New from Heller
I never bypass the chance to read a novel by Peter Heller. I love that I never know what to expect—each book is so different from the one before, but all are gripping; his prose is both spare and lush in its evocations; and on top of that, the guy can tell a story. Once having read both The Painter and The Dog Stars, I would have been hard pressed to choose a favorite between them, and although I liked Celine less, it was, again, such a departure from previous works that both its characters and its mystery intrigued me.
His new book, The River, is similarly powerful. The sense of uneasiness evoked from the very first page builds to a cascade of climactic moments, each overpowering the previous one, until you wash into the ebb tide of the epilogue and realize you’ve been holding your breath for a good part of the book.
Two college friends, Dartmouth classmates Jack and Wynn, are taking a much-dreamed-of trip together, setting aside a few weeks to canoe a series of lakes into a northern-flowing river up into Canada. Jack, who was raised on a ranch in Colorado, is the more experienced of the two at camping and hunting, but Wynn, a gentle giant from rural Vermont, has his share of skills. They plan a leisurely trip of trout fishing, blueberry picking, and a slow trek through a route that alternates between smooth, flat water idyllic for paddling and rapids that must either be run or portaged around.
All of this changes one afternoon halfway through the trip, when the two climb a hill and see the glow of a massive forest fire about 25 miles off but clearly headed directly across their path. The lakes up until now have been completely empty of humans, and the two boys have enjoyed the cry of the loons and the spectacle of moose, bear, and other wildlife, but as they paddle upstream with new urgency, they encounter first a pair of men, drunk on whiskey and lolling in their campsite with no awareness of their peril, and then, as fog drops down and obscures the shore, they hear the voices of a man and woman, arguing passionately, their voices bouncing across the water. They warn the men about the fire, but can’t catch a glimpse of the contentious couple, and paddle on to their next campsite.
The next day, burdened with a sense of guilt for not searching harder, Jack and Wynn agree to turn back and warn the couple, if they can be found. This turns out to be a fateful decision that burdens them for the rest of their trip with unexpected responsibilities, dangers, and crises over and above the dreaded wildfire, which approaches ever closer.
Heller always delivers on atmosphere, and even if you have never camped out, paddled a canoe, or caught a fish, you are right there with his characters on the bank of the lakes and river, looking at the stars, watching the raptors in their nests at the tops of the tallest trees, or reeling in a line with a brown trout on the hook. The reader also gets quickly inside the heads of both protagonists, as well as tapping into the quiet and solid friendship between the two, which nonetheless becomes strained as events ramp up to catastrophe and their differing temperaments emerge.
As with his other books, I read this one in a day and a half, only deterred from one continuous sit-down by a traitorously depleted battery in my Kindle. In an interview for Bookpage, Heller said that he writes…
“…a thousand words a day, every day, and I always stop in the middle of a scene or a compelling train of thought. Most writers I know write through a scene. But if you think about it, that’s stopping at a transition, a double-return, white space. That’s what you face the next morning; it’s almost like starting the book fresh. If you stop in the middle, you can’t wait to continue the next day.”
That same sense of urgency pervades me as I read any of his books.
A reliable, enjoyable read
I just picked up Michael Connelly’s latest, Dark Sacred Night, which is a combo novel featuring both Harry Bosch (his 21st outing) and Renee Ballard (#2 for her) in the Bosch “universe” of 31 books. I have been nervous, for the past few volumes, that with Harry truly getting beyond the age of a comeback, Connelly’s franchise would dwindle. Although I am a fan, for instance, of John Lescroart’s Dismas Hardy series, I have been vocal about my disappointment in those books in which he chooses one of his other characters as the lead, and I wasn’t quite sure, with the first Renee Ballard book, that Connelly wasn’t going to go the same way, even though Renee’s character sketch was intriguing. (She has no permanent home but that of her Gran’s up in Ventura, and sleeps between shifts in a tent on the beach in Venice, with her dog to guard her, and her surfboard and a casual relationship with a lifeguard to keep her entertained.)
