Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman
Delacorte Press 2009

Tedious. That's the first word that comes to mine when thinking about the title character to Frank Portman's follow-up to King Dork. And self-absorbed and self-important. Unfunny and uncharming. Manic, but not in a pixie dream girl sort of way. Did I say tedious?

At the core of this book is a teen girl who views the world through a prism of tarot and dark magic. When she loses her best friend and partner in magic, Daisy, and her boyfriend in the same week she is convinced the universe is sending her messages. More specifically, Daisy is sending her messages from the great beyond via her cell phone. It's a puzzle – what is Daisy trying to tell her? – that only the most egocentric of people would assign magical properties to. Steeped as deeply as she is in the teas of the occult, there isn't a moment that doesn't in some way echo back with acridity to Waite or Crowley or her tarot misreadings. There are numerical coincidences, and concordances with books in the library in which Andromeda works, but in the end the Great Mystery from the great beyond is little more than a prank that may have once had altruistic origins but has sense gone off the rails.

Portman's portrayal of Andromeda reads like an avatar for his own dissemination of arcane knowledge more than an enriched character portrait. Andromeda suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease that causes her bones including those in her ears to be fragile, allowing her to mishear conversations right and left. This coupled with her constant analysis and regurgitation of the arcane reduces the storytelling to a lurching train of words coupled, at times, to mind-numbing lengths. Portman's third-person narrator slips conveniently (or sloppily, depending on your read) between a distant observer and a voice so close it might just as well be Andromeda's subconscious. There are writers out there who could make this work, and to great effect, showing the reader how messed up Andromeda is in a way that would make us sympathetic. Portman isn't that skilled and the result is a bit of a slog to read.

With a story so deeply invested in various rituals and magik you would hope that the journey through its 400-plus pages would reveal something quiet and reaffirming about the confluences of life's various streams. Instead we find Andromeda the butt of a joke so base that police action is inevitable, but not shown, rendering the intricacies of following the girl's journey virtually worthless. The biggest cop-out comes in not following through on the aftermath, which would have been far more interesting than a good chunk of this book's flabby middle.

Nope, sorry. It's been a while since I had a book make me regret the time I spent with it.

Black Juice

by Margo Lanagan
HarperCollins 2004

Having been given a number of "warnings" about the intensity of Lanagan's most recent book, Tender Morsels, I decided to get a better sense of her writing through one of her short story collections first.

I wish someone had warned me about this collection as well.

Lanagan is an intense writer of dark, emotional, human fantasy worlds. There are echoes of older cultures and languages buried deep in these worlds, a sense not so much as coming from another planet but as if reading reports from undiscovered country. It is the type of fiction that reads like literary reportage from a past frontier transported through time. Like something forbidden, these stories are a black juice indeed.

The collection opens with "Singing Down My Sister," a strange description of a ritual that involves sending a woman out into the center of a lake of tar. Knowing Lanagan hails from Australia, and having grown up with the tar pits of LA, it wasn't too illogical a step for me to imagine a sort of hybrid Aboriginal culture that appeared to be redressing some sort of wrong through an old, odd cleansing process involving tar. But no, this is clearly something else as the event at hand is actually an execution, a slow death in front of an audience with a wake built in. Equally fascinating and disconcerting, the effect is how I would imagine it to be watching surgery being performed on myself while fully conscious.

Short story collections by their nature must start off strong and bold. They must open with a story full of promise for the rest of the collection yet not be so strong as to let the reader down along the way. Reading "Singing Down My Sister" it almost feels intimidating to continue with the rest of the book. If the rest of the book is anywhere near this intense it might be impossible to finish.

Fortunately, the book wasn't impossible to finish. Unfortunately the rest of the book was equally intense.

Each of the stories contained so completely build their worlds – unique and richly textured worlds at that – this it is possible for each story to sustain its own book. "Red Nose Day" delves into a dark world full of professional clowns and the hitmen who kill them, with more than a hint of allegory aimed at the Catholic church. "The House of Many" posits a clash of parallel worlds that fluidly includes a Middle Ages cult surrounded by a more contemporary society rich with cars and candy. Demonic angels that help children break free of oppressive adults. Queens who prefer the company of dancing gypsies to their own kingdoms. Lanagan plucks the familiar image and icon and from our consciousness and folds them deftly into something new, a magical literary origami.

I think the warning I would have wanted was more in the form of advice. I think these stories should be savored slowly, with a lot of space between them. Perhaps as ways of cleansing the palate between other books. One after another, the power in these stories makes reentry into the world difficult. Better to dip into these waters with some reserve.

Whether this has helped me to better enter the world of Tender Morsels has yet to be determined. As it stands, I feel richer for the diversion.

My Father's Son

by Terri Fields
Roaring Brook Press 2008

The only thing missing from the front of this book is an exploding gold medallion with the words RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES! printed in bold red letters.

One day as Kevin Windor is watching TV he sees a news bulletin: The notorious DB25 serial killer has been apprehended. What Kevin sees on the screen, though, is his own father being escorted away by police. It can't be, Kevin says in shock, he knows his dad is innocent!

Already Fields has lost me. Without establishing that Kevin's dad is (or might be) a good father I have to take Kevin's emotional, determined word that his dad isn't the killer. That means that Fields wants me to either take a stance against the main character -- essentially lumping me with all the local citizens who have seen the news reports and leveled guilt on Kevin's dad -- or I have to have faith that Kevin's unwavering and naive support of his father will be justified in the end. In the later case, since I have to correctly guess the end of the story in order to be sympathetic to Kevin, what's the point of reading further? Happy ending, story over.

