Young Adult

The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

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In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

Permanent Rose, by Hilary McKay

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I’ve been taking refuge in YA books from the depressing ugliness of some of my adult reading. This series about the Casson family started out fun. It’s a rather madcap family where the mother, flighty Eve, is too busy painting in the garden shed to feed the children, while the father Bill lives in London where he can do his “real art” without being bothered by children underfoot.

Yes, I should have know then.

However, at first it’s rather fun. As in the best MG and YA books, the children take charge. Indigo makes hearty meals to keep Caddy’s strength up while she studies for exams and takes ridiculous driving lessons. She’s a heart-stoppingly incompetent and distracted driver but her teacher , “darling Michael”, is too enamoured to care. Saffy becomes friends with the wheelchair girl who lives nearby when they have an encounter that is half a battle and half a recognition of soulmates, before hatching a daring plan to find Saffy’s inheritance.

In the first book, Saffy’s Angel, we learned that the children are named after colors on the paint chart posted in the dining room: Cadmium is the oldest; then the boy Indigo, with the youngest being Permanent Rose who was so very impermanent at the time of her birth. Saffron, however, can’t find her name on the chart and thus learns that she is adopted.

My irritation with Bill grew, but what kept me reading was my fascination with Rose, a belligerent, truth-speaking child who is—through some trick of genes and chance—a born artist, more of an artist than either parent. She’s fierce in her passions and honesty, and utterly blunt in her exposé of the Casson family dynamics.

In this, the third book in the series, she writes letters to her father—“Darling Daddy,”—describing the desperate happenings at home, hoping that they will persuade him to come home, something that he has ceased doing since acquiring a new girlfriend. Bill, happy in his London life, spending the money he earns on trips to Paris and New York and on Samantha rather than on his cash-strapped family, chooses to believe that Rose is making things up.

She isn’t.

Indigo also pulled at my heartstrings. I have too often seen children bravely take up the slack and act as parents when their own irresponsible and self-indulgent parents prove useless. Sent to buy groceries—“Real food!” as one child demands—Eve returns with cherries and tubes of paint.

I know it’s all meant to be jolly fun and aren’t the children clever to manage on their own, but frankly, it’s all too real to me. I find it heart-breaking. Tempted to strangle Bill and smack Eve, I wanted—if nothing else—to call child services on the pair of them. They obviously “love” the children, but how empty is a declaration of love without a meal behind it or even just noticing that a child is struggling?

My only consolation is the other adults who step in to help the children with a meal or a timely helping hand. And the competence of the children themselves.

The theme of all these books seems to be that quirky families are far more interesting and wonderful than those boring families with regular meals and clothes and parental attention. For me, though, the only thing that matters in these stories is the love—as in care and attention—each child has for the other.

I learned long ago, when still very young myself, that “love is not some wonderful thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do.” As always, I learned that from a book, in this case one by Elizabeth Goudge. In these stories of the Casson family, I don’t see anything I would call love from the parents, only between the children. And that—the absence of parental love—seems to me a tragedy. No wonder Permanent Rose is so belligerent, demanding what she needs and brooking no denial.

Have you read a novel where you had mixed feelings about the characters and the theme?

Abigail, by Magda Szabó

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Szabó‘s novel The Door made a strong impression on me so I leaped at the chance to read this newly translated book, also set in Hungary. Originally published in 1970, it is the story of 15-year-old Gina who in 1943 is exiled from Budapest by her beloved father, sent to boarding school near Hungary’s eastern border.

Gina is bewildered and furious at being sent away from her father and her social life in the city, which ranges from her friends at school to the more sophisticated people she encounters at the home of her aunt, especially a young lieutenant. The General’s sister may be flighty, but she is Gina’s only other relative. Yet Auntie Mimó is not allowed to know where Gina is going. No one is.

Headstrong, a little spoiled, Gina rebels, finding creative ways to break the rules at the strict academy. When her clothing and few possessions are taken from her, she finds a way to secret a few. She mocks the games and traditions of her fifth year class and later leads them in a series of pranks.

She can only talk to her father by phone once a week in the presence of the humorless Director and the Deaconess; Gina’s forbidden to complain to him. Only later does she come to understand his motives in hiding her away. The war is not going well for the Axis countries and there are fears that Germany will occupy its supposed ally. Thus, this book complements my recent nonfiction reading about WWII.

While having many characteristics of a traditional coming-of-age story, and echoes of books like Jane Eyre, Gina’s story is unusually perceptive and complex. My book club read this, as we had The Door, and we discussed the significance of the title. Abigail is the name of a statue of a woman holding a vase in the school’s garden. The girls believe that the statue comes alive to help them, so when they are in trouble they leave a note in the vase. This legend lends a magical touch to the story.

