When the train whistle blew that one time. And then again the next year.

Continuing discussion of Fran Cannon Slayton’s WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS…

The most unusual thing about WTWB is that it’s told as a series of vignettes, one each Halloween from 1943 to 1949. At first, I found this narrative style frustrating. After the most arresting vignettes, I didn’t want to skip ahead a year; I wanted to know the aftermath.

The storytelling method grew on me, though. When I thought about it, I always did know what happened next; the vignette style was an economical way of forcing me to imagine the inevitable conclusion.

The seven-year timespan also lets the book’s central relationships — between Jimmy and his father, and Jimmy and the railroad — develop in a natural way. I recently noted, when reading JACOB HAVE I LOVED, that I think it’s rare for middle grade or young adult books to cover long periods of time (finite series like HARRY POTTER being an exception). In fact, now that I think of it, taking place over a particularly long timespan is one of the things that makes even a book that takes place mostly in adolescence come across to me as an “adult book.” It must be something about developing an implicitly adult perspective, looking back on life.

Anyway: one consequence of this tendency toward compressed time is that the conflict sometimes has to develop and be resolved artificially quickly — or at least, books have to take place during periods of crisis, in which a timespan of a few months can carry a narrative arc for something as major as the evolution of a son’s relationship with his father.

WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, on the other hand, is a more naturalistic kind of story, where the changes between some years are subtle; others, more dramatic; and the story as a whole unfolds lackadaisically without wasting time. It’s a nicely different addition to my bookcase.

Why I love it: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

We are both blogging this week about Frankie Landau-Banks, her history, and its lack of reputability. Emily posts about the book’s use of language today; come back tomorrow (or however we space them out) for Elizabeth’s take on the book’s feminism.

Elizabeth had told me I would love THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS, by E. Lockhart. Not just that it was a great book, but that I particularly would love it, and she couldn’t tell me why because that would ruin it, but trust her.

So I was at Barnes and Noble soon after that and picked it up to read a few pages and see if it was worth buying, and I got to page 2 and burst out laughing at “It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.” And then I finished reading Frankie’s letter to the headmaster and really couldn’t contain my glee at “gruntlement”, and I called Elizabeth and left a long voicemail, in which I definitely gave up on words a few times in favor of happy squeal noises, and said I didn’t know if this was what she meant as the reason I would particularly love this book (as it turned out it wasn’t), but it was incredible and if there was some other reason on top of it I couldn’t even fathom what a great book this would be.

And while there are many great things about TDHFLB, having read it fully twice what I genuinely love most, is the language, and that’s for a few reasons. One is just I like language and puns and silly words and silly usages of words, and did I say puns? So reading that Frankie does not want to pugn anybody’s character is endlessly amusing for me. On a deeper level, though, I think Lockhart does an incredible job of using Frankie’s language and thought patterns (which relate properly to each other in the way that they do in real people) to create her as a character. And while lots of books have characters with clear styles of speaking, or accents, or slang, that help put them in a time and place and form a piece of the character, I can’t think of another book where not just the way a character speaks, but the way she herself explicitly thinks about language are so key to understanding her personality.

It also helps that Frankie’s particular attitude towards language happens to be very similar to mine. I like to use language the way it ought to logically work, even when that’s not how it really works. I always get annoyed at the redundancy of the phrase “from whence”; and when no actual word in the English language signified the meaning I needed to express in my senior thesis, I made one up and used it throughout. I was telling a friend of mine about TDHFLB and the neglected positives and it was only once we were deep in argument that I realized we were having almost the exact conversation that Frankie and Matthew have:

“Mmmm,” she whispered. “Now I’m gruntled.”
“What?”
“Gruntled. I was disgruntled before.”
…
“And now, you’re…”
“Gruntled.”
She had expected Matthew’s face to light at the new word, but he touched her chin lightly and said, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
…
“Gruntled means grumpy,” he said, walking over to the dictionary, which stood on a large stand.
…
“Why? Frankie was cross that he was being so literal. “That makes no sense, because if gruntled means grumbly, then disgruntled should mean un-grumbly.”
“Um…” Matthew scanned the dictionary. “Dis- can be an intensifier, as well as a negative.”
Frankie bounced on the couch. “I like my version better.”

