A Higher Type of "Right"

Seeking Eden was on my mind this morning. I had written a post about it earlier this summer, but that post was all about me and not about the book (shame on me). The book deserves to have its own post. 

(There will probably be spoilers below...)

I once wrote a post about another of Ann Turnbull's books, saying Alice in Love and War should be required reading for teen girls because it shows the consequences of falling for the first guy that comes along. Well, Turnbull has done it again - Seeking Eden should be required reading for teens, both boys and girls, because it says important things about doing what's "right." It's kind of like that book about raising teens' expectations for themselves (Do Hard Things, by Alex and Brett Harris), but in a narrative, which I think makes it more effective. Sort of a "stealth" lesson, ha ha!  

Seeking Eden is the last book in Turnbull's Quaker trilogy. The two earlier books, No Shame, No Fear, and Forged in the Fire, dealt with important issues, but the main focus of those two books was the relationship between Susanna and Will. I guess I expected Seeking Eden to be another love story with history as a backdrop; there is a romantic relationship at the heart of the story, but it seems to me to be secondary to the historical and social aspects. What takes center stage in this story is Josiah's journey of conscience.

Josiah starts out as a rebellious son who rejects everything about his father (Will, the "star" of Forged in the Fire), but it didn't take me as a reader long to realize Josiah's really a chip off the old block, so to speak--an honest young man struggling to find the right thing to do. For Will, the struggle was to maintain his integrity in the face of persecution for his faith as a Quaker; for Josiah, the struggle is to maintain his integrity when others around him--who share his religious faith--are accepting and even participating in the terrible institution of slavery. Josiah is faced with a situation in which he can either turn away and avoid conflict, or act to support the ideals of his faith and suffer the consequences.

Specifically, Josiah is apprenticed to a Quaker merchant who occasionally deals in the slave trade (which wasn't illegal in the early colonial period). Turnbull lets us see through Josiah's eyes and through the parallel story of Topka (a young slave) the inhumanity of the slaves' conditions (a perfect example of the value of showing vs. telling, btw). When Josiah's master brings Topka and his girlfriend back to Philadelphia and sells them to separate owners, Josiah is faced with a real dilemma: should he do the "right" thing by maintaining his apprentice contract and obeying his master, even though it means Topka will be separated from the one he loves, just as Josiah loves Kate, OR should he do the "right" thing by allowing Topka to escape, so there is at least a hope that Topka can reunite with his love and escape to freedom?

In my PR class, we talk about ethical dilemmas, and the textbook we use defines a "dilemma" as a situation in which there are definitely, unavoidably, going to be some undesired consequences. I like the way Turnbull shows Josiah struggling with the potential consequences, and I like even more the way she shows his thinking once he knows what he will do. I like Josiah's response to the consequences he faces; he doesn't try to wiggle out of them or seek an exception. (OK, here's the big spoiler...) He chooses to follow the higher version of "right," the one that stays true to the principles of God's word and affirms the humanity of the slave. What a guy of integrity. It's a powerful story.

Teens face so many situations in our society in which there aren't going to be easy answers. I think about the political elections coming up here in the US, I think of the random violence of the shootings in public places, I think of the overwhelming issues of poverty and quality of education and (put your favorite social issue here). They are going to face situations in which there will be competing versions of what is "right." How are they going to respond? I know reading a single novel can't replace a lifetime of experiences that help build integrity, but at least it's a starting place. 

If you want to read this book or to encourage teens in your life to read it, it's not going to be easy in the US--the book isn't easily available here (you can order it through third-party sellers on Amazon). I suggest asking libraries to order it or suggesting it to English teachers; they can order it through Amazon.co.uk . Or contact Candlewick Publishing and demand they ask them nicely to pick it up for their young adult fiction list!

A Little Touch of Melancholy

You know how you wait and wait for something, and finally it's here, and then you go through it as slowly as you can, trying to make it last as long as possible? Well, that's where I've been the past week or so with the last of Ann Turnbull's Quaker trilogy, Seeking Eden. And as is often the case after some much-anticipated event is over, I'm suffering a little touch of melancholy, for a variety of reasons.

The first reason, of course, is because it's over. There will be no more stories about Susanna and Will or their children. That makes me sad because I love those characters and because the time period (late 17th century) is so interesting. Turnbull's books are so well-written that I felt myself drawn into the world of the book and truly invested in the character's lives. Seeking Eden seemed a little slower to get going than the other two books in the trilogy (No Shame, No Fear and Forged in the Fire), but somewhere in the middle of the book, I became so caught up in the story I finished the whole thing in one sitting. So much for my plans to make it last by drawing it out!

Another thing that makes me sad is knowing this excellent book has, as we say here in the South, a hard row to hoe to find an audience. Candlewick, the publisher that created the US editions of the other two books, declined to publish this one, even though the story takes place in Philadelphia. A quick check of Amazon's website showed Seeking Eden is not available directly through Amazon in the US; one can, however, get it through one of Amazon's associated sellers. I had to get the book through Amazon UK, which meant shipping charges were more than the price of the book (worth every penny, though). And then I see the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy as an Amazon bestseller, and I just get angry. I suppose now we're going to see a whole slew of knock-offs of that book (which is a knock-off of Twilight) on the publishers' menu for the next couple of years. It's not that I think Fifty Shades of Grey shouldn't be published; if people want to read it, fine. But it really does make me angry and sad that high-quality, substantive books like Seeking Eden are squeezed out of the marketplace and become less and less available for people like me who have zero interest in Fifty Shades of Grey and its progeny.

Finally, I have to admit that one of my first reactions immediately after finishing Seeking Eden was a sense of   depression (sort of) because I realize my own writing just doesn't measure up. One of the things I appreciate about the story is how smoothly Turnbull balances so many different elements. There is the family story of 16-year-old Josiah's conflict with his parents, particularly his father (did Turnbull have spy cams on our 16-year-old son? ha ha). There is the love story between Jos and Kate. There is a wealth of historical information, ranging from details about the persecution of Quakers in the New World as well as the old, the early years of Philadelphia, apprenticeships, the slave trade, slave auctions, and slavery, including the fact that Quakers at that time owned slaves. Then there is the overarching moral conflict Jos faces - should he break his contract with his master in order to follow a higher law? And that's not everything - the book is so rich and so jam-packed with good stuff. Yet it maintains the flow of a good story, building up to a point where I felt tense with nervousness about what would happen.

I hope I'm being too hard on myself, but I definitely had that sinking feeling that my own story was a lightweight, fluffy little love story compared to Seeking Eden. Nothing's wrong with fluffy little love stories, but my goal for writing is to go beyond that. I want to write things that are both entertaining and thought-provoking. I want my stories to say something important about humanity. (Gosh, that sounds pretentious...but maybe you know what I mean.) Of course, I must remind myself, I've written one book and Ann Turnbull has written many. Maybe I can get there someday.

But I'll never get there if I don't find a way to work writing time into my daily schedule. I thought summer vacation would free me from the grind of teaching and grading - no, it's only replaced the grind of teaching with a different grind. If I'm going to write, I'm going to have to forcibly grab some time and guard it selfishly, which won't be easy and which the family probably won't understand. Another reason to feel melancholy....

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I recently finished reading Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson. It's the story of a slave girl (Isabel) during the British occupation of New York City in the Revolutionary War. While I learned something about that historical event, the main thing I'm taking away from this book is an increased appreciation for the injustice of slavery.

