I like my romantic ideals a bit less anti-romantic, actually.

It is because I am so committed to romance novels, and teen romance in particular, that I must register some objections. Why are so many of the romantic ideals in these books so… unromantic?

[Spoiler alert for HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES]

As Exhibit A, take HARRY POTTER and THE HUNGER GAMES, and specifically their codas. Both of these books end by jumping into the future to show us that the protagonists really do stay Together Forever with their teen sweethearts, which I guess is meant to prove that it really was true love after all.

Which: have some confidence in the stories you told us, Rowling and Collins, because some bland factual knowledge that the characters are still together in 20 years doesn’t add anything to the emotional resonance of what I already experienced those characters experiencing together. I gather that the logic is that the significance of the relationship lies not in its meaning in the present, but in what it turns out to amount to in the future. And what exactly is romantic about that?

By the same token, I don’t see how a compelling story of those characters changing later on and maybe not working so well anymore cheapens the story we already saw. The scene when Willow and Tara blow out their candle in New Moon Rising does not take away one bit of power from the way Willow smiles when she gets that Oz really likes her, because how could it? The romance isn’t in the future; it’s in all the moments.

Also. I’ve had enough of this “you’re just what I was always waiting for” business that’s in every third teen romance*, mostly when the author doesn’t seem to have any idea what else a romantic hero might say to express their feelings, because the image it gives me is of a giant checklist that you create early in life of all the traits you seek in a person, and serendipitously there comes the creature that you have reductively decided to want. But is not the whole idea of romance that someone is always surprising to you, and this matters precisely because you never stop being curious enough about them to try to puzzle them out? And also that through their relationship, both parties to it become something a bit different than what they already were?

I feel like romance is an emergent property of a relationship, not something you can shellack on top of a story by offering proof (through declarations or longevity) that it must have been there the whole time. And I also feel like my idea of what romance is is the much more romantic one, in the sense that it’s so inherently idealized, and so it puzzles me that people drawn to writing romance don’t seem to share it.

And in truth I feel a bit plaintive here, because the fact is, I was built for romance stories. I cried and cried for Dawn and Tim, people. Why am I finding so little romance in my romance novels?

* And yes, I do make an exception for The National. Obviously.

I am River.*

If her dress were orange and had flowers and butterflies on it, maybe people would say River looked like me.

Just got back from Madison’s “Can’t Stop the Serenity,” which is Joss Whedon’s FIREFLY movie, SERENITY, on the big screen — a one-off annual event. Madison’s innovation this year was to also play DR. HORRIBLE’S SING-ALONG BLOG, which was highly awesome. I can’t wait until I, too, have a Ph.D. in Horribleness.

Because I own a boatload of dresses and never wear them, I wore this really summery sundress. With my combat boots. And I’m small. The first thing my friends said when I got in the car? “People are going to think you dressed up as River!”

Sure enough: two people took pictures with me in my “costume.” I win.

A woman who came in the same group as me, but who I just met tonight, said that I carry myself like River too. A normal interpretation of this statement would be that I present as a goddamn lunatic, but I prefer to think it means I kick ass.

* besides, you know, my curly hair.

Make them pay, I say! Mwahahahahhahahaaaha

Having finished my term paper (…the first one, that is), I recovered by spending all weekend reading. Beginning with an ARC [advanced reader copy: not-quite-final promotional copy] of WATERSMEET by Ellen Jensen Abbott.

I was quite absorbed by this fantasy, whose protagonist is an outcast in a harsh human world at war with other creatures and its own internal ‘demons.’ I definitely felt this book was a good use of my Saturday, although my enjoyment of it wasn’t quite evenly paced: I loved the first half, then it kind of dragged for a while, then near the very end I got interested again. Whatever, I had a good time reading it.

And yet. A couple things about it kind of bugged me. Like, the whole point of the book is that the different creatures have to overcome their antipathy toward one another, people from all species have done terrible things in their mutual wars but they’ll be stronger and happier if they unite, etc. But then there’s these other creatures to which this doesn’t apply.

Okay, so some of those other creatures are notably less sentient; I’ll buy that as a relevant difference. But some of them totally aren’t. And I find it kind of odd to be reading this whole story about species who assume each other have no humanity having to learn to question that assumption, and yet the book never questions it about these other guys. It’s not like I wouldn’t accept even some pretty tenuous principle here; it’s just that I didn’t see any principle at all.

Like, what was with Clem? is what I'm saying.

