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Chained by Lynne Kelly

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When ten-year-old Hastin’s younger sister becomes ill and his mother must borrow money for her care, the only way to pay off that debt is for his mother to leave her family and become an indentured servant to an indifferent rich family. Rather than having his kindly mother suffer this indignity, Hastin agrees to become an assistant elephant keeper for a circus master, but he must travel far away and leave his family for many years in order to free his mother. But while Hastin doesn’t know what to expect from this position, he is not prepared at all for the difficulties he encounters. The circus owner is cruel, malicious, and money-hungry, and Hastin is forced to trap and ensnare a kindly young elephant that he names Nandita. Even worse, the head elephant trainer savagely beats the elephant in an attempt to ‘teach’ her, and Hastin’s term of service keeps getting extended on the circus owner’s whims. Yet Hastin also encounters kindness–from Ne Min, the cook with a difficult past who becomes a mentor of sorts, and from Nandita herself. But when Nandita’s future becomes more endangered than ever, Hastin must craft a plan to save both himself and his friend.
In her debut novel, Lynne Kelly has crafted a beautiful book that tugs at the heartstrings while simultaneously spinning a marvelous plot. Hastin is a strong hero whose love for his family, including Nandita, who becomes both a best friend and a sister of sorts, shines through. This is a story about sacrifice, bravery, and compassion, but most of all about friendship. About how human/animal friendships can often be the strongest of all, and how Hastin and Nandita help each other, even as both are suffering themselves. It is also nice to see a friendship that crosses generations in the bond between Hastin and Ne Min, and the character development of Ne Min, along with the revelations about his past, is well-paced and realistic. Chained is a lovely and touching story that will find a home in public, home, and school libraries.

Readers looking to find more sensitively drawn, multicultural works like Chained should seek out Mitali Perkins’ Bamboo Summer and works by Linda Sue Park.
Disclosure: Review copy provided by publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) for review.


The Princesses of Iowa by M Molly Backes

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At the end of last school year, Paige Sheridan, along with her two best friends Nicky and Lacey, were in an accident after a late night drinking party. Because Paige’s mother is obsessed with keeping her daughter’s reputation flawless, she ships Paige overseas to au pair for the summer, thinking that by the time summer’s over, the accident will be out of the minds of everyone in their small Iowa town. Paige has to maintain her image as one of the popular, pretty, perfect girls.

When she gets back from her summer away, Paige is ready to see her boyfriend Jake and she’s eager to see Nicky and Lacey. The time apart was meant to heal their wounds, except when Paige returns, things are anything but peachy. Nicky and Lacey aren’t interested in being kind to Paige and Jake, who promised to take a creative writing class with Paige, has suddenly changed his schedule to take a film class with Lacey instead. Now Paige is alone and has to figure out who she is and where she now fits in at the school where she’d once reigned supreme. Thankfully, she’s got a lot of time to do it and a lot of opportunities to figure herself out via this creative writing class she hates being in.

Princesses of Iowa has all of the elements of a book I love: complicated characters, complicated situations, and a lot of unrest and insecurity between the two. There’s also great voice in this novel.

First and foremost, we’re dropped into the story at the beginning of the new school year. We aren’t forced through the car accident that created the rift between the girls, and we’re not forced through the summer after. Instead, we’re left to figure things out right along with Paige. And she has a lot to wade through. Where we should have some sort of sympathy for her, especially because it seems everyone has turned against her, Paige is not at all easy to like nor is she all that sympathetic. She’s very much a princess, and she’s egged on by her mother to be so. Paige has made a ton of mistakes in her past, including the drunk driving accident (easily forgotten, given the story’s set up) and she doesn’t feel an ounce of remorse for how she’s behaved. Moreover, she has further made unlikable because of her affluence — it’s not just that she’s wealthy in an area where wealth isn’t all that common, but it’s that she unabashedly flaunts it. She’s really had everything handed to her in life, and she’s not afraid to talk about it. There’s a scene in the story where she runs into Ethan — a new kid in town who has been the source of some relentless teasing — and he’s working at the local coffee shop. Paige even says to him that she can’t believe he has to work while he’s in school because, well, she’s never had to. She’s above him in this moment, and this interaction is just one of the many moments when she pivots herself as better than her peers because of her privilege.

