This is supposed to blow your freaking mind.

I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President
by Josh Lieb
Published by Razorbill, 2009
ISBN 1595142401
Pages: 304
Ages: Middle School through YA
Lexile: 780L

Sometimes you’re excited about books being adapted into movies – especially if your little heart swells to think of the royalties going to the author. Other times, other books, the idea of a film adaptation is, at best, cringe-worthy. This is one such book. It’s coming to the big screen sometime this year, and I just simply cannot imagine how they can take this hilarious gem of a book and effectively translate it to video.

I first picked up this book based on its deliciously verbose title and its endorsement from Jon Stewart (“If War and Peace had a baby with The Breakfast Club and then left the baby to be raised by wolves, this book would be the result. I loved it.”) When I discovered that its author was one of Stewart’s executive producers, and that it had come out in paperback, I could no longer resist its evil, evil charms.

I was quite wrong about it, though. I thought Genius was going to be more or less realistic fiction about an over-intelligent, misanthropic kid running for student body. As it turns out, I was a tiny bit wrong about that “realistic fiction” bit. The story’s protagonist is Oliver Watson, a thirteen-year-old kid who may be overweight but who is also the third wealthiest person in the world. An evil genius, he built his fortune from a single petty crime (stealing some money from his mother’s purse)  and carved out an empire of subterranean tunnels accessible from his bedroom or a secret locker passageway. He’s a blimp-piloting, minion-smacking, evil gadget-inventing mastermind who, as a seventh grader, holds the strings of any number of puppet corporations and countries.

Oliver is determined not to divulge his crazily successful alter ego, and so he lives his life as a very convincing idiot. He’s got everyone fooled into thinking his shoe size exceeds his IQ – classmates, teachers, even his mother and, importantly, his father. It turns out that Oliver is motivated, not by greed, respect, or a desire to change the world, but by a consuming dislike for what he sees as his self-interested and small-minded father.

He’s also motivated by puppy love, but that’s another story.

As Oliver’s best intentions fall apart around him, he ends up in an amusingly messed-up race for student body president, gets cut down a size or two, and maybe even grows up a little bit. But that’s not why you should read it; you should read it for the footnotes.

I’d say that Genius would be what happened if a Daily Show writer re-wrote Catcher in the Rye as a superhero comic book, but since that’s basically what this is, I guess I’ll just say that it’s now available in paperback and as a $6 hardcover through Amazon. If you’re ready for a good, smart laugh, find yourself a copy and buckle your seatbelt.

Back to School!

Some of us have already been back to school for a couple of weeks now (where does the time go?) but it always seems like September truly heralds the start of the school year. To celebrate, Great Perhaps is going to read some books about school and the extraordinary – and sometimes awful – lives that are being lived within them.

Our tentative reading list, in arbitrary order, includes:

Columbine by Dave Cullen

I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb

Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga

King Dork by Frank Portman

and Stargirl and Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, because we are just now getting around to this charming story.

 Feel free to join us this September as we read!

Perhaps a Hiatus

The Great Perhaps is going to take a brief-ish hiatus for the month of August to recover from summer courses, prepare for teaching, and deal with some family stuff. We’ll be “back to school” in September – check back soon!

In the meantime, check out some of the great links in the right sidebar, or log off and spend some quality time with your favorite bookstore or library.

Teens Reading 3: Fat Kid Rules the World

Silly Princess Bride Clippings

Last year, I had a great time teaching satire, characterization, plot structure, and parody to my sophomores using The Princess Bride. Several of them listed it as their favorite book they’d yet read in school.

You could probably work in a nice mini-lesson about tone and context by using something like this Princess Bride re-cut movie trailer, which turns the relatively lighthearted fairy tale into a horror flick:

 

And I just loved this cartoon found on Twaggies, a website that takes funny Tweets and illustrates them. You’d have to decide whether it was appropriate for your specific group of kids and school, but still: hilarious.

 

Bookending the LGBTQ Book Club

This has been a significant month in my life as a human and especially as an educator.

