The aftermath of the massacre at Columbine high school totally defined my high school experience. I was in 8th grade at the time and remember being horrified throughout the day as periodically we would get rumors about what had happened out in Colorado. I rushed home from school and parked myself in front of the TV for the rest of the evening. For some reason, when a disaster happens I park myself in front of the news, trying to absorb every bit of information as it comes out (I think this started back in kindergarten, when my mom tells me I was obsessed with the Persian Gulf war and wanted to watch the news about it every night. And kudos to my parents, they let me).
After Columbine, school was different: within a few weeks there was a bomb scare at my middle school, and we watched across campus as visible security measures went up at the high school: cattle gates closing off all but one access to the parking lots during the day, security officers checking visitors in and out of the parking lot, etc. Even as new tragedies befell the nation over the course of my time in high school, Columbine's legacy was felt in all sorts of school policies.
Dave Cullen's tome on the Columbine shootings is the culmination of ten exhaustive years of research. From my perspective, it seems no stone was left unturned. While some of the book was a confirmation of what I already knew (Cassie Bernall most likely never said yes; the trench coat mafia was made up), much of the rest was filled with startling and unsettling revelations. More than once I had to set the book aside and take a break to do something mindless, just so I would stop thinking about it.
Also, reading the book made me totally wreck my nails. I've had a terrible nail biting habit since forever, but usually I only do it when I'm bored. Turns out if I get incredibly anxious I can say bye-bye to my nails as well. All ten finger nails were bitten down to the quick by the time I finished the book. Not my proudest moment.
Back in April, Oprah was going to feature Cullen on a show about Columbine, but decided to pull it because it focused too much on the killers. Cullen's book focuses at least half of its attention on Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris and sometimes disturbingly settles into what Cullen imagines would be their thought or speech patterns. Non-quoted parts of the text curse, call authority figures bastards, etc. The book's chapters alternate between detailing what happened on April 20th, 1999 and afterwards to the survivors and the victims' families and looking at Klebold & Harris prior to the shooting. The text in chapters that aren't about Klebold and Harris doesn't fall into the vernacular of its subjects, so the brief moments where the text does begin to sound like Klebold and Harris sticks out all the more.
For me, this was an absolutely must-read book, and I certainly think it should be required reading (at least in excerpts) for anyone that works in schools as Cullen goes through a lot of effort to debunk the myths of the "profile" or a school shooter. However, it's certainly not an easy read, so have a nice light, fluffy book on the nightstand as well to comfort you when this one gets to be too much.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
REVIEW: School for Dangerous Girls by Eliot Schrefer
For some reason, I always get a kick out of reading books where a character shares my name. I have no idea why - it's one of my weird quirks.
So I was immediately drawn in to the story of Angela Cardenas, a "bad girl" sentenced to Hidden Oaks - a remote boarding school that serves as the last chance for girls that their parents deem dangerous.
The first several chapters are engaging and intriguing, as we watch just how far this school will go to try to control these dangerous girls - from locking them in their rooms and observing them with security cameras, to strange mind games that pit the girls against each other.
There are lots of twists and turns in this book - too many perhaps. Girls disappearing, the mysterious purple thread vs. gold thread standings, ominous warnings from teachers, and a lone teenage guy in a school filled with lonely girls. There's a lot to keep track of, which means that a lot of characters - especially the evil teachers - are never fully fleshed out.
Plus the book has the annoying stylistic quirks of a pulp detective novel. Almost every chapter ends with a cheesey, "ominous" statement, along the lines of "Little did I know, there wouldn't be a next meeting" or "But she wasn't everything she said she was." If they had been occasional additions they would have been fun, but it was a stylistic quirk that was done to death.
And while I don't want to spoil anything, I have to say that the ending of this was completely unsatisfying. There's an exciting plateau...and then an epilogue that skips through several arduous months and just has some telling-not-showing dialogue that says "We did this, and it was hard, and we did that, and THAT was hard, but now we're here!" Everything ties up in too neat of a bow with a real let down in the excitement factor.
I think Schrefer was perhaps going for an old school film noir (book noir?) feeling for this book - a scary, secluded school; rumors of deaths and disasters; evil teachers and absent parents - but wasn't quite committed enough to really pull it off. There were lots of enjoyable elements, but enough uneven parts to make it fall short.
So I was immediately drawn in to the story of Angela Cardenas, a "bad girl" sentenced to Hidden Oaks - a remote boarding school that serves as the last chance for girls that their parents deem dangerous.
The first several chapters are engaging and intriguing, as we watch just how far this school will go to try to control these dangerous girls - from locking them in their rooms and observing them with security cameras, to strange mind games that pit the girls against each other.
There are lots of twists and turns in this book - too many perhaps. Girls disappearing, the mysterious purple thread vs. gold thread standings, ominous warnings from teachers, and a lone teenage guy in a school filled with lonely girls. There's a lot to keep track of, which means that a lot of characters - especially the evil teachers - are never fully fleshed out.
