I Didn't Tell You

-->A Poem By Me

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

at first

that I stopped believing.

           

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner

that I wasn’t paying attention

to the sermons and lectures and tirades 

about miracles and modesty and gay marriage.

I wasn’t paying attention

because I was reading Ephesians

where Paul says we're chosen

to be like Jesus.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

that I didn’t feel chosen.

You would have explained

that faith isn’t a feeling,

it’s a choice,

like love.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner

that I got angry in Sunday School

when someone said, “Pray for my sister.

She’s started drinking.”

I got angry because I didn’t see

how we had the right to look down

on people with different standards.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

that I hated all the rules.

You would have explained

that being chosen isn’t for everyone,

it’s for the separate,

the beloved.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner

that I stopped reading my Bible

and started writing poems in my journal

and pretending to look at the verses.

I stopped reading because I wasn’t

experiencing a personal relationship

with the words not with Jesus.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

that trying to read it made me sad.

You would have explained that

sometimes God is silent for a bit

to test his children,

to test their faith-choice.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner

that I thought God must be evil,

if he’s really in control,

and there’s so much bad that happens.

I thought God was evil, because

he SAID he would never leave me,

but I FELT so goddamn forsaken.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

that I couldn’t see the beauty in the world.

You might have told me sooner

about the time our family was too broke

to buy milk and bread, and an angel

left groceries on the porch.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner

that it’s easier to believe

that there is no God,

or He’s too far away to trouble with humans.

It’s too hard to believe that tragedies

like Katrina and Nine-Eleven were planned,

caused by a person with a

“greater purpose” in mind.

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you

that I didn’t care about a God who didn’t care.

You might have protested,

but it wouldn’t have made a difference.

You see,
somewhere,

I stopped believing.
I wish I had told you sooner,

but I guess I couldn’t have.

It happened too slowly,

like an engine

running
out
of steam.

Where Things Come Back, Printz Award, 2012

At first glance, Where Things Come Back is utterly boring. If I hadn’t been taking a class on the Printz Award, I would never have finished it.

By page five I hated the main character. Cullen is simply a pretentious writer stuck in a teenage body. He’s deeply introspective, in love with love, picked on by jocks, and hopelessly self-important. He’s comfortable with being “an insecure shell of a man” and goes so far as to pick friends who allow him to be this way. He’s misogynistic in his descriptions of Ada, his brusque toleration of Meena, and his ignorance of Laura Fish’s emotions. He broadens these offensive ideas to all women in this ridiculous statement, “Pretty girls always want guys who treat them, and most everyone else, like complete shit.”

His voice grated on my nerves. The “When one does X, he begins to imagine Y” pattern used to distance himself from his fantasies throws me out of the narrative many times. The insertion of super-extra-clever book titles for his journal sometimes make me want to gag. Zombies and dark humor just seem like a contrived part of this emo package.

The setting felt cliché. Lily is a tiny town where nothing important happens; however, this tiny town has much more than it’s fair share of tragedy. Teenagers regularly die, adults who desperately want to leave get stuck there, parents are abusive or alcoholic or absent, and by the end of the book, the biggest hope the town has had in its entire existence turns out to be false.

The interwoven plot was jarring at first. I had no idea there was a dual narrative to this book until I was jolted out of Lily, Arkansas and plopped down into third-world Africa. Even after several switches, when an experienced reader would be expected to easily shift mindsets between narratives, the completely disjointed plot still made me want to throw the book across the room. I didn’t begin to sympathize with plot B until late in his story when I read, “He had traveled halfway around the world, slept in dirt-floor huts, given food and water to the poor and dying, but still hadn’t impressed Mr. Jackson Sage.” I finally felt something for him, and stopped feeling like trashing the book, but I still had no clue why he was there.

As I rounded the corner to the second half of the book, I began to understand why it won an award. I was happily surprised by the beauty and style of lines like these:

“He imagines heaven to be not some huge city with streets of gold and tall, white building, but a simple room filled with just enough of the good people to make him smile and feel like the center of attention as he tells a funny joke or talks about a new idea for a book. He sees his brother standing in the corner wearing green flannel pajamas like he did at Christmas five years before, and he sees his mother and father holding hands at the kitchen sink as he caught them doing on time when he was eleven. He see Lucas Cader tossing a football across the room to his older brother Alex, who looked just like him, and he hears his aunt Julia singing a hymn that he heard in church when he was eight or so.”

