YA or STFU

Conrad, Lauren (2009). L. A. Candy. NY: HarperCollins. 336 pages.

Now, you know I wasn't going to, like, not read this book. Of course, Lauren Conrad's first novel (there are reportedly two to follow this debut and that serve to continue the story begun in Candy) totally precedes itself. First, there's the press that Lauren is doing to promote the novel: she's visited The View, Late Night and The Early Show, and is currently (as of June 23, 2009) engaged in a multi-city book-signing tour (Salon.com's review of the novel and of one of Conrad's appearances can be found here). Then, there's the whole Being Lauren Conrad Thing, which takes it all to the next level.

The skinny: L. A. Candy follows best friends Jane and Scarlett, two Santa Barbara girls who move to L. A. to go to school (Scarlett) and intern for a famous celebrity party planner (Jane). When the girls are picked out of a partying crowd at a hot nightclub by a television producer, they submit to participation in a reality show based on their lives. Starring with Jane and Scarlett are two other girls: Madison, a bitchy heiress who loves the spotlight, and Gaby, a dumb blonde and would-be starlet. While naive, girl-next-door Jane is flattered and charmed by the spoils of reality stardom, Scarlett--who is characterized as the hotter but also smarter of the two--is a harder sell. When, following a test screening, the producers of the reality show select Jane as the primary narrative focalizer (she's just so relatable), the claws come out and Madison vows to refocus the spotlight on herself.

I watched Lauren's interview on The View (the clip is embedded on her MySpace page), and was struck by the way she described the genesis of her novel. After Whoopi asks Lauren how she got the idea for L. A. Candy, Lauren explains, "They came to me with this idea, and they said would you ever consider writing a novel?" Of course, she said yes, and decided to base it on her experiences as a reality show starlet. My questions: who are "they" and what else have they suggested? Are "they" the ones who suggested the hackneyed plot that pretends to critique the reality show world, but ends up drawing its characters just as broadly and typically as a reality show would? While this characterization is sort of meta--in one scene, Scarlett complains that the girls have been misrepresented and simplified--this meta-ness seems more accidental than farcical.

Of course, I totally ate the book up and will definitely be on the lookout for the next one. The predictable plot, the contrived villainy of Madison, and the wide-eyed innocence of Jane are just too awesome to pass up. Now, I've never watched The Hills, so I can't really draw parallels between the show, Lauren's "real" life, and the novel, but I bet there are Easter Eggs in there for folks who are looking. Prove me wrong.

Posted by Amy P. at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Contemporary Realism | Girly Books | Popular Series

Nelson, Blake (2009). Destroy All Cars. NY: Scholastic. 224 pages.

The first couple of pages of Blake Nelson's new book are in the form of an AP English essay written by the novel's main character, James Hoff, and entitled "Destroy All Cars." A four page rant divided into sections entitled, "Primitive Machine," "I Am So Sick of Cars," and "On the Lameness of People in General," this fictionalized essay sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Alternating between James' progressively more English class appropriate essays (read: further essays attempt to follow James' teacher's admonition to, for one, support his claims with specific examples) and his journal-style first person musings, Destroy All Cars reads more to me like a slice of life than a novel per se. While, between the essays, James mourns the dissolution of his relationship with his girlfriend Sadie, goes on one sort of failure date, and then briefly gets back together with Sadie, there isn't any really dramatic rising action, climax or real denoument. Then again, I read most of the novel in various windowless classrooms and in a bar while at an academic conference, so I might have missed something.

That said, Nelson remains one of very few YA authors who really manage to capture the high school experience in a realistic way. For one thing, in this book (as in his other novels), Nelson describes the existence of a semi-outsider but otherwise unremarkable high school student. Torn sweaters, thrift store fashion and anti-consumerism aside, James Hoff comes off as distinctly more regular and more regularly flawed than, say, Janet Tashijan's "Larry" (from The Gospel According to Larry, et. al.). Like most of us, James lives a rather unremarkable life and passes at least part of his time commenting on but not necessarily interacting with the other kids in his milieu. For example, a number of chapters mention a new kid in school, a guy named Jebediah who intercepts the food kids would typically throw away in the cafeteria and then eats it. Whether Jebediah is making a more public comment about consumerism and throw-away culture is almost beside the point as we are party to James' snarky asides about this guy who may or may not be a poser. When Jebediah is finally expelled and escorted from school, James watches him leave the building with the same kind of interested dispassion I remember from when I watched our residential college's local drug dealer walked out of our building during one of our dorm lectures.

