Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret

 By Judy Blume

Atheneum  1970

171 pages     YA

When I saw that the brilliant 1970s YA novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was being made into a movie, it brought back my first year as a librarian when the book was published. I absolutely loved the book but worried about putting it in the Middle School library because of some of the topics Blume covers in the book: “menstruation, burgeoning sexuality and fraught gender dynamics, religion, the barefoot-in-the-sprinkler joys and gossip-twisted tribulations of girlhood.” The New York Times article describing the movie suggests the book has “been both banned and beloved for it.” Indeed, I put the book in the library and never had a problem with people concerned about it. That was 1970—way before book banning because a “thing.”

But now I have two 12-year-old granddaughters and my love for the book caused me to re-read it and buy copies for my granddaughters. It was absolutely as good as I remembered it to be. What I had not remembered was the focus on religion. Margaret’s father is raised Jewish and her mother was raised Catholic. Margaret is interested in religion and trying to figure out the differences between the faiths her parents were raised with. After praying “Are you there, God?” many times, she decides she won’t have a religion, like her parents. I guess you could call her “spiritual but not religious.” This concept, too, has caused the book to be banned as well.

I am so looking forward to the movie when it is released on April 28. You can find the trailer here. There is also a just-released documentary about Judy Blume on Amazon Prime. It’s gonna be a Judy Blume week.

P.S. I just read a really good review of the movie on the LitHub website. Here it is. 

The Hate U Give

by Angie Thomas
 Balzer + Bray     2017
444 pages     YA

I was driving a young African American woman who is on the periphery of our family to a play we were going to see together. She is currently living with grandparents as she goes to community college. On our way, she told me that she had been at a party the night before at a Motel 6. Apparently there had been a lot of drugs, alcohol and sex. One of her "friends" had accused her of making out with the friend's boyfriend. A fight broke out. and at 4:00 a.m., she placed an emergency call to her grandpa who came to rescue her. She said, "I was scared that someone might have a gun or someone might call the police." I said to her, "Are these your friends?" She responded that no, just the girl she went to the party with--the one that caused the fight. I told her that I wasn't sure she needed friends like this. She agreed that she had been too scared to let that happen again. We'll see.

This story was fresh in my mind when I began reading The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, one of the most devastating and powerful books I have ever read. The book begins with Starr at a party, very similar to the one I just described. She is not sure how or why she got to the party. When shots ring out, she escapes the party with her childhood friend, Khalil. On the way home from the party, Khalil is stopped by the police, shot, and killed. It is horrible and breathtaking. Even more devastating, this is not the first killing that Star has witnessed.

Starr is 16, Black, a member of an intact family, living in an African American neighborhood of an unnamed city. Her parents are living the best lives they can--the mother a nurse and the father, the owner of a convenience store. One of the first teenaged things the children are taught is how to react if they are stopped by police. The parents' concern for their children extends to sending them to a mostly white private school in the suburbs. Starr's mother wants to move away from the ghetto neighborhood, but Starr's father feels that they can do more for the neighborhood if they stay and work hard at the store to upgrade the neighborhood. Here is a remarkable quote from Starr about living in one world and going to school in another. When she has to speak to the police following the shooting of Khalil, she muses, "My voice is changing already. It always happens around 'other' people, whether I'm at Williamson (her school) or not. I don't talk like me or sound like me. I choose every word carefully and make sure I pronounce them well. I can never, ever let anyone think I'm ghetto."

The plot following the shooting concerns Starr's response to being the eye-witness. It exposes the entire Black Lives Matter movement, police brutality, moral and ethical choices, and how young African American teenagers negotiate a world filled with fear, violence, and bad choices. One of the most remarkable aspects of the book is the fierceness with which Starr's parents and the extended family protect her and her siblings. One of her greatest advocates is her Uncle Carlos, who is a police detective.

My writing about this book and its plot cannot possibly serve it justice. I have to lead two discussions of the book over the next several weeks, and I am not sure how to proceed with the discussion. I asked an African American friend to help me with one of the discussions, and I had to laugh when Starr talks about being the "official representative of the black race." I guess that is what I am asking my friend to be.

