Graceling--Delving in the Science Fiction World

Kristen Cashore's Graceling is the first true-blooded fantasy novel I've really worked through. I just can't get into them, but I toughed it out for our class discussion. This story deals with the world of Seven Kingdoms and the special power, or "grace," of Katsa--the power to fight and kill with her bare hands. Katsa's uncle, King Randa, keeps her employed doing his dirty work, a graceling himself able to manipulate others' thoughts. One of her missions, however, introduces her to Prince Po, with whom she falls deeply in love, a particularly difficult situation when she has trained herself not to feel too much when she must work as a killer. Po, graced himself, is able to meet Katsa fairly in battle, using her talent for fighting to grow close to her and make her more human. Po and Katsa bond over their suspicion of the current power structure, and go on a sort of adventure to turn the established order upside down. This book expresses well the awkwardness of being a teenager, of feeling like being different, even if it is a gift, is mostly a burden.

I've never been a sci-fi/fantasy type of reader. A fervent supporter of the classics in most genres, I have yet to get through a single J.R.R. Tolkein novel. I've always felt that sci-fi writers get to break the rules in whatever way they want, they get to "cheat" so to speak, in the way they explore the problems of our current world. In addition to my resentment of the sci-fi genre in general, I also had some problems with repetition of other novels' major themes. If you've read some of my previous posts, you'll see how much I enjoyed Looking for Alaska, and my analysis of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. This novel also presents a strong female character searching for self and truth, but whereas those two titles deal with a figurative "fighting the man," Graceling gets to present that same struggle literally. That sort of translation into a literal battle just feels like a cop-out to me. Katsa does take a uniquely strong anti-marriage stance, saying that giving herself to Po in marriage would be taking away her freedom. I can't quite figure out how it would be much different than the current relationship she has with him, but the assertion was a pleasantly bold one. Overall, I would recommend this book to a student needing that strong female experience but looking for something more in the fantasty realm; it just isn't my personal cup of tea.

Suggested Grade Level: 10th grade
Appropriateness: some violence, some sexuality
Classroom use: literature circles dealing with strong female narrators

Final Project

I'm beginning to consider my final project options for my Young Adult Literature course, and want to put them out there for future editing and revision. Choosing between a unit plan, a course proposal, and a course video is going to be pretty difficult. So far, here are my ideas:
Lit circles-Banned books
Catcher in the Rye
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Looking for Alaska
The Lovely Bones
Go Ask Alice

Lit circles-Gender identity and sexuality (LGBT issues)
Stone Butch Blues
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
My Brother Has AIDS
The Laramie Project

Course proposal-LGBT Young Adult Literature
Above texts

Text Pairing unit plan and/or video-
The Book Thief
The Diary of Anne Frank

Dating, Love, and Sex

In discussing YA novels that focus on dating, love, and sexuality, we read and discussed The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart. This novel is the story of a teen girl at an upper class boarding school, who grows from awkward gawky girl into a stunning young woman over one summer. Coming back to school the next year, Frankie gets used to the new attention, and begins dating cool senior Matt. However, Frankie's new boyfriend is a member of the school's all-male secret society, The Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. Feeling a victim of her circumstances, being female and judged on her looks by the "cool crowd," Frankie covertly tries to take over this secret society by coordinating pranks through manipulative emails. When Frankie must face the consequences of her actions, she brings the reader to strong criticism of gender double-standards in a way students haven't considered before. It is a fun story for teens in its sense of secrecy and danger while exploring gender issues in a world fairly close to their own.

This novel is a tough one for me to place in a classroom. There are definitely some interesting aspects of the novel I would want to explore with students, including some fun with wordplay, a couple really great metaphors, and an interesting narrator perspective. However, this is a novel that deals, on the plot level, mostly with dating. There is some room for teaching Marxist and feminist criticism out of this book, and while I do like the idea of using easier material to teach difficult concepts like literary criticism, there is no getting around the pretty simple plot line of this book. I'm so torn, because it would be nice to see kids working on literary criticism without spending class time summarizing plot because of difficult language. Still, I think there are better books to do so with, including earlier review book Looking for Alaska. In many ways, I see The Disreputable History as the poor man's Looking for Alaska--a strong female narrator that boys swoon for, finding a way to subvert the power stuck in upper-class patriarchal society, but without the stunning style and greater life lessons of John Green's novel.

Suggested Grade Level: 9th-10th grade
Appropriateness: Some language and sexuality, subversion of authority

Read "The Book Thief" by Markus Zusak!

Read this book.

No, seriously, I mean it. Read. This. Book.

I picked this book up when it was on the “Our staff recommends…” shelf with 5 staffers’ names on the description card. Only when I got it home, having devoured the first chapter on the way, did I realize that it was a Printz Award Honor book.

The Book Thief is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl living through the Holocaust, as narrated by Death. Yes, you read that right. Death here is not your hooded skeleton with a scythe lurking in the shadows, however; he wants a vacation from carrying souls, and it breaks his heart to see the living survivors he has to leave behind. It’s hard not to give away spoilers here, as Death only runs into Liesel when he is taking someone from her, and he does describe her as “an expert at being left behind.” I can tell you that Liesel is given to foster parents in a suburb of Munich at a very young age, not fully understanding until Hitler’s rise to power why her mother had to give her up. She tries to grow up as normally as possible, with a ravenous desire to learn despite her humble background, her current poverty, and the tumultuous political situation. Her home becomes a sanctuary for a young Jewish man, and she has to understand moral complexities very early in her life.

