O Brave New World...

Bah, I didn't manage yesterday. So I'll do two today. I keep promising 200 words only, and failing to keep that promise.

I'm done with historical YA fiction, I think. But now I think I need to look back at the earliest parts of this, well, series, I guess, to see which favored authors I covered and which I didn't. I haven't been doing them in order, exactly, and the original list itself (which has been augmented while I've been writing these, as names occurred to me) was pretty random.

Sydney Taylor

J. D. Fitzgerald

Ruth Sawyer

This is a group that is... sort of related to historical fiction and sort of related to 19th c. classics -- essentially because these authors wrote pretty much about the times they themselves lived through, which are now very clearly 'history'. I think all of them were children in the 1880s or 1890s... well, Taylor might be later. She may have written in the early fifties. But it was also about her own childhood in the 'teens. I'll do her first.

Sydney Taylor wrote a series of books -- the All of a Kind Family books -- telling stories about her own family growing up -- Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the 1910s. I loved these books, growing up. The family is a stair-step family of girls, until the final child, the long-awaited son, is born. There is Ella, the oldest, then Henny (Henrietta), the tomboy with the incongruous blond curls, then Sarah, the bookworm, and finally Charlotte and Gertie. Their father is a rag and bottle and trash collector -- basically a recycler. The stories are full of details of Jewish home life in the first generation after immigration: Sabbath on Friday night, gefilte fish made from fresh carp kept in the bathtub until just before it's made, Passover Seders and Sukkoths, Yom Kippur and Charlie, the baby's boy's bris.

There are also the kinds of details that make an era come alive: New York's subway, pickle barrels and cracker barrels where you get a scoop for a penny. Penny candy. Public libraries and their importance to children. Settlement Houses. Pinafores and organdy dresses. When Henny 'borrows' Ella's only fancy white dress to wear to a party, and it gets stained, the mother at the party saves the day by dyeing the dress with tea. When the mother wants to encourage the girls to do their chores well, she hides buttons -- and once in a while an actual penny, which was almost untold wealth, to them -- in the weird, out of the way places they might forget to dust. I loved it all. I grew up in a town that had a healthy Jewish population, and these books made me feel less ignorant. Maybe even slightly envious and impressed and interested. I bet my niece will love them. I think I have them, or most of them, in paperback... I have to find out, when -- this week -- I sort out my classroom library for getting rid of. Or for transporting the books I don't want to own personally to school. One of those two options. Only the ones I am most passionate about are going to remain in my closets, that's all I can say. And the Taylor books would definitely fit.

The next author, J. D. Fitzgerald writes so engagingly and in such a believable kid's voice that it is somehow hard to believe that he is describing his own (suitably exaggerated and embellished) childhood, with his conniving older brother Tom D. Fitzgerald, known as The Great Brain, because he is so good at scheming and moneymaking and, basically, swindling other children and sometimes even adults. His series is set in Utah in the 1890s, possibly just as it is shifting from territory to state, but while some remnants of Old West still remain. A major theme in the book (aside from all of Tom's shenanigans) is the tension and balance of social power between the majority Mormons and the very small minority of 'Gentiles', meaning non LDS Christians, I guess. Adenville, Utah is a small town, and the Fitzgerald boys (there's also a sort of boring older brother named Sweyn) live with their parents -- their father, who is the editor of the town newspaper, and their mother, a housewife, and 'Aunt Bertha', an unrelated spinster who lives with them -- as the only Catholics in the town. Tom is incredibly intelligent and sly and sneaky and charismatic and arrogant. And J.D., his little brother, looks up to him and occasionally is incredibly angry with him. The books are fantastic, every one of them, although I will talk about my two favorites. There are eight books in the series, though one was posthumously assembled from notes. Unsurprisingly, it is the weakest.

The Great Brain, More Adventures of the Great Brain, Me and My Little Brain, The Great Brain at the Academy, The Great Brain Reforms, The Great Brain Does it Again, and The Great Brain is Back.

For me, the best two are Me and My Little Brain and the one which follows it, The Great Brain at the Academy. In the first of these, J. D. is the hero, and he is indeed a hero. Also, it introduces an excellent character, the orphaned Frankie Pennyworth, described by J. D. at one point as "Frankenstein Dollarworth" because he is a monster and a dollar's worth of trouble. And the second one is both a boarding school story -- always something I liked as a kid -- and a story of fomenting rebellion against authority, in this case Catholic priests who teach at this Jesuit school. The plotline about Tom smuggling in candy to sell is ... well, great. Like his brain.

