A Middle Grade Book For Adult Readers

 You know how I have this interest in adult books with child protagonists? A book has to have more than a child protagonist to make it a children's books, and it can be an adult book without an adult protagonist. 

It's a little bit of a mystery.

Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett is pretty mysterious and amazing, because not only is it an adult book with a child protagonist, it's an adult book that reads amazingly like a middle grade novel. In fact, it's very similar to the kind of middle grade novel that wins the Newbery Medal. 

• You've got a ten-year-old girl protagonist. (The kind of middle grade book I'm thinking about almost always has a girl protagonist.)
• You've got a dead mom.
• You've got a grieving father.
• You've got a troubled older sister.
• You've got a dog.
• You've got a cast of slightly off-kilter secondary characters in a small town. That guidance counselor is a gem.
• You've got people with unique interests--the main character wants to finish writing her mother's book about animals with sleep issues, and the older sister is at work baking 1,000 rabbit cakes so she can get into the Guinness Book of Records.
• You've got a this-is-how-we-deal-with-death theme.

I think what might make Rabbit Cake a little more adult than middle grade is the length of time covered. Elvis (a girl with a quirky name!) ages two years over the course of the story. Children's stories are usually more compressed, in my experience. While any of the issues raised here can probably be found in an upper middle grade novel (infidelity, for instance), they may be a little deeper in Rabbit Cake. Not disturbingly deep, though. A ten- or twelve-year old girl wise beyond her years could read this.

There is nothing wrong with writing a middle-grade novel for adults, and Rabbit Cake is a well done one. I think a good argument could be made that this particular kind of middle-grade book--girl protagonist, dead mom, grieving family, quirky people in a small town, dog--is of more interest to adults than to children, anyway. It's adults who award these books the Newbery Medal and Honors, after all, and it may be adults who are the primary readers. I've heard that some librarians find them a hard sell for kids.

So all you adult middle grade readers, here's a good one for you.

Upping My Diversity Reads This Month With Jasmine Toguchi

Multicultural Children's Book Day is January 29th. This event motivated me to seek out some diverse reading instead of just randomly reading whatever drops into my lap.

I began with Jasmine Toguchi, Mochi Queen by Debbi Michiko Florence with illustrations by Elizabet Vukovic.  This is the first in a chapter book series about a Japanese-American girl. The family is getting ready to celebrate Japanese New Year, which involves getting together to make mochi, a type of rice cake. It seems to take a great deal of effort.

As a nondiverse reader, what I look for in a diverse book is a situation that is new to me with a story line or character that is somehow universal. Jasmine Toguchi Mochi Queen has both those things. I knew nothing about Japanese New Year or mochi before I read this book. At the same time, Jasmine's issues with her place within her family transcend culture.

This is a girl chapter book series, something that I think has kind of been a thing over the years. I was reminded of Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park. When I read one of the Junie books back in 2005, I found Junie a little too wise. "Though she is definitely funny, the humor to me seems adult. I don't think she talks like a true funny first grader, she talks like an adult's idea of a funny first grader. She's a little over the top."  When I tried one of the Celementine books by Sara Pennypacker in 2007, I thought it seemed a lot like Junie B. Jones, but with better grammar. I found both girls "cute the way adults like kids to be cute. They're cute like the youngest kid in a sitcom family--not the older wiseass kid, but the one who says oddly adorable things that have some kind of significance."

That's not the case with this first JasmineToguchi book. Jasmine seems very much like a real girl responding to a real situation in a realistic way and sounding like a real girl. For that reason, this book seems more child-oriented than other girl chapter books I've read.

I'm planning on recommending this book to an eight-year-old family member, or maybe even getting it for him for Easter. I'll be interested to see what a boy thinks of Jasmine.

"You Are Terrible, Ada. I Like You."

I like Ada, too.

She is the main character in The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. This middle grade novel is the sequel to The War That Saved My Life. I liked that book, though according to my post on the subject I found the beginning and ending a little melodramatic. That wasn't the case with the sequel. This was a book I really looked forward to getting back to reading.

Ada, who was also the main character in War That Saved My Life, is marvelous, though not someone who could be described as nice. In fact, I'm a little surprised she made the cut in children's publishing, where likability is tossed around a lot. Perhaps she was accepted because this is a historical novel, and gatekeepers felt young readers could feel some distance.

