Books to inhale
Last week I brought a stack of books home from one of my local libraries, and then a bag came in the mail from the Vermont Department of Libraries, with three books for me to review before March. --Thanks, Grace! Seriously!
I haven't read them all, but I'm partway through the audiobook and have only two more hardcovers to go. Last weekend was the perfect weekend to read and read and read some more. HH and I were both mostly recovered from the nasty colds we picked up at the end of an otherwise lovely vacation, but we didn't have much energy and we didn't have anything on the calendar. So we read.
Let me share the highlights, the books I'm going to go back to again (mostly) because, now that I've read them like a reader, I want to read them like a writer:
This one stunned me, almost the way Harriet the Spy did when I was a kid. Natalie Standiford knows the pain of being a teen, and she knows that friendship and love are on a spectrum, not two separate things. She also knows that kids who don't fit into the community of teens (aka school) have ways of finding and/or making their own communities. I'll re-read this for its use of various techniques to move a narrative forward, for the way Standiford uses setting, and for the way she presents grief, and knows when to ease up on the narrative tension.
Francine Prose took me right back to the months when I wavered on the border between child and teenager, to a time when nothing happened, except that my mother said certain words that put the idea in my head that it could happen and I realized, like Maisie, that there was no going back. One of the best lines: "[Chris and Kevin] weren't kids anymore, but they weren't men, either. They weren't even teenage boys. They seemed to have stalled at some bizarre in-between stage." I'll pair this one with Speak, and look at first-person narratives and at sexuality and popularity, and I'll look at choosing the right level of language for the narrator.
Once Was Lost is Sara Zarr's best book to date and my oh my is it a satisfying read. I especially admire the way she handled the question of religion and faith, and how the two may or may not fit together, in a way that seemed completely appropriate to Samara (what a choice name!) While the issue of life as a preacher's kid isn't new, any more than having an alcoholic mother is, the way Zarr particularizes Sam's life and dilemmas makes this novel stand out. I'll be reading this for the way it treats religion, and--like How to Say Goodbye in Robot--for the way the specifics of the setting are integrated into the plot.
Translated from the Swedish, this first novel by Annika Thor just received a Sydney Taylor Honor from the Association of Jewish Libraries and also the ALA's Mildred Batchelder Award for books in translation. Both are well-deserved. What did I love about this? While it treats a little-known aspect of the Holocaust, it stands on its own as novel. English-speaking readers may find hints of Anne of Green Gables here, but it's also a tale of two sisters, and anyone who is an older sister will find much to empathize with, because novel is told from that sister's point of view. Thor, a native of Sweden's small Jewish community, conducted numerous interviews, but there's never a sense that factual information is being shared; it all becomes a seamless part of the story. As for the story's background: In 1938, after Kristallnacht, when German anti-Semitism became apparent to the world, Sweden offered to shelter 500 children (England took in 10,000 children, in what were called Kindertransport), but Sweden wasn't interested in offering refuge to Jewish adults, like so many other countries. I'll reread this one for ways to make the historical particular (if I ever do any historical fiction).
The others on my list to share are:
Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castelucci. There was so very much to love about this book, which includes selections by all the usual nerdly suspects, aka John Green, M.T. Anderson and Garth Nix, etc., as well as a few new names to me: Cassandra Clare and Kelly LInk in particular. But it also illustrated one of the problems with any anthology--it's difficult if not impossible to put together an anthology in which all the contributions are of the same quality, however you want to define quality. But! This collection is a wonderful reminder of how much the world has changed--geeks and nerds are in a whole new place from where they were when I was a geek, a nerd, and a "walking encyclopedia." (If anyone ever calls me that again, they will suffer the dread glare-over-the-lowered glasses.)
Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman. I don't care if the man decides to start wearing khaki, or shaves his head, or whatever move a rising mega-celebrity might make: he can write. This is, in so many ways, a very simple story. But then, just as happened in The Graveyard Book, it is told so very well. So well, in fact, that a simple sentence stopped me dead in my tracks, just as it did then ( link to previous post). This time around it was near the end: "[Odd] was still limping, a little." The comma wasn't necessary, grammatically, but oh is it effective. It tells you everything you need to know about Odd's changed attitude toward his gimpy leg.
Three Girls and Their Brother, by Theresa Rebeck, is the novel I'm listening to on audiobook. So far, I've heard two voices, and have enjoyed them both. The different perspectives on celebrity (or 15 minutes of fame, depending on how you want to look at it) is fascinating. This should be a good one to read for voice.
Now, back to to the books.