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liri
OH HAY GUYS YOU KNOW WHAT THIS SEMESTER WAS MISSING? A BOOK ABOUT ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS FROM THE ABUSER'S POV! LET'S REMEDY THAT FORTHWITH!
Breathing Underwater - AAAAAAAAGH. WHAT THE GODDAMN HELL IS NEXT, YA FICTION? OH THAT'S RIGHT, THE ROBERT CORMIER BOOK ABOUT THE SERIAL KILLER IS STILL OUT THERE, I GUESS THAT ANSWERS MY QUESTION. Yes, this is the book about an abusive boyfriend, narrated by the abusive boyfriend. Whose own father is abusive, blah blah cycle of abuse blah. Why the HELL could the inspiring narrative about overcoming abuse not be from the point of view of the girl who gets the fuck away from him? Except that this particular girl gets away from him and hooks up with a jackass who gloats to the narrator (who beat her up, remember) about sleeping with her. QUESTION YOUR SEXUALITY, ABUSED GIRL, LESBIANISM MAY BE YOUR ONLY HOPE FOR SOME MODICUM OF HAPPINESS IN CONTEMPORARY YA ISSUE FICTION. QUESTION IT A LOT.
The Burn Journals - A memoir. I don't think I like memoirs. In this one, the writer attempted commit suicide at 14 by setting himself on fire. His family was, apparently, filthy stinking rich, so his recovery involved the finest medical care and occasional schmoozing with celebrities. The book is written in tight first-person - no retrospective, more or less stream-of-consciousness... in the mind of a depressed, hostile, and eventually, once he's recovered a bit, extremely horny fourteen-year-old boy. Who will not shut the fuck up about boobs. What's possibly most galling to me, aside from all the goddamn boobs, and the FIRST-PERSON STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS MASTURBATION SCENE, is that the kid's obviously severely depressed, but at no point does he actually deal with the depression - he's hostile and uncooperative with therapists, and generally insists that there is nothing wrong with him, and obviously he's not going to try to kill himself again because the last attempt sucked so much. DEPRESSION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
If it weren't for the fact that probably three-quarters of the people I have ever known were depressed at some point in their teen years to varying degrees of severity, I wouldn't feel quite so strongly about the portrayal of depression in YA books, but, well, three-quarters of the people I know were depressed in their teen years and the others have not revealed anything one way or the other. Sometimes didactic lit is a good thing, and removing the stigma from depression so kids don't have to feel like it's admitting they're crazy if they seek help for it is not just a good thing, it's fucking necessary. Sometimes you get lucky and it goes away after a while, but not always. If ANYONE should know how important that is you would think it would be someone who once set himself on fire on purpose.
Westmark - See, it's not male protagonists I hate, it's male protagonists who will not shut up about their penises. We all know I love this series. The paperbacks I own have really homely covers - I miss the more stylized covers from the library copies I read way back when - and a short note on the books' background printed on the inside of the back cover. Alexander talks about the conflict of good vs. good, rather than evil, which goes a long way toward explaining why so many Suikoden players love these books (or is it just me and Merc? I always got the impression there were a bunch of us...)
Rodzina - Karen Cushman! *fangirl squeal* Novel about a young Polish girl stuck on an orphan train and determined to scare off any adoptive parents she thinks will use her as slave labor. Are orphan trains a well-known historical phenomenon to people who didn't spend their early years devouring any book that held out an offer of sunbonnets within its pages? I'm not sure I can actually call this YA, but I read it and I liked it.
Howl's Moving Castle - Mmmm, well-written, witty, puzzle-plot fantasy with John Donne allusions and an awesome love story with bickering and weed killer and actual female characters who do things and have brains and thoughts and stuff, and NO ABUSE OR MASTURBATION OR RAPE OR DEPRESSION OR CATS AND DOGS BEING KILLED OR PEOPLE BEING BURIED ALIVE OR SETTING THEMSELVES ON FIRE OR LUSTING AFTER VAMPIRES OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.
The Kestrel - All that capslocked stuff HMC doesn't have? This book... er, actually, rape is sort of there, as the unspoken companion to pillaging, but it's not right out there in the open and it totally flew over my head when I read this as a kid. Anyhow, it doesn't have the other things! It just has the horrors of war, all over the place, but not wallowed in.
Notes From the Midnight Driver - A teenage boy, angry about his parents's divorce - his dad had an affair with his third-grade teacher, which REALLY bugs him, and his mother has started dating again - decides to get drunk and drive over to his dad's house for a confrontation. He knows nothing about drinking OR driving, however, and ends up tearing up a neighbor's yard and decapitating her lawn gnome. He's sentenced to community service at a nursing home, where he's assigned to an elderly hellion - as he describes the situation a month or so into it, "at least while I'm playing the guitar, Mr. Lewis is not mocking me, swindling me, or spilling icy beverages on my innocent flesh." I liked this one; there was a hint of trying-too-hard to the snarky tone at the beginning, but I suspect that was deliberate, and I like the fact that (a) it's got romance from a teenage boy's POV that is not all "PENIS PENIS PENIS" all the time, and (b) it's another of those books that uses humor both to preempt any schmaltz from Life Lessons and to set you up for it to rip out your heart and the protagonist's. Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Doomsday Book are still the only two novels that have made me bawl openly, but this one got me sniffly.
Truthfully, Breathing Underwater was one of the last books read for the semester, but I stuck it right after the cut because it was the main source of my frothing. Burn Journals pissed me off, but not to the point where I had to hit myself in the head repeatedly and kept throwing the book on the floor and losing my place.
I am now done with the required reading! Any further fiction rants are entirely self-inflicted!
