and if you must, please don't marry me off to some sickly bitchy thing who will soon die and trap me in my inlaws' ho please don't arrange my marriage.
and if you must, please don't marry me off to some sickly bitchy thing who will soon die and trap me in my inlaws' house where i will be a burden and where they will treat me like a servant but i won't have anywhere else to go until they in turn ditch me in some creepy city where discarded widows try to make a go of it.
just don't do it. it is the worst.
this book is pretty good, but my warrior-liberated-woman parts gag when confronted with these types of situations. i am very fortunate to have options and all, but it just makes me angry to see how few opportunities other people have.
i am pretty sure this makes me an obnoxious, racist american, but it makes me want to distribute cassette tapes of joan jett and pat benatar to these little girls and dance with them in the streets in perfectly choreographed defiance...
this book was very (view spoiler)[good. (hide spoiler)] i didn't think i was going to like it because it started out in the voice of (view spoiler)[a this book was very (view spoiler)[good. (hide spoiler)] i didn't think i was going to like it because it started out in the voice of (view spoiler)[a five-year-old, (hide spoiler)]which was too (view spoiler)[twee (hide spoiler)] for me, but it thankfully changed as the female child-character grows up to show the slow acclimatization and americanization of a korean family and the struggles and triumphs they undergo, while still holding on to their roots. it is actually a very graceful and delicate story, but it does not shy away from certain (view spoiler)[harsh realities. (hide spoiler)] i really loved this book, and while it is true i am only writing this review right now because (view spoiler)[i am so enamored with this new feature and want to test-drive it, (hide spoiler)] anyone interested in immigrant stories should read this children's book, even if they are (view spoiler)[a grown-up. (hide spoiler)]!!!
if oddballs was augusten burroughs for the younger generation, chris crutcher is their david sedaris. both books are humorous♥ i love chris crutcher ♥
if oddballs was augusten burroughs for the younger generation, chris crutcher is their david sedaris. both books are humorous essays involving childhood and family and all the tales of things that happen to shape a boy into a man, but crutcher just has better stories. and a more genial approach to telling them. part of this is due to a complete lack of vanity on his part; a trait those sedaris kids have in spades. seemingly unconcerned about how he appears to others, crutcher is able to gleefully recount his mishaps, foibles, pettiness, and shortcomings both physical and personality-wise. but you end up loving him because of this boldness. he is charming, he is real, he is relatable. he was a little kid with a terrible temper who wanted to impress girls and be good at something, anything, but kept fucking up*. his horribly transparent lies made me cringe in sympathy and remembrance. this is the stuff that makes paul feig and sara barron such satisfying humor writers, while sloane crossley, with her "does this story make me look fat?" hesitancy, is less enjoyable.
there is a genuine good-naturedness rolling off of these stories, and i can see this as an excellent match for kids who don't fit in and aren't good at sports to show you can still be successful despite uneven beginnings. because he is a normal kid, full of an eagerness to please, and loyalty and sweet gullibility, but also admits to stealing money from his mother's purse, masturbating all the time, cheating in school, and eating a lot of candy. he does not glamorize himself or make himself appear to be cool or athletic or smooth, or even intelligent. in fact, his father nicknames him "lever - nature's simplest tool." and you feel bad for this kid, but you know as an adult, he bears no grudges, and he became a really funny guy, so it's perfectly okay to laugh at him as a hapless teen.
i really liked whale talk, and a lot of the stories he tells in here later came into play in his novels. i am definitely going to read more of his books in the future, because he is a really gifted storyteller, but i think i would enjoy reading another collection of essays like this even more. in his "other" job, he works as a family therapist dealing primarily with severely abused children and he uses what he sees in his work to reach kids who may be in similar situations through his fiction-work, so his fiction (she judges based on the one novel she has read) ends up being both funny and moving.
i was only a little disappointed because the blurb on the from promised "a good reason to be phobic about oysters and olives," both of which i hate, but it is a very chris crutcher-specific reason, and not one i can use to inculcate the masses.
* i know that some people have a problem with "cursewords used in reviews of teen fiction titles because we have to protect teh children or whatever, but my belief is, if the author is going to use the words in the book, i am allowed to use them in the review. and i have a long way to go to catch up. one of the funnier passages from this book recounts his experience publishing his first novel, when it was recommended he tone down the language (which he did for the first novel, but then never did again):
"in its original form running loose was a three-hundred-page epic. i removed two words and it became a two-hundred-page coming-of-age novel. during that editing time, when one of my mother's friends asked her how i was doing, my mom told her she hadn't heard from me for two weeks, that she thought i was holed up at my typewriter unfucking my book"...more
bones are awesome. and this is a great book for kids who are budding forensic anthropologists. you know you are out there - KIDbones bones bones bones
bones are awesome. and this is a great book for kids who are budding forensic anthropologists. you know you are out there - KIDS, STOP WANTING TO BE ASTRONAUTS - ASTRONAUTS DON'T EVEN EXIST
but this book shows all manner of cool stuff - how people were buried, what they were wearing, what they were buried with, what happens to bones over time. it is fascinating that so much of people's lives can be reconstructed just based on their bones: who smoked a pipe, who was what race/gender/religion/socioeconomic class, who had rickets, even the identities of the bodies lying in unmarked graves - HOW COOL IS THAT??
