NaNoWriMo Research: Akeelah and the Bee

My pregnant friends tell me that they cry at the drop of a hat at touching movies.  For this reason, I think pregnant ladies should probably not watch Akeelah and the Bee.  So if you are pregnant and don't want to become a sobbing mess, don't watch Akeelah and the Bee. 

It is awesome.  I knew I was going to love it, so it's kind of a real wonder that I managed not to watch it for this long.  It's just great.  Smart female protagonist who has retreated into hiding is drawn out into the spotlight where her talent can shine if she can just be honest with herself and others and get the help she needs from her family, school, and community.  It's a traditional underdog story, so you will likely not be surprised by the overall trajectory.  There were a few surprises for me, and I realized one twist in advance and felt like the pot calling the kettle black (and also stupid for yelling at a movie character).

The extras were enlightening and helped me write off some of the critics more virulent criticisms (the movie was written a long time before the documentary about spelling bees, so it wasn't derivative) and has a charming underdog story of its own. 

Some of the acting is amazing, and it's a feel-good sort of story, so set your expectations low, warm, and fuzzy, and you will probably enjoy it despite its occasional heavy-handedness.  If you know any tweens, enjoy it with them, too.

NaNoWriMo Research: Shug

Shug by Jenny Han: Shug is a tomboy, but she and her friends are getting older, and now she has a crush on one of them, and nothing is going right with her friends, teachers, or family.  POV: 1st person limited, present tense.

(It's pronounced like the first syllable of the word sugar, something I wish they would have pointed out earlier, so I didn't have to unlearn the wrong pronunciation.)  Another Southern girl novel!  Wow, I really had no idea they were so well represented in Tween lit . . .  This is a first novel and somehow shows it.  Too many smoking guns for something this size and a somewhat clunky, out of gas ending but lots of charm and heart and painful honesty not just about crushes but about transitions and family dysfunction and other things handly less delicately than I've usually seen or assumed. Delicate isn't quite the right word.  Sharper?  They're less blunted, somehow.  More honest while still filtered realistically through the character's point of view.  Totally worth the 3 bucks I paid at the used bookstore. 

NaNoWriMo Research: Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Anne starts out the book as an orphan and then finds a home and friends and family at Green Gables.  POV: 3rd person limited, varied, past tense.

Abridged versions of children's books should burn in eternal fire.  I was only supposed to read this up to where Anne was an early teen, but that self-control didn't hold out well at all.  I find it interesting how much Anne's vanity is irritating to me this time around.  I don't know how many times (or if ever) I've read this book, but I didn't remember Anne being such a girly-girl.  I guess I remembered things like walking ridgepoles and assumed this sort of thing was mutually exclusive to wanting frou-frou dresses.  I failed to remember that most of the tomboy activities occured when she was younger.  (Don't worry.  I obviously didn't hold it against her.)  I wanted to immediately go on to Anne of Avonlea, but I couldn't justify it because of the protagonist's age.  Soon, I told myself, after November you can read it.  After a little grumbling, I agreed.

NaNoWriMo Research: Millicent Min: Girl Genius

Millicent Min: Girl Genius by Lisa Yee: Millicent Min is looking forward to her senior year in high school, but first she has to make it through her 11th summer surrounded by the love and misunderstanding of her family and and the hostility and misunderstanding of her peers.  POV: 1st person limited, present tense. 

I've read this book before, so when I was looking for quirky, smart girl voices to dump into my reservoir, I couldn't resist revisiting Millicent.  She's a unique character with a very unique point of view.  She's sometimes annoying, and this book is quite different from the other bright-girl book I read (Emma Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree).  Where Emma's voice was sort of gentle and whimsical and a bit puzzled but very orderly and rational as she dealt with her peers, Millicient is rough and abrasive and socially clumsy because she hasn't had much experience dealing with her age-mates or her peers because of all the grade-skipping she's done.  I actually read the hilarious Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time first and looked this book up later because it covered the same time period from a totally different point of view, and I like it when authors try this (especially when it really works).  Good stuff.

NaNoWriMo Research: Ten, Eleven, and Twelve

Ten, Eleven, and Twelve (first half) by Lauren Myracle:  Winnie is a regular kid growing up at her own pace one year at a time and learning how to deal with changing friends, changing family members, changing priorities, and her changing body and mind.  She just wishes everything could stay the same.  POV: 1st person limited, past tense.