Finally, Ruth Sawyer was a children's author who grew up on the East Coast and wrote about New York in the 1890s, and also the coast of Maine, same era. She -- and her fictional protagonist for those two books, Lucinda Wyman -- was from a wealthy New York society family whose fortunes crashed around the Panic of 1893. They retrenched by selling everything in NYC and moving to their summer home in Maine. Lucinda's rebellion against the strictures and confining beliefs about girls, and especially upper class girls is the plot of Roller Skates, in which book the girl's parents go to Italy and leave her boarding with two of her teachers, who do not exercise anything like the traditional control over her. She has roller skates and uses them to roam the entire city, making friends with people she encounters from an Italian barrow boy to a journalist she calls Mr. Nightowl, to a poor violinist and his family in a tenement, to an abused Middle Eastern wife of some rich Bluebeard living in a hotel. There is sadness in the book, but it's also funny and lovely. The sequel, The Year of the Jubilo takes Lucinda and her returned mother and brothers to Maine. She's older and less able to inhabit a half-fantasy world in the second book, but it is still wonderful. Sawyer's Roller Skates won the 1937 Newbery Medal. And -- I love this bit of trivia -- speaking of Maine, her daughter, Peggy, who became a Children's Librarian (makes me think of our wonderful librarian-that-was, at my school, in my district, which has abolished librarians below the high school level... BRILLIANT) married Robert McCloskey of Make Way for Ducklings, One Morning in Maine, and Blueberries for Sal fame. Those are his East Coast books. His Midwestern books (equally wonderful) are Homer Price, Centerburg Tales, and Lentil. God, I love those books. What a great pedigree children of McCloskey's had... I can just see them, total little beatniks in the 1950s.

Almost forgot. Man, five more posts after this one.

James Lincoln Collier has been writing historical YAF since the 1960s, and the book he's probably best known for -- which he cowrote with his brother, Christopher Collier, as he did several others -- is My Brother Sam is Dead, written in 1975. I used to see it on the shelf at the Evanston Public Library, as I would run my finger along the bottom looking for titles I hadn't read that sounded interesting. It's about the American Revolution, and the quandary of Tory families. That's an interesting topic. But I chose to read Esther Forbes' 1944 Newbery Award winning Johnny Tremain, instead. Now that's an excellent book, with plenty of historical detail of silversmithing, Paul Revere, Boston, the lead up to the American Revolution, and a great struggle to overcome adversity. My Brother Sam is Dead is just not that good. Better than that is Collier's trilogy, also about the early American Republic, but taking on the issue of slavery.

Jump Ship to Freedom is a YAF novel about a young man, Daniel, whose father won his freedom by fighting for the Continental Army, but who died while out fishing, after the war, before he could buy his son's and wife's freedom. He had saved his pay, in Continental army scrip, and much of the plot of the book revolves around whether Daniel will be able to convert that worthless paper into actual money. Daniel escapes to pursue that dream, and ends up in New York City, where he interacts with members of the Constitutional Convention. Essentially, Christopher Collier was a historian who fed his writer brother facts to make accessible to preteens, so what I can say about this book is that it's a pretty good explanation of the three-fifths clause as the linch pin of passing the Constitution. Which doesn't augur particularly well for the brilliance of plot, characterization, or dialogue. Still, it's pretty good. I've used it as a teaching tool a few times, in fact, and own, somewhere, a class set, in paperback. The books which complete the trilogy are War Comes to Willy Freeman and Who is Carrie?.

Strangely, though, his best book is (okay, actually this is not that strange; it makes perfect sense, as I will explain in a minute): The Jazz Kid, which is about a white kid in Chicago in the 1920s who falls in love with black music -- with jazz. This subject is obviously close to Collier's heart, as according to Wikipedia he is, himself, a jazz musician. And the protagonist is white, as he is himself. I don't think he writes black characters particularly successfully, which isn't a huge shock. I can only think of one or two white authors who manage it at all. Maybe just one; I'll have to think about it. I mean, as a main character. Still, The Jazz Kid, of all of these, is well worth reading. It's far more culturally convincing and nuanced than all of his other books combined (though I have not read the one about the beatnik guitar teacher, called The Teddy Bear Hero.)

Bah, I'm a post behind again. What got me so busy yesterday? Well, for a teacher's summer and a teacher-who-is-unemployed's summer, I was kind of busy, what with aqua with amarama, diabetic retinopathy screening photos, celebratory organic ice cream with annathebean and kaleidescope for the latter's new job, and picking up john_b_cannon at BART after his flight home from Kansas -- yay, john_b_cannon is back in town, hurrah. He and I went out for late night food at a café in Emeryville called Rudy Can't Fail, which always makes me think of the Clash song, but john_b_cannon said he never had a Clash period, so he didn't know the song. Which just seems weird to me, but may only mark our age difference. I told him about how this boy in my 7th grade French class, Jon Jacobson, sidled up to me -- a very brave taking-of-risk on his part because I was absolutely student-non-grata in middle school... beneath the very idea of pecking order, though also learning not to ever, ever give a shit about that kind of thing, which was an excellent life lesson... hm, to balance that description, I was also well known as the school Commie, which was fine with me. The school Commie-dyke-pinko-Iranian-lover, to be specific. In 1978. ANYWAY, Jon Jacobson sidled up to me, that year, and literally kind of whispered out the side of his mouth... "[my name], do you know this group, the Clash? You should really get some of their albums..." and then sidled away again, quickly. I love that my politics forced him to make this dangerous social excursion. And, of course, I loved the Clash as soon as I went out and got London Calling and later, Sandinista!.