Plus the book has the annoying stylistic quirks of a pulp detective novel. Almost every chapter ends with a cheesey, "ominous" statement, along the lines of "Little did I know, there wouldn't be a next meeting" or "But she wasn't everything she said she was." If they had been occasional additions they would have been fun, but it was a stylistic quirk that was done to death.
And while I don't want to spoil anything, I have to say that the ending of this was completely unsatisfying. There's an exciting plateau...and then an epilogue that skips through several arduous months and just has some telling-not-showing dialogue that says "We did this, and it was hard, and we did that, and THAT was hard, but now we're here!" Everything ties up in too neat of a bow with a real let down in the excitement factor.
I think Schrefer was perhaps going for an old school film noir (book noir?) feeling for this book - a scary, secluded school; rumors of deaths and disasters; evil teachers and absent parents - but wasn't quite committed enough to really pull it off. There were lots of enjoyable elements, but enough uneven parts to make it fall short.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
BOOK NEWS: Update on BBYA
While this is a bit of old news around the blogosphere, I hate blogs that get all sensationalistic and then never follow up to let you know what happened. So despite this information being available elsewhere, I wanted to make sure I got it out as well.
The big news: BBYA was not sunsetted. In fact, it looks like early on in the ALA conference the YALSA board decided to move it from an "Action Item" - where a decision would have been made then and there about whether to phase out BBYA by 2011 - to a "Discussion Item." Liz gave some fast and furious notes about what was being said at that discussion. And from what Cindy and Lynn are reporting over at Bookends there was widespread agreement that BBYA needs to be updated (certainly updated before we throw in the towel), but there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what exactly needs to be updated!
Through the YALSA blog I found several posts on BBYA, but one that was absolutely fascinating by mk Eagle. This one gives another rundown of the events of the meeting (poor people trying to edit their passionate reasons for keeping BBYA down to 1-2 minutes! I know when I set out to write my blog post on BBYA, I did not expect it to be the length it ended up!) plus makes a point that I wasn't aware of before. Around the blog- and twittersphere there were lots of librarians/authors/teachers talking up how much they use the BBYA list for reader's advisory/building collections/getting recognition at a small press. But mk Eagle pointed our attention to the list's policies and procedures page - and would you believe that the target audience is not, in fact, librarians? The target audience is YA readers themselves!
To me this means that BBYA's biggest problem might be in the marketing. I don't recall having any idea that the BBYA list existed before Cindy Dobrez got on the committee while I was in high school. Now I have no doubt that she and all of the other librarians I interacted with as a young adult were using the list, and probably books that went on display in my libraries were often picked for display because of that list. But considering how much I rely on the BBYA list now (both in its final form and the nominations list) to help me find books worth reading, I'm sure I would have been glued to the thing in middle school, steadily working my way through the list.
Ultimately, I'm incredibly happy that BBYA has, at least, gotten a bit of a reprieve. It's clearly a valuable list. Very few things in this world are perfect, so I think everyone should be open to the idea of updating BBYA in some way to ensure it stays relevant and on target, but BBYA is definitely a list that should continue to stick around.
The big news: BBYA was not sunsetted. In fact, it looks like early on in the ALA conference the YALSA board decided to move it from an "Action Item" - where a decision would have been made then and there about whether to phase out BBYA by 2011 - to a "Discussion Item." Liz gave some fast and furious notes about what was being said at that discussion. And from what Cindy and Lynn are reporting over at Bookends there was widespread agreement that BBYA needs to be updated (certainly updated before we throw in the towel), but there doesn't seem to be much agreement about what exactly needs to be updated!
Through the YALSA blog I found several posts on BBYA, but one that was absolutely fascinating by mk Eagle. This one gives another rundown of the events of the meeting (poor people trying to edit their passionate reasons for keeping BBYA down to 1-2 minutes! I know when I set out to write my blog post on BBYA, I did not expect it to be the length it ended up!) plus makes a point that I wasn't aware of before. Around the blog- and twittersphere there were lots of librarians/authors/teachers talking up how much they use the BBYA list for reader's advisory/building collections/getting recognition at a small press. But mk Eagle pointed our attention to the list's policies and procedures page - and would you believe that the target audience is not, in fact, librarians? The target audience is YA readers themselves!
To me this means that BBYA's biggest problem might be in the marketing. I don't recall having any idea that the BBYA list existed before Cindy Dobrez got on the committee while I was in high school. Now I have no doubt that she and all of the other librarians I interacted with as a young adult were using the list, and probably books that went on display in my libraries were often picked for display because of that list. But considering how much I rely on the BBYA list now (both in its final form and the nominations list) to help me find books worth reading, I'm sure I would have been glued to the thing in middle school, steadily working my way through the list.
