September 30, 2007

Burmese Refugees in Fort Wayne

I used to hang out with a group of Burmese refugees while back in Fort Wayne. I had met Win Moe, who was just a great guy, while taking an Astronomy course at IPFW and he introduced me to his group of friends. All of them had fought a guerrilla campaign against the Burmese military regime and were a fascinating bunch to talk to. And to drink with--boy, could they drink! Before meeting these guys, I had studied Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the spokeswoman for Burmese democracy (and has been under house arrest for over a decade because of it), so I was somewhat familiar with the country's recent history. But Win Moe and his friends introduced me to their culture, as well as the Burmese community in Fort Wayne--a city that has the largest population of Burmese refugees. And since the recent pro-democracy protests in Burma have begun, the news is taking note of the community in Fort Wayne, an example of which is this report on NPR. Let's hope that this protest gets further than the last one . . . .

September 28, 2007

mmm . . . carrots

I have to admit, I've got a bit of a crush on Giada de Laurentiis. Her and Natalie Portman. In fact, I think the two are the same person. But anyway, the reason I'm mentioning this is because I was watching YouTube videos of Kids in the Hall and this video was posted alongside it . . . I couldn't stop laughing. Maybe it's the fact that I got 5 hours of sleep last night. Who knows . . .

September 24, 2007

Review: Saint Iggy

Going, K.L. (2006). Saint Iggy. New York: Harcourt. 260 pages.


Summary & Evaluation: Iggy's life is pretty frustrating: he's soon to be expelled from high school for something he didn't do; nobody at the high school really even likes Iggy--they all think he's addicted to drugs because he doesn't do well in school and is constantly in an agitated state; his mother (who was pregnant with Iggy while addicted to drugs, which might explain his agitated state) has left the family without saying when she'll be back; and his father cares more about his drug habit than he does anything else, especially his son. So, taking the advice of his principle, Iggy sets out to make something of himself, to do something that will make people change their minds about him. Iggy ends up achieving this by helping his (only) friend, Mo, to get out of a drug deal gone wrong--thus giving Mo a second chance to reconnect with his estranged family.

Saint Iggy was a heartbreaking novel to read. While a lot of the other YA novels that I've read so far deal with kids getting themselves into tough positions and then extracting themselves from it, Saint Iggy is all about a kid whose in a situation created almost entirely by other peoples' bad decisions. I first picked this up because I was looking for a readalike to the novel for my booktalk, A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich, mistakenly thinking it was another story about a kid hooked on drugs. I'm still going to use it for the booktalk, because it's almost the reverse story of Hero--where Benji was the drug-addled kid with everyone willing to help him, Iggy is the straight one with (almost) everyone around him addicted to drugs and in need of help. It was all that more fantastic for it, though, because it's not always the kid's fault that they're in a bad situation.

Booktalk Hook: The start of this story is just awesome--it really grips you with Iggy talking about how he got kicked out of school and was planning on making amends. Since the story's in first-person, the intro of the story is Iggy going on this rant about how unfairly he was treated and it's just so believable, the way it's written. Because of that, I'd have to read the first two pages, and I really don't think it would take much more than that to get some people interested in this book.

September 20, 2007

Review: Smack

Burgess, Melvin (1996). Smack. New York: Avon. 293 pages.


Summary & Evaluation: Tar and Gemma are two fourteen-year-olds runaways who have left their troubles behind (Tar with his physically and verbally abusive parents; Gemma with her atypically authoritarian parents) and found a comfortable alternative by squatting in houses with some benevolent anarchists. But while Tar is just beginning to find himself, Gemma is agitated and unhappy with the situation--until she meets the mystically appealing Lily, a fellow runaway who introduces the two to heroin. Soon, Tar and Gemma have become addicts as their lives spiral out of control as their dependency upon smack increases--until a series of pregnancies snaps heroin's hold on Gemma and she takes drastic action to get them all straight.

Melvin Burgess' novel Smack is far from your typical teenage tale of "reefer madness." Released the same year that the movie adaptation of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Smack tells a similar tale with some of the edge taken off--but not much. Smack does seem to glorify the life of a runaway somewhat at the beginning of the novel, when Tar and Gemma fall in with Richard, a college-aged anarchist who "liberates" empty houses for young squatters to live in. But Young Adults (and their parents) will be horrified as they watch Gemma, a loveable, somewhat erratic teenager make the move from being a grungy punk runaway to a junkie who supports her habit by working at the local massage parlor. Other subjects are explored as well, including family abuse, alcoholism, abortion, boy-girl relationships, and the bonds of friendship. Overall, a fantastic read for its stark portrayal of how the life of a junkie is frighteningly easy to fall in to.

Booktalk Hook: I don't really think that this novel would be much of a hard sell in that it got quite a bit of attention when it was released--but it has been over ten years since then, so perhaps it would need a little push. A reading from it would certainly suffice however, which is why I'd read pages 102-103, where Gemma first comes into contact with Lily at a party. It's a great intro into why Gemma was attracted to the life of a heroin addict and I'd want to keep away from the depictions of h0w her life goes downhill after that, which isn't that much of a surprise.

September 16, 2007

Review: Troy

Geras, Adele (2000). Troy. New York: Harcourt. 340 pages.


Summary & Evaluation: In this work of historical fiction, Adele Geras creates a story where the gods of Ancient Greece not only concern themselves with the famous events of the Illiad, but also with the unknown citizens of Troy. The story focuses on five adolescents--three girls and two boys--entwined in the intrigues of love, as Aphrodite and Eros guide their affections to create conflict and disarray. As Troy begins to fall to the Greeks, the youth begin to understand that love, like war, has very real consequences in that it can rend the bonds of friendship and family and injure in lasting ways.