Right, none of that has anything to do with YAF. Though at that moment I was probably carrying, and had possibly even been reading, a young adult fiction book. I was the kind of kid who could walk into a light pole or a parking meter while reading.

Okay, then, where were we? Ah! Karen Cushman. She's great. She singlehandedly reintroduced the vast subgenre of English medieval historical novels to a new generation, and a generation of girls, at that. She has also branched out into other territory, and is equally good there.

So, background: I loved this subgenre when I was in elementary school. My fourth and fifth grade teacher, Ms. Weingartner (she who smoked in the classroom and drank endless Tabs) used to read aloud to us (which is probably why I think it is an incredibly important thing to do, too, even though I teach middle school). One of the books she read was Marguerite de Angeli's The Door in the Wall, which was about a boy in medieval London who is crippled by disease (polio?) and loses the use of his legs. It's about how he is taken care of by a friar, and learns to look for a different future than his expected one of being a knight. It's funny; I loved that book and the archaic language and the details of medieval England, but I have just read Amazon reviews, and even all the reviews that are strongly positive are like "kids will hate this, don't, for god's sake, assign it or you will strangle their love of reading stillborn!!!!1! zomg!" Weird. Well, as noted, I was a weirdo. I don't remember anyone else in my fourth grade class hating it, but then maybe I was completely insensible to their reactions. I am like that when reading or hearing a story or drawing. Just like my older niece, ha! Anyway, though, in general, most medieval fic was aimed at boys, was about knights and castles and adventures and serving the king or whatever. And I loved it. I just imagined my way in as a boy, I guess.

But then, thirty years later, Karen Cushman broke upon the scene with her first published book (not at all my favorite) Catherine, Called Birdy. It was such a ray of better gendered light that it pretty much was immediately added to the school canon, as was her second (much better, in my opinion) book, The Midwife's Apprentice. Catherine, Called Birdy was about a knight, and a manor if not a castle, and his family, and serfs, including dog boys (nod to T. H. White's The Once and Future King). But there the resemblances stopped.

The protagonist is the daughter of a minor lord, discontented with her lot, unusually literate, and in danger of being married off as an economic transaction. She keeps a diary, and this is the problem with the book -- it gets very tedious to follow that format, and most entries are too wrapped up in BEING entries, in comments about the day, the date, the process of writing a diary, and the wacky long story of which crazy-ass Saint's day this is, and what gruesome death that wacky Saint died. That's interesting and funny for a while, but then becomes kind of repetitive and tedious. My other problem with the book was that I kept wondering how incredibly anachronistic it was, to put these self-liberatory thoughts -- the metaphor is the birds that Catherine loves, but to love, keeps in cages... she's a caged bird, too, flapping her wings against the bars -- in a girl's head in the 1100s or whenever it is. During one of the earlier Crusades. But it is a very good book, anyway, especially as the first thing Cushman wrote.

Her second book was also an instant school classic -- I read it to students myself, at least twice, in West Oakland. And The Midwife's Apprentice is a very good book for that, both because the writing is clear and simple, for read alouds with students who are not at grade level in reading, and because the book's point is about the importance of coming to love and believe in yourself. Also, literacy is a fantastic idea. Kids really responded to both her circumstances -- homeless and living literally in shit -- and to her slow realization of self-worth. Their emotions were engaged and they were rooting for her.

Dungbeetle -- as the main character is known, because of how she tries to keep heat in her body at night -- is a homeless orphan trying to scratch a living begging and doing odd jobs, in medieval England. She goes from village to village, staying until she's driven away. At the opening of the book the girl, who seems to be about twelve or so, is rousted from her bed, which is burrowed into the dung-filled manure heap in a byre, by a grouchy woman who is the village midwife. This woman, Jane, known as Jane Sharp for her sharp nose and sharp tongue and generally sharp outlook -- thus the Middle Ages origins of English-language surnames is introduced in the book, with many other examples -- takes Dungbeetle in as a general dogsbody, allowing her to sleep in the rushes on the floor and eat scraps. The book is very good in its detail about what people would have been likely to eat, according to their stations -- the joy in eating a turnip or onion, for example, or an apple, is extreme, for Beetle. As the short book proceeds, there are small adventures which throw light on ordinary social practices, but the main thrust is whether the girl can gain skills and belief in herself, and how. I highly recommend this book -- it's really, really good.

Cushman has written other books set in medieval England, and they're very good too -- Matilda Bone is about a girl whose clerk father dies, and while she is cared for (and taught) by the church men she lives with, is eventually handed over for apprenticing to a bonesetter. This bonesetter, Red Peg, is an earthy and independent woman who utterly oversets the general old-fashioned chivalric notion (from YAF, I mean) of what women in medieval England were like. Since such notions were never located anywhere below the nobility, that's not surprising. But it's an interesting exploration of medieval notions of medicine and science, as well as ideas of class and social status -- beneath the level of nobility. In a way, it's almost an answer to A Door in the Wall, because Matilda wants desperately to become a learned Abbess or clerk like her father (which is impossible, the latter, as becoming a knight became impossible for the boy in de Angeli's story) but slowly has to let go of her snobbishness and accept where she is, eventually finding pleasure in it. I haven't read Alchemy and Meggy Swann yet, but I look forward to it. Maybe today!

