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.