Constructed like the worst sensationalist television drama, Kevin moves through the accusation and his father's unwillingness to tell the truth (despite the fact that it would support his innocence) like a clueless teen whose knowledge of the law and the real world came exclusively from watching cop shows. Bad ones, with corny stilted dialog. When he goes to confront his father's lawyer Kevin seriously believes that if he could only talk to his dad and hear directly from his that he's innocent that everything will be okay. Then when his dad cuts off communication and says he's going to plead guilty -- to a string of murders, mind you -- Fields has upped the ante in manipulative absurdity.

Unless Kevin's dad truly was guilty of the crimes he's accused of, and the story is an examination of what it feels like to be the child of such notoriety and parental deception, the only reason to have Kevin crusade on his father's behalf is to show how a trial-by-media and guilt-by-association brings out the worst in people, the worst in society. Rather than letting the reader into what Kevin feels it's as if Fields wants to hold up a mirror and accuse the reader of being no better than the people who shun Kevin and his mother.

Now, if Fields were instead using Kevin to serve as a detective to prove his father's guilt (with his father's knowledge and cooperation) we might have had a reasonable mystery story here. There'd still be the son-of-a-serial-killer stigma involved, but it would serve as an adversity for Kevin to battle with emotionally. But that's not the book Fields wrote, and in the worst tea cozy mystery tradition she has dad explain everything to Kevin in the end, a tidy little summary delivered in the best tell-don't-show fashion.

My Father's Son is episode of Jerry Springer turned into an ABC After School Special. It's high concept, lowbrow entertainment. Minus the entertainment.

Here Lies Arthur

by Philip Reeve
Scholastic 2008

It's said history is written by the winners, but who writes the legends?

The Legend of King Arthur is one that weaves fact and folklore into an irresistible tale of medieval knights, battles and romances, intrigue and mysticism. As legends go Arthur's is as mailable as they come. Defender of Britons against the Saxons, crusader for the Holy Grail, the Arthur of legend is of a man who speaks both to and for a Christian God while receiving gifts from Pagen mistresses in lakes.

Playing against the backdrop of familiarity, Philip Reeve's Here Lies Arthur takes the legend of Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, and presents him as he might have been: a boorish, petty warrior with a thirst for conquest and the gift of a good Public Relations man.

Arthur, nicknamed the Bear, and his band of knights roam the countryside like Medieval Mafia offering protection from the Saxons in exchange for tribute. Those who remain loyal to others find their villages laid to waste. To ensure a smoother, more peaceful transition (and to avoid fighting wherever possible) Arthur has his storytelling friend Myrddin arrive in advance telling tales and spinning yarns about the man who will unify them once and for all. There is magic woven into this spin doctoring, a cheap magic designed to fool the superstitious, and Myrddin has dedicated his final years toward convincing one and all that Arthur is the leader they need in these troubled times.

Ah, but the thing here is who is telling the story of the creation of the legend.


When Here Lies Arthur opens we are in the midst of a raid on a small village. In the chaos a young girl named Gwynna escapes by slipping into the river and swimming downstream. When found by Myrddin, this girl with her ability to hold her breath underwater provides him with the opportunity to help the Bear unify a local band of knights behind him. After that, Myrddin decides to take Gwynna as his servant but must pass her off as a boy in order to keep her close by. It's Gwynna - now the boy Gwyn - who tells the story of Arthur as she knew him, from the height of his limited empire, through his days with Gwenhwyfar and a preposterously creaky round table, to his last sad, almost pathetic moments. It's a great adventure, full of battles and questionable alliances, and it lays down a nice little spin on the idea that great legends often mask the ugly truths behind those tales. In this case the clue is in the title's verb.

It's an interesting take on the power behind the throne. Myrrdin has but all his eggs in one basket and is willing to overlook Arthur's weaknesses because he feels that his importance as a polarizing figure are more important. Sometimes it's difficult not to see the parallels with modern politics where, say, a presidential advisor might be the one secretly behind the scenes pulling strings and diverting public attention. As Reeve has Gwynna/Gwyn slip in and out of various circles on influence we see the legend as it might have been, from the eyes of dull villagers trying to survive, through the adreneline charged eyes of the knights, to the cloistered whispering of the ladies of the house.

A few words of caution here. Yes, I realize this story is told from the perspective of a girl, but anyone who ditches this book because of the fact is doing themselves a great disservice. Gwynna is a tough, resourceful narrator who discovers she is much happier being one of the boys (especially later when Myrddin has her become a girl again in order to keep eye on Gwenhwyfar for him). She's a keen and wary observer, full of mischief, and a a growing sense of consciousness that allows her to question what she sees as clearly wrong.

It's easy to want to go looking for connections with previous tales, to match the Old English names with the ones we know today. Reeve plays with all the elements anew, almost deliberately seeming to debunk as much as he can, so for those who find the legend of Arthur sacrosanct you may wish to take a pass at this. You'd be missing out on a great yarn, but you'd wind up arguing with the book's recombined narrative.


Also, don't go looking for this book with the awesome UK cover (top) because Scholastic decided to wimp out and go with something a little more fantasy looking. I can understand not wanting the face of a boyishly handsome Arthur on the cover of a book narrated by a girl, but did Scholastic have to go with the dull electric sword (middle)? Couldn't they at least have been bolder and gone with the German cover(bottom)? Hmm, maybe that German cover wouldn't work either.

Normally I like to wait until a book is out before reviewing it, but this one has me busting at the seams. I'm sure advance copies are floating around already, but otherwise keep an eye peeled around the end of October.

This post is is also over at Guys Lit Wire today. Also, a bunch of us guys who review for Guys Lit Wire are part of a group interview today at Innovative: A Word for the Wri-teen.

Ten Mile River

by Paul Griffin
Dial 2008

In a sentence: It's Of Mice and Men, only set on Manhattan, and it's dogs and not rabbits, and instead of the big guy being strong and dumb he's strong and smart, only he's book smart and he still takes lip from his scrawny pretty-boy partner because... uh, let me get back to you on that.

