High School Drama: Sarah Dessen

Sarah Dessen is familiar name around YA lit circles. With nine novels to her name and a solid fan base, Dessen's books continue to appeal to a wide range of teen readers, mostly girls I would assume. I read her novel Someone Like You, and I'll admit I remain slightly ambivalent about it. The plot moves fluidly and the characters are engaging, keeping the reader interested and invested in the outcome. But it was too much the typical teen problem novel, with the high school drama, the mother-daughter conflict, teenage pregnancy, and bad-boy boyfriend who is only trying to get in the nice girl's pants. Typical. Don't get me wrong, her teen characters, Halley and Scarlet were excellently and realistically portrayed and the growth of the two as they struggle to support one another and take charge of their own lives is authentic without falling into mere cliche. Both were portrayed as strong young women but Halley's conflict with her mother flirts with moralizing. Fortunately, even though the mother is right about some things, Halley proves herself quite capable of choosing the best decisions for herself, and she does so on her own accord, proving to her mother and to herself that she is no longer a child.

My complaint, and it is completely biased, is that it is too much like a written version of The O.C., or to be old school, Seventh Heaven. We're flooded with that on T.V. I really have no desire to spend my reading time being drown in more of the same. Still, I can understand why teenage girls would enjoy these novels, and to be fair I haven't given Dessen the chance she deserves. I have heard great things about Dreamland and reviewers usually praise her writing. According to friends who have read other novels by her, she generally sets her novels high school. This is most likely part of the reason I'm overly harsh on her. I'm old now, I've done the whole high school thing and to be honest, we never had as much drama as the characters in Someone Like You. But I won't write her off until I've read more of her novels and am better informed. If you want to get a taste of her as an author, check out her blog at http://writergrl.livejournal.com/ (it is pretty great!) or her books at http://www.sarahdessen.com/books.

Surviving the Labyrinth: Looking for Alaska

So I finished reading John Green's Looking for Alaska and I have decided it is great. The book is told from the perspective of Miles who enters his first year at Culver Creek boarding school. At the beginning of the novel, Miles is perhaps the most boring and uninteresting narrator ever. Coming from a school where he had zero friends, he is quickly befriended by the Colonel, Takumi, and the beautiful but wild Alaska. The three form an eclectic and, for the administration, often troublesome group that you can't help but like. When the group is faced with an unexpected death, everything changes and those left behind must struggle to make sense of their loss.

This novel presents an engaging story and it does so with literary merit. It is beautifully crafted and will make you laugh as well as cry. Early in the novel, Alaska asks the question, "How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?" and this becomes the overarching theme of the novel. Green engages the darkness or the labyrinth. Alaska was haunted by the darkness of her mother's death and her own feelings of guilt, pain, and shame. Instead of dealing with her past, she runs from it in the most self-destructive ways possible. She is incapable of accepting and making peace with what happened, but the fact is, it happened and it is not going to go away. Miles, in the end, recognizes this. He felt the darkness also, of his own failure and guilt and pain but instead of running from it, he eventually acknowledges what happened and that he is not wholly to blame. He goes through the pain and darkness and finds forgiveness. It is a fact of life that bad things will happen, you will make bad decisions, it is part of life, of growing up. You can't outrun the darkness, and to attempt to do so will only lead to self-destruction and suffering. You have to engage the labyrinth, the darkness. You have to forgive. Miles will still deal with the intense pain, but he doesn't drown in the suffering, and there is a big difference between the two. In the end, he realizes that you can't just pretend the labyrinth does not exist and you can't flee from it. You have to recognize its existence and live within it and it is no longer merely a labyrinth of suffering that we are trapped in but becomes a complex world full of possibilities.

This book portrayed the chaos of unexpected death and the corresponding feelings of guilt and pain well without crossing the line into the melodramatic. Eventually Miles finds his answer and it is the truthful one: sometimes there is not an answer. Life is not a math equation, one must live with uncertainty. It's something everyone can relate to.

A Sampling of the Classics: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

For a recent assignment, we were asked to read a "classic" YA novel. Now, you may be wondering what it means to be a classic. Sadly, I do not have a satisfactory answer for that question. As far as I'm aware, what makes a book a classic is its enduring popularity and literary merit. I chose to read Are You There God? It's Me Margaret by Judy Blume partly because I had never read her, partly because I had just read Chelsea Handler's Are You There Vodka? It's Me Chelsea and so the title caught my eye. In case your wondering the two do not have much in common but they can both be read in about two hours so feel free to make your own judgments. Basically, the novel is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Margaret and focuses on her arrival at puberty, her uncertainty towards religion, and her problems with friends as she tries to assert herself as an individual and as a member of her friend group.

