Pink by Lili Wilkinson

I was super excited for this book - Australia, theater, and, most importantly, a bisexual protagonist! And in fact, there are lots of small things to love here, but I was never quite sold on our protagonist.

Ava has always been a dutiful daughter - going with the flow at her public high school, eschewing pink (and most other colors) from her utilitarian wardrobe, and spending lots of time with her radical anarchist girlfriend. Did I mention that Ava's parents are anti-establishment types? But Ava yearns for some normalcy in her life - demanding academics, pink argyle sweaters, and maybe even a boyfriend or two. So she convinces her parents that she should start attending a rigorous private school, a place where no one knows the old Ava and she can make herself over without anyone from her old life commenting on the change.

While her new look immediately ingratiates Ava with the popular "pastels" of the school, that doesn't make her new life easy. Joining the stage crew of the school musical (after an epic crash and burn at the actual auditions) in order to be close to the cutest boy on campus, Ava finds the "Screws" are the school's social lepers - and decides that she's now qualified to give them a social leg up even while she's precariously balancing her new social status, and hiding her new self from her old girlfriend and family. Most troubling to Ava is balancing her emotions - she still feels close to her girlfriend Chloe, but she undeniably finds the lead guy in the musical hot, and then there's the cute and helpful leader of the Screws who makes her feel all sorts of confused. Which Ava is the real Ava? And will she ever become comfortable with herself?

For me, Ava herself was the biggest problem of the story, in that she doesn't seem to actually grow in any meaningful way. The best illustration of this for me was when she tried to play matchmaker among the Screws, and it fails miserably, in part because Ava makes a lot of assumptions about the people whose hearts she's toying with. But in the end, Ava pulls the exact same stunt...only because it's a platonic set up everyone's okay with it? Also I have to say that while I love having a character proudly call herself a feminist, Ava has some extremely retrograde and ill-informed feminist thoughts. Which would be okay if she'd come up with them independently but considering her parents are professors and should be on the cutting edge of gender studies, it doesn't make sense that Ava would be so incredibly wrong sometimes (and really, asking the kid of Asian descent where he's "really" from? Wow, not okay. And that's pointed out in the text, but is again illustrative of just how out of touch with progressive and feminist thought Ava is).

BUT, it is encouraging to see a story with a bisexual protagonist - not that Ava uses the label for herself, but it's probably the closest label that fits. She makes it very clear that her relationship with Chloe is real and important and certainly not just a phase, and while it's a little preachy I did feel it was important to include some acknowledgement of the legitimacy of that relationship to make it clear that Ava wasn't just a lesbian until the "right guy" came along to straighten her out.

Also, science fiction geeks will have a lot of fun with Ava's stage crew friends, as they are huge nerds. In a delightful way. Lots of discussions of Star Trek and Lord of the Rings and zombies and...just general geekery. Gotta love that.

Nonfiction Monday Review: The Girl Who Was on Fire ed. by Leah Wilson

When I got the ARC of this from Smart Pop books, it included a bit of info on the editor - including the name of her degree from Duke University: Culture and Modern Fiction. Um, can I go back to school for that? Seriously, if money (both to go to school and in terms of making a living later) were no option, I would love to get an advanced degree in something like that. Which is probably why the Smart Pop books in general appeal to me so much, as they combine my love of all sorts of bits of popular culture with light academic reading. So when I was asked to look at Smart Pop's April 2011 title, all about The Hunger Games trilogy, I was allllllllllll over it!

13 YA authors tackle The Hunger Games trilogy, looking at topics as varied as the roles of fashion and the media, to politics and PTSD. There is some really serious stuff in here, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone who paid attention to more than the (gag) love triangle in the original books.

I'm clearly going to be partial to any essay titled "Team Katniss" - after all, that's the team I officially supported with a t-shirt at the Mockingjay release party - and Jennifer Lynn Barnes offers an excellent analysis on why Katniss herself is who we should be most concerned with - not being preoccupied with her love life. On a more frivolous level, I really enjoyed Terri Clark's look at Katniss' (and Cinna's) many fashion statements throughout the trilogy, and how Cinna was able to use fashion as a rhetorical device. Reading it made me think that Cinna would have loved to design for Madeleine Albright. Sarah Darer Littman, who is a political columnist when she's not writing novels like Life, After, writes a devastating essay comparing the politics of the trilogy to contemporary US politics - especially some of the rhetoric used during the Bush Administration to justify the war on terror (I can see that essay inspiring a LOT of negative criticism. Littman doesn't pull any punches - but it might be my favorite).

All of the essays here are worthwhile - those are merely my favorites, but each of them has something excellent and worthwhile to add to conversations on The Hunger Games. I wouldn't recommend powering through this book in one sitting, however. Unlike a lot of other Smart Pop books, the authors only had three novels to work with, which leads to some repetitive passages - talking about the bombs in the Capitol in Mockingjay or Katniss' use of the berries in Hunger Games. The essays themselves aren't repetitive, and all of them make unique points from the same set of examples, but reading one essay after another really highlighted for me how little material, in a sense, the authors had to work with in comparison to the Smart Pop book on Harry Potter.

I said in the intro that I consider this "light" academic reading and I want to make it clear that I don't intend that as a slight, but on the other hand only a few of these essays rely upon any sources outside of the three novels. Most of those outside sources are excerpts from interviews Suzanne Collins gave while promoting Mockingjay. This isn't hard hitting collegiate-level literary analysis, but would serve as an excellent introduction and as examples of just how many different ways one book (or set of books) can be analyzed.

The Girl Who Was on Fire goes on sale in April, and I consider it a must-read for any fan of The Hunger Games.

Reviewed from an ARC provided by the publisher




This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Great Kid Books. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

Nonfiction Monday Review: The Good, The Bad and the Barbie by Tanya Lee Stone

Last year I absolutely loved Tanya Lee Stone's Almost Astronauts, about the American women who trained to fly the space shuttle. This time around, Stone has set her sights on something far more down to Earth, something that almost every woman had her in childhood bedroom over the last fifty years: Barbie.


Stone takes a methodical look at the history of Barbie, from her creator's early beginnings through the creation of Mattel and the first Toy Fair where Barbie was set to make her big debut - and flopped. Who would have imagined this ubiquitous doll would, at one point, have been totally shunned? The toy buyers at the time were almost all male, and couldn't imagine that a mom would ever buy her daughter a toy with breasts.


From there, Stone looks at the evolution of Barbie, noting when her friends and family appeared on the scene and when she finally deviated from the blonde-haired blue-eyed original to represent girls of various ethnicities, and the criticisms that quickly followed and dog Barbie to this day. Stone fills the book with quotations from girls and women, giving their true feelings on Barbie, from young girls who are genuinely angered by how Barbie doesn't reflect them to older women reflecting on how they mutilated their dolls - not out of anger, but just for fun!


Stone also looks at the art that Barbie has inspired, from altered dolls to sculpture and painting to jewelry and short films. For better or worse, Barbie is an icon that had a lot of cultural cachet. 


Stone takes a very even-handed look at this often-controversial doll. There are both young girls and grown women who hate Barbie...and then there are young girls and grown women who love Barbie, and all of them have a say in this book. The most interesting part for me was the development of, and the reactions to, non-white Barbies. For some girls, it's great to have a Barbie that looks at least a little more like them, but for others its still frustrating because so often the only change was the pigment in plastic - it wasn't until 2009 that Mattel even attempted more African-American hair textures and styles with the So in Style dolls.


I also loved the look at how girls (and their brothers) will destroy their Barbies. When I first heard about kids doing this, I was horrified - I could never even bring myself to cut my Barbie's hair when I was a kid, let alone pull her apart and dye her hair with food coloring. But I had issues as a kid - usually I never got much farther than dressing all of my dolls up. I had at least a dozen and was convinced I needed to play with them all equally, but by the time all of their outfits had been changed...I wanted to go do something else!


The book does focus on the more "real world" aspects of Barbie - concerns over girls wanting to look like her, and questions about how she's styled for her various careers (at one point apparently Surgeon Barbie was in a scrubs mini dress) or ethnicities, but nothing about the more fanciful aspects of Barbie, like all the times she's been some variation on a princess (I realized this as I was thinking about my own Barbies - I had two collector's editions, one Native American Barbie and the other Barbie as Rapunzel). I suppose when the doll has had over 100 careers, you have to leave something out.


Stone neither praises Barbie nor demonizes the doll. She lays out the evidence for the reader to draw her own conclusion. I doubt a hard core hater or lover of the doll will be swayed away from their beliefs, but for someone like me who is more ambivalent about the doll, it raised a few new questions to consider while helped me put some other concerns to rest.


The Good, The Bad and the Barbie will be published on October 14th.


With all the talk of Barbie mutilation in this book, I'd love to hear how you played with Barbies as a kid! Were they tortured or prized? Did you collect them by the dozen or only have a prized doll or two? Was there something else entirely you liked better than Barbie? For the guys, were you forbidden from playing with Barbie, or did you never have an interest outside of torturing your sisters' dolls?




Today's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Madigan Reads. Stop by to see all the great nonfiction being reviewed this week!
Reviewed from ARC picked up at ALA.

Nonfiction Monday Review: Hungry by Crystal Renn

Found via: Amelia Bloomer Project nomination

I'm not a big follower of fashion, but Crystal Renn's name pops up periodically in any feminist discussion of beauty and body image in popular culture, as she's one of the most successful "plus size" models working today (never mind the irony that she's in the size 10-12 range - the average size for American women today). I hadn't realized she had written a memoir, but when I saw it nominated for the Amelia Bloomer Project, I knew I had to give it a read.

Renn's memoir looks briefly at her pre-modeling life, living happily with her mother and grandmother who always encouraged her to be happy more than anything else. Despite the hints at some complicated family issues, it's clear that Renn had a happy childhood.

Everything changed for her at the age of 14 when a scouting model looked at her and said she could be a star - if she lost weight. Renn says she's always been a bit compulsive and something of a perfectionist, and the scout's statement was the impetus for her perfectionist tendencies to be directed towards her body. The bulk of the memoir focuses on Renn's struggle with anorexia as she works in modeling in New York City - trying to live the dream, but never finding much success, even as her agents tell her to lose more and more weight. When she hits rock bottom, she finds the strength to get out, get healthy, and re-emerge on the scene, healthier and more talented than ever.

I've been questioning some of the Amelia Bloomer project's nonfiction nominations recently - not because they were poor quality titles, but because they really didn't seem to fall into the "birth to 18" age range the list is built for. Renn, however, is barely out of her teens herself - she's 24 now - so much of the book focuses squarely on her teen years and is written in a way that is totally accessible to teens and adults.

Renn's story is absolutely terrifying. The dominant narrative of anorexia is about girls delusional enough to think they're fat even as they're wasting away. Renn knew she had anorexia and avoided doctors even when she developed other illnesses or injuries because she knew a doctor would take one look at her and declare her anorexic. So why did she keep starving herself? It was the only way she knew how to stay working.

This is more than just Renn's personal story, however. She makes pointed criticisms of the industry and a lot of the "reforms" that have been "suggested" in order to improve the health of the women working the runways of the most important fashion shows around the world. She also gives great insights into the world of fashion that should disabuse anyone of the notion that it's full-time glamorous.

Renn's story is a powerful, positive message. When she switches to plus-size work, Renn is told that there will be plenty of work in advertising, but very little high fashion work. Renn sets out to prove them wrong, and is obviously succeeding considering how often she's been on the covers of magazines around the world. She was in the news again late last month, coming forward with allegations that she'd been photoshopped to look dangerously thin. She acknowledges in the book even that photoshopping is a way of life in the industry - getting rid of zits and stray hairs are great since fashion photography isn't about creating a documentary - but it's clear she has a strong personal line and woe to the photographer that dares to cross it.

This will definitely be of interest to anyone who's curious about the pressures of the entertainment industry - for a lot of what goes on in modeling goes on for other performers as well. It's an inspiring story of overcoming a deadly illness and not letting anything hold you back.


This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Three Turtles and their Pet Librarian. Be sure to stop by and see the other nonfiction posts this week!

Review: Borrowed Names by Jeannine Atkins

Found via: Read Roger

More poetry! But I'm not too bothered I couldn't fit this in to National Poetry Month, as this collection is all about mothers and daughters. Well, three specific pairs of mothers & daughters: Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane, Madame C.J. Walker and daughter A'Lelia Walker and Marie Curie and daughter Irene Joiliot-Curie. A perfect post-mother's-day book!

1867 was apparently a banner year, as that is the year the three mothers highlighted in this collection were born. The book is divided into three sections, each focusing on one mother/daughter pair, chronicling the daughter's life as she grows up, watching her mother, learning from her mistakes, and gaining inspiration for her own life. For the daughters are no slouches either: Rose Wilder Lane was a journalist and a biographer before helping her mother turn stories of her childhood into the Little House series; A'Lelia Walker used the fortune she earned as part of her mother's company to support the Harlem Renaissance; and Irene Joliot-Curie joined her mother as a WWI X-Ray technician, saving countless lives, before earning her own Nobel Prize, following in her mother's footsteps by studying radioactivity.

