Escapist reading

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Since finishing up my grading and saying goodbye to another school year, I've found myself craving YA lit as an entry into summer.  I'll get to some of my bigger must-reads in later weeks; for now, give me a good page-turner (or two, or three, or four).

I started at the end of last week with Gregor the Overlander, book #1 in Suzanne Collins' five-book series, The Underland Chronicles.  I knew Collins only from The Hunger Games, her best-known series, about which you and I have both raved here.  It's no surprise that this earlier series is both gripping and filled with compelling characters.

The series skews a little younger than The Hunger Games.  Our hero, Gregor, is an 11-year-old boy living close to poverty in an apartment building in New York with his mother and two younger sisters, Lizzie (7), and Boots (2), and grandmother.  Their father, an engaging and involved parent and excellent science teacher, disappeared without a trace two years before the beginning of the first book -- homage to A Wrinkle in Time?  Gregor and Boots are down in the laundry room one day when they fall into an open grate, are caught by misty currents, and land impossibly far down below New York City in Underland.

It turns out there's a whole world down there, populated by very pale humans, descendants of a British explorer from centuries earlier, and giant talking bats (friendly, bonded with humans), cockroaches (keep to themselves) and rats (bad, at war with the humans).  Bartholomew of Sandwich, the original settler, was also a prophet of sorts.  In Regalia, the gorgeous stone-carved capital city of the humans, he left a room filled with prophecies carved into the walls.  Soon after Gregor's arrival, the people of Regalia decide that Gregor is "the warrior" mentioned in a number of prophecies, and he and Boots embark on a quest to find and save their father, and possibly all of Underland.

It's a fine exploration of the "Who, me?  I'm no hero.  Okay, well, maybe I am" theme.  Gregor is appealing as he tries to resist the prophecies but starts to realize he might actually be something special, and Boots, the two-year-old, is a hoot.  She's totally fearless, and bonds immediately with the giant cockroaches, who revere her as a princess.  Speaking of princesses, one of the other major characters is Luxa, the underage queen of Regalia.  She's strong and at first quite cool -- her parents were killed by rats, and she's in training to take on the full powers of the throne when she turns 16.  She and Gregor don't like each other at first, but come to have a grudging respect, which develops into real caring as the series goes on.  (As of early in book 3, no romance yet.  They're only 11.)  There are many adventures and hairsbreadth escapes -- Collins is a master of the cliffhanger chapter ending -- and semi-major characters die in the fighting.  It's a good read.

After finishing Gregor the Overlander in a day, I quickly updated my library hold list to request the second and third books in the series: Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane and Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods.  While I waited for them to come in, I took a more realistic turn with a book you'd recommended a while back, Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  The alternating chapters by John Green (The Fault in Our Stars) and David Levithan (Boy Meets Boy) worked together well, and I found myself speeding through it with great enjoyment.

I like summer.

Love, Annie

Pointing out the obvious

Dear Annie,

I'm in the middle of ordering books that will arrive in the store this fall, and as usual feel deluged with a lot of average stuff, with the occasional really wonderful book poking its head above the waves.  I'm noticing a mini-trend: the anti-digital gadgets picture book.  A child is surrounded by shades of gray and boredom, moving from one digital object to another. "Loading... Loading.... Loading," says one. "Game Over," says another.  Finally she leaves the house and discovers color -- first in a flower, then in fields, and in wonderful adventures galloping across the countryside.  In another book, a girl rejects a friend's gadgets in favor of lying outside watching pictures in the clouds.  And yet another shows a child having increasingly outlandish adventures while trying to attract a phone-centric parent's attention.

Some of these books have wonderful art and funny scenes, but I find it hard to imagine anyone other than an irritated grandparent buying them.  They're a better illustrated version of preachy behavior books, making their points with thinly concealed lectures, rather than with good stories.  Many wonderful books about using your imagination exist -- it's not necessary to say, use your imagination this way before introducing them. 

