The Events Are Real...I AM NUMBER FOUR

“The events of this book are real.”

That’s the first sentence of I Am Number Four.  Before I say anything else, I have to say that I think it’s a pretty cool to begin a work of fiction (or at least I think it’s fiction…).

I bought this book in an airport with my plane due to leave extremely soon.  I was standing in front of the YA section of the airport bookstore, knowing I didn’t have time to read any back covers, or even glance at any front covers.  I’d heard of I Am Number Four and, with the metaphorical buzzer going off, I grabbed it.

I Am Number Four is pretty awesome when it comes to the whole grab-you-right-away-and-don’t-let-go thing.  I’m always intrigued by books about teenagers pretending to be something other than what they really are, because sometimes it seems like that that’s what adolescence is all about.  But this mission gets complicated when you’re an alien.  And when you’re one of the last survivors of a decimated planet.  And when you’re on a list of Most Wanted by a horrific enemy (also alien) species.  And you’re Number Four on that list.  And numbers One, Two, and Three are dead.

So yah, Number Four’s got some problems.  And that’s besides just navigating high school with injustice coming at you from both the football playing bullies and a buffoon principal.  But if you get to hang out with the prettiest girl, and she actually likes you too, things seem a little more manageable.  Throw in an alien-conspiracy-theorist buddy, and maybe being a hunted alien going to high school on planet earth isn’t so bad.  Until the bad guys show up.  Not the bullies or the principals.  The alien bad guys.  You know, the ones with superpowers.

I’d say this is a great book for readers who love action and aliens and, before the action starts, the anticipation and suspense of some lurking Big Time Problems (the kind that might kill you, and also destroy the earth).  Once the battle really gets going, it’s fast and sometimes a little gory and quite cinematic.  Actually, I kept thinking about the movie-version as I read, and I haven’t even seen the movie version (though now I’m curious).  In the end, this was a quick read that moved fast and was pretty darn fun along the way.

The Closing of a Bookstore

Though we don’t have a Borders in my town, where the book business is dominated by an independent bookstore and a few used bookstores, I’m not living in a cave—a cabin in the woods, sure, but not a cave—so I’m aware of the recent misfortunes that have fallen upon Borders.  Still, it didn’t become real until a little over a week ago when I was in Seattle.  I didn’t aim for Borders, as I already had my reading material with me, but I have a pretty hard time walking by a bookstore without going in, much less a bookstore plastered with signs reading “Everything Must Go!  50-80% Off!  Etc!  Etc!”

But I kind of wish I hadn’t walked into the downtown Seattle Borders.  Because it was just plain sad.  Half-empty bookshelves, all sorts of carts and ladders and miscellany littering the floorplan.  This was not a place to browse and think and mingle with other book-loving souls, it was a place going down, fast.  When I got home, I looked it up and discovered that when I went in, that Seattle Borders had less than two weeks before closing.

I made my way over the YA section, and while the gaps made me happy that many books had found good homes, the remaining titles looked so lonely and forlorn I wanted to buy the whole stock.  Actually, I might have done exactly that if I didn’t have a single carry-on bag and a trip across the country just ahead of me.  My bag was so full that I had to sit on it to close it.  Space for a library didn’t exist.  Space for a single book didn’t really exist.  Still, I couldn’t walk out of that store without a book in my hand.  It was a small action, and not one that would make any sort of difference for Borders, but it felt like I was adopting an orphan, giving a book a home, if only just one.

I remember when I was a teenager and Borders was a new thing near my east coast hometown.  My mom and I would go inside and ogle at the books, usually coming out with small bundles each.  I loved the bigness of the carpeted aisles, the tallness of the bookshalves, the crisp cracking book jackets, and the comfy chairs where you could sit down and get lost in a book before you even took it home.  I guess the only reassurance I can find is that the books remain, somewhere, even while what happens inside the walls of a former bookstore will change.  I just hope I’ll have that reassurance for a long time to come.

And Also...THE TIGER'S WIFE

So.  While this blog is primarily devoted to middle grade and YA lit, I do read all sorts of literature (and blogs and magazines and etc and etc).  Because I sometimes fall in love with reading material outside the realm of kid lit, I’m adding this “And Also” feature, where I can talk about other awesome reading materials.  Part of why I’m adding it is that I can’t resist gushing a little bit about a(n adult) novel I finished recently: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht.

This isn’t exactly a novel that’s been hiding in the shadows.  It’s the debut of an author who’s been recognized by The New Yorker and the National Book Foundation, and the novel won  the 2011 Orange Prize.  Set in eastern Europe, it follows Natalia, a young doctor who has set out on a goodwill mission, yet it quickly becomes a story about Natalia’s grandfather and war and history and folklore and magic.

By the first page, I’d fallen in love with the writing itself: the beauty and strangeness of language, the deftness and grace Obreht shows when she puts words on the page.  Since I started my master’s program a couple of years ago, I’ve really started reading like a writer, paying attention to the way a novel is constructed, to what the author does with time, with setting, with character, with everything that makes the novel work (without drawing attention to their techniques).  In my opinion, The Tiger’s Wife is a great book to read as a writer, because Obreht demonstrates so many remarkable feats of craft.  She manages to interweave two stories set in two different times.  The narrator has her own storyline, but the story at the heart of the novel is that of the narrator’s grandfather.  Or maybe it’s the story of the Deathless Man.  Or of the Tiger.