Cushman's other three books are historical, but not medieval. The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is about a girl uprooted to a California gold mining 'town', in ways similar to both Patricia Beatty's works, and Kathryn Lasky's. It's good, though not among my favorites. Rodzina is her exploration of the Orphan Trains, which took the orphaned offscourings (or not orphaned; parents who didn't have the money to support kids could also drop them off to this organization) of Eastern city slums West to be either adopted or... well, the adoptions could seem more like bound labor, though I guess they were all legally adoptions. Rodzina is the awkward, plain, somewhat bellicose daughter of Eastern European immigrants -- Poles, I think, though I don't remember. And she is suspicious of this process throughout the journey. Again, a good book, but not my favorite.

My favorite? The Loud Silence of Francine Green -- which is a school story, of sorts, but also part of my absolute favorite tiny subgenre: stories of the countercultural 1950s. This book makes a great companion piece to two of my recent favorites, by local author Ellen Klages. I'll talk about hers later. Meanwhile, Francine Green is the daughter of two fairly liberal Catholic middle class folks in Southern California, who meets the daughter of a screenwriter because Sophie Bowman is transferred into her class in a parochial school. Sophie and her father are Bohemians, more or less, and her father is at least a fellow traveler (none of the heroes of these books are ever actually in the CP, sigh... they're always heroic fellow travelers persecuted for being CLOSE to people who were actually in the Party). Francine learns to be more open in her challenging of the stifling mold of 50s culture, and to question hegemony. Yeah, basically that's the plot. It's a great book.

Lord, this is exhausting, mentally, writing a post a day. I won't be surprised if my posts approach nearer and nearer to exactly two hundred words.

So. I haven't come up with any other awesome historical YAF writers, though I also haven't really tried to do that... let me think a minute... Hm. Berlie Doherty and Jill Paton Walsh and Harriette Gillem Robinet are all authors I don't know AS MUCH about, though they definitely have written in this realm. Katherine Paterson... I think I mentioned Katherine Paterson before for one of her books? Did I? Well, I'll do her twice then, even though her Xtianity makes me nervous. At least it's extremely progressive Xtianity: she's written at least twice on labor history. Oh, and James Lincoln Collier. And his brother. And Christopher Paul Curtis. Did I already write about HIM? There, that's nine more, so four posts.

So, first:

Kathryn Lasky

Mildred D. Taylor

Karen Cushman

Hm. That's three VERY heavy-hitters for one entry. To be fair, I should spread those three out, to balance my lesser interest in the others. Agh, this is getting confusing. Maybe I'll just do them one at a time if they need longer treatment.

I don't remember which the first Kathryn Lasky novel was that I read. She's written plenty. She is incredibly prolific, in fact, as I imagine one needs to be if one wants to earn a living writing. She's written series literature, too, which I am usually not at all into. But I am curious, now about this Guardians of Ga'Hoole thing... oh, not that curious actually. I prefer her standalone books, because they mostly deal with American history. She's written one of the better treatments of Escape from Slavery fiction -- this is a fairly big subgenre, and some entries in it are pretty bad. Ann Rinaldi's for example. Anyway, Lasky's True North is excellent. The protagonist is the daughter of realistic Massachusetts abolitionists. And all of Lasky's characters are quite nuanced and realistically rendered.

My favorite of her historical novels is undoubtedly Beyond the Divide, which is the best Oregon trail novel I've read. The heroine is Meribah, oh, I forget her last name, but she is Amish, and her father ends up getting shunned because he cannot suppress his curiosity about the outer world... he decides to leave and emigrate West, and Meribah goes with him. The book has a depth of detail about the trail, but it also tackles very serious issues involving gender and race -- it is strongly implied that there is a rape on the trail, and after a fair amount of tragedy, there is a very unexpected denouement with Indians. Honestly, it's a fantastic book, from all kinds of points of view.

Other favorites include her story of her own family's immigration from Poland, The Night Journey, her depiction of Salem during the witchcraft trials, which is almost as good as Speare's, Beyond the Burning Time, her treatment of later 19th c. Western life, about paleontology, The Bone Wars, and her quite excellent novel of silver mining and mining towns -- and newspapers -- one of the main characters is a realistic, and truly present, Mark Twain -- this one I have just reread, in fact: Alice Rose and Sam.

Continuing with historical YAF novels...