And that gets to the heart of what I like about Blake Nelson's novels: sometimes things just don't really happen. Or, they happen, but instead of happening to you, they happen to someone else, and you get to watch and enjoy the freedom to comment. Or maybe it's just me.

The next comment is more of an aside, and not really a critique of Nelson's novel but more of a "thought experiment:" why do you think it is that Nelson takes pains to situate James in an AP English class? Why not "regular" English? Or even "Remedial?" It's not just Destroy All Cars that does this; lots of YA novels that use the old English essay trope as a premise take care to first distinguish the novel's narrator (and essay-writer) as somehow academically excellent or talented or genius. Rob Thomas's Rats Saw God is one example, but I'm sure there are a lot of others. I wonder if this conceit is one adult authors (and adults in general) think is necessary to craft a believable character. Like, "normal" kids (kids today, grumble, grumble) wouldn't be able to write nearly as well as to be readable, let alone to reach novel length, so if a teen character's writing forms the body of a YA novel, that teen must be somehow exceptional. The existence of novels like Sapphire's Push that take pains to characterize its narrator in terms of her lack of educational opportunity through the use of deliberate misspellings sort of proves my point. In YA lit, it is the exceptional (exceptionally bright or exceptionally under-served) character who is granted the agency to write his or her own story.

Posted by Amy P. at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Contemporary Realism

McNamee, Graham (2008). Bonechiller. NY: Wendy Lamb books. 304 pages.

Graham McNamee, author of the 2003 thriller Acceleration and the 1999 Delacorte winner Hate You, is one of those YA authors you tend to forget about because they publish so comparatively infrequently but who, when one of their books does finally make it to the shelf, you're both satisfied and thinking, "Dude! About damn time!"

Following in the thriller mode he began in Acceleration and adding a touch of the supernatural, McNamee sets his latest novel in the depths of winter and in the sparsely populated Canadian north. After a night with his friends-- Pike--militaristic and mercuric--Howie--Pike's brainy younger brother--and Ash--a girl boxer with Native blood--Danny, newly arrived to the town of Harvest Cove, is chased and marked by an unidentifiable large beast. Wary of sharing this experience with the gang (especially since he is nursing a crush on Ash), Danny keeps mum about it until Howie reports a similar encounter. As Danny and Howie begin to notice physiological changes that appear to be the result of their meeting with the beast, the four friends investigate what appears to be an historical phenomenon and embodiment of a First Nations legend.

While I enjoyed this fast-moving thriller--especially the chill that seems to pervade the narrative--I am both intrigued by and concerned about the First Nations legend mined by McNamee. Drawing from the story of the Windigo, an evil and angry creature that hungers for human flesh, McNamee relies on the story's only full-native character--Ash's father--to relate the myth. While this seems to preserve the story's "voice" as it attaches a native character to the story and depicts this character's ownership and telling of the myth, I can't help but feel like the old "First Nations Legend" trope is a little tired. It's kind of like the old "Ancient Indian Burial Ground" that serves as the explanation for the disturbances in Poltergeist. While, on one hand, I appreciate an attempt to authorize the mythologies of and give voice to a people who have been historically marginalized, I wonder if this focus on the more horrific of the tribal legends isn't somewhat manipulative and doesn't ultimately paint a sensationalist picture of the people who identify as native.

Posted by Amy P. at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Horror

Zarr, Sara (2008). Sweethearts. Boston: Little, Brown. 224 pages.