we love bone detectives!they solve the mysteries of "where is this one's head?" and "why was this one just hucked down this crawlspace with this broken crockery??" and "what did this one look like with its skin on??
if my textbooks had been this fun in jr high and high school, i would be way smarter. but i'm not. but at least my bones are still inside my skin - suck on that, jamestown bitches!!!
what kid isn't fascinated by skellingtons?? this book treats them like clues, not corpses, and shows how respectful the scientists are as they exhume and examine the bodies. i can only hope that someday i get all dug up by scientists who will piece together my life and will maybe accidentally make it more exciting than it actually is and they will tell young wide-eyed kids i was clearly a racecar president gymnast with big boobs.
this book is like running with scissors for the teen set, but with less statutory rape and depression. it is a seEDIT so alfonso doesn't start crying.
this book is like running with scissors for the teen set, but with less statutory rape and depression. it is a series of autobiographical essays devoted to "look how unconventional my upbringing was!!! look at how creative my sister and i were when we were on long car rides and wrapped ourselves in brown blankets and pretended we were poo and had conversations that we expected poo would have if it could talk!!! look at how our mother's casual housekeeping and hands-off parenting freaked out other mothers, and note her snappy retorts to the offended individuals!! how cool must life have been for us, you see???"
this book treads the line between funny and irritating. there is an inescapable smugness to it, but some of the stories are quite good. let me try to explain what this book makes me feel inside.
let's say there are two people. person A is blathering on about how he has four cars. he thinks this makes him really cool, and he is telling person B because he wants person B to be totally jealous of his four cars. however, unbeknownst to person A, person B actually owns six cars. but he has never mentioned them to person A because it is just a fact of life to which he has become accustomed and maybe he is a little shamed by his own excess or he just doesn't think it is interesting to talk about or any of person A's business. so but person B is listening to all this and feels like maybe he should speak up about it and clarify what is happening here because he is feeling increasingly embarrassed by the situation and person A's totally misplaced value system because if it ever comes up in future conversations it is going to be very embarrassing to them both when person A learns that person B just sat there the whole time without saying anything...
and that awkwardness is the way i feel as a reader. not because i had a particularly wacky childhood, because i didn't. but because listening to someone boast about how craaaaazy they are makes me feel just glazed and dead inside. no one wants to hear about skits you put on for family friends when you were eleven. trust me.**
and i did like a lot of this book, and i liked running with scissors to a certain extent too, but the whole idea of glamorizing parents who will drive their kids somewhere unfamiliar, give them a dime, and tell them to find their way home or call for help if they can't do it; it seems unhealthy. it was a different time, sure, but it just seems careless. and there was too much weird family togetherness in the skit-performing and weird overly-involved in some things and totally laissez-faire in others that struck me as this horrifying bipolar formative experience, like being raised by some methed-out version of the von trapps.
and there is an edge of cruelty or masochism in some of these stories. for example - staging fake fights on public transportation where one girl would be ostracized and openly mocked by the other girls at full volume for the benefit of the other passengers, to gauge their reactions. as someone who has to deal with public transportation every day, this irritates me beyond belief. but i fucking hate spectacle, that's just me. and breaking into some poor compulsive liar's fantasy-world and taking it over and turning her only friends against her, even if they were only polite to her out of basic human civility. there is just something terrible about these people. who does this?? and does it with such wild gleeful abandon and then brags about it in adulthood?? "yeah, we totally ruined the only place she had where she felt like she belonged. but it's okay because she was always lying about shit." etc etc
what a tool.
at the end, sleator is there to remind the reader that he is, first and foremost, a writer of fiction and that he may have exercised the writer's prerogative to embellish a little in order to make the stories "pop" a little more, or to give them a more satisfying resolution.
oh, if only james frey had employed this tactic, he could have avoided being scolded by oprah in front of everyone.
