11 posts tagged “kids in peril”
My usually-reliable NYT magazine had a LAME article about Jodi Picoult, who (they say) is "the most visible and dedicated practitioner of a subcategory of contemporary genre fiction that might best be described as the literature of children in peril." Uh, no.
Now, I would like to think I KNOW from kids-in-peril authors. And JP is NOT among them. The whole point of kids-in-peril lit is that it's about the KIDS, and their own problems, their own consequences, their own resourcefulness. JP's books are all about the PARENTS (even the NYT admits it) and the myriad ways they can suck at their parenting. I would like to propose that we give JP the category "There's So Many Ways To Screw Up A Child" and let her be the figurehead for that. But keep off my favorite genre.
I recently finished The Dead and the Gone, the cheery sequel to Life As We Knew It. Both are stories of What Happens After catastrophic climate change caused by an asteroid crashing into the moon and altering its orbit. With the increased gravitational pull from the moon being closer to Earth, enormous tides flood coastal areas, volcanoes erupt, ash causes mass crop failure ... and then to top it off there is a flu epidemic.
Wait, what's this I hear from NASA? They are planning to crash a huge satellite into the moon? And "the resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles"?
Well then. Looks like I'd better find my can opener.
Here's a book I wish I enjoyed more:
It's a pretty dated little tale of a boy who becomes king and does things as king that king-children would do (like decree that every child in the kingdom should receive a pound of chocolate). He runs away to war, establishes a children's parliament, banishes his ministers ... There's a long subplot about his friend Bum Drum, king of the African cannibals, that probably played well in 1923 when it was originally published but not so much with the PC crowd now. All in all, it's a series of little adventures that ends rather sadly and abruptly when little King Matt's reforms backfire, he loses his kingdom and is banished to a desert island (after his death sentence is commuted). !! Not anything I'd be handing to any kids too soon.
BUT. In case you aren't steeped in Jewish history, Janusz Korczak, the author, started a children's orphanage for Jewish kids in Warsaw in 1910, one that sounds kinda close to Matt's kingdom (with a children's parliament and court system and all). In addition to being a doctor, this orphanage and the children it served became his life.
I think we all know how well the Jews of Warsaw fared during the Holocaust. Korczak was a prominent citizen and had mulitple opportunities to escape the Warsaw Ghetto but refused to leave behind the 200 kids he accompanied. In fact he followed them all the way to the gas chambers.
So reading this in my warm American home as a novel for well-fed American kids leaves me unmoved, but imagining them as escapist tales for Jewish orphans on the train to Treblinka leaves me ... moved.
Now that all the hoopla is over, I can get back to my primary passion -- reading kids' books for fun! Awesome! Here's what just came in:
A graphic novel. About going into a volcano. How has no one done this yet? I can't wait to eat this.
Suzanne Collins wrote the Gregor the Overlander series, which I thought was great. This looks pretty decent, although it has the distinct possibility of being derivative. This involves a fight to the death on live TV and I feel like I might have seen that movie before. Also, violence between kids was done to perfection in House of Stairs, what, 30 years ago, so I might be disappointed.
My cover doesn't look like this. Same girl, but looking all surly on a deep grey background,and glaring the other way. Hmm? Also, this guy is a bit too edgy for a middle school library, but I'm keeping his other two and just hoping no parents happen upon them (particularly that "Oval Office" sex scene. Oops).
I'll report back on whether these suck or not in future installments.
When I was young, I always wished I had a cave nearby, a la Tom Sawyer and others. I would retreat to this cave in order to be alone and to do Serious Solitude Thinking. Having no local caverns, I was forced to revert to burying a pen and a notebook in a plastic bag in the woods behind our house, which could be dug up in Solitude Moments should profound thoughts need to be jotted down. But the trees were rather sparse, and you could totally see the Braico's backyard from my fortress, and it just generally sucked way more than a cave would have.
Now, had some of these recent jolly underground books been around, I might not have been so keen on a cave (although you'd think Tom Sawyer would have been a bit cautionary, too).
Leepike Ridge has a fast-moving river that acts all innocuous as it flows past your house and then SPEEDS UP and HEADS UNDERGROUND for a long time before bottoming out in a dank underground pond, complete with bodies from previous spelunkers and treasure-hunters. Naturally, the grouchy son of a possibly-remarrying mom would hop on to a piece of refrigerator foam and accidentally end up there, with no apparent way of ever getting out. Scary, suspenseful and fun, with a great archaeological-mystery, avenge-my-dead-dad subplot. But what a stupid cover, and not the world's greatest title either.