Fortunately, with his choice to bring the two detectives together for Renee’s next adventure, Connelly both solidified her character further and gave us something to compare and contrast between the way the old veteran and the young fanatic go after their cases. Harry recognizes by the end of this joint endeavor that Renee has that same certain something—the gleam in the eye, the doggedness of the pursuit, the dedication of the purist—that has kept Harry going through multiple separations from the LAPD, private consulting, and now as a part-time temporary guy at San Fernando’s tiny police department…and so do we, the readers. So while I had my doubts, this book made me much more confident that Connelly can pull off this changing of the guard, particularly by using these transitional novels.
After Ballard’s run-in with a superior officer (a sexual harassment incident in which she was the target) in her book #1, she was shunted off to “the late show” (the graveyard shift) at Hollywood’s detective bureau. And although it’s not been great for her career, she has decided that there are many advantages to this shift, including greater autonomy both at work and in her free time, and the opportunity (in the occasional downtime of the wee hours) to pursue cold cases. One night she returns to the deserted detectives’ bureau after having rolled out on a case that might have been homicide but turned out to be accidental death, only to find a stranger going through filing cabinets that she would have sworn were locked when she left the office. After interrupting him and essentially kicking him out, she becomes curious about who this guy is and why and how he got access, and goes on a fact-finding enquiry about Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch.
When she finds out that he’s pursuing a cold case and herself becomes intrigued by it, she offers to work with him, in her spare time, to solve it. Harry’s not sure he needs the help or wants a partner (when has he ever?), but since having an in-house buddy at the LAPD ensures him access to stuff he couldn’t get at on his own, he agrees.
The case is nine years cold, the murder of 15-year-old runaway Daisy Clayton, brutalized and left in a dumpster, and Harry has a personal interest in the case; he has met and befriended Daisy’s mother, Elizabeth, and helped her to get clean from an opioid addiction she fell into after her daughter died. Harry has promised Elizabeth that he won’t let go of Daisy’s case until he solves it and gives her at least that much closure. Renee Ballard, being generally inclined towards solving cases involving victimized women, is immediately intrigued by the details of Daisy’s story, and she and Harry trade off on tracking down leads, sources, and suspects before and after Ballard’s late-night shifts and Harry’s part-time day job, sometimes working together and sometimes tag-teaming one another. Being true to actual police work, this case isn’t the only thing keeping the two detectives busy, and the book is an action-packed amalgam of multiple story lines.
The book is told in the third person, but from two viewpoints, following each character individually and also when they work together, and it’s an effective back-and-forth reflecting all the fascinating details of police procedurals at which Connelly excels.
At the end of the book, a tentative suggestion is made by one detective to the other that perhaps they could work together again in the future; I have a feeling that offer will be taken up in Bosch 22, Ballard 3, and Universe 32! (Or maybe it will simply be called
B&B #2.)
Books about the queen
Although I included The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett, in a previous list of “books about books,” I hadn’t actually had the pleasure of reading it.
I finally got around to it recently, and felt I had to follow up with a little more detail about this delightful story.
A certain generation of us were raised with a particular consciousness of England’s royal family, because the abdication of Edward VIII from the throne (in favor of marrying a divorceé, Wallis Simpson, which simply wasn’t “done” at the time) catapulted his brother, Albert, to the throne as George VI. The key ingredient to this story for girls, however, was that George VI had two daughters, Elizabeth (the next heir) and Margaret Rose, who were instantly in the limelight, and we were fascinated with their every move—their dress, their hobbies, their education, their pets….
Already predisposed towards the love of princesses,
I came to know about the real ones through a book my mother bought me, called The Little Princesses, by Marion Crawford. The initial events took place in the 1930s when “Lilibet” and Margaret were five and two years old, respectively (well before my time), but the book, written by the princesses’ long-time governess, “Crawfie” (as she was nicknamed by Elizabeth), was published in the 1950s, and it crossed my path when I was seven—able to read its grown-up text but probably not able to understand some of it until re-reads years later. I was nonetheless fascinated with the whole story, and particularly the photographs of the princesses and their governess, dogs, ponies, and so on that were included in the book, and over which I pored at length.
The book explores the inner life of the royal family from the girls’ childhood up through Elizabeth’s wedding and the birth of her son, Prince Charles. It does so lovingly and without a hint of scandal or any lack of respect, but Crawford was nonetheless banned from the family (and from her employment) for writing it, despite her claim of having been given permission to do so. The rumor is that the Queen Mother felt the intimacy of the narrative would detract from the mystique of the holder of the throne.
