A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle

"'Are you really a ghost?'
'Oh, I am.'
 'And you're really my mother?'
'Yes,' said Tansey.  'I am.'
'I'll tell you what's really weird, then,' said Emer.  'I'm not all that surprised."

Anyone out there have a family ghost story?  I do.  When my grandfather was a teenager in Poland many years ago, he apprenticed as a metalworker with his uncle, who was horrible to him.  After two years of apprenticeship, my grandfather ran away and returned to his family farm.  Later, after my grandfather had moved to Canada and married, he saw his uncle in a dream and his uncle apologized for having been so mean to him.  A few weeks later,  he got a letter from his family in Poland telling him that his uncle had died the night of that dream. 

Sounds like an urban legend, doesn't it?  There are a lot of family ghost stories like that kicking around, tales of familiar family members coming back to say goodbye, reconcile, or bring comfort rather than spook or scare.  Roddy Doyle's latest book is a family ghost story, but it's not noir or gothic.  It's really just a lovely inter-generational family story, where one of the family members happens to be a ghost.  Doyle described it in a recent interview as "the afterlife from the perspective of an atheist".   It revolves around four generations of women;  Mary O'Hara (a twelve-year-old girl), her mother Scarlett, her grandmother Emer, who is dying, and her ghostly great-grandmother Tansey.

Tansey isn't the kind of ghost who is particularly mysterious or threatening.  She first appears to Mary outside Mary's  home,  and opens up by chatting about the weather.  She's a little strange--her clothes look old-fashioned and she doesn't get wet in the rain--and she wants Mary to "tell your granny it'll all be grand."  Mary's a bit taken aback, but not really scared:

"Mary should have been worried, maybe even frightened.  She was worried, and a bit frightened.  But not nearly as much as she thought she should have been.  This woman had come out of nowhere.  She knew Mary's name and all about her granny--Mary should have been terrified.  But she wasn't.  Something about the woman, the way she spoke, her face, her smile--she seemed familiar.  Mary didn't know her--but she did."

We learn that Tansey, who died when her daughter Emer (Mary's granny) was only three, has hung around in spirit, keeping an eye on Emer, because leaving her didn't feel right.  And now Emer is an old woman, dying and kind of scared about it,  and Tansey wants to ease her mind. How that happens involves all four generations and is the essence of the story. 

One of the reasons I liked A Greyhound of a Girl so much is that Doyle really conveys the emotional intimacy of  family life, but he's not at all melodramatic or obvious about it.  He's very subtle.  The theme of loss is  handled so delicately, and the warmth and comfort of family love is always there.  If ever a ghost story could be life-affirming, this one would be it.  

Roddy Doyle, of course, is a well-established writer of both adult and children's fiction.  His novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the 1993 Booker Prize. 

Book to Film: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower came out in 1999, a thin little book that was released straight to paperback, and one with a very unassuming cover at that.  It didn't have a lot of fancy publicity, and it wasn't a smash hit like Harry Potter or Twilight.  It was a quiet book, but there was something about it that made people want to pass it on.   Librarians handed it around to each other.  Friends recommended it to friends.   It built a following, then people started talking about it as an underground classic. It's now quite easy to find quotes from the book all over the internet (frankly, they sound kind of trite  out of context).  And finally, it's become a movie.  I read the book about seven years ago, and saw the movie with my daughter last weekend.  We both loved it.  It's a great adaptation, but then again, it should be--it had Stephen Chbosky himself as screenwriter and director.

Perks was a book that really spoke to me.  First of all, it's set in the early 90s, and refers to things like making mixed tapes for your friends.  That made me all nostalgic--I had a friend who used to make the best mixed tapes for me around that time.  But it also resonated because of  how closely I could identify with Charlie, the book's main character.  He felt like me when I was a young adult.  Charlie is damaged by things he can't talk about.  He's introverted, socially awkward, clueless about setting boundaries or expressing himself (except in writing).  He reads a lot and thinks a lot, and watches people, but he's not easily noticed. He's a loner who wants to be more connected but can't seem to do it naturally.  But here's the thing--when I was growing up and going through all of that, I didn't really like myself a lot.  But Chbosky makes us just love Charlie.  I mean, just adore him.  That made the book for me right there.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is about Charlie's first year in high school.  This awkward kid manages to make a few friends, Sam and Patrick, who are seniors, much older than Charlie and seemingly much freer as well.  They have a group of buddies, dramatize The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the movies every week,  go to parties where the brownies taste a little strange, and listen to lots of music.  The story is about the ins and outs of their friendship.  Charlie's friends have their own issues, and the friendships aren't straightforward, but they are very believable.  I think Chbosky has captured both how warm and enlivening it feels to belong to a community of friends, and also how left behind you can feel when a friendship falters.

