Whiny Kid: Hangin' Out With Cici

Francine Pascal's Hangin' Out With Cici is the last book I read for the Shelf Awareness Challenge. It's from Chapter 7, and is my 7th book. I'm quite sure I haven't read this book before, because the whiny tone of the narrator seared into my brain, and the scars are life-long. If not longer.

Victoria, the whiny narrator, gets flung back in time where she befriends her young mother. Then she gets flung back where she gets along better with her mom because now she knows her mom used to be nice. And a crazy trouble-maker. The premise is fun, but the main character is a trial, being petty, self-centered, and not that bright. I'm not sure why the mom found her such an immediately great friend. I'm glad Pascal pulled back from her characters a bit for the hundreds of Sweet Valley High books.

This is the last day of the Shelf Awareness Challenge, and I managed to read 7 of the 8 books I wanted. I couldn't find any of my selections from Chapter 8 in my local libraries, and I wasn't ready to perform heroic searches. It was fun going back to the sort of books I read back then, and seeing what I like now and what I would have liked then. I think the tone and poetry of the book matter more now; I don't demand beauty but I'm impatient with ugliness. I guess that means I'm getting old.

Wimpy Parents: Domestic Arrangements

I skipped to the last chapter for this Shelf Discovery book, because I'm finding Cici (Chapter 7) rather whiny. I remember Norma Klein as writing about well-off New York City types, which fits with the city family in Domestic Arrangements. The most mature person in the family is fourteen year old Rusty, who has heard her parents talk about self expression and freedom and modern times all her life, and who really thinks people believe in that stuff. So she is surprised when her parents, well, actually only her father, gets so upset when he finds her having sex with her sixteen year old boyfriend.

The father can't bear to be the kind of old fogey who says "no," so instead he tries to have conversations about maturity and emotional consequences, but it's clear he has no idea what he is talking about. I wish he'd mention venereal disease sometime, though. Rusty knows about pregnancy (she asks for a diaphragm for Christmas), but the other dangers of sex are an unknown to her. Since the family already allowed Rusty to pose topless in a movie production, he's lost all the moral credibility he occasionally wishes he had. The mom thinks that everyone should feel comfortable exploring whatever they feel comfortable with, and Rusty takes a long time to figure out it's OK to say "no" to her boyfriend. (She already knows how to say "yes" when she wants to.) It's up to Rusty to figure out appropriate boundaries for herself since her parents are utterly useless in giving any guidance, even when she asks for some. But Rusty probably will be all right, since she does have faith in herself. I'm very glad she turned down the role of Lolita, though.

As a kid, I would have thoroughly enjoyed this titillating book, rooting for the sweet and generous Rusty and being glad that she didn't have to suffer for her lack of virginity (she even has unprotected sex once and gets away with it!). As a parent, I want to throw rotten tomatoes at her family and her boyfriend.

Hey, my library shelves this in Adult Fiction. I guess it was written before YA had its own shelves, but that's kinda funny. B+

Mommy Meanest: Don't Hurt Laurie

Poor Laurie. Willo Davis Roberts just won't let her catch a break in Don't Hurt Laurie. Her mother is a good stepmom to her new husband's kids, but when mom gets stressed she beats her own daughter. The stepdad travels a lot, so he doesn't really notice anything, and mom is smart enough to make sure they move frequently, so there is always a new hospital to take the abused child to.

But Laurie is plucky and keeps looking for reasons to be happy, including the new friend they make who shares a secret puppy with her. Sadly, the new friend has some mysterious disease that keeps him back in the hospital for operations, and the secret puppy chews his rope and comes bounding up to stress out mom. But don't give up! Laurie's step brother knows that it is just not right for an adult to beat a child with a poker, so he helps them all head for his grandmother's house. She's sensible, so mom is talked into going for counseling, and and soon as she is all better, the kids will go home. Police involvement not necessary.

