Call Me Ishmael

Ishmael is the first-born son of Abraham.  Born to Hagar, one of Abraham’s slaves, Ishmael has an uneasy relationship with Sarah, Abraham’s wife.  But Ishmael loves his father—he loves to hunt with Abraham, and he loves to pray with Abraham.  When Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac, the son that God has promised to her, Ishmael and Hagar are driven out into the desert.

Sam lives with his mother and father in Brooklyn.  When Sam’s father falls in love with another woman, he leaves his family to start a new life.  (And this new life includes another son.)  Sam loved his father—he loved to play basketball with his father, and he loved to sit beside his father at church.  But now he can’t help but feel that his father is nothing but a hypocrite.

Nikki Grimes (author of Bronx Masquerade) weaves together the stories of Biblical Ishmael and contemporary Sam in this young adult novel in verse.  She beautifully captures the anger, fear, uncertainty, and love of these two characters—separated by centuries but connected by circumstances.

 

The Start of Another Young Adult Series

Ally Condie’s Matched hooked me right away.  Set in a futuristic dystopia (a cross between the world of The Giver and the world of The Hunger Games), the novel opens as 17-year-old Cassia prepares for her Matching Banquet.  At the banquet, she will see the face of the young man the Society has chosen as her husband.  When she sees the face of her close friend Xander, she could not be happier.

The next day, though, when she loads the datacard that will give her more information about her Match (something that is hardly necessary in Cassia’s case, since she has known Xander all her life), she sees the face of another boy.  Another boy she knows.  What does this mean?  Has the Society made a mistake?  How should she feel about this other boy?

Matched develops a scary and engrossing vision of the future:  careers (like marriages) are arranged by the Society, literature has been reduced to the Hundred Poems, people no longer learn how to write (as technology has made handwriting obsolete), citizens carry three mysterious pills with them at all times, and everyone dies peacefully at the age of 80.  When her grandfather dies, passing some final words and a forbidden poem to Cassia, the novel’s young protagonist starts to question the perfection of the Society.

Unfortunately, the book spends a little too much time with the requisite love triangle.  (YA authors, can we move on now?)  And—as with so many young adult books—the reader reaches the end only to discover that this book is just the first of a series.

 

Learning about the Real World

After reading a number of strong reviews for Marcelo in the Real World (and after resisting for a while because it didn’t sound like my kind of book), I finally picked up this young adult novel to add to my classroom library.

Marcelo Sandoval is a 17-year-old with a condition similar to Asperger’s syndrome.  (One of the things that I really like about the book is the way that it allows the reader to experience the way that Marcelo’s brain works—the way that he thinks very literally, the way that he has difficulty with idiom, the way that the everyday buzz of life can overwhelm his senses, the way that he experiences feelings as a sort of internal music.)  When Marcelo finishes his junior year, his father (Arturo) tell him that—instead of working for the summer in the stable of the special school that he attends—Marcelo will work in the mail room of Arturo’s high-powered Boston law office.  It is time, Arturo has decided, for Marcelo to experience the real world.

At the law office, Marcelo meets those who befriend him (like Jasmine, his supervisor in the mail room) and those who take advantage of him (like Wendell, the arrogant son of his father’s law partner).  And he unwittingly becomes involved in a major case that stirs feelings he has never experienced before.

Part coming-of-age story, part legal drama, part spiritual exploration, Marcelo in the Real World is a moving piece about a memorable young man.

 

Feed Your Head

A friend recommended M.T. Anderson’s Feed, and I bought a copy a few years ago when it was a choice for our student book club.  (We didn’t select it for discussion, so I didn’t read it at the time.)

After reading the first 20 pages, I didn’t think I would continue.  I found the author’s teen slang annoying, and the futuristic setting didn’t appeal to me.  But before adding the book to my classroom library, I thought I would try to finish it.

Once I started reading again, I finished the rest of the book in one sitting.  (Like many young adult novels, this one reads quickly.)