I was a bit worried about the casting before I saw the film--the characters felt real to me in my head, and I didn't want to sit there thinking "Oh look, there's Hermione Granger pretending to be Sam, and Percy Jackson's taking a break from being a demigod to be Charlie."  I kind of wanted people I had never seen before playing the roles.  But Logan Lerman absolutely disappeared into Charlie, and Ezra Miller, who was a new face for me, blew me away as Patrick.  Emma Watson was obviously the big name in this film, and although she is much more of a refined, classic beauty than I imagine Sam being, she brought a lot of warmth to the role.

Even though it's a relatively short book, Chbosky streamlines the story quite a bit for the movie.  I didn't feel it lost anything, though.  The big shock at the end of the book is much more foreshadowed in the film, but I already knew the plot, so I can't really judge what that would do for someone coming to the story fresh.  One difference I did notice;  although in the book I definitely felt that I was reading about a certain time period, the movie seemed to blur that a bit.

Here's the movie trailer:

And here's an interview with Stephen Chbosky and Emma Watson:

 

Every Day by David Levithan

It's hard to think of a teen writer today more romantic than David Levithan. From his breakthrough novel Boy Meets Boy to the recent Lover's Dictionary, he writes about love beautifully and optimistically. Every Day is about love, of course, but being David Levithan it's a little more philosophical than many teen love stories, and it uses elements of fantasy and magic realism to explore some questions that most of us aren't forced to ask.  What is it that really makes us love someone, and how important is the physical aspect of love?  I personally trust  David Levithan and I'll read whatever he cares to write, but while I found Every Day quite thought-provoking, I thought it had a few flaws in its premise that kept me from totally buying into it.

Every Day is about a person named A.  Because A is without a body, he doesn't have the normal attributes we cluster around identity--gender, race, culture, religion, family, even language change for A every day. (I'm going to refer to A as a he, just so I don't go crazy writing he/she).   A wakes up in a new body each day, lives the life of that person with the aid of memories that he can access, and then moves on to another body in a totally unconscious process that takes place each night while he sleeps.  It's been that way for A since infancy, and while A doesn't really understand why he's different, he's never told anyone.  There are a few parameters:  A ages normally (A is now 16, and so only wakes up in bodies that are also 16) and doesn't range too much geographically.  A can't choose whose body he will occupy, and  is never in the same body twice. 

As you can imagine, A is the ultimate loner.  With no relationships to anchor him emotionally, A goes through  life mostly as an observer--the main goal being not to disrupt or interfere in the lives of his hosts, whatever they are like.  But one day A wakes up in the body of a not-very-emotionally-sophisticated 16 year old  named Justin and meets Justin's girlfriend Rhiannon. Just like that, A falls in love.

From there, the story launches into a unique courtship.  After an idyllic day at the beach, A begins to anonymously seek Rhiannon out, to meet her anew and befriend her each day. He can't bear to be without her.   A finally tells her what his life is like, and despite some initial skepticism (of course) she finally believes him.  They slowly grow more attached. They sometimes communicate by e-mail, and sometimes in person, but A's changing bodies become an issue.  You can see Rhiannon respond differently to him when A occupies the body of a handsome jock, or a really fat kid, or a severely depressed goth girl, or a transsexual.  Whether Rhiannon will hold his hand or not depends a lot on what body that hand is attached to.  It also bothers Rhiannon that there is a sense that she can't rely on A.  He doesn't know what his circumstances will be from day to day.  As she points out to him at one point, he's always going to leave her, even if he always comes back. 

There are so many interesting and unexpected things about this story and how the relationship plays out, and I thought the premise was really clever.  But something bothered me all the way through.  The way A experienced infancy and childhood, with a different family each day, should have left him not as emotionally functional and mature as Levithan makes him.  Young children do not thrive emotionally with no attachments.  Yes, there is an undertone of melancholy and poignancy around A when he thinks of  his childhood, but A is not presented as a sociopath (unlike the one other transient soul he meets toward the end).  A is a kind, moral, caring person who would probably have no trouble finding love in normal circumstances.  I can understand why Levithan set things up the way he did in terms of the storyline, but psychologically it didn't feel right to me.  Still, if you can overlook this, Every Day is an absorbing, original read. 

