Nom de Plume

I’ve been doing Big Brothers Big Sisters for several months now. My “little” is in 7th grade; she’s told me some things about her school that make my hair stand on end. I won’t even get into the social aspects (like having a gun pointed in her face by a member of the SWAT team). But let me just say that the more I learn about the Seattle public school system, the more appalled I become.

Take this, the 6th grade level expectations for language arts (conveniently posted for ridicule at the Seattle Public Schools web site):

In sixth grade, students are aware of the author’s craft. They are able to adjust their purpose, pace and strategies according to difficulty and/or type of text. Students continue to reflect on their skills and adjust their comprehension and vocabulary strategies to become better readers. Students discuss, reflect, and respond, using evidence from text, to a wide variety of literary genres and informational text. Students read for pleasure and choose books based on personal preference, topic, genre, theme, or author.

Good lord. And the person who wrote this convoluted, awkward piece of crap is tasked with helping kids become better readers and writers?

Hoo boy. The blather continues for 7th grade:

In seventh grade, students are aware of their responsibilty as readers. They continue to reflect on their skills and adjust their comprehension and vocabulary strategies. Students refine their understanding of the author’s craft. Oral and written responses analyze and/or sythesize information from multiple sources to deepen understanding of the content. Studnets [sic] read for pleasure and choose books based on personal preference.

Can someone please tell me what a student’s responsibility as a reader is? And what, precisely, does “reflecting on skills” mean? Because I for one have never put down a book mid-chapter and said, “Let me reflect upon my reading skills now and adjust my comprehension strategies.”

And really, what are comprehension strategies anyway?

Argh.

“Get me a book, will you?” I asked Steve about a week ago, as he prepared for a jaunt to the library. “I’m running out of things to read.”

So he came home with Tomato Girl. “It looked like something you’d read,” he said by way of explanation. Actually, it didn’t really, but that’s fine. No complaints on my end. Sometimes one gets in a reading rut; sometimes one needs something a little more unsettling.

Which is what Publisher’s Weekly says about it on the back cover, saying that it’s an accomplished debut. And the author bio says she’s published in literary journals and has written a book of poetry.

The reason that I’m telling you all this is because I want you to know that I was absolutely fair. I was prepared to like this novel. I opened its covers with a completely open mind. And sadly, nothing prepared me for its sheer, unutterable terribleness. It was beyond bad. And the really sad thing was that it wasn’t like trashy novel bad, which is just bad writing plain and simple and you harrumph about the crap that gets published these days, but it was a mass market paperback so who really cares? No, it was more like college fiction workshop bad, where everyone thinks they are saying profound new things in beautiful new ways, but it would be more enojoyable to hear a tortured cat scream for three hours straight. (If you’re wondering where that piece of randomness came from, chalk it up to the feral cats on the prowl last night.)

Enough said.

*Update: I feel a little guilty for posting that review, so I feel the need to mention that she has samples of her poetry on her site; they are MUCH better than this novel.

Padma Viswanathan tells a ripping good yarn. The year is 1896; Sivakami is 10 and her family is looking for a husband. They visit the healer in her mother’s home town to have her star chart done; he begs the family to let him marry her. Though his own chart says that he might die in the ninth year of his marriage, the birth of a son might stop his death from coming to pass. When the son is finally born, he does the calculations and realizes that he will die. And because they are Brahmins, and because Sivakami will enter a world of virtual seclusion upon his death, he does everything he can to prepare her, including hiring a local man, Michumi (who also happens to be gay and therefore trustworthy) to oversee the properties.

And then the story wafts over the next three generations, with Savakami holding the family together with the help of Michumi. Ripping good yarn. One of the things that was fascinating to watch was the arc of superstition and magic. Sivakami believes in the superstitions of her tradition–tradition, of course, being one of the few things allowed her. But her son Vairun (who by the way has vitiligo, which is a great thing to see represented in fiction) wholeheartedly rejects the idea of Brahmins’ inherent superiority and of all superstition, including star charts–despite the fact that his and his sister’s both come true. And it’s interesting to see how the story starts in one place–a mythologized place of legend–and ends grounded in the modern world, with problems blamed on people, not on gods.

To be absolutely, completely honest, I lost interest in The Toss of a Lemon toward the end, and it felt like a bit of work to finish it. And I didn’t really like the ending–don’t worry, no actual spoilers–because the end of an era, which has taken the novel almost 600 pages covering sixty-odd years, feels too explicitly stated. Still, if you read one book this summer, make it this. In addition to being a gripping read, Viswanathan’s prose is gorgeous.

Here’s the cycle: I vow I will post reviews of every book I read again; I’m good for a week; the books pile up; I tell myself I’ll get on top of it; they languish some more; I start feeling daunted; they need to be returned to the library; I forget what I’ve read.

I don’t even know whether people even read the book reviews, but the simple truth is that I miss them. There’s something so evocative about them for me; I remember where I was reading the book itself, where I was when I was posting the review–and more importantly, where I was in my life, what was going on.