Cut to the recent past, when Queen Elizabeth’s early reign has been explored by the Netflix series “The Crown.” In it, Elizabeth is portrayed as deeply uncertain and vulnerable on the inside but formal, traditional, and almost staid in her mannerisms (particularly for a young woman) on the outside—ever conscious of her image and her duty to uphold a certain appearance. For those who had read the account by Crawford of her formative years, the portrayal was spot on, and continued a sense of exactly who Elizabeth II is in the world (even to the uncanny similarity of appearance between the actress, Claire Foy, and the young queen).
I preface my comments about The Uncommon Reader with all this simply to say that Alan Bennett also has an extraordinary grasp of both the woman and the office, and portrays her as a somewhat elderly woman who has pursued exactly the life Elizabeth II has lived, only to find that something has been missing that, upon its discovery, changes everything.
A short synopsis of the book: Queen Elizabeth, wandering outdoors in search of her beloved corgis, stumbles upon a bookmobile near the palace. She feels compelled by good manners to check out a book, which she struggles through, returns, and feels compelled to take out another. But this one she enjoys! This behavior is out of character for the Queen, who has previously allowed herself few hobbies or interests that express a preference for anything, and now here she is, preferring books, which habit begins to influence the person she is and how she reigns and interacts with her subjects. Not everyone approves, however; politicians and staff collaborate to steer her away from this selfish, isolating, alienating addiction!
In his tiny volume (shown here in my gargantuan hand just to convey size and scale), Bennett absolutely nails the personality, the inner thoughts, and the outer habits of the Queen, along with the judgments and expectations of those intimates of her court who are always on the lookout for aberrant behavior from their monarch, with the desire to neatly nip it in the bud. But Elizabeth isn’t going to be ruled by their expectations (after all, who is the queen here?) and quietly pursues her new hobby to an astonishing and humorous end. If you are a person who loves books about books, and you also have a sneaking fascination with England’s monarchy, don’t miss out reading this charming but also revelatory and even mildly subversive novella.
Why dystopian fiction?
Why have dystopian and post-apocalyptic books become and remained so popular? As a teen librarian, this was one of the questions most frequently asked of me (mostly by bewildered parents and teachers), so I recently included my (extensive) answer in a speculative fiction lecture to my Young Adult Literature class.
Included in the dystopian and apocalyptic sub-genre are books addressing the degradation of the planet, painting societies that have run out of fossil fuels, societies that have run out of water, numerous scenarios of global warming, and societies in which the entire infrastructure has broken down and created a scavenger mentality. There are stories addressing the breakdown of civil society, with the rise of oppressive religions and philosophies and the persecution of “the others,” and experimenting with ideas about who those others of the future will be—will they still be gay people, Jewish people, Muslims, people of color? Or will the society shift and find different victims on which to avenge itself?
Some observers of the success of this publishing niche point to 9/11 and the many terrorist events before and after it as an existential catalyst to make people consider end-of-the-world scenarios. But dystopian fiction was around long before any of our current destruction scenarios, starting in 1932 with Brave New World, and featuring such classics between then and now as Fahrenheit 451, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, and Parable of the Sower. And in addition to those considered classics, there are equally enduring stories (even though some of them are dated) such as Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank; Logan’s Run, by William F. Nolan; War Day, by James Kunetka and Whitley Streiber; Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; On the Beach, by Nevil Shute; and The Family Tree and The Gate to Women’s Country, by Sheri S. Tepper.
The question is, though: Why are these books so popular, especially with teens?
Before The Hunger Games ever spurred a glut of dystopian and post-apocalyptic books on the teen market, there were forays into this downbeat science fiction sub-genre of dark, diminished futures focused on survival: cautionary tales such as Feed, by M. T. Anderson and The House of the Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer; and future projections such as Obernewtyn, by Isobelle Carmody, the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld, and the chilling Unwind (and sequels) by Neal Shusterman. After The Hunger Games, which is the all-time best-selling book series (surpassing even Harry Potter and Twilight!), the reading public went crazy for such books as Ready Player One and Epitaph Road, and overdosed on such series as The Maze Runner, Divergent and sequels, and The Young Elites.
Some of these works are focused on the immediate hereafter, while others project centuries ahead to speculate on what a future world would look like after the immediate destructive effects have subsided. If adults are feeling anxious enough to write these books, it’s probable that their anxieties are being communicated to their teenagers through more than popular fiction and the movies made from it.
