On Skittles' Terms

Skittles has identified one specific spot in the house where she will allow petting to occur.  Any petting outside this zone is strictly prohibited (though I have been known upon occasion to break these rules).

Of course, the area she has chosen is perhaps the most annoying one in my entire household, as it happens to be any spot within arm’s length of the toilet IF I am seated upon it.  She’s figured out this is a place of vulnerability for me.  I will not move quickly from this spot, which gives her ample opportunity to flee if she perceives an attempt to pick her up is imminent.

She loves being pet and will purr ferociously when I stroke between her ears or beneath her chin, but in the perverse nature of all cats everywhere, she is unwilling to endure that which she loves unless it is on her own terms.  Thus, when I’m on the toilet, no matter where she was in the house when I headed for the bathroom, Skittles will always show up. 

She enjoys pacing in a large circle at my side, moving from almost close enough to snatch up to outside arm’s length.  She loves for me to catch her tail in a gentle hold at its base and then allow it to slide from my grasp as she circles away.  As the tip of her tail escapes my hand, she invariably circles back, tilting her chin toward me, inviting me to stroke her there as well. She’ll stand still for a few seconds, allowing me to pet and stroke her head and chin, then will slowly move beneath my hand until her tail is once more within my reach and the cycle begins again.

We’ll repeat this strange ritual multiple times until her need for contact has been appeased and she strolls leisurely away.

Over time, she has circled closer and closer and lingered longer and longer, for more extensive petting.  Over time, she has even occasionally ventured close enough for me to snatch her up and hold her in my arms.  In the early days, her claws would immediately extend and she would struggle to escape. I would use towels to capture her when I could, just to protect myself from though wayward claws. Though I should mention that her struggles were never aggressive in nature. She was struggling to get down, but not attacking me. Any scratches I received were purely inadvertent results of her desire to escape.  In later months, towels and blankets were no longer needed for protection.  Instead, she would simply freeze upon capture, claws fully sheathed. It would take long moments of constant stroking and attention for her to begin purring again.

Now, after many months of negotiating how and when she’ll be pet and held, I’m finally able to sit upon the closed toilet to engage in our petting ritual.  And though she still tries to flee when sensing imminent capture, Skittles now purrs the moment that capture becomes fact. 

And because I must work so very hard for her affection and her time, Skittles’ every purr, every head butt, every tail slide brightens and enriches my world. 

As we continue negotiating the parameters of our relationship, I slide ever deeper into love.

Pushing the Limits

I think that what makes Pushing the Limits by Katie McGarry appealing to so many teens (to the extent that it made the teen top ten list) is that it blends fantasy and realism so well.  There is the romantic fantasy mixed with elements every teen can relate to.  The tendency to say one thing while thinking another, the cliques and the difficulties inherent to high school, the inability to control one's life, the desire to rebel mixed with the desire to please others, I could go on.  I think the relationships portrayed here - Echo and her father, Echo and her stepmother, Noah and Echo, Noah and his brothers, Echo and her friends (the public ones and non-public ones), Echo and the counselor, the counselor and Noah, Noah and his two "roommates" - along with the struggle to discover oneself outside the family dynamic make this a story most teens can relate to.

In fact, of all the YA novels I read this semester, Pushing the Limits and Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers were my favorites. For me, both novels were romances and I thoroughly enjoyed them for that very fact.  I think that teens especially enjoy the fantasy element and many often want a romantic element threaded through their story as well.  It's something I struggle with in my own writing - how much romance to include in the YA fantasy novel I'm writing when I really never intended to have any romance at all.  Beta readers have made it clear, though, that they expect romance!  As a result, I've been trying to find a balance - enough of a romantic thread to appeal without having the romance overtake the plot (thus turning it into an actual romance novel).

Ultimately, I would declare Pushing the Limits a success.  Though there were some rough spots that pulled me from the fictive world, overall, I was hooked.

