You guys, this book is shockingly poorly edited. Simon & Schuster should be ashamed of themselves. The publicist sent me a review copy, but it’s a final, not an ARC. And yet a character describes herself as “neither fish nor foul,” and Grahame can’t get two interchangeable servants’ names straight:

“Deja vu!” explained Grace.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Howard asked, arching one eyebrow as though Helen had said something a bit racy.

The dialogue is clunky and does as much exposition as forwarding of the plot. Characters come and go without leaving much of a mark on the story or reader. And it probably isn’t fair to say this since I have no evidence other than the lack of an Acknowledgements section, but I suspect Grahame’s period research consisted entirely of watching BBC America.

Simon & Schuster offered me a giveaway as well, which was very generous. But in the end I couldn’t really justify promoting the book here, even to get free books for my lovely readers.

Also reviewed by: Rebecca’s Book Blog

The pitch:

The review: This reminded me strongly of some of the children’s science fiction from my childhood, which today’s kids (and adults, for that matter) mostly won’t know: Strange Tomorrow or… any of dozens of City in a Bottle / First Time in the Sun novels from the 1970s and 1980s that I can’t find right now, although I just spent way too much time looking. (I did find this wiki list of post-apoc organized by type of apocalypse, which seems useful for future reference.)

The world never turns out to be what the protagonist expects. Sometimes it’s more dangerous. Sometimes far less. Either way, it’s better than being stuck in the relative safety of the City in a Bottle, because as every kid knows, taking risks and making one’s own way in the world beats being bored and lied to by controlling adults.

All of this is definitely the case with Search for WondLa. We aren’t breaking much new ground here. (Er, pun not intended. Sorry.) DiTerlizzi has a boundless imagination, and he has created a gorgeously detailed world, if not an especially rich one. To me the fantastical creatures and landscape didn’t seem to have much to say beyond being a lot of fun to read about — it seemed more like world-decorating than world-building.

Mild spoiler: To some degree that’s because he takes the easy way out with things like a magical universal translator. Eva and her new alien friend Rovender don’t have to flail around for long before he gives her a device whose spores she can breathe in and then understand every language on the planet, so long as the device is with her. (This works for Muthr too, which seems even less plausible — how is she breathing these spores, exactly? And what are they doing in her robot brain?) /Mild spoiler

But I also found the story thin because I’ve read a lot of stories like this, and was able to figure out very quickly where Eva had come from and why the world was so different than she’d been taught. My 7th grader, who beelined the minute she saw me to tell me it was so amazing and I had to read it, did not have everything figured out and is anxiously awaiting the sequel for the resolution of more mysteries. I was frustrated by Eva’s cluelessness, however understandable; my student breathlessly followed right along with her as she discovered the wonders of her new world.

The biggest buzz about this book was about WondLaVision, the web component that allows you to use a webcam to “walk” through the world with augmented reality as though you’re using Eva’s all-seeing Omnipod. I haven’t tried it myself. (Bad 21st century librarian!) But I did watch DiTerlizzi’s demo video on the site, and it looks nifty, if fairly extraneous to the enjoyment of the book.

Best for: Girls and boys 8-13 who enjoy fairly light adventure fantasy and science fiction. Minimal violence, only a couple of scary bits, no romance.

Also reviewed by: GeekDad in Wired and Kirkus (man, I love that I can read Kirkus reviews and link to them now!)

I should start by making it clear what I think the book is about. Or rather, I should quote my friend Deborah, because she says it very well in her HG movie post:

a book where the desperately poor fight and struggle simply to survive while they produce material goods for the upper classes. …A book where even the working folk among the top strata of society live in luxury unimaginable to the people at the bottom, a luxury whose every bite of food and scrap of cloth relies on the direst poverty of the people at the bottom. A book in which the malicious and cruel control by the people at the absolute top would be unmaintainable without the complacency of individuals — often genuinely nice, kind, well-meaning — lower down in the upper echelons.

In other words, I thought I was looking at a vicious condemnation of us.

So what worried me most as I went into the movie was that this subversive condemnation would be stripped away in the interest of box office success. Overall, it succeeded far better than I feared but less well than I dreamed. (What else is new?)

Note: this review is a world of SPOILERS for both the first book and the movie. It’s also probably a bit scattered. Did I mention I’m working from three receipt-backs’ worth of scribbles?

We have met the Capitol and they is us?

Wes Bentley (and his gorgeously sculpted facial hair) was perfect as Seneca. He’s young, handsome, gently mannered, stylishly but not outlandishly dressed — sympathetic through and through. But his job is finding creative, entertaining ways to murder children,  and in the end he’s killed not because he stood up to Snow in some sort of heroic reversal, but because he didn’t do that job effectively enough.