The story indirectly described the suffering the rebels experienced during the occupation (I say indirectly because Isabel's owners were British sympathizers and therefore were given preference when it came to getting food. They are even able to have some elaborate parties.). Isabel also ends up taking food scraps to the American prisoners of war, and the description of the conditions in the prison is almost uncomfortably vivid. It's not the first time I've read about those kinds of conditions (The Heretic's Daughter and Forged in the Fire, for example, had pretty vivid prison scenes). What makes it different this time is that the main characters in Chains are slaves, and that adds a whole new dimension to their suffering.

Isabel and her younger sister Ruth are sold early in the book to a selfish, cruel woman and her husband, who take the sisters to New York City. Throughout the book, Isabel is trying to find a way to get away from Madaam. On top of all the work Isabel is expected to do, Madaam hits Isabel with a riding crop, constantly insults her, separates her from her sister, and even has her branded with an "I" for "insolence." That's all bad enough, but what really brought the injustice home to me was that Madaam wouldn't even allow Isabel her identity. Shortly after arriving in New York, Madaam renames Isabel "Sal," even though that's not who Isabel wanted to be. I don't know why that bothered me more than the branding. (spoiler) Actually, I decided as soon as she was branded that the "I" should stand for "Isabel" instead of "insolence"; it took Isabel nearly to the end of the book to come to that conclusion herself.

The fact that all this cruelty is set against the struggle for the patriots to free themselves from British "oppression" is ironic. At least a couple of times, Isabel appeals to people who are engaged in this struggle for freedom and they refuse to help her; freedom is not for the slaves. There's also a sad reality in the way Curzon (Isabel's friend) is treated in the prison. He was captured fighting for the rebels and taken as a prisoner of war along with all the free white men. However, even though he was actively fighting for their cause, the other prisoners still place Curzon in a lower position. They steal his blanket and they take the lion's share of the food - even when Isabel has brought it for him.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, which means there will probably be a lot of discussions about slavery. Sometimes I think it's easy to intellectualize what slavery was about. Chains takes slavery out of the intellectual realm and makes the reader see and feel what it must have been like to be owned, body and soul, by another person and how hard it would be to escape that situation.

Let's add Laurie Halse Anderson to that list of people I want to study to be a better writer....

Rules

(guest post by my daughter - she read this book in about 24 hours)

The book Rules by Cynthia Lord is a really great read that pulls at the heart strings. This book was made for the young adult reading group. The main character is a twelve-year-old girl named Catherine. Catherine's problems keep mounting up; her best friend is in California with her father, her little brother has autism, and her old neighbor is moving away. Then a new problem comes -- she meets a boy who can't talk. Suddenly she finds herself trying to figure out what does normal mean? Will she get a new best friend? Can she help herself to not feel weird around her brother? Find out and read this book. Oh, and don't forget the rules!

Once Again, It's the Little Things

When I teach Introduction to Rhetoric and Social Influence, one of the exercises I always do with the class is about censorship of books. I put together a collection of books that have been challenged, find a part that relates to the reason for the challenge, and then have students read that section and say whether or not they would support the challenge. Every time I gather books for the exercise, I find a new book I want to read. This year, it was The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.

What interested me about the book was the conflict the main character, Junior (Arnold) Spirit, faced. Junior is a Spokane Indian living on a reservation, but one of his teachers at the reservation school tells Junior he should go to the public school in a town off the reservation. Junior decides to take the risk, even though it means his best friend now hates him for "deserting" the tribe. Junior faces discrimination at the town school, but eventually he makes friends with several of the white students. Throughout the story, though, Junior struggles with being a "border dweller" (another term from Intro to Rhetoric class!) who lives between two cultures. I liked that entire storyline. While I was saddened by the portrayal of the hopelessness and alcoholism of the Indian culture, I liked the way Alexie portrayed the sense of community of the Indians.

But...once again, there were some little things that seemed sloppy to me and took me out of the story several times. One thing happened right in the first chapter. Junior is introducing himself, and he's got all kinds of physical problems, like being born with hydrocephalus and having seizures and being very awkward with big hands and feet. Then he goes on to tell about playing basketball and in fact, becoming a starter on the town school's varsity team and even hitting the shot that leads to his school team destroying the reservation team. That seems unrealistic to me. I've had a couple of students in the past with those kinds of physical problems, and those problems don't just go away in time for a kid to become a star basketball player. Strike one.

Another thing I thought was unrealistic was Junior saying how many times he ended up walking the 22 miles from the school to the reservation because his dad forgot to come pick him up (or was too drunk to do it). I'm not arguing with the fact that a kid could have to find his own way home from school; what seems unrealistic to me is the distance. How long would it take to walk 22 miles? When my husband and I used to do backpacking, the best we accomplished was something like 11 miles in an 8-hour day. Of course, that was carrying a pack, but wouldn't a school kid have a backpack full of books? You should see what my daughter hauls back and forth every day. I don't buy it. Strike two.

The thing that bothered me most, though, came when Junior's grandmother died. Of course, she died in some bizarre way. At her memorial service, a rich guy steps up to return a ceremonial dance dress that he said belongs to Grandmother Spirit. Then Junior's mother steps up to say, "I'm her daughter....." Wait...I thought she was Grandmother Spirit, related to Arnold Spirit. If Indian surnames follow the same rules as Anglo names, that means it would be his father who was related to Grandmother Spirit, not his mother. Maybe the rules are different for Indian marriages, but there's nothing in the book to say that. It reads like a mistake to me. Strike three.

Those three strikes, combined with what I thought was an overdone "voice" for Junior's character, soured me a little on the book. I don't know that this is what was in Sherman Alexie's mind, but no author should take for granted that readers will, without question, overlook sloppy detail work if the issues in the story are "important" enough. It especially bothers me when that happens in a young adult book. YA readers are still forming their perceptions of the world - they may not have the critical thinking skills to ferret out the mistakes and correct them. In my opinion, we do those readers a disservice when we are less than accurate - even with minor details.

How Should a Girl Deal with It All?

I whipped through Mockingjay in two days (including time to feed the family, although I'll admit, I wasn't doing a very good job of that at the end). For the past couple of days now, I've been trying to decide what I think about it. I don't think I liked it that much, and I'm trying to understand why. Today while listening to a student's speech, I think I might have found the answer. 

The student was talking about having strength in the face of difficult circumstances. She said she has found that hiding is not the answer, that problems have to be faced. It occurred to me that Katniss was always hiding. I know she was suffering PTSD, and it's no wonder. No doubt, she's been through some horrifying experiences.  But as a literary character, I'd like to see her fight her way through the pain to salvage some sense of hope. (Spoiler!) In the epilogue to this series, Katniss has what could be labeled a happy life with Peeta, but she still seems detached from it and unable to fully trust in it and even to appreciate it. I don't expect that the character would suddenly "get over" all the awful things that happened, but it would be nice to see evidence that she's healing. That evidence wasn't there, at least not to me.

Am I being unfair? I thought of some other characters who have faced terrible circumstances and how they've come out of it. Most recently, Ophelia. I reckon having your father murdered by your secret husband, thinking you've been cast off by that husband, having to fake your own death to escape the threat of a poison-happy, evil king, and then learning your husband and your brother have killed each other would be about as traumatic as what Katniss went through. The interesting thing is that Ophelia did the same thing as Katniss - she hid and sank into depression. For Ophelia, this happened in the convent, and she was finally brought out of it by the friendship of Isabel and by finding a purpose in working as a healer for the nuns.  When Horatio shows up, she's well on her way to being able to put the events of her past behind her and face her life with hope. 

