Rating Some YA Books

Six books, each of a different genre 
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (contemporary realistic fiction), The Arrival (historical fiction), Catching Fire (science fiction, fantasy, dystopia), My Friend Dahmer (nonfiction, information), Paper Towns (adventure, mystery), Luna (diversity, multicultural, cultural differences)

Best overall book
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Because of the method of storytelling and the content. I think it's really valuable to have a story that chronicles an adolescent boy's coming out story and I love that this book is multicultural.

Most Likely to be banned 
Luna  
Because it deals with transgender issues and acceptance of a character who is transgender.
Runner up - My Friend Dahmer - Because of the subject matter: homosexuality, alcohol abuse, young serial killer's inner mind (taboo topics).

Most Likely to be adapted into an award-winning screenplay
Aristotle and Dante
Because it deals with a lot of sensitive issues and is quite moving

Best book to stimulate research questions 
Catching Fire
Students can use it as a jumping off point to research political processes, revolution, poverty and class systems, and  different types of leaders across history.

Best unravelling of a plot 
My Friend Dahmer
The author conveys Dahmer's unravelling sanity through well-paced images and emotionally stirring scenes and carefully leads up to the exact moment when he snaps. The reader can truly feel the darkness creeping in.

Most Vivid Descriptions of Settings 
The Arrival
Because it actually visually represents the scenes! And the images are breathtaking.

Best Use of Purposeful Meaningful Dialogue
Aristotle and Dante
A lot if not most of the interactions between characters in the book are shown through dialogue. The dialogue reveals their characteristics and important aspects of their relationships.

John Green's Paper Towns

 Paper Towns is a book about finding yourself. For protagonist Quentin Jacobsen, the search is disguised by a search for a lost friend. Margo (Roth Spiegelman) has disappeared after briefly rekindling their childhood friendship. She left Quentin some clues that he assumes she wants him to follow to find her. In his journey he learns a lot about Margo, but also much more about himself.

This book opens with a great hook: Q's memory of finding the dead man in the park with Margo and her reaction to it. It is eery, intriguing, and sets the reader up to expect a lot of excitement. Unlike other types of stories that need a couple of chapters to build up to "the good stuff," I'm sure that adolescent readers will be interested in Paper Towns right from the beginning. Green has written the rest of the book in a way that keeps their interest - Will Q really find Margo dead somewhere? Why did she leave? Where will the next clue lead? Can they really make it in time to catch her before she leaves Agloe? - until the end. This is a very big selling point for teachers who need to convince their students to read!

The book is also filled with a bunch of helpful hints for teens (and adults!), cleverly hidden as plot. When Q feels frustrated at one of his friends, Radar says to him "You know your problem Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit man, because you're you" (194). I think adolescents will really appreciate the authenticity of the language Green uses for his teen characters and they will then be easier to relate to. When you relate to characters, you learn from them. Characters in "classic" novels - even those that use slang or the standard vernacular of their time - do not speak the way teens do today. While I feel it's good for teens to hear other ways of writing and speaking, there is something really valuable about speaking to adolescent readers in their own language. And in their language, each character in Paper Towns has at least one moment of true wisdom. This validates the teen experience and can make young readers feel like they really do matter.

I thought the paper town and paper people metaphor was really nice - something teens should think about. Considering a very popular young girl who cultivated her "paperness" and then decided to leave suddenly to transform herself because she didn't want to be an idea that everybody likes anymore, because she "could never be the idea to [herself]" could have a great impact on a young mind (294). As Quentin and Margo do, they will start to see the things about their lives that have actual substance and meaning. Then they can begin to create their own direction for life.

http://casabloncaa.deviantart.com/

Benjamin Alire Saenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

(longest title ever)
I held off on blogging about this book because it was my favorite and one of the reasons I think I loved it so much was that I got to discover everything along with the characters. Not knowing what would happen made the experience of reading this book so much richer than I think it would have been if I'd seen a summary beforehand or if someone told me "you will love this book because ______."

So. If you have not yet read this book, please do not continue reading this blog. Just go read the book. You will love it because______. (If you don't love it, you can leave a comment below, but I still think your life will be better for having read it.)