I had this problem with the latter seasons of BUFFY and ANGEL, actually. My favorite “how season 7 could have not sucked” suggestion from someone on one of the Television Without Pity boards was that the show should have embraced the corner it had backed itself into by letting some soulless demons have apparent personhood, and let the “slayer death wish” come because slayers grow ambivalent about their role as they realize some of what they’re killing could be redeemed. …And now I am mindful that Emily’s principle that “MY SO-CALLED LIFE is inherently on-topic” does not apply to BUFFY. Anyway.

My biggest problem with WATERSMEET is that I respected the main character less and less as it went on. And the main reason for this is that she made various mistakes, terrible decisions, selfish actions, etc, all of which were potentially forgivable… except not one of them had any real consequences for her. That, to me, was unforgivable.

I actually kind of fall in love with characters who make huge mistakes, as long as they also pay huge prices for them. Here, our protagonist pretty much endangers an entire community — one could even say the world — through her desire to avoid an unpleasant discussion, and when this comes to light? No one is angry; worse, the monster who wants them all dead hasn’t gained any appreciable advantage from the added time when his enemies were unawares. This violates a Fundamental Principle of Cause and Effect in Fiction, I’m pretty sure.

It’s not that our hero doesn’t suffer; actually, she suffers a huge amount in this book. But all of it is because of things beyond her control — which is compelling, up to a point, but not when I kept feeling like she should be suffering more for what she was actually doing. Unfortunately, the ending in particular did not fill me with hope for the sequel that is obviously planned. Just remember, Abbott: Personal Responsibility — bad principle for U.S. politics; great principle for fictional protagonists.

And the award for “Most patriarchal teen vampire romance I’ve read since Twilight” goes to…

It looks kind of gothic and cool.
It is not.

EVERNIGHT, by Claudia Gray (the pen name, evidently, of someone named Amy Vincent), was highly disappointing.

For starters, it opened with exactly the kind of prologue I find most off-putting, namely, one that seems to exist only because otherwise the first several chapters will be too boring, so the author wants to assure us that something suspenseful is going to happen later on. The problem? I don’t usually feel any suspense during action sequences unless I’m already invested in the characters, which, almost by definition, I’m not by the time of a prologue. I gathered from EVERNIGHT’s prologue that someone would wind up in some danger and feeling some guilty anguish, but nothing made me really care.

But I’d heard good things, so on I went to the actual book. Throughout the early chapters, I kept trying to like it, and almost managing. I thought the premise — a school for vampires suddenly opens itself to human students — had definite potential. Character-wise, Gray did something I really liked:

It’s funny — when people call you “shy,” they usually smile. Like it’s cute, some funny little habit you’ll grow out of when you’re older, like the gaps in your grin when your baby teeth fall out. If they knew how it felt — really being shy, not just unsure at first — they wouldn’t smile. Not if they knew how the feeling knots up your stomach or makes your palms sweat or robs you of the ability to say anything that makes sense. It’s not cute at all.

– but then undermined it by never having her character actually think or act like a shy person, just telling us a lot of times that she was. I felt like I would’ve wanted to read the book Gray told us she was writing.

On a sentence level, EVERNIGHT vacillated between incredibly pedestrian, generic prose and the sort of quintessentially young adult cadence I really like, where really long and really short clauses mix together; you can see all of this in this short paragraph from early on:

Until that moment, I hadn’t known what fear was. Shock jolted through me, cold as ice water, and I found out just how fast I could really run. I didn’t scream — there was no point, none, because I’d gone off into the woods so nobody could find me, which was the dumbest thing I’d ever done and looked like it would be the last. [...] I had to run like hell.

There was also a lot of sloppiness on little details (like, no one in high school is old enough to drink legally!), which was distracting, but I dutifully moved along in the book, waiting for the plot to develop. And then it did, and I was sorry.

(Vague but important spoilers below.)

The entire first half of the book is playing an absurd trick on the reader, which is then revealed. It’s a trick in the tradition of Agatha Christie’s THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, which I thought was very clever when I read it as an eleven-year-old; it here has the effect of just undoing any investment I had in the character I thought I was reading about. Seriously, there was absolutely no reason to have kept the crucial information from readers except for the author to revel in how “clever” the trick was, except it… really wasn’t. EVERNIGHT is trying to be “Enemies” from Season 3 of BUFFY, and ending up more in the territory of “And it was all a dream!”

