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Field Notes: Blankets by Craig Thompson

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Blankets by Craig Thompson is an autobiographical look at growing up and finding oneself through trials of religion, family, and love. The illustrations set a powerful backdrop to what otherwise may have been a cliched story line of teenage exploration.

This is a fast-paced graphic novel that weighs in at over 500 pages, but is one demanding to be read quickly in one sitting. There are moments forcing you to slow down and absorb.

Blankets is far from perfect, as it seems much of the growth Thompson describes weighs far too heavily in a singular relationship that happened over a single 2-week period with a girl for whom he had incredible lust. A little far fetched, I think, for what the rest of the story brought in terms of religious and family impressions on who we are as humans.

That said, Blankets is a classic in the graphic novel world and for good reason: it’s a well-executed story with much literary merit to the writing. We have symbolism, we have foreshadowing, we have a classic bildungsroman set up and more, all in addition to fantastic graphic elements. The text-to-image balance was perfect.

Blankets is a fantastic readalong to David Small’s Stitches and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. There is tragedy and an ultimately hopeful conclusion in each title, along with a near fully-fleshed main character. I’d venture to say Blankets would be a good story to get new readers into graphic novels — but only if the size won’t intimidate. It’s a classic story arc, though sometimes the fluidity can be a bit challenging (i.e., how one scene moves into another). Give this to fans of, say, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It. It’s not as strong a connection as it is with Stitches, but we’re thinking more in terms of reader versus the storyline here — this is where you can potentially pull in a new reader, versus someone looking for a similar story. Just make sure your reader does not object to nudity, as there is a little; it is not gratuitous nor overpowering. The language will be similar as that found in all of these titles. The ideal age is the teenager and above, though certainly it is more appropriate for older teens content wise, and the appeal for the actual story will trend older. Blankets is a reflection and as such, the more one can do that, the more one will relate.

This is a title I will pick up again in a few years. My reading my be greatly impacted and changed, and it’s something I know I can come back to with an entirely different perspective. It certainly will be a perennial classic for that reason alone.

AudioSynced: Thrillers!

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One of my goals this year is to read every title on our state high school awards lists, the Lincoln List and the Read for a Lifetime list. I’ve read a healthy number, but certainly not all, so I set in to listen to one on audio I thought I’d have a hard time digging into in print form: Harlan Coben’s Hold Tight. Coben is a very popular author of thriller-mysteries, which is exactly what this title was. And if you know anything about me, it’s not really my genre. But thanks to a fantastic audiobook, I quite enjoyed it and would certainly go back for more.

After the suicide of his friend, Spencer Hill, Adam Baye has become more and more distant. Rather than handle it idly and face the potential same consequences as Spencer’s parents, Mike and Tia Baye — Adam’s parents — choose to install spying software on their son’s computer. They never thought of themselves as the type to distrust their son, but they didn’t want to take any chances here, either. A suspicious message appears a few days after the software is installed that worries his parents and prompts them to take action.

Oh, and Adam has now gone missing.

As any parent trying to put together the pieces in the death of her son, Betsy begins to seek an answer through Spencer’s networks. In browsing online, she stumbles into an online memorial set up by his friends; it is here she finds a photo taken the day Spencer killed himself. Adam may be in the photo, too, but it’s a little hazy and she knows she needs to talk with Adam to find out more. It is clear he had something to do with this.

Hold Tight weaves together many family lives into a fast paced story that never once left me a bored listener. I felt for the Hill family, but at the same time, the actions of Betsy left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I was at once able to sympathize and understand the Baye family’s spying decisions, but when things really get rolling and the mystery began to unravel, I got angry with them. It was too little too late and a clear violation of privacy.

What Coben does in his book that just worked so well for me was building characters you both love and hate at the same time. As a listener, I was able to hold contradictory thoughts about these characters and even with the story was over, I still feel the same way. Not only that, but Coben’s magic is developing a large number of plot lines and keep consistently interesting characters; he manages, of course, to make them work together in the end, but throughout the experience, I kept trying to anticipate how things would merge and it was never as expected. A true thriller.

Listening to this book was the right way go to. Scott Brick narrates much like you’d imagine a 40s radio broadcaster to read — there is mystery, a little jazz lilt, and a feeling like you’re in that smoky bar getting the facts first hand. He gives a semi-voiced reading, though the semi is very true: only a couple female characters have a different sound to their narration. It never feels weird nor do the transitions ever get confusing. I quite preferred this stripped down audio production, as it let the story tell itself. Brick didn’t need to make the story; he just delivered it. The sound and editing were consistent and seamless.

