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Interested in books that could help YAs make the jump to adult mainstream literature? You might want to take a look at at American Youth by Phil LaMarche.

Setting, both in time and place, is extremely important in American Youth. Teddy LeClare's family is part of a rural, hunting culture that feels itself being pushed out in the '80s by newcomers who are creating and moving into developments on property the locals once hunted and roamed on. Teddy's mother definitely feels that these people are different, not like her and her family. Complicating matters is an economic downturn that's left developments unfinished and meant that a lot of people have had to put their houses up for sale--for what good that does them.

At the beginning of the book, Teddy, who is about to start ninth grade at a regional high school, invites a couple of these new kids into his home. When these brothers find his place boring, he agrees to show them his gun, one of a number in the LeClare house, and even loads it when they ask him to. Teddy has been brought up by gun people. He knows never to point a gun, loaded or unloaded, at a human being. (I remember learning that, too.) But these new kids weren't brought up around guns. And when Teddy steps out of the room, one brother points the gun at the other and kills him.

This is a tragedy, of course. What elevates it to a nightmare is Mrs. LeClare's insistence that her son Teddy not tell anyone he loaded the gun. In the world in which she grew up, her only child did nothing wrong. But in the world that is being imposed on her by these newcomers, she fears the family will be held responsible for the accident and made to pay dearly.

The misery and guilt Teddy feels is compounded by the guilt over the lie and worry over whether or not he'll be caught, since his story conflicts with that of the surviving brother. He's ripe for the picking when a gang calling itself American Youth approaches him. Claiming to support "American" values and the rights of the individual over federal intrusion, the members are sympathetic to Teddy's plight.

At first.

One of the strengths of this book is that it isn't an anti-gun rant. It's not an apology for gun use, either. The gun owners are not romanticized, certainly, but treated with respect. This is a portrayal of a culture, a slice of life.

In terms of YA readers, American Youth is both familiar and unique. Most readers will be able to identify with the teenager struggling to get along, the clique (in this case a gang), and the problems with parents. What's unique is the setting, the culture within which the story takes place. I don't think there are a lot of YA books that go much beyond YA culture. This adult book does. It places what's going on in this poor boy's life within the bigger society. That may be what makes it an adult book instead of YA.

American Youth is well written, but not in a flashy way. There is no wise-ass YA voice, which can become very cliched when it isn't well done. There definitely is no humor. This is a dark tale about a dark period in a young person's life.

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I'm a fan of mysteries--especially British and Scandinavian ones. (Of the Americans, I do like Sara Paretsky and Laura Lippman.) I especially like listening to mysteries, because I can't race through them as I do when reading.

I have been waiting and waiting for Reginald Hill's Death Comes for the Fat Man to come out on audio and it finally popped up this week. Hooray! (If you haven't read Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series, I highly recommend it.) Only it was under its British title: The Death of Dalziel.

I hate to say it, but this time the Americans got it right. Death Comes for the Fat Man is an infinitely better title than The Death of Dalziel. (Dalziel is the Fat Man of the series--Chief Superintendent to Pascoe, who is the more intellectual of the two detectives.)

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This book was nothing that Nick Hornby didn't do better -- and is there anything sadder than reading a book narrated by a stand-up comedian and knowing you would find his act almost completely unfunny? - but I did find it fascinating in one regard. The author is black, and there are a few tiny clues that the main character is probably black too, but the book is written completely colorblind. Unless there are clues in the Britishisms that escape me, you would never know it was written by a black writer. That's not something you see very often in books written by black Americans.

I'm really curious as to whether that is genuinely Gayle's life -- he feels and is seen as just British, not black-and-British -- or whether that was a very deliberate choice on his part to project a better world, ala Boy Meets Boy. The utter thoroughness of the lack of physical descriptions seems deliberate. I didn't find anything about it on his website though, and none of the reviews I've seen mention race, not even the one on a "black issues" website.