“I was trying to figure who I was back then. Trying to figure out why I said and did the things I said and did. Trying to understand why I cried ten minutes after Lucas told me Ada was at Russell’s but never shed a tear when my cousin dropped dead. Wondering why I had written nearly ninety titles, but not one single book. Questioning why I couldn’t do a damn thing to bring my brother back.”

Cullen’s quiet, intense emotion broke through my spite and confusion and began to draw me in. The two plots began to come together. I couldn’t stop turning pages to find out what had really happened to Gabriel. The parallel of themes, the merging of disparate stories, the beauty of Cullen’s emotions gave the feel of something almost supernatural at play in the previously boring story.

When I finished the book, I had to stop and think for a long time. There are so many themes and symbols at play in this book, a literature class could probably spend an entire semester on it. The symbols of resurrection – Gabriel, the bird, the revived town, Benton’s crazy ideas, Russell, and even Cullen himself, combine to create magical realism. Whaley puts it this way, “things could come back from the dead, mistakes could be rectified, lives could be started over.” Whaley provides social commentary on short-lived fame, law enforcement, and religion. Themes include interconnected fates, false hope, cynicism, death, grief, and friendship. Cullen points out something important about the way other people handle grief:

“I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. If you feel sorry for someone, don’t pretend to be happy. Don’t pretend to care only about their problems. People aren’t stupid. The world can’t be satisfied but that need to fix it all can.”

A more prominent theme, traceable through both stories is obsession. The townspeople are so obsessed with the bird, they overlook a 15-year-old’s disappearance. Cabot’s obsession is aptly described here: “He had taken Benton's notes and not blown them out of proportion so much as he had strapped an atom bomb to every letter of every word.”

Over all of this, the theme of second chances transcends the story. Cullen says, “People can’t give up on other people yet. We all get a second chance, you know. We get to start over like Noah after the flood. No matter how evil man gets, he always gets a second chance one way or another.” Second chances make this story something newer, something beautiful, something that deserves to be read a second time.

Ship Breaker, Printz Award, 2011

 Ship Breaker bases a fast-paced, fascinating story in an even more fascinating world. There’s no doubt setting is Paolo Bacigalupi’s crowing achievement in this book and the primary reason it won two awards. Paolo flawlessly works references into the story that are easily recognizable even though they’re completely unfamiliar in our world– things like Harvesters, the Life Cult, the Scavenge God, the Rust Saint, the Fates, City killers, Orleans II, and the Teeth. The imagined world is frighteningly realistic, since the reader can easily trace a pattern of event from now to that dark, ugly age. The explanation for how that world came to be is even scarier - “The climate changed. The weather shifted. They did not anticipate well.” 


Its style of story telling is quick, with plenty of forward momentum. The style of language is often poetic like when Nailer nearly drowns in oil–“Spinning, spinning, spinning the wheel, his lungs bursting, all or nothing, reckless with the need to get out.” Or when Paolo describes injuries–“His should was a bright blossom of pain.”


Character’s voices reinforce the nature of their reality. Nailer and Pima speak with slang, irregular grammar, and in a clipped terse way like, “Luck or smarts, I don’t care, long as I’m not dead.” Nita speaks in perfect formal language with large words and complex syntax.


 Nailer’s fighting spirit is what makes him stand out as a character. My favorite example of this is his exchange with Pima at the end of the story.

            “What makes you think some lower deck grease monkey ahs a change with a girl like that?”

            “Beats me. Maybe I think I’ll just get lucky.”    

Even through terrible physical circumstances, Nailer is always dreaming big, working hard, and protecting those he loves.