No, Ada is not likable. What she is is angry and distrustful and expecting the worst, for good reason. When we first met her in the first book during World War II, she is the victim of maternal abuse. What saves her is the evacuation of children from London. Her mother didn't arrange for her to get out, so this incredibly tough young one got herself out. She and her younger brother land with Susan who an adult reading between the lines will believe is a lesbian grieving for her dead companion and a victim of periodic bouts of depression. I love this about Susan. She doesn't wear any signs saying "Lesbian" or "Mental Health Character." She just is. Just as World War II saves Ada, Ada and her brother save Susan.

But just because Ada is saved, it doesn't mean that everything is sweetness and light for her in Book 2. There's still that pesky Hitler to deal with. And Ada is still enraged, because her mother hadn't loved her and hadn't even tried to provide her with some basic health care that would have given her a much different childhood. Ada lived a horrible life before connecting with Susan. She can't be confident that she and her brother won't end up in a similar situation some day.

So The War I Finally Won is both a World War II home front story and a personal story about a child at war with her past and her present. It is really well done. 

Oh, another remarkable bit of character development about Ada--Because her mother kept her confined in an apartment with no access to the world, she is remarkably ignorant regarding run-of-the-mill life things that other children her age would have picked up. She doesn't know what a dragon is or fairy tales, for instance.

A Bully Book About A Bully...Sort Of

I am very much interested in the inner workings of people who are not very nice. Who isn't, for that matter? Over the years, I've seen/read a lot of books about kids who are being bullied. I don't recall reading much from bullies' points of view. Though I would like to.

I enjoyed Restart by Gordon Korman, which does, indeed, have a bully for its main character. Chase is the full on stereotypical athlete bully. But is he really? Because when we meet him, he's suffering from amnesia after a head injury. He's not aware he's a bully. The people around him certainly are. The story is told from different points of view, including those of people he has bullied and those of his bully friends.

The reality of his pre-injury life is only slowly revealed to Chase. He is shaken by it. He doesn't want to go back to who he was.

That's a nice redemption story. I like redemption stories. It is also hopeful for readers, because it suggests bullies can see the error of their ways, though maybe only after something dramatic like amnesia. 

As a well-known over thinker, though, I wonder about the science behind amnesia and whether or not a personality would change this way and this much. Would the bully slowly return? And would that not make an interesting story, too? A dark, disturbing one? 

Maybe that would be an adult book.

An Inspiring Mystery

Tomorrow my May Days Facebook writing...I guess we could say binge group...begins its annual October effort. October May Days, if you will. After spending the summer on flash writing and the last four weeks or so on submissions, I plan to spend OctoMay Days on my YA mystery. Then keep going on to a NaNoWriMo-ish four weeks on the same project.

So it makes a world of sense that I would write today about One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus, because when I read the first chapter this summer, I said to myself, "Self, you've got to change the first chapter of your mystery. Get right to the point, Gail, like Karen does."

My many, many blog readers know that I am not a fan of alternating points of view and romance in genre. The first slows down the narrative drive, and the second is usually a distraction. It rarely supports the main story. This book had both these things. And, yet, I liked it.

In addition to liking the basic story, I thought McManus did some interesting things with some stock YA characters. One of Us is Lying is a book that received a lot of attention and deservedly so.

A Middle Grade Book About Eating...Sort Of

For some time now, I've been interested in writing essays about eating. I'm not talking food writing. For food writing, you actually have to know something. I'm talking about eating, because eating is universally interesting. What do you have to know?

So when I stumbled upon Pete Hautman's Slider,  a book about a boy about to start high school who is a fan of competitive eating, I thought, Well, that's eating.

Our narrator, David's, younger brother, Mal, is autistic. That could easily be the set-up for a problem story. But, no, Mal, who does require a lot of care from the family, is more of a background/side character, just as David's older, college-aged sister is. David's problem here is that he used his mother's credit card to bid on what is said to be the a half hot dog that was a sort of souvenir of a competitive eating contest and through some kind of technical glitch ended up paying $2,000 for it instead of the 20 he'd planned. Now he's desperate to get the money to pay his mother back before she realizes what he's done.