Ultimately, I'm incredibly happy that BBYA has, at least, gotten a bit of a reprieve. It's clearly a valuable list. Very few things in this world are perfect, so I think everyone should be open to the idea of updating BBYA in some way to ensure it stays relevant and on target, but BBYA is definitely a list that should continue to stick around.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Book News: YALSA proposes to eliminate BBYA list
The internet has been all a-twitter this week after it was revealed (rather surreptitiously, apparently) that the director of YALSA has proposed eliminating the Best Books for Young Adults list (link leads to a .pdf file). In its place, according to Liz B is a Best of "Reader's Choice" list (again, link leads to a .pdf file). I have to take her word for it, since I don't get YALSA stuff all formally in a way that would make the connection obvious, but it certainly sounds like this Reader's Choice list is intended in some way to supplant BBYA.
To make it short, I believe this would absolutely be a bad idea.
But let me elaborate.
As I mentioned over at Bookends, being able to be part of BBYA in some small way was seriously one of the highlights of high school, if not my life, and is definitely what inspired me to pursue a career in literature.
I first heard about BBYA about half way through my junior year of high school. The school librarian told me that Mrs. Dobrez was starting some book club for young adult books and thought that I should be a part. I really don't think I knew much more about it before I decided to join. I knew there were going to be lots of books, other people that liked books, and Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan, my middle school librarians who I sorely missed at the high school level.
Participating in the "club" was an exhilarating experience for a young geek like me. Mrs. Dobrez was on the BBYA committee, which meant she was being sent new and upcoming books by the box load. To help gauge interest in the books and to share the wealth, she and Mrs. Rutan started the BBYA reader's group where students from 6th through 12th grade (and eventually higher - even once we'd graduated high school several of us found ways to keep coming back!) could grab new books and eventually share our opinions on them with other readers and, perhaps most excitingly, have our opinions heard by the BBYA committee at the ALA conferences. Mostly these opinions were relayed by Mrs. Dobrez or Mrs. Rutan via the feedback cards we diligently filled out for all the books we read (ironic: I couldn't be bothered to keep track of what I was reading back when I was doing summer reading clubs through the local library, but give me the chance at my opinions on books reaching a national audience and suddenly I became extremely meticulous!). But on a few rare occasions, we students got to make the trek to the ALA summer conference and share our opinions directly with the BBYA committee.
I got to go to ALA twice - first I made my poor mom drive me all the way down to Atlanta so I could not only share my opinions on the panel, but meet Sara Ryan, whose book Empress of the World pretty literally changed my life (I read it seven times in the week I borrowed it from BBYA and I will still re-read it eagerly. I also used it for pretty much any college project for a couple of years that could be manipulated to be about a YA book). I felt like such a star-struck fangirl. First I nearly passed out when Mrs. Dobrez introduced me to Sara Ryan, and then I distinctly remember walking around the conference hall with Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan. They paused for a moment to talk to some people they knew and I remember glancing at the nametag of one woman to discover it was E.R. Frank. I felt like I was in Hollywood or something, rubbing elbows with all of these famous people!
Attending that first ALA conference was the first time, I think, that I realized that librarians actually do stuff outside of the library. It's not all checking out books, giving endless booktalks, and shushing rowdy kids (although, as I learned from the internship I did my senior year with Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan, there is plenty of that!). Librarians not only get all the cool books and meet the cool people, but can really play a part in getting obscure books into the hands of people who need them (Alex Flinn explains this from an author's perspective here).
Actually contributing to the BBYA panel was a real trip, lol. The teen presentation day fell on father's day, which meant pretty much all of the local teens dropped out at the last minute. They'd managed to rope in a random group of kids who were attending the conference, I believe, to see the Printz winners. Which meant they were a well read bunch of kids, but they'd all read the same books. Meanwhile, I had been systematically plowing through as many of the nominated titles as I could. I think on the handout they gave us of all the nominated titles there were ten titles per page, and I regularly found that I had read 6-9 of the titles on every page. I felt so self-conscious after it quickly became clear that I had easily out-read all of the other kids there that I made myself pick only one book per page that I felt really strongly about. Usually strongly positive - Mrs. Dobrez remembered that I'd had a very negative reaction to Three Clams and an Oyster and made me share my opinions with the whole group, lol. It was a heady experience, and one I'll absolutely never forget.
A few years later I got to go back to ALA when it was in Chicago (much shorter road trip this time!). I was officially "too old" to be a teen reader, but the current crop of BBYA readers was going and I was old enough to be considered a chaperon. So one sunny summer day I climbed on a bus with a bunch of middle and high school kids to play grown up while they shared their opinions with the BBYA panel. The kids ran the gamut of "young adult," from middle to high school. Most of the high school kids had been middle schoolers when we started BBYA, and most of us could hardly string together a more coherent sentence than "I really liked this book. It was cool and exciting. I liked the main character" when sharing with each other at our weekly meetings. So it was great to go into the teen BBYA panel and see these kids be able to give concise and precise reviews of exactly why any particular book should or should not be part of the final BBYA list. Even the younger kids held their own - undoubtedly they had learned by the example of the older members.