Reading about a society that is worse than yours, or a scenario in which the worst that could possibly happen has transpired—but people have survived and are using their ingenuity and determination to make things better—can be reassuring.
There is also the advantage of being able to talk about socially unacceptable topics in a fictional arena and work out how you feel about them or how you should feel about them. Calling a political regime into question, or rebelling against a religion or cultural restriction by reading about it can help a teen (or an adult) who can’t quite bring him- or herself to rebel in real life, by offering some relief, or possibly even guidance and encouragement. Authors can offer pointed commentary about societal trends (as did the authors of Brave New World and 1984) from within a fictional setting and gain an audience while not suffering the criticism or retribution they might receive if their comments were offered in plain speech.
Teens can use these books as metaphors to work out their own problems with the real world. Teen brains are not done maturing yet, and many teens are filled with rage and fear and longing, and have trouble articulating their thoughts and feelings; so fiction that provides a cathartic release and relief of these emotions is helpful. These books can also inspire us by the actions of their courageous, defiant protagonists who overcome barriers and limitations or come to the realization of their own shortcomings and seek to do better.
Ultimately, it is also fiction that, once again, provides the opportunity for the learning of empathy.
“Reading good literature can be a powerful way to develop empathy. Empathy could be one of the most important qualities to develop in young citizens who will go on to be successful actors in a complicated world.”
—Dr. Brené Brown
Fantasy fiction
What is the appeal of fantasy fiction? People who don’t read fantasy ask this question a lot. Here are some reasons why people might enjoy reading fantasy:
Escapism: travel into another WORLD, culture, history, set of natural laws
Heroism: the exploration of greater themes, unconscious hopes and aspirations, the experience of admiration and emotion
Specialness: a hidden talent for magic…
Wonder: the appeal of the unfamiliar
Romance: Not just “couples” romance, but the romance of the road, the charisma of the swashbuckler, etc.
Simplicity: the straightforward moral code of good and evil
“The more rational the world becomes,
the more we demand the irrational in our fiction.
The genre starts where science ends.”
—Mark Chadbourn
The Great Library
Periodically, I blog about young adult books or series that may have adult appeal, and the series that begins with Ink and Bone, by Rachel Caine, is one such.
To any bibliophile, the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, the first so-called universal library, was a tragedy of epic proportions. The loss of the ancient world’s single largest archive of knowledge, the idea that so many “great works of brilliant geniuses” (Orosius) was destroyed, causes anything from a wince to a fit of weeping by those lovers of antiquity who can only imagine what they might have missed by this loss. In this series, Caine rewrites literary history by allowing the Library at Alexandria to survive, and then postulates what might have happened next.
By the present day (the series actually takes place a decade into our future, although it’s a weirdly old-fashioned and steam-punky rendition), the Library and its staff have gained immense political power and influence, akin to that of the Catholic Church and a world government rolled into one. The Great Library is a looming presence in every major city, and has complete power over the dissemination of information via its Serapeums (Serapea?), the equivalent of your local library branch. Through the use of alchemy and the highly developed mental powers of the Library’s servants called Obscurists, literally any literary work can be delivered to a “blank” book for any citizen to read…but at the same time, the individual ownership or possession of “real” (original, permanently printed) books is strictly forbidden. The Great Library wants to keep the power of the written word solely in its own hands. This begins as a noble goal to protect and preserve knowledge, but over the course of history has become a restrictive and smothering power play.
The primary protagonist of the book is Jess Brightwell, whose family has for centuries been involved in the black market trade for illegal books. Jess, however, is neither qualified for nor as interested in following the family trade as is his twin brother, Brendan, so his father decides that, since he’s a bright boy who likes to read, the best thing Jess can do for the family is to become a librarian! What better than to have a loyal family member strategically placed within the organization of your rival? This begins Jess’s association with a motley group of other teenagers, all vying for a role in the hierarchy of the most powerful organization on earth. But what they discover is that the Great Library isn’t as benign, high-minded, and well-intentioned as they’ve been brought up to believe….
