The Session, by Judith Kellman

Meh.

OK, I guess that's not really a review, though that is pretty much how I felt after finishing this mystery/thriller. The premise sounded promising.  P.J is a psychologist at Rikers Island women's prison.  During a "wedding" that she approved between two inmates, one of the "brides" was killed.  P.J. is blamed, and fired as a result.

She thinks that her biggest problem is making her rent, until she gets a call from one of her former patients at the prison, who is sure that she saw the victim's husband, a known batterer and sociopath, at the prison the day of the murder.  When P.J. can't get the police to act on the word of a schizophrenic inmate, she decides to investigate on her own.  Chaos ensues...blah blah blah.

Here's the deal.  P.J. as the narrator is self-deprecating and funny-or at least, Kellman tries really really hard to make her that way.  Too hard, in fact.  The one-liners and sarcastic rejoinders (both internal and between characters) felt forced to me.  And I didn't really buy the story.  As an Alex Delaware fan from way back, I'm willing to go with the "mental health professional turned investigator", but in this case I couldn't really figure out P.J.'s motivation for getting involved, nor did I really believe the path her investigation took.

There were some things that worked in this book's favor.  P.J.'s relationship with her extremely successful deaf sister was interesting, as was her complicated relationship with her ex-husband, who just happened to be (you've probably guessed already) a district attorney.  And there was a sub-plot involving P.J. and her brother Jack that was sort of interesting on its own...at least, it was until it became completely predictable.  But Kellman did a decent job of doling out information in such a way that I kept reading until the (unsatisfying) end.  So, in the final analysis-not awful, not great.

Meh.

I Hunt Killers, A Not So YA Young Adult Thriller

As a long time reader of mysteries and thrillers, it can be hard for new authors to hook me.  There are so many series that I love, from Jonathan Kellerman and his wife Faye, to Sue Grafton, Harlan Coben, and Dana Stabenow.  I've read various iterations of the female private eye, the mystery-solving psychiatrist, or the gruff police detective, and it is rare that an author brings anything truly new to the table.  So imagine my surprise when I discovered a something novel and, frankly, really fascinating in a young adult thriller.

I Hunt Killers is the first novel by Barry Lyga, and I discovered it while attending a reading conference with my best friend.  As good as the workshop sessions are, the best part of the conference for me is the exhibit hall.  It is full of books and people (mostly teachers) who love books, milling around, flipping through pages, sometimes getting so engrossed that you realize you've already missed that session you were planning to go to.  I discovered this title at a booth for a small, local bookseller that deals primarily with schools.  It was hard to miss...the cover art if pretty striking and frankly I was a little surprised to find it with the other young adult books.  But after reading the blurb my friend and I both decided that we had to have it.  The premise that Lyga puts out is pretty simple, but ripe with possibilities.  The main characters, Jazz, is the son of a notorious serial killer.  Raised in the "family business", Jazz is now 17.  His father has been in prison for four years, and on top of the normal travails of adolescence, Jazz is trying to figure out whether he has become the things his father always wanted him to be-a sociopath.  When murders start happening in his hometown, murders that are eerily similar to his father's, he gets drawn into the investigation, and realizes that his horrific upbringing makes him uniquely qualified to help the police.  Jazz doesn't need some fancy profiling course from Quanitco-he finds he can think like a serial killer.  While this is a pretty great skill for solving the murders, it raises a whole host of questions for Jazz about his own identity, and his own capacity for violence.

I find this whole idea of the child of a serial killer becoming a hunter of serial killers fascinating.  I think that one of the reasons I read books about fictional serial killers, or watch documentaries about real-life ones, is because I want to figure out what it is that creates these human monsters.  As a person who believes people are inherently good, I want to know what went wrong along the way that created personalities with no remorse, empathy, or basic human emotion.  Brain research is coming up with clues as to what makes a person become this very specific kind of killer, but so far there is nothing definitive.  At the very root of Jazz's story is the while nature/nurture debate.  How much of what we become is a result of our genetic make-up, and how much is the environment we grow-up in?  And what about free will?  Increasingly, the answer is that what makes us who we are is neither one nor the other, but both/and.  Our genetic make-up may predispose us towards a certain path, but the interaction between that and our environment is too complex and sophisticated to tease out easily.  Reading the book, I got the strong sense that Jazz is a moral person, but when he questions himself, as a reader I found myself doing the same thing.

