Hold Still by Nina LaCour
My coworker, Anna, has an adorable habit of scooping up my current read, flipping to a random page, and reading to me. Sometimes this gets her hooked and she decides to read the whole book (How We Decide). Sometimes she is indifferent (Malice) and sometimes a serious-subject book like Hold Still is lambasted for its immediately noticable poor writing and trite dialog.
Hold Still is a finalist for the 2010 William C. Morris YA Debut Award.
How that happened, I don’t know. I suppose if you raved all over Wintergirls, you would rave all over Hold Still. They are both pretentious YA novels attempting to tackle a melodramatic teen problem - suicide, in this case, anorexia in the former. In my opinion the writing damns them both.
Hold Still assumes by saying a whole lot of nothing, it’s really deep stuff. Like the narrators inability to speak signifies the depth of her loss. If she was going for In Our Time young adult style, I wasn’t feeling it.
The dialogue is pretty bad overall:
Someone leans against the lockers next to me. Dylan. Her hair is even messier up close. Strands stick out all around her face.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hi.”
She stares at me for so long that I start to wonder if I look weird, if there’s ink on my forehead of something. Then she gives me a smile that’s hard to pin down. It’s sort of amused, but not in a bad way. Before she leaves, she rummages in the bag she’s carrying and slams her lock onto the empty locker next to mine. She stomps away and I’m alone (p 25).
If you’ve read it and have a different or confirming opinion, I’d love to hear. My big beef is with the delivery. Not the message. Certainly, teen problems demand attention. I just don’t believe these two books should be representing the best in YA. What book would you choose?
The Problem with the Puddles by Kate Feiffer
Baby got in, she looked up at the sky and saw the dog-shaped cloud. It lifted its back leg. Sure enough, rain fell on the Puddles (p 3).
Feiffer’s debut novel is adorable, lovable, deplorable. No. Not deplorable, though there is a deplorable character.
Rain clouds stop for the Puddles. Could it be because Mr. and Mrs. cannot agree? They agree to disagree. They disagree so fervently that decision-making often frustrates their two children, Baby and Tom. When the Puddles leave for the city without their dogs (big Sally and Little Sally, they couldn’t agree on a dog), a chain of disagreements set in motion a chain of events that end in the reader falling in love with this quirky family and their dogs. A fantastic transitional reader I would give to those who enjoy Junie B. and Clementine.
I wish I lived next door to the Puddles. A strong contender for the Newbery. I wish there was a new author award for children’s literature, similar to the William C. Morris award.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
I’m very late to the party on this one, but a coworker’s enthusiasm pushed the book to the front of my To Be Read pile. If you want a hint of the plot, watch the trailer.
or read the New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani. I happen to agree with much of what it says. Ruth never sat well with me. I attributed her obsession with Susie to a crush that never ended due to Susie’s death. When Susie enters Ruth’s body, I was jolted. Now we were entering fantasy land, though her actions, once human again, were understandable.
The allure for me was the nature in which Sebold tackled Susie’s killer (though his demise was a little hard to believe, especially after all the build up via Hal, the police and Harvey’s brazen return to the Salmon residence). Some of it was tedious reading (some of the Salmon family past was excessive), but overall, a decent read.
I’m sure to make my way to the theater to see Jackson’s vision, though I have mixed feelings about the absence of a rape/murder scene. Early reviews applaud this absence (Good. Too many filmmakers revel in horror. The Sun) and others balk (The screen version, by contrast, is so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation. The Guardian).
Sprout by Dale Peck
Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, and their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happen to’ve been born out of wedlock. As for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendageswere catalogued by a list of nicknames so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would’ve wished he’d been born as smooth as a Ken doll (p 50).
This is a complex book. The narrator is aware of his reader and frequently addresses him/her directly. He is gay. His mother recently died and his father is now alcoholic. He has just moved to rural Kansas. But he never bogs us down in his sobering reality (though some passages were tedious reading). He seems inherently hopeful.
I’ve never lived in the south or in a rural area. Currently living in NJ, I can’t exactly see myself recommending this to one of our teens, except for its GLBTQ theme, even though it’s a book about so much more. Even as the narrator tries to force that issue into the back seat. It really is integral. I can’t say I loved this book but I did enjoy most of it. A little heavy-handed meta cognition though.
SLOB by Ellen Potter
SLOB is the story of twelve-year-old Owen Birnbaum, the fattest kid in school. The reasons behind Owen’s eating disorder are revealed as Owen: attempts to build Nemesis (a device that will capture the events of the past), suffers through humiliation after humiliation at the hands of a cruel gym teacher, and as Owen tracks down a thief who takes his lunch time Oreo snack.
The prose often struck me as insightful. This passage, on page 29, jolted me:
Everyone thinks they know the fat kid. We’re so obvious. Our embarrassing secret is out there for everyone to see, spilling over our belts, flapping under our chins, stretching the seams of our jeans.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have other secrets that you can’t see.
I also enjoyed the occasional clever metaphor: “She may not be supersmart, but if you stick her in a crowd of people, she just pops, like a zebra-stripped jeep in a shopping mall parking lot” (p 80).
The ending kept me guessing. It’s not often you read about a boy with an eating disorder but this is an exception read. I’m sure it will be in the run for a Printz (though I’m pulling for The Devil’s Paintbox). I believe it also qualifies for the Newbery.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days by Jeff Kinney
Kinney does it again. This time our admittedly lazy hero, Greg, must mend fences with Rowley (his best friend), work off a debt to Rowley’s dad, go above and beyond to attract the attention of the community pool life guard, and become famous by creating a new comic strip for the local newspaper. All this leads to a boring vacation with Rowley’s family, a failed attempt at a V.I.P. Lawn service company, and no girlfriend or fame.
But Greg remains optimistic through it all. Incredulous at the adults around him and baffeled by their misunderstanding of his genius, he holds himself accountable for nothing and is seemingly without empathy. Of course, this results in one seriously funny book.
Greg has been holding on to a library book for a little too long. This is what he imagines will happen if he returns it.
The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd
I picked this one up after reading Book Envy’s review. Her summary is spot on and I agree with her assessment so check that out, then continue.
There was a lot of good description:
Let it all out. If only I could. Letting it all out would involve me exploding like a firework, a beautiful riot of rainbow sparks bouncing around the car and lighting up the entire lot. Everyone would look over to see what was going on, and one by one they would understand everything I had inside me (p 132).
But it was occasionally over-written. I often believe YA novels could be better if they were shortened by half.
In addition to BookEnvy’s comments, I found Dade’s relationship with Pablo fascinating. A few years ago, a former high school classmate of mine whom had since come out, said, “I hooked up with a lot of guys from school. In the baseball dugout. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you their names.”
I don’t know if I was satisfied with the ending. Without giving anything away, I would’ve liked to know what could have happened if things ended differently for Pablo.
Those who enjoy Alex Sanchez’s novels will like The Vast Fields of Ordinary. [On a side note, I am totally uninformed when it comes to MySpace music and the newfangled stuff kids are listening to these days to define themselves.]
The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane
In the 1960s a guy named J.C. Martin made a living catching the great Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball. Doug Mirabelli always caught Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball for the Red Sox. They were called “personal catchers.” Catching a knuckleball was so difficult and so unpleasant for most regular catchers that if you could do it reasonably well (nobody did it really well), that one skill could keep you on the team. The personal catcher would sit on the bench until the knuckleballer took the mound, and then he and his special floppy mitt would enter the game. It was an odd kind of intimacy, to be joined together like that, a weird baseball marriage (p 74-75).
How can I express how much I enjoyed this book? It blended many of the themes present in several of this year’s best children’s books (see OCL’s Mock Newbery List): death and abandonment, grief and alienation, discrimination and friendship. Yet none of these drowned the story and baseball tied it all together.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Baseball is what helps Molly hold herself together. It helps her come to terms with her father’s death and to discover herself. It is how she codified life:
Molly meanwhile was fantasizing about a scoring system not for baseball but for life. If she said something stupid, if she forgot to bring home her science book – those would be errors. If her mother came through for her and a third of the time – that sounded about right – her batting average would be .333. Back when her locked has been defaces and Lonnie came along and rescued her, he could have been credited with a save” (p 147).
The setting – Buffalo, NY – was a perfect choice. Like Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, whose wintry and bleak Syracuse, NY setting gave the perfect backdrop to Melinda’s troubles, the gloomy Buffalo is “like Siberia, a place you’d go to disappear, or to be punished” (p 115) to this story. It supports Molly’s suspicions that her father’s job was “taking the starch out of him” (p 37) and that her mother was like a flower withering in such grey desolation.
My father, like Molly’s, was a reporter for the local newspaper, covering equally mundane and repetitious stories. While scavenging to salvage some of her father’s memorabilia, Molly stumbles across one of her father’s notepads. At first hopefully it will contain some sort of explanation for his mysterious death, she finds it blank and instead stages a mock interview with her father (p 55). I thought this and all the other little steps Molly took toward forgiving her father was exceptionally well done.
[END SPOILERS]
If you enjoyed this book, I recommend No Cream Puffs by Karen Day and Playing the Field by Phil Bildner.
Love, Aubery by Suzanne LaFleur
“I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else.”
I couldn’t help but compare this book to Ann Dee Ellis’s Everything is Fine.
Both books feature a female protagonist whose physical well being has been abandoned by the adults in her life and her mental well being has been disrupted, both by family tragedy.
Love, Aubrey is an excellent first offering from new author Suzanne LaFleur but Ellis’s story is more concise, literary and ultimately more haunting. Both authors navigate their precious girls through the horror and confusion of one life-altering moment and the aftermath with elegance and poignancy. Both also do an excellent job building suspense.
I’ve seen this on some mock Newbery lists but decided to pass on it for our Library’s final list.
Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally) by Lisa Yee
Holly still sounded mad. A couple of years ago, all he had to do was stick a crayon up his nose and Holly would crack up and forget why she was angry. Bobby wished he had a crayon in his pocket now (p 121).
Holly and Bobby are entering that time in their lives when it is uncool to befriend the opposite gender. So they keep their friendship hidden but solid, until Jillian Zarr, alpha female, enters the scene. Soon, Holly has straightened her hair, painted her fingernails and started wearing dresses to school. Bobby warns her, “If you’re not careful, you’ll turn into a girl!” (p 55).
When the two find themselves running against each other for Student Council Representative, Bobby wants to win badly. With depth and humor, Yee tackles a classic boys versus girl plot line with more depth and humor than the usual. I like that Yee doesn’t sell out, turning Holly away from Jillian nor having her blow Bobby off in the end. It takes a strong-minded, centered girl to navigate both sexes and I believe Holly Harper can. And it won’t be long before Bobby appreciates that Holly is, indeed, a girl.
