MOAR BOOKS

[liri]

This class has both assigned books (often not to my taste, and usually about guys) and the expectation we pick a bunch of books of our own. I'm editing to note which ones I picked out. If not otherwise tagged, it was required.

Midnighters: The Secret Hour (my choice) - This book is set, hilariously, in Bixby, Oklahoma. Bixby is a real place, not far from Tulsa... apparently it was selected for its location in latitude/longitude. I don't know if people who are from real cities can understand how peculiar familiar names in the setting can be for someone from a place like Oklahoma, which ordinarily people don't notice unless one of its senators is being an asswipe in public again. And in Bixby, of all places. There are some missteps that made me laugh and laugh - one girl excitedly tells another that the party they're attending will have boys from Broken Arrow, because BA is such a cosmopolitan, exotic place (hint - it's not. It's where my parents live. And the locals always refer to it as BA. Four syllables just take too long, I guess.) But in general, it's not so far off that it took me out of the story, and my inner twelve-year-old, who used to feel left out that exciting things only happened to fictional kids in New York or various parts of the UK, was thrilled to have a book set in Oklahoma. Which is not even about the Dust Bowl! Omg!

Oh, yeah, plot and stuff. A group of kids in Bixby who were born on the stroke of midnight have access to a secret hour at midnight when time freezes for everyone except them and the darklings, who are naturally monsters. Normally this is only a mild level of peril, but the darklings get pretty aggressive about the new girl in town.... It's very much the first part of a trilogy, but it's a good starter volume, and the use of 13-letter words as magic makes for an interesting gimmick.

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (my choice) - Okay, so I picked it up because I (rarely) write fanfic about an amnesiac so I thought I'd check out what another writer doing first-person amnesia would write. Answer: An oddly disjointed high school romance, which at least helped me to process that common plot point in anime where an amnesiac will lose the memory of everything that happened post-amnesia after regaining pre-amnesia memories; it makes more sense if you think of it as "15+ years tends to overpower a few months' worth of memories," though I still don't like what Scrapped Princess did with that. This book didn't actually have her lose her memories from the amnesiac period, at least.

Code Orange (my choice) - A deeply stupid suspense novel about a kid who finds a couple of old smallpox scabs in an envelope in an old book, handles them (because I know when I see old scabs of indeterminate source, my first thought is not "eww!" but "OMG MUST TOUCH") and then when he determines that they're from smallpox - "variola major" was written on the envelope - he doesn't bother to tell his parents, or a family doctor, he starts emailing random people from the internet. So he gets abducted by terrorists. I hate to blame the victim, even fictionally, but the protagonist is TOO STUPID TO LIVE.

King of the Mild Frontier - Meandering memoir of YA novelist Chris Crutcher's childhood and adolescence. The bitter hatred I'd later develop towards Chinese Handcuffs casts a pall over this, which I didn't really care for anyway.

The Loud Silence of Francine Green (my choice) - It must be weird to write historical fiction about the period when you were an actual kid - not as a memoir but as historical fiction. Set in 1949-1950, a well-behaved girl makes friends with a classmate who's determinedly non-conformist and whose father is a screenwriter. While the Hollywood blacklist is getting underway. To be honest, I thought the friend, Sophie, was annoying, but I love Karen Cushman's writing.

Fever 1793 (my choice) - Set during a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia; Laurie Halse Anderson is a very good writer and I'm pleased that this is apparently not her only historical fiction. She also, luckily, picked a time when medical care was such that a reasonable person could argue against having a sick person bled (some doctors did, some didn't) - bleeding is a pet peeve of mine in historical fiction. More on that later. Added bonus points for Anderson - I always like the acknowledgment that women in certain circumstances did have a measure of independence. A widow can run a coffeehouse, and if her only child is a daughter, the daughter can inherit it. The idea that women should only do domestic work is a Victorian (and 1950s US) construct that was only workable for an economically privileged minority of people. "Traditional gender roles" are not all that traditional! It's an interesting element of history that in high school you only tend to get as a token mention (and how many people take upper-division history classes voluntarily, if at all?) and I hope someday I'll be in a position to shove novels into kids' hands to remedy that.

Chinese Handcuffs - I hate this book so much it will get a separate entry. I haven't thrown a book since I was in tenth grade and tried to feed For Whom the Bell Tolls to the family dog. I would not feed this book to any innocent creature. HATE.

Catherine, Called Birdy (my choice) - I picked this book because I already knew I loved it. First point of awesome: it's a fictional diary that doesn't record long stretches of dialog, have the writer breaking off for cliffhangers, or otherwise break the diary device. Second: Medieval fiction needs more acknowledgment that people had fleas and almost never bathed. Third: Historical fiction writers have a very hard time when it comes to medical beliefs and knowledge, so having the narrator's father getting bled for a toothache and having her not think this is useless is refreshing, as is her sincere belief that goat or dog dung is medicinal. Fourth: It's funny.

