A complete and total shock.

I wrote out my top 10 YA books last April when a request came up (maybe on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books?) for Persnickety Snark's Blog. I completely forgot about it until today, when I came upon the top 100 list.

The main reason why I'm shocked? I'm quoted a few times in the posts about the individual books. I think that's what happens when you say that you're a future librarian.

 Anyway, if you love YA then you'll love this list

Also, I really am a future librarian... I'm working on my MLIS and everything.

Sometimes we’re always real same-same

 Sometimes we’re always real same-same by  Mattox Roesch

             There is a huge amount happening in this novel, and I’m not sure that all of it comes together. Cesar, 17 moves from Los Angeles, when his mom decides that she wants to return to where she came from: Unalakleet, Alaska or Unk for short. Cesar really doesn’t want to live in such a small town, where there are no real stores and the only job going is counting fish in the stream. However, his life in LA wasn’t exactly that great.  His brother ran with a gang, but is now in prison for killing two fifteen year-olds,  so Cesar hasn’t seen him for years. His father has left his mom, and doesn’t really seem to care much for Cesar. As well, Cesar has been running with a gang for the past few years, and he’s done something horrific that he doesn’t feel that he can admit to anyone.

            When he gets to Unk, he meets his cousin Go-boy, who has huge reserves of energy and enthusiasm. Go-boy is the kind of guy that you want to know because he cares about everyone and he always tries to make a difference. However, as the novel continues, it becomes apparent that Go-by isn’t the stable presence he appears to be. Go-boy’s step-sister Kiana, a math genius who still keeps on messing up, is a possible love interest for Cesar, but she really seems to hate his guts.

             Go-boy is really interesting because as Cesar starts to build a proper life for himself, Go-boy seems to be falling apart. Go-boy has a strong personal philosophy about how people should behave and how they should be good, but there seems to be something wrong with him. On one hand, he runs for mayor and makes t-shirts for the entire community that say same-same, indicating how much he cares for and loves his town. On the other hand, he starts writing the 100 reasons why he loves Valerie all over town, but she isn’t interested in him anymore. In fact, she’s become scared of him.

            I’ll say it again; there is a huge amount of things happening in this book. First there is Go-boy and the question of his mental health. Then there are the issues within the Eskimo community of Unk (As a Canadian I feel really weird typing Eskimo, but apparently it’s the only word that really covers the two native communities in Alaska).  There aren’t a ton of jobs, and the old jail still exists as a symbol of some of the past traumas within the community. As well, there is a horrific incident in which a father comes home drunk and accidently puts his four year old son in a coma.  Then there is the fact that Cesar is unsure if anyone can know him, unless they know what he’s done. In LA, as the situation between the two gangs kept on escalating exponentially, he participated in the gang rape of a rival leader’s girlfriend.

          There are some really interesting ideas in the novel, especially when Go-boy is talking about religion or community. However, the novel comes from Cesar’s point of view, which means that the plotting is confusing, as we discover things that happened months ago only when Cesar finds out. As well, Cesar’s not the most organized of story tellers.  I enjoyed this book, but I kept on flipping to the end, or back to the beginning to figure things out.  I did like that this book tried to really show how life is in a small town fishing village in Alaska. The only other book that I’ve read recently that dealt with the North (from a Canadian perspective) was Consumption by Kevin Patterson. I will say that the end of the novel moved me, but it took me a long time to get there.

There's a darkness inside of you

Saving Francesca by Melina Marchetta     (YA)

                Francesca is having a tough time. Since her all-girls school ends in year 10, she has to start all over at a new school. However, her mother doesn’t want her to start just anywhere. She is one of the pilot project of 30 female students to attend a traditionally all-boys school, St Sebastian’s. All her friends from before have gone off to another school, while she is stuck with the outcasts from St Stella’s. As well, none of the boys like having the  girls at the school, and the school itself has been fairly unwelcoming by choosing to put on Stalag 17 and have no sports teams that the girls can join. On top of all this, Francesca’s mother, usually the loudest one in a room, won’t get out of bed.

                 Just to make things clear, depression doesn’t just affect the individual, although that’s the most noticeable thing. When someone you love is depressed, it can be absolutely devastating.  It sometimes feels like that person has disappeared, and you have no idea if they’ll ever return.  It’s painful for family and friends, and they can feel lost and unsure of how to help or what to do.

Francesca is used to having an incredibly loud and bubbly mom who she fights with constantly, but who is always there in the end.  In fact, her mom was one of her constants, always telling Francesca that she is hiding part of herself from her friends and cheering her on when she was wild and out there.  Now Francesca has to fight for her mom, who barely seems interested in her own life. She has to try to keep her family together, take care of her brother and try not to blame her father for her mother’s illness. On top of that, she’s expected to lobby for the girls at school, get good grades and not cause too much fuss in the classroom.

