Kat’s Film and Book Reviews

Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

Harper Torch Press

2002

496 pages

Mystic River is a very complicated novel, but complicated in the way real life is complicated. It’s messy and overwhelming, but only because of the pain, struggle, and tragedy it tackles. The writing is actually clean, sharp and strong—expertly conveying the depths of pain and struggle that human lives encounter.

The story begins with a prologue from the lives of three boys—Jimmy, Sean, and Dave. Jimmy’s the bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, while Sean’s the golden boy, the one things seem to go right for, at least from the outside. And then there’s Dave. I think we all know a Dave, a sort of frumpy-dumpy kid who has good intentions and a good heart, but never seems to fit in anywhere. He might have acquaintances who tolerate him, like Jimmy and Sean do, but he doesn’t really have any close friends…no matter how badly he wants them.

In this first section, Dave is kidnapped by two child molesters pretending to be police officers. The things that happen to Dave are never spelled out, but it’s clear as the book progresses that in the four days before he managed to escape, Dave has been abused terribly. But he’s a poor kid with a crazy mom and no real friends; he doesn’t get counseling or support or any kind of attention. He’s just left to struggle along alone, the best he can. So are Jimmy and Sean, who saw the kidnapping, but have no idea how to deal with their role in it, or with Dave in the years to come.

That’s the set-up, and then the book skips to the three boys’ adulthood. Sean’s a detective with a shattered marriage, Jimmy’s an ex-con with three daughters who has gone straight, and Dave’s a blue-collar worker with a wife and son. In the beginning of the present day, a gruesome tragedy occurs—Jimmy’s daughter is brutally murdered—and the rest of the book is about how each of the three characters deals with that. The murder brings each of them back into each other’s lives in ways none of them could have imagined, and the mystery surrounding the girl’s death affects each of them in ways that only unfold slowly through the course of the book.

The book looks at the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, cops and criminals, siblings and old friends. It looks at questions of duty, love, and vengeance. It explores how short we all fall in our efforts to make something of our lives. In fact, sometimes the relationships are so realistic and so complicated, it can make the reader a little depressed. Don’t any relationships work out? Doesn’t anyone ever get anything right? Isn’t anyone happy?

The mystery is extremely compelling, and I’ll only say that things aren’t always as they seem—though the author is never less than honest with us. And the ending, though sad, almost seems as though it’s for the best.

Dennis Lehane writes with a fullness and complexity that compels you to keep reading page after page, even when you’re afraid of what you’re going to find. Every character is relatable and sympathetic, even when they’re doing things we hate. Lehane is uncompromising about the dark depths of human life, yet he doesn’t fall into the traps of nihilism or pretension that so many so-called literary authors do. His story and characters simply are what they are, for better or worse. I recommend that you read Mystic River and experience them for yourself.

Code Orange

By Caroline Cooney

Delacourt Press, 2005

Some people are better researchers than fiction writers. We get the feeling that what they really want is to show the reader how interesting their topic is—and it usually is interesting. But that’s not what we go to fiction for. We read fiction because we want to learn about people, others experiencing things that we find connections to. The best fictional characters, like the Velveteen Rabbit, become real simply because we believe in them so completely.

Caroline Cooney understands the difference. Each of her novels centers around a certain theme—forgiveness, sundered families, identity—and you know that she’s done her research. But that’s not why you read. You read because the main character—always a teenager—grabs your attention and your heart from the first words.

That’s exactly what’s going on in her gripping novel, Code Orange. The title refers to the Homeland Security danger alert codes implemented after 9/11, and hints at the sort of danger that will be encountered in the book. The main character, 16-year-old Mitty Blake, accidentally comes across an envelope full of smallpox scabs, and from there we follow his journey into fear and paranoia, illness, bioterrorism, and worse. It’s utterly compelling, and incredibly suspenseful; as Cooney counts off the days from exposure to infectiousness, we are as impatient and fearful as Mitty is. And she cuts us no slack—is that headache just a headache, or is it the onset of smallpox? Is Mitty chilled because it’s February in New York, or is it a symptom of smallpox? She won’t tell Mitty, and she won’t tell us.

