Summer Teen Drama

I finished Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira on a plane. Not a good idea. Tears were streaming down my face as I sobbed out loud through the last pages of this young adult novel.  My fellow passengers at the start of a nine-hour flight to London thought I was demented and kept their distance from me the remainder of the long trip. Actually, now that I think about it that was not such a bad thing. So Love Letters to the Dead not only moved me, but also saved me … in a way.  No one disturbed me with mindless chatter for the entire flight.

The “letters” started as an English class assignment in the protagonist’s new high school. Students were assigned to write a letter to someone who had died – it didn’t have to be someone they knew personally.  Laurel wrote hers to Kurt Cobain. She talked to him about her older sister, May, who was gone. Laurel had moved to a different high school, away from everyone that had known May. She was a freshman. She didn't turn in that letter to Kurt Cobain, but she continued to write more letters. She not only wrote to Kurt Cobain. She also wrote to Judy Garland, Amelia Earhart, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Heath Ledger, E.E. Cummings, and others.  Her older sister had been her idol, perfect in her eyes. During the course of the school year and the letters, Laurel comes to understand more about her sister and heal from the loss of her only sibling. 

The book uses a wonderful framework as the writer explores the lives of people who died young. It also shows a teenage girl learning how to live in the world. At one point Laurel writes, “…maybe what growing up really means is knowing that you don’t have to just be a character, going whichever way the story says. It's knowing you can be the author instead.”  The book is engaging and emotional. Like I said earlier, it made me cry. Hard. The book would make a great movie, and has already been optioned for film. So read it before the movie comes out!

Stories Coming Alive

If you like fantasy, fairy tales and quest stories, The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly is for you. Even if you don’t think you like this type of book, you might still be absorbed by the themes of loss and grief in children. The book was nominated for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and received a 2007 Alex Award, which honors adult books that appeal to teen readers.

I honestly cannot remember exactly who recommended this book to me. It must have been one of the geeky-cute twenty-somethings working in the auditorium desk at Montreat. We had a long discussion about fantasy novels one night this summer. All I know is a week later I was at Malaprops in Asheville, North Carolina (another one of my favorite bookstores) and I found this book title written in my notes in my iPhone. I looked for it and decided I needed a fantasy novel this summer. The Book of Lost Things did not disappoint.

As soon as twelve-year-old David loses his mother at the start of the novel, I realized I was entering the realm of fairy tales and Disney movies. This was not going to be the typical fantasy novel. Connelly manages to weave in many well-known fairy tales throughout the novel. The familiar tales are told with unfamiliar twists. This is definitely an adult novel. The malevolent Crooked Man is hideously evil and the child David witnesses horrifying sights in the strange world he enters in search of his mother.  Yes, we have portals, woods, even a Woodsman, dwarfs, trolls, wolves, evil princesses, and much more. I am a sucker for books like this one.

And the best part of all, David’s mother taught him to love books, especially fiction. She “would often tell him that stories were alive.” She told her son that stories could “take root in the imagination and transform the reader. ‘Stories wanted to be alive,’ she would whisper in his ear.”

So, of course, after her death, David’s beloved books did begin to talk to him and he was transported into another world where, indeed, his familiar fairy tales came to life and not usually with a happily-ever-after.  In the course of this amazing journey, we see the often-petulant child David mature into a wise young man who develops empathy and understanding. He learns that everything one could want to know about life is found in books. Don’t you agree?

John Connolly ends the novel with a 120 page section subtitled, “Some Notes on The Book of Lost Things.” This is a scholarly treatise on the fairy tales mentioned in the book and each one’s origins. Each story is re-told in its original or most popular form. These are stories like Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Billy Goats Gruff, Beauty and the Beast and more.  To me, this made the book even more interesting. Check it out and see for yourself. 

Mark Twain + Harper Lee = Coming of Age in Australia

Picking up from my last post, John Green said in a recent vlog that when he was in college he thought adult life would be a series of very interesting conversations about great books. That is what I want this blog to be about – a series of very interesting conversations about great books. So indulge me and please, please comment.

This week I want to share a book that you may not know about – Jasper Jones. It’s a brilliant book by a young Australian writer, Craig Silvey. The book was published in Australia in 2009 and was shortlisted for two of Australia’s biggest literary awards and won the Indie Book of the Year Award in Australia. In Australia and other parts of the world where it was published first, it is considered an adult literary masterpiece. But when the book was finally published here in the United States in April 2011, it was classified as a young adult novel and won the Michael L. Prinz award honor book for excellence in young adult literature. I really can’t tell you why the US publisher Knopf labeled it for young readers. I feel it reads like a classic – for all ages. This book reminds me of both Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird in one delicious book. When I heard Jasper Jones called an Australian To Kill a Mockingbird, I really didn’t believe it would be as good as my all-time favorite book. But it was.

The story is set in the summer of 1965 in a small mining town in Western Australia. The main character, Charlie Bucktin, is a serious book-loving boy of 13, who wants to be a writer when he grows up and calls Harper Lee and Mark Twain two of his favorite writers. His best friend, one of the most vivid characters in this book, is a Vietnamese refuge named Jeffrey Lu. He is absolutely devoted to cricket in spite of his small size.

