YA Review: Drawing From Memory

Say, A. (2011). Drawing from memory. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.

In his new visual memoir, Caldecott Medal Winner Allen Say, tells his life story from his birth in Yokohama Japan in 1937 until he leaves Japan for the United States in 1953 at the age of sixteen. Portions of this book read like a traditional graphic novel with a regular distribution of panels and text, while other sections have a more varied layout and incorporate a variety of images including hand drawn maps, photos, old postcards and comic book panels. The author writes briefly about when and where he was born, where he lived during World War II and how, after his parents marriage falls apart, he was moved around from relative to relative. By the time Allen Say was twelve years old he lived alone in a small apartment in Tokyo and attended a private junior high school. The heart and focus of the story (and the vast majority of the pages - 40 out of the 57 pages) show us the three years that he spent as apprentice to the master cartoonist Noro Shinpei – the man who would become his, “spiritual father” (p. 59). He kept his apprenticeship secret from his family who did not approve of artists. At the end of those three years, when he was sixteen years old, Allen Say moved to the United States. A detail rich Author’s Note at the end of the book fills in more information about how he developed the idea for this book and includes additional photographs and artwork.

Reading this book, I felt as though I was able to experience through Allen Say’s simple use of language and illustration what life was like for him as a young man in post-war Japan. The sentences were spare, but conveyed so much meaning. For example, “When the war ended four years later, everything was broken” (p. 13), sums up the entire situation simply and completely. This sentence appears on the page next a photograph of the author, age 4, smiling broadly and holding a toy gun. The juxtaposition of the child’s joy with the sentence’s statement helped me to see how a young child could be oblivious of the destruction around him. Another example of Allen Say’s pithy writing, “When I was drawing, I was happy. I didn’t need toys or friends or parents.” (p. 9), made me think that as a child Allen Say was not often happy, or that happiness was elusive for him. He found a place of safety and joy in the act of drawing and yet it was also a place of loneliness. The poetic sentences, combined with the mixture of illustration techniques, pulled me into the story of a very young man who is emotionally alone in the world and who longs to be an artist. I remain haunted by the image of his spare one room apartment with the bare light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Using both written and visual storytelling techniques, the author helped me to feel his excitement on the day he moved in and “floated with joy” around that room and I felt his isolation when he returned to it alone one evening and found that it, “felt cold and lonesome.”

Sometimes, as an adult and as a teacher, I can feel that my students are not really paying close attention to what I say to them. And yet, in this story Allen Say remembered every little bit of encouragement that adults gave him - from the first affirmation of his first grade teacher, “Mrs. Morita said that my ability to draw was a wonderful talent. No one had told me that before” (p. 13). to the final goodbye from his mentor, “Be true to your art, Kiyoi, and journey well” (p. 56). I realized reading this poignant story how much the words I say, to encourage or discourage, matter to the young people I interact with.

YA Review: 30 Days to Finding and Keeping Sassy Sidekicks and BFFs

Hantman, C. (2009). 30 days to finding and keeping sassy sidekicks and bffs: a friendship guide. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.

Clea Hantman’s lively little pink and black handbook on how to make and sustain “girlfriend-ships” takes a close look at what it really takes for women to have great relationships with other women. The book is organized into four sections - “friendship basics,” taking it to another level, “the major pitfalls and obstacles of friendship today,” and the final section on how to elevate your friendship to, “Mount Everest” heights (p. 3). Each of the four sections is divided into chapters with a grand total of 30 chapters – one per day for the thirty-day duration. Each chapter in this book delves into a theme, offers some advice and provides a daily activity to put the theme into practice in your life. Just for fun, the author includes a daily topical haiku at the beginning of each chapter; often these poems are quite humorous. At the end of each chapter there is a musical selection for the day with a brief annotation detailing how it applies to the theme since, “music magnifies our feelings and self discoveries” (p. 3). Extras at the end of the book include playlist suggestions and a BFF Movie Marathon list. This book isn’t perfect. Some of the material may be a little too much (too silly, too sappy, too cheesy), but looking past the flaws it does examine some valuable topics in an engaging and effective way.

This book struck me as quite “self-help-y,” but it does manage to avoid being preachy. In part, I think that this is because it is not directed at teens only, but really to anyone and everyone who is interested in having great friendships. In fact, I found this quirky book very funny and enjoyable to read. I particularly like that the chapters are short and easy to digest. The language of this handbook is so informal and hip, that I felt as if I was sitting down over coffee with Clea at our local coffee shop and we were talking about women and friendship rather than reading a "how-to" guide. The author is constantly including herself in her daily challenges in a self-depricating way that makes her seem more like the girl-next-door than some professional authority figure. I found that the daily exercises and activities she recommends were legitimately helpful for me. I really liked this book because so often I can forget that friendship is based on the simple basics like kindness, interest in others and openness to new people and is not all about how I look or what I wear.

