Friday, May 29, 2015

Left Behind in France


Hiding Out
by Elizabeth Laird
written for ages 9-12 | recommended
published in 1994 (1993) | Mammoth | 208 pages




The Castles and the Fletchers are driving back through France to Calais and stop for a picnic. They leave in a hurry in their two cars, and Peter Castle is left behind. The parents have traffic problems and get different ferries so they don't realise their mistake until they reach England. Peter, meanwhile, decides to make a go of being stranded, finding things he can eat, lighting a fire and trapping fish, avoiding the local farmers. His father returns to France and mobilises the police who eventually find him.

The point-of-view shifts between the characters to create a nice balance of tensions, heightened by the communication problems of different languages. Peter faces up to his situation, and deals with his fears, mostly by recalling the advice or example of his father and grandfather. There is a subplot of the friendship between Mr. Castle and Mrs. Fletcher whose husband has just run off with his secretary, but this is suitably resolved and is the only thing which comes between the boy and his father when they are reunited.


Tim Golden is a computer programmer in London. This review first appeared on goodtoread.org

See more reviews of juvenile books at Mercatornet.com

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Another Dog Poem!


Letting the Dog In

by Emily Ruppel


Whereas the cat has found her way

along the low roof and through

– a quick and weightless leap –

the open window of the master

room, the dog croons wearily to

an implacable moon, fastened

as he is by gravity and obedience

to the big oak in the midnight yard.



Rain falls faster, fuller, the master

still at large come one a.m. I’m curling

my tongue round the pads of my paws,

attenuating their wetness in

the warmth of the guttering fire.



I hear you, yes, and feel the surge

of what must be pity—a broad,

ambiguous heave of it. Less for you,

perhaps, than for your dimly

imagined ancestors, that they

trustingly and with such buoyance

year after vanishing year made

the selections they did.



This poem was first published in the 2015 God and Nature Magazine, a publication of the American Scientific Affiliation.

Related reading:  A Poem About Dog Sledding; Mickey Blue Eyes



Friday, May 15, 2015

Franz Wright RIP


The American poet Franz Wright died at his home on Thursday, May 14, 2015, after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 62. He and his father James Wright are the only parent/child pair to have won the Pulitzer Prize in the same category. Wright was born in Vienna, Austria. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1977.



Poet Franz Wright, 62, died at his home in Waltham, Mass., on Thursday after a long struggle with lung cancer, his publisher Knopf confirmed. Wright's 2003 collection "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" won the Pulitzer Prize.

Wright was born March 18, 1953, in Austria and as raised in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. His father was the poet James Wright, also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.

Wright's books of poetry include "F" (2013), "Kindertotenwald" (2011), "Wheeling Motel" (2009), "God's Silence" (2006), "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" (2003) and "The Beforelife" (2001), all published by Knopf.

His longtime editor at Knopf, Deborah Garrison, said, "Franz wrote fearlessly about mental illness, addiction and loneliness as well as about faith and the unending beauty of his world, no matter how broken; he never wrote a line that wasn't fiercely important to him, musical, as witty as it was deadly serious. Franz lived for poetry -- at times it seemed it kept him alive -- and he managed to write poems in which the choice to live feels continually renewed, not just an urgent daily requirement for the poet but a call to arms that includes every single reader."

Read more here.


Friday, May 8, 2015

Teens and Dark Fiction


Barbara Kay

Last week Nancy Drew, teen detective, celebrated her series’ 85th anniversary of continuous publication. In the 1950s, Nancy still wore demure dresses, drove a snappy blue convertible and called home from a telephone booth. Today I’m told she wears jeans and t-shirts, drives a hybrid car and carries a smartphone. Nevertheless, I am sure the clever sleuth is still the upright character she always was: cheerful, resourceful, civic-minded, ethical, honourable, courageous and loyal. And non-sexual.

What a sea change fiction for adolescents has undergone since Nancy solved the Mystery of the Old Clock.
In my youth, children read what educators call “window books,” books that focused a child’s attention outward onto character-building adventures abroad — literally or figuratively. Nancy Drew was a humble subset of what one would call literature, and made no special moral or aesthetic claims. But the series nevertheless obeyed the general principle of its era of influence: while unrealistic, the stories mimicked the aspirational thrust of classic literature — that is, its main character strove to prove her merit according to the standards of her (admittedly white-bread) culture.

As we became more and more an identity-obsessed, sexualized “therapy culture,” adolescents gravitated to “mirror books,” me-focused fiction in what became designated the Young Adult category (YA), targeting 12-18 year olds. This fiction is usually narrated by a disaffected adolescent, the plot typically lingering over social pressures involving sex, drugs, divorce and racial or gendered alienation. Adults in these books are often either absent, hostile, abusive or in other ways unsympathetic. The reigning motif is victimhood. The narrator’s only source of self-esteem is pride in remaining “authentic” in a conformist and hypocritical society. The Urtext for mirror books was J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, Catcher in the Rye.

The troubled protagonist of Salinger’s novel, Holden Caulfield, is an icon of psychological health, though, when compared to today’s YA protagonists. Holden merely moped about and sneered at people for being “phony.” By contrast, in Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 YA novel, Rage, a girl is filled with self-loathing, symbolized by compulsive cutting. Sadistically bullied by her peers as “cutterslut,” she slashes her arm to shreds, “but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and meat.…” In Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 YA novel,Scars, the narrator is a girl who has been raped since she was a toddler by her father, who provides her with knives to cut herself to death as a teenager. In the Canadian YA novel, When Everything Feels Like the Movies, by Raziel Reid — this year’s Governor-General award winner for best fiction in children’s literature — a narcissistic and masochistic gay teenager, whose ambition is to become a cocaine-addicted male prostitute in Hollywood, obsesses over sexual fantasies (some quite deviant) and proudly recounts successful baiting strategies to ensure attention-getting beatings.

Clearly this kind of lurid extremism pays off in the marketplace. Books ostensibly written for adolescents are nowadays increasingly bought by aesthetically lazy adults with simplistic adult appetites. So there is strong motivation in this glutted buyer’s market for writers of YA to gild their festering lilies. They are furthered encouraged in their transgressive impulses by progressive cultural elites (like those who sit on the G-G Awards committee) who naively pride themselves on their belief that the more frankness around sexuality of all kinds young readers encounter, however disturbing, the more helpful it will be in expanding their understanding and sympathy for marginalized youth.

Is that the case? Does adolescent immersion in fictional worlds where characters their age suffer or inflict horrible sex-related abuse on themselves, and where graphic content is — it seems to me — expressly designed, like pornography, to elicit a prurient response, have a salutary effect?

In fact, there is no evidence to show that is the case. But there is evidence to suggest the opposite. In her 2013 book about bullying, Sticks and Stones, journalist Emily Bazelon describes a method some schools use called “social norming” to discourage drinking and driving. She writes, “When [students] find out that [drinking and driving] is less prevalent than they think — outlier behavior rather than the norm — they’re less likely to do it themselves.” The same with cruelty, and by inference, behaviours like cutting, anorexia and grotesque sexual fetishism.

We can’t go home again in children’s literature, nor should we try. But one can at least say with confidence regarding Nancy Drew something one cannot say with confidence about the representative YA examples I have cited above: She did no harm


Barbara Kay is a columnist for Canada’s National Post, where this article was first published.