Featured Book: Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton
Houghton Mifflin, 1939

In Virginia Burton's Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel, the reader learns, in a series of beautiful and detailed pictures, what a steam shovel can do: dig canals, cut through mountains, lower hills, straighten curves, smooth ground, fill in holes, create landing fields for planes, and dig holes for the cellars of skyscrapers. Mike Mulligan is proud of his steam shovel Mary Anne (apparently a reference to Marion Steam Shovels), and boasts that she could dig in one day what 100 men could do in one week, and the two always work faster and better when others are watching.   

But gas, electric, and diesel shovels are rapidly replacing steam shovels. Out with the old and in with the new. Mike knows that Mary Anne still has worth; so he goes to the small town of Popperville, which needs a basement dug for its new town hall. Mike is so confident that the work can be done in a day (remember his boast about the 100 men?) that he promises that the labor will be free if not completed by nightfall. 

At dawn the next day, they set out to work. The reader gets the sounds of the digging: BING! BANG! CRASH! SLAM! The people of Popperville (and neighboring Bangerville, Bopperville, Kipperville, and Kopperville) all come to watch, which makes Mike and Mary Anne work faster and better! The ending is exciting and unexpected: Mary Anne gets stuck in the basement! 

This dilemma encourages interaction with the reader, asking of him what should be done in this situation.  Ultimately, upon the suggestion of the little boy in the story (based on the suggestion given to Burton by a real-life 12-year-old), it is decided that Mary Anne will be used to heat the new town hall, and Mike is given a job there so that he may always be with her.  The technology in the book is deliberately outdated (and infinitely more outdated now). But the story still feels fresh. Ahead of it's time, even. At least for me.  I'm still young, but I can feel more and more each day just how quickly the world moves, and how easy it is to feel suddenly irrelevant. Especially as a writer. Mike Mulligan encourages salvage and reuse of valuable resources and finding value in things (and people!) that might otherwise be written off. Not preservation for preservation's sake, but creative and essential new uses for what we already have.

Picture Books

I devote much of my time to reading, writing, and reviewing books for middle grade and young adult readers. But my love of words began when I was very young. With picture books. And now that I have a young son of my own, picture books have become a significant part of my life again.  So for the next week or so, I'll talk about a few of my favorites. Books my son enjoys. Books I enjoyed. Books my parents enjoyed. And books their parents enjoyed.

I hope you enjoy them, too.

Featured Book: Goving Bovine

Going Bovine by Libba Bray won the 2009 Michael L. Printz Award. And since I believe the Printz (and similar awards for children/YA lit.) should always be about getting into the hands of young readers books those readers will love to read (and will make them want to read more), Bovine is a worthy selecion for the prize.

I admit, I was wary of Bovine at first, because I didn’t know how much a novel by Bray, best known for her Gemma Doyle Trilogy, would appeal to male readers, especially adolescent male readers.  But those familiar with Bray’s larger body of work, which includes stories about the band Cheap Trick and the musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show, won’t be surprised that Bovine is a quirky, random, twisted adventure with a cast of misfits, complete with its very own mad scientist. In short, it’s exactly the kind of story many adolescent boys might be interested in.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Delacorte Press, 2009
Cover art by Yuan Lee

Bovine opens on a moody, apathetic, and angst-ridden burnout named Cameron, who recounts a traumatic near-death childhood experience on the It’s a Small World After All attraction at Disney World. And whether it’s because Cameron is so young when it happens or simply because he’s listless by nature, the brush with death does nothing to spark a zest for life in him. Now sixteen, he goes through the motions at school, taking no initiative, and putting in as little effort as possible in everything he does, other than smoking weed and listening to Great Tremolo records (mostly so he can make fun of the artist). Cameron also fails to demonstrate much love or respect for his family. He suspects his dad cheats on his mom. He feels betrayed by his twin sister, who now runs with the popular crowd at school--the crowd by which Cameron feels tortured. He hates his job at Buddha Burger. He lazes about the house. And he smokes pot.

In short, the opening is not atypical of a YA novel. Other than the Disney World incident, of course.

But then things start getting weird. Cameron loses control of his faculties, even punching popular Chet (who happens to be his sister’s boyfriend) in the stomach. Inadvertently.

This, understandably, earns Cameron counseling and drug therapy.

Then come the fire giants. That’s right. FIRE GIANTS, raining fire from the sky. And a dark-armored knight coming after him with a sword.

What?

Then, to the horror of his mom and sister, Cameron writhes on the floor in terror as the toaster starts on fire and the giants come after him again.

