Pixiepalace

A recent School Library Journal article stated:

“Don’t expect to see Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches (Abrams/Amulet, 2009) at Scholastic school book fairs this year. It’s been censored—at least for now—due to its language and homosexual content.”

This statement was thoroughly backed up:

“But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.”

“The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as “geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple.”

“Scholastic defended the move. “Authors are often given the opportunity to make changes in the books to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs,” adds Kyle Good, a Scholastic spokeswoman, explaining that the title will, however, be available in the Scholastic Book Club catalog.”

Scholastic responded to this article quickly. Their response gave the impression that they were having a very visceral reaction to having been called out for censoring a book:

“School Library Journal inaccurately stated that we censored the book. We review thousands of books each year and only a limited number can be carried in our channels.” – Kyle Good commenting on the SLJ article and the same comment was repeated verbatim on the Scholastic blog with pictures of their Book Club catalogs featuring the book to reinforce the statement

“Scholastic does not censor books. We review thousands of titles each year for our book clubs and book fairs, and we are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents. In an interview with School Library Journal, Scholastic stated that we are currently carrying Luv Ya Bunches by Lauren Myracle in our school book clubs. We also said we were still reviewing the book for possible inclusion in our book fairs. Having completed our review of Luv Ya Bunches, Scholastic Book Fairs will carry the title in our spring fairs for middle school. Scholastic is proud of our long history of providing books that will appeal to the wide range of interests and reading abilities of children in the many diverse cultures and communities we serve. Luv Ya Bunches is just one example.” – On the Scholastic blog later, after much outcry arose in response to the SLJ article

The controversy over the book has been covered all over the internet, so I’m not going to go into it. Besides, as much as I wholeheartedly agree that it’s a really important issue, I don’t think that the reasons the book were censored are the most interesting part of this whole thing. I think that Scholastc’s knee-jerk reaction to a word is the most interesting part.

Scholastic repeated and vociferously claimed that they do not censor books, that they did not censor this book. But they have not countered or refuted any of the specific claims of the article, despite being repeatedly asked and given the chance to do so. Given that, it’s hard not to assume that they are, in fact, true statements concerning what occurred. And if that is the case, than Scholastic needs to dig out their dictionary (they publish several, so they must have some laying around they could check).

The word “censor” has a few meanings, but two particularly apply to how it is being used in this context. Seeing as I don’t happen to have a Scholastic dictionary on hand, I’ll provide examples of definitions from multiple other sources. The first is it’s meaning as a transitive verb.

- “to examine and expurgate” (American Heritage)
- “to examine and act upon as a censor or to delete (a word or passage of text) in one’s capacity as a censor” (Dictionary.com)
- “to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable or to suppress or delete as objectionable” (Merriam-Webster).

The second is one of the word’s meanings as a noun.

- “an authorized examiner of literature, plays or other material, who may prohibit what he considers morally or otherwise objectionable” (American Heritage)
- “an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds” (Dictionary.com)
- “an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter” (Merriam-Webster).

So now that we’ve got a good definition, let’s look back at the evidence stating Scholastic was censoring Love Ya Bunches.

1. The publisher has a “review process”, which rejected Love Ya Bunches on the grounds that it had “offensive language and same-sex parents”. According to our definition, any “review process” that rejects a book on the basis of “offensive” content of any kind, whether it offends them or not, is censoring.

2. Scholastic says “authors are often given the opportunity to make changes in the books to meet the norms of the various communities that host the fairs”, which implies that they want the author to “expurgate”, “suppress”, or “delete” whatever it is that the “review process” determined needed fixing. Again, that matches our definition of “censor”.

If a censor is someone who “examines” media “for objectionable matter” (such as offensive language and same-sex parents) “in order to suppress or delete” said objectionable material (like, for example, asking the author to change it or refusing to carry it in a certain venue), then it seems that Scholastic has no leg to stand on in their claims of not censoring. In fact, it sounds like Scholastic censors everything they carry, it’s just that not everything is found to have “objectionable material”.

