So we're not actually changing the name to Mythology Monday, but we are giving a little bit of a mythology lesson this week. (And by "we," Cassy really means she, because for all the mythology I learned in 19 years of formal education, I remember very, very little of it. So I'm more on the learning side than the teaching side of things this week, which is fun!) We're going to be reviewing The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood at the end of the week. The book is based off of the myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Atwood actually has become quite fascinated with Penelope's version of the tale and has decided to tell her own version.
"But what's the tale of Penelope and Odysseus?" you might ask. (As I did.) Well, I'm so glad you did! Because I'm going to tell you. Sure, we've all heard of Odysseus (went off to fight the Trojan war for ten years, pissed Poseidon off right at the end and so it took him yet another ten years to get home. Talk about your bad luck.)
However, right before Odysseus left, he had a wife and a kid and then bam. Left for twenty years (so his kid barely knew him and then was an adult when his father returned.) While no one really bothered Penelope too much during the Trojan War (after all, it was a big deal and she was a fairly intelligent woman), when Odysseus didn't show up after it was over, everyone presumed him dead. And then Penelope was bombarded by suitors. They came into her home, ate her food and drank her wine. As usual, no one thought a woman could rule, so clearly she had to be married.
But Penelope never did marry. In fact, she used every trick in the book to hold them off, including making a burial shroud everyday and then unraveling it at night.
"But why ever would she do that, Cassy? It seems so counterproductive."
Well, yes, but that was the point. She told her suitors that once it was finished, she would choose a suitor. Ergo, if she never finished it, she would never have to choose a suitor. This went on for three long years before one of her maids discovered her and ratted her out to those pesky suitors.
Odysseus finally came home and killed all the suitors (mind you, because of another trick from his wife) and they were happily reunited. But not before he killed twelve of her maids.
Now, the idea is that the maids had either betrayed her (ok, that seems reasonable) or slept with the suitors (excuse me, what?). Atwood has never really liked this explanation for the maids. She's always felt that there was something more that went on with them. And what did Penelope think of the whole situation? Her husband was hardly faithful in all those years that he was missing, yet she was unendingly faithful to him, only to have him come home and kill her staff.
That's just a little back story on this week's book. Stay tuned for our review of The Penelopiad on Friday!
I took a long time to getting around to writing this review. It isn't because I've been busy, or because I forgot... I just don't really know how I feel about this book.
I really liked the idea of it. Basically, a girl tries to decide whether to "stay" or "go" while she's comatose after a deadly car accident. It's a really interesting and unique idea, and it was well-written. I like the setting, the dialogue, how none of it seems too "explainy" (you are shown, not told, what is going on).
But this girl's family... my gosh. I don't think there's a single family in the world that is that perfect. I won't go into detail, but they're just... perfect. It's a little ridiculous. In fact, it's distracting. I understand, though. There was no need for them to have extra conflict... it would have made the book way longer, because there would have been a lot more back-and-forth and confusion and really, all we need to know is that she really liked being around her family and they were a very loving group. But they're so perfect.
Other than that, I don't really have anything negative to say about the book... yet I still don't love it. Which is okay; it happens. I would still recommend the book to people, because I do think it was good. It just didn't have the impact on me that I had hoped for.
This book was a lot different than I expected. If you read the description on the flap, you get the feeling that she was going to have to make a decision between her family, boyfriend and her future. But when I got only a short distance into the book, I realized that it was something very different than I expected. It was Mia in a sort of limbo, knowledge of her family's death from an accident, choosing whether she wanted to continue on with her life or choose death.
Mia is really kind of a fly on the wall as she watches her family simultaneously grieve and hope and we're a little bit of a fly on the wall to her memories. She sees her family hope against hope that she survives, largely because they lost her parents and her brother to the car accident. She is essentially their salvation but Mia isn't sure that she wants that burden. And it is a huge burden for her. She would be facing a completely different life, lonely and dealing with an unimaginable amount of grief.
Part of the reason I loved this book, though, is because it shows you that family doesn't mean the people who are related to you. Through my own life, my family haven't really been the people I could depend on. They weren't really the people my friends went to. At one point in the story, Kim, Mia's best friend, tells her that she still has family. I think that's an amazing message to tell kids. I think so much emphasis is put on family, which is good, and this book does affirm family values, but blood doesn't always mean family. Family is the people who love you, who support you, who are there for you in the worst of times and a lot of times, they're the people who aren't related to you by blood.