Breathing Underwater - AAAAAAAAGH. WHAT THE GODDAMN HELL IS NEXT, YA FICTION? OH THAT'S RIGHT, THE ROBERT CORMIER BOOK ABOUT THE SERIAL KILLER IS STILL OUT THERE, I GUESS THAT ANSWERS MY QUESTION. Yes, this is the book about an abusive boyfriend, narrated by the abusive boyfriend. Whose own father is abusive, blah blah cycle of abuse blah. Why the HELL could the inspiring narrative about overcoming abuse not be from the point of view of the girl who gets the fuck away from him? Except that this particular girl gets away from him and hooks up with a jackass who gloats to the narrator (who beat her up, remember) about sleeping with her. QUESTION YOUR SEXUALITY, ABUSED GIRL, LESBIANISM MAY BE YOUR ONLY HOPE FOR SOME MODICUM OF HAPPINESS IN CONTEMPORARY YA ISSUE FICTION. QUESTION IT A LOT.
The Burn Journals - A memoir. I don't think I like memoirs. In this one, the writer attempted commit suicide at 14 by setting himself on fire. His family was, apparently, filthy stinking rich, so his recovery involved the finest medical care and occasional schmoozing with celebrities. The book is written in tight first-person - no retrospective, more or less stream-of-consciousness... in the mind of a depressed, hostile, and eventually, once he's recovered a bit, extremely horny fourteen-year-old boy. Who will not shut the fuck up about boobs. What's possibly most galling to me, aside from all the goddamn boobs, and the FIRST-PERSON STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS MASTURBATION SCENE, is that the kid's obviously severely depressed, but at no point does he actually deal with the depression - he's hostile and uncooperative with therapists, and generally insists that there is nothing wrong with him, and obviously he's not going to try to kill himself again because the last attempt sucked so much. DEPRESSION DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!
If it weren't for the fact that probably three-quarters of the people I have ever known were depressed at some point in their teen years to varying degrees of severity, I wouldn't feel quite so strongly about the portrayal of depression in YA books, but, well, three-quarters of the people I know were depressed in their teen years and the others have not revealed anything one way or the other. Sometimes didactic lit is a good thing, and removing the stigma from depression so kids don't have to feel like it's admitting they're crazy if they seek help for it is not just a good thing, it's fucking necessary. Sometimes you get lucky and it goes away after a while, but not always. If ANYONE should know how important that is you would think it would be someone who once set himself on fire on purpose.
Westmark - See, it's not male protagonists I hate, it's male protagonists who will not shut up about their penises. We all know I love this series. The paperbacks I own have really homely covers - I miss the more stylized covers from the library copies I read way back when - and a short note on the books' background printed on the inside of the back cover. Alexander talks about the conflict of good vs. good, rather than evil, which goes a long way toward explaining why so many Suikoden players love these books (or is it just me and Merc? I always got the impression there were a bunch of us...)
Rodzina - Karen Cushman! *fangirl squeal* Novel about a young Polish girl stuck on an orphan train and determined to scare off any adoptive parents she thinks will use her as slave labor. Are orphan trains a well-known historical phenomenon to people who didn't spend their early years devouring any book that held out an offer of sunbonnets within its pages? I'm not sure I can actually call this YA, but I read it and I liked it.
Howl's Moving Castle - Mmmm, well-written, witty, puzzle-plot fantasy with John Donne allusions and an awesome love story with bickering and weed killer and actual female characters who do things and have brains and thoughts and stuff, and NO ABUSE OR MASTURBATION OR RAPE OR DEPRESSION OR CATS AND DOGS BEING KILLED OR PEOPLE BEING BURIED ALIVE OR SETTING THEMSELVES ON FIRE OR LUSTING AFTER VAMPIRES OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.
The Kestrel - All that capslocked stuff HMC doesn't have? This book... er, actually, rape is sort of there, as the unspoken companion to pillaging, but it's not right out there in the open and it totally flew over my head when I read this as a kid. Anyhow, it doesn't have the other things! It just has the horrors of war, all over the place, but not wallowed in.
Notes From the Midnight Driver - A teenage boy, angry about his parents's divorce - his dad had an affair with his third-grade teacher, which REALLY bugs him, and his mother has started dating again - decides to get drunk and drive over to his dad's house for a confrontation. He knows nothing about drinking OR driving, however, and ends up tearing up a neighbor's yard and decapitating her lawn gnome. He's sentenced to community service at a nursing home, where he's assigned to an elderly hellion - as he describes the situation a month or so into it, "at least while I'm playing the guitar, Mr. Lewis is not mocking me, swindling me, or spilling icy beverages on my innocent flesh." I liked this one; there was a hint of trying-too-hard to the snarky tone at the beginning, but I suspect that was deliberate, and I like the fact that (a) it's got romance from a teenage boy's POV that is not all "PENIS PENIS PENIS" all the time, and (b) it's another of those books that uses humor both to preempt any schmaltz from Life Lessons and to set you up for it to rip out your heart and the protagonist's. Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Doomsday Book are still the only two novels that have made me bawl openly, but this one got me sniffly.
Truthfully, Breathing Underwater was one of the last books read for the semester, but I stuck it right after the cut because it was the main source of my frothing. Burn Journals pissed me off, but not to the point where I had to hit myself in the head repeatedly and kept throwing the book on the floor and losing my place.
I am now done with the required reading! Any further fiction rants are entirely self-inflicted!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-22 09:03 pm (UTC)As for the Westmark/Suikoden connction... my sister is also a Suikoden/Westmark fan. We tried to get Cat to read them, but that hasn't happened yet. Beyond that, I don't know who else has read the Westmark trilogy.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-03 09:56 pm (UTC)