Words matter, and as as publishers and proponents of education Scholastic should know that. In fact, they should be among the first to stand up and defend language and encourage proper usage and respect for words. You can’t pick and choose – if you’re going to be a champion of something, you have to defend it even when you don’t like it. That means that even when you come up against a word you don’t like, if you claim to care about language the way Scholastic tries to through it’s educational publications and programs, then you have to accept and even defend it anyway.

That’s not to say that review processes and boards don’t have their place, because they do. But don’t rail against it when someone accurately calls them on being censors. Being a censor doesn’t have to be a bad thing A mom censors a TV show when she decides her three-year-old shouldn’t watch The Sopranos and changes the channel, but that doesn’t make her wrong for having done so.

Words are important and it’s worth defending them, even the ones you don’t like.

“But to malign writing for killing women when killing said women is a way of giving them the ultimate praise, of saying they’re the most important part of the life of a given character, hardly seems to be sexism to me. If anything, it is merely guilty of being an overdone plot device.” – Neal Bailey

Ok, so I’ve heard the argument that killing, raping, maiming, whatever a character as motivation for another character is actually a compliment to them because it shows how much they are loved before, but this goes a step beyond. The above quote is from a blog post. “Women in Refrigerators” is a phrase coined by Gail Simone and refers to the trend in comic books where female characters are killed or assaulted and seriously disabled somehow in order to provide a motivation for the male heroes in their lives.

I’m not going to argue that attacking the loved ones of a hero provides him or her a strong motivation, but I do have to wonder what villain in their right mind would possibly want to make a superhero that mad at them. I mean, seriously, do you really want a grieving husband or wife with superpowers coming after you? Really? That might deserve being thought through a little more before you actually attack his wife or her husband. But it’s motivation, and from the writer’s point of view, that’s the important point. I get that. And there can be times when it works. They may have had Joker shoot Barbara Gordon as incentive for Batman to hunt Joker, but she’s become a better character for it having happened. That event isn’t remembered as being about Batman, it’s remembered as being about Barbara.

And that’s the key point here. Women are people too and their motivations and hopes and dreams are their own. Yes, just as men are motivated by what happens to their wives, girlfriends and mothers, women are motivated by what happens to their husbands, boyfriends and fathers. Somehow, though, that doesn’t seem to matter. Female heroes rarely have family members stuck in refrigerators. And when the men do, it’s often forgotten after a few issues (Ralph Dibny may have morned his wife until he joined her in death, but more often it feels like the writers have forgotten the incident even happened a few issues later).

If a woman is her own person, even if she’s just a background character we never got to know, it can never be the “ultimate praise” for her to be killed to show that she’s the most important part of someone else’s life. Yes, it is possible for someone’s death to be the most meaningful thing that ever happened to them, but that involves them owning their death. It’s not that the person has to exactly choose to die, but they are personally ascribing meaning to their own deaths when they die (think of saints, dying for their beliefs with God’s name on their lips). These women aren’t given the chance to do that and have no ownership over their fates. They are victims, period.

Think about the way that sentence is phrased. How she feels about him is irrelevant. It allows for a woman to be killed for a man who adores her and considers her the most important part of her life, thus making her death the “ultimate praise”, when she doesn’t even like him or know who he is. Obviously, this isn’t the typical case. But the meaning of someone’s life, even a fictional character’s life, can’t be what they mean to someone else. What do they feel? What do they want? They must have dreams, ambitions, wants of their own. They are people and even the most minor of characters should be assumed to be the center of their own story.

Again, this doesn’t mean that they can’t be attacked or provide motivation, but it does mean that we can’t treat their deaths as existing only for the hero who is left behind. Every character has the potential to act, not just be acted upon, and suggesting that the best a woman can hope for is to be loved best by someone else takes all of that away from her. Even if we never see her own life, never see her act individually, it should be assumed that she can and does do so. She must have other people in her life, other things she does (a job, hobbies, etc.). To do otherwise is to draw a paper cut-out, not a character, and that is a disservice to our hero.