**EDIT - i realize i did a poor job of explaining here. let me clarify. i do not mind tales from people's childhood, as will soon become apparent. what i do mind are people's tales of "how cool they were when they were little which made them so cool in adulthood" but only when the things they think are cool are things i feel sorry/embarrassed for them for having done. like the kids who in jr high could quote every monty python sketch ever, and they were so cool in their little circle, but then they grow up and then you think "how sad" because that is like their life's achievement and they have practically written a glory days type of song about it. me and sleator's "cool factors" do not line up. pretending to have a baby swaddled in a blanket and then hurling it at the ground so it splatters everywhere and it takes people a little while to realize it was actually a watermelon - i don't find that funny. it is basically littering.i find performance art to be intrusive and the practitioners of it are rarely clever, so it just becomes an inconvenience.and, yes, they were kids when they were doing this so that should mitigate it a little, but the fact is, he grew up and still thinks it is cool. i did plenty of annoying things as a teen, but i will not talk about them, much less publish them, because i have grown up enough to know that it was actually not cool. and maybe you think it is cool, and that's fine. i just don't. it makes my skin crawl a little. i don't think i have explained myself any better here, but it's all i have today.
seriously, it is time to just raze everest and be done with it already. i mean, it's big and impressive but it is just taking RELEASE THE KRAKAUER!!!!
seriously, it is time to just raze everest and be done with it already. i mean, it's big and impressive but it is just taking up all this room and killing people so why do we even need it anymore?? can't we just get over it? really, i think it has reached its peak and is all downhill from here.
shameless punning aside.
so this started out as an article that KRAKAUER was asked to write for outside magazine about the commercialization of everest. it should embarrass us that something that costs 75,000 dollars to even attempt even has the potential to become "commercialized." (for example - i just balked at shelling out $7.17 for the sandwich i am eating. and like everest, it is kind of crappy) how misplaced is our spending? for fifty bucks a toe, i will chop yours right off and you can pretend you climbed everest and had a gay old time. everyone wins! but there are purists who think that there was golden age of everest and everything since then has just been compromised and now everest is a trash heap full of inconvenient dead bodies and empty oxygen bottles and really just anyone can climb everest so it isn't even a challenge anymore...
THAT IS THE KIND OF ATTITUDE THAT EVEREST WILL FUCKING KILL YOU FOR HAVING!!!
do not climb everest - it is a trap!!
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when i was making this year's thanksgiving meal, i decided to have a little fun and incorporate things i learned from everest into the prep. because i had soooo many brussels sprouts to prepare, as well as parsnips, carrots, beets, sweet and regular potatoes, turnips, onions, cauliflower, etc. it was a lot of peeling. and i tried to see how many i could peel while holding my breath, and what that did to my motor skills. all i learned is that i really like to breathe and any activity in which i cannot breathe is not for me. by the end, i was weeping, "KRAKAUER wouldn't give up!! he would chop allllll the brussels sprouts!!!"
but from everything i have read of everest (note: two books) it is THE WORST. all of the reaching of the summit which should be time for celebration is always so anticlimactic. you can't stay up there very long because humans need to breathe and all; there is no fireplace and hot cocoa like at the top of the viennese alps, and then there is the small matter of DESCENDING!! all that bullshit and putting-up-with for ten seconds of "experience"?? i gave all that up in high school, thank you very much.
oh shit - i have class now. i will "review" more later...
okay, so i went to class. i learned some stuff. and i don't have much more to say about this. it is not as action-packed as peak, and a lot of it reads like KRAKAUER working through his personal demons and dealing with his culpability, but it is still interesting. i still think everest is unnecessary - it is like a hot fourteen year old - who needs that kind of temptation, right? oh, and also, this:
holy f*ck - i h8 this book! *shakes walker and geriatric meds at sky*
this book is like when you find someone's diary at work (not a co-worker's diary holy f*ck - i h8 this book! *shakes walker and geriatric meds at sky*
this book is like when you find someone's diary at work (not a co-worker's diary - that would make you a jerk) and you idly flip through it until you remember that most people are fucking boring and their innermost secrets are totally dull and most likely misspelled.
people like virginia woolf or anais nin can have their diaries published because they are either very intelligent and insightful or super sexy. these girls are just superficial.
so, these aren't diaries, but IMs, but the end result is the same. the format of this book sets it apart as "unique", but it doesn't change the fact that these characters are utterly trivial and a book that is only IM's of teenage girls, with no interior monologues or action sequences or descriptive passages is more like a trap than a novel. it is just all teen dialogue. vapid, vapid teen dialogue.
my reaction to this book is probably a result of my extreme old age. i do not text. i did not have a computer in high school, no gaggle of giggle parties in some chat room - in undergrad, i used my computer to write papers and play endless games of apeiron. if i wanted to talk to someone, i would walk over to them and use my mouth (LGM)
so, i am most certainly not the target audience for this book. but i can't see how young people who spend all day texting and instant messaging would want to read the instant messages of strangers/characters in their leisure time. and how this blossomed into a series is beyond me. i mean, gracious. kids these days...
