Tag Archives: Judy Blume

Before I Fall

Title: Before I Fall

Author: Lauren Oliver

Genre: Magical Realism YA

Length: 117,000 words, 470 pages

Read: May 16-17, 2011

Summary: Very very good.

ANY CHARACTER HERE

This is one of the best YA books I’ve read in a long while. Part Groundhog Day, part The Source Code, part Judy Blume, part The Lovely Bones — all itself.

We start with a high school girl, Sam, who dies in a car accident, and is doomed(?) to repeat the last day of her life again and again. Seven times to be exact. Sound like a recipe for repetition? It’s not.

First of all the writing is lovely. Really lovely. I’ve read perhaps 50+ first person girl narratives in the last year alone and this one had the best voice. It’s fairly well tied with Mary E. Pearson in that regard for recent entries (Judy Blume still wins for lifetime achievement). It’s funny clever without the annoying Snark. The voice is so good that it just drags you through the entire book, and it’s a pretty long book for YA. Lauren Oliver really is a lovely writer. The dialogue is good, the narrative description and interior monologue are amazing, and even the flowery interstitial description that glues together connected days is short but evocative. The Lovely Bones also had great voice, and a tremendous first half, before it fell apart into an abysmal mess of moral apathy. Before I fall is better.

There are some things worth noting. The characterization and the high school realism is top notch. I was reminded a bit of a modern Freaks and Geeks in that there was that kind of insightful tragio-comic realism. These girls felt pretty darn real. Even the minor characters had some depth. It’s this more than anything else that echoed the master of all YA: Judy Blume. Blume uses dialogue more liberally, as it’s her main method of characterization. Oliver prefers interior monologue and narrative description. The net result is similar. There’s a lot of detail here too, but the voice manages to make it interesting. Sam and her friends are popular girls, and more than a little bitchy, but they don’t extend into characterture. They are a little bad, but not too bad — realistically so. This is no melodramatic Gossip Girl. There is plenty of drinking, rudeness, etc. The sexuality is muted. Handled well enough, but perhaps a bit tamer than it could have been.

Now as to structure. Oliver does a really first notch job repeating the same day seven times without ever being dull. Sam makes different choices, and on some days this plays out very differently. One time she doesn’t even go to school. Still, even when the same scenes are repeated, and they are, different angles are shown, revealing and painting from different directions. This is hard to do, and must have taken considerable planning and rewriting. I’m actually facing a bit of this myself in my second novel, which is a time travel book and involves overlap and revisiting.

I’m going to stop for a second to pontificate on writing this kind of fiction. One of the things that makes this work in Before I Fall is the loose structure of the high school day. Sam’s day includes: getting up, driving with her friends to school, various classes, lunch, ditching, hanging out after school, and the party. These events flow from one to the next because of the inherent structure. If she skips lunch, or English class, she can pick back up on the schedule, because it’s immutable and set at a level greater than herself. This it has in common with Back to the Future I and II. There the structure of the dance forms a background on which Marty can play. In my own story, I have been trying to revisit a complex action scene multiple times. The whole scene — even the first time — folds out from the actions of the protagonist without any background structure, which makes altering that flow… complex.

In any case, in Before I Fall there is a also a very strongly structured arc, like, Groundhog Day, the protagonist has to learn a series of lessons from the failures of the first and subsequent trials. Much like a video game level, she gets to play it over and over again until she gets it right. This is very satisfying to read. Too bad real life doesn’t work like that.

The seven day structure also helps avoid the dreaded “reveal” problem. There is no giant structural reveal, the premise is setup in the first couple pages, and so the book does not suffer from the first half being better than the second. It races right on to the end. But there is an end, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. Given the options, Oliver chose a pretty good one, and it does leave one with a deep sense of catharsis. So it was probably the right choice. Still the looming shadow over the entire affair left me with a deep sense of sadness not unlike that caused by reading The Time Traveler’s Wife (the excellent book, not the mediocre film).

For a review of Oliver’s second novel, Delirium, click here.

Bleeding Violet

Title: Bleeding Violet

Author: Dia Reeves

Genre: Paranormal YA

Length: 84,000 words, 454 pages

Read: March 14-20, 2011

Summary: Unique, good, and very different.

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This is a weird weird book, and I mean that in a good way. Nominally, it’s about a schizophrenic girl, Hanna, who’s dad has died and who decides to move in unannounced with her mom she’s never met. But her mom doesn’t live in a normal town. She lives in some kind of weird place in Texas where gates between universes have let all sorts of strange monsters and realities in. A town with its own supernatural police.

