Oh goodness, is this ever a fraught time of year. I was raised Jewish by half-and-half parents, so we also have a tree and presents and whatnot. And I love it — I love holidays and traditions, and specifically pretty white lights and gingerbread smells and Christmas carols and snow and all that jazz. I am an atheist, Jewish Christmas apologist.
Unfortunately, I have this Christmas Curse. Even if nothing bad has happened the rest of the year, the week or two before Christmas is 55% likely to feature the breakup of a serious relationship and/or a health crisis. This seems statistically implausible, but I assure you it is accurate (sample size: 11 post-college Decembers). I realized this year that Christmas is somewhat hopelessly tied to moping about for me, and 2011 sure wasn’t shaping up to buck this trend, so I’m skipping Christmas.
Whoa, what? Christmas is not a holiday one can just skip in this country. The pressure to Celebrate is so great that it’s not avoidable, even if the holiday itself has no real meaning for you or your family. Even people who really don’t observe Christmas at all are visiting their folks, because they get the time off. Restaurants and bars are closed. Volunteer gigs are few and fill up fast, because everybody wants to get a last bit of goodwill in.
But what’s the point of being Jewish if you can’t ignore Christmas with a movie and Chinese food? you ask, and you’re right, but I’ll be doing it alone.*
So I am reaching for the same solace I’ve used on many a lonely Valentine’s Day: gleeful bitterness. I am collecting Terrible Christmas Things. Picture me dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future, carrying one of Your Neighborhood Librarian’s Advil Calendar cocktails (most of which are the opposite of terrible, but the Crystal Lake Surprise looks promising).
Or dressed as Krampus, which is pretty much the ultimate Terrible Christmas Thing and is therefore my new favorite thing in the world. Christmas should be much more like Halloween.
And of course there’s Jonathan Coulton’s classic “Chiron Beta Prime,” performed by my favorite ASL singer Stephen Torrance (even if he does misspell “soylent”):
More Terrible Christmas Things tomorrow!
*This is where I feel compelled to add that my family and I love each other very much. My dad even offered to fly here for the day. So I am alone by choice, but given the situation, it’s really best for all concerned.
Out of curiosity, Kate Harrad was inspired to genderswitch the characters in Pride and Prejudice, and then to follow it up with a Sherlock Holmes story. She simply changed names, titles, pronouns, and “a handful of details to keep it broadly believable.” The results are surprisingly fascinating.
The two links above are her descriptions of the process. (You can read the works themselves as well.) She has some interesting things to say about how the switched genders changes her perspective on the relationships. (“The elopement of what is now Lyndon Bennet and Miss Wickham feels disturbing to me, where the original didn’t: an adult woman in the military seducing a sixteen-year-old boy?”)
But my favorite part is how she thinks of this as having created a science fiction world:
I had expected my process to create a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy within the world of the books, and it did; I had not realised I was also going create a pagan rather than Christian universe. But of course, once you change ‘God and ‘priest’ for ‘[the] Goddess’ and ‘priestess’ you’re giving quite a different visual image and context.
She adds, “I still haven’t quite decided whether in a genderswitched universe, men have the babies. I think they probably do.”
I teach, as most of you know, at a girls’ school. A couple of years ago our play was Pride and Prejudice, with girls playing the men’s roles, but as men. I love imagining the play this way instead.
Cammy is a “loser” in typical high school novel style: she’s awkward, shy, the butt of jokes, and only has one friend — Gerdi, the perpetual Danish exchange student. When she starts receiving mysterious texts promising to help her get revenge on her popular classmates, she does what the texts say, of course. Before she knows it, she’s wildly popular and Luke, the boy she has a crush on, has started to notice her — but she’s also in too deep to back out when the texter’s demands start getting more dangerous.
I’m leading a book club at school this trimester (focusing mainly on making book trailers or some other project), and two of the girls chose this book to read. So I had to read it, too. (The 6th graders chose the Clique prequel, which is sitting on my nightstand now. Pity me.) This review has spoilers, because frankly there’s nothing surprising enough (except the identity of the texter, maybe) to warrant the maintenance of suspense.
I will admit that it was more interesting than I anticipated. The “mysterious texter directing her every move” bit was a new angle to the generic high school tale of popularity’s rise and fall. The moral is more or less the same as usual — “Old, true friends are the best; be true to yourself” — but things are a bit more complicated for Cammy. Her life was too safe; she did need to shake things up, and it was fun to watch her do so. I also liked that she did not end up with the boy in the end. She did some crappy things, and it would have been unrealistic for Luke to still want her after all that. (It reminded me of Vintage Veronica in that way.)
Interestingly, this book was written by vote — the author posted the first four chapters on her publisher’s site, and then readers voted on each successive plot twist. I’m sorry I didn’t get to watch that process unfold. There’s some sloppiness (at one point Cammy walks away from Luke’s house without her bike, but is riding it shortly thereafter; the school is described as having 156 people total and she’s lived there her whole life, yet there are kids she doesn’t know at all in her English class) but also an unusual number of fun quirks and memorable scenes. I’m curious how much the process contributed to these oddities.
Overall, a slightly above-average representative of a boring but popular genre.
A friend just alerted me to this ad for Hunger Games nail polish on Bookshelves of Doom. “Capitol Colours,” it’s called: “What will you be wearing at the opening ceremonies?”
Really? Isn’t this kind of like selling fake Dalmatian-fur coats to girls who want to be glamorous like Cruella deVille?
