The Zen Leaf

A Step From Heaven, by An Na

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Thistle

I am in a reading slump. A terrible one. I keep picking up books and saying never mind. After doing this with about 4 in a row, I decided I needed to do the old book roulette from the Random Reading Challenge and just read whatever it came up with. I have about 100 books on my TBR shelves near my computer, so I let Random.org give me a number. It came up with A Step From Heaven by An Na, a thin book that I need to read for the Printz Project anyway. I figured it was short, so I could get through it.

A Step From Heaven is about a girl named Young Ju who immigrates with her parents to America from Korea. The narrative goes from the time she is 4 until she’s about to leave for college. She deals with a lot of things that new immigrants deal with – language barrier, culture shock, etc – but she also has to live with an abusive father and a very dysfunctional family.

At first, I had a hard time reading this. Not only was I in a slump, but there were no dialog tags, no quote marks. It was all very vague, and I was not familiar with Korean words such as Apa and Ummha (Father and Mother). Add to that the fact that the book starts very impressionist because the memories come from a four-year-old’s sketchy point of view, and I was confused a lot. Slowly, though, as Young Ju grows older and her memory firms up, I began to understand the book more. Words spoken in English were given quotation marks, while those spoken in Korean (though written in the text in English, of course) never had any quotation marks. I realized the quotes were being used to distinguish which language was spoken, and it made much more sense to me after that.

This was a very well-written book. The childhood memories felt just like they were from a child, without being condescending or false or too detailed. I keenly felt the struggles that Young Ju went through. More than that, I became very concerned about the story of a side character – Young Ju’s younger brother, Joon Ho. His role in the book isn’t huge, but the glimpses of him made me ache with sadness and anger. He’s treated like a king as a child because he’s the firstborn boy, so he grows up spoiled and wasted. Na only gives us glances at this – rotting front teeth in a photograph, a little boy peeing in the street, a young teenager skipping school over and over – but it’s enough to know that that little boy, because he was treated as if he could do no wrong as a kid, was growing into a hoodlum. That sort of thing always makes me sad and very, very angry at parents. I hate when parents do that to their children. It’s worse than almost anything.

Ultimately, the book was hopeful, though. About 3/4ths of the way in, I wasn’t sure, and I’m not in the mood for super-depressing books right now, but I was satisfied with the end. It was well constructed. I’ve actually never read anything about Korean culture or Korean-American culture, so it was an interesting experience for me.

A Step From Heaven won the Printz Award in 2002. It is well-deserved. I’m glad I stuck through those difficult opening chapters.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged POC | Leave a comment

Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Thistle

I was born on 31 January 1979 – a Wednesday. I know it was a Wednesday, because the date is blue in my mind and Wednesdays are always blue.

Daniel Tammet has savant syndrome. He can recite the numbers of Pi to over 22,500 decimal places. He can learn a new language in a week. He also has Asperger’s – a particularly high functioning form of Asperger’s which allows him to communicate and interact socially, though it is difficult for him to do so at times. Lastly, he has synesthesia, a condition of the nervous system that causes cross-sensory perception. In his case, he sees numbers in color, size, shape, motion, texture, and more. This book is his memoir and a record of how he came from being an awkward, lonely child to an independent functioning adult.

I heard about this book years ago because of Tammet’s synesthesia. I have synesthesia myself, though my kind is far more common than his. They say about 20-25% of the population has it. I have color-grapheme synesthesia, which means that I see numbers and letters in color. I also sometimes periodically see music and people in color as well. The color patterns on numbers and letters have been there ever since I learned my ABCs and 123s. They are unchanging and automatic. They aren’t associative (meaning I don’t picture a specific color because of a specific item – like some people will associate the color red for A because in grade school A always has a red apple next to it). Ask me any word, and I’ll tell you what color it is. It’s a completely automatic response. 🙂

I didn’t know I had synesthesia until a few years ago. I knew I saw things in color (as did my brother and one of my sisters) and that others didn’t, but I thought it was something I could teach them. I was never embarrassed by it as other people with synesthesia say they are. I talked about it with anyone who would listen. My sister and I used to lay in bed at night and argue over what colors each of the letters were. We had very different alphabets. A few years back, an ex-boyfriend and I met up via MySpace, and he told me he’d learned about synesthesia in school. He remembered me trying to teach him to see in color. I was so excited to learn about this neurological condition! I’ve been soaking up books and information ever since. I could go on for pages and pages about my synesthetic experiences and about synesthesia in general, so I’m going to try to reign myself in here and just say that it was my interest in the subject that first led me to Mr. Tammet.