I re-offer three, all listed under "imaginative play" on our picture books list:
Roxaboxen
The Queen of France
Even Firefighters Hug Their Moms

Somehow this feels parallel to books about books.  Picture books which sing the praises of reading -- with dancing animals, endearing siblings, or engaged students -- also tend to strike me as one step removed from the heart of reading.  It's easier to internalize that books offer huge ranges of emotion and experience simply by reading them, rather than reading books which tell you that's what they do.

Those are the thoughts rattling in my sample book-addled brain. 

Love,

Deborah

For the graduate...

Dear Annie,

Yes, I'm totally with you on Oh the Places You'll Go!  I think of it as a gift shop kind of book, as opposed to anything that goes deeper.  It sells like crazy at this time of year, though.  To all ages, from kindergarten to college grads.  There's that desire to say, you've done well, go out there and strut your stuff.

We usually have a whole display of Dr. Seuss this time of year, but we also keep a supply of 100 Words books next to the register for people looking for something different.  They're spinoffs from the American Heritage Dictionary, which of course has great resonance in our family.  My father, your grandpa, worked for American Heritage, and when they were creating the first of the AH Dictionaries, I remember his bringing home the questionnaires they sent to their usage panel.  The results were eventually boiled down to one and two sentence analyses of different words.

I carry three of these small and lovely books:


100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know -- here is the list -- gives definitions and pronunciations for 100 words, and at least one quote from literature for each word.   Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling, Beverly Cleary, Sherman Alexie, Gary Schmidt, and many others are there.  Here's a quote for "A place in which to live, a residence.":

Late in the  evening, tired and happy and miles from home, they drew up on a remote common far from habitations, turned the horse loose to graze, and ate their simple supper sitting on the grass by the side of the cart.

-- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

It's a vocabulary list, but it's got personality.  And it's another way to say, hey, you know a lot.  Even if the recipient doesn't know every one -- they'll know a significant number.

Moving up the grades, we have
100 Words Every High School Freshman Should Know (list is here), which ventures into science as well -- I'll never manage to retain what a xylem is.  This one abandons the quote-for-every-word format, but it still includes some wonderful ones.  "Sharing the same opinion; being fully in agreeement":

Cecil Jacobs, who lived at the far end of our street next door to the post office, walked a total of one mile per school day to avoid the Radley Place and old Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose.  Mrs. Dubose lived two doors up the street from us; neighborhood opinion was unanimous that Mrs. Dubose was the meanest old woman who ever lived.

-- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

And for the college-bound, 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know, gets tougher: abjure, jejune, moiety, orthography, and quasar all show up on this list.   Again, the quotes appear every few pages, but they're great: Willa Cather, Charles Darwin, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and more.  "The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language":

There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution.

-- Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse

Language -- ain't it grand?

Love,

Deborah

Oh, the graduations you'll attend!

Dear Aunt Debbie,

The school year is winding to its slow, hot end here in New York.  I turned my grades in today, and graduation is on Monday.  This afternoon, the girls and I went to get summer haircuts at our lovely local hair salon.  While waiting for our turn, Isabel picked a book out of the basket of kids' books the owner keeps waiting on the floor: the perennial graduation-gift favorite, Dr. Seuss's Oh, the Places You'll Go!

About which I feel -- eh.  There's a lot of Dr. Seuss I love: Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, Hop on Pop, The Lorax, to name a few we've touched on.  But I have to admit, aside from the pleasurably wacky Seussian drawings, Oh the Places You'll Go! is a pretty boring book.

Which is funny, because even when Dr. Seuss is plotless and random, as in Hop on Pop or One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, he's always quirky and specific as well.

Probably my favorite page in One Fish Two Fish is a brief stand-alone scenario, accompanied by this illustration:

Look what we found

in the park

in the dark.

We will take him home.

We will call him Clark.

He will live at our house.

He will grow and grow.

Will our mother like this?

We don't know.






 Compare that to the banality of Oh, The Places You'll Go!:

Out there things can happen

and frequently do

to people as brainy

and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,

don't worry.  Don't stew.