I think that Kim was my favorite character in this book. Mainly because she reminds me of Alex and I so much. Kim and Mia were not good friends when they met. In fact, they weren't friends at all. They couldn't stand each other. It wasn't until a fist fight that they finally became friends. The first time I met Alex, I told her that I couldn't stand Stephen King and that I thought he was a terrible writer, despite the fact that her shelves were lined with his books. We were really just peripheral friends for about three years until, our senior year of college, we spent a summer together discovering that neither of us thought the other person liked us when, in reality, we both thought the other person was great.
Kim also seems to know exactly what Mia needs. She leaves and finds Adam (Mia's boyfriend) because she knows that it's going to be for the best. Even though Adam and Kim have never been close, they bond as they try to break into the ICU so Adam can be close to her. I like how no nonsense Kim is and how, as Mia remembers her time with Kim, the two of them are always there for each other. They're family.
Forman could have really made this book weird and gone into left field with it, but I think she handled it well. I think the family relationship that Mia has with her family is just a little too near perfect (families are messier. They fight and argue and there were 12 years between my sister and I and we certainly didn't get along in the magical way that Teddy and Mia did.) I understand that she wanted to focus on relationships with friends as opposed to relationships with families, but I think that she kind of missed the mark with Mia's family.
I can't hate on this book much more than that. The themes hit too close to home for me, something that not a lot of authors touch on. Family doesn't always mean blood and I really love how well Forman shows that.
My Bottom Line: 4 out of 5
I set a lot of store in who someone's favorite author is. I think it says a lot about a person. Not necessarily good things or bad things, just... things. So we're going to tell you who our favorite authors are this week.
Mine is, hands-down, unequivocally, indisputably, Neil Gaiman. That man is a genius. He wrote my favorite books, the Sandman series of graphic novels. (But we'll talk about our all-time favorite books another time.) He also wrote Stardust, American Gods and Anansi Boys (novels that are likely intended for adults, but are great for the more reading-inclined of adolescents) and he co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett (the author of the Discworld books). He has also written some other graphic novels, like Murder Mysteries (about the first death among angels) and Marvel 1602 (which is pretty much what it sounds like... Marvel heroes in the year 1602). He also has written several children's books, with The Day I Traded My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls which are both picture books, and the chapter books Coraline and The Graveyard Book.
I was first introduced to Neil Gaiman's work in my adolescent literature class in undergrad, when our professor showed us the movie Mirrormask, which is also a picturebook by Gaiman. It's a beautiful film, and if you liked Coraline, I'm positive that you'll like Mirrormask, because I think they're similar (but Mirrormask is better, in my humble opinion). That same professor mentioned that Gaiman was best known for his Sandman books, which I checked out all of at the public library the next time I went home on break.
He has said himself that he can't identify the genre for his books, because he didn't write them with a genre in mind. He just... wrote them. If pressed to categorize them, I would call them fantasy, for the most part. Gods and demons and other supernatural entities mingle with humans, other worlds exist right next to our own, and sometimes very out-of-the-ordinary things happen. Gaiman sees things in a beautifully different way and can find and arrange the words he needs to describe them that way.
My favorite author is actually identifies as a YA author, though he has written adult novels (and honestly, I wish he would write more because The Risen Empire books are some of my favorites by him.) Scott Westerfeld is a man I love, respect and I think is doing a lot for the YA world.
I was first introduced to him in the same adolescent literature class that Alex took (I just took it a different semester than she did. Thus, I read Coraline, not Mirrormask that semester. But really, it was the professor in that class that made us fall in love with the books, I feel.) We read Peeps, which is still my favorite book by him. It's a vampire novel, technically, but it's done like no other vampire novel I've ever read. He incorporates science with his lore in such a way that has you wondering why everyone else is even bothering with their stupid vampire novel. I also like it because he's pushing the boundaries of YA literature. The main character is 19 and living in NYC. Technically, an adolescent but different than most because he's very independent compared to most protagonists in YA literature.
He most recently finished the Leviathan series, which combines science with steam punk and history. He essentially takes World War I and shows us what it would be like if we had slightly different technologies at the time. Again, Westerfeld pushes boundaries. We have cross-dressing and two lost kids, from completely different backgrounds, just trying to do what they want to do with their lives, because they think they way things are isn't right. We also have young kids engaged in battle and war, something that's generally frowned upon.
Westerfeld keeps a blog and is very interactive with his fans, which I think is great. So often these days we see a lot of entitled authors who think that they deserve their fans or they don't deserve to get harsh reviews. That's completely untrue. You are an author at the mercy of the public. Westerfeld understands that and embraces that. He also loves things like Fan Fiction and Fan Art. In fact, on his blog, he has Fan Art Fridays, where he posts pictures fans have sent him. They might have drawn his characters, or taken a picture of themselves cos-playing or one fan even did a mock-up of a computer program he mentions in his book. I just love that kind of interaction and dedication to his fans. He shows a good example to other YA authors, I feel, and I really love his work.