And this, understandably, lands Cameron in the hospital. Poking, prodding, and MRI-ing ensue.

Finally, we learn that Cameron has Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)—better known as MAD COW DISEASE. That’s right. MAD COW disease. Hence the title—Going Bovine.  CJD is a degenerative neurological disorder—incurable and fatal.  Common symptoms—memory loss, personality changes. Hallucinations.

While in the hospital, awaiting his fate, a punk-rock angel named Dulcie (who he’s seen previously at Buddha Burger) explains that a scientist name Dr. X, who has traveled through time, unwittingly unleashed the evil that that is actually killing Cameron (not CJD).  She gives him a bracelet (a Disney World park pass) that will temporarily overpower the crippling effects of his disease (while the bands of the bracelet disappear over time) so that he can travel the country in search of Dr. X, saving himself (and the planet in the process). And, oh yeah—he’s supposed to take his diminutive and hypochondriac roommate along with him. 

What follows can best be described as Life on Mars (the original British version) meets Catcher in the Rye meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Scott Pilgrim meets Don Quixote.  The story is filled with mythological and classical literature references (appropriate since Cameron’s mom taught classics and mythology before she had children), as well as fictional pop-culture references (like a bizarro-universe of our own pop culture from the last thirty or forty years), including an MTV-type network, a Carson Daily-like character, a Grateful Dead-esque band, and a Star Wars-mimicking movie franchise called Star Fighter). 

But the story also uses familiar settings like New Orleans and Disney World (where the story both begins and ends), but distorts them in a way (especially for readers who are familiar with the real settings) so as to make them dreamlike—or nightmare like. 

What emerges from this odd premise is a surprising, often hilarious, and sometimes touching story that tiptoes along the narrow, fragile line between reality and fantasy. We wonder, throughout the journey, what is real? What is an hallucination? But we realize that it almost doesn’t matter. Because Cameron slowly, reluctantly, but completely comes to appreciate life and living for the first time ever—an appreciation he didn’t gain from his first near-death experience as a child.

Recommended for boys ages 15-18.

Featured Book: Antsy Does Time

Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman is a sequel (or companion) to The Schwa Was Here. Like Schwa, this tale is set in Brooklyn and narrated by Antsy—Anthony Bonano—and, at least at first, seems to center on someone else’s crisis. When his stoic, Scandinavian classmate Gunnar reveals he’s dying of Pulmonary Monoxic Systemia (in which your body turns oxygen into carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide and you’re essentially poisoned by the very air you breath—p.s. it doesn’t exist IRL), Antsy offers Gunnar a month of his own life, trying to shake his new friend from his morbid, death-fascinated funk. This simple act takes on a life of its own, and before he knows it, Antsy becomes the center of a life-donation frenzy in which he draws up and distributes legal-ish looking contracts, collecting additional life for the fast-fading Gunnar.  In no time it becomes a school-wide obsession, culminating in a rally for Gunnar at which Antsy is the keynote speaker.

Antsy Does Time by Neal Shusterman
Penguin Group, 2008
Cover art by Steven Guarnaccia

But there’s something a bit off about Gunnar’s disease, and his obsession with it. There’s something off about the Ümlaut family, in general. There’s even something off about Kjersten, Gunnar’s older sister, who starts dating Antsy in the middle of all of this.  But Antsy can’t put his finger on it. When he has dinner at the Ümlaut house early in the story, there’s a palpable tension when Mr. Ümlaut joins them at the table.  Antsy assumes that it’s due to Gunnar’s fast-approaching death, but he’s confused as to why no one in the family (other than Gunnar) seems willing to talk about it. 

Antsy learns, as the story moves forward, that the family’s problems extend far beyond a son who says he’s dying. And just as the Ümlaut’s collective problems begin to boil, Antsy’s own life-and-death family crisis emerges.

All of this is told in Antsy’s familiar, energetic, and flat-out hilarious voice. Schwa is one of my favorite books, and I generally, unless it’s part of a trilogy or series, dislike sequels.  I put off reading this novel for some time for that reason, but I’m glad I finally did. This sequel works for me for several reasons.  First, the Bonano family is great—especially Antsy—and is definitely worth spending more time with.  Second, this story stands on its own.  It’s not following a formula from the first book, simply inserting Gunnar and his problems where the Schwa was in the last novel.  And finally—and most importantly—Shusterman, I think, successfully expands on a theme—a current—that runs through both of these novels.  Language. And meaning that comes from it.