This book was classified as young adult by the booksellers, and I have found it on young adult reading lists since.  The main characters is a teenager, which is often a pretty good indicator that the book was written for that age group.  But the book is pretty gory.  Violent acts are described in some detail, and there is a sinister air about the while story.  While it was an easy read, I was completely drawn into the story, and I didn't feel any of the disconnect that I sometimes feel when I read young adult books.  When an adult reads books meant for a younger audience, sometimes the connection that we feel with the story or the characters is more of a remembered connection than an authentically current one, if that makes sense.  Reading a book about first loves brings back my own, but I don't have the same emotional response to it I would have had 25 years ago.  But with this book I was completely engaged the whole time, not just in the plot, which is in the end is fairly formulaic (it is essentially a procedural, after all)., but with Jazz as a character and the emotional roller-coaster he is on.  Perhaps what makes this story universal is that the journey of self-discovery and the creation of identity doesn't end in adolescence, and I suspect (and hope) that it continues as long as we live.  We might not be wrestling with whether or not we are a sociopath, but I think that each of us wrestles daily with being the best person we can be, which created a connection between Jazz and myself as the reader.

This is the first book in a series, which I could tell would be the case about half-way through the book.  I've already bought the second, Game, and I'm looking forward to seeing where Jazz's journey takes him-and the reader-next.

In Defense of Reading Young Adult Literature

I've always considered myself an equal opportunity reader.  I love a good literary novel, and I'll occasionally read some non-fiction, but I also enjoy lots of genre fiction.  Not that genre fiction can't be literary...see, this is where I start to have problems with the "experts" of the literary world.  I want my reading selections to
have some substance-for mindless distraction I go to reality television (though usually of the "talented people doing things I can't do" variety a la Top Chef or Project Runway).  But who's to say that high fantasy or a procedural thriller can't have substance?

Nowhere is this bias more obvious when reading the more "serious" book bloggers I know than when it comes to young adult literature.  I've seen adults who read young adult literature described as everything from immature to unintelligent (a much nicer word that is occasionally used).  As a teacher and literacy coach, it is actually part of my job to keep up with what's new and good in children's and young adult literature (and if you'd like to see what I've been reading, you can visit my other blog, Second Childhood Reviews), but that is not the only reason that I enjoy-yes, actually enjoy as a reader-books written for middle grade and adolescent readers.  These types of stories can bring me back to my own childhood, or help me make sense of what the children and youth in my life may be going through, but they can also have something profound to say about the human experience and our relationships to each other that is just as eye-opening and thought-provoking as the best of "adult" literature.

Obviously, not all children's and young adult literature is created equal-just as not all adult literature is equally meritorious.  Good writing is good writing, and bad writing is bad...sometimes very bad.  While I got sucked into the Twilight phenomenon when my daughter read them in middle school, now that I have recovered from my vampire/werewolf fog I can recognize how badly those books are actually written.  But at the same time, the Harry Potter series or the Hunger Games trilogy point out how good writing and powerful storytelling can transcend the labels and sometimes arbitrary decisions we make about what book goes where in the literary pecking order.

If you'll forgive me for a moment, I'm going to take you into the world of leveling books.  If you are not a teacher or a parent, you may not even realize that books are leveled according to readability and subject matter for the purpose of matching readers in schools with appropriate books.  There are various leveling systems that publishers and teachers use to determine what "level" a book is, but the one that is getting the most press at the moment is lexile levels.  The new common core standards that most states in the US have adopted to drive instruction for elementary and high school students use lexile ranges to place books in a continuum for guiding instruction.  The reason I bring this up is because what a lexile really measures is readability-in other words, at what point in their development as readers should a child be able to actually read and have basic understanding of the words in a book.  There are some literary types who would have you believe that in order for a book to be substantive and achieve that coveted title "literary fiction", it needs to be difficult to read.  Being an "easy read" is somehow seen as a negative.

