When a Good Girl Does a Bad Thing

Jayne Thompson, the protagonist of Susan Colebank's first YA novel, is on top of things: she's valedictorian of her junior class and she's a star on her tennis team. But on top of things isn't always that great. Her mom, a local TV reporter, is more concerned with appearances than reality; her younger sister, a diabetic, is completely irresponsible (and Jayne is pressured and counted upon to cover for her, make up for her, do things for her); her dad, while nice, seems out of touch.

And Jayne never complains out loud. But what she does do, as a knee-jerk reaction, is run a red light.

That one instance results in the death of a young girl, the sister of a "mean girl" at Jayne's school. Jayne suffers terribly for her actions--her grades drop, she isolates herself, she shuts down.

Things change when she is sentenced to a year of community service at Outreach Arizona. Jayne initially seems to be headed down a dangerous path: drinking, a tattoo, a piercing, but all of that is part of Jayne finally finding herself, rather than who others want her to be.

I liked this novel and think that teen girls would relate to it, especially those like Jayne (I was kind of like her) who are under tremendous pressure from a parent to be what the parent wants.

The book would work well in a unit on chances/second chances. Students could also read Looking for JJ and We Were Here, for example, and talk about the juvenile justice system and what seems to be fair/unfair punishments.

I want a Grace

Kristin Cashore's second YA novel, Fire, won the Walden Award for YA Fiction this year, so I've been wanting to read it and find out what all the buzz is about. It's a pre-quel, a companion novel to Cashore's first YA book, Graceling. So I read Graceling first, and thought it was pretty rockin'.

Katsa (very close to Katniss, huh?) is a bad-ass, a femme fatale, the adolescent "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (and bad attitude). She is graced, meaning she has a special talent, only hers is killing people. Or so she thinks. It takes meeting a dreamy guy named Po and helping him save the Seven Kingdoms from a bad guy named Leck to realize her Grace might be something she didn't expect after all.

While I thought the book's pacing was uneven and it got yawner long in some places, I can't help but respect Cashore's brand of YA feminism. Katsa will be no one's wife, or mother. She will take Po as a lover, and to hell with anyone who thinks that's wrong. She's a fighter, and decides that she will spend her life training young girls to fight. At one point in the novel she wonders why the weaker gender (in physical strength) never gets encouraged to learn to fight when young, like boys do.

(Got me thinking about my own childhood, how I was encouraged to set the table, do laundry, wear panty hose, while my twin brother was encouraged to play with GI Joe figurines and watch "The Incredible Hulk." Me, spoons and forks. Him, a big green man with bulging muscles, a short temper, and a penchant for violence. Interesting).

The book also made me want a Grace..but what would I want my Grace to be? Mind-reading? I think that would get exhausting, but it'd be fun. Camouflage? That'd be cool. I always wanted one of those capes Harry Potter wore, the one that makes you invisible. Or maybe I would just settle for being able to multiply myself by 10 so I could get everything done in a day that needs to get done. Yes, I like that Grace idea very much.

Cashore's second book, Fire, is the pre-quel companion novel to Graceling, which means it is set some 30 years before the events in Graceling take place. There's one crossover character who plays a big role, but you'll have to read the book to see who that is. My complaint with this one (and this may just be a sign of me getting old) is that I couldn't keep up with everyone and the who's-who of which kingdom. I had to turn back a couple of times and re-read to remember--why is Fire at that castle again? What is she supposed to be doing? Who is Murgda? And Mydogg? (I couldn't tell if some of the names were meant to be funny...I mean, don't you just want to say, Whassup Mydogg?! ha).

But other than that, again, I really like the strong female protagonist. Like Katsa, Fire refuses to marry or have children (for one, she's a human monster, and human monsters are hated by just about everyone, so ethically, there's that issue with bringing another little monster into the world), and like Katsa, she sleeps around, with girls and boys alike. And Fire kills her father because he has a serious screw missing in the morality department. And this book kept me guessing, and surprised (as did Graceling). Not predictable at all.

I like how Cashore doesn't shy away from the dark underside of life that is, well, present in everyone's life, whether we admit or not. Fire has a lot of insight into this underside, since she can read minds. She can also control others' minds, and the book raises interesting questions about privacy and power, and why some people with power choose to do good, while others abuse their power.