I wish all the Capitol citizens had been styled like him, instead of like Willy Wonka’s bizarre sidekicks. My friend Rebecca mentions that she found the Capitol dress “queer-coded,” and I definitely agree — they’re flaming, and not in a Girl on Fire sort of way. They are also “alien” and “Other” — these are not styles the audience will covet or identify with. The clothes are described in the books as colorful and over-the-top, yes, but that could have been done in a way that retained the crucial identification of the audience with the Capitol.

Or maybe I’m wrong. The creators of Hunger Games-marketed makeup and nailpolish certainly think fans will “hope for these products in their survival packs” (see Peggy Orenstein’s post on “The Greed Games”). That makes the Capitol-is-us point way better than the movie itself ever could, for anyone with a halfway developed sense of irony. I wish I believed that included more of us.

Reality show

Part of making the audience uncomfortable was forcing us to recognize our role as voyeurs. We’re watching a movie about a reality TV show in which children kill each other, which means we’re watching children kill each other, and we’re there with our popcorn and candy and Team Whoever shirts enjoying it. The movie didn’t do so well with the “our comfortable lives rest on the misery of 99% of the world” part of identifying us with the Capitol, but this part I think they almost nailed.

The opening scene in which Cesar, the host, interviews Seneca about how the Games have been healing for Panem is perfect. They almost had me believing it. It lines up just right with the “war, terrible war” video the Districts have to watch at the Reaping, which casts the Games as a “pageant of honor,” and with the patriotic music that plays every night during the roster of the fallen — according to that music, they really are honored tributes.

And of course every time Cesar is on screen, we recognize his frivolous but comforting reality show patter. We have watched reality show hosts coax flirtatiously inane commentary out of gorgeously dressed contestants a thousand times Stanley Tucci mimics this perfectly, so I momentarily forgot that I was watching children who are about to fight each other to death and then was horrified at myself as soon as I remembered; repeat ad nauseum whenever he was on screen.

The Gameroom (which looked fantastic, even if it didn’t make much sense to see the Muttations created digitally rather than in a genetic lab) also reminded us that this was a game, not a forest survival story. I particularly liked how the Muttations walked away from Cato at the end as soon as Katniss shot him — they aren’t real animals; they don’t care about their freshly killed meat.

The thing we desperately needed more of was scenes of the fictional audience — both in the Capitol and in the Districts. It was too easy to get caught up in the action scenes in the woods and forget, until a scene of Cesar or the Gameroom reminded us, that the tributes’ every single action was being scrutinized by millions of viewers. Scenes of the tributes’ families would have been heart-wrenching, and scenes of the Capitol viewers looking like our friends on American Idol night could have been incisive.

A few perfect scenes

• Katniss’ goodbye scene with her mom was appropriately harsh, given how angry Katniss is about how her mother has failed her and Prim. It connected well for me with this very nicely done essay about Katniss and domestic violence.
• Katniss getting in the tube on her way to the Arena: Jennifer Lawrence perfectly captured that sense of being trapped and terrified, but having no option but to go forward.
• In he pig scene, where Katniss displays her skill with a bow and arrow before the Gamemakers, she came off as pissed off, not calculating — that’s crucial for her character, especially without an internal monologue to tell us these things. I’ve heard some valid criticisms, but overall I think Lawrence aced this role.

The things I’m leaving out

I don’t feel like I need to discuss the racist response to Cinna’s and especially Rue’s casting, because so many people have already done it so well. I am of course disgusted, though not as surprised as I’d like to be, that so many people felt that Rue’s death was less affecting because she’s black. That’s gross and shameful and I’d rather not dignify it any further, since my response mostly consists of incoherent rage.

As for the romance angle, I’m leaving that out of this post because I’ll address it in part 2! I’ve assembled a crack team of guinea pigs: intelligent, articulate adults who are almost complete tabula rasas about the books. They’ve agreed to submit to my grilling after they watch the movie. (Perhaps they didn’t know what they were getting into. Don’t worry, I’ll buy them some beers.) If you have questions for the guinea pigs, please ask in a comment!

I wasn’t sure at first what this was a metaphor for. But as I read the Esquire article Young People in the Recession: the War Against Youth, all I could think of was this governor ignoring his people while he sent cartloads of soap up the volcano for his cremated ancestors.