Reading this as a kid, I'd appreciate the child centered options and solutions; Roberts has written many books that I enjoy. As an adult, I was appalled at how hard it was for Laurie to get help, and how easily the fix was presented. I read it as much as a sign of how attitudes have changed as for itself. This is my fifth chapter book for the Shelf Discovery Challenge. C+

Dead Sister: Beat the Turtle Drum

Since the Shelf Discovery Challenge is about to end, I have to hurry up and review the books I read. My Chapter 4 pick was Beat the Turtle Drum, by Constance C. Green, about two sisters who are good friends. Joss, the younger girl, is ready to celebrate her birthday with the gift of a horse in the garage for a week. The sisters are shown as good friends; different enough to irritate each other sometimes but also loyal and valuing their respective strengths. So it's rather sad when one sister falls out of a tree and dies (while the older one watches).The rest of the book covers the grief of the family, shock and rage and disbelief and denial and through to a hope of acceptance. It's a well done book, with little sentimentality but a lot of telling detail. I would have hated it as a child because I had a little sister and I would not want to practice her death. I wonder if I read it and managed to forget it? I did have a bit of deja vu as I read.I do have one question -- what is a turtle drum? Did I just miss that? B

Kids Making Good: The Grounding of Group Six

My next book for the Shelf Discovery Challenge is The Grounding of Group Six, by Julian F. Thompson. To my confusion, the copyright date was 1997, which makes me much much older than the original Shelf Discovery author, but closer inspection says it was originally published in 1983. I wonder what he changed for the new edition? Anyone know? The clothing makes a lot more sense in the original date.

I also found out that the author's name is Julian, not Julia as I thought for the past quarter century. I had skipped this book thinking it was all about the romance, and I bet a lot of that assumption was based on the author being a girl. Of course, a lot of this book IS about the romance, but a lot is about the hiding from the evil murderers. Five kids and a counselor head off into the wilderness, but will any of them come back? Will anyone not get laid? Because the new school is not all it seems...

I bet I would have enjoyed it a lot back in the day. It was pretty fun now, but I had a more detached perspective, watching the three girls pair up with the three boys (well, two boys and an awfully young "teacher"). It's also fun coming as a parent to the description of the five awful parents who pay for the grounding (permanent, as in in the ground) of their failed children. I suspect I had more sympathy with them now than then. And I had more of a gut issue with the pairing of the twenty-two year old with one of the sixteen year olds, even though he was a very immature guy in a lot of ways. It's good that it's a fast read, because otherwise the basic premise is a bit dodgy -- their decision to hang out lurking in the woods next to the murderers instead of driving away is rather odd. But suspenseful! Will Sully make a move on Sara? Will the sniper shoot her on the way to the cottage? Will they find proof before they get caught? B

To Take a Dare

My second book for the Shelf Discovery Challenge features a life as exotic to me now as it would have been back then. To Take a Dare, my selection from the second chapter, "She's At That Age: Girls on the Verge," is by Paul Zindel, an author I knew and read in junior high, and Crescent Dragonwagon, whom I am sure I have never heard of before. The protagonist has a lousy family (this seems familiar to Zindel readers) and her early-developing and large breasts change the way everyone treats her, until she runs away from home and carves out her own life. I have to say, this book doesn't really seem to fit in with the others in that chapter; the protagonist, Chrysta, isn't so much dealing with puberty (although that hits her hard and knocks her down in the beginning chapters) but with premature adulthood. Her problems don't really belong in the same focus group as a Judy Blume character, or even a L'Engle.

It's narrated in first person, so you see Chrysta's tough persona and hear the basic goodness inside. She even mentions that she lives a charmed life -- no drugs, not much violence, and she's good at finding jobs and getting along. Honestly, that's the part that amazes me the most -- I still find the prospect of moving to a new town and finding a job and an apartment rather daunting, but she handled it dozens of times before she turned fifteen. The title explicitly refers to Dare, the young boy she tries to mentor (almost adopt). She finds a job, finds love, even finds a career, and also finds that some mistakes can't be fixed, some choices have irrevocable consequences. But I'm still stuck on that find-an-apartment thing...

It's different from most books nowadays; it preaches different messages, and leaves out a lot of common currency nowadays (no AIDS, no crippling trauma from sexual abuse). It doesn't make me want to drive my children from my home at age thirteen, but it does make me interested in knowing real people who followed their own paths so young. B

Ludell

This is my first post for the Shelf Discovery Challenge, after actually reading that book. I'm trying to read one book per section, and for the first chapter, "Still Checked Out: YA Heroines We'll Never Return" I only had one choice, Ludell by Brenda Wilkinson. Well, I may reread Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself because my only memory is reading it, so I'm not sure it counts.