We wondered why this statue, significant as it is in the story, should be the title. I believe it’s for the same reason the author includes several flash-forwards, brief messages from a future Gina telling us how a particular thread will turn out. At first I was surprised that the author would give away these endings; surely the goal should be to build suspense rather than deflate it. Then I realised that the author didn’t want these threads to run away with the story. She wants us to stay with Gina and how she learns to recognise and admit when she is wrong, not least about the Abigail legend which works as a symbol of Gina’s arc.

One of my book club friends asked if this book is for adults or young adults. Publishers and bookstores may categorise it as a Young Adult book simply because of the protagonist’s age, but I would say it is also for adults.

While it’s obviously a book that would appeal to young adults, there’s plenty to interest those of us who are no longer in that age group. There’s the vivid reminder of what it was like to be 15, so sure of things and so often wrong. There’s the vivid evocation of time and place: an ancient monastery turned boarding school in remote Árkod in the last years of WWII.

There’s also the experience of a mind gradually opening to new ideas, to seeing her own mistakes, adjusting her worldview, understanding people from their own point of view rather than what we think they must be feeling.

I can’t think of anything more relevant to this particular moment we find ourselves in. This book has made me recognise how my own outlook and opinions have hardened as I’ve aged. As a result, I’m trying to cultivate again the kind of mental resilience that Gina demonstrates—not an easy task!

There is much more to this book—the subtle use of symbols, the remarkable shifts in characterisation, the minimal yet effective evocation of setting—all of which I plan to examine more thoroughly in hopes of improving my own writing. Still, Abigail is a fun and poignant story for non-writers, adults and teens alike.

Have you read a story set in a boarding school that lingers in your mind?

Prairie Fires, by Caroline Fraser

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A friend recommended this book so vehemently that she actually sent me a copy. As I mentioned before, I’d never read the Little House books, so I’ve been catching up on them as I read this biography. Wilder always maintained that her stories were true, but questions arose even as the books were taking the world of children’s literature by storm. Now Fraser’s meticulously sourced account shows what is fact and what is fiction in those books.

That is not a criticism of Wilder. She was writing for children and wanted to spare them the most devastating details. She was also writing to memorialise her parents, her father in particular, so of course she managed the details to show them in a good light.

For example, one thing that was obvious to me reading the books as an adult, even without Fraser’s clarification, was that Wilder’s father was not above stealing, as when he knowingly tried to homestead on land that belonged to the Osage. He was also terribly reckless, constantly dragging the family away from security to chase a dream of a self-sufficient farm far from other people.

Fraser makes clear the near impossibility of achieving that dream, given the lack of federal programs at the time, the uncertain and often disastrous natural conditions—drought, storms, locusts—and the unsuitable land set aside for homesteaders. There is much here for us to consider looking at today’s situation: ongoing ecological damage that has put us on the edge of another Dust Bowl, the difficulty of making a small farm work even with boutique vegetables and the growth of farmers’ markets, and the near takeover of agriculture by enormous farms run by corporate agribusinesses with large federal handouts.

Yet, as the book’s subtitle, The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, asserts, that image of the self-sufficient pioneer pulling himself up by his bootstraps is a big part of the U.S.’s mythology. Much of the credit for that goes to Wilder’s books, as Fraser’s account shows.

As an adult, however, I could glean even from Wilder’s idealised stories that the family often depended on the help of others. The truth is even more substantial, not only during Wilder’s childhood, but even as an adult when she somehow didn’t see the hypocrisy of decrying government assistance while receiving federal money herself. Just as many of the people today who hate the government are the ones themselves receiving the most assistance.

Before reading Fraser’s book, I was unaware of the influence of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, on the books and on her mother. It was Lane, already a journalist, although one who larded her stories with fictional elements, who pushed her mother to write the books. It was Lane who first edited them, with the two wrangling over changes. Lane also wrote her own books, appropriating some of her mother’s stories and penning a thinly-veiled Mommy Dearest novel.

Fraser treats Lane fairly, acknowledging her strengths while not hesitating to point out her weaknesses. She presents her as emotionally unstable, with several nervous breakdowns, and increasingly prone to paranoid conspiracy theories. Lane was part of the triumvirate of Founding Mothers of the Libertarian movement, along with Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson. She also pushed her mother to join her in her angry rants against the government, adding political screeds to some of her mother’s later books.

