Category: Wicked Cool Overlooked Books

Welcome to the first Monday of the month, and another episode of Wicked Cool Overlooked Books! I completely missed September somehow — but I’m back!

Even now, if I sit down and just read the first few pages of a Beverly Cleary book, I’m hard pressed to set the book down. There is something about the tone and setting that make even the most dated of her books seem as alive and real as they must have been when the first readers opened them ages ago. So, when I saw an old copy of a Cleary I’d never read at a used book sale, I immediately picked it up.

I wish you could see my copy of the book. Harper Collins has done a reissue, and so all of the new editions are bound either in sort of girly-pink with party dresses or sort of random pink with hamburgers and telephones and other stereotypical sixties teen era detailing. Now I love the pink and I love the sixties, don’t get me wrong, but this is an atypical YA romance, and I prefer my cover. My library bound, 1965 edition of Jean and Johnny, which was first published in 1959, is a distinct brick red and has a beige and black drawing on the front of a boy in a plaid shirt walking with a shy-looking girl with horn-rimmed glasses and a realistically slightly terrified expression. It’s adorable.

And so is the story. Jean Jarrett is fifteen, and enjoying the first day of a two week Christmas break. She’s a terrible dreamer sometimes, which shows up in her work — though she’s made her own skirt, it’s plaid, and none of the lines match because she forgot to leave enough material for the skirt to gather, which is kind of a disaster. She’s a decent girl who admires her older sister, Sue, as being the smart one and the pretty one — though it’s worth noting that she admires her without angst, which is refreshing. Both girls wish for something exciting to happen, to maybe meet a nice boy. When Jean, wearing her horrible skirt, goes down the street to her friend Elaine Mundy’s house to write to her pen pal, they take an unexpected trip to Mrs. Mundy’s club, to drop off some Christmas decorations. A holiday party is in progress, where gorgeously attired dancers spin in a room of candlelight and flowers. The girls stop to watch the dancers — and Jean gets asked to dance.

In her hideous skirt.

It’s both deeply embarrassing, and completely magical, as Jean realizes that dreaming about a boy is vastly different from the reality of trying to dance with one, and make small talk. Jean is quickly obsessed with finding out more about this boy, Johnny. He’s a senior at her own high school. Why did he even notice her?

The late fifties setting of this novel gives it a really fun feel. The television commercials are described with Cleary’s drolly sardonic touch. Jean’s contest entering mother, competing for appliances by writing why she likes specific products (in twenty-five words or less), and her newspaper-rattling sarcastic father who makes disparaging comments about Jean’s choice of television shows, are perfect. At school, the band kids and the dramatics of the modern dance girls give a humorous, realistic touch and remind the reader how little high school has changed in some ways in the last fifty years.

The Jarretts are definitely working class, and certainly aren’t rich — the sisters sew and only splurge occasionally on Cokes because they know the value of a dime (which is what a bottle cost back then). However, the girls also know when to buy a store-bought dress, and their father knows when to give them a little spending money. In subtle ways, Beverly Cleary has constructed a loving, functional, balanced, frugal family, who sometimes quarrel but always make up. They’re not perfect, but they’re real.

I read this book the first time, expecting Mrs. Cleary to have written a traditional girl-crushes-on-boy YA romance — and to have earned that pink cover — but it in fact, this story isn’t routine or predictable, especially for its time period, which is why I am so glad I took a gamble and bought it. Jean learns a thing or two about relating to boys which are still relevant to this time, and more than that, Jean learns a thing or three about her herself — and comes out definitely ahead of the game. This is one wicked cool book, and if you see it in your library, by all means, pick it up!

More Wicked Cool Overlooked Books today at Chasing Ray!

It’s the first Monday of the month, and time once again to enjoy WCOB ~ Wicked Cool Overlooked Books.