The Hate U Give is the Kalamazoo community read for 2019, and Angie Thomas will be speaking in Kalamazoo on April 18. I noticed that in the lead up to the event, several high school classes are reading the book. I am sure that the discussion that night will be incredible and revealing. I would not have read the book if it had not been chosen for this event, but it is a book that will stay with me forever. One reviewer said that it has entered the lexicon of great young adult books. A movie of the same name came out in 2018, which I intend to see before the Reading Together events.

Here are some comments from the reviewer in The Guardian: "The Hate U Give is an outstanding debut novel and says more about the contemporary black experience in America than any book I have read for years, whether fiction or non-fiction. It’s a stark reminder that, instead of seeking enemies at its international airports, America should open its eyes and look within if it’s really serious about keeping all its citizens safe."

Every Exquisite Thing

by Matthew Quick

Little Brown     2016

265 pages     YA

Do you remember the book that was most influential to you when you were growing up? Did it change your life? I'm thinking of Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. While all of these were important to me, the book that sticks in my mind forever is Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. I read it the summer I graduated from high school, and it certainly influenced my decision to major in philosophy and theology. Franny's search for meaning echoed my search for meaning.

This is the setup for Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick—a book that changes everything. A favorite teacher gives Nanette O'Hare a worn and tattered copy of The Bubblegum Reaper by Nigel Booker. It is an out-of-print, cult classic, coming-of-age story, and Mr. Graves tells Nanette that it is the book that changed his life when he was a kid. Nanette soon finds that it is changing her life as well. She reads and rereads it, and when she discovers that the author lives nearby, she wangles an introduction.  Booker is a recluse, but he takes a liking to Nanette and soon introduces her to Alex, another teenager who loves The Bubblegum Reaper. Booker remains a solid presence in their lives and does what he can to guide Nanette and Alex through their obsession with The Bubblegum Reaper and the confusion of high school.

Like many teenagers, Nanette and Alex feel alienated from the world and other kids their age, and The Bubblegum Reaper parallels their angst and encourages their rebellion. Nanette has been a high school soccer star but she quits the team in dramatic fashion because she finds that it has no more meaning for her. Her middle class, suburban high school feels confining and conventional. Alex feels the same about his life and his school, but he is far more action oriented than Nanette, and his actions lead him down a path from which he cannot emerge. Alex is a poet and interspersed throughout the novel are his poems, many of which he gives to Nanette. At one point he says to her that they will be together in the future but "we just have to make it through this last bit of our childhood." 

Quick tackles teenage mental health in Every Exquisite Thing, something that is far more common for today's teenagers than generally recognized in YA literature. At one point, Nanette tells her parents everything that is going on in her life, and they encourage her to get therapy, which she does gladly, because she knows that her life is spinning out of control. The therapist really understands Nanette and helps her forge a new, authentic path for herself.  She introduces Nanette to Pat Benatar and her song Invincible. The song "encourages Nanette to take control of her life." Slowly a new, more mature Nanette emerges, ready to face the next chapter of her life.

I chuckled at that because my 19-year-old grandson has been in and out of our house this summer. He told me last week that he had decided to "take control of my life." I, of course, thought that was a good idea and expressed as much. We'll see how that goes as the summer progresses.

Although I can't quite remember my feelings of alienation as a teenager, I certainly can remember my children's anxieties, and now I hear the same from my grandchildren. There is much that is real in Every Exquisite Thing. Does it take itself too seriously? Perhaps from the perspective of a grandmother, but I believe that my 15-year-old granddaughters will love every word of it.

Here's what I learned from Every Exquisite Thing. I learned that I needed to discover the poet, Charles Bukowski. I discovered that I had a new novel called Shadowboxing with Bukowski by Darrell Kastin on my to-be-read list. I also found a collection of Bukowski's musings about cats on my Kindle which I never got to. Part of my summer's reading, I guess. I have also been listening to Pat Benatar, whose music escaped me in the past. Every Exquisite Thing helped me remember once again that as adulthood beckons, young adults come out of the morass of anxiety and "make it through this last bit" of childhood. 