Here's a video of Levithan talking about Every Day:  

Soonchild by Russell Hoban, Illustrated by Alexis Deacon

[Russell Hoban was] "a maverick writer of extraordinary imaginative gifts and highly original turn of phrase;  although he was sometimes compared to Tolkien and to CS Lewis, he conformed to no obvious literary tradition...His was a unique vein of magical fantasy, taking themes...that seem too devastating for contemplation, and turning them into allegories in which humour was combined with intense imagery and narrative momentum."  
Obituary for Russell Hoban, Telegraph newspaper. 

Soonchild is a very special  treat, and we're all the more lucky to have it as it is a posthumous work.  Hoban truly shone in the field of both adult and children's literature (remember the Frances picture books,  Turtle Diary, The Mouse and His Child, or Ridley Walker?), and Soonchild is as good as his best.  Although it's not a picture book, it is generously  illustrated in black and white by Alexis Deacon, who captures the vivid, worldly-yet-otherworldly atmosphere of the book majestically.  

 

The hero of Soonchild is Sixteen-Face John, an inuit shaman. Being a shaman, he walks through the world of spirit as well as that of earth.  But the world of spirit isn't what it used to be in the time of the ancestors:

"Some of the spirits of the place have moved away, others have died.  Yes, spirits die.  They die when they're no longer taken notice of, no longer spoken to.  But there are still some who live on the best they can and answer if they're spoken to in the proper way...Spirits like a lot of attention.  They like to be admired, and the shaman has to know how to please them so they'll be friendly to his people."

Sixteen-Face John begins to hear whispering in the spirit world.  "The whispering was in his head and he heard it when he was sleeping and when he was awake.  It was the kind of sound a glacier might make as it slides toward the sea, inching in the night.  He couldn't make out any words and he was thankful for that...There was no doubt in John's mind that whoever was doing the whispering was waiting for him in one of those places where shamans have to go so he thought it would be a good idea to stay out of those places."  One problem, though--his wife, No Problem's, belly is big with a child who won't kick, won't move, won't come out.  His child doesn't believe there's a world left to come into, because she can't hear the world songs any more.  Is the problem with the world, or is the problem with John?  Because he's no longer the shaman he used to be, either...

Of course Soonchild includes a Big Dream, a mythic journey, companions, and danger.  After all, what father wouldn't face anything to bring his child into the wide world?    But it's also populated with the most amazing characters.  Here's how Hoban describes Sixteen-Face John:

Sixteen-Face John was the big fear man.  Nobody was as afraid as he was, nobody had so many faces to be afraid with.  If a thing was too much for him to face with his first face, he would go to his second one and so on down the line.  What I'm saying is that he had sixteen different faces for looking at what scared him.  I can't tell you how he did it because he himself didn't know how he did it, it was just what he did."  

Now there's an interesting hero.  Later Hoban tells us that "His number one face had the kind of smile you right away distrusted."   That's so great. And here's how we're introduced to No Problem, Soonchild's mother:

"No Problem was a big, strong woman with the kind of face that made you not want to make her angry.  She used to beat all the boys at wrestling when she was a girl but now that she was a grown woman she spent most of her time scraping hides and making kamiks and atigis and that kind of thing.  So there she was with her big belly.  When people asked her if she wanted a boy or a girl she said she wanted a girl.  'I could use some help around here,' she said."  

Hoban has a great sense of humour, too:

"People used to ask him how he got to be so scared.  He told them that he started out scared and as time went on he got a little more scared every day.  'There's so much to be afraid of.  Listen to the wind, how it's moaning with the voices of the dead, the cold and lonesome dead.  They're afraid the same as I am.'

What of?  they wanted to know.

'They're afraid the world will go away and so am I,' said John.  'Aren't you?'

No, they said, they weren't.

'Don't you feel it slipping away?' said John.  'Like your pants falling down?'

Maybe, they said, John felt that way because his pants were falling down.  He had a big belly and a small bottom so that was bound to happen, what did he expect."

This is the kind of story that's really timeless, but it happens to take place in the present day.  It's magical and distinctive and stirring, but also very down to earth. This is published as a teen book, I think because of a brief reference to Sixteen-Face John's bad habits (these include spending the night with various women of his acquaintance) but if you're not fussy about protecting children from  things like that it could easily be read by middle-schoolers (and really, I don't think most children would pick up on the reference). 

Cinder by Marissa Meyer: the Lunar Chronicles, Book 1

"She was 36.28 percent not human."

With Cinder, debut author Marissa Meyer re-imagines the fairy tale Cinderella as a futuristic political thriller.   Cinder is an exciting story that will appeal to female fans of dystopian fiction, steampunk, science fiction, and fairy tale reinventions.  It plays with a range of ideas (medical ethics, political compromises), but especially the question of what defines us as human.  Is it our bodies?  Our emotional capacity?  Or something else entirely, something that can't be precisely understood? 

Cinder Linh is a cyborg living in the futuristic city of New Beijing, under the control of her resentful stepmother.  She is an expert mechanic and has a booth in the marketplace where she repairs all manner of broken technology.  One day, Prince Kai approaches her booth incognito.  He has a broken android, and is willing to go to great lengths to have it repaired, although it is an obsolete model.  Why?  What Cinder doesn't know is that the Emperor, Kai's father, is lying ill with a deadly disease called letumosis, a disease without a cure which is devastating the earth.

Things quickly unravel for Cinder.  Her stepsister Peony, the only person in her small family who actually likes her, catches the disease and is sent to a holding place where she is expected to die quickly.  Since Cinder was with Peony when she became ill, Cinder's stepmother vengefully "volunteers" her for medical research--as a cyborg, she is not considered fully human, and has no rights or independence.  She expects to die as a research subject, as almost none of the cyborgs enrolled as test patients survive.  Surprisingly, she does not.  She is mysteriously immune.  Meanwhile, the Emperor dies, Prince Kai is about to become Emperor in his father's place, and the sinister Queen Levana, ruler of the Lunars (who live on the moon) arrives on earth to  manipulate him into marriage.  Cinder finds herself in a perfect storm of political intrigue, deception, and danger.

The big weakness of this book is that one of the plot points (who is Cinder, really?) is pretty easy to guess from about half-way through--the clues are a little too obvious.  Still, the story is engrossing despite that.  We may know who Cinder is before she does, but we don't know how she's going to get the prince and save the kingdom, or even escape getting squashed by Queen Levana's peculiar ability to "glamour" and control those around her.  Cinder is an interesting heroine which some cool attributes of her own (her cyborg programing allows her to see when people are lying to her, for example).  Since this is a modernized version of the old tale, she is of course conceived of as much more independent and gutsy than the Cinderellas of the past. 

Cinder is the start of a four-book series, which Meyer has stated will each be based on a different fairy tale.  Scarlet is coming out in 2013, Cress in 2014 and Winter in 2015.  Cinder's story is left unfinished, but it looks like the next book will focus on different characters.  Here's a short author interview put out by the publisher:

The Chaos by Nalo Hopkinson

For fans of science fiction and fantasy who have sought and craved non-White voices, characters, and perspectives, the small number of Black writers in these literary genres have provided them few options from which to choose... Nevertheless, recent developments have excited Black speculative fiction and fantasy enthusiasts about the prospects for the fiction of the new millennium to reach into the future and, just as importantly, grapple with issues centuries old and older. At the center of this fervor is the Black speculative fiction and fantasy novelist Nalo Hopkinson, who forever changed the field in the three short years following the 1998 publication of her much-acclaimed novel, Brown Girl in the Ring. Following in the thematic footsteps prefigured by Octavia E. Butler, the first Black female writing speculative fiction and fantasy, and yet writing in an inimitable style no one could have anticipated, Hopkinson makes her fiction as rich as her own background.
Gregory E. Rutledge

The first thing I want to say is that it is a pleasure to read a teen book which features the city of Toronto so graphically and unapologetically.   I could follow the action in The Chaos down to the street. This story had an incredible sense of place for me, partially because it's set in my hometown and I could recognize many landmarks, but also because I think place is one of the things grounding this very unusual book.

