Looking For Alaska, Printz Award, 2006

 

The story of Looking For Alaska depends entirely on character. The boy-meets-girl, girl-dies-tragically plot is weak, but three vivid characters–Pudge, the Colonel, and Alaska–shine as Green’s true accomplishments in this book.  

Pudge is a unique teenager– intensely inquisitive, kind-hearted, and desperate for affection. We see his character most clearly in the way he views Alaska. He sees himself as nothing, and Alaska as everything in this passage:

“[I wished we could] just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane” (88).

The ability to make the reader love, hope, pine, and lash out just as the main character does is a mark of great fiction. Green does this beautifully, and as the book progresses, the reader also takes his focus off Pudge and develops an obsession with Alaska.

Voice, style, and authenticity all contribute to this melding of character and reader. Pudge’s voice is intelligent and obsessive. It is invaded by reference to Alaska even where she isn’t immediately present. For example, when he day dreams in class, he thinks,

 “The trees seemed to clothe the hill, and just as I would never notice a particular cotton thread on the magnificently tight orange tank top Alaska wore that day, I couldn’t see the trees for the forest – everything so intricately woven together that it made no sense to think of one tree as independent from the hill” (39).

Style changes effectively reflect Pudge’s state of mind including physical and emotional calamity. For instance, Pudge’s change in mind during his concussion is evident from his incessant repetition of “I’m concussed.”  Minute details display his hopelessness after Alaska’s death–details like, “I’d gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels” (175).

Authenticity of a teenage experience furthers the bond between character and reader. High school is full of silly pranks, little crushes, big dreams, nervous embarrassment after any sexual encounter, and relationships that consist of little but fighting or settling for the easiest companion. I specifically identified with the fun of cramming six people into a tiny old car to go to McDonalds.

There were only a few problems I had with this text. I personally could not identify with the prevalence of smoking, drinking, and sex in a high school setting, because I attended a private school where immediate expulsion was the consequence for these activities. I also had questions about plausibility like, Why is a dork like Pudge attractive to Lara and Alaska? and, How are these students getting such high grades when they spend so much time drinking, talking about sex, and playing pranks? and, Why would any parent pay for their child to attend a school which cultivates such blatant disregard for authority?

My biggest problem with the story is Pudge’s treatment of Lara. After setting Alaska up as a such a strong feminist, Green works against his own message by allowing Pudge to ditch Lara immediately after their first sex experience. In his grief over Alaska, Pudge becomes the kind of hit-and-run guy that Alaska and all self-actualized women would despise.

Themes in Looking for Alaska include relationships, authority, religious philosophy, death, guilt, and forgiveness. Controversial issues include underage smoking, drinking, and sex, suicide, and dangerous pranks; however, no content is gratuitous. The primary theme is the passion of a youthful spirit. It is summed up in the last passage of the novel.

“Awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be . . . We [teenagers] think that we are invincible because we are.  They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.”

How I Live Now, Printz Award, 2005

The story of How I Live Now is fast-paced, unusual, and engrossing. It’s a perfect blend of love story and survival story. Expert handling of voice, character, and setting make Daisy’s journey completely believable amidst incredible circumstances.

The primary part of the novel is written in continuous prose style, without normal punctuation, a style which is very difficult for some readers, but can create a spell-binding effect of actually being inside Daisy’s head. Daisy later explains her unconventional writing as grief stricken ramblings because she “refused to relinquish a single detail of the past.” Her voice is sometimes devastatingly sad and sometimes quite humorous. Daisy’s teenage mind flawlessly blends the two as a way of allowing both herself and the reader to cope. One of my favorite examples of this is in chapter 28. “We couldn’t go on. We went on. Staying alive was what we did to pass the time. . . . I was thinking of approaching my old school the next time we were in New York and telling them to replace the unit on Media Communications with one on How to Survive Half Dead in the Wilderness without Much in the Way of Hope.”

The setting of a vague current war is frankly terrifying to me. Some readers won’t abide the lack of specific details about this war, but the lack of detail is authentic and understandable. Rosoff merely asks us to imagine what life would be like if an organized terrorist group were to attack both Britain and the U.S. and cut off all normal communication like phone and internet. People would be confused, to say the least. Many would not even know who the real enemy was. Transport systems for medicine, food, and gasoline would fail. Hospitals would be dedicated only to war injuries. People would organize militia groups to fight back. Drafting and quartering acts would be expected. When the enemy is defeated, people would debate about what exactly started the war in the first place, throwing out ideas like “oil, money, land, sanctions, democracy.” The vagueness of this war is not at all a weakness of the story; it provides a strong emotion-laden setting.