Of course, we are still struggling with the effects of Lane’s work. Many of today’s politicians criminalise the poor, condemning them for needing assistance. Many demand that the federal government be downsized, if not disbanded, while living high on the hog on federal money themselves, ignoring the hypocrisy. An egregious example is Maryland Republican Andy Harris who campaigned on doing away with the Affordable Health Care Act, which would take away heath care from up to 10 million citizens, complaining when elected that his taxpayer-funded health care wouldn’t take effect for a month.

It is no wonder that during the Great Depression and WWII people flocked to Wilder’s simple tales of a loving family, enduring hard times together, as embodied by a line from a hymn that recurs in the books: “We are all here.”

The Little House books are lovely fairy tales for children, but not something to base a nation on. However, even if we question the myth of a self-sufficient, rugged individual, many of us today embrace other values extolled in Wilder’s books: the importance of family, being happy with simple things, pulling together and being brave when things go wrong.

Even if you’ve never read the children’s books, this biography is essential to understand how we in the U.S. have gotten to where we are today.

What book have you read that illuminated an historical era and its effects on us today?

Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

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I never read these books as a child, being too busy with fairy tales and Arthurian stories, and never saw the television series. However, Caroline Fraser’s biography of Wilder, Prairie Fires, came highly recommended to me, so I thought I’d better catch up on these children’s books.

In this, the third book in the loosely autobiographical series, Laura and her family leave their beloved Wisconsin house in the big woods, described in the first book, and set out for Kansas. The experience of traveling in a covered wagon is vividly conveyed, seen from young Laura’s perspective, though the discomforts are minimised. Laura, her older sister Mary, and baby Carrie get restless sitting in the wagon all day, and Laura worries about the dog Jack who has to run the whole way, but she’s also fascinated by all she sees and comforted by the sound of the horses feeding as she goes to sleep.

As in the other books, the small family encounters hazards and setback, but Ma and Pa can always be relied upon to keep the girls safe and feeeling loved. Eventually they find themselves on an open, seemingly uninhabited prairie near Independence, Kansas. The descriptions of the grasslands—their shy colors and scents, their creatures and breezes—show a genuine love of this land.

Reading this book as an adult gives me a curious double perspective. I know too well the ecological damage done by farmers like Pa plowing up the fragile prairie. I know too much about blatant lies of the government and railroads that lured homesteaders onto lands not appropriate for wheat farming, and of course about the injustice and genocide visited upon the Osages who in fact inhabited this land.

There has been some outcry about the depiction of the Osages in these books, but at least in this one I found it pretty even-handed. Remember that it is from a child’s point of view, one who knows nothing of the larger picture or the history. When the Native Americans do turn up on their seasonal migration, Ma and some of the other nearby homesteaders are afraid of them, but Pa treats them as neighbors, with courtesy and respect. Young Laura describes the ones she actually meets as beautiful and awe-inspiring.

I also know too much about poverty, and do not take at face value the nostalgic recreation of life in a one-room cabin with sometimes only potatoes for dinner. If I’d read this book as a young child, in a bedroom well-stocked with toys and books, nourished on three balanced meals a day, I wonder how I would have reacted to young Laura’s blissful descriptions of her single doll, a rag doll made by Ma, and the comfort of a single potato or turnip for dinner and Pa’s fiddle afterwards.

As an adult, I was fascinated with her detailed description of the house Pa built: the way he notched the logs, put on the roof, built the door, and crafted leather hinges for it. Laura’s childish pursuits are charming, but what captured me was Ma and Pa’s endless toil, the heartbreak of lost harvests, the impossibility of breaking even.

It was not a simpler time; it was an infinitely more difficult time. I’ve chopped wood for winter fuel and washed clothes with a washboard. I’ve tried to live off what I can raise. The hardships of frontier life, of homesteading don’t seem romantic to me. Perhaps they might have if I’d read these books as a child, unaware of all that was being glossed over.

Have you read or reread a children’s book that seems different to you as an adult?

Best books I read in 2018

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Best books I read in 2018

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. These are the ten best books I read in 2018. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor
This unusual and remarkable book is the story of a village in the Peak District and its surrounding countryside. It’s a story about time, stretching over 13 years with each chapter covering a single year of the village’s life. This is not a book to rush through. It is a book to savor.

2. Waking, by Eva Figes
It’s quite short, only 88 pages, but don’t be deceived. There’s a lifetime packed into this stunning novel. Each of the seven chapters takes us into the thoughts of our unnamed narrator at a different point in her life, from childhood to the edge of death.