Paige doesn’t act much better at home, and in fact, it’s probably her family and home life that contribute directly to her being the less-than-pleasant girl she is. Her mother is obsessed with maintaining an image of perfection, both for herself and for Paige. Without doubt, her mother uses Paige as a way to achieve the vapid glories she, too, longs for. Then there’s Miranda — Mirror — who is the younger sister and with whom Paige hasn’t necessarily had the greatest relationship. Mirror is envious of the attention her mother gives to her sister, and I think it’s fairly telling that she prefers to be called Mirror. Then there’s the father in the story, and even though he and mom are married, dad is never around. I suspect had he been around a lot more, we’d have an entirely different mother. It’s pretty obvious from the start that mom is bored and restless with her own life and she uses Paige as her way to find excitement and meaning. She’s lonely, much like Paige is. Need I mention her sister prefers to be called Mirror?

Nicky and Lacey are characters who are hurting a lot, but they also don’t garner a whole lot of sympathy. Nicky has taken on the role of advocate for an anti-drinking and driving campaign at school, right before Homecoming and she’s recruiting others to help her push the case. Lacey is dealing with being physically injured from the car accident, and while her pains are real, she uses them as a way to get attention and sympathy. Although we’re getting that reading of her behavior from Paige, I don’t doubt it’s true. Jake, who used to be involved with Paige, has essentially dumped her in order to “help Lacey out.” As much as it sounds like it’s out of the goodness of his heart, I don’t for a second believe it. He’s in it for the attention it brings him. For the honor of being close to tragedy.

Although the heft of storytelling falls in developing characters who are really unlikable and rather terrible people — my favorite kind to read about — one of the biggest plot points is about Paige’s journey of self-discovery through creative writing. She takes the class because she thinks it will be easy and because Jake will be in it with her. But when he chooses to take a different class with Lacey instead, Paige is left on her own. And this writing class isn’t easy at all. Paige doesn’t have anything she believes to be worth writing about. More than that, though, the classroom is a battlefield of everything she’s ever fought against. She has to deal with people who are different than her and who challenge her reputation of perfection. It’s in this class she first meets Ethan (the coffee shop boy) and has to confront the notion of what she’s been led to believe about a person isn’t necessarily the truth about that person. Along the same lines, Paige has to figure out how to work with her teacher, Mr. Tremont. Rumor is he’s gay and being gay in a place like small town Iowa isn’t cool. It’s scary and makes Paige uncomfortable when she buys into the rumor. . . and maybe spreads the rumor herself.

This creative writing class not only helps Paige learn about other people and how it’s okay to be different, but it helps her discover who she is. It forces her to confront all of the ugliness she carries and use it in more meaningful ways. Although it’s effective in the story and at times it’s great to read (because when you read or when you write, you confront those very same things about yourself and getting that affirmation via reading is always neat), I felt like it sometimes bordered on didactic.

The Princesses of Iowa is a long book, and when I was reading it, I felt the length more than once. That’s not to say this isn’t well-paced or well-written because it is. There is certainly great character development and I appreciated watching these terrible characters get what they deserve, but because of the length, the power of the creative writing element made me question whether the characters were really great characters or whether they were props supporting this Great and Meaningful Message about the way writing can change your life. That’s not to say I ever believed that was the purpose of the story or the characters, but it felt like a little too much. Combined with a few plot points that felt over-the-top and slight (including a scene where the anti-gay coalition shows up at the high school to protest their hiring of a teacher who may or may not be homosexual which was over and done in just a couple of pages, despite being a huge and important thing worth digging into), the story became heavy within itself. It took on more than it could support when it had so much going for it already. A little less could have made this even stronger.

Backes’s book reads like a love letter to writing, and the real story behind it here is that of how writing can change a person. Paige definitely has an ah ha moment in the book, but I think she got off much too easily. For being as terrible a person as she was, she comes to some hard and fast realizations through making new friends and through realizing that opening her mouth when she shouldn’t isn’t always the smart thing or the right thing to do. She works through 450 pages of story and walks away way more unscathed than she should. I’m a big believer in terrible characters getting their fair share so it was a little bit of a letdown.

Princesses of Iowa will have nice appeal to teen readers who are interested in writing themselves, and I think it’ll appeal to readers who like stories with complex and downright unlikeable characters. This book is set in small town Iowa, so it’ll appeal particularly to readers who want stories in a rural setting. There were a lot of interesting cross-over themes between Backes’s story and Geoff Herbach’s Stupid Fast, particularly in terms of social class, small-town life, social norms, and the whole host of -isms which box and label people, and I could see those who liked Herbach’s story liking this one, too. Fans of Catherine Gilbert Murdoch’s Dairy Queen series who are looking for something a little more mature will likely appreciate this one as well.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Princesses of Iowa releases today.

