Girl Detective

You know how everyone tells you how great something is, and you’re all, “yeah, yeah, I’ve been meaning to get to it” or, “yeah, I tried it but it was only OK” and then you finally try whatever it is, or re-try it and hit yourself in the head and yell, D’oh!? You know that feeling, right? Well, that’s the feeling I have after reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson, a.k.a. The Bloggess. It’s the “Why didn’t I listen so I could have enjoyed this sooner?” feeling. Because both my husband G. Grod and my internet friend Pat who blogs at O Canada Y’all have been singing her praises for years. I read some entries and liked them but never subscribed to the feed for her blog. Maybe I was feeling overwhelmed at the time. (Since I feel this way 85% of my life, that’s my guess). Maybe whatever the post was failed to fully engage me. Maybe I got lost in the labyinthine tangle of entries that is her history with Wil Wheaton and twine. But for whatever reason, I moved along.

I’m not sure why I ordered this book, then. Maybe my husband sent me a link of her begging people to buy it, so I ordered it next time I was at amazon and needed something to up my total to get free shipping (we’ve since broken down and gotten amazon prime so no need for that kind of compulsive behavior anymore). So, I ordered the book. I saw it was being read by everyone on the interwebs and that they liked it. And then it sat gathering dust, as books often do around here. (And by that I mean not just the physical dust from me not cleaning, but the metaphorical dust that settles on a book that I HAVE TO HAVE and then don’t read.)

But then we saw that she was doing another book tour, and coming to our town, and well, then, what were we to do but read the book and go see her? Which we did. But that gets me to where I should describe the reading next, and not her book, and you might not care about the reading, since her tour is now over, and you might still read the book, right, so that’s what you want to know about.

It’s a bizarre memoir/collection of essays with a lot of curse words. It’s hilarious, except when it’s sad and touching, and sometimes it’s a combination of both. But mostly, it’s hilarious. I laughed so hard that people looked at me strangely when I was in public, had my kids asking, “what, what?” when I read it at home, and when I read it alone I laughed so hard at various times that I cried, got a stitch in my side, and started a coughing fit. Lawson is from rural Texas, grew up poor but didn’t know it, and suffers from anxiety, agoraphobia, and some other stuff.

that’s when Victor started shaking a little bit. It worried me, because only one of us was allowed to have a panic attack at a time, and I’d already called dibs. (157)

She is obsessed with zombies, vaginas and serial killers, and curses a lot.

“Don’t get all crazy just ’cause I threw a vampire monkey wrench is your faulty Jesus-zombie logic.”

There are some really sad parts too, but the exuberant joy of weirdness is what will stay with me. (I think. I only finished it like 30 minutes ago but liked it so much I had to review it RIGHT AWAY.)

She was very funny and personable at her reading, which is pretty amazing given her agoraphobia and anxiety disorder. Also, she devotes an entire chapter in the book to how she spent her life being afraid of women as friends, and then has a weekend that is both terrifying and fun when she tries to get over that. I thought it was pretty interesting, given that she packed one of the biggest bookstores in the Twin Cities with 99% women. (Our ticket for signing was so long down the list that we left with book unsigned to go see The Bourne Legacy, which was good, but not as good as the original recipe.) So clearly, a lot of women want to be friends with her.

If you are bothered by cursing, or the word ‘vagina,’ you will likely not enjoy this book. The rest of you should check out this and if you enjoy it, then get the book and remember, reading it in public will be awkward.

I read Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase as part of my Summer of Shelf Discovery Readalong. It’s one of the books from Chapter 9, “Old Fashioned Girls,” of Lizzie Skurnick’s reading memoir Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.

From Laura Lippmann’s essay in Shelf Discovery:

Wolves has everything. A high-spirited rich girl (Bonnie Green), her virtuous poor relation (Sylvia Green), a tragic shipwreck, an evil governess, loyal retainers, an uncannily clever and gifted goose tender, a horrible boarding school–run by Mrs. Brisket no less, who rewards snitches with little pieces of cheese. And I’m not even going to tell you how the geese foil a dastardly crime. (354)

And Lippman’s list doesn’t even include big bad wolves, a big bad man, a kindly poor relation in a garret and a sympathetic adult. Wolves does indeed have lots crammed into its few pages, and its a rollicking read. I was reminded of Jane Eyre, Turn of the Screw, A Little Princess, and more. I’m sad I didn’t encounter this one as a child, but happy that I’ve read it now. I look forward to passing it on to my boys, 6 and 9 years old.

