This article is full of rich ideas to unpack. Here’s a particularly interesting bit:

That girls in the Middle East are consistently at risk of gendered violence implicitly suggests that girls in the “civilized” West are immune to such threats. The education students with whom we work are very familiar and comfortable with the stereotype that the lives of Muslim women are inherently scary, that they cannot work or vote or walk around without the threat of violence. Of course there are Muslim women who live in oppressive or patriarchal regimes (in the Middle East and elsewhere). What we contend is that young adult novels written by white women and marketed and consumed in the West consistently reinforce the idea that Muslim women are inherently oppressed, that they are oppressed in ways that Western women are not, and that this oppression is a function of Islam. By positioning “Eastern” women as the women who are truly oppressed, those in the West pass up a rich opportunity to engage in complex questions about oppression, patriarchy, war, families, displacement, and the role of values (imperialist or faith-based) in these relations.

I also love the discussion questions the authors suggest for teachers using these books in their classrooms. A sample:

• Which parts of the novel are you absolutely certain are true? How do you know? Where did you learn this information? Students can try to pinpoint the resources they rely upon to get their “facts.”
• Who is the author of this story? How do they legitimize themselves as an expert? What might be their motivations? Who are they speaking to and for?
• How is the book marketed and what does it intend to teach Western readers? Students might examine the description on the back of the book, the author’s note, the map, the glossary, and book reviews to make observations about what kinds of readers are being targeted.

These are librarian questions! These are the sort of media literacy questions I encourage my students to ask about every source they work with. Who is giving you this information? Why do you believe it? Why are they a trustworthy source, or not? We don’t discuss these nearly often enough (in school or elsewhere), particular not in relation to fiction.

I’ve seen a lot of this sort of novel (written by white women about Middle Eastern Muslim teen girls), and I’m starting to see more novels written by Western Muslim women about Western Muslim teen girls. But I see almost no books by Muslim women about Middle Eastern Muslim teens, particularly not for the YA market. If you have a recommendation, I’d love to hear it!

Huck, by Wallace, doesn’t believe “He was a mighty good n____*, Jim was.” Instead, “He was a mighty good man, Jim was.” In Twain’s book, Huck, expressing approval of Jim, says, “I knowed he was white inside.” In Wallace’s, this becomes “I knowed he was good.” Why is Wallace so eager to let Huck Finn off the hook? What was, in Twain, a telling exposure of how racism infects even the most sympathetic of characters becomes, in Wallace, just a coupla guys sitting around on a raft, talkin’. Huck is no Simon Legree. He does love Jim, but cannot escape his own racism entirely. That’s the point. The world would be a lot simpler if we had bad guys and good guys, but what we do have is a whole lot of mixed-up, uneasy people positively bustling with ignorance. And that’s Huck—us—the good guys.

And in the most recent Horn Book, “YA Fatphobia”, about the tendency of YA’s fat characters to be “pathologized” binge eaters, and the new crop of fat-acceptance YA.

I can’t comment too much on this since I haven’t read the books Kathryn Nolfi uses as examples, though now I’m curious to read Will Grayson, Will Grayson to see if I agree with her. (It was already on my list; I might bump it up.) She says, “The authors are unclear about the purpose of Tiny’s size,” which indicates to me that Tiny might be just the opposite of the standard YA fat character — not a cipher, the “point” of whose fat is as another character (as opposed to personality) trait. But I haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t say.

She wraps up with:

It is possible to write compelling and unsentimental stories for teens without casually insulting fat people, without relegating fat characters to the side, and without portraying fat teens as irretrievably damaged. To rely on the easy fat joke is lazy and oppressive writing.

Word.

(Thanks to Rebecca Rabinowitz for that link.)

*I know this can be a triggery word, so I’m leaving it out. Huck Finn, read in class or not, has context and literary import that running across that word in a blog doesn’t.