The premise does seem to lean heavily on Steinbeck even if that was never the intention. Two underage juvie loners, Jose and Ray, on their own and living off the fat of the land (taking cash for breaking windshields and boosting whatever else they need), living hand-to-mouth until they are 20 which is when Jose thinks is a good time to think about the future, if he should make it that far.

Ray, hefty and insecure, could probably return to a foster home, land himself a good education, and really make something for himself. But he keeps taking orders from Jose who is one dumbass mistake after another and prone to taking off his shirt to show off his abs in front of girls. Ray's bashful longing for a girl at a salon leads both him and Jose toward going straight, but with the opportunity/cliche to do "one last job" and the retire (Jose wants the cash to buy a motorcycle) everything falls apart and the boys are incarcerated and and taken back to square one.

The bond that holds these boys together is elusive. They fell in at juvie a while back and seem to have one of those classic unspoken man-love relationships. Ray plays the housewife at times, insisting on cleaning and being left to cook, and Jose both takes advantage of the situation and gives Ray a hard time for it. The homophobic banter is authentic learned-from-the-inside posturing but there may be something just below the surface to justify it; we are never really given insight into their background to know for certain.

Come what may, it's clear that Jose's living on borrowed time and Ray will turn out okay.

Griffin's debut, though it feels derivative and mines familiar territory, is assured and authentic in its language. Wannabe delinquents will enjoy Ray and Jose's exploits from a safe vantage point though I totally suspect the prime audience for this book are the sheltered, privileged kids who need the occasional dose of reality to remind them that there's another world just outside their comfort zones.

I liked it, I didn't like it... my opinion about the book seemed to go with the breeze. I think once the Steinbeck imagery entered my head it was hard not to go looking for the parallel commentary -- how are Ray and Jose like modern day depression-era drifters George and Lenny, what's the underside of the homeless juvenile off-the-grid workforce look like, that sort of thing. I should let Griffin's book stand on its own but like I said, whether it tried to or not, it brought on the comparisons on its own and once it did it became impossible not the read it the way one would a modern day adaptation of Hamlet. There is tragedy all over this from page one and the question is: will it resonate with a the YA reader it's intended for?

Honestly: dunno.

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.

Rumble Fish

by S. E. Hinton
Delacorte 1975

Did I really reread this? Did I need to? Man, this thing didn't age well.

Rusty-James thinks he's the the world on a string. Kid brother to the infamous Motorcycle Boy, RJ walks around honestly believe he has his older brother's smarts, looks and charisma to run the gangs of their midwest town. But RJ isn't any of those things, and where his brother used the gangs as a creative foil for his twisted genius, and then moved to disband them, RJ thinks he's inherited some sort of crown that allows him to be cock of the walk.

Motorcycle Boy left to see the sea, to expand his horizons, but two weeks later he's back. He saves RJ from a knife fight (probably not the first time he's bailed out the kid) and spends his days reading and drifting off into a half-deaf semi-trance. There's a local cop who doesn't like Moto Boy and threats all around that one of these days he's going to bring him down because the young punks in town look up to him. It doesn't matter which side you're on, when you see the Buddha on the road, kill it.

The book is framed with RJ on a beach in California running into an old friend Stevie from back in the day. They've both escaped the confines of their small town lives -- Stevie went to school and was planning on becoming a teacher, RJ fresh from the reformatory has finally made it to the beach his older brother never saw. In talking to Stevie RJ is forced to remember and relive those last days five years earlier when his brother was gunned down while setting free the animals in the pet shop. It was a last, desperate act of a person who was so smart he "could have done anything, but nothing interested him" as his drunken father points out. The curse of the big fish in the little pond (or in this case, the Siamese fighting fish in a separated tank). At the end, once RJ has recalled it all he tries desperately to forget. But he cannot, and that's the burden he carries.

Okay, aside from the dated references and slang, two things really stand out: first, the movie Francis Ford Coppola made out of this book is both brilliant and such a brilliant adaptation of this story that it practically eclipses it in relevance; second, are there any kids out there who are going to care about RJ enough to want to finish this book?

Seriously, RJ is a tragic figure in that he hasn't got a clue but he gives the reader all the clues they need to know that he's an idiot. The Motorcycle Boy is only mythic in the way he's viewed by his little brother; aside from being a pacifist with a death wish it's hard to get the read on his genius everyone else sees in him. As a picture of gang life in Tulsa the thing reads like a throwback to West Side Story, only without any social commentary. It's difficult to understand why this book has premained popular -- unless it's because it's short, has entered the YA cannon, and reluctant boy readers will read anything that has fighting as it's focal point.

That said, the movie that Coppola made out of this film almost justifies the book's continued existence. I could talk about this film for days because what FFC did was locate the horrible truth that lay at the heart of the book, that is the secret heart of all stagnant life in America. The movie is about time, wasted time, stopped time, putting in time, doing time, passing time, all the problems an active soul encounters when there is nothing but time. Rusty James feels his time has come, the Motorcycle Boy has come to the end of his time, and everyone else is traped in time but is too blind to notice. Coppola makes all this time with time-lapse photography of clouds passing, clocks that speed up, a giant clock face on a truck with no hands on it... one could argue that it isn't subtle, but it's so artfully shot (in black and white, to match the Moto Boy's colorblindness) and poetically rendered that it plays like a running gag in a city that time seems to have forgotten.

I never thought much of the book until I saw the movie, saw what was possible with Hinton's blank canvas, and now I canot read the book with those images burned into my head.
Movies can certainly color a reader's impression of a book they haven't read, but it takes one hell of a movie to supplant all previous images if the book was read first. I'm not about to suggest that the book shouldn't be read, despite my misgivings after this recent read, but I wonder if it's passed its relevancy phase and is moving on into period piece curio.

I know there are plenty of good books turned into good movies, and good books turned into bad movies, but are there any other films out there that turn sub-par books into cinematic masterpieces?

