How I Live Now ~ Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, which won the 2005 Printz award, is told by Daisy, a fifteen your old American girl, shipped off to England to live with cousins. Her dad has remarried, and Daisy just does not fit in the picture, with a new baby on the way. She doesn’t like her dad much at this point, so, even though she did not choose to go to England, she’s just as happy not to stay home. But, an important point about Daisy is that she is not happy. And, as I suppose is the case with many books for adolescents and about adolescents: the book tells the story of the character, in one way or another, and his or her journey towards happiness.

Daisy moves in with her aunt’s family, in the countryside (her dead mother’s sister) She turns out to really love these people, almost right off. The hitch is that soon after her arrival, war breaks out, and all hell breaks loose. The story follows Daisy and her cousins and their efforts to deal, in this somewhat post-apocalyptic situation. It’s dark and grim and tense – the book, I mean. Yet, in some ways, their situation is pretty normal, they live and eat (the eating part is kind of important… read the book, you’ll see) and are actually pretty okay, against a fuzzy dark-ish scary background.

As someone who studiously avoids books with scary stuff and violence, I think it says something about this book and the way the story happens that I really loved it. The story of Daisy and her cousins is sharp and clear and vivid, and not so war-like and violent, and the war stuff feels – for the most part – more in the background, and less sharp and clear, and I think that is why I could deal with it. It was actually an interesting device, on the part of the author, the way she left a lot sort of fuzzy, about the war. That’s not to say there are not a few yucky moments, but, by the time they came around, I felt okay about reading them, for some reason.

I would not say that Daisy is a totally loveable character, there is something about her that means you don’t just fall in love with her (she’s no Maniac Magee, a character we all want to either be, be best friends with, or be the parent of…). But, she’s interesting and compelling and soon after the story begins, you do find yourself really wanting to know what is going to happen to her, how it will all turn out for her.

Margaux with an X - Ron Koertge

This was my second book by Ron Koertge – the first being Shakespeare Bats Cleanup. When I began reading, I was not at all sure I was going to like the book. It just had a sort of negative feeling for me, and I was not totally pulled into it. Perhaps I had too high expectations, having liked Shakespeare Bats Cleanup so very much. But, I liked it enough to keep reading, and in the end decided it was a very good read. Not sure I would have persisted if it had been my first Koertge book; but, as things stand now, I am in the market for another book by him, for sometime in the near future.

The story is about Margaux, beautiful, and, we get the feeling – mean. In addition to being mean, she’s also restless and unhappy, and ultimately, the book is about her effort to get past this restlessness and unhappiness, to move beyond it and find something more meaningful and positive in her life. And, in the course of this journey, we also discover that the meanness we sense in the beginning is more of a façade than a reality. Or, we discover that there is much more beneath the surface.

Margaux’s a high school student, in LA, with a set of wacko parents, who she seems to not like at all (and, with good reason, we decide, as we read and learn more about them). She has a close girl friend, and together, the two of them seem like a powerful, mean duo, alternately feared and admired by others in the high school community. What is not so quickly understood about Margaux, but revealed as the book progresses, is that she is smart, and she loves words. I think this is where the book got several degrees more interesting to me (though by this time I was also definitely engaged by the story line). She thinks about and plays with words, and uses sophisticated, obscure, and interesting words.

Example here:

An hour later, Margaux listens to Sara and a couple of her dunderheaded acolytes describe some farcical gymnastics in the inevitable back seat. p. 110

When I realized this, I then was suddenly able to make the connection between this book and the other one by Koertge. It’s not just Margaux who cares about words, it’s also Koertge. Now, yes, sure, all authors care about words. But, for some more than others, this is a driving concern, a central feature of their writing. While at first I thought these two books – Margaux, told in regular prose, and Shakespeare, written as a series of poems – were stylistically really different, I in the end have come to believe that they are actually very similar, even though their “shape” differs. Words really matter in each, both in the writing – from the author’s end, and for each of the main characters, Margaux and Kevin. [Margaux with an X, while written in third person point of view, is most definitely told through the eyes of Margaux, so it’s her voice and her word choice we are experiencing.]