Amelia Anne

In my opinion, the beauty of its prose is what makes the YA novel,  Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield stand out.  I think Rosenfield made a conscious choice in how she wrote this novel, in terms of style and layout.  The end result is certainly an effective and almost poetic read.

Regarding the characters in the book, a number of my classmates felt that Amelia Anne stood out as a more vibrant character than Becca.  I actually found James to be the most interesting and dynamic character in the novel.  I certainly found him to be the most likable. One student in our group raised the question of how the author managed to make us care so much about Amelia Anne when we know from the first page (and the title) that she is dead.  Does the knowledge of her impending death somehow imbue her scenes with more urgency?

Ultimately, those who were not satisfied with the book attributed it to the fact that, in their opinions, it did not fulfill their expectations of the mystery genre, which raised the question of whether conventions are as well established in the YA market.  We seemed to agree that there is more flexibility in genre expectations of a YA novel, which allows an author to experiment a bit more in the writing of a YA novel.

(WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD)

I think it’s interesting that some readers found the added scenes about the town or about Brendan’s death to be extraneous and perhaps unnecessary.  In my opinion, these were the scenes that added true depth and originality to the story.  The charm of this book, I think, lies in its depiction of the small town, which certainly served as a character in and of itself.

The idea that gossip is the lifeblood of the town and that everyone knows everything literally seeps from the pages.  In fact, this is why the death of Amelia Anne is so disturbing to the inhabitants of the town.  Her identity, her killer, the reasons behind her death are all unknown.  The town’s inability to keep anything secret is a nice contrast against the one event no one talks about - the day three women visited the house of a mother in mourning, an outsider who is like a ghost wandering their town. The fact that James was one of the boys who witnessed Brendan’s death, to me, makes that scene critical to the book.  James has known too much death in his lifetime and in two cases, has been asked to become a participant in the act of dying, to provide a victim the ease of death.  In many ways, this too is the poetry and beauty of this book - that death is horrible and often violent, but in some cases, can become a blessing in and of itself.

Fault in Our Stars / Not a Test / Ashfall

In The Fault in Our Stars (WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD), we see Hazel on a journey toward acceptance, not of her own mortality, but rather of that mortality in others.  Hazel has lived with the knowledge of her own death for quite some time and has accepted her own mortality, from that moment in the hospital before we ever met her on the pages of this book, when her mother asked if she was ready and she answered yes.  We read The Fault in Our Stars, knowing that Hazel has already accepted her own mortality.  It is the journey toward acceptance of Augustus’ death that is truly her coming of age journey - the acceptance that some will go before her, including the boy she loves.

In This Is Not a Test (WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD), Sloane too has already accepted her own mortality.  She is ready to die.  She has decided on a day and time and it is only through sheer circumstance that she ends up surviving beyond the moments of her intended death.  She is somehow caught up in the race for survival, even as she has convinced herself she is in a race toward death.  She must somehow achieve an acceptance of the loss of Lily before she can truly embrace the idea of life.  She must somehow reach a point in her coming of age story where her will to live drowns out her will to die, where she is able to see that there is something worth living for, even in a world defined by the words “zombie apocalypse”.

I’m going to throw in a third book here, simply because I just finished reading it and it is on my mind as I grapple with the issue of death in YA novels.  Ashfall by Mike Mullin is another end-of-the-world, apocalyptic YA novel.  The main character, Alex, is on a coming of age journey as well.  As he treks through a post-volcanic world, trying to reach his family, he encounters people willing to help in times of terror and others who wish to harm.  Along his journey, he is continuously forced to make decisions that may not only impact his chances of survival, but also his ability to retain a sense of humanity.  His journey isn’t necessarily one toward an acceptance of death, or of Being-toward-death, but rather one of living with strength and honor.  He is continually confronted with the idea that it isn’t how we die that matters, but rather how we live.

