For such a small space with such narrow focus, it is undoubtedly one of the glitziest museums I’ve ever seen. They make liberal use of new holographic technology, which is remarkably effective. For several moments, we weren’t sure whether the Tory and Patriot women arguing on Griffin’s Wharf were actors or holograms. The Lexington & Concord film is stirring, with high production values; it wouldn’t look out of place on the History Channel. The ships are beautifully detailed (look for the rat hiding in what I guessed to be the first mate’s cabin). And our actors/tour guides were funny and engaging.

All that pomp added up to some real emotion. These colonists had incredibly difficult, scary decisions to make, and I felt that at several points along the tour. (When King George defended the Townsend Act as a unanimous act of Parliament, I found myself grumbling, “Wow, what a surprise,” just like I do while watching the State of the Union.) “History is so boring” is one of the saddest sentences I hear from my students, because it means they’ve lost the story part. I love any book, movie, or museum that makes history about what could have happened as much as what did happen.

But that engagement needs to be followed up with real learning, and that’s where the museum fell flat. Because it’s all first-person, there’s never an opportunity to educate from a modern perspective. I had so many questions! There’s a black Minuteman in the movie: was that historically accurate? How did African-Americans fit into this story? When the Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawks because that was a “symbol of liberty,” what on earth was that about? For heaven’s sake, can we talk about the shortcomings of their “liberty”? (When a picture of a traditionally dressed Native American floated by during the movie’s rousing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” concluding montage, I threw up in my mouth a little.)

Not only that, but what about the ships? Were they built for this museum or restored? Were they the actual Tea Party ships? Even the website just says “authentically restored” — from what? The captain’s furniture wasn’t bolted down, the dishes were displayed in open shelves. This was designed with theater rather than authenticity in mind, but there’s no meta-commentary to say so, and that calls into question the authenticity of the entire presentation.

Overall, it’s more Disney than PBS. Go, but do a little reading on your own before and after.

Now my blog is a teenager, who appears to be doing the bloggy equivalent of

“How was school today, honey?”
Grunt

I’m not sure where this blog is going or what she has to say right now. But I know that I can’t imagine who I’d be if I weren’t Parenthetical.

1. The guy who’s a weirdo but having a good time is way more fun to hang out with than the guy who’s too cool for everything you enjoy.
2. Girls aren’t aliens. (And the corollary, neither are boys.)
3. Everybody does completely humiliating stuff all the time. It will be okay.

Origami Yoda approaches these truths honestly. Its middle schoolers are both likeable and behave like real middle schoolers, which is something of a feat: sometimes when you get inside a kid’s head, he’s not a misunderstood sensitive soul. Sometimes the things he’s thinking really are kind of mean. But hey, that’s true of us all, right? This book never labels kids bullies for behaving like kids; it just quietly and hilariously moves them towards a slightly more mature view of the world.

Using an origami Yoda finger puppet on the hand of the weirdest kid in school.

My kids are all about the diary-format-with-doodles right now (thanks, Wimpy Kid!). The cover hasn’t been selling it to them — as eye-catching and adorable as it is — because most 6th grade girls are not immediately drawn to Yoda, but now that I’ve read it I can pitch it as a Wimpy Kid read-alike and they will be all over that. This is an easy cross-gender-appeal book: boys will see themselves in the protagonists, and girls will get an enticing window into the boys’ lunch table while being amused at the boys’ fear of theirs. The friendship issues and humor are universal. Definite 4th-7th grade winner!

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Betsy Bird

Eve & Adam is way too much like Cinder to be truly original, but Cinder was totally original and this is the first copycat I’ve seen, so I’ll take it.

As for Supergirl Mixtapes, I adore the cover and the title, but since my students have never encountered a “mixtape” in their lives, I have to suspect that I am the target audience — ie., women in their mid-thirties who read YA. I guess that’s a burgeoning audience in its own right!

(Thanks again for all the books, Anita!)