Reggie has big dreams for his school, but Clarke Junior School isn’t stepping up. His classmates are more interested in helping themselves than helping each other, and besides, nobody listens to Reggie anyway after an unfortunate incident on the first day of school left him with the nickname “Pukey.” With help from his best friends, Ruthie and Joe C., and the residents of a local homeless shelter where his youth group volunteers, Reggie sets out to change Clarke and change himself. Ideally without any more puking.

I fell in love with this book on page 4, when Ruthie prefaces her current events report in class thusly:

“Because of the American media’s obvious bias, I used seventeen different global news sources — including the Madagascar Weekly — to put my report together.”

Ruthie is my hero. As is Reggie, as is Olugbemisola R-P for writing this fantastic book. These are hilarious, brave, real kids who I miss since I finished their story. This book manages to be an honest, well-rounded friendship story, family story, political story, and coming-of-age. It even discusses religion without being preachy or about disillusionment. Reggie is never in danger of losing his faith, but he’s always considering what it means. None of the spheres of Reggie’s life are neglected or one-dimensional — a pretty stunning feat for such a zippy book.

Not only that, it stars recognizably urban kids with urban kid problems (including money) who will be relatable for well-off suburban kids. (At least, so I suspect — I’ll let you know after I start pushing this on my own well-off suburban kids.) Finding a book whose appeal straddles those worlds is so rare.

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers, Reading in Color, and Steph Su Reads (who disagreed with me about the book being “zippy”). And here’s an interview with the author at Mitali’s Fire Escape.

If you somehow missed these books, the premise is that aliens invade, in giant metal Tripod conveyances. They enslave all human adults with mind-control Caps and use people as slaves in their huge Cities. The small human rebellion depends on converting kids before they’ve been Capped. In the first book, Will, Henry, and Beanpole join the rebels; in the second, Will, Beanpole, and a new boy named Fritz infiltrate a Tripod City. Pool of Fire is the last book, the climax of the rebellion.

Apocalypse how? Aliens. Big, green, tentacle-y aliens who breathe green air. ‘Nuff said. The world is pretty rural, and there’s mention of human city ruins. I only re-read the last book so I don’t remember, but I think the implication is that the aliens blasted us back to the Middle Ages.

13 vs. 31: The world sure changed in the 10+ years between this book and most of the ones I’ve reviewed this month. Most immediately obvious to me is that there is not a single woman in this book. No named characters, certainly, but not even a shopkeeper or mother of a future revolutionary. (S theorized awesomely that the Tripods killed all the women, but the men were too depressed by this to deal with or even mention it. This interpretation does add a new dimension, you must admit!)

The casual racism and Eurocentrism is also excellent. The final assault on the three Tripod Cities needs to be done at the same time, by different rebel groups in different parts of the world. When they get word that one attack didn’t succeed, Will immediately jumps (incorrectly, as it happens) to, “The one in the east? The little yellow men failed then…” This is particularly interesting given the conclusion of the book, which has our heroes heading off to bring the world’s people together, now that they have the freedom to choose peace or war. I like to think Christopher meant this juxtaposition to be ironic. (I could say so much more about international relations in the Tripod books, but I want to post this sometime this month.)

Most fascinating to me was the portrayal of Julius, the rebel leader. At the beginning of the book, he’s challenged by another man, Pierre, who wants more democracy in their decision-making. Julius shuts him down:

“There will be a time… for us to discuss among ourselves how we shall be governed…. Until then, we have no room for squabbling or dispute…. Nor do we have room for dissension, or the suspicion of dissension.”

Ok. There’s an argument to be made for despotism in wartime. But it’s a tricky one at best, and in a modern novel, a statement like this would be challenged, by the text if not by the characters. The book would make the risks of this way of thinking a theme.

This book ends with a parallel Council meeting, in which the leaders of the new free world are, in fact, “discuss[ing] among [them]selves how [they] shall be governed.” They’re all set to elect Julius as President, when Pierre starts talking again. He says some stuff that makes a whole lot of sense to me:

“We are expected, out of sentiment, to vote him back into office. We are asked to confirm a despot in power…. There were others who worked and fought for freedom — hundreds, thousands of others. We accepted Julius as our leader then, but that is no reason for accepting him now…. Julius wanted the Conference held here, among the peaks of the White Mountains, as yet another means of reminding us of the debt we are supposed to owe him. Many delegates are from low-lying lands and find conditions here oppressive….”