But let's look at the lexile level of some classics, books that are considered examples of the best of English language literature.  A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, is admittedly one of his shorter, more accessible titles.  But even so, it has a lexile level of 460L.  Roughly, that equates to a 3rd grade reading level.  Yes, you read that right, third grade.  Does that mean that the issues raised in the book are accessible to a third grade student?  Of course not.  But it does raise the question of whether "literary" and "difficult" necessarily go together.  Huckleberry Finn, at 850L, is roughly fifth grade level, The Iliad is fourth grade level, as is The Handmaid's Tale and The Grapes of Wrath.  Given that the readability of these classics is so low, it is obviously more than the relative ease or difficulty of reading them that makes them remarkable.  So why is it so hard to imagine that literature written specifically for young adults, literature that might be "easy" for a skilled, mature reader to read, might have value?

I don't really care whether other people judge my reading habits because I happen to read a lot of children's and young adult titles.  I choose the books I read mostly for my own selfish reasons, as I assume most avid readers of any kind do.  But I think that this strict admonishment against reading young adult literature as an adult is silly, and cuts us off from some really excellent works of fiction.  Maybe you like all of your books to be a mental workout to read-if Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow are your favorite books, then maybe young adult books or most genre fiction are not for you.  I myself read almost no romance or chick lit-those stories just aren't my cup of tea.  But I don't judge people who do, and that it is the point.  There are so many wonderful stories out there to discover-why make people feel as though they have to limit themselves based on the sometimes somewhat arbitrary classifications that the hoi polloi of literature and publishing have created?

Cross-Blog Pollination: Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

Regular readers of this blog will know that I also write a blog devoted entirely to children's and young adult literature.  As a literacy coach, it is part of my job to keep up with the best in literature for young people, so that I can guide students and teachers in the right direction when it comes to what to read.

Occasionally one of the young adult books I read seems like it would also be enjoyable for adults, and when that happens, we get cross-blog pollination!  I think that adult readers who deny the enjoyability and relative value of books written for children and youth are denying themselves some very pleasant reading experiences-experiences that just might help them understand the world of children and youth, and the way that children and youth see the world.

This particular cross-pollination comes in the form of a fantasy novel called Graceling, written by Kristin Cashore.  Graceling tells the story of Katsa, a young woman born with a remarkable gift.  She has a Grace-a special ability that is innate, and that sets her apart from other people.  And Katsa's Grace requires her to keep people even more at a distance than usual, for her Grace is killing.  Her uncle, the King of Middluns, uses her to bully and threaten people who oppose him, and to get his way with the other kingdoms.  Katsa hates being his slave, but she considers herself to dangerous and flawed to do anything else.  That is, until she meets Prince Po of Leinid, another Graceling who is gifted with fighting ability.  His grandfather has been kidnapped, and Katsa is part of a team that rescued him from his captors. But even after he is safe, the question remains-why would someone kidnap an old man, even if he is related to the King of Leinid.  Katsa and Po will travel across the seven kingdoms to discover what nefarious plot is afoot, and along the way Katsa learns new things about herself, her Grace, and her ability to choose her own path.

Despite the fact that the "seven kingdoms" of Katsa's world immediately make me think of A Song of Ice and Fire, Cashore has created a fantasy world that is all her own.  The story moves at a good pace, and the emotions of the characters and the events as they unfold feel authentic within the mythology of the fictional seven kingdoms.  And there are some big questions addressed by the story-the nature of violence and freedom, the use of torture, naked power wielded cruelly, exclusion, the responsibility to use our "power" ethically, and the right to self-determination.  But what makes this a book I couldn't put down was Katsa's strength, determination, and unwillingness to be used as anyone's pawn.  Katsa is a hero, not in spite of being female, or because of being female...she is entirely her own person, operating almost completely outside of any gender roles.  There is a love story hidden within the action, but it is not what drives  the story; rather, the love story enhances the emotional impact of the true task of the characters-to save a princess, and in doing so their entire society, from an evil king bent on world domination.  This is a book that I will give to my daughter, and to the young teens I work with as a youth advisor, because Katsa is an example of a heroine that we can look up to, even when we may not agree with her every decision.  Because despite the violence of Katsa's Grace, what we see in her is the struggle all of us engage in every day to act in as moral a way as possible, even when people and events seem to conspire against us.