                           *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

So since you've all now read the book, I will skip a summary. Several things about this book were wonderful: the writing style and atmosphere, getting to see through the eyes of a thoughtful 15-year-old Mexican American boy, getting to see how each of the boys feels connected or disconnected from his heritage, the strong emotions the story elicits, the descriptions of the desert (an environment I am drawn to), and all of Aristotle's astute observations about himself and others. I loved the fact that he questions everything and actually thinks deeply about his surroundings. I wondered if this is a rare quality among teen boys (and girls) or if they all do it, often without seeming to.

But really what I most connected to was that the whole book is Ari's coming out story. Having come
out as gay myself, I know that this experience is one that is unique to each person and isn't a single event, but a bunch of different seemingly unrelated ones - maybe even some false starts and backtracks - that can span a great deal of time. I think Ari might question more than the average heterosexual teen because he is also questioning deep parts of himself. Although all teens must go through a search for self, I know that the journey is a little harder for one that is or might be or will be gay. Though my coming out story is very different from Ari's, the story still rang true for me. More than that, it was familiar and .... lovely. Anyone who has come to realize that he/she is gay will relate to this passage - and anyone who is questioning his/her sexuality may find direction through it:

"All this time. This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I'd met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn't let myself know it, think it, feel it." (358)

It's that part about not letting yourself know it that you start to beat yourself up over. It's comforting to know that a lot of others go through the same thing. It wasn't until after I came out that I started searching for and finding more mirrors in books, movies, and TV shows. In high school, all I had was Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and thank goodness for Joss Whedon). Lesbian was still a bit of a dirty word, even in Madison. I can only imagine what good it would have done for me to read this book at 15. I can't really let go of my inner confused gay teen at this point to think about how straight teens will take to this book, but I want to believe that exposure to a story like this would help them understand some of their peers or put themselves in the shoes of gay adults they encounter. Besides, there are enough stories about straight kids for them. Let there be gay books too!

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers (100% Complete)

Manju narrating a passage from the book about her life
india.nydailynews.com/newsarticle/4f5518e60169a5345c000000

As my reading continued, I encountered towering corruption, dying people ignored, and suicide. Near the end, while an uppercity animal rights group is able to rally a lot of support for horses kept in the slums, the people of the slums could not change their situations. Instead, "powerless individuals blamed other powerless individuals for what they lacked. Sometimes they tried to destroy one another. Sometimes, like Fatima, they destroyed themselves in the process. When they were fortunate, like Asha, they improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people" (237). They could not rally together to make change, something that the author could not understand before she researched this book. I feel that while it is unfortunate that the slumdwellers did/do not feel they can band together for a common cause, it is understandable; Their lives have very little certainty and they have very little means. Most of their time is spent scraping up what they need to live for one day. If I put myself in their place, I can imagine I would feel like I didn't have much time to think about anyone other than my own family. It would be hard to put aside immediate needs in favor of addressing the bigger ones.

I think I understand the author's purpose with this book now. She writes "Ten years ago, I fell in love with an Indian man and gained a country. He urged me not to take it at face value" (247). Until reading this book, I did not look deeply into India. I did not know what the true conditions are like in its cities. Boo says that there had been a shortage of nonfiction about India, and through her book, she has created some. She believes "that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives" (251).

So while her book presents an almost endless list of India's problems (I found myself saying "Really?! That too?") and no plan of action for improvement, I think that's okay. We need to hear about what's wrong before anything can be done. Awareness is the first step for any type of change. I don't know that I would have adolescents read this entire book unless they were very interested. I still feel depressed after reading it and I think excerpts are enough to get them familiar with slum life. I think I would use this as nonfiction (that reads like a fictional story, but all the names, places, and events are true to life) to accompany other reading about poverty - to connect fictionally impoverished characters across time  (to the modern) or space (the similarities and differences between the impoverished in different nations). The link to the article above will provide some nice visuals for students - pictures of the actual slum and the people in it.

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers (at 50% complete)

I am about halfway through Katherine Boo's book about life in a Mumbai undercity and I am so depressed. From starvation and religious persecution, to disgusting hospitals and a "sewage lake," she has totally destroyed my romantic vision of India.