A selection for one of my book groups, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was something both I and my husband wanted to read. It does a clever job of handling how to include 80’s geekiana in a book without making it set in the past or conveniently obsessed with it in the present by setting it in the future. A rich, Asperger-y Bill-Gates-y guy dies in the 2040s, and leaves his fortune to whoever can solve the riddles he leaves behind in the virtual reality he created, The Oasis. Turns out we destroyed the planet and spent more and more time playing with gadgets till people barely went outside and interacted, and The Oasis became exactly that–what people retreated to. Wade, an orphaned teen, manages to solve the first riddle then becomes enmeshed with others–some honest, some evil, none in between–seeking the fortune by solving the riddles.

It’s like Westing Game with a dash of Ender’s Game, but just a dash, because while this is a fun read, especially for those of us who grew up on the same pop culture diet that’s celebrated in the book, it’s not much beyond that. It’s a boy book: young orphan boy goes on quest, makes friends, finds (chaste) love, fights evil empire, is helped by benevolent old man. Fun, but it doesn’t ask any complex questions and the characters never quite got three dimensions, which is perhaps unsurprising in a book about virtual reality.

It’s also the kind of book that prompts nagging questions after its over that leach away at my opinion of it. The expository opening is awkward; its purported audience would know the history of the world till then, though its actual audience doesn’t. In a critical scene in which the main character is threatened, a simple statement of fact would prevent something bad from happening. Then, when that something bad happens, it never feels like its given believable weight. A character is described as Rubenesque, but is 5′7″ and 168 pounds. (Was it in The Pick Up Artist that Robert Downey Jr. tells Molly Ringwald that she has the face of a Chagall and the body of a Rubens? Yet, I don’t think the reference in the book to Rubens is ironic.) A character at the end has long hair, when long hair makes no sense in this future, virtual society.

I really wanted to love this book, and I merely liked it. I tore through it, though, and had fun while I was reading it. In the end, though, it felt like watching one of those “I Love the 80’s” shows. Fun, funny, but with questionable long-term value.

Welcome to the penultimate week of the Summer of Shelf Discovery readalong of Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery and some of the books in it. Week 9 is “Old-Fashioned Girls: They Wear Bonnets, Don’t They?” and features these books:

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
All of a Kind Family by Sidney Taylor

Laura Lippmann, best-selling mystery writer (and wife of The Wire and Treme writer David Simon), is the guest writer in this chapter on THREE books, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes.

We get her thoughts, and Skurnick’s on what the continued draw of of old-school books like these? Skurnick jokes:

Of all the forms of fetish pornography running rampant in society today, the deepest and most invidious must be that found in all of the stories of young orphaned girls plunked down in splendorous circumstances who proceed to go about returning all the inhabitants thereof to a state of beruffled, wool-stockinged happiness….

One need only look to any Merchant-Ivory film, or, dog forbid, Harry Potter sequel, to see that English colonial porn is alive and well–as are its American offshoots. (342-3)

But I think the pull is even deeper than a craving for pretty, shiny things and happiness, and is captured in one of my favorite passages of all time, from Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem:

“But very deep down, below the realistic level, I think in Cinderella terms.”

“Cinderella terms?”

“You know, Cinderella, wicked step-relatives, fairy godmother, Prince Charming. Deep down I believe–no, it’s too deep down to be called belief. It’s just reflexive. Deep down I reflex that because I’m such a good, hard-working girl, someday, on the night of the ball, the great transformation will take place.”

Goldstein’s character acknowledges how problematic that reflex is, but then realizes that she, too, buys into it:

“It’s a lovely story.” I smiled across the desk at my friend, who was smiling back at me, the intelligence lighting up the planes and angles of her face.

“The loveliest,” she answered.

All of the chapters in Shelf Discovery focus on books that had one pull or another on female readers. I don’t think it’s a surprise that she left this chapter till almost last in respect of its power. (As well as in humorous contrast to the last chapter, about the naughty books. Heh.)

Some other books that came to mind: Jane Eyre. The Alcotts I read again and again were Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, which featured many of the same themes as An Old-Fashioned Girl. Anne of Green Gables and Understood Betsy would fit, here, too, I think. What else?

And what did you read for this week? Remember to comment, even if you didn’t read this week. There will be a drawing at the end for a prize pack from Skurnick itself. Also, I’m getting slammed by spam, so I can’t tell you how heartening it is to find real comments among the dreck!