Africa. It’s a continent that is constantly embroiled in conflict, and it’s a gathering of small nations and kingdoms and peoples of which I didn’t really learn much in school — except from the viewpoint of 19th century novels, which were required reading for most of my high school and college years. I learned to loathe the phrase “dark continent” as a cop-out and a nasty racial euphemism, and squirmed uncomfortably as teachers trotted out pictures of bushmen with wild hair and bones in their noses, spouting what sounded like gibberish, and reminding everyone of what Western Civilization was not. There had to be a broader Africa, I knew, but we never saw that one. Instead we focused on nearly-naked people who guided the Wild Kingdom guys around the jungle. I often wished that I could see the people as more than National Geographic photographic fodder. There were other worlds in Africa, real stories, real experiences, and real girls like me.

Beverley Naidoo’s Carnegie (and myriad other) awarded novel, USAID, which indicated that they were part of a State Department refugee relocation plan. They spoke no English, and I could not begin to guess from which country on their massive home continent they hailed, but around me, all of the passengers changed from their busy workday attitudes, and became astonishing. Peole gently helped them into their seats, buckled their seatbelts, helped them choose refreshments from the drink tray, and smiled at their children. This is us, we all told them silently. We are America. It will be better here.

At least one hopes.

I thought about this story that day, and I wished I could launch a thousand paper cranes — symbols of all the good luck and good wishes to them, thoughts of comfort, prosperity and peace as they begin life from scratch with no one but each other.

What is the truth? That justice and human rights are the right of every person, on every shore. Keep hoping that no other child will lose a parent to a corrupt government, and not another person will flee their homeland for a safer, less familiar shore. Keep hoping that someday freedom and the right to speak the truth will belong to everyone.

More Wicked Coolness rounded up at Chasing Ray.

I write fantasy because it’s there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.

–from “Faces of Fantasy” by Patti Perret, Tor Books ©1996
Via Creative Quotations.

Patricia A. McKillip is made of awesome.
I love her old books, like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and I love her newer books like The Alphabet of Thorn.. I adored Od Magic and I thought I had her style down: enigmatic plots, lyrical language, well-paced, arresting, and absorbing stories that often surprise or anger, the reader enters them so thoroughly. What I loved about her was that her writing was fully in the make-believe past. Which is why Solstice Wood completely knocked me on my backside.

It’s a modern faerytale from the queen of mythical and medieval.

Sylvia Lynn has always meant to get back home, but it’s only when her grandfather dies that she makes the journey. She has lived with her grandparents — the kindest people in the world — since her mother died, but then she graduated and went away for college, and somehow, things just happened — time lapsed, there were books and studies and tests and jobs and now years have passed — and her grandfather has, too, and Sylvia is heartbroken.

She’s also more than a little scared.

See, there’s something about the dark and scary trees in Solstice Wood, and something about Sylvia that her grandparents, who raised her, don’t know… and it’s the reason she’s stayed gone all these years. It’s the reason she knows better than to stay at the house near Solstice Wood for very long. And no matter that her grandmother insists she stay and be introduced to the sewing circle, her group of loyal old friends in the Fiber Guild who sit in the parlor and stitch away their lives with her, Sylvia has no plans to stay. She can’t. What her grandmother doesn’t realize is that some things in life are more than they seem.

The story in this novel is told from various angles — we hear Sylvia’s bewildered and angry voice, her grandmother Iris’s grieved and determined voice, the voice of a family friend, Owen, and the voice of Sylvia’s teen aged cousin Tyler’s — and more. Slowly the world of Solstice Wood unravels, as the bright threads of Sylvia and Iris’ quiet existence are torn apart. Sylvia is furious to learn things her mother kept from her, secrets about the father she’s never met. Tyler is just trying to stay out of the way — and failing. Slowly, the reader is brought to the understanding that it’s not just Sylvia who’s been keeping secrets all this time.

This book isn’t strictly YA in that the protagonist is a recent college graduate, but that she is young and being bossed by a very determined grandmother helps to bridge this to YA readers. Also, Tyler, and later an alter ego of Tyler’s — is a perfect teen voice — a little clueless, right in the middle of things, and changing everything.

An almost completely G-rated urban fantasy for those who aren’t quite as comfortable with some of the darker elements of fey, this is really well told and ends with a lot of open doors — anything can happen next.