So, of course he decides to do so by entering and winning a competitive pizza eating contest. That requires he first win a qualifying contest and there's an entry fee and some skullduggery on the part of other adult competitors.

This is a light read with an interesting and somewhat unusual story line, at least for this reader who doesn't know much about competitive eating.

Fifteen years ago, I read Hautman's book Sweetblood.

Geeking Up Cinderella

Though I can't claim to be a fan of your basic Cinderella story, I do seem to be drawn to Cinderella variations.

• The Prince and the Dressmaker
• Traditional Fantasy
•  A Cinderella Story For People Like Me
•  So That's What Happened After Happily Ever After
• A Mature Cinderella
• Cinderella Is All Over The Place Check the comments on this one for a discussion of Cinderella stories in other cultures.
• The Spirit of God Comes to Cinderella   

My most recent Cinderella read is Geekerella by Ashley Poston, in which our heroine is a second-generation uber-fan of a cult TV show. She's not looking to attend a ball, but a cosplay contest at a con. Her prince is a young actor playing the hero in a movie version of the TV show. They have a Pride and Prejudice thing going on, in that when they originally meet, it's dislike at first sight. Readers might also think of You've Got Mail, since their relationship develops in a similar way. 

At one point, I found the evil stepmother and stepsister a little over the top. And then I thought, This is Cinderella. Of course, they're over the top. 

Ashley Poston has two other fairy tale updates set in this universe. The most recent, Bookish and the Beast, was published last month.

When You Have To Read Something Over And Over And Over Again

You have not seen me here this past week, because I just spent three-and-a-half days with a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who has a new baby sister coming home soon. I made pumpkin custard, blueberry babycakes, and  two batches of cupcakes, because I made the first one with the two-year-old and may have left out the baking powder. I  did crafts and learned how to find Little Baby Bum and Super Simple Songs on YouTube.

I  also read What the Dinosaurs Did At School by Refe and Susan Tuma before every nap and every bedtime. And maybe once in the middle of the night. The kid couldn't get enough of it. I liked it a great deal, too. Thank goodness.

I was very grateful whenever I read this book, because there was another one our little guy liked a lot that was a long, heart-tugging poem. He thought the cover illustration for that one was of him and his mother. What the Dinosaurs Did At School, on the other hand, is a very clever and amusing story told totally for laughs. The amount of text is great. The narrative drive is good.

I'm not sure what a two-year-old sees in it, though, because I think to get the jokes and really appreciate the whole situation, you may need to have some knowledge of school. I was concerned I was going to have to do a detailed explanation about the section regarding ventilation, for example, but it didn't come to that. I just had to answer the question "What that dinosaur doing?" a lot.

The illustrations are photos of plastic dinosaurs posed as if they are behaving very, very badly. The combination of the reality of the photos and the dinosaurs raising hell may be an irresistible draw for tiny listeners. 

YA Thrillers

I am just beginning a new project, a YA mystery or thriller that I'm working on in order to have new material to bring to my writers' group. As part of getting myself pumped up for this, I've been reading the occasional YA mystery or thriller.

How I Would Love An Island Retreat

The Kindle edition of We Were Liars by E. Lockhart turned up on sale this past spring. It's main character, Cadence, belongs to a stinking rich extended family that has a multi-house compound on an island. Before the book starts, something happens to Caddie. She just doesn't know what.

As I began reading this atmospheric novel, I thought, I want a multi-house compound somewhere--an island, anywhere--for my family. Later, I began to think, Hey, why don't any of these kids have summer jobs? Sure, they're stinking rich, but you'd think they'd want jobs as a way to strike out on their own. Then I thought, Wait a minute. Why don't any of their mothers have jobs? Sure, they're stinking rich and all, but you'd think they'd want jobs just for something to do.

Turns out, these were significant questions.

And that's all I can say about this book, because not knowing much is a big part of what makes it enjoyable. It's enjoyable enough that I picked up another Lockhart book, Genuine Fraud.

Ah, What's Going On Here?

Turns out, I'd read Genuine Fraud before. It didn't hurt my enjoyment of this book. This was one of those deals where I remembered each event in the story as I got to it, but couldn't recall what was coming up.

I don't really feel I can say much about this book, because, as with We Were Liars, not knowing what's going on is a huge part of what's good about it. How bad is the bad guy here? How good is the good guy? I can say that a very intriguing aspect of this book is that it's essentially written backwards.

And What Did You Learn From This Reading Experience, Gail?

Theme. I read once that that is an important part of what makes YA YA, and I think it's the case here. With We Were Liars the YA theme involves place in and connection to family. With Genuine Fraud the YA theme is who am I? Who am I going to be?

Oh, also. It's good...maybe even great...to have a big reveal at the end of the story. The story, in fact, is about the reveal.

Now THIS Is A Babysitters' Club

I came to A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting by Joe Ballarini after reading two and a half books I call "crush and make-up" stories, because they're about girls with crushes who are into make-up. I am not the woman to read crush and make-up stories, though I respect that there are people who are.

I am the woman to read clever, witty stories about young people taking on the supernatural and grinding it into dust. It was a great relief to realize that was what I had when I started reading Babysitter's Guide.

The basic premise here is that the monsters under kids' beds are real and the only protection from them is a group of highly trained babysitters. Unfortunately, main character Kelly doesn't know this until her charge on her first babysitting job is stolen by monsters. She ends up spending the evening with the babysitters' group hunting for her kid. As luck would have it, she has a gift for this kind of thing.

A Babysitters Guide to Monster Hunting could be described as a lighter, less end-of-the-world-is-coming Skullduggery Pleasant. In both books there is a group no one knows about that is taking care of things that no one knows about, as well as wise-cracking characters who are able to crack wise and make it stick.

A second Babysitter's Guide book came out this past year.

Environmental Book Club

Sometime in the past, I wondered here if environmental books couldn't work with environmental settings instead of environmental themes. I'm not certain what environmental themes are. "We must save the planet?" "Humanity is destroying the Earth?" "We must save the planet from us?" If so, they are themes that are often used in cliched and very preachy ways.

Books with environmental settings or, maybe, situations, can have nonenvironmental themes, giving a book more complexity and getting away from heavy-handed lessons and warnings. A good example of this is Kissing Frogs by Alisha Seviny, which is a romance set on a trip to work with endangered frogs. The theme here could be described as the rogue outsider finding love with an opposite, which does not have anything to do with the environment. The setting--the work with the endangered frogs--provides the environmental aspect to the story.

Another example is Blight by Alexandra Duncan, a traditional dystopian, post-apocalyptic story set within a world in which only a few types of food plants are viable, because of a...you guessed it...blight. Agribusiness is the bad guy here, as business often is the bad guy in post-apocalyptic worlds. There's not a lot of dwelling on what happened, what brought humanity to this state, though. AgriStar is the bad guy not because it caused the blight (Though it may have. I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember.), but because of what it's done since the blight. 

We've got a plot driven adventure here, including a journey story. We've got rebels. We've got evil junkers, a group of seriously bad guys who also appear in The Girl With All the Powers and The Boy on the Bridge. There are junker-like characters in the Rot & Ruin books. They may be a staple of post-apocalyptic stories.

My point is, this is the kind of narrative that could exist in many post-apocalyptic settings...a zombie apocalypse, an alien apocalypse...or in a religious dystopia. Blight is set in an environmental situation, but because it's more interested in its plot-driven adventure, it's far less environmentally cliched and heavy-handed than many books that might be described as environmental.

A Terrific Alex Award Winner

Somehow I got onto a Tor.com newsletter a year or two ago, which provides me with some interesting info on books. Earlier this year, I learned on the newsletter about All Systems Red by Martha Wells, one of this year's Alex Award winners. I thought it sounded intriguing, and I was able to get the eBook for a very reasonable price. Cheap, really. You know me. Intriguing. Cheap. I bought that thing.

It is fantastic.

All Systems Red is the first in the Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot being the name an android gives itself, because...Well, isn't it obvious? Murderbot is a security android assigned to a group of scientists doing research on another planet. Its main interest is watching what we'd call soap operas it's downloaded. But when its people are endangered, it focuses on saving them.

I loved this book. As I was reading it, though, I wondered what made this one of the ten Alex winners, "book written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18." But by the time I finished, I got it. Murderbot is trying to understand why it is the way it is. And the humans in the story tend to treat it as a youth.

All Systems Red is a novella, one I purchased in print form for my niece to read during exams. I'm planning to get another copy for a family member short on time. There are three more novellas coming out this year.

The Das Saga

I'm taking a little break from picture books to write about You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins.  This book features a unique subject, and by that I don’t mean the lives of the Indian family
followed for three generations, but immigration and assimilation. This is a Bengali family, but to some extent they’re experiencing what families from  many cultures have experienced coming to America, with the stresses of living with both the old and the new.

My big interest when considering assimilation into American life is that immigrants lose so much in order to do so, since that was certainly the experience of the Gauthier family. But the second and third generation members of the Das family are still Bengali, as well as American.

Perkins dips into each generation of this family, covering mother, daughters, and granddaughters. My complaint about the book is that I wanted more about these five women. I could have gotten into a Forsyth Saga type read spread over several books.

A thought just occurred to me...In children’s literature we get very thin fantasy stories spread out over three or more books all the time. Why not a family/historical tale?

FTC Transparency Information: I am acquainted with Mitali Perkins, having met her a few times. I know her just well enough to get all "Oh, wow, I know a writer whose book made the long list for the National Book Award" when You Bring the Distant Near did just that.

Entry Points

I picked up The Shape of the World: A Portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright by K.L. Going with illustrations by Lauren Stringer for me. We visited a Wright house in Grand Rapids, Michigan while we were on vacation a few years ago. Wright's all over the place in the midwest, and we're probably going to visit another house he designed this fall when we're in Illinois and Wisconsin. But my point is, I wasn't interested in readability for children when I brought this home.

Then I found myself with a five-and-a-half-year-old house guest, who is as fond of bedtime reading as I am. I still hadn't read Shape, so I added it to one of our evening bed binges. But I thought, I'll just skim this with him. We won't get into the real techie stuff.

Well, we didn't skim it. The book worked just fine with a littlie. This is what I think did the trick--the shapes. Early on, the author and illustrator introduce the idea of the boy Wright being given gifts: "cubes, spheres, cones, pyramids, cylinders." They appear to be blocks or other kinds of toys. And then they carry the shape idea throughout the book. Kids get shapes, or ours did. Shapes were a way getting into the Frank Lloyd Wright story.

During a trip to the library, our guy picked out Pocket Full of Colors: The Magical World of Mary  Blair, Disney Artist Extraordinaire by Amy Guglielmo and Jacqueline Tourville with illustrations by Brigette Barrager. This book uses a similar device. "Other children collected marbles or dolls, but Mary collected colors of every shade and every hue." And the idea of what Mary Blair did with colors is carried through the whole book.

In both cases, something child readers are familiar with--shapes or color--is used as way of bringing them into a story about adults.

Mentor texts?

And Now For Something Completely Different

Alternative History

That Inevitable Victorian Thing by E.K. Johnston is a quiet book in a very unique setting. Basically, it's a romance with your classic YA torn-between- two-lovers scenario. It begins with young upper class women (and, if I recall correctly, men) doing the debutante thing in the city of Toronto and then moves to an idyllic Canadian lake. The relationships are worked out without a lot of passion and drama. What raises the interest level here is the kinds of relationships we're talking about and the world the whole story is set in.

What we have here is a well-developed universe with computers...DNA issues...a superficially twenty-first century-type setting. But we also have a British Empire that the sun hasn't set on with a powerful queen, as well as a United States from which pirates set out to pillage Canadian/British ships on the Great Lakes. What's more, this is a particularly diverse world, in large part because the historic Queen Victoria from whom the present queen is descended married off her children to leaders all over the world, not just to European (and, of course, white) royalty. So the royal family is diverse and that makes it acceptable and normal for every other segment of society.

One of the many nice things about this book is that it doesn't preach or hit readers over the head with any Hey, look how we have characters from all over the world here! Look what we do with sexuality! Everything is just there, as if it's just totally run-of-the-mill life. Which, in a book, it should be.