I think the book also presents opportunities to talk about the "male gaze"--Fire, as a human monster, is gorgeous--brightly colored and flashy and mesmerizing. You can't help but look at her. But Cashore does a nice job of showing the reader what it feels like for women to be constantly objectified--leered at as objects to be consumed. It takes its psychological toll, in ways we probably don't even realize. Because Fire can read minds, she always knows what the male (and female) gazers are thinking--and wanting--and she constantly has to defend herself, mentally and physically, against their insults.

Ultimately, I think we need more fairy tales like Cashore's. Reminiscent of the Tatterhood tales.

Check out Cashore's blog for more information on the books. Cashore is at work on her 3rd book, Bitterblue. Bitterblue is a character in Graceling.

Check out Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog for more info. about the Walden Award.

Life or Death?

...I think about what the nurse said. She's running the show. And suddenly I understand what Gramps was really asking Gran. He had listened to that nurse, too. He got it before I did.

If I stay. If I live. It's up to me.

Hoo-boy! This is an intense read. Reminds me a bit of Crutcher's Deadline and the wonderful Before I Die by Jenny Downham, but unlike the characters in those two books, who don't have a choice whether or not they die--they're both terminally ill--17-year-old Mia in If I Stay, does. She's got a ruptured spleen, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and she's missing some skin thanks to a horrible car accident that landed her in a coma and killed her parents and younger brother. She has good reason for wanting to die.

To go down as a family. No one left behind.

Reminiscent of the main character Susie in Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, Mia narrates the story from some nebulous purgatorial middle world. She's in a suspended state--not dead, not sure if she wants to be alive--and walks around in the hospital, unseen, describing her treatment by doctors and nurses, and grandparents' and friends' (and boyfriend Adam's) reactions to her comatose condition.

What does death feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest, never-ending nap?

The narration moves seamlessly back and forth between Mia's real-time observations in the hospital, and the past, where we see Mia and Adam's relationship grow, Mia's burgeoning talent as a cellist (she had applied to Juilliard before accident, but hasn't heard anything back yet), and Mia's loving family. Her parents were hip and wacky, and totally supportive of Mia, even though Mia often felt like she didn't quite "fit in," didn't "belong" because she doesn't consider herself very cool. (She's cooler than she gives herself credit for. As Adam describes her, she's fragile and tough, quiet and kick-ass...one of the punkest girls [he] knows, with a sense of humor so dark you almost miss it. And can I just say for the record, this book has quite possibly the hottest, no-sex-involved make-out scene I've ever read).

But Mia's not sure a world without her parents and younger brother is one she belongs in, either.

Dying is easy. Living is hard.

I won't spoil the ending for you. Go get the book and read it. This is smart, compelling, warm writing--young adult literature at its best.

Winter's Bone

I haven't read this book--have never heard of Daniel Woodrell--but I saw the movie adaptation recently and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. In the movie, 17-year-old Ree Dolly has a shit family, all tied up as they are in cooking, dealing, and snorting crank in the w-a-y back-woods of the Missouri Ozarks.

Ree hasn't "developed a taste for it yet," and you have to wonder--watching her skin squirrels for dinner, or beg her mentally checked-out mother to help her make a hard decision about the family timber, or cut the hands off her dead father to prove to the bondsman he's dead--why she hasn't succumbed to the siren song of meth, also known as the "poor man's cocaine." Ree's hard-nosed, paranoid relatives resent her for it, even though they're culpable in making Ree the "meth-orphan" she is. Ree learns blood ties take on new meanings when money and greed are king.

Life hasn't been easy on Ree or her younger siblings, and you know it never will be. Yet Ree perseveres, destined to forge her own way, and write her own definition of selfhood and family. Thanks to writer and director Debra Granik for this portrayal of a resilient, courageous adolescent girl who survives by sheer willpower and grit. A true heroine, reminiscent of Katniss in Hunger Games (and the movie makes me think, too, about Tyrell in Coe Booth's YA novel of the same name). New Yorker movie critic David Denby calls the film "one of the great feminist works in film."

I'm looking forward to reading the book, and getting to know Woodrell's fiction. The movie won for best dramatic film at Sundance this year, so I imagine we'll hear more about the book in days to come.

IMing in Teen Fiction

This book came out several years ago--the first young adult novel written entirely in Instant Messaging-style (IM)--and I didn't like it the first time I read it. It wasn't hard for me to read, since I've spent some time in chat rooms and know what most of the chat lingo means (e.g., "ttyl" means "talk to you later") (at least, I knew the lingo in this book). But I didn't like the story--3 teen girls are best friends and are starting their 10th grade year in high school together. They promise to always be friends and not let the pettiness of cliques and gossip and all the other crap that goes along with high school social dynamics get in the way of their friendship. But, as things tend to go, their friendship is tested in big ways.