I don’t mind skimming over the plot points here in the attempt to avoid spoilers, because it is really the style and figurative language of the book that makes it so wonderful. In an interview, Markus Zusak talks about the multiple drafts it took to get this narrator right; Death is weary of his eternal job, worn down by the horrible things he sees in Nazi Germany. He sees the world with an unending framework, so metaphor weighs heavy on everything he sees. Color plays importantly into his view of the world, and it creates some beautiful images for the reader. This book’s central theme about the power of words and ideas, to manipulate in Hitler’s case and to overcome for Liesel, is an important one for teenagers, and one that has never been told so perfectly in a Holocaust novel. The prose of this book was stunning and touching, with a style entirely its own. Please do yourself and your students a favor by reading and assigning The Book Thief, wherever you can fit it and whatever means it takes.

Suggested grade level: 9^th-12^th grade

Appropriateness: violence/death, dark themes, length (500+ pages)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party

For this week, our Young Adult Literature class theme is Printz Award winners and Honor books, a category specifically reserved for young adult novels of high value and literary quality. How to define value and literary quality is a whole argument in itself, but hopefully one day I’ll get to that in this blog. I personally chose to read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (review coming next), while our entire class read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. Both books are historical fiction with very different takes on the genre.

Octavian Nothing is the story of the son of an African princess being raised by a secret society in pre-revolutionary Boston. The Novanglian College of Lucidity is working on an experiment, giving Octavian the same premier education as European princes, to determine if race has any effect on intelligence. Among their intellectual experiments, the society also works with medicine, trying a primitive inoculation against smallpox that goes awry. As the revolution begins, the society trips up, and Octavian goes on the run. Here Octavian’s voice ends for a long while, and the rest of the novel is a multigenre experience recounting his recapture and slavery, experiencing a sort of physical imprisonment where his intellectual imprisonment ended.

This book would be a hard sell to high school students. The idea of historical fiction can make history lessons more interesting, and can work really well for interdisciplinary teaching. This book, however, I don’t think is the one to do it. The entire first half of the story details Octavian’s education and experience with the College of Lucidity through his point of view, and this is a slow section. The language, for one thing, attempts to recreate early American highly educated ways of speaking, but it makes the first half of the book very difficult to get through. There isn’t much action to be seen in this section either, compounding how slowly it moves. I appreciate the themes of freedom that the book raises, making intellectual imprisonment the true suppression of freedom. Young adults could use this sort of illustration of the power of rebellion to funnel their incredible energy. Still, acknowledging that high school students can be difficult to motivate, a novel that was tough for a college student to plow through is a tough expectation for younger students.

Suggested grade level: 10th-11th grade
Appropriateness: racial issues, difficulty level

If utopia literally means "no place," where is DYStopia?

The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins is a young adult dystopian novel, a story that takes place in a dark future marked by harsh government control. Each year, the 12 districts of the new North America must send one male and one female between twelve and eighteen years old to participate in a televised battle to the death. The story's protagonist, Katniss, is from the poorest of the 12 districts, and volunteers for the Hunger Games to take the place of her younger sister, despite having to battle against young people from much wealthier districts who have been training for most of their lives. Upon arriving in the capital to prepare for the Games, Katniss experiences something akin to today's reality shows, creating looks and entire personalities suited for better mass consumption. Katniss develops a relationship with Peeta, the other competitor chosen from her district, but has to play the game to stay alive. The game itself is built up very well, very high-stakes and tense. The characters are well-developed, and as far as dystopian novels go, this story raises a lot of societal and critical criticisms that students would benefit from critically reflecting on.
Still, I've never personally been a fan of sci-fi/fantasty, because I feel like they get to bend the rules in a way I don't appreciate as much. Many of these stories get to create a reality where they critique current society in a way that avoids offending their readers. They get sort of a free pass by creating their own rules for criticizing society, and I've never been able to really find myself sold by any author's set of rules.
Still, in trying to think about this story critically, I started thinking about the types of dystopian stories that are told, and some of the source material from which The Hunger Games was drawn. These stories warning us against the dangers of government control and our own overindulgence in entertainment have been told in a lot of different ways, and with a lot of different predicted outcomes. So, as something of a thesis to this blog post:
When the Ancient Greeks told the story of Theseus of Athens being selected by Crete to battle the Minotaur;
when Battle Royale ups the stakes of a state-sponsored reality game to the death;
when the movie Gamer tells of a world where prisoners are used as live characters in a video game;
when TV’s “Jimmy Neutron” features aliens who will destroy planets based on the outcome of a game:
Does dystopian literature still serve a purpose, when none of these situations have come true for centuries?
Do dystopian novels really try to predict the future? Or are we fooling ourselves into thinking that “dystopia” is somewhere beyond the here-and-now?
If "utopia" literally translates to "no place," and "dystopia" is its opposite, where is dystopia?
This is the type of question I think students should be grappling with when reading dystopian novels, rather than just summarizing plot assuming that this means they're analyzing the author's intent.

Suggested grade level: 10-11 grade
Appropriateness: some violence, dark themes