The New Forever

Few writers can compare with Judy Blume.  Mostly because, it seems, few writers want to take on some of the subjects she was willing to write about–at least not for young people.  

You will find some Judy Blume novel at the heart of some “growing up moments” for so many women.  You only have to read read Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume to see just how she influenced a generation with her fiction.

A couple of the essays in Everything take on Forever… (a.k.a. The Sex Book), and Stacey Ballis describes it like this:

“Forever was the book that got passed reverentially from older sibling to younger, usually with key passages highlighted and essential page numbers listed in the back.  It was the book that we read aloud at slumber parties, whispered about in the back of the school bus, and was the single most likely item to be stolen from a sixth-grade desk.”

Yes, the book’s notoriety among tweens and teens was related to the fact that it talks about sex.  But the book’s resonance went beyond the illicit content.  Ballis continues:

“Judy Blume opened a door for me by simply depicting something real and not overly romanticized, which seemed to make it even more, well, romantic.”

That’s what I was thinking about when the teen novel Anatomy of a Single Girl by Daria Snadowsky landed on my desk at work.  The ARC had an eye -catching jacket that promised the kind of illicit content that made Forever what it was.  In case you can’t read it in the photo below, the jacket says:

“Warning:

Reading may produce the following side effects:

Rosy cheeks

Sweaty Palms

Racing Heart”

Snadowsky does make good on that promise.  There is sex in this book and plenty of it.  But what reminded me so strongly of Judy Blume was its lack of romance.  The sex in Anatomy of a Single Girl isn’t really about being erotic, despite what the warning might make you think.  It’s more clinical than sexy, and our narrator manages to be scientific and emotional.

The story began with Anatomy of a Boyfriend, which follows the same storyline as Forever.  Life goes on, of course, even after a break up.  And we get the second installment in Anatomy of a Single Girl.   I don’t know if Snadowsky’s books will have the influence and staying power of Judy Blume’s books, but they definitely add to the list of books that answer all the questions about sex and relationships that girls are often afraid to ask.  I think that’s a good thing.

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February Book Pick: Just One Day by Gayle Forman

“We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.”

Here is a story for the romantic in you that touches on so many of the themes that make coming-of-age novels great.  There’s a whirlwind romance in a foreign country, an opportunity to be someone else just for a day, and then heartbreak.  And not just any kind of heartbreak.  The kind with no closure, no certainty of any kind.  Willem disappears while Allyson sleeps after they share one day in Paris.

And that’s just the beginning of the book.

I picked it up because I loved Gayle Forman’s If I Stay, and there was a lot to draw me in with Just One Day.  Frankly, I love find-yourself-while-traveling novels, of which there are many in teen fiction.  But this is less about the romance and the travel in this book than one might think.  It’s more about what comes after.  How do you come back from an experience like that?  For Allyson, the question is whether she can still be who she was before.  The girl who lived out her mother’s plans and followed every rule.  It’s time to ask herself what she wants.

Recommended for readers of teen fiction who want to read a bittersweet story of self discovery.  As a bonus, we are promised to finally get Willem’s side of the story in a companion novel to be released next year, Just One Year.

Read an excerpt of Just One Day here.

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Check out last month’s Book Pick: Goliath

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Teens, Grief, and God in Fiction

Most of the time, I avoid books with the potential to make me cry.  Frankly, I do most of my reading these days on my commute, and I hate to cry on the bus.  It has happened more times than I care to admit despite my attempts to screen  out tearjerker titles from my to-read pile.

Recently, though, I found myself reading J.J. Johnson’s new teen novel The Theory of Everything on my bus ride home from work.  It was clearly about grief and loss, which would usually be screened, but it managed to intrigue me anyway.  I’m glad it did.  It was a nice contrast to the many, many novels about grief that invoke faith. (Not to knock those that do invoke faith when characters are grieving; See You At Harry’s, for example, is excellent.)  In TToE, Sarah isn’t particularly religious, and when her best friend dies in a freak accident, people  offer religious ideas to comfort her.  Sarah finds it more alienating than comforting, especially when it comes from her boyfriend who turns out to be more religious than she thought.  The book isn’t all sad, though.  Sarah is a snarky narrator, and each chapter begins with a humorous chart or diagram.  I appreciated these attempts to off-set the grief, and Sarah’s growth throughout the novel made this a book I would recommend to readers who enjoy the tragicomic.