I love the fact that Francesca is so wrong about her own life. The girls who she thinks are her friends never liked the real her, they only liked her once they’d taken her down a few notches. Instead, at St Sebastian’s, she becomes close friends with girls she never would have talked to before: wild Siobhon, radical feminist Tara, and nerdy accordion player Justine. She also finds that though the boys are sometimes gross, they also have hidden depths  and can be wonderful friends.  It turns out that not everything about a person can be seen at first glance. Fairly obvious, but it’s nice to be reminded.

There’s also the standard love plot, but I did like how it involved a lot of mistakes and horrific embarrassments. Finding out that the boy you kissed has a girlfriend is pretty humiliating. I didn’t really care too much about the love story, but I thought it was necessary for Francesca. I find myself at the point at which I’m starting to believe that love (at least in books) is just a way to help people to distract themselves from the harder times in their lives, which is a worthy goal in itself.

Finally, I loved the fact that depression did not suddenly disappear in time for the climax, or even in time for the end of the book. Life isn’t that easy, though it can and usually does get better. There will be setbacks and delays, and people will need you to be there for them. It's just the way things are, but it's nice to know that in advance.

Addendum to Libraries as a Safe Space

  I'm not sure that I got my point across before, and I'd rather use someone who is better with words. My belief in empathy is best said by these two authors.

John Green in Paper Towns, using Woody Guthrie as a starting point: Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else[...] But imagining being someone else is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.


Kurt Vonnegut: But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Libraries as a Safe Space

               Last week I attended a workshop on Libraries as a Safe Space. There was a quick talk on cyber bullying but the main focus was mainly on making the library a safe place for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer/questioning) clients. Some scary things came up. In a study by School Library Journal, 73% of public and school librarians have admitted to not purchasing certain books for children and young adults, even though they are best sellers and/or award winners, because they were afraid that they would be challenged by parents. They self-censored  to prevent any fuss. Books about sex were the most likely not to be bought, and unfortunately, since homosexuality is seen by society (or these librarians) as inherently sexual, books with openly homosexual characters were also less likely to be bought. Oh and if you’re looking for young adult novels about Trans youth, there are apparently only three that have been written. If there are only three books that deal with the subject, it seems unlikely that every library will have a copy anyway, so at the workshop we were told to go out and write another one. I had actually read one of the three in the past two years, Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger, and I thought it was really honest and funny.

             There are tons of issues with self-censorship, the main one being that it's a failure in one's duty as a librarian. Obviously, there are going to be LGBTQ clients at any public library. They are going to want to have access to books that reflect their lives. They are going to need access to books that help them understand issues, especially if they don’t have the acceptance of their families.  Since these clients exist, there need to be books for them, end of story.

            For me, however, clients need access to the books for a less obvious reason. Stories do so much for us, especially when we’re young. Of course they can help us escape reality, but they also help us understand reality as well. They put us in other people’s heads and give us the tools to help us understand other people, as well as to understand ourselves. In a course on slavery and the Middle Passage I read an article stating that empathy is dangerous and destructive because it is satisfied through another person’s suffering.  I don’t agree. I cannot see another option for mutual human understanding other than empathy, because logic only does so much for us. Straight and cis-gender teens also need access to these books in the hopes that if they read them, they’ll be more understanding of other people. 

It’s an old self-censorship checklist from the New York Library Association, but it just might help.

http://www.nyla.org/index.php?page_id=444

Does anyone deserve to be treated so badly?

The Treasure Map of Boys  by E. Lockhart  YA

I was so impressed by The Disreputable History that I decided that I had to read something else by Lockhart. Unfortunately, the Education Library doesn’t have a huge range of books. This is the third in the series of Ruby Oliver books, and while I haven’t read the other two, there is enough background material to help me understand what is going on. In the past, Ruby’s boyfriend, Jackson, left her for her best friend, Kim.  Understandably, Ruby was pretty heartbroken about this and when Jackson kissed her while Kim was away, she went with it. Kim was disgusted with Ruby when she found out, and turned all her friends against her. Without any friends, Ruby starts to suffer from panic attacks and while in therapy she writes down the names of all they boys she’s had crushes on. Her ex-friends find the list, photocopy it, and leave it all over her school. Everyone at school assumes that this a list of boys Ruby has slept with, and that she’s a slut, resulting in her getting tormented in various ways. The Treasure Map starts after all this has occurred.