 The Chaos is Nalo Hopkinson's first novel for teens, but she has a stellar reputation for her adult work, which has been adopted by the sci-fi/fantasy community although her writing has at times been described as boundary-breaking.  She has won or been nominated for many major awards, including winning the World Fantasy Award for her anthology Skinfolk.  Her themes typically encompass issues of race, culture, queer identity, and history.   Her books have been variously described as urban fantasy, black fiction, occult fiction, speculative fiction and magic realism.  I think the term magic realism applies best to this particular novel, but Hopkinson pushes the genre to it's extreme.  The term that kept coming to mind as I read The Chaos was surrealism.  This novel is a bit like Kafka, a bit like Charles de Lint, but wilder, richer and with more diverse imagery than either of them.  I think what gives it its richness is partly Hopkinson's gift for description, but mostly her ability to mash up the folklore of extremely different cultures without blinking an eye.  As an experienced reader, that's something that appeals to me.  It feels very fresh.   Like Kafka, Hopkinson does not offer explanations for her fantastical situations --we never know exactly what the Chaos is, what drives it or how and why it manifests on earth.  Hopkinson just plunges her heroine into unreality and watches her grow.   This book is going to frustrate readers who want to understand the internal logic of fantasy worlds.  It's going to frustrate readers who like closed endings.  It's even at times going to frustrate readers who want to know what the heck's going on. We don't always know.  To get into this book, you have to let yourself go a little.  But I think it's worth it. 

The plot centres around a young woman, Scotch, who is the child of a white Jamaican father and a black Canadian mother.  Her parents are strict and the atmosphere at home is tense and uncomfortable.  Strange things are happening to Scotch--she keeps getting black, sticky rashes on her skin that mystify doctors and that grow frighteningly quickly, and she has started seeing surreal floating creatures that no one else seems to notice. At an open mic with her older brother, a strange bubble of light appears, and her brother vanishes.  A volcano shoots out of Lake Ontario, mythical creatures take on form and substance, and almost every physical object transforms into something else.  Traffic lights become highlighters, bathroom stalls become singing clock towers.  Scotch's black rash starts to thicken and cover her whole body like a crust, threatening to turn her into a monster, and as she races to find her brother, Baba Yaga and a Rolling Calf (a monster from Jamaican folklore) seem to follow her around.  It's like a crazy, dangerous dream.  But amidst all the panic and confusion, Scotch is given the opportunity to make choices and show courage.  She is given the opportunity to grow. 

I haven't talked at all about the secondary characters and how strong they are, or  about the clever way that Hopkinson smashes all sorts of stereotypes.  This is a book which combines depth with imagination.  I'm not sure it will be the right book for the mainstream teen reader, but for the teen ready for something a bit more experimental, it's a good choice.

Here are some short video clips of Hopkinson discussing influences on her writing:

Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook by Shel Silverstein

I'm not the world's biggest Shel Silverstein fan--I find The Giving Tree kind of creepy--to me that story seems more about ingratitude and disrespect than giving.  Silverstein's poetry books are clever, but I don't always find much depth there.  However, I came across Runny Babbit a few days ago and loved the concept.  Published in 2005, Runny Babbit is a project Silverstein apparently spent over 20 years working on.  The poems not only rhyme, but also feature tongue-tripping nonsense words that can be decoded by switching first letters around.  Here's an example:

THE FUNNY BAMILY

Runny fad a hamily--

Matter of fact, he had

A sother and two bristers,

A dummy and a mad. 

His mamma fed him marrot cilk

And parrot cie and such,

And all of them were happy

In their cozy hunny butch.

I thought this book was hilarious.  But I must report that I didn't get great reviews when I brought it home.

Me (to son who loves funny books):  "Hey, listen to this, Ewan, it's really funny!"  (reads two poems)

Son (with bored look on his face):  "I don't get it."

Not one to be discouraged, I try again.

Me (to husband who is normally incredibly supportive of my bookish enthusiasms):  "Listen, I want to read you something--" (reads one poem).

Husband:  "Yeah.  I've got to read the newspaper." 

So maybe it's just me.  By the way, I love the part in Diary of a Wimpy Kid where a young Greg Heffley's parents tell him that if he gets up in the night he might find Shel Silverstein walking around in their hall, and how much that freaks Greg out.  Can't say I blame him.  This is Silverstein's author photo for The Giving Tree.

Would you want to find this guy prowling your hallway at night? 

Here's one final poem from Runny Babbit: