that language-of-the-people stuff, but it feels as wrong as shoulder pads on a t-shirt; it's a statement, but is that really the statement you want to make?

In a bit of backward glancing at all the people who loved this book, and all of those that didn't, I'm starting to get a sense that this book could be a new litmus test for determining whose judgment I can trust. I think there are a lot of people out there, many of them librarians, who would consider this prime Newbery material. Sadly. Probably the same ones who agreed with the Newbery committee over The Higher Power of Lucky. Savvy nabbed a Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor recently. Let's hope it stops there.

*shudder*

I'm not going to burn in a place I don't believe in, but I'm sure my ass is going to get bit one day for this.

The Daring Book for Girls

Andrea J. Buchanan &
Miriam Peskowitz
illustrated by Alexis Seabrush
Collins / HarperCollins 2007

The girls had to wait a while but it's finally here. With a clear debt paid up front to the creators of The Dangerous Book for Boys, here we have a collection of things to know and do for girls to help them be as equally rounded in their informal educations as the boys.

I've already seen some backlash against this book in places where, sadly, brains tend not to be engaged. The crux is this: boys got a book that was "dangerous" while girls only get "daring," implying in this that while boys are risk-takers girls are merely flirting with the edges of what is considered taboo. The reality is that a boy is more likely to pick up a book with the word dangerous on its cover and read it and feel subversive for the act of actually reading poetry and learning how to make a secret ink out of urine. And girls? They like to play Truth or Dare and don't somehow feel less subversive than if the game were entitled Truth or Danger. In fact what girls consider daring would, to a boy, be considered dangerous. For adults to get caught up in the wording of the title, well, just shows how little they understand what appeals to children.

Another concern was that there should be an omnibus book for KIDS as opposed to ones specific for each gender. Wrong! You may as well call something like that The Big Bright, Shiny Book of Ever So Much FUN! for Lucky Little Girls and Boys! and watch that book collect dust on every shelf it touches. Boys and girls like their distinctions, they revel in them, and when they want some dirt on what the other is like they want to be able to find it in one convenient location. Just because it says "for boys" or "for girls" doesn't mean the other can't appreciate it. In fact, both The Daring... and The Dangerous... book features a section on the opposite sex which would appeal to the curiosity of both. Manuals for scoping out the enemy, always good reading.

A paltry sampling from the table of contents:

• Rules for Basketball
• Lemon powered clock
• Palm reading
• Every girl's toolbox
• 14 games of tag
• 5 karate moves
• Daring Spanish girls
• Joan of Arc
• Four square
• Pirates (female)
• How to tie a Sari
• Building a campfire
• Playing hearts and gin
• Clubhouses and forts
• Putting up your hair with a pencil
• How to be a spy
• How to paddle a canoe
• Cleopatra
• Math tricks
• Boys
• Public speaking
• Hiking
• Telling ghost stories
• The Periodic Table of elements
• and so on

Definitely some girly things there, but plenty of things a boy could get into, just as girls could get into some of the boys things. Girly or boyish, these books are handsome editions that don't deserve the crappy knock-offs and gag books that have sprouted up around them.

These two books combined would make an excellent edition to any family library. Perfect for casual grazing, rainy days, bored afternoons and, with the proper adult attitudes, a more complete education. Those who fret over the words in the title or some of the contents would do best to get out of the way of their children and have them prove that you raised them right by letting them explore what's on offer.