 Ruby has managed to make two new friends, Meghan and Nora, and there is a boy who thinks she’s lovely, Noah. However, Nora is completely head over heels about Noah, and since she’s one of Ruby’s only friends, Ruby feels that she can’t date Noah. As well, Jackson has finally broken up with Kim and he wants to be friends (or more) again. In case this isn’t too much, Ruby has been fired from her job at the petting zoo because she tells off a drunk man who puts his child in danger around the animals. Ruby’s life is just a mess and she has very few good things in it.

What I really liked about this book is the way it deals with slut shaming. It’s a real thing that happens to tons of girls and there is nothing similar that happens to boys. Ruby hasn’t done anything other than kiss someone else’s boyfriend, but that’s enough for everyone to hate her and assume the worst of her. Obviously, it wasn’t a good thing to have done, but it was a mistake and she feels horrible for having done it. People do mess up, but girls and women have to deal with the consequences for so much longer than boys and men do. I could really feel Ruby’s loneliness as she hears her ex-friends in class. She’s just managed to rebuild some sort of life out of what has happened and now there’s the chance that it’s going to be destroyed all over again because of the boys in her life.

One other thing I loved about Ruby is that although she’s a feminist, she admits to being boy crazy. She really likes being in a relationship and this makes it harder for her to ignore the sparks between her and Noah. I just find it interesting to read about a character who admits that her values don’t fall exactly in line with her desires and needs. It’s pretty realistic and I feel that teens sometimes need reminders that life isn’t all that cut and dried, especially because expectations that things must be just so can lead to bullying, as seen in the novel.

I didn’t like this one as much as The Disreputable History, possibly because I didn’t read the first two books, but I think it really has a message that some people really need to hear. There are girls experiencing slut shaming and there are tons of people letting this happen.

Love does not exist

This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen                  YA

           I have a huge backlog of books to review,  but I decided that I had to write about one of my favourite young adult writers. Sarah Dessen knows how to write girls on the verge, afraid of who they could be but not willing to stand still anymore. Yes, the books are about love, but the love is usually a distraction from some of their other issues. Take Remy, for example.

           Remy has a bit of a bad reputation that she’s still trying to get away from. She’s always trying to quit the combination of boys, beer and smokes. Part of her problem is that she doesn’t believe in love. Her mom is a romance writer who is just about to get married for the fourth time. Her father was a musician who died without ever meeting her; he left her mom before she was born. All she really has of him is his only hit, a song that he wrote for her called “This Lullaby”, where he sings “I will let you down.” Her mother’s relationships and her father’s song have led Remy to believe that every relationship is doomed from the beginning so you should leave before you are left. Then Dexter decides that she’s the one for him.

            I love Remy because she’s so mean, but she’s not sure that she wants to be. She regrets the things she says, but she can’t see a way to not say them. She’s self-aware in a really refreshing way. She knows that her name is ridiculous, and she makes fun of it herself. She knows that her mom’s marriage is doomed to fail, but she still plans a spectacular wedding for her, because she can’t stand things being done wrong. She knows that two of her friends hate each other, but she’ll cares about them both, so they better deal with it. Remy is a perfectionist as a way to cover for her “bad old days”, but the novel makes it clear, even if Remy doesn’t admit it, that at least one time Remy was raped. This event never seems to make it into Remy’s calculations about how things are, but it’s a silent factor in her dark world view.

          Now Dexter is not my favourite Dessen character.  I never really got to understand Dexter since we only see him from Remy’s view, and I’m not exactly sure how he wins her heart. He’s a struggling musican who travels each summer with his band to a new town with a good music scene as they try to make it with their “Potato Opus.” He and his bandmates are an adorable mess, and it’s fun to watch Remy struggle with the desire to clean them up. However, he’s going to be gone by the end of the summer, and Remy’s going to Stanford, so Remy thinks that nothing major will happen. Obviously, she’s wrong.

         This Lullaby was my first Dessen novel, but not my favourite because she doesn’t talk so much about female friendships, and Dexter doesn’t feel as real as he could. (In case you care, Someone Like You and Just Listen are my favourites) However, Remy’s voice is so strong and so real that after I first read it, I went out and bought a copy for a friend.

Let's hear it for the sidekicks

Harry Potter and the etc.... by J. K. Rowling

I’m not actually going to write a review of any Harry Potter novel, because either you’ve read it or you haven’t. If you don’t like these books then there is nothing I could say to change your mind, though you do have to admit that J. K Rowling really knows how to plot things out.

 Instead, I would just like to talk about my favorite character in the series, Ron. I mean sure, Harry is always going off and being brave, but he’s also always wanting to do it alone.  I think if you’ve read enough children’s books, you know that doing it all by yourself is just silly. There is a time and a place to be a lone wolf, and it is almost never when fighting the forces of evil. Without Ron and Hermione, Harry would have died multiple times. Now although Hermione is smart, loves to read, and loves the library, she isn’t actually my favorite. She is the smartest in the year, she’s helped the guys with their homework on too many occasions and without her we wouldn’t have had the intricacy of plot of the Prisoner of Azkaban. My problem with Hermione is that when she is being at her worst, a know it all who is shocked that you haven’t read Hogwarts: A History, she reminds me too much of myself, and some other people I know.