America Dreaming

How Youth Changed America in the 60's
Laban Carrick Hill
Little Brown 2007

Finally. Now we're getting somewhere.

In an amazingly clear and concise 175 pages or so the history and influence of the Boomer generation is laid out for a young adult audience. Starting with the post-war population boom and suburban expansion, the book focuses on the various key elements and movements that brought about the most sweeping changes in the way America and Americans defined themselves, for better or worse, and how young adults were at the forefront.

The opening chapter sets the stage as 1950's Americans flooded to the pre-fab development communities of Levittown, as television and rock-and-roll took the cultural stage, as the Cold War began to heat up. Then chapter by chapter another piece to the puzzle is added -- the race for space, the Kennedy Camelot including the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Beatles and psychedelia and free love, the Civil Rights Movement. All tried and true subjects, but what makes this fascinating are the chapters on the Black Power Movement (including the full text of the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Plan), the Chicano and Native American movements, the radical anti-war protests (not just Kent State but the Weathermen), the feminists and, as the boomers reached the 1970's, the gay rights movement with a bit of coverage on the Stonewall riots. Hill doesn't shy away from messier topics like drugs or abortion rights, covering the material in an even-handed tone that gives readers a chance to draw their own conclusions and make their own connections.

The chapters move in a mostly forward progression but thy also stand alone in examining their subjects. History isn't presented here as a liner parade of facts and dates and places, but as ideas shaped by time and place, growing organically out of what came before without the tidiness or need for perfect order. Chaotic times call for a different narrative. The book flows at it's own pace, to its internal rhythms. Readers might be surprised to learn just how politically and socially radical their parent's and grandparent's once were. If nothing more, the material gives plenty of ammunition for conversations about what things were like "back in the day."

Presentation goes a long way. The book's larger size -- approximately 10 by 12 inches -- allow for large blocks of text to be accompanied by full-page images and sidebars filled with details and tidbits. Archival photos and period ephemera make this a triumph for the designers as well; the book feels fresh without veering into forced hipness, even if the subject matter is a few decades older than its intended audience. It also makes the book half as many pages as if presented as straight text, making it feel more accessible.

My only quibble, and it is minor, is that the book really is more of a portrait of the boomer generation than a pure examination of the 1960's. At the end of the book there is a year-by-year summary of major events that starts in 1946 and ends at 1975, pretty much the formative years of the boomer generation. I doubt that anyone is really ready to present the boomers as a worthy subject of study for middle grade and young adult, but that's essentially what the 60's are about. That aside, this really is a fine introductory study for the third quarter of the 20th century.

Now we need something exactly like this for the final quarter to explain how the gen-x generation brought us to where we are today.

Miracle Wimp

Erik P. Kraft
Little, Brown 2007

This is the story of Tom Mayo, nickname Miracle Wimp. Sixteen years old, further down on the pecking order, working his way through the vicissitudes of social life in high school. Should have been in Computer Animation, wound up in wood shop.

Where is this story going? Good question. Page by page there's a new vignettes, each no longer than a page or two, another little window into Miracle Wimp's life. Somewhat linear, bits and pieces of a story thread pop up. Easy to pick up and put down. Easy to abandon. Perfectly enjoyable, easily forgettable.

Two thirds of the way through Tom grows a bit of a spine. Things actually seem to be coming together. Is Kraft going to knot all these little bits into a massive gabbeh of lush storytelling? The kid's got some better friends, a kinda-sorta girlfriend, a small cache of cool. It's coming into the home stretch, down to the wire...

Nope, that's it. Book over.

Fair enough, it does pick up steam in the last half and seems to pull itself out of being just a collection of random-seeming vignettes, but coming on the heels of finishing the first two Wimpy Kid books I have some questions. Do teen age boys really want to read about nerds and the socially maladjusted hosers (here referred to as Donkeys and bolos) they deal with every day at school? If you had to go through all this in middle school would you still be interested it in high school? Is this really the only way to capture teen boys who don't want to delve into fantasy? Is the best we can offer them in terms of realistic fiction that isn't the cold world of The Chocolate War?

Yes, the bits ring true, the totally awkwardness is palpable, but on a lot of levels I can't help wonder if this book wouldn't track better with a certain sector of the male adult population. Guys who were there once, who came out of it okay, and can look back and laugh.

I laughed a couple times, but it was the hit-or-miss laughter of watching stand-up. That's no coincidence; Kraft does stand-up comedy and that's the exact rhythm of this book. Jab, jab, jab, punchline. Smirk, smirk, smirk, laugh. Ponder, muse, laugh, use the bathroom, answer the phone, take a nap, grab a snack, pick up the book, open it randomly, read.

Literature for a short attention spans that...

What? Huh? Was I saying something?

Poetry Friday: Something About America

Maria Testa
Candlewick 2005

I was originally going to bow out of Poetry Friday this week with a collection of original things that, honestly, I wasn't sure were worth the electrons. Instead I discovered a collection of poems that caught me in a funny place. The night before I was ranting on to anyone who would listen (my wife) about all the things that I hated about this country and the way it behaves.

Then I pick up this book. The narrator of these poems weaves a narrative about escaping Kosova during the ethnic cleansing. She was four when her village, her house, were set ablaze. Her parents escaped to America, fleeing for their lives and for the hospitals that would help their daughter heal. And among the poems are diatribes from her father, complaining about America like any good American. I had to step back and think about my previous night's diatribes.

She continues, this girl, growing up in America, and American. Here's the poem that caught my attention.

One Small Sticker
(Like a Neon Sign)

On September 12, 2001
my father pressed
one small sticker,
an American flag sticker,
into a corner
of the outside window
on our front door.
He pressed it firmly,
evenly
perfectly straight,
like it was meant
to last
forever.

It's still there.
And every time I look at it,
that one small sticker,
fading fast
and curling around the edges,
seems to shine as brightly
as a blinking beer sign
in a bar window.