One of my favorite chapters was on kindness. Kindness is so obvious it is easy to overlook and Clea points this out. Talking about kindness could be so sickeningly sappy, but not in this book. I found that the author’s openness and honesty about her own shortcomings made it easier to be honest with myself while I was reading. Clea writes, “But even I can admit that there are times when I’m not so kind. You know when? When I’m overtired or stressed out, maybe when I haven’t had any coffee. Maybe no one was kind to me that morning. And you know that kindness begets kindness. It’s one of those pay-it-forward, contagious-yawn things” (pp. 24-25). This passage seemed like a page out of my own life and made me think about how challenging it is to be kind when I’m not feeling it. In the end – mixed in with all the fun – I find that I like the message that Clea is putting out there: kindness will make me more real friends than the right haircut or the right purse. In fact, the entire book resonated with me because it was making a real argument for taking the focus of relationships off the superficial and onto issues of character that really matter.

YA Review: Soul Surfer

Hamilton, B., Bundschuh, R., & Berk, S. (2004). Soul surfer: A true story of faith, family and fighting to get back on the board. New York, NY: MTV Books.

In the autobiography Soul Surfer, Bethany Hamilton tells her own story of being attacked by a shark and loosing her arm at the age of thirteen. Bethany tells us about the morning of the attack from her perspective. Included in this personal tale are a great many details about what life is like for kids growing up in a rural corner of Hawaii and about what kind of commitment it takes to become a professional athlete. The book is organized into chapters some of which are directly about the shark attack, Bethany’s rescue and surgery and her recovery. The other chapters – interspersed throughout – go into the story of Bethany’s family and how they ended up in Hawaii, Bethany’s faith and what it is like, “being kind of famous” (p. 155).

Although, I had heard a tiny amount about a surfing teenager from Hawaii who had lost her arm to a shark, I went into this book knowing little more than those scant details. For me the book reads as if Bethany was sitting right next to me telling her story and I would not be surprised to learn that the book was written from recorded interviews. As Bethany described the morning of the attack I felt like I was right there floating on a board in the water next to her which was both thrilling and a little creepy, “The waves were small and inconsistent, and I was just kind of rolling along with them, relaxing on my board with my right hand on the nose of the board and my left arm dangling in the cool water. I remember thinking, ‘I hope the surf picks up soon…,’ when suddenly there was a flash of gray.” (p. 3) Every detail about that morning seemed gripping to me and I was completely fascinated by how Bethany managed to get back to the beach and how her friends helped her get to the hospital.

There were times when the book veered off into territory that wasn’t as interesting to me – details about Bethany’s favorite foods and activities, for example - but overall I found the description of life on rural Kauai to be completely fascinating. As I read the book, the details about Bethany’s working class family and her parents dedication to helping their daughter achieve her surfing dreams blew away all of my assumptions about what kind of people become professional athletes. I had thought that for sure you had to be pretty well off financially to be able to focus so early on a sport, but at least in Bethany’s case I was wrong and my respect for Bethany and her family and their commitment to her career grew. One part of the book that I really appreciated was Bethany’s honest discussion of her faith and how it helped her through the loss of her arm. Most discussion of faith that I can remember reading in contemporary popular writing is heavily ironic or cynical. I was struck by Bethany’s openness and honesty about how her faith in God comforts and motivates her. Personally, faith is important to me and I found it refreshing to encounter a young woman who also finds real practical courage from her belief.

YA Review: What I Saw and How I Lied

Blundell, J. (2008). What I saw and how I lied. New York, NY: Scholastic.

It is 1947 and the War is over. Fifteen year old Evie (Evelyn Spooner) lives in Queens with her knockout mom, her stepfather Joe and his mother, the grumpy Grandma Glad. Joe had served as an army sergeant in World War Two, but now that he is back home he owns and runs three appliance stores. One day in September, Joe decides they should take a trip to Florida. After a four day drive that grows quieter and hotter the farther south they go, Evie and her family finally arrive in Palm Beach. Unfortunately, everything is boarded up and closed tight until the season officially begins in the winter. The Spooners settle into Le Mirage, the one open hotel in town and become friendly with the Graysons, a sophisticated couple from New York. Then a handsome young man named Peter Coleridge shows up saying he knew Joe in the War and things begin to spiral out of control.

Although Blundell captures all the details of the time period perfectly with the smoking and the lipstick, the cocktails and the late 1940s slang, it is not the picture-pefect setting or the realistic dialogue that won me over. Sometimes historical fiction can be interesting despite a mediocre story, just because the time period is unfamiliar and I'm learning about a time and place I know little about. Not the case for What I Saw and How I Lied. In a way this story could have been set anywhere or anytime and it still would have had the same emotional weight for me. I was blown away by what is at the heart of this book - the universal story of a girl yearning to be considered a woman. The path to womanhood turns out to be a lot different than Evie imagined. At first, being an adult seems to be all about how you dress and who you kiss. Although Evie thought she understood the grown-up world, what she finds out is that she missed key details or misinterpreted what she did see. "I'd noticed things on the way down, too. I'd seen it all - the way he took off his hat, the way he lit her cigarette, the way she walked away, her scarf trailing in her hand. Flower petals and a pineapple vase. Now I had to look at it again. This time without me in it, wanting things to go my way (pp. 2-3). By the time Evie and I realize what has really been going on all along, the truth is devastating,crushing,humiliating and ultimately maturing. At the beginning of the book being an adult woman seemed so glamorous and sexy, but by the end it was so much more than what you can see on the surface.

From the very first chapter it was clear that there would be a revelation later in the story. The surprise for me was that that revelation was not about murder or death. Instead, it was all about an inner revelation - the shock of seeing the truth of a situation. It was about being a kid one minute - naively thinking that things were one way - and in the next minute turning a corner and suddenly realizing that you are "a sap" (p. 218) and what you thought you understood was completely wrong. The most powerful aspect of this book for me was what Evie choses to do once she finally understands the truth. In the end Evie shows some real grown-up courage that I hadn't seen coming.

YA Review: The White Darkness

McCaughrean, G. (2005). The White Darkness. New York, NY: HarperCollins Pub.

In Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness we are inside the mind of Sym (Symone), a 14-year-old social outcast at the secondary school she attends in London. Her schoolmates consider her to be “a misfit weirdo” (p. 42) with oddities such as her hearing aides in both ears, that she has never had sex and that she has an unusual and highly opinionated uncle Victor. This uncle, speaking to Sym's geography instructor, says, "You learn your subject, then regurgitate it year after year! Around and around, staler and staler. Like astronauts drinking their own piss" (p. 10). Even worse than all that, Sym lets it slip that she has an imaginary friend. Her imaginary friend is Captain Lawrence Oates, nicknamed Titus, an explorer who died 90 years ago and who was a member of Scott’s doomed trek to the South Pole. The story begins after the death of Sym’s father, when her eccentric uncle whisks her away, first to a weekend in Paris, then to the place the two of them have been dreaming about their whole lives - to the Antarctic.

I thought this book was very strange. The world Sym inhabits is so dreadful, every person in it so appalling and horrid, I don’t blame her for having Titus as an imaginary friend. I found Sym to be a sharp observer and her descriptions of people can be funny and cutting like here when she first gets a glimpse of the other people on their Antarctic tour: “ They were, for the most part, bronzed and polished; their watches showed Pacific time and the phases of the moon. Most seemed to own handheld computers, cameras with lenses as long as my forearm, and tiny mobile phones. (The richer you are, I’ve worked out, the smaller your telephone and the bigger your telephoto lens)….They were rich in years, too: The majority were over sixty” (p. 51). In my opinion, the author gives Sym a gift when she plunks her down in Antarctica. Suddenly Sym doesn’t stick out at all – everyone is clumsy in the Antarctic apparently, “Even when we climbed down from the plane onto the blue ice, and tottered and slithered and clung to each other, helpless, out of our element, I could only laugh: Usually it’s just me falling over my own feet” (p. 76).

It isn’t like Sym is perfect. She isn’t. Sym is sympathetic. And I love Titus as much as she does. Odd as it may sound, he is a true friend. Everything Sym believes to be true – even all the awful things she thinks about herself – are called into question as, little by little, in a very peculiar and unsettling way, the truth about uncle Victor is revealed. “The whole idea creeps up on you like pack ice-pressing in and pressing against your head, then crushing the hull and tumbling inside” (p. 4). That passage perfectly describes the strange sinister creepiness I started feeling when uncle Victor first took her away for the weekend in Paris. I was worried for her – afraid that Nabokov’s Lolita was about to happen. It turns out much worse and much more epic at the same time. And Sym rises to the occasion. All of her detailed knowledge of the Antarctic and of the many expeditions to the South Pole ends up coming in quite handy. I was so afraid for her, but it turned out I didn’t have to be. She isn’t as useless as she thought she was. In fact, she’s amazing. And she’s only 14.

YA Review: If I Stay

Forman, G. (2009). If I stay: A novel. New York: Dutton Books.

A half an inch of snow cancels school one winter day in Oregon, and Mia and her family head out for a drive to visit friends and family. In the midst of the happy and comfortable family outing, a terrible accident occurs and Mia finds herself watching the paramedics as they try to keep her alive. As Mia follows her own body in the ambulance, and later to a hospital in Portland, she is faced with having to make the choice about whether to let go and die or to fight on and live.

