YA Review: Bitterblue

Bitterblue by Kristen Cashore Bitterblue is a sequel to Cashore’s fantasy YA novel Graceling and a companion novel to Fire. Bitterblue, the young Queen of Monsea, is the main character in this book. Unlike Katsa and Po from the first book and Fire from the second, Bitterblue has no Grace or superhuman powers or abilities.

Summary: “The long-awaited companion to New York Times bestsellers Graceling and Fire Eight years after Graceling, Bitterblue is now queen of Monsea. But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisors, who have run things since Leck died, believe in a forward-thinking plan: Pardon all who committed terrible acts under Leck's reign, and forget anything bad ever happened. But when Bitterblue begins sneaking outside the castle--disguised and alone--to walk the streets of her own city, she starts realizing that the kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year spell of a madman, and the only way to move forward is to revisit the past. Two thieves, who only steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with an extreme skill called a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart (Amazon.com, 2012)

Things I liked:

• There is humor. I like that. This book was very funny in parts. It certainly isn’t always funny, but especially in the beginning there were such funny things being said and discussed... sometimes very silly things.

• The librarian. His name is Death (rhymes with teeth). There are a lot of librarians in books written for youth and, while it is true, that many of them are heroic, lovely model human beings, some are not. The one fault I always found with the Harry Potter series was that Hogwarts had such a mean and vindictive (and old) librarian. Whenever I run across a mean librarian in fiction I imagine that the author is getting her revenge on some real-life librarian who did her wrong as a child or who refused to help her while she worked on her first book. The librarian in Bitterblue is different. At first he starts out as the stereotypical old-school, sour librarian, but so extreme that he makes me laugh. Out loud. As the book goes on and I get to know him more I came to understand where his behavior comes from; what shaped him into the dour person he has become. He wins me over as he wins over Bitterblue herself and he becomes one of my favorite characters in the book. Whatever you do, don’t skip over the list of characters at the end of the book as Death wrote it and it is also incredibly humorous – in a witty, biting kind of way.

• Cashore is a master of creating real and honest relationships on the page - relationships that I, as a reader, feel a part of. I actually went back and re-read Graceling and realized that even though I love so many things about the book the parts I treasure the most (and like to go back and reread) are the sections where Po and Katsa are becoming close. There is a quality of openness and honesty in those sections that takes my breath away in Graceling (for sure), but also here in Bitterblue.

• The theme of this story is not as original as the themes in the two previous books, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism. While Graceling is about a young woman with extraordinary physical prowess learning to face the only real fears she has – fears around loving and trusting and Fire turns teenage angst about appearance on its head by creating a character that possesses shocking, otherworldly beauty, but who desperately wants people to know her inner self, Bitterblue is a somewhat more standard young woman’s coming of age story. But Bitterblue is not just any young woman growing into adulthood she is also the leader of her country – a country that is coming out of the long shadow of the her father’s devastating tyranny. Although this is a fantasy novel, I felt like the problems that Bitterblue faces are not so far from reality… say if she happened to be the new leader of North Korea or Albania or Romania after the fall of communism instead of the Queen of Monsea.

I didn’t fall head over heels for Bitterblue as I did for Graceling which seemed so wildly new and eye-opening when I read it for the first time. However, I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book – which deals so much with honesty and truth and the cost of lies and I certainly heartily recommend it.


Citations: Amazon.com. (May 1, 2012). Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Bitterblue-Graceling-Kristin-Cashore/dp/0803734735/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336419409&sr=1-1.

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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.