Blog Archive: November 2007

I’ve long admired the way Robin McKinley writes animals. She treats them as fully developed characters, with their own personality, habits, and quirks, rather than as props. (That’s the way to write good animals. Period.) From the yerig, the foltsza, and, of course, Talat in The Hero and the Crown, to Friar Tuck’s dogs Sweetheart and Brown-Eyes in The Outlaws of Sherwood, McKinley’s animal characters exude intelligence and humor.

So it’s not entirely surprising that McKinley should finally write what is, more than a fantasy or science fiction, an animal story. That book is Dragonhaven (Putnam, 2007).

Teenager Jake Mendoza is native to Smokehill National Park, the only North American (and only one of three in the world) refuge for dragons. Real dragons, that is. The flying, fire-breathing, 80-foot-long stuff of St. George: Draco australiensis. That’s almost everything Smokehill’s researchers know, however, because the dragons are so elusive and mysterious – until Jake finds a mother dragon, shot by a poacher, and saves one of her tiny, squirming, butt-ugly babies. He names her Lois.

For a human to “interfere” with dragons is highly illegal, so Jake’s new baby has to be kept a secret. And since humans know virtually nothing of dragon physiology, husbandry, and so forth, every moment with Lois challenges Jake’s intuition and improvised mothering skills. But there’s no giving up. She’s imprinted on him, and he loves her – well, as parents love their children.

It may sound strange, but Dragonhaven has more in common with, say, The Yearling than with Eragon. Speculative aspects (i.e., existence of dragons) aside, the story is firmly rooted in modern-day America. You won’t find any magic here but the miraculous bond between Jake and Lois.

But Dragonhaven departs from classic animal/coming-of-age stories in a couple ways. For one thing, Jake has reason to believe dragons aren’t “just animals”; they may be as or more intelligent than humans in their own way. For another, while you may feel your eyes getting a little dewy by the end of the book, this is not a tearjerker. I hope it doesn’t spoil for you to know this book has a happy ending!

Nonetheless, I found Dragonhaven a long and somewhat difficult read – not that McKinley’s ever been a great choice for reluctant readers. When I was eleven, I initially had trouble getting through The Hero and the Crown because of its rather complex and formal narrative style. Ironically, Jake’s narration is difficult to parse for its informality. The entire book is written in his very strong and likeable voice, but – well, to put it Jake style: it’s like clauses are piled on top of clauses, and you can’t necessarily get the meaning just by glancing at the page, you actually have to read every word, which is understandable because why would McKinley put the words there if they weren’t meant to be READ, but at the same time it makes for slow going, especially when the sentences are long, and the paragraphs are long, and the sections are long, and the chapters are long, and… you get the picture. To put it bluntly: I could have done with some more white space on those pages.

All in all, I was glad to read another truly original story by McKinley. Her fairy and folk tale interpretations are very fine, but in an age when every tale in the Brothers Grimm seems to be getting a makeover, I question whether anyone’s, like, making stuff up anymore. (I know that’s not true. But surely you’ve noticed this trend?) By grounding Dragonhaven in our own world, McKinley’s speculation is all the more potent. You’ll be fervently wishing there was a Smokehill, somewhere in the crags and plateaus of the American West, waiting for you to jump in your car and drive there, hoping for a glimpse of dragons flying in the distance.

I suppose one could say that all poetry is, on some level, a celebration of language – figurative language, compression of language, blah, blah, blah. But F E G: Ridiculous Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children, by Robin Hirsch, art by Ha (Little, Brown, 2002), goes to extremes.

Read strictly for meaning, these poems are nothing special; in fact, many of them do no more than serve as vehicles for a punny punch line. But that’s not the point. Rather than dress up the English language with frilly similes, Hirsch gleefully shows its underpants. These poems express the sheer joy of playing with language, exploiting its every eccentricity (or, dare I say, X N TR C T?).

Treating letters of the alphabet as phonemes rather than merely symbols is just one form of word play you’ll find in F E G. You’ll find visual word play in palindromes and anagrams, and aural word play in spoonerisms, puns, and onomatopoeia. Then there’s all the other stuff that doesn’t fit under a tidy linguistic label.