Known in elementary school as "Fattifer," overweight, lisping Jennifer Harris suffered through her early school days and lonely afterschool hours with one friend, the equally outcast Cameron Quick. A quiet soul who seemed to understand Jennifer to a degree her mother never mustered, Cameron was Jennifer's best friend and perhaps even her first love. When, in fifth grade, Cameron disappears and Jennifer learns first that his family has moved and then, that Cameron has died, Jennifer retreats even further socially. Her mother's remarriage and the family's subsequent move to a new area of town provide the impetus for a transformation and Jennifer loses weight, changes her name to "Jenna," and insinuates herself with the popular kids at her small, alternative high school. When Cameron reappears--and with him, Jenna's memories of their shared past--she is both ecstatic that he is alive and anxious that she will be forced to confront the more difficult days of their past.

The first person narrative shifts between Jenna's memories of her youth with Cameron and her present; both story strands allude to an ominous event in Jenna's and Cameron's past. This allusion creates a kind of suspense in the novel and, though readers might be initially let down at what seems to be the relative tameness of this scene, its description and its implication are richly haunting.

Like Zarr's first novel, Story of a Girl, most of this novel's action is part of the characters' pasts and the narrative tension is invested in their present understanding and interpretation of these situations. While the title of this novel would seem to suggest that it is a love story, Sweethearts is not, in my estimation, a romance. The bulk of the novel is given to describing Jenna's and Cameron's complicated closeness and real affection for each other; however, I don't really think that this relationship is described in romantic terms. If anything, Zarr contrasts Jenna's past and present relationship with Cameron with the other relationships she has been told are more significant in her life: her difficult and silence-filled relationship with her mother and her physically passionate but somewhat fatuous relationship with her boyfriend. To find someone who knows you so well and likes you anyway, Zarr seems to suggest, is an uncommon gift, and not one so easily labeled in terms of mere romance.

Posted by Amy P. at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Contemporary Realism

Fletcher, Christine (2008). Ten Cents a Dance. NY: Bloomsbury USA. 368 pages.

I read this one on the recommendation of my friend Beth and found it so intriguing that I finished it in nearly one (long) sitting. Set in Chicago in the early days of the Second World War, the novel follows Ruby, a fifteen-year-old meatpacker who has left school to support her ailing mother and younger sister. Discouraged by the tough job, low wages and her family's perpetual debt, Ruby takes a job at a "dance academy" at the suggestion of Paulie, a good-looking local tough. Paid by lonely men ten cents for each dance she spends in their arms or at the academy's soda fountain, Ruby finds herself exposed to a nighttime world of wild jazz, segregated nightclubs and hustling.

If anyone besides me is reminded of Tina Turner's "Private Dancer" here, know that Ten Cents is much more up-tempo than Turner's musical lamentation. Fletcher's second novel (her first, Tallulah Falls [which I haven't read, by the way], was published in 2007) is comparable to Judy Blundell's award-winning What I Saw and How I Lied. Both novels are set around WWII (Fletcher's novel falls right before and then during the United States' involvement; Blundell's describes the postwar years) and both rely not on set pieces but on tone to convey the anxiety of the past. An uncommon World War II story, Fletcher's novel makes what we would call today the "working poor" the center of her story and complicates our understanding of the time period by calling our attention to the racial prejudices and attitudes that colored interactions during the period, describing these in terms more nuanced than mere black and white. That said, Ten Cents is not a story about racial prejudice, nor is it a story about World War II. Instead, as in What I Saw, Fletcher demonstrates how a young person's life and world view can be altered so dramatically by circumstance and individual agency, describes the "adult" work young people are capable of, and highlights the ironic demands adults make for these same young people to "return" to their young lives once their work (on behalf of the same adults) is done.

Posted by Amy P. at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Historical Fiction

Anderson, Laurie Halse (2009). Wintergirls. NY: Viking. 288 pages.

I think that I must be a terrible person: I did not like Wintergirls. Not hardly at all. Before I tell you why, let me just provide a bare bones (ha!) sketch of the plot for the two folks who (besides me as of a couple of weeks ago) haven't yet read Anderson's acclaimed novel. Seventeen-year-old Lia hasn't spoken with her best friend Cassie in over a year, so when she receives a series of cell phone calls from Cassie late one night, she doesn't bother answering. When Cassie's body is discovered and Lia realizes that she had been calling her the night she died, Lia's tentative recovery from anorexia (she and Cassie had, prior to the dissolution of their friendship, engaged in disordered eating behaviors together) ceases and she finds herself returning to her old and oddly comforting ways.

