Nonfiction Monday Review: The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge

I'm kind of a bad English major - I've actually never read one of Edith Wharton's novels. So why did I pick up this biography? Because even if I haven't read her work, I'm still fascinated by women who defied social expectations and made a career for themselves - and Edith Wharton was certainly one of those women.

Born into a wealthy New York family, Edith lived a charmed life from an early age, especially as she spent most of her early years in Paris. When she and her family returned to New York, it was at a time of social upheaval, as the old guard of society was clashing with the uppity new money folks, who had made their money off of coal or railroads, rather than inheriting it as Edith's parents had.

While her mother was heavily invested in maintaining the old ways - notably including the notion that a woman's name should appear in print only when she is born, married, or has died - Edith rebels subtly. Obsessed with the written word, Edith writes mostly for herself for years before finally striking out to publish her works publicly - and under her own name.

Wooldridge has put together a fascinating look at this woman who was well ahead of her time. Not only did Wharton not much for social conventions against writing, she also made waves for socializing primarily with men in Parisian literary salons, spurring on the modern interior decorating movement, driving fast cars, and organizing massive relief efforts in Europe during World War I. But despite these trailblazing efforts, we also get glimpses at her weaker moments, too - her self-doubt about the quality of her writing, and the painful deterioration of her marriage and love life. The book is also peppered with plenty of period photographs and copies of Wharton's letters and manuscripts, really bringing the era to life. Living in New York myself now, I'll admit I was entertained to discover that I now work in the same neighborhood that Edith Wharton lived in when she was young - and chuckled at the idea that 59th street was so far up town that her family was worried they wouldn't be able to safely visit a family member that had moved there.

This is a lovely book, and I wouldn't really want to change anything about it, but reading this out in public was a little unwieldy, and it made me realize that almost all YA nonfiction is in a larger format than novels, or even a lot of nonfiction published for adults. Now, some books absolutely require large pages for pictures and for multiple pictures to be included right alongside the text in order to do the subject justice - Frozen Secrets and its amazing panoramas of Antarctica as well as its charts and illustrations of complex scientific facts comes to mind - but why must a biography be in the same oversized format? It makes it more difficult to bring the book along for reading on the go. Anyone out there know why all teen nonfiction falls into this format?




This week's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Picture Book of the Day. Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction titles highlighted this week!

What Have I Missed? Review: A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly

Recommended by: Bob

A Northern Light is one of the books that inspired me to start this challenge. Bob had recommended it to me ages and ages ago, but I never got around to it because I wanted to keep up with all of the new titles coming out. When I started seeing people rave about Jennifer Donnelly's Revolution I knew her name sounded familiar...all because A Northern Light was still in the back of my mind as a book I needed to read! So I decided this needed to be the first book I challenged myself to - and that my reward for getting this challenge under way would be getting to read Revolution next!

In 1906, in a small farming community and summer tourist town, Mattie Gokey dreams of going to New York City to study writing, to share her stories of everyday life with the rest of the world. But realistically, Mattie knows she's never going to leave North Woods. Her mother has recently died, leaving Mattie and her three sisters alone with their father, who can barely bring in enough money to keep food on the table through the winter. Even if she could get a scholarship to cover her tuition, where would she get the money for lodging, clothes and books? And then there's the fact that handsome Royal Loomis has come courting, and Mattie is feeling a surprising impulse to stay at home and settle down.

Taking a summer job at a big tourist hotel to help out her family and put away a little savings for herself, Mattie is implored one day by guest Grace Brown to burn a bundle of letters. Mattie takes the letters, but keeps them hidden, just in case Grace ever asks for them back. Until Grace's drowned body is pulled from the lake, the apparent victim of a boating accident. The young man she was traveling with is nowhere to be found. Mattie begins reading the letters, hoping for a clue as to who Grace was, and maybe for a little guidance from beyond the grave for who Mattie should be.