I would say that this attitude is pretty disturbing, and when only female characters are seen this way, it is indeed sexist. But it doesn’t have to be. This would be just as bad were it applied to male characters being killed to prove that they’re the center of someone else’s world, too. And if it were only applied to male characters (as it appears to be only applied to female characters here, although I don’t think the author means it that way), it would be sexism that way. But sexism isn’t the problem here, it’s lack of allowing for human agency and understanding that no one can exist solely to be part of, even the center of, someone else’s world and be considered a fulfilled human being. Being loved is important, but you need to be a person and have some kind of agency too. Otherwise you’re a doll.

Like most girls in America seem to do, I read Little Women when I was growing up. For whatever reason, it spoke to me just as it seems to speak to most women who read it (making it the enduring classic it has remained for nearly one hundred and fifty years), despite the fact that I didn’t think I liked it the first time I read it. It’s hard to say I didn’t like it when it stuck with me so fastly and I remember the characters so well and so fondly in ways that I remember few other fictional characters. And like most girls, it seems, Jo was my favorite (although this opinion is slightly less universal than the appeal of the book generally, since many women do find other characters more appealing). I started thinking about Jo March again recently because of the introduction written by Linda Medley that appears at the beginning of the book Amy Unbounded: Belondweg Blossoming.

Medley discusses Jo and her ultimate fate at the end of Little Women quite a bit in this introduction. She states that while Jo is set up as a feminist character, her marrying a “stodgy old dope” like Professor Bhaer is a particularly unfeminist thing to do. She even goes so far as to wonder if some of “modern feminist literature has sprouted from… deep-rooted adolescent disappointment in Jo’s fate”. She begins all this musing by quoting her mother as saying (in “a tone of bitter disgust”) “Jo should’ve married LAURIE. Not that – that OLD MAN!”, to which she replies “Right on.”

This got me thinking. Was marrying Professor Bhaer a particularly unfeminist thing for Jo to have done? Was it unfeminist at all? The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was. In fact, the statement “Jo should’ve married LAURIE” feels far more unfeminist to me. So I dug out my copy of Little Women (which is dated 1911, so I’m guessing it’s the later version that we’re still all reading today).

I really couldn’t find any evidence that Jo ever wanted to marry Laurie, nor is she upset at all when he marries someone else. So why is the opinion that she should have so common (because it really is)? Do we feel so strongly that she needs to be married to someone that we have to pick who we think is the most appropriate partner for her, even if she doesn’t agree? Jo and Laurie have a great friendship that stays strong right up through the end of the book. Laurie clearly fell for Jo, but Jo never expresses any romantic ideas or feelings about Laurie. She also states a couple of times that she doesn’t want to be or marry rich, which makes sense. She has ambitions of her own (she’s a feminist, remember?), and rich mens’ wives couldn’t really spend their times writing books and things when they should be maintaining a large household of servants and keeping up appearances.

Can you really see Jo in silk gowns with bustles every day attending balls and giving instructions to nannies? It doesn’t sound like her, but it’s what Laurie’s wife would do. Amy can paint as a rich man’s wife because painting can be excused as an “accomplishment” when necessary, but you can’t do that with writing. Not to mention the kinds of things Jo wrote (remember, her stories were full of scandal and melodrama)! So, in the absence of romantic love and faced with a lifestyle that doesn’t match what she wants for herself, there would be no sense in Jo’s marrying Laurie. I can only conclude that we, as modern readers, want her to do so because he is young and handsome and rich and those are the qualities we have deemed most desirable in a husband (particularly a fictional one).