From the comments over at Bookends, it's obvious that a lot of people feel passionately about the BBYA list. Teachers and librarians alike use the list to decide what books should be added to their school libraries. They use it to justify adding books to the curriculum. BBYA doesn't rely strictly on popularity, which means that obscure books or controversial books have just as much of a chance of being recognized as heavy weights like Harry Potter. But for me, BBYA has touched me on a much more personal level. I hope to one day be one of those librarians who relies on BBYA - or maybe even be one of those who gets to vote on the list. Or maybe I'll be an editor at a small publisher, who finds that a little gem of a book has a chance at wider recognition because the BBYA committee is considering it at a conference. I don't know where exactly I will end up, but I know I will end up there in no small part because of what I learned as a teen reader for BBYA.
Update: YALSA board member Michele Gorman tries to calm things down over here, clarifying that this is only a proposal at this point, and saying that the Reader's Choice list is not intended to be a replacement for BBYA, since neither proposal mentions the other. I think the assumption that the Reader's Choice is a replacement is because a) the two proposals appear consecutively (which could just be a coincidence) and b) the Reader's Choice list would appear to be the only opportunity for a general best-of-YA-lit list. Reader's Choice could certainly co-exist with BBYA, but if it comes into being just as BBYA is phased out, it will be seen as a pretty poor replacement.
To make it short, I believe this would absolutely be a bad idea.
But let me elaborate.
As I mentioned over at Bookends, being able to be part of BBYA in some small way was seriously one of the highlights of high school, if not my life, and is definitely what inspired me to pursue a career in literature.
I first heard about BBYA about half way through my junior year of high school. The school librarian told me that Mrs. Dobrez was starting some book club for young adult books and thought that I should be a part. I really don't think I knew much more about it before I decided to join. I knew there were going to be lots of books, other people that liked books, and Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan, my middle school librarians who I sorely missed at the high school level.
Participating in the "club" was an exhilarating experience for a young geek like me. Mrs. Dobrez was on the BBYA committee, which meant she was being sent new and upcoming books by the box load. To help gauge interest in the books and to share the wealth, she and Mrs. Rutan started the BBYA reader's group where students from 6th through 12th grade (and eventually higher - even once we'd graduated high school several of us found ways to keep coming back!) could grab new books and eventually share our opinions on them with other readers and, perhaps most excitingly, have our opinions heard by the BBYA committee at the ALA conferences. Mostly these opinions were relayed by Mrs. Dobrez or Mrs. Rutan via the feedback cards we diligently filled out for all the books we read (ironic: I couldn't be bothered to keep track of what I was reading back when I was doing summer reading clubs through the local library, but give me the chance at my opinions on books reaching a national audience and suddenly I became extremely meticulous!). But on a few rare occasions, we students got to make the trek to the ALA summer conference and share our opinions directly with the BBYA committee.
I got to go to ALA twice - first I made my poor mom drive me all the way down to Atlanta so I could not only share my opinions on the panel, but meet Sara Ryan, whose book Empress of the World pretty literally changed my life (I read it seven times in the week I borrowed it from BBYA and I will still re-read it eagerly. I also used it for pretty much any college project for a couple of years that could be manipulated to be about a YA book). I felt like such a star-struck fangirl. First I nearly passed out when Mrs. Dobrez introduced me to Sara Ryan, and then I distinctly remember walking around the conference hall with Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan. They paused for a moment to talk to some people they knew and I remember glancing at the nametag of one woman to discover it was E.R. Frank. I felt like I was in Hollywood or something, rubbing elbows with all of these famous people!
Attending that first ALA conference was the first time, I think, that I realized that librarians actually do stuff outside of the library. It's not all checking out books, giving endless booktalks, and shushing rowdy kids (although, as I learned from the internship I did my senior year with Mrs. Dobrez and Mrs. Rutan, there is plenty of that!). Librarians not only get all the cool books and meet the cool people, but can really play a part in getting obscure books into the hands of people who need them (Alex Flinn explains this from an author's perspective here).
Actually contributing to the BBYA panel was a real trip, lol. The teen presentation day fell on father's day, which meant pretty much all of the local teens dropped out at the last minute. They'd managed to rope in a random group of kids who were attending the conference, I believe, to see the Printz winners. Which meant they were a well read bunch of kids, but they'd all read the same books. Meanwhile, I had been systematically plowing through as many of the nominated titles as I could. I think on the handout they gave us of all the nominated titles there were ten titles per page, and I regularly found that I had read 6-9 of the titles on every page. I felt so self-conscious after it quickly became clear that I had easily out-read all of the other kids there that I made myself pick only one book per page that I felt really strongly about. Usually strongly positive - Mrs. Dobrez remembered that I'd had a very negative reaction to Three Clams and an Oyster and made me share my opinions with the whole group, lol. It was a heady experience, and one I'll absolutely never forget.
A few years later I got to go back to ALA when it was in Chicago (much shorter road trip this time!). I was officially "too old" to be a teen reader, but the current crop of BBYA readers was going and I was old enough to be considered a chaperon. So one sunny summer day I climbed on a bus with a bunch of middle and high school kids to play grown up while they shared their opinions with the BBYA panel. The kids ran the gamut of "young adult," from middle to high school. Most of the high school kids had been middle schoolers when we started BBYA, and most of us could hardly string together a more coherent sentence than "I really liked this book. It was cool and exciting. I liked the main character" when sharing with each other at our weekly meetings. So it was great to go into the teen BBYA panel and see these kids be able to give concise and precise reviews of exactly why any particular book should or should not be part of the final BBYA list. Even the younger kids held their own - undoubtedly they had learned by the example of the older members.
From the comments over at Bookends, it's obvious that a lot of people feel passionately about the BBYA list. Teachers and librarians alike use the list to decide what books should be added to their school libraries. They use it to justify adding books to the curriculum. BBYA doesn't rely strictly on popularity, which means that obscure books or controversial books have just as much of a chance of being recognized as heavy weights like Harry Potter. But for me, BBYA has touched me on a much more personal level. I hope to one day be one of those librarians who relies on BBYA - or maybe even be one of those who gets to vote on the list. Or maybe I'll be an editor at a small publisher, who finds that a little gem of a book has a chance at wider recognition because the BBYA committee is considering it at a conference. I don't know where exactly I will end up, but I know I will end up there in no small part because of what I learned as a teen reader for BBYA.
Update: YALSA board member Michele Gorman tries to calm things down over here, clarifying that this is only a proposal at this point, and saying that the Reader's Choice list is not intended to be a replacement for BBYA, since neither proposal mentions the other. I think the assumption that the Reader's Choice is a replacement is because a) the two proposals appear consecutively (which could just be a coincidence) and b) the Reader's Choice list would appear to be the only opportunity for a general best-of-YA-lit list. Reader's Choice could certainly co-exist with BBYA, but if it comes into being just as BBYA is phased out, it will be seen as a pretty poor replacement.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Review: The Girl in the Arena by Lise Haines
When I was wandering the floor at BEA last weekend, I was passing the Bloomsbury booth when I heard one of the workers handing a galley to another attendee saying "This is for Hunger Games fans." I stopped in my tracks and quickly got my own galley of The Girl in the Arena, excited for the possibility of something to tide me over between Catching Fire and whatever the next book is (does anyone know what the third one will be called?)
I first grew suspicious over whether I would actually enjoy the book when I noticed the back cover says that not only is it for fans of The Hunger Games, but Fight Club as well. Granted, I've never read Fight Club, but I've seen the movie and Wikipedia'd the novel, and it really seems like the only thing it has in common with Hunger Games is people beating the crap out of each other. So what on earth would Girl in the Arena have in common with my beloved Hunger Games?
Turns out it's mostly the girl-going-to-fight-to-the-death plot.
The Girl in the Arena presents a bit of alternate history - after losing his son in an attempt to dodge the draft in Vietnam, a man decides to re-create the ancient sport of gladiators in order to give young men (and originally it was all men, though eventually women were allowed some participation) a healthy outlet for their aggression. Eventually he hopes that the gladiator sport will be so successful it will remove our need for armies and war. (This whole thing never quite made sense to me - especially the part about fighting as a gladiator as an alternative to military service in Vietnam. Last I checked, people weren't exactly signing up to fight in Vietnam in large numbers because they wanted to kill people - they were drafted, whether they needed an outlet for their aggression or not.)
Over the years, this underground group of gladiators gains more and more attention, with a complex set of rules governing their fights and behavior outside of the ring. Eventually it gains the fame of other major sports, and the complex rules and bylaws begin extending beyond the gladiators themselves to their wives and children. One of these archaic rules involves the "dowry bracelets" that daughters of gladiators wear. If a gladiator other than her father possesses the bracelet, the daughter is required to marry that gladiator. In a tragic turn of events, our protagonist Lyn had given her seventh father (her mother's seventh gladiator husband) her dowry bracelet for good luck on the morning of what ended up being his last fight. After Lyn's father has been brutally cut down in the ring, his opponent, Uber, picks up the bracelet, thinking it is nothing more than a trophy from his latest kill. Thanks to the obsessive paparazzi, however, it doesn't take long for everyone to discover who the true owner of the bracelet was, and what this means for Lyn now.
Lyn has long been at odds with her mother, Allison, and gladiator culture in general. Lyn has started to consider herself a pacifist - the antithesis of the hyper violent gladiator fights - and finds her mother's behavior as a career gladiator wife backwards at best. Freshly 18, Lyn wants to move beyond life as a member of "glad culture," but with Uber's capture of her dowry bracelet, she must find a way to navigate the tricky rules that govern glad culture to find an acceptable way out of the engagement while protecting her mother and her younger brother.
