Beyond the Last Page: IF I STAY Will Stay With You

You know, as you read the first few pages of Gayle Forman’s If I Stay, that something devastating is about to happen to this amazing family, a family celebrating a snow day with slightly burnt chocolate-chip pancakes and a drive to see old friends and grandparents.  It makes reading those pages very difficult, because just underneath all the happiness—and it is genuine, believable happiness, with just enough quirk to stay on the right side of cheesy—is tragedy, or the potential for tragedy.

And then it happens.  I’d call this a spoiler, but it’s not really a spoiler as much as the central fact of the book.  Everyone in seventeen-year-old Mia’s immediate family—her once punk-rock now tweed-donning teacher dad, her fierce and loving and tough mom, her curly-haired little brother who’s still in T-ball—all of them are killed in a car accident.  All but Mia.

Mia is in a coma.  But she’s also outside of herself, watching the aftermath of the accident and deciding whether or not she can return to her body and to a world that’s no longer the one she knew, a world in which some of the people she loved the most are gone.

Forman reveals the details of Mia’s life, from her relationship with her emo-punk rocking boyfriend Adam to her friendship with her devoted best friend Kim to her ongoing dance with her musical partner: her cello—an instrument that holds the potential to deliver Mia both to everything she’s every wanted and, possibly, away from everyone she’s ever loved.  These details are interspersed with Mia’s observations of the hospital, from her visitors to her nurses to her own battered body, creating a stark contrast, a contrast that drives home again and again how different her life will be…if she decides to return to it, if she decides to stay.

Though I could not put it down, I’d be lying if I called If I Stay an easy read.  There’s nothing easy about reading a book that reminds us of how close we are—even in our happiest moments—to tragedy, to loss beyond loss.  Yet that’s also what I loved about the book: Forman’s willingness to dive headfirst into this truth, that even the deepest joy has an underside of loss, even if—maybe even especially if—it’s the potential of loss.  After all, isn’t that potential that makes the joy even deeper and greater and more moving?  Maybe we only finally start to truly fear death once we discover something we really want.  This is the question Mia must face in Forman’s novel: whether there’s something in life she wants enough that she’s willing to keep going, keep living, even when she knows that the life she’ll return to will be nearly unrecognizable and more difficult than she can even start to grasp.  That’s the struggle of If I Stay, the question that remains, that ties us to Mia until the very last page, and, perhaps, beyond.

[Forman, Gayle. If I Stay. New York: Penguin, 2009.]

Stealing Time for THE BOOK THIEF

Today I went searching for my next YA read, and I turned to the New York Times Bestselling lists.  (I’ve heard they once combined the children’s best-sellers with adult best-sellers until Harry Potter showed up; then they had to separate the lists, perhaps to prove that adult books were still being sold.)  I went first to the list of Children’s Paperback Books.  There, at the top of the list, holding strong after 175 weeks—yes, one hundred and seventy-five weeks—I found one of my all-time favorite books (a term I don’t use lightly): Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief.

There is no way to capture the beauty and strangeness and wisdom and sadness and joy of a novel like The Book Thief.  I’ve already bought three copies, because I want to keep pressing it into the hands of other readers—regardless of their age—and say, “Read this.  I promise you won’t regret it.”  Two copies have disappeared from my classroom shelves.  I told my mother about it, and as soon as she finished, she began recommending it to her friends.  It’s the kind of book that comes along only rarely, a book that seems to generate its own kind of electricity.

There is something both irresistible and chilling about a story that focuses on a reader who will risk her life to read.  Liesel Meminger could win over the most hardened and skeptical readers.  Her foster father teaches her to read from the pages of her first stolen book, “The Gravedigger’s Handbook” and all she wants is more—more books, more words, more stories.  Markus Zusak can make us love Liesel with a ferocity that’s almost palpable, yet he also finds a way to make us sympathize with Death—the narrator who’s far more feeling and wise and, yes, endearing than we might have imagined. 

Zusak lets us read a life story of a Jewish man hiding in the basement of Liesel’s foster parents.  When we glimpse those illustrated pages, pages scrawled on the paint-whitened pages of Mein Kampf, we feel as if we’ve been allowed to witness a sacred secret—a story.  And, in a way, it’s the same feeling we get when we put The Book Thief down.  As if those pages, those words, were an honor to read.  And, looking back now, I know they were.