In a modern book, Pierre might be the hero. In this book, our heroes Will, Beanpole, and Fritz are horrified when the Conference votes against Julius. We could be meant to take this as blind loyalty on Will’s part; his shortcomings are a theme throughout the trilogy. Except that the delegates don’t even suggest any other candidates. Without Julius to lead them, the Conference falls apart and the delegates return to their respective countries. The text comdemns Julius’s ouster just as Will does, which strikes me as distinctly old-fashioned, or British, or probably both.

Ultimately, this book held up. It’s a classic for a reason. I particularly loved how scientific and careful all the planning was — there are no plot holes here. But I couldn’t ignore the datedness. Old-School indeed.

Covers: There’s time for a lot of covers in 30+ years in print! Here’s a selection. None are especially crazy, unfortunately.

So that’s it, folks! I hope you enjoyed Old-School Apocalypse April as much as I did. I now return to my regularly-scheduled diet of YA and middle grade published in the last few years, and I think none of it will be science fiction for a little while. One final plea: it’s easy get stuck on the “I have to read all the new stuff!” treadmill, but take some time to revisit old favorites. It’s definitely never boring.

When Ron visits Manhattan with his dad near the end of the summer, he can’t get enough. (The girls, after all, are “fantastic.”) He runs away from home for a last weekend fling before they close the City. Like a good suburban tourist, he picks up a hot chick who steals his money and gets beat up by a guy who steals his ID. Without an ID he can’t leave the Dome before it closes for the year. He’s trapped.

New York, of course, was not completely evacuated. It’s full of an assortment of gangs, one of which picks Ron up because he happens to be good with machines. From that point on it might as well be any urban gang story, with the violence and girls-as-currency and internal power struggles and tragedy. (Until the end, which I’ll get to in a minute. It’ll be spoilery, because the end is the most interesting part, but the book isn’t so amazing that I think it matters if you’re spoiled.)

Apocalypse how? This isn’t a worldwide apocalypse, but a local one (and very much a dystopia).

Here’s the World-Weary Adult Who Explains It All (every YA post-apoc has one):

“Too many people crowded too close together. People started falling over in the streets, dead from pollution or mugging or just plain brain fever…. The banks threw up their hands and said the city was a bad investment. Eight million bad investments. Then the Federal Health people came in and said the environment inside the Dome had sunk below the level needed to sustain human life. Inside of a year everybody would be dead.
“You should have seen the rush! It was like a riot and an earthquake and a war, all at once. Went on for months. Families separated. Kids left behind…. People running every which way. When the dust finally cleared, the City was declared officially abandoned — empty, nobody here. So they sealed it off.”

Some people stayed behind, of course. Including the World-Weary Adult, some black marketeers who make their money off starving kids and then go home to the Tracts at night, the gang kids’ parents, and, as it turns out, all the people of color.

A lot of talking about race:

From the very beginning you know that the only black people Ron has ever seen are on TV, fighting the distant war in South America. When he joins the gang, it’s made clear that the south of the City is all white gangs, while the north is run by their enemies, the black “Muslims,” who are united under one leader, Timmy Jim.

After the devastating destruction of his own gang, Ron is taken to work for the Muslims, fixing their machines and training more repairmen. (It turns out, by the way, that “black” here includes Latin American and “Indian,” which probably means Native American rather than South Asian. Asian Americans are never explicitly placed in the world of this book.) Timmy Jim adds this to the apocalypse story:

“Oh, they took out the whites, all right [when the city evacuated]. Rich and poor. Irish and Italian and WASP and all. They got out okay. But they kept us inside. When we tried to get out, they beat us back with clubs, electric prods, water cannons, lasers — they didn’t let us out, man! They closed this City and wrote it off as a dead loss and claimed all of us were dead.
“That was why they closed the City down, man. The real reason! Wrote off all the welfare cases…. Left us to starve, to freeze, to be rat bait. They left us to fight with each other and kill ourselves off.”