Cooney uses Mitty’s science research paper as a way of feeding us the information we need to have to become as scared as Mitty is. Mitty writes in his own words about the symptoms and development of smallpox, how it is passed from person to person, how it was eradicated and how it might return, and chillingly, about its potential uses as a weapon of bioterrorism. It never feels too farfetched, especially since Mitty can come up with a million reasons why this couldn’t really be happening. We know the incredible odds as well as he does. But we are still as afraid as he is.

Even more interesting than the smallpox storyline is Mitty’s character development. When we first meet him he is the ultimate teenage boy slacker. He cares for nothing but music and the girl he’s crushing on, and he’s filling a seat in an advanced biology class that his parents paid the school to put him in. But through his research and the fear that he might contract smallpox—and even worse, give it to others—we see him grow up. He realizes what’s important, and he learns how to act on his newly discovered feelings of love and loyalty. In the end, Mitty is no longer a slacker in any sense. Mitty knows what the right thing to do is, and he acts on it.

I would recommend this book for middle school age and up (including adults). The terrorism theme might be scary for the younger kids in this age group, but in my experience it’s better for them to be a little bit afraid and to ask their parents or teachers about it, than to hear something on the radio or TV and be terrified. Much as adults might hate it, terrorism is now a part of our children’s lives, and like all difficult subjects, kids must be exposed to it in controlled amounts. Since the book has no violence, only the threat of violence, I think that even pre-adolescent kids can handle it. And adults will find that they can’t put it down, and don’t want to, until they know how it ends.

Maximum Ride

The Fugutives, Books 1-3

James Patterson

image courtesy of hatchette book group

Book 1 Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment

Book 2 Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever

Book 3 Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

The Maximum Ride books by James Patterson can be consdered two trilogies starring the same characters. The first trilogy is The Fugitives, the second is The Protectors. This review will concentrate on The Fugitives, a group of genetically altered kids who struggle for simple existence against those who created them and pursue them still.

The kids who star in this series are ages 6 through 14, and have DNA that has been altered to be 98% human and 2% avian. This 2% has given the kids distinct birdlike characteristics—most notably, each has a set of wings and can fly. They are also tall and proportionally stronger than most human beings.

Because of this birdlike humanity, they call themselves a flock, rather than a family. Each member of the flock was genetically altered either before or after their conception and birth in experiments conducted at a facility they know only as The School. They lived in cages and were treated like animal experiments rather than like human children. The one kind influence in their lives was one of the scientists, Jeb Batchelder, who treated them humanely, and eventually rescued them from the school and took them to live in a hidden home deep in the mountains.

When the book opens, Jeb has disappeared and left the oldest member of the flock, 14-year-old Max, in charge of the family. Max, the eponymous Maximum Ride, is strong and caring, and takes personal responsibility for the well being of her flock. She can be bossy and overbearing, but she is loved by her flock and manages her little family as well as any 14-year-old could. There is absolute trust and loyalty between the members of the flock: 14-year-old Fang, a dark, quiet boy who functions as Max’s right hand; 14-year-old Iggy who is blind as a result of past experiments performed on him; 11-year-old Nudge who talks incessantly but has a gift for computers; 8-year-old Gasman, or Gazzy, whose gift (to the delight of middle school readers everywhere) is exactly what you’d expect the gift of someone called the Gasman to be; and Gasman’s biological sister, Angel, who develops gifts in telepathy, mind control, talking with animals, and breathing under water.

The flock’s hiding place is soon discovered when agents from The School, genetically altered half-men half-wolves called Erasers, find their hideout and kidnap Angel. Max resolves to get her back, even if it means returning to The School and the horifying memories it contains for all of them.

From that point on, througout the three volumes, the action rarely stops. There’s a reason this part of the series is called The Fugitives; for three volumes these kids run and run and run. They are guided and protected by Max, who struggles to keep them safe even as she has to deal with her own feelings of inadequacy, fear, and anger. She doesn’t make every choice well, but we never forget that she’s 14. How many 14-year-olds have to face assassins every single day?