Hold Tight definitely will appeal to fans of thrillers and mysteries, but I think people who aren’t connoisseurs of those genres will find a lot to like here. There’s great writing, strong and interesting characters, and a lot of ethical issues with which to grapple. I never felt this got overly dramatic or stretched on too long. Quite frankly, when I got to disc 9 of 10, I really was concerned the story wouldn’t wrap up and I’d need to quickly seek out the second book in the series. Luckily, I was proven wrong. This is a standalone, powerhouse of a story.

As far as being on the state list for teens, I think this will be a big boy hit. But it might be a hard sell to many readers. I’d find it difficult to recommend this title to a teen I didn’t know well because there is a lot of violence, a lot of adult situations, and more that wouldn’t make me too comfortable to blindly recommend. For the older teen boys, though, those might be the exact reasons this will be an easy sell (not to mention Adam and Spencer are 16 or 17) and the bonus is that Coben’s written quite a few more books in the genre. Love one, look for more, right?

Dystopia Double Take

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Here’s an interesting double take. Both of the books are dystopias, and their covers are very, very similar to each other.The first book is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go is a dystopia for adults, a book I read for an undergraduate class and fell in love with. It’s set in the 90s in an English school called Hailsham, but of course, the school isn’t your normal school, and the students have a purpose very different from learning writing and math. I think the cover is spectacular. It’s a close-up of a young woman’s face, her eyes gazing somewhere in the distance. While the book was marketed to adults, it’s a book young adults would also enjoy, and it won an Alex award in 2006.

The second book is The Unidentified by Rae Mariz, a dystopia for teens to be published in October. (Apologies for the size, I couldn’t find a larger photo.) This book is also set in a school that is more than what it seems. Despite this parallel with Never Let Me Go and the book’s eerily similar cover, The Unidentified seems to much more closely resemble MT Anderson’s Feed, so much so that I couldn’t help but compare Mariz’s book with Anderson’s as I read the first two chapters of The Unidentified. (Judging from the first two chapters that I have read, I have a feeling Feed will win this battle handily.)

There are probably other covers out there that resemble these two. Do you know of any? Which of the two covers above is more effective? I have not yet finished The Unidentified, but I like the cover for Never Let Me Go better. Despite the flat affect apparent on the woman’s face (which is integral to the book), her eyes are focused on something in the distance and seem to indicate some emotion or depth. The eyes of the cover model are clearly intended to be the focal point for the reader. The cover model’s eyes in The Unidentified are partially obscured by the title text and it’s more distracting than it is arresting. Still, the cover is what led me to pick the book up.

AudioSynced: War Dances by Sherman Alexie

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I love Sherman Alexie. I read many of his short stories and poems in college, and I’ve read both Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian and Ten Little Indians. When I saw my local library had his latest collection of poetry and short stories available as an audio book, I knew I needed to pick it up. Aside from the fact I like his writing, I knew, too, he reads his own work. I knew Alexie had a very distinct voice, and I knew that would make this audio book really stand out.

And it did.

While leery at first of trying to listen to an audio book of short stories — my thought was that the story breaks would be difficult to follow — War Dances changed my mind. And quite frankly, listening to poetry aloud is the way it’s meant to be enjoyed for many, and Alexie writes his in the way that’s meant to be performed.

War Dances, like Alexie’s other books, made me both want to laugh and to cry throughout. The mixture of poetry and prose moves seamlessly, and what really works well in the audio is that Alexie just reads with his own personal reading voice. He doesn’t give any of his characters separate voices, though he does change his intonation slightly to distinguish dialog from description.

A couple of pieces stood out to me distinctly. A short story, actually one of the lengthier ones in the collection, follows the loss of hearing of the main character. In this story, he describes the process of losing his hearing by reflecting on his own father’s life and end-of-life illness. The sound of hearing loss was like that of a colony of cockroaches taking up residence inside him. What I loved about this story was its homage to Kafka and how Alexie turned a well-known tale into something entirely new and refreshing. The allusion’s slight, aside from the introductory quotation, but it is a story enjoyed on so many levels.

