i have a phoenix

Lyrical Life: A Rock'n'Roll Love Story Told in 200 Song Lyrics, Casey Jones, 2003

2005-02-22T19:38:00.000-06:00

I'm generally not a reader of graphic novels, but I liked this premise enough that I picked this one up when I heard about it at a YA literature workshop I attended in December. It's a short boy-meets-girl story whose only words are taken from song lyrics. When Boy sees Girl in the Sad Café, for example, the page reads, "And then I saw her face..." When Boy is angry at Girl, he yells, "De-doo-doo-doo, de-da-da-da, is all I want to say to you!" When Girl is caught cheating on Boy, she says, "Oops, I did it again." Their first date happens at MacArthur Park, and when Boy stays in a mental hospital for a while, his room is labeled "Soft Cell." Very cute. Sure, the lyrics used were a little Eagles-intensive, but whatever.

The Devil You Know: A Novel, Wayne Johnson, 2004

2005-02-19T22:22:00.000-06:00

This is the story of fifteen-year-old David, who lives with his mother and his seven-year-old sister Janie. David's dad, Max, was an abusive drunk that left the family a few years before the story begins. David has a quick temper himself and takes some shit at school for standing up to a bully that's picking on another kid. In the middle of all this, David's mom announces she's trying to work things out with Max, and they all have dinner tomorrow and David can't decide if Max has truly changed or if he, David, is just a pussy for thinking that.

So Max takes David and Janie on a camping/canoeing trip, and they run into a bunch of assholes with their own internal drama, i.e. some of them are stealing from the meat-packing plant at which they work, and they think one of their number has ratted them out. The assholes decide David and his family know too much about them, so they set out to kill them. The rest of the book is action-packed, with David taking charge of moving his badly wounded father and sister via damaged canoe to try to find shelter and medical care while simultaneously avoiding the four dickheads. And then it starts snowing, and no one's prepared for it, and it gets very intense and riveting.

Parts of the book are pretty bad. It started out very slow, and I thought about abandoning it a few times. And many of the descriptive passages are overwrought as fuck; I can't believe Johnson's editor let them stay. Still, the second half moves quickly and is written well, and I cared a fuck of a lot about David by the end. His incredible tenderness for his little sister made me love her too.

The best part by far, though, was the interaction between David and Max. David resents Max for beating him up occasionally when he was younger, but Max does show signs of changing. But then Max will be in a bad mood and will revert to his old ways; he doesn't become violent, but he's aggressive and unable to take criticism, and there are times when David really needs Max to be able to accept constructive advice, like when Max buys all the wrong supplies for a camping trip and David, the experienced outdoorsman, knows better but is afraid to say so. What's especially well-done here is David's range of emotion: he wants the family to have the right gear for their trip, but he doesn't want to piss off Max, and he also doesn't want to be a wimp that doesn't stand up to his dad, especially when his younger sister's first camping experience and perhaps even safety are at stake, but he really does want to get along with him for the sake of their mom and Janie, and he also wants his dad to acknowledge his greater familiarity, and...you just know the author has been in a situation like this himself, and he renders it beautifully.

(Admin)

2005-02-05T09:35:00.000-06:00

So in the interim between my last post and today, I've (1) had a kidney infection that wiped me out for a week or so; (2) begun nonstop Mardi Gras festivities; and (3) gotten thoroughly sick of book reviews. And I've begun to miss my old blog, the one that got me into Big Trouble at work. So, while I will continue to update this space on occasion, I proudly unveil I Been Havin' a Snake.

Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix, 1998

2005-01-16T19:03:00.000-06:00

Becky recommended Haddix's Running Out of Time, which I liked but did not love. The concept was excellent - kids growing up in a nineteenth-century human exhibit are made to believe it actually is the nineteenth century, but then when some of them catch a disease (I think smallpox) that's not curable until the present day, some of the parents sneak the heroine out to get help. I loved this idea, but Haddix didn't flesh out the characters well enough ahead of time, so we didn't even get to know the protagonist or what her life was like in the nineteenth century before getting all caught up in the plot.

I liked Among the Hidden better. It's The Near Future in a vague sense, and Luke is the third child in his family, which isn't allowed because of population controls. He has to stay in hiding all the time without going to school or playing outside. Gradually the restrictions increase and he has to live in the attic and can't even eat with his family, so he spends all his time watching the neighbors out of a peephole in his bedroom. One day, he sees a face peeping back, only he's already seen the parents and two boys leaving for the day...so this must be another Third Child.

