I loved Tyrell. In fact, it is kind of amazing how opposite my reactions to this week’s two books were. (I have a feeling that I feel better in the hands of a female author writing about a male than I do with a male author writing about a female.) The fact that Tyrell has frequent mentions of oral sex precludes me from suggesting it for the summer reading list, but I really wish I could. Also, I think that this is a perfect book to use in group or one-on-one therapy with teens at risk (I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately).
One of my favorite parts of the book is Tyrell’s mom. She’s just horrible. But a lot of teens have horrible parents, and I think the worst part about that is probably the feelings of guilt and anger and aloneness that go along with it. Tyrell’s sense of responsibility to his sister, coupled with his own natural teenage desires seem so real and basic — even when I got angry at Tyrell, I still understood him.
When I interviewed my husband for our last assignment, one of his comments was that his clients (who are young, male, some are African American, and all are in “the system” in one way or another) idolize city life. He wants to use Tyrell to give them some perspective — I think if he can get the kids to read it, it could do much more than that. If nothing else, it might show them that there are books that are written in their voice, with their vernacular, and with their struggles in mind. (When I used it as one of my “talk to teens” books, almost all of the students picked it up and expressed interest.)
Even teens whose lives don’t come close to Tyrell’s will appreciate his struggle to be both a teenager and a grown man. I love how self-aware teens are about the liberties granted to them by their age. When I catch students goofing off or being silly (and sometimes I’m in the unfortunate position of having to ask them to stop), they often say “hey, we’re teenagers, it’s what we do.” It’s so cute. It’s also so true. The luckiest teens come from families who allow them “be teenagers,” but I know many who don’t. There are teens who work two jobs to help pay the bills, who care for sick parents or small siblings, who have dead or absentee parents, who are foster kids living in a different home every month. I think that most teens struggle with the expectations of how much kid to be and how much adult.
I think Tyrell was my very favorite book this semester. It was in my last book order, and I can’t wait to start getting feedback about it from teens. In terms of age, I think this book, bu virtue of the writing, story, and cover, will be well-like by all the teens who I serve (about 14-18).
I had a really hard time getting into Dirty Games. I couldn’t stop thinking things like “where is this guy’s editor” and “Wait, if it’s ten years before where we just were, then these girls are 7, but we know that Makeba doesn’t have sex until she’s 12, so ten years from when??” Finally, I gave up and just went with it. The story was compelling but, like MK said at one point, the narrative itself was so distant from the characters. I had the nagging suspicion — confirmed by the book’s ending — that I was supposed to have sympathy for Destiny. Of course, I also felt enormously guilty the whole time I was reading because I really DIDN’T have sympathy for any of the characters (except for Ken-Ken, who we lose early in the book, and Mrs. Simmons, who deserved better from Makeba). I read some customer reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and the readers who posted definitely felt bad for Destiny, and even hoped for a sequel.
I do see, in a way, why teens might be drawn to this book, though it won’t have the broad appeal of a book like Tyrell. During our second class project (the teen/community resource), I interviewed my husband about the teens he works with, and I learned that a lot of them are drawn to anything about New York; they see it as “authentic.” The fact that Holmes himself did time probably enhances the authenticity factor. A book depicting life in “the game” from a real player could definitely be of interest.
I was troubled (slash confused slash thrust into a world of self-doubt) by the sex scenes. I mean REALLY? I couldn’t help but suspect that the author indulged some of his gender’s — and perhaps his own — most narcissistic tendencies here. And again when dealing with the lesbians in prison issue, I had the same nagging sense of doubt. Surely Shannon Holmes has more knowledge of the issue than I do (since I don’t know any women who have been to prison, and I’m guessing he does), but does Riker’s really spawn insta-lesbians hell-bent on dominating all “straight” girls? The fact that the “lesbians” in jail responded to Destiny exactly the same way the men on the streets did really seemed ludicrous to me. I though he treated the whole topic with a kind of prurient insensitivity, and it bugged me.
So I don’t know. The cover of the book, coupled with Holmes’s background, will certainly be a draw for boys. Girls might like to read about a female protagonist (?) who is actually pretty well-written at times, except when Holmes’s own thoughts seem to get in the way. The sex scenes are likely setting both groups up for some disappointment (if they’ve not had sex yet) or self-doubt (if they have), but that charge can be leveled against a lot of authors with YA appeal. Ultimately, the story is a pretty good one, and pretty convincing. Certainly his depiction of the projects is in line with my own knowledge and minuscule experience.