And speaking of gratuitous choices, here’s my fan letter to the author:

Dear Claudia Gray,

Please don’t spoil Hitchcock movies I haven’t seen since I was a small child and don’t remember the big plot twists in, just so you can have the characters discuss them to establish that they both like old movies. Thank you,

Love,
Elizabeth

As blog readers will know, though, I can overlook a lot when I really get into a teen romance. Which is why the final straw for me was that the protagonist and her love interest are the most codependent creeps since Meyer set the trend in this genre. Seriously, our heroine Bianca goes on, and on, and on about how much the sniveling hero Lucas just wants to protect her. If I could’ve believed in these characters and their allegedly undying love for one another, I would’ve been really frightened for them.

My last complaint, I swear: EVERNIGHT flagrantly violates the Chekov Rule (“If there’s a gun in the first act…”) with the most blatantly dropped plot point this side of BUFFY’s seventh season. (And by that, I do mean every damn week of season 7, but that’s no excuse; if it was real bad when Joss did it, it’s certainly no good when this lady follows suit.) It’s possible this is just setup for some sequel, but I’m sure as hell not reading any more to find out.

TWILIGHT, VAMPIRE ACADEMY, now this… Why can’t I find a damn vampire romance that’s any good? In book form, that is.

If you’re looking for a teen vampire romance…

…that is 800 million times more original, creepy, and moving than TWILIGHT, rent LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

But oh my god, it scared the crap out of me.

Best scene, according to me: a discussion about what “going steady” means, held between two twelve-year-olds. One of them is a vampire who is rather covered with blood during this conversation, but the conversation is played straight teen angst and joy. Best part: the characters are totally believable, but there’s such a mismatch between the content of their words (going steady doesn’t mean anything) and the emotions that come along (one of them, in particular, in disbelieving ecstasy at the decision to do it). It’s an in-character incongruity, and it’s awesome.

Best scene, according to my boyfriend: Let’s just say it involved body parts. And not in a “now they’re trying to make you think about sex” way, in a “oh my god, all these people are going to die” way. He called it HEATHERS-esque.

Also: watching this movie really makes me realize how BUFFY/ANGEL’s occasional little glamorous tricklets of blood do not do justice to what would be gushing around and messing up everyone’s clothes and faces if there were real vampiric consumption taking place.

Also also: I liked the way the movie gives its own take on some of the vampire canon while making it a genuinely cool scene, instead of a belabored “Now we’re going to explain why vampires can’t do X.” Well done. (You know, I hope this post makes any sense since I am trying so hard not to ruin anything. Spoiler-free is the way to be!)

Friday “Why?”: For cripes sake, why do the Roma always have to be magic?

So I’m nearing the end of THE SWEET FAR THING, the final installment in Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle series, and there’s a lot I’m going to say about this book next week after I finish it, even though I think it’s going to be kind of exactly what I already said about the first two books, but with new examples.

But here’s one thing I’m going to say now: Do the damn Gypsies have to be magical in everything? I mean, seriously.

Season two of BUFFY rocks my world, now and forever, but it was bad enough that they built the whole show around an ancient Gypsy curse. But after they already did that, it’s even lamer for Bray to do it, in my opinion.

"I find your gypsy curse as attractive as your blank stares, Angel!"

And at least in Buffy, some of the Roma, when they went from being plot devices to actual characters in season two, were real people with conflicting desires, better or worse motivations, etc. The Roma in Bray’s book tend to be wise and mysteriously all-knowing about evil and how to fight it. We never learn (at least, not yet, at over 700 pages into the third book) why they know so much about the magic that is hidden from almost everyone else, maybe because it just seems so obviously in-character that they would. They are Gypsies, after all!

There’s a funny scene in Sherman Alexie’s RESERVATION BLUES where he has these two Indian guys make fun of a condescending tourist they meet in a rest stop bathroom by pretending to be magically at one with nature. Who’s the Roma’s Sherman Alexie?

Book vs. Book: Battle of the kids battling racist humiliation and not quite winning

Inaugurating our latest regular series: BOOK vs. BOOK. It’s a death match between somehow-related examples of young people’s fiction… because Lord knows, no one would ever read more than one book.

The books: Sherman Alexie, THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN; Mildred D. Taylor, ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY

SPOILER ALERTS for some key scenes in both books.

These are not books, at first glance, that one might think to compare. And yet if you happen to read them side-by-side (as I did a year and a half ago, when doing the research for this article), the similarities are surprising.

ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY is a classic, published in 1976 and winning the following year’s Newbery, set amid a Black community in Great Depression Mississippi. Nine-year-old Cassie’s family struggles to keep their land — their only hope of being able to determine their own future against every twist of unjust fate.

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN, on the other hand, is a contemporary novel, told in text and comics, about the repercussions of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold Spirit Jr.)’s decision to leave his crappy school on “the rez” in favor of the well-funded white school nearby.

The similarities:

Both books open on the first day of school, with our respective protagonists’ excitement turning to disillusionment and anger when they realize, via the pathetic state of their textbooks, just how little their education is actually valued by anyone with any power. Both Cassie and Junior rebel by rejecting their books, and in neither case does it go exactly as planned.

We get the picture: the world is stacked against them, but these kids are fighters. But they may pay a price for that that they can’t quite imagine — yet.

More strikingly, these books also share some fundamental similarities in the scene I found most powerful in each. With a lot of buildup so we understand just what is being risked with this choice, Taylor and Alexie have their protagonists each choose to stand up to more powerful white kids, whose outward friendliness is heavily spiked with racism and condescension.

And then Taylor and Alexie give us the same painful twist: after all that courage in standing up for their own dignity and self-respect, Cassie and Junior are met with bafflement. It’s not that the white kids are angry; it’s not that they fight back and punish our heroes; rather, they just don’t get it at all. Junior and Cassie’s defiant stands deflate into irrelevance in the face of their would-be antagonists’ genuine inability to understand why they are so angry.

Both scenes are so well done, it’s hurting me just writing about it. I think these books’d be worth reading for this alone, but as it happens, they’ve each got a lot more to offer.

The comparison:

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY has an irreverence I love, with hilarious observations and exactly the kind of obsession with, and half-angst-half-pride about, masturbation that we expect from a teenage boy.

I like that Alexie doesn’t shy away from showing the really destructive elements of reservation culture — its alcoholism; crushing and unromanticized poverty; a misplaced toughness borne of oppression and the absence of any imaginable future — without ever disrespecting his characters and their humanity. Also, as I recently mentioned, I was quite struck by some small references to how homophobia distorts Junior’s friendship with his also-straight best friend. There’s a lot here that moved me, and made me think.

Unfortunately, there’s a point in the book, about two-thirds of the way through, when I started to find it really tough going. Alexie kind of piles on the tragedy, with (I said SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!) the deaths of two emotionally central characters in a row. The book is described as “semi-autobiographical,” and I suspect that this is one of those autobiographical parts, because it’s the kind of thing that actually happens in life but doesn’t really work in fiction.

Which, actually, is interesting; I’ve long remembered a Joss Whedon interview where he described his philosophy of writing as “put the characters in the worst situation you can imagine, and then make it worse.” Which I think is just brilliant (and exactly why BUFFY’s season two plot arc is so phenomenal, but I’ll save those discussions), so here you would think Alexie is just following that advice and I would love it, but I don’t.

This suggests to me that the real plotting secret is something more specific, like maybe that the escalation of badness has to be of a qualitatively different kind; at a certain point, DIARY begins to feel, unfortunately, like an undifferentiated mass of depression. And this might also be personal taste, because I’ve found some other books with really depressed narrators, like Laurie Halse Anderson’s also-wonderful TWISTED, to be hard to wade through as well.

But anyway, that’s my one caveat about Alexie’s really amazing book, his first for young adults, and I truly hope not his last.

ROLL OF THUNDER, meanwhile, manages something I’ve seen in only the best political books (Katherine Paterson’s LYDDIE is one of the few I’d put up on this same pedestal): a real exploration, in plausible and human terms, of the tradeoffs involved in some strategy for facing oppression — with absolutely no abstraction, just the logical development of choices made by characters I care about.

What Taylor does (and maybe this is closer to what Whedon meant?) is put her characters in what seem like truly impossible circumstances, and then really examine the consequences of their reactions. She does this, somehow, without descending into either nihilism or easy answers.

How this plays out is that everyone in and around Cassie Logan’s family has their own plan, more or less explicitly, for trying to make it; it goes the worst for the one who goes the farthest to ingratiate himself to the white power structure, but no one gets by without scars. The Logan family, and especially Cassie, have to learn to make compromises they hate in order to survive. But they also have to learn that sometimes you have to stand up for yourself, your dignity, your family and your life, or none of that was worth protecting.