Each book captures one year of her life with a chapter per month.  Each chapter mainly covers an event that happened during the month, not everything that happened during the month.  The books are mostly light, and Winnie is a fun main character.  She's a late bloomer, and this is handled pretty well.  Her mother is amazing, her older sister is well-drawn, and her puzzlement about the choices her friends are making is really genuine.  Sometimes I feel like maybe the narrator is a bit too old for her years, but, frankly, I don't really care.  (The popularity of these books indicates that most tween girls don't care either.)

NaNoWriMo Research: Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree

Emma-Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree by Lauren Tarshis:  Emma-Jean is in seventh grade, and she is very bright and thinks about the world very differently from her classmates.  She keeps her distance and observes their bizarre behaviors benevolently until the pain of a classmate draws her in, and she starts trying to help others with some interesting results.  This one is told in alternating POV between Emma-Jean and Colleen (the classmate she first tries to help).  POV: 3rd person, quasi-limited, alternating.

I adored Emma-Jean.  The author did a great job of making her point of view read completely differently from really anything I've read before.  I wasn't as big of a fan of Colleen.  I'm still not entirely sure she was needed as a POV character, but I think that may be because I loved Emma-Jean's familiar head so much.  Ah, nostalgia.  Colleen's POV did help set off the uniqueness of Emma-Jean's as well, and I'm sure to the average reader, she was needed as an accessible entry point and someone to relate to.  And there were some twists that would have been hard to show clearly if there were only one narrator.  Overall the characters are quirky and well-made, the twists are pretty unexpected, and the adults are a good mix of nice and nasty and mostly realistic, as are the kids.  Loved it.  Thanks to Joseph for this recommendation.

NaNoWriMo Research: Caddie Woodlawn

Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink: Caddie's 11 and lives in the mostly-wilderness of Wisconsin where she and her older and younger brother get into trouble a lot and grow up a little, too.  POV: 3rd person quasi-limited, past tense.

"In 1864 Caddie Woodlawn was eleven, and as wild a little tomboy as ever ran the woods of western Wisconsin.  She was the despair of her mother and of her elder sister Clara."  I sort of wish I could have offered this book to my mother at age 11 to show her how much worse it could have been.  Alas, the cream pie of justice flies only one way.  This won the Newbery, which usually indicates literature, but the dog doesn't die.  I do like the father much better than the mother, which tends to be a mark of literature. I'm not sure if this one should be classed as literature or fun, but I enjoyed the heck out of it.  Lots of adventures and some lessons learned without feeling the least bit preachy.  Thanks to Deborah for the suggestion. : )

NaNoWriMo Research: Skinnybones

Skinnybones by Barbara Park (the "updated" version from 1997): tiny class clown Alex Frankovitch tries to talk his way out of trouble, but he usually ends up doing just the opposite, like the time he ends up in a pitcher's duel with the state little league star even though he describes his baseball prowess as follows: "I'm not exactly what you'd call a real good athlete.  Actually, I'm not even real okay.  Basically, what I'm trying to say here is, I stink."  POV: 1st person, past tense.

Well, I didn't just want to read serious literature that requires tissues or stuff about girls getting their periods and crushes on boys, so I threw in some other fun things.  This is one of said fun things.  This book was updated after 15 years to make it more accessible to the kids who kept writing the author to ask who certain super-famous-in-the-early-80s people were, which I find amusing because there were several names I didn't recognize from the update.  (The context made it clear enough who the people were supposed to be, though, so I didn't think the book lost anything.)  This is a short book that moves as fast as the main character's motor mouth and has a sort of surprise ending that I found pretty funny.

NaNoWriMo Research: The Agony of Alice

The Agony of Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor: Alice doesn't have a mom, and she is looking for a role model.  Too bad she gets the frumpy teacher instead of the beautiful, young, and glamorous one.  It's kind of hard becoming a woman when you, your college-aged brother, and your father don't know exactly how it's supposed to work.  POV: 1st person, past tense.

These sorts of things (getting the teacher no one wants and being a total jerk about it, accidentally kicking your favorite teacher in the head while dressed as the rear end of a horse, etc.) are always funny in retrospect, but they are The End of the World when you are living them.  I feel like the author really captured that while still keeping this funny.  It's a fine line between making fun of and sympathizing with while being a step removed/older/wiser.  The Catholic saint card bit was a hoot.  I like that Alice's dad is bumbling but good-hearted and that he is allowed to have a work life that is part of Alice's life.  I like that her brother isn't a monster despite the age difference, that she has some good extended family, and that the lessons she learns about not judging by appearances aren't too heavy-handed.  The ending is really sweet, too.