Just go right along.

You'll  start happening too.

 
I talk to my creative writing students a lot about avoiding general statements, understanding that often, it's the most specific details that pull a reader in and lead to an emotional response.  Too many generalizations, and your book starts to read like a long-form greeting card.  And, apparently, to sell like hotcakes.

So, any other suggestions for graduation-appropriate kids' books?

Love, Annie

Number the Stars

Dear Annie,

I'm so glad you wrote about the poem scene in Anastasia Krupnik -- that's the one I always think of with that book.  And as you say, the parents are wonderful -- and very deadpan, as I recall.

Before we leave the multi-talented Lois Lowry, I have to sing the praises of her first Newbery winner:
Number the Stars.  Horrifying times in history are sometimes presented in kids' books through their heroic moments, rather than through the experience of cruelty.  We've talked about that in relation to slavery, and this book by Lowry builds on an amazing piece of Holocaust history that took place in Denmark in October 1943.  Just as the Nazis were about to start deportations, non-Jewish Danes hid that country's Jews, transported them to the coast, and ferried more than 7000 of them to safety in Sweden.  Only 5% of Danish Jews were caught by the Nazis.

Number the Stars is the story of 10 year-old Annemarie Johannesen and her friend Ellen Rosen.  Ellen's parents go into hiding and Annemarie's family tells the Nazis Ellen is their child. They take her to an uncle's home on the coast, where she's smuggled to a boat and then to Sweden.  There are several terrifying moments when Nazis confront the family, but they manage to deflect the attention.  The feeling of constant threat opens the story, when Annemarie and Ellen race each other home from school and are stopped by German soldiers:

Annemarie stared up. There were two of them. That meant two helmets, two sets of cold eyes glaring at her, and four tall shiny boots planted firmly on the sidewalk, blocking her path to home.... And it meant two rifles, gripped in the hands of the soldiers. She stared at the rifles first. Then,finally, she looked into the face of the soldier who had ordered her to halt.... "Why are you running?" the harsh voice asked. His Danish was very poor. Three years, Annemarie thought with contempt. Three years they've been in our country, and still they can't speak the language.

The book stays with Annemarie's point of view throughout.  In Lowry's 1990 speech accepting the Newbery medal, she talked about trying to show the events from a child's perspective.  She told the story of a Danish friend who had been a child during the Nazi occupation.  "When I asked Annelise to describe, through the eyes of her own childhood, the German soldiers themselves, she said: 'I remember the high shiny boots.'"  Lowry emphasized the boots in the book, to the extent that her editor suggested she cut out some of the references.  During the time she was trying to decide how to deal with his suggestion, she met a Dutch survivor of the era, who as a very young girl had been hidden under floorboards while her mother was taken away by Nazis.

I asked her, as we sat there talking, if she remembered any of it.  She said the memory was very vague, because she had been so very young.  There was only one thing, she told me, that she recalled clearly from that day when she had peeked out through a crack in the floor.

   She said: "I remember the high shiny boots."

   So when I went back [to my editor], I asked him to leave the boots there in the book -- every reference -- again and again and again.  I decided that if any reviewer should call attention to the overuse of that image -- none ever has -- I would simply tell them that those high shiny boots had trampled on several million childhoods and I was sorry I hadn't had several million more pages on which to mention that.

Over the years, Number the Stars has been published by two different companies, but it's always had that cover photo of the blonde girl and the Star of David necklace.  At the dinner I attended with Lowry two weeks ago, she told us that she had taken the photo.  The girl was the daughter of Swedish diplomats who were friends of the Lowrys.  She was 21 by the time the book was published, and gave her permission for its use.  Although Lowry stayed in touch with the parents, she lost touch with the daughter over the following decades.  This spring the daughter came to an event where Lowry was speaking, and there was a cheerful reunion.  She pulled out her iPhone at the restaurant and passed around the picture she'd taken.  It was of a very attractive 45 year-old blonde woman, wearing makeup and a dress which showed off her curves.  She looked like someone I might enjoy meeting, and one could see the girl on the book in that woman's face.  But the iconic photo had definitely grown up.