Although Daisy is really the only developing character in the story, the others are by no means boring. Piper is angelic, innocent, trusting, and she can talk to animals. Her weakness serves as the catalyst for Piper’s growth. Edmund is a 14-year-old smoker with scraggly hair and puppy-dog eyes. He’s intelligent and sensitive. He has some kind of telepathic ability that allows him to hear people’s thoughts. He serves as motivation for Daisy’s journey. Daisy gradually grows from a selfish, insecure, anorexic teen bent on punishing herself and her family into a brave young woman who fights to protect the safety and innocence of Piper, to survive the threats of the wilderness and war, and to love Edmund despite his damage.

In spite of numerous negative reader reviews concerning the “cousin issue,” I didn’t personally find it to be a problem. A relationship with a first cousin is not morally wrong, or incestuous; in this book, it’s not even gross (the cousins have never met each other before). It is a societal taboo, and Daisy recognizes that fact, pointing out that they can only get away with this behavior because adults aren’t around.

The only part of this book I didn’t like was the abrupt end to the first section. I would have appreciated knowing what Daisy thought as officers showed up at her door and carted her off to a plane bound for America. I wanted to know how she felt about being put in a hospital when she went back. I understand leaving a gap for the time she was actually in the hospital, but details leading to that point could have emphasized Daisy’s emotional state when she began writing her story.

Themes of How I Live Now include love, responsibility, control, hunger, lust, underage sex, anorexia, telepathy, war, and survival. The primary theme is survival for the sake of love. Survival in itself is never Daisy’s goal. When she lives in America and feels unloved, her self-punishment and demand for control work against her own survival. After she grows to love Edmund and Piper, and they love her, she uses base survival as a means to keep that love. She reminds us at the end of the book when discussing her love for Edmund that “Fighting back is what I’ve discovered I do best. . . . And that’s how I live now.”

The First Part Last, Printz Award, 2004

The First Part Last follows the relatively boring life of a teenage father. I say boring because all of Bobby’s actions and reactions are expected and understandable. His experiences even seem designed to be an “issue story,” a cautionary tale to teenagers about the dangers of unsafe sex. Need I emphasis how annoying those stories are to teen?

But Angela Johnson does something wonderful. She transforms a predictable, issue-heavy narrative into a vivid experience through her expert handling of voice, character, setting, and style. Booklist calls The First Part Last “poetry,” and I agree. The feel of reading it is more like reading a novel in verse than reading a novel. The narrative is clear, concise, and construed more to make an emotional impact than to spin a story.

Bobby’s voice is like we’re hearing a story he’s telling himself. His thoughts are often short, which makes him sound like a teenager. Sentence fragments emphasize his immaturity and eagerness in passages like this. “I spray black. Then red, mixed with some blue. The boy’s got to be paler. But no, maybe just some green all around him. Maybe just some more green. I’m losing wall now. It’s all got to come to an end soon.”

But the thoughts themselves are often deep and focused, which makes him seem mature. For instance, when Nia is about to break the big new, he notices a balloon. “Nia was waiting on our stoop for me with a red balloon. Just sittin’ there with a balloon looking all lost. I’ll never forget that look and how her voice shook when she said, ‘Bobby I’ve got something to tell you.’ Then she handed me the balloon.”

For Bobby, voice perfectly matches character. He’s alternately immature and mature, petty and deep, irresponsible and responsible. He loves basketball, video games, painting and pizza. He wants to have it easy sometimes. He’s scared of responsibility. He doesn’t trust his rich teacher or the rich families that could adopt his baby. When he finds out he’s a father, he wants to do the “right thing,” not just because his mom tells him too, but because he loves Nia and the baby that kicks inside her. The Then/Now sequence of the book, while confusing at first, falls into an understandable pattern, and serves to contrast Bobby’s former self and current self, as he grows from a carefree child into a responsible teen who puts the good of those he loves above his own.           

The setting of Manhattan is real, but not overbearing. The story could take place in any large city. We see Bobby’s world most often through the things he loves about his city. He says, “He loved the smell of it. Pizza on one corner, falafel and French pastries on the next . . . Couldn’t sleep without the ambulance noises and people calling to each other in the street who are just getting back from the clubs . . . He loved the sounds the kids made running to the subway, and cabs blowing by and screeching to a stop.” This passage, where Bobby takes on a third person voice to tell his own story, is particularly engaging because many of us do take a step back and think of the story of our lives when a difficult situation arises.