I also thought about Sarah in The Heretic's Daughter. Being imprisoned in a 17th-century jail for months and having your mother be hanged as a witch is pretty traumatic, I'd think. Yet at the end of the book, Sarah has found a degree of hope in preserving her family's story so it's not lost to the future generations.  I even remembered Patty from Summer of My German Soldier - physically, verbally, and psychologically abused by her parents, suffering the loss of her friend Anton, under suspicion of spying for being friends with Anton, sent to a detention center - still, that book ends with a note of hope.

Mockingjay didn't seem to have any hope at the end, just a weary, distrustful sense of acceptance.  Maybe I'm naive or weak to want hope at the end of the stories I read; after all, not everything in life has a hopeful ending. But I would argue that books are not life. They are stories that can help readers, among other things, find the silver lining in the gloomiest cloud. That doesn't mean I want a "Pollyanna" ending. I know I've used the quote from Elizabeth George Speare before, so I'll just paraphrase very loosely here, but at the end of a book I want to feel that the main character can stand up to his/her life and will be ok. Maybe he or she is not ok just yet, but he/she is on the road to being ok. The book can have a "sad" ending, but still have that little glimmer of hope that keeps the ending from being "bleak." Mockingjay was bleak.

(There's a really excellent one-star review on Amazon by a reader named Suzanne G, and the follow-up comments are good, too. The review does a more in-depth critique of Katniss' character and the failings in her relationships with the other characters.)

Yeah, I Read YA Fiction...and apparently a lot of other adults do, too

One of the most (slightly) embarrassing moments of my life was when I was interviewing for a teaching assistantship for my master's degree program. I was sitting in the office of one of the professors, surrounded by high-level academic books. He leaned back in his chair, made one of those little tents with his hands, and asked, "What do you read?" 

At that point, it would have been nice to be able to pull out the title of some high-level academic book or even one of the classic novels from my literature classes, but instead, I was honest and said, "Mainly children's books."

That answer didn't keep me from getting the assistantship, but I've always felt a little apologetic whenever I admit to my preference for young people's books.  But I guess I have nothing to be ashamed of, according to a recent article in the New York Times. The article says 47% of women aged 18-24 and 20% of women aged 35-44 buy and read YA books.  The article goes on to explain some of the appeal YA books have for older readers:

There’s a freshness there; it’s engaging.

Another of the experts quoted in the article says we middle-aged readers of YA books may be drawn to the "big type and short, plot-driven chapters" that make YA literature easier to read, since we are tired.

Ok, I'll admit it. I do like the fact that most YA books have shorter chapters and more focused plots and move along quickly. But I've decided that's not a sign of being intellectually shallow on my part. If I were reading Nancy Drew exclusively, maybe so.  But one thing I have really enjoyed about YA (and children's) novels are the deep ideas that lurk beneath the seemingly simple surface. I've read about gender issues and race issues and death and love and rebellion, among other things. I agree that maybe it is intellectually shallow of me to want to avoid some of the issues in adult novels, like child molestation and psychological torture (although there are YA novels that also deal with these issues, and I generally avoid those, as well - why make myself miserable?).

I suppose that's another reason I prefer YA literature - there's a sort of an innocent hopefulness to YA stories, or maybe it's a hopeful innocence. Either way, I like it. I like coming away from something I've read with a feeling that there is hope for the world, even if things don't work out the way I hoped they would.

A Mixed Reaction

(Sorry, this will have lots of spoilers.)

Somewhere along the way, A Northern Light and I parted ways. At first, I loved it. The main character, Mattie, reminded me in many ways of my teen self. She loved words and writing, but her day-to-day life made it difficult, if not nearly impossible, to see how she could follow her dreams of studying literature and writing her stories. I liked the dilemma she was facing (and wrote about it in an earlier post). I liked the supporting characters of Weaver and Royal and Miss Willcox and Mattie's family.  I liked the slice-of-life glimpse into early 20th-century upstate New York, where the rich came to vacation in the mountains and the poor made a living by serving them.

But toward the end of the book, Jennifer Donnelly made several choices as a writer that I disagreed with and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth as far as this book is concerned. First, I think the turnaround of Emmie Hubbard was just too darn convenient. Emmie has been a -- well, I don't know what she has been. A victim? Royal's father has definitely been taking advantage of her for years. A prostitute? She's been accepting his "gifts" of the first, freshest milk, etc. for all those years. Whatever she is, she's definitely weak. I think Donnelly wants us to view her as a victim, but I can't see it entirely that way.  But, I digress - her turnaround.  At the end of the book, Weaver's mother has moved in with Emmie and, in the space of a week or so, has completely reformed Emmie, so that she is clean and respectable and able to provide for her children. I don't buy it. For one thing, if Weaver's mother has been living across the road from Emmie all these years (and it came as sort of a surprise to me when that was revealed at the end of the book), and if she's such a good influence, and if everyone in the area knew what was going on with Emmie and Royal's father, and if she thought Emmie was being wronged - then why didn't she do anything about it before???? I think it's because it ties in to something else that bothered me about the book - the way Donnelly wanted us to feel about Royal.

I'll admit I've changed my mind about having Mattie get together with Royal since my previous post. I really don't think they would be compatible. She is attracted to him because he's good-looking and because she thinks he is attracted to her, despite her plain and bookish self. She doesn't really care for him or have anything in common with him and isn't really interested in the things he cares about, so for them to marry would definitely be a mistake.

However, I think Donnelly wants to push all the blame for this failed relationship onto Royal. The reason he wants to marry Mattie is because he sees the opportunity to build a farm "empire." He doesn't love her or care about her interest in books. The two things that eventually make Mattie decide to dump him are that he is going to pay the back taxes on Emmie's land so he can have it (which means Emmie will be homeless) and that he brings Mattie a used cookbook for a birthday present. Although she doesn't say so, I imagine that Donnelly wants us to say, "The nerve of the guy!" and write him off as a jerk. Well, I refuse to do that.

What's wrong with Royal wanting to get Emmie's land? She hasn't been meeting her responsibilities for years, either for paying her taxes or for taking care of her kids (they regularly come to Mattie's family's house to eat). He wants to take the land and make it productive. Then add to that the fact that his father has been having a long-standing affair with Emmie, and Royal sees his chance to get her out of their lives. I totally understand his motivation, and don't see it as being particularly ignoble. Yet Donnelly wants us to see him as selfish and grasping, willing to turn a mother out on the streets. And she even has Weaver's mama step in and straighten Emmie out so Emmie's not a bad mother anymore. I just didn't like that whole bit.

Another thing I didn't like was making Royal into a jerk for giving Mattie the used cookbook for her birthday. When she sees the gift and knows it is a book, she gets her hopes up, only to have them dashed. The way it comes across in the story, that's the worst thing a guy can do - be so insensitive to his girl's feelings and so unaware of her desires. Like the "right" guy for a girl is going to be perfectly in tune with her and understand exactly what she wants. Come on. I bet most women out there have had a gift like the used cookbook. Maybe it's something you open and you think, "Why did he think I would like this??"  Or maybe it is a useful and totally impersonal household appliance. Yet the husband or boyfriend who gave the lame gift has enough other, good qualities that you'll let it pass. At least Royal thought about Mattie enough to remember her birthday.  He should get some points for that, instead of being turned into an insensitive lout. Let's face it - he's not the only problem in that relationship. Mattie didn't care about his dreams, either. She was thinking about Emily Dickinson instead of concentrating while he was talking about a new kind of corn.