Love,

Deborah

First loves: Lois Lowry

Dear Aunt Debbie,

Apologies for the longer-than-usual grading hiatus!  I somehow managed to miss the fact that my seniors' grades were due today until late last week, so further paper grading on top of the portfolios took away the Friday night I was saving for you and Lois Lowry.

I have been meaning to write about my deep and abiding love for Lois Lowry for over a year, since we had that foray into "first loves": the YA authors whose books I read and reread until their cheap pages wore down, whose entire canons I owned, the books I can still practically quote from now, more than 20 years later.  I wrote about Madeline L'Engle as sci-fi and as chick lit, Cynthia Voight, and Paula Danziger, but the list would be sadly incomplete without Lowry.

Now, I'm not talking about the serious, dystopian, later Lowry that you covered in your excellent post last week, though she is the Lois Lowry my students know -- they've all read The Giver, and it blew their minds in 5th and 6th grade and set them up for a good time with Ursula K. LeGuin and her ilk later in life.  No, the Lowry I adored was the creator of the Anastasia books.

In the first Anastasia book, Anastasia Krupnik, our heroine is 10 years old.  She has freckles, big owl glasses, and a name too long to fit across the front of a t-shirt: middle-grade outsider, and thus someone I instantly identified with.  She lives in Boston with her father (an English professor and poet) and mother (a painter), and early in the book finds out that her parents are expecting a baby boy.  She's not thrilled about the news.  The third-person text of the book is interspersed with Anastasia's changing lists of "Things I love" and "Things I hate," which she keeps in a private green notebook, and which provide a commentary on the action.

In summary, the book sounds cute and possibly wholesome, like the photo cover image of the current paperback, up there on the left (the pricklier, stranger cover I remember from my edition is on the right).  What I have always loved about Anastasia, though, is her weirdness, and the supportive weirdness of her parents.  Here they are on page 2:

Anastasia had a small pink wart in the middle of her left thumb.  She found the wart very pleasing.  It had appeared quite by surprise, shortly after her tenth birthday, on a morning when nothing else interesting was happening, and it was the first wart she had ever had, or even seen.

"It's the loveliest color I've ever seen in a wart," her mother, who had seen others, said with admiration.

"Warts, you know," her father had told her, "have a kind of magic to them.  They come and go without any reason at all, rather like elves."

I love those parents.

The action in the book is episodic, and contains the requisite number of cringe-inducing middle grade experiences and rebound moments.  Anastasia writes a poem for homework, a lovely free verse poem about small quiet sea creatures, which her teacher Mrs. Westvessel rewards with an F because it doesn't follow the rhyming structure she's been taught.  Her father (who keeps drafts of his poems in the refrigerator crisper drawer so they won't burn if there's a fire) reads it aloud, and changes the F with his red pen to "Fabulous."  Rereading it tonight, I got all choked up.

The episode I hated most as a kid because it made me cringe so badly, but which interests me now, involves Anastasia's crush on Washburn Cummings, a boy in her school.  Washburn is black, and has an Afro (the book was published in 1979); in order to express her admiration for him, Anastasia rats and teases her normally straight hair to mimic his, and goes to school that way.  Mortal embarrassment.  But it's such a straightforward treatment of race and not fully understanding difference, it's kind of fabulous, too.

When faced with the knowledge that she's getting a younger brother, Anastasia threatens to run away from home.  One of the ways her parents dissuade her from doing so is by giving her power: her father says Anastasia can name the baby.  Because she is planning to hate him, Anastasia chooses the worst name she can think of, and writes it in her notebook.  The name?  One-Ball Reilly.  (Weirdness!)  Of course, when she first sees him, she falls in love, and the last scene has her giving him the name which will carry on through the rest of the series, and into his own series: Sam.