Shine, Shine SHINE, COCONUT MOON

I first heard about Shine, Coconut Moon on one of my favorite bookish-writerish blogs: The Rejectionist.  The Rejectionist listed Neesha Meminger’s book as one of her favorites of the year.  I can see why.  Shine, Coconut Moon goes places few other YA novels go, yet it stays firmly planted in the real world.  It’s about the challenges of being a teenager and dealing with family and expectations and friends and boyfriends.  It’s about trying to fit in and discovering who you are.  And it’s about how we all changed after September 11, 2001.  It is a book for our times.

Just about any teenager has probably felt the way Sam—short for Samar—feels when she tells her uncle, “”I feel like the epitome of different—from everyone.  I feel like there’s no one else like me on this whole planet’” (74).  In some ways, Meminger creates a protagonist anyone can relate to.  Yet at the same time, she creates a protagonist who’s rarely found in the pages of most YA books.

For a long time, it’s been just Sam and her mother.  Sam has a best friend, Molly, who befriended her when she was being bullied not long after she moved to their New Jersey town.  What Molly has, what Sam longs for, is a big raucous family: cousins and grandparents and aunts, stories and traditions and histories.  But Sam’s mother has cut Sam off from the rest of their traditional Sikh family.  Then, just a week after September eleventh, two things happen that make Sam question the distance she’s always accepted between herself and her extended family: Sam’s Uncle Sandeep shows up on her doorstep, and an Indian-American classmate calls her a “coconut”--brown on the outside and white on the inside.  Suddenly Sam doesn’t know who she is, and her confusion parallels the confusion sweeping the whole country.  Things are shaken, they have yet to settle, and no one’s really sure where to turn for the answers.

Just as our country hasn’t fully emerged from the confusion, Meminger doesn’t pretend that every one of Sam’s problems can be solved.  But she does provide a lot of hope in these pages.  There’s the bright spot of Sam’s friendship with Molly, a friendship that survives some pretty uncomfortable truths.  There’s Uncle Sandeep, who lifts the novel with his kindness and his determination in the face of hate.  There’s Sam’s realization when she attends a service at her uncle’s gurdwara, or temple:

It dawns on me, clear as the summer sky, how wrapping a turban, speaking the language of your parents’ parents’ parents’ and celebrating the same holidays that everyone before you celebrated are all like little thank-yous to those who survived.  Those seemingly small things are a long-held memory whispered from the lips of the past into the ear of the future. (81)

Thank you to Neesha Meminger for this hopeful book, a novel that gives voice to characters who have nearly enough space on the shelves of our bookstores and libraries, a novel that’s worth all the beauty and shine of its amazing title.  Thank you.

[Meminger, Neesha. Shine, Coconut Moon.  New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2009.]

Some Time Well-Spent in the Pages of THE GRAVEYARD BOOK

When I was a child—especially during my third and fourth grade years—I loved ghost stories.  My best friend Jenny and I would tell each other the scariest stories we could dream up, trying to give each other goosebumps (even if we were sitting in the warm sunshine near the pool’s snack bar drinking orange soda and eating grilled cheese sandwiches).  We watched horror movies when the adults weren’t around to notice that perhaps The Exorcist wasn’t the most appropriate fourth grade fare, and we roamed the school library, searching for anything involving anything haunted.  And we loved graveyards.

I grew up in a small town on the north shore of Massachusetts, and so I was lucky.  Not only was Salem nearby—with its witches and cobwebbed history—but we had some old graveyards right in our town.  Jenny and I got it in our heads that we wanted nothing more than to camp overnight in a graveyard.  Preferably the oldest graveyard in town. Ideally on Halloween.  Upon hearing this request, my mother didn’t immediately forbid this venture.  Instead, she waited a little while—a while during which we made plans involving tents and chocolate bars and grave rubbings and such.  Then she gathered us to share the unfortunate news that it was illegal to camp in graveyards.  We were forced to abandon our plans, moving into new supernatural investigations.

I first heard about Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book from my nephew, a precocious reader and one of my favorite people with whom to talk about books.  When I asked him what it was about, he told me that it starts with the murder of a family in which one member—a toddler—escapes and is rescued by the ghosts of the graveyard.  I was hooked.  I knew that at some point I would have to read this book, and now I finally have.  I’ve finally gotten my chance to spend the night in an old graveyard. 

And not just one night: the toddler who escapes death grows up in graveyard, learning the dangers of ghouls and the tricks for becoming invisible along with his ABCs.  Bod—short for Nobody—has parents and mentors and friends and guardians just like any other boy.  Except that all of these folks just happen to be dead.  This small detail doesn’t stop them from being funny and sweet and odd and difficult in turn.

