In Which I Fangirl like a Fangirl over FANGIRL and All Things Rainbow Rowell

I had dinner with Rainbow Rowell last week.

Okay, the phrase "had dinner" actually means: "I ate at a long table with 25 people and Rainbow Rowell walked by my end of the table quickly and sat at the other end and ate quickly and I watched her through the hazy lens of my two martinis on an empty stomach and when she was leaving I pretended I was taking a picture of my friend Natalie but I was actually taking a picture of Rainbow Rowell."

The next day I met Rainbow Rowell.

Okay, the phrase "met Rainbow Rowell" actually means: "I stood in a ridiculously long snaking line at the Books by the Banks festival in Cincinnati for 45 minutes and nearly came to blows with the woman in front of me who accused me of trying to get in front of her by saying EXCUSE ME, MA'AM, I WAS STANDING HERE FIRST!! and I was all like, Chillax, lady, no need to freak out, we are all Rainbow Rowell fans here and I'm sure she wouldn't want us to come to blows over line placement, and then I turned around and started talking to the lady behind me because, honestly, the level of freaky fangirling emanating from the woman in front of me was scary, but then it was MY turn at the front of the line, at last, and I said hello to Rainbow Rowell and she said hello to me and I blabbered like an absolute idiot about how my book was on the same Florida Teens Read list as hers and I knew she would win the award (she did) and I was just glad to have my book mentioned in the same breath as hers, and she just nodded and smiled and said, oh that's nice or something lovely like that, and then the security person (she had a security person!!) took my picture with her."

If you can't tell, I love Rainbow Rowell.

My first introduction to her work was the beautiful, heartbreaking novel Eleanor & Park, which is about a romance between two teens-- a half Korean/half American boy named Park who loves comics and 90's music (the book takes place in the 90's) and a poor/overweight/sensitive/red-headed/wrong-side of the tracks girl named Eleanor. 

There's a slow build up of their relationship, a sense that Eleanor and Park are in a lovely bubble, as forces outside of their control-- asshole kids who ride the same bus they do, Eleanor's terrible dysfunctional family life--threaten to tear them apart. Interestingly, they don't even hold hands until at least halfway through the book, and that scene, the drawn out lead up to the touching of their hands, is one of the most romantic scenes I have ever read. 

It's Eleanor's wrenching home-life, though, that is the most moving and memorable to me. Her struggles with her downtrodden mom and many siblings all piled into the same bedroom with each other and her yearning for privacy and dignity under the leering eyes of her stepfather are all painfully captured by Rowell. 

This feels real. Because, I suspect, it is. 

The book has been banned in some schools, for language--the concerned/outraged parents say-- but it's clear those people haven't read the book or if they have, they don't get it. Last year there was a blow up on social media, the story of a school inviting Rainbow Rowell to speak and then dis-inviting her after a parent called the book obscene. 

Someone asked Rainbow Rowell for a comment and she said: "When these people call Eleanor & Park an obscene story, I feel like they’re saying that rising above your situation isn’t possible. That if you grow up in an ugly situation, your story isn’t even fit for good people’s ears. That ugly things cancel out everything beautiful."

I was forever a fangirl after reading that. 

And then, I read her book Fangirl.

Or rather, I listened to it on audio. My husband, teen daughter, and her boyfriend, and I were driving 17 hours to Florida for Spring Break and I checked out Fangirl because it was written by Rainbow Rowell! and because I knew it was about a girl's first year in college and I thought my daughter might be interested. 

I put the first CD in and my husband was sleeping and my daughter was sleeping, but her boyfriend and I listened as main character Cath moves into her dorm, anxious about being away from home, anxious about not rooming with her twin sister, and only finding a little bit of solace in her writing. (Turns out she is a "famous" writer of fan fiction. She writes popular stories, eagerly followed by her many fans, on a Harry Potter-like series called Simon Snow.)

CD number two, and everyone in the car was awake, and we listened for the next 16 hours as Cath figures out how to navigate college and homesickness and her extreme anxiety and her loud-mouthed seemingly obnoxious roommate and the roommate's adorable boyfriend and her troubled twin sister and her struggling father and her distant mother and all the while interspersed with bits of her more and more popular Simon Snow fan fiction.