Themes in Ship Breaker include intelligence, luck, poverty, wealth, war, oil-dependence, global warming. The consequences of killing stands out as an important theme as Pima’s mother coaches Nailer on how to deal with his feelings “You’ve got blood on your hands. It always costs. It never goes away.” The primary theme is family. Nailer reminds us that loyalty is more important than blood ties and blood ties don’t make our character. “The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family. Everything else was just so much smoke and lies."

The only part of the book I didn’t care for was the weak explanation of the corporate war going on that trapped Nita in the middle. The evil guy’s main character flaw was quasi-legal tax evasion? Maybe I missed something big. I think teenagers are old enough to understand business relationships, but Paolo used such large words in Nita’s mouth that I didn’t understand most of it. Paolo knows teens can handle the violence and darkness in the world of Ship Breaker, so why doesn't he give them the chance to understand a few business concepts? Keeping this information lofty and out of reach is just as bad as talking down to kids.

While I don’t usually quote other readers, Stefan, a reviewer on Amazon.com, wrote a comment I completely agree with and couldn’t say better myself: “While I enjoyed Ship Breaker, and would recommend it to mature YA readers, I can't help but wonder if this story wouldn't have worked better as a regular, non-YA novel. Some of the darker concepts, situated on the periphery of Nailer's story, are only broadly hinted at rather than described outright, which left me feeling frustrated and wanting to read more. If you told me there was a 600-page adult version of this 340-page YA novel, in which Paolo Bacigalupi really embraced the story's darkness and delved more deeply into the world's history and set-up, I'd be first in line to read it.” I too wanted to know more about the darkness of this world, and I wanted so many more pages of this wonderful story.

Going Bovine, Printz Award, 2010

Going Bovine is a deeply satirical, often dark, surreal quest story. It’s not the kind of story for everyone. It’s long! The plot is complicated and twists in and out of believability. It’s off-color and even vulgar. But Bray takes on huge social concepts and turns them all into comedic barbs. The story is quite a trip, and that’s the point.

The main character sells it as a believable teenager. He coasts through school and work, likes pretty girls, hates his father for having an affair, despises his emotionally distant mother, fights with his sister, gets high in the bathroom at school, and generally doesn’t give a fuck. His voice is alternately sarcastic and apathetic or positively ecstatic. When something does make him light up, make him care, he’s whole-heartedly passionate.

Music does it: “The song makes me want to run and shout, kiss girls and ride motorcycles through the desert. It makes me feel really alive, the way Eubie says music should.”

Dulcie does it: “Something brushes against my bare skin. Fingers? Lips? Wings? I can’t say, but the sensation is incredible. . . . It’s so intense, this happiness – there is no escape velocity from this kind of feeling. And for once, I’m not looking for a way out.”

As far as style goes, I’m jealous of Bray’s ability to blend dreams/fantasy and reality. She sends Cam from waking to dreaming and back flawlessly in this selection:

"I’ve put my head on my desk, where I can hear the minute hand ticking hard in my ear. My eye-lids are heavy. Almost . . . Asleep . . .

The room is on fire. A row of flames shoots up in to my field of vision. I leap out of my chair, knocking it over. It hits the ground with a loud thwack.

'Mr. Smith? Are you okay?' Mrs. Rector asks.

When I look up to the front of the room, everything’s fine. No fire."

Transitions from Cam’s journey to the hospital room are also fluid but clear. The reader knows exactly where reality is interrupting the imaginary journey.

“The fire god pries open my mouth and covers it with his. He breathes out, filling my lungs with choking smoke. My body shakes. Somebody’s pushing against my chest in a hard rhythm.

‘Page Dr. Xavier!’ Glory shouts. I’m on a gurney, watching the fluorescent ceiling lights strobe over me fast . . . .

The next think I know, I’m on the pavement of Farm Route 44 with a van headed right for me.”

Setting is where Bray’s wit shines, starting with the SPEW test (State Prescribed Educational Worthiness) where thinking outside the pre-prescribed test material is strictly prohibited, and continuing on to a giant mockery of MTV’s spring break television shows. She purposely compares the setting of this story to the setting of Don Quixote. The famous literary novel is introduced by Cam’s cheating; he says, “The Fake It! Notes tell me that Cervantes is satirizing the culture of idealism.” He goes on to compare suburban housing to Don Quixote’s windmills. And the reader automatically continues to make similar comparisons throughout the book.

