Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'Summer of My German Soldier', Bette Greene's 1973 book about Patty Bergen, who fears her father more than an escaped Nazi.
(In honor of Passover being two-three? - weeks ago, we are doing a two-part series about Jewish girls during WWII. Today's column is the one with the real Nazi. Please prepare your book reports on Judy Blume's 'Starring Sally J. Freedman, As Herself,' which contains a completely imaginary Hitler, for the comments next week.)
What can we say about a Jewish dad who beats the hell out of his daughter? It is not, to say the least, the common literary conception of "Jewish Dad" found in most old-school YA, where, when Tate is in evidence at all, he is generally a hardworking sort stamping down rags and letting his children choose books from his store, or a kindly dentist dubbed "Dodo bird" by his adoring daughter. (Do your reading for next week, ladies!) In fact, excepting stepfathers, genuinely beastly fathers are rare in YA: while they run the gamut from switching their daughters to make a point (oh, Pa!) to calling them fat and useless, I can't think of any other instance where one whips off his belt to beat his daughter by the side of the road...before he even knows she's sheltering a Nazi.
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler', E.L. Konigsburg's 1967 novel about extremely unaccompanied minors run amok at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back.
I miss New York. Not the New York somewhere over to my left. A New York before The Squid & The Whale brought divorce to the Museum of Natural History. A New York before nannies got groped; a New York before private-school girls intertwangled lustily on beds in some benighted plan to rule the school. It was a New York that had room for a notepad-toting minor to spy unaccompanied on people through dumbwaiters; a boy to wander Chinatown having adventures with a cricket; teenagers to contend with a genie in a mystery at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Not a world where children playact adult dramas, or unhappily contend with the chaos adults leave in their wake. It's a New York that keeps adults perpetually at shoulder-level, briefcases and purses jostling, while the children, front-and-center in the frame, get up to whatever children get up to.
So there's a story by Jim Lewis on Slate about perfume. Not just about perfume, though — about writing about perfume. The story is linked to a book called Perfumes: The Guide, by husband and wife team Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. I used to write about music, which I always thought was really tough; somehow the vocabulary ("upbeat, sing-along, power-pop" or "the songs meandered, looped, tinkled out or built to a dramatic orchestral crescendo") always seemed forced and limited. But describing a scent seems even more challenging. Lewis points out that the words perfumers use: amber, citrus, floral — are pretty vague. But! Luca Turin describes Fracas thusly: "A friend once explained to me how Ferrari achieves that gorgeous red: first paint the car silver, then six coats of red, then a coat of transparent pink varnish..." Can you smell it? Glossy, bright and sharp. More »
Latest by JeanGenetRamsey: The color of bourbon and two or three melted ice cubes, it smells luxurious, grosteque like the arch of a wrist, exposing the close veins. It is Chanel no. 5, and she wears it in her hair and scarves, with more »
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'A Gift Of Magic, Lois Duncan's 1971 story of 11-year-old Nancy Barrett, whose grandmother bequeaths her a totally ESPecial legacy.
Once upon a time in a house by the sea, lay an old woman, a special old woman who had the gift of magic.
If every author has their red-headed stepchild of a book (John Updike: The Witches of Eastwick: WTF?), every author also has the book that, whether it's a reader favorite or not, seems the purest expression of their very authorial being.
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'The Secret Garden', Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1909 novel about an orphan who gardens her way to a good character.
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable child ever seen. It was true, too.
Somewhere along the line, along with straw prams and caning rods, having a child character not even the narrator can stand went out of business. (Off the top of my head, I can only think of Ingalls Wilder's condemnation of Nellie, and you know she was just writing the God's honest truth.) But in the case of Mary Lennox, daughter of Colonial India, Frances Hodgson Burnett does not stint:
She had a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow, because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another.
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, New York Observer reporter, blogger and Postcards From Yo Momma co-creator Doree Shafrir rereads 'The Chocolate War,' Robert Cormier's 1974 novel about a 14-year-old boy who stands up to the bullies at his high school.
Back when teenagers still bought books that didn't feature a paranormal love interest, a school for wizards, or spoiled Upper East Side prep schoolers, there were books like Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War, which featured an all-male, working-class cast of characters at a Catholic school in Massachusetts (as did most of Cormier's books; he grew up Catholic in Leominster, Mass.). In fact, when I suggested rereading The Chocolate War, I soon realized that I had had another one of Cormier's books in mind, the deeply weird, depressing I Am the Cheese, in which the reader slowly realizes that the narrator is, in fact, in a mental hospital and tried to kill himself.
More »
Our girl Judy Blume has a whopping five titles on the American Library Association's "Most Challenged Books" list. In this clip from Current TV, Blume defends herself and her books against evil PTA members who continue to ban her informative, delightful, classic Young Adult novels. Of the oft-banned Forever, Blume says, "I wanted to allow a young woman to enjoy her sexuality, which I think is the thing that got me in so much trouble." Damn the man. Save Judy!