This book was so wonderful to read. At first it was hard – in the very first paragraph, Tammet describes 9s as blue, which is SO WRONG in my head. He kept talking about the various colors he sees things in, and it was jarring because my colors are so different from his. I had a hard time imagining it – my own colors kept interfering. Fortunately, and in some ways unfortunately, he didn’t spend a lot of time on the color portions of his synesthesia. The book turned out to be much more about Asperger’s and savant syndrome, which isn’t what I expected, but I nevertheless enjoyed.

I don’t know why, but I felt an automatic kinship for Tammet. Maybe it’s because his birthday and mine are both made up of a bunch of primes: his is 1/31/1979 – mine is 3/1/1979. Maybe it’s because he was born exactly 29 days before me (also a prime, for those who would notice). Maybe it’s because I was also a very socially awkward child and used some of the same coping techniques that he did. Not that I have a brain anywhere near as impressive as his, nor do I have the same social issues to the same degree as him. I am a mere fraction both ways. But I could see. I could feel what he was saying, and he just had so many interesting things to teach me! And not just about the way the brain works, but about the ability of people to overcome obstacles. Despite his difficulty connecting to people on an emotional level, Tammet found love with his then-partner, Neil. He began a web business that helped him earn an independent living. He learned to travel all over the world despite his anxiety. He can look people in the eye when he talks to them. He has overcome.

Tammet has his own Wikipedia page, where I found out that he has two other books published. One concentrates on savant syndrome, the other on his conversion from atheism to Christianity.

I really enjoyed this book. If you do read it, make sure to keep in mind the way that Tammet thinks and connects to the world. It’s very logical and factual rather than emotional, and often goes off on mini-tangents. Because I’m sort of a split-personality on the way I connect with things – sometimes in logical, cold ways and sometimes intensely emotional, but never both at the same time – I was able to read this and relate to it, but some might have trouble with the way he writes. I think it’s worth the read, though.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged LGBTQIA, nonfiction, psychology | 1 Comment

Amphigorey Too, by Edward Gorey

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Thistle

Amphigorey Too is the second collection of Edward Gorey graphic novel shorts. It includes 20 stories. While I didn’t enjoy Amphigorey Too as much as Amphigorey (the first collection), it did have some memorable stories in it. I’m going to focus my review on those four that I liked best.

The Evil Garden

How elegant! how choice! how gay!
To think one doesn’t have to pay.

In The Evil Garden, a family visits a free garden where each of them slowly meet a horrific fate, be that getting sucked feet first into a man-eating plant or strangled by snakes. There is evidence all around that others have also met their doom in this garden, like a stockinged foot sticking out from behind a rock. The whole story is told in simple, upbeat rhymes like the ones above, giving it a slightly malicious air as it contrasts with the context and pictures. This is Gorey at his best.

The Chinese Obelisks

A was an Author who went for a walk.

This is an alphabet story similar to the Gashlycrumb Tinies, except that it concentrates on one specific character (the Author) as he goes out on his walk and, um, meets a very peculiar fate. What really fascinated me about this story was the fact that it was included twice in the collection. The first rendition was not at all in Gorey’s normal style, but more in hasty sketches. When I got the second rendition (which was in Gorey’s style), I realized that the sketching wasn’t a stylistic thing – these actually were his sketches! It was really interesting to see what changed between the original and final product.

Leaves from a Mislaid Album

I can’t give you a quote from this one, because this story exists entirely in pictures. They are gorgeous, Goreyesque drawings made to mimic old fashioned photographs, except with the author’s usual trademark gothness to them. I love them!

The Inanimate Tragedy

“Death and Destruction!” said the Pins and Needles. “Destruction and Debauchery!”

