YA or STFU

Schraff, Anne. A Matter of Trust(2006), and Lost and Found(2007). NY: Scholastic.

I've just read the first two books in Scholastic's relatively new "Bluford Series," a series of novels about a group of mostly Black, urban teens who attend Bluford High School in coastal California. The first two books feature a female protagonist, fifteen-year-old Darcy, who expands her social world by befriending a couple that she and her best friend, Brisana, had dismissed as too ghetto, and grows closer to her crush, a singer and guitar player named Hakeem. Darcy's father, who left her family when she was just 10 years old, has suddenly returned and, although Darcy's younger sister is eager to reunite with him, Darcy and her mother wary of his intentions.

These first installments of the larger series are easy and natural to read. In spite of the fact that the series is sold with a Teacher's Guide, I don't feel hit over the head with morality. It's clear that Darcy and Hakeem are going to be the Elizabeth Wakefield and Todd Wilkins of the series and, to be honest, the four would probably have a lot in common. Unlike "Sweet Valley High," however, in which the default and assumed race of all the characters is white, in the "Bluford Series," the default and assumed race is Black. To me, it's very exciting to read a popular series about Black characters where that kind of "hidden curriculum" assumption is challenged in a subtle way. That is, the characters aren't described in elusive terms meant to indicate their Blackness; the series just assumes we are approaching the characters as the Black folks they are. Just like "Sweet Valley High" didn't go out of its way to describe Liz and Jess's whiteness in every book, this series doesn't go out of its way to inscribe Blackness on its characters for the benefit of a dominant audience. And, in the mostly white world of juvenile and teen series fiction, this is saying a LOT.

The publisher's website (Townsend Press, though the CIP data indicates Scholastic has taken over the series) touts the series' "accessible writing style" and its 5/6 grade reading level, as well as each novel's "relatively short length" and emphasizes what the publisher believes is the series' broad appeal. I'm always a little wary of a popularly constructed series that needs to tell its readers and buyers that the content is broadly appealing. After all, isn't that how popular fiction is supposed to work normally?

Posted by Amy P. at 04:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Friend, Natasha (2007). Bounce. NY: Scholastic. 188 pages.

A surprisingly good novel (I was not a fan of Friend's weaker, earlier novels, Lush and Perfect) about a family's dramatic reorganization following a father's remarriage. When, at her thirteenth birthday dinner, Evyn's father drops the news that he intends to marry the Boston college professor he's been seeing and plans for Evyn and her brother to move to the city to live with them, the shit threatens to hit the fan. With a mother long gone (she died when Evyn was a baby), Evyn has no choice but to "bounce" and roll with the punches. Her new life with her father's wife's large family (6 kids!) in an unfamiliar city and at a snooty private school is not fun and Evyn has trouble adjusting. Her difficulty becomes even more awkward in the face of her father's transformation from hippie to yuppie and her brother's social success at his new school.

This is a short, quick and sympathetic novel that really works. Evyn's imaginary conversations with her dead mother (shades of Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret are some the most honest and effecting parts of the book and there are some funny and humiliating moments in the story (when Evyn catches her father and stepmother in the shower together--yikes!). Like Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature (by Robin Brande, blogged on YA or STFU), Bounce is a younger YA novel. It's characteristically graphic cover will draw the attention of established Friend fans and its charm will entice others.

Posted by Amy P. at 04:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pow, Tom (2007). Captives. New Milford, CT: Roaring Brook Press. 185 pages.

Lame, lame, lame. I really expected more from this novel if only based on its premise: two families (one British and one American) are kidnapped while on vacation in the Caribbean and are held captive by a group of socialist terrorists bent on extracting an American mining company from its island. The novel's main character is Martin, the teenaged son of the British family, and a witness but not strong participant in the captivity narrative. After Martin's father's memoir of the family's experience is published (illustrated by drawings Martin's mother did while in captivity), Martin finally reads and questions his father's version of the events.

Pow is clearly trying to garner sympathy for the band of activists who kidnap the families; however, these characters emerge more as stereotypically principled, Latin savages than real characters. Their captivity ends in tragedy for the American family, and Martin's perspective of the narrative is taken up with mooning over the American family's nubile teen daughter. Told in two parts: Martin's father's "published" memoir and what is supposed to be Martin's own view of the experience, Martin's perspective is more American-daughter-centric and reads more like the fantasies of an overly romantic victim. I was initially intrigued by the idea of the twice-told story and the inconsistencies that would emerge between the father's and son's narratives; however, Martin's story read more like an elaboration of his father's rather than the rebuke and symbol of their relationship than it could have been.

Posted by Amy P. at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brande, Robin (2007). Evolution, Me, and Other Freaks of Nature. NY: Knopf. 268 pages.

Fifteen-year-old Mena enters high school with more enemies (the whole school, practically) than friends (zero). A former member of her fundamentalist church's tight knit youth group, Mena has been ostracized from the group, the church, and even her family after she wrote a letter of apology to a gay teen the youth group had been trying to "save." On her first day in biology class, Mena finds herself paired with Casey, a science genius who worships their unconventional and brilliant science teacher. As Mena and Casey work on a science project together, Mena glimpses a family and way of living distinctly different from her own sheltered experience and, as she and Casey go to war with a group of students protesting the teaching of evolution in the science classroom, she begins to think more deeply about her Christian beliefs.

While this is not a Christian fiction novel in the tradition of the "Christy Miller" or "Sierra Jenson" series, Brande's first novel definitely falls closer to this end of the spectrum than to the Madeleine L'Engle or C.S. Lewis end. That said, the stance the book takes about evolution (that it is part of God's design and falls under the umbrella of free will) will likely disturb the intelligent design camp.

This is a fun, and (oddly enough) light read that would probably appeal more to the younger YA than the older, with its focus on the family lives of the characters and their teachers. I enjoyed this book; however, I don't feel it was as effective as it could have been. Brande tries to build suspense as she initially skirts the issue of Mena's ostracism and, when we finally get the details of her rebellion, it is not as complete or satisfying as it could have been. For example, the book hangs on this letter Mena wrote to the gay student bullied by the youth group, but, when it's finally explained, the letter is neither quoted nor represented. Because this is such a key to Mena's character, I feel that by failing to get into this in greater detail does a disservice to the novel's characterization of the protagonist as a whole. That said, the characters of Casey, his family, and their science teacher are completely described (I get the feeling Brande really enjoyed writing these characters) and this almost, but not quite, makes up for Mena's near cypher-status.

Posted by Amy P. at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wittlinger, Ellen (2007). Parrotfish. NY: Simon and Schuster. 294 pages.

Grady's always has trouble figuring out who, exactly, he is. As a young high school student, Grady--then known as Angela--came out as a lesbian; however, acknowledging a love for women only seemed like part of the process. Acknowledging the uncomfortable feeling that she didn't exactly belong in a female body and would like to live as a male was not easy, but, following the Thanksgiving holiday, Angela decides to return to school as Grady and "perform" gender in the way that feels the most natural, the most right.

As a "new" kid, Grady doesn't exactly get a warm welcome. Grady's younger sister is embarrassed by her transgendered brother and Grady's former best friend shuns him in an effort to get in with the popular crowd. The only person who takes Grady's transition in stride is Sebastian, the nerdy guy who has been assigned a locker next to Grady's.

Michael Cart, writing for Booklist, called this novel "nonthreatening" and I have to agree with his assessment and his judgment of the novel as perhaps incomplete because of this treatment. That said, by not hitting us over the head with transition details and titillating information (how does Grady bind his breasts? Does Grady "stuff" his pants?), Wittlinger emphasizes the humanity of the character and, in downplaying the transgender issue (Grady faces some logistical difficulties in gym and gets bullied by some jerky popular kids), doesn't raise the central conflict from structural to political. On one hand, this works well; it becomes easier to "forget" that Grady is transgendered and, I think, that is Wittlinger's intention. However, I'm not certain (and this my political self talking here) that we can ever engage with this subject (at least in "today's society") without bringing in politics to some degree.

Posted by Amy P. at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Forman, Gayle (2007). Sisters in Sanity. NY: HarperTeen (Harper Collins). 290 pages.

On the road to meet the rest of the family at the Grand Canyon, fifteen-year-old Brit's father makes an unexpected detour at Red Rock, a girl's school he thinks his punk rock guitar-playing daughter should "take a look" at. Little does Brit know that this school visit is really a ruse: within minutes of approaching the school, administrative thugs remove Brit from the car and "register" her for Red Rock's boot camp rehabilitation program. While Brit maintains that her new stepmother is behind the strong-arm treatment and forced incarceration, an increasingly persistent worry clouds her reasoning: does her father believe that Brit, like her birth mother who succumbed to paranoid schizophrenia, is on her way to mental illness as well?

Much of the novel reads as you would expect: boarding school/prison girls/boot camp exploitation. Brit manages to forge a friendship with a small group of girls who meet in secret and call themselves the "Sisters in Sanity" and the gang vows to watch each others' backs at the group shaming/therapy sessions. Brit even manages to escape the facility and play a show with her band (who happen to be touring in the area), after which she actually returns to Red Rock.

There are two ways a story like this can go: you can either camp it up super hardcore, or you can invest the narrative in the dirty and depressingly regular details of the characters' controlled lives. Sadly, Sisters in Sanity does neither. Once Brit gets settled, the "Sisters" get involved in a plot to expose the school and the novel concludes in a predictably fairy-tale-like manner. While I have nothing against fairy tales or predictability, I wonder when teen boot camp private schools became an appropriate setting for high school social fantasy?

Posted by Amy P. at 08:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chappell, Chrissa-Jean (2007). Total Constant Order. NY: Harper Collins (Katherine Tegan books). 278 pages.

Numbers, numbers, numbers: fourteen-year-old Fin sees them everywhere and thinks about them constantly. Since her family's recent move from Vermont to Florida and her parents' subsequent divorce, obsessive counting and drawing have become Fin's refuge. Worried about the control the numbers seem to have begun exercising over her life, Fin asks her mother to bring her to a psychologist and she begins a course of therapy and medication and begins an unlikely friendship with an outcast boy from her class.

The first chapters of Chappell's novel effectively describe Fin's developing OCD and the slightly speedy introductory chapter is a compelling description of obsession voiced a la Jack Gantos' "Joey Pigza" books. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel doesn't retain this mood or pace, though there are some realistic and descriptive moments; the chapters during which Fin adjusts to (or attempts to adjust to) an SSRI are particularly effective. There are some dangling plot points that I would have like to have seen explored a bit more, especially with regards to Fin's relationship with her mother and her mother's likely OCD. While this kind of exploration might disrupt the typical no-parents-allowed narrative of the standard YA novel, in this case, it might have been appropriate.

Ultimately, I don't feel like Chappell's novel is as successful as Terry Spencer Hesser's 1999 treatment of the same subject (Kissing Doorknobs); however, the bright and eerily attractive descriptions of Fin's rituals are compelling enough to allow latitude for understanding, if not empathy.

Posted by Amy P. at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)