It’s the way Taylor believably navigates that particular set of contradictions that makes the book incredible; I can’t think of any other that really manages this as well.

Advantage: THUNDER. But since it actually is possible to read more than one book, do yourself a favor and read them both, and savor it. In fact, I may just read them again.

A fairy tale romance of a different kind

Did anyone else read all those fairy tale books edited by Andrew Lang? You know, THE GREEN FAIRY BOOK, THE MAGENTA FAIRY BOOK… I owned a lot of these, and read them a lot of times, even though once you’ve read about ten stories you’ve pretty much covered the plot and thematic elements that will be endlessly permuted throughout the rest.

My sophomore year of college, a German teacher assigned us to write a fairy tale (auf Deutsch, natuerlich). I’m pretty sure this was just a throw-away assignment for him, but I took it very, very seriously, incorporating as many genre tropes as I could — the series of three trials, the less virtuous and worthy trial-undergoers whose quests must be disappointed before our seemingly humble hero can advance… Keep in mind, I studied German for seven years and can barely introduce myself, so spending a lot of time on my German assignments clearly wasn’t my usual practice.

Real German fairy tales are a lot creepier than mine was. Image from http://www.cultcase.com

Point being, I know my fairy tale conventions. And since I’ve been reading what the book pros call “paranormal romance” these past few years*, I know those conventions too.

And that is why I love WICKED LOVELY by Melissa Marr. Because it also knows these conventions, and breaks them very smartly.

You know how in fairy tales and paranormal romance, you often have a couple that is destined to be together by some centuries-old unyielding mystical fate? Especially if there’s some sort of royalty involved and a kingdom to be ruled before it is destroyed, or used to destroy the world? WICKED LOVELY starts there, and goes somewhere awesome that I won’t spoil (except a little bit in the third footnote). Someplace a thousand times cooler than TWILIGHT’s “I was destined to love yooooouuuu.”**

In general I love anything that subverts a genre very well.*** (footnote includes more WICKED LOVELY plot detail)

Angel: Mythic superhero, or just another puppet?

There are a lot of valid complaints about the pilot episode of ANGEL, but I will always love it for the way it totally gets the superhero genre, and messes with it. The best scene: the obligatory car chase as the female victim is being kidnapped; Angel leaps into his black convertible in slow-mo, black leather duster billowing… and we pull up short into real time: the key won’t turn in the ignition. Swivel camera two cars over, and there’s Angel’s car… the other black convertible in the lot. Awesome.

Someday, when I am a sociology professor, I hope I will teach a class called “Writing for Sociologists,” and we will discuss what unfathomable rules comprise the genre of “sociological writing,” and we will look at ways that clever sociologists try to muck around with them. And if my students are lucky, they will get to watch that scene from ANGEL. I probably can’t make them read WICKED LOVELY, though.

* because I’ve been reading young adult and that’s been about half of young adult, and can I just say that I’d tried to explain the preponderance of vampires to my boyfriend, but he didn’t really get it, so I made him stroll through Barnes and Noble’s teen section with me, and now he totally does get it and is mildly disturbed?

** While we’re on the subject of genuinely romantic fairy tales, as WICKED LOVELY is in its own non-traditional way, I would be remiss if I did not mention the best fairy tale song I know, “Fake Empire” by the National. I don’t even really understand what the hell it’s about, but it’s full of all this fairy tale imagery, from Disney mostly, which is very incongruous coming from the singer’s extremely deep voice, and I love it.

***Those “politically correct bedtime stories,” which I thought were fun for about ten minutes back in 1994, don’t count; partly because they’re kind of right-wing, but mostly because they’re not really that well done. …As opposed to the NANCY CLUE books (a gay Nancy Drew parody), which were utterly spot-on. It was the attention to the clothes, pitch-perfect to the original series, that really did it.

That’s the thing, though; WICKED LOVELY isn’t a parody… it’s a genuine fairy tale, except it asks what a smart, clever girl with a sense of her own worth would do when suddenly thrust into this fairy tale world, and the answer has her busting through the conventions of the genre. Like, maybe she wouldn’t fall in love with the prince, just because he told her she was destined to; and maybe her initial resistance wouldn’t just be for show. So then how would she make that work?

I don’t know if Marr started from there or from the book’s basic premise (which is that Aislynn, our hero, has gone through life seeing a world filled with troublemaking fairies invisible to everyone else), but that’s what makes the book really work for me.