A Regency/Spy/Fantasy Mash-up

Murder, Magic, and What We Wore by Kelly Jones is a gem, especially for readers who, like myself, spent many hours of their youth reading regency novels. Sixteen-year-old Annis Whitworth and her intellectual aunt have been left destitute by the sudden death of Annis's father. But Annis, whose big skill up to that point appears to have been advising her friends on how they should dress, is no classic damsel in distress, facing a sad future as a governess or companion. She discovers she has the ability to sew glamours into clothing, creating magical outfits in this world where glamours for this and that are a fact of life.

Oh, and also, she wants to follow her father into the spy business.

Regency novels often involve romance. This is more of an Austen-type social commentary with the strongest feminist tone I can recall ever seeing in a book of this type. There's even a #metoo type thing going on at one point. And, like That Inevitable Victorian Thing, there's no metaphorical neon sign here to make sure readers get it. This is merely the world of this book.

A YA Historical Mystery

Anyone familiar with what I call nineteenth century historical mysteries? Obviously they are mystery series set in the nineteenth century. Some examples: 1813 or so--Sebastian St. Cyr Mysteries, 1890s to post WWI--Amelia Peabody, 1890s--Veronica Speedwell, 1880s or 90s--Gaslight Mysteries (Hillary Clinton's a fan). My Kindle is heavy with these things. The ones I read usually have a female and male amateur detectives or an amateur combined with a professional detective. The ones I read also have some kind of romantic tension and then involvement between the male and female leads.

Well, The Lost Girl of Astor Street by Stephanie Morrell reads to me like the first entry in one of those series. Except for being YA. And set in the early twentieth century.  I would not describe it as "Downton Abbey in downtown Chicago" the way one of the blurbs does. It has a lot more story than that show ever did.

Piper Sail (eighteen years old, on the high end for YA) is the daughter of a well-known defense lawyer in 1920's Chicago. A lawyer with Mafia clients. (This is hardly Lord Grantham we're talking about.) When her best friend disappears, Piper gets involved in the hunt for her. She also gets involved with the hot, young Italian cop on the case. And who, guess what!, also has Mafia connections. Piper is one of those women who is trouble because she won't stay in her place. Mariano, an outsider to both his Mafia family and WASP Chicago culture, can tolerate her.

They are a couple made for a historical mystery series.

A Nearly Teen Queen Speaks

I am a fan of Tommy Greenwald's first book, Charlie Joe Jackson's Guide to Not Reading, so I entered a contest last fall to try to win a copy of his (then) most recent book, The Real Us. As you can see, I did.  Us is not as funny as Charlie Joe Jackson, but it's not supposed to be. In an interview last year, Greenwald said that as he developed the idea for The Real Us, "I realized this could be my first story that goes a little deeper into the issues and emotions that middle-schoolers face."  The book deals with an intriguing situation, a bad week in the life of a girl leader of a clique.

Calista is a particularly pretty girl who, because of her beauty, has moved away from the friend and athletic pursuits of her younger years. There's an interesting twist here because shes not the stereotypical mean girl who sucks others into her power field. It's more as if she's the one who is sucked away from her past. And it's all because of something she has little control over. Her looks. She's marked by her appearance.

And then she gets a pimple. And within days, she's got a rash. This means she's no longer the prettiest girl in school. She loses her chair at the cafeteria table! Those lame girl hangerons stop hanging on!

This story is told from three points of view, Calista's, a boy's with a health problem you don't see every day, and one of Calista's friends. Calista was the focus of interest for me. 

There's an identity thing going on here. Who am I if I'm not pretty? That's a very legitimate and interesting theme for child readers who are  determining who they are going to be.

Tommy Greenwald had a picture book come out last month, Hooked. 

FTC Transparency Info: I won this book, as mentioned before, and am  acquainted with the author through Facebook and NESCBWI.

Okay, Well That's A Different Kind Of Apocalyptic Story

Landscape with Invisible Hand by M. T. Anderson is an apocalyptic story, which I didn't pick up on
from reading the flap content. But, then, I try to avoid apocalyptic tales, so I may not be able to spot one as easily as a fan would. This one has a really intriguing premise, though. Humans fall to the alien invaders because they destroy our economy. How cool is that?