So You Want to Read YA?: Guest Post from Lee Wind

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Today’s guest for our “So You Want to Read YA?” series is Lee Wind. 

Photo by Rita Crayon Huang
Lee Wind is a Blogger, Author and Speaker.  He has a masters degree in Education and Media from Harvard and is widely seen as an expert in GLBTQ Teen Literature.  His award-winning blog “I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I Read?” gets over 200,000 page loads a year, and he’s the official blogger for the Society of Children’s Books Writers And Illustrators.  His articles and interviews with luminaries in the world of Children’s Literature have been published on-line and in print, including the 2011 and 2012 editions of “Children’s Writer’s And Illustrator’s Market.”  He speaks to thousands of students and educators a year, conducting Smashing Stereotypes workshops and presenting Safe Space: Ending Anti-Gay Bullying in our Culture… and at YOUR School programs.  You can find out more about Lee at www.leewind.org.
 
I often joke that for writers of kid lit, we have these ages of arrested development – these times in our childhood when colors seemed fiercer, tastes exploded in our mouths, and our memories seem so real that we can go back there in an instant.  And those are the times we go back to when we’re writing a six year old in a picture book.  An eleven year old in a middle grade work.  Or a fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen year old in a Young Adult novel.  We can write all those ages because we’ve been all those ages, and art and craft and inspiration fill in the rest.
For adult readers, there’s something truly exciting about being able to go back inside ourselves to those same ages through reading, and nourish (and sometimes heal) our inner child.  Our inner teen.
When I was growing up, I knew I was attracted to other guys, but I didn’t even know the word for it. When I learned the word (and a bunch of other not-so-nice versions of it) there wasn’t even a single book that showed me a positive, happy gay teen character.  The only “gay” characters were adult pedophiles and predators (like Baron Harkonnen in Frank Herbert’s otherwise brilliant “Dune”) and that wasn’t helping me claim my authentic identity.  So I read between the lines.  Voraciously.  I even figured out a loophole in the mating ritual of the dragons and dragonriders of Pern, and felt maybe there was a place for gay me in the fantasies of Anne McCaffrey.  But it was never stated on the page.
Which left me feeling that if there wasn’t a place for me in the world of fantasy and fiction, how could there be a place for me – as a gay guy – in our real world?
It was a cold lesson. And it kept me closeted for years.
But as I grew to be an adult and came out as a proud gay man, that lack of representation in teen fiction made me determined to become a writer myself, and write the damn stories I had yearned to read.
In time, the world and children’s publishing started to change, and in the last decade, there’s been an explosion of books for teens with gay characters.  Lesbian characters, too.  There are even a handful of bisexual and transgender titles. There are books with gay parents and uncles and caretakers, and even picture books with two dad and two mom families.  
“Annie On My Mind” by Nancy Garden – the first teen lesbian love story with a happy ending – made me cry when I read it in my 40s, because even though they were so different from me, at their core, the humanity of Liza and Annie spoke to me so deeply.  “Boy Meets Boy” by David Levithan and “Freak Show” by James St. James and “The God Box” by Alex Sanchez and “Absolutely Positively Not” by David LaRochelle rocked my world with great gay teen characters and hopeful and even happy endings.  There were so many GLBTQ teen titles that I started a blog to list them all and let teens and other readers review them in a safe space.  (“I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I Read?” at www.leewind.org)
Every GLBTQ Teen book I read – most recently “Zombies Vs. Unicorns” – an anthology that included three stories with queer main characters, rocks my world.  And I think, wow, just one of these books would have changed my life.  If I could have seen a gay “me” in fiction when I was a teen, I would have known that there IS a place for gay me in reality – and that’s a lesson I hope EVERY teen, no matter who they are, understands today.
And for us adults, we can time travel back to our inner fifteen year old, and say, I have something you have to read.  And it’s gonna rock your world.  And in nourishing and healing our inner teen, we nourish and heal our adult selves as well. 
So read YA for your inner teen – and let it rock your world!
***
Where to find great GLBTQ Teen Books:
Every year since 2008 the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table and the Social Responsibilities Round Table puts out the “Rainbow List” of the best books for kids and teens with GLBTQ characters and themes published.  Check out their lists here: http://glbtrt.ala.org/rainbowbooks/rainbow-books-lists
Daisy Porter has excellent reviews of Queer YA on her blog, http://daisyporter.org/queerya/
And of course, my blog lists of over 450 books in these categories: 
Gay Teen characters/Themes, 
Lesbian Teen characters/Themes, 
Bisexual Teen Characters/Themes, 
Transgender Teen Characters/Themes, 
Questioning Teen Characters/Themes, 
Books with Queer (Gender Non-Conforming) Teen Characters/Themes, 
Books with an ensemble that includes GLBTQ Teen Characters, 
Books with a GLBTQ Parent/Caretaker, 
Books on Friends and Family of GLBTQ Characters, 
Books with Homophobia as a Theme, 
GLBTQ YA Graphic Novels and Comics, 
Easy Reader/Chapter books with GLBTQ (and Gender Non Conforming) Content, 
Picturebooks I wish had been read to me when I was a little kid, 
Books with surprise gay (GLBTQ) content, 
Cross Over Adults Books of GLBTQ Teen interest, 
The GLBTQ Middle Grade Bookshelf, 
The Gay Fantasy Bookshelf, 
The GLBTQ Teen Short Story Bookshelf, 
GLBTQ Teen nonfiction, and 
GLBTQ Biography and Memoir.  
You can check them all out at www.leewind.org.