I mentioned, a moment ago, Antsy’s great voice, which—of course—is all about language.  And there are several language-related jokes that pop up throughout both of these books.  I mean, in this one, we have the Ümlaut family.  An umlaut, of course, is that little two-dot symbol above vowels that represents vowel fronting or raising. The U in the family’s name has an umlaut, giving it the oo sound. The same symbol, incidentally, appears in the author’s last name on the cover of this book (but is not in the author’s name IRL). Similarly, a schwa, from the first novel, is an unstressed neutral vowel (or the symbol—ə—that represents it). And a schwa appears in Shusterman’s last name on the cover of The Schwa was Here. Clever. It doesn’t end there, though. Throughout the novel, Gunnar  spews 100% made up quotations, supposedly by famous people, making us question the importance of which words are said by whom.  And in chapter six, Gunnar asks Hakeem Habibi-Jones, “Doesn’t your culture ululate for the dead?” When Hakeem indicates he has no idea what that means, Antsy quips that cultural traditions are lost in hyphenation. Later, in the same chapter, when Ansty asks Gunnar if his sister likes him, they quibble over whether it’s Like with a capital L or like in italics, because the meaning apparently hinges on that distinction.

Shusterman plays with language and punctuation throughout, toying with the meanings of words, punctuation, and structure, and challenging us to understand how we come to those meanings and what our understanding of language says about us. I’ve heard it said that language is like a culture’s DNA, and I think that idea comes through in these novels.  Moreover, the understanding of language in this novel is through the POV of an adolescent. Presumably Antsy’s learning about language in school in a concrete, academic way. He learns that in real life, language is nuanced. And meaningful.

There’s larger, more obvious symbolic references throughout the story, like the Steinbeck project that Gunnar and Antsy create, using herbicide to make a dustbowl of the Ümlaut’s backyard (and half of the yards on their street). Or the name of Kjersten’s favorite band—NeuroToxin. Or the very disease Gunnar claims to have—a disease in which he’s poisoned by the air he breaths (or, figuratively, poisoned by the house he lives in, the family that surrounds him). All of these things are important, but, I believe, secondary to the focus on language. 

The importance of language is most obvious when Ansty’s family faces its major crisis of the novel—his dad’s heart-attack. When the doctor approaches the family in the waiting room, his first words to Antsy’s mom are “your husband has an acute blockage of the—” Antsy doesn’t hear or care about the rest. He focuses on the word has. Not had. His dad is. Not was. Present tense. Not past. His dad is alive.  Such a simple distinction, but in that moment, it’s all that matters to Antsy, to his family.

Shusterman has done good work here.  It’s a fun novel with some darker undertones, and a playful and healthy dose of language that challenges readers to think about the words they read and speak and the meanings behind them.

Recommended for boys ages 12-15.

Featured Book: Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
Harper Collins, 1993

I’ve long been a fan of Chris Crutcher. Deadline, Whale Talk, and his collection of short stories Athletic Shorts, are among my favorites. I decided this week to reread an oldie, but a goodie, one of his better-known novels, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. Originally published almost two decades ago, the novel has aged remarkably well and is as relevant and readable now as it was in 1993, managing to touch on such complex issues as adolescent obesity, bullying, conformity, pressure for perfection, abortion, religion, teen suicide, and child abuse (just to name a few) without 1) getting bogged down in too many ideas, and 2) seeming preachy, or even suggesting that there’s a perfect solution to any of these issues (or any solution at all).

The story, set in Spokane, Washington, is narrated by protagonist Eric Calhoune, a formerly obese teen who slims considerably after joining the school swim team (earning him, of course, the moniker Moby).  Only catch, he’s concerned that his newfound slenderness and skill (and subsequent boost in popularity) will estrange him from his best friend Sarah Byrnes, who 1) is burned at age three when she (allegedly) pulls a pot of boiling spaghetti onto her face, and 2) insists on being called by her first and last name at all times because of the way her last name is pronounced (Byrnes=burns), hoping to forgo the latent potential for even more jokes at her expense when people make the ironic connection between her name and her face. So for a time, Eric eats extra, trying to stay fat.  Sarah Byrnes tells him to knock it off, which he does, and they’re able to maintain their friendship, although in a slightly diminished capacity, if just for the fact that Eric spends a lot of time swimming.