I picked up the first book because of the little gold plate on the cover that said “THE GREAT LIBRARY.” I thought the book was brilliant. The alternate history, the scene-setting, the imagery, the concepts, the characters, the action, are all fully on. Every time I had to stop reading, I couldn’t wait to pick it up again. It’s a book that will definitely appeal to teenagers, what with the impulsive decisions, quickly embraced loyalties, and underlying romances among its cast, but the series is definitely worth a look by adults intrigued by the premise.
After discovering the first book, I have, over a period of years, read the sequels—Paper and Fire, Ash and Quill and, just this past week, Smoke and Iron. The subsequent books take Jess and his band of friends—including his teacher, Scholar Wolfe, and the teacher’s lover, Commander Santi of the High Garde, Thomas the brilliant inventor, Khalila the quiet diplomat, Morgan the Obscurist, Dario the haughty member of Spanish royalty, and Glain, stalwart soldier of Welsh origins—on multiple harrowing adventures as they fight the current corrupt leadership for the soul of the real Library they love and wish to save.
Although there is inevitably some variation in pacing when reading a series, Caine managed, by varying the scenery and also developing and changing the relationships among the characters, to keep the books pretty consistently at the same level of quality. I had read somewhere that this was originally intended as a trilogy, and somehow assumed that Smoke and Iron was the last in the series, only to get to the end and realize that there is one more book—Sword and Pen—still to come. This fifth book publishes in September, and I will be the first adult on the waiting list at the library to read it. Look out, teens, I’m coming through!
Wild thing
I just finished reading Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens. I didn’t initially realize that such a big “to-do” had been made about the book; one of my students had read and liked it, and passed it along to me. She doesn’t know much about my reading tastes, but this immersion in the life of a virtual orphan growing up alone in the marshes of North Carolina was just to my taste. It apparently struck a chord with many others as well, considering its 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list!
We had just read a book for YA Literature class (If You Find Me, my review here) in which a bipolar mother with a meth habit raises her kids out in the middle of a national forest until they are 14 and 6 years old, so to pick this up next, by sheer coincidence, and discover a protagonist who is deserted by her mother, all her brothers and sisters, and finally by her alcoholic and abusive father (the reason why everyone else left) to grow up alone in the wilderness was pretty weird.
This story also made me think of my mother, the youngest of nine children and the last left at home, whose own mother died when mine was 10 years old and who had to care for her father (a truck farmer with severe rheumatoid arthritis) alone for the next two years, when he died too and she was sent off to live with a serial array of sisters until she turned 20 and married. Her stories of struggling to cook on a wood stove after her mother was gone, and of being ashamed of her meager wardrobe of two skirts and
two sweaters when she was in high school made me tap right into similar accounts in this novel.
The book revealed the sad truth about so many people, which is that they will hold your upbringing and circumstances against you even when no part of them is your fault or choice, and will treat people who are poor or different as pariahs rather than embracing them and turning them into “one of us.” Thankfully, this child had her points of connection to humanity, and as seems typical, it was the people with the least to give (the black couple with the dockside fueling station, the store proprietor who made the wrong change to give Kya more buying power) who gave and did the most.
I could see, in some areas of disconnect between one sentence and the next, or an occasional parochial description that took me out of the story, that this was a first-time writer; but all was made up for by the lyrical, celebratory, sometimes lush language used to bring the marsh and its environs to life on the page. There were certain moments, too, in the human interactions that were both beautiful and unique—such as Tate teaching Kya to read not by using an alphabet book or a traditional text but by urging her to read from the Southern Almanac, so that her understanding of words and their complexities is powerful from the very beginning, as well as tied into nature. Since nature was already her primary fascination, this choice could only expedite everything she was to become.
The story of her life alone in the marsh, her hardships and challenges, her gradual awakening first to friendship and then to first love followed by another desertion, and then the betrayal by the second person to whom she gave a chance was heartbreaking. The fact that she was then the prime suspect in a murder, almost exclusively the result of no other evidence but that of being the “Marsh Girl,” further illustrated the ignorance and small-mindedness that surrounds the unknown. But there are twists in this book you don’t see coming, and front to back (with some slow passages here and there), it was a mesmerizing read.
I would agree with the reviewers’ assessment that people who like Barbara Kingsolver (especially such books as Prodigal Summer and Animal Dreams) would also enjoy this book. Perhaps also the readers of Diane Ackerman or Annie Dillard. Like the worlds they “discover” for the reader, the marshes and swamps surrounding the Outer Banks are lovely places in which to immerse oneself.
