Filed under: Book Reviews, Commercial Fiction, YA Lit | Tags: before i fall, book reviews, books, high school, lauren oliver, lit, literature, reading, ya lit, young adult
Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall is an unabashedly moral book, all the better for the ways its author never attempts to hide or brush over its moral code. The novel is a sort of Groundhog Day high school story, with its narrator, Sam, living the same day again and again. At the end of that day she dies in a car accident, after leaving a party with her friends. The novel tracks her as she runs through the gauntlet of emotions (despair, anger, sorrow, acceptance) about what seems to be her inevitable fate as she wakes up, again and again, on Friday, February 12th. While Oliver overdoes certain images, coming back time and again to the idea of the “butterfly effect”, her ability to revisit and subtly (or significantly) change moments that Sam and the reader have already lived is remarkable.
Before I Fall opens with the car ride that ends with Sam’s death. Sam’s beyond-the-grave narrative voice appears throughout the novel, suggesting that there’s a limit to what Sam can change as she relives that Friday, though it’s hard to suppress the desire to see her wake up on Saturday the 13th, having somehow found a way out of the loop of time she’s been trapped in. She reveals herself early on to be a classic mean girl, albeit one who’s keenly aware of the ways in which she and her friends – in which everyone, really – works to blend in. Right down to the bagels they eat and the way they take their coffee, Sam’s friends strive for a sameness. Oliver seems to take some pleasure in highlighting the ridiculous nature of high school’s delineations between what’s cool and not cool, setting out a hierarchy even for lunch meats.
A few characters outside of Sam’s social circle make their appearances in each telling of the day. Sam realizes, a few days in, that these people are of more importance to her and her story than she would have thought on the first day she died. There’s Anna, a girl who for months has been sleeping with a boy dating a girl saving herself for marriage, but who long before that was marked as a slut and white trash by Lindsay, one of Sam’s best friends. Painfully, Sam comes to realize that to Lindsay that designation doesn’t mean anything, writing of the “AC=WT” (Anna Cartullo=White Trash) grafitti markered in all the girl’s bathrooms, “I’m pretty sure Lindsay wrote it on a whim – four measly letters, stupid, meaningless – probably to test out a new marker and see how much ink it had. It would have been better, almost, if she’d meant it. It would be better if she really hated Anna. Because it matters. It has mattered.”
Then there’s Juliet Sykes, labeled “psycho” – again by Lindsay. It’s Juliet who is at center of the story, a sort of vision of what Sam herself might have been if, in the seventh grade, she hadn’t been plucked out of obscurity by Lindsay, the same girl who for years had been tormenting her with cruel rhymes. On the day of her death, Cupid Day, Sam and her friends send Juliet their annual rose, with a message taunting the fact that she never has – that she probably never will – receive a rose from someone who cares about her. And finally, Kent, the boy Sam was friends with as a child but tossed off when she became popular, in favor of her skeezy lacrosse player boyfriend.
Sam isn’t a likeable character when the novel opens, but she’s aware of that, even directs that line of thought back at the reader.
I know some of you are thinking maybe I deserved it. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent that rose to Juliet or dumped my drink on her at the party. Maybe I shouldn’t have copied off Lauren Lornet’s quiz. Maybe I shouldn’t have said those things to Kent. There are probably some of you who think I deserved it because I was going to let Rob go all the way – because I wasn’t going to save myself.
But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?
Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?
Is it really so much worse than what you do?
Think about it.
Oliver pulls no punches in asking her reader to identify with Sam’s character, and to question their own actions, in this way. These asides, either directed at the reader or commenting on Sam’s own actions as she relives “Cupid Day”, become a sort of pleasant break from the petty incidents of the novel, the name-calling and gossip-mongering. Sam’s authorial voice in these moments is strong, but always believably that of a teenager. Although Sam only lives this one day seven times, Oliver develops her character well throughout; she changes, at times gradually and at times quickly and at times seemingly not at all, but she is always developing and rethinking her actions as anyone would at her age. The idea around which the novel centers, that Sam is somehow bound to relive the day of her death until she is able to change something, improve herself, has Sam turning into a more feeling and sympathetic character during the reading. Even as she becomes a better person, though, she makes missteps, issuing a number of mild cruelties that she intended to be kind.
So many of Sam’s observations are typical high school fare, but Oliver gives them a new weight and meaning. In a sense, Before I Fall offers Sam an opportunity to engineer her own funeral. Even as she becomes a fuller and more caring person, she is concerned in part with how people will think of her after she dies. She wants them, she writes, not just to remember her, but to remember her as a good person. She focuses, too, on the way people change, and how quickly and slowly that change can come. After just a few days, Sam feels that she is becoming a different person than her friends, that something is inalterably different in their interactions because she, unlike them, has been given the opportunity to shift her actions and view their effects on this single day. Oliver, again, grounds her novel well in keeping Sam’s thoughts on this point so much like those of any other high school girl:
It’s weird how much people change. For example, when I was a kid I loved all of these things – like horses and the Fat Feast and Goose Point – and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. It’s kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there’s no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you’re no longer a kid but a “young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.
