A Wrinkle in Time

The Graphic Novel
by Madeleine L'Engle
adaptation by Hope Larson
FSG 2012

The classic middle grade book gets a solid graphic novel treatment by award winning artist Hope Larson.

The weird thing about graphic novel adaptations is that they tend to be much longer than their source material, and they rarely convey all the details and explanations in their retelling. Graphic novels conceived as graphic novels from the beginning work to condense story where adaptations, it seems, look to open up narrative, alternately speeding along the story and slowing it down at the same time. There's a certain elasticity of time and events involved.

Could there be a better-suited book for a graphic novel treatment than A Wrinkle in Time?

Meg is an odd duck, rendered here like your typical unruly tomboyish nerd girl. Impatient and impulsive, she doesn't fit in even among her family; her mother has beauty that she envies, her twin bothers the model of normality, and her baby brother Charles is a precocious clairvoyant mistaken by those around him as a moron. Her father? Mysteriously away, subject of much gossip, though truly gone in a way the local townfolk could never conceive (much less believe) if they knew the truth.

Charles is in contact with some old ladies who live in a house in the woods most consider haunted. Mrs. Whatsit at first seems like a doddering old fool, her companion Mrs. Who speaking often in quotation, and eventually the occasionally unfocused apparition Mrs Which presents, taking the form of a Halloween witch. Together, these tree form a trinity of Star Sisters who serve as prophets, guides, and guardians for the journey about to come. A classmate of Meg's, the sensitive outsider Calvin who is better at passing as normal, finds himself drawn to the haunted house in the woods and once united with Charles and Meg they are informed that they can help bring Meg and Charles's father but that the mission involves some peril.

as always, click image to enlarge

Traveling the wrinkles in time, the sextet make it across the galaxy to the planet Camazotz where a cloud of evil is holding the kid's father as a prisoner. This evil has grown and crept across the galaxy, threatening to force the inhabitants of other planets to succumb to fear and remain orderly and obedient. This evil is controlled by IT, rendered as little more than a massive brain sitting on a pedestal in a protected tower. Utilizing their wits and few tools left them by the Star Sisters they rescue Meg's father but at the expense of losing Charles in the process. They regroup at a safe distance and discuss options for rescuing Charles, where Meg finally comes to realize that this is her destiny, and enters a final confrontation with IT using as her weapon the one thing IT wants but IT doesn't have.

I'm going to admit right here that I am as old as this book, and that I read it when it was less than a decade old. I have vague memories of images from that initial reading that have, over time, merged with images from episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Prisoner, bits and pieces from other science fiction stories (Bradbury and Clarke most likely), and special effect from the occasional badly produced movies that would end up on TV in the afternoons on weekends. Which is to say that the material read fresh to me while at the same time oddly derivative. But more startling to me was the complete mash-up of Cold War fear, Orwellian dystopia, post-war mythology, and a solid dose of budding New Age religious thinking. None of this is negative or unwelcome, as I was suddenly aware of how tame and safe a lot of middle grade fiction is these days by comparison. Talking time travel as if it were as easy as breathing, quoting classic scholars and thinkers, lumping artists and religious icons together as visionaries who have tried to explain the unexplainable... after a while it was a little like the articulation of thoughts from someone gloriously tripping on LSD. Again, not a bad thing, but odd all the same.

I applaud Larson for taking on a classic that, like movies made from books, will no doubt disappoint those who have set ideas of what the characters look like or how certain elements should be rendered. It's also no small feat to take on the telling of a story that has as its base the notion of time travel without any real explanation for how it is possible. Merely referring to "the tesseract" and giving a basic description of how travel across the fifth dimension could easily lose a reader, but the story is carried along by the strong-willed personality of Meg and her through-line desire of finding and rescuing her father.

As excited as I was to get my hands on this I had a little bit of graphic novel adaptation remorse after finishing it – I probably should have reread the original novel first and made a true comparison. But I've thought this over and decided that as much as I'd like to think of graphic novels as gateways to reading in general I sincerely doubt a majority of readers are going to read both: unlike book-to-film interest there is little evidence of a similar graphic-novel-to-book conversion taking place. We can debate and discuss this all we want, but the reality is what it is, when a kid finishes a book they don't generally go hunting down the graphic novel adaptation, and vice versa.

With that thought in mind I am glad there is this second, and perhaps slightly more accessible, graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time out there. It provides more opportunities to open up young minds and getting their heads wrapped around the notion of time travel and just what intangible is truly the most powerful weapon in the universe. Besides reading, of course.