There is definitely a racial component her that I’m trying to skirt around because I don’t like to think of myself in those terms. A big part of why I didn’t like this book is because I couldn’t connect with it, and came at it with the critical (and kind of elitist) eye. Teens — people — whose lives might contain some elements echoed in the book will enjoy this more than Gossip Girl or even Jodi Picoult. This is the one book (ok, other than Seventeenth Summer) that I ALMOST stopped reading, just out of sheer boredom. But actually I’m glad I read it and I’m glad to know about Shannon Holmes. I might read B-more Careful next, which he actually wrote while in prison.
Preface: For some reason I left this post “unpublished” last week. It’s not that exciting, but here it is:
Or, TATDoaPTI — good title, but too long to say all the time! This was one of the first books I read for class (I think because it was at or very near the top of our original reading list), and after reading it I thought, “well, that was an OK book, good not great.” But then I couldn’t really stop thinking about it. I got it for my library, and gave it to a few “reluctant readers” (the boys about whom people say things like “he doesn’t read!), and they’ve loved it beloved.
I’ve already slotted TATDoaPTI for next year’s reading list (I can’t do it for this year because we’re not allowed to have hardcovers) for a number of superficial reasons: 1) it’s a boy book 2) it’s “multi-cultural” 3) I think teens really like it. It will be one of the Freshman options (so for students who have just finished the 8th grade), which I think is a great age for this book.
So I read Good Girls, and then I read the article by Tanya Lee Stone, so then I also had to read Forever, by Judy Blume to see what all the banning is about. (Was about? Is it still banned? Google search says…Yes! And so is Of Mice And Men? Huh.)
I loved Good Girls, and I though that it touched on a really important point for today’s teen girls — just how exposed they are (or can be) by things like digital cameras, cell phones, and the internet. Now, I’m not a luddite and I don’t think that kids should be shielded from technology (obviously), but I do think that they need to know how hard it can be to deal with that kind of exposure. (Look how hard it was for LC and she didn’t even really HAVE a sex tape…) Like financial debt, incriminating digital photos or video can follow you wherever you go, and haunt you well after the event itself has faded into the distant past. Plus, the relationships in the book seemed very genuine to me, and I think the teen girls I know would love it. (It makes me sad that the covers of these books are so girly. What about the boys??) I also really liked that there were no real villains, just kids dealing with their own insecurities.
I know this week is all about positive values, and so, I think, is Good Girls. Ultimately, it’s about friendship and being true to yourself and deciding who you are. The fact that the impetus is a blow job makes the book both realistic and engaging. And it’s lacking any detailed or highly suggestive descriptions of the act itself, which should spare it from suffering the same fate as Forever.
Karen and I made a blog for our most recent class project. Check it out here.
Best YA book title EVER.
For about five horrifying minutes I really thought that I was the annoying girl from James’s American Classroom trip. (There were some strange coincidences, and I did this thing called “presidential classroom” in once high school, but I googled Peter Cameron and there is NO WAY we would have done that at the same time, based on age, so I’m good.)
I just think that this book PERFECTLY captures so much of the inherent nihilism of being a young adult. If I were an English teacher, I would try to replace Catcher in the Rye with This Pain. (Jen, if you’re reading this, I know Catcher is great, but I think it could be time for a replacement.) Actually, a great senior English project might be to compare and contrast the two books, both in terms of textual analysis and historical context.
Great Ending: I thought this book had a great ending, and I definitely cried at it. I love that James does go to Brown, and tells us that he was “miserable that first semester” (implying that things did indeed get better). And the final line (“I’m only eighteen. How do I know what I will want in my life? How do I know what things I will need?”) resonates with all the hope and prescient perspective that I remember so well from adolescence.
The NY Times reviewed This Pain and said that James had “adult perception without the deadening, reassuring glaze of adult experience” and that “Cameron understands the choice young people are presented with: give up the sensitivity, or pass on the anesthesia.” I can’t say that I totally get what they meant by that. But I do think that, of all the books we’ve read this semester, this one crept the most uncomfortably close to reminding me of my own teenage years.
I wrote to my friend who is a YA book editor, and asked her about the partial photos on book covers (we were talking about it in class on Saturday). Here is her reply:
Q: Why are there so many partial photos on YA book covers?
A: So that the character isn’t over-described. You want to draw the reader in, but leave some info to the imagination, and partial faces, or a hand or pair of legs, seems to do the trick. Fully shown faces, like on the Scott Westerfeld books (Pretties, Uglies), often suggest a sci-fi or fantasy story, and complete girls or scenes tend to make the book look younger, at least in the teen market. Everything eventually depends, too, on what B&N and the other major accounts have to say about a cover. Often what’s working — Gossip Girl, for example — informs everything else not because we’re trying to copy it, but because literally nothing else sells, so the chains demand that kind of cover (because the customers are only buying that kind of cover).