But Timmy Jim is more than a gang leader — he’s a military commander, and he has big plans. First he got the black part of town under control (Ron describes it as cleaner, with working lights and open shops). Next the Muslims will fight until they unite all the white gangs under Timmy Jim, too. And then they’ll invade Outside. All those black soldiers? Timmy Jim planted them somehow (the book has some plot holes the size of Manhattan Dome), so he knows they won’t defend the Tracts.

Ron is stunned. He no longer feels particularly connected to his home, after a year in New York, but he can’t imagine it invaded either. (And, I’m sure, can’t imagine it controlled by a black man, though he doesn’t say that explicitly.) At the same time, he’s horrified by the starvation and poverty he’s seen in the City. At the end of the book, he manages to get his ID back. He leaves when the City reopens in June, vowing to “change [the Outside people],” to “rub their noses in the filth they’ve left behind them.”

So on the one hand, the blacks have their shit together way more than the whites — their part of town is the part that works. On the other hand, that’s because they’re run by a military dictatorship. I’m not sure what other sort of government would work for people sealed up in a lawless, starving City, but we’re clearly supposed to be afraid of Timmy Jim and the idea of him invading Outside.

Ron is offered as the saner, safer alternative: the Tract whites can change, without the violent revolution. “Even if I have to make myself President,” he vows — not “even if I have to blow some shit up.” We white folks can fix ourselves from the inside, now that we understand the problem. It’ll all be ok, we just need to be shown the way by one of our own!

13 vs. 31: The starkness of the color line felt very ’70s to me — not that we don’t still have plenty of racism, obviously, but I find it hard to imagine this book flying today. It doesn’t even pay lip service to the idea that people of different races should try to get along.

A lot of the world-building doesn’t hold together. How can New York be so crowded and full of shops and “sharp” girls if everyone who fills it in the summer is from the Tracts just like Ron? He says he feels like a “real” New Yorker when he buys his fancy duds, but there’s no such thing. (Well, of course there is, but he doesn’t know that yet.)

Also, it’s implied that the soldiers don’t mostly come from Cities. So where do the black men who become soldiers grow up? Are there poorer black Tracts? And where did all the poor white City people end up?

I’ve always had a fetish for closed societies, which is I think what appealed to me about this 20 years ago. (Also, who could resist a dramatic title like City of Darkness? Which, now that I think of it, is kind of a terrible pun…) I was more annoyed this time ’round by the things that didn’t make sense. But I was still drawn in (as evidenced by the fact that this is the longest post ever).

Finally, an environmentalist sidebar for Earth Day: Ron and his friends gush a lot about how exciting all the noisy cars and crowded streets of the City are, compared to their own sanitary homes and electric cars or trains. The thrill of the City is in the transgression. When Ron leaves the City to shake things up Outside, it’s the ultimate transgression — maybe he hasn’t grown up, as we’re led to expect from the usual trajectory of the YA novel; maybe he’s just taking his thrill-seeking to the next level.

Covers: The first one was the cover of my childhood (sorry it’s so tiny); you can’t tell it’s science fiction at all. It just looks like urban teen fic (with very ’70s haircuts). The others are obviously SF, but you can’t tell they’re YA. I do kind of dig the one in the middle that looks like a graphic novel.

…Whew! Guess I made up for not posting in a week. Pseudo-academic wankery takes up some space, man. You get a cookie if you made it this far. A post-apocalyptic doom cookie.

Nine months after effectively banning most fund-raising food sales in city schools, a city panel will vote Wednesday on an amended regulation that will allow student groups to sell items like Pop-Tarts and Doritos during the school day, but not brownies, zucchini bread or anything else homemade.

Ostensibly this is about “health”: they have a whole list of proposed regulations about percentage of calories from fat and allowable ingredients. It could also be about allergies. (My theory, based on the sort of things I’ve heard people say at my school, is that it’s at least partly about sanitation: who knows what could be going on at those other parents’ houses? At least if it’s pre-packaged I know it’s safe!)