These kids can’t trust anyone, and every time they start to do so, it blows up in their faces (sometimes literally). Yet all they want is to be regular kids. Their ongoing, often interrupted quest in the three books is to find their parents, to find out why they were given into the hands of the coporation that made mutants of them. The answers aren’t always pleasant.

It’s heartbreaking to see the flock, during their few forays into normalcy, wish so badly for it to go on, but even the youngest kids enter every room with their eyes on the nearest exits, and not even the simplest everyday tasks are undertaken without knowing what their backup plan is.

It’s no wonder, when she has to be so strong to keep her flock safe, that Max has a hard time letting herself be vulnerable. She develops feelings for Fang, but every time she comes to the point of having to open herself up a little bit, she can’t do it. This leaves Fang frustrated and angry, and Max confused and hurting.

Those human moments are why we read these books. I read the first three books in just a few days, I didn’t want to put them down. As an adult, I could do without the bathroom humor, but I recognize that gas jokes have a hallowed place in the middle school psyche. And at times the continuous action gets to be a little much. It’s really an action series with emotional scenes, not an emotion series with action scenes.

Even so, the characters are real and interesting. They make age-appropriate decisions and mistakes. Most of the humor—led by Max’s sarcastic narration and smart aleck comments—is truly funny, and the whole thing has a tinge of realism that’s a little disturbing. Experiments are being done on humans right now that confound the DNA code of different species, so why wouldn’t we end up with bird kids? And why wouldn’t we believe that the scientific community set out to destroy experiments that they didn’t consider useful? It’s already happening.

The books are fun, funny, compelling, emotional, interesting, current, and well written. They aren’t perfect, but I don’t want to enumerate all the flaws. You don’t really notice them at first, anyway. Maximum Ride is like a good action movie; you don’t think to question it until you leave the theater and are driving home, and you say, “Hey, wait! How could that happen?” Incredible coincidences, occasional pacing problems, and plot points that float unaddressed for far too long would be on the list, if I were to list it, which I’m not. Like I said, you don’t notice. Not at first, anyway, and by that time, Max and her flock are long gone.

The House of the Scorpion

Nancy Farmer

Scholastic 2002: 380 pages

Image courtesy of BYU English Department

Some things are just glimmers in the imagination…today. But tomorrow they could form the basis of a brave new world where people of the future pay for the hubris and bad judgment of an earlier generation—usually the generation living at the time of the writing. The best speculative fiction rests on this premise, and an author must have a thorough and intuitive knowledge not of what will happen, but of what is happening now. If someone really understands what’s happening in the labs, boardrooms, and voting chambers of a society, it doesn’t take much more work to envision how things soon will be.

Nancy Farmer, a three-time Newberry Honor author, has created the world of our great-grandchildren with just such deep understanding. Her 2002 National Book Award winning novel, The House of the Scorpion, takes several scientific, political, and social issues of the early 21^st century and weaves them around one boy…or perhaps it is more accurate to say “boy.” His name is Matteo Alacràn, and the status of his humanity is not resolved until the end, at least in his own mind. His story incorporates the all-too-familiar themes of cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, terrorism, illegal immigration, encroaching socialism, government corruption, drug trafficking, human enslavement, religion, poverty and privilege, dysfunctional families, and child-rearing.

This may sound like too many too-big themes for one young adult novel, but it’s not. In real life, people and issues touch each other, and this is the case in the life of young Matt. At the beginning of the novel, which takes place at some unspecified time in the future, Matt is six years old and living alone in an isolated house on an opium plantation. His only companion is Celia, the cook up at the Big House. The Big House is home to El Patròn, the drug lord who owns this plantation and is one of the most powerful men in the country of Opium. El Patròn, whose name is also Matteo Alacràn, is rich and powerful enough to have anything he wants, including clones of himself to use as he chooses.

Young Matt learns that he is one such clone.