My other recent underground read is the fourth book in the City of Ember series. Right now I'd like to give a shout-out to my stand-up buddy Paul, who actually schlepped all the way to San Jose and then came with me to see the tepidly-reviewed, PG Kid Thriller Flick "City of Ember", based on the first book. The author, Jeanne DuPrau, is local and came to our school last year and made me a Totally Awesome Librarian Hero with the 4th-6th grader set for hooking that up.
The basic premise of the series is that some unspecified apocalypse has forced the remains of humanity underground,
I actually thoroughly enjoyed the movie, although I think it was enhanced for me by the backstory that any movie has to eliminate for time purposes. Maybe because the story was less meaty to begin with, it translated to the screen with greater ease than, say, Harry Potter. Usually I'm afraid to see the movie of books I've loved, because I don't want my mind's view of them tainted, but since this wasn't exactly a life-changer, I was happy with how it turned out.
(But I'm going to continue to keep away from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and another book-turned-movie I won't be seeing is Blindness. Just in case.)
Tonight Eric went to celebrate his friend's birthday in Pleasanton, so Ainsley and I had a silly evening together -- we had breakfast for dinner, we went to the library REALLY REALLY late, we skipped bath and mixed up our usual nighttime routine. When it came time for stories, I let her pick out of the new batch of library books we had just brought home, which included these little gems:
And really, they are all lovely books. Unfortunately, they share a common theme: DUCK ABANDONMENT AND DUCK FEAR.
We started off with Ping, which actually came with a CD, so I just sat back and turned pages. All I remembered about it was liking it as a kid when all the ducks walked in a line. People! These ducks are beaten with a stick! Ping is separated from his family and captured to become DUCK DINNER! And, being a CD, I couldn't fake the words -- the brutal tale just unravelled before Ainsley's enormous eyes.
"Ping got lost," she whispered after it's all over.
"Yes, but he found his family and the wise-eyed boat [WTF?] and it all turned out so wonderfully for Ping. Aren't we HAPPY??"
Next up is Little Quack. Mama stays for all of this one, but each little duck needs to point out something terrifying about the night, which is preventing their sleep. This provided inspiration for my daughter, who is rehearsing for the touring production of Mommy, Just One More Song -- And Some Ice Water, Please: A Only-Child Revue of Bedtime Delays From Seven to Midnight. "Mommy, why is the night oh so dark?" Thanks, Little Quack, you damn duck.
Ah, but then: Come Along, Daisy. This book we know! This book we OWN. This book we have read a million times -- but not since the Imagination came. To summarize: Daisy wanders off and plays with a frog, and is All Alone. A big fish ripples the water, and she hears rustling in the reeds, which turns out to be -- her mama! Not scary, if you get to the end when Mama comes back -- and if you don't have a show-offy librarian mom that is just Such a Good Storyteller that she can't shut it off.
Now read this to yourself in a dark room in the scariest possible manner: "Something big stirred beneath her. Daisy shivered. She scrambled up onto the riverbank. Then something screeched in the sky above! Daisy hid in the reeds. If only Mama Duck were here! Something was rustling along the riverbank. Daisy could hear it getting closer... and closer, and closer, and CLOSER ..."
At this point Ainsley starts whimpering, "I don't like this, I don't like this!" Then my auto-pilot turns off and I realize how scary I just made this stupid bedtime book. What the hell is wrong with me?
"No, no, it's Mama Duck, look! They're together now!" But Ainsley is done. She marches out of bed and collects the three books and tells me, "You need to take these back to the libraray. They are Too Scary."
We stuck Owl Babies on the return pile, too, since the whole plot is three scared owls waiting for their mom, repeating "I want my mommy" over and over again.
Nice work, library mom.
Here's the last comment on the whole child-in-peril genre, brought to you by Douglas McGrath reviewing "The Film Club" in today's NYTimes Book Review:
"Since I became a father, I have read stories about parents and their children with a humiliating lack of emotional armor. Right after our son was born, someone gave me a copy of Scott Berg’s biography of Charles Lindbergh. I thought it was wonderful until the Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, and then my stomach knotted up so badly I had to put the book away. Instead I read Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger,” a story of a homeless writer almost starving to death, and it was like a light comedy by comparison."
Thanks, Doug! You put it better than I ever did, not in my forty posts on the subject. And I'm spent.