 An interesting interview with Quick on the NPR show, Here and Now, discusses his experiences as a high school English teacher that informed his writing of Every Exquisite Thing.

The Girl in the Wall

By Daphne Benedis-Grab

Avon, MA, Merit Press, 2012

186 p.     YA

Other than Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, I have read very little YA fiction over the past few years. Wait! That’s not completely true. I read quite a bit of classic YA literature while I was working last year for Scholastic Books. Yet, I know that YA fiction is currently a very big part of publishing, so when the publicist asked me to read a few YA books, I agreed. I had few expectations.

The Girl in the Wall was typical and unusual all at the same time. Two teenage girls alternate in telling the story of a hostage crisis. Sera is the former BFF of Ariel, a poor little rich girl, who feels that she has been betrayed by Sera. In typical high school fashion, she has turned everyone in their elite private high school against Sera. When the entire class is invited to Ariel’s house for her birthday, Sera’s parents insist that she attend the party. Besides, the current pop idol, Hudson Winters, is going to be singing at the party, and who would want to be left out of an event like that.

So far, so typical. But we are no more than two chapters in the book when, excuse the expression, “all hell” breaks loose at Ariel’s house; there are dead bodies everywhere, and the party ends up in a hostage crisis. The plot moves into the thriller-mystery genre with only twinges of teenage angst. And as far as thrillers go, it is pretty good. Sera tells her part of the story as one of the hostages; Ariel tells the story from her viewpoint hiding from the gunmen in the secret passageways of the family mansion. It takes a while to figure out who the mastermind of the entire crisis is and why he has decided to stage this bloody coup. 

Daphne Benedis-Grab is a good story teller and this is a very satisfying, albeit very bloody story. Even though the protagonists are teenagers, there are way too many deaths, and the people getting shot aren’t vampires, they are real friends, fathers, and allies. It would make it a bit difficult for a young teenager girl to read. I think that teenage boys could read through the father and the BFF and the boyfriend getting killed, but they will not pick up the book because of the cover, which has a beautiful teenage girl on it.

But then again, perhaps I am being overly sensitive. I took my grandsons to see Jack Reacher last week with Tom Cruise. In the movie, a sniper killed several people in the first few minutes. The boys were unfazed while I kept thinking about Sandy Hook. Today, I read an essay by Charles Honey in our local newspaper about the mystery of evil, and I realized that the villain in The Girl in the Wall could be considered evil personified. What makes him all the more evil is that he was a trusted member of Ariel’s life (and I don’t think that I am giving any plot away by saying that.) The essayist says, “America is awash is violence, from the weapons we wield to the games we play and the movies we watch.”

When the kids at Ariel’s party finally take action, they use every weapon they can think of, from hairspray to shaving cream to luxury cars in an attempt to overcome their captors. That part of the story reads like a movie script. I could see it unfolding on the screen. There are little tweeks of humor in the assault, and glimpses of romance. It was fun to read. As Ariel says, “It turns out its fun to scavenge for weapons. I am looking at the stuff in my house in this whole new, totally insane way, wondering what kind of damage it could inflict.” I just kept thinking as the mutiny occurs…was there a way that the plot could unfold without their being so many deaths? At the same time, I counted a lot of deaths in The Hunger Games, so I know this is the trend, and I read The Hunger Games with interest without it bothering me. Not sure, at this point, what the difference is. Perhaps it is the national discussion that is evolving on violence, but also we understand The Hunger Games because it is part of the dystopian genre of YA fiction; The Girl in the Wall may be too close to real life.

It will be interesting to see how Benedis-Grab evolves as a writer. This is her second book. The first is Alive and Well in Prague, New York. I will look forward to her next book.

Daphne Benedis-Grab’s website: http://www.daphnebg.com/

A very funny review on the Forever Young Adult website: http://foreveryoungadult.com/2012/11/08/this-sweet-seventeen-partytotally-isnt-ending-up-on-mtv/