Oh wait, I just found this profile, which makes it sound like the choice is both deliberate and a reflection of how Gayle perceives the world.

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Imagine you were thirty five years old and suddenly discovered you had an identical twin. That's what happened to Elyse Schein, a filmmaker living in Paris. Elyse had always known she was adopted, but when she decided to search for her birthmother, she learned instead she was born one of two identical twins.

Despite her initial shock upon discovering she's a twin, Elyse is thrilled to discover she has a sister. She's always felt someone or something was missing and learning she's one of two makes complete sense to her. When the adoption agency locates Elyse's twin sister, however, she--Paula Bernstein--is more ambivalent about being found.

Told in alternating first-person accounts, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited is a fascinating exploration of twinship, adoption, and identity. Elyse and Paula discover they share much in common, despite the fact they were raised separately without any knowledge of the other's existence. They both write about film, they love the same movies, they both suffered from depression in college. What the reader learns when considering Paula and Elyse's stories is how truly different they are from one other. Elyse is more adventurous and open than her twin. But, Elyse, who has suffered more loss (the death of her adoptive mother, for example), seems needier than Paula. Paula is cagier than Elyse and protective of the life she has forged as a journalist, wife, and mother. Their unique voices and personalities demonstrate that identical DNA at birth only means so much. Nature vs. nurture? More like nature and nurture.

Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited is also a detective story. Paula and Elyse not only attempt to learn more about their birthmother, but they also take on the adoption agency in the hopes of discovering why they were separated and adopted out to separate families. The truth--a psychological "study"--is difficult for Paula, Elyse, and the reader to accept.

Identical Strangers is a compelling read and one teens might enjoy given its necessary focus on identity, adoption, and family.
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For more on Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein's memoir, check out this episode of Talk of the Nation.

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The fourth volume of The Sharing Knife is finished.

In a way, spreading news like that is just mean.

Oh, and I was wrong: apprently volume 3 is titled Passage.

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The Sharing Knife: Legacy was lovely. Sweet and dryly funny and scary and sad and ultimately hopeful. And full of interesting possibilities still to be explored. I see the point of the irritating series title now: the books are as closely knit as the three books of The Lord of the Rings are. And I can just imagine how frustrated Lord of the Rings readers felt when the books were published in increments, though thankfully neither Beguilement nor Legacy end on terrible cliffhangers the way The Fellowship of the Rings and The Two Towers do.

I'm pretty sure there is going to be a third book; I can't remember now if I actually read it will be called Affinity or not, but I'm betting it will. The word kind of leapt out of the pages of Legacy. On the other hand, Google is not supporting this theory.

I read a number of complaints that Legacy is too depressing, but seeing as how my favorite Bujold book is Mirror Dance, which is sheer torture almost from beginning to end, I figured I could take almost anything she can dish out. Anyway, so is The Lord of the Rings depressing, if you read it that way. I never do.

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Sherman Alexie has a YA book coming out in September that is being chatted up in some circles. That's all I know on that subject.

However, Alexie's book Flight came out in April, and I do know that it's just wonderful. And it seems darn close to YA to me.

At the beginning of the story, Flight's fifteen-year-old main character is angst-ridden for very good reasons. He falls in with bad company and ends up dead. Then he starts traveling through time, always (well, with one exception) ending up in some confrontation between Native Americans and whites. Sometimes he's in the body of a white character, sometimes he's in the body of a Native American. (Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, uses the term Indian in the book and at his website.) In almost every case, someone is trying to force him to commit a violent act.

The book involves a young character who is definitely in search of self. It also takes acne seriously, which we tend to think of as the curse of the adolescent. Don't laugh. The book doesn't make light of it.

Why wasn't this published as YA? Because Alexie was publishing another YA book this year?

Sometimes I'm embarrassed by my need for novelty. I like YA, but sometimes you do see a lot of similar material published in that genre. For instance, you get your boarding school with a dead character books. You get your Holden Caulfield books. You get your girls with posse books. You get your books in the form of diaries.