Government, academia, the professions, corporations, unions, and both political parties — all continue to mine the vulnerability of youth in service of the needs of their aging power base. Separately, each of these cases would amount to a minor scandal, but taken together they point to a broader and more significant alteration to the way of the world. From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.

My metaphor is dramatic; I use it because I think in terms of the stories I read, and this one resonated. I want to make it clear that I don’t think of everyone over 60 as a pot of ash, nor does the Esquire article. Far from it! I love my parents and my grandparents and respect everything they’ve done for me; of course I want them to have a comfortable old age. And one thing the article leaves out is how many elderly poor there are; not everyone of retirement age is benefiting so much from this pattern in our entitlement programs.

But if we as a country want to progress, that means supporting young people with new ideas and long lives to put them in action. It means supporting children and their parents. We are in a pattern of planning ahead financially only so far as matters to the wealthy and powerful, almost all of whom are in the last third or quarter of their lives. As a teacher and a person who cares what this country will look like more than 30 years down the road, I find this utterly terrifying.

The filter at my school is pretty lax. I rarely run into problems. Our students can look up breast cancer all day long. What we discovered today, however, is that we can’t google the website of our national academic honor society: the Cum Laude Society.

It’s in Latin, people! Cum on!

Part I: Deals by genre and $$

Part II: Single vs. multi-book deals

Part III: Trends

Which had my favorite graph:

Does this mean we can look forward to a science fiction retelling of Casablanca? I certainly hope so!

When I was recently asked why more gays and lesbians weren’t seen in dystopian novels, my off-the-cuff response was that our present day is plenty dystopic enough. Some future-tastic police state isn’t going to be more horrifying than what GLBTQ teens experience now in modern America. We’re a veritable checklist of dystopian tropes….

He suggests that dystopian authors challenge their readers by “creat[ing] a world where heterosexuality is a shocking desire.” I can’t think of any YA that has done this off the top of my head; if you can, please comment. The most popular material that comes to mind is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “The Outcast,” which attempted this reversal of expectations with mixed success. David Greven’s Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek has some interesting things to say about this (Google Books link).

The goal of the best dystopian science fiction, as Bacigalupi puts it, is to

…force readers to question who they are, what their society is like, and what they take for granted. A good dystopia will illuminate the horrors right before our eyes, and one can hope that if it does its job well, it will create empathy and humanity in world that is sorely lacking.

This is exactly what I think of every time I see something like the Hunger Games nail polish  or gym workout. Hunger Games did do that job well, but these trivializations smooth over the discomfort created by the book and leave us with nothing but a bland sense of hype.

I listened to the audiobook, which Gilbert reads herself with a tongue-in-cheek self-mocking quality that was essential to my enjoyment of the book. I got a kick out of the first two sections. After the end of her marriage and the breakup of another complicated relationship, she travels to Italy to eat the hell out of some pasta and then to India to follow a spiritual leader she had been introduced to in New York.

Yes, yes, obviously this is a pretty privileged thing to do with one’s heartbreak, but it’s not like she pretends it isn’t. Her travel costs are largely covered by her publisher (which made them back, I am quite sure). She consistently acknowledges how ridiculous her situation is, but along the way has some genuinely entertaining and middle-class-universal things to say about spirituality, self-discovery, and third-life crises.

…In the first two sections. “Love,” on the other hand, can be summed up as, “I have a hot Brazilian lover with whom I have lots of great sex on beaches in Bali. And you don’t. Neener.” I gave up because it was making me feel terrible about myself (and have heard the same from several other women). Back to YA I go — at least the 15-year-olds make me feel like I have my life pretty well together!

If this all sounds like a soap opera… it sort of is. There’s more drama packed into these pages than there maybe needs to be, strictly speaking, and yet it doesn’t matter. Melina Marchetta is so good at making her characters deal with the drama she throws at them, in believable and heart-wrenching ways, that I totally forgot how implausible the whole thing sounds until I wrote it out like that. I pitch it to Jodi Picoult fans below, but unlike Picoult, this story begins and ends with the characters; it never feels “ripped from the headlines.”

Marchetta does rely a little too heavily on psychoanalyzing to us how the characters relate to each other, a problem I hadn’t noticed in her previous books. But mostly that bothered me because I didn’t need it. It’s a mark of her skill that I knew these people — where they needed to go and how hard it would be to get there — even though I was dropped in at the middle of the story… and that I loved them even though many of them were jerks who made awful mistakes.

I loved the way Tom’s day rises and falls on whether he gets that little “1″ next to his name in his inbox. Boy, do I know how that feels. And I loved how tight these families are — the blood-related ones, and the families of choice. This is a book about the power of community and family, even when they’ve screwed up badly, and that is a message I can always get behind.

The pitch: Jodi Picoult and John Green fans, the line forms on the right. This is definitely more for adults and older YAs.

Also reviewed by: PaperBlog Princess, A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy, and Persnickety Snark.

I’m not professionally involved; I have been to the US as a foreign exchange student back in 1970′s and my daughter last year, which makes me interested in education in Finland and in the US.

Immigrants and refugees in the Helsinki area are a challenge – definitely harder to teach kids who are just learning the Finnish language. Continuing studies after the basic education is finished at 16 is also a problem, high unemployment among the young without further education. High schools are all pretty average, if you get in any of them you will be ok. Top schools are just more fun for the smart.

PISA just happens to measure things that the Finnish system is good at, educating the average student. However large the gap may be after basic education, American kids seem to catch up soon in college and the Universities in the US are the same or better than the Finnish. What PISA does not measure, are the foreign language skills. Finland is doing fine in math, science and reading, but at the same time, during the short school days most kids manage to learn at least English close to the level that you see me write here. Many learn also Swedish and French, German or Russian. If all that time was spent on PISA subjects Finland would not fit in the same chart with most of the countries. The difference between the US and Finland is huge.

My daughter said an ordinary school day in the US was a total waste of time as nothing useful was done. To make that up, a lot of homework was given – and the homework really had to be done, which was annoying as she was used to the system in her Finnish high school where you do  homework if you feel you have to practice more. So, at least in high school there is obviously something very different going on in the classroom in Finland and in the US. I remember that my American classmates felt pretty smart, but school was easy and there was very little continuity. The classes were seldom based on something that the students had been doing the previous years, so I was on the same level with them in American history, allthough I had never studied it before. People took language classes and dropped them in the spring, never getting very far in anything. It was a lot of fun, though, and gave me a chance to try different subjects without getting serious with them.

So I think it might be the national curriculum that works well in Finland. You start from point A and after 9 years everybody has reached point B, following the shortest route explained in the curriculum. Of course some kids remember exactly what was taught along the road and some kids have forgotten a lot of it, but everybody has some kind of an education and can continue with it. If you like, you take three more years of the same to reach point C and then you take the only standardized test, the matriculation examination. I think it is a pretty solid system and gives good results.

I was particularly interested in the perception that “nothing gets done” in American schools as opposed to Finnish ones, so I asked for clarification. He said that his daughter’s school in Finland is particularly good, so it might not be a fair comparison. But:

I took a class of pre calc in the US and I think it was the most demanding course of mathematics in that High School – however, it was really easy in two ways: I had already learned most of it before, and all the questions in the tests were short, requiring one line answers at the most. What I was used to, was real mathematical problems where the solution easily filled two full pages and where you had to remember and use things you had learned earlier. I think most Finnish foreign exchange students share these views – there is a lot of homework in the US, but education is superficial and there is no continuity. The US pupils in the class have different backgrounds – and I do not mean ethnic or cultural groups – they have studied different things and every class that I attended sort of strated from the beginning. The only exception was the math, which clearly was based on previous studies, but even in that case the level was about two years behind the Finnish.

Of course there is a significant difference in the school systems in Finland and in the US. In the US everybody goes to High School and therefore compulsory education is over when you are 18; In Finland you start at 7 and after 9 years, at 16, you are free to quit or choose between vocational or High School. Therefore Finnish High Schools select their students, students are there mostly because they want to go to college. There is generally high motivation and the teachers try to prepare every student for college. College is free, so it is an option for everyone. All this makes the comparison between the American and Finnish High Schools a bit unfair. However, the differences in the US and Finnish High Schools are at least partly consequenses of the education before High School level.

Actually, in most states the drop-out age is 16. The difference is that it’s nearly impossible to make a different living in the States without a high school diploma. And, of course, college is financially beyond the reach of many — not to mention that there’s such a range of primary and secondary education here that college is academically beyond the reach of many without a lot of remedial work. So there are a great many students who stick around past 16 without any motivation beyond the diploma.

What I love about the Finnish model, from what I understand from the original article and from my conversation with “Pur,” is that it sounds like everyone gets a fair start. Some schools are better than others, it sounds like, but none are bad. No children are, ahem, left behind because of their socioeconomic status. And if you’re ready for college, it doesn’t matter whether your family can afford it or not. There are some big differences in homogeneity between the US and Finland, yes, but we are the wealthiest country in the world. It should be one of our greatest shames that we aren’t using that wealth to prioritize our children — all of our children.