Search Results for: anything but typical

Project Jackalope by Emily Ecton

Nov24

The jackalope is said to be a hybrid of the pygmy-deer and a species of “killer rabbit”. Reportedly, jackalopes are extremely shy unless approached. It has also been said that the jackalope can convincingly imitate any sound, including the human voice. It uses this ability to elude pursuers, chiefly by using phrases such as “There he goes! That way!” During days of the Old West, when cowboys gathered by the campfires singing at night, jackalopes could often be heard mimicking their voices. It is said that a jackalope may be caught by putting a flask of whiskey out at night. The jackalope will drink its fill of whiskey and its intoxication will make it easier to hunt. However, legend has it that they are dangerous if approached.

My source for such informative data on the elusive jackalope is, of course, the ever-trusted and trustworthy Wikipedia. The narrator of Project Jacklope, Jeremy, who is a “basic junior high type”, and his next-door neighbor Professor Twitchett, who is “kind of a wack job”, both make liberal use of the same source. So I’m in good company when it comes to finding out about jackalopes and other so-called mythical creatures.

I say “so-called” because after you finish reading Project Jackalope, you may or may not believe that jackalopes actually exist. I’m a skeptic, but then it takes a lot to convince me of anything outlandish. And Project Jackalope is an outlandish tale in which a crazy zoo employee leaves a science experiment in Jeremy’s bedroom along with a note telling him to “keep it safe, keep it secret.” Jeremy ends up on the run, with the jackalope (or animal hybrid) in a Dora the Explorer suitcase. Jeremy’s only friend, and accomplice, is another neighbor, Agatha, Miss Know-it-all, Science Fair Champion, and Accomplished Anathematizer.

Yeah, we are not treated to any examples of the actual words Agatha uses, but at several critical moments in the story, Agatha cusses up a bluestorm, as my mother would say. And Jeremy’s language while not profane, is definitely on a continuum from cheeky to downright rude. Typical junior high. If that’s likely to annoy, don’t read. Otherwise, Project Jackalope is funny and entertaining.

Author Emily Ecton is a writer and producer for NPR’s Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and I think some of the snarky humor of that show rubbed off on her or got into her book or something. Junior high is a snarky time of life, so the shoe fits. Maybe a few examples, chosen, nearly at random, would give a more accurate picture of the tone of this middle grade comedy adventure:

“I rolled my eyes. How corny can you get? You’re going to see the boss. But I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I was getting an ulcer or was going to puke or something. Agatha stopped cussing and got a stricken look on her face.”

“Agatha turned around in her seat and stared at me. Somebody needed a whack with the cluestick.”

“If you didn’t count the problem of the freaking mutant sitting in the middle of the floor, we were all clear.”

“I think I handled the situation well. I immediately slammed the door in his face and locked it. It was an impulse and I went with it. So sue me.”

It may say something about the general level of humor around this house that I read straight through Project Jackalope, laughed frequently, and generally didn’t mind the (unspecified) cussing and the snark. And I’m inconsistent because I just wrote about another Cybils nominee that it was too junior high sarcastic for me to enjoy. It just wasn’t funny anymore after a few chapters, but this book was.

So sue me.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

May15

Mr. Eugenides, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Middlesex, has given us a novel about the demise of the novel. It’s also a story that’s mostly about sex and its various permutations, but not really much about marriage, and equally about religion and its sundry incarnations, but not much about God. And I think the emphasis on sex and religion rather than on the core spiritual relationships of man and woman (marriage) and God and man (the core of religion) is an emphasis that is intended to say something about our culture and what we’ve lost in the twentieth century. Perhaps the idea is that we’ve reduced marriage to sexual attraction and sexual athletics, and we’ve reduced knowing God to going through the forms and expressions of religion and being good. Or maybe that’s just what I saw in the book.

Madeleine is an English major at Brown University in the 1980’s (Eugenides attended Brown), and as the story begins she’s about to graduate, has just broken up with her boyfriend, and has a massive hangover. The story moves back and forth in time a lot, beginning each section with a crisis moment and then going back in time to show us how the characters got to that crisis. However, this narrative technique isn’t confusing at all, and I rather liked it for some reason. Maybe it helped to hold my interest when the major characters weren’t terribly sympathetic or likable.