As for my own writing, my thesis project is a YA fantasy that features quite a bit of death, some of which happened offstage before the novel begins, and more that occurs as the novel moves us forward.  I don’t know that I am dealing with death in a way similar to either John Green or Courtney Summers.  Death hovered over The Fault in Our Stars persistently.  There was always an awareness that death was coming for many of the characters, sooner rather than later. Hazel and Augustus spend much of their time ignoring its presence until they are unable to avoid its reality any longer.  Courtney Summers had death occurring offstage for much of the novel, then ruthlessly killed two-thirds of her cast in the final chapters of the book.

In essence, our characters struggle to accept the mortality of others. Though our methods for dealing with death are quite different, the journeys of our characters may be the same -  Hazel must accept the loss of Augustus, Sloane must accept the loss of Lily, Alex must accept the loss of his parents, and my own characters must accept the losses in their lives.

In the end, I think that it is the willingness to live, the act of turning away from death and embracing life, that truly represents the shouldering of adulthood and is truly representative of the stories being told in YA literature today.

Grave Mercy

We were asked as a class to assign a genre to the YA novel, Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers.   The choices we were given were Fantasy and Historical.  When it came time for me to vote, I was very frustrated because I did not want to vote for either of those choices.  Why?

Because for me, Grave Mercy was clearly a romance novel.  Certainly it was set in a historical time period and had a number of paranormal elements, but at its core, I felt this was more a romance than anything else.  In fact, if this were marketed for an adult audience, I believe it would have been placed in the romance section, rather than in fantasy or even historical fiction.

Having said that, I would be more likely to label it historical romance than paranormal romance, which is what led me to choose the genre of historical novel, rather than fantasy/paranormal.  The history flavors every page, the plot line is woven with political intrigue, and we have a hero and a heroine who warily circle around each other, uncertain whether they can trust the other.  They worry about betrayal to be certain, but they also struggle against trusting the other with their heart.
At its core, the story is about love and trust.  Our heroine learns much about herself and essentially grows up through the course of this novel, which helps to place it in the YA genre, but truthfully, it would fit quite neatly amidst any number of historical romances on the shelves today.

I don’t think the cover art influenced me either way, nor did the jacket copy because I began reading this story expecting one thing and ended up with something else entirely.  It truly was the story itself that led me to my conclusion.  The jacket copy led me to believe this would be a historical novel embedded with political intrigue.  The cover made me think “kick-ass heroine-assassin” and I was several hundred pages in before I finally clued in to the fact that I was basically reading a historical romance.

I think the beautiful thing about the YA market right now is that it transcends genre.  People who affiliate themselves with one genre (mystery, romance, sci-fi, etc.) end up reading books outside of “their” genre because YA does not really attempt to classify its novels.  You end up with a mish-mash of genres, which in many ways, enriches the stories we read.  I think YA offers writers the opportunity to write those cross-genre novels that they’ve always wanted to write.  That paranormal-mystery-western-romance that’s been plaguing them for years.  Set it up as a YA novel and you have an instant market.

Does genre matter?  I think genre only matters in the mind of the reader.  The industry has created an expectation for what a mystery novel will contain.  It has created that expectation of the happily-ever-after in romance.  What expectation is there in YA?  We certainly expect a great story.  And if there’s a girl on the cover in a long flowing gown, we expect a bit of romance, even if she is carrying a crossbow.

Ultimately though, a well-written story that defies genre may go further in the YA market than in the adult one.  It’s what I love about YA.

Unwinding Unwind

I ended the novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman with only one certainty - that despite my compulsion to finish the book, I would not be recommending it to ANYONE.  Trying to figure out why has been a struggle.  Why, if it was such a compelling read, do I not also feel compelled to recommend it to others?

(WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD)

In the end, I think it came down to the underlying main idea or theme of the novel, which in my opinion centered on the value and nature of both life and death.  For much of the novel, the reader understands that unwinding is death.  Proponents of unwinding couch it in politically correct terms, claiming that those unwound will continue to live in an altered state.  We as the readers, however, understand that this is simple posturing, a justification that has no basis in reality or fact.  We are rooting for the children of this novel, whether that child is a tithe, a ward of the state or a bully, because we understand that at their core, each child is a potential victim.