One of my favorite pairs of poems contrasts conventional “ear rhyme” with “eye rhyme.” Bough, cough, dough, and enough are all spelled alike, yet ough makes a different sound in each! In contrast, “Ewe Rhyme” collects words that rhyme with ewe but are spelled very different. Here’s the first stanza:

There once was a man whose name was Lou
Whose favorite dish was lamb ragout
He liked nothing better than a stew
Thickened with a tasty roux

The footnotes are as much or more fun to read than the poems. In them, Hirsch explains the various types of word play, including the etymology of their names. (For example, I now finally know the difference between homographs, homophones, and homonyms.) Hirsch also waxes humorous on various historical and literary tidbits alluded to in the poems.

The collection’s subtitle is fitting. F E G assumes the reader is intelligent and inquisitive – delighted by knowledge in general, and language in particular, for its own sake. Suggest it to upper elementary and middle school readers who are bright, love puzzles and arcane knowledge, and like a good dose of silly with their poetry.

Find this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Susan Writes!

I chatted with Brian Mandabach at the First Annual Kidlitosphere Conference, and got a brief sneak peek at his debut novel, …Or Not? (Flux, 2007) I was enticed, but had five long weeks to wait before I could get my hands on a copy for real. (Note to library users: put quotation marks around the title, or the Boolean search engines'll get you.) Now I’m back to talk about it.

Just reading the jacket copy, you might think …Or Not? is the story of a confrontation between pinko Cassie and the right-wing jerks at her Colorado middle school. As it turns out, it really isn’t. Misconceptions aside, however, I enjoyed the story all the more for what it is.

Cassie Sullivan feels very deeply; I can think of no better way to put it. She’s smart and introspective and extremely sensitive to the pain in the world, particularly the pain of innocents. That’s why she’s a vegan, and that’s why she opposes America’s war in the Middle East. What sense does it make, she wonders, to counteract the terrorists’ killing of innocents on 9/11 with the killing of innocent families in Afghanistan or Iraq? Unfortunately, voicing her views in school does put her in a spot of trouble with some of her teachers and fellow students.

But as I said, that’s not where the real story lies. It’s just a catalyst for the real conflict: Cassie’s existential crisis. Living in a world filled with people doing such terrible things to each other and the planet, trapped in our routines of endless test-taking and kowtowing to authority, being so small and insignificant in a universe so vast, how can we go on living, day after day? Many days, Cassie wishes she could escape to her family’s rustic cabin in the mountains; some days she wishes she could escape the tethers of life completely.

In Jay Asher’s big debut Thirteen Reasons Why, the main female character finds reasons not to go on living. …Or Not?, in contrast, is about Cassie’s discovery of reasons to live, even when she’s feeling weighed down by the tedium and sorrow of life. It’s about finding the resolve to hang on, even when she feels helpless and hopeless.

I enjoyed and identified with Cassie as a character. You get the impression that she is a true individualist – not going against the grain for the sake of turning heads, but because she’s being true to herself, even when it’s unpopular. She does have a touch of righteous indignation about her, but Mandabach successfully prevents her from being insufferable by surrounding her with characters who respectfully disagree with her, and whom she respects in turn. Cassie’s prickly and wants to be left alone, yet she also longs to be loved. Kirkus' reviewer calls her "spoiled", and it's true that Cassie isn't facing dire circumstances; but as anyone who suffers from depression can tell you, life doesn't need to be dire to be difficult.

The whole time I was reading the school scenes, I wished I could break into the story and give Cassie and her parents a copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn. Cassie seems like a natural candidate for unschooling. She’s mature, intelligent, and driven in her particular areas of interest. She’s tortured by the rote learning, test taking, and stifling atmosphere of her school. Outside the confines of formal schooling, who knows what she might achieve? I can envision her writing books, learning to live sustainably, traveling the world to help people in need and causes she believes in. For that matter, her friend DJ might also be a good candidate for unschooling – not that his mother would ever go for it. He’s obviously remarkably intelligent (he writes a helluva love poem, anyway), yet barely scrapes by in school. He just doesn’t seem to be cut out it.