Jo knows what she wants and needs much better than we do, though. She meets Professor Bhaer halfway through the second part of the book (which was originally published as a second, separate book). They don’t fall in love right away. They develop a friendship through sharing interests, having great conversations and just generally getting to know one another. This is clearly an adult friendship, whereas Laurie’s friendship with Jo is one of those “we’ve been friends since childhood” friendships. There’s a different quality to it. Friendships in adulthood usually grow because of common interests or activities, whereas childhood ones are often started because of proximity (you make friends with the kid next door even if you don’t really have much in common, because it’s convenient and you’re too young to travel to find someone who shares your interests). This doesn’t make one type better than the other, but it does make them different.

Not only do they develop an adult friendship, but Jo and Professor Bhaer both actually develop romantic attachments to each other. Jo pines for him when she is separated from him, even though she doesn’t believe (or even imagine) anything romantic will ever come of their relationship and clearly Professor Bhaer dreams of Jo. The professor’s proposal isn’t particularly romantic in a conventional sense, but the whole scene with them discovering that they love each other as they stand in the rain is marvelous. Clearly this is a happy match for both. Even better, it is a match that will make both happy – they understand each other and will be able to support each other in their dreams and their work. Not only will Jo be able to keep writing, but she will have a husband who understands, encourages and supports her along the way (a rare thing for the time period).

I think that in choosing to marry the man that she loves and who will understand and support her in her dreams, Jo is doing something very feminist. It is not unfeminist to get married, just to get married to someone for the sake of being married (because you’re supposed to be a wife). Jo makes her decision for all the right, feminist reasons and, in the end, everyone is happy. I think that the reaction women have today of being disappointed that Jo married the professor instead of Laurie has more to do with our romantic ideas about love and marriage than about feminism. We look at Jo and the choices we believe her to have had and our cultural teaching tells us that you choose the man who is young, handsome, rich and romantic, not the man who is older, maybe not so classically handsome and not rich at all. Ideas of who you are actually in love with or who might make you happy don’t really enter into it (it’s generally assumed you will fall in love with the former anyway). But they should, a feminist examination would say that you look at the person for who they are, not what they look like or how rich they are.

I honestly believe that Jo is a great feminist character and that choosing to marry Professor Bhaer is one of the most feminist decisions she makes in the whole book. Little Women is a realistic story. The characters are supposed to reflect life. I’m glad that one of the most important fictional icons for girls in this country since the mid-1800s has been one who made decisions based on what she wanted and needed and, in following her heart, managed to find love. She may not be perfect, but no one is in real life either, so perhaps her very imperfections are what make her such a great icon. And if you need more proof that she made the right choice of husband, Louisa May Alcott wrote two more awesome books about Jo and Professor Bhaer and their lives together: Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Both are well worth reading!

This past week I wrote a two-part article for Examiner.com about how to start and run a book club for kids or teenagers. I think that it turned out quite well and I wanted to point it out to my Pixiepalace readers as well! The first part (about how to get started) is here while the second part (with activity ideas and more) is here. Let me know if you have more ideas or suggestions!

Dreams of the Dead
Thomas Randall
2009 (Bloomsbury)

Kara and her father have just moved to Japan so that her father can teach at a private school in an idyllic little Japanese town. Although everything seems perfect at first, Kara soon discovers that a grizzly murder occurred on the school grounds the term before they arrived and no suspects were ever arrested in the case. The victim was one of the students and her sister, who quickly becomes Kara’s friend, suspects that she was murdered by fellow schoolmates. Suddenly, several students begin having terribly nightmares (Kara included) and one by one kids start dying in mysterious ways. Kara and her friends set out to solve the mystery before every last one of them ends up dead.

The mystery in this book is pretty good. There are plenty of interesting interlocking clues, an appealing supernatural element, and enough kept hidden to keep the reader guessing. The problem is that parts of it don’t work. The justification for Kara getting the nightmares and being one of the intended targets is so weak that even the characters have trouble justifying it. While I appreciate that including her in the list of potential victims is an effective way of getting the heroine involved right away, it was possibly the biggest plot hole in the book and seriously hurt the mystery’s credibility throughout the entire story.