Donnelly weaves lots of complicated themes into what is on the surface a basic coming of age story with a bit of mystery. Classism is big, ranging from the rich tourists coming in to land that's been settled by poor farmers, to the poor farmers looking down on those who are even poorer. Sexism is the other big one, and all the myriad ways it rears its ugly head. There's the expected views that women shouldn't be educated, but also ideas about what is appropriate for women to be writing about and how to handle sexual harassment. Mattie's best friend is African-American, and she gives us a first hand look at the ugly realities of racism in a Northern state 40 years after the end of th Civil War. Want more? There's also wonderful questions about decency and obscenity, both in people's actions and in literature through the books Mattie's beloved teacher surreptitiously loans her.

My one irritant in this book is the use of Mattie's dictionary word of the day. On the one hand, it's a fun trope and is used well to indicate when a particular chapter is set (the story goes back and forth between the discovery of Grace's body and the months leading up to Mattie taking the position at the hotel). On the other hand, the bit began to wear thin about halfway through the novel as Mattie often would struggle with how the word did or didn't fit how her day was going. I felt that the idea was well established enough at that point that it could have been left to the reader to figure out how a word did or didn't fit thematically, and only have Mattie mention it when it was an important comment on the story.

Huge thanks to Bob for recommending this to me! Next on my list? Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now, winner of the Printz in 2005 and recommended by Rachel!

Sci Fi Friday Review: Feed by Mira Grant

Sometimes I debate what titles I should include in my Sci Fi Friday reviews. Should I expand it to Sci Fi/Fantasy? (No, because I generally dislike fantasy and don't want it interfering with my science-y goodness) What about horror? Or superhero graphic novels? While Feed falls firmly into the horror genre, what with all the zombies running around, there are also some awesome bits of science and tech, allowing me to make it a Sci Fi Friday contribution without hesitation.

Which is a good thing because there's been a dearth of SF in my life lately

It's been twenty years since the dead have risen. Mutated from the cures for humankind's greatest illnesses, the virus lies dormant in every human being, ready to reanimate the corpse to become one of the walking dead with the incessant need to feast on human flesh.

Siblings Georgia and Shaun, along with their friend Buffy, are mid-level bloggers ready to make it to the big time when they're selected to be part of the press team for presidential candidate Peter Ryman. Dedicated first and foremost to reporting the news, the bloggers unwittingly become part of the news when a series of suspicious zombie attacks start following Ryman. A cut fence here, an infected horse there, and it begins to become very obvious these aren't accidents - someone is using the zombie virus as a biological weapon.

Technically this is an adult novel, but I'm confident it will have plenty of teen crossover appeal. Georgie and Shaun are in their twenties (no definitive age is given that I saw), and they also still live at home, under the imposing shadows of their famous-blogger parents. There's been some talk over the past year about a potential new marketing category called "new adult" and I think Feed could easily be classified there.

Grant has included lots of funny details for readers to pick up on. While it's explained that Georgia was born at a time when the most popular girls' names were Georgia, Georgette and Barbra as George Romero was recognized as a sort of patron saint of the zombie apocalypse, it's up to zombie fans to guess where Shaun's name comes from - Shaun of the Dead anyone? (And for the uninitiated, Barbra was the woman in Night of the Living Dead) Bloggers have also organized themselves into a couple of factions - broadly the Newsies, the Fictionals and the Irwins, who like to go out in the field and poke zombies with sticks (they also give out an annual award called the Stevies, solidifying the tribute to the late, great Steve Irwin). Each faction has sub-factions - for example in the Newsies, the people who deliver the news with a healthy dose of opinion are called Stewarts. I loved these little glimpses into Grant's world building, and make it clear she probably has lots of details planned out for this trilogy.

As a blogger, and as someone who probably gets 90% of her news from various blogs (and the other 10% still from internet sources like the New York Times online or streaming Rachel Maddow's show), I absolutely loved following a group of citizen journalists on the campaign trail. Of the trio, Georgia and Buffy were definitely my favorites, but Shaun and Georgia have a great rapport as well.