…Or Not? isn’t perfect. It runs almost 400 pages, which felt slightly long. The school harassment issues, which initially seem like the book’s focal point, drop out of the plot almost entirely, about a third of the way in, only to pop up again at the end as another incendiary event. Meanwhile, it’s suggested that a former friend of Cassie’s is behind the harassment, but the reasons for the end of their friendship and the ex-friend’s apparently extreme antagonism are never explained.

Nonetheless, I found …Or Not? to be a very enjoyable and thoughtful read. I imagine many teens will read Cassie’s story and think, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way about life!” And that by itself will give them hope as they learn to be.

This week saw the launch of a new gender-related book blog, Boys Blogging Books!

So far, reviewers include 14-year-old Kurtis and 11-year-old Michael. They kicked off with a review of Thirteen Reasons Why and an interview with the author, Jay Asher. I look forward to reading more!

Via Disco Mermaids

As I commented on Wizards Wireless, I’m terrible at predicting Newbery and Caldecott winners. First, for as many books as I read, there are countless that slip past me. Second, the books I’ve enjoyed most that past few years haven’t seemed to attract those shiny gold and silver stickers. Third, because I wait to read books until they’ve arrived at the library, I’m always lagging a bit in my reading of new books.

But since the end of the year is galumphing toward me all too fast, I figure I may as well start rounding up some of my personal favorites now. Not books I think are destined to win shiny stickers, necessarily, but ones I got a huge kick out of, just the same. Here’s the first:

Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and A Red Dog
By Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

Though members of House Fyrdraaca always go into the military, Flora, approaching her fourteenth birthday, has no desire to follow in her General mamma’s footsteps. Instead she dreams of being a Ranger like her hero, the mythical Nini Mo, focusing less on fight and might than on magick, cunning, and survival skills. But when Flora uses her magickal essence to help Valefor, the banished Fyrdraaca Butler, regain his former power, she finds herself in trouble way over her head. And that’s only the beginning!

Once I got through the somewhat overwhelming prologue and first chapter (lots of names thrown around), I was utterly enchanted by this unique fantasy: its haunting magical setting, its unexpected twists and turns, its odd combination of the familiar and alien, the modern and ancient. It also had many bits that made me laugh out loud. For example, in one of my favorite scenes, a disguised Flora enters a bar and gruffly demands a beer, only to discover it’s actually an ice cream parlor.

What I liked best, however, was its distinctly American flavor. This is not done-over Arthurian or Scandinavian folklore. The story takes place in a country called Califa, in what seems to be an alternative San Francisco Bay Area. Califa has a rather strained relationship with Huitzil, its neighbor to the south – a nation ruled by, we are to believe, blood-thirsty Aztec-esque warriors. Wilce draws on Aztec and Native imagery in presenting their different style of magick, but doesn’t chain herself to their mythology. In Summerland, Michael Chabon aimed to write an American fantasy, drawing on various American legends, and the result was a ponderous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink volume. In contrast, in Flora Segunda, Wilce has created a fresh setting, characters, and story that ultimately owe allegiance to, it would seem, no one.

I recommend Flora Segunda for readers grade 6 and up. Fans will eagerly await the second volume, Flora Redux, on its way in August 2008. Finally, in the interest of full disclosure: I met Wilce at the First Annual Kitlitosphere Conference, where she graciously accepted my effusive, yet stuttering, praise.

Some Online Interviews with Ysabeau Wilce:

BookPage - "It's easier sometimes to use real details than to make things up—I know an awful lot about 19th-century military culture, and rather than let all that useless knowledge go to waste, I figured I'd recycle it."

Cynsations - "...I wanted to try to capture the feeling that you have when you are kid and everything seems so super important, and yet the adults around you are oblivious to this. When you are a kid, everything can feel so super-charged, and yet as adults we forget this and figure that nothing in a kid's life can possibly be that important."