Themes of The First Part Last include teen pregnancy, parenting, love, grief, and sacrifice. The primary theme is accepting responsibility. Bobby’s initial decision to raise Feather may have been more emotional than rational. He says, “I don’t know anything about raising a kid. I’m sixteen and none of those people on the wall look like the kind of family me and Feather’s gonna be. But I’m doing it.” When the social worker protests, he responds, “But I love her, and even though I’m not set up for her, she’s mine. And I’m hers.” He finally knows that his actions, his love, and his relationship to this child dictate the sacrificial responsibility it takes to raise a child instead of the selfish irresponsibility it take to give one away.

[Note: I do not believe putting a child up for adoption is always the selfish thing to do, but in Bobby's particular case it is. Bobby has a stable extended family and material resources to benefit the child. He and Nia do not choose to give the baby away for the baby's benefit, they do it for their own convenience, which is selfish.]

My favorite passage is the chapter where Bobby discovers Nia’s been taken to the hospital and then sees Feather for the first time. Angela Johnson perfectly captures the raw emotion of a boy running, screaming all the way to the hospital, and feeling like a child as he gives in to grief. She slows down her prose as she brings Feather to her father for the first time, giving the reader time to move from sadness to joy. Then as Bobby holds his three day old daughter who cried through the night, she sticks us with the theme in a way that feels absolutely right and natural. “I’m supposed to suck it up and do all the right things if I can, even if I screw it up and have to do it over.”

Postcards From No Man's Land, Printz Award, 2003

Postcards From No Man’s Land is an introspective coming-of-age story. Pieces of Jacob’s life and Geetrui’s weave together to create a satisfying narrative. The style is very mature, with a broad vocabulary and deep themes. To a unpracticed reader, the book may be boring, offensive, or hard to understand. One goodreads.com reviewer said, “It’s just this sort of book that causes YA readers to shun books with an award medal on the cover.” I disagree. It’s the sort of book that is literary, methodic and meaningful. Yes, it’s very different from the fast-paced active stories that teens are used to reading for entertainment, but it’s not inferior.

The voice is authentically teenage most of the time–self-centered, angsty, energetic, and eager. However, much of the vocabulary seems contrived. At one point I put the book down, thinking, this prose is ridiculous. The passage that struck me this way is as follows:

“How often with the aid of a couple of mirrors he had scowled from every possible angel at that offensive hooter, that hideous snout, that swollen trunk, that tumescent nasal evacuator. He would sometimes squeeze and manipulate the end of his embarrassing blower between finger and thumb, like a sculpture molding clay, hoping to reshape it into at least a presentable, if not a handsome conk.”

Jacob’s internal dialogue is far too literary for his age and personality, which may contribute greatly to the negative reactions to this book by other reviewers.

The format of switching between two stories is straightforward, although I spent far too much time trying to figure out how the two stories were connected. The dual-narrative format could also be an obstacle to less experienced readers. The format especially tripped me up at the insertion of other accounts of the 1944 battle from page 152 to 185; these accounts seemed out of place and unnecessary.

The two main characters are fascinating. While other characters are not fully round, they accurately represent what the two main characters could practically know about them. The reader meets the side characters as Jacob and Geertrui do. Emphasis is on their emotions and impressions rather than the actual description of the characters. For example, Geertrui does not initially tell us what the older Jacob looked like, only that “He had eyes that made me melt” (16).

Two settings serve to further the themes, contrasting an old Dutch village and new Dutch city. The descriptions are vivid, so it’s easy to imagine Geertrui’s house, the hotel turned military hospital, Daan’s apartment, the museum, the river, the little shops and restaurants in Amsterdam, and the graveyard.           

Themes in Postcards From No Man’s Land include identity, self-discovery, sexuality, self-honesty, grief, bravery, and integrity. I appreciate Chambers’s open discussion of issues like sexuality, euthanasia, and moral dilemma,  but Postcards addresses so many issues that it starts to feel like a heavily didactic story. This may be on purpose. In the story, Daan equates education with corruption (not meaning dishonesty or vice, but meaning distortion and alteration of form), and makes a valid point that new education inherently challenges old ideas and norms. I can't say how much Daan’s opinions about love resonate with me.