I have to confess that I had my doubts about pursuing young adult LGBTQ literature for this project. I wavered, considering several less risky options. But in the end, I decided to take that last step off the high jump.

Since making that decision, I’ve encountered some exceptional and some less-than-exceptional writing. I’ve met some amazing characters and some who faded into the wallpaper (not including, of course, any wallflowers). I’ve stepped into some truly unforgettable fictional lives, and shared true secrets with some breathtakingly honest memoirists.

All of that could have happened, however, no matter what theme I’d chosen to pursue.

On top of all that… I’ve learned. I’ve learned how much I didn’t know, and how much I’d learned that was wrong, and I’ve begun filling those holes and rotten places in with reality. I’ve seen my own bias, and having seen it and confronted it with the knowledge I’d gained, I’ve scrubbed much of it away. (Homophobia, it turns out, isn’t just spewing hate speech and physically harming others – it’s all of the little misconceptions we harbor, all of the queasiness we try to hide, all of the awkwardness we feel.)

I’ve experienced a tiny taste of what it must be like, as an LGBTQ teen, to find books that apply to one’s life. I’ve gone to the bookstore and waded through the Disapproving Old Boys’ Club, all standing around flipping through military history books, to get to the out-of-the-way and tiny selection of LGBTQ literature; I’ve felt their stares and heard their little sounds of disgust as I sat down to browse. Another bookstore put their LGBTQ literature next to books on marriage and divorce; the two women browsing those shelves backed away from me and fled when I began digging through the gay/lesbian memoirs. I’ve spent hours browsing our local libraries’ online catalogues, collecting long lists of NO RECORD FOUND notices. We have a local bookstore chain that is (as local rumor has it) owned by the LDS church. It’s one of the best places in the community for teachers to buy books, due to their deep discount program, or to find high-quality used books. This bookstore chain is apparently exercising a silent boycott of YA authors who write about LGBTQ characters or issues – prolific, award-winning authors simply don’t exist on their shelves. Practically every store that did have a LGBTQ section squished it up against the Erotica shelves, as if to reinforce the idea that homosexuality is equivalent to over-the-top sexual expression.

Best of all, I’ve gotten mad.

These are people. These are my students. I have had and always will have LGBTQ students and students with LGBTQ family members and friends. Our schools go out of their way to represent and celebrate pretty much every other minority. I’m not saying we need to drop everything and have schoolwide Pride Months, but don’t our LGBTQ students deserve access to books with protagonists whose lives and problems resemble their own?

No teacher that I’ve ever known would stand by and allow students (or, heaven forbid, school staff/faculty) to say “nigger” or to tear down another student based on their ethnicity. I’d like to think that teachers wouldn’t permit aggressively sexist behavior or speech, either. Why then, do teachers turn a blind ear to the word “faggot”? Why do teachers allow kids to say “that’s so gay” – why do teachers say it, too?

This isn’t about politics. It isn’t about religion. It’s about kids. If nothing else, as a teacher I have a professional responsibility to differentiate, to know my students, and to help them. I have a professional responsibility to strive to provide a safe learning environment for all my students. It’s not necessary for a teacher to agree with something or like something in order to provide it to a student in need.

I’m not entirely certain how to fight this fight. The first step is easy: put these books on my classroom library shelves, not quarantined in their own little section but intermingled in with all the other stories for real teens. It’s what comes next that is unclear. I have the words, the statistics, and the anecdotes ready for the moment if when I am confronted by parents or fellow educators. What I don’t know is how to address something I experienced last year: the exaggerated sounds of disgust as a student reads the back cover flap, the moment when I realize that an easily offended, deeply conservative student has unwittingly picked up an LGBTQ book to take home with her, the nasty comments buzzing around the bookshelves. I have just under a month to come up with my battle plan, because I believe in this and am not going to walk away from it. I hope to find some of the tools I need from the Think B4 You Speak campaign and GLSEN’s Safe School Kit.