I knew that India is not really like that pretty place I so wanted to go to when I was younger - full of vibrant colors, delicious food,  and (what seemed like) magic - but I didn't fully grasp the fact that life there is so hard for so many people. Even those who are not living in slums are still subjected to widespread corruption, arranged marriages, and rigid gender-based restrictions on employment, dress, and simple every day actions These might include leaving your dwelling, to whom you may speak, and negative consequences for being seen with a person of the opposite gender. Ironically, slumdwelling affords slightly more opportunity for gender equality; when faced with the option to move to a village where her family could own some land, muslim Zehrunisa decided she would rather stay in the slum than move to a place where she might be forced back into a burqa.

Boo focuses on Annawadi, a slum made up of three-thousand people squatting on land owned by the Airports Authority of India. It was "settled" by members of the lowest castes and could be razed by airport authorities at any moment. Within the slum, there is tension based on family caste or religion, though "most young Annawadians... considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact" (66). The young seek opportunity, believing they can "move up" in the world (not possible in the old caste system). Boo writes, "As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains found in garbage; politics and corruption in
which Asha placed her hopes; and education" (62). With a choice between buying and sorting garbage to sell to recycling facilities, getting involved in political corruption, or going to school, education does seem like the best option. But this book dashes that hope for me too, revealing that many of the schools are "fraudulent; some, like Manju's, taught by unqualified teenagers." The university Manju attends teaches only by rote. And 60% of the state's public school teachers have not finished college and had to pay a large amount of money under the table to secure their positions. So the slumdwellers, seeking the best education possible, are also forced to pay for private schools that may be equally ill-equipped. This means that only a few of the children actually get the chance to go to school.

All of that is bad enough, but here are some quotes that convey the pure filth of Annawadi. It is hard to believe that anyone could get used to this way of life. It certainly made me shudder.

"It was orange blossoms compared with the rotting hotel food dumped nightly at Annawadi, which sustained three hundred shit-caked pigs." (7)

"The leaves of the tree were gray, like many things in Annawadi, on account of sand and gravel blowing in from a concrete plant nearby. You won't die to breathe it, old-timers assured red-eyed new arrivals... But people seemed to die of it all the time - untreated asthma, lung obstructions, tuburculosis." (14)

"[Being a garbage scavenger] could wreck a body in a very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks, and Abdul and his younger brothers kept a running wager about which of the scavengers would be the next to die." (35)

"Hut walls grew green and black with mold, the contents of the public toilet spewed out onto the maidan, and fungi protruded from feet like tiny sculptures... 'I'm going to die of these feet,' said a woman whose fungus fanned out like butterfly wings as she lined up in the rain for water." (117).

"At Annawadi, the sewage lake crept forward like a living thing. Sick water buffalo nosed for food through mounds of wet, devalued gargbage, shitting out the consequences of bad choices with a velocity Annawadi water taps had never equaled. People, also sick, stamped the mud from their feet and said, 'My stomach is on fire, my chest.' 'All up and down this leg, all night.'" (117)

I'm waiting for some of the "hope" this book promises in its subtitle. I know we all need to know the truth, and that makes this story valuable. It also moves me to take action and make change, but the intricately woven problems of which it tells seem too huge to approach. Because I'm having a hard time getting through it, I wonder what it would be like for an adolescent reader. Will they be spurred on by the awful truths, or will they give up in sadness? We will see.

Lauren Myracle's Shine

Shine is set in Black Creek, North Carolina, where Patrick, a gay teen, is now in a coma after a brutal beating. He was found tied to a gas pump outside of the convenience store where he worked. The nozzle had been stuck into his mouth and "Suck this, faggot" written in blood across his chest. His childhood friend Cat investigates the hate crime, fearing that the police will never find out who is to blame. She is convinced that the guilty party is someone in their own community.While the central tragedy of this story is in the verbal abuse, harassment, and violence aimed at Patrick, a huge number of other little heartbreaks orbit it. While Cat has been keeping the abusive incident that caused her to withdraw from all of her friends (and people in general) to herself, she hasn't seen what else is happening in Black Creek. Her investigation into Patrick's beating leads her into all the dark corners.