I want to be that teacher

I have fulfilled my dream of teaching college writing by teaching a couple of online composition classes, and I still want to be that teacher.  I think I would be good at being that teacher.  You know, the one who

• knows all about the major and minors and department and catalog and makes sure her advisees are on track.  
• is dedicated to helping students understand and learn and apply.  
• teaches students to love learning and words and communication.
• students love and come to for help because they can tell the teacher loves them and wants to help them succeed.  
• learns from her students and takes delight in learning all sorts of things.  
• loves her job and constantly finds ways to love it anew.  
• is involved in the school and helps out on committees and in the community.  
• has office hours and is available outside them.  
• has an office you want to stay in, so you can look around.  
• teaches students about how to try to be a decent human being.  

I want to be that teacher.  And I don't think I ever will be.  And it hurts.

My Life Is Not a Musical

I saw Billy Elliot the Musical the other day, and all the trees look like dancers.  I love that about ballet.

I loved the movie Billy Elliot.  I wanted to see the musical version of it the last time I was in England, but I was roped to a high maintenance, mentally unstable, young roommate for the duration of our tour there, so I had to see what she wanted, which was not Billy Elliot.  I wish I weren't so nice.  I was therefore pleasantly surprised when it came to my area.  But then I faced a dilemma, which is the fact that I loathe musicals.

I wasn't always like this.  I actually acted in a lot of musicals up through high school.  I still regularly have lyrics and music I sang nearly 20 years ago get stuck in my head.  So why can I hardly stand to watch musicals?  I guess it's because they make things feel so trivial.  On a positive note, musicals are about words and movement, and there were moments with a lot of angry words and violence and dancing in the movie.

Billy Elliot was so dark and nuanced and political that I was pretty sure turning it into a musical would destroy it because of the nature of the genre-beast.  Musicals like to take the most powerful/poignant/emotional moments and dwell on them.  To death.  In a movie like Billy Elliot, the strength lay in the lack of over-dramatizing, in the careful restraint from any descent into sentimentality, in those quick moments of awesome beauty in an otherwise, cold, angry, brutal, awkward, real, grounded and gritty world.  Another strength was the reserve and inarticulateness of the characters.  These are not things that scream "great musical" to me.

It's a good thing there was some outstanding acting going on.  Stealing the show was a grandmother who I don't think was actually even in the original.  She was amazing.  The woman who becomes Billy's teacher was pretty great, too.  The music was very good, and some of the dancing was well done.  The fusion of a lot of different styles really worked in the numbers that weren't too exaggerated in typical musical style.  Billy's actor that day was pretty good, too.  His dancing-acting was incredible; his acting-acting was not quite as good, but he was trying to speak in an unfamiliar accent in a language that was not his first, so, you know, I'm going to cut him some slack.  That's a tough role to play for anyone, and he mostly pulled it off, even the copious swear words.  (Yeah, it wouldn't be what it was if they didn't leave those in there. :)

I enjoyed it, and I cried at the end because it turned out to be the last performance, and that always choked me up in my theater days. 

Have you seen any good musicals or plays lately?

Plot summaries and other challenges

Have you ever tried to give a plot summary of something you really like?  I've read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books over a dozen times, and I have a long, deep relationship with them.  I find it nearly impossible to give an elevator pitch about what makes them so great.  (It's the same with most books I love and have read multiple times.  It's also the same with books I've just discovered and read once recently.)

Often, I'm reduced to mentioning a scene that I think will make someone interested.  "You should read this one," I say, because it has a zombie dinosaur.  Or "There's a beautiful scene in this one, one of the best I've ever seen that shows (instead of telling) the characters getting so drunk that they eventually drop a bomb in a lake, so they can 'fish' successfully."

Some books, like The Name of the Wind, are slightly easier to describe because you get such a strong feeling/impression from them that you can say, "You should read this book because it's written beautifully like the most tragic, adventurous ballad ever told by one of the best storyteller's you'll ever meet."


How do you summarize books (or movies or musical groups or whatever else you try) to recommend to people?  Do you go for concise and pithy?  Talk about character?  Plot?  Ramble on and on hoping your passion will be contagious?