While I was reading Flight, I was so excited because, at least as far as I was concerned, this was new ground.

Here's the positive aspect of publishing Flight for adults. Maybe that way it has the potential to become a cross-over book like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

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There is one more Miles book that simply must be written, because the friends who turned me on to the series have already named it: Ivan, You Idiot.

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What I found most interesting about Austenland was the way it expressed the ambivalence I suspect many romance readers feel about enjoying romance. Most romance readers who blog proudly proclaim that they have no trouble separating fantasy from reality; perhaps those who do wonder keep quieter about it.

Though I confess that I didn't actually get, in Austenland, why the main character felt that Pride and Prejudice had so negatively affected her. Her choices all seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I find myself wondering if it was difficult for Hale to decide whether to give the book a romantic happy ending or not. (I'm not going to say which she chose. Assuming she did indeed get to choose.)

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(Titularly connected to children's books, because Hale is a Newbery Honor winner. Not for this book, natch.)

Austenland surprised me, which surprises me. Austen has been recooked and warmed over by so many authors by now, many of whom don't seem to actually get her books. Hale actually knows her Austen, which is surprising in itself. But Austenland really doesn't have all that much to do with Austen; it's about romantic pretense, albeit in a funny, lighthearted way. I was reminded a bit of the story "Pilgramage to Earth," but I suppose naming it Sheckleyland wouldn't get nearly as many readers.

I don't want to say much more, since it might constitute spoilers.

(I have yet to see the infamous Colin-Firth-in-a-wet-shirt version of "Pride and Prejudice," but nonetheless, I love the dedication to him. The follow-up in the acknoweldgements is even better.)

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The most common thought that people hold, and I held it too, is that food was responsible for my weight gain. That is a belief that does not serve you, and in my mind now it is complete balderdash! Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight. Remember, thoughts are primary cause of everything, and the rest is effects from those thoughts. Think perfect thoughts and the result must be perfect weight.

— from The Secret

What good news, because Chloe has been packing it on the last couple of years, and now I can tell her that it is not the food that is responsible for her large tummy, but her thinking that food will cause weight gain that is really responsible. I’m sure this concept would be life-changing for her, if she weren’t, you know, a cat.

Here’s my problem with The Secret. When I find a statement that I can get behind, like this:

Get clear on the weight you want to be. Have a picture in your mind of what you will look like when you have become that perfect weight.

Then I’m hit with something that seems this side of crazy, like this:

Let go of all those limiting thoughts. Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can.

Come on! I see a benefit in the concept of focusing your energy on a positive instead of a negative — i.e., your target weight rather than the idea of losing weight — because you can make subtle and real changes by visualizing the end goal, or so I hear. With that picture of yourself in mind, maybe you’ll be less likely to grab that third Oreo (or fourth or fifth or sixth... don’t judge me!). But I can’t stand by the idea that food doesn’t contribute to weight gain. There are a lot of fat cats, fat lab mice, and ahem, fat people who will beg to differ on this concept.

The section about health raised similar problems for me. I think that it is possible to bring out healing powers from within, but I wouldn’t want to count on that instead of say, insulin for diabetes. I think that the more you focus on your bad health, the more depressed you get, and the worse you feel. But I don’t think that people are attracting cancer to them. Then there is this part, the most insane section of the book:

Often when people first hear this part of the Secret they recall events in history where masses of lives were lost, and they find it incomprehensible that so many people could have attracted themselves to the event. By the law of attraction, they had to be on the same frequency as the event. It doesn’t necessarily mean they thought of that exact event, but the frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event. If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have no control over outside circumstances, those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was going to put in a sarcastic comment about the World Trade Center or the Indonesian tsunami or the Holocaust, but I can’t even do it. I’m so irritated by that concept, that my blistering smart-ass response has been short-circuited.