I had a little bit of trouble relating to the characters in this book. They come from such a different world than the one in which I grew up: Thoughts of Jesus and whether or not you are sinning are
on the minds of most of the teens and the adults; extreme poverty and/or depression has caused a lot of the community members to deal and use meth; adolescents have little or no support from the adults in their lives and most drop out of school before they reach 16. Each of those problems is the cause or the result of another one, and they create a cycle that sustains itself, but weighs down the people of Black Creek to the point of ruin. To me, Shine creates a worst-case scenario for LGBT youth. And while it's true that young gay people live in places like Black Creek, it's not the only place where they could become the victims of hate crimes. There might be a tendency among teens who read this book to think that "those things don't happen here."

Please read the comments below for more information about this map...

 According to this map showing hate crime rates across the US in 2008, there were just as many hate crimes in Wisconsin as there were North Carolina. Many Madison citizens feel like negative aspects of the rural south are a very distant reality, but we're not as far from it as we'd like to believe. I think it would be important to address this with students who read this book so that they'll be on the lookout in their own schools for the warning signs that Cat and the adults in the town ignored - not only signs of possible violent acts, but for signs of drug involvement and sexual harassment/abuse.

I was really glad that this book has a happy ending - at least in one respect - because I cried several times while reading. Hopefully Myracle's power to create an emotional response in her readers will help keep adolescents interested and build empathy in them for the many types of characters she introduces. I hope it will also show them the consequences of bad decisions (it may be on the border of seeming "too preachy") and the horrors of hatred, encouraging them to think about their actions and hold their peers to a higher standard of respect for others and for themselves.

Shaun Tan's The Arrival

The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel about the experiences of a man immigrating to a new country. His country of origin and the place in which he arrives do not seem to relate or be based on any specific real-world places. They are fantastic, strange, and otherworldly - especially the new and unfamiliar land. The man's experience, however, closely relates to the experiences of immigrants to the United States who came through Ellis Island beginning in 1892.The series of images during the man's "intake" into the country seemed true to that history. He is physically examined, questioned, and tagged with a bunch of pieces of paper that have no meaning for him because they are written in an unfamiliar language (that even the reader does not recognize). In reading this section I felt the man's frustration in his unmet need to communicate and his indignity at having to undergo these somewhat humiliating trials.

I believe The Arrival can teach students about the power of art. Through nothing but imagined images, readers connect with the character(s) to learn about the experiences and emotions of immigrants. No one will argue - this book is beautiful. The drawings are outstanding: vividly detailed, highly imaginative, skilled, and precise. Tan seems to have used a material/medium readily available to anyone who'd like to try (graphite pencils). I loved the contrast of his classical style of rendering with the sort of futuristic look of the new country. The softness and color of the images that is created in this

medium help to communicate the fact that this story relates to history. They seem like old photographs or documents, or the way things can look in memory. I also loved noticing how Tan made choices in pacing and focus through the scope and content of the images. A small series of images can convey a single action or scene or portray the passing seasons of a year. A whole-page illustration has a "zoom out" effect and allows us to see the full setting for a single moment in time. The variety of image sizes helps break up the story and focus us in on certain parts.

The images in the story that I found most moving were the ones that depicted the man's loneliness without his wife and daughter, who had to remain (temporarily) behind. To communicate the pain of leaving them behind, Tan focuses in on grasped hands that slowly let go. When the man finally finds a place to live, in my favorite scene of the book, he opens up his suitcase to reveal a little table at which is wife and daughter sit, looking sad. It so poignantly illustrates that this suitcase is all he now has of home: his only connection to the ones he loves.

Luckily, he also finds an adorable little companion creature (pictured on the cover) in his new apartment. The addition of that little buddy made the story so much better for me - I was starting to feel very depressed before he showed up! The creature is a native of this new land and to a certain extent can help the man learn how to find what he needs. It also fills a little bit of his loneliness and helps him meet some new people.

I loved this book, purchased a copy for myself, and plan to include it in my future classroom library. It can transcend age and ability levels, could generate a lot of thought and discussion, and will maybe even inspire students to try their hands at visual artwork.