The Baby-Sitters Club

With nineties nostalgia in full swing, I feel like every couple of months or so there is a new funny thing online about the favourite ghostwritten children's lit series du jour. Today it is The Baby-Sitters Club, or BSC for those in the know. The Huffington Post has put up this Where Are They Now? satire. Now, this might just be my leftover fondness for the series talking, but I didn't find it terribly funny. It's been done before (a search for it brings up more than one), but I still like being reminded of the series, so I thought it was worth posting.

When I was about 9, my best friend and I used to devour these books. I remember she had a drawer full of absolutely all of them, books I had never even SEEN, as my exposure was pretty limited to the local library, which was very, very tiny. Apparently her aunt worked for a bookstore or a publisher or something, and the result was that she had every BSC book in existence. I was already jealous of her tropical fish tank and how she had her own room when I had to share mine with my older sister, but this made me ridiculously jealous.

Looking back, I recognize how ridiculous these books are. I realized it to some extent even then, because I always skipped chapter two, knowing it contained all the same tired information about how Kristy's parents were divorced and Dawn was from California and Mary Ann was a loser, etc. Still, I loved those books. I really admired their business moxie, I guess.

That's a lie. What I admired was the drama. I was (and still, let's face it, am) a sucker for an overwrought, dramatic story line. My favourite character was Stacey, because she was from New York (glamorous!) and had diabetes (glamorous?). I still remember the book where she ate a candy bar in a flash of pique and went into a diabetic coma, during which the book flashed back to when she discovered she had diabetes. She was on a train to New York to visit her dad (her parents had just gotten divorced! The poor girl!) when she found herself having to pee all the time and also being unreasonably thirsty. I have no idea if these are real symptoms of diabetes, but for years I wondered excitedly every time I was thirsty or had to pee a lot if I had a dramatic, potentially terminal illness. I am not particularly proud of this. But there it is.

Um, you can all feel free to psychoanalyze 9-year-old Stephanie now. Current Stephanie can probably take it.

The Hunger Games

I mentioned in my last post that Patrick Ness had gotten me interested in Dystopian fiction. But after I devoured The Knife of Never Letting Go, I had a few weeks' wait ahead of me before The Ask and the Answer came out in paperback. Luckily, about the time I finished the first book, there was some general internet hubbub about a book called Mockingjay, the third in a series that had been hovering in the back of my mind since I first heard about it on the lovely Sarah Rees Brennan's journal. I decided that since all three books were out, it was about time I read it. The series is called The Hunger Games, after the title of the first book.

The Hunger Games is about a girl named Katniss Everdeen. Katniss lives in District 12, in a country called Panem. Every year, one girl and one boy from each of the twelve districts of Panem are chosen to fight in The Hunger Games, a fight to the death on national television.

Yep. Fight to the death. You see why I was interested.

Again this is a book that is hard to explain without spoiling, but I think it's safe to say that Katniss is a participant. What follows is a story very smoothly written (it's in present tense and I didn't even notice until I was a third of the way through the book, which is extremely impressive) that kept me constantly guessing and never took the easy way out of anything. The critique of reality television is extraordinarily interesting; the games are fought by district children for the entertainment of the people of the capitol, whose lives of extreme leisure juxtapose nicely with the lean, impoverished lifestyle of the districts. Though we watch reality television knowing that the contestants are there voluntarily, there is still a sense that their actions are for our benefit. While they're on television, they essentially exist for our entertainment. When we no longer find them interesting, their television careers die. Taking it a bit further, to a fight to the death, isn't as much a stretch as it seems at first. Rich from fourfour has a more in-depth (and much better) analysis of the reality television theme here.

This book contained many moments when I wanted the characters to do one thing, and then was extremely relieved when they did something else. Because what I want for the characters isn't always (actually, is probably almost never) what is best for the story. Suzanne Collins doesn't shy away from putting her characters in difficult situations, and she certainly has them make a bad decision or two. Katniss is very compelling despite being extremely flawed (the best description I've heard so far called her a "loveable asshole"), and it's interesting to watch her try to make the best decision when there isn't really a right decision available.