There were several other Anastasia books, and a whole Sam series I've never read.  I stayed with the series through Anastasia Again, Anastasia at Your Service, Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst, Anastasia on Her Own, Anastasia Has the Answers, and Anastasia's Chosen Career.

In the second book, which might have been my favorite, Anastasia and her family move to the suburbs of Boston.  Anastasia is at first totally resistant to the move, made because the family needs more space and her mother wants a studio for her painting.  She makes Sam promise to pretend to be allergic to every suburban house they visit, and her one request is to have her room in a turret.  Of course, the house the Krupnick family finds contains a turret for Anastasia, a huge library for her father, a light-filled studio for her mother, and a grassy neighborhood filled with interesting people.  Sam starts to pretend to sneeze, and Anastasia shuts him up.  As a kid growing up in a one-bedroom apartment with my family of four, I found the description of the house both compelling and foreign.  As an adult, I recognize it as Lowry's foray into real-estate wish fulfillment.

Okay, yes, I want the house too.  But I'll settle for a good reread of a great, strange little series.

Love, Annie

"A room full of elephants"

Dear Annie,


Emily's poetry post is spectacular.  I've ordered a few of the books for the store -- such knowledge and enthusiasm.  Thank you, Emily!

It's been a week since I was at Book Expo America, and I've finally found a site with Lois Lowry's speech, and some other excellent ones given at the Children's Author Breakfast.  Navigation there is a little odd.  Here's the site, then click on "Author Breakfasts and Editors' Buzz" so that tab turns green (you won't go to a new page), and look at the videos listed in a line beneath the video screen.  Tenth from the left is "Children's Book and Authors Breakfast," running 01:07:26. Speeches during that hour, and their hit times:

00:06:00 - Walter Dean Myers, current Ambassador for Young People's Literature (our post here) made opening remarks.
00:25:00 - John Green, about whom we've written here, with more below.
00:40:10 - Lois Lowry.
00:53:30 - Kadir Nelson, illustrator and author -- see posts here and here.

In the order of things that morning, as you can see, John Green spoke before Lowry.  He's both a good YA writer and a masterful internet and social media communicator.  Although he wears both hats, he gave an impassioned ode to the empathetic power of reading.  At one point, he described the setting -- a booksellers' convention -- as " like being in a room full of elephants, as an elephant, talking about how great elephants are."  Not sure how I feel about being an elephant, but it captured the we-all-love-books feeling in the room.  His speech got eclipsed a bit by Lowry's knock-out one, so I'm offering some excerpts here.

As you may have already seen in his video blog, Green speaks at breakneck speed, only occasionally implying commas or periods.  My transcription:

The thing about books is that because they are composed out of text, because there is this act of translation that one has to do when reading, because I have to turn these meaningless scratches on a page into ideas that exist inside my head, I become the co-creator of the story when I read the story, in a way that I don’t become the co-creator of any other kind of medium. Which is precisely why reading takes concentration and it takes focus and it is an activity that you can’t do while you do other things.  It’s a very unpopular kind of activity these days.  But it was through stories and through people like Scout Finch and Pecola Breedlove and Holden Caulfield that I came to understand that other people were really real – and those people being real by extension made you real.

...

  I don’t think we need to become something that you look at while you do other things. I don’t think we need to become twitter or tumblr – and god knows that I don’t think we need to become angry birds.  I can take a break from creating a Power Point and glance at twitter.  I can play angry birds for 20 seconds while I’m waiting for lunch.  But that is not how I read a book.  Reading is quiet and contemplative and immersive and that’s why I like it.  And that’s why it matters.  And that’s how we’re going to compete, is by being the thing that we’re great at. 

...

I do believe that someday someone will create a multimedia text-based narrative that lights the app store on fire but I don’t think that it will succeed because it has a lot of bells and whistles or social media integration or whatever. I think it will succeed because of its story.  I believe that story trumps everything.

A lot of applause for that line.

I hope your grading frenzy is easing up.  Your guest bloggers are excellent, but we all look forward to your return.

Love,

Deborah