It’s very clear that the author of this book loves Japan, or at least his idealized version of it. Everything about the setting is carefully chosen and arranged, lovingly described. It’s almost like the author is describing is own perfect little fantasy world for us where cute Japanese girls in short-skirted sailor fuku uniforms pulled right out of the cheesiest animes attend school in ancient temples set among lush, picturesque natural settings. All this while still having all the conveniences of the modern world! It’s too perfect and too much of a western fantasy version of Japan. And the main character shares this fascination and almost worship of this perfect image.

This setting wasn’t believable in the least and felt weirdly paired with the ghost story mystery. While I appreciate the desire to connect the folkloric elements of the mystery with the feel of historical Japan, it just didn’t work for me. I felt like it was an interesting story being told by someone more interested in the perfect anime world than in the actual country of Japan or the actual folkloric elements of the story. I kept wondering why they didn’t search the internet for information on the supernatural creature, but that might have broken the pastoral, anime spell, so I’m not terribly surprised that they didn’t, even if it would have been the logical thing for cell-phone carrying teenagers in Japan to do.

I also want to comment on the cover of this book. I read an advanced reader copy that I received from the publisher and it has the cover shown above. This cover makes absolutely no sense. It’s photographic, which is pretty much all Bloomsbury ever uses, and it’s a white girl, which again, fits with their MO (much has been written about this lately in regards to the cover of Liar, so I’m not going to spend time on Bloomsbury’s typical practices other than to say they exist). The problem is, I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be. This story takes place in Japan and only two characters in it are white – Kara and her father. Both of them are alive throughout the entire book and Kara not only never sleeps outside, but she’s not really a frilly type of girl (as the blond girl on the cover is dressed). There are several dead girls and sleep is an important theme, but all the dead girls are Japanese and, as I said, this blond girl in no way seems to have anything to do with Kara. I’m starting to wonder if Bloomsbury just pulls random stock art until they find something that matches the title and listed genre! The cover shown on the website is shown below in a thumbnail and at least matches the text, if not the genre or feel of the story. If I had to pick one of these two, I’d go with the one from the website, but I think they both suck.

This is an interesting book and a decent mystery, which is a genre that could always use more teen-specific titles. Still, it has a lot of problems and I’m not really sure that I could say that I recommend it. I wasn’t fond of this book at all. It’s the first in a series of three (either called The Waking or Gaijin Girl, I’m not sure which), although where the series is going exactly I have no idea. I’m certain there is an audience out there for this book (possibly somewhere among the manga-reading teens), but I really wouldn’t be comfortable recommending it. If you really like supernatural mysteries and have always wanted to live in an anime, this might be your book, but otherwise, I’d stay away.

- Publisher’s Description
- The Official The Waking Series Website

- Thomas Randall’s Website

- Buy it from Amazon

Power fantasies are a big deal these days. As much as videogames might come under attack from the media and activist groups, they also draw in new players from all around the world every year and many games are understood to be such fantasies. Tons of research has been done on power struggles in social interactions and communications (Deborah Tannen is the best writer I know of on this subject) and superheroes like Spider-Man and Superman are often seen as healthy male power fantasies. In short, we understand that men want to be strong and able to beat up bad guys and save the world. And if you think about it, the appeal is pretty easy to see. Why wouldn’t a guy want to be someone who’s able to be always in control, always able to protect the people he loves and unquestionably always on the side of right? So here’s the tricky question: what is a woman’s power fantasy?

The feminist answer would be “the same thing”, but the reality is always more complicated than that. Yes, women want those things too. That pretty much goes without saying. Except, sadly, it needs saying because many people don’t understand that a woman would want to protect her loved ones and be able to retain control of a situation and be always doing the right thing as well. So the question becomes, why do women want those things too? More than that, why do women need them?