I’m ready to read something else, but I have really truly enjoyed this past month. If I can keep the momentum rolling during the school year, I’ll look forward to revisiting LGBTQ literature for teens next year – goodness knows I didn’t get through half of the books I collected this time!

If you’re interested, the packet I put together for my presentation on LGBTQ lit for teens is available here.

Teens Reading 2: It Girl

(c) 2010 Meredith Hoffman. Please contact artist at moonchild13 (at) gmail for permission to reproduce.

All This Will End at Midnight

Ash
by Malinda Lo
Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2009
ISBN 9780316040099
Pages: 264
Ages: YA
Lexile: 1050L
Awards: Andre Norton Award Nominee, William C. Morris YA Award Finalist, Kirkus Best Young Adult Novel, Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Everyone loves a Cinderella story, even (or especially) sports fans who never acquainted themselves with the Brothers Grimm. It’s an ancient tale, with early versions traceable as far back as the 1st century BC, and variations appearing in different cultures including Ancient Egypt, China, the Philippines, the Arab nations, and your usual line-up of European peoples. Today, the Cinderella theme shows up again and again in movies, television, sports legacies, and of course books.

Malinda Lo has unwoven the Cinderella story and re-knit it into the somberly beautiful Ash. Ash, or Aisling, is the requisite girl orphaned and left in the care of her cruel stepmother and thoughtless stepsisters. In this telling, Ash’s parents illustrated the transition between the older pagan beliefs of their land (magic and fairies, in which her mother believed) and the new scientific beliefs moving in (her father’s beliefs). Ash is caught in the rift, wondering why her parents loved each other so much but were unable to see eye to eye about the nature of their world.

Ash succumbs to a natural grief and denial after her mother’s death; the supernatural comes in to play when she tries to slip away with the fairies’ Wild Hunt in order to rejoin her mother beyond the veil. One of the fairies turns her back, though, and becomes a constant haunting presence in her dreams. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that there is some strange bond between the fairy, Sidhean (pronounced sheen), and Ash. Later, he will help Ash in the same way that Cinderella’s fairy godmother helped her. All the while, Ash begs Sidhean to take her away with him, to stay with her and take her away from the painful life she lives.

The plot breaks away from the familiar story with the introduction of the King’s Huntress, an office held by a series of women whose clothing, mannerisms, and relationships stand in stark contrast to the feminine finery of other women in the kingdom. As Ash reaches her late teens, she meets Kaisa (KY-suh), the King’s Huntress, and is fascinated. It’s a gently drawn fascination – is Ash envious of her freedom and confidence? Desirous of a friend and confidante? Admiring of a strong and kind female role model?

Ultimately, as familiar Cinderella plot points drip beautifully through Lo’s filter, the situation crystallizes. Ash is infatuated with Sidhean and with the idea of regaining what she has lost – or at least, of losing the pain. And just as Ash has within her grasp the power to join Sidhean forever, she discovers that she has a reason to live and love in the world of the living. It’s certainly true that this is, as fairy tale retellings go, a lesbian retelling – but it isn’t a (cue exaggerated broadcaster voice) “gay book”. It’s a story about the complexities of love, the process of navigating grief, and that all-important choice between holding on to the past and embracing the future.

This book hit all the right chords for me. I’m nuts for fairy tales, so it really had me at “retelling of Cinderella”. I loved the Irish names. I loved the idea of the King’s Huntress, the humanization of Sidhean, the light hand Lo has as she paints what turns out to be an intricate layer of symbolism. And after reading some considerably more heavy-handed approaches in LGBTQ literature, I loved that Lo didn’t make this a book about lesbianism. This is what I hoped to find: a book with characters that we care about, that we respect and root for, who incidentally happen to not be straight.

This is one of the books I checked out from the library that I’ll be looking to purchase – maybe a copy for home, too – and I’ll be looking for more books by Lo in the future. Apparently there’s a forthcoming book set in the same universe, about new characters, including some who are lesbian; maybe I’ll be able to review it in a 2011 LGBTQ book club! I enjoyed browsing her website, particularly her four-part article about avoiding LGBTQ stereotypes when writing YA fiction (link goes to part 1).

Postmodern Tinkerbell, My Ass

Empress of the World
by Sara Ryan
Published by Speak (Penguin Group), 2001
ISBN 0142500593
Pages: 213
Ages: YA
Awards: ALA Best Book for Young Adults, Lambda Book Award Finalist, Booklist Top Ten Teen Romance, Oregon Book Award

As I finish reading Empress of the World, I am wondering wherein lies the correlation. The majority of the books I’ve been reading for the LGBTQ Book Club feature teens who are not only LGBTQ, but also brilliant. Do authors feel uncomfortable writing average (or, heaven forbid, unintelligent) gay characters? Are the sort of authors with the guts to write about such things also the sort of authors who want to write smart characters? Or am I unconsciously selecting books that feature interesting, intelligent characters? I’m thinking all three ideas may be correct; goodness knows I’m often guilty of the last.

Empress takes place at a summer camp for brainy kids at a local college. The teens are taking a wide variety of college-level mini-courses, learning more about topics from music theory to computer programming. Our narrator and protagonist is Nicola, who has come to camp to study archeology and determine whether she wants to be an archeologist when she grows up.

Ultimately, the main thing Nicola seems to learn about archeology (since she’s already more savvy about the subject than most of the other kids in her class) is that it all depends on grants and fundraising. Instead of archeology, Nicola learns about her heart – specifically, that it can fall for, and be broken by, a girl.

This book is the story of the romance that blooms, explodes, collapses, and regenerates between Nicola and a female camp-mate, Battle. It’s a story about young love, and it’s – more directly so than some of the other books I’ve read – a story about lesbian love. Indirectly, it’s a story about (obviously) coming-of-age, exploring possibilities at that crucial pre-college transition point in our lives, and negotiating expectations. It is really well-written, and the language, story, and narrator’s voice kept me engaged to the end.

On the flip side, as a character-driven reader, I felt uneasy about the two central characters’ development. Battle is, in many ways, the more interesting character. Her father is a minister whose past life as an actor suggests a certain artificiality in his life, and her mother has an idealized vision for Battle that is seemingly devoid of interest in what Battle actually feels or wants. Battle’s absent brother is a dark shadow in her life, and all of the affection she would have focused on her brother and her distant parents is poured into her two corgis. Rejecting her mother’s autumn-in-the-Hamptons vision for her, Battle shaves her head bare and begins a passionate romance with Nicola. Frustratingly, the summary I’ve provided in this paragraph is almost as much insight as Ryan gives us about Battle. There is so much provocative material to work with, and yet Battle is still drawn in two dimensions – a caricature of a rebellious preacher’s daughter away at summer camp.

We have so much more insight into Nicola, as the book is written from her perspective – and we have the added benefit of glimpsing into her “field notes” that she keeps throughout the camp. And yet there’s a curious hole in all that remarkable character development. One moment, Nicola is thinking about her (male) crush from high school and being slightly surprised at how riveting she finds a female camp-mate, and the next moment she’s as comfortable in a physically-intimate lesbian relationship as if she had been in one her entire life. There’s never any fear or doubt, and despite being a painfully reflective person, she doesn’t really try to understand whether she is lesbian, straight, or bisexual until the book is nearly over. I kept wondering how realistic her almost thoughtless coming-out could be – does anyone just come out, to themselves and their friends, so seamlessly and quickly? (It’s a sincere question – I don’t know. But it struck me as being a little too tidy.)

I see, on Ryan’s website, that she’s written a sequel that apparently focuses on Battle and her estranged brother. I’m hoping to track it down and see Battle’s character rendered into 3D, even though I’m a little disappointed that the blurb seems to suggest that Nicola won’t be making a reappearance. She was a fun character, and I’d like to see what happens to her as she grows up, too.