This is by far my favorite story in the collection. It just appealed to my sense of humor. It involves two buttons, marbles, a knotted string, a thumbtack, and a fountain pen tip. Between these characters, there is intrigue, secrets, fighting, destruction, murder (both purposely-done and accidental), mistaken identity, and suicide. Oh yes. And the Pins and Needles are there to cheer the fellows on. I laughed the whole time. Brilliant.

So there. It’s Gorey. If you like his weird sense of humor, you’ll probably like this book. If not…sad!! 😀 I’m just kidding. I do love Gorey, and am slowly working my way through all the Amphigorey books (there are four as far as I know, and I own all four of them).

Posted in 2009, Adult, Visual | Tagged circus horror, collection, speculative | Leave a comment

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on November 29, 2009 by Thistle

I did it! I conquered my nemesis book: Ada! It only took me a decade to get through it, but in the end – Nabokov, I sunk your battleship!!!!!

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit too enthusiastic, especially for a book that in the end, I didn’t even like. In fact, the main thing I learned from this experience is that I don’t really like Nabokov’s later books. I love his earlier ones, but as his career advanced, he became very arrogant about his genius (and to be fair, the man was brilliant – he had a reason to be arrogant!), and started sacrificing story to form. The book published directly after Ada is called Transparent Things, and I hated that one. I only disliked Ada. But still, after a decade of trying, I’m so happy to finish. Until this past summer, I’d never gotten past page 2. This summer, I made it through 30 pages before giving up. But I was determined this time, and rammed through all 600 pages of it…and believe me, three weeks to read this book is definitely ramming speed!

So what’s Ada about, you ask? Well, in brief, it’s about the lifelong love affair between Ada and Van Veen, who are supposedly cousins but in actuality siblings. This love affair starts when they are 12 and 14 years old, respectively, and goes until their mutual death.

Awhile back, my brother and I were talking about this book. It’s one of his favorites of Nabokov’s. He hadn’t realized I hadn’t finished it when we were talking, and accidentally gave away the ending…except the ending that he gave me actually didn’t happen in the book. What he said to me was, “At first it just seems like a bunch of people all having sex with each other, until eventually you realize they’re all the same person.” (paraphrased) I was thinking this would be some surreal sort of exploration of existence or perhaps of mental illness, and that really intrigued me. Eventually I would discover that the whole incestuous family only existed in the mind of one character (probably Ada’s or Van’s)!

However, nothing like that happens. I kept waiting and waiting, looking for clues along the way that would point out the eventual ziplining into a single entity. I even read through the footnotes (written by Vladimir Nabokov’s anagrammatic alter-ego, Vivian Darkbloom) and the Wikipedia article looking for any hint of what William told me. Nothing. I thought I’d been spoiled…but apparently not. I’ve got an email out to my brother asking what the heck he was talking about!!

So yeah. I didn’t like the book all that much, especially when it didn’t even redeem itself with a surreal exploration of existence. It felt excessive, especially starting in Part 2 (of 5), and there were sections that were purposely almost unreadable with their difficulty. I’m sure 95% of the book went straight over my head, and I’m not an unintelligent girl. For example, Wikipedia explained to me that this all takes place in an alternate history where Russia was one of the main settlers of North America. I didn’t catch that at all. This is the sort of book that would have been best read over an entire semester with a professor who had studied it laboriously. Maybe I would have liked it then?

Observe, for instance, the following passage:

Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!) was banned all over the world, its very name having become a “dirty word” among upper-upper-class families (in the British and Brazilian sense) to which the Veens and Durmanovs happened to belong, and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important “utilities”–telephones, motors–what else?–well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker with lolling tongues, breathing faster than gundogs (for it’s quite a long sentence), such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires (Prince Zemski had one for every bed of his harem of schoolgirls) were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved “minirechi” (“talking minarets”) of a secret make.

That, btw, is the first sentence of Chapter 24, Part 1. I chose the passage not for its particular difficulty – there are passages far more tedious than that – but by randomly opening the book to a page and choosing the first thing that came up. If you can believe it, that longwindedness (which in essence says “Van was sad things such as tape recorders were illegal and therefore no longer manufactured”) is one of the easier-to-understand passages of the book. The first 6 chapters are about 10 times that dense (hence why I’d never gotten too far in the book before).

