Reading Rave - Everybody Sees the Ants
I absolutely adored Please Ignore Vera Dietz, A.S. King's Printz Honor Book ( Reading Rave here), and I'd heard such good things about Everybody Sees the Ants, so I was prepared to like it. What I was not prepared for was how much I would utterly love it, from the first line on.
"All I did was ask a stupid question" is now on my list of best first lines ever.
For Readers:
Everybody Sees the Ants has received much well-deserved coverage for the way it deals with bullying, but really, it's so much more than anti-bullying book. It's also about the way war affects succeeding generations (that Biblical phrase about until the 7th generation came to mind), in a way that makes connections not only with our history, but with our present. It's about the way all families are weird, each in their own way, although some are more weird than others. It's about how an individual can appear differently to different people.
It is rich and deep, and it does magical realism even better than Vera Dietz, as Lucky Linderman moves between this world and another one, in which his mission is to rescue his grandfather, a POW-MIA in the Vietnam War. There's food (Lucky's dad is a chef/cook, and lucky works on it) and the sorts of homework projects that teachers will assign, and there are girls some of whom may be friends and some of whom might be something more. But most of all, there is Lucky, a kid who has been picked on by one particular other kid since he was seven, but who someone has managed not to turn into whiner, or a person who turns around and bullies someone else. That's because, for all the cards stacked against him--and lord knows they are many--Lucky is a decent kid. He tries to do the right thing, even as he realizes that his intentions may meet up with other people's limitations. I hope he meets Doug Swieteck from Okay for Now in some alternate book character universe, because I think they'd enjoy each other's company.
For Writers:
There aren't a lot of writers doing magical realism for young adults, so A.S. King is a must-read if this is a technique/approach you are thinking of trying. In Vera Dietz, the magical realism was pretty much restricted to the talking pagoda, but here Lucky travels in time and space, and because he brings back souvenirs of his trips to Vietnam, those trips cannot be dismissed as dreams. But aside from the first one, which is understandably a surprise, Lucky accepts them very matter of factly, even as he conceals them from his parents. The magical realism is crucial to this novel, too, both for Lucky--it's an opportunity for him to be active and a hero--and for the reader, because allows King to create layers of meaning that would be impossible otherwise, or, if possible, only with a great deal of telling.
I'm looking forward to seeing what A.S. King comes up with next.