As I said earlier, I don't have a problem with Mattie deciding she doesn't want to marry Royal, after all. That's actually a pretty good message for young women - don't marry the first guy who says you're pretty if you know you have nothing in common. What I didn't like was having Royal be villified for being that guy.

Finally, I didn't like having Mattie just leave at the end. All through the book, she's been so concerned about keeping the promise she made to her dying mother; at the end, she doesn't even think about that. She doesn't seem to care at all what will happen to her family, especially to Lou, the sister who seems to me to have some emotional problems following their mother's death.  Mattie's teacher once told her, "You are many things, Mattie Gokey, but selfish is not one of them." I disagree.

Sometimes I Wonder If I'm Out of Touch with the Rest of the World.....

I finished reading Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta last night and was quite glad to be through with it, just to be honest. I was so tired of the "drama." I know it must be tough to have been abandoned by your mother. I know it's infuriating when everyone around you seems to know more about your history than you do, and no one's talking. But I thought if I saw one more line where Taylor said something to the effect of "I knew if I looked at it, a piece of me would die," I was going to go into a hysterical fit worthy of any high school drama queen.

Let me say first of all, that I'm separating the content of the message from the telling of the message. The story in and of itself was interesting (though it could have been told in about 250 pages instead of 419, imho). Who doesn't love a good mystery in which the pieces slowly come together? (although I'll admit I had the whole mystery figured out by a little past halfway through the book, and I swear this time I did not read ahead!)

I just find it really hard, though, to focus on the plot and themes when the main character was not someone I could empathize with.  I just didn't like Taylor. There, I said it.  I didn't like Jonah much, either. I didn't like Hannah much. I thought Raffy and Ben were sort of cliche' sidekick characters. Let me tell you, if there's going to be as much whining and drama as went on in this book, you've got to like somebody to be able to put up with it.  I got very annoyed at Harry in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix; but I already loved Harry, so I was able to bear up under his bout of self-pity and wait for him to come out of it.  I'll admit that once Taylor found out what she wanted to know, she became more bearable, and I might have even learned to like her somewhat. Of course, that was the end of the book. She was just so mean and self-centered early on that I was repelled by her character.

However......what do I know? This book was the 2009 recipient of the Michael Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.  Other bloggers describe it as "lyrical" (I thought the writing was flabby), and as "so beautiful and powerful that everything else pales in comparison," and as "intricately told and well written." I guess I just don't "get it."

A Word from the Target Audience

My husband's car had a flat this morning, so since I'm on sabbatical with nothing else to do (uh-huh), I got to  be the one who took it to be fixed.  The mechanic was really busy, which meant I ended up at school (I always go to the mechanic who's just down the hill from the university) with nothing to do but wait around. I went to the library and found Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta. I had seen a glowing review on another site and thought it might be an interesting book to check out.

Well, it is interesting, and I'm probably going to read the whole thing since I made a pretty good start while waiting today, but what's with all these books that have some psychologically damaged, angry, rebellious teen who's been abandoned, abused, or otherwise let down by the adults in his/her life as the protagonist? I don't read a lot of "realistic" fiction, being so enamored with historical fiction, but it seems when I'm perusing the "new books for teens" emails that Amazon sends me, there is always at least one book with such a protagonist who's struggling with some major downer of an issue.

Is that what appeals to teens? I wonder.  My husband is a high school band director, so I get to observe teens interacting on a fairly regular basis (tonight, for example - their last concert of the year).  The kids in his band don't seem particularly angsty.  Of course, the kids who have the biggest life problems generally don't seem to join band (although there have been some rather sad family stories in his 20 years of teaching). But overall, these teens seem happy and full of humor and to enjoy what they are doing and being around each other, and while they don't want to hang out with adults, they seem to accept that we are people, too.

On the way home, I just had to ask.  So I turned to my son (my finger on the pulse of teen culture, ha ha) and asked him that question:  Does that kind of book appeal to teens?  His answer: he doesn't like them.  He said he'll read them if the rest of the book is "awesome" (didn't exactly define what that meant), but that he gets tired of that kind of character.  That led to a second question:  What kind of books do you like?  His answer: Rainbow 6 and Shogun.  After reminding him those are books written for adults, I asked what he liked about them.  He said he likes the "epicness" of them - the way the story develops over time.

Go figure. That flys in the face of other advice I've seen on blogs this week, that books for young adults should be no more than 80,000 words.  I wonder if it's time for young adult publishers to do some new market research?

Love at First Sight (or, You Had Me at "Dang It")

Within pages, I fell in love with the character of Jed Reston in Just Ella by Margaret Peterson Haddix. It's sort of ironic, really, since a key theme of the book is how unreliable those "love at first sight" feelings are as the basis of a relationship. But as I was reading the chapter in which Jed is introduced into the story, I had this warm, happy, sort of giddy feeling - I just knew he was a character I would truly love.

That doesn't happen very often. That's not to say I don't love other characters, but usually it's more of a "come to love" type of reaction.  The character will be introduced and then as the story develops, I learn more about his/her personality and grow to be fond, or even (mildly) obsessed, with him/her. This time, though, it was sort of instanteous. How did Haddix manage it? By showing Jed in action. He's careless in his appearance and clumsy, but when that's balanced with his self-deprecating comments, it comes off as charming rather than oafish. His dialogue is a mix of the formal "speak" of the nobility (with which he is obviously uncomfortable) and his sincere, honest observations. His interaction with Ella foreshadows what we will later learn is his honorable character.  In none of this does Haddix give us a narrated description of Jed.  It's a textbook case of why showing works better than telling. We are allowed to draw our own conclusions about him -- and I bet 95 percent of the people who read the book have a reaction similiar to mine.  Well, maybe not the giddy part.

"About the faith--," Jed began.
I began giggling again and calmed myself only to start again. And again. I was a fountain of hilarity, shooting out bursts of laughter every time Jed tried to speak. At last he gave up and laughed too.

It's been a while since a chapter ending left me with a smile the way this one did.

Plot vs. Story - A Reader's View

I recently finished reading It's Like This, Cat by Emily Neville, the Newberry Award winner for 1964. I was motivated by curiosity (and the need for an "I" book for my A-Z reading challenge).  Back when I was a kid, I read this book, and I couldn't remember much about it, just that there was a boy and he adopted a stray cat.

Sad to say, after reading it again, I can't say much more about it now.

That's not entirely fair to say, I guess.  There were some stories about Dave's relationship with his father, and about how Dave's family sort of adopts a young man who was like a stray cat, and about the "crazy cat lady" who wins a fortune from her estranged brother, and about Dave meeting a girl.  As I sit here trying to piece it all together, though, it seems to me that something was missing.  I think that something is a plot.

Maybe I'm sensitive to plot right now after reading an entry on agent Janet Reid's Query Shark blog. In that entry, she advises a writer that his/her query has "a series of events rather than any kind of plot."  That made me wonder, what's the difference? (I'm sure Mrs. Richardson, my high school English teacher, would be groaning about now if she read that!)  I won't delve into my thought processes in answering that question here (since I've already done that on my other blog), but suffice it to say a plot is more than just what happens in the story.  The plot is about how the events of the story change the protagonist. If a character is dynamic (and the best ones are), then somewhere along the way in the story, external events have an internal counterpart. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for example, when Harry gets to the Department of Mysteries and finds the visions of his godfather lying injured were only a lure to bring him there, he realizes his own responsibility for endangering his friends and that he really doesn't know everything it's going to take to battle the powerful evil of Voldemort.  It's a humbling experience for him, one that makes him better in the end.  That's plot.