Links of Note

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Sometimes it blows my mind how much stuff I read in a week, let alone two, especially about the book world. Consider these links some required (and not-so-required) reading from the last couple of weeks. There’s a lot here, so get comfortable!

  • Publisher’s Weekly shared their “Galleys to Grab” article for BEA. None of us are going this year, but we caution everyone reading this and getting really excited about these books that we’ve been led astray by this guide both years we’ve gone. Not all of these books will be available at BEA to grab — sometimes, they’re just books that’ll be buzzed, rather than books that’ll actually be there. Also, if your only goal at BEA is to grab books, then you’re probably doing it wrong. 

  • Brevard County Libraries in Florida pulled Fifty Shades of Grey from their shelves because it doesn’t fit their collection policy. I’m thinking it’s time they reconsider their policy, particularly for a book that has a high patron demand. Also, if the book somehow made it through the selectors and onto the shelves before they realized it was erotica, then there might be bigger problems in your library than this book.  
  • The Atlantic Wire’s YA for adults series is still annoying me for some reason (I wish I could pinpoint why but I can’t). This week, they talked books that taught us about sex and offered up virtually nothing current. I get this one is meant to be much more nostalgic but perhaps a foray into the great books out there today that are tackling this topic would give the story a little more relevancy. But maybe that’s just my bias. I wish they’d talked a bit about the updating/new forward in Judy Blume’s Forever because maybe that’s the most interesting part of that book today. 
  • I have a thing for James Patterson stories. I mostly skimmed this one, but I thought the interesting nugget in this one was that since 2006, one out of every 17 books books sold in America has his name on the cover (I hesitate to use the words “written by him”). Anyway, this is why Patterson cares about kids reading. 
  • I didn’t want to share this one because I’m pretty sure it’s simply link bait, but this blog post on YALSA’s official blog has made me ten kinds of angry this week. The suggestion that adults being fans of YA books impacts collection development in libraries makes me question then what YALSA’s standing for here. First, suggesting that only books with great teen appeal go in the YA section seems to say to me that YALSA’s award books — most of which do not use “teen appeal” as a factor in their selection — shouldn’t be added to the teen collection. Second, why then does YALSA have its own book blog written by adults? Then let’s talk about some of the comments about adults reading YA somehow being indicative of a problem in and of itself.  Remind me again why I am linking this? The message here is nothing new. It’s librarianship 101. It’s insulting to think this is getting time on the YALSA blog when they didn’t bother blogging about locking down their awards lists until after enough people complained. 
  • The Wall Street Journal talks about the secret online lives of tweens in this interesting, but not too surprising, story.  I think it’s fascinating how in the US, we’re finally realizing how much mobile technology is allowing this sort of thing. But it’s not new at all — this has been going on for years in more tech-developed countries, including Japan and in Scandanavia. There’s a fascinating, though slightly dated, book worth reading if this thing interests you called Smart Mobs by Howard Reingold. The first chapter (if I remember correctly) delves into youth and the mobile tech world and how it’s become one of their private social spaces.
  • I didn’t want to bring up the plagiarism issue again, but this is absolutely, positively the best blog post on the entire topic. It gets to the heart of why we blog and what blogging is (spoiler: this is writing — it’s not practicing writing but the thing itself) and it talks about women and communication. I can’t really say more than read this, please.  
  • io9 offers up a bunch of recommendations for summer reading that have a science fiction or fantasy bent to them. I’ve added a bunch to my to-read list. Also, I love how these books are considered “beach reading,” because this is about what I’d consider beach reading too. I like my beach adventures mostly filled with other worlds. And little beach. 
  • Is YA killing itself? There’s a thought-provoking piece over at Fuel Your Writing about this very topic. While I think there are some really good points made, I think it might be conflating the “genre” of YA with the marketing of YA. 
  • Something light hearted. Kim sent this one to me knowing how much I have feelings about American Girl dolls (in short: growing up as a poor kid and never getting to have one of these dolls sucks). But anyway, here’s a creepy gallery of girls posing with their American Girl dolls. Some of these girls make me angry, even as an adult who is recalling what it was like to be envious as a kid.