Oliver does an creditable job of combining the typical high school story with this metaphysical one of change and growth and opportunity. Sam never seems to think of herself as not-dead, because she is so keenly aware of what is coming at the end of each of her relived days; but in the development of her actions and thoughts, she is absolutely alive, absolutely human, absolutely believable. In Before I Fall Oliver finds a new way of telling this story of high school popularity and redemption. In doing so, she’s given us a world that is recognizable (sometimes, too recognizable; prepare to relive some of your own more humiliating high school moments) but also, despite the repetition of events and stories, new and remarkably fresh.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Commercial Fiction, Fantasy, YA Lit | Tags: book reviews, books, erin morgenstern, literature, reading, the night circus
With a book as hyped as Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, it’s impossible not to wonder how your reaction is tied up with the massive advertising campaign devoted to the novel. Reading about the novel as some sort of one-shot Harry Potter, of a movie deal before publication, of circus events set up to advertise the book, makes the book hard to see for itself. On one hand, you’re only reading the book because of the hype machine; on the other, the book can never live up to all the pre-publication praise; from another angle, you want to love the book so you can join the crowds that are heaping praise on it; from another, your inability to love the book the way you’ve been told you should makes you resent the reading experience more than you otherwise would.
In some regards, The Night Circus is a gorgeous book. Revolving around two illusionists, Celia and Marco, the book follows them and the competition they’ve been bonded to. The night circus, which moves from location to location with little notice and is closed during daylight hours, is the canvas for their competition, which over the years morphs into a collaboration of sorts between the illusionists. They don’t compete against each other Harry Potter-style, dueling with their Ollivander wands, but rather work as if they’re playing a chess game; one creates a new tent or attraction for the circus, and the other responds in kind.
Morgenstern takes chapters from four views: Celia’s, Marco’s, Bailey’s (a boy who visits and falls in love with the circus, eventually being pulled into the competition), and the second person. What she seems to be aiming for, with those last two views – the “you” and Bailey – is a sort of wonder with the circus; by telling us what the circus is, what it means for its guests, she attempts to imbue the novel with the same magic Bailey feels when he visits the circus.
The problem with this is that while some parts of the world are drawn gorgeously, fully, others are left so bare as to drag the story down. The competition that Celia and Marco are a part of is so vaguely defined that it reads as if the author herself doesn’t know what the aim or rules of the contest are. As if to keep the world of the night circus in the world of the fantastic, she never moors the world to any recognizable set of rules. This might seem appealing when you’re thinking of a fantasy novel – nothing to hold it back! – but reading The Night Circus serves to remind that one of the things that makes Harry Potter such a loved series are all the rules (to the magic lessons, to quidditch, to how Harry can interact with Voldemort), that the world of Lord of the Rings is defined right down to the grammar structure of each and every language, that what makes it possible to love the fantasy stories of our childhoods is not the lack of rules and boundaries but their clear and defining presence. Perhaps Morgenstern wanted to say something about the limitless nature of fantasy by not placing any limits on the contest between Celia and Marco; but it reads as though she was too lazy, or too consumed with the imagery of her text, to define the contest – if not for Celia or Marco, then for the reader at least. Celia at one point asks her father, “How can I excel at a game when you refuse to tell me the rules?” The reader, likewise, can’t be expected to experience the book as fully as he or she might, without knowing what guides the central conflict.
Morgenstern devotes much of her authorly energy to detailing, rather than illuminating, the world of the night circus. This is a novel that may well make an extraordinary movie; the best parts of the novel are Morgenstern’s descriptions of Marco’s and Celia’s illusions, but even these fall flat as Morgenstern is unable ever to show us why something is extraordinary, but only to tell us that it is. Celia and Marco’s love for one another, which is meant to stand at novel’s center, is hardly believable; we’re told that the power of their feelings for each other touches everything around them, even heating the air at a party, but that love never feels like more than a plot device.* We have ships made out of books, seas of ink, tents filled with cloud mazes, extraordinary clocks, but these images, every last one of them, read better as directions to a film director than as passages in a novel.
The verdict? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but The Night Circus is a book that I see doing better as a movie, with a director who will give credit to Morgenstern’s images while providing more shape to the plot. I’m in the minority in not loving this book, though, so be sure to read the reviews up at Words and Peace, Entomology of a Bookworm, and Confessions of a Booklush if you’re looking for a more positive opinion.