a few things rescue this from being a one-star book. the energy is good - it is really fast-paced and takes about ten minutes to read. the characters have discrete voices - even though they each get their own color ink in the book, the reader can tell without that device which character is speaking. so - cheers on voice. also, the parts where two girls are "talking" about the third one behind her... keyboard?? display device?? is that the modern day equivalent of talking behind someone's back? whatever - there is a spot-on well-intentioned cattiness that i certainly remember from my own high school days.
cute idea, but i am the wrong audience,like with musicians on the subway. I AM NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU MONEY BECAUSE YOU ARE ANNOYING ME.
this is a perfect book for young teenagers. if you were trying to devise a formula for writing a perfect book for this age group, you could not have dthis is a perfect book for young teenagers. if you were trying to devise a formula for writing a perfect book for this age group, you could not have done much better than this.
1) mysterious parentage. kids are totally self-absorbed. some never grow out of it, of course, but in younger people, it is more excusable - their internal life makes up the majority of their experience, they are used to being the center of attention and they spend a lot of time thinking about themselves and fantasizing. so having romantic, mysterious origins is the best thing ever - "maybe i am the son/daughter of a god/goddess/russian count, etc..." i still wonder about that, even though it is clear where i came from.
2) this book has excellent gender equality, so it appeals to both younger girls and boys. goddesses are just as cool as gods, and their children are equally badass. this is rarely the case in teen adventure lit. (see naruto)
3) this makes history class relevant.(or wherever it is that kids learn about those wacky greeks) personifying the gods and goddesses makes them more recognizable and immediate for kids; bringing old litterature aliiiive and all that. and they will definitely learn not to mix up chiron and charon.
4) but it is also wonderfully subversive. it is all about polytheism and it makes the point that what we consider mythology today used to be a very real belief system for tons of people. any bright kid is going to make the logical leap to thinking about contemporary religion and how one day, it may well fall under mythology for students of the future, and how any current religious disagreements will be just like poseidon and athena's quarrels. because of this, i am surprised that this series has not been more frequently challenged/banned. oh, i know why, because the people most likely to challenge shit are not themselves capable of making that logical leap; they operate solely on knee-jerk see-a-bad-word reactions.
but this book is great - it has fantastic pacing, the characters are incredibly appealing, i like the premise, and i really really like that it is five books only. i will definitely read the rest of these puppies when i get around to it.
i have decided that "the x-men" is actually short for "the exposition men". i mean, i know this is a collection of several comic books strung togetheri have decided that "the x-men" is actually short for "the exposition men". i mean, i know this is a collection of several comic books strung together to make one big fat story,and in order to refresh readers' minds as to what happened a month ago or whatever, it is sometimes necessary to throw in little callbacks to previous escapades, but boy does it end up reading awkwardly: "this is my name. this is your name. remember when we did that?? now we are doing this. why?? in order to facilitate this thing that we need to do..." and on and on and on...
i expected a little more from the man who co-authored (with george lucas) the continuing adventures of willow ufgood.
i don't read a lot of superhero comics. i have read a bunch of batman because he is pretty awesome, but this is my first x-men. having fallen asleep in each of the x-men movies, this is what i know: wolverine is cranky and has awesome claws, i ♥ alan cumming, and the green chick is painted and you can see her boobs.
that is neither here nor there, i am just showing off my extensive knowledge of the x-men. so this is my question: are all superhero books really about how shitty it is to be a superhero?? because batman never gets to have any fun, and everyone in here is miserable: "i'm phoenix, i am alive, now i am dead, now i am alive again, now i am in the cosmos, now i am back in time, now i am confused, now i am evil, now maybe i will die again, who knows..."
that's just awful. if these books are supposed to be about idealized "men" and "women" (superheroes in general, not specifically the x-men, who are special cases because they are largely ostracized), and serve an escapist role, why are they so unhappy??
and what the fuck is with the dazzler?? i love that she had a spin-off comic that got canceled because everyone hated it (i am pretending that this is something i know, but i only know it because greg told me)
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because really, how could this get old??