The voice here is really fun. It’s first person past, but with a sort of cavalier devil-take-care crazy-girl style. I liked it. Some sentences were fantastic (both literally and figuratively). Not exactly in the lyrical kind of way that you might expect, but because of their deft wit, and quick and creative way of describing utterly fantastic goings on.

Because this book is FILLED, PACKED, STUFFED, with weird monsters and magic. Reeves uses the protagonist and POV character very deftly to explain it, or mostly just show what happens. She doesn’t feel the need to combine herself to easy concepts either. For example, sound sucking, student grabbing, invisible squids live inside the high school windows and one of the characters defeats them with a deck of playing cards! It’s a tribute to her skill that I could follow nearly all of this stuff. And it’s compact too, not being a very long book and containing dozens of strange encounters. The descriptions are lean but vivid. Occasionally she violates POV slightly on the side of clarity because the protagonist is new to this stuff and she explains it with a bit more understanding than she might be expected to have. But this isn’t very noticeable. Now I do wonder if someone with less experience reading speculative fiction in all its forms might have trouble with this novel. I mean, I’ve read A LOT (5000+ speculative novels), and played hundreds if not thousands of video games with magical systems etc. We won’t even count the movies and TV shows. Certainly someone who likes their reality… well… real, would be put off by the book. I wasn’t. The supernatural flavor was really interesting and unique, reminding me ever so slightly of something like the eerie Lost Room, or the wonderful but very out of print Marianne series by Sherri S Tepper.

The choice of using such a fractured POV character was interesting. There could be an argument that the entire book was some sort of delusion. I myself just treated Hanna’s view point as literal, and everything she saw as factual. The protagonist, and some of the other characters for that matter, don’t feel entirely real. They aren’t cardboard per se, as they feel well rounded, they just have a bit of surreal style to them that comes from their rather depressed moral compass. There’s a lot of killing and murder in this book, often horrifically grisly in fact, and no one seems to care too much. One of your best friends has been impregnated by evil demon spawn who are eating her from the inside out, well, just cut them out and leave her bleeding to die. That sort of thing. It works in the story, but if you stop and thing about the reactions any non psychopathic person might have… These characters just move on. It didn’t  really bother me in the context of this story as the narrator’s view point tends to whitewash away the consequences.

There’s also a good bit of cavalier sexuality — a welcome break from the self censorship that seems to be the norm since the 90s. Hanna is certainly open minded in that regard, and likes to take off her clothes. Unfortunately 🙂 there isn’t a lot of detail, like most everything else in the book a lot is left to the imagination. This is also part of the trend. To tell the truth Judy Blume’s Forever (1975) is still the most explicit teen book I can remember.

Overall, this is a great book, but it’s much more FANTASTIC than your typical paranormal. Being a fantasist, that was more than fine with me.

Book Review: Lost It

Title: Lost It

Author: Kristen Tracy

Genre: YA Romance

Read: Jan 3, 2011

Summary: Forever 2007.

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This is a very likable teen romance about an Idaho girl’s first real relationship and of course… how she lost her virginity. I read this in my continued meandering quest to find out just how edgy and racy YA can actually be. I hope someone points me to another answer, but I’m thinking… not very. If you know anything really edgy, please put it in a comment. Lost It is pretty reminiscent of Judy Blume‘s Forever (my review HERE), and it’s gone backwards in the sexual explicitness department big time. Really there’s barely any.

Don’t get me wrong. This is a good book, and it stands on its own. It’s just not racy. But I really did like the voice. Using the standard first person past you are immediately and tightly drawn into protagonist Tess’s head. She’s pretty funny too, and not your totally typical teen girl. There is a lot of interior monologue, but it doesn’t suffer from the “too much tell” problems that this often entails. Like, for example, the Indy book Switched (my review HERE) I read the previous day. With Lost It, I actually laughed a number of times aloud — or at least chuckled. Like all these books, the narrator is what drives the whole thing, and the book delivers 100% in that regard.

Many of the other characters are good. The best friend, the boyfriend, and the grandmother all felt unique and real. The parents less so. Tracy doesn’t have the effortless ability to make every character totally and completely believable like Judy Blume, but who does? Nevertheless, she gives it the good old college try and the results are very good.

But the tameness bothered me. In our era of hyper shock factor, it would be nice if an honest book like this was a bit more honest and open about its central topic. Sex. Forever certainly has the edge there, and it’s more than 35 years old. It’s also worth noting that the two books have almost the same cover. I guess publisher marketing departments all think alike. Observe to the right!