Overall, The Secret was a great disappointment to me. There were some gems in there which focus on our own power to shape our thoughts and perspective, and by doing so, to shape our lives in real ways. There were useful messages about the power of positive thinking for our health, relationships, and ourselves. But for me, the good in this book was overshadowed by the bad and the totally insane.

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From The Children of Men by P.D. James:

"The toys have been burnt, except for the dolls, which have become for some half-demented women a substitute for children. The schools, long closed, have been boarded up or used as centres for adult education. The children's books have been systematically removed from our libraries."

No children is bad enough, but NO CHILDREN'S BOOKS???!!!

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“I learned from The Secret that what you focus on expands. I hoped that wasn’t going to be true of her ass.”

— Roland Gentry, from “You Pay Your Dues”

I missed the first buzz of Rhonda Byrne’s book, The Secret. But it wasn’t long before library patrons were asking for Secrets or The Secret to Life or That Book From Oprah, and I put my name on the hold list below three hundred other wisdom-seekers.

There may be a problem when you’re reading a book, and you’re already rolling your eyes at the dedication:

Dedicated to You

May The Secret bring you love and
joy for your entire existence.

That is my intention for you
and for the world.

I’m not going to enjoy this, am I? And it’s not that I hate self-help books. I’m a big fan of expanding self-knowledge and a big fan of books, so occasionally those two interests direct me to some interesting and useful publications. The writing in this one, though, was a little... much for me right from the start.

The overall premise of the book — and DVD — is that you attract to you that on which you focus. There is part of this concept that has value for me. I do think that as you focus on the negatives, you bring more negative energy in. I also think by focusing on the positive, that you bring positive energy in.

However, I don’t believe that if you focus on getting a bicycle for your birthday, that you’ll get a bike. I don’t believe that if you focus on a car, that you’ll get a car. I don’t believe that if you focus on George Clooney, you’ll get George Clooney. Because believe me, I’ve been focusing my energy there for years.

Oh I forgot — if it doesn’t work, then you’re just not believing in it strongly enough. Very clever.

Let’s get back to the good, just for today. There is value in understanding that your own thoughts control your experience of the world around you. Your positive or negative outlook will affect any given situation and/or your interpretation of that situation. I know people who always believe that they are the victims, and they do turn out to have bad luck more than I would otherwise expect. But neither are they able to look at the good aspect of anything that happens, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In my own life, I’ve been looking at my tendency to attract chaos with my focus on current chaos. I’ve been feeling so very disorganized in my household and my activities, and it does seem that the more it bothers me, the worse it gets. Part of the problem is in my own ambivalence on the issue. While I would like an organized home and mind, I also think that some of the creativity in my humor and my writing comes from the disorder of things. It’s what let’s me make the link from Phillipa Gregory’s books to Lunchables. Or Nobel Peace Prize winners to Pinter tea lights at Hallmark.

What I didn’t get from the book, in attracting like to like, is how to break the bad patterns of attraction. For instance, in my situation, do I just imagine that I’m an organized person and then I’m done? So who picks up the actual Happy Meal toys and tosses the rock tumbler kit?

The Secret has 1,486 reviews on Amazon, and they are all over the board. Some of you may have strong opinions as well. Let’s leave today for your positive or more general comments. Tomorrow I — and you — can let loose on some less stellar aspects of this provocative book.

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266 pages; reading and writing: 4 hours





Inconsolable by Marrit Ingamn. Seal Press, 2005 (978-1-58005-140-8) $14.95

I've been typing in quotes as I've read this book, and as I get towards the end of the book and the end of the book challenge and am increasingly tired and punchy, I keep finding much wiser, much funnier quotes. Too bad. I'm tired and punchy. Go to the end of this non-review and read the link to Marrit's "Kid Rock" piece and she can speak for herself. And if you've read Alterna-Dad, I think she would want you to know, she wrote "Kid Rock" first.