There are a lot of surface comparisons to be made between Girl in the Arena and The Hunger Games (and there are a few minor plot points that have an eerie similarity to minor points in Catching Fire as well), but nothing deep enough that would have me legitimately recommending this to someone based solely on their love of Hunger Games. Yes, Lyn ends up in the arena to fight to the death and she does it in a round about way to protect her family, much as Katniss participates in the Games in order to protect her sister. But in The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins developed a horrifically blood thirsty culture, where most of the sane people in the districts realizes these fights to the death among children are disgusting and wrong. In Girl in the Arena, gladiators are always adults, they are always volunteers, and since a gladiator fight is little more than a sporting event, most people can avoid them (and in fact Lyn mentions having lots of problems at school because she is one of only two gladiator kids at her school). The crazy rules that extend beyond the gladiators to their families are stifling, yes, but violating those rules means losing your contract or your family loses prestige and money - a far cry from the lethal punishment handed out in District 11 to a child who just wanted to play with nightvision goggles.
Additionally, Girl in the Arena tries so hard to be cool at times that it's a book I see becoming dated very, very soon. I can only sit through so many references to YouTube, Second Life (seriously, does anyone still play Second Life anymore?), and the Virgin Megastore before my eyes start to glaze over. Plus the author totally got the format of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart wrong - something so small, but would have been SO EASY to actually research. Yes, it's a bit of alternate history so some things can be forgiven (maybe in this reality Jon Stewart hosts an hour long show with multiple guests?) but with all of the attempts to be cool it just got grating after awhile.
I first grew suspicious over whether I would actually enjoy the book when I noticed the back cover says that not only is it for fans of The Hunger Games, but Fight Club as well. Granted, I've never read Fight Club, but I've seen the movie and Wikipedia'd the novel, and it really seems like the only thing it has in common with Hunger Games is people beating the crap out of each other. So what on earth would Girl in the Arena have in common with my beloved Hunger Games?
Turns out it's mostly the girl-going-to-fight-to-the-death plot.
The Girl in the Arena presents a bit of alternate history - after losing his son in an attempt to dodge the draft in Vietnam, a man decides to re-create the ancient sport of gladiators in order to give young men (and originally it was all men, though eventually women were allowed some participation) a healthy outlet for their aggression. Eventually he hopes that the gladiator sport will be so successful it will remove our need for armies and war. (This whole thing never quite made sense to me - especially the part about fighting as a gladiator as an alternative to military service in Vietnam. Last I checked, people weren't exactly signing up to fight in Vietnam in large numbers because they wanted to kill people - they were drafted, whether they needed an outlet for their aggression or not.)
Over the years, this underground group of gladiators gains more and more attention, with a complex set of rules governing their fights and behavior outside of the ring. Eventually it gains the fame of other major sports, and the complex rules and bylaws begin extending beyond the gladiators themselves to their wives and children. One of these archaic rules involves the "dowry bracelets" that daughters of gladiators wear. If a gladiator other than her father possesses the bracelet, the daughter is required to marry that gladiator. In a tragic turn of events, our protagonist Lyn had given her seventh father (her mother's seventh gladiator husband) her dowry bracelet for good luck on the morning of what ended up being his last fight. After Lyn's father has been brutally cut down in the ring, his opponent, Uber, picks up the bracelet, thinking it is nothing more than a trophy from his latest kill. Thanks to the obsessive paparazzi, however, it doesn't take long for everyone to discover who the true owner of the bracelet was, and what this means for Lyn now.
Lyn has long been at odds with her mother, Allison, and gladiator culture in general. Lyn has started to consider herself a pacifist - the antithesis of the hyper violent gladiator fights - and finds her mother's behavior as a career gladiator wife backwards at best. Freshly 18, Lyn wants to move beyond life as a member of "glad culture," but with Uber's capture of her dowry bracelet, she must find a way to navigate the tricky rules that govern glad culture to find an acceptable way out of the engagement while protecting her mother and her younger brother.
There are a lot of surface comparisons to be made between Girl in the Arena and The Hunger Games (and there are a few minor plot points that have an eerie similarity to minor points in Catching Fire as well), but nothing deep enough that would have me legitimately recommending this to someone based solely on their love of Hunger Games. Yes, Lyn ends up in the arena to fight to the death and she does it in a round about way to protect her family, much as Katniss participates in the Games in order to protect her sister. But in The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins developed a horrifically blood thirsty culture, where most of the sane people in the districts realizes these fights to the death among children are disgusting and wrong. In Girl in the Arena, gladiators are always adults, they are always volunteers, and since a gladiator fight is little more than a sporting event, most people can avoid them (and in fact Lyn mentions having lots of problems at school because she is one of only two gladiator kids at her school). The crazy rules that extend beyond the gladiators to their families are stifling, yes, but violating those rules means losing your contract or your family loses prestige and money - a far cry from the lethal punishment handed out in District 11 to a child who just wanted to play with nightvision goggles.