Nabokov is, no doubt, a certified genius. He does amazing things with words, and in three languages, no less! Sadly, though, the story of this book was, as it seems to be in all the later works of his that I’ve read, pointless. Part of me is a bit irritated that I sat through the whole thing (especially as I kept searching for Ada and Van to become one person). I didn’t get anything out of it, beyond the satisfaction of having finished it. Of course, at the same time, I’m a bit at a loss now that it’s over. I’ve had a nemesis book so long, it feels weird to no longer have one. In the words of my dear Stiffs, Incorporated:

An end to enemy – I’ve no identity.

Without Ada, who am I now? How should I define myself? I need a new nemesis.

So…um, there’s not much else that I can say. I doubt anyone else is going to read this book, and I honestly wouldn’t recommend it. There are plenty of Nabokov books far greater than Ada. I’m just happy I conquered this book, even if I didn’t understand most of it.

Nabokov, though I sunk your battleship, I still admit defeat. I bow to your superiority.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged classics | Leave a comment

Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr

Posted on November 23, 2009 by Thistle

Aislinn has always seen fairies, but she can’t let them know. These are not fairytale fairies, but scary, monstrous, mischievous creatures that Aislinn is terrified of. And then two begin to follow her…

Okay, so I have issues with fairies in books. They always end up being these absolutely perfect, beautiful creatures who no one can resist. Think Tithe or Wings. Absolutely ridiculous. I hate it. I complained about it in both of those reviews. So while I’ve been looking forward to Wicked Lovely for a very long time, I’ve also been worried. Worried that the fairies would be the same boring old perfect. Worried that the humans would either be completely negligible like in Wings or unadmirable like in Tithe. I ought not to have worried. This book was beautiful.

The fairies weren’t perfect. They weren’t even beautiful most of the time! Even the summer king, at full beauty brightness, needed manipulation to get people to love him! And then Aislinn still resists! Here is a strong, female protagonist who can resist, except when drugged (and that doesn’t count), the beautiful fairy! I love it!

I love just about everything about this book. I love Aislinn, who is strong and decisive and yet still scared and vulnerable at times. I love Seth, her good friend, who despite his scruffy-like appearance (long hair, tattoos, piercings all over the place) is a really good role model. He’s responsible and honest and kind. Totally stereotype-breaking, and a stereotype that I love to have broken! I loved that the situation between Aislinn and the summer king, Keenan, was completely unpreventable, and yet Aislinn still made the best of it. I’m really looking forward to the next two books now.

The only negative things I can think of were a few places where the dialog needed to be cleaned up. Some of it was awkward and twisted off in weird directions, not very naturally. Otherwise, I loved the execution, I loved the cat-and-mouse game, I loved the way I couldn’t figure out how everything was going to end the whole time. And best: I loved that all my expectations about this YA fairy story – flippant beautiful fairies, shallow pointless humans, etc – were proven wrong.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged speculative | 2 Comments

Protected: Clubbing, by Andi Watson

Posted on November 20, 2009 by Thistle

Posted in 2009, Visual, Young Adult | Tagged speculative, WTF moments | Enter your password to view comments.

Lock and Key, by Sarah Dessen

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Thistle

When Ruby’s mother abandons her, Ruby is sent to live with her older sister Cora, who she hasn’t seen in ten years. Life changes for her so drastically she feels like she must be dreaming. Whereas once she lived in squalor, dodging creditors, running roaches out of the house, getting high with her “friends,” she now lives in a million-dollar house and goes to a private prep school. More than anything, she wishes she could leave and go back to that independent life. But as she comes to learn more about the people around her and information about her past is revealed to her, she becomes less and less sure of her identity, and more sure who she can trust. The problem is, once she begins to reach out to others, it’s their turn to pull away.

Confession: Before reading this book, I’d always thought Sarah Dessen was pure fluff. The covers look like fluff, like chic-lit for teenage girls. I grabbed this book on a whim at ALA because Dessen was signing books, they were at a reduced price ($5), and the line was very short (it was the end of her signing time). I’d heard somewhere that Dessen wrote like Deb Caletti, which to me is a high recommendation, as Caletti is one of the most talented modern authors I know and I love her books. But still, I worried. The books look like fluff.