EMILY: And the best thing is, she comes up with these neglected positives, like where there’s a word with a negative prefix but the positive version isn’t a word or doesn’t mean what it should. Like, there’s disgruntled, but there’s no gruntled. Hee! Gruntled!
ADAM: But that doesn’t really work, its not how the language evolved.
EMILY: But gruntled!
ADAM: We have different attitudes towards language. I don’t like made up words.
EMILY: Or ept! Like inept, ept.
ADAM: Yes. I’m glad you’re enjoying.
EMILY: But they’re such good made up words. And sometimes you have to make up words, if the one you need doesn’t exist.
ADAM: Then you find a word that does exist.
EMILY: I like my way better.

A lot of folks have written a lot of great posts and comments about why TDHFLB is a great book, and Elizabeth’s going to write about feminism in the book tomorrow later this week, but ultimately, why I love it is neglected positives.

Railroad whistles and American dreams

I just read an Advanced Reader Copy of Fran Cannon Slayton’s debut middle-grade novel, WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS, after winning it as part of a prize pack of debut novels.

The book — set in 1940s Virginia — is half about the protagonist Jimmy’s relationship with his dad (the mom is such a minor character that I kept forgetting she was living; more distortions of my fairy tale-centric childhood?). And it’s half about Jimmy’s relationship with the book’s other central character: the railroad where the family’s men work, and where Jimmy is desperate to go to work himself.

The centrality of the railroad had a special resonance for me because I read a ton about Eugene Debs last summer, including Ray Ginger’s beautiful biography THE BENDING CROSS. Debs grew up as the railroad era was beginning, and it was the major influence on his early life; he was enthralled with their power, and he dropped out of school to work for them as soon as he could, as a 16-year-old in 1871 — exactly what Slayton’s Jimmy wishes his father would let him do. In fact, though, Debs was later bitterly regretful at having truncated his formal education; I think he’d have been the first to tell Jimmy to listen to his father.

But he’d also have understood Jimmy’s desperate drive to grow up, to take a ‘man’s job,’ and most of all, to do it on the railroads. Debs quit railroading only a few years in, with extreme reluctance, prevailed upon by his mother’s concern for his safety. As emerges in Slayton’s story, railroad work was immensely dangerous; in Debs’s time, the railroad workers’ associations (called Brotherhoods) were basically insurance clubs whose main function was issuing death benefits to the widows of men killed on the job.

But Debs, still fascinated by the railroad he was no longer working for and desperate to avoid the boring life of a retail clerk, leaped into organizing the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, transforming it into a true union and leading the first national strike in U.S. history. It was 1877, and he was 22 years old. Debs’s increasing recognition of the depth of exploitation in the railroad industry, the tight collaboration among its monopolistic owners and the government, the violence with which they would maintain the profitability of their industry, and the inability of conservative union professionals to challenge any part of this, helped him to become possibly the most important labor leader in American history. His own obsession with the railroad was emblematic of his era; the class struggle this led him to spark would define the next era.

Slayton’s story bookends this history. Like Debs, Jimmy sees before him two possible lives — the life of a grocery clerk or life on the railroads — and knows which he wants, despite all the objections of his family. And like Debs, Jimmy finds that the railroad can’t live up to the promise it seemed to hold for his own life, and has to find a third path for himself.

But Debs’s transformation was at the beginning of the railroad era, and the era of unionization; Jimmy’s comes as its end. Whereas Debs’s disillusionment was that the railroads never lived up to the sense of social progress they seemed to promise, Jimmy’s problem is that time is progressing on, whether he likes it or not. The railroad jobs he knows are dying — the steam engines around which his entire town is organized replaced by diesel. His solution, too, will be of a more solely personal nature than Debs’s; indeed, no union is ever mentioned in the book, and his dad, who’s some sort of foreman, pays out of pocket to maintain the income of some of the displaced workers.

In that sense, I think, WHERE THE WHISTLE BLOWS isn’t only a portrayal of Jimmy’s time (which actually was itself a time of substantial and militant class struggle), but of ours: it’s a beautifully-told story of having hopes destroyed by economic forces out of one’s control, but finding recourse in one’s personal relationships and character. At this point in American history, the Debsian solution isn’t one that most people can imagine. I wonder, as the economic crisis continues, what other kinds of stories we might begin to see.