This novel is definitely geared towards young, pre-pubescent girls. As a "classic" this book is significant because Blume was the first ever to address menstruation and its importance for young girls. Blume has had immense influence on YA authors and continues to be adored in the YA circle and its easy to see why. Her protagonist was authentic and she engaged issues that had in the past been ignored but which have a big impact on young girls. I found parts of it dated but that's inevitable for a book written over twenty years ago. One of the best aspects for me was her ambivalence towards religion, which is possibly even more relevant today given our increasingly pluralistic society. Would I recommend this novel? Only to young girls. And even then, you have to know a person to recommend a novel to them. I for one would not have liked this book as a young girl. I would have found it boring, but then I was always more of an action/adventure/fantasy/pirate/knight/anything exciting fan. Still, the writing is fluid and the characters believable. Plus, Blume is a huge name in YA lit so perhaps I just need to read something else by her.

Prison of Silence: Speak

I just finished reading Laurie Halse Anderson's novel Speak. Verdict: Definitely worth the time....and the honor Printz award it won back in 2000. Melinda Sordino enters freshman year at Merryweather High an outcast, blacklisted by old friends for calling the cops to break up a party. Rather than speak about what happened, Melinda opts for silence, to the dissatisfaction of teachers and her parents. As Mel struggles to survive in an environment where she is labeled with a bad reputation, the reader is left wondering if the truth will ever come out.

Speak authentically engages this theme of silence. Mel is incapable of talking about what happened. Her words have been taken from her and so she retreats into herself, drawing farther away from anyone who threatens that silence. She lives in constant fear and pain. And nobody has any idea. She is entirely alone. Her parents aren't involved enough to bother trying to reach out to her and her friends all hate her. All she has is an art class she stumbles into and a kindly art teacher who can see her brokenness and her need to express it through art. In art, she finds a way to channel her emotion, to begin to sort through the chaos within. It keeps her sane, if only barely. As the novel progresses, one is forced to wonder, will the girl break the silence or will the silence swallow the girl?

By the end of the novel, Melinda is a good friend that one can't help but root for. The internal struggle with herself and the outward struggles with teachers, friends, and family are excellently and realistically portrayed making it impossible not to empathize. In the end, it is an intriguing, desperate read that sucks you in and keeps you reading when you should be doing other things.

What is YA lit?

A very good question, one I found myself asking after enrolloing in a class entitled "Adolescents in American Literature," only to discover that we would not be focusing on works featuring an adolescent as a main character as I had thought. We would in fact be reading YA--or young adult--literature. "What the hell is YA lit?" I asked myself, trying to recall if I had read the course description, remembering that I have never read a course description so I most certainly had not, and silently cursing my lack of preparedness in my all-important college education. As I sat there trying to decide whether I was going to drop the class and pick up another, I could not help but become interested as our professor began to speak about YA lit. Apparently it is its own genre. Who knew? I have spent ample time in bookstores and libraries in my day so I was aware that the teen books were shelved in their own area, seperated from Fiction, but I had no idea that YA literature was its own market, with its own somewhat hazy perameters, written specifically for 12-18 year olds. The more I heard about it, the more interested I became. I have always been an avid reader and I remember fondly my teenage years trying to find books that I liked but which were not sappy romances or soap operas in dust jackets. No one informed me about YA lit back then. We were too busy being drowned in Shakespeare and Jane Austen--no disrespect intended, I happen to enjoy the greats also--during the school year and largely ignored over the summer, except of course the one summer reading book chosen and demanded by the administration. It is to these days that I ascribe part of the blame for the lack of interest in reading that is characteristic of most of my friends. No one wants to read something that does not interest them, no matter what its literary merit. YA lit attempts to counter this unfortunate side effect of English classes by offering complex, literary novels geared towards teens. It is not merely your overdone "problem novel" or a moralizing story devised to keep teens out of trouble. These books address all different sorts of situations and struggles in a realistic and truthful way. Instead of pretending the darkness or confusion or ambiguity doesn't exist, these novels engage reality from the perspective of a teen. What makes YA lit different from other literature? According to resident expert Patty Campbell YA books "must have a teen protagonist speaking from an adolescent point of view, with all the limitations of understandings this implies." YA lit enages questions of identity--who am I?--so often the central action is internal, in the psyche of the teen. With anual awards now given specifically to YA literature written for teens, the quality of these novels is beginning to be recongized as authors take literary risks. Just in the past few weeks I have read enough to realize that YA lit is no joke, its quality writing. While I am no longer a young adult, technically speaking, I still appreciate good literature and a good story. And this is exactly what good YA literature offers us.