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?

And speaking of strict constructionism…

We at Underage Reading have sometimes expressed our consternation at the trendy headless girls (or partially headless girls) YA cover art. Now, Editorial Anonymous finally uncovers a method to the madness.

Free Books! …and makeup?

Lenore is running a contest to win free books… and makeup. Not to mention an interesting interview on how the cover of THE STOLEN ONE (the book prompting the contest, which I have not read) came about.

What are y’all’s favorite covers? TWILIGHT is an all-time favorite of mine — I picked it up, before I’d heard any of the hype, because of the alluring apple image. Sometimes choosing books that way doesn’t work out; THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS had a cover that grabbed me (mostly for its fairy-tale imagery, which suits the book), but the story was a bit meh. It set up a kind of cool fairy tale world, but there weren’t enough surprises (the evil characters stayed evil and you knew who they were from the get-go, etc), which made it feel moralistic, in the sense that it reduced the story to its moral, which as I recall was something about not being selfish, or something. I suppose that’s a bit true to fairy tale conventions, but I like my fairy tales, these days, with a twist.

I’ve already talked about how much I love IRAQIGIRL’s cover. We originally had a very different design, but I prefer the one we ended up with. (It helps that I like pink!)

(Click the picture to see IraqiGirl’s cover in larger size.)

One-Eyed Cat: In which Paula Fox shows us the possibly dire consequences of disobeying our parents, and somehow it’s less didactic than lovely

This is what my edition looks like, and while it is so very '80s (down to the very odd posing)...

...I cannot imagine who is buying this newer one. When I glanced at it I thought the boy on the cover was an old lady ghost. That can't be what they were going for.

I don’t know what it was about the ’80s that made great authors start great books in the most boring way possible, but between this and JACOB HAVE I LOVED, I feel like I’m being confronted with some sort of trial: subtle and surprising stories await those with the patience to wade through long scene-setting descriptions while the author meanders around to such niceties as character and plot.

“This” is Paula Fox’s ONE-EYED CAT, a classic (a Newbery Honor) that I discovered only recently, and the problems of the book’s beginning were heightened by the fact that I couldn’t really get my head around the character; take this scene early on:

“I believe it must be close to your birthday,” she added. Ned was surprised; grown-ups often recalled things he thought they would have forgotten.

What kid doesn’t believe adults are always thinking of them and their birthdays? I scoffed. I now think this was in character for the book’s protagonist, an extraordinarily gentle boy who makes a mistake that leads him into secrecy and misery throughout much of the book.

Paula Fox, in fact, doesn’t mess around with her characterizations. The character painted with broadest strokes in this book is one Mrs. Scallop:

Ned went over to the radio and drew a finger down the back of the bronze lion. He imagined Mrs. Scallop saying, “Mrs. Scallop doesn’t dust lions.”

Or take this exchange that I particularly related* to:

He opened his mouth and she said at once, before he could speak, “Calm down, calm down.” He hated the way she spoke in that false soothing voice, as if she owned the country of calm and he was some kind of fool who’d stumbled across its borders.

But Fox rescues Mrs. Scallop from being a parody, not by redeeming her as much as simply revealing her. At the end of the book I still didn’t like or even particularly respect her, but I truly believed in her.

What I love about Fox is how moral her books are, and by that I don’t mean that she moralizes. I mean, instead, that she presents characters whose choices matter, and she shows us how they matter not by over-dramatizing their consequences in the outside world, but by showing the characters realizing how much their own sense of themselves depends on what they do.

In ONE-EYED CAT, I also particularly like the relationship between Ned’s parents. His father is the town minister and his mother, because she is the mother in an atmospheric novel for kids, has a mysterious ailment (I believe its technical name is Disneyosis). We get tiny glimpses of the family’s complicated relationship to religion; Ned remembers that before his mother was sick, his father (who provides very loving care for his ailing wife) never spoke in his “preacher voice,” but now he sometimes uses it like a shield; Ned’s mother has her own beliefs, which are not necessarily her husband’s, and not necessarily anything she feels an urgent need to spell out to Ned. They seem like real people, in other words.

And… holy shit, you guys. Writing this post and thinking about how principled Fox’s books seem to me made me want to learn more about her, and the first thing Google has taught me? Paula Fox is Courtney Love’s grandmother.

That kind of just took the wind out of whatever I was going to write. I leave you with that odd bit of trivia.