Bigger Than A Bread Box

by Laurel Snyder
Random House   2011

As her parents are going through a separation, a girl finds a magical bread box that can grant her almost any wish she can imagine. But what if what she wants can't fit inside the bread box?

There is no arguing, divorce is rough on families. It's usually rough both before and after for all parties, but especially so during, and no more so than on kids who get caught in the middle. And Rebecca is right there in the thick of it, listening to her parents argue when the power goes out, her mother reaching the breaking point as she berates her father for not paying the electric bill, again. But it's just a fight, right? Or rather, just another fight? But the next day Rebecca comes home from school to find the car packed and her mother waiting to take them from Baltimore to Atlanta where Rebecca's grandmother lives. "For a visit" she's told but Rebecca is furious at being taken away from her father, her friends, her home; more so when she wakes up the next morning and learns she's going to be signed up for school in Atlanta.

Refusing to speak with her mother Rebecca goes exploring and finds her way into the attic. Among all musty old things she finds a bread box, one of three but different that the others. A casual wish for a book to read is answered when she opens a red bread box and there, waiting for her as if by magic, a book to read. Soon, Rebecca discovers that the bread box can grant any practical wish, provided it fits inside the confines of the box. An iPod pre-loaded with her favorite tunes. An endless supply of her favorite snack cakes. A thousand dollars. A thousand dollars! About the only thing the bread box cannot deliver his Rebecca's life back the way it used to be.

But Rebecca has other problems when she is enrolled in school and battles with being the new girl. Buying off friends (courtesy of gifts from the bread box) she finds herself bumping up against the school's queen bee who, it turns out, has family troubles of her own she's hiding. And when she uses the bread box to find a birthday gift for her mother – a collectible spoon – and then later tries to return the spoon out of guilt once she realizes where it came from, Rebecca's story spins in a whole different direction altogether. Just as strangely, it all comes together in the end, although not with the happy ending Rebecca had hoped for.

There is, within the various structures of fiction, the "rule of three" that suggests things happening in groups of three are more satisfying to the reader. In Bigger Than a Bread Box the three main story elements are the divorce and relocation, Rebecca at the new school, and the magical bread box. All three work well together... and yet there's a part of me that wonders if this story could have managed with only two, any two, of them. Because the bread box is key to helping Rebecca learn some "lessons" it should stay, so then the question for me is did this have to be a story about both a divorce and fitting in at school? Looking at it from that perspective I like the divorce story more because there's some real gut-level, kids-on-the-front-lines emotions to be dealt with, while the school story is just, eh, a bit of a distraction from the other two story arcs. This doesn't mean I find the overall story flawed, only that I think I would have preferred there to be two books, The Bread Box Divorce and The Bread Box Goes to School. I know, I know, I need to review it as written.

It used to be that divorce was not a topic of middle grade. Divorce – along with runaways, drug use, and other social misfittery – was once the providence of YA. Oh, sure, you'd get a bounced-around Gilly Hopkins now and then, or the occasional inner city family landscapes of Walter Dean Myers, but for the most part middle grade was the stomping ground of golden tickets and Swedish tomboys and the occasional girl who speaks to wolves. That "issues" stories have shifted toward middle grade is neither  new nor news, and a divorce story like Bigger Than a Bread Box is welcome in a world where readers actively seeking both answers and escape in their own lives. What is new, and refreshing, is the use of a fantastical or science-fictional element within realistic fiction to tell these stories, and in that Bigger Than a Bread Box has much in common with Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. For lack of a better description I would put both of these books in the category of middle grade magical realism, something I would like to see more of.

It is said (I've never read a first-hand account) that Jules Verne was upset with H.G. Wells for writing sci-fi that didn't explain the science of the fiction. When you're planet is being invaded by aliens from space and destroying life as we know it, who cares about the science! Some might suggest that this becomes the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy because, after all, if you can't explain it as either the cause or the result of science then clearly it is fantastical. But ultimately I find the arguments over genre slightly tedious and only barely helpful from a marketing perspective. So why bother mentioning it at all?

How the bread box does what it does is never fully explained, and I'm fine with that. Really, it's fine. The bread box is a middle grade McGuffin designed to present a mystery that isn't actually the point of the story. True, it presents complications that have consequences within the narrative arc but it's not a story about a bread box. It's a story about divorce, and a girl named Rebecca trying to navigate that emotional territory, and these are subjects firmly based in a real world that real middle grade kids have to deal with in their lives. To a child afraid of the dark an imaginary friend my become a comfort, to a teen it might be experiencing elaborate fantasies about defeating seven evil exes, and these are coping mechanisms for both the character and the reader to process the emotional terrain of the stories.