                        “There are no rules about love. Who you love. How many people you can love. Like love is some kind of commodity  . . . . Love is not finite. It is not that we each have a limited supply of it that we can only give to one person at a time. Or that we have one kind of love that can only be given to one person in the whole of our lives. It’s a ridiculous thing to think so.” 

I did struggle through this book, but the last few chapters completely changed the way I view it and personally connect to it. Although I could have done with a hundred less pages, I absolutely believe Postcards From No Man's Land deserved an award for its skillful narrative, authentic characters, challenging ideas, complex emotional journey, and advanced themes.

Kit's Wilderness, Printz Award, 2001

I expected a lot after reading the back of this book – I expected an intense plot, detailed stories about the past, and a search for ghosts. I didn’t get any of those things. Kit’s Wilderness has a rambling plot, which, even as magical realism, seems unrealistic. My opinion may stem from the drastic difference between the English culture portrayed in this book an my own – the repeated use of “eh? eh!,” the lax authority of all adults in the text, the classroom focus on the arts, the use of such a terrifying story as a school play, and Kit’s family’s responses to his grandfathers illness all seemed illogical to me.

Almond effectively uses a storyteller character’s voice as the narrator. The style of switching between story narration and Kit’s writing propelled the story through a slow part of the plot. The short story about Lak and his baby sister fascinated me, but the writing seemed far more mature Kit would be capable of. I would be very surprised to read a passage like this written by a 13-year-old – “He moved quickly with hope in his heart. The baby slept, contented. Behind him, the great dark birds spiraled from the sky, flapped heavily down into the hollow.”

Kit’s wilderness is full of unrealistic and undeveloped characters. I don’t know enough about any of them to care about their life or understand their decisions. Kit’s grandfather and Allie were the most interesting characters to me, but neither were active in the resolution of the story. The ghost children, as characters, served no purpose in the plot. They created a sense of magic and horror, adding to the tone of the story, but did not actively help or hinder Kit and Askew.

The theme of the books seems to be something grand about the struggle between life and death and the uncertainty of death. I think the story tries too hard to be heavy and important. The symbolism is hard-hitting and unmistakable. Askew is darkness and death but he’s capable of light and life. Allie is light and life but she’s capable of darkness and death. Kit is caught in between, trying to decide which he’d rather be with.

As a side note, the interactions between Kit and Askew really rub me the wrong way. Their passive-aggressive friendship mirrors many negative romantic relationships in more recent YA lit. John is a bully and focuses much of his anger on Kit, but Kit still befriends him and follows him into a frightening situation merely because Kit feels responsible to save him. The last scene in the mines makes this point for me. Askew lights a fire in the mine, and Kit cautions, “This is lethal. If there’s gas around . . .” Askew clearly cares for no one’s safety, responding “Kaboom! Great flash of fire and we’re all gone.” Kit stays in this dangerous situation only to repeatedly remind Askew that his “mother is searching for [him].”

The strongest aspects of Kit’s Wilderness are tone, history, and setting. The tone is beautifully bleak, like The Graveyard Book. The history of the small town is beautiful, and I wanted to know more about it. The sub-theme of the magical effects of history on current reality creates a far more fascinating concept than Kit’s struggle between life and death. The setting, with landscape descriptions, weather, and small town charm, really comes alive.

Monster, Printz Award, 2000

While the story Monster takes a unique tack with the teenage-victim-of-racism angle, it’s a bit boring and predictable. Reminiscent of John Grisham novels and every court-room drama aired on television, the novel makes use of sensationalism, extreme villainization, revelations of prison atrocities, and a protagonist of questionable morality.

Steve’s voice seems authentically masculine and teenage, and effectively uses a mixed media to convey story.  However, his voice is at times whiny and angsty. For instance, in one scene Steve watches a baseball game on tv and says, “They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn’t in jail, watching them from a completely different world.”

Because the voice is first person, it seems absurd to leave Steve’s guilt or innocence vague. A boy like Steve, so set on proving how horrible his situation is, would most likely answer that question in his own journal. The author gets around it by having Steve say, “I thought about writing about what happened at the drugstore, but I’d rather not have it in my mind.” Instead of coming across as a genuine emotion of the character, this reads as a contrived way to keep the reader in the dark.

The style keeps the narrative at a relatively quick pace, but format design could be confusing or annoying for some readers. The style is also completely “telling,” since Steve controls the entire narrative to the extent that all characters become untrustworthy.