* I feel uncomfortable even using the phrase “plot device” here, as the greatest failing of The Night Circus is that its plot is so damn vague.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, YA Lit | Tags: books, laurie halse anderson, literature, reading, speak, ya, young adult
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak is advertised as a classic of young adult fiction, but it’s one that only came to my attention about six months ago despite its 1999 publication date and my occasional enthusiastic forays into the young adult section of the library. This was an interesting time to read the book, given the recent Wall Street Journal piece declaiming against violence, sex and foul language in current young adult fiction.
Anderson’s book, although frequently banned, isn’t “offensive” in the way the WSJ piece suggests so much contemporary YA fiction is. Anderson deals with what my fifteen-year-old self would label some “heavy issues,” but she does so by exploring her narrator Melinda’s reactions to the events that shape her school year rather than the violence itself. Her novel is, literally, about a girl who refuses to speak, a girl who sees no way of expressing what has happened to her and finds herself abandoned by her friends, shunned by nearly everyone at her school, because what happened to her and what she did afterwards were so misunderstood.
Anderson’s prose is occasionally clumsy, as when she describes one teacher having a “[n]ose like a credit card sunk between his eyes” (10), but obscuring that fault is her skill at describing high school (“Every year they say we’re going to get right up to the present, but we always get stuck in the Industrial Revolution… We need more holidays to keep the social studies teachers on track” [7]), the cruelties of teenage girls (as when Melinda’s one remaining friend, a student new to the high school, matter-of-factly friend dumps her at lunch), and the mind of a student verging on collapse. Melinda is the sort of person, the sort of character, we shy from in life and fiction for the ways in which she refuses to simply “deal” with her issues or reshape herself into the sort of socially acceptable girl she was before the summer leading up to her ninth grade year. Anderson is unflinching in her portrayal of the character.
More than that, Anderson has given us a character who is not only nearly mute when dealing with those in her world, but one who is not capable of admitting to herself what has happened until halfway through Speak. Until that point the reader is left knowing only that something happened over the summer to define Melinda’s year, and her depression, her reluctance to speak and her fear of approaching old friends, are difficult to understand until Melinda herself thinks of herself in terms of “shame.” Melinda does, of course, eventually reveal to herself, to the reader, to one of her friends, what has happened to her, but even then it seems uncertain that she’ll pull herself out of the depression that for the school year has seen her sleeping through whole afternoons and skipping as many classes as she attends.
Anderson’s book should be required reading for teens, not just for the issues it examines but for giving a voice to the sort of high school student it is often easiest to ignore. Contrary to what the Wall Street Journal piece has to say on some other young adult offerings, Anderson deals with sex and violence and depression in an adult fashion, showing what Melinda’s life has become as the result of both what happened to her and her shame over what happened to her, but without glorifying the idea of being a down and out teenager.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Commercial Fiction, YA Lit | Tags: book review, books, literature, sarah dessen, what happened to goodbye, ya fiction
Sarah Dessen’s latest offering, What Happened to Goodbye, fails not so much because it’s an objectively worse book than any of her previous nine novels, but because it never emerges from their shadows. Dessen’s made a career out of revealing the interior lives of teenage girls, surrounding them with “quirky” friends or co-workers and one sweet and long-suffering boy of the type that’s never been seen in a high school, placing her characters in schools and towns familiar to her long-time readers. Dessen doesn’t shy from family drama or classic moments of teenage self-doubt or introspection, but What Happened to Goodbye reads like a novel written from a mold. While the book provides a comforting read it’s not one that’s comparable with Dessen’s earlier efforts for the simple reason that it tries too hard to reimagine what those books had.
Dessen here follows Mclean Sweet, the daughter of a former restauranteur and the wife who left him for the basketball coach of the family’s favorite university team. Doing her all to avoid her mother and her new family (which includes two new half-siblings), Mclean moves across the country with her father,Gus, spending a few months in town after town as he attempts to resuscitate failing restaurants bought by his friend Charles’s company. In each town Mclean renames and remakes herself, becoming “Liz” or “Eliza” or whatever iterations her middle name offers; but in her latest move, she is stymied in her efforts at self-recreation and becomes, again, simply “Mclean.”
The quirky characters are in full force here, from the staff of Luna Blu, the restaurant Gus has been brought in to work on, who on paper have no positive qualities but in life are what draw people to eat there, to the friends Mclean finds herself collecting, almost against her will, before she’s decided which version of herself she’ll be in this new town. Her parents’ divorce having proven, to Mclean, that relationships can’t last and will only hurt her in the end, she’s been in the habit of forming only the surface-level friendships that gather her friends on Dessen’s reimagined facebook, Ume.com, but no one she regrets leaving behind as she slips out of town after town.