Elizabeth Marie Pope

Elizabeth Speare

Cynthia Harnett

I should possibly have done Elizabeth Marie Pope as one of my one hit wonders, but I like her two novels so much... not that that's an excuse; I ADORE Indi Rana's Roller Birds of Rampur, but haven't ... well, whatever. Anyway. Pope is the author of two semi-historical, semi-fantasy YA novels from the 1960s or so. I think. Let's check. Well, The Sherwood Forest was published in 1958, and The Perilous Gard in 1974, so maybe by averaging those dates I am right. Anyway, both novels are excellent. The first is a story of the American Revolution... with a romance interwoven in a modern and historical setting. In the modern setting (well, the 1950s, anyway) a young woman whose father is an archaeologist is more or less abandoned by her father to her uncle's estate in... oh, I don't remember. Let's say it's Connecticut. It could be. He is a scholar of the American Revolutionary period, as well as the scion or a DAR type family, who zealously preserves family traditions, including throwing a grand Revolutionary Era fête and ball every Fourth of July. But he is guilty about something. The niece is lonely and bored, though she meets a young Brit history researcher who wants to talk to her guilty uncle. While she is wandering around the house and the grounds, she keeps running into engaging people from the past -- er, ghosts. These are her ancestors, and three or four of them tell her bits and pieces of a story of the Revolution, involving a young British spy courting an American patriot. It's very well done.

Her 1974 book is even better. Apparently, Pope's own area of specialty was Elizabethan England, Shakespeare, and Milton. She taught at Mills College here in Oakland for her entire career, in fact. I bet she was good. Anyway, The Perilous Gard is described by Wikipedia as a fictional reworking of the ballad of Tam Lin... which it is, sort of. But it also works in another ballad -- one my sister and I grew up with a few different versions of: the story of either two or three competitive sisters, one of whom murders the other for the love of a suitor, who doesn't want her anyway. Gruesome stuff! The story is set against the period just before Elizabeth I's accession, and it involves the New Learning, and a reconsideration of fairy tales as being legends of Pre-Roman Celts and Druidic folk. It's incredibly good, and I re-read it probably a few times a year, seriously. I wish that Pope had written more than just these two books, sigh.

Elizabeth Speare wrote in American history settings. Her most famous book is certainly The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which was adopted by tons and tons of state literature curricula. It's a very good examination of how witch hunts work, published in 1958 (and thus subject to the same sort of political scrutiny as Miller's The Crucible -- no treatment of witch hunts in the 1950s can be assumed innocent, in that sense.) It adds interesting details of the contrast between life in the Caribbean (well, the rich planter's life...) and in Puritan New England, and details about sailing and trade. It's almost a fictional foreshadowing of Boyer and Nissenbaum's historical standard analysis, Salem Possessed, although this is a one-off witch hunt, not part of the classic 1692 case. She has also written in the white/Indian subgenre, with Calico Captive, and The Sign of the Beaver, which isn't so much captive literature as let's-all-just-get-along Indian-European narrative. And finally, she wrote an interesting consideration of New Testament stuff in 1961, The Bronze Bow, which is sneered at in Wikipedia as being written "by a Sunday School teacher". Ha. It's not my favorite of hers, for sure, though the historical detail is good. She's another 50s-60s historical YAF writer from Connecticut. What is it about that state? Maybe I should move there to become a YAF writer.

Finally, Cynthia Harnett was an English historical YAF author, whose extremely detailed novels often deal with the emergence of knowledge and science in the beginnings of the English Renaissance. She looks at it from several different perspectives just before and then during Tudor times -- the beginnings of printing with Will Caxton, and the expansion of Oxford College and its libraries, with her most well known book, The Writing on the Hearth, which again deals with people who believed in witchcraft, alchemy, herb lore, etc. I am trying to get more of her books, though I have The Writing on the Hearth and The Cargo of the Magdalena, which is about the struggle to import paper for printing, from the Low Countries. But there are others, and I salivate for them.

And now I want to know more about this Naomi Mitchison! The Wikipedia article about her is intriguing... and a few of her books are available on Amazon...

And, the women.

Madeleine L'Engle

Ursula K. LeGuin

Nancy Farmer

In my mind, Madeleine L'Engle goes well with C. S. Lewis. I can't get beyond her religion and her politics to appreciate her as a writer. I mean, I've read most of her stuff... not being able to forgive authors for their politics and their religious ... evangelism... doesn't stop me from reading them, and liking parts of it, evidently. But I reserve a deep well of doubt and reluctance, somehow.

L'Engle is most famous, I imagine, for A Wrinkle in Time, and I will admit that in one way, she was outstanding with this, in that the main character, Meg, a) is a girl who is a science geek, and therefore an outsider, and b) that the science is serious, and hard, and interesting. I was always very resistant to math, myself, but I bet that the notion of a tesseract deeply influenced a certain proportion of girls who might never have become theoretical physicists otherwise. Or philosophical mathematicians. I actually know of such a girl, an exact contemporary of mine, for whom this was certainly one influence on her way to being such a person -- the kind of theoretical mathematician where doing actuarial science is a summer job in college because it's so easy and remunerative. Her other influence was her early computer science father, so I'm sure she was bombarded from all sides, but still. I have no doubt that Meg was in there, somewhere.