Last but not least, the book has some suspense/mystery, and some fun relationships between interesting characters (I hesitate to say romance, because I’m not sure that it’s quite the right word, but, it’s something like romance…).

Life on the Refrigerator Door - Alice Kuipers

Based on Katie Rose's Planning Around A Text project for this book, I decided to read it. It's the story of a mom and a daughter, both busy and therefore constantly missing each other (by which I mean they never see each other, though, presumably, at times, they also do miss each other. Though, like most mother-daughter relationships, it has its occasional tensions and flare-ups). So, they tend to communicate by leaving notes for each other on the refrigerator door.

It's a short, sweet, and easy read. But, really, more bittersweet than sweet, as one of the central plot devices is that the mom gets cancer and we see them dealing with it, and their relationship, through their refrigerator door communication.

Yup, for me, it was a tear-jerker. I admit it.

It was a good read, but, pretty solidly in the chick-lit camp, I think I'd have to say.

Interesting point, from a teaching or YA Lit standpoint is that it has been marketed as both adult and young adult lit (just like The Book Thief and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time).

Also perhaps note-worthy is its note-based-structure, that is, its sort of epistolary format. I'm suddenly noticing a lot of these out there, and think it might be something worth exploring more, from a teaching-literature standpoint. There just might be some sort of a fun project in there, waiting to be created.

The Green Glass Sea ~ Ellen Klages

So much available reading material about WWII, and the Holocaust, even within the Young Adult Literature world. Lots of books to pick from, many very well-regarded ones. But, it seems to me that, for the most part, much of the fiction written about this time period is set in Europe, in Germany or other nearby parts. Another line of related books chronicles the Japanese Internment side of the war. I think Farewell to Manzanar is a classic for this [note: I’ve never read this one, and think I should give it a try sometime]; and, a year or so back I read Weedflower by Cynthia Kadohata, which also tells the story of a Japanese family in the U.S. during WWII.

The Green Glass Sea, which is billed as historical fiction (and it clearly and successfully is this), [for me, one sign of good historical fiction is that it gets me interested in learning more about that time period, and what was going on at the time], falls into neither of the above categories, but is set in this same time period: WWII. The story takes place in New Mexico, Los Alamos, to be exact. Though, at the time of the story, the place is really only barely coming to be known as Los Alamos. The story primarily follows two eleven year old girls. While they are quite different from each other, they do have one important thing in common: both are the daughters of top notch scientists/mathematicians, called to this place, out in the middle of nowhere, where all the good brains of the time have gathered to try to create a solution to the war.

What a great idea for a story: creating the world of the kids living in that time and place, looking at that event through the eyes of the children who were there at the time, really just living very everyday lives, in a slightly not so everyday place.

The girls, Dewey and Suze, are young, and innocent, though their innocence is not just a function of their youth. The work the people are doing on “the hill,” as it is known, is top secret and while everyone knows they are trying to create a solution to deal with the war, no one is really talking about what they are doing.

From our removed, 21st century perspective, we, of course, have some idea of what they are doing; and this omniscient perspective that we have, compared to the limited perspective the narrators have (while the story is told/written in the third person, it is actually really being told through the eyes of either Dewey or Suze, depending on the chapter) is one of the interesting things about this story. For me, what was also interesting was just getting a little window in to this one specific element of the larger WWII story.

I loved some, though not all, of the characters (which is as it should be and, I think, what the author intended for us), and felt fully engaged by their circumstances and stories. Even though at some level, we know what happens in the end (just like we know that the Titanic sinks, but are still interested in the stories of those on the boat), I was still curious and, as I read, found myself always wanting to know what would happen next, as the story unfolded, and wanting to know what happened “in the end” for these particular people. Really, this might be my favorite book yet, this fall.