With the family issues and Mclean’s reaction to her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new life, Dessen is her usual self, confident in envisioning the impact the (very public) break-up of Mclean’s life had on her. But that’s the problem, maybe; Dessen is simply revisiting her usual territory of broken or breaking families, of teen girls meeting that first boy who will at end help them through their often hidden feelings about their families. What Happened to Goodbye often reads as though Dessen did nothing more than trudge through her old steps as she wrote it.
Dessen is a skilled writer of young adult, and she has undeniable talent when it comes to the interior lives of girls in high school. It’s not a talent that she’s growing, however, and her earlier books read as fresher than this one because she hadn’t yet fallen into the mold that now defines her books. Dessen’s last few offerings read as though they might have all been built on the same plot; simply edit character names and quirks and the specifics of family and you have, at heart, a string of books about teenage girls finding themselves in markedly similar ways. What Happened to Goodbye may be a comforting read, but it’s not one that will stand time as well as Dessen’s earlier novels, particularly That Summer and Someone Like You.
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Filed under: Book Reviews, Book vs. Movie, Commercial Fiction, YA Lit | Tags: books, david levithan, hipsters, kat dennings, michael cera, movies, nick & norah's infinite playlist, rachel cohn, reading, where's fluffy, young adult literature
Book: There is a frenetic caffeinated energy to this novel. Nick and Norah take alternate chapters and after reading the wretched doubled narration of Megan McCafferty’s Bumped it was such a relief to see this working. Nick and Norah both seemed older than they are, even when they’re reminding me of how old I am getting. (I kept doing the math, not quite believing it. I know that being 25 doesn’t exactly make me ancient, but I still find it hard to believe that I am seven years older than either of these characters.) Nick’s been dumped by his girlfriend of six months but she shows up at one of his band’s shows anyway, so he asks Norah to be his girlfriend for five minutes to throw Tris off. Norah agrees, which leads into a night of music, debating what this means for either of them, how they feel about their exes, what they are going to do with their lives, whether it’s possible to meet someone and know, that night, that they are the right person. Norah especially sometimes reads as too screwed up to be eighteen years old but I couldn’t slow down reading long enough to really care about that.
Movie: It wasn’t until rewatching this after reading the book that I realized how much the film departs from the book. Unlike the book, the movie goes for the gross-out in its focus on Norah’s friend Caroline (the scene of her vomiting into a bus station toilet, dropping her phone and gum in, reaching in for the phone – then the gum) and it turns a few of the characters into caricatures, which works better in some cases than in others. Nick’s ex-girlfriend, Tris, loses the humanity she has in the book; here, she’s nothing more than a lying, cheating, Lindsay Lohan-style Mean Girl, and watching her is never not painful. One of the pleasures of watching the film, though, is to see what they’ve done with Tal – he wasn’t a real sympathetic character in the book so there isn’t much departure there, but to see Jay Baruchel who is always so adorable and puppy-like (have you seen Undeclared or Knocked Up or She’s Out of My League?) play the part of a raging asshole is kind of wonderful.
Maybe because we can’t access the inner monologues of Nick and Norah as we can in the book, the movie makes its focal point finding Where’s Fluffy rather than Nick and Norah finding each other. I mean, they do, of course they do, but that’s all kind of secondary, a benefit to their efforts to find Caroline and then the band. The movie gives you what you want, which is finding the band, Nick and Norah realizing they like each other, Tal and Tris getting their comeuppance, and lots of good jams and potty humor. My one major complaint is that Kat Dennings is so much prettier than Tris – and in the book she’s not, not by a long shot. I guess when you make a film you gotta have your leading ladies be gorgeous, but it’s still kind of a disappointment even though I like Kat Dennings.
Verdict: Tie.
These two versions of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist don’t seem like the same story so much as they do riffs on a theme. They’re good in different ways and in different places and I can’t say that one is better than the other. They’re different, that’s all.
Both the book and movie also serve as a healthy glimpse of what I’m headed back to once I finish my service here in Macedonia. Things that wouldn’t have annoyed me too much before (like Nick driving a Yugo – such a teenage hipster move, imagine the effort required to find a Yugo in the States) drove me nuts now that, you know, I live in a country that was part of Yugoslavia and where a lot of people, including my host family, drive a Yugo if they’ve got a car. I wanted to tell Nick to stop using his Yugo (a) to tell the world he doesn’t have enough money for a different car, and (b) as an expression of irony. I am not sure how well I’ll do living in Brooklyn when I get back, or anywhere for that matter. Maybe I should give the two Nick & Norahs a win and me a lose, for now.
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