Latest by yummylicious: "Forever" will forever be one of my favorite books! I'm so glad I read it when I was 16. It's sad that evil PTA members want to ban sex ed in any form. more »
Red Hot Read
Rare is the occasion on which I read things that don't have ads, but I'm excerpting an actual book for you today because Chinese repression and forbidden love (oh, also, existential torment!) are in the news, and Serve The People, newly out in paperback, was banned there with the warning, THIS NOVEL SLANDERS MAO ZEDONG, THE ARMY, AND IS OVERFLOWING WITH SEX. It tells the story of Wu Dawang, a soldier who finds himself working as a sort of slave boy in the house of a powerful division commander who happens to be impotent and his bored wife, who points at a propaganda sign that says "Serve The People" whenever she wants him to come upstairs and fuck her. They have a lot of sex and eat a lot of food and deface a lot of Cultural Revolution propaganda in a very short time, but it can't last, and Wu ends up a defeated, broken, bad-skinned shell of a man living in a place where the odds of a single dude getting laid are sort of like mine in New York. It's supposed to be some sort of satirical takedown of China under Mao, and while it's hard not to think Wu would have been better off never having all this hot counterrevolutionary sex, at least, in a free society, when we are hard up we can read trashy novels. Click the pic for some passages.
Last week, in honor of the 35th anniversary of the publication of Fear of Flying and the acquisition of Erica Jong's papers by Columbia University, the author herself gave a talk about Flying's role in the feminist pantheon. Rebecca Traister of Salon thinks of Flying more as a sex book than as a feminist book (Jong on her legacy: "I used to worry that they would put zipless fuck on my tombstone."). And though Jong's book is frankly sexual — "his curled pink penis which tasted faintly of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth" — it's also very, very autobiographical, as Jong's irate sister pointed out in the middle the lecture. According to the New Yorker's Rebecca Mead, Jong's sister, Suzanna Daou, stood up and said, "I love my sister very much, but Fear of Flying has been a thorn in my flesh for thirty-five years."
More »
Latest by CatOTO: It's not just anti-feminist to sell your sister down the river to further your own success. It's also anti-feminist TO FUCK YOUR SISTER'S HUSBAND and treat it like some heroic feminist act. more »
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie', the 1982 story of Sylvie Krail, who hits the road for Hollywood with a hatbox and a dream.
I've always had a soft spot for Ellen Conford, one of the great unsung authors of the YA genre. (I'm not quite sure how you quantify "sung"ness, but let's start it at screaming when an author's name is mentioned, for one.) And why is she unsung? Because her novels, I think, are so skilled and vibrant, she's prey to the solid-A syndrome: so dependable, readers forget she even exists. By the time our daily reading has switched to matte-finish trade paperbacks, memory has already mistakenly shelved her work in with a favorite, showier author. (My particular mis-shelf is always to put And This is Laura, her teen-psychic foray, into the Lois Duncan section.)
More »
What are my hypothetical "dealbreakers"? I didn't think I had any, until this fellow I know emailed me with a link to the story that sits atop the New York Times Most Emailed list. The story is about "literary dealbreakers," which is to say, "books that are bonerkillers" or "It's Not Me, It's Your Books." Now: there is little in the way of reading material I hold in lower esteem than the New York Times' Most Emailed List, whose prominence on the New York Times homepage — in addition to the internal and circlejerkospheric prestige a writer earns when she or he writes a story that finds its way onto the list — serves not only as an important signifier of the wanton consumerism to which the once-great news gathering institution has succumbed, but a shameless perpetuator of said consumerism. Migraines! Maureen Dowd! Shamu! Oh yes, and also: "People in New York are detestable in every way; come, let us count them!" Today in class: your one-night stand is judging your book collection.
More »
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'The Westing Game', Ellen Raskin's 1978 multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-p.o.v. mystery about the race for a multi-millionaire's fortune.
The sun sets in the West (just about everybody knows that) but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange!
Okay, it's fine how I just figured out the significance of that line now. But before I get into how I'm still happily flummoxed by a book for the lanyard set, I'd like to say how I've become a little perturbed how technology keeps obviating classic teenage reads. Forget how we no longer need to disembowel our own pigs or avoid being shuttled to the stocks — I mean more recent betrayals, like how the cell phone would have killed Are You in the House Alone, or how Zach could have just kicked Vicky an email after Yellowstone. (I'd still like to think Harriet would have resisted the glories of Facebook.) But worst-worst! — is the most fabulist fabulous The Westing Game, which in present time would have ended abruptly the minute one plugged "FRUITED PURPLE WAVES FOR SEE" into Google.