I'm afraid to say much more in case any of you decide to read it (which I obviously think you should). So: fast-paced? Yes. Well written? Absolutely. Did I cry? Maybe a little. So you should read it.

p.s. It is worth noting that I cry very easily when bad things happen in books. So take that one with a grain of salt.

Ramble ramble books life ramble

Hello, everyone! Are all three of you here? Good. I have been away awhile. But don't worry, though I haven't been writing, I have certainly been reading. Clearly I like books, so this should be obvious, but I sometimes go through periods of literary apathy. I credit this largely to my job, which includes reading copious amounts of fiction all day (Listen, I'm almost done crying you this river, so just be patient), but I will admit that sometimes I just stop reading and don't really know why. Anyway, I stopped reading for fun sometime in the bustle of buying a home (!) and packing and moving and all this time also working and generally panicking about life. I needed a kick start, and I decided to go on vacation to visit my friend Chloë (visit her wonderful blog, to which I too-seldom contribute) in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Vacations are good for sightseeing but I also wanted to use the downtime, what seemed like my first in weeks, to read. But what book? I was coincidentally, what with the moving and the vacation and all, having some anxiety about money, so I decided to read one of the many books I have sitting on my bookshelf, living the sad lives of unread and unappreciated literary genius. The book I chose was Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly, and I could not recommend it highly enough. It is not for young adults specifically; you would find it in the fiction section of your local bookstore, but I feel it is a book that teenagers would appreciate just as well as "adults." It is also a perfect summer read, and not in that way that people say where they mean you don't have to use your brain at all. This book is a hilarious look at an extremely dysfunctional family, written in beautifully poetic language with incredible insight. (That was my extremely poor attempt at a real book review/blurb, I guess. Needs some work. Too many adjectives?) Needless to say, I liked it. It got me excited about reading again, and I moved on to other books with enthusiasm, including, and here's where this post becomes at least semi-relevant to the blog's subject matter, some YA!

By this point my anxiety about money was gone, which was good because I had already read all the YA books on my shelf and therefore needed to buy more. But which ones? A friend had brought my attention to the twitter account of a wonderful local bookstore, Nicholas Hoare (@NicholasHoareTO). The person running this account (I am still not sure which cute bookstore guy this is, though I have speculated on it every time I've been to the store since; if it's the woman who works there I will be extremely disappointed) was doing an amazing thing. People wrote him with the names of three books they liked, and he would recommend a new book that he thought they would like. So cool, right? I jumped right in, made it in just under the wire with my books. One was The Great Gatsby, one was Apologize, Apologize! and one was Paper Towns by John Green, who is, incidentally, a person I like to think of as my nerd author husband. I should write a whole post on him. It would be no problem for me, let me tell you. TO THE POINT. NicholasHoareTO recommended a book called The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.

Well. This book is hard to review because it is the kind of book that is very easy to spoil. The Guardian review manages it in much better words than I ever could. But I love it. A lot. Many people who don't read YA fiction dismiss the genre as kid-lit (why this is a derogatory term I don't know, but it is often used as such), assuming that because a book is aimed at a younger audience it is aimed at a dumber audience. I have discussed this before, and it just baffles me that people think this because it is so WRONG. This book, which takes place in a dystopian future, takes on big issues—feminist issues, globalization-related issues, postcolonial issues, climate change issues—while using language in a racing, creative way that makes you almost physically incapable of putting the book down. It's funny when it wants to be funny, serious when it needs to be serious, and extremely heartbreaking when it wants you to cry. Go read it, and when you're done go read the second in the series (called Chaos Walking). But don't tell me about it, because I'm only halfway through as of this writing.

This book was so good it inspired me to continue on the dystopian fiction path with The Hunger Games, a little blockbuster series you may have heard of. More to come on that next time. For now, I'm going to go read some more.