It's the first in a series that I think is up to the fifth book. Of course, my library sucks ass, but I'll keep looking for the others.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brönte, 1847

2005-01-11T15:57:00.000-06:00

I can't believe I never read this book in my childhood. I read all the other old-fashioned girly books - Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Gone with the Wind, The Secret Garden, Pride and Prejudice, Heidi...all that shit. And yet I never read Jane Eyre? Bizarre.

I finished it last night, though. I absolutely adored it. It's the story of little orphan Jane, who lives with her aunt and cousins because her parents are dead. Her new family can't stand her and relegate her to outsider status until they finally send her away to a rather Dickensian boarding school. When Jane finishes school, she stays on as a teacher there for a couple of years, and then she decides to seek a position as a governess in a manor outside a large town in a different county. That's how she reaches Thornfield Hall.

At Thornfield, she befriends Mrs. Fairfax, the housekeeper, and teaches Adele, an orphan living with the house's owner, Mr. Rochester. Rochester himself is rarely around, at least until Jane moves in; then they become close friends and, of course, Jane falls in love with him. I want to say more but I can't because I really want anyone that hasn't read this book to go get it NOW and I don't want to spoil it.

I loved the language; the book is over 500 pages, but except for the occasional description of nature, every word has meaning. There are no throwaway conversations, and not a word is wasted. The atmosphere of the whole thing is a bit spooky, too, like in The Secret Garden or The Ghost Writer or something by Daphne du Maurier.

One quibble: what's up with the bad grammar? Or is it just hopelessly dated grammar? Throughout the book, there are passages that say things like,

Jane asked the housekeeper for a glass of water. The housekeeper said "she would get it as soon as she stoked the fire."

Like, with the quotes not accurately representing what the housekeeper's actual words were ("she" instead of "I"). What's up with that?

America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, Jon Stewart, 2004

2005-01-07T21:19:00.000-06:00

Jeff got this for Christmas and said it was hilarious, so I gave it a shot. It's pretty funny in spots, but sort of lame in others, and it's sort of hard to read continuously because there's no narrative to pull the whole thing together. It took me eleven days, but I have now conquered it.

It's a mock social studies textbook, which is a funny concept because, of course, most history textbooks are mind-numbingly boring and full of inaccuracies. I liked the history sections best; I found the chapters on government and the media to be pretty dull, probably because I'm too ill-informed to get the jokes. But once you get through those, you have "The Future of Democracy" and "The Rest of the World," which are funny as hell. The first, obviously, is about the America of the future, and the second, while it relies heavily on ethnic stereotypes, is still riotously clever. Recommended.

Tokyo Bistro, a Japanese restaurant in the Garden District

2005-01-07T18:03:00.000-06:00

I checked this place out on the advice of Rudolph and r (via Jeffrey) after my last Japanese restaurant review. It's very near my house, and in fact I would have walked if I hadn't been unsure whether they closed down between lunch and dinner, and I wished to dine at 4pm. They didn't answer their phone when I tried phoning first; minus one point for that.

The place was half-full despite the odd hour, and I was given the lunch menu, which I presume is cheaper than dinner. It was very reasonably priced, but the sushi order form did not include explanations of what was contained in each roll. Now, I get that many people know what oshinko maki is, or what's in a California roll, but there are many that do not. And surely no one's expected to know what the Uptown or the Metairie is. I asked the waiter which were vegetarian, and she said only the avocado two-piece, egg two-piece, vegetable roll and asparagus roll fit that description. This was a mild disappointment considering the lengthy list of meat-containing sushi, but hardly a surprise.

I was curious about this egg thing. "What's in that besides eggs?" I asked the waiter.

W: Just eggs and rice.

Me: Okay. What kind of eggs? Like, scrambled, or...

W: Egg cake.

Me: What's that?

W: Egg cake.

Me: I don't know what that is.

W: It's, um, egg cake. It comes that way. I don't know what's in it.

Me: You don't make the sushi here?

W: No, we do, but the egg cake comes already processed.

