Livin' in a Powder Keg and Givin' Off Sparks

Ashley Hope Pérez

OUT OF DARKNESS

Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Lab, 2015.

ARC provided by Carolrhoda Lab/Lerner Publishing

Henry, Naomi's step-father, and twins Cari and Beto's real dad, in a fit of newly found religious zeal to "make things right with God" takes them from their grandparents in San Antonio to live in the oil boom town of New London, East Texas, in 1937. This means more opportunity for the twins who are in Grade 3, smart, and white-skinned. But at 18 years old, Naomi is very self-aware of her dark skin, her poverty, and her ethnicity. At home, she struggles to overcome her hidden fears that the ugly monster Henry she remembers from her childhood will soon return, especially since she is older and looks like her mother once had. As  she endures ostracism at school and the burden of taking care of her family, Naomi finds herself attracted to Wash, an African-American from the New Egypt community who has befriended the twins and becomes smitten with her. The tension of their forbidden relationship is set against the historical backdrop of the horrific New London School explosion of March 18, 1937.

The story arc of Pérez's characters is well-suited for the setting. The story is tense, violent, and explodes, leaving few survivors to relate the tragic events that actually occurred. Racial tension and the race for money, oil, and souls in Depression Era East Texas was a powder keg waiting for a match, and Pérez found the fuse in this realistic narrative.

I would advise for mature students only, ages 16+, as there is intense and graphic violence of both sexual and physical nature.

Out of This World: a Review of ORBITING JUPITER by Gary D. Schmidt

Schmidt, Gary D. ORBITING JUPITER. New York: Clarion Books. Advanced Review Copy provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers.

A farm family in rural Maine fosters Joseph, a 14-year-old whose life is a series of unfortunate events. It's a rough start for Joseph and his new family, too, but he soon opens up to them after a bonding moment with foster brother, Jack. Joseph explains the truth behind the stories and shares his determination to reunite with his daughter, Jupiter. Just when life begins to look up, bad things go down.

Schmidt smartly establishes setting and character through a first-person narrator. Use of classical allusion, in this case, the Nativity, gives the novel its literary chops. Then there are the humorous potshots at English teachers, the nods to great literature, the ins and outs of middle school life one expects from Schmidt. But, somehow, in ORBITING JUPITER, Schmidt has managed to accomplish with fewer words what he fails to do in many of his other books--here, he makes every scene plausible. There are no zany subplots or misdirected steps. The most appealing of his novels, ORBITING JUPITER will stand out as classic Schmidt--crisp, clear, compelling.

Schmidt, Gary D. ORBITING JUPITER. New York: Clarion Books. Advanced Review Copy provided by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers.

Publication Date: November 3, 2015. 

ISBN: 9780544462229

Ages: 12 and up

Grades: 7 and up

LIKE WATER ON STONE

Walrath, Dana. Like Water on Stone. New York: Delacorte, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-385-74397-6 

Shahen Donabedian wants more than anything to escape his sleepy little Anatolian village to go to New York City, just like his uncle before him. His twin sister, Sosi, does not feel the same, having just discovered the earliest stirrings of affection for Vahan Arkalian, the clock-maker's son. Together, Shahen and Sosi, are expected to help their parents with the family mill-work, grape harvests and care of their five-year-old sister, Miriam. When the unthinkable happens, and the children are forced to flee while their parents are brutally murdered, nothing matters but survival.

A very sensitive book detailing the horrors of the Armenian genocide for a brother and two sisters in 1914, as they escape to Aleppo with the help of an eagle. Walrath doesn't spare us the details-senseless murder, rape, rivers running with blood, death by starvation-but her choice of free verse somehow gives the reader a chance to come up for air once in a while. In addition, she pays attention to the little details of her Armenian heritage-the music, the food, the daily duties of mothers and daughters. She also explores daily interactions among Turkish Muslims, Kurds and Armenians in rural villages before nationalism crept across the Ottoman empire. Great understanding and depth of insight into the human condition is portrayed in this deceptively simple book.

Author's Website: danawalrath.com

Teaching Guide

The Heart Goes Last: a Novel

Atwood, M. (2015). THE HEART GOES LAST: A NOVEL. Nan A. Talese. ISBN: 9780385540353.

Stan and Charmaine have no money. Signing up to live in an experimental society is better than living in their car, even if they do spend every other month in jail.

Pretty soon, however, things take a strange turn. The POSITRON/CONCILIANCE experiment begins to go awry. The reader realizes this dystopian novel is about the definition of marriage. What is it? Sex, romance, dominance, dependency, any, all or none of the above?

Atwood's tells the story in the voices of Charmaine, a perky optimist, and Stan, her somewhat resentful husband. How far are they willing to go to be comfortable, to have "the good life"?

Based on Advanced Review Copy. Release Date September 29,  2015. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese.

Publisher's Summary:
Margaret Atwood puts the human heart to the ultimate test in an utterly brilliant new novel that is as visionary as The Handmaid’s Tale and as richly imagined as The Blind Assassin.

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around—and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in…for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their “civilian” homes.
At first, this doesn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one’s head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan’s life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.

MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; and her most recent, MaddAddam. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

Author Website:http://www.margaretatwood.ca

Author Social Media: Twitter @MargaretAtwood; FB MargaretAtwoodAuthor

I Read Literature Like a Professor. Who Knew?

Foster, T. (2003). How to Read literature like a professor: a lively and entertaining guide to reading between the lines. New York: Harper.

This book is recommended reading for AP Lit teachers everywhere. It is also recommended for their students. Having taught the courses, I would find a few chapters useful. The intro is good for its discussion of memory, symbol and pattern. His chapters on Shakespearean and Biblical allusion are a good intro for students who may not have had much exposure to either, but are expected to understand obscure references to both in encounters with other literature. There is also a great apologetic for students who always question if readers are reading too much into a text. I would use that, for sure. His chapters on myth, poetry, seasons and setting are too cursory. I've seen better material. Where the book fell short: he uses examples that most AP students or college Freshmen have still not read and therefore will not understand or find his discussions engaging. His conclusions also draw 98% from the Western canon, yet he claims there is only one story. I believe he should qualify that statement a bit more. One last thing, I fear that some students and/or teachers may use this book exclusively for developing a critical literary lens. That would be disastrous, as many of the archetypes, symbols and motifs he shares are often used to limit an interpretation of a text, leading to a false sense that there is a "correct" way of knowing what an author was trying to say.

There are helpful reading lists in the back of the book, again, mostly drawing from the Western canon. If you teach BELOVED, Joyce, Eliot, Dickens or Frost, this book will be helpful. He also draws significantly from the works of Frye, Freud, Jung and Bahktin. 

A Great and (not too) Terrible Book

Bray, Libba (2003). A Great and Terrible Beauty. New York: Delacorte. 

This book and the author get tons of hype from Booklist and ALA. This book was fine, and some girls will get into the series, but it's not great. As far as historical fiction, the descriptions of England, India, gypsies--all a bit cliche. It's not a read alike for The Hunger Games or Divergent crowd. There was some mixing of occult and mythology. That was odd. Plus, what was the veiled lesbian stuff? And the repressed sex? Just a bit too much.

All that criticism aside, Bray is an enjoyable writer.  Anyone who suffered through the Twilight series will certainly enjoy this series more.  It is far better written and the female characters are much more nuanced and independent. For the literati, it might appeal for comparisons to The Crucible, as it does contain some similar themes--jealousy, adolescent friendship, first love, coming of age.  

The book is the first in the Gemma Doyle Trilogy.  Other titles are Rebel Angels (Gemma Doyle, #2) and The Sweet and Far Thing (Gemma Doyle, #3).   You can read more about the series on the author's homepage.  Fans of the author should check out her other books as well at http://libbabray.com/. 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: a Novel. New York: Riverhead, 2007.

For the past 3 years, this has been on my radar, as everyone in my "library" classes had been going on and on about it. I really didn't like it that much, nor do I care for Diaz' short stories that I pick up here and there. There are some inspired lines, such as, "...when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thudded inside his chest, a lonely rada." Sure, what girl wouldn't fall in love with that line? But "a lonely rada" is kind of lost on me. I'm just not that citified, I guess. The only Dominicans I really ever met were at Word of Life Camp when I was a teenager, and they didn't swear or speak in the vernacular Diaz uses in his writings, at least not while they were at Bible camp. I would have to say that I did enjoy the narrative techniques, story within a story within a story, the thread that ran through the narrative, the epiphany when the narrator was revealed-that was fresh. I learned quite a bit about DR history. And this book was so much more enjoyable than How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. If I was in a school where I was able to teach either book, barring censorship, I would choose Diaz over Alvarez. He's less agenda-oriented and less self-aware, more about the craft.