Previous posts from the Summer of Shelf Discovery:

Chapter 6 “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land”
Chapter 5 “You Heard It Here First: Very Afterschool Specials.”
Chapter 4 “Read ‘Em and Weep: Tearing up the Pages”
Chapter 3 “Danger Girls: I Know What You Did Last Summer (Reading)”
Chapter 2 “She’s at That Age: Girls on the Verge”
Chapter 1 “Still Checked Out: YA Heroines We’ll Never Return”
How To Read Along

I lead a book group in the Twin Cities of Minnesota that reads mostly fiction with themes of myth, religion and spirituality. So Vestments, by John Reimringer, was kind of a no-brainer as a selection. It’s about a young Catholic priest in St. Paul, Minnesota struggling with his calling.

Saturday morning in Saint Paul, church bells ringing the hour. I was in the dining room of my mother’s house, celebrating Mass, when we heard my father arrives–the rattle of a rusted exhaust, the backfire of a badly tuned engine. He’d come to drop off his alimony.

James Dressler tells those who ask why he’s taking a break from the Church that he had “trouble with a woman,” and as the novel plays out, we find out what that trouble was. It’s more interesting and complicated that I would have guessed, and Reimringer’s novel overall is the same way. James’ ties to friends, the priesthood, and his blue-collar family are palpable and believably ambivalent, in the true meaning of that word: pulled in multiple directions. James prepares to celebrate his brother’s marriage, even while his parents’ has fallen apart and his beloved grandfather, Otto, is dying.

Vestments tackles the biggest topics–living, dying, loving, belief, family, vocation–but in ways that felt grounded and true as they played out in this particular family. I live not very far from where it’s set, but Reimringer’s depiction of blue-collar Saint Paul was like reading about a foreign country. I found Vestments rich, deep, and satisfying in ways I would not have expected. I look forward to talking about it in a group.

Largehearted Boy has Reimringer’s playlist to accompany the book here.

Reimringer and another author, in a head-tilting pairing, will be reading at Common Good Books (Garrison Keillor’s store) in Saint Paul on September 17, 2012.

Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen was a particular favorite of mine when I was young. I re-read it as part of the Summer of Shelf Discovery Readalong for Chapter 8, which is about romance. Re-reading Fifteen, it’s easy to see why I liked it. IT’S SO CHARMING! And yet, not in a saccharine way, at least to me.

(Is my tolerance of its sweetness a result of my nostalgia/early imprinting? One of the things I’ve noticed on this readalong is that some books, e.g., A Wrinkle in Time, aren’t as fiercely beloved by adults who read them for the first time. So I’d be curious if any of you out there read Fifteen for the first time, and what you thought, since my reaction is obviously colored by having a history with it.)

Our heroine, Jane Purdy is fifteen years old. You guessed that, right? The book was published in 1956, and is still in print, so I have to think it’s got something timeless going for it, since modern teens reportedly are obsessed with new things, not relics, and much of it is absolutely of its time:

“Oh, Pop,” said Jane impatiently. “I don’t want to marry him. I merely want to go to the movies with him.”

“Horsemeat!” Mrs. Purdy began to laugh. “He delivers horsemeat!”

Not only was it a time and place in which cajoling your parents into letting a boy take you to a movie was a conflict, but one before dog-food companies stopped advertising their true ingredients.

(Fans of Mad Men might remember in “The Gypsy and the Hobo” how a dog-food company’s brand suffers when the public learns the main ingredient in the early, mid-60’s.)

The attraction of this book for me, and I suspect for others, is that of an every-girl entering into her first romance. Jane and a New Boy meet cute while she’s babysitting a terror of a little girl, and Fifteen, all 125 pages of it, goes back and forth over the age-old question: Does he like me? Jane thinks of herself as plain and boring, especially compared to popular Marcy:

Her yellow cotton dress was too–well, too little girlish with its round collar and full skirt. Her skin wasn’t tan enough and even if it were, she didn’t have a white pique dress to show it off. And her curly brown hair, which had seemed pretty enough in the mirror at home, now seemed childish compared to Marcy’s sleek blond hair, bleached to golden streaks by the sun. (4)

We soon learn that New Boy’s name is Stan Crandall when he calls to ask her out. But Jane is insecure–about how she dresses, her experience, and because she’s never had Chinese food (!), so she frets. And that fretting, about whether he likes her, and how she should be to get him to like her, and whether his liking her is worth pretending to be someone she’s not, is pretty much the conflict and plot of the whole thing. (I don’t think there are many other books out there like this. Yes, there are lots of romances, but they usually have some other conflict, something other than “does he like me” driving the plot.)