The Least Depressing Book about Death I've Ever Read

Occasionally my book club forces me to go outside of my regular reading comfort zone and try something that I would never have picked up on my own.  I remember thinking that I wasn't really interested in reading The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe.  It's non-fiction, for a start, though it is memoir, which I find much more enjoyable than other forms of that genre.  But I will admit to having some prejudices.  I imagined a book full of discussions about "how to deal with death/dying" books, and I was prepared for something akin to The Five People You Meet in Heaven (not that there's anything wrong with that-just not my cup of tea).

What I got instead was a smart, thoughtful, thought-provoking look at the end of a remarkable life.  Will Schwalbe's mother, Mary, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007.  She was a strong, confident, socially conscious woman who had worked for years supporting refugees in war-torn parts of the world.  She had traveled to some of the most dangerous places in earth, and when she came back from a trip to Afghanistan feeling ill, at first no one thought too much of it.  But what her doctors thought was a form of hepatitis was soon revealed to be tumors in her pancreas, which had already spread to her liver.  And while treatment could extend her life, the illness was terminal.  This left Mary with the task of living while dying, and her family the task of figuring out how to relate to their spouse and mother knowing her time was limited.

Will would often accompany his mother to her chemo treatments, and it was in the waiting and treatment rooms at Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York that they started what was to become a two-person, mother-son book club.  Both Mary and Will had always been avid readers, and the books they chose to read were either old favorites or new stories they discovered with and for each other.  The chapter titles are the titles of the books they read together, and each book frames a different part of their experience.  Some of the books had new meaning reading them while in the process of dying.  Some of them reminded Mary or Will about the things that were important in life, and all of them were high-quality literature.  My fears of a book full of trite, sentimental soundbites and self-help advice were unfounded.  In fact, as I read I found myself drawn more into the books they were reading than the story of their relationship.  I got a new reading list out of it, in fact.

That's not to say that the story was moving and emotional on a personal level.  Will and his mother had the enormous privilege of having the means and opportunity to spend this time together.  At several points in the book, Will or Mary points out how lucky they are to be in a position for her to get the best possible care, or for Will to quit his job and take on a new venture without worrying about losing his house or feeding himself. But ultimately, all of the money and education and connections in the world could not stop the inevitable progression of her disease.  Rather than railing against his mother's fate, Will is grateful for the time they were able to have, memories that will now forever be associated with the many wonderful books they read and loved together.

Afterwards, Rosamund Lupton

Last week, I was at a conference for reading teachers in Springfield, IL.  One of the vendors in the exhibit hall, Anderson's Books (a great independent bookstore in Naperville, IL, in case you happen to be local), had some reader-centric t-shirts in their booth.  I came home with these two...

But there was another one that I plan to get, that expresses a sentiment I have always felt.  Namely, that authors are my rock stars.  I never ceased to be amazed at the ability of good writers to create whole new worlds, or to shine a light so starkly on the world we already live in.  After thousands of years of the written word, the fact that there can still be anything literarily new or original is mind-blowing.  

In this spirit, I eagerly picked up Afterwards, by Rosamund Lupton, in preparation for my book club last month.  We had already read her book Sister, which engendered a great discussion about whether we agreed with the use of the literary device she employed.  In that book, the story is told in what we think is a letter to the main character's sister, only to discover that the while conversation is taking place in the main character's mind.  Lupton tried out a different narrative structure this time.  For Afterwards, which is essentially a mystery just like Sister, she placed the narrator and her daughter in a limbo state, stuck between life and death, able to observe what was happening to them and their loved ones without really being able to interact with them.