Mia narrates this strange story, with its many flashbacks, in an honest teenage voice, sharing every awkward and embarrassing moment she has lived through. She brings us with her back in time as she remembers significant moments with her quirky and loving family. I became so fond of her former punk rocker Dad, who traded in his leather jack for vintage suits, bow ties and a job as a middle school English teacher. As he makes ten-year-old Mia laugh through her tears when she is paralyzed with stage fright, I was laughing and crying too. I wanted to hang out with her hipster mom with her cool, eclectic outfits and her fierce loyalty that often got her into trouble. And then there was Mia’s sweet, much younger brother Teddy who loves Alice Cooper and who needs special magic kisses that only his older sister can give. Even though Mia’s family is already gone by page 15, her vivid, emotional memories of them make them so real that I felt some of the ache of loss she must have felt.

Music is woven into every aspect of this story and each song or classical piece that is referenced adds its history into Mia’s story. Mia’s dedication to the cello is what her boyfriend Adam first notices about her. Their first date is to see Yo-Yo Ma in concert. Music – the right music – is important to Mia’s family. Mia recalls her mother’s rage when she was in labor with Teddy and the midwife offered, “We have some lovely Enya. Very Soothing”(p. 154). For Mia’s mom, it had to be the heavy, heavy sound of Melvins or Earth – no substitutions. Even the car accident is described in musical terms, “A symphony of grinding, a chorus of popping, an aria of exploding, and finally, the sad clapping of hard metal cutting into soft trees” (p. 15). Mia and her mom talk about her relationship with Adam in terms of music, “Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.” (p. 210). There is only one time in the story that the use of music – well, falls flat, for me. The first time Mia and Adam do more than kiss they go up to her room and Adam tells her, “I want you to play me like a cello.” Sorry, but that just seemed silly to me.

I kept asking myself how a book about so much loss and pain could be so funny, but sometimes there is humor in truth even in truly awful situations. The humor keeps the story from getting too sappy, like when best friend Kim tries to reason with the unconscious Mia: “Please don’t die. I can understand why you’d want to, but think about this: If you die, there’s going to be one of those cheesy Princess Diana memorials at school, where everyone puts flowers and candles and notes next to your locker… I know you’d hate that” (p.67-68). The wisecracking comments of Mia’s parents also helped me to appreciate and love them as Mia remembered them in flashbacks. As Adam and Mia head out on their first date, Mia’s mom calls out the door, “Don’t you kids get too crazy. Bad injuries at the last Yo-Yo Ma mosh pit” (p. 37). By the end of the book, I felt like I’d been up all night in the hospital waiting room, listening to Mia tell this story and laughing and weeping with her along the way.

As a side note, disregard the prominent marketing message on the cover of the paperback: “Will appeal to fans of Stephanie Meyer’s TWILIGHT. – USA Today.” Aside from taking place in the Pacific Northwest and being a story about a teenage girl this book has no vampires and very little in common with the Twilight series.

YA Review: Notes from the Midnight Driver

Sonnenblick, J. (2006). Notes from the Midnight Driver. New York: Scholastic Inc.



This book is a wild and hilarious ride with high school junior Alex Gregory through a minefield of topics such as teen drunk driving, divorce, emphysema and estranged families. “As insane as it looks in retrospect, I was fully convinced on that particular Friday evening last September that stealing my mom’s car and storming my dad’s house was a brilliant plan.” (p. 1). Alex goes on to crash his mom’s car into a neighbor’s lawn gnome, get arrested for drunk driving and ultimately end up having to serve 100 hours of community service at a local nursing home.

What makes this story such a rollicking good time is that Alex is telling us the story – uncensored. The story rolls right along and we are inside Alex’s head and get to hear all of his thoughts and comments about everything and everyone he encounters. Occasionally the story is told through letters that Alex writes to the Judge overseeing his sentence, but mostly it is told straight-up by Alex himself. If you enjoyed Sonnenblick’s “Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie,” you will appreciate the similar style and irreverent humor in this story along with the experience of being inside the mind of an adolescent boy. Alex is not the most popular kid at school, he is no star athlete or musical prodigy, instead he is just a regular guy and the humor and the charm of this story comes from his honesty and his blundering attempts to befriend and assist the curmudgeonly Solomon Lewis, a resident at the nursing home where he is assigned. In the midst of all the regular pressures of high school and the added strains of his parents’ acrimonious divorce, Alex pours a lot of his time and energy into playing the guitar. His interest in and commitment to music becomes an integral part of the story as the book progresses.

Notes from the Midnight Driver is very funny, but it is not merely funny. In an interview recorded at the end of the paperback edition of the book, the author says, "the whole thing popped into my head, pretty much complete.... the idea came to me: What if a really good kid did something bad, and then refused to take responsibility?" To some degree, Sonnenblick is attempting to teach a few lessons with this book which might have put me off if the story wasn't so much fun to read.