Additionally, Girl in the Arena tries so hard to be cool at times that it's a book I see becoming dated very, very soon. I can only sit through so many references to YouTube, Second Life (seriously, does anyone still play Second Life anymore?), and the Virgin Megastore before my eyes start to glaze over. Plus the author totally got the format of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart wrong - something so small, but would have been SO EASY to actually research. Yes, it's a bit of alternate history so some things can be forgiven (maybe in this reality Jon Stewart hosts an hour long show with multiple guests?) but with all of the attempts to be cool it just got grating after awhile.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Review: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
When I heard earlier this year that the galley for Catching Fire, the sequel to Hunger Games, one of my favorite books of last year, was going to be at Book Expo America, I cursed my current employer. Since we already have a showroom in New York, and BEA was going to be in New York, we decided to just have all of our clients come into the showroom. Which meant there wasn't going to be a way for me to sneak out onto the floor to score myself a copy of the book. ~sigh~
But eventually word got out that little ol' Angela really, really wanted to get on the floor at BEA. So strings were pulled, and by the end of the day yesterday I had a pass to get onto the floor. So I woke up ridiculously early for a Saturday to make sure I would be at the Javits Convention Center right around 9:00 when the floor opened.
I ended up getting there around 9:30 (stupid E train running local through Queens. You're supposed to be express!) - and already there was a huge line at the Scholastic booth for the galley, which was being given away at 10! I was a little nervous about whether I would make it to the front of the line before they ran out of books, but it turns out I didn't need to worry - there were plenty of books to spare by the time I made it to the front of the line.
Now I must confess, I seriously considered finding some out of the way spot right then and there and starting to read. But when I was getting in line I happened to bump into a friend who was working at the show and had actually volunteered to pick up the galley for me, so instead I decided to be social and went with her to see Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black and Cassandra Clare talk about steampunk and building alternate worlds. Then we had to go pick up the Leviathan galley, but that's a post for another day.
It was a gorgeous day in New York, so I decided to take my new galleys and check out the new lounge chairs in Times Square. Naturally I started with Catching Fire.
While my copy of the galley didn't specifically request I avoid discussing the twists and turns of the novel, I'm still going to avoid a detailed plot summary for a couple of reasons. Mostly because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around a lot of the plot.
But let me assure you, this novel will in no way disappoint fans of The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins is an extremely deft writer - I noticed this as I re-read Hunger Games twice over the last three days. Both Hunger Games and Catching Fire are extremely tightly woven stories - if Collins mentions something early on in the book, you can bet it will play a part in the story later on. Of course, now that I was on to her, I was feeling rather smug going into Catching Fire, sure I'd be able to predict the plot based on Collins' effective foreshadowing. Boy was I wrong - while I often caught what was going to be important later on, there was absolutely no way of predicting just HOW that plot point was going to be implemented.
Like Hunger Games, I was an extremely vocal reader during Catching Fire (so much so that I eventually decided I needed to leave Times Square and read in the solitude of my apartment). I may even have been more so this time, thanks to the deeper emotional investment we have this time around. We've watched Katniss survive insurmountable odds once - to see her thrown back into the fire after the president's reaction to her stunt at the end of the Hunger Games is almost too much.
And of course, we're left with another fucking cliff hanger. There seems to be a consensus here: as awesome as it is to get to read this galley, it's going to make the wait for the third book even longer - especially if, as this Publisher's Weekly article says, they don't do a galley for the third book!
But eventually word got out that little ol' Angela really, really wanted to get on the floor at BEA. So strings were pulled, and by the end of the day yesterday I had a pass to get onto the floor. So I woke up ridiculously early for a Saturday to make sure I would be at the Javits Convention Center right around 9:00 when the floor opened.
I ended up getting there around 9:30 (stupid E train running local through Queens. You're supposed to be express!) - and already there was a huge line at the Scholastic booth for the galley, which was being given away at 10! I was a little nervous about whether I would make it to the front of the line before they ran out of books, but it turns out I didn't need to worry - there were plenty of books to spare by the time I made it to the front of the line.
Now I must confess, I seriously considered finding some out of the way spot right then and there and starting to read. But when I was getting in line I happened to bump into a friend who was working at the show and had actually volunteered to pick up the galley for me, so instead I decided to be social and went with her to see Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black and Cassandra Clare talk about steampunk and building alternate worlds. Then we had to go pick up the Leviathan galley, but that's a post for another day.
It was a gorgeous day in New York, so I decided to take my new galleys and check out the new lounge chairs in Times Square. Naturally I started with Catching Fire.
While my copy of the galley didn't specifically request I avoid discussing the twists and turns of the novel, I'm still going to avoid a detailed plot summary for a couple of reasons. Mostly because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around a lot of the plot.
But let me assure you, this novel will in no way disappoint fans of The Hunger Games. Suzanne Collins is an extremely deft writer - I noticed this as I re-read Hunger Games twice over the last three days. Both Hunger Games and Catching Fire are extremely tightly woven stories - if Collins mentions something early on in the book, you can bet it will play a part in the story later on. Of course, now that I was on to her, I was feeling rather smug going into Catching Fire, sure I'd be able to predict the plot based on Collins' effective foreshadowing. Boy was I wrong - while I often caught what was going to be important later on, there was absolutely no way of predicting just HOW that plot point was going to be implemented.