As you might guess, Stan likes Jane. I think this is probably obvious to most readers, even if it’s not to Jane. This, alone of the books in Shelf Discovery’s Chapter 8, has a conventional happy ending, one which I found very satisfying, and very cheering. This would be a good book for a bad mood.

And for a recent(ish) equivalent, I found a lot of similarities to Bridget Jones’ Diary. Jane meets Stan in an embarrassing way. Stan likes Jane, even though Jane is embarrassed by her parents. Stan’s roguish friend Buzz flirts with Jane, causing tension between Jane and Stan. Jane does silly, ostentatious things (e.g., giant flower arrangement) and carries them off in amusing and charming ways. At the end, Stan likes her–not Marcy, not the pixie dream girl from his old school–just the way she is.

All that said, though, I wish I could lop off the last two sentences of the book, as I think the one before them finishes things perfectly, and the last two do actually make me squirm:

Smiling to herself, Jane turned and walked toward the house. She was Stan’s girl. That was all that really mattered.

But, like Jane, like all of us, nobody’s perfect, and we all get bogged down in buying into silly visions of romance at one point or another, right?

This summer I’m doing Summer of Shelf Discovery, a readalong of Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery and some of the books in it. Week 8 is “Him She Loves: Romanced, Rejected, Affianced, Dejected.” These books are discussed:

Forever by Judy Blume
Happy Endings Are All Alike by Sandra Scoppetone
Fifteen by Beverly Cleary
My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel
In Summer Light by Zibby Oneal
The Moon by Night by Madeleine L’Engle
To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie by Ellen Conford

Skurnick has 2 guest writers in this chapter, Tayari Jones on Forever and Margo Rabb on In Summer Light.

It’s an interesting mix of books. Happy Endings Are All Alike is not about a Him she loves. As Skurnick notes in the intro to the chapter, there’s only one book (the sweet but not saccharine Fifteen) that has a “happy” ending. In all the others, there is a breakup or an ambiguous ending. So, love hurts, which feels pretty true.

Interestingly, when I was a teen, I was also very into trashy/romance novels like those from Kathleen Woodiwiss, Judith McNaught, and Judith Krantz. While the list in Shelf Discovery is a good cross section of different relationships and endings, there was something very powerful drawing me to traditional narratives of boy meets girl, boy and girl fight, boy and girl make up, the end. So while as an adult I can appreciate the complicated books, as an actual teen, I preferred the happy endings ones. Perhaps as a balance to the Teen Problem books from Chapter 5?

Previous posts from the Summer of Shelf Discovery:

Chapter 6 “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land”
Chapter 5 “You Heard It Here First: Very Afterschool Specials.”
Chapter 4 “Read ‘Em and Weep: Tearing up the Pages”
Chapter 3 “Danger Girls: I Know What You Did Last Summer (Reading)”
Chapter 2 “She’s at That Age: Girls on the Verge”
Chapter 1 “Still Checked Out: YA Heroines We’ll Never Return”
How To Read Along

Writing friends to the rescue in my time of travel/computer trouble that I’m blaming on Mercury in retrograde.

At Mental Multivitamin, she tackles Sandra Scoppetone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike, which I couldn’t find at our library. She poses a question I’ve noticed a few times in the Summer of Shelf Discovery reading project: why are some of these excellent books out of print? Why don’t some of these books remain in the canon?

My Chapter 8 — “Him She Loves: Romanced, Rejected, Affianced, Dejected” — choice for Girl Detective’s “Summer of Shelf Discovery” reading project (related entry here) was Sandra Scoppettone’s Happy Endings Are All Alike.

Published in 1978, the novel frankly and sensitively examines the relationship between two young women, as well as the concern, fear, misunderstanding, and loathing to which they are subjected because of their affair. While the brutal physical assault on Jaret is certainly the embodiment of the societal rejection they face, it was the depiction of the sister’s verbal abuse and her amateur diagnoses that most discomfited me. Claire was a beast.

What I appreciated most about Scoppettone’s novel was her portrayal of the girls’ parents, whose reactions rang true: cautious acceptance, dumbfounded silence, curiosity. It worked for me.