In the world of the novel, clones are treated not as humans, but as pets at best. But El Patròn’s clone is a cherished piece of property, so Matt is simultaneously spoiled and abhorred by those around him. The result is a character who is deeply flawed but also entirely sympathetic, and the reader turns page after page in the hopes that the little bit of love Matt does receive, from the cook and a body guard and a young girl, will help him become the person he will need to be. If he is to be a person, that is.

About two-thirds of the way through, the novel takes an unexpected turn. It is a plot development reminiscent of the hobbits’ return to the ravaged Shire in Tolkien’s Return of the King, and sometimes leaves the reader wondering if this part was necessary to the resolution of Matt’s story. But like Tolkien, Farmer needed to show that the consequences of choices reach far beyond our own lives, and therefore so must the solutions. Since El Patron’s choices affected people far beyond the borders of Opium, so would Matt’s.

If Nancy Farmer’s vision of the consequences of our actions is in any way accurate, future generations will have a great struggle ahead of them. In The House of the Scorpion, Farmer shows how those battles might be won. Power, greed, and corruption may win some of them, but love, courage and hope win the war.

New Moon

Stephenie Meyer

Little, Brown and Company

2006

New Moon is the sequel to Stephenie Meyer’s 2005 novel, Twilight. Like many in fandom, I’ve read New Moon several times now, which makes it easier in some ways and harder in others to review it.

At the end of the first book, Twilight, Edward and Bella reach an impasse. Bella wishes for Edward to change her into a vampire, and Edward refuses to do it. He doesn’t think she understands how difficult the life of a vampire is, and he doesn’t want to condemn her to that. Bella doesn’t really care about the technicalities; she just wants to be with Edward forever, and the immortality conferred by vampirism is an obvious way to do that.

New Moon starts out in September of Bella and Edward’s senior year of high school. Bella wakes upon the morning of her 18^th birthday and is depressed that she is now older than Edward ever would be, since Edward is not aging. The Cullens, spurred on by the irrepressible Alice, throw Bella a party that she doesn’t want, and at this party, the tragedy Edward has been fearing nearly occurs.

Knowing that Bella nearly came to irreversible harm because of what Edward and his family are is too much for Edward, and he resolves to leave her. This will come as no surprise to anyone who read Midnight Sun, the partial manuscript for the Twilight story as told from Edward’s point of view. Edward is convinced he’s not good for Bella, and has always intended to leave her when he was strong enough, or when he loved her enough to put her safety over his own happiness.

He finally reaches that point in New Moon. And amazingly, to the first time reader at least, he does it. He leaves. If the book is divided into quarters, the middle two are spent entirely without Edward.

So, if we have no Edward, what’s left? Bella’s left, on her own, and her mental stability seems to have left with her vampire lover. She enters a state of near total dissociation, in which she physically moves through her days, but emotionally is completely absent from her own life.

It’s not a healthy state of being, but in this story, the reader really has to make allowances for the strong supernatural element involved in the relationship. If a real teenage girl were this destroyed by a break-up, she would require hospitalization. But real teenage girls do not have the hand of destiny guiding their relationships with their vampire boyfriends.

Bella soon finds solace in her friend Jacob Black, and comes to depend heavily on his friendship. Jacob helps her begin to heal and encourages her in some of her more irresponsible activities. As Bella puts it,

Only a teenage boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn’t see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods.

Jacob gives her space for a while, but she senses his growing attraction to her. And she starts to wonder what it would be like, to be with someone who made her feel better, even if that someone could never be the one she lost.

And then we discover that Jacob has a secret, too. The supernatural is exploding all over the rainy green state of Washington, and old legends, once thought to just be fairy tales, come to life on the Quileute reservation. Jacob is right in the middle of it, and it alters his relationship with Bella in ways that both help and hurt them both.

It takes a while for Bella and Jacob to find their footing as friends in this new situation (I don’t like to spoil it, but is there anyone in the world who doesn’t know what’s going on with Jacob and the Quileutes?). So now Bella, still on the fine edge of mental health, still dealing with losing Edward, has to work to preserve her relationship with Jacob, too.

