December: notes from the front lines

Dear Annie,

Oh my, you've posted so many things recently that I want to respond to thoughtfully.  I have other books by George MacDonald, and the wonderful combination of L. Frank Baum and Charles Santore sitting by the computer waiting for scanning and blogging.  I need to comb through my shelves for some good books with Latino characters.  And I'll get there too -- just not tonight.

I was in the store 11 hours today, working flat-out the whole time.  Hanukkah starts tomorrow, so the holiday rush has heated up more quickly than in some other years.  (Heaven knows what'll happen to shopping madness next year when the first night of Hanukkah is the evening before Thanksgiving.)  Some of the many things that happened to me today:

-- In YA: at closing time, we had only one copy each of Every Day, The Fault in Our Stars, and Where Things Come Back: I suspect they'll all sell out before noon tomorrow (more coming on Monday).  We seem to be selling more YA books than in the past.  There's a great crop of new ones this year, but I also suspect that more families that have been shopping in my book section since their kids were tiny now have teenagers -- and they keep coming back!

-- After giving a very enthusiastic description of the Anna Hibiscus books to one customer, I reached for the first in the series, only to find it completely gone.  I know that we had 20 copies a little more than a week ago.  A thorough search unearthed our last four copies in the back of an overstock shelf, but I ran to the computer to place an urgent order for another few dozen to get us through the next weeks.

-- An African-American grandmother asked if we had an early chapter book series starring a black girl.  As I pulled books to show her -- we had five series in stock -- another woman (white) came over to listen because that was one of her interests.  There was only one copy of a few of the titles I was showing; I worried about that, but left them amicably perusing all the books.

-- A discussion of the depressingly bad grammar in the Junie B. Jones early chapter series veered into talking about Latin -- the customer teaches it at the college level -- and its strict grammar.  I really liked the woman, and before long we were talking about college texts of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic.  I could have gone on in that conversation for a while, but too many others called.

-- Someone walked past me carrying volumes 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the Wrinkle in Time books, leading me to worry that we were out of #1.  No, she smiled, her daughter had read the first and wanted to read all the rest of them.  That quick interaction meant I didn't have to stare at the gap on the shelf trying to remember what had been there.

-- The man who ordered the gorgeously illustrated three-volume hardcover boxed set of The Lord of the Rings ($100) came to pick it up.  But I have yet to sell one of our four-volume paperback boxed sets of the complete Calvin and Hobbes comics (also $100).

-- I had to explain that although, no, we don't have a book with animal characters that would explain sex to a three year-old, we do carry some good ones with people.  I don't know what the outcome was on that.

These conversations are all part of daily life in the job of a bookseller, but the volume and variety increase at this time of year.  It's what makes things interesting.

Love,

Deborah

Body surfing

Dear Annie,

Yes, Maine was wonderful.  Kind of quiet this year -- but that means we all did lots of reading.  I'm happy to say I even read a few grown-up books, although as promised I blasted through a bunch of YA and younger ones.

The last one I picked up was
Every Day, by David Levithan, one of the authors of Will Grayson, Will Grayson (the other author being John Green).  The main character is a self without a body.  S/he wakes up every morning inhabiting someone's body for a day: being able to see that person's memories and knowing the context of the life.  This person -- who refers to him/herself as A ("I needed something pure") -- has been doing this for 16 years.  S/he has grown from inhabiting babies to moving into the bodies of teenagers.

... as a little kid, I thought it was some kind of a game, and my mind learned how to access -- you know, look at the body's memories -- naturally.  So I always knew what my name was, and where I was....
   I wanted friends, a mom, a dad, a dog -- but I couldn't hold on to any of them more than a single day.  It was brutal.  There are nights I remember screaming and crying, begging my parents not to make me go to bed.  They could never figure out what I was afraid of.  They thought it was a monster under the bed, or a way to get a few more bedtime stories.  I could never really explain, not in a way that made sense to them.  I'd tell them I didn't want to say goodbye, and they'd assure me it wasn't goodbye.  It was just goodnight.  I'd tell them it was the same thing, but they thought I was being silly.

