(When I began this essay, I realized I had a few things to say about boys' books and girls' books and how much I've had to talk about them AGAINST MY WILL, but I went on for 19 hours and decided to spare everyone who just wanted some turtle in their soup, many thanks. To read the official preface to the piece, click here.)

For a young reader, I found a surprising number of my books on airport and train station carousels. (See below for more on my status as a world traveler of note.) For this reason, I was introduced to the wondrous Roald Dahl not through the delightful Danny, Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, or, of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but by the truly demented Tales of the Unexpected and Switch Bitch. (Leave it to me to lead with leprosy.)

That's why when I espied Henry Sugar and Six More on the top shelf of the children's section — still can't decide if it belongs there — I spent my hard-earned budget on the hardcover although it cut out a good 5 paperback purchases. A) It was worth it. B) Henry Sugar is an odd duck of a book, and no two ways about it — the kind of hodgepodge collection you might acquire if you simply asked an author to turn whatever currently sat on the desk and one or two old published favorites from years past, then hurriedly asked for an essay "On Writing" to round out the page count. (For all I know, this is exactly what happened.)

It begins with the spooky and brief story of a boy who rescues a turtle from a terrible death, moves on to a delightful tale of a speeder and a pickpocket, shifts to a story of a trove of Roman silver uncovered in an English field, moves to "The Swan," one of the most terrifying stories about bullying ever written, segues into the fantastical title story about an Englishman who learns to see without his eyes, then takes a break for Dahl to talk about how he became a writer (he invented the word "Gremlin" and hung out with FDR!) before presenting the first thing he's ever published-an account being shot down over North Africa during WWII.

But for all that the collection could seem scattershot, it is not-because it is held firmly together by Dahl's enduring theme: The terrible power of the thick-headed bully, and the transcendence of knowledge and kindness in the face of meaningless cruelty.

Common to horror writers is this pitched battle of the good against the innocent, the moment of quivering uncertainty when we don't know yet whether something terrible is going to happen and won't be able to stand it either way. But what's particular to Dahl, and what I'd forgotten, is how much he associates evil with eating. Because, whether it's to chop up a turtle alive during Waterloo for a dinner course of soup, kill and hack apart a swan for play, or simply greedily hoard silver a stash of wondrous silver, evil in Dahl is associated with overfeeding, and if you need to know who the bullies are, look for close-set, glittering eyes; fleshy lips and a wet, open mouth; meaty arms and thighs; nuts stuck in teeth, or simply the overly oiled who seek only to pamper and increase their flesh.

A Freudian might point out-and might manage to actually be right-that Dahl's linking of evil bullies to food might easily be traced back to the days when he could be caned for leaving a burnt spot on a slice of bread. And in each story there is that horrible moment of non-control and terror when the turtle caught; when the swan is actually shot; the siren goes off; the yogi dies; the silver stolen outright.

But Dahl, for all that horror, is an absurd optimist, who always allows the good to prevail. (My personal favorite revenge on the greedy comes from his story "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which – spoiler – a woman kills her husband with a large frozen lamb, then feeds it to the policemen investigating the crime.) Without exception, the persecuted simply swim, fly, drive, or otherwise slip the grasp of the cruel world. Even Henry Sugar, who's only held back by his own greedy proclivities, winds up a globe-hopper creating homes for the fellow homeless orphans.

Each reader will forever keep the image that stays with her of how they've escaped the grasp of the gobblers of life. (Mine is always Peter from "The Swan" not flying away, but moving his head back and forth to gently make enough of a depression in the train tracks to not be killed when it passes over him. But what Henry Sugar reminds us is that although the world is ruled by the senses, there is more shoot or be shot, cane or be caned, eat or be eaten. While the greedy try to eat it all up, the good see right through them.

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Hello pretties! Very brief Plotfinder this week from a friend who IS DESPERATE to know. The only detail she remembers is that a black girl is told to put butter in her hair to calm it, and, lacking butter, uses ghee. Takers? I remember using butter as lotion which makes your hands smell rancid (Flowers, yes?) but am clueless on this one.

Answer in comments below or send to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Winner gets FREE COPY.

Also have to relate brief story of what happened to me this morning, JUST BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I live in Jersey City and travel out of Newark Penn station 900 times a month to various places, supporting Amtrak as is my way. (I love trains.) The other day I was in Hudson Booksellers and started chatting with the clerk, and, since it was almost exactly the pub date of my book, told her all about it, and also that I would bring her a card and a copy the next week when I returned. So TODAY, I go in, w/card, and it turned out SHE'D ALREADY ORDERED IT AND THERE IT WAS ON THE SHELVES!