Some interesting points:

• Adam, our main character, is an artist, and each chapter relates to a piece of art he's creating. In one chapter there's discussion of the artists of the Hudson River School and how their work is about atmosphere, clouds, mist, and moisture. Their work is "paintings of the air between things." I hope I remember that the next time I'm in a museum and stumble upon a Hudson School painting.
• Adam suffers from a bowel problem, a disease he picked up from drinking bad water in this dystopian world. Oddly enough, a character in The Lake Effect, another recent read,  also suffers from a bowel problem. Yes, this is a meaningless coincidence. Though in both books the situation is presented as the life problem it is, not as an opportunity for toilet humor. So it may not be meaningless after all.
• At various points, I felt that this book was a serious downer. Which, of course, is the case with books about post-apocalyptic worlds. But the ending is on the positive, light side, making it different in my experience of the genre.
• Landscape with Invisible Hand is short! That's how I want my apocalyptic novels.

Love Them Summer Jobs

I have have a soft spot for teenage summer job stories, for some reason particularly if they involve boys. In fact, when I told someone about this preference recently, he pointed out to me that I wrote a teenage boy summer job book. So I picked up The Lake Effect by Erin McCahan because it involved a recent high school graduate’s summer working for an elderly woman in her home on Lake Michigan. (I’ve been to Lake Michigan!)

This was a light-ish read with heavy spots. Personally, I think there was a little too much going on. I would have liked to stick more to Abigail’s issue or more about grandma Ruth. Pick a couple of things and dwell on them more. I'm on a less is more kick this year.

Regarding the funerals that the main character’s boss is always making him take her to: Some people may not find that very believable. To them I would say that Grandma Gauthier took me to crash a wedding when I was very young...no older than seven. We didn’t go to the reception, just the  Catholic church service. It turned out the bride was the older sister of someone I went to school with, and the girl I knew saw me there. I don’t recall things getting particularly awkward, but I do remember that it happened. That must mean something.

What’s with these old ladies?

Beowulf Drew Me

I don't have a lot of interest in teen angst, or maybe any kind of angst, so Grendel's Guide To Love and War, A Tale of Rivalry, Romance, and Existential Angst by A. E. Kaplan wasn't a big draw for me because of the angst there in  the title. No, I picked up  Grendel's Guide because of that word Grendel. It's a reference to Beowulf. Beowulf is my favorite epic. I spent some time ten years ago writing about it here. I did. That was the year of the Beowulf movie with Angelina Jolie. Probably not Beowulf's most glorious moment recently. That would be Seamus Heaney's version of Beowulf.

Beowulf In A Nutshell

Beowulf is the tale of a Dark Age warrior who helps out Hrothgar, King of the Danes, whose hall is attacked every night by the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills Grendel, which ticks off Grendel's mother, so Beowulf has to kill her, too. Then he goes home, lives into old age, has to fight off another enemy and doesn't survive it. The point being, in my mind, that we can do things when we are young that we can't do when we're old. That's life.

Back To "Grendel's Guide"

My interest in Grendel's Guide was looking for Beowulf connections. Now, the big one, of course, is that the main character is named Tom Grendel, tying him to the Beowulf monster. Though this Grendel isn't at all monster-like. The Rothgar family moves in next door. Hrothgar, remember, was the name of the King of the Danes in Beowulf. One of the Rothgar teenagers is named Rex, a name that means king.

Here's a particularly interesting bit: Rex Rothgar is a nasty piece of work, raising hell in a neighborhood of elderly people with loud music into the night, every night, tormenting Tom Grendel as well as his PTSD-suffering father. So here we have Rothgar tormenting Grendel instead of Grendel tormenting. Neat, huh? Also, Tom Grendel has that father, but no mother, because his mother is already dead. There is no Grendel's mother to seek revenge for her child.

I didn't get the significance of all the old people. Unless they have something to do with my perception of the original material being about growing old.

But Where Was Beowulf?

This is really embarrassing, but I kept looking for Beowulf in here and couldn't find him. It's embarrassing, because when I read the Author's Note at the end of the book, I figured it out, even though Kaplan didn't come right out and say who he was. It's embarrassing, because it should have been obvious. What was I thinking while I was reading this?

Author Kaplan says in her Note that she first encountered Beowulf in her ninth grade English class. (I was a freshman in college.) Grendel's Guide would be a fun companion volume for teenagers reading Beowulf for the first time.