SPEAK

"It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate and a stomachache."

So begins Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.  It’s a narrative voice that’s believable from the first line, and a protagonist whom I rooted for from that very first page, even as I followed her through the brutal high school hallways, suffering from each scathing glance, bristling under each adult’s misdirected attempts at communication, and knowing all the while that the pain she suffers isn’t melodramatic or romanticized.  It’s real.  It’s high school.  And Laurie Halse Anderson doesn’t shy away from the truth of it.

Great writing is about truth.  There was a time when books for kids were about teaching moral codes and painting pretty—yet unrealistic—pictures, but that time is past.  A few brave souls plowed the way, and now writers can tell the truth, even to teenagers (who, of course, have always seen it quite clearly).  One of those brave souls was the children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom,* who wrote to an author about the problem of “influential and unimaginative and thoroughly grown-up and finished and rigid adults” who were often “embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn’t embarrass them and also doesn’t give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality.”  Nordstrom ignored the rigid and unimaginative, pushing through innovative books and revolutionizing the children’s book industry.  Her authors included Maurice Sendak, E.B. White, Shel Silverstein, and Louise Fitzhugh.  She opened the door to writers who would tell the truth. Laurie Halse Anderson is one of those writers.

But there remain many who would close the doors.  Just this month, a man in Missouri challenged Speak’s presence in a high school.  On her blog, Sarah Dessen (another one of my favorite YA authors) wrote about the challenge to Speak.  Dessen captured my feelings about this issue perfectly when she wrote, “if you don't feel a book is appropriate for you or your kid, don't read it and don't let them read it. But just because you disagree with the content does not mean you have the right to keep it out of the hands of other readers.”

Speak is one of the best books for teenagers that I’ve read in the last decade, maybe one of the best ever.  It tells the truth.  It’s about the importance of expression—in writing, in art, in speaking out. As Laurie Halse Anderson writes, “When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”  Speak, like other books that may be challenged, won’t go quietly to a corner to die.  It won’t be silenced.  And for that, this reader is grateful.

*Note: If you’re interested in reading more about Ursula Nordstrom, check out the fantastic book of letters Dear Genius, collected and edited by Leonard Marcus and published by HarperCollins.  The quotation above is from a letter Nordstom wrote to writer Meindert DeJong in 1953.

Celebrate Banned Books Week

In honor of Banned Books Week, here are some of the books I’ve enjoyed that have been banned or challenged in the last decade:

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling 


The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 


I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

His Dark Materials (series) by Philip Pullman

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 


Forever by Judy Blume 


The Color Purple by Alice Walker 


Go Ask Alice by Anonymous 


Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 


To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee


The Giver by Lois Lowry 

Beloved by Toni Morrison 


Bridge To Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson 


Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 


Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 


One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey 


The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going 


Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson 


Mick Harte Was Here by Barbara Park

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury



A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle 


Julie of the Wolves by Jean Graighead George 


Next on my list of challenged or banned books I want to read?  A recommendation from one of my students: Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging, by Louise Rennison.  If you want to join me in celebrating Banned Books Week by reading a recently banned or challenged book, you've got lots of options on the list above and more at the American Library Association's website.

Booklist #1: Best Realistic Dramas

In honor of the “Booklist” part of this blog, I am going to start posting a weekly booklist.  Every week, I’ll choose a type of book to focus on (fantasy books, books about animals, high-action books, survival novels, historical fiction etc.) and list some of my favorites in that sub-genre.  So, to begin, we have a “Best Realistic, Non-Historic Dramas.”  This mouthful allows me to narrow down the list by focusing only on books set in modern times (though some, such as Homecoming and Dear Mr. Henshaw might seem a little pre-modern to today’s readers).  While it’s tempting to comment on each title, I’m trying to keep these posts about the lists, so without further ado, I present Mrs. Davis’s List of…

Best Realistic Non-Historic Dramas (in no particular order)

Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt

13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

The Schwa Was Here by Neil Shusterman

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by e.l. konigsburg

Fat Kid Rules the World by K. L. Going

Just Listen by Sarah Dessen

The Truth About Forever by Sarah Dessen

The Last Chance Texaco by Brent Hartinger

A Companion Post: Silent to the Bone

Imagine if your friend’s fate—whether or not he goes to prison—is in your hands.  And you’re a middle school student with nothing more than a pile of notecards and an awesome half-sister on your side.  This is the situation Connor Kane finds himself in at the beginning of e.l. konigsburg’s companion novel to The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.  Connor’s best friend Branwell finds himself accused of putting his baby sister in a coma.  Branwell might defend himself—he’s awkward in lots of ways, but not when it comes to finding the right words—but Branwell isn’t talking, which leaves Connor to find out what happened to baby Nikki. 

Silent to the Bone isn’t just about Connor’s process of discovery; it’s about the trust between friends, about whether or not we can ever really know the people we’re close to.  It’s a question that plagues Connor after he hears a discomforting story from Vivian Shawcurt, the au pair who was hired to care for Branwell’s baby sister, and who was there on the day that baby Nikki fell into a coma.  Connor thinks that he still believes in Branwell,

“But after having supper with Vivian, and having learned some of the details, I had some new thoughts about Branwell, and I wondered if the Branwell I thought I knew was the Branwell I knew.