Shall we count the things that piss me off here? “Childhood obesity” is a bogus bogeyman. Let’s teach our kids to make healthy choices about their diets rather than micromanaging everything. A list of ingredients and a portion size doesn’t make something healthy — in fact, I would argue that, whatever the fat content, brownies made from scratch are healthier than Pop-Tarts because they’re made out of actual food ingredients pronounceable by human beings. Baking together at home is an educational family bonding activity; stopping by Costco is not so much. And for crying out loud, can schools stop [insert gross metaphor here that I won't use because this is a family site] huge corporations already?

That’s five things, and I didn’t even include my made-up sanitation theory!

2. From Wired: How to Raise Racist Kids.

Step One: Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

Step Two: Actually, that’s it. There is no Step Two.

Or at least, so says the authors of a recent book researching how kids think about race.

3. And back to food… The Anti-Fridge

While the wall-mounted “anti-fridges” are pretty cool, I’m not sure they’re so practical for large quantities. My current eating lifestyle involves very little refrigeration in production or transportation, but lots in my home. Turns out you have to chill a lot of produce if you a) live in New England, b) don’t buy produce except from the farmer’s market, and c) want to eat something other than root veggies all winter. But it does concern me to be so dependent on refrigeration… clearly I’ve found my next Crazy Hippie Food Project!

The best thing about this link, though, is that it introduced me to You Are What You Eat by Mark Menjivar, “a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.” It’s not quite as amazing as Material World: A Global Family Portrait, but darn close.

(Thanks for the links, Martini-Corona!)

The Prince of Fenway Park, Julianna Baggott

Check this premise, people: the famous Curse on the Red Sox is a real curse, brought on by an angry faerie. Not only does it prevent the Sox from winning the Series, it also traps an odd assortment of Cursed Creatures in tunnels under Fenway Park. Oscar’s deadbeat dad turns out to be one of them, and only Oscar can break the Curse and free his father and the rest of his family.

It’s one of the most original fantasy premises I’ve ever heard, and as a Bostonian I’m contractually obligated to love it at least a little. I wanted to love it a lot — and there were things I did love about it, besides the Boston stuff.

Oscar is mixed-race, white and African-American, and adopted by white parents (ok, one turns out to be half-fae, but it’s not like that’s a box you can check on the census). There aren’t enough books like that to start with, and the way this one uses the fantasy journey to help Oscar find where he belongs is kind of beautiful. The Curse ends up being in part about how shamefully the Sox treated black ballplayers, and the parallels between Oscar and Jackie Robinson were neat. I loved that the Sox weren’t the unmitigated Good Guys — they were a deeply flawed “hero” who had to grow up in order to be worthy of having the Curse broken. It made baseball be about something deeper.

Lots of kids will love this book (though I can’t tell how many will be neither Bostonians nor baseball fans). But I was disappointed in the magic: it’s too easy, too contrived.

The Farwalker’s Quest, Jodi Sensel

In this vaguely post-apocalyptic future, almost no one ever leaves their village, and little old knowledge remains. Thirteen-year-olds Ariel and Zeke are about to choose their vocations, when they find a mysterious message dart in a tree that sends them on a long journey and changes their futures forever.

This is an old-school fantasy adventure that manages not to be (too) derivative, the above summary notwithstanding. If you like the title, you’ll like the book — it’s pretty much as advertised. I couldn’t put it down.

Slight spoiler
I have to tell you, though, that I got a little obsessed with the relationship between Ariel and her protector, Scarl — and I wasn’t alone. A bunch of us judges got vibes. The book claims that they develop a father-daughter relationship, but I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide how old Ariel would have to be before their 16-year age gap was no longer icky. I mean, I had a crush on Scarl, so I totally saw where Ariel was coming from. He’s all moody and tortured! (It was very Fire and Hemlock, for the three of you who get that reference.)

11 Birthdays, Wendy Mass

This is Groundhog’s Day for kids — and I love me some Groundhog’s Day, so I found it charming. If you’re looking for a slightly quirky read for nice girls who can’t get enough books about friendship and Learning About Themselves — the girls who loved Savvy — this is a solid choice. But as a potential award winner, I didn’t think it sang.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin

If you need a gift book for an elementary school girl, this is a lovely choice. It’s the children’s novel equivalent of a period piece: the set designer and costumer will win Oscars, and it’s easy to ignore the rest.

Fortunately, in this case the rest is also lovely. Lin’s writing is simple in a way that evokes mythology, but it’s meatier than Odd and the Frost Giants. The stories all weave together in a very particular way: I was reminded of Bridge of Birds, which makes me wonder if this brand of story interconnection is a feature of Chinese mythology. (Anyone know?)

I would have been totally bored by it as a kid — there’s not enough excitement, and it would have felt like something adults thought was Good for Me. But I hope not all kids are as narrow-minded as I was, because it really is an excellent book.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman

This is an invented myth about a boy who tricks the frost giant who’s taken over Asgard, thereby saving his people from endless winter — it’s Neil Gaiman, doing what he does with the reinvented mythology and whatnot. It’s cute, but slight.

The Serial Garden, Joan Aiken

This is a posthumously collected book of Aiken’s short stories about the Armitage family, to whom something magical happens almost — but not every — Monday. They’re delightful, and so adorably British they created an insatiable desire for tea and crumpets… but they’re all kind of the same. Once you’ve got the hang of the amusingly blase way the Armitages react to a unicorn in their backyard or a witch teaching the neighborhood school, you could pretty much write the rest of the stories yourself.

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I just read an excellent article by Mitali Perkins in the April School Library Journal, “Straight Talk on Race”. She designates five questions to consider when reading a text:

• Are the nonwhite characters too good to be true?
• How and why does the author define race?
• Is the cover art true to the story?
• Who are the change agents?
• How is beauty defined?

There are no “right” answers to these questions, and Perkins doesn’t try to give us any. She uses her own books and others she loves to show how a good book can make flawed, or just complicated, choices about race. I can’t recommend the article highly enough — it’s a great example of the kind of critical wrestling I want my kids to do more of.

And then, as I was getting ready to post this, I read these (because the internet is always thematically relevant):

Justine Larbalestier’s post yesterday, The Problem with Gone with the Wind

Deborah Kaplan’s response to Justine’s post, Loving Things That Are Broken

All these women love children’s and YA lit — which is why we want to discuss it and fight with it and unpack it and make it better. After all, the best books are the ones worth criticizing, right?

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Crosbie, John S. Crosbie’s Dictionary of Puns. New York: Harmony Books, 1977.

Let’s start with the fact that there’s a dictionary of puns. It’s alphabetized by keyword, without attribution, such that each entry reads (for example):

fray A good seamstress is like a good poet: She knows how to turn a frays.

Thanks, pun dictionary! That was… helpful?

But what’s really “awesome” about this book (by which I mean “gross”) is its casual racism. The fourth paragraph of the introduction reads:

One recalls the story of Eleanor Roosevelt at a state dinner, discussing democracy with an Oriental ambassador. “And when did you last have an election?” she asked. “Before blekfast,” he replied with some embarrassment.

Nothin’ but class, John Crosbie. (And no, I did not “recall” that in no way apocryphal story.) Ew, on so many levels.

Because there’s not enough “ew” in this post, I will close with a quote from the final page, an excerpt from Word Play: What Happens When People Talk, copyright 1973 by Peter Farb. It attempts to be “scholarly,” characterizing a common two-part structure of obscene puns. For example:

The two-element structure is adaptable to a great variety of pun forms, such as… the Confucianism, which partakes of the traditional proverb with its pretensions of wisdom, thus adding an extra bite to the humor: “Confucius say, ‘Seven days on honeymoon make one whole week.’”

Gosh, weren’t the 70s fabulous? If this is the first page and the last page, I can only imagine what’s in the middle. Off to the discard pile with you, Crosbie’s!

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