It’s puzzling that a well written book about so contemporary a subject is out of print. This one deserves a place on school library shelves, as well as in the local library’s YA section.

OK, this post is really a placeholder for the Chapter 8 post for the Summer of Shelf Discovery because I can’t find my copy of Shelf Discovery. I think I may have accidentally put it in the library return slot. Oops.

Also, I thought Chapter 8 of Shelf Discovery was the one on Old-Fashioned Girls, but NO! It’s “Him She Loves” about romance. I’m away from my book stack, and brought one from chapter 9 but not any of the several I have from chapter 8.

Also, I misplaced the power cord on my computer, and was barely able to post this.

In other words, I’m kind of a mess, but trying to pull things together. The week 8 post will be later this week, as will a review of a chapter 8 book.

IN THE MEANTIME: if any of you would like, you can send me a book review of any of the chapter 8 books (which were apparently on romance), or a couple paragraphs on teen romances, or the draw of romance books (or lack thereof?) and I will post it here.

Also, please comment, those of you who WERE able to read Chapter 8 and/or a book from chapter 8:

Forever by Blume, Judy
Fifteen by Cleary, Beverly
To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie by Conford, Ellen
The Moon by Night by L’Engle, Madeleine
In Summer Light by Oneal, Zibby
Happy Endings are All Alike by Scoppetone, Sandra
My Darling, My Hamburger by Zindel, Paul

From “Your Sixth Sense” at Psychology Today, on why people are drawn to paranormal explanations. (via The Morning News)

As with most forms of paranormal belief, people who do not feel in control of their lives are more likely to believe in precognition, perhaps because to accept premonitions is to think that the future is already laid out for you, without your input.

Is it a coincidence that this article should run the week we’re talking about paranormal books for teen girls?

A quote from the new Batman movie:

“I’m a detective. I don’t believe in coincidences anymore.”

Over at NPR’s Monkey See blog, they’re having a poll for your top 10 YA books. I’m not nearly as well versed in the genre as I used to be, but still had a hard time narrowing it to 10. I felt they did still include many that I consider more kid than YA (Treasure Island) and had a LOT of more recent ones. (Whither art thou, Lois Duncan?) Nonetheless, an intriguing list of candidates:

Vote for your favorite YA books.

occult /oc·cult/ (ŏ-kult´) obscure or hidden from view.

-Oxford English Dictionary

In Chapter 7 of Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, Lizzie Skurnick explores why girls in the 70’s and 80’s were drawn to supernatural stories, like almost all of Lois Duncan’s works that haunted library shelves. She gives numerous good reasons for this, among them that it’s fun to imagine being able to read minds, commune with animals and terrorize bullies with just a narrowing of the eyes. But I’d like to expand on Skurnick’s view that the general upheaval, changes, and development of puberty are why girls flocked to these books, and why there were so many supernatural books for them to flock to. I contend that books about girls entering puberty and acquiring supernatural powers are written, and voraciously read, because they are actually mythological. Whether they do it overtly or not (e.g., Stephen King’s Carrie), these books point to the blood of menstruation and its power.

The connection between menstruation and childbearing adds its quota of supernatural dread….

-M. Esther Harding, “Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient & Modern.”

In The Moon & The Virgin. psychologist and poet Nor Hall expounds on the connection between the moon, women’s intuitive function (the receptive, feeling, creative side or anima, found in both genders), and menses at length Throughout many cultures, the moon was seen as the ruler of women, its phases mimicking or controlling women’s menstruation cycles. It was also seen as the giver and controller of Earth’s fertility. In many early societies, and perhaps some modern ones, the moon’s connection to women and Earth imbued menstruating women with troublesome, or even supernatural powers. To regulate this power, menstruating women were regulated to huts and not allowed to cook, step over children or crops, or perform other tasks lest their menstrual blood interfere with or taint things.

People with runny noses do not hide their tissues from colleagues and family members. They do not die of embarrassment when they sneeze in public. Young girls do not cringe if a boy spies them buying a box of Kleenex. Caught without a hanky on a cold day, people sometimes use their sleeves; they are sheepish, but not humiliated. They do not blush or stammer or hide the evidence. No one celebrates congestion…those who suffer publicly–ah choo!–are casually blessed. It is, in essence, no big deal.
The same is not true of periods.