In the end, the story belongs not just to granddaughter or grandfather, but to many other characters, named and unnamed, some with reliable memories and some with fantastic imaginations.  The Tiger’s Wife takes on the form of a Russian nesting doll, bringing the reader deeper and deeper into one embedded story after another.  Yet Obreht’s skill allowed me to release each story for the promise of the next, and to trust that in the end the novel would hang together.  That trust was rewarded, and by the last page, I wanted nothing more than to go back and start examining Obreht’s novel to discover just how she pulled off what I found to be a remarkable achievement.

Toil and Trouble in WITCH CHILD

Last week my school librarian came into my classroom before school and handed me a book.  I looked at the cover: Witch Child by Celia Rees. 

Her introduction?  It takes place in New England, during the era of the puritans and the Salem Witch trials. 

Oooooh, I thought (and probably said)  I LOVE anything about the Salem witch trials. 

But wait, she said.  There’s more.  In this case, the main character actually IS a witch.

Is it possible to love a book before reading the first page?

The premise of Witch Child presents the perfect brew of suspense and intrigue and history.  The novel is told as a found story, the recently discovered diary of a fourteen-year-old girl who leaves England to voyage across the ocean in the wake of a tragedy.  The novel chronicles her attempts to forge her way in a small village founded by a zealous puritan in the wilderness beyond Salem.  The diary is part of the story, the discovery of it in an old quilt by a modern-day historian, the arrival of it back in the 1600s as a gift from mother to daughter, and the stubborn refusal of that daughter to give up writing in it despite the fact that most frown on her “ink-stained fingers.”  Still, Mary writes, even if writing might cost her everything, including her life.

Witches, diaries, a passionate writer, New England history…my librarian advised me that I would devour Witch Child on my own voyage (by plane, not boat, like Witch Child’s protagonist) from Alaska to the east coast (for the adventure of my younger brother’s AMAZING wedding), and that’s exactly what I did.  I’d recommend it for anyone who admires historical fiction, especially historical fiction with a twist.

Oh, and yes, it is possible to love a book before reading the first page.

(p.s. Here's a link to the website all about Witch Child.)

Influential Books?

One of the assignments we had in the online discussion board portion of my summer Fiction Writer’s Workshop class was to name our Five Most Influential Books.  Everyone agreed that this is an impossible task.  I wrote and posted my list quickly, as I knew I was sure to change it within and hour, then again and again a thousand times.  While I DID think about other books I would have mentioned if I’d been asked at a different point in time, I’m also kind of glad I took the opportunity to write the first five books that came to my mind.  They were:

The Changeling by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Electric Universe by David Bodanis

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

and Ulysses by James Joyce.

The first couple of titles were in some ways safest, as not too many people in my class were familiar with those books.  Snyder and Bodanis are both writers whose books I buy again and again just to give to other people because I love them so much.  Old Holden simply could not be left off the list because I’d be lying solely to avoid cliché of being a Catcher fan.  Plus, when I worked at a deli in New Hampshire one summer during college, I sliced J.D. Salinger’s sopressata a few times, which was just about one of the biggest thrills of my whole life (and gave me cred when I was a first year MFA student: I might have submitted weird fantasy YA lit to a serious literary workshop, but I had sliced Salinger’s lunch meat, so I had that going for me.)  The Sylvia Plath might have been the first to go in a revision, but since the question was about influential books, not favorite books (TOTALLY different list), I had to confess to my Plath-inspired-dark-angsty-teenage-poetry phase.  While I didn’t write any good poems during this period, and I probably didn’t really understand Plath’s poems, I was a teenager, and I was writing passionately, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

And then there’s the old Ulysses, the entry I thought would make me look like I was a big, giant show-off.  But here’s the thing about Ulysses.  It was REALLY hard to read.  It took me a bunch of attempts, and I finally got through it only because I took a class devoted entirely to that book.  I couldn’t even read the book when I was in Ireland, despite my efforts.  But I did read it, in full, finally, and I have to say that it redefined for me what reading and writing could be.  It challenged me, for sure.  But I like that.  When a book makes me work, it also makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something by reading it (and understanding it, or, in the case of Ulysses, understanding some of it).  I love to learn, and I’ve always felt that real learning takes place when we’re a little outside of our comfort zone.  Reading Ulysses felt, at times, like an act of pure faith.  Do I want to spend all my time reading books that I barely understand and that I sometimes want to throw against a wall?  No.  But I also hope that I’ll never stop reading books, at least once in a while, that get me out of my comfort zone.  Books that make me think about what’s possible in literature, and books that just make me think.  So when I look back at my Most Influential Books list a few months after writing it, I’m left not only with all the books that I might have included (Orhan Pamuk, Philip Pullman, John Steinbeck: if only they only called for a list of eight…), but also with the sense that my first impressions may not have been too far off.