MG PUNK

I just finished reading M. Evan Wolkenstein's Turtle Boy and I really, really liked it. No major details, just wanted to say that it got me thinking about middle grade books and punk music. 

In Turtle Boy, Will gets paired up with a terminal patient a few years older than him as a pre-Bar Mitzvah community service project. The older boy, RJ, is a drummer, and he and Will start to bond when RJ starts teaching Will how to drum. Eventually, RJ sends Will to a punk show and gives him a playlist of music to listen to (after Will admits that he doesn't really listen to music and RJ is, rightfully, appalled).

Turtle Boy reminded me a lot of Rob Harrell's Wink, another absolutely endearing middle grade novel. Both are about 7th grade boys dealing with an unusual medical issue (Will needs reconstructive surgery on his jaw, Ross has cancer in his eye), both boys lost a parent at a young age, and both cope, in part, by falling in love with loud music (which they learn to play and then perform at talent shows). Both books also made me want to listen to loud punk music - in Turtle Boy, there are lots of references to The Clash, and in Wink, Ross ultimately winds up performing a Ramones song (if I'm remembering correctly). Loud music, especially punk, seems like exactly the right catharsis for the feelings Will and Ross are dealing with - fear, anger, humiliation - and I love that they both channel those feelings into playing.

And since I'm talking about middle grade books and punk music, a word for Celia C. Perez's The First Rule of Punk, a truly great story with a really disappointing cover (I do really like Malú's Blondie t-shirt, though). It's been a few years since I read this one, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and, much like Turtle Boy and Wink, I loved that it dug into one of my favorite genres of music. I can only hope that these books will make kids curious about punk the way that Please Kill Me did for me. I'm also curious now about any other middle grade books that dig into punk - I love pulling together these kinds of collections (and I'm also thinking some kind of display about books and music would be really fun...something to keep in mind as the new school year looms).

Not, I think, my best bit of writing, but wanted to start putting my little punk collective together while the thought was still fresh in my mind. 

I can't stand the rain

It was awfully rainy earlier this year, and so very green as a result. It hasn't been nearly so wet for a while now (although we've had some wild storms in the last few days), but I can't help remembering those days as I read the first volume of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, in which an epic flood washes baby Lyra, with new characters Malcolm and Alice, down the swollen Thames toward London.

I'm not entirely sure how to explain my love for books that are driven by (usually catastrophic) weather. I don't think I've written about my cold books yet (although I've certainly thought about it quite a bit) - books that describe long winters and bone-cracking cold, that make you shiver if you read them in the summer and make you deeply grateful for your warm blankets if you read them in the winter. And I wrote ages ago about Seventeenth Summer and the sensual way Maureen Daly talked about the actual season of summer.

La Belle Sauvage is reminding of the good flood stories, the ones that jump into my head when it seems like the rains will never stop, and the ones that remind me of my own floods. The big literary floods that come to mind are all magical, which seems about right; I've experienced a few big floods and they all seem touched by a similar unreality.

The first time our street flooded, I was nine and I woke up to find our house surrounded by water; it felt like a fairy tale. We spent the day wading in the water. I remember it being an otherwise beautiful day that ended in a perfectly golden summer evening, and we gathered with our neighbors for a cookout as the waters receded. (The second time the street flooded, I was older and up all night, minding the downstairs toilet to ensure it didn't back up - less idyllic, but no less unreal and out of time.) When the river flooded in 1997, it was after an historic winter (that's for Malcolm), and downtown Grand Forks burned even while it was surrounded by water. My family was high and dry, but a drive downtown took us to the edge of the flood, where street signs stood above the water. When the river flooded 12 years later, I lived by the river and watched it rise and helped sandbag and worried and fretted, but when the water crested, I was still enchanted by it. Couldn't help myself.

(I didn't mean to go on about my own floods. I meant to talk about the book floods!)

Of course there's The Flood, the Genesis flood (and it's counterparts in all the other mythologies) that all of these other floods hearken back to. But I'm more inclined to think about all the Gabriel Garcia Marquez floods. The one in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where "it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days" after the banana company massacre. And one that I can only kind of remember, though I can't remember which book. And my favorite, in the short story "Light Like Water": "For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded."

But maybe more than that, I think of a flooded Gormenghast, a ruined castle filled with water and intrigue and the Bright Carvers, who paddle boats through the flooded rooms on an upper level (the lower levels, of course, being entirely filled with water).