All of this to say that I think we might want to consider moving away from classifying middle grade books by genre. I know, I've drifted afield here, but what Bigger Than a Bread Box underscored for me is that I think sometimes we adults look too closely at the wrong things. We're like Rebecca's mother who despite having the weight of her world on her shoulders has simply forgotten to look closer at what her middle grade daughter might need, assuming that our adult decisions and responsibilities are enough. We can't, and shouldn't, presume that any one book will reach out and help a child cope, but sometimes, like a girl in the attic wishing things could be just a little better, a book can provide a moment of grounding and hope. In those moments the hair-splitting of genres and the science of magic hardly matters.
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Full disclosure: While I don't happen to think these things matter here, I received this book from the author via her publisher, and I consider her a friend (though we have yet to meet). Take from that what you will.

Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner
Random House  2010


In a post-post-9/11 America, the most deadly threat comes from the Internet, and Sam and a small cadre of young hackers are the sole line of defense...  

Sam is a hacker, a freak, a natural.  He can code on the fly and read viruses and cut them off before they can do any damage. And like any teen boy he uses these powers for good, which is to say he and his buddy Fargas dip into a large multinational company so they can dip into their bank accounts and order up some sweet new laptops and neural headsets that allow you to jack into the Internet world through thought waves.

Seeing as this is the near dystopic future, life isn't all roses.  Terrorists have taken out Las Vegas with a nuclear weapon and Homeland Security is now on par with the CIA in terms of proactively making sure the US remains protected.  The problem is that this includes attacks via the Internet, and Sam's little cyber crime has alerted the big boys.  He thinks he's free and clear until he attends a super secret hacker's convention that in turn becomes an online meet-up on the White House servers which, in fact, is really a sting operation to catch Sam.  Once caught, it takes him only a few short weeks to figure out how to get out of the minimum security facility... and right into the arms of Homeland Security, who set the entire thing up as a sort of protracted pre-employment test.  It was the only way to find the best of the best, and Sam passed with flying colors.  It also means he either works for the government, or he returns to jail.

Once he's working for Homeland Security Sam's job is to serve as wingman for Dodge, a punk he'd encountered back at the hacker convention.  Their job is to monitor Internet traffic and sniff out potential threats.  One attack appears to destroy them one moment, and then in the next be their savior. This phantom of the Internet also removes spammers and online gaming, things many are happy to see gone.  But as they try to understand what is going on Sam senses something darker is in the works, something dangerous that involves the neuro headsets that get people addicted to being so jacked into the Internet that, like his fried Fargas, they cease to do anything but stay plugged in until they die.

And once Sam figures that out, all hell breaks loose.  Like internal civil war and mass hypnosis hell.  Families torn apart, one branch of the military against the other type of hell.  Can Sam and his friends save the country before it destroys itself?  And if he can, will Sam be destroyed in the process?

This story has fingerprints of The Matrix all over it, what with an entire world full of people jacked into a world where they can just "know" things due to the collective hive mind.  But the battle scenes with virus attacks read like air-to-air fighter jet combat, written with assured technical jargon and a very real sense that this sort of thing could be happening in our future.  Faulkner's plotting and pacing is perfect, the jogs between real world action and battle online taut, and there isn't a single page of fat or filler to be found.  Books that push beyond 200 pages have to prove themselves to me, but half way through these 350 pages I knew I was in good hands and eagerly wanted to know how Falkner was going to make this work.

It has been a long time since I picked up a book that I wanted to race to the end of, and if this isn't already optioned for a major motion picture then someone is asleep at the wheel.  That said, I hope someone in Hollywood is asleep at the wheel, because this book could so easily be ruined in the wrong hands.

As for that phantom that takes over the Internet and sets the country against itself, I believe Pogo said it best: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Dark Life

by Kat Falls
Scholastic  2010

A dystopic sci-fi hybrid of life between settlers who have gone to homestead the sea and the topsiders who remain on land in overcrowded conditions.  And a child shall lead them... 

Living and farming under the sea with his family, Ty cannot wait to turn 18 and claim a homestead of his own.  One of the first children born and raised entirely in the ocean, Ty's abilities and instincts seem almost super-human.  His skin has the sheen of luminescence from eating deep sea fish, but what of his being able to see and hear things others cannot?