Something that I forget a lot of times is that while women live lives always having to be somewhat on alert, always careful, men not only don’t have to do that, but they very often aren’t even aware that women do. Jennifer de Guzman wrote a brilliant post on her LiveJournal about this that really articulates it well:

As I wrote in my reply, I am kind of astounded that some men don’t see why physical empowerment would clearly be attractive for women. I think it’s intriguing to note that women often like the hot women who kick ass as much, if not more, than men do. Here’s what I think is behind that: As women, we are nearly constantly aware of physical threats. And those threats often are of being violated sexually. When I used to go to campus for night classes and people warned me to “be careful,” what they are saying was, essentially, “avoid getting raped.”

Now, what if, what if, as a woman, you could walk around, be sexually attractive and not have to feel threatened? What if all the rage you feel about women being victimized and brutalized could be channeled into pure, righteous ass-kicking? And, because you’re a woman, you could possibly do that ass-kicking without being seen as a testosterone Steven-Seagal-esque meathead. Ass-kicking fantasies for men are more about proving and retaining power, I think. For women, they’re about finding and asserting power when they’re not expected to have any.

That’s exactly it. That’s a really big reason why women, and even little girls, need power fantasies and superheroes of their own. But as brilliant as this post was, what made me really think about this was the reaction it elicited from Michael May over at Amazon Princess:

That makes so much sense I’m ashamed I never thought of it, at least not in those terms. I’ve been operating under the hypothesis that the attraction of Wonder Woman for women has a lot to do with confidence (and argued that that also makes her attractive to men – or at least to men like me), but Jennifer’s thoughts go deeper than that and explore at least one of the reasons why Wonder Woman can afford to be so confident. She’s gorgeous and she can damn well take care of herself.

So, yes, women do want and need superheroes. Little girls need superheroes. This isn’t to say that boys don’t need them, but why can’t we have both? If there can be three ongoing comics at the same time about Batman’s adventures in Gotham, surly there can be a little more room for real superheroines! There are so few comics highlighting superheroines (and at the rate Marvel’s going, fewer all the time) and the ones that do exist often feel like the neglected side projects that either got hastily put together while the writers focus on their real stories or are assigned to second-string artists and writers and never promoted in any way, giving them no chance to gain a real following. Even flagship characters get dropped and forgotten (how many times has Spider-Girl lost her book? when was the last time one of the DC editors even mentioned Wonder Woman’s book publicly?).

Women deserve more heroes. We deserve more games with heroes we can see ourselves in (and yes, if you read the above you’ll see that we do like them beautiful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they all have to be naked and have DD-cup breasts, beauty is more complicated than that). We deserve more comics with kick-ass heroines. We deserve heroines with real female friendships, since women do occasionally interact with each other. I’d love – *LOVE* – to read a comic that passed the Bechdel Test, but since Birds of Prey ended I haven’t found one. I’d love to see as many little girls running around pretending to be Batgirl, Spider-Girl, Wonder Woman and Supergirl as I see little boys running around pretending to be Spider-Man, Superman, the Hulk and Batman. Maybe if more guys saw that girls could be heroes, more women would actually be safer in real life too. You never know.

Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook
Norm Feuti
2007 (Hyperion)

I worked in retail for a very long time (almost ten years, starting when I was in high school), and like most people who have done so, I can tell you that it’s a very mixed experience. In some ways it’s really nice – you have flexible hours, often you can have a lot of fun with your co-workers, and very occasionally you get to feel like you really, honestly helped someone. In a lot of ways it’s not so nice – you don’t actually get paid that much and still have to clean up weird things sometimes, retail stores don’t have holidays off so you almost certainly have to work at least some of them, and many, many customers treat retail employees like they are some kind of incompetent hired help that need only be barely tolerated and certainly not treated as human.

Still, we live in a consumer society that has yet to completely forgo the need for brick-and-mortar stores with flesh-and-blood customer service employees to wait on customers hand and foot. As much as I would love to be able to get corporations to realize and appreciate the value of their first-line customer service representatives and salespeople, that’s not going to happen any time soon (in fact, it seems to get worse rather than better every day). Likewise, I’d like to convince customers to keep in mind that the people behind the counters and on the sales floor wearing name tags are normal, regular people just like them who deserve respect. I’d like for it to become understood that when you treat someone well, they will be more likely to give you better service, even if they never meant to give you poor service in the first place. People just like being treated with respect and respond to it.

