8:45 am to 9:45 am - reflection

In a perfect world, my job would include an hour or two reserved purely for thinking, reflecting, planning, and mulling things over.  Some of this thinking would be targeted at particular issues facing existing or upcoming programs - trouble-shooting, fine-tuning, problem-solving, and improving - but some of the reflecting would be unfocused and undirected.  How lovely it would be to feel free to wonder "what if..." and see where that question takes me. 

As is the case for so many people these days, the reality is that there isn't enough time in the day to spend on all the projects I'm responsible for, much less time to dream and ponder.  Surely this is a problem!  There is great pressure for libraries - and for my library system in particular, which is trying valiantly to pull itself out of a slump caused first by a decades-long, head-in-the-sand culture and now by terrible budget woes - to be innovative.  Yet can there be innovation and creativity if we're fighting hard just to keep our noses above water? 

As I've gotten older, I've discovered some truths about myself, some of them rather dismaying.  The main thing I've learned over the past 5 years is that I'm simply not creative in that brilliant, lightbulb-flashing-on way that I so admire in others.  I don't get sudden fabulous ideas.  I'm not going to be the one who comes up with an amazing new service model that wows the crowds at a future ALA conference.  (Well, never say never - I could be a late-bloomer, right?)

Luckily, along with the sad self-revelations come positive ones as well.  For instance - it has become more and more clear to me that not only do I do my best work when collaborating with others, but I love it.  For an introvert who felt for years that I could be happy shelving books all day long if I could get a decent wage for it, this is Big News.  And happy news, too - because my colleagues are intelligent, hard-working, and (most importantly) brimming with amazing, creative ideas.  Aha!

So my tiny Youth Services staff met with a handful of fiercely dedicated YA Librarians on Thursday and with similarly enthusiastic Children's Librarians on Friday, and together we created the outlines - and even fleshed in some details - of what will be a terrific 2012 Summer Reading Program.  My job was to lay out all the things we needed to discuss and decide - and then guide the discussion, coax out details, keep folks on track and enthusiasm high...

...and then get to the unglamorous task of turning all the great ideas into a program we can implement.  Because that's another one of my strengths - being practical and hard-working. 

But to help transform LAPL into not just a well-functioning library system but also a dynamic and responsive one, I need to encourage the creative people around me to share their ideas with me and prod me into figuring out a way to make them happen. 

And even a busy workhorse like me needs some time just to dream and ponder. 

What if...?!

Child characters, adult books

I've just read two books, one right after another, in which the main character is a young person, and yet both books are for adults.  Weirdly, both books are almost exactly the same size, being somewhat smaller and having fewer pages than most adult books.

In Matthew Kneale's When We Were Romans, a 9-year-old British boy named Lawrence writes of the tumultuous, confusing time when his mother drove his little sister and him to Rome quite suddenly.  Lawrence understands that they are fleeing the threat of his father, who has separated from his mother but who is apparently stalking the family.

What Lawrence doesn't understand, though the reader slowly does, is that Lawrence's mother is mentally ill.  At first she seems to be a fine and loving mother who is perhaps a bit paranoid or overly worried - but through the course of the novel, it's clear that she is seriously disturbed.  Lawrence is an extremely intelligent, sensitive, and appealing boy - but though he finds some things about his mother's statements and behavior illogical or strange, he has neither the perspective nor the desire to understand that there are some big problems here.  Instead, he has no choice but to embrace her delusions entirely.

Older teens would surely read between Lawrence's slightly misspelled but precocious lines and know that Lawrence's mother is spiraling out of control.  Teens are also just far enough from childhood themselves that they can empathize with Lawrence's point of view while also seeing the limits of his understanding.  As well, teens will enjoy the added layer of meaning created by Lawrence's delicious descriptions of various tyrants, gleaned from the Hideous Histories series he is reading.  Would a child actually write this way?  Well, no - and yet, there is a decidedly young flavor to the narration, with its breathless sentences, misspellings, and childish phrasing.

This book is about adults - their manias, their relationships, and the way children are dragged along in the wake of their dramas.  But teens, while not as autonomous as adults nor as likely to be parents, won't find the situations incomprehensible. In fact, I'm betting many older teens would enjoy this book quite a bit.  It would make a fine book to discussion in an English class. 

Quite different is Megan Abbott's The End of Everything.  Told from the point of view of 13-year-old Lizzie, it's about the apparent abduction of her friend Evie.  Abduction of teen girls is a common theme in YA fiction (think Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott and Stolen by Lucy Christopher, to name just a couple).  So why is this particular book meant for adults?