My mind was as mixed-up as that sentence.”

And so the reader follows Connor as he tries to understand what happened, and understand his friend.  As luck would have it, he has an older half-sister who’s willing to help him.  Though Margaret Rose Kane is grown up and running a business, she hasn’t lost the plucky gumption that allowed her to take on the Epiphany Town Council when she was twelve.  And it seems her brother inherited a bit of that pluck as well.  He needs it in Silent to the Bone.  His best friend depends on him to have it.

Silent to the Bone is a story about silence and listening, friendship and trust.  Its characters are rich and real and full and flawed.  The tale is told with konigsburg’s characteristic wit and charm.  I wouldn’t expect anything else.

Uncles, Alums, and Outsider Art: The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

First, let me get this out of the way: I’ve admired e.l. konigsburg since I was in elementary school and I read From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  It’s not as if I’m the only one who fell in love with this book—it won a little Newbery Medal—but it’s one of the books I read when I was young that has stuck with me.  If you haven’t read From the Mixed Up Files, you should.

What’s awesome about e.l. konigsburg is that she has continued to write and publish wonderful books—she’s won two Newbery medals, the second twenty-nine years after the first.  A couple of years ago, I came across her book The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.  A title like that I couldn’t resist.  I picked it up, read it, and immediately decided that it had to be a book I kept close, as I knew I’d be returning to it often.  It’s funny and inspiring and smart.  I’ve read it several times—the mark of a truly beloved novel.

The story’s protagonist is twelve-year-old Margaret Rose Kane, who’s been sent to Camp Talequa (“warehoused” there, as she puts it) while her parents are in Peru.  Margaret ends up in a cabin of “alums,” girls who’ve been to Talequa before.  Trouble begins when Margaret refuses to give up her bunk to an alum, and it escalates when she tells the alums she doesn’t want a nickname (as her uncle Morris once told her, your name “will stop bullets if you let it”).  Margaret quietly decides that she will not participate in the “warm companionship” Talequa has to offer.  In fact, she will participate in nothing at all.  She responds to the increasing desperate and irritated efforts of Talequa’s camp director with a simple, “I prefer not to.”  (This first section is titled “Bartleby at Talequa.”)

When Margaret’s uncles hear about the “problems” Margaret’s having at Talequa, her Uncle Alex comes to retrieve her.  He arrives wearing “wing-tipped, leather-soled oxfords; a long-sleeved, button-up shirt; suit jacket; necktie; and a Borsalino hat.”  His truffle-hunting dog Tartufo accompanies him.  In short, Uncle Alex, like his brother Uncle Morris, is astonishingly wonderful.  But what the brothers have created in their yard is even more astonishing.

I’m not going to try to describe the towers that the uncles built in their yard.  I will say this: Margaret Rose Kane loves them.  And while Jacob Kaplan—son of the infamous camp director—tells Margaret “’Only a dead soul wouldn’t [love them],’” there are people who want the towers torn down.  And when Margaret discovers this plot—the plot of the town council of Epiphany—she resolves to stop it. 

One of my favorite moments in the novel takes place when Margaret remembers an encounter between one of her uncles’ neighbors and her Uncle Alex.  The uncles have just finished touching up the towers with orange-sherbet paint, when their neighbor, Geoffrey Klinger calls the towers an “off color joke.”  Margaret remembers:

Uncle Alex said to him, “The towers are a joke, Mr. Klinger.  They would be useless if they weren’t.”  To which Geoffrey Klinger replied, “You and I have very different definitions of useless.”  To which Uncle Alex replied, “And jokes.”

This exchange captures the way konigsburg mixes defiance and humor into a warm and inventive brew. The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place is about some of my favorite things: art and family and inspiration and taking-on-the-world.  But it’s the characters who make it hum.  So imagine my delight when I discovered the “companion novel”—not a sequel—to Outcasts years after meeting Margaret.  Silent to the Bone is a very different novel, and one that takes place years after Outcasts, but Margaret Rose Kane reappears on the page, albeit not as the main character.  In my next post, I’ll write about Connor Kane, a boy who wasn’t even born when Margaret when to Camp Talequa.  A companion post for the companion novel: Silent to the Bone.

Until then, go and find The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place.  It’s not only a great novel for kids and teenagers, it’s great for artists and parents and dreamers and shakers.  Go.  (Though of course, in homage to Margaret, I must add, if you “prefer not to,” that’s okay with me too.)

A Shiny, New, LOW RED MOON

A friend of mine in New York City told a marketing manager at Bloomsbury about this blog, and about a week ago I received a package from Bloomsbury with three shiny new hardcover books inside, plus the catalogs of what’s coming out this fall and winter.  New books are right up there with new notebooks—all those fresh pages—on my list of favorite things.  One particularly eye-catching novel was Low Red Moon by Ivy Devlin.  It has a beautiful, shiny, deep red cover.  Of course, I just had to open it.

