Blood, Peter, and Annie Patterson. Rise Up Singing: The Group Singing Song Book

Contains the "words, chords, and sources to 1200 songs," grouped loosely by themes such as "America," "Hard Times & Blues," and "Women." Sources are everything from very traditional music to sixties protest songs to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Broadway musicals.

It's a very useful book if you have just enough interest in folk music. If you have more than just enough, then you'll want something more authoritative, maybe with melody lines included, certainly with more detail and sourcing; aside from that, you have to be impressed at a book that includes everything from "Beans in my Ears" to "All Clear in Harrisburg" to "Taft-Hartley" to "My Mom's a Feminist."

Many of the songs (if you couldn't tell from the titles) do feel a little dated in our ironic generation, and the book will be much more valuable if you think of yourself as a hippie, at least a little bit. But for every song I snickered at under my breath, I found one to say "Oh, that song! Yay!"

Patron, Susan. The Higher Power of Lucky

Lucky lives in the tiny desert town of Hard Pan, California, where she is being raised by her guardian Brigitte--her father's French first wife--after the death by electrocution of her mother. For fun, she listens in on 12-step meetings. When she thinks she finds evidence that Brigitte is abandoning her to return to France, she decides to run away.

There was something that made me nervous about the famous offending passage--not any of the words in it, but a certain tone of "Oh, isn't it adorable when small children don't know things." But, contextualized in the story, contextualized in terms of Lucky's love of science (she has a dog named H.M.S. Beagle!) and curiosity about the world around her, it makes perfect sense and doesn't feel cute or cloying, and I am relieved at the end when Lucky does find out what a scrotum is. There are various moments of adorableness, and moments of surprising tenderness. Astonishingly, the "Oh no! Based on too little evidence I will decide I am unloved!" plot, which I'd usually find unworthy of a Saturday-morning cartoon, makes perfect sense, and there's some subtle symbolism that I think works very well-- though I'll note that others found it distinctly unsubtle.

Also? Brigitte talks like a French person talks. This is not a small achievement.

"Then I drive and drive and drive"--Brigitte air-drove a car, her hands gripping a pretend steering wheel--"until there is no more people, only desert, a lot of desert! I am a little frightened because there is too much space everywhere, and I almost drive into a cow and her little veal..."

I don't know if it really is the year's most distinguished contribution to children's literature. But it very nearly sank without being noticed by hardly anyone, and I'm very glad that it got rescued from that fate. Even if we all never want to hear the word "scrotum" ever again.

Lord, Cynthia. Rules

Her best friend Melissa leaves for California for the summer, but Catherine has two new friends: the new girl next door, who is richer and pretty and one of those girls who you know is going to be popular, and Jason, a mute boy in a wheelchair she meets in the waiting room at her autistic brother's occupational therapy. He communicates by pointing at word cards in a book; Catherine decides he needs some new ones, like "awesome" and "whatever" and "stinks a big one." And so a friendship is born.

I started reading this because I never go to eat lunch by myself without a book, and I had a craving for a good sandwich. I finished half of it at lunch, then thought, "Okay, I guess I should get on with the rest of my day," then went out to the parking lot, thought I would read just to the end of the chapter, and finished the whole thing. It is very rare for realistic fiction to hit me with that much sheer unputdownableness, and I think it's all in the pacing--little scenes, meticulously detailed, with a lot of subtext, rather than the perfunctory summary scenes you often see in juvenile fiction to keep the page count down.

Catherine doesn't learn that Disabled People Are People Too, or anything as perfunctory as that... shes knows the obvious lessons, because she's been dealing with her brother for years. She's much more clueful than Jason's speech therapists, who insists on treating him like he's both deaf and stupid, when he's merely mute. She knows what she should do, and can't always find the strength to do it. She's trying to deal. And when I think on that for a while, it strikes me that the book is very carefully crafted around the idea of the gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it, in the list of "rules" that Catherine keeps explaining to her brother David.

