We are way overdue for a recipe blog.
But
until a couple of days ago my recipes had been kidnapped and were being held hostage. And
the worst part is the kidnapper wouldn’t even contact me about a ransom.
And yes, it was irresponsible of me to send
my only copy of my recipe file out into the world alone, a print copy at that,
so faded and old as to be impossible to scan.
Mea culpa.
But who could know? And anyway, the crisis is over, and they
are back safe and sound, with a backup file to boot. And you still aren’t going
to get a recipe blog.
At least not this
time.
Because I promised on
Facebook that I’d write a quick book review. Even though Geoff Herbach’s I’m
with Stupid is a YA novel, and if I am going to put book reviews instead of
recipes or anything else on my blog I should
be writing reviews about middle readers since my first one (Coyote Summer, remember) comes out this
fall. Although I guess this is not really what you’d call a review. So maybe that’s ok.
I’m reading YA novels lately because I happened upon one
(Beautiful Music For Ugly Children) in the library and it stunned me. So I
wrote Kirstin Cronn-Mills (the author), and during our brief correspondence
she’s given me several other author’s names. And they have all been wonderful
and truly amazing. Amazing in that they
speak to such universal truths, to the real problems you face growing up and
the even realer problems you encounter trying to deal with them, that I found
myself saying yes, yes! (sometimes even aloud) as I read.
Because up until lately, you see, it’s only been Buffy the
Vampire Slayer.
And now you are really beginning to wonder. Buffy? Where on
earth is she going with this?
You know how some comics, like Ellen Degeneres, start out
with a topic and seem to wander all over and then suddenly Bam! - there they are back where they started having tied
everything up neatly?
Yeah.
Well, that’s probably not going to happen here. But
bear with me.
Buffy. The show that used vampires and demons and witches
and odd reptilian creatures to tell great stories that just happened to touch
on all of the problems high school kids face, sometimes providing solutions but
even when there wasn’t an easy solution you came away from the show feeling ok
about being different, or liking girls instead of boys, or not having a parent
around, or having scales and a tail because that one made you a natural for the
swim team?
Until recently, it seemed to me that with a few notable
exceptions, Buffy was it. And when YA literature started to become popular
again, it was full of dragons and vampires or it took place in the distant past
or future or on another world.
These people, though, this latest crop of writers, the
Kirstin Cronn-Mills’s and Geoff Herbachs and A.S. Hyatts and David Levithans,
just to name a few, they write these raw, powerful stories with problems like
the ones you had growing up, or people you knew had, and the endings aren’t
always all happy but there’s usually at least a few answers and a lot of hope
because that’s what you need when you are a teenager. These are the stories I read and my heart
tightens and then opens and oh, I wish I’d had these books when I was a
teenager because they are my life.
That’s what I’m With
Stupid did for me.
Take a kid who was bullied when younger, give him a terrible early memory he hasn't dealt with and a parent who's not really there for him. Throw in the fact that now he's a popular jock and a heck of a football player, partially because he's got this anger inside that he deals with by crushing the competition. How does he cope? Where is his life going? What happens when he decides to use his power for good instead of evil (sort of) ?
What happens is a piece of your life. Somewhere in this book, and others by the writers I've mentioned above, is a piece of your life. Doesn't matter who you are or what you were in high school. You're going to go - ""Wow. Yes." at some point.
Guaranteed.
So, no. not really a book review. But what I wanted to say.
And thank you, all of you YA writers out there.
Keep going.
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