Don’t miss Bookslut’s review of Solstice Wood, with an additional McKillip review as well.

Wicked Cool Overlooked Books originated at Chasing Ray’s place, which features Cherie Priest and the freakiest book covers ever. The great reads continue with Little Willow talking up a new Tara Altebrando, and more will pop up throughout the day. Happy reading!

“Wherefore Art Thou, Teen Detectives?” was Colleen’s plaintive query recently at Chasing Ray. It’s a good question, actually. Where are the great mysteries for teens and young adults?

There are myriad mysteries for middle grade readers. Remember Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown books? I loved those because they always surprised me. Some of my more recent MG mystery favorites are Nancy Springer‘s Enola Holmes series, which I adore. Endymion Spring is so involved that it could have interest for older readers, but the age of the protagonist puts it squarely in middle grade territory, ditto for lovably loony psychic investigator Miss Gilda Joyce.

My only exposure to classic young adult mysteries outside of the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys tradition has been Joan Lowery Nixon, whose mysteries were cozy and somewhat predictable for me, but at least depicted strong female characters who did things. Canadian author Graham McNamee’s 2003 novel, Acceleration, is classified as a mystery, but much of the action and the emotion takes place in the character’s head, also making it a psychological thriller. Pitching this question to my writing group brought up the name Nancy Werlin, also known for her psychological thrillers which delve into the darkness of the human psyche. Again, a thriller isn’t exactly a mystery, at least not by definition.

To me, a thriller is like… let’s say it’s like the game Jenga. You already have all the pieces, it’s just a matter of trying to carefully delay the tower of facts all falling down on your turn. A mystery is more like a two thousand piece jigsaw puzzle — without the box lid. You’ve also got everything in your hands, but… how does it all fit together?

Sometimes I’m not in the mood for the hard work of figuring out whodunnit and can’t deal with the high level of anxiety created in psychological thrillers. It’s then that I turn to my favorite frothy mystery, Black Taxi, by Australian author James Moloney, which uses both elements of suspense and mystery with a little comedy on the side.

Rosie Sinclair left school to be a hairdresser like her leopard-print wearing Mum, but at sixteen, she’s back, because it all fell apart. Her beloved granddad, whom Rosie admits is “just a bit bent” has gotten busted on the last job of his 30 year petty crime career. His inevitable arrest means he’s entrusting Rosie with the keys to his gorgeous classic black Mercedes, and his cell phone. Of course, Rosie is thrilled. Sure, sure — okay. He’s left her with the responsibility for chauffeuring around all his geriatric friends, and the phone is ringing off the hook with the querulous demands of the ‘wrinklies,’ but the car is awesome, and the guys it’s attracting are hot.

But Grandpa Larkin is a well-known crook, and someone else has the number to his cell — someone who is threatening bodily harm to Rosie and her grandpa, if she doesn’t return ‘the ring.’

What ring? Rosie wonders. And then the real fun begins.

This novel was possibly not as well received in the U.S. because Rosie is considered a high school dropout and her best friend, who is two years older, is an exotic dancer. This is unfortunate, since the Australian educational system, which releases sixteen year olds from compulsory education who don’t wish to go on to University, doesn’t label them ‘dropouts’ at all. I actually read a review that named Rosie’s best friend as a prostitute instead of an exotic dancer — which is patently false, and shows that the reviewer either did not read the book, or read FAR more into it than was written. While Rosie is definitely not polished and demure, the friendship shown between she and her best friend is true and solid, and the novel is entirely G-rated. Best of all, the decisive and funny conclusion will make you cheer. The mystery itself isn’t that taxing, but there are some surprises, and the lightweight storyline moves quickly. This is definitely a Wicked Cool Overlooked Book.