But you won't necessarily notice that the first time you read it. You'll just notice that it's good.

Happy Poetry Friday!

Over here we are frying bigger censorship-fish, and the whole Newbery thing just strikes me as more and more silly, but I do have to link to a contest for the best use of "scrotum" in a limerick or other poem.

Quoth Rosefox: (I just love love love higgledy-piggledies, as a poetry form.*)

Dingly-dangly
Newbery Medalists
Love to say "scrotum"
Which some find uncouth.

I say the libraries'
Antitesticular
Stance hides a little too
Much from our youth.

Horror writer C.M. Priest:

Oh you can't read aloud about scrotums
that word's too uncouth, so demote 'em
to balls, nuts, or nads
or just call them "the lads"
but anatomy textbooks? Don't quote 'em.

Marissa Lingen, with the inevitable William Carlos Williams parody:

This is just for the snake to say--
I have bitten
the scrotum
that was on
your dog

And which
he was probably
hoping
I wouldn't.

Forgive me
it was so delicious
so salty
and somewhat cooler than the ambient body temperature.

*More properly known as a double dactyl; more here. Why do I love them so? I think it's the minuet-like rhythm, which gives them an airy, elegant-yet-silly feeling.

Hartnett, Sonya. Surrender

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

In small-town Australia, Anwell chafes under the abuse and domination of his repressive parents. He meets a wild boy, Finnigan, as outcast as he himself is, and they forge a pact that holds them together through secrets, arson, and murder.

It's very hard to write a novel where the big twist is that the villain is the hero's father. Or where it turns out that the protagonist has been dead all along. If you are expecting a lot of big emotional payoff from your twist ending, you had better not use a twist ending that has also been used by a movie with, if not massive popularity, at least a whole lot of cult appeal. Fifty pages into the book, I was pretty sure about at least part of what was going on. This in itself wasn't necessarily such a bad thing, but it made the book's coyness, its reluctance to tell you anything straight-on, stand out all the more.


There's a lot of good in this book, and it works both as psychological character study and as a thriller. There's some beautiful writing; and then there are some passages that made me snicker a little with the purpleness of their prose, and there were some passages that were just plain frustrating. It's not impossible for a good novel to be so thoroughly confusing about What Really Happened, but it's a very hard thing, and I don't think it works here, even if it is the point.

If it seems like I'm reading less than usual-- I've set myself a goal of two books per week, and any extra time that I have is to be used for other pursuits, like foreign-language reading, which I've been neglecting.

I need to update the blogroll, but in the meantime, Orange Swan (a thoughtful contributor to a community website I lurk on) has set herself to reviewing all the Newbery medalists. Well worth a look.

Holm, Jennifer. Penny From Heaven

Penny has a widowed mother, an elderly, incontinent poodle, and a ton of relatives on her Italian-American father's side--uncles, aunts, her grandmother Nonny, her cousin Frankie.

This is a quiet coming-of-age story taking place over the course of one summer in 1953, except for the darkness seeping up under it, the story of the death of Penny's father and the anti-Italian sentiment during World War II.

I liked Holm's Our Only May Amelia a lot, but I think Penny From Heaven really impressed upon me just what a good writer Holm is. Like May Amelia, you go on, and there's a vignette that's funny or revealing or a little sad, and you go on that way for most of the book, and then-- all of a sudden, something awful happens, and it's astonishing how hard it hits you. A lot of authors will bring in the literary equivalent of violin music, and you'll be able to see the sad stuff coming from a mile away. With Holm's books, there's a lot more verisimilitude; the bad things aren't endlessly foreshadowed, they hit you out of the blue (although not so much out of the blue as to be completely random).

It's a great evocation of the 1950s, though a little too educational for my tastes, but the concerns are essentially timeless, and it's a really touching book

Spinelli, Jerry. Wringer

In a small town, the upkeep of the local park is funded in large part by an annual pigeon shoot in which five thousand of the birds are captured, released, and killed; the town's ten-year-old boys are "wringers" who collect the dead birds and wring the necks of the ones that are merely wounded.