Since I discovered Roald Dahl en route (and contributor Jennifer Weiner, for what that's worth) I urge you — if you are in a place of transit and see a bookseller and you feel like it, tell them about this book! They seem like they'll order pretty much anything.

xoox
L

A note before we begin: A Summer to Die was not my Death book. My Death books (I had several; bear with me) were, excepting the pre-digested A Taste of Blackberries, Just Like Always (cancer ward, snotty blond, not to be confused with Just Like Sisters), Beat the Turtle Drum (horses, tree climbing, snotty sister), Bridge to Terabithia (running, bossy BFF, creek-swinging), and Jacob Have I Loved, in which the snotty sister, Caroline, doesn't actually die, though the dark-haired Louise wishes she would, often.

A Summer to Die is the story of two sisters: Meg; circumspect, awkward, and artistic; and Molly, confident and blonde, going so far as to make the cheerleading team (to the consternation of their English professor father). Which brings us to an important point about Death books: while survivalist narratives confine themselves to the nature of suffering tout seul, for someone to die in YA, you have to have two. Preferably a blonde- and brown-haired two, one lovely, haughty, and impatient with the other's caution; the other mousy, observant, and impatient with the other's confidence. (It occurs to me that I can just go ahead and tack on My Darling, My Hamburger here, as the important point is not for the blonde to die but for the blonde to suffer.)

Ah, yes! Spoiler alert! The blonde always dies. What we cannot achieve in life, we can in print. (Though in so doing the author often seems to forget that in killing off the casually superior compatriot, she propels her to an angelic realm wherein her beauty, once a terrestrial torment, is now not only also beatific but forever free of the ravages of age.)

Anyway. Meg and Molly (Meg is slightly younger) are recently removed to a lovely, rambling home in the country in order for their professor father to finish a book in peace. There, before tragedy strikes, Molly runs among the flowers, Meg masters photography, their mother quilts, their father writes, and Meg and Molly befriend Will, a kindly old widower next door, as well as his hippie tenants, Maria and Ben. In this temporary Eden, Meg putters in a darkroom with Will, walks in the snow, dances with her father and mother along to the radio, and, eventually, photographs the live birth of the child ("Happy") of said hippies. (Molly, during this whole part, is DYING, but more on that in a second.)

Which brings me to a third point — who knew I had so many points? — about Death novels: they tend to occur not in the mix of the larger, outside world but rather in leafy, close-knit environs, as if the assembled were only making a pit stop in the Elysian Fields to briefly acquaint the doomed member of their party with their future resting place before heading back to the land of the living.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall," in which the speaker informs another Margaret that what she thinks is sorrow over the falling of leaves is really only sorrow for herself ("Margaret, are you weeping/Over Goldengrove unleaving?"), is the philosophical and aesthetic spine of the narrative. But as Molly's leukemia gets worse, the miniature village becomes even more isolated — though happily — in its ever-thinning grove. It's a happy isolation, and in its particulars made me remember a late-70s world that is now vanished, if it ever existed — one free of irony, in which the boundaries between adulthood and childhood were entirely permeable, in which teenagehood was not a state of isolation from one's adult familiars or a brief bridge to being a grown-up, but simply an alternative state, like being from France.

In this world, Meg is free to pursue serious photography simply because she enjoys it, not as a means to a collegiate end; Molly and Meg can befriend an elderly widower next door without anything being odd about it; a young couple can welcome two girls into their family not only as valued companions but as peers. Adults can be guides or students: When Molly wants to learn the names of all the flowers before she dies, Will teaches her; when Meg masters her darkroom, Will studies with her. And adults are never simply a stand-in for unpleasant authority: when Ben and Maria talk about wanting to get married by a river to guitar music, you know it's not simply to spite their rich parents. Most strikingly, when Meg is asked to photograph the (home!) birth of Ben and Maria's child, she only response is a mild inquiry from Will and her father, and the scene concerns mostly Meg's pleasure in her mastery over the camera and the vivid experience of watching a child being born, not a budding Annie Liebovitz but one wholly formed.

It's not only Meg who is given adult authority. When Meg and her father visit Molly on the verge of her death, her father has a surprising take on his daughter: "'This is a very hard thing to explain, Meg, but Molly is handling this thing very well by herself. She needs us, for our love, but she doesn't need us for anything else now.' He swallowed hard and said, 'Dying is a very solitary thing. The only thing we can do is be there when she wants us to be there.'"