But when Sarah Byrnes stops talking one day, stops communicating altogether, and she ends up in a juvenile psyche ward at the hospital, Eric is the only one to visit her. Well, Eric and Sarah Byrnes’s dad, but Eric is the only welcome visitor. Eric is sure she’s faking her stupor, but he doesn’t know why. She won’t talk, even to him. Dale, an enemy turned friend, indicates that the boiling pot of spaghetti story might not be entirely true—or true at all. Eric investigates, and when he discovers the truth, he faces some very difficult and dangerous decisions--and circumstances--to keep his friend safe.

Crutcher does many things well in this novel, but one of my favorite elements is how he weaves together the sublpots, which carry with them such emotional weight on their own but also make the punch—the climax and resolution—of the overall story so much stronger.  Many of the subplots grow out of Eric’s experiences in his Contemporary American Thought (CAT) class with Ms. Lemry, his ally and swim coach. For instance, Eric has several run-ins with Mark Brittain, a teenage religious zealot, both in the pool and in the class, including a battle over Mark’s (ex-)girlfriend, who leaves him for Eric. Also, Mark has the vice-principal (who goes to his church) on his side, a man who’s been on Eric’s case since junior high.

With the exception of vice-principal Mautz, who’s a tad one-dimensional, Crutcher gives us real, living, breathing, complicated characters, wholly authentic and unpredictable. The bully. The religious zealot. The preacher. The single mother. The boyfriend of the single mother. All different than we expect them to be, either at first glance, or at last. Even the terrifying Mr. Byrnes, Sarah Byrnes’s father, is captivating. Trying to figure out what makes him tick is the scariest part of the novel.

And everything holds together so well (remember what I said about all of the subplots?). Eric (and we) are antagonized by Brittain, and his father, and Mautz just enough that Eric (and we) have the strength to get through what’s coming.  And what’s coming is really bad. I even understand why Crutcher draws Mautz the way that he does. His pig-headedness allows the other characters to act in interesting and inspired ways, revealing their nuances, including Mark, Brittain, whose arc is among the most poignant elements of the novel.

Thematically, and even plot-wise, Sarah Byrnes reminds me of Until They Bring the Streetcars Back by Stanley Gordon West, a sort-of historical YA thriller that’s set in St. Paul. Although Streetcars is much darker, and has less comic relief.  But I think Sarah Byrnes is emotionally heftier, and more satisfying, especially for male readers. It’s themes of friendship, shame, and courage, are subtle, but unmistakable. 

And chapter five of this book absolutely breaks my heart. Ellerby, the son of an open-minded preacher, and a friend of Eric’s, brings a recording of the song "From a Distance" with him to class. They listen to it, and the class generally thinks it’s a nice, inspiring song. But Ellerby explains that what the song makes him think about his how far away God really is, and what He, She, or It actually thinks about us, sees of us.  His belief is that God put things into motion, but doesn’t regularly interact with us, and that explains why “bad things” happen (to good or bad people) better than “God has a plan” or “it was meant to be” does.  He uses Sarah Byrnes as an example.  Did God do that to her? Allow it to happen to her?  No. He says it’s out of God’s jurisdiction. How Sarah Byrnes is treated, though, that's firmly within the jurisdiction of humans. Ellerby talks about how, although he doesn’t recall ever being mean to Sarah Byrnes, he never, unlike Eric, ever gave her the time of day. And he could have.

So Ms. Lemry asks Ellerby, given the song and his speech, if his CAT project with be the juxtaposition of God and man in the universe.

He indicates it won’t.  He says, "My subject will be shame.”

Recommended for boys ages 15-18.

Naptime

It's the magic time. Late afternoon. Filled up and played out, our six-month-old is down for a nap. It's my writing time. Sometimes it's just a few minutes. Sometimes it's, blessedly, a couple of hours. Sometimes I have to do dishes or laundry. Or have something to eat, because I forgot about lunch. Or didn't have time.

But mostly I write.

Or sometimes nap.

Or often, like now, grab my walking shoes and BabyBjorn because I think I hear him waking up.

Featured Book: Shift

In Shift by Jennifer Bradbury, friends Chris and Win—known as Chrisandwin by everyone at school for their attached-at-the-hip nature, decide to take a cross-country bike trip from their home in West Virginia to Washington state following their high school graduation.  It’s both a last-hurrah before going off to separate colleges and a way to avoid the minimum wage drudgery of a summer job.  But something goes not quite as planned—at least for Chris. He and Win (short for Winston) get separated towards the end of the journey. And when Chris returns home, heads off to college in mid-August, he learns that his friend never returned home at all.  He faces not only the prospect that something terrible happened to his best friend, but also pressure from Win’s father (who’s hired several people to “tail” Chris—including an F.B.I. agent—and threatened to disrupt Chris’s education or even end his dad’s job) to give Win up, convinced that he knows where his son is, what’s happened to him. Or even that he had something to do with his disappearance.
   