The setting is real and raw, full of minute detail and colored by Steve’s emotional lens. For example, Steve describes his janitor duty with this sentence, “On the floor there were big arcs of grey dirty water and swirls of stinking brown bubbles.”

Steve as a character is hard to like. He doesn’t develop or reveal an interesting personality. All we know about Steve by the end of the novel is that he loves film and his family and that he was put in jail and on trial for a crime he may or may not have committed. The antagonists were flat, stereotypical characters, simply there to be villainized. Those supposedly supporting Steve weren’t much better.

Themes include racism, prison life, gang violence, fear, loneliness, name-calling, and labeling. The ambiguity of Steve’s guilt provides discussion opportunities. However, constant reference to race seems to be promoting or at least accepting the racism of the system instead of challenging it.

Steve wrestles with the question, “Am I a monster?” Through Steve’s emotions, Meyers points out that this “bad kid” labeling is harmful. Myers could have made this point better by clearly stating Steve’s guilt or innocence. But instead of correcting the wrong perpetuated by the adult characters, the story wallows in it. The final response to the question is a confirmation to Steve that he is a monster. The prosecutor turns away, Steve’s father leaves, his interactions with his mother are never the same, and he is left only with this label and nothing else. Because Steve’s guilt is unclear, there is no final moral point for the reader, no growth or redemption for any character. The tragedy is simply displayed and not condemned. I can see no award-winning quality in that.

Newberry Honor 2011: One Crazy Summer

One Crazy Summer is not just a story about politics, racial equality, and estranged parents. It’s about sticking up for yourself, loving people who aren’t nice all the time, and, above all, it’s about loyalty – loyalty to a race, to a cause, to friends, and to family.

The mother/daughter theme is extraordinarily successful, but I don’t think “learning about the black panthers” was a central theme (as Rita claims in the back insert of the book).

Delphine participates in the Black Panther cause for completely non-political reasons. She says,

“It was funny how things changed. If Cecile had been arrested when we first arrived in Oakland, . . . Nothing would have made me happier than to leave Cecile and Oakland back then. But we hadn’t gotten what we came for. We didn’t really know our mother, and I couldn’t leave without knowing who she was.”

This – the desire to know her mother – seems to be Delphine’s motivation for delving into the Black Panther cause. If she can fight for her mother’s cause, she can fight for her mother. Even though she’s worried, knowing her mother is more important than staying home (or calling her Pa for that matter). Because the mother/daughter theme is the primary one, the political theme is rightly allowed to fade into sparse information.

I was also really impressed by character in this book! The fact that the plot was all emotional worked great for me, but I can see what you mean about some kids not getting it.

Cecile’s characterization made so much sense to me. I believed Cecile was selfish enough to tell her child, “Should have gone to Mexico to get rid of you when I had a chance.” I was surprised that she never truly mended her ways, but that’s not a bad thing. Usually, bad parents have a way of redeeming themselves in children’s books in a sappy-sweet nearly magical way. Cecile never redeems her wrong actions, but she does offer Delphine (and the book’s child readers) an opportunity to understand why an adult can be selfish too. Understanding other’s actions is sometimes better for a child than assuming that bad people will always change drastically for the better.

I don’t think the ending is even about Cecile coming to the point that she wants to hug her girls. It’s about the girls hugging her – they finally take charge enough to reach out physically to her. Delphine says, “How do you fly three thousand miles to meet the mother you hadn’t seen since you needed her milk, needed to be picked up, or were four going on five, and not THROW YOUR ARMS AROUNG HER, whether she wanted you to or not.” I loved that Fern, the 6/7 year old, was the one who realized they needed to physically tell Cecile they love her.

There is no confusion or faltering in Rita Williams-Garcia’s book – only beauty and straightforward motion to a satisfying finish. The only thing that concerned me was not finding out exactly why Cecile left in the first place (p.210), but that is a minor detail when so much is done right. I think One Crazy Summer is deserving of the Newberry Honor and perhaps more deserving of the Newberry Award than Moon Over Manifest.

Btw, Delphine will be returning if Rita Williams-Garcia finishes her next project. She says, “I'm also at work on the sequel for One Crazy Summer, titled P.S.: Be Eleven. I just couldn't leave Delphine, Vonetta and Fern alone! In this follow up story, the girls have just landed in New York, their father has an announcement, their Uncle Darnell will return home from Vietnam, and Delphine must face the dreaded sixth grade dance. There’s a whole lot going on!”