For me, I couldn't read that book without (as with C. S. Lewis) seeing the parallels to the Cold War, which, when I was 11, 12, 13, 14 was still in full swing. In middle school social studies, 7th grade, or 8th grade, we had a Unit (everything was taught in Units... I wish I could do that) called "Socialism, Fascism, Totalitarianism" -- because my teacher thought that was all one continuum. She honestly did. At the time, I tended to ascribe that to her heritage as the granddaughter of a White Russian officer, in the Russian Civil War. Now, of course, I wonder whether that wasn't the Illinois state social studies curriculum during the last hurrah of the Cold War. In A Wrinkle in Time, the main character's father is a scientist working for the government (which in my household was more a scary, CIA-linked thought, than anything wonderful) and in his researches on space travel, he is caught up in a tesseract (no, I can't define that... it's... a wrinkle in time. And space, I guess) and then taken prisoner by essentially the same totalitarian disembodied-brain (Communist) villain as exists in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength. But a firm grasp on love and compassion and self-sacrifice (much as in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with Meg's little brother Charles Wallace being brainwashed, somewhat akin to Edmund in the Lewis story -- and Meg fulfilling the Lucy/Susan role of at least witnessing sacrifice) help to defeat the atheist and materialist forces of evil and identikit modern suburbs.

I think I probably sound somewhat mean-spirited. As I say, I've read all of the Kairos chronicles -- the Murry and then O'Keefe novels which deal with fantasy elements... and religion. And I've only read a few of the Chronos novels, which deal with the Austin family, and are more (mostly, not entirely) realistic. In fact, I may only have read A Ring of Endless Light, among those. So even if I struggle with them, and argue with them, I still engage more with the heavily religion-saturated series. The O'Keefe family books -- especially the Time Quartet -- comprise A Wrinkle in Time, The Wind in the Door, Many Waters, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet (though Many Waters was published well after the other three, it takes place BEFORE the finale of those first generation books). definitely caught me. Many Waters was particularly interesting to me because it came out of the immediate post-Cold War period, and was more openly Biblical -- it is set literally in Biblical times, as L'Engle conceives them, with miracles and angels, just before the Flood, with Noah. Kind of a fascinating window into that world. It is amazing to me that Christians protest her work... they're crazy.

Ursula K. LeGuin And now for someone completely different. I love Ursula K. LeGuin. She's an anarchist. Her father was the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, who wrote about the last Yahi Indian to grow up completely outside Anglo, white culture, Ishi (ca. 1860 - 1916). I've read LeGuin's mother's treatment of that experience, Ishi: Last of his Tribe, and given that Theodora Kroeber got that published in 1960, it is a sensitive and fascinating (and depressing as hell) piece of anthropology. Anyway, LeGuin is one of the most flexible, radical fantasists of all the ones I've written about in these LJ posts. She is amazing on gender, on anti-imperialist themes, on ecology, on political economy. And despite being fascinated by those themes, she also writes deeply engaging fantasy. In terms of YAF, undoubtedly her best known novels are the ones set in the pre-industrial (and magic) archipelago world of Earthsea: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore... and, after a long interval, a kind of feminist reinterpretation of Earthsea, with Tehanu and The Other Wind. There is a collection of short stories set in Earthsea, as well. I loved the first three books, around age 12 or whenever, but I did recognize that they were male quests. It was a great relief to read her much later addition, Tehanu. To be honest, I haven't yet read The Other Wind, though from the Wikipedia description, I want to. What has influenced me more by LeGuin, though, are her other sci-fi novels, starting with The Left Hand of Darkness, which is one of those books that produced a shift in my young mind, as Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time did.

The Left Hand of Darkness was groundbreaking in that the main characters in the cold planet Winter (Gethen) are -- well, the Wiki article describes them as androgynous, but I think actually intersexed, or hermaphroditic, is closer. They are both sexes, one at a time, depending on chemistry with a partner, once a month. That's very complicated. Hm. Most of the time, they have no sexual urges or desires at all (something already almost impossible to imagine, which creates great difficulties for the Ekumenical Mobile, Genly Ai, a Terran) but once a month they are in kemmer, which means they are sexually attracted and attractive, and migrate to one or the other end of the biologically male/female spectrum. Either end. So the theme is not really homosexuality, which can't even really exist, biologically, on this imagined world, but the embodiment of both genders and thus the questioning of rights that pertain to one. Along with all of this to think about, there is also a great deal of deep emotion in the book.

I could write for a long time about LeGuin -- her meditation on anarchist society affected me for a long, long time -- not necessarily positively. That's her novel The Dispossessed. And The Word for World is Forest shows an ACTUAL anti-imperialist revolt that Cameron clearly ripped off for Avatar. Finally, her Always Coming Home is one of those future dystopia/utopia books -- this one set in a future California that is much darker yet more successfully neo-Native American than, for example, Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing -- which I read, reject, think about, read again, get more used to, then love.

Nancy Farmer brings us back more explicitly to both YAF fantasy, but remains consciously political, at least to a certain extent. Farmer is white, but because (this is according to her own interviews on the subject) she spent 17 years in Africa, at first in the Peace Corps and then because she married a (white) guy she met at the University of Zimbabwe, she set most of her earliest fiction in Africa, whether it is science-fictional future Zimbabwe (The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm), or contemporary Africa (A Girl Named Disaster), or whimsical fantasy somewhat akin to the Disney movie Madagascar, (The Warm Place). These are all compelling, well-written, fascinating reads, which take their setting for granted, in a sense, not as a place which is Other and Exotic, but as the place that simply IS, for that story. I was so used to this, in fact, that it took me a long time to recognize that her more recent dystopia, The House of the Scorpion, was more inspired by the War on Drugs and Aztlan, than Africa -- and that her most recent triumph is a trilogy of 'troll' novels pulled straight from Norse mythology.