Now that Colleen has asked the question, I’m going to be looking around for more really good young adult mysteries, and encouraging a few people in my writing group to, for heaven’s sakes, FINISH THEIR BOOKS. *cough*

“I plunged into this thing lightly enough, partly because you were too persuasive, and mostly, I honestly think, because that scurrilous Gordon Hallock laughed so uproariously at the idea of my being able to manage an asylum. Between you all you hypnotized me. And then of course, after I began reading up on the subject and visiting all those seventeen institutions, I got excited over orphans, and wanted to put my own ideas into practice. But now I’m aghast at finding myself here; it’s such a stupendous undertaking. The future health and happiness of a hundred human beings lie in my hands, to say nothing of their three or four hundred children and thousand grandchildren. The thing’s geometrically progressive. It’s awful. Who am I to undertake this job? Look, oh, look for another superintendent!”

Since paying a visit to the Museum of Childhood, I’ve been itching to get my hands on some of those lovely old books for girls. I went to my own bookshelf and pulled out my first edition (!!! Two dollars from a used book store!!!) of Jean Webster’s Dear Enemy.

Jean Webster, born Alice Jane Chandler Webster, was a publishing kid; her father, Charles, worked for her mother’s uncle, Samuel Clemens. Jean knew all about the pressures of writing, the autocratic process of dealing with editors — and very temperamental writers — and much of what she observed was reflected later in her amusing sketches of bossy, patriarchal men. Jean Webster’s fiction is described as being subversive; early 20th century women were still thought of as rather…empty-headed, in that kindly, overbearing Victorian sense, and in need of guidance by men. All of Jean’s female characters went on to become educated (Webster herself was a Vassar graduate), and whether they were from poor orphanage backgrounds or wealthy socialites, they learned the value of hard work, and went out and “made something” of themselves, for the sake of others.

Far from being sort of grinding morality tales, Websters work is — delightfully funny. The dialogue is arguably the basis for a lot of American movies that were filmed in the forties and fifties — playful, combative men and women who eventually fall in love — as equals.

After Vassar, Webster traveled and wrote and worked as a journalist, so it’s hard to figure out where she found time to fit her writing, but she did.I very much wish that I could get my hands on Jean Webster’s earlier works; though only two of them survive in print (and I found her first one on Project Gutenberg– Yaaay!), Webster was prolific, publishing six others as well as Daddy Long-Legs, New York: Century, 1912, which Jean illustrated herself, and which was made into the famous Leslie Caron and Fred Astaire vehicle. Dear Enemy New York: Century, 1915, also survives.

Dear Enemy is a companion novel to Daddy Long-Legs and tells of Judy (Jerusha) Abbot’s roommate, a girl named Sallie McBride who was born to money, but whose education in economics and social work — and her wily roommate — has challenged her to take up orphanage reform. Short of experiences, time and battling up-hill against the “we’ve-always-done-it-like-this” Victorian bureaucracy, Sallie is trying to allow the kids to be individuals instead of faceless wards, and trying to bring life and color into the lives of the kids at the John Grier Home. Her nemesis is a Scottish doctor, Dr. Robin MacRae, whose grim view of her frivolous expenditures and fevered ideas about what it takes to raise a child cause continuous clashes. As the orphanage superintendent (a job I wanted myself as a teen), she must deal with him daily, and so writes him letters addressed to ‘Dear Enemy.’ She writes hilarious letters of complain to her roommate, Judy, and Judy’s husband, Jervis. Sure she’s in the wrong place, she does her level best to make a difference in the lives of her charges anyway — and she truly does.

It’s a love story, a comedy, and a social commentary all at once. It is also, sadly, Jean Webster’s last book. She died, at the height of her career, in the moment of what should have been only happiness — the morning after the birth of her daughter, apparently of childbirth fever. Dear Enemy deals with simple and practical solutions to life in institutions, and things like hand-washing and cleanliness and order are discussed thoroughly. The irony of Jean Webster dying from a disease brought on by an unsterilized obstetric room and dirty hands is simply painful.

This is a WICKED cool book, and what those post-Victorian age women did to drag poor children and women out of the margins is also wicked cool. Funny, sassy, intelligent (though with some interesting ideas; Sallie McBride was pro sterilization for the mentally unstable — but this book was written right in the midst of the eugenics movement — think Love Curse of the Rumbaughs — eek!), this novel is perfect curl-up-and-smile reading for a snowy day (which we’re having here). The epistolary format and the line drawings are charming, and might just make you wish you had three hundred orphans of your own over which to worry.