Beer inside!
American inside!

Please believe us.

I remember during the first gulf war, stories from urban centers where anyone who looked vaguely Middle Eastern fell under verbal and physical attack. I remember stories of native-born Pakistanis and Indians and even one Pacific Islander begging people on the news not to burn down their businesses, not to chase them from their homes. Please believe us.

The Kosava immigrants in the book settled in Lewiston, Maine where a few years after 9-11 the mayor had sent a letter to Somali leaders telling them that the town had "maxed out" on their share of immigrants. Then an anti-immigration rally was planned, and the immigrants organized a pro-immigrant rally. 30 people protested the immigrants, 6000 showed up to celebrate what it meant to be an American from another country.

In very simple language, simple images, small phrases and careful crafting Testa sets down a multi-faceted look at what it means to to be an outsider, an American by choice, and how easily those ideals that we consider rights by birth can easily be twisted into hypocrisy and fed by ignorance.

Why does tolerance intimidate and frighten so many who claim a religious upbringing?

Abandoned: Love, Stargirl

by Jerry Spinelli
Random House 2007

Spoilers included, if you care.

How sad. When Stargirl was published half a lifetime ago I loved it. I loved her. I even loved the ending which, I have come to discover from others, was not the most universally loved part of that book. No matter, it was and still is, a great little book to me.

Immediately afterward I wondered what happened next but knew better than to hitch my wish to a star that Spinelli would write a follow-up. Could he capture the same lightning in a bottle, I wondered?

I wonder no more. I've had access to the ARC of this book for seven months now but I just couldn't bring myself to read it. I was torn: I wanted it to be good, and I didn't want to tarnish my memories of the first book. Enough about me.

What worked with Stargirl was that it was a portrait of Stargirl viewed from the outside, from the perspective of Leo, average boy. We watched Leo struggle with recognizing the outsider for who and what she was, watched how he agonized over defending and rejecting her, using this confusion to better define himself and his beliefs. She was who she was and we had Leo's world to contrast it against.

Sixty pages into Love, Stargirl and I feel like Leo led us astray, like his vision was clouded by... something, I don't know. Adolescent blinders? It's the same Stargirl, but she's inside some Bizarro World where everything around her is as weird (or weirder) than she is. Her diary entries addressed to Leo pick up shortly after where the previous book left off but without a baseline normal to gauge against it's like some fun house mirror version of Stargirl.

In a word, yuk.

There's a precocious neighbor kid that is supposed to re-ground Stargirl but, one, I don't buy into her as a character and, two, she annoys me to the point that every time I saw her appear I wanted to skip ahead to when she'd disappear. But she's a fairly main character, and reading only those parts without the little snot would leave me with a government pamphlet of a book. Then there's this old guy mooning in the graveyard and I'm, like, yeah, okay, whatever, that's kind of a tired image. And the scruffy boy that's suppose to show Stargirl how much she's changed and grown since she left Leo and...

Wait! The ghosts of Christmas past, present and future! Who she was, is and could be! Yawn!

That's grasping. I really couldn't get beyond those first 60 pages before jumping to the end to read the last chapter. And there she is, at the end of her diary, about ready to mail off her book-length epistle to Leo with the promise that one day they'll meet again, if the accident will. And if I were Leo I'd shake my head and wonder what this girl was using for brains because, honestly, after a year of silence, if I got this in the mail I'd probably consider myself lucky she was gone.

There's a part of me that thinks it's wrong to review a book I couldn't finish. I don't ditch a book that often, usually I put it aside and try several more times before giving it another shot, eventually forcing myself to finish. And even then, while I will review things I don't like I don't review everything I hate. But this book is trading on my memory of a book I loved and to crush that memory so completely, well, I just couldn't let it go unnoted.

If there was a great cry across the land from those of us who begged to know more about Stargirl, and if after years of not writing about her Jerry Spinelli finally gave in and wrote this book, and if my unconscious thoughts were part of that transmission then I kindly apologize and respectfully ask for my thoughts back.

Dream Factory

by Brad Barkley and Heather Kepler
Dutton 2007

The "fur" characters (including those not wearing fur, like princesses) have gone on strike at Disney World in Florida at the beginning of the summer. This forces the Disney folks to hire scab labor to fill in so that vacationers can continue to enjoy "The Happiest Place on Earth" without the ugly bits of the outside world creeping in. But this book isn't about any of that.

Instead, the story follows the recent high school graduates who have answered the call to replace the striking workers, kids with little conscience about being scabs with loftier problems like what to major in at college and what to do with the rest of their lives. And even then this book isn't really much about that.

This book is could easily be called Summer at Camp Disney with a good dose of typical high school shenanigans and petty teen behavior and, naturally, mismatched lovers. While the contract negotiations continue these kids are housed dorm-style in a commandeered hotel and are quickly thrown into a prelude of what college is like while dipping into all the experiences corporate life has to offer. There are morning meetings and rules and regulations and even some team-building exercises designed to bring the couldn't-care-less rabble in with the party line in the House of the Mouse.

And at it's core, it's a teen romantic comedy stacking a heartbroken Cinder Ella and her second generation Disney geek Prince Mark Charming against Chip-n-Dale mates, the Uber-Achieving triple-major snob Cassie and her killing-time-before-inheriting-the-corner-office flounder Luke.

If you need help drawing a line between points A and B on a map explaining what Luke's Star Wars geek parents gave him as a middle name (beginning with the letter S) then perhaps you will find the narrative full of surprises. That could be said about much of the book, where so much information is parceled out over long stretches in ways that might insult quicker readers. Do we really need the protracted mating dance that takes place between all these characters? In a word, yes, because that's the way the book is structured.