The story takes place in the 1980s, and though the 13-year-old narrator tells of events in the present tense, there is no feeling that this is a 13-year-old voice. Lizzie's choice of words, her sentence structure, and her preoccupations all give the feeling is of an adult looking back at a very intense and life-changing time. 

One of the main themes running through this novel is the awakening of sexuality in girls, and this tinges the narration with a diffuse, lush, awkward, and sometimes uncomfortable sensuality.  Lizzie is at the end of her childhood and she knows it, yet she also knows how very much she doesn't know about sexuality.  This confusion feels both familiar and stylized to me as an adult reader.  That is, I remember the confusion, excitement, frustration, and fear of being 13 - but if I had been asked to describe it, I would have blinked in astonishment.  The sophistication of Lizzie's narration is masterful - and not necessarily something that teens themselves, even older ones with a bit more perspective, would recognize or relate to.

Then there's the "abduction" of Evie (by a neighbor named Mr. Shaw), which is inextricably linked for Lizzie with Evie's father Mr. Verver, Evie's older sister Dusty, and with Lizzie's intense and incoherent feelings about these people.  There is strangeness here - Evie sort of sees it and the reader definitely does.  It's nothing definite, and yet most readers will feel very queasy indeed about how the charming and undeniably great Mr. Verver relates to his daughters and to Lizzie.  As for Evie and Mr. Shaw - well, the mystery is not so much in what happens as in Evie's thoughts and reactions to what most would agree is a heinous crime.

Teens have read with great interest Emma Donoghue's Room, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and other adult books about intensely disturbing situations involving teens or young women.  There's nothing in this book that is any worse than those, and I suspect many older teen girls will in fact read this one as well.  I'm not sure, though, that the revelations will hit readers of this age with quite as much force as they would older readers.  Sure, there is the intrigue and nastiness of the basic situation - but it's all the subterranean currents that make this a powerful read, and I'm not sure teens would be as apt to pick up on them. 

Each of these two books is clearly meant for adults, but with characters, themes, and a smaller size that make them possibly intriguing to teens as well.  Do we recommend these and other adult books to older teens?  It depends on the book and on the teen, of course - but in general, I like the idea of guiding teens to the bounty of the adult fiction shelves.  While they may have already discovered adult genre fiction (fantasy, horror), it's a bit more daunting to find those small gems hidden among the Stephen Kings and George R.R. Martins.  Short, well-written books with young main characters are natural bridges, even if they contain adult themes that teens may not have the experience or perspective to fully appreciate.

Review of Tighter by Adele Griffin

Griffin, Adele.  Tighter.  Knopf, 2011.

"You'll have to give this book a try when I'm done with it," I told my 17-year-old when I was halfway through Tighter.  "It's creepy - kind of a modern version of Henry James' Turn of the Screw."  Which she hasn't read - but after hearing the plot, she agreed that Tighter might be worth a try.

It starts out most promisingly, with a troubled 17-year-old girl named Jamie getting what sounds like a cushy summer job babysitting a rich 11-year-old girl named Isa on a ritzy resort island in New England.  Naturally, there has to be a catch.  First there's the matter of the tragic death of last year's nanny, Jessie, and her boyfriend Peter.  Then there's the dour housekeeper Connie and Isa's disturbing older brother Milo.  Finally, there's the matter of that ghost that keeps popping up and doing mischief.  Add to all that Jamie's depression and pill-addiction, and it ends up being one heck of a summer.

Until about halfway through the novel, the tension keeps winding tighter and tighter.  However, with the introduction of some local teens with whom Jamie interacts, the plot loses some of its tantalizing claustrophobic menace and becomes more mundane.  The spookiness ratchets up a notch towards the end, when the reader finally realizes just how unreliable a narrator our Jamie is - but then fizzles out over the anticlimactic last chapter, which could easily have been left off to much better effect. 

There are some unanswered questions for readers to ponder - what is really going on at Skylark?  Are all the ghostly activities just in Jamie's head?  And what's up with Isa, anyway? 

Jamie's voice is compelling and will keep most teens reading breathlessly to the very end of the book - especially those who have never read Turn of the Screw.  As for my daughter, she snatched Turn of the Screw off our bookshelf after I described it; whether she'll read Tighter as well remains to be seen.

Recommended as a mildly spooky psychological thriller for ages 14 and up.

The lure of jammies

Right now I could be downtown at the Central Library seeing Colson Whitehead speak, but though I quite liked The Intuitionist and enjoyed Sag Harbor up until I got bored with it - AND though I'd love to be the sort of person who partakes in the cultural life of the city - well, shameful truth be told, I'd rather be at home in my jammies reading Zone One than hearing the author talk about it.  I'm a hermit at heart.