Ludell is the only non-white heroine in the chapter, and her accent was hard for me at first, keeping me distant. The pace of the book also seemed jerky or syncopated -- jumps in time, then concentrated pages. But as I eased into Ludell's life, I started to really enjoy her story and the depiction of her life. I even liked the occasional jumps into the heads of the adults around her, which gave an added dimension to the book. All the other books in this chapter feature comfortably middle-class kids (like I was), so Ludell's life in segregated Georgia seemed even more remote. Yet like all kids she could rely on the parents around her to keep her safe, even if that parent was her grandmother. She had friends to rely on or who let her down. She had goals and dreams, sometimes even realistic ones. I think I'll try to hunt up the sequels, and I like the final chapters with their emphasis on her blossoming writing skills. B+

Blast From the Past: Shelf Discovery

Lizzie Skurnick writes breezy reviews of books she remembered from her teens growing up for the Jezebel web site. She's about the same age as me, so our reading overlapped quite a bit. She gathered many of those commentaries, and wrote some more, for this lively collection (Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading: a Reading Memoir) that brings those books back to vivid memory. She organizes the books into various categories (Heroines, Puberty, Tear-Jerkers, etc.) and also sometimes invites other people to contribute their own essays. Her tone is light and cheerful, occasionally mentioning darker concerns or marveling at the ability of her younger self to overlook flaws or enjoy painful sections.

The book was a good reminder of many stories I enjoyed those decades ago, and a fun chance to dig up the few that I missed. There's also a challenge running along with it; I considered skipping the essays on the books I still have to read but then decided that was far too much organization for me. Not a deep book, but a fun one. It would be interesting to have a male bibliophile check it out to see how much lower his match rate was. B.

PS. It is sad how long it took me to get the pun in the title. Self Discovery/Shelf Discovery. My only excuse is that I find the latter much more interesting than the former. That's why libraries are so much more fun than meditation.

Shelf Challenge

Time for another challenge, because all the cool kids are doing it. At least until they hear I've joined in. And I have the key book already -- I'm about to start Shelf Discovery, and Booking Mama has announced a challenge to read six books from the many described in there. So I browsed through the table of contents, and found the books that I either haven't read or can't remember squat about.

My six picks for the challenge, taken one from each chapter, are:

1. Ludell. I've put in an ILL, but just in case, the backup book is Starring Sally J Freedman As Herself, which I cannot remember an iota of.

2. To Take a Dare. On hold. There are two others in this section I haven't read, but that's a later challenge. (Sister of the Bride and Caroline, if you are wondering.)

3. The Grounding of Group 6. I think this is the one I always meant to read but didn't, so I've summoned it via the magic of the library. The others I can't remember are: Daughters of Eve, Summer of Fear, and Secret Lives. I'll hold them in reserve in case I find I remember the 6.

4. Beat the Turtle Drum. The Gift of the Pirate Queen will be a good reserve.

5. Don't Hurt Laurie! is a book I heard about somewhere else lately, so it beats out Are You in the House Alone? despite the name Richard Peck on the cover.

6. I've, er, read all of these. I liked them all, too.

7. Hangin' Out with Cici will be my sixth book, although there are three others I don't think I've read here: Stranger With My Face, Jane-Emily, and Down a Dark Hall.

The other chapters will be optional extra credit, depending on my whim and OCD desire to check off at least one from each list.

8. Ooo, ick, love stories. I'll try Happy Endings Are All Alike but if it's too sappy I have In Summer Light and To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie as possibilities.

9. Um, read them all again. What a nifty feeling.

10. I can't believe how few of the naughty books I've read. I'll try Domestic Arrangements because I trust Norma Klein more than V.C. Andrews (Sweet Audrina), and I suspect I've just repressed Wifey.

I haven't forgotten my other challenge. I'm still clearing off my shelves, sorta. In October I read about 23 books, 5 of them old. So I'm on track with my 20% goal. Of course, this recent glut of library books isn't helping. Maybe I should count books I've had out for over six weeks...