I still had no idea what it was (anyone?) so I ordered a two-piece avocado, a vegetable roll, and veggies tempura. Very impressive. The two pieces of avocado sushi contained probably half an avocado, very fresh. The vegetable roll was perfect; I'm not sure what vegetables were in it (I think cucumber, radish, and a tiny bit of pickle), but I know there wasn't any carrot, which too often ruins a good veggie roll. Carrot is too tough and chewy to form the middle of a delectable piece of maki.

The tempura vegetables were delicious as well. The portion was extremely generous for $5.25; there were two pieces each of eggplant, onion, sweet potato, carrot, green pepper and zucchini. All were perfectly done except the sweet potato, which is generally my favorite veggie tempura but in this case was cut a little too thick to get the desired tenderness. The tempura sauce was weak; I added soy sauce to it to give it a little more flavor.

My bill came to $13.61. Excellent meal. I'll be back.

Conversations with J.K. Rowling, Lindsey Frasier, 2000

2005-01-07T18:01:00.000-06:00

This very slim question-and-answer book doesn't really reveal anything the Internet can't tell you about Rowling or Harry Potter, but it was a nice quick read. She's a bit less clean-cut than the media sometimes paints her -- not much, but a bit. This book, though, is more for kids to understand that books are written by human beings.

Insomnia: 50 Essential Things to Do, Theresa Foy DiGeronimo with Frank DiMaria, 1997

2005-01-07T17:56:00.000-06:00

One of my New Year's resolutions was to stop using alcohol as a sleep aid. I've found it difficult to fall asleep on my own since I was very young -- I have memories of elaborate rituals I would devise to keep myself entertained in the hours between my bedtime and when I would actually fall asleep -- but it was only post-college that I began relying on a few beers to do the job. Obviously, this is less than desirable, but the idea of lying awake for hours was unappealing too, so I picked up this book.

It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know - use your bed only for sleeping and sex (impossible in a studio apartment), drink herbal tea at nighttime, cut out caffeine and naps, try acupuncture if you're that sort. I'd recommend it as a primer if you don't know a lot about the subject, but it's not especially good for those of us that have already tried the obvious.

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story, Timothy B. Tyson, 2004

2005-01-07T17:49:00.000-06:00

Tells the story of the race wars in Oxford, North Carolina, in the 1960s and 1970s, ending with the brutal murder of a young Black man that flirted with a white woman. Three of the woman's family members chased the kid down, beat the crap out of him, and then shot him while he was unconscious.

Tyson, a young white kid growing up in Oxford when the story takes place, sets it in a context of racial clashes going on in eastern North Carolina at the time. His history of a few small towns tells how the move from Dr. King's nonviolence dictum to the looting and arson of later activists affected what happened the night of the murder. Tyson went on just a little too long in the middle with all the background he provided, but when he was done, I felt like I'd gotten an education in 1970s race politics in the South via library research and lots of oral history. He intertwines this with tales of what it was like growing up with a white liberal preacher for a father. Highly recommended.

(Admin: 2004 stats)

2005-01-03T20:56:00.000-06:00

Of the 268 books I began this year, eleven were my favorites, as indicated in the last post; 86 were books I can honestly say I loved; I finished 141 others, but did not love them, although I may have liked them a lot; and 30 were so bad I didn't finish them.

Breakdown by genre:

76 nonfiction: 1 favorite, loved 26, 39 other, didn't finish 10
59 literature*: 6 favorites, loved 30, 18 other, didn't finish 5
49 juv. fiction: 2 favorites, loved 7, 39 other, didn't finish 1
35 YA fiction: 1 favorite, loved 11, 21 other, didn't finish 2
11 classics**: loved 4, 3 other, didn't finish 4
9 mysteries: loved 2, 3 other, didn't finish 4
8 science fiction: loved 4, 3 other, didn't finish 1
6 audiobooks***: 6 other
4 essay anthologies: 3 other, didn't finish 1
3 fantasy: loved 1, 1 other, didn't finish 1
3 essay collections by a single author: 1 favorite, 2 other
2 plays: loved 1, 1 other
2 short story anthologies: 1 other, didn't finish 1
1 short story collection by a single author: 1 other

*Fiction that doesn't fit into another category
**Books twenty years old or more with popular appeal and critical acclaim
**Most of these were the Harry Potters, which I do love, but I didn't mark them "loved" because I've read most of them in print this year

(Admin: Best books I read in 2004)

2005-01-01T23:42:00.000-06:00

I began 268 books this year, but I abandoned thirty of them. Of the remaining 238, I've selected eleven as my very favorites.

Those not reviewed below include links to where I reviewed them during the year.

11. Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg, 2001.

10. School Story, Andrew Clements, 2001.

9. What Happened in Hamelin, Gloria Skurzynski, 1979.

8. Dolores: Seven Stories About Her, Bruce Brooks, 2002.

7. House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III, 1999.

6. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace, 1997.

5. Affinity, Sarah Waters, 2000. This is the story of Margaret, a privileged woman that volunteers as a sort of mentor/good influence on women in prison in Victorian England. She falls in love with one prisoner -- Selina, a psychic convicted of fraud -- who asks Margaret to help her escape. Like The Ghost Writer (see below), the beauty of this book is that I wasn't sure until the end whether the twist was going to be supernatural or not. Supernatural, I felt, would have been a copout. Well, it wasn't.

4. The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger, 2003. Henry is among the first humans to have Chrono-Displacement Disorder, meaning that at various moments in his life, usually when he's feeling anxious or sad, he's sucked back or forward in time to a different point in his life. The time he reaches is generally also a meaningful occasion. So he goes back and forth in time and meets his wife, Clare, as a child. Clare as an adult has to deal with Henry suddenly leaving for times unknown; the two of them hope like hell he won't vanish in public, particularly, say, while she's walking down the church aisle toward him at their wedding. Clare as a child has to wonder whether this mysterious man that visits her near her family's estate in Wisconsin is real or what, although Henry eventually convinces her that he is in fact her future husband.

What's the difference between a love story and a romance? A romance, that genre I loathe beyond all others, involves two people that at first dislike one another, but then get together in the end. The definition of the genre is that the happy ending relies on the protagonists beginning a relationship. A love story, on the other hand, I couldn't have defined until I read this book.

3. Bringing Down the House, Ben Mezrich, 2002. My favorite nonfiction read of 2004 was the mesmerizing story of a bunch of MIT students that figured out a way to win thousands, even millions, of dollars playing blackjack in Vegas. Their theory is that counting cards only gives you an advantage of 2 percent or so because you can count cards all you want, but all it does is let you know whether the deck is in your favor or not. But if you have several accomplices working other tables, and more kids sitting down at the end seat of your own table and talking in code to let you know whether you've got the best deck or not and then passing that information on, then you can win tons. Not only is the strategy fun to read about, but the actual adventures of the kids as they boarded airlines with thousands of dollars tucked under their clothing, avoided casino security, wore disguises, pretended to be drunken tourists, etc. are fascinating.

2. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore, 2002.

1. The Ghost Writer, John Harwood, 2004. My favorite book of this year is, as usual, a Becky recommendation. This creepy story involves a young boy living in Australia with his distant, haunted mother. As an escape, he joins a pen pal society and begins writing to Alice, who lives in an English orphanage. Their letters seem straightforward but keep you guessing. And then there are the ghost stories the boy finds hidden among his mother's things; they're Victorian and spooky and at times seem to come true, but...ooh, I can't tell you any more, except that I'm not a horror fan and this isn't horror. Just...mmm.

TGI Friday's frozen spinach/cheese/artichoke dip

2005-01-01T22:27:00.000-06:00

I'm a big fan of spinach, cheese, and artichokes. I also love homemade artichoke dip, the kind you make by simply mixing one cup grated Parmesan, one can sliced artichoke hearts, and one cup mayonnaise in a pan and baking for twentyish minutes at 350 degrees (eat on Triscuits). So when I wanted to indulge in a high-fat snack product for this evening, I confidently grabbed this product out of the Robért freezer section, along with some giant crouton-esque things for dipping.

Bad idea. This product looks like vomit, smells like meat, and tastes like salted canned soup with chunks in it. Avoid.

The Hole, Guy Burt, 1993

2005-01-01T19:16:00.000-06:00

I'll never get enough of the throw-five-teenagers-into-a-room-together, don't-let-anyone-else-in, see-what-happens plot. I loved Susan Wallach's Operation Isolation, William Sleator's House of Stairs, and, of course, The Breakfast Club.