And so, I heretofore vow once again to start the book reviews. Moreover, I am just going to abandon the whole list of books that I SHOULD review, which is incomplete anyway. There’s nothing super memorable anyway. Even the books I thought were memorable have somehow faded into the background–with one exception: Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. I didn’t like it as much as I liked What I Loved and full appreciation is marred by the fact that her male protagonist often speaks like a woman trying on a masculine voice; nonetheless, it was so well-written, and with such universally acute observations, that I would wholeheartedly recommend it nonethless. Siri Hustvedt is fascinating to me; she is, in my opinion, a better writer than her more famous husband Paul Auster–yet is not nearly as well known. It’s a shame.

Which was the only book I loved more than Pat the Bunny when I was a wee little thing. So imagine my delight when I opened up Google this morning to see this:

Mira Serafino seemingly lives a perfect life on the Oregon coast–until that is, she discovers another woman’s phone number on her husband’s cell phone bill, at which she has a meltdown and then packs up and heads to Seattle, where she takes a job as a barista in Fremont. I have to be honest: The only reason I read this was because it was set in two places that I’m familiar with. It was fine; it was frothy chick lit, but it wasn’t anything that memorable.

Ahh kiddie lit. We at Nom de Plume do like well-written kiddie lit. And we certainly like Theodosia, who spends most of her time at the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in turn-of-the-19th century London. Her parents are obsessed with Egyptian antiquities. Theodosia is obsessed with removing the curses no one else can see from them. When her mother returns from Egypt with a famous amulet, Theodosia is kept busy making sure no one gets hurt. Delightful.

Esperanza Gorst is sent by her guardian to be a servant to the Baroness Tansor for a reason that I never learned because I lost all patience with the book and gave up. This was one of those books that I thought I would love–dark, gothic historical teeming with mystery–but alas. Abandoned.

14-year old Candace Ong wants to be something other than the “Eggroll Girl” in her parents’ San Francisco Chinese Restaurant. She wants her parents to speak better English. She wants to have the freedom of her brother Kenny, who by dint of being male is allowed to wander through his life chore-free. She wants to live somewhere other than the small apartment over the restaurant. But more than anything, she wants to be pretty and popular like her friend Ruby.

Never mind the fact that Ruby is a budding Lolita who seems to have a taste for pedophiles. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that pedophiles seem to have a taste for her. Nonetheless, Candace models herself after Ruby, and starts getting herself into mishap after mishap.

In one way, this was a fairly typical coming-of-age story of the child of an immigrant family, and it is also the story of a girl in a particular time. Set in 1983, Candace has a freedom that it doesn’t seem like the typical teenager has today. I can certainly remember that heady freedom of going off and doing what you wanted, when you wanted it. (It also brought back the memory of jelly shoes. Remember those? I had a pair when I was 11; they were translucent pink, and the only time I felt more hip was when I clattered around in my red Dr. Scholls when I was six.)

But on the other hand, there is something dark about I Want Candy that is at odds with the cheerful title and innocence of the moniker eggroll girl. Despite feeling trapped by her life, the freedom–arguably from parental neglect–that Candace does have is frightening and what she does with it even more so.

*Spoiler alert*

When Ruby dies in a freak accident, her ghost comes back to Candace along with the ghosts of other women from Chinatown. Candace sees them all. And this, to me, was one of the most amazing things about this novel. My first encounter with Chinese-American literature was through Maxine Hong Kingston, and the idea of the supernatural made a huge impression on me when I first read it. I Want Candy incorporates the same idea, but there’s a difference: Ruby’s ghost is always prosaic. But there is something about that very matter-of-factness that makes the whole idea even more creepy.

At first glance, this seemed like yet another novel about upper middle class Northeasterners who have Issues. And yes, it’s about upper middle class Northeasterners and yes, they have issues, but all the characters are so finely drawn and their stories so compelling that this was a read somewhat out of the ordinary. Basically, the story starts out like this: The McKotch family goes to the Cape for their usual summer vacation with siblings and nieces and nephews and cousins … a houseful of family. Pauline, the somewhat controlling mother, heads up the McKotch contingent during the week, and is joined by her needy (and she was say sex addict) husband Frank over the weekends. They have problems, but they muddle through. And then in one lightning moment, Frank looks at their daughter Gwen and realized something is wrong, that she is not nearly as developed as her cousin. And it turns out that she has Turner’s Syndrome. The discovery breaks apart the family–not because of the discovery itself but because of how everyone deals with it, including the fact that Paulette and Frank divorce. The rest of the novel follows their lives and the lives of all the children as they, in turn, muddle through. And that they do more than muddle through is the point. It is reductive to say that there are Happy Endings and there are Sad Endings (and of course, whether an ending is happy or sad depends on where in the story you stop). But all told, this was the best kind of happy ending because through it all, the best of Haigh’s characters come shining through in a very real, very human way. I liked this.