This is somewhat similar to another book I read recently that addressed loss.  In 37 Things I Love by Kekla Magoon, Ellis narrates her feelings as she and her mother make the decision to take her father off life support:

“We’re not religious, but when I think about what’ll happen when Dad goes away, I have to wonder.  I don’t know if I like the idea of an afterlife.  It feels like a huge gamble.  I mean, it’s pretty much fifty-fifty that there’s life after death.  But on top of that, it’s fifty-fifty that life after death is going to be something worth hoping for.  You just don’t know what you’re casting your lot toward.  It could be awesome, a euphoric heaven where you never feel worried or hurt.  Or it could totally blow, and then you’re really stuck.  What if heaven/eternity/forever is this horrible trap that’s way worse than life as we know it?

Maybe it’s better if the end is just the end.”

It’s good for teens to read that there are many ways to find comfort when you lose someone you love.  These books introduce the idea that one person’s answer isn’t necessarily going to be your answer.  I think that’s an important thing for teens to know.

I’ll add these books to the very short list of teen fiction with secular main characters, and I’ll go back to reading books that won’t make me cry.

However, if you do like to read books that make you cry, here is a list of Contemporary YA Fiction about Grief and Loss from Stacked.

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Also pictured: After Eli by Rebecca Rupp, which has a young teen dealing with the death of his older brother.  It is for a slightly younger audience (middle school) than the TToE and 37 Things, which are for teens.

For more about secular family life, see my Secular Thursday page or check out the Books for Secular Families Amazon Book Shop.  A portion of purchases made from Amazon.com links on this site benefit Proper Noun Blog.  Thanks for your support!

Everything You Need to Survive the Tightrope Walk of Parenting

Parenting can be a tightrope walk.

We’re always in search of a middle ground. We want our kids to eat healthy, but we don’t want to deny them sweets.  We want to guide them to good decisions, but we don’t want to make decisions for them.  It isn’t always clear at first where the middle is, so we are always readjusting our sense of balance.  At least, I am.

I think that the most delicate and debated issue that requires nearly constant readjustment is that of religion–or in my case, lack thereof.  I’ve written of my desire to let my daughter make her own choices about her beliefs as she gets older.  But that’s easy to type.  In practice, it gets a bit murky.  How do you answer your child’s questions about the world without indoctrinating them?  Is that even possible?!  Sometimes I wonder.  Writer Wendy Thomas Russell delves into the murkiness of the non-religious parenting on her blog Relax, It’s Just God.

All that never far from my mind, I was eager to read the teen novel Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse by Lucas Klauss.  Yes, it’s a novel published for teens.  But I am recommending it to parents.  Non-religious parents, in particular, may relate to the father, described as an “enthusiastic atheist,” as they read the teen’s story of exploring religion.

I couldn’t help but wonder if my daughter would feel like she needed to hide her interest in beliefs that differ from mine like Phillip does.  Or if I would forbid her from it like Phillip’s dad does.  I don’t think that I would, but sometimes we act more emotionally than rationally, especially when it is about the people we love the most. The book isn’t about religion being true or not true or good or bad.  It’s about the way religion affects people and the choices we make as we decide how we will let it affect us.  It’s about family.

Recommended to parents of all sorts, but especially those wondering how to approach the balancing act that is allowing our kids to explore beliefs that are different from our own.

 

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For more about secular family life, see my Secular Thursday page or check out the Books for Secular Families Amazon Book Shop.  A portion of purchases made from Amazon.com links on this site benefit Proper Noun Blog.  Thanks for your support! (Book was reviewed from a library copy.)