It’s billed as a paranormal romance, and I definitely think it would appeal to fans of Twilight (perhaps those on team Jacob in particular), with its gorgeous, otherworldly, and distinctly wolfy male lead, its troubled but endearing female protagonist, and their break-all-the-rules bond.  Plus, it’s a lot shorter than Twilight, which might be appealing for those readers who are daunted by the sheer heft of the books in the ubiquitous vampire series.  I confess that the brevity made me long for more at times—more tension leading up to that inevitable first kiss, more development of the theme of protecting the town’s forest, even more about the alternately harsh and mundane high school life--but I also know there’s a lot to be said for a book that comes in under 250 pages, especially if you’re a student lugging around a backpack that already weighs seven hundred pounds.  (Okay, I exaggerate.  A little.)

Overall, I found Low Red Moon to be a rather pleasing romp in the world of tragedy and true love, destiny and drama.  The premise hooked me right away: a girl’s parents have been brutally murdered, and she was there, but she remembers nothing.  Add to that a mysterious newcomer to the small town (our wolfy hunk) and it’s hard to stop turning the pages.  The book moves quickly, but my favorite quotation actually comes from a part of the book that’s less dramatic.  It’s a short section about the protagonist—Avery—and her mother and art.  Avery’s in art class, staring at a bowl of apples only days after her parents were murdered.  She remembers, “Mom said that loving art was just was important as being able to create it.”

It seems to me that every single book has something—a scene, a character, a single sentence—in which the reader might recognize herself, recognize something she knows, even if she hasn’t yet articulated it out loud or on paper.  I think that’s one of the reasons we read: we’re seeking out those moments of recognition.  For me, it’s that sentence—Avery’s thought—that evoked my moment of recognition.  My love of reading and my love of teaching and my love of writing are all bound up with each other.  I feel that the appreciation of a great story is integral to the writing of one.  In fact, when writing is at its best, it feels like reading.  You continue along the page—whether it’s blank or filled with words—with the same question: What happens next?  Low Red Moon keeps the reader asking this question from page one through to the end.  And, I suspect, beyond.  The possibility for more, for a beyond, is there at the end of the novel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a sequel were already in the works.  We can only wait and wonder and imagine about what happens next.

The Mockingjay's Spark

During the summer of 2009, I attended my first two-week writing residency as part of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s low-residency MFA program.  The program has been great—inspiring and challenging—but I must admit that at first I felt a little reluctant to disclose my love of YA to all of those serious writers.  But once I did, I discovered a surprising number of kindred spirits, other adult readers of YA.  One was my roommate, who recommended several great YA books, including Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. 

I read The Hunger Games quickly, riveted by a world in which children are forced into a reality-television competition: a competition to see who can survive the Hunger Games.  The parallels to our current culture make the book as thought-provoking as it is exciting, with its fast-moving plot.  It’s the ideal combination: insight and action.  When I finished, I tried to put The Hunger Games on my classroom shelf, but it never made it.  A student borrowed it before I could get it to the shelf.  And for the rest of the year, the book passed from hand to hand.  It didn’t hit the shelf until the very last day of school, when a breathless student returned it, having finished it just in the knick of time.

The first student who borrowed The Hunger Games bought the sequel as soon as it came out, and Catching Fire made its rounds as all of us who’d fallen in love with Katniss (right along with Peeta and Gale) got a chance to root for her again.  But Catching Fire ended with a beginning.  The story wasn’t finished, though a third book was promised.  And so we had to wait for it.  And wait.

I knew that Collins’s third and final book in the trilogy came out in August, and I knew I wanted to read it as soon as I got the chance, so I was thrilled when on the first day of school, one student came in and I spotted the silver mockingjay emblazoned on the blue cover of his book.  “Mockingjay!” I exclaimed.  “You have it!”

And so, by my second week of school, I’d already experienced my first—hopefully the first of many—book exchanges, updating the student on where I was in the book—“Peeta just tried to strangle her,” “The bombs are dropping”—and what my impressions were—“Gale seems a little too into the whole war; it worries me,” “I’m not so sure about Coin…”  And always, as he looked at me, knowing the whole story, I’d cover my ears and say, in the spirit of every reader who’s in the middle of a great book, “But don’t tell me what happens!”  He’d smile, knowing the great story that lay ahead of me.

This series has earned its accolades.  One of the things that impresses me the most about the three books is that Suzanne Collins doesn’t shy away from the violence that’s permeated human history.  The same week that I read Mockingjay Collins was the “Author of the Week” in the news magazine The Week.  The magazine quotes Collins talking about her father, a Vietnam vet, and how he used to talk to her about history and war.  She says, “He would discuss these things at a level that he thought we could understand and was acceptable for our age.  But really, he thought a lot was acceptable for our age, and I approach my books in the same way.”

A great book tells the truth, even if that truth isn’t always beautiful.  And then, somehow, the beauty is found even in the ugliness, because it is told.  I’m as excited to give Mockingjay back to its owner as I was to borrow it because I know that the next reader is waiting, ready to continue the saga.