Afterwards begins with the narrator, a 40ish year old mother named Grace, realizing that her daughter is trapped in a burning school.  She rushes in to save her...and the next thing she is aware of is being in the hospital, looking down on her own comatose body lying in a hospital bed.  Her 17 year old daughter Jenny, who was horribly burned in the fire, is also in a coma, and together they start wandering the hospital, trying to find out what has happened to them.  It soon becomes apparent that each woman is in critical condition.  It also become apparent that their injuries are not the result of a tragic accident, but arson.  Grace and Jenny spend the rest of the novel alternately dealing with their own rather bumpy relationship, or tagging along with other characters who are actually living in the world as they try to solve the mystery.

And that is where Lupton lost me a bit.  Because was seemed like an interesting plot device at the beginning soon got rather tired.  Because the fact is that as much as Grace may follow her husband as he tries to keep them safe, or her sister-in-law the police officer as she investigates the fire, she can't actually DO anything.  Except have conversations with people that they can't hear, or discover clues that she can't tell anyone.  And as the book progresses, it becomes more and more sentimental, to the point that I was actually slightly annoyed by the resolution not of the mystery, which had be guessing until almost the end, but of the novel's other major plotline, that of whether Grace or Jenny can be saved.  I won't say that I didn't enjoy reading this book, because it kept me engaged throughout.  But I found myself reading faster and faster as the end approached, and not necessarily because I wanted to find out whodunnit-I was ready for it to be over.

Take One Candle, Light a Room

Many years ago now, I read a book call Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, by Susan Straight.  It's the story of a black woman living in poverty, doing whatever she can to raise her son in  violent neighborhood.  It is richly detailed, with an emotional honesty and depth of experience that you really are transported into the character's life.  When I finished the book, I was almost stunned to find that Susan Straight was a middle-class, middle aged white woman.  Not that it isn't possible for authors to write convincingly from a cross-racial viewpoint, but the book was so raw and the emotions felt so authentic I could only imagine someone who had been in similar circumstances to be able to articulate the story so well. When I delved a little more deeply, however, I realized that living in the racially and socioeconimcally diverse city of Riverside, California, and working in the struggling public schools there, gave her an insight that truly comes to life when paired with her remarkable facility with language.

So I was very pleased to get Take One Candle, Light a Room as a gift earlier this year.  It had been years since I had read one of Straight's books, and I was looking forward to what she could bring to her new subject-mainly, the inner struggle that comes from being of mixed-race, and how the legacy of slavery can affect the descendants of slaves even today.  The narrator of the book is Fantine Antoine, daughter/sister/niece/aunt of a mixed-race family originally from the Louisiana coast, now living in Rio Seco, California.  Fantine, who goes by FX in her professional life, is a travel writer-a profession which forces her to disappoint her mother on a daily basis, since it means that she has deserted the family compound for L.A. Fantine, just back from a trip to Switzerland, returns home to find her nephew on her doorstep-with two of his gang-banger friends.  Victor is a gentle, intelligent, creative type, scarred emotionally by his mother's murder five years before.  Tired from her travels, Fantine sends him away, promising to spend time with him the following weekend.  But when he and his friends are involved in a shooting that leads to the death of a rival gang member, Fantine embarks on a very different kind of trip, cross country and back through time and history to find him and bring him home.

Straight does a beautiful job of getting into the head of Fantine and her family members.  The family's history is firmly rooted in racial violence-her grandparents left Louisiana because of a white man who was preying on the young black girls in the parish.  Since coming to California, the family has stayed mostly in the small town where they settled, running an orchard and keeping to themselves.  Fantine was raised on the stories of the women who came before her, the slaves and former slaves who struggled to survive so their children and grandchildren could have a better life than the one they had.  Straight explores issues of revenge, belonging, guilt, redemption, and the invisible threads that keep us connected to our past, even as we try to run away from it.  Fantine's journey takes her back to Lousisana, and Straight uses Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop for the final climactic scenes of the book.  It's a story of second chances, for another shot at doing the right thing, and about the resilience of a people who refuse to give in to the titanic forces trying to tear them apart.