No, why Ron wins in my books is because he is useless. He is not the smartest, nor the bravest. He isn’t even the best at magic. He knows all of this, especially since he is the youngest boy in his quite large family. He comes along anyway.

Harry and Hermione have a purpose in the trio, they even have names that start with the same letter, but Ron is the prop that keeps them all upright. When he goes missing, things are worse. He is the guy who will tell you a funny joke and cheer you up, and yes, he makes many, many mistakes, but he always apologizes and he’s always genuinely sorry. He’s also Harry’s first real friend, and his family always treats Harry like he’s one of their own. The movies have definitely added to my love of Ron, especially since he has the best actor of the trio, but it started with the first book.

As a side note, I would also like to note my love of Snape, for the obvious reason, as well as because all of his visible plans; stopping Quirrel, capturing Sirius etc. always come to naught because of Harry. Can’t Snape have anything good?

Returning to an old friend

The Ear, the Eye and the Arm by Nancy Farmer

 I must admit, I have always been a serial rereader and as a child I reread The Ear, the Eye and the Arm, as well as A Girl Called Disaster about five times each . I decided to return to The Ear to see how it holds up.

            It’s set in Zimbabwe in 2194, and it follows the three children of the Chief of Security:  Tendai (13), Rita (11) and Kuda (4). Since their father so powerful and has eliminated almost all the gangs, he is always afraid that his children will be kidnapped as a way to get back at him. Instead the children are homeschooled and never experience much of the outside world. As well, since their parents are always working, they live surrounded by robots and are watched over  by the childlike Mellower, who is a professional Praise Singer. Unfortunately, this makes it very hard for Tendai and Rita to get their explorer badge in Scouting, so they ask  the Mellower to help them leave the house for a day to go from one part of the city to another. The Mellower hypnotizes their father during Praise into giving them codes out of the house, as well as money for the bus and for food. However, the three children have no experience of the real world, including how to pay for food and how to take the bus and they are promptly kidnapped. When their parents realize what has happened they hire detectives.  The Ear, the Eye and the Arm were born in Hwange village, where their mothers were exposed to plutonium in the water. Each of the detectives has specialized mutations, including amazing hearing, amazing sight, and the ability to sense other people’s feelings, and occasionally read minds. The novel follows Tendai as he tries to bring his sister and brother home, and the detectives as they try to find the children.

             I still love this book because it has such a mishmash of genres. It’s sci-fi futuristic, it’s filled with adventure, there’s a coming of age story, there’s a detective story and  Shona beliefs about ancestors, spirits and witchcraft are integral to the plot. Ancestors can pass their gifts on to their descendants, and if it is necessary,  the mhondro or spirit of the land can enter people to help them save Zimbabwe. At one point, the children reach Resthaven, a walled community that decided 200 years ago to live as their ancestors did and to deny the advances of technology. Tendai loves the traditional village life because it feels so right, especially compared to his machine-filled home, but he can’t deny that there are some problems too.  In Resthaven, Rita has to work harder than he does because she’s a girl. As well, when twins are born, one must die, and the witch who cursed the mother and caused twins must be found and punished.  Traditional life isn’t seen as perfect, but it also isn’t denigrated as the bad old days.

  The novel also talks about the way that people put a blind eye to other people’s problems. The children had no idea that there were place like Dead Man’s Vlei, an old garbage dump, where people live and mine the plastic and other resources. The people who live there are seen as disposable people, out of sight, out of mind, but the Vlei is also a safe place for people who have been thrown out of regular society. A lot of stock is put in the way that too much Praise may help people feel so good that they ignore the experiences of others.

You are allowed to mock me, but I only found out that Nancy Farmer is white when I was in high school.  At first, it bothered me because I was concerned about appropriation and (when I was younger) authenticity, but rereading the novel again I think that it demonstrates a love for Zimbabwe and its people. It doesn’t make the country or the characters exotic and the appendix mentions that her explanation of the spirit world of the Shona, and of the Shona as a people is simplified because a young non-African audience might not understand. I did some research and found out that she worked as a scientific researcher in Mozambique and Zimbabwe from 1972 to 1988 and lived through some very dangerous situations, especially because there were civil wars occurring in both countries at the time. She returned to America mainly for her son’s sake. Rereading the novel now with that in mind, my main thoughts are that I hope that Zimbabwe can someday be as bright and peaceful as what she’s imagined, because right now it’s a dark, hard place.