In The Graveyard Book, Gaiman makes us believe every detail of Bod’s world.  Gaiman makes the impossible seem merely invisible, and in doing so, blurs the line between fantasy and reality.  One of my favorite passages occurs not long after Bod has made his first “live” friend, a little girl named Scarlett:

On the way home Scarlett told her mother about the boy called Nobody who lived in the graveyard and had played with her, and that night Scarlett’s mother mentioned it to Scarlett’s father, who said that he believed that imaginary friends were a common phenomenon at the age, and nothing at all to be concerned about, and that they were fortunate to have a nature reserve so near. (42)

Of course, five-year-old Scarlett is not making Bod up, just as Bod is not making up his graveyard friends and caretakers, though Scarlett—not having the Freedom of the Graveyard—cannot see them.  And upon hearing that Scarlett’s father, a teacher of particle physics, has dedicated his life to “things that’s smaller than atoms,” Bod decides that such a man is “probably interested in imaginary things” (44).  Who can argue with that kind of logic?

Each chapter of The Graveyard Book holds a little adventure, while the central tension—the man who would murder Bod is still after him, yet a boy can’t live in a graveyard forever—remains throughout.  The Graveyard Book is a novel that can be enjoyed and appreciated at any age, by anyone who enjoys a sometimes dark, sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical, sometimes tender book.  And certainly by anyone who believes that the impossible might just be the invisible in disguise.

[Gaiman, Neil. The Graveyard Book. New York: Harper, 2008.]

I Can't Wait For WHEN YOU REACH ME To Reach You

So when you read a book that won the Newbery Medal, you know that a few people already noticed it and thought it was pretty good.  Still, that’s no guarantee that I’ll love it as they did.  But now that I’ve finally read When You Reach Me, I can say this: they were right.  This is an amazing book.  It deserves every accolade it’s been given.  I’m so glad that it has the shiny gold circle on its cover, because the more people that read this funny, sweet, original book, the better.

When You Reach Me stars Miranda, a New York City native (circa 1978) who lives with her mom in an apartment on a street shared with a crazy man who sleeps under a mailbox, a friendly shop owner who gives out free Vitamin C, and a gang of intimidating but largely harmless kids.  (With this last group Miranda follows her mom’s advice: “Don’t laugh, don’t take off running…Do nothing.  Act as if they’re invisible,” and it works pretty well.)  When she’s not swiping office supplies from her job, Miranda’s mom is training for her spot on The $20,000 Pyramid.  And when Miranda’s not assisting with this training, she’s attending sixth grade, losing and making friends, working in a deli (during her forty-five minute lunch break), and trying to track down the person—possibly from the future—who’s leaving her mysterious notes.

The setting—or rather, Miranda’s description of the setting—is one of the (many) awesome things about Rebecca Stead’s novel.  Living in Alaska, far away from the big city, I thoroughly enjoyed Miranda’s casual mention of New York life, from the fact that most sixth-graders leave school for lunch “unless something is going on and they won’t let us, like the first week of school, when there was a man running down Broadway stark naked” to “Mom’s Rules for Life in New York City” (including gems such as “Look ahead.  If there’s someone acting strange down the block, looking drunk or dangerous, cross to the other side of the street, but don’t be obvious about it.  Make it look like you were planning to cross the street all along.”)  What’s more, all the strange details play a part in the mystery at the center of When You Reach Me.  Every detail matters; it’s the kind of book that once you finish, you want to go right back to the start, just to revel in Stead’s craftsmanship.

When You Reach Me is about time-travel and growing up and seeing the story behind a stranger on the street.  It’s about misunderstandings between friends and grandiose scientific theories.  One of my all-time favorite books—Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time—plays a starring role.  And while Madeleine L’Engle, who won the Newbery in 1963, left some big shoes to fill, I think Rebecca Stead steps into those shoes with grace.  Shortly after Stead’s Newbery win was announced, Stead said this about A Wrinkle in Time: "What I love about L'Engle's book now is how it deals with so much fragile inner-human stuff at the same time that it takes on life's big questions.”  Her description could easily be transferred to her own award-winning novel.  Her admiration for L’Engle pours into her own work, and that’s a great thing.  Simply put: When You Reach Me is a delight.

[Stead, Rebecca.  When You Reach Me.  New York: Yearling, 2009.]