Random.org chose this book for me from off my shelves as part of the Random Reading Challenge. At first, when I began reading, I didn’t think I was going to make it through. That same day I’d read through the first 100 pages of Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah before deciding I didn’t care enough about the book to read another 400 pages of it, and Lock and Key had a lot of similar plotline elements. Ruby’s mother was neglectful even before abandoning her, and Ruby was therefore simultaneously responsible (she kept doing her mother’s night job for her) and immature (all the drugs and drinking). So I almost gave up. I didn’t want to read any more on that subject (Firefly Lane had expounded on a similar situation for all those 100 pages…). I knew I was in a bit of a slump, though, so I put it aside and tried it again the next day.

As it turns out, the book was really good, and just like that recommendation, the story was similar to Deb Caletti’s in style. It talked about real issues, in a real way. It didn’t skirt the truth, but it didn’t have to stick the reader’s faces into it, either. It was tactful. It was the sort of book that, while it dealt with teenagers, could be read by adults from a completely different angle. It transcended its genre. By the end, I cared about all the characters, even the no-good mother.

The book isn’t fast-paced, and it’s very character driven instead of plot oriented, but even so, I read almost all of it in a single day. I stayed up late to finish. I didn’t have to – it’s not like the book pushed me the way 13 Reasons Why or The Knife of Never Letting Go did – but I wanted to. Dessen made their world unfold for me, and I was completely sucked into it.

I can’t say how this compares to other Dessen books as it’s my first, but I can say this won’t be my last. It’s an excellent book, and I’m glad I gave it a chance.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | 1 Comment

The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa

Posted on November 10, 2009 by Thistle

The Professor was once a brilliant mathematician, but an accident in 1975 left his short-term memory damaged. While he is able to clearly remember events prior to the accident, his memories since then are limited to the past 80 minutes. The Housekeeper is the tenth housekeeper the Professor’s sister-in-law has hired to care for him. She comes to work for him in 1992, and soon he’s insisting she bring along her ten year old son, whom he nicknames Root because of the square root shape of his head.

This is a very quiet book, so elegant and beautifully written. I’ve seen movies before about this sort of memory loss (Momento, 50 First Dates, etc), but I’ve never seen the subject handled with this much care and precision. The Professor keeps his life afloat the best he can by writing messages to himself and clipping them all over his clothes. In the most prominent area: “My memory lasts only eighty minutes.”

Ogawa makes us see, through the eyes of this housekeeper, how difficult life is for the Professor. All he has left in the world is math, which he resorts to whenever he is nervous or uncomfortable. He opens every day by asking the Housekeeper not who she is, but for her shoe size or her birth weight or her telephone number. He finds relationships between seemingly random numbers, and is always teaching the Housekeeper and Root about math. Or baseball. Both the Professor and Root share a love for baseball, although Root avoids mentioning that the Professor’s favorite player was transferred to a new team after the accident and later retired altogether. Learning such things upsets the Professor – it reminds him how much time he’s lost. Though he knows his memory only lasts 80 minutes, he has no idea how many years has passed since that was true.

I liked math in school, so it was fun to take the little problems the Professor presented to Root and figure them out before reading the solutions. When it got to the more complicated ideas, I just read along and didn’t try to understand so much. You don’t need to have a love of math to love this book, but the Professor does take math and turn it into something beautiful and poetic. Even if you don’t understand, you can see the beauty in it. Ogawa also seems to have done a lot of research on the subject. I’m not a mathematician, and maybe a real mathematician would feel differently, but I thought this book treated the subject with respect. You don’t see that very often when math and mathematicians are displayed in fiction.

One of the things I loved about this book was that the characters were nameless. Other than Root’s nickname, none of them had names. They were just the Professor, the Housekeeper, the Widow (the Professor’s sister in law), and Root. Their names didn’t matter. They could have been any people in any time in any country. Their story, just like math, is universal, and that’s exactly how this was written. It was gorgeous.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is translated from the Japanese. Normally I have a rough time with translations because a lot of the original written elegance is lost, but not so in this book. The translator, Stephen Snyder, does a marvelous job of maintaining the poetic feel that I’m sure was intended in the original. I had no complaints at all about that. Being a translation didn’t detract from the original.

My favorite lines came from early in the book, from the Professor:

Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.

This quote helped me to understand how difficult this life was for the Professor. Here was a man who had gone on uncharted expeditions and solved mathematical equations that had never been solved before. Now, because of his short memory window, he could only do 80 minutes of work at a time. He spent his days solving problems for contests in math journals, somehow adjusting for his memory, winning prizes more often than not. It was a great example of his willpower and adaptability, to be able to solve those problems, and yet, to him, this is no accomplishment – the solutions were already known by someone else, and he no longer remembered them the next day anyway. The contests were simply a way of filling his time. The numbers comforted him in his loss.

Posted in 2009, Adult, Prose | Tagged Asia, comfort, favorite, POC, psychology, translation | 2 Comments

Life As We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Thistle

When an asteroid knocks the moon out of orbit, the world goes crazy. The tides change. Volcanoes erupt that had never been active before. Electricity is no longer dependable. All commerce ceases. One family’s struggle to remain alive through this catastrophe is chronicled in 15-year-old Miranda’s journal.

I’m in two minds about this book, so I’ll start with the negative and move on to the good things afterwards. First let me tell you that I’m not sure I was in the right mood to read this. With all the stress involved in writing my own YA occult thriller, I would have done better with a comfy, quiet book. Reading it really stressed me out, so I was a bit turned off of it while I read. I’m sure that influenced the way I viewed it. It’s possible I would have loved it to pieces had I been in a different place of my life.

I think my biggest problem with the book was the diary format. I couldn’t buy it. It was like the Blair Witch Project – it’s not very realistic that she would have kept the camera rolling as she ran through the woods from a ghost, you know? Sure, the movie was creepy and all, and I’m not making fun of it, but of course the set up involves a serious suspension of disbelief and not everyone has it in them to suspend that much. The diary in this book felt the same way. Miranda would relate pages and pages of full dialog, both before and after the catastrophe. She put in a bunch of stuff that I can’t imagine anyone putting in a journal. Sometimes she was writing as major, horrifying events were happening, while she was dealing with them. Absolutely impossible. So I had a hard time suspending my disbelief. I’ve actually heard that the second book in the series is a third person account of these events and I honestly think I will like that far more. I think it will feel more honest to me, and I kind of wish this had been written that way instead of by diary entries. I think in the end it would have been more powerful for me.

Also, I had a hard time believing some of the things that happen. Or didn’t happen, to be more precise. I won’t debate about the moon and how much influence it has on our weather patterns. I don’t know enough science for that. But I will debate the reactions of people in this book. For example, not once in 10 months is the family ever in any danger of people raiding their house for food. When people die, others in the town let the family of that person have first grabs of the house. I don’t believe it. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I believe families would do everything they could to survive, and that includes stealing other peoples’ food, killing for food, etc. Maybe it’s just because I recently read In a Perfect World, which for all its faults generally had a fairly realistic portrait of the way people act when society falls apart. I would have believed this book more had I seen more of the violence that would have naturally resulted from this sort of situation.

So those are my main issues. There were good things, too. Especially in the last third of the book, I really started to care about the characters. I didn’t want them to die. I felt terrible when anyone died, minor or major character. I could feel the spiral of disintegration. I stopped caring so much about the things above that I said irritated me, forgot that I was reading a diary, and really felt the horror of what was happening to this family. I even dreamed about the end, about finding solutions to counteract the moon’s nearness (my dreams involved very strong magnets buried deep in places around the world, backwards so that they pushed backwards against the moon’s force, which somehow created balance…).

It was family that I really felt strongly. One of the worst things in this book involved Miranda’s father. This might be a minor spoiler, but it’s really not anything huge. Miranda’s parents are divorced. Her dad is remarried and his wife is pregnant when the moon gets too close to Earth. She’s frantic about her parents and wants to drive to Colorado to find them. Miranda’s family lives in Pennsylvania. Dad and his wife come to visit them for a week on their way to Colorado, and Dad is devastated when he leaves. He cries and his wife drives the car. They all know they’ll probably never see each other again. Miranda’s brother, Matt, is extremely angry at Dad because he left them there.

That really made me think. I mean, if his wife wasn’t pregnant, I think the choice would have been easy – he may love his wife, but he should stay to take care of his children and make sure they survive. But she’s pregnant with his child, too, so where should he go? He can’t expect his wife to abandon her family, either. It’s a tough choice, and it really made me think a lot about divorce and remarriages and priorities. I don’t know that I have an answer.

I loved the end. Technically, it was a bit deus ex machina, but in my present mood, something life-affirming was exactly what I needed. I’m not saying everything ends up peachy roses and the moon goes back where it belongs or anything, but I’m glad it didn’t end with, say, Miranda’s diary simply stopping because you know she’s died. I don’t think I could have taken that right now.

I will look forward to reading the sequel, which I think I will like more than this one. But I won’t read it right away. I think I need to take a break and read something quiet.

Posted in 2009, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged dream-invader, speculative | Leave a comment

Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins

Posted on November 3, 2009 by Thistle

Before I describe the plot of this book, I want to say that it sounds really, really cheesy when summarized. Please bear with me. I’ll keep it short.

Gregor and his two-year-old sister, Boots (nickname), are doing laundry in their apartment complex’s basement when they investigate an air draft coming through a grate and end up falling hundreds of feet into the Underland. The Underland is an underground world filled with giant cockroaches, spiders, and rats, as well as humans who are so pale they’re translucent. Because of a prophecy written by the original explorer who brought humans to the Underland hundreds of years ago, the rats begin a war against the rest of the creatures, and Gregor finds himself leading a quest to try to save their world.

Okay. Yeah. Yes, it sounds cheesy. When Morrigan picked this book for me to read for our family book club, I was not particularly happy. Giant rats and cockroaches? Underground society? Mm. Sounded too much like a sewer-version of Narnia to me, and I didn’t like Narnia to start with. The only thing this book had going for it was the author: Suzanne Collins, who wrote The Hunger Games, which I loved.

As it turned out, though, this book was far from cheesy. Actually, it was quite wonderful, much different than I expected. Despite the fact that many of the characters are non-human, I felt the same toward them as I did the human characters. They had voices and personalities. And Collins tackled so many issues in this book:

She advocated peace whenever possible, fighting only in defense or to save those we love from harm.
She talked about loyalty and trust.
She touched on the longlasting grief caused in children who have lost parents, as well as the importance of family in general.
She addressed understanding others in so many different ways. Gregor was constantly reevaluating the way he saw people (and creatures) based on learning more about them. People he judged badly at one point, he came to understand by the end of the book, even if he never particularly liked them.
Beyond that, Gregor was the character who most tried to understand the non-humans, and pushed everyone else to cooperate and understand each other as well. He was almost a poster-boy against discrimination and prejudice.
As well as understanding, there were lessons about forgiveness and mercy.
Lastly, Collins pushed for hope. Hope for harmonious and cooperative living, hope for peace in the Underland, hope for the lives in the Overland (our world).

I loved it. I can’t say it was without problems – there were a few parts that felt a little forced, as if she directed the plot just a little too heavily – but for the most part, it ran smoothly. It was easy to read in snatches in between writing my NaNo book. Not too difficult to put down, but very easy to pick back up, too. The ending is not a cliffhanger even though it’s the first book in a series – it could be read as a standalone book. That’s a big plus for me.

I do recommend this book, especially if you like middle-grade fiction. I’ve read quite a bit of middle-grade fiction in the last year, and this has been one of my favorites. Plus, it just has so many good messages, so many good things I’d want my kids to learn, that I would have no trouble giving it to younger readers. I’m happy that Morrigan has read the whole series. I used to suspect they were violent books, but they aren’t. I won’t claim there is no violence at all, but none of it is gratuitous, and it is both tactfully handled by the author and regretted by most of the characters.

Posted in 2009, Children's, Prose | Tagged memorable, speculative | 4 Comments