Fossil fuels sure are seductively powerful, but it turns out that they’re dangerously dirty. And we’ve known this for a very long time.

The March… OF SCIENCE

The pitch:

The review: There are precious few good lesbian YA novels. Thanks for writing an awesome one, Lisa Jenn! Let me count the things I love:

I love that Colby’s orientation is only part of her story. The book is about figuring out all of her relationships: with her friends, her dad, the dog she rescues from the side of the road, the dog’s vet…

At the same time, I love that the relationship issues are central and don’t pull punches. Characters fight about coming out, recognizing that they need to do so in order to be true to themselves and to have the kind of relationships they want with their families, but they don’t pretend that will be easy — and it isn’t. In at least one case, a character recognizes that it might not even be possible, that her family’s prejudices might be too hard to overcome. As much as I love books set in Boy Meets Boy rainbow fantasy land, where gay high school relationships can proceed exactly like straight ones, that’s sadly not the world most teenagers live in. (Yet.)

I love how issues of class are introduced sensitively but honestly. Colby and her best friend Van make it clear they aren’t poor, but money is an issue. Van picks up cans along the highway to earn the deposits for spending money. Colby works long hours at a grocery store. And, of course, her dad is a long-haul trucker because it’s more lucrative than the jobs he could get closer to home; Colby’s anger at his absence is one of the main conflicts of the story.

I love that when Colby screws up, she screws up. It’s believable, and it’s also not easy to fix. She has to have some hard conversations, and while some go a little too smoothly, most of the people she’s hurt don’t let her off the hook easily.

Overall, I just love the feel of the book. I read it weeks ago, and its warmth has really stayed with me: Colby’s trailer all decorated for Christmas, the heavy sigh of the dog on the couch, the warmth of Robyn the vet’s kitchen.

I do have a few quibbles:

The Gay/Straight Alliance chat room conversations were distracting and didn’t add much to the story.

Colby’s father’s extended absences seemed to border on neglect — he was only home one or two nights a week, leaving a high school junior basically living alone. None of the other adults in Colby’s life (her GSA advisor, Robyn the vet) seemed as concerned about this as they should have been.

And as refreshingly honest as everyone is about their money troubles throughout the book, they seem to disappear in the overly sunshiny ending: Colby’s dad gives up the trucking jobs for some unspecified (and less lucrative, according to the arguments he made the whole book) job closer to home, yet they still have money for Colby to quit her job to play soccer without even a discussion?

These really are totally minor quibbles, though. Overall, I loved it to death. Colby reminded me of D. J. Schwenk from Dairy Queen, and really, there is no higher praise.

(There are still basically no lesbian novels that are appropriate for kids under the age of 15, alas. Some second-base action and suggestion of more keeps this one firmly in the high school realm.)

Also reviewed by: Bonjour Cass (who has some lovely things to say about how the book handles Colby’s relationship with her late mother) and After Ellen (who points out how great it is that Colby never questions her sexual identity, just how others will deal with it).

The pitch:

The review: …I guess? The actual plot doesn’t feel that clear, and the pacing is way, way off, and things that should be symbols are literal and vice versa. The OPT is pretty important for awhile, but why does she really need to take it? There’s a lot about needing to meet eight other princesses who live on the other side of the island, but why are they just sitting there, and what will meeting them accomplish? What’s the current situation in Raven World? Is Bee in a rush to get back there so she can do her duty as the heir, or isn’t she — and if not, why on earth not?

It feels like a book written by someone who doesn’t know how to write for kids. (Alice Randall is the author of The Wind Done Gone, so she is an accomplished author for adults; Caroline Randall Williams is her daughter, a first-time author.) Writing for kids isn’t about cobbling together fantasy elements (orphan, princess, destiny, prophecy, journey of self-discovery, romance) to create a feel-good Important Message. Kids need world-building, and they need mysteries whose answers fit with the world that has been created. They need a clear plot with a conflict and a journey and a goal (or more than one, of course, but they should be clear).