Back to It's Like This, Cat.  I like Dave Mitchell as a character, really. And if I stretch myself, maybe I could argue that the stray cat is a metaphor for the stray people that Dave accumulates over the course of the story.  A metaphor isn't a plot, though. The novel is a collection of entertaining episodes, but at the end, I can't really put my finger on how Dave is different for going through those episodes.  Maybe he doesn't fight with his father as often?  Maybe he has a wider view of the world? I just don't know. At the end I found myself asking, "It's like what, Cat?"

I do have to say one other thing - I can't imagine parents today letting a teen do the things Dave got to do in this book.  Riding a bike from one borough to another in New York City????

Notes from a Reading Binge

I don't very often go on a reading jag, where I pretty much ignore all but the most essential duties (like being sure the family is fed). But from about Thursday until Saturday afternoon, I was totally caught up in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series. I finished The Hunger Games on Thursday and went immediately into Catching Fire Friday morning, finishing late yesterday afternoon in time to cook something decent for supper (after throwing sandwiches on plates for lunch, ha ha).

I had several things I wanted to write about while reading, so instead of trying to tie it all into one coherent post, I'm going to stick together several small segments.

Katniss "Not Dynamic," Teen Says

When my son was first learning to read in kindergarten, I told myself I was going to be a mom who was on top of it all and keep ahead of what he was reading so we could talk about anything that might be challenging or questionable.  Ha.  I bet you can imagine how long THAT lasted.  He outstripped me on the Harry Potter series by the time he was in second grade.  I still try to read some of the things he's read, more now to be able to keep my finger on the pulse of young adult literature and culture than to keep my thumb on him (so to speak).  Every now and then, we do talk about those common things we've read.

For example, this morning on the way home from church, I asked him if he thought there was a plan in place all along to put Katniss in the Hunger Games to turn her into a symbol (more on that later). We shared perspectives on that for a moment, then he said, "Katniss wasn't a dynamic character."  Interesting comment to be coming from the mouth of a 14-year-old boy, so I asked what he meant.  He went on to explain that she didn't change much (I guess he DOES pay attention in his English class!).  Then he retreated back into the solitude of his iPod, so I'm left to ponder the validity of his statement on my own.

He has a point.  On the surface, some of the things Katniss does seem to be from unselfish motives, like volunteering to take Prim's place in the initial reaping.  But in reading her thoughts about everything that happens to her, I believe she's got a pretty self-centered outlook on the world.  When you get right down to it, the reason she doesn't want Prim in the reaping is because she herself couldn't stand the thought of her frail little sister being killed in the arena.  Ok, that's a good place for a character to start at the beginning of a trilogy.

(WARNING - Spoilers abound below!)

But while I was reading the conclusion of Catching Fire, I thought it seemed like Katniss was angrier about being used for the plan without anyone telling her than she was concerned with whether the plan was going to help the terrible life condition of the people in the various districts (which she had witnessed on her victory tour).  She says she thinks she hates Peeta for fulfilling his mission to keep her alive, and you get the sense it's because she feels that she failed in her mission to keep him alive (even though they believe he is still alive at the end of the book, he's most likely in the hands of the Capitol and may not have long to live).  She decides she's going to die from spite as a last, desperate way to try to spare him.  That seems to cheapen the sacrifices Peeta made for her.  A more mature character would possibly say, "Ok, you thought the cause and my role in it were important enough to sacrifice your life....the least I can do is make sure you don't die in vain."

I can't help making comparisons to Harry Potter, who was also the "chosen one" around which a rebellion of sorts centered.  Harry went through his whiny phase in Order of the Phoenix, but by the last two books, he was ready to take his place in the fight.  In all fairness to Katniss, Catching Fire is only the second book of three, so maybe in the third book, she will realize this thing is bigger than herself (to fall back on a cliche') and play her required role.  I'm betting she will, with typical Katniss intensity.

Well, that took more room than I thought it would, so I think I'll break this note into a short series of posts over the next few days.  Don't want this to turn into a dissertation.

This should be required reading....

(Note: This entry will be rife with spoilers!)

When I was a teenager, I ordered a paperback copy of a little novel called I Want to Keep My Baby through the Scholastic book orders. It was about a teen girl who got pregnant and whose teen boyfriend refused to marry her. She decided to keep the baby and raise it on her own. I think the reason I bought it was because I was curious about sex, and reading about it in a book (although I don't remember there being very much, ha ha) was preferable to talking about it with my parents.

Well, that was a long time ago, and the world has changed a lot, but some things haven't changed. Teens are still curious about sex, and they generally don't want to talk to their parents about it. And they don't have to - messages about sex are everywhere in popular culture. Watch a half-hour of music videos, in any genre -- flip through the ads and articles in popular magazines -- read the books at the top of the young adult list -- you'll see plenty about sex, and most of it is much more explicit than anything in I Want to Keep My Baby. However, there's one thing you don't see a lot of, and that's consequences of sex.

That's why I say Ann Turnbull's fine historical novel, Alice in Love and War, should be required reading, at least for teen girls. Alice is one of them, albeit living 300+ years ago. She feels stifled and trapped on the farm owned by her aunt and uncle, who adopted her when her father died. She's 16 years old, old enough to be recognized as a sexual being (including by her uncle, who has recently begun to make advances toward her). She longs for escape and love. Both present themselves in the form of Robin, a handsome, flirting young soldier with the Cavilier army (this is during the English Civil War). Alice falls hard for Robin, and provoked by the fear that he will be leaving soon when the army moves on, she gives her virginity to him in a clandestine meeting in an abandoned shepherd's hut.

Part of Alice knows she shouldn't have done it, but she justifies her decision by convincing herself that Robin loves her - the fact that he wants to make love to her proves that, doesn't it? When the army is ready to move on, she begs Robin to take her with him, and he does. For the next several months, Alice follows the army. She is very lonely, even though she makes friends; she has little time to be with Robin -- except at night, when he always manages to find a place where the two of them can be together. Just before the army is going on leave for winter, Alice discovers she is pregnant. When she tells Robin, he evades her insistence that he must marry her, and when she wakes the next morning, he's gone. He's left her a note and some money, but no mention of marriage or of a way she can contact him.

Long story short, Alice goes through the pain and heartbreak of miscarrying the baby. When Robin does return in the spring, Alice has to seek him out and confront him, at which time he confesses that he is already married and had, in fact, gone home for the birth of his second child with his wife. Alice has made friends among the wives of other soldiers, so she remains with the army. Eventually, however, her friends are killed and she manages to find refuge in a small village nearby. There she meets a Parliamentary soldier who is severely wounded, and she helps nurse him back to health. As she sits by his bed and reads to him and talks to him, she falls in love with him, but she fears a godly man like Jem will never have anything to do with a woman with her history. When Jem returns to the army, they continue a correspondence, and eventually he asks her to marry him. Alice gets a happy ending, after all.