And just when Bella starts to think that maybe life could go on—a wounded, partial life, maybe, but still a life—a vampire shows up at her house. It’s not Edward, but Alice, and we discover that through a misunderstanding, Edward now thinks that Bella is dead, and has gone to Italy to request execution from the vampire world’s royal family. He intends to commit suicide by Volturi. Only Bella can save him, and she doesn’t hesitate to jump on a plane with Alice and go, despite Jacob’s pleas for her to stay.

For the reader, part of us wants to cheer that we get more Edward, truly one of the most compelling characters in contemporary fiction. But it hardly seems fair to Jacob, for Bella to drop him the minute Edward needs her. And it’s not fair, of course. It leaves Bella feeling guilty and Jacob feeling resentful and bitter.

Those feelings will carry into the next book. New Moon and its sequel, Eclipse, are the two most intimately connected books in the series, and in that one, everyone will have a high price to pay for the choices they all made in New Moon. So if you’re one of those readers who gets frustrated by the lack of Edward in New Moon, just remember, it’s in service of the greater good. There’s a lot more Edward coming up, and since Jacob isn’t going anywhere, there’s a lot of angry, arrogant, intense and suffering Edward coming up.

That’s how we like him best.

Twilight

By Stephenie Meyer

Little, Brown, and Company

2005

In one sense, not much happens in Twilight. Isabella Swan’s life plays out, day by day, in small high school dramas that aren’t dramas—who likes who, who’s jealous of whom, which school subjects are interesting and which aren’t. Bella is a new girl in the town of Forks, Washington, where “it rains…more than any other place in the United States of America.” She’s painfully shy, a condition that is exacerbated by her natural clumsiness, and terrified of drawing attention to herself. She’s also smart enough to understand that the new kid in a small town always draws attention, so she bears it as best she can.

On her first day, Bella’s own attention is drawn to a crowd of impossibly beautiful teens who sit together by themselves. She learns that they are the adopted children of the town’s young doctor and his wife, and that they mostly keep to themselves. Bella is awed by their sheer beauty; the three boys and two girls could be models or actors with little effort. She ends up sitting next to one of the Cullen family, Edward, in biology class, and he seems to be furious that she is there.

From there, the story unfolds with a deepening sense of fascination between Edward and Bella. This is what keeps the reader returning to the book—or never leaving it, if she’s lucky. Just as Bella can’t help being a bit obsessed with Edward, the reader can’t help being obsessed with the love that is growing between them. Edward is an extraordinary hero: strong, mature, self-sacrificing, with just enough of a temper and ego to make him interesting. And he is as tortured as any Heathcliffe or Mr. Rochester could be, knowing that his love is putting Bella in mortal danger at every minute.

Edward’s big secret comes out about halfway through the book; it’s not that shocking, since we either knew it before we ever picked up the book, or we put two and two together along with Bella. What’s so compelling is how the secret works in the relationship between Edward and Bella. She has a million questions, but it doesn’t affect her love for him. And he in his turn is equally fascinated by her. These two are drawn together like poles of a magnet, knowing that it’s not safe for them to be together, but unable to live without each other. With eyes wide open, they make the commitment.

I don’t approve of sex in novels geared toward youth, and there isn’t any in Twilight. In fact, there’s barely even kissing. That’s one of the defining characteristics of the Bella and Edward’s relationship; because of Edward’s secret, he would be putting Bella in even greater danger if they were to get physically intimate at all. But their love is so intense, so focused and passionate, that the reader, like Bella, feels that there should be something, and the unresolved sexual tension is maddening. It’s another element that keeps the reader returning, page after page.

The big events of the plot happen toward the end and gear toward the climax, where some of the danger that Edward anticipated comes about. In these scenes, Bella proves herself to be every bit the extraordinary hero that Edward is, proving that whatever comes between them, these two are made for each other.