YA stands for young adult, which is identified as the age group between twelve and eighteen years old, as far as book publishing and marketing is concerned (although the target audience for YA literature can be from ten to twenty-five, and actual readership extends well beyond that range).
If a book isn't explicitly identified as YA, you can tell pretty easily on your own. Usually, the protagonists are adolescents, instead of adults, to help teen readers identify with them. The themes tend to be relevant to an adolescent's life. These are typically divided into two groups: problem novels (anorexia, bulimia, running away, failing grades, self-injury, drug abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, divorcing parents) and coming-of-age novels (dealing with first loves, building independence or one's own identity, friends drifting apart, proving oneself as worthy of becoming an adult). They're usually pretty edgy, using some vulgar language - as teens in general tend to do - and covering topics teens don't normally discuss with, for example, their parents. This is why so many YA books wind up on the banned/challenged books list so often; parents sometimes don't approve. Which drives me crazy. Honestly, it's not like parents didn't go through these issues themselves. However, I think that parents are from a generation that just didn't talk about these things and certainly didn't read about them. Therefore, I think the reason a lot of the baby boomers generation (who are the bulk of parents with kids in school right now) don't approve of these books is because THEY were always taught not to talk/read/think about these topics. I'd like to think that as their kids come of age and have their own kids, this mindset will start to change. Especially now that we HAVE this genre.
The first time "young adults" were identified as a distinct group was in the early 1800s. Before that (and even for a while after that) it was expected that, at a certain age, a child would start to behave like a smaller, less learned version of an adult, until they were an actual adult. Adolescent culture didn't exist until much later. However, several books were published in the 1800s with the intent of drawing in younger readers (but not small children): Alice in Wonderland, Swiss Family Robinson, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Oliver Twist, to name a few. If you're looking for a GREAT read about YA Culture and history, I suggest Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage. He talks about YA culture from the 1890s, through the 2000s and shows you connections about youth that you wouldn't even dream about! He explores how youth were used for propaganda (Hitler Youth, anyone, or even the Boy Scouts) and how youth have come to hold the power that they do today. Really a fantastic book if you're looking for a great academic read about YA culture.
The 1950s began what we think of as YA literature, bringing us Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, To Kill A Mockingbird, and perhaps one of the most notable, The Outsiders. Real research began in the 1960s to determine what adolescence really was. By the 1980s, books for adolescents were covering hard-hitting topics that real adolescents were dealing with: drugs, beauty ideals, sex and sexuality, and teen pregnancy. Other cultural phenomena like MTV contributed to this revolution of teenage-ness, unquestionably identifying adolescence as a distinct stage of life characterized by a different set of problems and ideals than childhood or adulthood.
You may have noticed (by sheer virtue of not living under a rock) that YA fiction has sort of bombarded pop culture lately. All you have to do is walk into a bookstore and YA lit will probably be the first display you trip over. Sadly, it will also probably be about vampires. Harry Potter is globally adored, read, and watched, and the same can be said (to a slightly lesser degree) for Twilight and Hunger Games. I have two explanations for this.
One explanation is that adolescence has been elongated. You hear all the time from the news that college graduates (typically in their early twenties) are staying at home longer, postponing moving out and living independently and finding full-time jobs (not by choice, but by necessity and which I want to point out is PERFECTLY OK). This means that older and older readers are clinging to the comfort of YA literature. (Hey, I'm 26 and I don't see myself dropping the habit anytime soon. I like it because I have a younger sister and I can introduce her to some great stuff that's right on her level. Plus, you know, it's awesome.)
Another is that it's really good literature. (Hold your Twilight jokes, please. I tried, but the sparkling was so bright it blinded me and I dropped them. But seriously, as bad as Twilight is, it's not the worst YA I've read.) Seriously; some of the best writing happening now is in YA literature. I could cite at least fifty examples off the top of my head of really excellent writing that is categorized as YA. It helps that YA is not restricted to a specific genre: it spans everything from romance to science-fiction to action/adventure to non-fiction.