-Karen Houppert, “The Curse: Confronting the Last Unmentionable Taboo: Menstruation.”

The books from this chapter:

Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck
A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
Stranger with My Face by Lois Duncan
Hangin’ Out with Cici by Francine Pascal
Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp
Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan

speak to us of a deep, ancestral part of us that believes menstrual blood, the language of the moon, and the cycles of life are potentially terrifying, and as such, necessarily occult–a hidden knowledge given only to the initiated. In these books, supernatural powers such as ESP and telekinesis are, like menstruation, both a curse and a blessing.

In the mundane world, our rational mind tells us that the biological machinations behind menstruation are as straightforward as the ones behind a sneeze. They’re not connected supernaturally to the moon like werewolves, witches and vampires. But dreamworld messages from ancestors say something quite different. These messages, however oblique, have been and continue to be disseminated through the fictions written down by our modern authors.

copyright Sarah Caflisch, 2012. All rights reserved.

My summer read-along is the Summer of Shelf Discovery, where we’re reading a chapter of Lizzie Skurnick’s book memoir, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading and some of the book selections she discusses in that chapter. This is week 7 (we’re more than two/thirds through!), and chapter 7 is “She Comes by It Supernaturally: Girls Who Are Gifted and Talented.”

The books Skurnick writes about in chapter 7 are:

Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck. (my review here)
A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan
The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
Stranger with My Face by Lois Duncan
Hangin’ Out with Cici by Francine Pascal
Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp
Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan

This type of book–girl approaches puberty and comes into “powers” of some sort–was huge with me as a girl. Some memories:

Ghosts I Have Been: sparked obsession with Titanic sinking, which I followed with Peck’s Amanda/Miranda.
A Gift of Magic: the book I flagrantly ripped off in one of my first attempts, ca. 4th grade, to write a novel
The Girl with Silver Eyes: asking my 7th grade science teacher, grumpy Mr. D, about this when we were learning about genetics. He was not amused.
Down a Dark Hall: entered a library picture contest and had it posted on the side of the kids card catalog. (My friend Karen won for her entry on Farmer Boy. She was and is a talented artist.)
Obsessions with Supergirl, Wonder Woman, Isis, Jean Grey/Phoenix, Bionic Woman, even Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.

Without knowing the mythologic implications of a girl coming into powers that frighten men when she hits adolescence, I devoured these books and books like them: And This is Laura, The Girl with Something Extra, Carrie, and the fantasy vein of them–the Anne McCaffrey Pern books. Long before the Spice Girls made it a buzz word, I think these books spoke to me of a Girl Power that I longed for.

What did you read this week, and what did it bring back for you?

Previous Posts on the read along:

Chapter 6 “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land”
Chapter 5 You Heard It Here First: Very Afterschool Specials.”
Chapter 4 “Read ‘Em and Weep: Tearing up the Pages”
Chapter 3 Danger Girls: I Know What You Did Last Summer (Reading)”
Chapter 2 “She’s at That Age: Girls on the Verge”
Chapter 1 “Still Checked Out: YA Heroines We’ll Never Return”
How To Read Along

Cover of The Ghost Belonged to Me that I remember reading. (Good)

Modern cover of The Ghost Belonged to Me (Hate it)

This is the cover I wish I’d had:

This summer many of you and I are re-reading books of my youth from the list in Lizzie Skurnick’s reading memoir Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Chapter 7 is “She Comes by It Supernaturally: Girls Who Are Gifted and Talented.” Skurnick includes Richard Peck’s Ghosts I Have Been, narrated by Blossom Culp, but I wanted to read the first book in the Blossom Culp group too, The Ghost Belonged to Me, which is narrated by Alexander Armsworth.

Starting in about 3rd grade, I remember becoming obsessed with ghosts and the supernatural, and began to devour books and television shows (In Search of!) about them. They scared me, but I loved them anyway. These two books were part of the canon for me back then, and a good beginning to my supernatural kick as opposed to some of the utter dreck that came later, e.g., The Amityville Horror.

Long before Peck won the Newbery Award for his children’s book A Year Down Yonder (which is very good), he was a prolific writer of teen fiction. Looking back, I think Peck, along with Lois Duncan, may have been the author whose books I read the most. Certainly the ghost stories of both these books were some of my favorites. In The Ghost Belonged to Me, Alexander has to contend with a ghost on his property.