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"it was a different time, karen"
i am so glad i was not (really) alive in a time when that character was thought to be a good idea. disco-ball superpowers?? unacceptable.
this book is the perfect antidote to the "graphic novels aren't real books" crowd's poison. it takes full advantage of the medium (lgm with the local this book is the perfect antidote to the "graphic novels aren't real books" crowd's poison. it takes full advantage of the medium (lgm with the local boy scout troops), and just runs with it. this story could not have been told as well or as broadly using a more traditional narrative structure. and at the end, there is a perfect collapse - the three storylines streamline so perfectly into one message about cultural acclimatization and race-shame and why it is bad. but not in a preachy way. it is not rah-rah asia, it is just quietly, "don't be an asshole; this is who you are." so it doesn't exclude roundeye from appreciating the message, like me at chinese new year at my ex's. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE SAYING ABOUT ME, GRANDMA TSUI!
so the stories include the traditional tale of the monkey king:
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a very tasteful depiction of a chinese gentleman come to america:
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and this cute young chinese-american boy with a perm:
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that's what the art looks like. and if i didn't have to read this for class, i would have missed out on it, because it is not the kind of art i am immediately drawn to. me and art, we don't understand each other. museums leave me cold, and with graphic novels, i am always drawn to certain ones and repulsed by others with not one whit of rhyme nor reason nor consistency. i am the worst at art-appreciation. but i am the queen of making thanksgiving dinner. and writing drunken book reviews. and white trash fixing of silverware drawers:
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recognize!!!
but yeah, a totally charming book. i have no personal immigrant experience from which to draw as a way of relating to this story, but it works on any level of "appreciate thyself and don't wear shoes just because the humans are doing it" kind of thing.
japan is full of wackiness. this is a fact. have you ever seen tokyo gore police?? i have. it is wacky. so is visitor q. they airbrush the pubic hair japan is full of wackiness. this is a fact. have you ever seen tokyo gore police?? i have. it is wacky. so is visitor q. they airbrush the pubic hair in their porn, they make beer for kids, they sell soy sauce flavored kit kats, their game shows are mind-boggling, everything is cute and brightly colored and for some reason, they still love hair bands from the eighties like bon freaking jovi.
it is a land of wacky inventions:
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and wacky vending machines:
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and wacky fashion:
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i am kind of in love with a bunch of things i noted above, but still - wackytown.
but then there's manga. i am not going to be a convert to manga, the way i could go over to the kit kat darkside. i did read all the battle royale mangas a few years back. but i mean, i had read the novel, i had seen the movie - if they made a breakfast cereal, i would probably have tried that, too. i am a completist.
but naruto?? i am not going to read the other 48 of 'em.i am not even going to read one more of 'em. i don't really understand the allure of this series, what makes the kiddies plop down with like eighteen of them and plow through them as though they were enjoyable.
naruto himself is pretty annoying; always doing stupid shit to get attention and bragging that he is going to be the most awesome ninja of all time, but he just doesn't have the skills to back it up. i know people like this - big talk, but really annoying to be around. "oh, but it isn't his fault!! people don't like him because one time, there was this giant ghostly fox-creature terrorizing the town, and so they captured it and put it in naruto's belly when he was a baby, so that's why people don't like him. poor poor dear. oh, and also, he is kind of a turd". i don't care about his fox-tummy, i just got annoyed by his loudmouth antics.and reading "backwards" kind of makes me seasick.
and also the female character. oh, cool - girl ninja!! this is great progress in gender equality!! oh, but all she does is complain that she doesn't have much in the t&a department and she pines after a boy ninja who does not notice her and she is awful at being a ninja because of her infatuation with said ninja. so it kind of is a shame she doesn't have big knockers, cuz now she can't even become a high-end stripper when she realizes she is a dumb, shitty, ninja.
i feel like this lack of manga-interest might be a side effect of being old and crotchety and "get-off-my-lawn" and all that, but that's just the way it is, wackos!...more
april is national poetry month, so here come thirty floats! the cynics here will call this plan a shameless grab for votes. and maybe tHAPPY POETRY MONTH!
april is national poetry month, so here come thirty floats! the cynics here will call this plan a shameless grab for votes. and maybe there’s some truth to that— i do love validation, but charitably consider it a rhyme-y celebration. i don’t intend to flood your feed— i’ll just post one a day. endure four weeks of reruns and then it will be may!
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this is the way this conversation should have gone down.
"so, i want to write a kid's book about the KKK coming to town and the town's reaction to it from all different perspectives"
"okay, i am listening"
"it will be set in vermont..."
"wait - what?? vermont?? not in the south??"
"no, in vermont. the green mountain state"
"okay, your call. keep 'em guessing, i like it. why pick on the south all the time, sure. everyone thinks vermont is so liberal - we will show them!!"
"okay - and i am going to have seventeen main narrators who-"
"seventeen?? really?? that seems like a lot to keep track of, what age group is this for??"
"no, it will be fine, i am going to have photos of all the characters on the front, and each poem will be a different character's perspective, and"
"poem?? what poem???"