Soft reads vs. edgy
My reading time is, of necessity, taken up right now with the novels I am assigning to my Young Adult Literature class at UCLA’s MLIS program. Most of them are a re-read for me, many with a specific goal of evoking some quality of YA lit that will give my class a context for where it came from, the ways in which it has been and continues to be effective for teenagers, and where it is now.
Last week we had a far-roving and engaging discussion about two “classics” of YA—The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton, and The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier—and two later books that continued the job of these seminal works—Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, and The Perks of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky.
Previous to the 1960s, there were narrowly defined categories for this newly emerging fiction sector: adventure stories for boys, romance for girls. That was pretty much the extent of YA fiction. With the exception of some vocation-driven series like Sue Barton: Student Nurse and Nancy Drew, most of the books written for teenagers were, to quote historian and critic Michael Cart, “slick, patterned, rather inconsequential stories written to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market.”
Hinton’s book was the start of the writing revolution in teen literature. Here was a teenager, writing from personal observation and with thematic relevance about class warfare, rejecting “the inane junk lining the teen-age shelf of the library” (to quote the young author Hinton herself), and echoing the rejection of the status quo for which the 1960s were known. The year 1967 kicked off a positive flurry of books about such formerly verboten topics as gangs, drug use, underage sex, homosexuality, teen pregnancy, and abortion. Teen fiction went from sweet stories tied up with a bow to exemplars of determinism and naturalism. Robert Cormier, who wrote The Chocolate War in 1974, commented that “Adolescence is such a lacerating time that most of us carry the baggage of our adolescence with us all our lives.” Judging from the discussion we had about these first two books and the two that followed, many YA authors and the teens who read them agreed with him.
There are certainly issues with these books that make them problematic to recommend to today’s teens. The absence of a single non-white character, the blatant misogyny exhibited towards both the “bad” girls and the “good” in the society of the 1960s, and the rather blatant sentimentality with which the characters are treated in The Outsiders would seem to be stumbling blocks, and yet this book is still widely read and enjoyed. The dark atmosphere of The Chocolate War, depicting teens (and humans in general) as hapless victims of social and natural forces and holding out no happy ending, seems similarly discouraging, but the book continues to check out of the library.
Other popular books of that era, such as The Contender, by Robert Lipsyte, which took up the theme of becoming an individual and focused on self-transformation through the eyes of an African American protagonist, or Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But A Sandwich, which explored heroin addiction in the first person of 12 distinct voices, continued and extended the reach of the admittedly rather gritty view of the teenage years. Author Richard Peck cited these works as books “about young people that parents thought their children didn’t know.” They fostered a writing revolution that has ebbed and flowed ever since, interrupted by the inane “problem novels” of the 1980s and revitalized in the 1990s, pushed off track by trendy fiction with the vampire craze and the fascination with all things paranormal and revitalized yet again in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction and the current return to realism.
The two books we read from 1999, Speak and The Perks of Being A Wallflower, are also classic books about secrets, about guilt, and about the adolescent task of figuring out what responsibility you bear for your circumstances versus the degree to which you have been victimized by others and by life itself. The class discussion concluded that these books are necessary so that teens who are in similar situations can see themselves in their literature, realize that they’re not alone, and possibly find reason for hope.
This week we continued this theme in a way, but brought it up to date with our segment on “soft reads vs. edgy fiction.” There are obviously teens for whom the books full of personal human tragedy are not relevant or not desirable. Likewise, these teens’ parents are more comfortable with a literature that doesn’t expose their children to language, relationships, and frank talk beyond their level of emotional maturity. There is definitely a place in teen fiction for the equivalent in adult fiction of the “cozy,” the soft read, the book that tells an uplifting and nonthreatening tale with a positive message and a happy ending. Even those who appreciate gritty fiction sometimes enjoy taking a break from it!
This week’s exemplar of a soft read was Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here, which would seem with its very title to express a different message than those other books we had been reading. Bauer is among the many authors who has written a baker’s dozen of books (between 1995 and 2016) about perky, approachable protagonists with a sprightly, can-do attitude and a feel-good mood. Authors for slightly older teens who want soft reads include Maureen Johnson, Melissa Kantor, Ally Carter, and Sarah Dessen.