It all happened when I was no longer a child nor yet old enough to be anything else. I was getting long in the leg but was still short on experience. This is always a difficult age to sort out or live through. All I know for sure is that ever after the ghost, I was changed somewhat and possibly wiser.

In Ghosts I Have Been, Blossom comes into her second sight when she hits puberty, and her adventures take her a very long way.

There are girls in this town who pass their time up on their porches doing fancywork on embroidery hoops. You can also see them going about in surreys or on the back seats of autos with their mothers, paying calls in white gloves. They’re all as alike as gingerbread figures in skirts. i was never one of them. My name is Blossom Culp, and I’ve always lived by my wits.

There’s good stuff in both these about poverty and social class. Blossom is a smart, wryly funny narrator, though one who lets her little sorrows show through the chinks in her armor every so often.

Some covers. The current one (meh)

The one I read as a girl from the library and which depicts Blossom as she’s described in the book:

Now I am not vain when it comes to looks. If I was, a trip to the mirror oulc cure me. My eyes are very nearly black, particularly if I am roused to anger or action. My hair needs more attention than I have time to give it. And my legs, being thin, do not show to good advantage, as being fourteen, I am still in short skirts.

And the one I owned, which, while attractive, shows a far-too-pretty Blossom and is by Rowena, who did a bunch of Anne McCaffrey covers, which were also supernatural books I loved as a girl:

Blossom’s story is largely about a ghost who drowned when the Titanic sank. Peck went on to write another story about Titanic passengers, this one a romance purportedly for adults, (there’s a recent re-issue for the anniversary of the Titanic!) though I know I read it at a tender age, even with this tawdry cover:

I read this book so many times the embarrassing cover fell off, at which point I threw it away. I wish I still had it. The guy on the cover, who is NOT in fact the main love interest in the book, has a similar back of the head to my husband.

An offshoot miniseries of Bill Willingam’s Fables comic-book series, Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love written by Chris Roberson (iZombie) and illustrated by Shawn McManus (Sandman: A Game of You) focuses on one of Fabletown’s favorite heroines.

Cindy, as she’s called by her friends, is an undercover spy enlisted by the sheriff of Fabletown to find out who’s been selling magical artifacts in the real (”mundy”) world. In her travels, she hooks up (in more ways than one) with Ala Al Din, “perhaps better known as Aladdin.” Or Lamp Boy, as Cindy calls him. The subplot, in which a shoe clerk in Cinderella’s shoe store messes up, isn’t funny, but the main story buzzes right along with laughs and a surprise villain at the end. A fun fast read for fans of the Fables series.

Just kidding. My mantra for this readalong is, if it’s fun and easy, read along, or comment. If it’s not, don’t.

Anyhoo, we’ll be discussing Chapter 7 this coming Monday 7/23/12, “She Comes by It Supernaturally: Girls Who Are Gifted and Talented”

This was one of a few chapters (along with chapter 5 and 10) that I’d read all the books in. I was a big Lois Duncan and Richard Peck fan. Next week we’ll be discussing these books. I’d love it if you read one and come to participate in our online discussion!

Jane-Emily by Clapp, Patricia
A Gift of Magic by Duncan, Lois
Stranger with my Face by Duncan, Lois
Down a Dark Hall by Duncan, Lois
Hangin’ Out with Cici by Pascal, Francine
Ghosts I Have Been by Peck, Richard
Girl with the Silver Eyes by Roberts, Willo Davis

This summer, I’m re-reading books of my girlhood, guided by the reading list in Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Revisiting some of these as an adult is great fun, but also fascinating to see what I notice now and didn’t notice as a girl.

Chapter 6 of Shelf Discovery is “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds, and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land.” In one of the books from this chapter, Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, teen girl Kit Tyler sails from Bermuda, where her grandfather and guardian just died. Unannounced, she arrives in Puritan New England, where her only other relatives are immediately embarrassed and inconvenienced by the impulsive and less-than-empathetic Kit, who has come to stay.

The contrast between Kit’s indulged childhood and the Puritan way of life is stark, but as an adult, I can see how both sides are more nuanced than I probably perceived when I was younger. Also, Kit is a selfish, spoiled, immature girl. I’m sure I related to her as a girl, but now can see her through the eyes of her Aunt Rachel. What’s enjoyable about this book is that Kit changes and grows, though doesn’t completely submit to the Puritan way of life.