King of Shadows

By Susan Cooper

Aladdin Press, 1999

Image courtesy of FantasticFiction.com

Nat Fields is a boy searching for his place in the world. After the painful deaths of his parents, which he deals with by denying and suppressing his grief, Nat finds that he has a talent for acting, and is accepted into an elite theater group, The American Company of Boys. He is under the direction of the enigmatic director, “Arby,” whose odd name will have significance near the end of the book. Arby has taken the boys to perform in London at the newly rebuilt Globe Theater.

Due to some unexplained time-travel, which we begin to understand is more common in the world than we might have thought, Nat Fields switches places with another Nat Fields in 1599. The Elizabethan Nat is one of the St. Paul’s Boys, players who serve the choir of St. Paul‘s Cathedral. He has been lent to Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company of William Shakespeare himself, to substitute in the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His disorientation at being found in a time four hundred years before he was born is mercifully short-lived, perhaps unrealistically so…but then, Nat is a boy who is used to being alone and dealing with whatever comes his way. So much has happened to him that he has no control over; perhaps waking up in another century is just one more thing.

Nat performs beautifully as Puck opposite Shakespeare’s Oberon, and the theatrical antics of the whole company are interesting and entertaining. In the course of the play, Nat and Shakespeare form a bond; the one grieving a dead father, and the other a dead son, they become fast and affectionate friends. For the first time since his parents’ deaths, Nat feels he has found his true place in the world.

Of course, Nat must return to his own time in the end. The lessons learned are about finding one’s place, making the most of what one is given, and learning to grieve without judgment or resentment. Nat has some very realistic trouble adjusting to all of the things that happen to him, both in the course of the unfolding story and in the backstory. Cooper offers us his tender feelings with compassion and without sentimentality; children are not idealized, but are treated with respect. Nat is a troubled hero with whom the reader empathizes.

The only bits that might be confusing concern the technical jargon of theater, especially where it applies to the original Globe. Young readers who aren’t familiar with names such as Burbage, Marlowe, Essex and Cecil might find themselves as lost in history as Nat initially was. Nonetheless, the life of the theater is described in such a lively way that I wouldn’t be surprised if readers’ minds are opened to learning more. Nat’s healing and coming into his own are reasons enough to read Cooper’s delightful book. If her book encourages anyone to learn more about Shakespeare or the theater, even better.

Nory Ryan’s song

By Patricia Reilly Giff

Delacourt Press

2003

Image courtesy of Fayschool.org

I am always grateful to authors who can make a historical abstract real to me. Patricia Reilly Giff places her story in 1845, at the beginning of Ireland’s horrific potato famine, and tells it through the experience of twelve-year-old Nory Ryan. Through Nory, the reader experiences the desperate denial when the crops start to fail, the frustrated resentment against English overlords, and the crippling pain of hunger. The hunger is at its worst not when Nory herself suffers, but when her elderly neighbor or her young brother suffer, and the fear for their very lives grows days by day. However, this despair, while sharp and real, is not the driving force of the book.

The driving force of the book is love and hope. There are moments when the love is painful, and the hope borders on pathetic, as when Nory’s sister in America sends a package, and Nory is convinced it must contain diamonds that she picked up off the streets. “Brooklyn in America” shines like a beacon of survival through the book, but those of us who know the history feel the bittersweet knowledge that life wasn’t quite so perfect for Irish immigrants in America. Still, imperfect is better than the slow death of starvation, and we children of immigrants feel proud that families like Nory’s could find some hope here on our shores.

Ironically, it is for the sake of love that the Ryan family separates, until only Nory is left to tend the family fire, which has never gone out for a hundred years. Everyone she loves has gone, but she is sure they will be safe, and so the story nears its conclusion with this beat of sacrificial love. It is only at the very end that Nory gets her chance to live as well, though the taking of that chance brings her both joy and sorrow.