I have to admit that I haven't read The House of the Scorpion yet, though I own it... but have devoured the first two of the troll trilogy -- The Sea of Trolls, and The Land of the Silver Apples... and look forward to getting the third, The Islands of the Blessed. I do feel a little cognitive dissonance in reading stuff taken so clearly from Norse traditions, and reconciling that with stories whose folktale allusions have more to do with southern Africa. The African stories have greater emotional depth and general intensity to them; the Norse adventure/quest trilogy has more obvious tropes, though its humor and the character development of the main female character, an orphaned Viking shield-maiden, is quite modern and relatively feminist-ish. She's a good writer, and I look forward to more of her stuff. My own students seem to prefer the troll trilogy, as it fits better with the magic and fantasy current in Harry Potter and in the Percy Jackson series.

Well, that previous entry was somewhat cathartic. My mom liked it, anyway. Now, back to our interrupted scheduling of non-stop writing about young adult fiction authors. I think I'll do fantasy. I'm saving historical YAF (which may be my favorite subgenre) until entry fifteen, halfway through.

Fantasy (YAF) authors whose names I would bandy far and wide:

J. K. Rowling

Philip Pullman

Christopher Paolini

Gail Carson Levine

Anne McCaffrey

Robin McKinley

Diana Wynne Jones

Monica Furlong

The organizing principle in the list above, by the way, is from authors who have books which have been made into films through authors who have not, in more or less order of fame.

( Read the details, if you want )

THIS 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.

There. If I save this now and edit it, it will come out on July 18th, Sunday.

Ha ha! Success, in time-stamping this entry. I just got back from Inception... what a cast -- at least, I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy and that girl who played Juno --, ah, thank you IMDb, Ellen Page. And the guy who played the "chemist", Dileep Rao. And Ken Watanabe, for that matter. I TOTALLY did not recognize Tom Berenger... man, it's been a long time since I saw him in Platoon, in the theater. Apart from the cast though, the movie was much more McGuffin and concept than it was script or acting, sigh. Not an utter waste of time, but... what they call in Bollywood terms a 'timepass'. It was also (unexpectedly) of Bollywood duration, at almost three hours long.

Hm. It says 2 1/2 hours, but we didn't get out of the theater until almost 11:25, and the movie was billed as starting at 8:30.

Anyway. This entry was meant to be about the next YAF author on my list, who happens to be the British author K. M. Peyton. Peyton has been writing both historical and contemporary Brit YAF since the 1950s, with her more recent forays deeper into historical YAF. She has a book published as late as 2008, in fact, a trilogy set in Roman Britain, now, "for younger readers", and so far two books set in turn-of-the-19th-century Britain (and the new penal colony Australia), Small Gains* and Greater Gains.

Many of her earlier books are of the variety known as 'a girl and her horse' novels. Or her pony. I am not too into horses, so although I read those books -- like her Flambards series, which combines interest in horses with early (WWI) aviation -- I wasn't AS into them as the three she wrote about an Angry Young Man in the early 1970s. These three, Pennington's Seventeenth Summer**, The Beethoven Medal, and Pennington's Heir, are enjoyable both for their treatment of class -- the protagonist is the son of a bitter Irish woman and her labouring husband, I think in East Anglia-ish -- and of the period. I mean, the first book was published in 1970, but now they function almost as historical documents of the culture and politics of the period. At the outset of the trilogy, Pennington is in his final year at a comprehensive school where he is rebelling against the form masters by growing his hair long and playing "O Tannenbaum" at school assemblies, because it is the same tune as "The Worker's Flag" ("The workers' flag is deepest red/it oft has shrouded our martyred dead/So raise the workers' banner high/under it, we'll live or die/though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/we'll keep the red flag flying here"). The book also delves into the growing subculture of English folk songs -- the Child ballads and their rediscovery by folk artists of the sixties and seventies. Pennington, whose surname is used so consistently that it's hard for me to remember that his first name is Patrick, is a virtuoso piano prodigy, sprung from unlikely working class roots. But he has a volatile temper and deeply repressed angers that get him into constant trouble.

The whole trilogy has believable emotional depth, in Pennington's simmering frustration with feeling trapped by social expectations wherever he goes, and in the sort of hungering, hopeless romanticism that teenagers love (a more middle class girl, one of Peyton's pony heroines from at least one other novel, possibly two -- Ruth -- falls for Pennington and also does another sort of falling...). The books are hard to get hold of these days -- my mother and sister bought them used for me for last Christmas, but they're worth taking the trouble.