Overall, I found this an immensely satisfying read with some pretty traditional romance novel tropes and a very traditional court scene. Kit meets the sailor Nat, but they quarrel. Then she meets a Puritan who courts her. He’s rich, and while she doesn’t love him, she likes the idea of what his money can get her, i.e. out of hard work and into pretty dresses. In the meantime she meets odd Hannah Tupper, the titular character and the one I think of every time I hear the Pearl Jam song “Crazy Mary.” Kit also befriends an abused girl, Prudence. In the end, everything, and I do mean pretty much everything, comes out right. Happy endings for all!

I will grudgingly admit that there might be some cliches in this book, but I still enjoyed seeing Kit’s (and a few other characters, too) uppance come, plus learning about Puritan New England.

My summer read-along is the Summer of Shelf Discovery, where we’re reading a chapter of Lizzie Skurnick’s book memoir, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading and some of the book selections she discusses in that chapter. This is week 6 (we’re more than halfway through!), and chapter 6 is “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds, and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land.”

The books she writes about are:

Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare
Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt
The Endless Steppe: A Girl in Exile by Esther Hautzig
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As in the other chapters of Skurnick’s book, she asks what the draw is to this subset of children’s/young adult books:

From whence comes our obsession with churning, straining, boring, sewing, scraping, stirring, carding, pulling, picking, boiling and scrubbing? (219)

I think the answer is similar to that from chapter 5, which was Very Special Topics. I wanted to know what it would be like to live off the land, to be in that situation in the book. Without, you know, actually having to live by myself on an island for 18 years, work really hard, be exiled to Siberia, etc.

For this chapter, I read Island of the Blue Dolphins, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Two very different books but both about girls who are abandoned and have to learn to cope, though Kit gets a lot more help than Karana did.

Two of the books from this chapter were particular favorites of mine when I was young: Witch of Blackbird Pond and Understood Betsy. Both were about girls who were transplanted, and I suspect my oft-moving young self related to this.

For modern equivalents, I remember the female half of Cold Mountain was like this, how the Penelope character had to learn to survive on her own.

Which of these books did you read/have you read? What are some modern-day equivalents of the fish-out-of-water story?

Previous Posts on the read along:

Chapter 5

Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
How To Read Along

Remember: post comments and links if you wrote about these books on your site. At the end of the summer, I’ll do a drawing, and Skurnick is donating a prize pack of some sort.

As I’m revisiting the books of my childhood reading along with the selections of Shelf Discovery, I’ve noticed many instances where I remember a few random details and forget many more.

As I was re-reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. This little sentence gave me pause:

My mother and father didn’t plan for me to be an only child, but that’s the way it worked out.

I’m sure I skipped right over when I read it as a girl. Now though, having known so many friends who have gone through the blood, sweat, and tears of infertility, it had an entirely different resonance. Judy Blume was known for her empathy to children, but this sentence hinted to me at her empathy for parents, too.

This summer, I decided to revisit the books of my youth, guided by the selections in Lizzie Skurnick’s Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. (Currently only $6 at Amazon!)

For Chapter 6, “Girls Gone Wild: Runaways, Left Behinds, and Ladies Living off the Fat of the Land,” which we’ll discuss here on Monday July 16, I read Scott O’Dell’s Newbery Award-winning Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Here’s what I remembered going in, besides “girl left behind” trope: a highly polished necklace with painstakingly drilled holes for stringing. Again and again on this re-reading odyssey, I’ve been surprised by what I remembered and just how much I’d forgotten. Why the necklace, and not the skirt made of cormorant feathers, or the taming of animals?

This is a spare narrative, and the main character, whose “secret” name is Karana, is not overtly romanticized or idealized. Instead, she overcomes difficulty and sorrow in practical ways, by working hard. Any of the many things she describes in the book–gathering abalone, making weapons, storing food for winter–would have most of us modern folks on our asses from the physical work within days, if not hours. And what must have been the monotony! I can only imagine the reaction of my children, who complain of boredom so much this summer that I’ve made it a word for the swear jar.

And yet, this glimpse into the past and a different life is exactly what makes the book so involving. I certainly had a starry moment or two of imagining living off the land, having an island to myself, though the thought of an island without books fills me with horror. But the work? The loneliness! The costs to Karana’s existence are presented matter-of-factly. There are interesting sub-themes about caring for animals, vegetarianism, and ecology. Ultimately, though, Karana’s ending and the reader’s ending of putting down the book bring are similar–they bring more relief than not in the return to other people and the comforts of civilization.