While I loved the blending of genres in this book (new adult, zombie horror, journalistic thriller), and Grant has clearly done some great work with her world building, the overall setting just never worked for me. It's been twenty years since the zombies first rose, which really isn't much time at all, and there's already a fully functioning government? It felt like the zombies were never that much of a threat if the whole world didn't collapse, and now that the government is functioning so well the zombies are only terrifying on a personal level (like if you're like Shaun and enjoy poking zombies with sticks) and no longer on a widespread level. There are so many weapons and defense tactics and decontamination safety protocols in place, that society really isn't in danger of ever collapsing, which for me is half the fun of zombie stories. Humanity can try to rebuild, but it shouldn't be as good as it was before, unless a much longer period of time has passed.

I know this review is getting long but I have to praise Grant on one other thing - this has one of the best surprises I've ever read in a novel. If nothing else, strictly from a writing standpoint it's fascinating to see it done, and her technique for accomplishing it. It's a huge spoiler so I can't go into detail, but as a writer myself it was interesting to see an author do what I'd long thought was impossible.

Feed is the first book in a new trilogy, but there's no severe cliffhanger ending here and feels like a complete story in itself. I recommend picking this one up, though personally I don't know if I'll be back for more - the fully functional society really irritated me on some levels.

Nonfiction Monday Review: Spilling Ink: A Young Writer's Handbook by Anne Mazer and Ellen Potter

Found via: Fuse #8 

True story: as a kid, I hated writing. It was easily one of my least favorite things to do, until a wonderful sixth grade teacher had writing days once a week, and eventually wore me down to the point that in high school I constantly had a notebook with me and spent every spare moment (and even some class time that technically wasn't "spare") writing (Animorphs fan fiction, if you're curious).

So if Spilling Ink had been around back in middle school, I probably would have devoured it.

Mazer and Potter have broken down writing into three general sections - Ready, Set, Go!; Crafting Your Story; and The Writer's Brain - and then those sections have been further divided into smaller sections, each like a mini-article written by Mazer or Potter (complete with byline, so you know who's talking to you). Some old writing standbys are addressed, like where to get ideas and questions to answer to help build your characters, but some other sections are unique to a book for young writers, like a few guidelines on writing children's picture books, and how to accept criticisms and tell good criticism from bad. About the only aspect of writing that isn't covered here that is covered in "adult" writing guides is publication.

Like noted in the Fuse #8 review, after children's books and series writing were mentioned, I hoped that other genres would be covered, like graphic novels and nonfiction, but I think the picture books and series were noted simply because those are the author's strengths. It's not a bad thing, but definitely left me wanting more!

I also have to say, this isn't a book that lends itself well to skipping from section to section - it seems designed to be read cover to cover. The small sections have really creative names, but that creativity sometimes means you can't figure out what they're about without the context of knowing its place in the entire book. "How to Turn Off Your Brain and Turn On Your Ideas" is straight forward, but "The View from the Boulder" is less so. So while in the introduction Mazer and Potter say they want this book to be for kids who are writers, kids who want to be writers, and kids who have no idea they want to write, I'm betting that last group isn't going to be picking this one up on their own. For kids who are passionate or curious about writing, this will be helpful, and really that's enough for me!




Today's Nonfiction Monday is hosted by Apples with Many Seeds! Be sure to stop by and check out the other great nonfiction being posted today!

Review: By the Time You Read This, I'll be Dead by Julie Anne Peters

Found via: Best Fiction for Young Adults 2011 nominations

So Julie Anne Peters is quickly racing up my informal "favorite authors" list. Last year I loved the under-appreciated Rage and now she's taken on another sensitive and timely topic in By the Time You Read This, I'll be Dead.

Daelyn has had enough. After her last suicide attempt robbed her of her voice and forced her into a neck brace, she is determined that the next attempt will be successful. She finds the website Through the Light, which is for "completers" - people who are determined to kill themselves. The site provides support and ranks suicide methods by categories such as ease of completion and pain involved. The site also asks new members to choose the day they will complete their suicide, setting the minimum at 23 days away. Daelyn chooses the minimum, and so her countdown begins.

Daelyn continues to go through the motions of her daily life, showing up to school where she's the freak who won't talk, and quietly clearing out her closets and shelves to spare her parents the pain of getting rid of her things. Most of her communication is online, reading blog posts on Through the Light and contributing her own, revealing that she has been a victim of bullying for as long as she's been in school, targeted usually for her weight. Until one day after school, while waiting for her mom to pick her up, a boy named Santana sits down with Daelyn and begins talking to her. He's back the next day. And the next. Daelyn sends every signal she can that she doesn't want to befriend this strange homeschooled boy, but Santana is nothing if not persistent. As Daelyn's completion date nears, she finds herself struggling with fundamental decisions about trust, friendship, and just how valuable life may or may not be.

This is not exactly a happy, shiny novel, but it is a timely one. Suicide and bullying are all over the news these days, following the suicide of Phoebe Prince earlier this year. States are proposing anti-bullying laws in order to make sure they have the proper tools to deal with bullying (my home state of Michigan has even proposed one, and my hometown paper is all for it - even if they can't spell it in their headlines...). At the end of the book is a discussion guide - also found online at Through the Light (good job, Hyperion) - prompting readers to really think about bullying and connect Daelyn's struggles with what happens in their own schools.

I was very intrigued by the use of the website in helping Daelyn plan her suicide. The rules of the website explicitly state that it is a support group for those who are planning to kill themselves, and attempts to talk people out of it wouldn't be tolerated, which brings up some major free speech issues, doesn't it? And even this has a counterpart in real life - a former nurse is charged with assisting in two suicides after providing encouragement online.

Daelyn's voice is haunting, and reminds me in some ways of Melinda's in Speak, as both young women have been traumatized and react by not speaking (though Daelyn's silence is initially forced by an injury). Daelyn's story is painful and captivating as we glimpse not only pieces of the bullying she's endured, but the friendship the future may hold for her if she chooses to live. This is another highly recommended title that I hope gets lots of exposure.

Review: Sprout by Dale Peck

Found via: 2010 Lambda Literary Award finalist

Why, oh WHY aren't more people talking about this book?! Fantastic writing, awesome characters, a great twist on the coming-out story - oh, and green hair, which may or may not have been part of my attraction. Seriously, folks, this is a book you NEED to get reading!

Daniel "Sprout" Bradford moved from Long Island to Kansas after his mother's death on a whim of his father's. Sprout still isn't sure if Kansas was the destination all along or if it's just where his dad ran out of steam. In his new small, insular town, so different from Long Island, Sprout is immediately pegged as an outsider, different, even before anyone knows he's gay or he first starts dying his hair.

It's now Sprout's junior year of high school and the advanced English teacher, Mrs. Miller, has decided to stake her reputation for educating essay-contest-champions on Sprout, going with a junior to ensure she'll have a student with an unprecedented two wins in a row. Sprout spends much of the summer with Mrs. Miller while his best (only?) friend, Ruthie, is visiting Europe, practicing speed writing or writing essays under ridiculous constraints ("don't use the letter e") to prep his writing skills for the big essay contest.

The tutoring with Mrs. Miller continues even as she begins dating Sprout's washed up drunk of a father and into the school year, where Mrs. Miller manipulates Sprout's schedule to make sure he isn't influenced by lesser English teachers. Through Sprout's writing we also see him develop a new friendship with Ty, a small, wiry kid who lives just down the street from Sprout's trailer, and who possibly has more problems in his life than Sprout does.

I'm often asking for more novels that aren't about being gay, where a gay character can have adventures that are totally independent of his or her sexual orientation. I found Sprout to be a twist on that, because in some ways this novel is about being gay - it's just not necessarily Sprout who is struggling with this. In fact, Sprout seems to be 100% okay with himself, and we never see that there was any sort of doubt or questioning in his mind. His sexual orientation is just another part of who he is, like having green hair, and the struggles we see are from other characters, reacting either to Sprout's or their own sexuality.

(Side note about Sprout's green hair: what kind of dye is that kid using?! I've bought hair dye from Wal-Mart before; the only type that should be flaking off is the sort that washes out immediately. If it's the sort that requires bleaching hair and weekly root touch-ups, you're doing something totally wrong if it's flaking off and making you leave green finger prints everywhere. Sorry. Had to get that out of my system.)

This is a very wordy and self-aware novel. It's hard to tell when Sprout's stories are part of an essay and when they're just narration. Sprout is clearly an accomplished writer who has an in-character obsession with the dictionary, which gives Peck a reason to have Sprout using words that most teenagers wouldn't be able to use un-self-consciously. Also, since Sprout is aware that he has readers, Peck is able to slip in some masterful foreshadowing that totally ramps up the tension for the last third or so of the book. I swear it's just one line, but Sprout mentions that he hopes his current behavior will make us forgive him for the terrible stuff that he does later, and later on in the story the tension was almost unbearable for me as I waited for that "terrible stuff" to make an appearance. I absolutely love smart novels, ones that require the reader to step up to the challenge, rather than talking down to the reader.

So now I've read four of the five nominees in the children's/YA category of the Lambda Literary awards (the others being Ash, The Vast Fields of Ordinary and How Beautiful the Ordinary. The library still doesn't have P.E. Ryan's In Mike We Trust). The Lambda awards are being presented TONIGHT (and if tickets weren't $100, I would be there). I'll send out a tweet as soon as I know the winner (you are following me on Twitter, right?) and look for an update here on Friday (or Saturday, if I have a lot to say about the winner!).

Also, if you missed it yesterday, be sure to check out the Gringolandia giveaway posted yesterday!

Review: Paper Daughter by Jeanette Ingold

Found via: Reading in Color

I picked this one up because I was interested in the journalism aspect of the story; it's simply coincidence that I'm posting my review during Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month.

In the aftermath of her father's death in a hit-and-run accident, Maggie Chen is helping her mother sort through his things when she starts uncovering startling inconsistencies. His old prep school and fraternity claim they've never heard of him. His notebooks have cryptic messages scribbled in the margins. An aspiring journalist, taking after her father, Maggie vows to delve deeper into the mystery. What she doesn't expect is to stumble upon a major criminal story in the course of her work as a newspaper intern that might just connect to her father's mysteries. But is it simply that her father was onto the same story? Or was the man lying about more than just his origins?

But this isn't just the story of Maggie and her father - this is also the story of Fai-yi Li, a 19th century Chinese immigrant whose story also plays a role in Maggie's life. As his story slowly unfolds, Maggie digs deeper into her father's past, until the stories intersect.

I like to think that I'm fairly well versed in history, but then I stumble across stories like this and I realize just how much there is that I don't know. I know that Chinese immigrants weren't treated well in the 19th century (because Americans really didn't treat any immigrants well at that point), but I didn't know about the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended legal Chinese immigration into the US for decades. The Act gave rise to "Paper Sons," Chinese immigrants who were allowed into the country because a Chinese-American citizen would claim the immigrant as a son (or daughter). Want more information on Asian immigration in this era? My friend Ay-leen the Peacemaker not only has a badass name, but runs the awesome steampunk project Beyond Victoriana and this past week's post was all about Asians in the Americas. (While the general focus of Beyond Victoriana is multi-cultural steampunk, many of Ay-leen's essays provide historical background for non-western cultures in the Victorian-ish era that are fascinating even outside of a steampunk context, hence the link this week)

I found the historical chapters to be a bit of a drag, and once Maggie starts researching the history of Chinese immigrants in Seattle the characters can get a little preachy - it's clear that Ingold did a lot of research and I'm sure it was insanely difficult for her to decide what there was room for in the story and what wasn't. The information she does include is fascinating, but I feel it doesn't roll out smoothly. But the journalistic thriller aspect of the story, as Maggie helps track down leads both about corruption in city hall and her father's secretive past, is fast paced and well done.

This is also an interesting novel on the immigrant experience, in part because that isn't the focus of the story. Many, many stories featuring non-white protagonists are about how the character doesn't fit in to mainstream America society and how different she or he is, but Maggie tells a fellow intern at one point that she doesn't necessarily think of herself as "ethnic" - she is aware of and proud of her Chinese heritage, but her family has been in the US basically "forever" so her primary identity is American. It is through the historical chapters with Fai-yi Li that we see what immigration was like for the Chinese on the Pacific coast.

On a closing note, continuing with my goal to not only shame publishers that white wash covers but to applaud those who accurately portray people of color, Harcourt wins for giving us an unambiguous Chinese model on the cover:

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: A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper

Found via: BBYA 2010 nominations

BBYA's annotation for this title is "Not even a small island nation populated mostly by royalty can keep neutral in the events leading up to the Second World War." The bit about WWII is what made me pick this up - I'm still a sucker for WWII literature (it all started with Anne Frank's diary, way back in elementary school) and this sounded like a different spin on it.

This isn't, however, your usual WWII book. For one thing, it doesn't take place in Europe proper, but rather a small (fictional) island nation in the Bay of Biscay, called Montmaray.

Montmaray has a storied past, with the royal family's history filled with noble warriors. The island once had a thriving population - but in 1936, the island has a handful of villagers (most of them elderly), a mad king, and three princesses. The crown prince spends most of his time at school in England along with Simon, the son of the royal family's housekeeper (who spends most of her time doting on the senile king rather than keeping house) and the object of Sophie's, our narrator, affections.

As Sophie relates in her diary, the story spans the end of 1936 and into the beginning of 1937. The island is so isolated that news from Europe comes in fits and starts. They know trouble is brewing in Spain thanks to Franco and his fascists, and Sophie's scholarly cousin, Veronica, has heard rumors of the terrible things Hitler does to his enemies in Germany. Trouble in Europe means that should anything happen on the island, opportunities for help will be few and far between.

While Montmaray was once a key player in European politics, it is now an unimportant backwater that rarely receives visitors - so it is a surprise when a pair of Nazi scholars take up residence in the village, allegedly looking for the Holy Grail, or at least information about it, on Montmaray. After one of the Nazis is accidentally killed, and then the family dog bites a chunk out of the leg of their commanding officer, it begins to look like the family's days of safety in Montmaray are numbered.

I have to say, I don't always quite "buy" the diary novel format. Maybe I'm just a terrible diary keeper, but it seems unlikely that a person could take down a story in such detail as to include lengthy conversations. However one thing I did like about this stories use of the format is how Sophie's use of the diary changed from the beginning of the story through the end. The diary is a gift from Sophie's brother, and initially she uses it to talk about how much she likes Simon and wants to go to Europe to make her debut in society and wear lots of pretty dresses. She also shares her frustration that her cousin and best friend Veronica doesn't share such ambitions - while Sophie is writing her musings in her diary, Veronica spends her days in the library researching and writing her own Brief History of Montmaray. Veronica notes that it is good Sophie is recording the events of life on Montmaray in her diary, as such a book will be invaluable to future historians. That makes Sophie reconsider some of her silly musings, and while her feelings for Simon are still present throughout the story, Sophie begins to become much more serious about writing about life on the island. It's a subtle way of showing how Sophie must grow up in the face of unprecedented adversity.