Dear Jean: you SO rocked.

Wicked Coolth began with Chasing Ray, and will be rounded-up there, too. Check out her post on Incognegro.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold:
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

– “The Destruction of Sennacherib,” by George Gordon, Lord Byron

Sydney-born author Judith Clarke is my favorite of the YA Oz novelists, and she’s not as well-known or squeal-inducing as some. This is a real shame as her literary talent transcends trend to reveal a real skill with words, whether in comedic stories, as in her Al Capsella series, or in more serious work. Her writing has a emotional resonance that leaves the stories echoing in your ears for months and years after you’ve read them.

Judith Clarke’s Wolf on the Fold is a collection of six interconnected short stories opening in 1935, and ending in 2002. The title suggests an outside threat to a defenseless group, and indeed, the novel chronicles generations of a family’s struggle, beginning in the Great Depression in the 30’s, continuing with various wars, divorces, deaths and financial woes. Through it all is woven a theme of survival.

The tautly written title narrative tells the story of fourteen year old Kenny Sinclair, who, in the middle of a desolate, cold winter after the death of his father, goes out to find a job to prevent his family from being divided, and he and his brothers ending up in a Home. Grieving, depressed yet finding himself needing to be the man of the family, Kenny sees his mother starving herself in order to provide for the kids, sees the baby wordlessly studying the faces of the older children, and knows he can’t let it go on. He leaves school (which he hates anyway), squares his shoulders and sets out, knowing that there are dangerous drifters on the road of the isolated town where they live; knowing that he might find nothing. He goes out in hope and in hopeless terror.

‘Be careful going through the flatlands,’ his mother warns him. ‘Don’t stop for anyone.’ But Kenny stops, and the language of the story evokes such a sense of horrible menace and anxiety — without being overtly scary — that readers are draw breathless to the edge of their seats. The words of the Byron poem that Kenny has learned in school ground, center and calm him in a time of peril, and in doing so, help him save his own life.

Many novels offer a coming-of age that takes place through a series of years. Though the time line of the novel begins with Kenny’s parents, continues to his daughters and ends with his grandchildren, Kenny comes of age in a single breath. The horrible realization that he has walked into the lair of a murderer and is as defenseless as a lamb before wolves is the pivot upon which the entire novel turns. Who Kenny turns out to be because of this night affects him, his friends, his children and his future generations.

Each story in the novel includes Kenny in a way that ties the whole together, even when he’s only the old man neighbor. The wolf coming down to savage the flock symbolizes the many threatening things the people in Kenny’s life has to face, from bullies to screaming parents on the verge of divorce to war zones to Alzheimer’s. This is a fabulously multi-layered, multi-generational book which really would be wonderful as a text for literature. In A Wolf on the Fold, the secret lives and choices of everyday people who are maybe dismissed as “only kids” are revealed, and the resilience and resourcefulness of those who survive provides readers rich food for thought.

Yep, it’s the first Monday of the month, which means it’s Wicked Cool Overlooked Books day elsewhere. Check out Colleen’s fabulous selection and nominate your own You Should Read This award winner.

It’s the first Wicked Cool Overlooked Books of the new year! (In case you need a refresher as to why we do this, Chasing Ray will remind you.)

I am not, generally, a fan of novels about the Civil War. I am of the opinion that most books treat the subject simplistically, unfairly vilifying certain persons while equally unfairly deifying others. Throw in someone saying “Yassuh, mastuh,” and a few belles in tragically faded frocks, and you’ve got Gone With the Wind, and me puking.

I wouldn’t have picked up Richard Peck’s The River Between Us, except that I respect his writing tremendously, enough to read anything of his. And I’m glad I did.