I think there are so many messages of value in this story for young women. Yes, one of them is that sex is a pleasurable thing that draws people together. However, the story also brings home the message that if the situation surrounding the sex is not right, the worry and insecurity and shame outweigh any pleasure. From the first time Alice slept with Robin, she was worried - about losing him, about the perceptions of other people, about becoming pregnant. She constantly has to reassure herself that he loves her, drawing on any little sign she can muster - or manufacture. Her married friends and their intimate knowledge of their husbands (and I mean "intimate" in the sense of knowing something deeply, not just sexually) contrasts sharply with the fact that Alice knows almost nothing about Robin, and she feels that lack. She tells herself that Robin takes care of her, but looking at it from the outside, we can see that he leaves her to fend for herself during the day, reappearing each night to take her somewhere that they can be together - even if that place is shared with a dozen other couples. There's no getting around it - Alice made a mistake, and even when she won't admit it to herself, she knows it.

I'm glad Turnbull redeemed Alice in the end, though, and gave us a picture of a positive courtship. Through the sickbed conversations and their letters, Alice and Jem come to know each other as people long before the relationship becomes a sexual one. Wait, I take that back. Alice feels herself attracted to Jem fairly early in their relationship, and I'm sure the same is true of Jem. But they don't allow that attraction to get out of control and to dominate the relationship. Their sexual attraction to each other is only one facet of their entire, healthy relationship. On their wedding night, Alice "felt not only passionate but also safe and certain in a way she had never felt with Robin."

In my humble opinion, that's the message teens need to get about sex. Parents and teachers and preachers may say it over and over, but I think sometimes a story may be more effective in allowing teens to reach their own conclusions. And that's why I think this book ought to be required reading.

A Short Treatise on What Gets Published

For the past two years (nearly), I've been submitting queries and, in a couple of cases, the manuscript of my historical novel to publishers and agents in an attempt to find someone who will bring it to the reading world. This post is not meant to talk about that experience but to talk about an apparent inconsistency in the way publishers apply the "rules of good writing," based on a published novel I just finished.

The book in question is The Falconer's Knot by Mary Hoffman, published in 2007 by Bloomsbury. (And in the interest of full disclosure as required by the government, I bought this book at my favorite used-book store). I had read a synopsis of the book online while shopping for something else, thought it sounded interesting, and even put it on my "wish list" for my favorite online bookstore. When I found the used copy, I was quite excited and pleased to have the chance to read it.

Excitement and pleasure turned rather quickly to disappointment and disbelief. I'm sure my husband got tired of hearing me say each night, "I can't believe this book was published." Let me temper what I'm about to say by saying it's not that I don't think the book has any merits at all; there were some characters who had potential to be sympathetic, and the idea for the plot was interesting. But this book also violated some of the most basic (in my opinion) rules of good writing without having any other qualities that made me willing to forgive the rule-breaking. Let me review some of the lapses that bothered me most.

1) Maintain a consistent point of view. Generally speaking, storytellers are advised to choose a "viewpoint character" and then to tell the story through the eyes of that character. All action in the story is interpreted through that character's mindset, even when the character interprets things in the wrong way (which I think provides some fun for the reader who can see the flaws in the interpretation). Granted, an author doesn't always have to limit him/herself to a single character's viewpoint; I can think of some books I've enjoyed that have had two viewpoint characters. There is also that third-person omniscient viewpoint that is sometimes used (but less effectively, for reasons I will discuss later).

This book had multiple viewpoint characters. In fact, it seemed that any time the plot needed to have something explained that the main character wouldn't know about, that the voice of the story shifted over to the thoughts of some character who could explain it - even if those characters were only minor players in the story. I'm not going to take the time to go back and count every instance, but I can think of about 10 different characters the book utilized as the viewpoint character. I personally found that unsettling, because it led to what I see as the second broken "good writing" rule.

2) Characters should be well-developed, fully-rounded people. This may be what disappointed me most about the book, because there were some good characters outlined in the story. The young nobleman who is wrongly accused of murder is compelling. The young woman who is forced into a convent by her cheap brother is very compelling. Yet as a reader I didn't really connect with either of them, because there is a distance that exists from the way the story is told. These two characters, who ought to be the heart of the story, get lost in the shuffle of all the other characters who vied for space on the stage. At one point, I found myself thinking, "What a waste of a wonderful character!" I would have loved to get to know Chiara (the unwilling novice) more intimately, to have been able to get inside her head and feel what it was like to think you are trapped inside this stifling, limited life when there is this attractive and interesting young man in the friary next door who doesn't seem to be any more committed to the religious life than you are. OK, I'll admit my prejudices; I'm a sucker for character-driven stories. This book is more of a plot-driven story. But even that aspect of the book breaks the good writing rules.

3) The plot should be logical and reasonable; it should never make the reader say, "WHAAAAAT????" I don't want to give away plot points. I'll just say that the entire story was built around a series of murders and the effort to find who was committing the murders - sort of a historical thriller. Except it wasn't that thrilling. The two characters who were under suspicion from everyone else in the book - the young nobleman and his mentor at the friary - obviously are not the people who committed the murders. There is no suspense that maybe these guys we like are not who they seem to be, that they are hiding something from us. There aren't even good clues that we as readers can put together to have the story as a "whodunit." About three-fourths of the way through, there is a single sentence that tells who committed the first murder, clearing the young nobleman. The other series of murders are solved in the last couple of chapters, when the young nobleman and his mentor suddenly realize (two dangerous words for good writing) who has committed the crimes. And the culprit is a minor character who has made maybe four appearances in the book otherwise. Just disappointing.

The romance plot is not much better. We know the young nobleman and the unwilling novice will end up together, and they do. But it really stretches the imagination that he would ask her to marry him and become his baronessa when they really haven't talked to each other all that much, constrained as they are by the separation between the friars and the nuns. The mentor and his former lover get together too, even though it requires him to give up his religious vows - and he's given a very convenient "out" to do that.

That leads to the last broken rule:

4) Show, don't tell. Long passages of exposition that tell us how people feel and why they are doing what they do are to be avoided - at least according to everything I've ever read about writing well. There is so much more emotional punch to watching characters act out a scene and listening to their dialogue than having the author/narrator tell us how the characters feel. Take the young novice, for example. Instead of telling us that she thinks the young nobleman is attractive, it would be so much more effective in terms of the story's impact to tell us she feels jittery when he's around, that she can see him from the corner of her eye past her white veil even when she's not supposed to be looking, that her heart races each time he speaks. Don't tell us she's attracted to him; give us the symptoms and let us figure it out. That's a lot more fun for a reader, in my opinion. Again, I think this problem relates to the use of too many viewpoint characters (that third-person omniscient viewpoint) and the fact that book is plot-driven; when trying to juggle so many people, it's hard to slow down and let us watch the story develop. It's easier to just tell us what's happening and move the story along.

All that leads me back to my frustrated question. How did this book get published? The rules I've given above are staples on the blogs of agents who are telling people how to improve their writing to increase their chances of catching someone's eye. If those rules were applied consistently, I honestly don't see how this book made it out of the slush pile. The only thing I can give as a possible reason is that the book cover says, right under the author's name, "Author of the STRAVAGANZA series." Hmmmmm.....I haven't read that series, but from what I understand by reading descriptions of it, it is a fantasy series with a really intriguing hook - a 21st-century boy with cancer is magically transported to a world similar to 16th-century Venice, where he is not ill and becomes involved in a struggle between good and evil. Sounds like it had some success and popularity. I bet The Falconer's Knot was never even in a slush pile. Since the Stravagnza series was catchy enough to get someone's eye, Mary Hoffman had her "in" -- and no one was holding her to the same standards for later works.