Now Available: October Mourning

Leslea Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies, happened to be a guest speaker for the Gay Awareness Week celebration on the University of Wyoming campus in October of 1998.  In horrible coincidence, that was the week that Matthew Shepard was killed as a victim of a hate crime.  Now all these years later, Newman has written about her connection to this incident in an affecting book of poems: October Mourning.

She wrote on the Huffington Post:

“It is my wish that October Mourning will carry that message of hope, born from a horrific act of violence, to our youth. Those entering college this fall were only four years old when Matt Shepard was murdered. Those starting high school were only infants. But Matt’s legacy will live on, and I intend October Mourning to be a vehicle for that legacy, to help our youth remember the lesson of his life and death: That all of us, no matter how old, no matter where we live, deserve to be free to be who we are. Hatred ended Matt’s life, but love can unite us.”

Amen.

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Believing Differently: Exploring Religious Diversity in Teen Fiction

I grew up knowing I was different because of what my family believed.  We were Christian, but we were outside of the mainstream enough that even as a kid, I stuck out.  As an adult, I’ve chosen another minority belief:  non-belief.  The number of non-religious people is growing, but many people (myself included) still perceive a stigma to the point that we are careful to avoid the topic altogether or avoid using certain labels–like atheist, for example.

I watch my daughter play with her young friends, and I wonder what her experience will be like–how much it will match my own.  She won’t have to go to the library during class holiday celebrations as I did, but she will at some point be set apart by what we have chosen.  For as much as I am trying to create a safe space of exploration of science, religion, and philosophy for her, she will eventually encounter people who want to push her out of that safe space into one label or another.  That thought makes me nervous.

That thought is part of what the Books for Secular Families series is all about.  I believe that education and stories are the first step to confidence and compassion. I grew up with stories, and I am grateful every day for my mom’s willingness to let me explore the world through stories so freely.  It was in a story that I first encountered the idea of a non-religious family and the idea that a child’s spiritual identity could be separate from the family’s.  Now, this is one of my core values.  Everyone is on their own journey–even our children.  Beliefs are not hereditary.

As I read Sarah Dooley’s Body of Water, which is a novel aimed at middle schoolers, I wondered if my daughter would ever lie about our family’s beliefs to fit in, if she would be embarrassed to be outside the mainstream.

In the book, twelve-year-old Ember has a lot she would like to keep secret.  Her family is homeless as a result of a fire, and they are living at a campground for the summer.  She lets the other kids at the campground think her name is Amber because that’s more normal than the nature-derived name her Wiccan parents gave her.  Ember knows from experience that not everyone will be friends with someone whose family worship nature.  My heart just about broke for the girl as I read her thoughts that if she wants any friends, she has to keep the spiritual part of her life to herself.

I think that any child in a family whose beliefs–religious, political, or whatever–are outside of the mainstream will be able to relate to Ember’s reluctance to share her family’s religion.  Ember’s unsent letters to her former friend throughout the book offer an intro to Paganism as Ember gets her chance to say what she’s always wanted to say to the friend who shunned her because of her religion.  It’s very informative.  Paganism and Christianity have more in common than one might think, and Ember lets loose with the facts she usually keeps to herself.

I just wanted to take Ember and all the other children who feel pressured to be the same label as their friends or who have been shunned by anyone because of their or their family’s beliefs and keep them safe until we have created a world in which children don’t have labels and they don’t automatically get the one’s their parents have.

Let’s work on that one, okay?

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Also pictured above: Girls Don’t Fly by Kristen Chandler (which I blogged about here) and Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah (which is about a Muslim teen who decides to start wearing a head scarf)

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Now Available: Where Things Come Back in paperback

I saw this lovely new edition of one of my favorite books from last year, and I thought I would share it–if only to have a chance to tell you that my post about this book (If you like… Sufjan Stevens) is one of the most popular posts on this blog.  I assume the traffic has something to do with those shiny stickers… Everyone loves an award winner, right?