Instead of a List of Resolutions...

A List of Some of the Literary-esque Things I’m Looking Forward to in the New Year…

1) Trying an audio book.  My best friend listens to her books while she makes jewelry, and my parents listen when they drive.  I walk every day, so it seems like a great way to “read” a book while in motion.

2) Finally reading Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me.  It just came out in paperback, and I’ve been waiting a long, long time for it to reach me in this (more affordable) incarnation.

3) Having some guest writers.  What’s your favorite YA book?  What was the book you loved when you were growing up, the book you read over and over again?  What’s the best one you’ve read recently?  I’d love to get some more voices here on The Infinite Booklist.

4) The release of Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories from Persea Books.  I confess: I’m excited about this because I have a story in the anthology.  So do some writers I think are amazing (and who I’m honored to be included alongside) including: Julia Alvarez, Ron Carlson, Dave Eggers, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Alice Walker.

5) Sunny June afternoons on my front porch, reading a book I can’t put down and don’t have to because those Alaskan summer days are long, long, long.

6) Reading more of my students’ book recommendations.  I have an impressive list going in my classroom, and I want to pull more of my new reads from that list. 

7) Supporting my local independent bookstore.  While shopping online can be convenient, I do love to browse a bookstore.  I’m glad to have independent bookstores around, and I want to keep them here.

8) Attending the third of my three MFA residencies at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where each year I get tons of great book recommendations and lots of writerly inspiration.

9) Cozy winter Saturdays curled up by the stove with a story that sweeps me away to someplace warm.

10) Looking at my book journal in December of 2011 and seeing what literary adventures I enjoyed over the course year.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by in 2010!

Finding My Way Down The JELLICOE ROAD

You know how sometimes you come across a novel that resonates with you in ways you can’t even quite explain?  It’s something in the style of writing and something in the way the characters move through the plot…and it’s something beneath the words.  It’s a sort of recognition.  I really felt that way about Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta.  It was the last book I finished in 2010, and I couldn’t have chosen a better finale.

The basics: Taylor, a teenaged girl who has been abandoned by her mother at a 7-Eleven finds herself leading the underground movement at her boarding school in a long-standing turf war against the kids from town (the “Townies”) and the army trainees who come to camp nearby for part of every year (the “Cadets”).  While leading these “wars” she’s also trying to piece together her family history and understand the secrets hidden in the manuscript of a woman who’s been looking after Taylor since her arrival at the school years before.

So those are the basics.  But before I get any further, I should admit that I spent the first part of Jellicoe Road pretty confused.  It has a lot of different plotlines that seem unrelated at first, and there’s a sort of ethereal, dreamlike quality that makes the story seem fragmented and surreal.  But I know that sometimes the best novels take a little work and a little patience (I wrote about Orhan Pamuk in my last post, and his novels have been like that for me: difficult at first and then beloved).  So I stayed with Jellicoe Road through the dreams and the stories, trying to piece together the elaborate yet evasive plot. 

As it so often is with great books, my patience paid off.  Marchetta unravels the mysteries of the story with a deft hand, and her writing is so great that I found myself forgiving even when I was confused.  After all, the novel’s narrator is confused.  She’s trying to piece the story together right alongside us; it wouldn’t be fair if we could see more cards than Taylor.  Instead, we see the world beside her.  Her perception is ours, and the promise of the novel for us is the same as the promise it holds for Taylor.  In some ways, when Taylor reads through Hannah’s manuscript—a manuscript that’s incomplete and out of order—searching for answers in the chaos, she’s echoing the reader’s struggle to find meaning in the novel.  Taylor describes the found manuscript:

The pages aren’t numbered, so I don’t know whether I have the beginning or end or whether it’s in sequence but these days I’m not really looking for continuity.

All I’m after is something that makes sense to me. (69)

I couldn’t help but think back—again—to Orhan Pamuk, and the reader’s quest for a book’s center.  We keep reading Jellicoe Road because we have the hope and the optimism and the faith that the center exists, just as Taylor does.  Marchetta freely plays in the lines between what’s on the page and outside of it, peppering her novel with references to books and movies and music, sliding the reader’s world into the character’s world.

And isn’t that one of the reasons why we read?  To believe in something, even something that’s only in black in white?  When Taylor’s sometime true-love and sometime arch-enemy tells her, “There’s no such thing as Atticus Finch,” she replies with a shrug, “It would be good if there was though.”

And that “if” is enough.