(The thing that pleases me most about this ad, though, is the butterfly cut-out eyelashes. When these came out awhile ago, I predicted that they would be worn on the covers of YA dystopias and/or paranormal romances within the year. I think an ad for a YA dystopia movie tie-in is close enough!)
J was born Jessica, but it never felt right. Inside, he knows he’s a boy. No one in his life gets it: his mother, his father, his somewhat self-absorbed best friend Melissa. He runs away from home to live as a man, but of course he can’t hide his secret forever.
I can’t talk about this without comparing it to Parrotfish, because that was the groundbreaker and is still one of the few YA novels with a transgendered protagonist. The biggest difference between the two is setting, and in this story, setting is everything.
Parrotfish‘s Grady is suburban, with middle-class white parents. J is biracial and lives in Manhattan, with parents who just scrape by financially. In some ways, J’s situation is easier than Grady’s — there’s a clinic and an entire public school for queer kids, and all of it accessible without a car. But the layer of financial woes and cultural pressure on top of J’s gender are so much harder than anything Grady faces.
Parrotfish is a problem novel. It’s a very good one, but there are limitations to that genre. “White and suburban” is the default, and so it’s the blank canvas on which Grady’s gender transition is painted, the star of the show. Whereas I Am J is a novel about a transgendered boy who is also urban, biracial, poor, an artist, a little homophobic, has a best friend who cuts… It’s much more complex (though therefore also for older teens, and less of a good Intro to the Concept of Transgender). Intersectionality fun times!
Another thing I loved about this book is how frank it is that gender dysphoria is hard to understand and takes some explaining, even for the most understanding and supportive loved ones. It’s all very well and good to instruct everyone to be “tolerant” and judge anyone who isn’t, but it isn’t realistic not to acknowledge that it can take awhile to come to that place. There are real issues of “losing a daughter” for the parents to go through here, and Beam does a very good (if painful) job with those.
I’m sorry everything’s been so quiet this fall in Parenthetical-land. I don’t want to get into everything here, but I haven’t been so inspired to write lately. And of course, the trouble with going awhile without writing is that you lose momentum. The first post back has to be The First Post Back, with sparklies and gold stars and sheer utter brilliance.
So I’m going to try to lift that responsibility by creating an even greater responsibility: at least one post a day for a month — from now until Martin Luther King Day. They certainly won’t all be reviews. They probably won’t all even relate to YA lit or education. But there will be something, and it won’t just be what I had for lunch that day. Unless my lunch was really interesting.
I’m in the process of switching web hosts. Hopefully it’ll go smoothly, and in a day or so I’ll be back up and running in my new home. But my experience has been that this sort of thing never goes smoothly. Cross your fingers!
Martin Maple and his dad live alone on an island. Mr. Maple spends all his time building a mysterious machine that he says will bring hope. When the machine is almost done, he rows off to the mainland to bring back the final piece. He never returns, nor do the vacationers who come to the island every summer. Martin heads for the mainland himself to figure out what’s happened and find his father. He finds that everyone in the world is gone except for a small group of kids who’ve all come to a small town now called Xibalba. (“Pronounced with a ‘sh-’ as in, ‘Who gives a Xibalba?’”)
This is a weird, amazing, amazingly weird book. The clearest analog I have is Lost. If you loved Lost (never mind the ending), you will probably love this. It’ll probably get classified as middle grade, but there’s a body count, and we aren’t distanced from it (though it’s certainly not on the level of, say, Hunger Games). But mostly it’s just plain creepy, in that way that things can get when kids who don’t have enough context or understanding end up in charge of making very serious decisions for a society.
The ending (while better than Lost’s) doesn’t entirely hold together, I think. Don’t try to fit it together too precisely. But it works well enough, with some wonderful “Ohhh, that’s what that was about!” moments. The world-building — from overall mood to inventive detail — are incredible enough to make up for any, “Wait, but why didn’t they-”s.
It’ll be a love it or hate it book for most kids (this one hated it, on Aaron Starmer’s blog), I think. I predict it’ll be a tough one to find a home for. This is definitely not a book for kids who look for the straightforward or linear, and that is most of them in the 10-14 range that I think is the target audience. But the kids who love Lord of the Flies, or the timeslip parts of When You Reach Me — get those kids to give it a try.
If you care about literacy and learning, please sign this petition.
Ensure all school libraries are properly staffed, open, and available for children every day.
Any school receiving Federal funds should be required to have a credentialed School Librarian on staff full time with a library that contains a minimum of 18 books per student…. Study after study has shown that well-stocked, well-funded, well-organized school libraries staffed by a “highly qualified” School Librarian, or other similarly qualified credentialed individual, improve student reading scores, test scores, and literacy rates. All children have the right to read and to have access to materials that will help them grow as learners and as people.
The opinions here are mine, and do not necessarily reflect those of my school. Also, even when I review books for younger kids, these posts are written for older teens and adults. In other words, I swear sometimes. Don't get upset.
Oh goodness, is this ever a fraught time of year. I was raised Jewish by half-and-half parents, so we also have a tree and presents and whatnot. And I love it — I love holidays and traditions, and specifically pretty white lights and gingerbread smells and Christmas carols and snow and all that jazz. I am an atheist, Jewish Christmas apologist.
Cammy is a “loser” in typical high school novel style: she’s awkward, shy, the butt of jokes, and only has one friend — Gerdi, the perpetual Danish exchange student. When she starts receiving mysterious texts promising to help her get revenge on her popular classmates, she does what the texts say, of course. Before she knows it, she’s wildly popular and Luke, the boy she has a crush on, has started to notice her — but she’s also in too deep to back out when the texter’s demands start getting more dangerous.