While most of these books are aimed at a female audience, their equivalent in gentle reads for boys include adventure, science fiction, and fantasy genre fiction that the girls likewise appreciate. Some of the more popular series that serve this purpose of transitioning children from age 11 or so to about age 14 are the Pendragon series by D. J. MacHale; the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz; the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer; and Michael Scott’s books beginning with The Alchemyst.
The flip side, the polar opposite of these books are those that place a high premium on being real—the realer the better—and if that means drinking and smoking, profanity, sex, and violence, then bring it on. This edgy fiction pushes all the boundaries beloved of teens and shocking to parents, and gives teens the ability to encounter those they may not ever know in real life, through the pages of books.
The ones we read this week included:
Tyrell, by Coe Booth: Tyrell is 14 years old. He’s grown up in the projects, with his dad, his moms, and his little bro Troy, but his dad’s just gone to prison, his moms is a hot mess incapable of caring for herself or her children, and the weight of it all is resting heavily on Tyrell’s shoulders. He loves his girlfriend but she won’t put out, he’s tempted by an overly friendly new girl he meets at the roach-filled motel where social services has parked them, and he’s angry and confused about the role into which his mother is trying to force him, which is as the wage earner in the absence of his father.
If You Find Me, by Emily Murdoch: When she was five years old, Carey’s mother stole her away from her father and took her to live in a trailer in the middle of a national forest. Her mother, bipolar and a meth addict, subsequently gave birth to a second daughter, whom Carey took care of during her mother’s frequent absences. Carey’s mother did whatever she had to do, including exploiting her daughter, in order to get a drug fix or a new winter coat, while the girls lived on cans of beans and Chef Boyardee and the squirrels and rabbits Carey shot in the forest. One day, after their mother has been missing long enough for the store of beans to be looking worryingly small, a man and a woman show up calling their names, and Carey and Jenessa are whisked off to the real world to live with Carey’s father, stepmother, and stepsister, with all the adjustments this involves. But Carey can’t help thinking about the crime she committed during a moment of desperation back in the forest, and worrying that its revelation will separate her from her sister, the only person in the world she really loves.
Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, by Matthew Quick: Leonard is the epitome of the sad loner at every high school, and like that guy, he’s about to indulge in some stereotypical behavior: His plan is to take a gun to school, shoot his former best friend, and then off himself after. But first, he wants to make a final connection with the few people in his life who have been kind to him by giving them each a gift. The book is the story of the last couple of days of Leonard’s sorry life…although some letters to Leonard from the future hold out a ray of hope.
Parents, teachers, and random adults have asked me, during my tenure as a teen librarian, “Of what value are these books for teens? Why are all of your book lists so irredeemably bleak?” My answer has always been, it’s what the teens want, and in many cases it’s what the teens need. Protecting a privileged notion of what constitutes teen literature can easily deprive teens of reading books that let them identify and understand their sadness, their loneliness, and their anger, and also equip them to fight the real monsters in their lives, whether those are other teens, the adults who control them, the world at large, or simply their own thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
The paradox of much of edgy fiction is that although the circumstances in which the characters exist are ugly, the characters themselves are beautiful in their vulnerability, and the literature itself can be lyrical even in its truthfulness. And in my discussion with my class, some of whom were put off or even horrified by the selection of edgy fiction we read, we ironically came to the conclusion that the soft reads are often identical in their effect to the edgy ones, and the adults who laud them as more appropriate aren’t seeing the spectrum on which they appear.
The book we read, Hope Was Here, has a protagonist whose mother deserted her, and she was raised by her aunt. She had to move repeatedly during her 16 years because of financial hardship. Her only constant is being a good waitress at the serial diners at which she has worked. Her new boss, of whom she has become fond, is dying of cancer. The town is run by a crooked politician who is exploiting the townsfolk. Reading that synopsis, would you guess it was a soft read? The fact that the heroine, Hope, takes a relentlessly positive attitude toward the obstacles in her life doesn’t negate the fact that she’s been dealt a tough hand.
The truth about young adult literature is, no matter what its guise—soft read, edgy fiction, paranormal or dystopia—the really good stuff is designed to invoke one important quality from the teens who read it: Empathy. The greatest gift we as librarians (or teachers or parents or friends) can give our teens is how to experience empathy; and one of the best ways to teach them that is through reading.