Palmer is torn between being a gentle, sensitive soul and needing to feel accepted by the local bullies, who are just the youngest parts of a culture of machismo that seems to permeate the town; not just the pigeon shoot, but a certain callousness towards all human feeling, and a persistent belief in the idea that you need to Be A Man, which means enduring pain and showing no emotion.

Some lovely writing and a biting indictment of the patriarchy are not enough to make up for a plot built entirely on contrivances. The worst--spoiler alert, sorry-- is when Palmer's friend Dorothy just happens to release Palmer's beloved pet pigeon in exactly the spot where the pigeons are rounded up for the pigeon hunt. It's dumb, it's contrived, and it doesn't help that the rest of the book feels just as contrived--every bit of the plot pushed around just so in order to get things the way they're supposed to be.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go

One of the things that gets on my nerves is literary writers tackling science fictional topics and then being all, "Oh, no, THIS isn't science fiction, this is actually good!" and all the critics go, "Oh, no, THIS isn't science fiction, this is actually good!" And while it may be good as a novel, it's retreading ground that many science fiction novels have covered with more originality and thoughtfulness. And so I had my doubts about this one.

It doesn't take place in the future, but in an alternate England where cloning was developed shortly after world war two, and clones are grown to become organ donors when they reach adulthood, after a period of becoming carers to current organ donors.

But it must be said that this isn't really a morality play about cloning; it's not about cloning at all except for four or five pages towards the end. It's about the friendship between Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, who grow up together on Hailsham, an elite school for clones. And how they try to figure out their place in the world, without ever struggling against it at all.

I think this is perhaps the ultimate novel of Resigning Oneself To Things. Ishiguro said in an interview that part of the point of the book is that we invest the concepts of art and love with all this redemptive power, and perhaps they do have some, but they can't do everything, and often they can't do much of anything at all. Which is all kind of hideously depressing, though in a much more quieter and more subtle way than many hideously depressing YA books.

What I really admired about the book is its attention to atmosphere, not just on the part of the author but on the part of the narrator as well, how Kathy is always aware of the atmosphere within a group, or between two people, and acutely conscious of what she can't or shouldn't or must say or do (which is not to say that she always acts as she should). It perfectly reflects the way she lives in a world where her very existence is almost a taboo subject.

But I must admit that I'm mystified at those critics who labeled it a tight, suspenseful, page-turner, because: no. Just no. Good in all sorts of other ways, but no.

Cushman, Karen. The Midwife's Apprentice

In medieval England, a homeless, hungry, itinerant girl is rescued by the town's sharp, uncaring midwife, and becomes her apprentice.

This was a bit of a slow starter for me. I've had more than enough experience of medieval fantasy novels and renaissance fairs, so to me, the evocation of medieval life was good but not enough to rise above the paint-by-numbers plot and the oh-poor-me of the beginning; and I felt like the historical information consisted of too much stringing nouns and facts together, and too little vivid grounding detail. I also felt like the characterizations, especially of the midwife, were kind of shallow at best and wildly inconsistent at worst.

And yet it sort of grew on me towards the end. I liked seeing how Alyce got over the whole poor-me thing and started to grow into her own person, and I thought that even if the characterization wasn't great, the author was unusually willing to populate her cast with people who are not nice and good but who are what they are--they're not people to escape from or be rescued from, but people you have to live with. Which is somewhat grim, but also refreshing.

Koja, Kathe. Going Under

Hilly and Ivan are homeschooled siblings. Hilly joins the literary magazine at the local public school, and makes a few friends, stepping out of the shell of her nuclear family for the first time; when one of those friends commits suicide, she is plunged into grief. The book opens two months later, as Ivan takes over from his parents in trying to help Hilly; Ivan, who is narcissistic, controlling, emotionally stunted.