Strangely, this doesn't hold true for children's and YA authors, which is why I'll be at the Children's Literature Council Fall Gala on Saturday, November 5th, hearing Lois Lowry speak and schmoozing with plenty of other authors as well as librarians and teachers and children's literature fans of all kinds. 

It doesn't hurt that it's a daytime event, so there isn't that longing for jammies that generally hits me about 8 pm...

Review of The Apothecary by Maile Meloy

Meloy, Maile.  The Apothecary.  Putnam, 2011.

It's 1952 and 14-year-old Janie's parents have just been blacklisted, which means a move for the whole family from Los Angeles to London.  Janie experiences major culture shock - not only is post-war London gray, cold and drab, but also they have to put pennies in a meter just to heat their flat, there is still rationing, and the students at her new school are learning Latin.

Mostly, the students seem fairly snobby, but one boy, Benjamin, appeals to Janie.  Intense and defiant, he wants to be a spy, not an apothecary like his father - but his father, it turns out, is much more than a simple dispenser of drugs and medicaments.  Rather, he is one in a long line of apothecaries who have guarded the hard-won secrets of herbal and medicinal lore, all of which have been written down in an old tome called the Pharmacopoeia.

The Soviets, aided by the East Germans, want to get their hands on these secrets and will stop at nothing, including torture and murder, to get them.  Janie and Benjamin join forces with a small bunch of eccentric and brilliant scientists, plus a street-smart urchin named Pip, to preserve those secrets and save the world from the threat of nuclear war.

Clearly there are familiar elements here, with bits and pieces reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and Kane Chronicles series, Baccalario's Century Quartet series, and even N.D. Wilson's recent The Dragon's Tooth.  Ancient knowledge must be kept out of the hands of the bad guys, and only a couple of intrepid kids and a few trustworthy adults can save the world from Evil.

So yes, it's been done before.  But what makes this book stand out is the freshness and competence of the writing, which sparkles with both humor and warmth.    Meloy has a gift for introducing a scene in just a few perfect sentences, giving us an immediate sense of both place and emotional resonance.  Here is Janie describing her first day at school.

The school was in a stone building with arches and turrets that seemed very old to me but wasn't old at all, in English terms.  It was build in 1880, so it was practically brand-new... Two teachers walking down the hall wore black academic gowns, and they looked ominous and forbidding, like giant bats.  The students all wore dark blue uniforms with white shirts... I didn't have a unform yet, and wore my bright green Hepburn trousers and a yellow sweater, which looked normal in LA, but here looked clownishly out of place.  I might as well have carried a giant sign saying I DON'T BELONG.

 Making Janie an American who finds herself in England means we get to experience all the foreignness of a different country along with her, and in addition the readers can see how different 1952 was, when the Soviet threat felt very immediate and kids had to take part in bomb drills at school. 

This isn't supposed to be a fantasy; it's science, not magic, that creates all the fantastical effects.  However, any potion that can turn children into birds or make them invisible counts as magic in my book, so let's call this a fantasy and not science fiction.  After all, Benjamin becomes a starling while Janie becomes the very American red-breasted robin, which feels like a very magical touch.

The blossoming of romance between Janie and Benjamin is both sweet and age-appropriate, and makes the ending all the more bittersweet.  And yet the end is satisfying and right, even if it's one few readers would hope for. 

The plot is supremely far-fetched in almost every way, and the science or magic or whatever makes no sense whatsoever - and these are definitely flaws, when one considers the masterful plotting of a book like Stead's When You Reach Me.  But they are only small imperfections when measured against the quality of the writing and the delight of Janie's adventures with Benjamin and the rest of her odd companions.

Highly recommended for ages 11 to 14.

program overhaul

Ever realize you've sunk into a rut, program-wise, and need to freshen things up?  I've got a post on the ALSC Blog that mulls this over.

Halloween cosplay

Halloween is only a week and a half away, looming in all its orangey-black glory.

Back when I was working with actual real children in the library every day, I wouldn't dream of showing up on Halloween without a costume.  Perish the thought!

But now I'm in an office all day and haven't put on a Halloween program in... oh, it must be at least 5 years.

On the other hand, my office is in Central Library, so I could wear a costume and stroll nonchalantly around the children's and teen departments.  In fact, there's no excuse not to!

First choice costume - the gown worn by the Statue of Civilization, which I pass every day at work. 

The two sphinxes that guard the top of the stairway are nifty, too, but that might be tough to pull off.  Maybe I should just replicate the gorgeous 20's gown pictured below.

 But my fave idea is still to rig up a Robe of Skulls, or in my case an old Fairy Costume of Skulls.  Dozens of 1" plastic skulls are on their way to me from the Skeleton Store.

I'll just sew them on the hem of my fairy costume to create an off-kilter (as in pastel) version of My Hero: