Wednesday Words: Is that what they’re calling it these–oh, that’s just what it’s called

[They were] known to make out while eating shepherd’s pie, which is not a euphemism[.]

– Maureen Johnson, THE NAME OF THE STAR

Wednesday Words: Survival of the misfitest

I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can’t imagine them properly now.

– Jo Walters, AMONG OTHERS

My Hunger Games movie review

…is right here.

There’s a long tradition of Socialist Worker movie reviews generating major debates, so I am eagerly awaiting responses.

Sometimes I really love the internet.

For reasons like this.

h/t Feminist Philosophers, a usual.

Thinking about Trayvon Martin

My workout ground to a dead halt tonight when I noticed that the TV above me was covering Trayvon Martin and I watched, riveted, while mainstream news said things like, “This is a new movement.”

That’s what it feels like, even being here in Wisconsin where there isn’t yet a response despite our own local murder of a Black boy for doing what teenagers do (what I did); despite the latest vicious racism, like semester-clockwork, from our frats; despite everything. It feels like something was let out of the bottle with Troy Davis and Occupy, or maybe like something finally crawled its way out, and it’s not going back even if it hasn’t yet taken stock of itself, even if it hasn’t figured out yet what it is.

I can’t stop thinking about the picture from the CNN slideshow of three men of color on a New York City bus urgently photographing the Million Hoodie March blocking their bus’s progress. It feels like a line is being drawn, between cops and prosecutors and reporters and racists laying bare that they don’t care in the slightest about Black boys’ lives, and people shouting that we care. When I look at that picture of the bus, it feels like maybe this is the first time they ever saw someone shouting that they care. It feels tangible how much they care back. It feels like one of those moments when options change.

I hope, I hope this is a new movement. Because we really need this one.

Wednesday Words: Obvious truths newly learned

I whirl around to face him — again, surprised by how confident I sound, considering that my heart is rushing, tumbling. Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys — maybe you just have to be angry all the time.

– Lauren Oliver, DELIRIUM

(Side question: why is YA so full of constructions like “rushing, tumbling”? Have you ever seen this in a book for adults? Now that I think about it, I think this is even more quintessentially YA than the long-short cadence I wrote about recently. What are the other stylistic quirks of YA?)

Caletti does Dessen, or: The one rule of humiliation

I tagged this as Book vs. Book, but it’s really Book vs. Oeuvre, because Sarah Dessen, to me, is her own genre.

SimonPulse emblazoned the front cover of Deb Caletti’s THE SIX RULES OF MAYBE with an SLJ blurb comparing it to the best of Dessen, and a glance at the back shows that all of Caletti’s books have Dessen-esque covers in overall look even if they lack the emphasis on disembodied body parts.

“Their marketing strategy is to trick you into thinking you’re buying a Sarah Dessen book,” I told Emily (we were at Books of Wonder; I’d never read Caletti). “Works for me.”

And I know why the SLJ blurb said that: it’s that narrative mix of emotional over-articulation, rendered in very deliberate, almost trite, imagery, blended with quick and astringent judgment, so you understand right away that the smart girl who’s narrating is knowing and wry, but not so knowing and wry that she doesn’t think her high school experiences are worth metaphors. And it’s that cadence where the sentences come long and then short, like it’s all flowing out of that girl faster than she can control until she’s pulled up short by her own realizations. I thought nobody did sentence-level pacing like Dessen; Caletti sure comes close. Well. It’s tone and pacing and character fused, because it always adds up to a girl who is looking, looking, looking, and wanting, and there’re reasons why these books, despite their fundamental similarity, never get old for me.

So that’s all to the good, and Caletti maybe isn’t edited as well — multiple passages, especially early, feel overwritten in a way that Dessen rarely does — but at her best she’s quotable as hell in the way of Meg Rosoff or John Green.

But I actually think Caletti does the big picture better than Dessen usually does, and it’s because she lets her protagonist fail harder. Here’s the core piece of my favorite scene:

I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick — I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.

“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”

It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in the air, the heaviness of his thoughts — my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.

The rest of that scene and what comes of it is perfect. And you can see everything here: that Dessen probably would’ve written this scene better, with more economy and precision (and certainly less pleading*), but also that probably she wouldn’t have written this scene, because while each of her characters is allotted her one emotional failing to work through by the book’s end, their humiliations are never really their own. They get humiliated by their mothers or their sisters or their boyfriends’ mothers, but not by their own sudden recognition of their immaturity. That’s what Caletti gets right. She gets growing up, the way it feels to look with contempt (long before affection) at where you’re coming out of, and the way you mostly can’t see very clearly what you might become, and when you do glimpse it it might be with shame and terror.

There was that whole dust-up last year about how dark YA can be, and I always figured that books in the Dessen genre, serious subjects though they all have, were imagined as the counterpoint. But maybe if you do it right, if you let the characters fail and flounder in the humiliation that they made themselves — if you don’t just let your characters feel inadequate, but you let them actually be inadequate to what’s ahead of them — then this little corner of YA can be darker, and richer, than it seems.

* I mean, that’s really pretty awful, right?