While Montmaray and its royal family are completely made up, the book still closely follows the political upheavals of the 1930s. The author has included a historical guide on her website, with plenty of links to Wikipedia, so readers can find out more about the people, places, and literature mentioned in the story.

Review: Freeze Frame by Heidi Ayarbe

Woohoo! First post of 2010!

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend. I always enjoy New Year's Eve - though now that I live in the celebration capitol of the country I fear for my life if I have to enter Manhattan on New Years Eve. Not because it's actually dangerous, but because there's so many people! But tourist season is officially winding down here, so that means I have a few months of (relative) quiet before tourists start coming back in the spring.

I got Freeze Frame from the library a couple of weeks ago, actually, but it took me a couple of tries to get into it. Not sure why, but when I did finally make it past that first chapter, I couldn't put this book down - I even stayed up late to finish the last two chapters (which actually doesn't happen to me too often anymore - since I know I have a train ride in the morning, I'm usually content to wait until then to do my reading).

On a cold winter morning, after Kyle insults his sister and angers his mom, he and his best friend Jason escape the house to explore the old shed behind Kyle's house. Jason pokes around on the shelves and unveils a gun that was hidden up there.

The next thing Kyle knows, there's a gun shot, and Jason is on the ground with blood flowing from his chest.

At the hospital, at 10:46 AM, Jason is pronounced dead.

Though Kyle can't remember what happened, the court sentences him only to probation, sure that this isn't an act of cold blooded murder. Everything has changed for Kyle, but now that he's on probation he's expected to resume his life: his probation agreement means going to school, getting good grades, and staying out of trouble, all of which are easier said than done since Kyle can't seem to care about school and when he is there, the other students either stare and whisper or harass him outright for being a killer. Home isn't a relief either: Kyle's sister was friends with Jason's brother, and the two families live next door to each other. Also, Kyle has taken it upon himself to look out for Jason's little brother, a target for bullies at his elementary school.

Kyle's one coping method is writing. As a film aficionado, he writes the scene of Jason's death over and over, imagining it as a movie script directed by a different director, each time getting closer and closer to uncovering how exactly he killed his best friend.

Kyle finds two saving graces at school: Clock, another outcast who tells stories through pictures, and Mr. Cordoba, a strict librarian who is the subject of numerous rumors about his past. When the cafeteria becomes unbearable, Kyle starts eating his lunch in the library, and Mr. Cordoba slowly but surely takes the troubled boy under his wing, giving Kyle a place to study in peace in return for some help re-shelving books. He also gives Kyle a series of books to read, and encourages Kyle to talk about them after he's read them.

As Mr. Cordoba's and Kyle's relationship grew, I found myself wondering why we don't see more awesome librarians in literature. We see cool teachers in all sorts of subjects, and sometimes the local public librarian can be an ally if a book takes place over the summer, but school librarians seem to be mostly absent. They certainly aren't as awesome as Mr. Cordoba. Kick ass librarian there.

What kept me up late reading was to see the culmination of the relationships Kyle built over the course of the novel. Before Jason's death, Jason really was Kyle's only friend, and even that relationship was drifting apart as Jason began to make friends among the popular kids. In the aftermath of losing everything, Kyle slowly rebuilds through his friendships with Clock, Mr. Cordoba and Chase, which is what really keeps the novel moving - the scripted scenes are interesting, but I didn't have nearly as much interested invested in those.

Has anyone out there made any reading/blogging resolutions for the new year? I know lots of people try to read 50 or 100 books in a year (I just went back and counted - I reviewed 97 books on here last year, though not all in full posts, which means I easily cleared the 100 book mark as there were a handful of books I read but didn't blog about, including one book that was actually an omnibus of 4 novels and a novella). I'm not setting a goal for myself this year, but one of my handful of resolutions this year is to blog consistently. That means averaging 3 times a week and hopefully building up a backlog of reviews to post automatically should I find myself away for a few days. Fingers crossed!