Freak the Mighty

This book by Rodman Philbrick has several elements of a traditional young adult novel, but also contains elements that make it unique. For me, stories about kids with rare diseases can be bad, but in this case it worked well. What I mean with the diseases is that sometimes an author can try too hard to be different, but I didn’t get that feeling from Philbrick. Everything he put in there added to the story and seemed unforced.
The story is about a huge kid named Max who feels like he is slow and dumb. He becomes friends with his new neighbor, Freak, who is extremely intelligent and suffers from a growth disease that has left him only a few feet tall. As you may expect, they learn from each other and "grow" and stuff because of their unique friendship.
I like that the two main characters aren't super likable all the time. Freak is kind of snotty sometimes and Max can be sarcastic and rude. Max’s voice reminded me of a lot of kids I knew in high school, myself included.
This book raises interesting questions about judging people. For the most part, of course, judgments tend to be wrong. But this book also contains an instance where Max's grandparent's judgment of his father is correct. They say he's a good-for-nothing criminal and that pretty much ends up being true.
The ending is sad, I guess, although quite predictable. That’s one criticism I have with the book. Sometimes I just feel like the death of someone close is too common a theme in adolescent literature. Sometimes it can be the cop out way of adding drama to a story. I know authors are trying to stray away from stuff that’s unrealistically chipper, but it’s not like everyone around dying is always the best way to do that. But besides that, I did like this book a lot.
P.S. I saw a few minutes of the movie adaptation of this book, The Mighty. From what I saw, it looked bad. Like with most movies, it looked like they took a good story and made it really corny and sentimental.

Out of the Dust

Out of the Dust is a Newberry Award winner written by Karen Hesse. I had never heard of it but was assigned to read it for class. I was really impressed with the writing style. It is written entirely in free verse as opposed to the standard chapter by chapter narration. I didn't know if I would like a book written all in poetry, but it works well here. The poetry isn't fancy or pretentious, as I thought it might be. It's simple, descriptive and easy-to-follow.
The story follows a young girl born in Oklahoma during the great Dust Bowl of the thirties. From a young age, she is faced with challenges foreign to most Americans now. Her mother dies while she is still young and she spends months blaming herself for it. Her dad is quiet and withdrawn, always worrying about their farm on which he can't grow anything.
The girl dreams of moving away to a better life. Her ticket to this new life is her above-average piano playing skills. She has the potential to go somewhere with her talent and is somewhat famous locally. But that all changes when she accidentally burns her hands with boiling oil. For the rest of the book, she has to overcome the pain in her hands and learn to play again.

Nice Work

This is the first book I had to read this semester for a contemporary British literature class I'm in. To tell the truth, I haven't been too impressed by anything in the class so far, with one big exception, The Remains of the Day, whose review is coming soon.
In the novel, by David Lodge, a conservative, industrialist man and a liberal literary theory professor woman are forced to work with one another as part of a government-sponsored program encouraging understanding between people from different worlds. It's not a bad idea for a book and the reader gets to see things looked at from two very different view points. Along the way, Lodge satirizes both ends of the spectrum. He's never mean, but he does point out the follies of both parties. On one side we have a man, Victor, who thinks that any thought beyond the practical is a waste of time. He's very pragmatic. Robyn, the woman, on the other hand spends all her time in school theorizing and thinking, but never really generating anything. Either of these extremes can be bad, and that seems to be Lodge's point. Of course, by the end of the book both Victor and Robyn have realized that perhaps a little of both worlds can be good for them.
Like I said, I wasn't terribly impressed with this book, but it's okay.