So give it a try. Nobody has ever made fun of me for pulling books from the teen section for my leisure reading. If it helps, the books are usually shorter, too. So instead of a book a month, you can read this many a month:
This is the first book we're reviewing here on Review Me Twice and that's largely because it fell on this year's list of banned or challenged books in the #8 slot. It's not hard to see why What My Mother Doesn't Know falls on that list. It talks about divorce (OMG!), kissing (scandalous!), even (GASP!) sex. And what's more, it talks a lot about Sophie keeping these things from her mother. Parents tend to want to keep books like these away from their kids because they don't want them to get the idea that they should be doing things like lying to their parents... or kissing boys for that matter. And don't even get me started on the sex. Parents often don't think their kids are mature enough.
Personally, I think that's a load of bull. But each parent can think what they want. My problem is when you start enforcing that opinion on other parents. This book, you can tell, is really marketed towards early high school students. I think that's more than an appropriate age to start talking about boys and your interactions with them.
So, more about this book. I, personally, liked Sones approach to mother/daughter relationships the most. I hate reading about mother/daughter relationships that are picture perfect things. I hate when they're oh so best friends and how life is just terrible when the mother/daughter duo have a fight about something absolutely stupid in a book. Real life just isn't like that. Mother and daughters are complicated. They are the most complicated relationship in the entire world and even the most healthy of those relationships aren't as perfect as they're often portrayed in books.
Sones manages to pretty accurately capture the complexities of mothers and daughters. Sophie never seems to want her mother to know anything. She hides things, never tells her mother what's going on, gets indignant when her mother shows any sort of concern or interest in her boyfriend. On the other hand, when her mother is indifferent, sunken into depression, as she often is, Sophia wishes that her mother took any sort of interest, cared at all, despite the fact that she's constantly telling herself she wants her privacy.
I like that Sones disguises this book about mother/daughter relationships in a romance. Sophia keeps talking to us about boys, boys, boys (and in fact, there is not one moment when she is not in a relationship, talking about a potential relationship or about how she is going to tell her friends about the relationship that she's in.) However, her relationships with boys reveal more about her relationship with her mother than anything else.
Really, the only thing in this book I didn't like was probably the poem free form format, which is really more of a personal preference than anything else. The only author I've read who has done that style, and has made me like it, is Ellen Hopkins and I think I've already told you how much she is made of awesome this week. I just don't think Sones writing style is strong enough to support writing in free verse. To be honest, it came off to me more like she was writing that way because she wasn't sure she'd have enough to make it a full fledged novel.
My Bottom Line: 3 1/2 out of 5
My turn!
Maybe it's because I'm 26 years old, or maybe it's because I've always read edgy, racy things (my mom didn't stop me from reading her true crime books or Stephen King when I was in high school, and it never fazed me)... But this book is really innocuous.
I can understand why some parents might not want their child reading this: Sophia, our main character, is dating a boy who wants her to do more than make out (but she tells him no and sticks to it, and doesn't make a huge fuss over it). There are occasional bad words, where appropriate (meaning when she's upset). It's also listed for nudity, which I think is particularly funny, because I know exactly which scene they're referring to: Sophia and her friends go out in public wearing nothing but long raincoats, because it is daring and bold and funny. This scene is one page long, and completely incongruous with the rest of the story. It felt sort of like an intermission, actually.
This is a short book. My library's catalog record says it has 259 pages. So if you're trying to encourage a reluctant teen reader, it's a decent choice. There's just enough mention of sex and bad language to entice them into turning the page, and before they know it, they'll run out of pages.
I like the ending. It's a little cliche and obvious, but I like it. I'll leave it at that so I don't ruin it for you, if that's possible.
Also, the family dynamic is sad, but realistic. Each member of her family sort of does their own thing and they don't play much part in each other's lives. (This is typical in YA lit, because it makes it easy for the teen to have lots of leeway and freedom, without having to be an orphan. But more on this another time.) This is particularly resonant in Sophia's relationship with her mother, which is distant to say the least, which Sophia reinforces, but sometimes she wishes it were different. It's not the typical flat, blanket "ugh I hate my Mom" narrative that we usually get from bland YA books. There is tension and potential for resolution and it's not Disney-style resolution where suddenly someone apologizes and "sorry" is a magic word that rights all wrongs. It is clear that both parties will have to put in effort to fix their relationship if it is going to succeed.
I'm positive that none of the challenges to this book came from it being included in a school curriculum, because I don't think any teacher would assign it. It doesn't have much literary value. The only reason a teacher would likely mention it to a student is as an example of free verse style. But if I had a student who was advanced enough to be really studying free verse style in detail, I would recommend Ellen Hopkins (edgy though her books are... rife with drugs and sex and prostitution and abuse and all sorts of stuff that is really, really interesting to read about).