I'm beginning to think being published is just a crap shoot. Sometimes it's about good writing; sometimes it's about a catchy idea; sometimes it's about something that will sell; sometimes it's about something that will sell a lot. But good writing is not necessarily a prerequisite, no matter what the agent blogs say.

The Perilous Gard

(I've decided to cut down on my number of blogs in the hopes that I will be more faithful in maintaining only two. This is a post from a blog I had set up to try to get my kids to write reviews - pretty much a failed effort! They love to read, but they don't seem to have inherited their mom's compulsion to write about what they read...)


Finding this book was one of those happy accidents that happen from time to time in my reading adventures. The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope brings together several factors that I enjoy - historical fiction, mythology and mystery, and romance. The story is set in Tudor England, in the last months of Queen Mary's reign. Katherine Sutton, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth, is exiled by the queen to a mysterious, isolated castle where she quickly notices that something weird is going on. She is especially intrigued by the handsome and aloof brother (Christopher) of the castle's owner, and her curiosity and infatuation with him (though she would never call it that) soon lead her into a dangerous encounter with the People of the Hill (who are faithful followers of the ancient, pre-Christian religion of the British Isles). She fights to save Christopher from being used as a human sacrifice in a religious ritual, with echoes of the Ballad of Tam Lin.

I liked Kate. When she finally gets the chance to step out of the shadow of her "perfect" sister, she develops into a strong and resourceful young woman who refuses to give up in her efforts to save Christopher. But when her sister re-enters the picture, Kate nearly slips back into the shadows before Christopher saves her, in turn. I liked the way the relationship between Kate and Christopher developed; for most of their "courtship," they can't even see each other and have nothing but talk to sustain them. I actually thought I might be imagining the "romance" angle of the story at first, but no -- the story ended in a satisfying, if rather predictable, way.

My favorite relationship in the book, though, is between Kate and the Lady in the Green (the leader of the Folk). Neither of them trusts the other, and yet they learn to have a degree of respect for each other - at least Kate does, which I think makes her the bigger person.

Teen readers today may be put off by the sort of stiff and old-fashioned writing style. I was, myself, at first. But as I read further into the book, I realized the writing style reflects Kate's personality - matter-of-fact and rational. That was just one more reason to like this book.

Disappointment Is Even More Bitter When Promise Is Great...

Did you ever have a package for your birthday or Christmas that looked and sounded like the most fantastic gift ever? You just knew it was Just What You Always Wanted. You quivered with the anticipation of the moment you would be able to pry open the lid of the box and behold the wonderful gift. When the time finally came, you held the gift in your hands for a moment before opening it, enjoying that last bit of anticipation before you opened the box and discovered......socks. Or something like socks, servicable and entirely practical.

That's just how I felt shortly after reading the first couple of chapters of Red Moon at Sharpsburg by Rosemary Wells. It's been a long time since I've had the chance to read any historical fiction for young adults, especially historical fiction about American history. I picked up this book at a school book fair, but had other reading obligations that kept me from being able to read Wells' book until recently. It was with great anticipation that I opened the book and read the first page.

The first chapter was fine, and in fact, it set up a nice mystery for the rest of the book: "All else that followed during the war came of those three promises, two kept and one broken, made the week before I was born." But beginning with the second chapter, Wells shifted to using the present tense ("When you first see me, it is July 30, 1861."), and I felt a little itch of irritation start in the back of my mind. I really dislike present-tense narratives. Really dislike. In my opinion, present tense gives a book the tone of a book written for very young children. That tone simply wasn't appropriate for the mature ideas and events with which India has to wrestle in this book.

That brings me to another problem: the character of India was inconsistent. Some of the time, she is this tough, confident girl who holds the family together when her father is off in the war. Other times, she seemed to have more in common with my 10-year-old daughter, carrying a doll around. (Actually, even my 10-year-old daughter doesn't carry a doll around anymore.)

Actually, the characters in this book all seemed to have problems of development and consistency. To tell the truth, there was no one in the book I came to care about. There was no one that I identified with and was pulling for. They all seemed sort of like paper dolls acting out a story, but with no emotional depth - when the story was rife with opportunity for emotion! For example, India falls in love (I guess) with her tutor, Emory Trimble. There are scenes in which they are working together on science experiments and recording data, but I don't really see that they are coming to have any feelings for each other until Wells has India tell us they do. Here is the description of their first kiss: "Emory's kiss stays for only the drawing in and letting out of a single breath, but it is warm and steady, as I have pictured it so many times when no one can read my unchaste thoughts." And that's it. I'd like to get to feel that moment. That was my biggest disappointment - that I wasn't able to immerse myself into the characters and their lives.

Wells does have some nice historical details included in the book, and the plot has some interesting twists. Wells also tried to "open our eyes" to the poor medical practices in the Civil War and to the very circumscribed role of women of that time. Actually, I thought she was rather heavy-handed in doing that for both issues. I might write some more about that in a different post.

I'm not sorry I read the book. I'm just really disappointed that it fell so far short of its potential. I'm sorry that it is probably one of those books that I will forget rather quickly, stuck in the "sock drawer" of my mind.

Not What I Was Expecting....

Somehow I got it in my head that The Princess Academy by Shannon Hale was the basis for that Disney movie about an ordinary girl (Anne Hathaway, I think?) who is told she's a princess and taken away to learn how to be one. From what I could tell from the previews, Anne has all the usual lessons in deportment and ballroom dancing, and she ends up meeting the prince of her dreams.

Well, I was wrong.

The Princess Academy, indeed, does involve an ordinary girl who is taken away from her home to learn to be a princess. And Miri does study Conversation and Dancing in order to be ready for the ball when the prince will choose his future bride. But The Princess Academy teaches Miri more than these typical "girly" things; she also studies Commerce and Diplomacy, two subjects that she puts to good use to improve the lifestyle of her village. I really appreciated that Shannon Hale had her heroine (who is a very sympathetic and appealing character) break away from the "princess" stereotype that little girls are normally fed by popular culture. Oh, sure, Miri is fascinated by the beautiful dress the academy princess (the top student) will get to wear at the ball, and she also has a love interest, so the break from the stereotype is not a clean one. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not one of those feminists who think girls should reject all things feminine in order to avoid exploitation. But what I like is that Miri goes beyond the limits of the stereotype to use skills that girls often aren't encouraged to develop.

My favorite example was when Miri and the other girls use Diplomacy to regain entrance to the academy after they ran away to attend their village's festival. Instead of pouting their way back in, or promising they would never do such a thing again, the girls (led by Miri) bargain with the head of the academy by pointing out her unsatisfactory behavior, by admitting their own wrong, and by setting terms for settlement of the disagreement. All this was done in a respectful, assertive manner. What a great, empowering model for young girls!

I also liked the ingenuity Miri shows in figuring out the "quarry speech" of the village, as well as her bravery and unselfishness at the story's climax. She sounds too good to be true, doesn't she? But Hale manages to make Miri a real and believable character instead of a cardboard cutout of perfection. Normally, I don't push "princess" stories on my daughter; if she discovers them on her own, I don't forbid them, either. However, The Princess Academy is a princess story I am more than happy for her to read.

No Light Confection, This

One of the dangers of living in an "advanced society" is a degree of arrogance toward those who came before. I recently read a little novel about the Great Plague of 1665 in London, and I couldn't keep from wondering how we in the 21st century would react if we were faced with circumstances similar to what the Londoners faced. I have a hunch that, regardless of how "advanced" we think we are, people would react in much the same way.