(I don't have a tidy way to end this, I'm afraid. I was reading La Belle Sauvage and was well into the flood part of the story when I found myself overwhelmed by the desire to talk about other floods. And here we are!)

Shining

Reading House of Sand and Fog (it was fine) and a trip to Seattle slowed down my summer reading a bit, but Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High is a book to fly through. I wasn't expecting prose, but I'm not mad about it, especially when she drops some poetry like this:

I look around at all of us, a colorful group of Americans. Not just our skin, although we are colorful in that sense too, but just about everything about us. The fitteds, the Jordans and Foams, the cutoff jeans, the bright lipstick and fresh sweats would make you think we were getting off a video shoot and not an eight-hour flight. We look beautiful and hood and excited to see the world, and none of us are hiding from this world seeing us. All of us shining despite what it took to earn our way here.

The project and long books

I do think I've actually written about the reading project I embarked upon a couple of years ago now, which is to read all of the fiction on my shelves that has, thus far, gone unread. (In case I haven't, there it is.) It's something I've gone at with varying enthusiasm - prior to the last week or so, I hadn't read anything in there since sometime last year - but I've been trying to work it into my summer reading plans. 

Frankly, it's nice to have the variation of some books not written explicitly for young people. That said, it was something I was dreading a bit, which always seems to happen when I'm away from "the classics" for too long. It's like the opinions of the general populace get into my head and make me forget and make me all nervous that I, like, won't be able to handle reading literature anymore. 

Silly.

I've been dreading the arrival at Sister Carrie (much as I dreaded Moll Flanders and The Woman in White, and Moll was fine and The Woman in White was fantastic) and now that I'm here, it's pretty good so far! I mean, there's a kind of nasty misogyny that pops up from time to time and I'd love to see Carrie's story told by a woman, but it's not too dry and I'm not bored. So there!

(I'm going to try to at least get through all of the D last names, which means after Sister Carrie, I've only got The House of Sand and Fog and The Three Musketeers.)

Mission

I wrote last night about my "mission statement" (I despise mission statements and I hate writing them, but this is one of the few projects I've done where I've felt a clear sense of mission; of course, that also means I've endured repeated frustration when I drift from the path). Let's see if I can do a better job of sticking to it, of posting impulsively about whatever grabs my attention.

For instance, I'm about a third of the way into Sarah Henstra's We Contain Multitudes. I started it last night and couldn't stop reading, which isn't terribly surprising. It's set in Minnesota, and I know I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for books that live where I live. It's also named for and opens with one of my favorite Whitman quotes:

 Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Is it a little cliche? Very well then it's a little cliche. (I don't care, I love it.)

Also, a review compared it to Aristotle and Dante, at which point I knew I was a goner. (Also, that cover!)

Anyway, it's lovely. But that isn't what brought me here! I could say that it's lovely on Twitter! 

What brought me here was biking. I love biking. I'm not a super-serious cyclist, with tight, butt-padded shorts and clip-in shoes, but biking generally makes me feel more free and more myself than most other things. That said, it isn't something I've done nearly as much over the last couple of years. Initially, I slacked off out of fear of embarrassment - I had (have?) a disease that made patches of my hair fall out and I was terrified the wind would uncover those bald spots. In hindsight, this is rather bizarre - on a bike is usually where I am least self-conscious, not to mention the fact that I could have worn a helmet and been properly covered (and properly safe). By the time I had made some peace, it was the dead of winter and there was certainly no biking, and then I was moving and living in a place less conducive to biking and I'm just out of the habit. It sucks, and I miss it, but I think I'm also in need of some inspiration to get back in the habit.

Perhaps this will do it. Jo writes to Kurl to thank him for retrieving his bike from the bottom of a river and describes his delight in returning to the saddle:

These mornings that aren't quite frosty but smell like frost...

(This is, by the way, one of my favorite times of year and a marvelous smell and thank you to Sarah Henstra for putting it into words.)

...Cycling is one of those experiences that, for me, points to life beyond high school....I am regularly reminded again that freedom is waiting. 

(I am, of course, not in high school. But biking is freedom from a lot of things, and I appreciated the reminder.)

 

 

 

Odd One Out

I finished Nic Stone's Odd One Out today. I'm not sure I have a lot to say about it, but it is a Royal Reader book, so I should have something to say. (Jumped back up here to add that this is going to feel more review-y than I want things on this blog to feel; my mission statement has always been to use this space to blurt out the thoughts I can't contain, right as they're inspired by whatever I'm reading, but I drift from that vision when I need a dumping ground for thoughts I might have to share with a group.)