Told in alternating viewpoints, chapters narrated by Luke and Ella, the plot chugs along more or less linearly and yet each time we switch viewpoints there is the strange sensation we've read it all before. It's as if in one character's telling of event we can guess what the other would think/feel/do so that when it happens there's a sense of deja vu. The device of giving Ella and Luke their own voice essentially doubles the time it would take to tell the same information from an omniscient viewpoint. Sad, really, because there's still a fun little story trapped inside this ping pong plot.

Ella's lost her brother in an accident and she's still processing that information when she gets word that her parents are pulling up roots to go work on a mission overseas. Ella is shuttled off to live with an aunt in Florida until the fall when she's supposed to start college in Vermont. Adrift and on her own she jumps at the opportunity to work at Disney World just to keep herself busy.

Luke's problem is that he's got the corner office at his father's company all sewn up, but he doesn't want it. In fact, he doesn't know what he wants because all his life he's been seen as the prodigal son destined for the corner office. While everyone else would kill to have that kind of security (like his fellow fur crush Cassie, who has her eyes on being the wife of the guy in the corner office) all Luke wonders is what it would be like to be free.

Luke and Cassie are already an item when Ella waltzes into the picture. What attracts Luke to Ella is her ability to question and seek out answers about life's larger questions, a natural effect in the wake of becoming unmoored from her family. When Mark does a last minute fill-in for an injured Prince Charming it becomes obvious to all her friends that perhaps Ella has finally landed her prince.

A team-building scavenger hunt designed to make the scab employees more knowledgeable about the park pairs competitive Cassie with Mark, whose father worked the park as a young man himself and is by virtue the person to beat when it comes to Disney trivia. Luke and Ella make a go of it as teammates but the awkwardness of their feelings for one another, the fact that they are otherwise engaged in relationships, and an undertow of petty jealousies pushes and pulls against them.

Everyone can see that Luke and Ella are destined for one another and all that remains is whether or not they can muster the effort to make it happen before the end of the book.

I could take or leave this book -- the formula is strictly Disney Channel Original Movie. That said the thing that truly irks me about this book is the cover. Why go through the trouble of telling a book from two viewpoints and then deliberately cut the potential readership in half by making the cover pink. Yeah, technically this is Chick Lit, but it doesn't have to be and there's no reason to automatically assume a male reader wouldn't want to pick this up because it happened to partly deal with relationships. I'll grant you, using Disney by name throughout the book could render some problems with the art department being able to use copyrighted material on the cover, but is this really the way to go, is this really the best you could do, Dutton?

Let me answer that: No. Sell the story, don't sell genre.

13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson
Harper Teen 2005

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

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

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

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

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

Like how much you enjoyed the book.

Joker

by Ranulfo
Harper Teen 2006

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's just not Hamlet.

dot dot dot

I don't generally traffic in kidlit news as I find others out there do it much better and more frequently, but this story from The Walrus hit my radar while checking out information on Grimm tales. The Grimm reference is almost tangential, the story is about the disappearance of childhood and the audience for books to go with. In particular I chortled at this particular quote:

If picture books are on the wane, Young Adult fiction is thriving. “You should write YA,” a publisher told me. “That’s where the money is.”

What kind of money are we talking about, exactly?

Actually, there's a nice little breakdown on how the children's book market has changed under the weight of big bookstores (perhaps nothing new, but good to remember) and I'm always a sucker for an article that references Neil Postman's work. I am, admittedly, a product of his Soft Revolution.

Life As We Knew It

by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Harcourt 2006

What could be more benign than the moon, cycling through the night sky, orbiting Earth and inspiring song and romance.

Bringing with it the end of life as we know it.

Miranda's journal entries quickly bring us up to speed. Her parents are separated, her father's remarried and his new young wife is newly pregnant. Her older brother is finishing up his first year at college and her younger brother thinks of nothing but baseball. Among Miranda's close friends she counts a girl enamored with her Born Again minister. Another friend died in an accident last year. Due to an injury Miranda has had to give up ice skating for swimming but she still follows the rise of a local boy on his way toward the Olympics.

Then there's all this talk -- excited talk -- about an asteroid on a collision course with the moon. The scientists have made their calculations and deemed the event historic but safe. The face of the moon has shown a history of asteroid damage and this current event promises to be spectacular, viewable with binoculars if not with the naked eye.

Miscalculation. The density of the asteroid was greater than anticipated. The moon is knocked from its orbit, closer to the Earth. Tides erupt into tsunamis all over the world. Earthquakes. Volcanoes awaken. The shoreline of every continent is swallowed. News vanishes from coastal radio and television networks. The moon sits uncomfortably close to the horizon.

Panic sets in. Miranda's mom has preservation instincts enough to grab as much cash as she can and go shopping for perishables. Miranda, her younger brother Jonny and their close family friend Mrs. Nesbit all help stockpile goods for the pantry. Miranda feels it's all a bit much, but then everyone is doing it so maybe her mom knows what she's doing. Families start to leave town, kids stop going to school. News comes in spurts from landlocked cities: rolls of the dead are read. The electricity begins to falter. The sky is covered in volcanic ash, the temperature rises, then falls sharply. How long with the heating oil and gas last? What kind of a winter is coming?

How long will Miranda and her family last?

As a member of Gen X (or the tail end of the Boomers, depending on where you set your marker) I'm one of those who have never had to learn first hand what bad times could be like. We've suffered depressions, but not like in the 20's and 30's. We've seen wars, and war protests, but it never really challenged our daily lives the way World War II brought on rationing and home front sacrifice. The Holocaust is something in history books, not living memory. I've seen my fair share of earthquakes (1971 and 1989), watched the hurricanes and tornadoes on the news, read about famine and disaster the world over. But the members of The Greatest Generation have done their job a little too well by cocooning the rest of us from the realities they vowed never to suffer again. We have not, as sheltered Americans, as world citizens en masse, had the personal experience of knowing what we would do when pressed to our limits.