Author Lauren Myracle writes at the end of the book that in TTYL she wanted to debunk the myth that high school friendships don't or can't last, and she does do that.

I guess I didn't like the story because it seemed so traditional considering the new medium in which it's couched. I figured if Myracle was going to push the boundaries of fiction (she says in a Cynsations interview that she really had to re-think conventional fiction to make the story work in this format), then p-u-s-h the boundaries and write a really radical story. One where, oh, I don't know, teenage girls think about things other than boys, what to wear, and what others think about them. With this (for me) cliched story, I felt like the IMing was just a gimmick, an appropriation of teen culture to tell a cliched teen story, to hook teens in with flash and flare only to give them fizzled-out fiction.

But I recently re-read the book because I'm teaching it in my summer "Digital YAL" class. One objective of the class is to get beginning English teachers to think about what teens' migration to the digital world means--why teens go online, what they do there--and how these technological changes effect how we understand communication (e.g., reading/writing, "texts") and today's teens.

Upon my 2nd reading of the book, I realized that TTYL really does comment on teens' (especially teen girls') uses of the Internet, specifically IM, and for this reason, it makes an interesting commentary on teen culture in the digital age. These are some things I'll highlight when we discuss the book in class:

• Many Internet & digital literacy scholars say that contrary to popular belief, teens go online to talk to people they already know. They also go online to maintain their friendships and social lives, create and negotiate identities, and police peer behavior. All of this happens in TTYL; it's why the girls go online. But teen girls have always done this, haven't they? Maybe this is Myracle's point--that just because the technology is new, teens are using it to do the same things they've always done. They now just have faster, more public tools to do it with.
• Cynthia Lewis and Bettina Fabos have researched adolescents' use of IM in their daily lives and say that these youths viewed their IM sessions not as individual, separate exchanges, but as "larger, entwined narratives." The IM dialogue relied on knowledge of and participation within an offline network of friends. Again, I think TTYL exemplifies this--the story told in the chat medium isn't the only story--the chat story comments on other things that happen in the girls' lives. It's a back-and-forth between f2f life where things happen and virtual life where the girls talk about what happened in f2f life--kind of like a de-briefing, or as Myracle says, "post-op." As Lewis & Fabos explain, we need to rethink the offline/online binary, as the techno-space and offline spaces are more entertwined than we think.
• Some technology gurus say the Internet has become the 21st century mall or arcade--the 21st century teen hang-out. They do "hang-out" online, but in the age of the Internet they can stay connected at all hours, even when the parents have said "go to bed," or "stay off the phone," etc. As I've read somewhere, teens are now the "overconnecteds." A good or bad thing? Who knows...
• Also obvious in the book is how linguistically versatile the girls are--they create new words and "play" with language in ways we don't typically see in school-related writing tasks. Also, they literally are bilingual in ways many adults aren't, as they know a sophisticated language (chat language) and its linguistic rules. And unlike what we tend to hear (especially from angry English teachers) they know the difference between chat language and Standard English. They know there are different audiences for different kinds of writing.
• Again, Lewis & Fabos encourage us as English teachers to celebrate the flexibility and versatility teens exhibit in their reading pracitices. Indeed, knowing how to read TTYL implies the reader is flexible and can read "across surfaces, genres, modes."
• Writing and speaking entertwined in IM medium--"voice" evoked through writing. Too easy distinctions between speech and writing break down in IM/chat medium.

What a great adventure!

I just finished The Evolution of Calpuria Tate by Jacqueline Kelly, and I loved every minute of this enchanting story about eleven year old Calpurnia. It's 1899, the cusp of a new millennium, and Calpurnia Tate discovers her grandfather, the natural world, and some things about herself. This story will make you laugh, make you think, and leave you extremely satisfied.

Calpurnia, the only girl from a family of seven children, fights to find her way in the world and discover what has meaning for her life. She also begins to realize the stereotypical expectations for girls of that time. But, she is determined to make her life count for more than tatting, sewing, and cooking. You will discover that some of the ways people think and act are timeless.

Jacqueline Kelly is a practicing physician and lawyer, and this is her first novel. I really hope she keeps writing!