By the time of the book, A is accustomed to the body-hopping.  Each of the 41 chapters is a new day, and a new host to adjust to -- A has no control over the destinations.  We get a tour of mostly middle class teenagers in the mid-Atlantic states -- a remarkable number of them have access to a car on school days.  It's a lovely variety of kids with different families, personalities, expectations.  There are two sweet same-sex relationships.  A few of the days are searing: one day s/he is a drug addict, trying to keep the body from getting another fix.  Another is a deeply depressed suicidal girl.  A's aim is not to disrupt the lives he inhabits, but in this case he finds a way to ask for help.

The plot centers around A falling in love with Rhiannon, the girlfriend of an unlikable boy he's inhabiting.  Because he's fallen for a straight girl, I ended up thinking of him as male, even when he was female-for-a-day.  Violating his own rules, he starts to take his hosts back to the girl's town and he eventually explains to her what's happening with him.  Each time they meet, he's in a different body, feeling desperately in love.  She's a great character, trying to understand A's life, still in love with the selfish boyfriend, nobody's pushover.  A leaves behind very little memory of his occupancy -- people will have vague memories of how a day went.  But he follows Rhiannon to a party and can't get his host back home before it's time to move on to the next body (midnight, of course) and the young man wakes up by the side of the road, convinced he's been possessed by the devil.

The plot thickens but avoids many pitfalls it could lurch into.  One cares deeply about the main characters.  There's a wonderful interlude when he wakes up in Rhiannon's body and spends the day trying to avoid doing anything she'll consider a violation of her privacy.  I was mildly disappointed in the ending -- endings are so hard to do well -- but no spoilers here.

It's good to be back to the blog.

Love,

Deborah

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

Gay lit 2: YA and younger

Dear Annie,

Many thanks to Tatiana for that great list of gay YA books.

I just read a new one written jointly by David Levithan, author of Boy Meets Boy (mentioned in Tatiana's list) and John Green:
Will Grayson, Will Grayson.  It's told in two voices, of high school characters both named Will Grayson who have met each other  by chance.  One is gay and comes out during the course of the book.  The other is straight with a close friend named Tiny Cooper, a huge football player who's flamboyantly gay and during the course of the book writes and performs a musical about his life.  Tiny and gay Will fall in love.  There's lots of humor and strong emotion and feel of what high school life is like.  There are a few homophobic classmates, but the focus is on figuring out who you are and how to be in love.  Tiny verges on the edge of being overdone, except for the fact that he's such a likable character.  One cares about all the people in the book.

Geography Club focuses on a high school with a meaner student body.  Several gay and lesbian kids find each other, then create a club with a name so boring they figure they'll be the only members.

I'm working my way into the younger middle-grade area.  James Howe, best known for his Bunnicula series, has done a series which started with The Misfits, about four middle school kids, one of whom is gay, who have been called names and ostracized for years. They organize against it and go on an anti name-calling campaign. A little heavy-handed, but a good read for middle grade kids. Howe has done two different sequels on individual kids in the group:
Totally Joe focuses on the gay kid. He has a crush on a boy who's not ready to come out, there's some harassment, but there's also lots of adult and peer support.

Howe's an interesting author.  He's also written early readers and picture books for much younger kids, including the Pinky and Rex series (written between 1990 and 2001).  I just re-read
Pinky and Rex and the Bully the other day.  Pinky is a boy who loves the color pink; his friend Rex is a girl who loves dinosaurs.  In this book, a boy teases Pinky, accusing him of being a girl.  So Pinky decides that he'll stop liking pink and try to conform to the bully's perception of how one should be a boy.  He gets talked out of this idea by a wise elderly lady and stands up to the kid who's been teasing him.  Of course we don't know Pinky's or Rex's sexual preferences, but it's refreshing to have a book for young kids which hits the boys-can-do-many-things theme. 

Love,

Deborah