The best book that I’ve ever found speaking to the experience of working in retail is Pretending You Care: The Retail Employee Handbook by Norm Feuti. It is funny and packed full of useful information about working in retail environments. Feuti sprinkles the book with excerpts from the run of his comic strip, Retail, which focuses on the staff of a fictional department store and the things that happen to them. Feuti uses stories from his own experiences working retail as well as stories submitted from readers in creating the comic and that wealth of knowledge clearly contributed to the book as well. The book covers everything from getting hired to the different aspects of the job itself and even common retail myths. There’s even a section on retail employee etiquette (“How Not to Be the One Everybody Hates”).

One thing that I wish is that I had known more about what I was getting into when I started working in retail when I was fifteen. This book would have been perfect. It’s a fun, easy read and it speaks directly to the reader about things that will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked retail. I would absolutely give this book to any teenager working retail, even if they’ve been doing it for a while. Even for the retail veteran, it’s a good read and sort of a comfort. It assures you that your experiences aren’t unique, that the good and the bad of retail happen everywhere, and that maybe if you can laugh at it the bad days won’t be so depressing. And when you’re a teenager, it’s a lot harder to believe that things aren’t depressing or that you aren’t alone. I think this book might even make more of a difference to some teenagers (and even some adults) than Feuti even imagined.

People are what they are. I don’t see customers, as a group, changing for the better any time real soon. There are gems and they stand out and make your day. I still have favorite customers and moments from my experiences that I’m sure I will remember for years to come while most of the bad customers are forgotten. Still, the fact that most hours consisted of ten customers dismissing me out of hand as useless or stupid while one spoke to me as a person isn’t forgotten even if the faces themselves are. In my experience, most retail employees really do care and really are trying to do the best they can, but sometimes, you just have to plaster on a smile and pretend. That’s when you need this book to remind you that you aren’t alone.

- Publisher’s Description
- The Official Retail Community

- Norm Feuti’s Blog

- Buy it from Amazon

Babymouse the Musical
Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
2009 (Random House)

Babymouse has tried her hand at dodgeball, band and even figure skating, so clearly it’s time for her next challenge. When a new student suggests she try out for the school musical, Babymouse decides to go for it! Henry, her new friend, helps her prepare, but in true Babymouse fashion, things never quite go exactly as planned.

The Babymouse books are brilliant and this one is no different. There are great side plots (like the squid in Babymouse’s locker revealing itself to be the “Phantom of the Locker” who steals everyone’s homework) and fun trips through Babymouse’s imagination. The references in this book are, unsurprisingly, almost entirely drawn from musicals, but they still manage to range from The Lion King to American Idol to A Chorus Line. The mix is fun, entertaining and works especially well for the book.

One of the things that I found most interesting in this particular book was how involved the narrator got. The narrator in this series has a very distinct voice and has developed quite a bit of personality over the course of the series, but in this volume the narrator got a whole song! Narrators are not only pretty rare in graphic novels, but I can’t even think of another one with so much personality (at least, not one that isn’t also a character). The narrator in Babymouse does more than move the story along, it is a complement to Babymouse herself. It has a snarky voice that parallels Babymouse’s and gives her someone to play off of. The narrator is really part of the unique charm of these books.

Babymouse the Musical is a fun romp through all things musical theater. From Cats to Annie, Babymouse can do it all. A fun new character is introduced and hope that he sticks around, at least showing up once in a while in future books, because he was different from the rest of the cast. The regular players were all here, though, and the story was fun to read. I definitely recommend this title, but I think it will be even more fun if you’ve read some of the previous books in the series. Babymouse is still one of the best graphic novel series I’ve read!