Although the author poses a number of questions and seems not to provide any answers, the reader is guided by the narrative toward an understanding that those who support unwinding are either misguided or self-serving or evil.  The concept of storking on the surface may seem acceptable, but once we have been exposed to its dark side, we understand it is yet another corrupt facet of this society.  We understand, perhaps even more clearly than the protagonists of this novel, that children are being killed in this world - not unwound - but murdered for their parts.  We understand that the harvesting of organs, tissue and body parts is clearly big business, just as we understand that those who have been unwound are no longer alive, in any sense of the word.

As a result, the themes of this novel completely break down for me in the culminating scene with Embry and the admiral.  When I am suddenly witness to a scene with hundreds of people acting as one body, providing the admiral and his wife with one final moment with their son, my entire understanding of life and death, at least as they occur within this society, have been turned around.  I am left with a foul taste in my mouth as I wonder - has the author just proven the enemy’s point?
I am complete aghast that I am now witness to the “altered state” proponents of unwinding have been spouting all along.  The fact that each body part somehow retains the memory of its original owner does nothing to alleviate the horror of the unwinding process.  However, I am still undeniably disturbed that the counselor’s final words to Roland were somehow true ones:  “You’re not dying — you’ll still be alive, just in a different way.”

I honestly believe that this novel was attempting to accomplish too much.  First, we are treated to a society that has gone to extremes when dealing with issues like abortion.  There are convoluted (and at times completely unrealistic) laws regarding storking, tithing and unwinding.  Questions regarding the soul and life after death are raised.  And no real answers are ever given.  Perhaps this is the strength of the novel, though for me, it is its ultimate weakness.  All kinds of questions are raised and we think we have our answers, at least in light of the unwinding and what it is truly accomplishing (spare parts for the wealthy and death for those unwound) and then we are slammed with the truth - Wow.  The unwinds really are still alive in an altered state.

In the end, I am left wondering what will happen to Embry after his unwind’s brithday celebration - will he get to go back to being Embry?  Even worse, I am left with the disturbing image of Conor with Roland’s zombie-arm (after all, if it still retains a part of Roland’s consciousness, even if it’s only skin-deep, what else can it be but a zombie?)

The result is that I am convinced that the themes of life and death that are pervasive in this novel have been undermined completely by the author’s unexpected decision to turn this unique concept into yet another zombie story (though I suppose it could be argued that zombie stories are masters at death themes… and yet).

Diarrhea of Books

I have, over the years, taught preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school and adult students.  This has resulted in what can only be described as an illness when it comes to acquiring books for the classroom.  That is to say, I pretend they’re for the classroom, but really, mostly they’re for me.  The sheer, vast number of books that I own has become epic and now that I am no longer in the classroom (as of last Nov., I’m working with teachers more than students in my district) all those books had to find a home inside my (very small) house.  As a result, I declared a moratorium on purchasing picture books, middle grade books, YA books, educational books and anything else that had to do with adolescent literature.  Then, I signed up for a picture books class last semester and a YA lit class this semester.  This ended the moratorium, of course, for I now an excuse to buy some more books - they don’t count because I needed them for class, you see. (The illness is becoming more apparent, isn’t it?)

The truth is, it’s very difficult for me to resist purchasing kids’ books because I love them all.  I particularly love YA literature, though I do think the industry lacks clarity when it comes to what constitutes a YA novel.  This results in a lot of books being marketed to 12 year olds and to 18 year olds, as if they should both be exposed to the same ideas and content.  As a result, I think that authors of kid lit in general, but particularly of YA lit, must be conscientious, not only of the overt messages their books contain, but also of any hidden messages they may not intend, but that readers absorb anyway.

This is the beginning of the semester (my 2nd semester at Seton Hill University in the Writing Popular Fiction program) and my Readings in Genre course this semester is YA literature.  I plan to continue writing my reviews / book journals for the books we read in class as part of this blog.  We’ll see how that goes.  Now I must head off and acquire some of the books we are to read this semester (so excited to add to the plethora of books currently overtaking my household).