On to the book:

"I'd discovered from my own experiences socializing with other mothers that we could talk about just about anything other than mental illness. We could eat braised puppy and defecate on each other before the topic of PPD would come up."

Tell me about it.

This memoir about post-partum depression can be a harrowing book to read--perhaps especially for me, because I sorta know the author and I know she's not bullshitting us, this stuff really happened. But even if you discount 50% of it as exaggeration, it's still one scary book. So why read it? This is how Marrit explains why she wrote it:

"It meant something real to me to hear words put to this maelstrom of feeling. To have something crafted from madness implied a reason beyond it, a purposefulness I could regain somehow. Something inside me was capable of creation, of explication. If I felt the desire to obliterate myself, stronger than the urge to vomit, I could separate it from me by naming it. There was a self inside me that was not sick, that could reason."
"And I began to write."

That applies to us readers, too, especially those who have experienced post-partum depression. Words put to this maelstrom of feeling. Yes, please.

But no, no, no, it's not all about awfulness. Inconsolable is also about "trying to get out of this mothering thing not only alive, but with my personality intact." That's where the funny comes in, since Marrit's personality leads to situations like having some of her fifteen-month-old's first words be "butt plug." And not minding particularly.

Here's some general wisdom about depression:

"When you're depressed you reach a point when you cease to be a rational beingmaking a series of decisions; rather, you fluctuate violently between Success and Failure at every turn. Every moment is literally either a victory or a crisis. You are understimulating your child or smothering her. You are feeding her hazardous pesticides. That Infant Tylenol and Motrin might be destroying her liver. And so you are locked in a cycle of anxiety, which feeds you depression, which impairs your ability to cope, which increases your certainty that you are the shittiest person alive."

And here's some specific weltschmarz about dealing with a special needs kid:

"Our first task is to eliminate the latex from our environment. It's not unlike eliminating the nitrogen from the Earth's crust. Everything that is wholesome and good in this world is bad for my son. Soon we'll outfit him with protective silicone goggles and enclose him in a Lucite bubble. We'll have to wrap him with aluminum foil and poke him with a fork so he doesn't explode."

Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the description of different kinds of mothers. I especially liked Indie Mother: "Wears skirt made from a purse; carries purse made from a skirt. Eats the most parodoxical of foods--vegan queso. Births at home with a midwife; swaps placenta for black CDs. Children are named Bright Eyes and The Incredible Moses Leroy. My score: MEDIUM. I think about doing all this stuff. But then I don't actually do it."

Marrit then goes on to say, "Needless to say--I hope--you've realized that these categories are all actually bullshit." Doesn't mean we can't laugh.

You can see that this book skips around some and covers a lot. It's about having PPD. It's about having a kid with serious issues. It's about the many varities of craziness that comes with the mom territory, even without PPD and special needs. It's real. It's truths that needed to be spoken.

Want some more Marrit? You can find one of the most entertaining pieces from the book here. And check out her website. And buy her book! Now I'm going to bed.

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226 pages. reading and writing: 2 hours

Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. Simon & Schuster, 2007 (9778-1-4165-3507-2) $24.00

I think I'm going to have to buy this book, to ensure that it's available when my son is old enough to read it. A memoir by a man with savant syndrome, it is also (and more importantly from my point of view) a story about a person with high functioning autism who survives and thrives, finding meaningful work, friendship and love. The sections on what it's like to have synesthesia, and Tammet's relationship with numbers and words are interesting glimpses into an unusual brain; I loved his descriptive of why certain sections of the decimal represention Pi are beautiful to him. It makes the fact that he broke a record by learning Pi to over 22,000 places meaningful instead of pointless.

***

I'm going to be out of town for most of today, but am hoping I will get one more book in before my 48 hours are up.

