All I want to do is write to you...

The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty         (YA)

                 Cassie, Emily and Lydia are three best friends who go to posh Ashbury in Australia, but their teacher wants to expand their horizons and makes the entire class write letters to the close by but “rough” Brookfield High. Although the girls have low expectations that this experiment can work, Emily and Lydia find that their male pen pals are actually alright people… even if they go to Brookfield. Cassie, however, has already been having a hard time in her personal life, and her pen pal just seems to be making things worse.

                I’m just going to put it out there that I love Jaclyn Moriarty. She writes epistolary novels, with this novel consisting of letters, diary entries and notes left around the house. It really allows the reader to get inside the heads of  the three friends, and also understand the Brookfield boys. Each character has a unique writing style and it helps to create really distinct personalities. I also love how the three girls relate to each other. Sure there are boys and the possibility of romance, but that is not in any way their main focus. They really care about each other, and they try to help each other out any way they can. The secret assignments from the title are a way for Emily and Lydia to distract Cassie from her grief and hopefully cheer her up. The girls are also really funny, especially Lydia who writes the most absurd, hilarious things to her pen pal in the hopes of scaring him off. These girls aren’t perfect by any standard, but that’s the reason why you’d want to be friends with them.

 If you’ve read Feeling Sorry for Cecilia, then Elizabeth makes a quick appearance and you’ll meet Bindy from The Murder of Bindy MacKenzie. My favourite Moriarty is Feeling Sorry for Cecilia, which is about building a new friendship when an old one falls through. I loved that novel because some of the letters from groups like the Association of Teenagers, and the Cold Hard Truth Society, showed how Elizabeth thinks in a funny but honest way. The Year of Secret Assignments is always written by a particular character, which still works but can be less engaging. We know that some thing is going on with Cassie, but since the friends know what's happened, we rarely get any information about it. However, I still love this novel for its humour and its portrayal of friendship.

What will we do to fill the days?

One Day by David Nicholls

                I don’t really like to think about the future too much.  I don’t mind thinking about what I’ll be doing next week, or next year, but I can’t stand to think of what I’ll be doing twenty years down the road. I can’t even picture it. It’s too far away and so much can happen in the meantime. David Nicholls doesn’t have the same squeamishness that I do and he decides have his two main characters imagine their lives in twenty years, and then actually show how their lives ended up twisting and turning.

                Emma and Dexter both went to the University of Edinburgh and on their graduation day they have a quick romantic interlude. Nothing really happens between them because of their own faults and fears and they end up as close friends. The day they meet is St Swithin’s day, July 15^th, and the narrative drops in on them every St Swithin’s day from 1988 to 2007. Life happens, and Emma and Dexter change as time passes. They both grow and regress, fall in love, do good, behave abominably, and all the things that they can do in between.

One Day is really about the way things change, the chances we miss, the importance of love and the difference between our expectations and reality. Since I’m still a student, I really loved the sections on the early and late 20’s in which Emma and Dexter do all the things that scare me about life outside the ivory tower. Emma tries to become an artist, fails and ends up working in a Tex-Mex restaurant for so long that they want to make her the manager. Dexter bums around Europe and Asia on his parent’s money, plans on being known for his work (whatever that will be) and falls into opportunities that Emma can't even imagine for herself.   

What I really loved about this book, was the way that dropping in on the same day every year meant that important moments were missing. There were things I, the reader, wasn’t privy to, that I couldn’t see. It also meant that things were always in the middle of happening. I don’t mean that Nicholls was following the writer’s handbook of beginning in media re , but more that life is always happening, things don’t always have an obvious beginning, and sometimes they don’t even have an obvious end.  Life is full of middles.

Dark doubles

Too Late by Clem Martini
Train Wreck by Malin Lindroth             (YA)           

   

There are some pretty great things about being a library student. Publishers will actually send books to various student groups because they know that the students publish newsletters with book reviews in them - and the people who will read the reviews are actually going to be a position to buy tons of books in a few years. In fact, I got a free copy of this book so that I could write a review for the AQBLA student chapter's newsletter. However, I just couldn't get it out of my mind, even after I wrote the review.

             The book is two completely separate short stories for teens, put in one book that can be flipped so that the other one can be read. These "flip" books are part of a series in which two stories on similar themes are put together. The stories are quite short, about 55 pages each. I would hesitate to call them novellas because the type is so large.

The issue with these two stories, for me, is how stark they both are. The theme that they share is dealing with the consequences of rape and sexual violence. In both cases, the narrator helps perpetrate this violence, even if he or she has also been a victim of it. For example, Too Late is about a boy in a juvenile detention centre for individuals who have committed sexual assault. He has definitely been the victim of his father, but he has to face the fact that he has done the exact same thing to another person. I’ve never seriously thought about people like him, and what opportunities they have afterwards… can they change? What chances do they have? I don’t know.

In my review for the newsletter, I needed to suggest what age range the book is written for. That is where my real problem came in. I really don’t know when it comes to a book like this. It’s a young adult book, but it isn’t for everyone in that age range. It isn’t graphic, but there were enough details to make me feel queasy, and both stories have such ambiguous endings. I know that there are teens out there who need to read books like this, because the right book at the right time can change everything, but I don’t know who they are. I finally ended up recommending it for reluctant readers over age 13, but I'm probably very, very wrong.

Capture your world while you can

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

                Ok, this is a classic for a few reasons.

1)     Cassandra lives in a castle! A run down, drafty castle, but a castle!

2)     Her family is incredibly poor even though her dad wrote Jacob Wrestling, a modernist classic.

3)      Her sister, Rose, begins the novel by saying that she’s so tired of being poor that she’s going to sell herself on the street. She doesn’t end up doing that. She does possibly sell her soul to the devil, though.

4)      It’s set in 1930’s Britain and written in the 40’s, so it has all the lovely and ridiculous details of British life that both charm me, and make me very glad I live in the present day.

5)     There is unrequited love and then there is unrequited love in I Capture the Castle. I think I would need to make a graph or something to show all the connections.

6)     Stephen! He’s incredibly handsome and loves Cassandra and would do anything for her. She doesn’t love him and finds that he has a “rather daft look on his face.”

7)     Cassandra’s stepmother Topaz is an artist’s model who loves to commune with nature in nothing but her rainboots.

8)   It was written by the author of 101 Dalmatians

.                      Looking at the list, you probably are thinking that I have terrible taste, but honestly, Cassandra Mortmain charms me like no one else. She is honest to a fault about herself and her family as she writes in her notebooks and tries to “capture” her family and the castle she lives in. Of course, the story would be incredibly boring (and depressing) if it were only about how poor the Mortmains are, so the narrative really kicks in when the new landlord from America, Simon Cotton, arrives with his brother Neil. Everyone, including Rose, decides that Rose needs to marry one of the two so that the family won’t flounder in poverty forever. As well, it would be great if their father would write a second novel  and not just read mystery novels all the time.

                      With those two goals in mind, Cassandra does what she can to help, and records the consequences of everything. There is a lot of talk about modernism and how music can make you feel, and a few moments of discomfort that always make me squirm with recognition. Of course, there are twists and turns, and even Cassandra finds herself in love.  Not everything ends happily, but that’s life. 

That girl was born for trouble

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart  (Y.A)

                Every so often you get your hands on a book that makes you want to cause some serious trouble. I mean, I now want to organize a group who works in mysterious ways to arrange Dada-esque protests in an attempt to change the social order.  I want to have a secret order at my beck and call, and I don’t want any of its members to realize that they are acting under my orders. I want to be Frankie.

                Not really, though, because Frankie never gets any respect. Everyone, including her adorable new boyfriend, severely underestimates her. She just recently bloomed, so people are falling all over her as if she’s new, but she remembers how she seemed invisible before. She’s tired of only being noticed when she needs to be rescued.  She’s mad that her boyfriend isn’t as interested in her life as she is in his. She’s mad that she’s seen as Matt’s girlfriend and not as a person in her own right and she’s mad that the guys at her boarding school have no idea of their male privilege. However, Frankie has a plan. She’s learned about the panopticon and she is ready to take it on with some tips from the Suicide Club.

                What I really loved about this book was Frankie and her single-minded need to have some power.  It’s hard to be honest about it, but everyone does want some power, some control and it’s rarer to see female characters portrayed as openly desiring it. Frankie just wants what she wants and she is willing to go after it.  As well, the girl has a wicked mind. The pranks she has the Order play are pointed and symbolic and they actually do affect some change into her world, even if the people she is trying to impress don’t realize it. The subtext of the novel indicates that the people who will understand her message best are not those in power, but those who never see power as an option, All in all, I love this lady and her willingness to destroy the cultural hegemony just so people will stop underestimating her.

               I have to agree with the narrator who says, “ And so, another possibility – the possibility I hold out for – is that Frankie Landau-Banks will open the doors she is trying to get through.  And she will grow up to change the world.”

What I like to read...

Technically, I like to read everything. I love science fiction, mysteries, classics, "literature" (whatever that might be) and so much more, but my real love right now is young adult fiction. I just finished a Masters in English, which was full of depressing reads about slavery and disease. I'm not saying that I didn't love it. I did, but it was hard and the only way to make it through was to read children and young adult books, along with some books my mom (but not I) would call trash. So don't worry. I do love the classics, I do love the thinking about higher things, but at the moment books for teens are getting me through life.