So this book does something that I really resent (unless used in the most unselfconscious and self-aggrandizing way possible, a la H.P. Lovecraft): it relies upon conventions of print to convey emotion. And sure, lots of books--for adults and YAs alike--use "handwriting" style fonts to demonstrate a change in narrative voice and even to suggest something about the personality of the narrator; however, most of us recognize this for the cheap shorthand it is and, when we see this in popular literature, recognize it as a trope. In Wintergirls, Anderson uses tiny font and itallics to distinguish emotive or provocative passages, so that we find paragraphs or sections of the book ending in an italicized sentence like a story from Weird Tales. Furthermore, Anderson engages in the old unreliable narrator tell by depicting Lia's real feelings and emotions as crossed out text placed beside the actual narrated text. And yes, I know this is supposed to convey the depth of Lia's self-deception and unwillingness to feel her own emotions, even inside her head, but come on, man! These are just cheap tricks.

While Wintergirls is primarily about Lia's eating disorder, a contributing factor in the form of her divorced parents and their relationships with each other and with Lia provide (in my opinion) the most interesting reading. Lia's friendship with the boy who found Cassie's body allows an unconventional character foil to make an appearance here, too.

Okay, so I didn't totally hate the book. I just resent (1) the cheap typographical techniques employed by either the author or the designer (or perhaps both) and (2) the critical reception of this novel that, in my opinion, doesn't really break any new ground for the problem novel or for the eating disorder narrative. Also, there's, like, a really, really long page of acknowledgments at the end of the novel which seems sort of out of place and--as they describe, in part, the author's consultation with experts in an attempt to depict Lia's physical and psychological deterioration accurately--just serves to highlight the somewhat over-constructed nature of the story.

Posted by Amy P. at 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Contemporary Realism

Simone, Ni-Ni (2008). If I Was Your Girl. NY: Dafina. 230 pages.

As promised, I'm working my way through the Ni-Ni Simone oeurve and, with If I Was Your Girl, have just engaged with one half of a two-book set, the first (I read them out of order) of which is called Shortie Like Mine, both of which tell the story of a pair of twins from each girl's perspective. If I Was begins with seventeen-year-old Toi's discovery of her boyfriend and baby daddy's infidelity. After Toi, her sister, and her girlfriends discover Toi's boy Quamir getting freaky with some ho, Toi slowly begins to realize that her future--and her baby's future--with Quamir is anything but secure. And it's not like the relationship was great to begin with: Quamir never helped with Toi's bills and kept bothering her at work, playing jealous when she tried to wait on customers at the IHOP.

When Toi meets Harlem, a good-looking university student, their connection is immediate; however, when Harlem reveals that he thinks teenage mothers are just "statistics" and that, as such, have pretty much screwed themselves out of their futures, Toi is offended and uncertain as to when and if she should reveal her own "statistical" status.

There's a little bit of genre-fied drama in this story and some obligatory "scenes from the hood" (most notably the first scene in the book, in which Toi and her girls give Quamir's new lay a beatdown); however, Simone's novel departs from its urban literary roots in a number of ways. Unlike A Girl Like Me, this story doesn't follow the Cinderella-in-the-Hood narrative that populates so much young people's fiction of this type. Instead, after all the drama with Quamir and Harlem, Toi decides she needs to focus on getting her own life together and spends the last quarter of the book doing just this. While purists might argue that not enough time is spent demonstrating the struggles with time, privacy, etc. that come with teenage motherhood, the point of the novel is not to vilify teen moms or glorify exceptions, and this lack of didacticism is a feature that I really appreciate in a YA novel. Instead, the novel treats Toi's eventual maturation with respect and realism. When Toi decides that she might like to go to college, there's not magical Single Mom Scholarship that appears and she has to figure out how (financially and literally) she might be able to attend school with her sister. The novel emphasizes the importance of family and its attendant support, but does so in a way that manages to avoid sentimentality. There are some sort of stock characters who add comic relief and who represent the Old School here that are pretty funny, too, and this admittedly silly humor distinguishes the book as well.

Posted by Amy P. at 02:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Posted to Contemporary Realism | Romance | Urban Fiction