Once more into the breach...

I should not be surprised that Ellen Hopkins was disinvited from a teen youth lit festival in Texas and yet I am stunned to see a librarian was involved in this mess. Leila has a roundup of links from Ellen and several others who have since pulled out in disgust over the matter, so she is the place to start in case you aren't up on it. Tera Lynn Childs also has a longer piece up at RT Book Reviews on why she chose to pull out.

All we can do is let the world know about this mess, support the authors in their hour of need, mouth off big time about the librarian and superintendent involved (how could a librarian of all people support dumping an acclaimed author from a literary event? Who the heck is this person???) and yet again, stand up, brush ourselves off, and say we are mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

It never gets easier does it? Being on the side of the side of the angels just never gets easier.

(And yes, I do think speaking the truth - especially the ugly brutal truth so often in Ellen's books - is the side of the angels. If you don't like her novels then simply do not buy them. That's all you have to do.)

Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco

The "Middle Eastern conflict" is really a series of conflicts that have been waxing and waning since 1947. People wanting to understand it can quickly get lost amid endless lists of politicians and combatants, military operations, and shifting international alliances.

In Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco tries to focus on a single incident: in November, 1956, Israeli soldiers entered the Gaza Strip town of Rafah, searching door-to-door for weapons and militants. By nightfall, 111 Palestinians lay dead in the streets and school yard. Sacco's previous graphic novels include Safe Area Gorazde, about the Bosnian War, and Palestine. He's been called the first comic book journalist, and his detailed black-and-white illustrations keep the his story from getting lost in lists of politicians and combatants, military operations, and shifting alliances. Instead, the images of cramped Gaza Strip slums, bulldozed houses, and the frightened and weary faces of Sacco's friends and interview subjects keep the human cost of the conflict in sharp focus.

Sophomore Undercover by Ben Esch

So the caveats to this review are that I know Ben; he’s decamped from his town in the gold rush foothills of California here to the City of Angels, where he’s become one of the LAYAs -- that group of us who write YA from our Pacific Rim perches, and occasionally gather at bookfair booths or local bars, to bemoan the long strange transition of Publishing into Something Else, in a century full of long strange transitions.

I also know the area -- the hometown -- he writes about, in disguised fashion, in his freshman effort, “Sophomore Undercover.” I didn’t know, exactly, which town, until he copped to it; I suspected some place a little more due west, though I had the general “central California” part mostly figured out.

Which means, before I ever read the book, I already had opinions formed about Ben (funny guy, quick with an observation, and good company in a green room), and the neck of the woods (hills?) where the book is set.

Which also means, this is scarcely an unbiased review -- but then, really, are they ever?

“Sophomore Undercover” tells the tale of Dixie Nguyen, the 15 year-old adopted Vietnamese son of a local cop and his family, who, in the Roman-a-clef town of “Stilton,” California, comes across what he thinks is a meth/crank -pushing scheme among the hated school jocks, who are responsible for the routinely recurring humiliation Dixie endures.

Doug TenNapel, Revisited.

Doug TenNapel’s new graphic novel, Ghostopolis, inspired me to re-read some of his older titles. While he is probably best known as a creator of the Earthworm Jim character for video games, here are my favorite graphic novels from this author.
Creature Tech has always been my favorite of TenNapel’s. With a background in theology 19-year old Michael Ong turns to science, wins a Nobel Prize and is then contacted by the U.S. government. Michael is forced to return to Turlock, California to run the Research Technical Institute, otherwise known as Creature Tech.

Back in his home town, he is going through a rebellious stage making him clash with his preacher father. Every day Michael deals with government secrets and strange creatures. When an evil doctor is resurrected by the Shroud of Turin, Michael has to stop him from destroying the world. Of course the most important aspect of Creature Tech is that there are lots of monsters and a humongous space eel.

Iron West is a steam-punk take on an outlaw who is deputized in an emergency. In California in 1898, some prospectors accidentally awaken some deadly metal robots. Preston Struck always looks out for himself, but a near death experience and his alliance with a mysterious shaman and Bigfoot begins to alter his path.

Doug TenNapel's Gear is fairly bizarre but follows the author's heavy use of monsters and robots. The art style with its vibrant colors strikes a different tone than in many of his other graphic novels. Amid the manic energy of a book about war, cats, theology and the afterlife, is a deeper story about choices and consequences. this is a good one to go through multiple times because it is a quick read, yet I find more to think about each with each reading.

TenNapel's catalog of graphic novels is among the best our there right now. They are all exciting, with great action and humor, yet TenNapel injects themes of redemption and courage to make you think.

Fans of Kazu Kibuishi's graphic novels, especially Daisy Kutter, will enjoy these works by Doug TenNapel.

Unrealistically, My Most Excellent Year

¶ My Most Excellent Year is a novel of love, Mary Poppins & Fenway Park by Steve Kluger.

My Most Excellent Year is a novel about three high schoolers stumbling their way through relationships, family, school, and working their way toward whoever they’re bound to become. Being teenagers, essentially. TC is from Boston, lives baseball, loves Alé, is Augie’s best friend. Augie is gay, is Chinese, breathes theatre, knows how to keep everything around him on track. Alé is the daughter of a former diplomat, is new, is smart, has a secret passion for performance. They’re in search of their happiness, and discover it in pursuing making happiness happen for others.