Confession: This book pushes my comfort level a little bit; I would have to have a very good relationship with a student before I’d recommend it, and there’s a part of me that squirms when I imagine leaving it on the shelves for students to browse. There’s no graphic sexual details, but it’s very clear that Nicola and Battle shed clothing and are intimate, and there are some mildly crude (but wickedly funny and realistic) comments between the teens. Maybe it’s just because it’s late at night and I’ve been thinking about some of my more conservative students today, but… yeah. I’m squirmy. That being said, it will be on my shelves. It’s a good story, and it may be exactly what some of my students need to read.

I Have a Banana in My Ear

Totally Joe
by James Howe
Published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2005
ISBN 068983957X
Pages: 189
Ages: Middle Level
Awards: ALA Notable Children’s Book, Lambda Literary Award Nominee (Children’s/Young Adult)

I’d like to think that there are precious few people out there who didn’t have the childhood joy of reading James Howe’s Bunnicula books. (I, myself, will never forget my embarrassment after discovering and sharing the titular pun in The Celery Stalks at Midnight with my trying-hard-not-to-laugh parents.) At the time that Howe first wrote about his vege-vampire rabbit, he was married to the first of his two wives. His writing career didn’t really take off until the early 1980s, about the same time that he came out as a gay man. Since then he has written more than seventy books, including the much-acclaimed Misfits and its stand-alone sequel, Totally Joe.

I couldn’t get hold of Misfits, but I found and quickly fell in love with Totally Joe. Finally, here was a laugh-out-loud funny book about a boy who liked other boys – no misery, doom, gloom, profanity, or allusions to sordid sex. It’s probably the gayest book I’ve read so far (if you measure gayness in terms of flamboyance, which is pretty unsuitable, but probably unavoidable) but at the same time, it is the most innocent and sweet.

The protagonist and narrator, Joe Bunch, is a twelve-year-old student who has been assigned to write an “alphabiography” of his life. The book, presented as his completed assignment, is broken into 26 abecedarian chapters, each representing some aspect of his life as it unfolds during his seventh grade year. B is for Boy, and what it means to be a boy, and how he can’t make himself fit within that mold. D is for Dating, and his musings about how his straight friends can publicly date while he and his boyfriend almost have to pretend not to know one another. Q is for Questions. S is for Surprises. X, predictably, is for Xylophone; unpredictably, it may be the funniest chapter (at least for this keyboard percussionist) of the book.

Even at the age of twelve, Joe is pretty comfortable with himself and the fact that he isn’t, as he puts it, a guy-guy. He sometimes wears nail polish, gets his ear pierced, and enthuses about weddings, fashion, Cher, and cooking. He’s precocious in that regard, but his maturity is realistically inconsistent as he expresses disgust at things like “exchanging saliva.” Perhaps the least realistic thing about him is his restraint and patience in interacting with his friend-turned-boyfriend-turned-nonfriend-turned-friend, who can’t yet be as comfortable with his sexual identity. Even so, Joe is vividly drawn, loveable, and so, so funny.

The silent counterpart to Joe is the teacher, Mr. Daly, for whom Joe is writing. Even though we never hear or see Mr. Daly, except for brief moments when Joe describes school events that include the teacher, he serves as a solid sounding board for Joe as he verbally explores his feelings. Structurally, this is like a younger, light-hearted version of Perks of Being a Wallflower; even though the “listeners” are invisible, they play a crucial role in the protagonist’s development. Joe’s trust in Mr. Daly is heartwarming, and I found myself envying him as he was placed in that position of trust.

One line in particular stood out to me. It is spoken about a school administrator who changes his mind about a proposed GSA club, and I think it’s something that all we teachers ought to bear in mind: “It’s nice to know that educators can be educated.” I’m going to try to talk more about that at the end of this whole reading experiment, but in short: I’m learning so much from these books, and it seems to me that other educators could do the same.

Oh, and I totally want my students to write alphabiographies now.