Was this idea of preternatural maturity, this equality across generations, simply a wish on the part of the authors of this era? If you heard the plot of this book described, you would think that the adult part of the book was that Meg has to handle Molly dying. But in fact Meg and Molly were already wholly exposed to an adult world in which they thrive and are fully a part. The world of A Summer to Die made me think a bit of this article about Facebook by Peggy Orenstein, in which she wonders if the world of intimacy across generations, of constant contact with one's family and community, is not some new expression of mass narcissism but in fact the historical norm. It's only a few decades post-WWII in which we had the opportunity and expectation to separate from our family of birth, not simply be absorbed.

Maybe she has a point. After Molly's death, like the Margaret of the poem, Meg is counseled not by her parents but by Will, another kindly older man who gives her a portrait of herself that allows her to move on:

I knew, though I had not known it then, that Will had taken it. He had taken it in the village cemetary the day we buried Molly there and heaped her grave with goldenrod....There was something of Molly in my face. It startled me, seeing it. The line that defined my face, the line that separated the darkness of the trees from the light that curved into my forehead and cheek was the same line that had once identified Molly by its shape. The way I held my shoulders was the same way she had held hers. It was a transient thing, I knew, but when Will had held the camera and released the shutter of one five-hundredth of a second, he had captured and made permanent whatever of Molly was in me. I was grateful, and glad.

See, now the English major part of me wants to observe that the book begins with a line across a room that separates Molly and Meg (death), and the book ends with the line that brings them together (life), but THE HUMAN PART OF ME WANTS TO CRY. God, I have held off on the death part for eight paragraphs, which must be some kind of record. What can I say, I am trauma-avoidant. Fringed gentian is the grove filling with leaves again and pussy willows out of water symbolize what happens to Molly and— shut up, English major. What I will take away today is not only the symbolic import of fringed gentians (sob!), but the newly remembered observation that friends, like gentians, can grow in all kinds of places.

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Guys, you did wonderfully well on last week's quiz challenge, Partial Coverage, especially as Google is not really a help in these matters! Before I list the winners of a copy of Shelf Discovery, I point you to the gallery where you may find the answers to all (click here if the image below doesn't show up):

2009-07-21

The winners are AS FOLLOWS, in no particular order, only because some of you got some close to right which counted as a half point and...oy. You are winners, all! (If you won for reals though, please send me an email to jezziefinelines@gmail.com with the words "Partial Coverage Winner" in the subject line):

1. Jennifer Gibbons
2. Kerry Stubbs
3. Jen McCreary
4. Katherine Nelson
5. Jane Mendle
6. Jessica Calgione
7. Alston Erato
8. Bailey Beans (Beans, are you also above as real person up there? I will choose 11 because I think that was a double.)
9. Kidlitfan
10. ANin
11. AvantGardenia

You guys had the MOST trouble with Ludell and I Never Loved Your Mind. The Root Cellar and Jane-Emily strangely robust. I am WONDERFULLY IMPRESSED.

Okay last thing....Shelf Discovery was #400 ON AMAZON A LOT OF LAST WEEKEND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you guys!!!! Please continue to spread the word. If you have any interest, all kinds of press, and my blog, are on lizzieskurnick.com/news. I am actually very shortly going to do a post on black book covers prompted by the recent experience of my friend and YA writer Justine Larbalestier. You'll hear more about Ludell! Then I'll do a post on how you didn't know enough to scream, "I never loved your mind, Dewey Daniels! I never loved your mind!!!!!!!!!!!", something I always enjoy.

xoxoxo
Lizzie

One of the wonderful things about the books of this era, I have always felt, is the cover art — which not only showed us the girls in the novel, but showed them in such attentive specificity that even now just seeing the images again elicits a visceral aesthetic shock. To celebrate the pub date of Shelf Discovery, I wanted to celebrate the covers and not the innards for a change. I ALSO have 10 countem 10 copies to give away! So here's the deal:

Below, please find 21 (in honor of coming-of-age etc.) covers from my bookshelves. Some have appeared in the column, in which case I have used a different edition. Some have not. Some are major, some are minor. The rules are, in the comments, using each image's number, you name as many as you can. You are all on the honor system here, but as this quiz seems kind of hard I can't imagine cheating being of any use. You must go with your shelves and discoveries, ladies, and you have until Friday, when I will announce the winners! Those who have the most correct answers win, and in the cases of those with the same number of corrects you will win by time stamp. If you don't have a profile, please also feel free to email me your answers at jezziefinelines@gmail.com, and your own favorite covers, if you have them.

Good luck!


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BONUS, because have same cover model, which I think is funny:


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(p.s., a few of you have asked about the best ways to find out about tour dates and such. This is to friend me on FACEBOOK or check out my website, LIZZIESKURNICK.COM.)