First things first, I feel like Rae gets short shrift. She certainly has a touch of MPDG about her, with the crossword puzzles and the high dollar words, not to mention the whole thing about Carousel Carl. (A story line that I think could have been left out. It didn't seem to pay out as much as it was building to.) And like any good MPDG, she seems primarily to exist as a catalyst for another character (or, in this case, two characters), flitting into their lives at a crucial moment and flitting right back out at a convenient time.

I did really like the way Nic Stone handled Jupiter's questioning (and that she explained her own history of questioning). It reminded me of this beautiful Orangette post (and it made me wonder, as I do every now and again, if Molly will ever post there again, because I really miss her writing), and her confusion and frustration felt very honest.

Let's be honest. I really just wrote this so I could bemoan the end (?) of Orangette.

Summer Book Clubs

Part the First. Or Part the Only. We'll see how strong my blogging muscle is this summer and how many thoughts I want to record about the books I am reading / have read for my two (!) summer book clubs.

I'll include the lists for these book clubs at the end; the overlap between them is due entirely to my involvement in the curation of both lists. As always, my goal is to read everything.

Let's begin with Hanna Alkaf's The Weight of Our Sky, because it's the book I just finished. Unsurprisingly, I was unfamiliar with the riots of May 13, 1969 and the tensions between the Malay and Chinese people in Malaysia. This is not a topic that was covered in any of my history classes. This is true of many of the books we've read over the last few years, and what I really want to talk about is how you sell historical fiction to kids (or adults, for that matter) when it's about history that is wholly unfamiliar to them. This book does a great job of giving you the right amount of information - it isn't didactic, but I never felt lost - so I think kids could follow and would get into the story if they started it, but how do you clear that first and highest hurdle?

Another thing we have to talk about is the trigger warning that opens the book. It is an intense book, and an intense portrait of mental illness. I was reminded particularly of reading John Green's Turtles All the Way Down - not my favorite of his books, but the obsessive and intrusive thought spirals there and in Weight are suffocating in a way that gives you a peek at what it would be like to live with that constantly. And if you're someone who struggles with intrusive thoughts anyway, it's nice to have a heads up about what you're walking into. But I'm curious to know what others think about trigger warnings. Turtles doesn't have one, this book does - how does that shape the experience of reading?

Finally, of course, the mental illness itself. Melati (which means "jasmine," according to Vincent) struggles with OCD, triggered by the death of her father and centered around her fear of losing her mother and trying to prevent that through obsessive rituals. I trust that Alkaf is providing a period- and place-appropriate picture of OCD - that it would be viewed as a sort of demonic possession and that spiritual healers would be consulted and preferred to actual doctors, for fear of institutionalization. It seems incredibly important to understand this history, given the stigmatization that still surrounds mental health care, despite the normalization (in parts of the US, at least) of therapy and medication like anti-depressants.

In the interest of keeping this post a reasonable length, I'll close out here with the lists (I'll bold the ones I've finished so far) and return another time (probably) with some smaller blurbs about those already-finished titles.

Moorhead Secondary Summer Book Camp

• Merci Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina
• New Kid by Jerry Craft
• Nikki on the Line by Barbara Carroll Roberts
• The Size of the Truth by Andrew Smith
• The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin
• Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster by Jonathan Auxier
• It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
• Internment by Samira Ahmed
• (Don't) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health
• The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Plot to Kill Hitler by John Hendrix
• Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner
• The Unwanted: Stories of Syrian Refugees by Don Brown
• Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
• I Am Still Alive by Kate Alice Marshall
• Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson
• The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf
• We Are Not Yet Equal: Understanding Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
• Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds
• On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
• Voices: The Final Hours of Joan of Arc by David Elliott
• The Past and Other Things that Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson

Hopkins Royal Readers

• Internment by Samira Ahmed
• Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
• New Kid by Jerry Craft
• Speak: The Graphic Novel by Laurie Halse Anderson
• What the Night Sings by Vesper Stamper
• It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
• Monday's Not Coming by Tiffany Jackson
• A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi
• With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
• Odd One Out by Nic Stone
• Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds
• Shout by Laurie Halse Anderson
• The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
• Ink and Ashes by Valynne E. Maetani
• Rebel Seoul by Axie Oh
• The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson
• #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women
• Just Mercy: A True Story of the Fight for Justice by Bryan Stevenson
• You're Welcome, Universe by Whitney Gardner
• The Other Boy by M.G. Hennessey