The Hole is a little different from all of these in that it uses a variety of perspectives and distances to retell the story of what happens when school prankster Martyn locks five classmates in a cavelike basement room, promising to come back in three days, and then (of course) doesn't show up. The book is less concerned with the psychological aspects of creating a new society than House of Stairs; it goes more into figuring out how the fuck the kids are going to get out of there. It's told mostly from the point of view of Liz, one of the five, who's writing a memoir about that time, but there are also interspersed tape recordings by Lisa, Martyn's girlfriend. And Liz narrates in the first person in the present day, but the third person when writing about what actually happened in the Hole. And at the very end, there's a twist that creates more questions than answers.

My Sister Life: The Story of My Sister's Disappearance, Maria Flook, 1997

2004-12-29T22:04:00.000-06:00

Weird and a bit long-winded. Flook also wrote a true crime I'm anxious to begin, and she writes fiction as well. I can't remember how I heard about her, but I bet it was in one of the review journals, probably Library Journal. But this one purported to tell about her sister vanishing from their family home when she was fourteen and Maria was twelve; how interesting is that? Answer: very. So I grabbed it but it was fairly slow going. Flook is a good writer, and I can understand writing a huge book about your family once you get started because my own is, you know, as weird and chaotic as yours surely is, but she really did go on a bit too long.

What happened is that the sister ran away from home and became a teenage prostitute. Her life became pretty shitty; she became a drug addict, took money for sex, etc. It's a pretty typical story, and I think Flook thought it was more interesting than it was because they came from a fairly ritzy (though not wealthy) home, but actually that was fairly typical in the late sixties: the kids grow up and get all rebellious and their parents flip out. Maria too was sort of a slut and experimented with drugs, but it was 1967, for fuck's sake. What was she supposed to do? Become a nun?

So Maria draws all these parallels between her sister's life and her own, and I guess that's what the title's supposed to mean, but it's kind of lame. Maria went to college and did her experimentation there, while the sister grew up in a whorehouse and was repeatedly raped and robbed an' shit. I mean, they both had babies at about the same time, and they experienced some twinnish intuitive moments while bad shit happened to both of them at the same time, but ultimately their lives are very different, and that's only highlighted by the fact that Maria published a book about it and the sister didn't.

The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, Elizabeth Kendall, 1981

2004-12-29T21:55:00.000-06:00

I have an obsession with Bundy that grew out of reading Ann Rule's fascinating The Stranger Beside Me. Rule, of course, is the creme de la creme of true crime writers; she's an ex-cop that's been setting the true-crime writing standard for years. So back in the late 1970s (I think), she volunteered at a crisis hotline, and her officemate was Ted Bundy. It was just a bizarre coincidence. He hadn't been accused of anything yet, and they stayed friends throughout his arrests, trials, jail time, etc. She sent him money and gifts in prison, even. Best.book.ever. Plus I was a Chi Omega, and that's the sorority into which Ted sneaked and raped and murdered a bunch of girls in Florida, and supposedly that was why we weren't allowed to have boys above the first floor at our sorority house in suburban Chicago, and I guess all of this explains my Ted fascination.

So this book is written by the woman with whom he (sort of) lived and with whom he was in love throughout all the murders....the woman that eventually turned him in to the police. Ann Rule calls her Meg Anders and says she's a shy, insecure little woman that thought of Ted as a good catch. Elizabeth (her real first name; Kendall's a pseudonym) says, both in Rule's book and her own, that Ted was never violent with her. She says he was a petty thief and often disappeared for a night or two, but she just assumed he was cheating on her, which he often was. Rule paints Ted as a sociopath, but Kendall seems to think he really did love her. Hard to tell; Kendall is biased, certainly, but wouldn't she know better?

The book doesn't give much background about Ted's victims, methods, trials or imprisonment, and doesn't provide much insight about any of Ted's relationships except with Kendall. I highly recommend the book, but not right away; first you must read Rule. Then you won't be able to resist The Phantom Prince.

Election, Tom Perrotta, 1998

2004-12-29T21:45:00.000-06:00

I remember really liking the movie with Reese Witherspoon, and then I read and loved Little Children, and then Becky recommended the excellent Joe College, and I thought this one was a definite winner. I was disappointed. It was a quick little read, but I didn't think it got to the guts of Tracy's personality like Reese and the movie did. And the whole adultery subplot seemed extraneous instead of like a natural extension of the character like Matthew Broderick made it seem. Wow, I think this is the first time I've ever liked a movie more than the book it was based on. I wonder if it would have been different if I'd read the book first.

Oh: Why did Paul and Tammy's last name change from Warren in the book to Metzler in the movie?

100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, Melissa P., 2003

2004-12-29T21:40:00.000-06:00

Ugh. This was hailed as the diary of a beautiful teenage girl in Italy discovering her sexuality and writing about it all hot and wet. The book was billed as "shocking" and "revealing" and "true." None of these adjectives is correct.

For one thing, it's a "fictionalized memoir," meaning it's actually not true. For another, it's really pretty boring: Melissa fucks a bunch of people, including some people she doesn't want to fuck but later she's glad she did. She never actually regrets anything, and she's constantly showered with gifts of expensive lingerie or leather bodysuits, and she's always being blindfolded and fucking five guys, or screening calls from some forty-year-old dude that has set up an apartment for her specifically so they can fuck, or whatever. It's particularly banal when you remember the "fictionalized memoir" part, so it's really just some girl's fantasies, and, I mean, we all have fantasies. We don't all pretend they're publishable.

Plus, in the end, she falls in love and stops sleeping around. Not only is that way too Cinderella for one thing, and unfairly demonizes sex without love for another, but also, I mean, I'm sure she's found her lifelong monogamous mate at age 18. Raise your hand if you're skeptical.

Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents, Bob Greene, 2004

2004-12-29T21:04:00.000-06:00

Bob Greene was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune for thirty-one years until he got fired for fucking a teenage intern. This is weird, because while he didn't go around preaching family values or anything, he was one of those men of a certain age, nostalgic for the allegedly simpler times of the 1950s, marveling at technology, etc. I wasn't a huge fan of his column because it tended to be a bit melodramatic and sappy, but I loved his Hang Time: Days and Dreams with Michael Jordan and its sequel. Those books not only got inside Jordan's head but also let the reader see Bob's excitement and awe at getting to spend so much time with the most famous man on earth.

I wasn't sure I'd like this book, because I tend to be bored by politicians (as opposed to politics, by which I am not bored but am admittedly woefully ignorant). But Jeff is working his way through a series of books about U.S. presidents, so I had to keep up. I didn't think I'd finish it, but I did, and loved it.

Greene visits five presidents over a span of twenty years: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush the Elder. He makes a point of not discussing Watergate or pressing anyone for details of scandals or infamous bad decisions; he just wants to hang out with these dudes and see what their lives are like. He asks them whether they want their children to go into politics, what it was like when they first moved into the White House, whether and how they pray, who was President when they first became aware of the existence of such a thing, what it was like to vote for the first time, etc. It was a very readable and enjoyable book.

Just Checking: Scenes from the Life of an Obsessive-Compulsive, Emily Colas, 1998

2004-12-20T13:38:00.000-06:00

Consists of a series of vignettes about the author's struggle with her fear of disease. There's not a lot of self-scrutiny here; it's just anecdotes, and they're funny, and it's a very quick read. Recommended.

The Anybodies, N.E. Bode, 2004

2004-12-19T22:49:00.000-06:00

I make a point of not reading any reviews of a book before I post about it, but I can only imagine that everyone's writing about this one, "Could it be more Harry Potter?" It's about Fern, an elevenish kid that lives with her boring parents, the Drudgers, and she can't really relate to them. Doesn't feel like she belongs. And all throughout her childhood she occasionally seems to have mysterious magical powers, but her parents deny it and even get mad at her when she's insistent, so she learns to cover it up. Then one day, during a dinner party her parents are having for their boss, Mr. Beige, and his wife and son, the doorbell rings and it's her real father, Mr. Bone, who takes her away into a magical world.

It works, though. Yeah, it's very Harry, but I love Harry. And it's even more Inkheart, which I totally hated, but this takes only the good parts of Funke's monotonous, vapid book. Fern, like Inkheart's Mo, has the ability to make characters and objects from books real; Meggie's dad does it by reading them out, and Fern simply shakes the book until they fall out, but same difference, and there's similar fallout: people that get read/shaken out often want to go back in. Meggie's aunt lives in a house entirely filled with books and likes books more than people; so does Fern's grandmother. Both Meggie and Fern are motherless, although Fern doesn't know it until The Anybodies begins, of course, because she thinks Mrs. Drudge is her mom.

Much more importantly, Fern is a lovable character, not a boring one-dimensional one; Mr. Bone and Mrs. Appleplum are real, not cardboard Good Person cutouts; and this book is 276 exciting pages, not 534 dull ones. The intrusive narrator was a bit cute, but overall I liked her. And I loved Howard, the kid that was switched with Fern at birth; he'd always tried to get Mr. Bone organized and he liked math an' shit, so the Drudges seemed like the ideal family for him.

Another highlight was how Bode (actually a pseudonym, of course, for Julianna Baggott) throws in all kinds of literary references, mostly to children's books. The characters that Fern shakes out of books include Templeton from Charlotte's Web and some hobbits. Mrs. Appleplum gives Fern a test of sorts to see whether she's worthy of living in the book-filled boardinghouse; it involves serving her green eggs and ham and asking whether she's scared to drink from a bottle with a "Drink Me" tag, and the boardinghouse has Borrowers! And in the very beginning, Bode acknowledges her influences in this early passage, when Fern is riding away with Mr. Bone, who has just revealed himself to be not entirely trustworthy, and his friend Marty:

Here you could possibly decide that this is an altogether bad book. If these two have abducted Fern in any way, shape or form, then this should be a story with a lesson to girls about always being on guard and never straying from home. If Fern were a boy, this thought probably wouldn't cross your mind. What if Stuart Little had been a girl? We would have arrested her parents for allowing a young girl to set off alone in a motorcar, that's what! What if Harry Potter had been a girl, spirited away by a giant of a man with a magical umbrella? We'd have said, "No, no," and "Tsk, tsk." You may think that girls are better suited to stay in little houses on prairies and within the confines of secret gardens. Or at least working within a buddy system. Wendy couldn't have gone off with Peter alone, you know. Would you have put up with Violet Baudelaire being hunted, on her lonesome, by that man with the singular eyebrow? And there's always that foursome traipsing around in Narnia -- Susan, Lucy, Edmund, and Peter -- which is fine, because at least they're trying to stick together, protected by their older brother. But Fern isn't a boy. She's a girl and she isn't in a buddy system. She's alone. Yes, she's in a car with two men, one of whom was dressed like a woman moments ago -- evidence of trickery. But you'll just have to see it through.

Oh, and what happens to the Drudgers while Fern's gone is great. Oh! and at the end, just when I had decided the Great Realdo thing was lame...well, never you mind.

Because of Winn-Dixie, Kate DiCamillo, 2000

2004-12-18T15:18:00.000-06:00

This is the Newbery Honor-winning story of ten-year-old Opal, who moves to Florida with her preacher father, and has a hard time making friends until she meets a stray dog at the grocery store. She names him Winn-Dixie, and he trots around town beside her for the next few weeks, making it easy for her to meet people. There are a couple of kids her own age she befriends -- the bullying Dewberry boys and "pinch-faced" Amanda -- but most of the group Opal collects are adults, like the elderly librarian, the ex-con manager of the pet store, and a woman the Dewberry boys are convinced is a witch.

It was nicely done -- a tad heartwarming, but without being cheesy -- but it's ultimately too young for me, I guess. YA is about my lower limit for a realistic book. DiCamillo's most recent novel, the Newbery Award-winning The Tale of Despereaux, was more my speed because of its fantasy nature. I was glad to read this one, though, because it increased my respect for DiCamillo; it's hard to write such different stories in such different voices and win awards for both books. And I'd recommend Because of Winn-Dixie to a kid any time.

Slumming, Kristen D. Randle, 2003

2004-12-17T20:01:00.000-06:00

This is a YA novel about three best friends, two months away from high school graduation, that decide to each select a person to make over...someone who has unrealized potential. They don't specify that each person should be of the opposite sex, but they do say they're going to take the makeoverees to prom, so I guess it's implied.

Right away, alarms went off in my head at the whole makeover thing -- Jawbreaker? Ten Things I Hate About You? Grease? Can't Buy Me Love? The Breakfast Club? But it turns out to be not quite like that. For one thing, the three best friends -- Sam, Nikki and Alicia -- aren't the most popular kids in school and they're not looking to make over the geeks. Nikki actually does choose a conventional nerd, but she's the only one.

Alicia, the only member of the trio who needs some serious help herself, selects a makeover candidate that doesn't actually need help. In fact, we never really get to know Morgan; he appears to be the archetypical handsome rebel, but he's always kind to Alicia when she appears at his side to tell him that if he ever needs anything, he can just call. Alicia's all fucked up because her mother has abandoned the family, and it seems like she's picked Morgan because she thinks he can save her, not the other way around.