Far from being the usual tale of the fragile-but-beautiful-belle, this history is framed within a narrative told in the voice of fifteen year old Howard Hutchings, who is, together with his father and brother, on a journey to see family that they’ve never met. Howard’s story is itself textured and layered, and doesn’t feel tacked onto the main story, which takes place in a small Southern town in 1861. I love Peck’s talent with setting and pace, and his imaginative detail of “the town, steeping like tea in the deep summer damp” (p12). It’s a quiet place where nothing much happens until a steamboat from New Orleans arrives in town and Delphine and Calinda Duval depart the boat seeking a safer place to stay. They take a room in the home of Tilly Pruitt and forever change that family’s lives.

Much is made of the contrasts between Delphine and the Pruitts. Delphine is lavish with scent; the Pruitts’ use plain soap and water, sparingly. Jewelry, money, even talk is wealth that she shares freely about. p.47 “We weren’t used to talk at the table, and the kitchen rang with hers.” The women in this family are so different, there seems no possible way that they can ever come together in any meaningful fashion — and yet they do. The Civil War interrupts so much of their lives that coming together is the only way they survive.

Because this is a woman’s perspective on war, this is a story that has moments of heartbreak, and rather than being fragile, the women have to be tough and resourceful to survive. However, there are droll, funny moments too that are pure Peck, and best of all, nobody stands around saying “the South will rise again.” For another perspective on a piece of American history, pick this one up.

“I am telling you this just the way it went
With all the details I remember as they were,
and including the parts I’m not sure about.
You know, where something happened,
but you aren’t convinced
you understood it?
Other people would maybe tell it different
but I was there.”

First lines of Virginia Euwer Wolff’s, Make Lemonade, Henry Holt and Co ©1993.

Probably my voice was shaking as I tried to read loudly but with some kind of feeling. My students were… loud, not with their voices, but with their bodies. They shuffled and pulled up the hoods on their coats. Their actions spoke of disgust and amusement that their teacher was reading them …a story. I mean, they were too old for that.

My students at Crestmont were at the school because they had been incarcerated for a variety of reasons. They were a strange mix of ancient and young, iron-hard and vulnerable, so it was fitting that I read a story that was rooted in the ground from which my students grew — the rocky ground of urban poverty. It was not a story of a person of a particular race — and my students were Caucasian, African American, Latino, and Filipino — but of a particular class, the category of “poor” into which all of my students fit. The girls in the story were poor — but one was poor and dreaming, and the other was poor and hopeless. One was a fourteen year old girl with a VERY determined mother, who’d grown up with the word COLLEGE in her house like a large piece of furniture that she had to step around during her day to day. The other girl was seventeen, already a mother of two with no mother of her own, and was advertising for a sitter.

Two girls from different sides of the street, but when their lives intersected, there was …possibility.

I deeply wanted to introduce ‘possibility’ to my students. Most of them had the idea that they were going to die before they turned twenty-one, that they would never find any other kind of life, and that this was how it had to be — nobody they knew had ever done anything different. They all wanted to somehow ascend the hill of fame, be Somebody Big, and then — die. Because they couldn’t imagine anything more than that.

And so I read them Make Lemonade.
I never really got to know what they thought of it, not really.
It wasn’t an assignment. I didn’t make them write response sheets (although our principal preferred that I had); we didn’t do any experimentation with blank verse or follow a study guide. I didn’t want them to have to do anything more strenuous than listen.

In time, they stopped moving, stopped shuffling, pulled down their hoods and were still. They listened, at times with a frightening intensity. They would ask me — sometimes in the middle of a math class, apropos of nothing, sometimes just when we were ending our session for the day — what something meant, why something had happened. I answered what I could, and others jumped in and put forth their own answers. I left those answers as they were — I didn’t try to gather them up or refine them or make them make sense. They felt too fragile — and amazing — to touch. As a group we were thinking. That on its own was enough.

With as much critical praise as this book has garnered, it maybe doesn’t warrant being a Wicked Cool Overlooked Book, but it was to me. None of the other teachers had read it. Quite a few older teachers in our system implied that “teaching poetry” to our school’s population was out of the question. But since this book was reissued in 2006, I know someone else must support my opinion: Make Lemonade is wicked cool.

I will always remember the first book I read to my Crestmont students. They listened, then like small children, they asked if we could read it again.