3. Priest Turns Therapist Treats Fear of God, by Tony Hoagland
In crafting his poems Tony Hoagland, who passed away this year, brings together humor and tenderness, wit and emotion, gentle satire and surprising insight. Using the things of this world, he invites us to be present in our lives and appreciate each moment. The poems in this, his final book, often moved me to tears.

4. Collected Poems, by Jane Kenyon
For me, reading Jane Kenyon’s poems for the first time has been like falling in love, that moment when you meet someone who seems to be your soulmate, who speaks your language, who knows what you have been through.

5. My Beloved World, by Sonia Sotomayor
This memoir by the Supreme Court justice is remarkably well-crafted and imbued with a generous spirit.

6. A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, ed. by Jan Heller Levi
In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser talks of the influence of Melville and Whitman, one “the poet of outrage”, the other “the poet of possibility”, and we can see both of these influences in her poems. She also speaks of different sorts of unity and embraces the possibility of our coming together, of our finally bringing an end to war.

7. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, by Walter Mosley
With this novel, Mosley takes us into the mind of ninety-one-year-old Ptolemy Grey, a mind that is fraying at the edges. It is one of the most moving portrayals of aging that I’ve read. Mosley’s novels are always entertaining, but for me as a writer they are also a masterclass in writing craft.

8. [Asian Figures], by W.S. Merwin
Merwin, a prolific and popular poet, a former poet laureate, chose to translate these proverbs from various Asian cultures. He side-steps the thorny question of whether they are poetry, and instead concentrates instead on what they share: brevity, self-containment, and “urge to finality of utterance”. What they also share is humor, wit, and true wisdom.

9. My Name Is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout
This quiet story is not for everyone, but I fell in love with Lucy’s voice. In addition to the voice, what I admire most as a writer is the way Strout releases information. Among the themes of imperfect love and family is the theme of reticence. The story seems to ramble haphazardly, but when I went back and looked more closely, I could see how well crafted it is.

10. How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff
Fifteen-year-old Daisy arrives in England, sent by her father and new stepmother to visit her aunt, only to find herself embroiled in an invasion. Daisy’s voice is the best thing about the book—surly, smart, funny and vulnerable. We are all flawed beings; Daisy is no different, yet in rising to the occasion she finds an unexpected heroism. I felt privileged to spend these pages with her.

What were the best books you read last year?

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff

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For once, I saw the film of this award-winning Young Adult book before reading the book itself. I’d taken an excellent workshop led by Rosoff, so when I saw the film listed, I decided to take a look. Only later did I follow up with reading the book, and was glad I did.

As the story begins, fifteen-year-old Daisy arrives in England, sent by her father and new stepmother to visit Aunt Penn, sister to Daisy’s mother who died when Daisy was born. The teen loathes her stepmother, who is pregnant, saying, “If she was making even the slightest attempt to address centuries of bad press for stepmother, she scored a Big Fat Zero.”

Daisy’s voice is the best thing about the book—surly, smart, funny and vulnerable. She’s met by her fourteen-year-old cousin Edmond, who is not only smoking a cigarette but has brought a “falling-apart” jeep in which he will drive her home.

Thus begins her adventures with her charmingly eccentric cousins in an old house in the countryside. Aunt Penn who is important in the government, leaves almost immediately “to give a lecture in Oslo . . . on the Imminent Threat of War.”

Daisy pays little attention to war-talk, since people had been yammering about the possibility for the last five years, though her oldest cousin Osbert can’t get enough of the latest news. She spends her days with Edmond, his twin Isaac, and their little sister Piper, and assorted dogs, goats and other animals. They fish and swim and picnic.

Then comes the invasion.

This is when the film blew me away. Watching it without knowing the story at all, I thought if a war came, it would be like the Land Girls or children being moved to the countryside during the Blitz, as in Lissa Evans’s Crooked Heart.

I was wrong. The images of rural England occupied by an enemy force—villages turned into military encampments, cars abandoned on country lanes for lack of petrol—shocked me deeply. And, to my shame, showed me just how superficial my empathy is for other countries trapped by warring armies: Sarajevo, Aleppo, so many others. Not England, I kept thinking.

Shameful, indeed.

I’m glad I went on to read the book. Not only is it more detailed and nuanced—movies must necessarily leave out much of what’s in a book—but Daisy’s voice is so true as she tries to keep her head above water, waters that get deeper and more treacherous as the story goes on. I felt I experienced every minute with her, every shifting emotion. We are all flawed beings; Daisy is no different, yet in rising to the occasion she finds an unexpected heroism. I felt privileged to spend these pages with her.

Have you read a book recently that showed you something new about yourself, perhaps something you’re not proud of?