Just between you and me: I was rather surprised that WTCB won the Printz medal.  I thought it was, um, too quirky to win.  Don’t get me wrong.  I liked the book.  I liked it a lot actually.  I just know a lot of people who probably wouldn’t.  They would say it was too introspective or too disjointed or just too slow.  Other people will read all the reviews that compare it to Catcher in the Rye and roll their eyes without even giving it a chance.

Patient readers with an appreciation for quirky characters, this one is for you. I recommend it.

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Drunken Decision-Making, Part 2

No, I am not talking about my own intoxicated indiscretions (which I don’t even admit to having).  I’m talking about books.  In April, I declared drunk driving/drunk decisions as the season’s trend in YA fiction, and time has been giving me more evidence for my wild assertion.

Case in point: Midsummer’s Nightmare by Kody Keplinger and 37 Things I Love by Kekla Magoon.  I’ve added both of these to the growing list of 2012 titles that take on the bad things that happen when you get wasted.  It isn’t just about driving.  Actually, neither of these books take on drunk driving or any of the potentially dangerous things that might happen when you’re too drunk to think straight.  They’re mostly about embarrassing yourself.

In Midsummer’s Nightmare, Whitley parties hard and often, but when the summer with her dad doesn’t go as she thought, she is forced to take stock of her life.  It is basically a just-for-fun chick lit title that will appeal to older teens, but the unreliable narrator  and a strong, assertive heroine that may draw in a deeper audience.

37 Things I Love isn’t about drinking, and it isn’t really the light read you might guess from the cover.  It’s about the complexity of family and connection.  Ellis is dealing with some heavy family stuff and watching her best friend Abby make poor decisions (such as getting drunk at a party and doing a strip tease that ends up getting her mocked mercilessly in school).  The result is a thoughtful novel that is well worth reading.

For the most part, I don’t think that the books I’ve pointed out that take on this issue are trying to demonize alcohol.  There is a bit of moralizing, I suppose, as the point seems to be to examine why we choose to drink, but overall, these are good stories with real situations that, perhaps, will help readers to get beyond black and white.

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Monday Morning Music with Supergirl Mixtapes

For me, Supergirl Mixtapes by Meagan Brothers was drenched in nostalgia.  The novel is set in the mid-1990′s–right around the time I was spending hours upon hours crafting the perfect mixtapes for myself and my friends.  I’m a sucker for nostalgia in general, but mixtapes are a particular weakness.

Of course, the “Supergirl Mixtapes” of the title are really just a small part of the story, which is about a girl who moves to New York City to get to know her estranged mother (who just happens to be a punk rocker).  The usual coming-of-age themes are set to a 1990′s soundtrack in this book as Maria is obsessed with Kurt Cobain, her mother idolizes Patti Smith, and Maria’s friend from back home sends her mixtapes full of indie bands, like one of my ’90s obsessions, Veruca Salt.

For your listening pleasure this Monday morning, here is a song that would have a place on any “Supergirl Mixtape” I might put together.

What are your favorite ’90s bands?  

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The Latest Trend in Teen Fiction

The latest trend in teen fiction as I’ve been reading it is teen drinking and drunk driving.

   

• Where it Began by Ann Redisch Stampler (March 2012)
• Princesses of Iowa by M. Molly Backes (May 2012)
• My Life in Black and White by Natasha Friend (June 2012)
• My Life Next Door by Huntley Fitzpatrick (June 2012)

I liked all of these books to varying degrees, and I’d recommend them to the right readers.  However, if I were to require reading on teenage drinking or drinking and driving it would be The Princesses of Iowa.  Not even the whole book.  Just the prologue.  It illustrates exactly what’s wrong with the way we talk about drugs and alcohol with young people.  I hope it will open the discussion beyond “don’t do it” to a more honest and inclusive consideration of the decisions kids make and the consequences that result.  Highly recommended.

Twin Cities locals can hear Molly Backes read from The Princesses of Iowa at the Red Balloon Bookshop Friday, April 27th.

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