So, after having been introduced to Madeleine and the culmination of her last semester in college, we go back in time to see how she met, mated, and lost the boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, how she came to major in English with an emphasis on the Victorian authors, and how she got the hangover. At a certain point, charismatic loner Leonard becomes the focus of the novel with his sparkling wit and intelligence, his brooding good looks, and his secret backstory that no one at Brown knows, not even Madeleine.

However, there is a third character who makes up the final point of this attempt at a modern, 21st century love triangle story, Mitchell Grammaticus. Mitchell, who’s been in love (or has he?) with Madeleine since their freshman year at Brown, is geeky, intelligent, and religious. He’s graduating with a major in Religious Studies, but he’s not sure what religion he believes in or where he’s going after college. So, he and his friend Larry decide to travel to India via Paris and Athens to see the world and wait for the economy to improve and inspiration to strike. Or maybe Mitchell is really waiting for Madeleine to realize that Leo Bankhead is a loser and that he, Mitchell, is the man she should marry.

The book is a mixture. There are some lovely and thought-provoking scenes in the novel that made it worth the investment of time, energy and slogging through (mostly sexual) sludge that it took to read the book. In one scene Mitchell encounters an evangelical Christian in the American Express office in Greece. The Christian girl witnesses to Mitchell in a rather formulaic, but sincere, way and tells him that if he accepts Christ as his Saviour, he can ask the Holy Spirit to give him the gift of tongues and he’ll be changed, completed. Mitchell tries it out, praying on the Acropolis, but nothing happens. “He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness. . . He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to.”

Another scene has Leonard trying to explain the experience of clinical depression to Madeleine who wants him to just try to pretend to want to be healthy.

“What’s the matter with me? What do you think? I’m depressed, Madeleine. I’m suffering from depression. . . .”
“I understand you’re depressed, Leonard. But you’re taking medication for that. Other people take medication and they’re fine.”
“So you’re saying I’m dysfunctional even for a manic-depressive.”
“I’m saying that it almost seems like you like being depressed sometimes. Like if you weren’t depressed you might not get all the attention. I’m saying that just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you can yell at me for asking if you had a good time!”

Whatever you think about depression and its manifestations, isn’t this conversation just exactly the kind of conversation couple might have in this situation, coming at the problem from totally opposed viewpoints, trying to understand, but failing?

I’m tempted to recommend this book, in spite of all the sludge, in spite of the ending, which I hated, just because I’ve been thinking about it and mulling over the characters and their motivations and their mental pathologies all week long. I want someone to explain the entire book to me, wrap it up in a nice bow, but I don’t think this is a book that’s meant to gift-wrapped. Alternatively, I want to explain some things to Mitchell and to Madeleine and to Leonard, but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. I’m afraid I’d come across like Christian-girl-in-Greece, saying “Jesus is the answer!” in a way that sounds trite and essentially useless. Mitchell’s search for Truth, especially, is so frustrating to me as a Christian, yet so very typical of the people I see, searching but not really searching, for a god of their own imagining, instead of looking at Jesus, God in the flesh and trusting in Him.

Anyway, it’s a very contemporary un-love story that shows modern youth culture in all its befuddlement. The ending is meant to be hopeful, but it wasn’t for me because it wasn’t grounded in anything. I’d be curious to know what you thought about the book and the ending, if you’ve read The Marriage Plot.

Other reviews: Books and Culture, Caribousmom, Farm Lane Books, Bibliophile by the Sea, Book Addiction, Walk with a Book, Amy’s Book Obsession, At Home With Books.

Oh, by the way, I loved all the literary allusions and references to popular books and classics, everything from Born Again by Chuck Colson to Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans to The Cloud of Unknowing. All three of the protagonists of this novel are people who read, a lot, which was the main thing I actually liked about them.

Angry Wind by Jeffrey Tayler

Jan22

Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel by Jeffrey Tayler. Recommended by Nancy Pearl in Book Lust To Go. Book #1 in my North Africa Reading Challenge.

In this book journalist Jeffrey Tayler writes about his travels through the Sahel, “the transition zone in Africa between the Sahara Desert to the north and tropical forests to the south, the geographic region of semi-arid lands bordering the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in Africa.” His journey began in Chad and took him through northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Morocco, and Senegal. So some of the countries Mr. Tayler writes about are a part of my designated North Africa region.

Beginning with Chad, in 2002 Mr. Tayler, a typical, young, liberal, religionless writer makes his way through the countries of the Sahel. Most of people are Muslim and black. Christians are a tolerated minority or a persecuted minority. Black Muslims are the leaders in government and in business in tis part of the world, and yet most of the leaders that Mr. Tayler meets are somewhat dismissive and even ashamed of their African heritage and want to claim Arab ancestry and lineage. Racism is alive and well in the Sahel, and very dark-skinned men tell Mr. Tayler that their families are of Arab extraction, not African. I found that interesting . . . and sad.

Mr. Tayler is something of a linguist, fluent in several languages including Arabic and French. His linguistic ability was quite helpful in getting him accepted in the villages and cities of the Sahel. Many Muslims accepted him and called him “brother” because he spoke Arabic, even though he told them plainly that he was not a Muslim. Others respected him because he spoke French, the language of European colonialism in Chad and Mali and Senegal.

His English was not so useful, and I found the misunderstanding and outright lies that were prevalent in the region concerning the United States to be quite disheartening. This trip took place soon after 9/11, and yet the people that Mr. Tayler talked with were somewhat anti-American and especially anti-George W. Bush. Then again, maybe Tayler found what he was looking for. He has a conversation with a government official in Chad, and the official says,”Your president, this Bush fils, he came to power by force. . . . I mean he manipulated the electoral process using his money. . . . Bush and his men see gold before their eyes, and that’s what’s driving them to attack Iraq.”

Mr. Tayler has no answer. “I didn’t know what to say. I would not defend elections in which only 24 percent of Americans had voted for their president, who in the end was put in office by a Supreme Court that split along party lines, just as civil war had divided Chad into Muslim and Christian factions.” Really? Our elections, specifically the Bush/Gore election, are comparable to the corruption and manipulation that goes on in most of Africa, in those countries where they actually hold elections at all? And our Republicans and Democrats are comparable to the Muslim/Christian split that has precipitated violence across the Sahel region for years? When’s the last time you heard about a Democrat/Republican shooting war? And has anyone set fire to the local Democrat headquarters in your town lately? Mr. Tayler could have put up a better defense of our democratic system had he wanted to do so.

I found out lots of other interesting tidbits about the region along the southern border of the Sahara:

Ethnic tensions: “Hausa, along with Fulani, dominate northern Nigeria and much of Niger, too. Fulani consider themselves, thanks to their history of jihadist Warring, high caste and above Hausa; and a Fulani-based elite rules northern Nigeria.” “We don’t let our girls marry the Hausa, because they’re not really Chadians.”

Jeffrey Tayler finds the few Christian converts that he meets in Chad to be downtrodden, “vanquished people.” He thinks that rather than missionaries preaching the gospel of Christ, there should be missionaries promoting “enlightenment philosophy” as the cure for ethnic and religious wars in sub-Saharan Africa. I personally find his faith in Voltaire, Rousseau, science and evolution, touchingly sanguine. If he thinks that Muslims will quit killing Christians and vice-versa if we just teach them all to appreciate the principles of the French Revolution, he hasn’t studied the French Revolution.

Ezekiel, a Christian in Muslim northern Nigeria: “If anything happened to an American here, the whole town would flee back to their villages, fearing the bombing that would come from your government. After all, the U.S. is the world’s policeman.”
Unfortunately, I’m not a fan of “the world’s policeman” role that we have acquired, either. Can we do something to get a reputation, not as policemen, not as bullies, not as rich exploiters, but just as friends and helpful benefactors? How?

Mali: “For four decades now, France, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the United States have subsidized Mali’s misere–and they show no signs of stopping. Foreign aid makes up a quarter of the country’s GDP and totals roughly $500 million annually. What have aid workers accomplished here over the past forty years? There is no satisfactory answer.”
When I read evaluations like this one, I am inclined toward the Ron Paul doctrine of foreign aid (even though much of what Mr. Paul advocates seems to me to be dangerously naive and simplistic).

“Congressman Ron Paul opposes foreign aid to all countries on constitutional, practical, and moral grounds. On a moral ground, Congressman Paul opposes foreign aid as it takes money from poor people in rich countries and gives it to rich people in foreign countries. From a practical standpoint, Congressman Paul notes that the amount of foreign that actually reaches those who need it is dramatically reduced after the numerous levels of bureaucracy within each government is paid for the distribution and any corrupt politician then takes their cut.

I could write lots more about this book and the thoughts and ideas it sparked in my mind as I read, but since I’m not writing my own book, I’ll leave you with my recommendation. It’s a good and insightful read, in spite of my difference in worldview with the author.

With a Name Like Love by Tess Hilmo

Dec25

Somewhere along the way, however, the good reverend decided a small town meant a poor town, and a poor town meant humble people. Ollie’s daddy was born to preach to those people. His daddy had been a traveling preacher, as was his daddy before him, all the way back to the time of Moses. The Good Lord ushered him into that long line of preachers, and then his parents gave him the name Everlasting Love.
It was everything he was.

A children’s novel with a father/preacher character who is not cruel, not confused, not pathetic, and not looney is a rare jewel. I can think of one, off-hand, Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn-Dixie. Now there’s a second.

And thirteen year old Olivene Love (Ollie), eldest daughter of Reverend Everlasting Love, is a PK who has no problem with being the daughter of a preacher; she just wishes he would settle down and preach in one place. The Love family spends three days holding a revival in one small town before moving on the next one: “[p]reaching, mostly—some singing and an occasional healing if the need arises.” Ollie is ready to stay in one place for a while, make friends, experience indoor plumbing and life in a house rather than a travel trailer.

I loved the characters in this book for middle grade readers. Ollie’s daddy gives her good advice:

“Be careful when you listen to people called they, Olivene. They often tell lies.”

“Some people are broken. They don’t know anything other than hatred. It’s like their heart gets going in the wrong direction early on in life, and they can never quite manage to bring it back around to love. It’s a sad thing and we should have compassion for them. Think of the joy they are missing in life.”

Ollie herself is a good girl, typical oldest child. Reverend Love says to her, “You are an example for your sisters in word and deed. I am blessed to call you mine.” Yet, Ollie isn’t perfect, not too goody-goody; she still gets impatient with her younger sisters, tired of living on the road, and sometimes a little too bossy for her own good. She reminds me of my eldest, whom I am also blessed to call mine.

Ollie’s mama, Susanna Love, is “like living poetry” as she welcomes the people who come to the revival meeting. Her sister, Martha, is the pessimist who’s always counting in her head to see who gets the most privileges or treats, but Martha is also the one who gets things done. Gwen, the third sister, is the spitting image of her father, and she wants to become a preacher just like him. Camille, sister number four, is “simple in mind”, but she almost has the dictionary memorized and has “an air of grace and dignity.” Ellen, the baby of the family, is friendly, a tagalong, and eager to please. Together, the Love family has a character and winsomeness all their own, rivaling other great families of literature such as the the Marches, the Melendys, the Moffats, the Penderwicks, or All-of-a-Kind Family. Actually, they remind me a little bit of the Weems family in Kerry Madden’s series Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain, maybe because of the time period (1950’s) and because of the way that each of the girls in the family has her own personality and way of coping with life in a preacher’s family.

With a Name Like Love is a good family story with a good plot (I didn’t mention the plot, but there’s a murder to be solved, friendships to resolve, and family decisions to be made) and excellent, heart-grabbing characters. Highly recommended.

What are your favorite families in children’s literature?

Missionary Fiction

Jun23

In an episode of what Madame Mental Multivitamin calls synchronicity/serendipity/synthesis, I read two works of fiction this week based on the lives of the authors’ missionary grandparents. I’ve also been thinking a lot about sending two “missionaries” from my own home to Slovakia in a couple of weeks and about my mother and my father-in-law and the legacy of faith they have given to me and to my family.

The first book, The Moon in the Mango Tree by Pamela Binnings Ewen, was just O.K. The writing quality is somewhat uneven, and the characters sometimes enigmatic. The story opens in 1916 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, when Barbara (Babs), a schoolgirl and aspiring opera singer, meets Harvey Perkins, a young medical student. As the two grow together, get married, and then endure being parted while Harvey serves in the military in France during The Great War, Barbara learns that she must subordinate her choices to those of her loving but firm-minded husband. The couple go to Thailand to serve as medical missionaries, even though Barbara must give up her hopes for a career in opera and even her enjoyment of classical music itself to live in a remote mission outpost in Northern Thailand. Of course, with such different outlooks and goals in life and with what I suppose was a typical (?) early twentieth century lack of communication in the marriage, trouble is bound to ensue. And it does.