The last book of her more than sixty published works that I want to talk about is one from 1983, as Thatcher was consolidating her iron grip on Britain. It's called Who, Sir? Me, Sir? and is also a portrait of working class youth, in this case several misfits from a comprehensive school whose main teacher decides to enter them in a tetrathlon competition (some kind of 'athlon, anyway -- one with running, swimming, shooting, and horseriding) against kids from a local posh 'public school', as they insist on confusingly calling fee-demanding schools. This book does bring horses into it, but it's a great look at believable kids, from a weedy boy who is so self-doubting that he utters the titular sentence on such a regular basis that his nickname is Hoomey, to a Sikh boy whose grandfather was in the Cavalry, to a girl who hasn't quite got the hang of puberty yet, to a boy under constant threat of juvenile detention, or the borstal, whatever they call it.

Now I want to go find her recent books. I bet they're not available on any of my newfangled e-book reader forms -- not iBooks, not Amazon for Kindle, not Borders, not Kobe, or Barnes & Noble. Let's see. Nope, none of them are available in electronic-form, on any of the services I just listed. Sigh. But I can order them used from Amazon...

Anyway -- K. M. Peyton -- highly recommended!

*on Amazon, Small Gains is listed as selling NEW for ... $479.06. You can get it used from $4.55.

**in the US, I think the first one was also titled Pennington's Last Year. At school.

Five entries in a row, man.

Laurence Yep. He gets a whole entry to himself.

Laurence Yep is a Chinese-American young adult fiction author whose second novel, Dragonwings, was published in 1975. He'd written a sci-fi young adult novel two years earlier, and it's good, too -- and strange in a way that for me, marks reasonable sci fi.

Anyway, Dragonwings, which I read for the first time not too many years after it was published, is the story of a young Chinese immigrant to the land of the 'Golden Mountain', e.g. the US, around 1903 or so. Maybe a bit earlier. It is set in Chinatown in San Francisco, and then, after the 1906 earthquake, in the Oakland hills. The spark that set Yep off was a newspaper story from near the turn of the century about a Chinese pilot of one of the earliest airplanes... right after the Wright brothers, with one of those wood-and-canvas boxy prop planes.

It's a brilliant book. It's fantastic with its historical detail, about Chinatown at the time, about the 1906 earthquake, and about early aviation. It was of its time, the mid 1970s, in that it turned ethnic stereotypes on their heads. I remember reading it and loving that when the boy spoke with his father, they spoke in Chinese -- the Cantonese dialect -- and it was in italics, so you could see that there was a whole other life going on. It allowed the characters to comment on what white Americans were saying to them, and sort of turned the "other" thing around. There were also interesting moments where the boy, Moon Shadow, reacted with distrust and in some cases disgust to (white) American customs, such as drinking milk. There are details about opium addiction, and immigration law, and tongs (which Yep rescues from the clichéd Hollywood/Charlie Chan view of them, describing them as neighborhood mutual associations...)

The book is so good that it was adopted fairly early in plenty of middle school reading programs, as a novel that should be read in sixth or seventh grade. I have taught it probably two or three times -- it's not an easy read for sixth graders, or at least not for the sixth graders I taught in Oakland, years ago. There is a lot of metaphorical language and good, strong vocabulary.

After the success of Dragonwings, Yep wrote other things too -- but he kept coming back to some fictional version of this Chinese immigrant, and later, Chinese-American family. He went forward in time to the 1960s, and then backwards in time to the 1860s, with two stories of Moon Shadow's ancestors, or nearly. It's a little complicated. I think I've tried to draw a family tree and gotten kind of tangled up in it. But, again, the stories are fantastic examples of historical fiction for young adults, with incredible (and interestingly written, not didactic and boring or lectury) detail about China, and the province that Canton (Guangdong) is in, with its rebellious stirrings against the Manchus. Yep then went forward and wrote two novels about the earlier Chinese immigrant experience, with the Chinese laborers who were building the eastward-stretching railroad, and then, miners and anti-Chinese racism in mining towns. The most recent book in the Lee family series (I haven't read this one, yet... I was waiting for paperback, but it must be in paperback by now) sort of completes his cycle by linking the second Lee book -- Child of the Owl, which is set in the 1960s, with that protagonist's father, a Chinese-American teen who played basketball, in Dragon Road, in the 1940s.

He's written a lot of Chinese-set fantasies, too, and contemporary mysteries set around Chinatown. But it's his family chronicles "of the Golden Mountain" that I love the most. This is a list of the books, in chronological order, with the rough years covered:

The Serpent's Children roughly 1849
Mountain Light it SAYS 1885, which doesn't make much sense ... I think it should be the 1870s or so...
Dragon's Gate 1876, Transcontinental RR
The Traitor 1885, in the US -- mining camps
Dragonwings 1903 -- San Francisco and the Bay Area... and the 1906 Earthquake
Dragon Road 1939 -- Chinatown in SF
Child of the Owl 1965 -- Chinatown in SF
Sea Glass 1970 -- Monterey-ish, I think. There's abalone diving, that's all I remember.

There's another series, more contemporary, that I think is also really good:

Ribbons
The Cook's Family and
The Amah

I highly recommend everything he's written, to be honest. A fantasy of mine is to be wandering around Pacific Grove and just randomly meet Laurence Yep. He lives there.