And messages are well and good, but the message needs to emerge organically from the story or kids will roll their eyes as much as I did. This book screamed so loudly, “You are beautiful and brilliant and worthy and girl power and black power and boys are nice but you need to be yourself first and environmentalism and self-sufficiency and world peace and btw Shakespeare and chess and vocabulary words are awesome!!!!” that as much as I love every single one of those messages, the presentation of them in this story made me weary.

I can’t help but be fairly sure that the authors started this book with “Let’s write a book to show black girls that they can be powerful, pretty princesses” rather than “Hey, what if this beekeeping black girl on a magical island were secretly an orphaned princess?” And message-first is death to any book, for kids or adults.

Also reviewed by: Kirkus, A Wrung Sponge, and Crazy QuiltEdi. Everyone loves it but me. I’ll be curious what my students think — I think I’m usually pretty good at predicting (possibly because I have the reading sophistication of a 12-year-old), but I have been wrong before!

The pitch:

Wow, I did that all without real spoilers! Go me. However, HERE BE SPOILERS FOR THE ROAR:

The review: Basically the entire book consists of Mika and Ellie and the rest of the Chosen masterminding their takeover of the Northern Government and negotiations with the rich dudes south of the Wall. All of which you know they’re going to manage somehow. As such, there are no new secrets or surprising plot twists, and it is therefore way less thrilling than The Roar. (It’s also 3/5ths the length, but still.) I predict that my young readers who loved the first book will be satisfied but less enthusiastic.

What I really want to talk about is the tone of the whole thing. I did a whole lesson with my 6th graders about how to discuss a book’s tone, and we brainstormed tone adjectives. This did not appear on our list, but the tone of The Whisper was “1970s hippie.” (Which is not an adjective. Don’t tell my kids.)

The least interesting part of The Roar for me was the discovery that the children are mutants with telepathic powers. The Roar (of emotion) builds in their heads and they can use that power for good or eeeevil. In this book, they learn that they also share the Whisper — a sort of Force-like telepathic connection. They can see the golden light of all living things, and can use the Whisper to share that light even with non-mutant adults. This is how they convince their parents that even though they’re angry at having their world taken away from them, they shouldn’t start a war with the South because it will destroy the beautiful nature.

The overt message of the book is that we are all animals, and unless we remember that and live simple lives connected with each other and with nature, we will lose our humanity. I absolutely agree with that.

Unfortunately, the underlying message is that we can’t actually solve any of our problems until we evolve magical mutant powers. The entire book, the mutant kids are all, “trust us, we have it under control.” Kobi, Mika’s best friend from the first book, is separated from the other kids, hiding with his dad in the impoverished Shadows. They’re taken in by a group of terrorists who want to topple the Golden Towers where the Northern rich folks live. Kobi, tapped into the Whisper, shares the “trust us” message with his dad and the others. They don’t listen, of course, but in the end the kids do everything they said they would.

These children are selfless and good to the point of being almost holy. Nobody has an attack of pettiness about who’s in charge, nobody gets scared and lashes out. Connected by the Whisper, they are a unified, beautifully efficient soul.

And so they avoid every hard question. Our real-world techniques for redressing grievances — negotiation, non-violent resistance, terrorism — are sidestepped. Magical mutant powers are a way better solution, clearly! Anyone who disagrees with the children’s vague vision of a world with enough nature for all is literally shown the light and they fall in line. The book ends (with no indication of a third book) as the poor Northerners start to trickle across the Wall, so the children don’t have to deal with how to parcel out land and build houses and feed those billions without destroying Nature.* This book ultimately has nothing to say about how we, without telepathy and mutant nature-vibes, can start to deal with our analogous problems.

(I hope I don’t have to tell you the world of ranting that will fall upon you if you try to tell me that middle grade science fiction isn’t for hard questions.)