School's out, so I'm fervently rearranging books in my library at work, and, like, dusting shit and opening mail from six months ago, and getting to read a bit more. In this past week, it's been Gee I Never Thought Of It Like That economics and Asian Power.
First, the Economic Naturalist -- I guess economists finally realized that their occupations are kinda bullshit (I heard one on NPR last week opining that oil might reach $180 a barrel by 2030. Right, or maybe next month, douchebag) because now there are all these Freakonomics-ish books like this one, trying to make economics Accessible and Hip! This was a series of Why Is That? questions answered with an economics slant, but done so superficially that I was pretty disappointed. I didn't want my life back after reading it, but nor did it give me any kind of new perspective on those Perplexing Questions of Life, like hot dog vs. bun ratios and the like. Whatever.
Much more enjoyable was the first in this YA series: KUNG FU PRINCESS! Pretty much I just love the title and have to say it over and over again. "Eric, I left my book KUNG FU PRINCESS on the bed. Could you please bring me KUNG FU PRINCESS so I can sit on the deck and read KUNG FU PRINCESS until I've finished KUNG FU PRINCESS?"
But seriously, it's very well done. Poor middle schoolers that discover they have a Destiny To Fulfill. From the first book, it appears that there are at least five demons for her to vanquish, and she's only bested but the two, so I'm looking forward to the next books!
Let us turn now to Japan, where Haruki Murakami continues to rock my world. For me, my first encounter with an author determines unequivocally my opinion of that author forevermore -- even if it's tainted by, say, reading the book during a bad breakup, or the stomach flu, or while I'd rather be swimming with dolphins in Bermuda, or whatever. I read Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in high school and it took my face off so comprehensively that everything I've read since then has automatically been awesome, even though I have a sneaking suspicion that they are not actually that fantastic. (Compare this with Philip Roth, whom I first read while men were repulsing me anyway, and despite his many effortful attempts to win me back, I'm still iffy on him. Him and John Updike, those nasty old men.)
We just got back from our annual trip to the East Coast, where we did all the things we
Eric is a huge Formula One racing fan, and I have gotten interested in it during the past few years. Once I noticed that the 18-19 races per year were all in Fantastically Awesome places (Australia, Spain and all over Western Europe, Japan, China, Bahrain, Monaco, Turkey, Brazil, Malaysia, Singapore, and on and on) I suggested that over our lifetime together, we try to get to see all of them. Eric Lives the Dream, and I get to see Fabulous Exotic Locations. What could be better?
The small matter of having no money has been standing in our way, but this year we started the journey at the Grand Prix du Canada in Montreal. We flew the red-eye, dropped off Ainsley with my parents in New Jersey and drove the six hours north to the luxurious Travelodge By The Airport (which actually turned out to be awesome). For the first evening alone in years, I settled in to choose between the two books I had brought for the weekend.
These were The Road and Case Histories.
I open The Road and read the dust jacket blurb. Father, son, "burned America" ... not for me, missing my baby and worrying that something awful would happen while I was gone. Case Histories looked much more promising. It billed itself as a "literary thriller" and interesting psychological study. Sounds great!
Until the end of the first chapter, where the angelic three-year-old VANISHES and IS NEVER FOUND. OH MAN!
As I have mentioned, ever since I became a parent I find Holocaust literature nearly unbearable in the visceral horror it elicits in me. Fiction, non-fiction, whatever ... it makes me want to stockpile food and weapons in case Anyone Ever Dares Threaten My Child.
Naturally, this is a rather large part of my job. So I try to avoid it in my pleasure reading, when I get to read for pleasure. And yet, somehow, in the past few weeks, during my Completely Debilitating Flu-like Symptoms, three (3) (!) ... no, wait, FOUR of them slipped into my bedtime reading. What the?
The Zookeeper's Wife was clearly the most brutal of the four, being a true story and taking place in Warsaw. Like most narratives about those who hid Jews, it manages to be both inspiring and admonishing -- why didn't more people do it and WOULD YOU DO IT? I think about this all the time, literally all the time. Who am I, in my position of (relative) privilege and (relative) power, who am I not speaking for? How do you judge history's nameless who Did Not Act? How should my own complacency be judged? Is it not the absolute height of hypocrisy to say "oh, the horror" and then send my time and money not to Darfur, or to lobbying ol' Zoe Lofgren and Mmes. Boxer and Feinstein, but to AT&T for my super DSL connection and my nifty cell phone and to my own bed to read escapist novels?