The novel was At the Sign of the Sugared Plum by Mary Hooper. It's a simple, short book for relatively young readers, but I found it to be really thought-provoking. The main character, Hannah, is a young girl who is coming from the country to live in London and work in her sister Sarah's sweetmeat shop (that's a candy shop, if you find it as confusing at first as I did). Hannah is excited about the prospect of living in the big city, and her top priorities are catching up on the city fashions and finding a sweetheart. Unfortunately for Hannah, she's come to London just as the plague has -- shortly after her arrival, the Bills of Mortality are announcing the number of deaths in St. Giles' parish has doubled during the week. Then the deaths begin in other parishes, then a neighbor's house is shut up for plague, then the Bills of Mortality begin to number in the thousands each week. Hannah's obsession with fashion is forgotten as she observes piles of bodies carelessly dumped into mass graves. Hooper does a fine job of moving Hannah's character through a growing awareness of the seriousness of the times she's living in.

One reason I liked the book so much was because it was so rich in historical detail. I've read other stories in which the plague had a role, but none of them ever brought home to me the way Hooper's book did the reality of what it must have been like to live during those times. The people of London were faced with an overwhelming crisis over which they seemingly had no control, and I find it fascinating to learn about how they reacted to that crisis. They had no idea what was causing the plague or how it was moving from one person to another; as a result, a hearty market for "plague preventatives" developed. Knowing what we know now, some of the things people tried to do to avoid plague infection were laughable -- carrying a handful of flowers to sniff, smoking heavily, taking specific herbal potions made to match up with their birth sign. Other things they did are horrifying, such as forcibly barricading an entire family into their home for forty days when a single member fell ill with plague, or killing virtually all the cats and dogs in the city. I also think it's interesting to look at the "civic government" side of the issue. Can you imagine being a city official who has to figure out how to dispose of 7,000 bodies in a single week, knowing next week there may be 10,000?

All that brings me back to my original statement. We look back on how seventeenth-century Londoners responded to the crisis of their times, and with the superior knowledge of history on our side, we can laugh at the ineffectiveness of their plague preventatives or condemn their practice of quarantining victims for its role in increasing the number of deaths. But I wonder if we would fare any better if we were faced with our own crisis, and I'm afraid the answer would be probably not. Human nature being what it is, we would probably respond with the same type of irrational fear.

We do have the advantage now of understanding germs and how disease is spread; but consider the descriptions of a possible outbreak of Ebola or bird flu. We may be able to understand that the disease is caused by a virus and that it's spread by contact with air-borne particles, but would that keep us from reacting with fear if or when we came in contact with someone who was ill? In one sad scene in the book, a child of one of Hannah's neighbors has died of plague, meaning the whole family will not only have to deal with grief but with being locked up. People from the neighborhood gather around to watch the scene when the baby's body is taken out of the house, but Hannah notices no one goes forward to comfort the distraught mother or to take care of the two little boys who are left. Would we be any different today? Or would we be like the "quality" folk of London, who got their Certificates of Health and got as far away from the city as they possibly could?

I don't mean to say that I believe everyone is so callused to the suffering of others. Actually, Hooper does a good job in showing Hannah dealing with the conflict of knowing what others need and wanting to do something to help, but fearing for her own safety so much that she can't make herself do what she knows need to be done. That's humanity, I think. In the end, Hannah and Sarah do take a big risk to do something to help someone else (although, of course, they get a big benefit as well). I like to think that "our better angels" will come out -- at least sometimes. Maybe the bigger the crisis, the more extreme the conflict in our human nature appears - there is a mighty pull for self-preservation, but maybe it will be balanced by noble regard for the needs of others and courage to risk personal danger.

Did I ever say I love historical fiction?

How Far Am I Willing to Suspend My Disbelief?

The good news is - I finally broke out of my slump! My kids were at a skating party for a friend's birthday, and I was totally unsociable. I read the whole time. Part of that is because I didn't know the other kids' parents, but the main reason is I was just so caught up in the story -- Pirates! by Celia Rees. It was a gripping adventure with a deliciously creepy villain and a honorable, faithful love interest. There was enough history to satisfy the historical fiction nerd in me. But........

As I thought about the story the next day, I saw some places where the author seems to have expected me to just "go with it" and not think too much. Now, I learned in "Introduction to Literature" as a college freshman that a part of engaging a story is being willing to suspend your disbelief. After all, a story is NOT life, and some things have to be manipulated to make it work as a story. But I felt this particular story asked me to give the author a little more liberty than I really should have had to.

(There are probably some spoilers below)

I had no problem suspending reality to "believe" the ruby necklace had some kind of magical link that allowed the Brazilian to track Nancy for more than a year. Actually, I was quite satisfied with the author's explanation for why he bothered to do that when most men would just cut their losses and find some other 16-year-old to marry. Being so creepy, the Brazilian would of course be driven by a desire for revenge. And I really liked the imagery of the necklace as a collar or choke-chain on Nancy. It was the perfect metaphor for what her life with the Brazilian would be like.

However, I found the romance with William unrealistic. I know they grew up together, but I couldn't see how they would have developed a devotion to each other that would lead them to pledge undying romantic love for each other. I think part of my problem with it was that William was only 12 and Nancy was only 10 when his father sent him to sea. I know people matured faster in those days than these, but I don't see children of those ages being that aware of choosing a mate. Yes, Nancy saw William two other times after he had started his career as a sailor, but would that really be enough to build a commitment that would last through the impossible circumstances they are up against? Wouldn't William, especially, just consign Nancy to the realms of memory and go on to marry some other respectable young woman? It all just seemed a little too easy -- William was always faithful. That relationship just didn't get much development.

I'm sure the reason it didn't is because this story wasn't really about Nancy's love for William; it was about Nancy's relationship with Minerva, her mulatto half-sister. And I'm ok with that. It was actually sort of refreshing to have something other than a romantic relationship as the major plot line. But that leads me to another idea that I couldn't quite buy. Minerva is supposed to be younger than Nancy. How much younger is never really specified. But we know that Nancy's father left shortly after she was born to go to his plantation in Jamaica. Even if we assume that he almost immediately started his affair with Minerva's mother, that means Minerva would be at least a year younger than Nancy. That means she's 14 or 15 during the events of the story. The problem I have with this is that Minerva never fails to be poised or brave or to know exactly what needs to be done. Ok, maybe it's because she's been a slave and she had to develop those qualities to survive, and maybe it's because being a Dahomey woman warrior is in her blood -- but it just seemed unrealistic to me.

But the thing that bothered me most was something really small (aren't those always the worst?!!). When Nancy shoots the overseer, she is still wearing the dress she wore at the dinner party at the Brazilian's house. The author makes a point of telling us about the amount of blood and other matter that was scattered around the room after the shot. The slaves go in and dispose of the body and clean everything up so Nancy and Minerva can get away. But then at the climax of the book when the Brazilian has caught up with them -- he has the same dress for her to wear, just like he's recreating the moment more than a year ago. WAIT!!!! Number 1, that dress would have been ruined by blood spray, etc. from the gunshot. Number 2, the slaves would have burned it or something to get rid of any evidence. There's no way that I can believe that the dress would have been in any condition to be used in the Brazilian's little revenge fantasy.

All that said, I still enjoyed the book. It was a great "escape" novel, and it made me think about what life must have been like for slaves and women (completely under the power of men) during that time. (Maybe I'll write about that another time.) And it got me out of the slump -- I've already started on my next book.