Themes in Going Bovine include mental instability, dysfunctional families, news and television, education, environmental concerns, religion, instant gratification, family, friendship, love, lust, fear, and death. Dulcie shares this ultimate theme with Cameron, “Everyone’s dying. A little, every day. Make it count.”

The theme is lofty, literary, and admirable, but I do take issue with the suggestion that what Cam did on his journey was really the core of living. Unless Bray believes the sum of these activities to be much greater than their parts, I don’t get it. Cam “lives” by partying, drinking, smoking weed, stealing money, avoiding religious crazies, having unprotected sex with a school crush and doing it again with an angel an hour later, running away from a dark evil force, getting put on a wanted list, and grappling with the intertwined concepts of music, physics, and trans-dimension time-travel. His version of “making it count” is only "making it fun." I was rooting for Cam to care about anything other than survival and self-gratification. I have a hard time accepting that anyone can make his life count- even an imagined life- without ambition and gratitude.

The White Darkness, Printz Award, 2008

The premise of The White Darkness is absolutely fascinating– slightly insane girl gets dragged to the arctic by her more insane uncle and must fight man and nature to survive. But the story’s execution wasn’t so fascinating.           

The setting and characters were often too strange to be believable. Sym’s multiple personality disorder with this persona of a long-dead explorer was acceptably quirky. I could not relate, but I could wrap my mind around it. However, her willfully ignorant adoration of her insane uncle rendered her one of the weakest female characters I’ve ever read about. The way she idealizes ignorance and “a little child’s imagination” (35) made me despise her. Victor, as a character, was completely over the top. His insanity was obvious from the moment he “lost” Sym’s mom’s passport and would not let Sym call home. From then on, it was easy to guess that he was scamming Manfrud, that he was drugging the members of the Pengwings Expeditionary Force, and that he never intended for Sym to leave Antarctica alive. My only surprise from this character was that he murdered Sym’s father.

Dialogue often confused me, like I was listening to part of a group conversation where a hidden party was saying something to connect the other peoples' statements. It was jolting and unnatural. Here’s an example:

Sigurd: “Your uncle, at home, his profession is . . . ?”

Sym: “Yes! I know.”

Sigurd: “You like maybe the animals . . .”

Sym: “I heard penguins stink.”

Sigurd: “I heard that also. That is a very attractive skirt.”

Sym: “Is that the itinerary. Can I see it?”

Setting promised to be a highlight of this story. Some descriptions shine as excellent writing like this one:

“I chose not to believe in weather stations and trucks and prefabricated igloos painted fire-engine red. I preferred to believe in meteorites nicking the planet’s skin, needle sharp starlight pricking it, the blood of dogs and ponies” (74).

Descriptions of the arctic wilderness were interesting at first, but became overdone and monotonous. I identified with a reader review on amazon.com that said, “We get it. It’s white!” There were even descriptions that, frankly, made no sense to me like this one:

“The horizon, for the first time was sharp as wire- three wired, in fact, because the horizon had tripled. And there floating above it, with a hand span of sky for a moat, hung a jet-black palace.”

Minute detail, and high emotion in description was wonderful. Here’s an example: “He threw the tin of syrup so that it hit the mantel-piece and we all sat and watched the syrup drip, drip, dripping into the grate like big amber tears” (69). But the narrative was so description-heavy that it was hard to find the beautiful moments.

Themes of The White Darkness include ignorance, innocence, exploration, discovery, crime, insanity, sexual discovery, love, and survival. A significant sub-theme is the contrast between subconscious knowledge and personal willingness to admit that knowledge. Sym says, “Every crime like this needs someone like me to look away and say nothing,” pointing out that her unwillingness to consciously admit certain facts allowed someone else to do wrong. The biggest theme is friendship, friendship which overcomes obstacles and fights for it’s own existence. Sym says, “Friends aren’t friends who tell you black is white just because you want it to be,” recognizing that friendship in itself requires one to stand up and say the right thing whether or not it’s going to be accepted.

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.”