Tomorrow’s follow-up post: The unusual storytelling method of WHERE THE WHISTLE BLOWS.

Random question: are teen girl actors better?

So I’m rewatching ONCE AND AGAIN, a Herskovitz & Zwick (the producers of MY SO-CALLED LIFE) show. Why? Because it’s finals time.* Ahem.

And there’s a lot of things I’m thinking this time through, mostly centering on how much recognition I feel at all the classically identifiable H&Z moments and tropes. Some of which is wonderful and moving for me, and more of which, actually, is annoying than I would have expected.

But here’s my question. They did a simply amazing job of casting the teen girl actors, Evan Rachel Wood (who’s gone on to a very successful movie career) and Julia Whelan (who I believe mostly stopped acting after the show). And the teen male lead is… not as good. I don’t recall whether he improves later in the show (I’m still just halfway through season one), but it’s very noticeable. He’s not awful, but… the difference is striking.

And it’s making me remember just how incredible Claire Danes was in MSCL, and how in a few key scenes, Jared Leto just doesn’t measure up. (Like, after they’ve broken up and he comes to her house to return her bike, except it’s really Brian’s bike, and they’re talking about sex and death, and it turns out her dad is listening the whole time…)

So, obviously any show can have a dud actor. And I’m not talking about duds here, just actors who don’t always rise to the greatness of their costars. (And actually, I think the weakest acting in MSCL comes from Devon Odessa, who plays Sharon.) But H&Z have been consistently incredibly successful about casting female leads who take your breath away. Is it a general pattern that in the teenage years, it’s more common for female actors to reach great heights of naturalistic displays of emotion? Or am I overreaching? What do you guys think?

* I don’t actually watch much TV anymore; I never watch it live. But some semesters, when I’m really in a panic over finals, I feel an inexplicable urge to watch my shows. My first semester of grad school, I didn’t watch any TV all semester (which was actually kind of an adjustment, moving away from my parents’ TiVo and all)… until finals hit, when I suddenly felt compelled to watch three seasons of ANGEL. (My first-year-of-grad-school roommate and I picked one another for several reasons, but the complementary nature of our respective TV-on-DVD collections was not the most minor of them. I had MSCL and the Collectors’ Edition of Freaks and Geeks, both of which were hard to find at that time; she had… everything else.)

But yeah. I don’t know if this pattern is a reaction to the anxiety (Avoidance, the Greatest Strategy of Them All!) or because when I’m so close to freedom I start fantasizing all the things I could do with it and then I really want to, or what. But this semester’s papers are a particularly painful bunch for me (as measured by the triumvirate of how much I care about these classes (a lot), how much I’ve done on these papers (almost nil), and how soon they are due (let’s not discuss it)), so ONCE AND AGAIN it is.

A really nice profile from Lenore, who’s always worth reading

Hey you guys!

Lenore made Underage Reading the latest blog featured in Presenting Lenore’s Well Worth Watching series. Check it out!

Lenore is also the promulgator of the coolest award icons

Awards!

We were the recipients of 4 awards in the past month or so that we were then totally delinquent in passing on. But here we are attempting to redeem ourselves:

We received the Zombie Chicken Award from State of Denmark in March – it was our first ever award! And, can I just say, whoever originally came up with this award name and description rocks.

The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken – excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their words.

We hereby bequeath it on to:

• Sadako at Dibbly Fresh, who we have no doubt would snark right through to the end in the event of zombie chicken apocalypse.
• Travis at 100 Scope Notes – what with all the kids in all the school libraries, zombie chickens would be no match for you.

We then received the Sisterhood Award from Sadako over at Dibbly Fresh, and just yesterday received this one again from Alice at the bizarre library- thanks guys!

1. Put the logo on your blog or post.
2. Nominate up to 10 blogs which show great attitude and/or gratitude!
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know that they have received this award by commenting on their blog.
5. Remember to link to the person from whom you received your award.

We’d like to pass this one on to:

• Lenore at Presenting Lenore
• Adele at Persnickety Snark
• Wendy at Six Boxes of Books

They have done much to draw us into the Kid/YA lit blogging community.

And finally, Sadako also gave us the One Lovely Blog Award.

This is the award given to new blogs and blogging friends that the blogger has just discovered.

Our nominees for this one:

• A Fuse #8 Production (which of course is not new, but is new to me (Emily) as I did not start reading it regularly until Elizabeth Bird began the still-ongoing 100 Best Picture Books Countdown, which I have been following religiously.)
• Dog Ear
• Little Snarky Two Shoes

Thanks everyone, we feel most honored!

Books I felt I ought to have liked but really didn’t: Harriet the Spy

Before picking up HARRIET THE SPY by Louise Fitzhugh again, I tried to remember why I didn’t like it many years ago. And all I could remember was that it gave me an uncomfortable, squirmy, unhappy sort of feeling that stemmed from reading about Harriet doing things she shouldn’t that were clearly going to cause Bad Things to happen. Now what’s odd is I wasn’t really a goody-two-shoes kid, and I liked lots of other books about characters that were naughty, or even who did things I felt they shouldn’t, who did things that I saw as hurtful, etc. So there must have been something more to it than that, but my memory consists entirely of the squirmy feeling.*

And then I opened the book, and the degree to which this is an obnoxious girl with no discernable redeeming qualities, with whom I cannot sympathize at all, and who is not even interesting to make up for it, absolutely bowled me over. Harriet’s attitude towards the people on the subway when they go to visit Ole Golly’s mother really turned me off. I began to get slightly more interested in Harriet as a character only when her spy notes began to be less observations and more musings. Like:

What is too old to have fun? You can’t be too old to spy except if you were fifty you might fall off a fire escape, but you could spy around on the ground a lot.

Harriet’s reaction to being an onion for the Christmas play went a long way towards endearing her to me as well, so by mid-book I actually cared about the main character, which is helpful. I vaguely recollect that my original reaction to Harriet’s friends reading her notebook was more on the friends’ side, but this time through I thoroughly empathized with Harriet, particularly as she goes through the subsequent days miserable and misunderstood. So from that turning point on I was properly hooked, and I really did enjoy the rest of the book, but I likely wouldn’t have gotten that far naturally (like, without being determined to finish and blog about the book).

A few other random thoughts:

• What the hell kind of a name is Ole Golly? I mean, seriously.

• I think Harriet seems like a 9 year old, not an 11 year old. The things she wonders about, her level of awareness (or lack thereof) of her friends’ and classmates’ having feelings, and just her general behavior, don’t ring true of an 11-year old for me. That made it hard for me to buy into the character; I eventually just decided that in my mind she’d be 9, and that made it all work much better.

• I suspect as a child I was confused by the progressive-type school Harriet attends, particularly as it would have seemed incongruous with the other time period cues given in terms of the parents’ behavior, etc.

• I’m not sure I find it believable that Harriet was permitted to print the newsletter items she did – but I enjoyed the twist of her not actually being reformed or learning her lesson.

*I recall a different kind of squirmy feeling from some books that I loved but that creeped me out or were deeply affecting in a way that stuck for days after reading (especially Time windows book), so that I started hesitating to re-read them, even though I loved them, because it was too big a psychological commitment. I do a similar thing with some movies now – I really want to see them, but I’m sure they’ll leave me depressed, and I’m never willing to commit to that so I keep really wanting to see them but when the time comes to actually sit down and watch something I choose fluff.

Wednesday Words: Usually when people confuse “integrity” with “stodginess,” it’s in the opposite way

“I tried to smile, but my face had too much basic integrity for me even to pretend I had heard something funny.”

– Katherine Paterson, JACOB HAVE I LOVED

Books I should have read in childhood: Jacob Have I Loved

This is the cover I recently bought used (image from http://wordlily.wordpress.com), and I think it sucks

JACOB HAVE I LOVED, by Katherine Paterson (famous for BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA, THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, and others), is one of the books that I owned but never read as a child.

Having just finished it, I can attest that this may have something to do with its boring as all get-out prologue. Seriously, four pages describing the island it’s set on and crab fishing, when we don’t yet care about the characters? Why did a writer as skillful as Paterson ever think that was a good idea?

Another possible explanation for my never having really cracked its spine in all the years it sat on my shelf is that, as I recall, the cover of my childhood edition strongly emphasized the biblical reference in the book’s title. Since I was totally unfamiliar with this*, the book became associated in my mind with Hard Things I Don’t Understand.

All of which is too bad, because it’s actually a great book. Shortly before reading it, I happened to read a discussion on writer Jennifer Hubbard’s blog about how good writing is about revealing emotions that we wouldn’t typically associate with an event, but that ring true when we read them. Or, as she put it much more pithily, “what it feels like instead of what it’s supposed to feel like.”** As it turns out, this is one of the things Paterson excels at in this book.

Here’s a handful of the tiny details that stuck out to me in this vein:

• “The pain in my arm became the only real thing, a sharp point of comfort in the midst of a nightmare.”
• “I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm.”
• “Call and Caroline were waving back and calling out to him, but I was standing there shivering, my arms crossed, my hands hooked up under my arms and pressed against my breasts.”

The biggest example, though, is a plot twist that I won’t spoil, but that definitely took me by surprise midway through the book. Suffice it to say that our protagonist develops an emotional response that I most certainly did not see coming, and that I think most authors would be hard-pressed to include today.

And speaking of things that felt dated (and I don’t necessarily mean that as an epithet): JACOB HAVE I LOVED follows its protagonist from age 13 until well into her adulthood. I think this would be a very rare choice today. Anyone got counterexamples, or a sense of whether I’m right or wrong that this this might have been more normal in the late ’70s/early ’80s?

* My most embarrassing story of how my childhood reading was distorted by my total ignorance of all things biblical: I was probably about nine when I first read Madeleine L’Engle’s MANY WATERS, and as I read this story about modern-day twins transported back to the dry, dry desert… living with a man who is the town laughingstock because he thinks God told him to build a big boat… a man named Noah… it did not occur to me that this was a retelling of Noah’s Ark until it actually occurred to the book’s main characters to speculate on this fact.

On the other hand, I did learn the story of Abraham from a very early age. Except, I think the part about how God said he wanted the killing done out on Highway 61 may have been embellished.

** It took a mighty effort to repress a MY SO-CALLED LIFE reference here. Bonus points to anyone (besides Emily!) who can identify it in the comments.

Why I Love It: A Northern Light

One interesting thing about Jennifer Donnelly’s A NORTHERN LIGHT is that I think I love the book for different reasons than she does.

In an interview I read, Donnelly talks about how the whole book was inspired by Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, which apparently played a central role in Donnelly’s own life. Her book is framed around this classic story, set in 1906: a young woman and young man go out boating, and she drowns. Can you guess what happened and why?

I’m not even directly familiar with Dreiser’s book, but I knew from page one what had happened; that’s what a childhood spent watching Lifetime Original Movies will do to you. This part of the story didn’t grab me at all, because the “mystery” was so easily solved, and the dead woman, Grace, didn’t develop enough to interest me. (Even though the book is built around this subplot, it’s actually rather peripheral to the main characters’ emotional journey, which is really just as well.)

However. The original story that Donnelly created around this now-cliched tale is fascinating and, for me, was almost absurdly moving. The main characters are Mattie, a white girl, and Weaver, a black boy, best friends and poor teenagers whose one hope is to escape their confining town in the Adirondacks and make their way to college. They both wind up working at the ritzy Glenmore Hotel (where they intersect with Grace’s murder) as a way to earn their keep (and, in Mattie’s case, get a measure of independence from her family), but subsequent events destroy each of their seemingly best strategies for finding their freedom.

The book’s central tension is in showing all the ways the deck is stacked against these characters, while nevertheless showing how deeply their own choices matter. Weaver’s one act of resistance has tremendously negative consequences, leaving the question of whether he should have protected himself by not standing up for himself — and what emotional price he would have paid for that choice. The fact that neither option was remotely acceptable is not belabored by Donnelly; it’s simply obvious from the character she’s created, and it’s a deeply painful and unfair fact. Meanwhile, Donnelly manages, with great skill, to end the book hopefully without seeming for a moment like she’s settled for an easy answer for her characters.

Indeed, A NORTHERN LIGHT ends with more questions about Mattie’s and Weaver’s future than it does with any certainty. I found this absolutely maddening as a reader, because I cared about these characters so deeply — for days after I read it last summer, I could not get them out of my head — but she couldn’t have done it any other way. A NORTHERN LIGHT is a very original and powerful story, no matter what cliched origins have left their scars in the setup.