I enjoyed it, have no doubt, but I won't be picking it up again, because I've already gotten out of it all there is for me to get out of it. Which is fine... some books are like that for some people. I probably would have simply overlooked it if it weren't on the banned books list. So congratulations, whoever challenged What My Mother Doesn't Know! You gave Sones two extra readers by doing so.
Most of the challenges counted for Banned Books Week come from one of two places: parents complaining about books in a school curriculum because they don't consider them age-appropriate, or people trying to remove the book from a library's shelves. In the latter situation, I am happy to announce that most of the time, the book stays put. See, librarians - despite our stereotype of stuffy old ladies shushing people and glaring at anyone who doesn't understand the classification system - are champions of freedom of information. Why else would we choose to spend all our time helping people find their way around an enormous repository of information and stories? But more on librarian stereotypes another day... back to the banned books.
Sometimes the complaint is that the book doesn't belong in the youth or teen section, so the book gets moved to the adult section. It stays in the library so that the people who want it can still access it, but the complainer is still satisfied. But requesting to pull a book off adult shelves is - in most areas and most libraries - a waste of time.
If you don't understand why it's not fair to try to pull a book of a library's shelves, think of it this way: John is allergic to peanuts and his mom wants the grocery store to stop selling peanut butter, even though it's your favorite food. Is that fair? I didn't think so.
This is why I (and the ALA) mostly refer to what we think of as banned books as "challenged books." It's more correct because, in America, we don't really ban books. A book might get banned from a curriculum or a school or sometimes a library, but mostly they're just challenged by people who don't understand that their views are not shared by everyone else, and the books remain accessible.
In honor of Banned Books Week, we would like to share our favorite banned/challenged books with you. Naturally, for bibliophiles such as ourselves, it is very difficult to pick favorite books, especially favorite banned books because we love so many of them, but we will make a valiant effort for the sake of you, the reader.
While some of my absolute favorite books of all-time are frequently challenged (the Harry Potter series, the Hunger Games series, almost anything by Robert Cormier), when I think of my favorite banned book, I always come up with Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I can see why it would be challenged, especially in the context of a high school reading list. There are some big, scary, complex, controversial ideas in it, particularly for adolescent minds. I don't want to sound like I'm looking down on adolescents (I was just there, after all) but developing minds are easily influenced, and books like Brave New World can make a huge impact on them.
My favorite part of the book is the first part, where Huxley describes how society is, with their bottled fetus-growing and rampant unabashed sexuality and shunning of solitude. But I set more store in setting and characters than I do in plot, so this sort of thing appeals to me more.
The worst part is all the Shakespeare references. I took an entire semester on Shakespeare, including reading the entirety of two plays that I know Brave New World references, and I still know that I'm missing a lot whenever John speaks in this book. I pick up a little more each time, and if I made more of an effort to understand the references, I bet I would enjoy more of the second half of the book.
I think Brave New World is timeless. It was first published in 1931 and other than the occasional reference to technology that makes the modern reader scoff (none of which I can call to mind, and I just re-read this a few weeks ago, so they can't be too egregious) it feels like it could have been written any year.
While I am similar to Alex in loving me some banned book repeats like the HP series and Mr. Cormier, I have a completely different love of a very particular banned book and have for a very, very long time.
I have had an almost life long obsession with Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (which is interesting because there is another book by her which is on my all time least favorite books list. Curiouser and Curiouser.) It actually hasn't made the list since 2003, when it was on for two years. However, it made the top ten list from 1990-2000.
Little known fact: the book actually stemmed from an incident in Paterson's life. The son of her best friend was struck by lightning and killed.
Usually, Bridge to Terabithia is targeted because it deals with language, death and, some claim, satanism. I first read this book in the fifth grade and was never struck much by the language (Jesse says "Lord" a lot and I do believe the word "Damn" is said.) The language is nothing harsher than what most kids at that age hear around them every day.
Also, I think fifth grade is just about the right age for kids to be old enough to deal with things like death and the emotions that come with it. They're starting to get to the age when people in their life might die. Grandparents or great-aunts and uncles might be passing away at this point in their lives. If we expect them to deal with it in the real world, then why shouldn't we also trust that they can handle it in the books that they read? In fact, isn't reading about grief in their books only going to better prepare them for grief in their everyday lives? I'd like to think so.
As for the satanism? Well, ok, some might call it satanism. But those of us who live in the world of books just like to call it imagination. I think that parents who sit there and say that Paterson is preaching a world of anti-Christian values have forgotten what it's like to be a kid. They've forgotten what it's like to fight off monsters with a wooden stick. Thankfully, Paterson didn't.