While Adele Geras found fertile ground for an exciting tale--what better excuse to feature the horrors and heroes of battle alongside the high passion of youth lovemaking than by setting the tale in Homer's Illiad?--her execution of the story is close to one-dimensional. The heroines' voices are not unique and so they begin to blend together, meaning that their first experiences with love becomes a shared reality to the reader. It's a bit unfortunate that this happens, as Adele Geras examines three very real modes of love--those being unrequited, spurned and fulfilled--that are important when examined individually. Adele Geras also tends to rely on a literary technique that becomes a bit tiresome as the Greek gods appear to the characters to impart crucial knowledge (driving the plot) but the characters--save one of the youths--always tend to forget, as the experience becomes dreamlike, and ultimately forgotten, a few seconds after it happens. Aside from these faults, the story captures the fervor of the youth's love stories while Troy teeters on the brink of destruction.

Booktalk Hook: If I were going to booktalk Troy, I would pull Frank Miller's graphic novel 300 in with the talk. Since 300's movie adaptation did so well in the theaters recently, I think it would be successful to offer Troy as an alternative for young adults interested in the theme of Ancient Greece and its wars.

September 8, 2007

Review: Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars

Pinkwater, Daniel (1979). Alan Mendelsohn, the boy from Mars. New York: E.P. Dutton. 248 pages.



Summary & Evaluation: Not only is Leonard Neeble the new kid at Bat Masterson High School but he's also the least popular. After befriending Alan Mendelsohn, an equally unpopular kid who claims he's from Mars, the two begin to have strange adventures as they discover the strange Samuel Klugarsh and his patented Klugarsh Mind Control course. Quickly achieving the right level of omega brain waves, Leonard and Alan achieve "state twenty-six" and begin to realize the untapped potentials of their mind as they discover extra-dimensional worlds--culminating in the two saving the "lost" land of Waka Waka while creating a lasting friendship.

Never having read Daniel Pinkwater before, I'll admit that I picked this book up because Daniel Pinkwater seemed to be popular in YA lit (there were tons of his books on the shelf) and because the cover was so off-the-wall (with a painting of two children in robes, surrounded by motorcyclists and topped off with a bizarre, flat-faced dragon). The cover fits perfectly with Pinkwater's eclectic subjects, as the story quickly progresses from being a story about poor, unpopular Leonard Neeble to revealing a sci-fi laden world where Leonard and Alan can do all sorts of wonderful things with the power of their minds. The book is less of a morality tale than it is a pulpy sci-fi tale, but that keeps it from getting bogged down in the moral of the story and allows the reader to just have a good time.

Booktalk Hook: A lot of really great sci-fi stories rely heavily on a new set of created terminology, and this story's no different. Of course, that can make it impossible to read from the middle of a story and have anyone understand you, so I wouldn't be reading from this book. Rather, I'd probably go into a description of this book, dropping some terminology along the way to keep the interest up ("so these two students walk into a dingy old bookstore, not knowing that they're about to understand how to control people by studying the patented Klugarsh Mind Control course and attaining state twenty-six!").

future posts: young adult literature

So that nobody gets confused, I wanted to let you know that I'll be posting reviews of young adult (YA) books that I've read. Keeping a journal of reviews is part of the requirement for a YA lit course I'm taking this semester and I thought that, given my lack of recent posts to the blog, that this would be a good way to keep me posting. Perhaps this will get some of you interested in reading Ya lit (it's not just for kids!). If it does, enjoy, because I've been having a blast with it so far.

September 6, 2007

play that banjer, boy!

let's start off with a song to begin this post, one to get you "in the mood" to read about my summer . . . this song's called "Jackson Stomp" and it's by the Mississippi Mud Steppers (it's off of the great Yazoo label's "Before the Blues Began, Vol. 1"--buy it!)

So I really only have ten minutes to write this post since I'm going into work this afternoon so here's a quick rundown of what kept me from posting to this blog:

see the last post for the beginning of the summer. after all that happened, Sam traveled to the Adirondacks to visit her friend in the backwoods for a week.

Sam returned, and we begun almost a month's-worth of weekends camping in New Hampshire. First we stayed at our favorite spot in Pillsbury State Park, where we got to chase the Pillsbury boy around and eat his delicious bread leavings. The next week we traveled to Crawford Notch in the White Mountains and stayed for four days with a large group of friends. While there we hiked around a bit and got to see the challenge that would face us on Sam's b-day weekend (Aug. 18th)--the very imposing Mt. Washington. The next weekend Sam's sister, Alana, visited us to help Sam shop for a wedding dress. Just before they got to their second stop, some nitwit ran a red light and plowed into the car. Both Sam and her sister were safe but it was so sad to see these two very happy girls be so bummed out. So I made pudding for them! And then the next week we hiked Mt. Washington. I'll be posting a video to YouTube here shortly, when I get the chance. So after all that, Sam and I didn't get enough of hiking mountains, so this past weekend we made out way to Mt. Monadnock--the second most-climbed mountain, after Mt. Fuji--and got our hike on! And glory be, we found a great hot dog stand on the drive there. School began the day after that and so now we're back to the grind and I'm back to posting.

If you want a visual depictions to go along with the narrative, visit my flickr page where I've uploaded the photos. I'll be labeling them and adding commentary as well soon.