Besides the fact that the characters’ motivations were sometimes obscure, I guess what I disliked about the story was that neither Harvey nor Barbara seemed to have much of a faith in God to lose. They do lose their faith, both of them, in the face of suffering and hardship in Thailand. But I couldn’t figure out whether they believed in anything much in the first place, other than themselves and their own ability to “be a team” and improve the physical lives of the Thai villagers. The book was good, but not great, although I liked the ending and the ideas about the legacy we leave as a result of the choices we make.

The second book I read had the same basic premise as the first: a young couple goes to the mission field, China this time, in the early twentieth century. However, City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell made me cry. It’s very, very difficult to write a book about Good People, about heroes and heroines, without making them larger than life, unapproachable, and unrelatable. (The dictionary says “unrelatable” isn’t a word, but it should be, and I’m going to use it anyway.) Will and Katherine Kiehn are ordinary, fallible people, and yet they are heroes. They go to China as young, untested volunteers with only their calling and their faith in God’s love and mercy to sustain them, and they survive disease and poverty and famine and family tragedy and war and persecution. Each of the two has a “crisis of faith”, maybe even more than one, but they manage to hold onto the the God who is always holding on to them, even when doubt and fear threaten to overwhelm. The story is told in first person from Will’s point of view, interspersed with excerpts from Katherine’s sporadically kept journal. The whole novel is just golden.

As a reviewer, I feel as if I ought to be able to tell you how Ms. Caldwell was able to write such a true story about people that I believe in as much as I believe in my own parents and grandparents, but I can’t. The humility and the honesty displayed in the characters of both Katherine and Will inspire imitation. I wanted to sit beside an elderly Will Kiehn, listen to his stories of China, and absorb some of his wisdom and his indomitable meekness.

City of Tranquil Light is one of the best fictional accounts of missionary life I’ve ever read. It ranks right up there with Elisabeth Elliot’s No Graven Image, a book I mentioned (and recommended) here. City of Tranquil Light has the added advantage of painting a wonderful picture of a committed, growing marriage.

Can you tell I really, really liked this book? I happened to pick it up from the library and read it because it’s one of the books on the long list of nominations for the 2011 INSPY Awards. Thanks to whomever nominated this book. If all the nominated books are as good as this one, the judges will have an impossible job.

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

Mar14

This book is not one to be read in a chunk, but rather a book of daily devotional thoughts written by Mr. Chambers, a Scots YMCA chaplain before and during World War I. Chambers died in 1917, and his wife compiled this book of daily devotional thoughts from Chambers’ writings.

However, the term “devotional thoughts” may give the wrong impression. These daily essays on how to understand and live the Christian life are not your typical little encouraging stories or aphorisms. Here’s an example, the selection for March 14th:

“His servants ye are to whom ye obey.” Romans 6:16

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding. Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: “I must have it at once,” whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) – once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There is no release in human power at all but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dominating power viz., the Lord Jesus Christ – “He hath anointed me . . . to preach deliverance to all captives.”

You find this out in the most ridiculously small ways – “Oh, I can give that habit up when I like.” You cannot, you will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly. It is easy to sing – “He will break every fetter” and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.

President George W. Bush used to read My Utmost for His Highest each morning when he was president, probably still does. According to Newsweek (2003), “George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.”

You can read these brief, but meaningful daily reflections here.
Wisdom in a Time of War:
What Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism by JI Packer.

Little Blog on the Prairie by Cathleen Davitt Bell

Apr24

I read an ARC of this YA/middle grade title, and I thought it was just OK. Gen’s family goes to a “frontier camp” for vacation, and they are expected to live like people in the 1890’s (ala PBS’s Frontier House, which the author acknowledges as inspiration at the end of the book). Unfortunately, Gen’s broken the rules by bringing along her new cell phone, and her friend back home has set up a blog to record all of Gen’s impressions of the place and the people in the “frontier” community.

Several of the characters were unbelievable. Gen’s dad goes on a three month vacation, not only not having read the brochure about the camp, but also not having listened to anything Gen’s mom told the family about the camp. He’s completely blindsided by the idea that the family has agreed to live like the pioneers, and he doesn’t know what to do about the entire experience. But he stays anyway and spends his days cutting down trees to scare away the bears. Really? Would anyone set off on a three month vacation without knowing anything about where he’s going or what he’ll be doing?

Norah, the daughter of the camp’s proprietors, is incredibly sheltered and naive and at the same time, she acts as if she knows all about human nature and modern technology. Norah isn’t a very likable girl, and she comes across as one of those stereotypical over-protected homeschoolers that I only find in books, not in real life. Only Norah’s so isolated and the friendships she’s made have been so transient that she has become bitter and disagreeable. That’s what life in the 1890’s will do to a healthy American teenager.

Caleb, Gen’s “love interest”, is so nondescript that I have trouble saying anything about him. He wears a leather necklace, and Gen thinks he’s cute.

Watch Frontier House if you want to see what radical historical reenactment will do for and to a normal American family. Read the book as a way to pass a few hours, but not for history or for character development. Publication date for this title from Bloomsbury is May 11, 2010.

Cybils YA Fiction Finalists

Feb11

Blue Plate Special by Michelle D. Kwasney
Chronicle Books
I haven’t found this one yet.
Others who have read it: Frenetic Reader, Pop Culture Junkie, Sarah’s Random Musings, Amanda at A Patchwork of Books.

Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
Disney Press
Carter is a typical male, I guess. I also guess I don’t want to read about every thought that goes through a typical male’s rather mundane and typical mind. Locker room humor disguised as reality/comedic fiction. Didn’t finish.
Lots of other people loved, loved, loved it.

Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Macmillan
With the f-bombs and other crude words dropping at a rate of one or two per paragraph, and the crude, rude, and socially unacceptable “situations” multiplying, I found it difficult to get to the actual story. So I didn’t finish. School Library Journal’s review says it’s “marked by explicit language and frank sexuality.” Yeah. It is–and not much else, at least as far as I got into it.
Again it was quite popular with other reviewers and bloggers.

How To Say Goodbye In Robot by Natalie Standiford
Scholastic
This one was both quirky and fascinating. I loved “listening” in on the late night radio call-in show, Night Lights, in which lonelyhearts and conspiracy theorists and assorted oddballs called to share their thoughts, feelings, and warnings about the apocalypse. The teen protagonists of the novel, Bea and Joshua, aka RobotGirl and Ghost Boy, share an addiction to late night radio, especially Night Lights.
However, even though I enjoyed the book, read it in one afternoon, I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. I found much of it, plot and characters, quite unbelievable. In fact, the Night Lights callers were some of the more believable characters in the novel. I mistakenly thought Joshua was a liar, making up stories to get attention, for about half of the novel. The truth was a little too fantastic to be believable. Then, Bea’s mother seems at first to be merely eccentric, but she quickly moves into the realm of insanity. However, Bea and her father expect Bea’s mother to function as a sane person, and eventually by the end of the story Mom wanders back to the sane side of the street. Finally, Bea and Joshua come up with a plan so fantastic and so completely unworkable that it’s hard to believe any two halfway intelligent high school seniors could even entertain the notion.
And yet . . . with a high tolerance for strange, odd, and even looney, a reader might really grow to love this novel of two teen in search of an identity.
Becky, and Jen, and Amanda, and Tirzah all liked it.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern.
Feiwel & Friends
I actually read several chapters of this story of Jessie and her friends, Bizza and Char. First of all, Char doesn’t do much of anything except bake a few cookies, so I’m not sure why she’s in the story. Bizza on the other hand is an expletive deleted, and I’m not sure why she and Jessie are friends in the first place, or the second place, or any place. While Bizza proceeds to contract VD from Jessie’s crush, Jessie considers joining the nerd crowd playing Dungeons and Dragons. Blech.
Several bloggers disagree with me and give it a thumbs up.

North of Beautiful by Justina Chen.
Little, Brown. Semicolon review here.
“North of Beautiful transcends the problem-of-the-week genre, and it’s a truly beautiful novel. The strength of the book is in its treatment of relationships and family dynamics. Terra Cooper, the protagonist of the novel, isn’t just a girl with low self esteem because of her facial disfigurement and her controlling dad.” Not my favorite of the year, but it’s a good solid pick.
North of Beautiful got lots of good buzz from everywhere: Teen Book Review, Presenting Lenore, S. Krishan’s Books, Miss Erin, and many others.

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Viking. Semicolon review here.
I read this one earlier last year because I usually like Ms. Anderson’s books. However, I really think Wintergirls was just O.K., nothing special, another problem novel, this time about anorexia. And the plot sometimes gets obscured by an attempt to be poetic, or fanciful, or something.
You can find lots of much more enthusiastic reviews of this one by a very talented author.

These are the books that won out and made the finalist list over Marcelo in the Real World and Flygirl and What I Saw and How I Lied and Secret Keeper? I don’t get it. I don’t mean to diss the committee, but can I respectfully disagree? Tell you what, I grant you the right and privilege of reading all of the nominees yourself and forming your own opinion. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about some of them.

And I almost hate to mention it, but in light of discussions about the dearth of characters and authors who are not white, not one of these books has a protagonist who is anything other than white-bread-white, and only one of the authors could be called a Person of Color. I don’t believe in quotas, but actually many of the YA books I thought were outstanding in 2009 featured persons who were Asian, Hispanic, and African American (see preceding paragraph).

If I were on the committee to pick the Cybils Award winner for YA fiction, and I had to choose from this list, I’d go with North of Beautiful. The Cybils winners will be announced on Valentine’s Day.

Wanting Mor by Rukhsana Khan

Nov5

Afghanistan is in the news almost every day, and those children who hear about the war there have questions about the people of Afghanistan and the culture there. Wanting Mor by Pakistani author Rukhsana Khan could serve as an introduction to a country that has become, for better or for worse, a preoccupying subject for Americans and for the world.

When Jameela’s mother, Mor, dies, her father decides that he and Jameela will move from their village to Kabul to start a new life. Unfortunately, Jameela’s father is a self-centered and cruel man. In a story that reminded me of Hansel and Gretel, Jameela’s father acquires a new wife, and then decides that Jameela, with her cleft lip and general uselessness, is an impediment to his new life.

The points that interested me the most in this book were those where cultures and ideas intersected. Jameela’s father and his new wife are typical of city dwellers in many third world and Muslim countries who are becoming Westernized and losing their loyalty to traditional customs and religious laws. Jameela herself finds comfort and strength in the traditions of Islam, particularly the head covering or chadri (also called a burka), that serves to protect Jameela from prying eyes and from the embarrassment that she feels over her cleft lip. The orphanage where Jameela ends up living is dependent on the charity of Americans and of other wealthy Afghanis and foreigners, but the attitude that children and the management of the orphanage have toward these benefactors is sometimes less than respectful or even grateful. This conversation between Jameela and another of the orphans shows the difficulties in such a relationship and perhaps could clue us in to how the Muslim world in general might feel about Americans and other westerners a lot of the time:

“What do you think of this new donor lady?”
I shrug. “She seems all right.”
“They all do when they first arrive.”
“What about the soldiers? They didn’t do anything wrong.”
Suraya scowls. “They’re invaders. They want to control us. They won’t be happy until they change us so we’re just like them.”
“They fixed things. You should be grateful.”
Soraya stands up and paces around our small room.
“I’m tired of being grateful.”

People do get tired of being grateful. And somehow we will have to find a way to leave Afghanistan, and Iraq, with a sense of mutual respect and cooperation. At least, I hope we can.

And I hope we can find a way to help girls like Jameela without taking away their cultural heritage or their self-respect.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book is also nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own.

BBAW: Best Blog Post

Sep12

Voting is now open at the Book Blogger Appreciation Week Awards.

This Blogging Thing Reminds Me of High School (Hey Lady, Whatcha’ Readin’?) : “I can only compare myself to me. Is my writing getting better? Are my insights into books getting more thoughtful? Is the traffic to my blog, which is tangible, growing each month?”

On Fantasy and Why I Read It (Things Mean a Lot): “I’ve been told that fantasy is meaningless because it’s not about real people or real situations. And I ask, what else could it possibly be about? No, Middle-Earth, Narnia, Prydain, Earthsea and Discworld do not exist, but is anything that happens there really unheard of? What are their inhabitants doing, if not dealing with very human situations and dilemmas? “

Write the Words of My Heart (My Friend Amy): “. . . the words, the metaphors, the symbols, and the examples that resonated with me…like someone had come along and plucked the words out of my heart that I couldn’t put together myself and wrote a book that reflected my thoughts right back at me.”

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker (Maw Books Blog): “It’s very rare for my husband and I to read the same book but he finished reading The Little Giant of Aberdeen County before I even started. He was thoroughly engrossed with this book and quickly finished it.” Then, Natasha proceeds to transcribe a hilariously typical husband/wife exchange about the book.

I really liked Natasha’s review best. The the book discussion she and her husband have is so perfect. They really do have some insight into the book, but the conversation is punctuated with “we’re not getting very deep” and “this is boring” and “Wait! Don’t put that in there!” Husbands and wives should read together more often; the marriage that reads together . . . doesn’t get boring?