The arrival of Gemma, a topsider and ward of the surviving Commonwealth, comes looking for her lost brother in order to become emancipated from the welfare system and so they can live happily as a family again.  She suspects he's gone prospecting which puts her in 16 year old Ty's world, a sort of a reverse of the fish out of water.

Additionally, there's a gang of criminals who have been stealing from the homesteaders, who have been supplying the topsiders with food grown in the ocean, creating a tense situation between all sides.  The homesteaders are charged with bringing in the undersea thugs or risk losing their supplies from the mainland, Gemma must find her brother, and Ty finds himself up to his neck in danger as it becomes clear that he possesses a Dark Gift that makes him either special... or a threat.

I have to admit that I guessed most of the twists in this story early on but was compelled to read onward for the descriptions of life under the sea.  Falls does a fun job of thinking through this world and making it seem plausible even in moments when I doubted the possibilities.  In a lot of ways it's no different than a story set on a Martian colony, except that it's based on Earth, in the ocean, and that's a subject I find intrinsically fascinating.  What would it be like to live under the water, to adapt to the environment, to suddenly have the other 70% of the world available to you to explore.  Yeah, yeah, ambiguities between good and bad guys, uh huh, strange new human superpowers, whatever, just give me more of what life is like under the sea!

It doesn't come as a surprise that this has already been optioned for a movie – Falls is a professor of screenwriting, and the pacing of a feature film is all there.  Though to be honest the inevitability of the ending causes the action to feel drawn out because so much action has to be explained where in a film it would all flash by in visuals that take up much less time.  I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the actual root of the problem I have with a lot of kidlit being about 100 to 150 pages too long; that authors are writing more cinematically and in doing so find themselves given in to recording detail better handled in pre-production by set designers and special effects departments. 

The book is solidly middle grade, but I suspect that Hollywood will gear the movie toward an older teen audience much like they did with The Lightening Thief.  The book's strength is in it balance of politics and action (at least until the final action scenes) and if I could have hoped for more it would have been in understanding how and why it takes the homesteaders so long to have a teen boy explain to them why the topsiders need the frontiersmen and women more than the other way around.  But like I said, give me a story about humans colonizing the sea and I'll forgive it just about anything.

Burning Chrome

and other stories  
by William Gibson
various editions since 1986

A classic collection of sci-fi stories by the writer who invented the term cyberspace and probably did more to shape what our vision of the future looks like in movies than most people realize.

Though technically not a book written for children, I am including it here because I think it's a solid read for teens, and have a review for it up at Guys Lit Wire specifically for that purpose.  I thought rather than cross posting reviews I'd take this moment to talk a little more about the problem of sci-fi in children's writing.  Specifically to ask why there isn't more of it.

As genres go, there are plenty of detective mysteries in children's literature, and books about interpersonal relations between boys and girls to qualify as romance, and certainly enough fantasy to fit any young reader's interest in things from wizards to mermaids to magic.  But where are the stories that speak of the future, a future that isn't entirely a dystopic nightmare?  Where are the stories that look at the problems of artificial intelligence, that propose difficult solutions to our current problems, allegories and cautionary tales, stories about ideas kids can latch onto?

I think we sell younger readers short by not providing them with these stories and having to send them to the adult shelves to find what they're looking for. 

And they are looking for them.  If books like The City of Ember and life as we knew it and The Hunger Games and The Adoration of Jenna Fox and Unwound have taught us anything it's that kids really like talking about the issues these books bring up.  And this is what science fiction does well, it brings up social issues in settings that allow the reader to perhaps see them for the first time and challenge the thinks they think they know or feel.

Perhaps the fear in providing younger readers with science fiction is that they will take the wrong lessons from it, misinterpret the message in a way that binds and blinds.  It was only recently that Ray Bradbury acknowledged that for years people have taken the wrong messages from Fahrenheit 451, that it's not (as its taught in high schools) about censorship, or a reaction to the McCarthyism of the 1950s, but a cautionary tale about the dangers of television destroying the interest in reading.  But even as we misread Bradbury's intent the fact remains that the literature provides a point of contemplation, so I'm not sure the excuse holds up as a reason for a dearth of science fiction for children.

Is the problem Science-based fiction? 

Have we become a society that fears to discuss speculative ideas based on science and technology for fear of an anti-science backlash?  Has science fiction become the Dalits of children's literature, or been smeared with the taint of the creationist-evolutionist battles? My hope is that we can hold back on the aliens, on the life-in-space stories, on all the external elements that get shoved into science fiction for kids, and instead seek out more stories about who we are as a species and where we are headed, or might be headed, down the road. 

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