Shift by Jennifer Bradbury
Atheneum Books, 2008
Cover art by Greg Stadnyk

The chapters alternate between the aftermath of Win’s disappearance on the bike trip and the bike trip itself. Bradbury uses this broken time effectively, offering pieces of the mystery just as we need them and staging the action for the most emotional impact when the mystery is finally “solved” (HINT: the why in this novel is the key to the mystery and the emotional heart of the story, as it should be with any good mystery novel—thanks for that lesson, Mary Logue!). I’m using a similar structure for a novel I’m currently working on, and Bradbury’s offered here an example of how it can work really, really well.

Friendship, obviously, is central to Shift. But I’ll get to that in a minute. I also want to talk about fathers, which are also an important part of this story.  Early in the novel, Chris’s dad pulls him aside and tells him to stop just talking about taking the bike trip. Set a date.  And no matter what happens, leave on that date. Apparently he had dreamed about, talked about, saved up for a driving trip along Route 66 when he was much younger. But that’s all he did—prepare. He never did it.  He doesn’t want his son to have that same regret. Later in the novel, both when Chris is on the actual trip and when he’s being harassed by Win’s dad, Chris’s dad is sympathetic, understanding, patient, wise. But believably so. He’s a father you don’t often find in YA literature. He’s refreshing. And I’m glad we have his moment of regret early in the novel, because otherwise he would have seemed a little too one-dimensionally “perfect.”

Win’s dad, on the other hand, is a father figure we’re more accustomed to seeing in YA lit.  Controlling, angry, concerned about family and personal image. He has incessantly chipped away at Win’s spirit for eighteen years.  But Bradbury tempers his otherwise unsympathetic antagonism by letting us see, through Chris’s eyes, him crack a little under the pressure of searching for his missing son. During a scene in which he comes to Chris’s college to bully him into giving up whatever information he has about Win, Chris sees that he’s shaken, almost panicky, under his seemingly cool demeanor. Chris wonders, and we wonder, if maybe it’s not just pride or his son’s shot at the Ivy Leage (Win’s late for reporting to school at this point) that he’s worried about. Maybe he’s actually—finally—worried about losing his son

But in the end, this is a story of friends. Of friendship. Of growing up. Of separation. They start their biking journey as Chrisandwin, together (as friends, as their fathers’ sons).  They end their journey, and the story, as Chris. And Win.

There’s a great scene in a barn in chapter twenty, in which Chris and Win have an all-out, no-holds-barred wrestling match.  They’re not angry at each other, exactly. They just wrestle, as boys do. But the reader senses there’s more at stake than just bragging rights in this match. Chris flashes back to a church revival they came across on their trip, in which the preacher talked about Jacob having to wrestle an angel.  The physicality of the boys working out whatever it is that they need to work out works well.  They’re boys. They don’t talk. At least not about emotion. They act. Even the Jacob v. Angel reflection works well. And when Win demands Chris let him go, we know he’s not talking about him letting him out of the near-pin he has him in. He means LET ME GO. For good.  Then he tells him he’s been a good friend.  A true friend. It's a powerful scene.

The wrestling sequence is just one example of how well Bradbury captures not only a teen male voice but the teen male world.  Chris is thoughtful, smart, and articulate, but he’s still a guy and thinks and feels as guys have been conditioned to (especially teenage guys, especially when it comes to emotion). There’s one point, during the end of the book, where she falters a bit, though.  Just preceding what is otherwise an excellent scene (which I’ll discuss in a moment), Bradbury has Chris recall, for several paragraphs, a long-sleeved T-shirt that he really likes and used to wear all the time. He’s literally outgrown it (oversimplified version: Win=T-shirt). This is a little too obvious. Too clichéd. And way too much telling.  Especially for a boy. Everything else in the novel is visceral. Punches we can feel. The wrestling match does the trick. As does the following scene. The shirt isn’t necessary.

Fortunately, this sequence is followed by the scene I just mentioned. Chris is alone with his bike at the end of the trip (Win has already bailed on him).  He rolls his wheel into the ocean and says, “We made it. To no one. Then he revises, “I made it.”  And between this scene and the barn scene, and the hundreds of hints all along the journey, we get understand: Chrisandwin—as noted above—is now Chris. And Win.

Recommended for boys ages 14-17.