The Damage Done

Every once in a while, I feel like I should review some fiction. Not very often -- I prefer nonfiction, and get discouraged by all the fiction reviews I see. But I found a novel by Walter Dean Myers this month. I enjoy both his nonfiction and his fiction. Sunrise Over Fallujah is about the invasion of Iraq. More precisely, about conditions soon after the invasion. And as General Sherman warned us, war is hell.

So I'm glad Myers doesn't try to glorify the conflict:

"You bombed my village," the old man, his head down, replied slowly in English. "First you shoot into my house, then you come to the door."

"Where you learn to speak English?" Jonesy asked.

"I drove a cab in London for twelve years," answered the old man. "When I had enough money to buy a house for my family, I came back to my country."

"You're going to be all right," Jonesy said. "We don't hurt our prisoners."

Future, Tense

In 1975 it was clear to me as a teen reader that the future was not going to look like what was promised back in the 1950s.  Even now, sixty years after those flights of architectural and aeronautical fancy first filled post-war imaginations, we are nowhere near living on other planets, getting around by flying car, or residing in floating Fuller Dome cities in the oceans. I think the reason for this failure of vision was that technology was viewed as means to an end product for consumers – Look at all the nifty futuristic things we can own!  Even robots were seen as servants to our lifestyle, not as artificial intelligence that would further mankind's thinking.

Skip ahead now to the mid-1980s.  Images in popular culture of our future no longer seem so rosy.  There is a world on our horizon filled with people using technology to augment their dreary reality, as a means to escapism.  Some rent themselves out as living memory caches, others jack themselves in to muck around inside the digital Matrix for a heist, and there are the corporate raiders who intricately deal and double-deal genetic designers in elaborate cat-and-mouse games.  Its a world where hackers fly to NYC to buy stolen Russian microprocessors, then to Hong Kong and back to fence their wire transfers to Zurich, then back to LA to bring down a Mob-run empire with the ease we know today of flying daily commuter routes and surfing the internet on our cell phones.  This is the world of William Gibson's collection of stories, Burning Chrome.

I came back to this collection, which has remained in print since it's original release back in 1986, just to see how well it would hold up for teen readers today.  Would mention of the Matrix elicit smirks from teens who first heard that term uttered from the mouth of Keanu Reeves?  My fear was that the writing would feel as dated as sci-fi movie effects looked back then, pre-digital, when obvious cutaways between a latex head and the wooden acting of Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't quite mesh in The Terminator.  Happily (though I shouldn't have been surprised) Burning Chrome remains both solid in its cyberpunk visions and as an introduction the work of William Gibson.

Metamorphosis: Junior Year by Betsy Franco

There better be some god of journals and blogs who cares about what I'm saying, or I'm screwed.

Thus starts Metamorphosis: Junior Year, the story of a high school junior named Ovid, whose sister got hooked on meth and ran away, leaving him home alone with his hovering parents. Ovid is an artist and a poet, so occasionally there are poems (by Betsy Franco, like the rest of the text) and drawings (by her son, Tom Franco - and yes, he's one of James Franco's brothers).

Ovid spends a lot of time talking about his friends in high school, all of whom are in situations that are very much like those faced by actual teens - a girl with an eating disorder, another who shoplifts and might be bisexual, another who prefers to hang out online and can't really deal with an in-person relationship; a guy who totally loved his girlfriend and was messed up when she dumped him; another who cuts himself. There are others, too, with different problems.

Ovid talks about his parents, too - how they are trying so hard to get everything "right" with him so that he won't turn out like his sister that he's going mental. He talks about his sister, too - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and about his artwork.

The First Boundary: Books that Make You Want to Read More Books!

A lot of guys grow up thinking books are not for them, that they shouldn’t be lost in their own imaginations with the printed page lighting the way. But if you get the right book, at the right time, you see such bias for what it is: an illusion that might deny you some of the best adventures you’ll enjoy.

Outside of comic books, I wasn’t a big reader, but a few books completely blew the lid off the illusion that reading was lame.

The first was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. While I loved Star Wars and Star Trek, this was a different kind of cosmic adventure. The story was big. Really big. End of civilization as we know it BIG. And through a series of linked stories that tied together an adventure to save the universe over thousands of years, Asimov painted an epic story of smarts against vice and decay, all using a cosmic background. I’ve never been moved by any other Asimov stories, but as a young man, snowed-in and sick, the adventures of Hari Seldon and the mighty villain known as the Mule blew apart the lie I’d believed: that books couldn’t be wicked fun and smart at the same time.

Dark, Dystopian, and Damn Good: Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

When I first read The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first volume of the Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness, I was absorbed. I was horrified. I was swept right along. And then I was MAD. Because it ended at possibly the most intense and stressful moment of the story. If you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. I cursed Mr. Ness roundly and then went about my life until such time as one of my fellow GLW contributors sent me a review copy of the second book. Oh, I was thrilled, just as I was thrilled when I got the privilege of reading an advance copy of the last volume recently.

And what can I say? This is one of the most striking series I've read in quite a while, period. It's raw and honest—because, of course, each of the male characters has his "noise," making his thoughts audible to everyone within range. But this series isn't just about what happens when everyone around you can hear what's running through your mind. It's also about deception, and how deep the roots of deception can go. It's about devotion, and how love can be powerful enough to fight back hatred and greed. And it's about redemption, asking the question of how far you can go before you are irredeemable.