*** Contains Spoilers ***
I finished reading After, by Amy Efaw today. It’s a story about a 15 year old honor student and star soccer player who gets pregnant and then leaves her newborn baby in the trash. I thought the story (horrible though it was) was beautifully written and thought provoking. It starts with a half-dead Devon being discovered by police and taken to juvenile hall (via the hospital – she’s hemorrhaging from her undelivered placenta). At first, she’s in such a state of denial that she has blocked out what happened. Over a period of eight days, her memories come trickling back, and the floodgates open during her declination hearing (the DA wants to prosecute her as an adult, her lawyer argues to keep her in the juvenile system). I thought using the scenes where her lawyer interviewed her to get the back story out were very effective. I wondered if the “Quotable Quotes” spouting character, Karma, was meant to be a metaphor for, well, karma. She was the one character that just didn’t work for me. Karma struck me as being a conglomerate, rather than one character with several facets. When I read the last page, I said, “What?!” out loud. Why on earth would Devon want to plead guilty at the upcoming trial? It just seemed to me that it ran counter to her whole realization process during the hearing. Maybe what the author intended was that after all those months of denial, she was going to take responsibility, and her soccer coach did say that she never cut herself any slack. However, when Devon was listening to all of the defense witnesses testifying and she realized that people still cared about her, even after she’d done something so terrible, she started to feel hope. She started to appreciate the even the paltry sacrifices her mother, who had also been an unwed teen mother, had made for her, namely not putting her in the garbage. Arguably, her mother’s lifestyle choices were a strong contributing factor to Devon’s behavior. Devon remembered that after her baby was born, she had hoped IT was dead. She could easily have made that happen, but she didn’t. Yes, Devon was guilty of a lot of things, but attempted murder wasn’t one of them. In the end, I really wanted Devon to get the help she so desperately needed and be redeemed rather than crushed under the wheels of the system.
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Summers End
Well, it’s down to the last few hours of summer vacation. I have a little twinge of is-it-really-over-already, but I’m mostly happy about it. We met my daughter’s new teacher on Wednesday and toured the classroom. She’s finished all of the Rainbow Fairies books and is now starting on Disney’s Pixie Hollow books.
Last Saturday, I read the tween ghost story, Wait Till Helen Comes, by Mary Downing Hahn. It is the story of a blended family who moves from the city to a former church, complete with cemetery, far out in the country. The isolation stresses relationship fault lines and the family structure begins to crack as over-indulged Heather, younger stepsister to main character Molly and her brother Michael, makes friends with ghostly Helen. It is brilliantly suspenseful and creepy, with a touching resolution. My only issue was that Heather’s “deep dark secret” was not really a secret, and both adults in the story should have at least guessed at the root of Heather’s bad behavior, if not been actively aware of it. That said, what is obvious to me as an adult may not be so to the target audience for this book. I definitely recommend it.
On the other hand, I have been struggling all week to read Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart. I’m somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way through it, but I find it very slow going. It’s got a great premise – a man (Mortimer “Mo” Folchart) has such a talent for reading aloud that people, animals or things actually materialize off the page into the real world. The down side is that for each something that comes out of the book, something else has to go in, and his wife becomes trapped in the book-within-the-book, “Inkheart.” The uber-villain (Capricorn) from this story that Mo read nine years ago has finally caught up with him and his now-twelve year old daughter (Meggie). Even the author of the fictional book gets involved in the story. Have you ever dated someone who seemed to be a perfect match? They seemed really nice, were good looking, had a good job – there was every reason to adore them – but there was just no chemistry. This book is like that for me. I really want to like it, even love it, but it just isn’t clicking with me.
August!
Three more action-packed weeks left of summer vacation. I had my daughter try on her remaining uniform bottoms from last year (her skirts were too short by March). Two pairs of pants are almost high-watering, but not quite (they will be, by the time it’s cool enough to wear them); the rest are too small. Tops & dresses are okay. On the up side, she’s read nearly the whole second volume of Rainbow Fairies (4 books). Daisy Meadows is the nom de plume of four writers who turn out the copious the Rainbow Magic books. There are rainbow fairies, jewel fairies, weather fairies and a happy ever after fairy, among others. Maybe I should investigate how to get on board with a book packager. Although, I’d probably be assigned to write the Sludge-in-the-U-Bend-of-the-Kitchen-Sink fairy.
I have found a website (thanks to Christina Katz) called Trend Hunter. She recommends it as research for article writing. Make sure you have lots of free time. Lots. If you can’t get inspired/amazed/horrified there, I don’t know what to tell you. Did you know there’s such a thing as brain piercing? Or a strap-on beer belly that you can fill with a beverage of your choice to smuggle into events? That the British government is putting grey squirrels on the pill? Whatever you have in mind, that site is one stop shopping.