* One of my boyfriend’s favorite ways to annoy me — one of many, I might add — is to adopt just this condescending tone. “There, there, relax,” he’ll say, just to piss me off. “Just — shhh…... Just calm down.” He does it because it drives me to violence. He perfected this technique on his sister growing up; I think it’s a wonder she still speaks to him.

My debut novel is about a drug-addicted dog-lover… or maybe the canine is the one with the chemical dependency problem?

Thanks to 100 Scope Notes for starting up this game.

It appears that my YA debut novel carries the timeless message that if you’re spending your afternoons in the garage with a bag full of magic markers, your dog will know.

Original image here. Also, it appears that the real Christina C. Treiber is a librarian’s assistant. I hope she likes Ellen Hopkins novels.

IraqiGirl’s beautiful cover

Click for larger size. Or if you want to know why I’m posting this book’s cover, see here.

Friday “Why?”: Why do girls get to have a face or a body but not both at the same time?

Last week I read GETTING THE GIRL, an early book by Markus Zusak *. Here’s the cover of my GETTING THE GIRL and an alternate cover of the same book:

These, obviously, are examples of the YA trend of cover cropping (HT: 100 Scope Notes). My question: WHY?

I mean, GETTING THE GIRL is actually all about a character who, unlike his brother, sees the girl-in-question’s humanity and personality rather than just her body. And yet.

Sarah Dessen has made a virtue of these covers, of which she’s very enamored. I read an interview with her where she talks about how she’s insisted to her publisher that her covers never show a girl’s face because she thinks “any girl” should be able to see the cover and feel like it’s her. Which kind of re-raises my frustration with her sense that all girls are white and thin (and, actually, blond, if they’re going to be one of her protagonists), but not my point at the moment.

My point is: I get why they use these covers; they work on me. I mean, I love these covers; they make me pick up the book:

… But they also kind of creep me out.

Meanwhile, you sometimes are invited to fetishize the girl’s face instead:

For all that I expressed puzzlement at John Green for covers featuring girls’ faces on books that seem ostensibly to be for boys, I give him huge props for using normal-pretty, instead of model-pretty, girls:

* who you might know from his book THE BOOK THIEF, which won a million awards including the National Book Award and is one of the best books I’ve read in many, many years, a Holocaust novel narrated by death and the only one I can think of that humanizes the German populace, but not the point of this post.

The Princess Bride and the naivete of (my) youth

I wanted to buy this, but was too disturbed by the cover; when you see it in the store, it doesn't even look like Cary Elwes and Robin Wright Penn!

Many blog readers have probably seen the movie THE PRINCESS BRIDE, where screenwriter William Goldman uses the framing device of a young kid (played by Fred Savage, a.k.a. THE WONDER YEARS’s Kevin Arnold) being read to by his grandfather, with all appropriate dubiousness about the book’s romantic elements.

Fewer have probably read the book that came first, also by Goldman. Starting in third grade, I read it over and over for many years (much as I had obsessively watched the movie from a younger age, until my mother taped over part of it with the six o’clock news, and no I am not still bitter, but only just barely).

Here, Goldman uses a different framing device: he presents the book as being culled from an old academic history, inserting editorial notes into the text where he has removed “a two hundred page digression on the history of the Florish crown” and similar.

The embarassing part: I did not get that this was all Goldman’s invention, at all. I was in high school when I was earnestly explaining to my friend Seth what a great book this is and how Goldman had really improved it from the original by deleting all this boring stuff, when he — entirely from my description — said, “But you know he made all that up, right?”

I just looked at him.

The really embarassing part is that if he hadn’t said that, I sincerely don’t know how long it would have taken me. Would I have a vague sense, to this day, that the history of Florin and its royal intrigues is something I really ought to know more about? We’ll never know.

Friday “Why?”: Why is John Green obsessed with boys who are obsessed with girls, and why I am obsessed with knowing if boys like his books too?

Today’s Friday “Why?” was originally going to be, Who puts a big picture of a girl’s face on the cover of their book that seems like it’s directed toward teenage boys?

But then Anita Miller gave me the opportunity to ask John Green this myself over at her blog. Thanks, Anita!

The exchange:

Q: Did you or your publisher worry that by having two of your three book covers feature girls you would be limiting your audience to female readers?