Sam's story is the most dramatic. He picks tough, bitchy, pierced, combat-boot-wearing Tia, and while she rebuffs him at first, she eventually lets her drive him to the state hospital where her younger brother lives. He has Down syndrome and his parents never visit, so Tia goes there every day after school to read to him and play with him. After she begins to trust Sam, she lets him in on a big disgusting secret about her family life, and Sam has to decide what to do about it.

The story alternates among the points of view of the three main characters, a device that can sometimes be irritating but in this case really works. The reader needs to be inside Sam's head because of the intensity of his story, but if we didn't see Alicia's and Nikki's perspectives on the boys they chose to make over, their stories would come off as teenage fluff, and that's really not the case. Well, they are compared to Sam's, but whatever.

What makes the story especially unusual is that it happens to three Mormon kids, the only ones in their school system. That's why Sam, Nikki and Alicia are best friends -- they grew up going to church together. The book doesn't focus on religion, but it's always in the background: Sam occasionally prays when he has to make a big decision; Nikki's brother gets his call to be a missionary; shit like that. The only thing that irked me was that because of this, the book refused to swear. Even words like "bitchy" or "pissed" were deleted from Tia's letters with substituted euphemisms in brackets. Still, there was no pro-organized religion message or anything like that. A good read.

Olive's Ocean, Kevin Henkes, 2003

2004-12-17T16:48:00.000-06:00

I learned about this one at the YA lit workshop I attended last week. The presenter described it as the story of Martha, beginning with the day her doorbell rings and it's the mother of a girl named Olive that had been in Martha's sixth-grade class. A month earlier, Olive had been killed in a car accident on her bike. Martha hadn't really known Olive, but Olive's mother hands her a sheet of paper torn from Olive's diary that says, among other things, that Olive hoped to get to know Martha better and be her friend.

That all sounded intriguing and that's why I checked out this book, but really it's much more the story of Martha's vacation that summer on Cape Cod, and how she bonds with her grandmother. It's also about how Martha likes a boy named Jimmy but his brother Tate likes her, and Jimmy does Something Awful and then she hates him. It's only a little about how Martha wants to do something for Olive's mother, so she fills a jar with ocean water to bring home for her. It was a nice little book, really more tween than YA, but it didn't particularly move me.

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters, Mark Dunn, 2001

2004-12-17T13:00:00.000-06:00

LoveloveLOVED this one. There's this island just off the East Coast that's named Nollop in tribute to Nevin Nollop, the creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." That sentence, of course, is used to test typewriters everywhere; it contains all 26 letters of the alphabet with minimal repetition. It has only 35 letters total.

The sentence appears at the top of a monument in Nollopton, and one day, the tile bearing the letter Z falls down. The island government take this to be a sign that Nevin Nollop has spoken from beyond the grave; they declare that Nollop clearly doesn't want the letter Z to be used any more, ever. Not in writing, not in speech. In fact, every piece of writing containing a Z must be destroyed. Almost everything is removed from the library and burned; only instrumental CDs and cassettes (without liner notes) and some picture books remain. Then, of course, another letter falls down. And another.

The real delight, though, is that the book takes place in a series of letters among a close-knit family. Ella, her parents, her Aunt Mittie and her cousin Tassie write to one another frequently, and they're very articulate and almost Victorian in their writing -- they have large vocabularies and complex sentence structure, yet I can't call their letters formal because they display such affection for one another. They're lovable people caught up in this crazy mess.

The letters they write, of course, stop including Zs early on, and as other letter-tiles fall, the notes they write exclude those characters as well. When I read the book description, I thought the forbidden characters would be replaced with asterisks or dashes, but that's also illegal. Instead, the members of this verbose family must resort to synonyms and alternate constructions (past tenses get hard once D falls) to continue writing to one another.

A group of Nollopites that are against the restriction convince the government's most flexible member to allow them a few months to come up with a sentence that beats Nollop's; this sentence must contain all 26 letters of the alphabet with such minimal repetition that the sentence itself is no more than 32 letters long. Various Nollopites try their best, but with limited success, until....something happened in the middle of the book that made me laugh aloud with joy. But never you mind. Read the book.

I've been way into nonfiction lately, but I was delighted to rediscover the joy of a damned good story. Don't miss this one.