Which is why some of us like reading about Earth shattering events that provoke those corners of our brains to ask "What would I do in that situation?" I couldn't make a steady diet of books and movies like that, like Life As We Knew It, but I could consume my fair share. I think many teens do, and for similar reasons -- because we want to compare our own emotions and reactions with those of the characters. We want to be right, and where we're wrong we want to know how and why. The book, movie or play become personal, we judge the characters and evaluate the situations and run a parallel narrative in our heads. Yes, hoard as much as you can, share with no one, and think about what you do when people get desperate. Can you second guess the medical concerns, the biological variables, the emotional trauma? When the food runs scarce who eats less, who eats more and who gives up all together?

I think Pfeffer has put together a great little story here, one that opens itself naturally to questions of morals and values. That alone probably prohibits it from use in the classroom (because morals and values aren't measured on standardized tests) but it shouldn't prevent whole-hearted recommendations to teens. I have a few questions and items I wish were addressed in the book -- political information, how the governments survived and some of the social mechanics of community, particularly after the first winter -- but perhaps that means I can look forward to a sequel. Honestly, there probably isn't any way to include the political in a journal reporting on a closed system like a single family's survival, still one can always hope.

Hope. Yeah, that's in there as well. The hope that Miranda can one day go to the prom, that the worst is over and that, with some adjustment, life as she once knew it will one day return.

Sloth

by Gilbert Hernandez
Vertigo/DC Comics 2006

Spoilers alert: About half way through. I'll let you know when we get there.

Parents moving from the city to quieter towns for the sake of giving their kids peace and relative safety may be trading off one set of evils for another. Gilbert Hernandez starts off his dark and gripping tale of teen angst by suggesting that nature abhors a vacuum, and for teens removed from a city, that vacuum leads to boredom, low existential self esteem and, perhaps inevitably, irrational suicide.

And that's just three pages in.

But Gilbert Hernandez uses this framework of teen ennui to build a story about another possibility, that a strong-willed teen named Miguel Serra has deliberately slipped into a coma for a year, and then wakes himself up, mostly unchanged. The loss of a year doesn't seemed to have changed much for Miguel of his fellow teens. Sure, his friends relationships may have been on hold -- in particular, his band which includes his girlfriend and his best friend -- but on the whole Miguel didn't seem to miss much. There's still some unanswered questions about why his mother abandoned him when he was for, whether or not his incarcerated drug-dealing father might have had something to do with her disappearance, but nothing that wasn't there when Miguel decided to drop into his dream-like coma state and chill for a bit.

Sloth is the name of Miguel's band. It's also the nickname he's been given by his homies in response to his slightly-slowed pace. To Miguel his pace isn't slow so much as it's deliberate. When the bands gets together to practice he finds he no longer has the taste for loud and fast and wants to rethink slower material. He hasn't lost emotion or feeling but adopted a more dream-like view of the world and it suits him fine.

His girlfriend Lita appears to have remained faithful to him the year he was gone, and has become something of an expert on urban legends. The one she's obsessing about the most concerns a local lemon grove where dead bodies are rumored to be buried, and where a mysterious creature called The Goatman lives. Lita gets Miguel and their bandmate Romeo to hit the orchard on a moonless night where they may or may not have spotted the mysterious creature that lives there. At one point the party is separated and when Miguel meets up he finds Romeo and Lita holding each other. He writes it off at first but the nagging suspicion that there's something between them grows. When he confront Romeo with it later he's unconvincingly evasive.

All the while Miguel dreams. He dreams of his mother, and the lemon orchard, and the peacefulness he found when he was in a coma. The coma was his escape from the banalities of the real world, from the drama and the trauma and it's beginning to look more and more attractive to him.

Here come some spoilers.

And that's when the transformation takes place, almost a transubstantiation really. A year's coma didn't change the world only his perception of the things within it, and so he drifts back into the comfort of that sleep...

And wakes up as Lita.

The second half of Sloth is actually divided into two parts, each shorter than the previous section, almost the inverse of the golden mean spiraling rapidly inward. In Lita's version of the self-induced coma she has yet to get the nerve to speak to Miguel, a silent crush that eventually finds its commonality in a love of a rock singer named Romeo X. It's a parallel universe with the same characters as before, only not. In Miguel's story there are bullies who become thugs but in Lita's coma-dream these bullies are wannabe rappers who dream of opening for Romeo X. And when Lita eventually meets her musical hero Romeo he turns out to be a compassionate nerd and she is torn in her love between him and Miguel. When Miguel confront Romeo the fight that results draws Lita into an accident that pushes her back into a coma. Romeo realizes that he's not good enough for Lita and drowns himself, slipping into a coma as Miguel rescues him. Romeo realizes there's a comfort in comaland and decides he may just stay there.

Draw what conclusions you may -- a coma as a stand-in for drugs, that escape is the universal dream of teens trapped that makes them feel helpless, that like caged animals we have created whole communities of souls driven to acts of desperation and self-destruction -- Hernandez manages to capture the contained world that is teen ennui. The sub-plot concerning the lemon grove, the urban legends and mysterious deaths only exist in Miguel's world, though Lita also dreams of the grove and the creature said to live there. It's like the Jungian idea that everyone caries their personal world into their dreams but that dream world caries commonalities that allow people to "connect" while there. In the brief chapter that is Romeo's coma the lemon grove -- which is the last panel of the book -- is his sanctuary. I may stay forever he says, and there's no reason to doubt him.

Apathy is not the answer, neither is checking out, running away, dropping out or just wishing it would all go away. None of these characters really wants to confront the issues they have before them despite all their attempts to grapple with them. At one point Miguel marvels that his grandparents argue opposite sides of the political spectrum but still love each other. He hasn't spent the time and years they have coming to terms with that idea that one can love and respect someone and still not agree with them; he hasn't the experience, the trials and errors that would give him the insight they have gained over time. Despite his deliberate, slowed pace he is still too impatient. The coma is the easy way out.