"oh, well, it is all in verse, so - "
"no. no. no. no way. no KKK poetry here, please. get out of my office, good lady."
many many animals were harmed in the writing of this story. and "good" animals, too, not just the necessary "starving in antarctica" ones that you havmany many animals were harmed in the writing of this story. and "good" animals, too, not just the necessary "starving in antarctica" ones that you have to kill for survival. there are awful penguin-clubbing sequences, some euthanasia of dogs and a cat, and lots of seals make their way into seal heaven. there is also one awesome amputation scene.disney will never option this story. there are very few places to insert singing mice (twss) but it is a true account of a young boy who stowed away on shackleton's ill-fated antarctic exploration, and details the cold, starvation, seasickness, and madness in very real and graphic terms.
so take everything i said about everest and double it. if everest hates you, antarctica hates your whole family past, present, and future. antarctica is having a fine time just floating in the cold icebergy, seal-filled water and resents it when humans decide to drop by unannounced. and like that one time those roaches tried to live in my cupboards - all shall be destroyed.
but i loved this book. i love survival stuff, to be sure, but particularly cold-weather survival. having read this, the terror, brian's winter, peak, into thin air, and aurororama all within the past year - i will not be making any arctic voyages anytime soon, thank you. but i will read about it all cozy in my slanket.and now i really want to read endurance.
but i still have some teen fiction on the syllabus to endure (yuk yuk chortle) first.
i was all braced to not like this one. it was for the humor section of the reading list, and surely my sense of humor is more refinHAPPY PRIDE MONTH!!
i was all braced to not like this one. it was for the humor section of the reading list, and surely my sense of humor is more refined and nuanced than a teenager's, right. RIGHT?? i just figured it would be silly and not really a stick-to-your-cranium kind of book.
but this is dr. chelton and this book:
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so i had to read it. how else am i going to grow up to be her? (and i was the only one in the whole class to choose to read it. i should give lessons in smooching up to teacher, because it is just shameful - these oversights and missed opportunities)
but it is a really good story; teen goes to stay with his gay uncle in arizona to work with horses in order to get experience because he wants to be a vet. while there, he loses his virginity (neither to his gay uncle nor to a horse), battles the heat, learns about courage, friendship, love; several generic teen fiction themes, and what it means to leave a place in which you have changed so much. the whole book is very sensitively drawn, but with actual humor. there is some overly broad comic relief in the form of a friend's survivalist father, but every scene between billy and his uncle is brilliant and the way teen sexuality is handled is neither shy nor gratuitous. the changes billy undergoes are at once subtle and realistic. i opted to not read his poetry book for the books-in-verse week because it sounded awful (shakespeare bats cleanup - no thank you), but i would recommend this one, and if i found myself reading another of his novels, i would be very pleased.
i mean, ugh - teen humor week?? i was expecting beavis and butthead, or the kind of stuff my high school boyfriend found funny, which is best left in the archives. i was only going to read one book from the list; the bare minimum, to give the old overachiever knob a rest, but i ended up reading three, and two of them were actually really good! but with each of them, i am pulling a caris (don't tell his wife!!!)( <------- an example of what i thought teen humor would be like) and rating these as an objective reader. no, this book is not as good as within a budding grove, but it is a really good teen book with depth and heart and - yes - humor, which should probably be read by a wider audience. it is a perfect book for its exploration of both the sorrow and the release of death (this is only a spoiler if you don't plan on reading the first page)
basic plot for everyone except jasmine - teenage boy, upset that his dad is banging his former third grade teacher (the boy's, not the dad's, you sicko) gets tanked, takes mom's car, crashes, vomits, decapitates a lawn gnome, gets sent to do community service at a nursing home, where he is forced to babysit/entertain a grouchy old jewish man with emphysema. also family and friendship-confusion and some jazz guitar.
and i am not ashamed to admit that i totally got sideswiped by the big "reveal." so - well played, sonnenblick!this round to you!
i swear, i didn't cry, but some calloused bits of my heart got pumiced a little.
everest is a giant mountain that people climb when they want to die. there is no other reason to climb it. is there a mac-and-cheese restaurant at theeverest is a giant mountain that people climb when they want to die. there is no other reason to climb it. is there a mac-and-cheese restaurant at the top?? no. is tamerlane up there?? nope. do you get free rent for life if you succeed? no way. so what's the allure??
the thrill of danger?? throw a rock at a bear. it will take less time and you are less likely to freeze to death. a sense of achievement? run a marathon - you will probably not lose any toes. wanting to be among an elite group of smug people? eat a lot of hot dogs, really fast - you will probably not asphyxiate. unless you aspirate one of 'em. try not to.
really - mountain climbing, who needs it?? everest does not want you to climb it, otherwise why would it be so big?? why would it be so hard to breathe up there?? to successfully climb everest, you have to clamber up a ways, then rest, then GO BACK DOWN so your blood doesn't explode or whatever, and then go back up to the same place you just were and somehow try to breathe the fake air that's up there, and you incrementally make progress, and maybe you get pneumonia or HAPE (where your lungs get all sloshy with liquid - awesome) or you lose some toes or other extremities, maybe you run out of food, maybe you fall down a crevasse and hopefully die instantly, maybe your rock crumbles beneath you or your rope fails and you tumble down forever, maybe a boulder falls on you or an avalanche buries you or a yak eats you. the only thing that could make this scarier is zombies. and that is only a matter of time - there are zombies everywhere else these days.
