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"Bridge to Terabithia"
Katherine Paterson
HarperTrophy, $6.99
I read "Bridge to Terabithia" in sixth grade, and I remembered crying to myself in the classroom, while pretending I wasn't so I wouldn't be embarrassed among my fellow 11-year-olds.
After the 2007 movie adaptation was released, I decided I would read it again before seeing the film, especially because it hadn't been too well-received, and I didn't want a poor theatrical version of the story to taint my memory of the novel, which had faded in the 11 years since.
Katherine Paterson's "Terabithia" tells the story of 10-year-old Jess Aarons Jr., the third of five children — and the only boy — in a poor family in rural Virginia. After initial hesitancy, he befriends Leslie Burke — a rich tomboy whose family (mostly inexplicably) moves to a neighboring farm. The two create the secret, magical kingdom of Terabithia, for which they are the king and queen, while developing a close friendship.
As in most novels, tragedy strikes, and the characters take with them the lessons they had been learning and teaching one another throughout the story so they can persevere.
But because that is a simple, overused plot technique doesn't mean that Paterson doesn't succeed in using it.
She also finds success in her character development by using general, exaggerated stereotypes, and in her foreshadowing by giving clues that might have been too far over my 11-year-old head but far too obvious for any adult.
"Terabithia" has landed itself on banned books lists for the subject of death, the use of the word "lord" and the promotion of secular humanism, according to Wikipedia. Added to that list could be the use of inappropriate language throughout the novel and the inclusion of topics like child abuse. What the banned book list makers seem to fail to grasp is the notion that 10-year-old children are exposed to death and swearing and abuse, and have imaginations that create worlds outside of the "safe" ones where the banned books list makers pretend death or swearing or abuse don't exist.
Paterson was able to step into the shoes of a fifth-grader when she wrote "Terabithia." She analyzes the important things of the world, like winning a foot race or making sure the seventh-grade bully doesn't take your lunch money. Paterson also is able to bridge the gap between how kids and adults deal with tragedy. She runs through the "what ifs" that all adults imagine after experiencing a terrible event and assuming they are somehow responsible for its occurrence, and she is able to see the event through the eyes of a 10-year-old who doesn't know how to respond without the full understanding of what has happened.
There is a reason this novel won the Newbery Medal. And if you haven't already — or if it's been a while since you've done so — you should pick up the book and discover why.
"The Time Traveler's Wife"
Audrey Niffenegger
Harcourt, Inc., $14
According to the book's jacket, "The Time Traveler's Wife" is "A most untraditional love story ..." and that might be the best way to explain it.
Audrey Niffenegger's novel tells the untraditional love story of Clare Abshire and Henry DeTamble. The pair are eight years apart. But because Henry is a time traveler, Clare meets Henry when she is 6, and Henry meets Clare when he is 28. So Clare grows up knowing who she will marry, and Henry has no clue of Clare's existence until he is 28.
They meet in real time and fall in love, and they go through the same troubles that all couples face. But their troubles are complicated, due to the fact that Henry disappears randomly to unknown places and times for varied periods of time. He travels most often when he's nervous, and finds himself naked, hungry and nauseated during his trips, not to mention lost and confused. And after he meets Clare in present time, he leaves her alone, confused and wondering when he will return:
Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waitin. Why had he gone where I cannot follow? (vii)
Niffenegger doesn't follow traditional rules of writing. The book is filled with run-on sentences, so you feel as though you are having conversations with Henry and Clare rather than reading a book, and somehow the blending of thoughts into lengthy breaths makes them easier to read. She also doesn't tell the story chronologically, for obvious reasons, but rather in a way that seems to make sense — telling the different vignettes of Henry's and Clare's lives in the order in which the reader would learn about them as though they were an aside, a flashback, but most of the time, they are told in the present while Henry is time traveling.
She takes real events and real places and gives her characters real problems to deal with — school, money, jobs, life, death, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, alcohol, cancer, AIDS — and the not so real problem of time travel, which is made real by the details with which she explains the incidents during Henry's travels.
Niffenegger's story is somehow believable, her characters lovable. Readers will find themselves attached to the couple they want to see succeed though they are dealing with the most difficult obstacle to overcome.
"The Time Traveler's Wife" is proof that the magic of love can triumph over hardships and time. It's nice to see a story of love having the ability to conquer all in a world with just too little of it.
"Nineteen Minutes"
Jodi Picoult
Artria Books, $26.95 (hardcover)
Because of the recent devastation in Blacksburg, Va., I can't decide if reading a book that delves into the why of a school shooting is more comforting — giving a window into the mind of a killer to show how it all started — or depressing — knowing that there might not be anything to stop this from ever happening again.
"Nineteen Minutes" is Jodi Picoult's 14th novel. She tells the story of the storybook town of Sterling, N.H., and how the high school and the town are devastated when one of the students goes on a shooting rampage that lasts 19 minutes and results in 10 deaths, 19 injuries and an untold number of lives changed forever.
As is Picoult's style, she focuses her story on multiple characters and their relationships with each other. There's Josie, whose single mother Alex has worked her way up to being a judge, but has failed at providing a family life for her daughter. And there's Peter, the social outcast who has never lived up to be as good as his brother Joey, even though mother Lacy has given him love and support.
Josie is like any other teenager, trying to find her niche in high school life, but perhaps only finding that the only way she fits is to pretend to be a person she is not — pretending to be the person her "friends" want her to be. She is in the popular group. Her boyfriend is a varsity hockey player. She is pretty. She is skinny. She is unhappy.
Peter and Josie used to be friends — until Josie realized that it was easier to make fun of Peter with everyone else in the school, rather than to try to defend him and be his friend. Peter drifts into the cracks of high school. And in 19 minutes, he gets revenge.
Picoult often tells her books by starting at the beginning and telling the stories by way of what is currently happening and flashbacks to other events that have affected the way things are now. Because of the nature of this story — the crime, the impending trial, the mystery of what really happened that day — it closely resembles her 1998 novel "The Pact" (the same defense lawyer and investigator even return to this novel). The past and the present meet in the final chapter, when the whole story of the crime is told. And like Chris Harte in "The Pact," we know that Peter Houghton is guilty the whole time we are reading — what we don't know is how the defense, prosecution and jury will interpret the word guilty.
But it is disturbing to think that something as insane and disheartening as a school shooting could be the logical conclusion of any turn of events. No person who is mentally stable and balanced could even consider committing any sort of destruction of that magnitude. This is where Picoult is genius. She takes topics that are difficult to talk about and gives them a story, a start for a discussion. This is how everything started, this could be the cause of all school shootings. And, like in most of her stories, she cannot give a solution because the problem is not black and white, and too many shades of gray make it impossible to come up with any sort of simple fix.
I usually have few or no complaints about Picoult's work because she ties up all the loose ends, and everything she writes has a reason that might only appear later in the book. However, this time, I found inconsistencies — most notably when she mentions a boy in the room for the prosecution's witnesses, only to have another boy talk about watching him die the day of the school shooting. And I don't know if she ran out of time or space or couldn't find the place most appropriate to put it, but there was never any reason given for why some of the students became casualties of Peter's rage.
The end of the book is unsettling. She takes less than three pages to discuss how things are one year later. And she only needs that much space because nothing has changed — the social hierarchy remains, the nerds are pushed aside from the popular kids, there is no cohesion in the school that had witnessed a tragedy a year earlier. And that might be even sadder than the fact that it happened at all.
"A Density of Souls"
Christopher Rice
Pan, $13.00
If Christopher Rice's parents weren't famous, I fail to see how he would have had a New York Times bestseller with "A Density of Souls"
His novel is the story of four friends. And their parents. And their teachers. And their classmates. And their lovers. The story follows them from pre-puberty up to their early 20s. And like any over-dramatic story, it includes love, friendship, alcohol, violence, hate, abuse, alcohol, sex, psychiatric hospitals, alcohol, alcohol poisoning, guns, death, rebellion, natural disasters and alcohol.
Basically, it's a soap opera squeezed into 288 pages. If that description turns you off from reading it, you're welcome for saving a few hours of your life that you might have otherwise spent gasping at the ridiculousness of this novel.
Every event that happens in the story is painted up through excessive description and dramatic dialouge as if what has just occurred will change the world:
Then Meredith heard it. A human, female wail, a torrent of vocal pain she had never heard given breath before. Meredith felt the wail pass through her body. She trembled. For a brief instant, it was as if the sound had ripped the black veil across Meredith's own grief.
An ambulance's sirens devoured the woman's screams. (91)
The characters yell and fight in conversations that would be discussed in a normal tone of voice in real life. They drink alcohol as much as they inhale oxygen. They fight and hit and punch as if they all have anger control problems — except for one character who mostly chooses to drink bottles of Stoli every night while writing in a secret journal, presumably hidden under her mattress (yeah, like anyone's ever NOT checked there for a diary).
Rice jumps around with his primary character, the one who is telling the story. While it would make sense for him to switch between the four characters who are supposed to be the stars who share a secret, he also jumps to the mom, the brother, the teacher, the jock — but they only tell the story while they are necessary to be in it.
Rice's book asserts that the jock would not exist if it were not for the homosexual because he needs him to be his opposite in the social order to prove his dominance. He shows this in the typical, generic high school way, where the jocks tease the homosexuals and call them names. But he also brings in a more disgusting, sexual description of how the social relationships between these two groups work, going too far with even the idea of that being a normal activity and with the graphic description of what happens between the boys.
A good story has developed, meaningful relationships between the characters because those are what keeps the reader interested in what happens to them. But the relationships between the four main characters is hardly explained. The only reason we learn anything about those friendships is because they are explained in the final section of the book — if the reader even makes it there.
Rice tries to pull the reader in by saying things such as Meredith will hurt Brandon if he ever goes near Stephen, and Meredith knows there's something about the boys that will always leave her out of the group, and Stephen knows the secrets about Brandon and Greg, and Jordan knows something is going on with Brandon but Elise won't tell him where he is, and more and more and more and more. Rice hides all of these secrets until the end of the book, but, just as with a soap opera, it wouldn't be hard to walk away in the middle of the story without missing what you didn't know about them or where they will go next.
The book is drowned in alcohol and depression. The only reason I could find to read it is so you can laugh at the ridiculousness of the drama and the way the characters yell and overreact about every event they encounter.
New York Times Bestseller? Really? Maybe it's easier to make that list than I thought. Maybe all you need is a famous last name.
"The World's Shortest Stories"
edited by Steve Moss
Running Press, $8.95
The world’s shortest stories, told in 55 words.
Some will make you laugh, some will make you gasp, some will make you think. Only a few I didn’t like.
It will make you wonder if you can write a story in 55 words.
A wonderful collection combined into the perfect coffee table book.
Read it.
"The Tenth Circle"
Jodi Picoult
Washington Square Press, $15
As usual, Jodi Picoult does not steer away from controversial, sensitive topics in "The Tenth Circle," with topics such as rape, self destruction, lying, cheating and death gracing the 387 pages of her thirteenth novel.
Trixie Stone is 14 and heartbroken. Stay-at-home Dad Daniel knows something is different about his daughter, but he is hardly willing to accept that she is growing up and growing away from him. And he knows something is different about his wife Laura, who we meet in the middle of an extra marital affair in the opening pages of the story.
So like any teenager who is sad about her first love, Trixie wants to get him back and tries to do so by making him jealous. The boy ends up raping her — so Trixie says. How could she have known that he would only want her back for one night instead of back for good, even after she dressed up and flirted and did everything she thought was right in high school relationships.
Picoult fabulously paints the picture of a family who is hurting — the way their individual situations have affected them and the way it has affected their relationships with each other. I found myself being able to relate to each of them, recalling times when I had felt broken or had loved someone who felt broken and how that changed the dynamics of our relationship and how it felt to try to fix it.
Picoult's idea of the rape that might not have been a rape is fascinating. What other crime is there in our society that has physical evidence that could mean nothing but could mean everything, that is dependent on the interpretation of actions, words, the looks on the faces of the plantiff and defendant. Nothing could have worked better into her story because it reinforces the idea that the truth is in the eye of the beholder and changes every time a story is told, especially if the one who is holding the secret isn't sure if she is lying to herself.
Although I have criticized her in the past for spending too much time talking about the side stories, I found myself wanting more this time around. We learn about Trixie's best friend Zephyr, but her story tapers off in the end. We hear part of the Stone family's story from the detective Mike Bartholemew, who has his own depressing tale of losing his daughter, but we don't know if he finds any answers or gets any resolve through Trixie's story. Seth, the object of Laura's forbidden affection, might have played one of the most important roles in the novel, but he disappears as if he didn't matter — which, to the family, he didn't. And Willie, who offers Trixie help when she gets to her lowest, is only in the story long enough to help bring her back up.
Picoult says "The Tenth Circle" is not a departure from her usual, but I would disagree. Her other novels end when the story ends, but this one stops at the end of a story within the larger story. The Stone family makes their way to hell and back, but the demons are still there when they return home, and the reader will never know how they make it out of that fight.
But this had to be a departure from Picoult's usual. It was the first time I haven't cried when I get to the ending. This story wasn't my favorite, but it is one that I will remember.
"My Misspent Youth"
Meghan Daum
Open City Books, $14
After painfully pulling myself through "The Quality of Life Report," I wasn't sure if I would ever want to read Meghan Daum again.
But I was pleasantly surprised throughout "My Misspent Youth" and have decided Daum is much more suited for writing nonfictional essays about the fortunes and misfortunes she has experienced than fictional novels about what she might wish to experience.
"Youth" is a collection of Daum's essays that have previously appeared in other publications, such as The New Yorker, GQ and Harper's. They are blunt. They are true.
Daum's writing is fresh. She is writing about herself and personal experiences without drowning the reader in first person pronouns.
She incorporates today's society, its expectations and how a twentysomething would conform in her writings. She discovers the ups and downs of finding love online in "On The Fringes Of The Physical World." She confesses her form of snobbiness through not being able to take a great deal of an apartment because of its one flaw in "Carpet Is Mungers." She searches for a definition of love and belonging in "According To The Women I'm Fairly Pretty."
The stories she tells don't always end, but she finds a way to finish telling them. The style allows readers to think about these ideas in their own lives, to fill in the spaces Daum has left. I could find myself in the stories she told — losing a relationship when the way to communicate changes; allowing disappointment with your bank account in order to be pleased with your everyday life; denying yourself love because someone can't fit the exact criteria of what you have planned in your life; falling in love where it will never work because of cultural expectations; finding success in something you always wanted but never did; dealing with grief when you're not sure if you're grieving.
The best stories are the stories that aren't just stories because they go beyond the realm of what is considered to be a story. They're the stories that are real. They're the stories that make you see, feel, believe. They're the stories you could see yourself writing, if you had the talent of Daum.
"Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture"
Ariel Levy
Free Press, $25
If Ariel Levy is making a suggestion for how to truly equalize men and women in American culture, it's stuck somewhere in between her complaints about the sexually liberated, the lesbians, the high school girls who will do anything to be "cool" and the men who reinforce all of this behavior as acceptable.
In "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture," she questions if our mothers' generation spent time fighting for equal rights so the new generation could disregard the concept of self-respect in favor of doing whatever is sexy to catch a man's attention — or another woman's attention, as described in the chapter "From Womyn to Bois."
Why has this become so socially acceptable? When did it go from equal rights to flashing a camera to get a trucker hat with "Girls Gone Wild" stamped across the front?
Levy attempts to investigate this and seems to come to the conclusion that the women of today who become involved in this type of behavior see it as liberating. Yes, their mothers fought for equality, but the equality came to them in the form of the ability to do what they want to do — even if what they want to do is wear skimpy clothes to tease boys.
The older women Levy talks to (mid-20s through late-30s) seem to jibe with the idea of being liberated and doing what they want to do — especially the lesbians and bois. Their biggest concern is being happy with who they are and what they are doing. But when Levy is talking to teens and young collegiates, their concerns are focused on keeping up with the other girls — specifically when it comes to attracting boys.
Levy brings a fresh perspective to the idea of strippers and porn stars — many are in those positions because they feel they are sexually liberated and that's how they would like to express themselves, while Levy seems to prefer they not compromise their bodies and their self-respect just because men would like them to. But if you're not against them, you're for them, and that's the type of attitude Levy casts against society. Of course women have the right to be strippers if they want to but they shouldn't be, seems to be what she is saying.
The attitude of those who support a woman's free choice to do with her body what she will is the same attitude of "Sex and the City," which, for some reason I still don't understand, is immensely popular among women in my age group. Levy brings up the show in her chapter "Shopping for Sex," and I was worried she was going to champion it and its characters as role models for young women who want to truly be liberated from men and enjoy the equality between sexes that should exist but doesnt. I was pleasantly surprised with Levy's take on the show:
Sex and the City was great entertainment, but it was a flawed guide to empowerment, which is how many women viewed it. (175-176)
The same females who are viewing "Sex and the City" as a guide to women's empowerment are the ones who are flashing Girls Gone Wild, competing with their girlfriends to see who can "go the furthest" with the most boys and allowing themselves to be harrassed and looked upon as sex objects because they think it is empowering.
The book jacket says "Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go." And that's true. Levy talks for 200 pages about how women are going in the wrong direction, but she fails in pointing us in the right one.
"My Sister's Keeper"
Jodi Picoult
Washington Square Press, $14
What if you grew up knowing the only reason you were alive was because you were created to save someone else's life?
That is how 13-year-old Anna lives. In "My Sister's Keeper," Jodi Picoult introduces the audience to the Fitzgerald family. Brian, the firefighter and wannabe astronomer, and his wife Sara, the no-longer-practicing lawyer, have three children: Jesse, the rebel whose parents have already given up on him; Kate, the girl who has had luekemia on and off for 14 years; and Anna, who was created when her parents picked the right genes so she could be a one-time donor for Kate.
But when the one time doesn't cure Kate, Anna becomes a donor again. And again. And again.
For 13 years, Anna is used to taking trips to hospitals and being poked and proded because her parents think it is in the best interest of keeping Kate alive. She is hardly asked whether she wants to because she has grown up knowing this role is her life. And how do you tell your parents you don't want to give up your body to save your sister anymore?
Well, when she needs a kidney transplant, you could sue your parents for the medical rights to your body and find a lawyer willing to take on the case pro bono.
Picoult, as usual, tackles a controversial idea in her "My Sister's Keeper," and she does it well. She dances around any political statement about whether it was right for Brian and Sara to conceive Anna to use her to help Kate, about whether Anna is obligated to give up a part of her body to save her sister. Whether it was right isn't what's important — it's how what is happening now has affected the family.
Picoult focuses on the character development by using flashbacks to specific situations that have made the characters who they are at present time. Of course Jesse is going to act out — after Anna was born and Kate was still sick, he lost his role in the family. Of course Sara is going to side with Kate — there is no relationship that is stronger than between a mother and her child, especially when that child needs help. Of course Anna feels like she's not part of the family — her parents pay the most attention to her when they need her to help Kate.
The only problem with the character development, as usual in Picoult's novels, is the side story distracts from the main story. What a coincidence that the lawyer and guardian ad litem had a previous relationship that has affected the way they treat each other now. And hearing about their past was boring. I was eager to get back to Anna and Kate. But as always, the side stories tie into the end of the main story and make reading them worth it.
I also wanted to hear more from Kate's point of view, but Picoult's reason for not telling the story from Kate's perspective was probably because Kate has never had her own voice throughout her life. We hear the most about Kate and how she has dealt with things through her mother because Sara's life has been taken over by taking care of Kate. Choosing to do this shows Picoult's strength as a story teller — she knows her characters so well that she knows who needs to tell which parts of the story to portray it most clearly to the audience.
And once you get to the end of the story, you know what is going to happen, and it ends in the only way that is right for such a story to end.
I don't know how she does it, but each time I read Picoult, I am amazed at the beauty with which all of the elements come together — the plot, the characters, the events, the language. And "My Sister's Keeper" is no exception, and perhaps one of her best.
And one of the best characters in this book is Campbell, the big shot lawyer who volunteers to help Anna's case. Campbell has a service dog, and the reason for his service changes with each time someone asks him why he has the dog:
I think about coming clean, for once, for the first time. But then again, you have to be able to laugh at yourself, don't you? "I'm a lawyer," I say, and I grin at her. "He chases ambulances for me." (408)
And Campbell's admittance of being able to laugh at yourself, to smile at what you have, is a reminder for all of us when we get to the end of the story, that we can smile at what we have.
And this admittance comes in full circle to Anna's admittance on the first page of the book:
When I was little, the great mystery to me wasn't how babies were made, but why.
Anna's story shows us that maybe the reason we're all here is to make life better for others — whether that means making crappy lawyer jokes or giving parts of your body to your sister in hopes that she will continue breathing for one more day.
"The Devil Wears Prada"
Lauren Weisberger
Broadway Books, $13.95
We all think we have the worst job in the world.
But we have never worked as an assistant to Miranda Priestly — the job a million girls would die for.
Andrea Sachs is Lauren Weisberger's character who is fulfilling the role as the devil's assistant — just until she puts in her year and is able to move onto something better. She puts up with the nonstop coffee runs, 16-hour work days, laundry pickup and dropoff and more on a daily basis because she has her eye on what could be ahead for her. She aspires to be a writer at The New Yorker, and working for the editor of Runway — only THE magazine in the fashion world — is a great start. Especially because it's the job a million girls would die for.
So she keeps telling herself.
But through her year of servitude, Andrea loses herself. The relationships with her parents, best friend and boyfriend strain. She loses sleep. She loses her own life, independent of Miranda and work.
But she never loses her ambition to try for something better.
Weisberger creates a dreadful character that anyone would hate — Miranda is quite devilish. She is the foil to Andrea, the recent college grad with plans to change the world and be successful and happy in her life. She says again and again, if she can get through this one year of working the job a million girls would die for, she will have a good start to her career and a leg up to all other recent grads struggling to be writers.
Andrea becomes a hero, someone the reader can see in herself, someone she aspires to be. You pity her. You want her to quit her job. You want her to realize that maybe it's just not worth it.
Weisberger cleverly gets the reader to thinking this through the way she has crafted her story. Each chapter is a new story, a new drama brought on by Miranda, and through telling the stories, Andrea brings up past incidents with the so-called Devil, with wearing the wrong clothes, with saying the wrong words, with eating the wrong food. Throughout the book, Weisberger doesn't flat out say that the reader should hate Miranda and the position Andrea is in, but the reader gradually grows to feel the stress on Andrea, the hatred she has for her job, for her boss, for her life and the direction it has taken.
The climax of the book slows down. Although I got to watch Andrea mature and learn to stand on her own two feet, I was hoping for something more. She improves, she moves on in her life and she gets some revenge on the hell that was her job a million girls would die for. But for getting so involved in the plot, becoming Andrea's cheerleader and imagining ways her life could pan out, I was disappointed in the way the book ended. It fizzled, and I expected sparks. But Andrea's story was inspirational, and just because the final three chapters of the book did not contain as much drama as the first 16 doesn't mean the book got bad.
The novel is somewhat girly and fashionistic. But underneath the Prada exterior, there is a real story that anyone who is frustrated with her life, her job — anyone who wants to just stick it out for a little longer until she can move onto something better — can relate to.
Weisberger's strong, motivated Andrea helps show the ugliness of the pretty, the poor side of fashion, the strength you can find when you think have fallen to your weakest.