Like many of the GoodReads reviews mentioned, the poem “Ode to a Mixtape” was wonderful. That, along with the poem about giving up one’s seat on an airplane were picturesque and such amusing insight into our culture today. All of the poems in War Dances can and would be enjoyed by those who aren’t normally “poetry people” since they are easy to grasp and quite memorable because of the emotion they provoke in the listener.

What this audio book does, though, is give you raw Sherman Alexie. He has an incredibly different and perfect reading voice. Alexie has a tiny bit of a lisp and a bit of an accent. Lucky for you, WHYY Broadcast has an interview with Alexie on their website that gives us a reading of the first poem in War Dances. Listen to the incredible lilt of his voice. Four hours of his story telling could have been forty hours for me, and I would have still listened in. There is something really engaging in his imperfect voice that made me care about what he was saying and want to listen to more. Oh, and please ignore the commentator on this one – it seems clear to me she didn’t read the book before interviewing him.

Don’t believe this will be an easy collection to read or understand. There are some very difficult to grasp scenes, and the language at times is not necessarily what you like listening to. But those moments are what makes Alexie’s points — this is a book of stories about ourselves, the disgusting and the beautiful, the racist and the too-politically-correct, and moreover, the story of art and writing. The man is brilliant and certainly a modern master of writing.

I was sad to finish War Dances. It was short, but it was enough to whet my need to seek out some of Alexie’s backlist on audio — but only if it is read by him.

Why Aimee Bender can never disappoint

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One of the first things we did when we began this blog almost a year ago was introduce ourselves by our favorite books. Mine was, of course, the delectable Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. This is a collection of strange but memorably depicted stories with lush images and semi-fantastical settings. No matter how many times I reread some of the stories — in particular, “The Ring” — it still as fresh as the first time I read it.

When I saw Bender had a new book coming out soon, I knew I had to get my hands on it. Luckily for me, the folks at Random House had galleys of this title at PLA and my entire trip was made by that alone.

But I digress.

Just as I’ve come to expect from Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a very strange story. Rose is 9 years old when she begins to realize she’s different; it’s a different she figures out upon biting into her mother’s lemon-chocolate cake. Rose can literally taste the emotions her mother had when making the cake. This won’t be the only time, either. Every time she tries to eat something, she can taste the emotion within the food, down to the feelings of the factory workers who packaged the food.

Rose can’t tell anyone about this, either, for fear of being the weird child. Her brother had been the golden child of the family, and while she and her brother had a good relationship, it’s her brother’s best friend George with whom she becomes close and spills her secret. George, the ever-Scientist, tests the theory of tasting emotions and it is through this that he and Rose develop a relationship — one that Rose can’t seem to develop with her own family.

If it sounds a bit Like Water for Chocolate to you, I promise it is an entirely different story. I’ve read LWfC but never once made the connection until a friend pointed it out to me.

Bender’s story is emotionally draining, despite the fact you are never once inside Rose’s perspective. Her story explores the deep secrets of families. We’re led to believe that Rose’s father is a normal person, but it is a secret that spills near the end of the novel that we find out Rose’s condition may actually be quite, well, ordinary in the context of the family. And we come to learn that Rose’s ability to taste emotion doesn’t work when she eats food she herself has made. Instead, she feels empty.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a literary work, ripe with rich language and metaphor. Rose’s emotional emptiness is a great exploration of the Edelstein family structure. The food in the novel itself is palpable. There is attention to every choice of word and language use, right down to the point that Bender chooses not to use quotations for dialog. This is conscious and makes complete sense in context of the characters and the story as a whole.

I am so excited that Random House chose to share galleys of this title. I think Bender is an under appreciated writer, and I think this particular story will have great appeal. I can see good book discussions about this title; despite being quite literary, it is a very easy read and quite quick, as well. According to the back of the galley, the final product will include a book discussion guide and will have significant outreach to book clubs.

While the book doesn’t release until June 15, 2010, I have a feeling there will be a lot of buzz about this title and every bit is well-deserved. These are strongly developed characters with a big of magical realism that is so characteristic of Bender’s style. The poetic language begs to be read over and over, too.

For those of you who haven’t read Bender or need something to tide you over, check out this selection of her short stories. I had been passed the link, but I didn’t realize that “Bull” is actually a sequel to “The Ring.” She’s well worth the investment of time and energy, though you will find yourself absolutely transported to strangely familiar worlds. Perhaps The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake will bring the attention deserved to such a different style of writing and writer. I won’t say it’s better than GitFS, but this is a great door opener to that collection and its follow up, Willful Creatures.