A: Yeah, I think we both worried about it. But with “Paper Towns,” it’s very hard to look back and feel anything but total elation, because the book has done so much better than anyone expected, and I think the cover designs helped. There will be a different, more gender-neutral cover for the paperback, and I think we may move toward repackaging “Katherines” as well in a more post-gender way. The problem, to be frank, is that publishers believe (and to an extent their evidence is unassailable) that 16-year-old guys do not purchase books. Now, I’m all for marketing to guys and convincing them that books make a better investment than (say) video games. I believe that all of us who love books and work with teenagers need to be out making that case every way we can. But I don’t really buy the argument that the only reason guys don’t buy books is because book covers don’t do a good job of appealing to them. So I think we have to take a broad focus in our outreach to male readers (which is a big part of the reason why so much of my creative work is made for youtube).

So, answers to my question above:
1. John Green does, that’s who.
2. Who says these books are directed toward teenage boys anyway?

On the latter, I see the point — even as I was writing the question I thought, I bet it’s all girls and women reading John Green’s books — it’s just that they still seem like such boys’ books to me. Part of this is the kind of alpha nerdiness that I’ve spent my life being angry is considered a male trait; but part of it, like I wrote about in my AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES review, is that he seems to really get male friendships. And I can totally see why reading about that appeals to females, because it does to me, but if teenage boys don’t also enjoy it, then that’s kind of sad, isn’t it?

I actually think the point about YouTube outreach is really fascinating. And, in fact, it’s how John Green got his start. * His own quirky, nerdy personality is what really comes across in his writing. The thing I always feel reading his books is that — while they don’t always fully work for me — I think he has an immensely enthusiastic fan base because he is speaking to an audience and a set of experiences that are not necessarily otherwise well represented in teen fiction. And they seem to me very gendered male experiences, but now that I’m thinking it through, I wonder if it’s actually girls to whom having those experiences represented in fiction actually appeals most strongly.

But yeah, so my new question: Why are all John Green books about a boy who’s obsessed with a girl (and discovers himself through the process), and is he going to keep that up?

* Tragically, I have not yet been able to watch this, because something is wrong with the my crappy computer-You Tube interaction. When I say this is tragic, it’s because I love YouTube more than anything else in the world after butter and my best friends.

When does a book cross the line?

I was already not much enjoying Richelle Mead’s VAMPIRE ACADEMY when it crossed my line into unredeemable.

My initial complaints were pedestrian: the prose meant to evoke the characters’ deep lust for one another was so generic that it mostly provoked my befuddlement and laughter (“His hands and lips took possession of my body, and every touch was like fire on my skin”); I didn’t feel for the characters.

The entire book — its plot and any emotional punch it aspires to — is premised on your caring about the deep friendship between two characters, but since we learn little specific about either of them, I didn’t really see why they felt for each other. Rather, I kept being told that they did. A lot. More than any other friends in the history of human companionship. Memo received; motivation lost in the mail.

Nevertheless, I kept reading because the world was sort of interesting. Mead’s book has two kinds of vampires — one evil, one not, but with the potential to turn — and the half-humans who devote their lives to guarding the good ones. It’s an interesting social structure and I saw potential there, if unrealized by the actual book. Sometimes that’s enough.

But then! Our protagonist gets one up on her rival by circulating the news that said rival’s parents are — can you bear the horror? — janitors! And when this hasn’t completely vanquished the girl, our would-be hero clinches the rival’s social exclusion by spreading word of her sexual dalliances. Apparently the uppity slut had it coming. At least, that’s the message I took from Mead, who doesn’t seem to be exploring her protagonist’s dark side as much as cheerfully affirming it.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it hard to root for an “underdog” who mobilizes the grossest elements of sexism and class snobbery to win her petty schoolyard disputes, without the slightest hint of either remorse or comeuppance. I lost all respect for the character and the book.

So, question for the readers: what does a book have to do to become unredeemable in your eyes? And does that mean you stop reading? (I finished VAMPIRE ACADEMY, but angrily.)

And now, to descend to a much pettier level of complaint: these books have a love interest named Dmitri who you’re supposed to believe is the hottest thing since ice caps started melting into the ocean. But the model they use on the second and third books (which I haven’t read, thank you) is just not hot. At all. Whereas the female model for the first book is, in that she looks exactly like Angelina Jolie.

Judge for yourself:

Vampire Academy

Vampire Academy #2

Vampire Academy #3