I've long known of Los Bros. Hernandez -- Gilbert and his brother Jaime created the seminal alternative comic book Love and Rockets back in the early 1980's -- so I was happy to see a new graphic novel making the recommended lists recently. In the past I preferred Jaime's stories because they felt more grounded to a landscape I understood, his approach to female characters seemed better rooted to me. Gilbert Hernandez doesn't do anything here to shake that feeling, but I was more engaged with this book of his than in any of his Palomar stories. Which is to say that I liked it, but I have reservations.

I'm getting to that point where I'm wondering about the appropriateness of certain materials for teens. I get torn because I'm all for the gore and gruesomeness being left in the Grimm tales but I go the other way when it comes to teens because I feel that there are larger issues involved. I look at the increase in violence in schools and I recognize that it's more of a societal problem than just the influences of culture, and yet that's a chicken-and-egg argument: does the society influence the violent cultural entertainments or does the entertaining violence alter the accepted culture? Part of me (the part that went to art school) likes to think of the arts as influential and transformative, but you can only live in that fantasy land for so long. The arts reflect, that's my stance, and that why I straddle the fence when it come to appropriateness.

Which is to ask the question: do I think this is appropriate for a teen aged audience? It isn't like I think they're going to go around inducing themselves into comas for escape. No, teens will do what they always have done, find whatever it takes to cope. I guess I'll take the same out that Vertigo Comics uses in the small print just below the bar code.

Suggested for Mature Readers.

An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green
Dutton 2006

So I finally caved and read it. My reasons for not reading it for so long were irrational. It's the math. I wasn't born with the math gene and anything even remotely smacking of math kindles rocket fuel in my stomach and makes my adenoids itch.

Yes, I know the math isn't relevant to appreciating the story, no matter how accurate.

I'm going to be up front about this and admit it's going to take some easing into in order to find the groove for this review. And, honestly, what's holding me down is that in thinking about this book, as a reader and a writer and as someone who occasionally writes reviews, I can't help feeling that books like this require an entirely different approach to discussion. I'm in the shower thinking What this book really needs is a new kind of criticism, the likes of which we haven't seen since Lester Bangs was pounding down NyQuil and frothing about the carpet.

As a further prefatory note there were moments when I wasn't sure about the audience for this book. Is it home schooled prodigies looking for a window into (or out of) their self-torment? Are there sixteen year olds out there who aren't addicted to social websites on the internet, who are intelligent and not at all nerdy, who not only still read but can enjoy the plight of the prodigy and his best friend on a road trip to nowheresville so they can do a little navel gazing before heading off to college? And can they laugh at all the right places without malice? I'd like to think they're out there, I really would, but just how big is that army?

The mind drifts, images of hyper-literate Ronin holed up in boho coffeehouses reading An Abundance of Katherines at a single sitting fills my head. I see seniors, their personal essays nailed, their college apps already in the mail, pausing to reminisce lightly over foolish pranks and late summer nights in local make-out sanctuaries, the burn of long-since renounced fast food burning the back of their throat, coughing and chuckling at the same time.

No, wait, those aren't teens, those are twenty- and thirtysomething hipsters and artsters, the incommunicognoscenti that drift among the sudoku-mad salarymen and women on public transit, peering into the windows of their youth with grins as wry as their martinis. And in the corner, standing alone with closed eyes and humming to himself is Colin Singleton, child prodigy, anagramming the title of his book:

Ken refuted a cabana nosh-in

Unfreshen a cabana to kin, Ed

Ed frees a cabana to inn hunk

Why can't he get away from the cabana? Could a cabana hold the key to happiness? And who, exactly are Ed and Ken, and so on.

Trolling the barren vistas of Tennessee, Colin and his best bud Hassan (introducing himself by saying "I am not a terrorist", and the people laugh) are out on that great post-high school metaphor, the road trip in a vehicle called the Hearse. The roadside lure of the final resting place of Franz Ferdinand leads Colin and Not-a-Terrorist like a divining rod to Gutshot, a company town that manufactures tampon strings.

Yeah, the book's funny like that.

Improbably fun they hit it off well with the backwoods locals, in particular a reluctant likely-prodigy-in-hiding named Lindsey. They pick up a job locally recording oral histories in advance of the town's demise and crash with Lindsey while they sort through their issues. Colin in particular is haunted with understanding why he keeps getting dumped by all the Katherine's he's dated going so far as to develop a mathematical theorem dedicated to determining the length of a relationship. Silly boy! The reason they don't work out is because he keeps dating women named Katherine! Ah, but that's too easy, and would make for a much shorter book.

I tied that once. Or twice. Dating Katherine's, that is. They didn't have much in common beside their name. And the fact that they both dumped me for other guys. And they lied to me about their ages (like I cared). It only took me two, but I got off the ride before I hurled. Totally true.

Meanwhile, back in the sticks, Hassan-the-Not-a-Terrorist consumes Hardee's Monsterthick Burgers by the gross (1420 calories each) and serves as another of literature's great fat sidekicks, part Hotei, part Pulcinella. When he isn't eating or mooning over Judge Judy on television Hass (I like to think of him shaped like the avocado, but with man tits) continues to put off his college education in the mistaken belief that by not doing something with his life he is doing something quite profound. And he gets the local hottie! That is until she relinquishes her opportunity at his Monsterthick-fed Thunderstick over a tryst in the cemetery.

Over my dead body! Franz Ferdinand might call out from the great beyond. And he'd be right.

In the end, as the smog of Gutshot sinks heavily into the rear view mirror, Colin finally breaks the cycle, forsakes his Katherine Wheel, and picks up a extra passenger on his way out of Gutshot and into Whatever is Next.

It's a crappy summary, but accurate where it counts. If it counts at all.