"Quick," writes Jessa Crispin on TheSmartSet.com. "How do you tell if a woman in a movie is supposed to be intelligent? First off, she'd probably be brunette, but past that. Glasses, yes. Little to no makeup. Her hair is probably in a ponytail. Clothes she probably bought at the Gap in a size too big. You know she's the smart one because she thinks about more important things than her appearance." We live in a world where "trendy" girls with "it" bags are often vapid, shallow beings bereft of a brain. The fashion magazine industry often makes things worse: "Elle talks to Ashlee Simpson. And writes down what she says. To be recorded for all time," Crispin notes. And "there is a huge disconnect between the fantasy world of Vogue — where women spend their days romping in fields wearing $1,500 sequined leggings — and reality." And yet there are women who are smart and care about fashion. Right? Right?
More »
Latest by Sukie in the Graveyard: The line about cleavage (and conversation skills) was so DAMN funny, it is now in my Facebook profile.
I know that sentence might make it seem like my IQ dropped a good 10 points, but it is something I think should more »
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer / reviewer / blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 novel 'The Moon By Night,' in which Vicky Austin goes camping and gets to know boys from A to Z.
"Vicky!"
It was John's voice and he was calling for me. I supposed somewhere on the inside of my mind I realized it, but with the outside of my mind all I heard was the constant crying of sea gulls and the incoming boom of breakers.
Don't buy into the party of unity: When it's comes to Madeleine L'Engle, you're either a Meg, Polly, or Vicky girl. (NO ONE is Camilla. And whatever, Maggies — you're deliberately being provoking.) For those of you rusty on the trois dames of L'Engle's works, Meg is, OF COURSE, Meg Murray, of A Wrinkle in Time fame, while Polly (Polyhymnia) is her red-headed daughter of the excellent Dragons in the Waters action. Vicky is Vicky Austin, of Meet the Austins, two kinds of awkward, three kinds of innocent, and strangely appealing for a fourteen-year-old given to frequent bouts of vigorous prayer.
Novel Idea
About a month ago, we posted about Graham Rawle's novel, Woman's World, which he wrote (then rewrote) by clipping words and phrases out of publications from the 1960s. Today, Nerve has an interview with Rawle, in which he details the writing process: "I might have had a sentence like, 'She stormed out of the room,' which then became, 'Red rage rose within her like the mercury in a toffee thermometer until she reached the boiling point of fudge.'... It forced me to be more inventive in the way I constructed sentences." And although the book it's a collage made with scissors and glue, the novel is still a cohesive story. "With the editing process, we had to be as ruthless as you would be with a straight novel. My editor would say, "We should cut chapter thirteen," and I'd have to go, "Okay. Well, that took eight months to make, but that's fine." [Nerve]
Much has been made about Margaret "Peggy" Seltzer, the writer whose gang violence memoir, Love and Consequences, turned out to be a fabrication. But, the New York Timesasks today, what of Cyndi Hoffman, Peggy's older sister? Hoffman is the one who turned "tattletale" and blew the whistle on Peggy. Her own sister. "We have powerful expectations of loyalty from a sister," Marcia Millman, sociology professor and author of The Perfect Sister: What Draws Us Together, What Drives Us Apart tells the Times. "But along with the idealized image of sisters, that they are always close, there is a stereotype that sisters are very competitive. It's the two extremes." They say blood is thicker than water, but is the truth thicker than blood?
More »
Latest by lola82: Dude, my big sister ratted my ass out for shit I didn't even do when we lived together...we tolerate each other know.
The Unabomber's brother "ratted" him out. Thank jesus.
Would I rat her out over a book? I dunno. Guess it more »
Fine Lines Lady
Lois Lowry (Anastasia Krupnik, Taking Care of Terrific, The Giver) was interviewed by Seattle public radio station KUOW on Friday, and the 71-year-old writer talked about her career as an author, the importance of children's/young adult literature, her family, and how writing has helped her deal with life's slings and arrows. Although long, the podcast of her interview is a great listen for a slow workday or leisurely lunch hour. You can listen to it here. [KUOW]
Welcome to 'Fine Lines', the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth. This week, writer/reviewer/blogger Lizzie Skurnick rereads 'My Sweet Audrina', V.C. Andrews' X-rated, 1982 gothic horror novel in which Audrina Adare, an innocent, is Desperately Seeking Sister.
There was something strange about the house where I grew up.
For a three-month span in my early twenties, when I was under the profound misimpression I was an appropriate candidate for a PhD in English literature, I was obsessed with writing a paper on the narrative conceit of what, in a sort of pertinent Q.E.D., I went around calling "The Man You Seek is Yourself." The most obvious example of my pet trope is Oedipus, who is so busy killing his father and sleeping with his mother he doesn't realize he is killing his father and sleeping with his mother, but you see it in mysteries everywhere, from Mary Higgins Clark's Where Are the Children to No Way Out, a.k.a. Last Decent Costner. While reading most mysteries feels like having a scatter of jigsaw pieces suddenly fuse into a picture with a satisfying click, the TMYSIY™ theme is closer to trying to locate, with increasing irritation, the weird corner piece with some blue cloud stuff in one corner and half the villager's hat along the edge, then realizing you've been holding it in your hands the whole time.
Jezebel
fine lines
Rare is the occasion on which I read things that don't have ads, but I'm excerpting an actual book for you today because 
