The House on Mango Street

Part novel in pseudo-verse, part short story collection, Cisneros's short work is a snapshot of life through the eyes of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl living in the Chicago projects. Told in a series of vignettes, usually a page to a page and a half in length, the book is a well-crafted and selective portrait of the world for young hispanic immigrants.

One of the most effective stylistic choices in the book is Cisneros's mastery of narrative voice. The story is told through a young teen's eyes, and the narrative reads as a closely-edited stream of consciousness that subtly illustrates the wonder, mystery, and innocent despair that accompanies adolescence.

Each story is at once a beautiful photograph of a small corner of Esperanza's ever-expanding world--and a poignant expose of looming issues of maturity, prejudice, and cultural expectations.

The book is not nearly as preachy as it could have been, opting instead to shed light on these overarching issues rather than dwell on them. Esperanza's narrative shows us a young fill who longs to escape the social, cultural, and sexual expectations that everyone else in the neighborhood so easily gives in to. Struggling to hold on to her innocence as long as she can, the plight of each story is to unearth the beauty in the poverty-stricken bubble that Esperanza lives in.

The book's greatest strength is Cisneros's ability to personalize every character in the book, whether their influence is great or small. Whether the reader loves or hates the characters that float--often wordlessly--in and out of Esperanza's stories, they occupy significant space in the book's weighty experience.

A Wind In The Door

This book, though it involves the same characters from A Wrinkle In Time, seems like it is somehow separate from the themes of its predecessor. It feels more metaphysical than A Wrinkle In Time, delving into subjects like the nature of telekinesis, different planes of existence and the realms of consciousness. The majority of the book is involved with "kything" a telepathic form of non-verbal communication.

Though these ideas seem really big, something that stood out to me in A Wind In The Door is the language that L'Engle uses to describe the concepts. It seems as though she went out of her way to explain the abstract issues and ideas in the story in a "dumbed down" way, even going so far as re-wording her explanations later in the story, as a way of helpfully reminding her readers about the general details of her lofty cerebral plot devices.

It is this new development in L'Engle's writing that makes me think she decided to act on some of the criticism she received after publishing A Wrinkle In Time, which claimed that there were too many challenging sentences and vocabulary words for a young audience. This book was published a little more than 10 years after the first installment in the series, so she would have had considerable time to re-work her writing style, but I feel like she missed the mark with A Wind In The Door.

The story was still well presented, though because of the removal of any challenging prose and the over-emphasis on kything, it quickly got slow and uninteresting. There were few worthy sub-plots or mind-bending time travels, though there are instances of altered perception that are intuitive. It just somehow felt like more of a forced children's book than A Wrinkle In Time.

The Giver

The Giver was the designated re-read on my list, and I'm very glad that it was. I remember being in 5th or 6th grade last time I read it, and even back then I knew that it was special somehow. It easily falls into the category of books that I love simply for their originality, diction and presentation. So far, out of all the books I have read this semester, it is my favorite.

Among some of the things that stood out to me upon re-reading it, I focused closer on the details of the dystopian community in the book. I feel as though, over the years, The Giver has been lumped along with other books in a genre simply labeled something like "YA Dystopian Sci-Fi" but now I find I have a hard time classifying it. I don't want to label it, really. I think that the book, its message, its presentation and its tone are all in a category of their own. That is undoubtedly why I enjoyed it so much.

But what really intrigued me this time was the fact you can so easily argue that the society of "the community" is not the kind of dystopia that makes every shred of humanity in you squirm with discomfort (unlike many traditionally dystopian books). Especially during the first half of the book, I found myself sympathizing with many of the community's methods and reasons for operating the way it does. When, in the course of the unraveling story, unnerving new facts about the society were brought up, I waged a little conflict with myself, trying to decide whether or not the community had more faults than virtues.

Lowry's unique tones of ambiguity and mystery in this book are ideal for generating discussion topics for a class of young adults. My mind was working overtime with all of the activities I could come up with about this story, particularly activities that encouraged my students to take a look at their own community.

The book is unusually brief, in fact it is much shorter than I remember, but this in no way affects its ability to reach out to the reader and draw them into the story. I feel as though Lois Lowry chose her words very carefully (another quality in writing that I prefer) and the story is a perfect balance between correctly chosen scenes and carefully omitted details.

It has come to my knowledge that Walden Media, of Bridge to Terabithia and The Chronicles of Narnia fame, is now in the process of producing a movie adaptation of The Giver. Last I heard, Jeff Bridges was set to star as Giver. Its tentative release date is 2011, but having just been reminded of the richness (and film-ability) of the story, I want it to be out sooner!

Little Brother

I'm not quite sure what to make of Little Brother. I think a lot of my initial wariness stemmed from the fact that I have little in common with Marcus, the main character. Of course, this shouldn't necessarily dictate whether or not I enjoy any book, but in this case it had a lot to do with my connection with the story and the way the book was written. Marcus is a supergeek who has no problem rattling on about the technical specifications of certain types of computer coding and all the mathematical theory that goes along with that. Or, I guess I should say, Cory Doctorow doesn't have a problem doing that.

You see, at no point in the story did I feel as though the narrative I was reading could have actually come from a 17 year old rebel--I was always aware that, at some point, Doctorow was sitting behind his computer, up late at night googling hacker methodologies and trying to break them down in a way that young kids could understand. That made the unraveling of the extremely slow-developing plot harder to get through.

Pages and pages of nothing but copy-and-pasted how-tos about computer hacking. Most of the time they are for fictitious technological devices, so all the passages end up becoming useless or too convoluted to remember exactly what function they serve when they reappear in the story.

Doctorow tries to make a diverse group of sub-characters, but they are never very well developed--they are given a lot of dialogue, but their place within the convoluted homeland security crisis that Doctorow dreams up (which seems contrived and implausible at best) makes their dialogue seem strained and inauthentic. Also, he drops Marcus's three supporting main characters like obsolete VHS tapes before the end of the first half of the book.

Maybe I didn't like it because the tech-savvy geek world that all the characters inhabit is either all too real and beyond my comprehension, or else it doesn't feel nearly plausible enough that anyone would do the things they do in this book. The usage of text-speak and internet lingo in conversation never happens (really it can't happen, at least to the extent that it does in this story) but its use in narrative never should happen, no matter who the audience is.

The initial rising action gripped me and it was surprisingly well written, but then it petered out and the next 3/4 of the book was a compendium of hacker-happy yammering sessions. Praise should be given to Doctorow for attempting, at all odds, to make Marcus's fight against the DHS more plausible, but in this instance, the extra passages of detail cannot hold every reader's full attention.

Not to mention, most of the time, Marcus is fighting for his cause like the short-sighted, idiot 17 year old he is. He is, of course, entitled to his character flaws. But his half-baked reasons for inciting mayhem for the authorities only instigate more DHS crackdowns, and they more often than not get people killed, tortured, or sent to secret prisons. After 400 pages of high-risk, low probability rioting and hacking, the book is brought to a coldly realistic resolution that feels out of place and unsatisfying.

meh

A Wrinkle In Time

I was very impressed with this book. I remember being fascinated by it when I read it in 5th or 6th grade, but I'm glad I chose to read it again--I picked up on L'engle's superior writing much more this time. Her ability to describe emotions, actions, beings, and events that would otherwise defy explanation (and which, most of the time, are either complex abstract ideas or elements which, by definition, do not exist) makes the reading enjoyable and enlightening. She has an extensive and well-expressed vocabulary and an imagination that, were this book written by any popular author fifty years later, it would only be described as "drug-fueled."

The elements of magical realism in this book are through the roof, though they have a firm ground in the notion of physics and other branches of very real science. The religious undertones are certainly there, but because of L'engle's excellent grasp of subtlety, she is able to insert a twelve-line hymn in the middle of the story without the tone of the book ever coming off as preachy.

The elements of fear and confrontation are deep and are made the basis of nearly all the action of the book.

The characters are extremely well developed, and though they border on being too romanticized, their personalities and characteristics end up fitting well with the style of the story.

Overall, the book hesitates on the diving board of character introduction and plot set-up, and then it plunges into the deep end with suspense, mystery, and psychedelic descriptions of mind-bending trips through the fabric of time-space, but the reader never feels as though they will drown.

A criticism (among only a few less mentionable ones) is that the elements of mystery sometimes take precedence in the unraveling of the action, so that the whole book seems as though it never really gets to answer every issue to the greatest extent that it could. I'm not sure how long it was before L'engle wrote the sequels to this book, but it doesn't really stand up on its own that well, given its occasional convolutedness and its abrupt and nearly unresolved ending.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

I really enjoy Sherman Alexie. I read Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven for my American Lit class some time ago, and I instantly liked his style. I have read little else by Native American authors, but I feel as though Alexie's style is unique, yet calculated. I find myself enjoying his tone as it shifts back and forth from cynical and deviant to terse and elegiac. Alexie captures every confused and muddled emotion that has become so associated with Native American history, and his ability to articulate each and every ounce of heartache, loss, satisfaction, or comedy rivals many other authors.

Absolutely True Diary did not disappoint in these areas, despite my initial wariness. I thought going into this book that, since it starred a wise-cracking teenager that it would read as if it were geared specifically towards young adults in a way that took away from what I have grown to appreciate so much in Alexie's writing. Instead, the book dives in headfirst to every last Native American issue, and it doesn't just scratch the surface. Arnold Jr. spells out the adversity he faces in every day life, all along speaking with the tongue-in-cheek sense of self-deprecating humor and dropping signature truth bombs that Alexie has long ago mastered.

The age group of this book's intended audience might float around in the late teens, but anyone, of any age, can get satisfaction from it. I think that this is a great accomplishment. It is also, on some levels, educational. I say this, but I know that it is only educational to the extent that it brings the reader to a certain state of awareness of the Native American situation. Particulars of reservation life are explained, but they are all from Arnold Jr.'s point of view. While the perspective is enlightening, it should be understood that it is only enlightening insofar as it can make readers aware of what is really a much more serious and long-standing problem in America.

There are a few complaints that I have about this book, but they are minor. I think the one that stands out to me the most is the fact that Alexie clearly either read The Catcher in the Rye immediately before penning this book, or he thought that his high-school aged audience would have been able to connect with Arnold better if they had been assigned the book in school. Either way, Arnold uses phrases that, word-for-word, Holden Caulfield uses in Catcher, and I think that it is pretty much an inexcusable oversight on the part of Alexie and his editor.