At the Sign of the Star (my choice) - More historical fiction with a female protagonist HUZZAH! Not required reading, of course. Too few boys. Main character Meg is the daughter and sole heir of a bookseller, at a time (Restoration England) when booksellers were also publishers. Her father's remarriage is as much an economic concern to her - if he has more children, her inheritance of the business itself is kaput and her dowry shrinks - as it is personal, though she doesn't get along with her stepmother on that level either. The stepmother is most likely younger than me, and I felt for the poor woman - although Meg's a first-person narrator, and sympathetic, it's clear to the reader that she's being a brat. The writer is manifestly a feminist (one of her earlier books was a feminist walking tour of London) and I suspect part of her motivation in setting the book when she did was that Aphra Behn was being published at that time. This is a laudable motivation. She's very good on the "modern characters in period dress" front, meaning she doesn't do that; although Meg is outspoken and independent-minded, when she reads a book on proper decorum she takes it seriously instead of shaking it off.

What Happened to Cass McBride? - After a high school student kills himself, his older brother abducts the girl who rejected him, buries her alive, and harangues her about driving his brother to suicide. The brothers had a miserable homelife with an emotionally abusive mother; the younger boy tried to ask out a popular girl, who turned him down politely, then wrote a note to her friend boggling that he didn't realize she's out of his league. He found the note, then killed himself. The girl has to try to get to her abductor in hopes of making him let her out. Suspense, but when you pair it with the overwhelmingly male reading list for this semester, the gender issues get really kind of icky. One of the few books where a girl gets a major voice, and she spends most of it buried alive for the crime of being a bit thoughtless and self-absorbed.

The Land (my choice) - The protagonist, son of a white former slaveowner and a former slave, learns in the years immediately following the civil war that even his own father can't treat him equally. His great ambition is to own land like his father did, which means that many later chapters of the book expound at great, stultifying length on his efforts to secure financing, and on white people dicking him over on financing, and I understand the point - look, this is how racism works, it's not just people in white hoods - and that's a good, educational point, but FICTION ABOUT MORTGAGES, omg. This is also based heavily on the author's family history, and I suspect a lot of the filler consists of family stories that are way more interesting (a) to the family, and (b) when they're told orally.

Wolf by the Ears (my choice) - Ambitious but not entirely successful story told from the point of view of Sally Hemings' daughter. And, allegedly, Thomas Jefferson's.

I Am the Cheese - Robert Cormier's brain is a very, very depressing place. Intricately structured, though the only way to explain the intricate structure is to spoil the novel, if for some reason you want to read a very depressing, bleak novel. At least it's a mind-fuck rather than a straightforward bludgeon of despair, which is the best way of describing The Chocolate War.

Sunshine (my choice) - Not even YA, but I wish it was - I'd like to offer it to kids as an anti-Twilight. Remember my notorious description of Twelve Kingdoms as "Fushigi Yuugi with balls?" This is Twilight with balls. I haven't read as much Robin McKinley as I should. I'm a complete sucker for magic as a small part of everyday life (the main reason I keep reading Sean Stewart novels, I think) and she seems to like that too; I know it was also present in Spindle's End.

True and Faithful Narrative (my choice) - The sequel to At the Sign of the Star. Meg, at 16, is starting to think she should marry before her dowry gets even smaller, because her stepmom keeps having kids. She's also trying to write, against her father's opposition, and has two potential suitors; one her best friend's brother, the other her father's apprentice.

Hole in My Life - I think Jack Gantos is a novelist, but we weren't assigned any of his novels, just this memoir of the path he took from high school to drug-smuggling to a year in prison. As sort of a capper to the machismo-fest of our other required reading this semester, he takes on a voyage smuggling hash because he's read a lot of Jack Kerouac and Hemingway and Jack London and thinks he needs to have some big adventurous manly experience before he can really be a writer. Which gets him incarcerated. Hooray for the Y chromosome, because it never makes people do stupid things at all! Let's read more books about it! My head hurts.

I have one more book about a teenage boy doing something DEEPLY DEEPLY STUPID (this time, setting himself on fire) and ogling women, and then I can ritually cleanse myself and start reading the OMG I CAN INCLUDE THE TWELVE KINGDOMS NOVELS IN MY COLLECTION FOR THIS CLASS. That sentence was going to end with something about reading the Westmark books and, if I can find it, Howl's Moving Castle, but I glanced at my bookshelf and inspiration struck. YAY!


The "Tolkien shall not defeat me!" project is postponed till classes are done. And until I get over the plague I think I'm in the process of catching from teh boyfriend.

Comments

[mergle.livejournal.com]

Other good pseudo-historical novels that address the issue of fleas and lice are Gordon Dickson's Dragon Knight series and the second and third book of a trilogy by Wrede and Stevemer. Okay, that sounded like I thought you only liked Catherine, Called Birdy for the fleas. But the Dragon Knight series was my eight grade lesson on "there's more to medieval times than quaffing ale and swordfights."

The Chocolate War and I am the Cheese were two YA 'classics' that appeared on most recommended reading lists when I was in high school. I never read them. I guess I'm not missing much?

On a related note, I've heard that Twilight is reasonably popular amongst Mormon teenage girls.

[lirillith.livejournal.com]

By not reading Cormier you are only missing intense despair and suffering.

The Mormon Twilight thing isn't entirely surprising. As some people on a reading list where I, um, lurk, have pointed out, it's all very chaste - they only barely kiss, Vampire Tamahome outright refuses to have sex with her (for Man-of-Steel-Woman-of-Kleenex reasoning rather than for moral reasons) and later they decide to only have sex after marriage, I don't know why. (I read spoilers, because I didn't want to let trainwreck curiosity force me to read the rest of the series.)