Reading the YA award winners

Hard to believe it's been a month since I last posted notes on my reading. In my defense, I am in the process of moving to a new job and a new state, so I've been a little pre-occupied with trying to finish up projects at work and home. But we recently got in a batch of young adult books that have won awards so I dipped in and here's what I came up with.

The Michael Printz Award is sponsored by a publication of the American Library Association (Booklist) and intended to exemplify “literary excellence in young adult literature” (ALA YALSA website). This year’s winner is The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean, the first ever 3-time winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (now Costa Book Awards) and a previous Carnegie medal winner—in other words, this woman knows how to write YA books! Here’s an excerpt from page 1: “I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now—which is ridiculous, since he's been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I'll be dead, too, and the age difference won't matter.” And this from the book jacket will give you the basic storyline: “Sym is not your average teenage girl. She is obsessed with the Antarctic and the brave, romantic figure of Captain Oates from Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole. In fact, Oates is the secret confidant to whom she spills all her hopes and fears. But Sym's uncle Victor is even more obsessed—and when he takes her on a dream trip into the bleak Antarctic wilderness, it turns into a nightmarish struggle for survival that will challenge everything she knows and loves.” Symone is a resourceful and tough 14-year old who will engage male as well as female readers, not least of all because she has struggled with being bullied for her hearing loss, and had to live in recent years without a dad. This is an incredibly intense survival story that so compellingly conveys the harsh reality of this frozen wilderness that you will relish anew being in a safe warm place when you read it.

Last year’s Printz winner and the first graphic novel to be a finalist for the National Book Award is American Born Chinese by former comic book creator Gene Luen Yang. I am new to graphic novels—The invention of Hugo Cabret being my first (see earlier blog). This book is largely about the impact of discrimination against ‘the other’ on the sense of self. There are 3 apparently separate story lines that all come together in the end. Each character, the monkey king of Chinese legend and two teenage boys, wants desperately to be something other than what he is—to transform himself. The moral of the story is that it’s best to accept and be who you are, and I have to say that I found it a bit simplistic and heavy handed on that score. Perhaps the format also limits how deeply one can explore the very real prejudices faced by those in non-dominant cultures.

I’d heard a lot of positive raves about The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt on the YA listserv I monitor. It was an Honor book for the Newbery Award, and, of this batch, it was my favorite. Above and beyond being stuck with a name like Holling Hoodhood, our seventh grade protagonist is the only non-Jew and non-Catholic in his class. This means he is stuck with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, on Wednesday afternoons when his classmates all disappear for religious instruction at their various places of worship. Initially she tries to get him transferred back to 6^th grade math class, then she consigns Holling to cleaning not only the blackboards and erasers in her room, but in every other 7^th grade classroom—the story is set in 1967 so they still have chalk and blackboards. Eventually her “torture” settles on making him read Shakespeare, and Holling discovers he likes the stories so much that he takes a role in a local theatre production of “The Tempest.” Schmidt brilliantly captures the angst of being a teen, being the son of an aggressively ambitious father, being the brother of an older sister who is opposing the war in Vietnam, and being at the top of the hit list for the local school bully.

By far the winner in the “heavy book category” is Brave Story by Miyuki Miyabe, which also won the Batchelder Award (given to the publisher of a book originally published in another language and translated into English). Weighing in at 816 pages, I doubt I am the first reader to think it is too long. It’s a fantasy adventure about a 12 year boy who passes through a temporary portal into an alternative world, Vision, which is created by the cumulative imaginings of people in this one, the real world. Again this tale struck me as a bit simplistic morally; our protagonist Waturu is more considerate of others instead of being totally selfish, and so achieves the ultimate prize in the end. The fantastic creatures he encounters and befriends in Vision range from a Barney-like giant lizard to a seductive cat girl. Still it is commendable that the protagonist gradually and believably comes to act and see himself as more brave and competent than he did before his series of adventures, and so can serve as an engaging and worthy role model for young boys.