The beauty of this story lies in the character of the Irish family. Nory longs for her eldest sister and her absent father, she and her middle sister take on extra work to spare their elderly grandfather. He, in his turn, takes on extra work to provide for his hungry grandchildren. Nory and Celia, the middle sister, squabble and fight when things are well, but when things are hard they show love and support for each other. Nory almost literally gives up her life for her young brother, Patch, the son who is the pride and joy of the Ryan family. And other such sacrifices by other characters, made in love and compassion, keep this book from being too bitter to read.

Though the Irish family can be proud of the place Giff gives them, the most compelling relationships in this book are two that Nory has outside of her family. Her best friend, young Sean Red Mallon, is clearly the only possibility for Nory’s future husband. They are devoted and intimate in the way only children can be, but Sean’s delight in Nory, and her affection for him, is on the edge of adolescence. When this relationship appears to be broken by circumstances, the grief is tangible (I cried more than once in reading this book, both in sadness and happiness), but each still relies on the hope he or she has in the other. Nory also becomes friends with Anna, the feared healer/witch of the village, and begins to learn her craft of herbs and treatments. Anna represents the wisdom of the old ways, and Nory will take those old ways into a new life.

This book has more substance and deeper character development than many adult-oriented books. The story is moving and compelling, and the characters will live forever in the reader’s mind. I am grateful to Giff for showing us the beauty and hope that are possible in some of history’s most difficult moments.

The Difficult Child, by Stanley Turecki, MD

Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child is More—Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, Energetic, by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka

I am reviewing these books together because they are written on the same issue—the challenges of raising challenging children. Both authors, practitioners and scholars in their field, use the same behavior theory in discussing behavior, and both give similar guidance in living with children with these behaviors. In brief, they talk about a child’s temperament, the way his or her personality is wired, and how that basic temperament is a neutral quality. A child cannot help his emotional wiring, and should not be blamed to punished for being that way. Most parents can relate to this; each of us, I am sure, has noticed something our child has consistently done or a reaction they always have, and said, “You know, she’s always been that way.”

Behaviors, however, are a different matter. No matter what a child’s temperament is like, some behaviors are not acceptable, and many of these behaviors seem to go hand in hand with certain temperaments. Each of these authors offers practical suggestions on how to address behaviors in children of different challenging temperaments, and how to notice those same qualities in ourselves. This is extremely helpful when dealing with a child who might be hard to understand. You can’t help being an introvert, you know how you get when your plans get changed at the last minute, you realize that your intensity is both a bane and a blessing. This self-examination, recommended by both authors, can open the readers’ eyes to what their children are dealing with internally, since children often inherit temperamental traits from their parents.

The differences between the books are really a matter of the reader’s stye. Each one offers similar information and guidance. You may prefer to call your child “spirited,” or you may have no illusions about your kid’s difficult traits. The Turecki book is a bit more scholarly, and is endorsed by other scholars in the field, including Dr. Stella Chess, one of the doctors who ran the pioneering decades-long study on temperament in people. The Kurcinka book is more chatty, and includes some of her sessions with a parents’ support group, so she is chronicling the real life experiences of people you get to know—one m\or more of whom is likely something like the reader. Both authors stress the dignity of the child, though Kurcinka puts more emphasis on avoiding labels and exploring the positive aspects of your child’s temperament. One of the best things about both of these books is that the reader is brought to see that their children’s difficult personality traits also have a good side. In fact, they’re often the things we love most about our kids.

Since every human being has an inborn, unchangeable temperament, these books would be useful for parents whose kids wouldn’t fall into the “difficult” or “spirited” categories. They’re not bad for taking a good look at ourselves, either.

Image courtesy of GraceUnderFire.com

What Happened to Lani Garver

By Carol Plum-Ucci

2002

Claire is recovering from leukemia and has missed 7^th and 8^th grades. It’s understandable that she’d find herself where she is, among people who like her but extract a high price for social acceptance. She doesn’t see it that way, of course; her anorexia and suicidal lyrics are secrets she keeps from everyone. But what can she do? She missed those vital years after elementary school but before high school when interests were peeking out and social groups were solidifying. Desperate for acceptance, she clings to the mixed-blessing of friendship with the popular crowd.