The poetry is well done, as is the biographical content. While I'm no expert on any of these women, Atkins doesn't pull any punches and shows both the ups and downs in these women's lives, including a troubled marriage for Rose and the sexism of the Nobel committee. This bit stuck out for me:

She remembers them taking a train to Sweden
where a woman might earn the Nobel Prize
but would be kept from speaking on the stage

Borrowed Names page 149
It's subtle but spot on, in the way that only poetry can be.

This is the sort of book I would have loved to have available for Ada Lovelace Day. Maybe someone else will pick it up for review next year. While I don't think this would be a replacement for a full biography on any of these women, it's certainly an interesting supplement, and really breathes life into these families in a way a standard biography never can.


Nonfiction Monday is hosted this week by Picture Book of the Day. Check out other great non-fiction posts going up today!

Review: Vintage Veronica by Erica S. Perl

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 3/1

I loooooooooove me some thrift stores. My mom knew she was raising me well when in 8th grade I went into some store at the mall (I think it was Express) and saw a pair of cut off shorts that were selling for some ridiculous price, and I asked why anyone would spend that sort of money when they could buy a pair of jeans for $3 at Goodwill and do it themselves? Almost all of my clothes shopping in high school was done at thrift stores; from my parents' house you can drive in a couple mile long loop and hit about 5 thrift stores without ever having to back track.

So when I ran across Vintage Veronica, which is set in a thrift store, I knew I had to read it. HAD TO.

Veronica picks up a summer job working at the local thrift store/consignment shop. On the first floor is Dollar-a-pound, where shoppers fill bags with clothes from a giant pile, paying a dollar for every pound of goodies they buy. The second level is home to the consignment shop, staffed by the Florons, aka Zoe and Ginger. Veronica works in the part of the store cordoned off and labeled Employees Only! Originally only an assistant, after her flaky boss takes off without warning it's now Veronica's job to decide what goes into the Dollar-a-Pound pile and what gets sent to consignment. Veronica's been cultivating her own unique fashion sense and an eye for bargains since she was a little girl, accompanying her father to flea markets, so this is essentially the perfect job for her. Fun clothes, and no annoying people to bother her.

Until Zoe and Ginger decide they want to be buddies with Veronica. She's hesitant at first - not only are Zoe and Ginger quintessential Mean Girls (they are constantly harassing the staff at Veronica's favorite donut shop next to the store), but Veronica is overweight and is suspicious that anyone would really like her. But Zoe and Ginger seem sincere, and convince Veronica to help them bust the mysterious of the enigmatic Lenny, the stock boy they are convinced is actually the head of some sort of vintage clothing crime ring.

But Veronica isn't cut out to be a super spy. As she's supposed to be spying on Lenny and reporting back to Zoe and Ginger, she quickly finds herself liking Lenny, first as a friend, and then potentially as more. And Lenny seems to like her, too, leaving Veronica to wonder who her true friends really are - the giggly girls who are out to get Lenny, or the shy, quiet boy who cares for sickly lizards and doesn't seem to notice that Veronica is fat.

This book is the definition of a cast of colorful characters. Aside from Veronica, Zoe, Ginger, and Lenny, there's also Bill, the stoner clerk in Dollar-a-Pound who had a thing for Veronica (and maybe still does), and the hoard that lines up in front of the store in order to ambush the pile. The store is also full of cats, which also made me incredibly happy, because I <3 my kitties.

Less colorful was Veronica's mom, who is a totally two-dimensional character. She's super health conscious, teaches yoga, and wears nothing but leotards and other workout gear, a stark contrast to Veronica, she of the reclaimed prom dresses, stubby pigtails, and lemon logs & mocha smoothies. She's so distant she has no idea where her daughter is working during the summer, and we only see her in brief glimpses at the end of the day, usually when Veronica is nuking a Lean Cuisine dinner.

While Veronica is snarky and sassy, she does fall into cliche territory as well sometimes. She's the fat girl that just doesn't have the self-control to stay away from the donut shop. She wears outlandish clothes that aren't all that flattering (though they are eye catching - taffeta dresses in a rainbow of colors worn with bowling shoes, for example). I wish a little more nuance had gone into developing her character.