- Publisher’s Description
- The Official Babymouse Website

- Jennifer L. Holm’s Website
- Matthew Holm’s Blog

- Buy it from Amazon

An Abundance of Katherines
John Green
2006 (Speak/Penguin)

Colin only dates girls named Katherine and he just broke up with Katherine XIX. He’s devastated. To help get him out of his Katherine-induced funk, his best friend Hassan proposes a road trip. They somehow end up in a small town in Tennessee. There they get recruited by a businesswoman to gather the life stories of the town’s inhabitants to preserve the history of the community. With the help of Lindsey, the businesswoman’s daughter, Colin sets out to write a mathematical theorem that can explain all of his past relationships and predict the outcome of future ones. Nothing seems to go exactly as planned for any of them, but it’s definitely a summer to remember.

The characterizations in this book are fantastic. Every single character feels fleshed out and distinct. Since it’s Colin’s story, the book itself kind of has a Colin flavor (footnotes, tangents, etc.), but every other character still feels unique. Even the town of Gutshot has a distinct personality which comes through in not only it’s physical characteristics, but also the personalities that inhabit it. The book is pretty quiet, when you get right down to it, and it’s partially the strength of the characters that make it so remarkable.

An Abundance of Katherines revolves around a number of themes, many of which are quite intriguing. I was particularly impressed that the themes carry through all the way to the end and it is these themes, and not anything happening in particular, that make the ending so satisfying. The idea of a search to remember and understand everything is possibly the strongest, and certainly one that carries through to every major character, but the idea of words and formulas representing anything and everything is pretty central as well. Mr. Green plays with these ideas in interesting ways and really asks his readers to think about them.

There are so many strengths to talk about in this book – the themes, the writing, the characters, even the math itself. I have a feeling that every reader is going to find something a little different in it, and that makes it all the more worth reading. An Abundance of Katherines really is one of the best young adult books I’ve read and I would absolutely recommend it. It’s got great ideas, interesting characters, fantastic writing and best of all, it does an amazing job of inviting it’s readers to think.

- Publisher’s Description

- John Green’s Website

- Buy it from Amazon

Nightmare on Zombie Island
Paul D. Storrie
illustrated by David Witt
2008 (Graphic Universe/Lerner)

Previously I wrote about The Time Travel Trap, which is the best book I’ve read so far from the Twisted Journeys series. Today I want to tell you about Nightmare on Zombie Island, which is the worst from the series so far. You are a kid tagging along on an archeological expedition for no very well explained reason to an island said to have a history of zombie infestation. There’s an interesting and elaborate backstory for the island involving pirates and plantation slave curses and treasure. Everyone is warned up front about what will make the zombies rise from their graves. Despite this warning, there is no way to prevent someone from the party raising the zombies (it’s not always the same person). Then it’s all about survival.

There are 28 endings in this book. You survive in less than a quarter of them and there is only one ending where the zombies are actually defeated, every other survival ending involves fleeing the island and leaving it overrun with zombies. There is no ending where everyone survives. This would all be fine, except that the choices you make feel really random and entirely powerless. As I said, you are a kid on an archeological expedition. Most of the adults don’t listen to you most of the time (and when they do, it usually seems weird). Your choices frequently amount to “go for help” or “save yourself” and often you can die either way. You can die falling down a hole or drowning as well as being a victim of the zombies.

I really liked the idea of this book. A book where you are coping with a zombie attack is a great idea, perfect for a choose-your-own-adventure story! But every choice in this book feels so powerless, so far from heroic that it was really disappointing. I wasn’t surprised when I kept finding endings where my character died. Of course he died, he was powerless and stupid! Never, even in the ending where we defeated the zombies, was my character really thinking about doing so. He was always focused on survival. That little mental shift would have made a huge difference! I really hope someone takes the idea behind his book and does it again, but makes the character controlled by the reader capable of heroics. In this type of story, your character should be able to prevail and should be interested in doing so. Yes, there should be failure endings, but there needs to be ways to succeed! “Ways” plural, not “way” singular.

- Publisher’s Description

- Paul D. Storrie’s Website
- David Witt’s Website

- Buy it from Amazon