Carol Plum-Ucci has created a complex world of adolescent terror, tearing social fabric, sexual inquisitivenss, thoughtless violence, and all manner of complex and potentially destructive relationships. She captures the centrality of a teenager’s friends, the givenness of alcohol and drugs for most teens, and the resonating effects of a critical illness years after it was supposed to be over and done with. But her novel, centered on sixteen year old Claire, is filled with hope, and light filters through the darkness. Claire’s name seems to be deliberately chosen.

The catalyst for the events of the novel is the presence of a new kid in the high school. The most obvious factor about the new student is his sexual ambiguity—is he a boy or a girl? He is tall with broad shoulders, but slender with a “swishy” walk. He has no chest to speak of, but his hair is long and frames his delicate features. And, to make it worse, his name is Lani. “It’s L-A-N-I, but he said you pronounce it Lonny.”

Claire eventually decides he is a boy, though Lani never confirms or denies. Lani seems so clueless and so asking-for-a-beating that all of Claire’s compassionate instincts are aroused and she takes it upon herself to stand by him, hoping that her popularity will buy Lani some safety. But Claire soon finds that every encounter and every conversation with Lani challenges her and calls into serious question both the assumptions and the choices she’s made.

Lani’s role in Claire’s life begins to become clearer when he takes her to an inner city clinic because she is afraid her leukemia is relapsing and she cannot confide in he parents. There she encounters people with AIDS, street people, and city people…actors and musicians and nurses and doctors. She starts to make connections that were impossible in her small town, and which teach her more about herself than she ever understood. And one clinic nurse tells her, “You need to go out there in the waiting room and find yourself a floating angel.”

Claire, of course, thinks he’s speaking figuratively, but he’s not.

“They come with you on visits like these. They hold your hand and they tell you good stuff and make sense of this world so you realize it’s not so bad—”

“Oh, I came with a friend. He’s out there.” I jerked my thumb toward the waiting room. “Thinks he’s at a family reunion. Not much help.”

“That’s cuz he’s a friend. Floating angels aren’t friends; they’re real angels. They’re real. Didn’t you see any of ‘em out there?”

“Uh, no. What do they look like?”

“Like faggots.”

My eyebrows shot up. I waited for him to laugh, but he was slick. He kept banging stuff around on his cart and whistling until I cracked up, and then he looked all surprised.

“What are you laughing at? There’s nothing funny about that. Not if you got your common sense working. Angels don’t have a gender. Remember that from church school?”

“I’m Protestant,” I responded. “We’ve got no-frills religion. No angels, no art, no saints, no Mary—”

“That’s not Protestant. That’s just white-people trash,” he informed me. “Angels don’t have a gender, so what they gonna look like?”

That’s the question, and Claire goes back and forth on it. Is asexual Lani—both strong and sensitive, both fearless and gentle—is he a floating angel, sent into Claire’s life to guide her? She certainly could use some guidance, considering that the people who should be watching out for her have completely let her down. Or is he just a kind-hearted but stupid gay kid unlucky enough to land in a town full of rednecks and closet-gays who will assault him to protect their secrets?

While Claire is working that out, all sorts of questions about cultural attitudes toward masculinity and femininity get played out. Claire develops anorexia because she considers herself too tall to be feminine—she literally tries to reduce herself. And Lani attracts the violence of the athletic boys simply because his masculinity includes enjoying lovely things and moving with grace.

This is an excellent book for high-schoolers, especially as it handles themes concerning religion, sexuality, and justice. I would not recommend it for middle-schoolers, who may be unfamiliar with many of the more esoteric elements of gay culture teased out in this book (gay porn, for example), and might find the violence confusing or disturbing. But older teens will find it challenging and disquieting, in a good way.

In the end, we don’t know much more about Lani than we did at the beginning. We don’t know for sure if he was gay, or even if he was really a boy. And we don’t know if he’s an angel. But we do know that he touched Claire’s life, wrestled with her like the angel wrestled with Jacob at the river. And like Jacob’s angel, he left her a little bit wounded, but infinitely blessed.