The main character is a high school student in a futuristic United States.  Like all of his friends (and like the majority of the population in this society), he has an electronic “feed” that was implanted at birth.  Information, music, advertisements, and instant messages are now fed directly to the brain.  (No more pesky computers!)  He never questions this technology—until a girl opens his eyes to new ways of thinking.

If you enjoy dystopian fiction—and a healthy criticism of American consumerism—this is a relatively entertaining choice.

 

A Chapter Missing from the History Books

In January of 1811, between 200 and 500 slaves—men who worked the sugar fields just outside New Orleans—revolted against their plantation owners.  It was the largest slave uprising in the history of the United States.  And it is an event that—for 200 years—was not even a footnote in history books.

Daniel Rasmussen remedies that situation with his slim and readable account of the revolt, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.  The book begins with some background on New Orleans (a recent acquisition by the United States, thanks to the Louisiana Purchase), the plantation culture of the late 1700s and early 1800s, the Atlantic slave trade of the time period, the French and Spanish plantation owners who controlled hundreds of slaves through violent means, the colonial governor (who spoke no French and had no understanding of New Orleans culture or society) appointed by the U.S. government, and the successful slave revolt in Haiti at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Rasmussen then moves to the revolt itself, with a focus on the leaders of the short-lived uprising (one was an overseer on a sugar plantation, two were brought to the U.S. on a slave ship from a war-faring African tribe), the plantation owners who formed an impromptu militia, and the savage punishment meted out to the defeated slaves.  (I could easily have read more about the revolt itself, but I suppose that the historical record is fairly thin.  In both his introduction and his epilogue, Rasmussen makes the point that the only other study of this revolt is a mere 24 pages in length.  In truth, though, Rasmussen’s discussion of the two-day revolt itself is not that much longer.)

American Uprising concludes with a section that examines the political ramifications of the 1811 slave revolt, eventually connecting the event to the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement.  I understand the point that Rasmussen is making here—that the revolt was an organized political movement for freedom (and not, as the governor of New Orleans at the time painted it, the impromptu actions of a few troublemakers)—but this final section feels stretched, a little padding to make the book reach 200 pages.

This is an interesting book that I read in one afternoon, and it is destined to be a top pick for history lovers this year.

 

Certain to be One of the Year’s Best

You Know When the Men Are Gone—a collection of loosely connected short stories by Siobhan Fallon—is simply an exceptional book, one that you will savor and then pass on to others.

Fallon is the wife of a military man, and she was living at Ford Hood in Texas when she started this collection.  And Fort Hood is the center of these stories, as the characters are all members of army families.  Only one of the stories in the collection is set (partially) in Iraq; the rest are about family members coping with separation, preparing for deployment, waiting for reunion, adjusting to life alone, readjusting to life together—the Bosnian wife who can’t bear to be separated from both her husband (fighting in Iraq) and her homeland, the woman who suspects her husband is cheating when she discovers a disturbing email from a woman in his unit, the cancer-stricken mother whose teen-aged daughter runs away from home with her young brother, the officer’s wife who has to retrieve her husband (who has just returned to Fort Hood) from jail, the soldier who sneaks home on leave to spy on his wife, the wounded young soldier who returns to a wife who now wants different things from her life, the widow who agrees to meet with the man her husband gave his life to save.

Every one of the eight stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone is a gem.  Fallon exquisitely conveys the solitude, the uncertainty, and the complexity of her characters.

 

Not Just Howling at the Moon

I’m not typically a fan of vampire fiction, werewolf fiction, alien fiction…you get the idea.  But I was intrigued by some reviews of Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth.

Set largely in the dark underbelly of Los Angeles, Sharp Teeth features several gangs (“packs”) of men who turn into canines.  There are drug wars, revenge killings, romantic entanglements, lost souls, noir villains, tired detectives—and dogcatchers.  Barlow writes all of this in a terse free-verse style that works quite effectively.

This isn’t a book that you absolutely must add to your reading list, but it’s an interesting deviation from the norm.