It’s a totally inexact science, of course, and certain things unexpectedly break out. But there are even subsets of rules, like you can get away with cute illustrated covers on mass-market trim books — Maine Squeeze — but not trade-trim — Gossip Girl. And then you have those photos on Sarah Dessen titles, which look a lot different than, say, the photos of girls on a Meg Cabot book, to further try to inform the consumer … it’s tricky. And annoying that you work really really hard on something and it can still fall short or be ridiculed on Amazon or whatever. But mostly we’re told that photographic covers work best in teen, and illustrated covers are the only thing for middle-grade, and thus we all try to be as creative as possible within those parameters.
I started my last post by saying that Gossip Girl is kind of a reiteration of a very old genre (teen drama), that we can trace back at least as far as Seventeenth Summer. The incarnation that meant the most to me was Sweet Valley High, which is why to this day I still want a red fiat, despite the fact that I know they are not reliable cars. But I really think that an argument can been made that books like Fanboy & Gothgirl represent something new in YA lit (maybe not BRAND new, but you know what I mean). The technology age has buoyed geeks and nerds at all stages of life, and removed some of the stigma of being smart or “alternative” (and it is not rare for the two to coincide). I feel like the literature I had as a teen didn’t represent as wide of a spectrum of human possibility. If you weren’t preppy and thin and relatively straight-laced, there weren’t many leading-role characters for you to identify with.
I’m really glad that seems to be changing. In an interview I heard the other day on NPR, the creator of Paranoid Park said something like, “They used to think that you couldn’t make money in YA. Now everyone wants to get into the act.” The new diversity of authors means more diversity of subjects, which is great for teens. Those teens who read Fanboy might not completely see themselves in the characters (though some might) but they may see shades of someone they know well or in passing. I think that one of the best things a book can do is help put you in someone else’s shoes; I’m glad that teens don’t have to cram themselves into stiletto pumps or gleaming white sneakers anymore. They have a wider variety of options. In my opinion, its undeniable that books help us figure out what kind of person we want to be, and our “social competencies” are formed while we explore how we want to be perceived. The spectrum of YA literature, and particular books like Fanboy, is doing a much better job of supporting this development than when I was young.
I’m glad that girls today have Gossip Girl. As it see it, the series is part of a long tradition of books that fall neatly into the “social competencies” category. For me, it was Sweet Valley High. Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield were my Blair and Serena, and I had to plum the depths of my soul to answer questions like: Is it scientifically possible for a twin to lapse into a coma and awaken with the other twin’s personality? I was devastated when the Wakefield parents broke up, and though Mr. Wakefield didn’t leave for another man (like Mr. Waldorf), it still shook the lives of all of us who knew and loved them as a couple. (Did they get back together later on? I might have been too old at that point…)
Of course, Gossip Girl is farther along the evolutionary chain of teen drama, but it still serves the same basic need: It’s aspirational. Very few teens live lives that even come close to looking like Blair’s and Serena’s, even if they do live in the city. (As the New Yorker article said, “children like to read what they don’t entirely understand”). In the GG world, teenagers have all the benefits and privileges of being adults, but none of the responsibility. It’s fabulous. So, vicariously, I get to be Serena and decide to have sex for the first time, or I get to be Blaire and cling hopelessly to a boy who I know deep down doesn’t really love me. And while, as a grown-up, I’ve already done both of these things (albeit it in much less glamorous ways), my teenage self still gets to see how it should be done.
My very first boss, who taught me more than my high school and college educations combined, used to tell me that when I had a bad moment at work or with a friend or whatever, that I should re-imagine it in the way that I wanted it to happen. As an adult, Gossip Girl is kind of like a re-imagination of my teenage years. For actual teenagers, it gives them a template — albeit a fantastical one — that helps them navigate the cruel waters of adolescence.
I’ve only read two GGs — the prequel and the very first one ever written — and I think the series is one you really have to get into to fully appreciate. Because of school/work, I haven’t been able to read as many as I would like to. Also, part of what appeals to teens (the “education in label recognition”) is exactly what I dislike about the books — I hate seeing a different designer name-dropped on every page, it’s just too over-the-top for me. I get over than, though, and the fact that I’m not as in love with von Ziegesar’s writing as Janel Malcolm is, because the books really are great fun.
