When a "Problem Book" Transcends Its Problem

I hate to admit this but I kept putting off reading my advance review copy Emily M. Danforth’s debut novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post. I’d read the back cover, so I knew what it was about, something to do with a girl coming to terms with being a lesbian. Several months ago there was a big discussion in the YA publishing industry about this very topic. I won’t go into all the details here, but the gist came down to this question: how much of a market is there for books featuring gay characters? The issue exploded when an agent (there is dispute about whether this actually happened or not) suggested to a writer that a manuscript would be more palatable to readers if she changed a gay character into a straight one.

From a business/marketing perspective, I suppose that’s a safer choice. On the other hand, controversy can be good for sales too. There are some books that are called problem novels. I imagine them being cooked up in a marketing department. Someone throws out a hot controversial topic. In the past it might have been abortion or anorexia or incest. More recently it might be meth abuse or cutting. The books that are created this way are rarely good. The issue is the whole point and often it’s handled in a lurid, sensationalistic way. Sometimes these books sell very well but they quickly disappear from the shelves.

So this is what I was afraid of with Cameron Post. That it would be one of those books with a tag line like, “an important book on an important topic, blah blah.” Then I was hesitant when I read the first page and realized that it had that nostalgic-adult-looking-back-on-defining-teen-moments tone to it. You know what I mean—a book that’s not a YA book at all but more of a memoir. But I got past that because the voice of Cameron was so real and honest and funny.

When we meet her, she and her best friend Irene are hanging out like they always do in the summer in Miles City, Montana. Swimming at the lake, watching reruns of Murder She Wrote with Cam’s grandmother, daring each other to do crazy stunts like swipe a pack of gum from the minute market. Later they share a kiss in Irene’s barn, and it surprises them both. But what really turns Cam’s world upside down is the death of her parents. When her ultra conservative Aunt Ruth moves in to take care of her, you can guess that life is going to get pretty stifling for Cam.

Here’s another confession: I thought the book was going to disturb me. And it did. But not because of the occasional girl kissing a girl. What was disturbing was worrying about Cam. Her crushing guilt that her actions were somehow responsible for her parents’ death. Her heart being broken. Her struggles to conform. Her earnest attempts to change herself.

This book isn’t about homosexuality.

It’s about growing up. About fitting in (or not fitting in). About the painful and horrifying realization that sometimes the people in charge truly don’t know what’s best for you. I hope that kids who struggle with this “issue” will find this book. And I hope that others will read it for the reason that they would read any book.

Because it’s really really good.

Joy of Cooking Gets All Snarky about My Turkey

Maybe it’s strange but I love reading cookbooks. Flip through one and you get so much more than a collection of recipes. Old cookbooks are glimpses into the past. I’ve got a 1960’s book that tells me how to talk to my neighborhood butcher. It also contains cool, quirky photos of dishes that would look at home on the set of Mad Men. My favorite is a “crown roast” constructed out of hot dogs.

Many cookbooks have a voice. I’m thinking of course of Julia’s Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I can’t make her potato and leek soup without hearing her distinctive accent in my ear. Julia seems so imposing and authoritative. When I do her beef bourguignon I close the book when I come to the part where I’m going to skip steps. I just don’t want her to know that I can’t be bothered sautéing mushroom slices in small batches or that I’m too lazy to towel off my beef chunks.

The voice in my Victory Garden Cookbook, which I’m assuming belongs to the author, Marian Morash, is more forgiving.

Marian, going by her picture on the cover, is so happy and perky surrounded by massive heads of lettuce in her farmhouse kitchen. She’s always referring to her husband Russ, who I imagine is out in the garden doing the sweaty stuff while Marian follows behind with her big basket collecting the bounty. Marian makes beets sound so good I decided to grow them even though no one in my family including me likes beets at all. FYI: They do have pretty purplish leaves you can use in salad.

One of the funniest cookbooks (yes, funniest) is Being Dead is No Excuse by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays.