I don’t know what it is, but at the same time the internet has opened the door to vastly more sexual material than my 70s or 80s brain could have ever conceived, popular media has less and less. But more violence. Somehow this seems pretty twisted — at least the more violence less love thing.

Anyway, Lost It, is a good book. Refreshing actually because I didn’t have to force myself to finish it. It’s all character driven, and when well done that’s a very good thing.

Book Review: Summer Sisters

Summer SistersTitle: Summer Sisters

Author: Judy Blume

Genre: Chick Lit

Read: Oct 21-22 2010

Summary: Loved It, but had issues with the second half.

Continuing on the Judy Blume theme. This is a the first adult novel I’ve read by Blume. It’s longer than her YA fare, but it still shows the same skill at painting fascinating characters. Summer Sisters is the tale of a girl, Vix, who joins her “wild friend,” Caitlen, for a whole summer on Martha’s vineyard (in 1977) and ends up with this surrogate family every year after. It follows them from 12 to about 30. The POV is present tense, but flips around between everyone in the story except for Caitlen (she’d probably be unwritable). About 2/3 the word count is from Vix’s point of view. The first half is frankly awesome. The people are so weird, yet so real. The late 70’s early 80’s Martha’s Vineyard setting is so true to life (been there). The sex is hot, and there’s plenty of it. The pre-sexual experimentation is really well told too. However, in the second half the story picks up the speed at which it moves through time and we blow past the college and post-college years. Caitlen runs off to Europe and essentially disappears from the picture, although not the mind of the protagonist. I’m not sure I loved where it all went and wrapped up. But it doesn’t really matter because the island scenes with the two girls are unforgettable and worth the price of admission. I’m still in envy of Blume’s character and dialog skills.

Book Review: Tiger Eyes

Tiger EyesTitle: Tiger Eyes

Author: Judy Blume

Genre: YA Drama

Read: Oct 19 2010

Summary: Loved It.

After reading Forever I went on a bit of a Judy Blume kick, trying to find all the ones I missed that are aimed at teenagers or up (I’m not sure I’m up for an MG novel). I’m determined to figure out how to write normal life scenes this engaging. It almost seems like she could have the characters do anything and make it a fascinating read. They shower, they change their sneakers, trim toenails — all stuff that is generally forbidden in writing guides — and yet it works. Tiger Eyes could have been like an after school special. In fact, it probably was made into one. It’s about a 15 year-old girl whose father is killed in a hold up, and she has to learn how to deal. It’s not preachy. The people are just real, the friendships real, the family dynamics real. The early 80’s Los Alamos setting is even interesting. There’s no sex, no violence (other than the retroactively occurring murder), but there is a lot of excellent dialog.

Book Review: Forever

ForeverTitle: Forever

Author: Judy Blume

Genre: YA drama

Read: Mid October 2010

Summary: Loved it.

 

Everyone should read. Okay. I admit I read a ton of Judy Blume back in Elementary School, but it’s been a long time. I found this because I was trying to find out how edgy YA books really get, particularly with regard to sex. Incredibly, a quick googling seems to indicate that 1975’s Forever is still about as much sex as YA gets. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong (and link me to some books) because I really want to answer the question as to how extreme (when well done) is appropriate for YA books today. In any case, somehow I had missed Forever in the 70’s — probably because I stopped reading Judy Blume at 10 or 11. I shouldn’t have. It’s great, and holds up perfectly well as an adult novel. After reading so many recently published and truly mediocre YA books (I’ll get around to reviewing some of them) this was like a breath of fresh air. First of all, I’m in awe at Blume’s skill at holding your attention with nothing but normal life. Mostly through dialog and a bit of interior monologue she paints incredibly real people effortlessly. I’ve now read a couple other books recently, and all her characters are always distinctive and real. In Forever she writes in a tight first person present. This drops you nicely inside the head of the narrator, but she doesn’t overdo the interior monologue (which I find tedious). There is none of the snarky-boy-crazy quality of so many current voices, just a very real teenager. Also, having grown up in the 70’s, I loved the subtle nostalgic flavor of suburban 70’s life. The book is never preachy, and despite the fact that absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happens, holds your interest through every word. The sex is frank and quite funny, using a clever device to soften it. You’ll know when you meet Ralph. Basically it just sticks your head right into this little slice of life, particular person, time and place, and holds it there for about two hours.