Koja's background as a horror writer shows. This isn't the kind of book that has gore in it, or anything supernatural, but it feels like a psychological thriller, and really quite a chilling one. It makes me go eeeeeek. It's written in alternating chapters from each sibling's point of view, and the point of view goes deep, so that you're immersed in the viewpoint of someone who's clearly not in a working relationship with reality.

This would've been a fantastic book if it had followed through on that a little better. I didn't think it followed through well enough. Or it breaks off too soon. Or we never know enough about Ivan to put the ending in enough context. As it was, the ending was too happy for me to really believe given what had come before.

But still, I think it's a very notable book for the way it depicts a relationship that is dangerously close, dangerously involved, and almost immune to the outside world.

Levithan, David. Wide Awake

Sometime in the future, I'm guessing in the neighborhood of 2050, the first gay Jewish President has been elected. But the election is being challenged. So Duncan and his boyfriend Jimmy and a bunch of their friends from the campaign go down to Kansas to protest.

I know I'm easily annoyed, and yet I'm shocked that David Levithan managed to write a book that got up my nose like this one did. But the thing about ideological fiction is that you get to say whatever you want to about your opponents. You get to make them up. You don't have to consider them with kindness and charity and the benefit of the doubt. And Levithan doesn't. The people on the other side are just... eeeeeevil. And the way that religion is portrayed, it really comes across as, "If you really believed what you say you believe, you wouldn't act that way." Which, to my mind, is honestly just as much emotionally abusive BS as it is when it's coming from the people who aren't on my side.

And the thing is, I am so so so on Levithan's side when it comes to politics. But it's rank hypocrisy to go on about tolerance and love and kindness towards your enemies, when the book is that uncharitable, that unwilling to understand people or give them the benefit of the doubt.

Once you get past the political stuff, Levithan's still an excellent writer, earnest and hopeful, with utopic and quirky ideas like non-shopping at the non-shopping mall, and a sharp sense of the stupid things that people do to mess up their lives. But being angry about the 2000 elections is not enough to write a good novel.

I sort of feel like Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons. "This Young Adult novel lacks sufficient nuance!" But what I loved most about Boy Meets Boy was its endless supply of goodwill and complete absence of even a hint of mean-spiritedness. To see that missing is a bit sad.

Lyga, Barry. The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl

Everybody hates Fanboy. Fanboy hates everybody. Fanboy's going to go eat worms or something. He meets a goth girl who holds the world in contempt just like he does. This does not improve matters.

This is one of those books that rubbed me so much the wrong way that I can't even pretend to be objective about it. I don't have much patience for protagonists who, given the hell that is middle school and high school, can't take that and go anywhere beyond contempt. It brings to mind two much better books, Speak and Boy Proof (especially the latter, which is so much about geek culture and fan culture). Both have protagonists who are depressed, morose, and largely contemptuous of the world. Victoria in Boy Proof has a lot of problems that are almost entirely her own fault. And yet she's sympathetic, likable even in her unlikability. Fanboy? Not so much. I waited and waited for him to do one single thing that would make me feel something beyond pity for him--and kept waiting.

Which makes the ending pretty cheap. It could have been cheaper. In fact, it was not nearly as cheap as I was expecting! But that is pretty cold comfort. The kind of 'standing up for himself' that Fanboy discovers, that Goth Girl advocates, is nothing real. It's not subverting anything; it's just another way of the strong bullying the weak, and if the strong occasionally get to change places with the weak, that doesn't change anything.

And Kyra--Goth Girl--she is... not a real girl. She is Psychotic Girl. She hardly has her own personality and motivations except to play into Fanboy's psychodrama. Admittedly, not in the cheapest and most obvious ways, but still. She is inexplicable except as a somewhat more hard-core standard for the standard-issue Crazy Whimsical Girl (e.g. Trillian in Hitchhiker's Guide).

I'm almost willing to put my dislike for this book down to personal baggage, and maybe it is. You can just feel free to disregard this review altogether. But Boy Proof was much in the same vein, and I thought it was fantastic.