Life of Pi

All right, its been awhile since I made a post. I've been caught up doing school stuff. The good thing is that most of my school work involves reading books so I've found a lot of good new literature this semester. Eventually I will get it all up here.
You may have heard of Yann Martel's Life of Pi on Oprah or something like that. But believe me, its still worth reading. I read it for a literary theory class I'm in as a perfect example of post-structuralism in novels. Before reading it, I was not too familiar with theory but this book helped me to understand it.
I really like this book. There is all kinds of stuff going on in it. The story is about a boy named Pi who is raised in a zoo. Not in a cage, mind you, his family owns the zoo.
After telling about his childhood there, his family leaves India to go the America and the boat crashes en route. The rest of the book details Pi's survival story as he is shipwrecked and stuck on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. This sounds very far-fetched, and its supposed to.
The awesome thing about this book is it presents itself as a true story. Depending on the reader, this can be believed up to certain points. But eventually, nearly all readers, I would say, catch on to the absurdity of it all and see what Martel is doing. He presents Pi's story as true, but at the end of the book, makes the argument, and I agree with him, that even stories told as truth are always mixed with different interpretations and perspectives. In this way, every story that is ever told becomes fiction in the telling.
I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone that hasn't read it and might. Just keep in mind that on another level, this idea is also Martel's philosophy of religion and belief. When you see how things play out in the end, it is an interesting take on how to view faith and belief. Basically, Martel says, there are certain things that have definitely happened. For instance, we humans know we are here on earth. That's the fact. How we explain this differs from person to person. We can explain it through nothing but cold, hard facts, or as Martel calls it, "dry, yeastless factuality." Or, we can choose, say religion, which explains things in a more creative and uplifting way. Martel contends that to choose just the factuality is to deprive life of its wonder.
This is a great book. Its easy to read and has some very interesting ideas.

Go Ask Alice

This was the response I wrote for Go Ask Alice, a book by 'an anonymous teen,' but most likely by the famous sensationalizing author Beatrice Sparks, the women responsible for 'discovering' other 'diaries' of troubled teens.
Several of my friends in high school did drugs and I can tell you that not one of them ended up at all like the girl in Go Ask Alice. That is because this “diary” is fictitious rubbish written with the contradictory motive to ‘keep kids away from drugs’ while telling them all about them and getting them interested.
To me there is lots of evidence that this is not a real diary. The vocabulary used is not typical of a teenager. The way the girl’s life flows also follows too much of a tradition plot line: she likes one boy at the start, a bunch of stuff happens to her and then a nice boy comes along and loves her for who she is. Then, oh no, she dies just when everything was looking up. Instead of being powerful, I found this to be the most clichéd and lazy ending. Speaking of cliché, there is nothing more tired and done than adolescent fiction in the form of a diary or journal.
Another reason this “diary’s” legitimacy questionable is the very fact that it would exist. Are we to believe that this girl who is higher than a kite and living on the streets is still faithfully keeping a diary like a good Mormon girl should? When she was strung out on whatever did she really have the thought to go and find some paper and pen to put down her thoughts? I find that hard to believe.
Okay, so the girl starts doing drugs and by the next month she’s already selling them and devoting her life to them. That's believable.
I was not empathetic with the narrator. From page one I found it hard to even read what she had to say. She was a spoiled, selfish girl who thought the entire world revolved around her. She’s crying about her comfortable life in Suburbia while all over the world kids her age are going to bed starving with no meal coming the next day. I just can’t empathize with her or recommend this book to anyone.

Walk Two Moons

This is the first book I read for my adolescent literature class: Sharon Creech’s Newberry Award winning book, Walk Two Moons, tells the stories of two young girls, Salamanca Hiddle and Phoebe Winterbottom. Salamanca, or, Sal, for short, is the adolescent narrator on a trip to Idaho with her grandparents. She is on her way to see her mother, who left home one day and never came back. Along the way, she tells the story to her grandparents of a girl she knew in Ohio, Phoebe.
As she tells Phoebe’s story, she also reveals details to the reader from her own life and the memories she has of her mother. Though the two girls are vastly different in personality, they are similar in that both their mothers leave home unexpectedly.
This deceptively simple book is well-deserving of the awards and praise it has received. In it, Creech has tackled timeless themes in a way that young people can relate to and understand. The book contains several elements that make it fun to read: suspense, humor, originality and good, solid storytelling.
Another accomplishment of the book is its ability to successfully get the reader to empathize with its characters. By the end, I felt like I knew Sal and I wanted her to see her mom again almost as much as she did. The pacing of the book which led to the ending was masterful.

I haven't posted much in awhile because school started and I've been busy with that. However, I have been reading some good books in my classes and will post some of the things I write about them for my classes soon.