Yes it is. You can see why I try to maybe keep off these on a regular basis. No one likes her chai tea to turn to ashes in her mouth.
Anyway. Okay, so The Amber Room and People of the Book were both about priceless "degenerate" art looted by the Nazis (oh, shit, there's ANOTHER recent YA book I read about this: The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, by E.L. Konigsburg of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler fame ... no wonder I'm so spun up). Amber Room was Da Vinci Code-esque (although far more artistically crafted -- that Dan Brown is a Bad Writer) and not really worth it for the Thrill. People of the Book dealt with the Sarajevo Haggadah, and is AWESOME. And the heroine is a book conservator! Again, the tragedy is that the book's parade through persecution: expulsion, Inquisitions, Nazis, Serbs ... like a flip book of anti-Semitism through the ages.
I wanted to write more about The History of Love -- I really liked it -- but I'm drained and I have to go ponder my complacency.
Or at least read like less of an asshole. It's like a drinking problem. I neglect my family, neglect my housework, feel kinda sick and hung over afterwards, and don't have much to show for it except a slightly perverse personal pleasure. Maybe it's more like excessive masturbation than alcoholism, I don't know. (I don't have either of those problems. At least, I don't think.) However, I do hope to blog more! We'll see.
Winter break started on Dec 22nd and I got some awesome books from the library before it went all holiday-hours.
For grownups, I took in: Foreskin's Lament, Shalom Auslander; How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman; True Notebooks, by Mark Salzman, and Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen, who is loved by me more and more with every passing day.
Foreskin's Lament was notable for its absolutely hilarious voice, this deadpan, I'm-so-mad-at-you-God, arrested-development author who has apparently been all over NPR all the time and yet I've not managed to hear him but once. (That damn Linda Hunt seems to be introducing City Arts and Lecture every single dingle second, however. Make some room, bitch!) Anyway, Shalom takes great umbrage when his deeply Orthodox friends and family describe him (treyf-eating, electricity-using) as notreligious instead of not observant. On Shabbat, he walks fifteen miles to Madison Square Garden to watch the Rangers lose a Stanley Cup game, eats a hot dog as a big fuck-you to God afterwards, but guarantees that God will make them win the Cup just to piss him off more. Pair with God Is Not Great for a rollicking romp through the many ways religion can deform you!
I don't think True Notebooks, wherein Mark Salzman teaches a writing class to kids
Plus it was really funny in parts. Delinquent kids can lay down some freestyle rap!
For the teen crowd, I took in 13 Reasons Why, by Jay Asher and
UNWIND is my next new favorite sci-fi tech dystopia after FEED, which will always be my first tech-dystopia love. After the internecine Heartland War, between the pro-choice and pro-life factions, the Bill of Life gets written into the Constitution, protecting life from conception until age 13. From 13 to 18, parents can then choose to retroactively "abort" their children -- you know, bad grades, too much sass talk, send 'em back -- and have them "unwound", harvesting every ounce of them for use in other people. The pro-lifers accept this because technically, the Unwinds are still alive -- just in a "divided state." A little bit After The First Death, a little bit House of the Scorpion. Very suspenseful!
Lastly, for the middle grades, I enjoyed The name of this book is secret, by Pseudonymous Bosch. (Damn! He stole the world's best nom de plume. It saddens me in the way I was saddened when I was about 12, watching the early days of MTV, when I realized that I could never be in a girl metal band, because the band name VIXEN had already been taken.) Also worthwhile was Book of a Thousand Days, by Shannon Hale, although I grow weary of the many well-developed kingdoms of the various fantasy novels, each with their currencies and economies and hierarchical deities and gender expectations ...Can we all just agree that from here on out, all fantasy novels will take place in Tortall, or Prydain, or Damar, or WHEREVER JUST PICK A PLACE ALREADY FOR THE LOVE OF THE GODDESS OR TRICKSTER OR SO HELP ME YOU GET THE POINT. Atlases could be published. We could all move on.
Wait, one more. I was shocked, SHOCKED to find a children's book by George Saunders (!!) in my library, namely, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I thought Civilwarland in Bad Decline was pretty much genius and to think there was this little illustrated George Saunders story nestled on my shelves the whole time, prepared to be foisted on the unsuspecting minds of third graders. I'm SO glad school is back in session!
Here are the words my little toddler can already read:
Mama Dad Ainsley Bama FedEx Up Hot Cold
Can Gappers of Frip be far behind?