*Not to mention that we only see Europe. Do terrorists seriously only try blowing up the wall at one spot in France on one day? No one else thinks of that or has the skills to do it? Everybody’s been shut up in the northernmost parts of the world for 25 years — who decides who’s going to move to the tropics? Who’s going to hack through all that perfect jungle growth in order to make room for people? There are some serious worldbuilding questions here!

Also reviewed by: Kirkus Reviews, Charlotte’s Library, Yearning to Read

“Too long; didn’t read” version: “After [the girl on fire scene], this was an unintelligible action movie. I feel like all character development happened off screen.” That was more or less the reaction I expected — like most of the Harry Potter movies (and a great deal of movie adaptations in general), Hunger Games hangs dramatic, lushly filmed vignettes on the barest skeleton of the book’s plot. It can be poignant for people who’ve read the book and can flesh out the plot for themselves, or fun for people who are happy to enjoy a quality action flick, but the book’s depth isn’t there as a stand-alone film.

If you’re curious what parts made sense, what parts were infuriatingly confusing, or what wisdom he had to offer (he noticed a number of things I hadn’t seen), read on for the play-by-play! (With the caveat that of course this is just one guy’s thoughts. A different guinea pig viewer might see things differently.) Or just skip to the wrap-up. Obviously, I spoil all the things.

In District 12:

He’s impressed with Katniss’s snarl at Prim’s hissing cat: “I’ll cook you!” That conveys a great deal about the world to him very early; not only are they dirt-poor, but they’re hungry enough to eat cats.

The mechanics of the Games make no sense; he has no clue what Gale is saying his name is in 42 times for. The intro text is totally insufficient.

“Very Appalachian,” he notes of the scenery. Effie, on the other hand, “evokes late decadent Roman empire… and even more so, French monarchy.”

“I did not expect her to have a mother. The attitude she had towards her sister is very ‘I’m raising you.’” This is cleared up at the goodbye scene, and I think speaks well of Jennifer Lawrence’s acting that this relationship was implied without knowing why.

“That’s an intentionally mocking motto” for the Games — of course they can’t be in everyone’s favor. Well said; I hadn’t put it in quite those words for myself.

His biggest confusion at this point, aside from not entirely getting how the Games work, is about the world. How big is District 12? How big is Panem? Are we talking suburbs around a city, the entire former United States, the whole world, another planet entirely? They’re poor, but why — because it’s enforced? Because they’re far away from the Capitol? Who’s in charge? What’s the governmental structure of Panem and of District 12? (The question of how the Districts relate to each other is, of course, really important, and that hasn’t even come up as a question yet.) Katniss and Gale’s hunting is clearly unusual, but why? The fence looks totally abandoned; it’s not clear that what they’re doing is illegal. The two-second scene in the Seam is meaningless; without seeing K sell her kills, he can’t tell anything about their economy. None of this got cleared up particularly as the movie progressed. So already it’s failed pretty badly: science fiction needs world-building, or the point of the story is lost.

On the train:

“Not sure that montage [of coming aboard the train] set me up for how shocking the transition is” from District 12. The display of food, in particular, isn’t shocking enough — “This is a world in which cats are sometimes eaten.” Couldn’t agree more; nobody’s hungry enough in this movie. Since the train style and piles of food are more familiar to most viewers than the deprivations of District 12, we’d have to get really comfortable in District 12 for it to feel like a shock.

In the book, the train introduces Katniss’s and Peeta’s characters, and sets up one of the major themes of the story: their past relationship, their class distinction at home in 12, and their resulting strengths and weaknesses in the Games. Katniss is tough but misanthropic; Peeta’s had a relatively soft life, but knows how to work a crowd. In only a few movie-minutes on the train, with none of K’s internal monologue, none of this comes through.

It’s clear K and P have a history, and that it’s not one K is happy about, but TMN has no idea what’s going on with that history. Something to do with muddy pigs? And bread? He does get that they’re “setting up very different approaches” between K and P, but isn’t sure what those approaches are, especially since he thinks K, not P, convinced Haymitch to help them. The loss of that scene was a serious missed opportunity, I thought when I saw the movie at first, and I was right that it creates a lot of confusion.