Sandwiched around super-rich, cholesterol clogging casserole recipes are tidbits about small town Southern life. And death. My favorite story is about a Southern girl who left home and returns after many years for a funeral. She rolls her eyes at the table laden with cream of chicken soup soaked concoctions and says something snarky like, “who on earth brought that canned pea casserole?” To which her mother replies, “I did.” The girl, without missing a beat, grabs the ladle, plops a big helping on her plate and says, “And Mama, don’t you ever stop.”

Snark is not something you often find in a cookbook. So when you do come across it, it’s always fun. Take Joy of Cooking by Irma. S. Rombauer. Many Thanksgivings ago I was using the book as a reference and I came across this little passage:

Today “roasting” (turkey) in aluminum foil has become popular because no basting is needed. So, if you decide, despite our Cassandra warnings about this method, that you’d rather clean the attic, improve your serve, or write Chapter IX of the Great American Novel than to baby-sit a bird, go ahead with the foil and take the consequences—which will be steamed rather than roasted.

You can almost hear Irma muttering the word, Idiot, under her breath.

A Bird, the Brain, and the Meaning of Life

I read two good books over the weekend that are still spinning around in my mind. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley and an advanced review copy of Fracture by Megan Miranda (pub date is Jan., 2012).

Seventeen-year-old Cullen Witter in Where Things Come Back could be the millennial generation’s Holden Caulfield. He tries to be upbeat about his life in rural Arkansas, but it’s tough. At the beginning of the summer his cousin dies of a drug overdose. His younger brother Gabriel, a sensitive, brilliant oddball, is grief-stricken. But life goes on, Cullen wryly observes. He’d like to be a writer someday, but all he’s been able to muster so far are potential book titles. When a weird guy from out-of-state shows up proclaiming that he’s seen an extinct woodpecker in town, Cullen has tons of comic material to work with. The “Lazarus” bird, as it’s called, gives the dying town hope. Also new marketing possibilities. Cullen’s mom, for example, the local hairdresser, creates a Lazarus bird hairstyle that becomes all the rage for the middle school boys set.

Then Cullen’s brother Gabriel disappears and nothing in Cullen’s life makes sense anymore.

Spliced around this story of a mysterious bird and a missing boy, is another one, the tale of a floundering teenage missionary attempting to please his impossible-to-please father, and his friend, a boy obsessed with the Book of Enoch. If you don’t know this book, it details the fall of angels in the bible and the angel Gabriel’s battle against them.

These two seemingly unconnected narratives collide in a surprising way and allow the author to explore the timeless question: how do we find meaning in life?

The novel Fracture tackles the question too. Be warned: this book is a page-turner, so clear out your schedule for a few hours before starting. In the first few pages Delaney Maxwell falls through the ice of a pond near her house and “dies.” When she wakes up from a coma, to the surprise of everyone, she seems completely fine. No long-lasting physical injuries except for a few broken ribs due to CPR. No apparent brain damage.

Except Delaney knows there’s something wrong with her. In the hospital she is sure that she sees a shadowy figure lurking around her room. And there’s a strange tugging sensation in her head whenever she’s around someone who’s about to die. She’s got other problems too. Her parents are plying her with medication fearing she’s psychotic. The boy next door, the one who pulled her out of the icy pond, is alternately concerned and distant. And there’s another boy who shows up out of the blue, someone who’s also been in a coma and shares Delaney’s “talent” for sensing impending death.

But is he helping Delaney or is he out to hurt her?

What was interesting to me about this novel was that the author took it beyond the level of straightforward thriller, asking readers: if you knew a person was about to die, what would you do? And how do you live your life when it is surrounded by death?

Two great books by two new voices in YA literature. Be sure to check them out.

Musings on Cleanliness, Procrastination, and Italian Grandmothers

Today I need to clean my house. Relatives are coming in from out of town and eighteen people will be sitting down to dinner next week on Thanksgiving. So there is a lot to do and I must get right on it.

Or, I could delay all that and write about cleaning my house. I read this article once that Italian women are the best cleaners in the world. I think it was sponsored by the company that makes Swiffers or whatever they’re called. You know those mops with a cleaning cloth latched on for quick-dusting floors?

Apparently, Italian women weren’t buying that product at the same rate that other women were. The Swiffer people discovered that Italian women really get into cleaning, spending way more hours a week than anyone else. They have a different, cleaner, definition of clean. So the company began to market the Swiffer as a mop that would polish your already clean floors and their sales went up in Italy.

I don’t know if it’s true that Italian women are so much cleaner. I’m half-Italian, but that doesn’t seem to mean much, which you would see if you visited my house. My grandmother was extremely clean. The saying went that you could “eat off her floors.” And this was before Swiffer was around. 

I think my grandmother would’ve loved Swiffer (but only for post-cleaning, buffing purposes, of course). Once, I went to visit her and talk came around to her favorite hobby. She went through her weekly cleaning schedule with me. One day a week, for example, she emptied her kitchen cabinets and dusted them. Another day she washed out her washing machine. That was interesting to me.

I confess that I have never cleaned my washing machine. I guess I trust that it happens whenever I wash a load of clothes.

But I was feeling the pressure of my ethnicity several years ago when my Italian aunt came to visit. I went on a cleaning rampage through my house dusting corners that had never been dusted and scouring nooks that had never been scoured. It was then that I noticed that the mini blinds in all of the windows were filthy. (Possibly because I had never cleaned them.) This wasn’t the kind of dust you could simply Swiffer off.

I got online for mini-blind cleaning tips and the very first website I came to recommended throwing out your dirty mini blinds and buying new ones. Well, the half-Italian in me had a hearty laugh about that.

The next site was more helpful. Soak them outside in a baby pool was the advice. It happened to be like 100 degrees when I did this. I had sixteen mini blinds soaking and then drying out on my driveway. It took me all afternoon. It was a major sweaty production, to put it mildly, but I was committed. When they were all dry, I went to hang them and found that several of the mini blinds had broken during the process.

Long story short, my husband bought replacements that didn’t match the color exactly of the others, and in the end we bought ALL new ones.

They were only a few bucks apiece.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is. But I suspect my writing-a-blog-to-delay-cleaning tactic is drawing to a close. So with that I will sign off and begin the search for my dust cloth.

Books with a Twist

I’m a sucker for books that trick me. I remember the first time it happened. I was ten and my friendly neighborhood librarian handed me a copy of a book called The Truth about Mary Rose by Marilyn Sachs. It was published in 1973; it’s not in print anymore, which is a darn shame because I think the story holds up for today’s kids.

The narrator Mary Rose worships her namesake, an aunt who died in a fire when she was twelve years old after saving all the people in her apartment building. The first Mary Rose was clearly a heroine, and our narrator is enamored with the details surrounding the aunt’s death, so enamored that she and her cousin like to act out the night of the fire, with our narrator in the starring role. The aunt seemed like such a cool, creative person. The only thing that survived the fire was a shoebox filled with her collection of handmade stuff, paper rings that narrator Mary Rose adores trying on. Supposedly there were tons of those shoeboxes, but on the night of the fire, the aunt thrust that one box into the arms of her baby brother, pushed him out the door to safety, then returned into the building to knock on every door and wake the inhabitants. There’s a newspaper picture of her, arms waving from the window of the burning building right before it collapsed.

I was totally caught up in the story, adoring the original Mary Rose myself. So it came as a complete shock to me when the narrator discovers that her namesake may not have been such a noble heroine after all. Throughout the book, her parents reprimand her for eavesdropping on conversations, and at the end she learns her lesson: the little brother who ran out of the building with the shoebox has a different version of the night of the fire. He says Mary Rose was a terrible, bossy, vicious girl who literally pushed him out the door with her precious belongings and returned inside only to save the rest of her stuff. I won’t tell you his other revelations about that night, but the narrator Mary Rose and I were both stunned.

I read the book again and again, caught up each time with Mary Rose’s point of view and struck by the fact that there could be an opposite, equally compelling version of the same events. When I was an adult I came upon another book that had the same effect on me. This one, coincidentally, also had the word truth in the title, so you would’ve thought I’d be ahead of the game.

But The Truth about Loren Jones by Alison Lurie ended up tricking me too. The narrator Polly is recently divorced and feeling bitter about males in general. She avoids them, interacting only with women if she can manage it, and even flirting with the idea of being a lesbian. Meanwhile she’s busy with a new project. She’s a biographer and her present subject is the brilliant, misunderstood painter, Loren Jones. Polly’s thesis is that Jones’s legacy has been tarnished by men, and she sets out to prove it, interviewing one guy after another and threatening to expose them.

I was mentally patting myself on the back the first time I read this book. I was in grad school working on an MA in English so I was no newby to unreliable narrators. Plus, I had The Truth about Mary Rose tucked somewhere in the back of my mind. I just knew that Polly’s thesis was going to be wrong. She’d discover that Lorin Jones was a lunatic or a bitch or fraud or something, and then wouldn’t she feel like a big fool.

Polly is tricked all right. But the funny thing was that I was too. I’m not going to give this book’s secret away either, except to say that Polly’s revelation at the end was mine. Very cool book that I also read several times, trying to figure out how the author managed to pull it off.

Maybe it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that my own novel—the one currently winging around the editorial desks of NYC—has a similar twist. Here’s the only thing I’m going to say about it (at the risk of jinxing the whole deal): writing one of these novels with a twist is just as fun as reading one.

Don't Neglect Your Gall Bladder

Sometimes I have the tendency, particularly when I’m not writing, to be a tad anxious and high strung. Cue: guffaw of hearty laughter from family and friends. Over the years I discovered that writing every day is an antidote. I think it has something to do with the “falling into the dark pool effect” (I’ve written about this before in my post “Caution, Writing May Be Hazardous to Your Skin.) The gist of it is that writing, like any activity that a person can throw himself into, can be absorbing. And by absorbing I mean that it’s like a drug to me. I know this makes me sound like a loon. The point is I get caught up in what I’m writing, and I lose track of time and my surroundings. Climbing out of that spell can be disconcerting. In other words, I need an antidote for my antidote.

Enter: yoga. Let me preface this by saying that I am not what anyone would call an athlete. When I was growing up I didn’t play sports. Unless you count kickball or dodge ball. And I didn't do these activities well. I was the stereotypical last kid chosen for teams in PE. Yes, they still did this when I was in school, and it ranks right up there with the most humiliating experiences in life. To say that I am not a physical person is putting it mildly. But a few years ago I found yoga. Or maybe….duh duh duh…it found me.

It came in the form of a dvd at the library (which I have since purchased. The dvd. Not the library). I liked the workout immediately because it was something I could do alone and was deceptively rigorous. It also, strangely, helped me work through plot holes. Every morning I write for a few hours then break for yoga, and any walls I’ve bumped into in a story fall away. It’s magic. Or not. I’ve read studies that show that switching from an intense mental activity to a physical one, such as taking a walk or washing dishes or even taking a shower, can improve creativity. Not sure how this works, and I don’t care.

Yoga, at least the kind I do, which is called Kundalini, is very new-agey. There’s lots of breathing and meditating and concentrating. I confess that all of this felt very over-the-top weirdo to me when I first started doing it. I am not an expert in chakras. I don’t even know what they are. But I can say with some degree of confidence that if mine are not balanced daily, I am in trouble.

So I no longer roll my eyes or snicker at the dvd instructor’s directions. He’s an adorably poetic guy named Ravi who introduces exercises by saying stuff like:

This next one isn’t easy but it’s glorious. Go for it and be victorious.

Stretching is your body’s way of receiving new information.

And

This is for your pancreas, gall bladder, and spleen. Let’s show these organs we care.

Ravi also wants me to care about my fascis muscles, and in one meditative exercise he asks me to float three feet off the ground.

And get this: I DO.

Maybe I am a new-agey person after all. And with that I will leave you, faithful readers, to don my yoga garb (this is a lie. I am wearing my yoga garb. It is my pajamas.) head up to my yoga studio (my bedroom) and strike a pose. As Ravi likes to say, "Sat nam."

Do You Like My Hat? No.

I forgot what it was like to read to little kids. And then I visited my brother and his family for a few days (See my post “Tips for Surviving the Snow Apocalypse” for other highlights of that fun trip). The first morning when we woke in a cold, powerless house, I heard my two-year-old nephew crying, and feeling virtuous and a little nostalgic about the time flying and the fact that my own once two-year-old was now eighteen and on a college overnight visit, I told my sister-in-law I’d get up and take care of him. After changing his diaper (another skill that immediately came back to me), little nephew and I snuggled up under the blankets of his sister’s bed with a book, Go Dog Go, the classic by P.D.Eastman.

I read it to my nephew fifteen times and probably would’ve read it again except by then everyone was up and my sister-in-law and I were on our mission to find coffee.

It was amazing to me how quickly I remembered that book. And when I say remembered, I mean that I can probably recite it to you now. It was my son’s favorite book too. My husband and I read it to him so many times that eventually we HID the book after my husband said he would lose his mind if he had to look at it again. I’m not sure exactly why it’s such an attractive book to two-year-old boys. Well, maybe I do know. It has dogs. Lots of them. And it has cars. And it has dogs riding in cars. It also has a cool tree with a secret dog party going on up in the branches. That’s a page you and your two-year-old can study for a long time. By which I mean about a minute.

Still don’t remember the book? Let me give you a few highlights:

1. The first memorable line: “Big dog. Little dog.”
2. The clever use of prepositional phrases: “One little dog going IN. Three big dogs going OUT.”
3. And colors: “A red dog on a blue tree. A blue dog on a red tree.”
4. The drama of the potential car accident where a line of cars is about to run over a clueless bird crossing a busy intersection: “Stop dogs. The light is red now. Stop!”

And of course, the recurring subplot of the budding romance between two dogs and the female dog’s persistent attempts to attract the male dog through her increasingly absurd hat choices. The first time we meet this adorable poodle she is wearing an ordinary hat. “Do you like my hat?” she asks, and the male dog says simply, “I do not like it.” Every few pages we see the couple again, the hats growing more and more ridiculous.

My little nephew LOVED these hat interludes, and we quickly developed our own dialogue.

ME: (pointing at weirdo hat) Do you like my hat?

LN: (shouting with glee) NO!

The two of us also shared a hearty laugh every time we came to the page where a miserable dog swelters on top of a house while the big yellow sun beats down on him. Meanwhile there’s a cool-looking dog sipping lemonade under the house. My nephew and I both agreed that, given our freezing cold lack of electricity situation, we would much rather be the dog sweating on the roof.

Not to go off on a whole books vs electronic media tangent, and maybe I’m like one of those troglodyte people at the turn of the century who insisted that horse and buggy transportation would never go out of style, but I just can’t imagine a world where we snuggle under the covers with our kindles. Books are so tactile. And durable. They can get drooled on. And chewed. They even have a recognizable odor. That Go Dog Go book actually smelled like my son’s copy. And the page at the end displaying the dog party was worn and wrinkled just like my son’s was. (You’ll be relieved to know that my husband’s and my moratorium on The Book did not last long. We gave it back to our son a day or two later and only half-reluctantly returned to the familiar saga of the dogs and their cars. And their hats.)

In case you're worried about it, in the end it all works out for our dog couple. The female dog wears a hat so idiotic, complete with flowerpots and spiders hanging off it, and the male dog shocks everyone by saying that he does, in fact, like that hat. Then they drive off together in his car.

My nephew still stuck with his line, "No." Then we turned back to the beginning and started the book again. Because that's what you do with two-year-olds.