The book starts with Jasper Jones, the town bad boy, summoning Charlie out of his bed in the middle of the night. Only a year older than Charlie, Jasper is much more worldly and basically on his own in life. Charlie barely knows Jasper, but he is sucked into a mystery involving Jasper and the daughter of the shire president, a very powerful man in their small town. The mystery surrounding the young girl’s death propels the reader through the book, but it’s also a romance, coming of age story and a moral tale of racism and adultery, and a story of a friendship. The characters are vivid and the story is gripping and intense, but also has its light moments. Get your hands on a copy of this book (I got mine in Australia, but you can find it online), read it and pass it on.

Building a Fire in the Darkness

As a life long lover of books and the practice of writing, I was heartened (to say the least) by the audience at two events (in one weekend) recently where I heard the young adult author John Green speak. At the first event on a Friday night, I saw a packed audience of mostly teenagers stand up and actually cheer for him. Not only cheer, but scream and dance and sing for this author.

Just before I saw Green live and in person, I read two of his books at the request of my daughter, a nineteen-year-old college student. She has been reading John Green’s books since she was fifteen. She was so touched by his books that she wrote him an admiring fan letter when she was in high school. She said he “changed her life.” When I entered Pasadena High School near Houston, Texas for the reading on a Friday night, I realized she was not alone.

So what was the fuss all about? Green’s first book, Looking for Alaska, is about an outcast high school kid who goes to prep school in Alabama in an effort to “seek the Great Perhaps.” Like most teens, he was waiting to start his life. This character Pudge Halter, is fascinated with last words. In fact, he collects them.

Pudge’s life at boarding school definitely gets interesting as he meets his friends and in particular gets to know one gorgeous and crazy girl named Alaska. Their adventures and experiences at Culver Creek Boarding School are anything but boring. Not to spoil the book for anyone who hasn’t read it, but death is a major theme in this book. It’s really about teens grappling with the Big Issues like death.

Green started this book just after working as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital. The stories he heard there and the people he got to know inspired this book about teens and death. Even though just before the student chaplain stint he was thinking about becoming a minister, Green admits his relationship with God is complicated. But in this book, Looking For Alaska, he manages to leave a positive feeling with the reader. In fact, the characters find redemption. Green said in an interview, “I believe there is hope for us all, even amid the suffering – and maybe even inside the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probably. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to build a fire in the darkness.”

Those teenagers on that Friday night in Pasadena certainly GOT Green’s message of hope in all his books. At one point in the reading, I kid you not, the audience actually sang the pop song, “Don’t Stop Believing.” Green’s fans call themselves Nerdfighters and have an entire subculture called Nerdfighteria. According to Green, Nerdfighters are nerds who fight anti-intellectualism. Basically they are smart and read books. And thankfully, there are a lot of cool teens who read John Green. His fans had been anxiously awaiting Green’s fourth novel, The Fault in Ours Stars, which was released in January and debuted at #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Children's Chapter Books and remained in that spot for five consecutive weeks. And you’ll be interested to hear Green personally signed all 150,000 copies of the first printing (already has double that number printed reprinted). My daughter went to our local bookstore on the day the novel was released to get a signed copy. She was not alone. The New York Times called the book “near genius.”

So this was the second Green book I read last month. Like in Looking for Alaska, death is also the theme in The Fault in Our Stars, which I finished just before Green’s appearance in Pasadena. In this book, two young cancer patients fall in love. Obviously Green also received the inspiration for this book from his time as a student hospital chaplain. He said TFIOS is the book he has been trying to write for the last ten years. The main characters - Hazel and Augustus - meet at the Cancer Kid Support Group and this irreverent book tells their story in a way that makes you laugh and cry a whole lot.

Green's genre is realistic teen fiction and he said that he finds teenagers interesting because a lot of interesting things happen for the first time to teenagers. He said how they deal with those events stick with them for the rest of their life. Cancer might seem like a cliché for a teen novel, but it’s not the stereotypical teen cancer novel. The characters feel real and even though the story is deeply sad, it resonates with humor and a joy for life.

So I haven’t told you about the second event that same weekend in January where I heard John Green speak. This was two days later on a Sunday morning. Green spoke to another packed audience at the American Library Association convention in Dallas. The librarians also cheered for him. They know him through his enthusiastic teens, but also because they are just as excited about his books as his younger readers. Green had been up late the night before signing books until 1 am at his reading in Austin and then driving in his tour bus (yes tour bus) to Dallas, arriving at 4:30 in the morning. He was tired, he said, but grateful to librarians for supporting him when the wider public did not know about his books.

His talk that Sunday morning in Dallas was about using social media to create community. Green said the people build real life connections on line and if librarians can infiltrate those discussions they can raise the level of discourse. Green has very astutely (or by accident, who knows) created a community among his readers, teens, librarians, booksellers through the media. His vlog -- http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers/featured -- has 600,000 plus subscribers! He uses YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr to reach his audience and it’s like a huge subculture of smart people who love books – nerdfighters united.

And here’s the thing that I think makes John Green so popular with his readers. He is accessible. Why did my daughter write him a fan letter when she was 16? Because she knew he would hear her. He has a meaningful interactive discussion going on with his readers. And he writes awesome books. I just ordered his other two books, Paper Towns and An Abundance of Katherines, on Amazon, and I can't wait to read them. John Green and his readers constantly say DFTBA, which is "initialism," as Green calls it, for Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. John Green is awesome and so are his readers. Become one and DFTBA.