When we reached the end of the audio book, everyone in the car was crying and after we all wiped our tears, my daughter spoke up very softly from the backseat and asked if we'd put the first CD back on because she'd missed it.

We did.

I could go on about my love and admiration of all things Rainbow Rowell, about how my book club read Landline, one of her adult novels, and it was one of the few novels that we all agreed was good. About Rowell's latest novel, the one she signed for me, called Carry On, a book of Cath's fanfiction about Simon Snow... (I am marveling at the brilliance of this!!!)

But I won't because I fear that this blog post may never end if I do.

Instead I will leave you with this:

 

5-Star Summer Reads

Looking for a few good YA books to read this summer?

Here's my list (at the moment) of the top 2013 YA releases in no particular order:

The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

I am a big fan of Zarr and always eager to pick up her latest book. The characters in this one depart a bit from her usual, focusing on a teen concert pianist from a wealthy, high achieving family (Zarr's other books feature kids growing up firmly in the working class world.) Lucy realizes that she's privileged--it's one of the many issues she's grappling with. The main source of angst, though, is her ambivalence about her talent. Nearly a year ago, she walked away from her promising piano career.

The pressure from her family (and from herself) grew to be too much. She hasn't touched a piano since, but her friendship with her brother's new piano teacher has her questioning her decision to quit and pushing her to figure out if there is a way to make music a part of her life again.

This book has a couple of strange plot strands--the relationship with the piano teacher is the big one, but all of the characters are so fully realized and the story itself pushes and spreads in a variety of directions that feels like life unfolding in the real world. What Zarr has to say about living a creative life--when you are amazingly good at what you do--is thought-provoking and inspirational.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

This is one of those novels that takes a big risk. The language is lyrical and metaphorical. The subject matter is potentially lurid (kidnapped teen girls). And the narrative is almost completely internal. Oh, there were so many ways that this book could go wrong!

My big pet peeve with literary novels is that those beautifully crafted metaphors draw attention to themselves and pull readers out of the story. (When I'm noticing what a lovely simile you just used, I forget what's going on in the narrative.) And very few writers are able to depict difficult subject matter without slipping over the line into soap-opera-y drama.

Add the whole internal stream-of-consciousness angle, and honestly, I didn't think Nova Ren Suma could pull this one off.

But, let me just say WOW. This book pulls you in from page one and keeps you turning pages with the mesmerizing hypnotic voice of girl who suddenly believes that she is seeing the ghosts of missing girls.

Look for 17 & Gone on the short list for the Printz Award this year...

Dear Bird's Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos

It rarely happens to me anymore, but once in a while I read a book and forget that I am a writer. The part of me that is constantly editing and analyzing shuts up and I simply fall into the story. I don't know why this happens with some books and not others. I wish I did! But I think it comes down to the voice--something about it resonates and pulls me in.

The voice in Dr. Bird's belongs to an anxious, sensitive, battered soul of a boy named James Whitman. James carries Walt Whitman's poems around with him. He hugs trees and contemplates grass blades. He talks to a bird therapist in his head. He worries about his sister Jorie who has been kicked out of school and out of the house by their %&^*# parents. There's a mystery at the core of the book: WHY did Jorie get kicked out? But really this book is about James trying to cope with the crappy aspects of life.

Here's something that a lot of adults seem to forget about being a kid: it sucks. So much of your life is out of your control and you're seeing for the first time the unfairness, the flaws in the adults who rule the world (and you). There is no magic answer to how you figure things out--how you grow up--of course, but I get the feeling at the end of this book that James will be all right.


Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

This love story blows all other teen romances away. The main characters are complex and flawed. Eleanor is a little overweight and weird and bullied. She's hurting, just treading water to survive in her dysfunctional family. Park is quirky and quiet. He stands out in their gritty midwestern town because he's half Korean.

The two don't have a love at first sight moment, instead, their relationship slowly, almost painfully, unfolds. They don't even hold hands until at least a third of the way through--but that moment is more charged than all of the ridiculously over the top teen Harlequins put together.

Oh, it's also set in the 80's, which will make teens today feel like they're reading historical fiction, I suppose. For adults of a certain age, uh, ahem, me, it will feel like time travel.