  • This one’s not necessarily book related, but it always brings a smile to my face. My friend Brian has been working on his Iowa Backroads project for years — it’s a website that focuses on small-town Iowa and the stories behind these places. One of his regular features is that of libraries, and he not only includes a photo, but a short blurb about the history of the library. If you’re into libraries as places, spend a little time checking out his great photos and stories. I particularly liked this week’s library — they have their own front porch!  

Madapple by Christina Meldrum

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I’ve written about Madapple a bit before, but I actually just finished it a couple of days ago. (My commute is all of five minutes, so it can take a while to get through an audiobook.) The listening experience was a positive one, although I found myself murmuring “This is such a weird book” more and more as the story progressed.
Aslaug lives with her mother in a rural area of Maine. Her mother has told Aslaug for years that she was conceived of a virgin birth, but Aslaug isn’t quite sure she believes that. In fact, Aslaug’s whole upbringing is strange: she’s kept isolated on the land with no interaction with other people, and her mother seems obsessed with religions (all of them) while claiming to ascribe to none of them. Her mother also teaches Aslaug about the wild plants that grow around their home and how they can be used – for good or ill.
When Aslaug’s mother dies, she goes to live with her mother’s sister, Sara, and things get even stranger there. Sara is a preacher with two children – Susanne and Rune. Aslaug grows close to them both, and they examine her mother’s old papers and explore the possibility of Aslaug’s virgin birth. Things soon take a turn for the worse – the relationships grow twisted, Sara begins drinking, and Aslaug’s stay with them culminates in an act of violence – maybe.
Interspersed with Aslaug’s first-person present-tense narration are excerpts from a court transcript set a few years later. We learn quickly that Aslaug is on trial for something, and the nature of the trial is revealed as Aslaug tells her story.
This is a heavy book, despite the dreamlike quality of its writing. It’s a novel that explores, among other things, teen pregnancy, incest, child abuse, and the nature of religious belief and miracles. It’s full of very messed up people who do very messed up things. Aslaug is caught up in all of it, and Meldrum does a tremendous job of portraying these events through her eyes. Throughout the novel, Aslaug is unsure if what has happened is real or a dream, and as readers, we are unsure too. I think part of what makes the novel so strange is Aslaug’s reaction to it all: we expect her to either lash out or withdraw, and she does neither. Instead, she seeks to understand the meaning behind it.
The writing is very, very good. I don’t think many readers would dispute that. That said, Madapple is not a book with wide appeal. To enjoy it, a reader must appreciate thoughtful, dark, and somewhat twisted stories. I’m no stranger to bizarre things in my genre fiction, but this is realistic fiction, and it’s bizarre in a completely different way. I think it might appeal to fantasy readers as long as they’re aware that this is not a fantasy, since the writing lends itself to an otherworldly feeling. In fact, it’s been shelved as fantasy on Goodreads by many people, which I find pretty amusing. 
If you’re looking for something a bit different and don’t mind a leisurely-paced book with more than a shake of darkness, you might enjoy Madapple. It’s a book that makes you think the entire time you read it, and long after too. I would definitely recommend it on audio; Kirsten Potter’s narration was excellent throughout and enhanced that otherworldly feeling that was so essential to the tone of the novel.