two hundred public words 10/30
Jul. 23rd, 2010 12:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66THIS is for THURSDAY, July 22nd, not Friday, July 23rd, no matter what the damn date says. I forgot to save it when I started it, which was on Thursday, more than half an hour ago. Sigh.
Oh, god. I am less in the mood to do this right now than ever, given the personal events of the day. But I said I would. I grit my teeth and churn on. Where am I on this list of young adult fiction authors? I should do it thematically, instead of author by author. I said I would do a bunch of authors who do class well -- it's not that common.
Many YAF authors aim at the amorphous American (or British, but usually this is an American failing) middle class, sometimes shading to upper middle class. Andrew Clements, who I like well as an author of school stories, is kind of like this. He can write well for suburban or rural American middle class up to children in private school settings, kids with a lot of money. But except for The Janitor's Boy, he doesn't do well at all with characters who are from the working class, or who are not white. His book The Jacket, which is about how a white kid's mother gives away his worn-out or outgrown jacket to her black cleaning lady, who gives it to her own grandson, and how the white kid sees it at school and thinks the boy stole it from him -- that book is EXCRUCIATING. Every note hit in it is wrong, wrong, painful, wrong.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, and hitting each note perfectly, are the books about a kid with ADHD, Joey Pigza, by Jack Gantos. I have written about the Joey Pigza series when I was considering YAF books that treated various disabilities, but I didn't really talk about how well they did class. Joey's parents are separated, and he lives with his father's mother, who is cantankerous and actually mean. Her rickety house is described perfectly, as are the marginal jobs his parents sometimes hold, and the small town generally underemployed America he lives in. In one of the books (What Would Joey Do?, deliberately titled that) Joey is taken out of public school because his IEP is not really being followed, or something (actually, there are no Individualized Educational Plans for kids with ADHD, even if they have it in a very severe form, as Joey does -- the first book is called Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, which he literally does. There are what are called 504 Plans, which are unfunded, i.e. it's a series of modifications which general ed. classroom teachers are supposed to try to implement. Anyway, Joey is taken out of school and added to a Christian neighbor's home schooled 'class'. It's extremely realistic. The series is marked by humor and realism, both, and sometimes the emotions are perilously near the bone.
Gantos is one of the best current authors who writes characters who aren't bounded by the safe middle class. Other authors... Norma Fox Mazer was one of the best. She only died last year, 2009, and I was sad to hear it... Many of her books are great -- she has a very strong, difficult entry in the time-travel to the prehistoric era novel, Saturday, the Twelfth of July -- and a very good escape from the Nazis one, Good Night, Maman... but her work which is my sentimental favorite is the one that shows class well -- it's a collection of her YAF short stories called Dear Bill, Remember Me?. There is one in there about a girl who lives with her uncle (I think, or father) in a trailer home, who makes chocolate pudding from scratch, and how she and a boy from her high school, but a considerably higher class level try to go out, and how it doesn't work, if I remember correctly. There are other fantastic stories in there, all realistic, all pretty nuanced.
Who else do I think has done class well? I guess I actually feel like Beverly Cleary wasn't bad with the Ramona books... the original ones (minus some of the Ozzie and Harriet-ness) and the later 70s ones in which her mother gets a job and her dad gets laid off... They're whitebread, yes, but at least they're not rich whitebread.
Trudy Krisher, who is a recent author, does class (also trailer parks, in fact) very well and in a regional style. She has two books, one of which is about the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and how a white teenager gets involved in it, against her family's wishes -- Spite Fences, and one of which is more contemporary. That's the trailer park one: Kinship -- ooh, I just saw that she has a newer book out about a teen in the McCarthy era, in North Carolina. THAT I need to get, and to review along with Ellen Klages, as they go together. Excellent.
Oh, god. I am less in the mood to do this right now than ever, given the personal events of the day. But I said I would. I grit my teeth and churn on. Where am I on this list of young adult fiction authors? I should do it thematically, instead of author by author. I said I would do a bunch of authors who do class well -- it's not that common.
Many YAF authors aim at the amorphous American (or British, but usually this is an American failing) middle class, sometimes shading to upper middle class. Andrew Clements, who I like well as an author of school stories, is kind of like this. He can write well for suburban or rural American middle class up to children in private school settings, kids with a lot of money. But except for The Janitor's Boy, he doesn't do well at all with characters who are from the working class, or who are not white. His book The Jacket, which is about how a white kid's mother gives away his worn-out or outgrown jacket to her black cleaning lady, who gives it to her own grandson, and how the white kid sees it at school and thinks the boy stole it from him -- that book is EXCRUCIATING. Every note hit in it is wrong, wrong, painful, wrong.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, and hitting each note perfectly, are the books about a kid with ADHD, Joey Pigza, by Jack Gantos. I have written about the Joey Pigza series when I was considering YAF books that treated various disabilities, but I didn't really talk about how well they did class. Joey's parents are separated, and he lives with his father's mother, who is cantankerous and actually mean. Her rickety house is described perfectly, as are the marginal jobs his parents sometimes hold, and the small town generally underemployed America he lives in. In one of the books (What Would Joey Do?, deliberately titled that) Joey is taken out of public school because his IEP is not really being followed, or something (actually, there are no Individualized Educational Plans for kids with ADHD, even if they have it in a very severe form, as Joey does -- the first book is called Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key, which he literally does. There are what are called 504 Plans, which are unfunded, i.e. it's a series of modifications which general ed. classroom teachers are supposed to try to implement. Anyway, Joey is taken out of school and added to a Christian neighbor's home schooled 'class'. It's extremely realistic. The series is marked by humor and realism, both, and sometimes the emotions are perilously near the bone.
Gantos is one of the best current authors who writes characters who aren't bounded by the safe middle class. Other authors... Norma Fox Mazer was one of the best. She only died last year, 2009, and I was sad to hear it... Many of her books are great -- she has a very strong, difficult entry in the time-travel to the prehistoric era novel, Saturday, the Twelfth of July -- and a very good escape from the Nazis one, Good Night, Maman... but her work which is my sentimental favorite is the one that shows class well -- it's a collection of her YAF short stories called Dear Bill, Remember Me?. There is one in there about a girl who lives with her uncle (I think, or father) in a trailer home, who makes chocolate pudding from scratch, and how she and a boy from her high school, but a considerably higher class level try to go out, and how it doesn't work, if I remember correctly. There are other fantastic stories in there, all realistic, all pretty nuanced.
Who else do I think has done class well? I guess I actually feel like Beverly Cleary wasn't bad with the Ramona books... the original ones (minus some of the Ozzie and Harriet-ness) and the later 70s ones in which her mother gets a job and her dad gets laid off... They're whitebread, yes, but at least they're not rich whitebread.
Trudy Krisher, who is a recent author, does class (also trailer parks, in fact) very well and in a regional style. She has two books, one of which is about the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and how a white teenager gets involved in it, against her family's wishes -- Spite Fences, and one of which is more contemporary. That's the trailer park one: Kinship -- ooh, I just saw that she has a newer book out about a teen in the McCarthy era, in North Carolina. THAT I need to get, and to review along with Ellen Klages, as they go together. Excellent.