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Bill Bryson has been our favorite read-aloud author (grown-up division) since the day I was looking for The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett and came across The Lost Continent instead. Evan just finished reading me The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which like many of Bryson's books, made me want to cry in between all the hysterical laughter.

"We had the tastiest baked goods at Barbara's Bake Shoppe; the meatiest, most face-smearing ribs and crispiest fried chicken at a restaurant called the Country Gentleman; the best junk food at a drive-in called George the Chilli King. (And the best farts afterwards; a George's chilli burger was gone in minutes, but the farts, it was said, went on forever.) We had our own department stores, restaurants, clothing stores, supermarkets, drugstores, florists, hardware stores, movie theaters, hamburger joints, you name it--every one of them the best of its kind."

"Well, actually, who could say if they were the best of their kind? To know that, you'd have had to visit thousands of other towns and cities across the nation and tasted their ice cream and chocolate pie and so on because every place was different then. That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else. If our commercial enterprises in Des Moines weren't the best, they were at least ours. At the very least, they all had things about them that made them interesting and different. (And they were the best.)"

Sob.

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What Would MacGyver Do? True Stories of Improvised Genius in Everyday Life, by Brendan Vaughan, is the perfect bathroom book. What? It is. Each story is short, light, and vaguely interesting.

It’s funny that the Amazon reviews are so extreme. (“Horribly Misleading!” “Smart and Fun!”) People loved it or hated it. But I think that it is a matter of what the reader was expecting. A few of the stories are cool. Many of the stories would be hard to call true MacGyver thinking, though some definitely fit the bill. The subtitle is far more honest about the content of the book.

I particularly liked “Sic Transit Rodentia,” which was not really a MacGyver tale, but is a well-written, funny story of man versus mouse.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“We got a mouse.”

His face went white, and he withdrew the book before I could write anything. He clicked on his walkie-talkie and spoke quietly into it.

The super materialized in seconds. I explained the situations, and he responded in a whisper. The building hadn’t had any mice in years, he said. Years. But he’d take care of it. In the meantime — and he practically passed his hand over my face to complete the Jedi mind trick — I didn’t see any mouse.

I also liked the stories of fixing the clutch with a knitting needle, using a sock to brew coffee, and making a bong out of a potato. What? It was interesting.

(Thanks to Emily Reads for pointing the book out.)

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I love books about nannies, because these people don’t write nanny books to say how great and attentive the parents are. No, people write nanny books because the parents are awful — to the children and to the nanny — and to make some cash. So whenever I read one of these books, I feel instantly better about myself as a mother. At least I’m not as bad as that one, I can safely say.

I liked The Nanny Diaries. I highly recommend it as a fictionalized funny/sad story of a nanny’s Manhattan experience. I liked White House Nannies. Again, recommended as a non-iction look at a nanny service operating in the power center of Washington, DC. I had high hopes for You’ll Never Nanny in This Town Again, by Suzanne Hansen, to cover the Hollywood version. Oh well.

Susie nannies for some important people, and she’s not afraid to name names. The lack of concern for the children’s privacy makes me uncomfortable, as the other books keep the identities under wraps. Susie is also a whiner, complaining and complaining about how she is treated, but never standing up for herself. She knew she was supposed to get a contract for her services, she didn’t, and it bit her in the butt. As she states many, many times throughout the book. She is very young and immature, and doesn’t do what she needs to do. I can understand the relationship of employer and employee, but all throughout the book I kept wishing for her to grow a spine and set some limits on the parents. While it seems the first nanny job was awful and they did take advantage of her, she didn’t help matters by being a doormat.

She learns some lessons from that experience as she moves on to nanny for Debra Winger and then Danny DeVito. They seem to have been good employers, though she finds things to complain about there too. Eventually she gives it up to — surprise! — write a book about the experience. Now that you’ve read a summary of her experience here, skip the book and read one of the other suggestions instead. Or tell me your favorite nanny book. (Is it the Melody Mayer series? You can tell me, because I read it too.)

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