Like Hunger Games, I was an extremely vocal reader during Catching Fire (so much so that I eventually decided I needed to leave Times Square and read in the solitude of my apartment). I may even have been more so this time, thanks to the deeper emotional investment we have this time around. We've watched Katniss survive insurmountable odds once - to see her thrown back into the fire after the president's reaction to her stunt at the end of the Hunger Games is almost too much.
And of course, we're left with another fucking cliff hanger. There seems to be a consensus here: as awesome as it is to get to read this galley, it's going to make the wait for the third book even longer - especially if, as this Publisher's Weekly article says, they don't do a galley for the third book!
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Review: The Dead Travel Fast by Eric Nuzum
Growing up, I watched horror movies with my family all the time. "The Blob" is possibly my mother's favorite movie of all time (we're talking the old school one with Steve McQueen, none of that re-make crap) and for several years running at Halloween we'd rent all of the classic monster movies for a monster movie marathon. Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Mummy (the original with Boris Karloff, of course, though we also enjoyed the Brendan Frasier version), The Wolfman, Frankenstein and, of course, Dracula.
So in college when I picked up role playing with Vampire: The Masquerade, I already had a bit of horror/vampire background, and had a blast spending Thursday nights with my friends pretending to be among the undead (it didn't hurt that the man who was to become my husband was playing with us!). While it's been ages since I've stayed up till dawn pretending to be a blood sucking fiend, I still love a good horror story, and vampires are some of the most horrific of all (along with zombies). So when I came across The Dead Travel Fast, billed as a "far-reaching look at vampires across pop culture," I was excited. I love academic, or even semi-academic, looks at pop culture, so I figured this book would be right up my alley.
Alas, it wasn't to be.
While Nuzum certainly explores a wide variety of experiences in order to try to "understand" our cultural obsession with vampires, it's pretty clear that he actually has little but contempt for most of the people who find vampires fascinating. People who attend conventions dedicated to Dark Shadows are overweight, disabled losers who have nothing to look forward to but watching old episodes of a sub-par soap opera in dark hotel ballrooms, and people who play the afore-mentioned "Vampire" have a habit of going off the deep end and murdering people (two examples of Vampire: The Masquerade-related deaths are then conflated with half a dozen other instances of people who believed they really were vampires actually murdering people).
Nuzum's choice of what aspects of popular vampire culture to study were also bizarrely chosen. He wanted to watch every vampire movie ever made, yet tried to go throughout his entire quest without reading a single Anne Rice book. I think Anne Rice may be a few fries short of a happy meal, and aside from a brief stint in high school I never thought her novels were all that great, but there is no way you can study our current perceptions of vampires and ignore Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. It's like saying you're going to study our obsession with magic without reading Harry Potter, or pirates and not watching "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Essentially the verdict seemed to come down to that the only acceptable vampire obsession was Nuzum's own - and his obsession was more with ridiculing those who find vampires interesting and intriguing than actually understanding where this interest comes from.
So in college when I picked up role playing with Vampire: The Masquerade, I already had a bit of horror/vampire background, and had a blast spending Thursday nights with my friends pretending to be among the undead (it didn't hurt that the man who was to become my husband was playing with us!). While it's been ages since I've stayed up till dawn pretending to be a blood sucking fiend, I still love a good horror story, and vampires are some of the most horrific of all (along with zombies). So when I came across The Dead Travel Fast, billed as a "far-reaching look at vampires across pop culture," I was excited. I love academic, or even semi-academic, looks at pop culture, so I figured this book would be right up my alley.
Alas, it wasn't to be.
While Nuzum certainly explores a wide variety of experiences in order to try to "understand" our cultural obsession with vampires, it's pretty clear that he actually has little but contempt for most of the people who find vampires fascinating. People who attend conventions dedicated to Dark Shadows are overweight, disabled losers who have nothing to look forward to but watching old episodes of a sub-par soap opera in dark hotel ballrooms, and people who play the afore-mentioned "Vampire" have a habit of going off the deep end and murdering people (two examples of Vampire: The Masquerade-related deaths are then conflated with half a dozen other instances of people who believed they really were vampires actually murdering people).
Nuzum's choice of what aspects of popular vampire culture to study were also bizarrely chosen. He wanted to watch every vampire movie ever made, yet tried to go throughout his entire quest without reading a single Anne Rice book. I think Anne Rice may be a few fries short of a happy meal, and aside from a brief stint in high school I never thought her novels were all that great, but there is no way you can study our current perceptions of vampires and ignore Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. It's like saying you're going to study our obsession with magic without reading Harry Potter, or pirates and not watching "Pirates of the Caribbean."
Essentially the verdict seemed to come down to that the only acceptable vampire obsession was Nuzum's own - and his obsession was more with ridiculing those who find vampires interesting and intriguing than actually understanding where this interest comes from.
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