looking for alaska

Green, John. looking for alaska. New York: Dutton Books, 2005.

Annotation: Lonely and bored, Miles leaves his Florida home for boarding school, looking for "the Great Perhaps." There, he finds real friends, real love, real fun, and real grief.

Justification for nomination: Alaska's a beautiful, tortured soul - a sixteen-year-old girl that Miles Halter, this story's protagonist, can neither get enough of nor understand. When Alaska's reckless behavior and frequent drinking eventually kills her, the friends she leaves behind aren't sure if her death was an accident. They also bear some responsibility, as none of them stopped her from driving off to her tragic end in a drunken stupor .

This story's been done before. Boarding school setting, friction between the insulated rich and the scrabbling poor, a talented kid dying some sort of thoughtless death..I'm thinking "Dead Poet's Society" or "A Separate Peace", for starters. Nonetheless, I loved this book. John Green's interweaving of Miles' adolescent desires, both known and unknown, with the lectures and questions of an aging "World Religions" teacher is deft and nearly perfect. Religion is how humans have always dealt with the underlying mysteries of life (gender, sex, death, love, to name some of the big ones) and I'm completely grateful to the author for writing this beautiful and honest meditation on the subject.

Genre: Printz/coming-of-age/edgy.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2007.

Annotation: Junior's decision to leave the reservation school in pursuit of big dreams is only the beginning of a very difficult first year of high school.

Justification for nomination: Countless times while reading this book, I thought to myself "Did Sherman Alexie take Literature 332 at Metro with Adela?" His first young adult work is nearly a textbook example of what makes YA lit YA..yet it overflows with natural and seemingly effortless storytelling magic.

Multicultural? Yup.. Junior, the main character, is a Native American living the poor rez life in Washington state. Young narrator? He's 14. Are there adults helping him struggle through his first year as the only poor Indian in an all-white school? No, they're too busy drinking. Does it cross genres and subjects? Part comedy, part tragedy, a sports story, and illustrated with great cartoons, it definitely does. Fast-paced? Both my son and I read it in one day. Is it optimistic with admirable characters? Junior stutters, sports congenital deformities and thus serves as a scapegoat amongst many of his fellow reservation-dwellers. His decision to go to an all-white off-rez school exponentially intensifies his ostracized social status. Instead of acting the pain out on himself or his family, he channels all his anger and fear into drawing comics and playing basketball. Alexie doesn't shy away from grimness and shocking tragedy in this story, but he kept me laughing all the way through.


Genre: Multicultural/coming-of-age/problem/realistic.

Keeping Secrets

Lyons, Mary E. Keeping Secrets: The Girlhood Diaries of Seven Women Writers. New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1995.

Annotation: Mary Lyons presents brief biographies of seven turn-of-the-century American women, all authors and diary-keepers. The secrets these women only revealed to their diaries are her focus.

Justification for rejection: This is a decently organized, well written book. Showing great depth of understanding, Mary Lyons draws clear, seamless connections between the prevailing social attitudes of the times and some of the pivotal life events of her subjects. The author used the women's original diaries as source materials whenever possible, providing a well-researched peek into their private thoughts. The "peek", however, serves as a major shortcoming. The excerpts she includes are exceedingly brief - often just one or two words, rarely even a complete sentence. I was left frustrated by this and wanting more. Even a well-chosen paragraph or two per woman would have let me hear their individual voices and aided my own interpretation. Instead, Mary Lyons keeps the reins in her own hands. Thus, while the theme of finding and developing one's identity and voice amidst formidable opposition offers developmental appeal to teen readers, her unwillingness to let the reader fully in on the "secrets" themselves prevents me from nominating it.

In spite of my rejection, the book has much to offer teens with a specific interest in either the history of women's rights and/or the biographies of writers. The awe-inspiring lives of the admirable women included in this book are contextualized into other important events in American history, such as the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, and the spread of yellow fever. A good read, but not for everybody.

Genre: Nonfiction/biography/multicultural.

Keesha's House

Frost, Helen. Keesha's House. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.


Annotation: Seven teenagers run away from home for seven different reasons and all wind up at Keesha's house, a fellow runaway..

Justification for rejection: I love poetry - when it's short and a little bit odd (or a lot...), but not so much as a storytelling device. Keeping this bias in mind, I approached Keesha's House with extra care but still, I disliked it - as an adult reader. The teen I was would have loved it. Here's why:

I found the menu of troubled teenage tribulations present in this work to be overdone - having homosexuality, drug dealing, incest, pregnancy, murder, and alcoholism all touched on very briefly in a short book is too reminiscent of "True Confessions" magazine for me to respect it. As a young teen, however, I loved "True Confessions" because I could vicariously experience someone else's tragedy through its sordid stories and thus escape my own. Frost's use of poetry has potential to counteract this tabloid effect, but she didn't pull it off. The seven teenagers' voices didn't vary enough to bring them into full focus as individual characters and eventually they all blurred into one in my head, sounding like the same brave-and-hopeful-yet-resigned and grown-up-too-fast victims for me to distinguish each from the other. Had there been more anger and/or more flaws evident in the teens that all found their way to Keesha's house, I'd feel differently. Instead, Keesha's House takes the same narrow and sentimental approach to too many complicated issues at once and doesn't provide remarkable insight into a single one as a result.

Genre: Problem/poetry/edgy.

Needles

Dominick, Andie. Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up With Diabetes. New York: Scribner, 1998.

Annotation: An Iowan girl learns the hard way that getting what you think you want can be a very difficult lesson when she is diagnosed at the age of nine with diabetes, just like her much-admired older sister.


Justification for rejection: This memoir spans a large portion of Andie Dominick's life, beginning with her early memories of playing with her big sister's insulin needles and ending with her wedding. Overall, the book lacked oomph in enough areas to not be a good candidate for the Printz award. First, Dominick's writing style lacks character - repeatedly, I felt I was reading an assignment for a creative writing class focusing on descriptive writing. Second, there's an overall cohesiveness missing (and admittedly it's one of the challenges of memoir-writing). The titular needles, daily necessities for Andie and her sister and dishing out lots of pain alongside their medicine, serve to focus the beginning of Andie's story. By the second half of the book, however, Andie moves on to the other challenges presented by her life with diabetes and the theme disappears, well before it was adequately presented. Third, young adult genre expectations are simply not met by this book: Andie's teen years don't play a central role in her memoir, nor are enough developmental issues addressed. Unavoidably, she comes to terms with her physical limitations; gets an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy happens in high school; and as an adult she suffers through her sister's early death. Her resulting vision is not particularly clear or remarkable, however, and I would only recommend this book to teens seeking out diabetes-related information.

Genre: Memoir.