so despite all my feelings about people who would opt to lose fingers and toes (FINGERS AND TOES!! YOU NEED THEM!!), i loved this book. from the beginning, i knew i was going to love this book.it is purely awesome the whole way through.
peak,the son of two once-famous, now separated mountain climbers, gets caught scaling a skyscraper in manhattan and tagging the very top of it. this is not the first one he has done, but the first one they catch him at. after a copycat dies in his own attempt, peak cuts a deal and gets shipped off to live with his dad in thailand, but dad has a little surprise. instead of going fishing, like normal safe people, he takes his son to tibet climb everest (with a secret agenda to make peak the youngest american ever to reach the top,also conveniently getting publicity for his climbing business)
and the rest is all climbing. and danger. and friendship and personal growth and some really wonderfully touching scenes and a perfectly appropriate ending. i strongly recommend this book, to y/a and other audiences. this is both a great adventure book and a great coming-of-age novel.
and now i see he has a book called sasquatch. this author is my new best friend.
what if the son of the mob boss fell for the daughter of the FBI agent investigating his father and bugging his house??
it is a cute conceit - a romeowhat if the son of the mob boss fell for the daughter of the FBI agent investigating his father and bugging his house??
it is a cute conceit - a romeo and juliet tale with fewer suicides. i thought the opening scene, where our young hero is at the beach, at night, with a (different) girl, and finds a severely beaten man trapped in the trunk of his car as he is reaching for his romance-blanket was the best scene in the book. tip: if you have a capital-f family, don't let them borrow your car.
i have nothing useful to tell you about this book, and i am only reviewing it because of my mental housekeeping; once it is "reviewed", i feel like i can put it behind me - i feel a sense of restoration. right now, there is so much jumble as i plow through these teen fiction books like one of those death race 2000 cars: teen paranormal romance: 50 points!!! teen survival story: 70 points!! blammo!!! i am carradine!!! but i don't really have much time for reflection, not for books i was only just "eh" about. so i fall behind and my anxiety grows.
this book was cute and amusing, but if i were machine gun joe viterbo, i would probably give it a pass to get to run over peak or shackleton's stowaway, which are more to my taste...
maybe that is my problem: whenever someone asks me for "just something funny" at work, i get the panic-sweats. for some reason, that is my fucking blind spot. and part of it is that humor is so subjective, more so than any other human reaction. want a sad book?? someone dies in this one - most people find that sad. want something romantic?? these characters "fall in love" - done deal. funny?? ummm garrison keillor funny?? david sedaris funny?? martin amis funny?? douglas adams funny?? it is a nightmare question, especially when they preface it with: i need a book for a friend who is very depressed/in the hospital/just lost someone close to them. no pressure, right?? hence, the panic sweats.
none of this is very useful to someone considering reading this book, and i apologize. but it makes me feel better to have released my own shortcomings into the wild.
if you know me, you know i am a fan of teen survival fiction. well, any survival fiction, but usually teen fiction is written with more immediacy and if you know me, you know i am a fan of teen survival fiction. well, any survival fiction, but usually teen fiction is written with more immediacy and doesn't use the genre to mask any deeper metaphors. it is what it is - live through this, or don't. no need for anything deeper, just primal, keep-breathing stuff. so with this one, i thought i was getting an untapped goldmine: a program for "bad kids" which forces them to hike and raft and climb and grind out their energies, redirecting them towards wholesome, outdoorsy activities instead of, well, stabbing. so the premise is that a bunch of them break out and steal some gear and decide "we will raft the grand canyon alone and unsupervised and then you will all recognize." or something like that.
"ooh," i thought, rubbing my hands together..."this is like the start of those programs about world's dumbest individuals. there is no way this is going to end well."
so imagine my disappointment. is this a spoiler? there is a sequel, so i feel like it is not. but this is not a teen survival novel. it is a teen adventure novel, which is similar, but not as cool. if these were actual teen delinquents, i think i would like it more; i feel like they would be more interesting. it seems like an odd program, the kids seem mismatched - one is in fact a stabber, one is just drifting homeless, one i think cut class or something - it seems like maybe you would move the knifey one into another group, with more hardcore cases. most of these kids seem less dangerous and more just moody.