Haymitch was a source of tremendous confusion throughout the movie, in fact. On the train TMN commented that his drinking might be symbolic of the “corrupting influence of the decadence” of the Capitol; once they got to the Capitol, he revised, “maybe he’s just using [alcohol] to mask his distaste [of Capitol decadence].” I wasn’t sure where he was going with that, until I found out later that he thought H lived in the Capitol (and later, that he sponsors K’s gifts). And why not? All we’re told about H is that he’s the only living winner from District 12; it’s never really explained what happens when you win the Games.

He does laugh at “That is mahogany!” So there is that. Effie is one of the few characters whose personality and role come through loud and clear exactly as they are in the book.

On TV:

My impression on first viewing was that the reality TV analogy was one of the most successful aspects (in no small part, we agreed, due to the talents of Stanley Tucci as Caesar Flickerman). TMN was certainly less confused during this section and more able to show off his media criticism:

On K’s beautification process: “I like that — they’re alternating between shots that look like caring for an animal and beauty parlor shots, which evokes a very clear role that they’re playing.”

On Cinna: His conflict is an interesting choice (he’s of the Capitol decadence, but on K’s side). TMN  guesses that he’s dressing K as a symbol of revolution (although that doesn’t really happen until the next book), “which gives this a point beyond her survival to get home to her sister.” My first reaction was, why do you feel this needs a point beyond survival? The reason was, basically, that most science fiction gets more global/political than mere survival story — which made sense when I found out later that he wasn’t aware this was the first part of a trilogy. It’s Standard YA Trilogy Form: first the conflict is personal, then the conflict becomes political, then the characters succeed in changing the world. But that’s a genre convention that isn’t necessarily obvious to “outsiders.”

The “girl (and boy) on fire” costumes: “symbolically burning the youth.” Nicely put, sir. Of course there is a major age-conflict component to this story, though I hadn’t labeled it as such before. Not that it hasn’t always been there, but I feel like that’s becoming an even more common and overt theme in YA dystopians lately.

Once again, we don’t know nearly enough about District 12. “I have frustratingly little background to her life before to compare” to the hotel. “They want me to share her visceral reaction, but it isn’t coming.”

K turning off the screen in her room is “a symbolic rejection of falsity.” Well put. That scene seemed a bit like a waste to me when I first saw it, mostly there to remind us that she’s a good forest hunter far away from home, but this comment added an extra layer for me.

Overall, “It reminds me of The 5th Element: the out-of-touchness of frivolity and the media obsessiveness.” I only saw that movie once when it came out, so it’s not in my go-to film vocabulary, but I think I agree: the aesthetics are really similar, and I think that’s a problem. The 5th Element is totally bananas; we’re supposed to be distanced from the wacko characters and their off-the-wall world. The Hunger Games is subversive only if it’s clear that we are the Capitol, so we have to be able to relate to them somehow.

Training montage:

“She’s getting too good at working the crowd — they’ll have to set her up for a fall, or else there’s no narrative arc; she’s already the best.” This was an ongoing problem for TMN: he felt throughout the Games that K was clearly the best at everything, effortlessly. She didn’t feel like an underdog in comparison to the Careers, even without the benefit of their training; she didn’t feel sullen and unlikeable in comparison to Peeta. Without the flaws in K’s character, the story doesn’t work at all.

And Haymitch continues to be confusing. He’s clearly had a character transformation, cleaned up his act, but it came out of nowhere — “I assume something about her reawakening him to the fight of his youth, but that’s all based off of stereotypes rather than anything they’re conveying.”

As I found out later (when I couldn’t understand why he was upset with K and Rue for not running right after Rue got out of the trap — “They’re totally unprepared kids, not commandos!,” I exclaimed), the entire training program was unclear — TMN assumed it was months, not days, which would erase much of the Careers’ advantage and make even the weakest tributes real contestants. Ah, the limitations of a montage.

The Games:

The Cornucopia was “a very well directed combat scene. I could follow everything, but I didn’t have time to process it.” In general, he found the action-movie parts the most effective. Which is not a surprise; it’s more important to a blockbuster’s bottom line to have thrilling action than cerebral political subversion, so of course that’s the language in which the filmmakers were most fluent.

Of course, the casualty there is a followable plot. It never makes any sense how the Games work: “Fire ball launchers seem a little bit [over-the-top]. They’re not even pretending this is a natural disaster.” Even after the tracker jackers and the Muttations, it’s never clear that the Games are a totally controlled environment rather than a real forest that Seneca is manipulating.

Nor is it ever clear that Panem is an almost totally controlled environment: “If I were in this situation, I’d be breaking every camera I came across.” Why she can’t — because the Games are the most important symbol of a tightly restricted dictatorial regime, and her family would be in danger if she showed that kind of rebellion — is never spelled out. I think in this case the movie-makers assumed their viewers would fill that in because they’re familiar with the genre conventions of post-apocalyptic dictatorships, but TMN is so lost by that point that he doesn’t know what he can reliably assume and what he can’t.

He’s started referring to the Careers as Romans. As in, “They haven’t trained these Romans in natural tactics very well” when the Career alliance trees Katniss but fails to kill her. That really is a laughably bad scene.

The political machinations of gift-giving are totally lost on him. Partly this is because he thinks Haymitch is the sponsor (as he reasonably explains, Haymitch signs the notes). So what’s up with those scenes where he’s talking to fancy-dressed people we’ve never seen before? And, of course, with neither an appreciation of Katniss and Peeta’s relationship (or Katniss and Gale’s relationship, for that matter), nor an understanding of the subtleties of sponsorship, none of the “pretend to be star-crossed lovers” business — the entire point of the last quarter of the movie — makes any sense.

The District 11 rebellion is the last straw. “I have no way of interpreting the movie at all right now, because I don’t know if she’s the leader of a nationwide rebellion.” We saw the three-finger salute at the beginning, but it had no context then either — is it the symbol of an already-extant rebellion? If so, did K start that rebellion? Do the Districts communicate with each other at all, and if so, how? Why is it such a big deal that K decorated Rue’s body, and why on earth should that be a signal for District 11 to start rioting? Not to mention, why are there so many police in 11 in the first place? (It was never clear, I discovered, that everyone was forced to watch as a form of subjugation; he assumed people were choosing to watch because their loved ones were involved.) We’ve never seen any other Districts until that point; the story just got a lot bigger and he has no way to make sense of that.

At this point, he’s so enthusiastically frustrated (and I am, I’ll admit, so frustrated at not being able to explain away his frustration) that my commentary notes get less coherent. Just assume from here on out that nothing, save the basic “they won the Games and survived” storyline of a generic action movie, makes any damn sense.

The wrap-up:

For me and the friends I saw it with, the movie version of Hunger Games was a powerful series of moments that evoked at least some of what was most powerful about the book. Watching with The Mad Neuroscientist confirmed what I suspected, though, which is that that only works if you know the book. It’s almost the film equivalent of a sense of humor entirely built on re-working Monty Python quotes: the joke is funny to the initiated, because it calls back to a remembered funny moment, but leaves everyone else out in the cold.

I say “almost” because of course there’s a great deal more creativity involved in making a film than in quoting one (even if that Python joke is re-worked in a new context). I do think it’s valid that the movie worked for fans — a more poorly made film could have called back to those moments from the book ineffectively; it is an achievement that we felt the emotions we did. But it still feels like an in-joke, albeit on a very large scale. It’s a new genre, I think: the movie adaptation that isn’t meant to stand alone, but instead works best as a visual component to the pre-written text; the opposite of a commentary track.

Can you think of other movies that feel that way, whether you read the original text first or not? And if you also saw the Hunger Games movie before reading the book, I would love to know how similar your experience was to The Mad Neuroscientist’s.