i also just like a book where there are consequences to actions. i like justice. ISFJ, bitches! this grand canyon rafting lark was a totally stupid thing to do - you have no training, not enough food, no guide book, what on earth are you doing?? i have never been white water rafting (i pause for laughter at the very thought of me attempting such hahaahhahha) but i know that sometimes, people drown doing it. so to blithely put themselves into this situation with relatively few consequences, well, it makes me want to drown a couple of them just to say, "see?? danger!!"
oh, did i mention one of them captured a scorpion and was keeping it as a pet in a plastic soap dish?? these dummies do not deserve a sequel.
so - more damaged kids attracting each other like magnets, filling in the places left by distant, absent, or overinvolved adults. a strange choice forso - more damaged kids attracting each other like magnets, filling in the places left by distant, absent, or overinvolved adults. a strange choice for LGBTQPR3Z week. sure, it is about a friendless boy whose home life is emotionally barren and a firecracker of a lesbian, but it isn't really about sexuality - that part is used more as window dressing than spotlit, and only serves as an obstacle to keep the characters from kissing. she's cool, he's not, and yet they form a relationship based on zines and teen angst until john/gio douches out and the ending happens.
i don't really understand what marisol gets out of the relationship - why she keeps coming back. he is clearly not as smart, talented, or interesting as she is, which is why he is forced to lie so frequently. what does some independent lesbian want out of a relationship with an emotionally underdeveloped boy, especially once it becomes clear he has a crush on her and asks her to the prom for goodness' sake?? teen girls do not typically have this kind of patience with starry-eyed stalker losers, especially if even a drunken pity-hookup is so far out of the question.
it is such a glaringly one-sided relationship. the only compelling thing about him is his passivity in allowing his parents to treat him so shittily and his lack of interest in being present in his own life. perhaps he is fascinating to marisol the way an overturned beetle is fascinating to a young child: the struggle and the persistence of nature etc. etc.
dunno - the real question is "will i ever get caught up on all my silly little book reviews, or will there forever be these sad blank spots effing up my bookpages...?" i am totally in class right now, by the way.
goddamn it, this was my bright shiny hope for gay YA week! this was the one i was banking on to be my best "assigned-but-loved-the-whole-time-i-was-regoddamn it, this was my bright shiny hope for gay YA week! this was the one i was banking on to be my best "assigned-but-loved-the-whole-time-i-was-reading-it-and-this-is-why-i-am-paying-for-grad-school-discovery." a lesbian retelling of cinderella?? sign me up! i've already read what robert coover and angela carter have done to improve fairy tales, let's see where this one goes!
and it starts out great - the writing is wonderful; it is very literary and lush and haunting. boy meets boy and keeping you a secret were so chatty and conversational - this one required more involvement from the reader, which involvement i have been missing in a big way. it's not a difficult read, but unlike the others, it is not all surface reading; there is depth here that elevates it to the ranks of "litterature," yessss.
but.
fairy tales are generally symbolic stories which mask universal human desires too emotional or frightening to deal with head-on. is this a universal truth, or am i letting my undergrad "psychology of fairy tales" class color my thinking here? let's say we all know this to be so. i simply do not understand this character's motivations, or what leads her on to her fairy tale ending. is it just a matter of "the heart wants what the heart wants", and we don't need to explain what attracts two people to each other? there was no "moment of falling". i never got a sense of character from the huntress; she remained enigmatic. strangely, she was even more enigmatic than ash's fairy-lover, with his intoxicating presence and fancy gifts and willingness to assist ash in all her assignations. am i the only one feeling bad for sidhean?? his was a "forbidden love", too, and he didn't even get any say in the matter. damn curses.
so as a fairy tale, it fails me, psychologically. and as a lesbian awakening novel, it fails me, too. we never see them fall in love, we never understand why. in the world of this novel, the same-gender love is not shocking, it is not taboo - sometimes girls just go with girls. so kudos on that, but this does two things: it removes conflict, except the conflict of "do i go with my awesome fairy lover which is what i have wanted since i was a little girl, or do i go with my awesome huntress woman who is badass and has a great job." two great options, must be nice.
in this world, she is not choosing the love that dares not speak its name over the more traditional lover, in fact, she is choosing the more socially acceptable one. mindboggling.
so but also, it is not developed enough to be that casual. because we never see the love developing, it just sort of seems unconvincing at the end. this is my favorite review: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... because this reader obviously didn't see this turn coming, and is confused by its ending, since nothing else suggests that this is where it is going to be going. i don't know if the stars are meant to avoid spoilers (although, really, you don't have to be a master wordsmith) or because it is a naughty naughty word, but it made me laugh. clearly, in the world of teen readership, we are not ready for lesbian lit that does not proclaim itself from the outset, as this other reviewer's surprise seems to indicate: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/.... secret, creep-up-on-you lesbian fiction?? maybe in a few years. biding our time, ladies...
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