A Certain Slant of Light

I have at last finished reading the 2020 Newbery books!

The Newbery award winner this year of Jerry Craft’s New Kid, a graphic novel about an African-American boy, Jordan, who loves to draw and yearns for nothing more than to go to art school… but his parents have sent him to a prestigious private school known for its academics, instead.

The story is realistic fiction - family life, the difficulties of fitting in at a school where Jordan is one of only a handful of black students, making friends, etc - interspersed with Jordan’s comics. My favorite is “Judging Kids by the Covers of Their Books!”, in which Jordan compares mainstream children’s books (“A thrilling magical tale that is sure to inspire readers of all ages to never give up until they have found the treasure they seek”) to books about/aimed at African-American kids (“A gritty, urban reminder of the grit of today’s urban grittiness”).

This is such a spot-on description of so many Newbery award winners and honor books (the Newbery committee often goes for yesterday’s historical grittiness, but still) that the Newbery committee may have given New Kid a medal in the spirit of “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”

On the other hand, the committee also gave a Newbery Honor to Kwame Alexander’s The Undefeated, a poem/picture book about African-American history, which is definitely in the more usual Newbery vein of yesterday’s historical grittiness.

This is for the unforgettable.
The swift and sweet ones
who hurdled history
and opened a world
of possible

The ones who survived
America
by any means necessary.

And the ones who didn’t.

However, the honor of “grittiest Newbery this year” may go to Christian McKay Heidicker’s Scary Stories for Young Foxes, which kicks off in the first chapter with a whole slough of foxes getting rabies, proceeds with animal-murdering Beatrix Potter, continues to a swamp full of murderous alligators (are there alligator swamps in England? I’m incredibly confused about where/when this book is set), and then we get to the really scary part with the menacing abusive fox who wants to add our heroine to his harem.

It is A Lot. And also possibly unfair to Beatrix Potter? I got online and googled it afterward and it looks like Potter dissected a rabbit one time, but she didn’t actually make a habit of trapping animals to draw them for her books and then murdering them.

I also expected Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home to hit it big on the grittiness scale: the book is about Syrian refugees and it’s written in poetry, which always makes me expect mega-grit. (This is an unfair legacy of reading Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust at a tender age.)

However, actually I liked Other Words for Home. It’s a classic immigrant-adjusting-to-America book, which is a genre I almost always enjoy, and in this particular book I also liked that we got a lot of luscious detail about Jude’s home back in Syria: the whole first section of the book takes place there.

And finally - last but not least! In fact, possibly my favorite of the Newbery books this year - Alicia D. William’s Genesis Begins Again, which kicks off with our heroine Genesis beginning at yet another new school, after her family is evicted from yet another house because her father’s drinking problem has gotten them behind on the rent. Genesis, as you might imagine, is pretty tired of new starts.

I thought this book was particularly moving in its portrayal of colorism (Genesis is very dark-skinned, and has internalized from both society and her family that this makes her ugly) and in Genesis’s relationship with her family, particularly her father, whose approval she yearns for even as she despises him - and yet just when it seems she fully despises him, something pulls her back and reminds her of his good qualities, and the difficult life that made him this way.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Ann Patchett’s This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which I liked more than I expected per last week’s review. Of course it helped that there are a couple essays near the middle of the book about Truth & Beauty and the controversy that erupted when the book was assigned as summer reading for incoming freshman at Clemson University. (Some of the parents thought the book was way too gay - it talks about two women being best friends and stuff! Clearly a front for homosexuality! - and also referenced drug usage and extramarital sex and OMG, how could this be required reading???)

I also read Cece Bell’s El Deafo, which is a comic book memoir about growing up deaf. El Deafo was the name Bell gave her superheroine alter ego, who got superpowers from her amazing Phonic Ear and later from a glasses. It’s cute and sweet and not very memorable, although I did particularly like it’s portrayal of Cece’s first best friend, a girl who always insisted on doing what she wanted to do, exactly how she wanted to do it.

I had a friend like this is sixth grade. It was exactly as exasperating as Bell describes it: she came up with good ideas just often enough that it’s hard to extricate yourself, but it’s still extremely grating to have the games fall apart every time you assert your own opinions on things. (“How about the imaginary game we’re creating together doesn’t revolve around your princess character, hmm?”)

And finally, this year’s Newbery Winner, Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover, which like Brown Girl Dreaming is a book in verse. Another verse from the book:

Basketball Rule #10

A loss is inevitable,
like snow in winter.
True champions
learn
to dance
through
the storm.

( Spoilers )

What I’m Reading Now

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which is an expansion of his article “Is Google making us stupid?” and, like many books that are expanded forms of magazine articles, doesn’t seem to have quite enough to say to make writing a whole book worthwhile. Carr argues that internet usage atrophies our attention spans: that, as we get used to digesting text and images in small chunks and jumping from one thing to another, we lose the ability to concentrate deeply that is central to reading books. I think he has a point, but I am somewhat doubtful that he needs 224 pages to make it.

I’ve also started Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman, which has not grabbed me so far, but I’m only a little ways in.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve finally gotten Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park from the library, which I’ve been meaning to do since I read Fangirl.

I’m also waiting for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Nancy Jo Sales’ The Bling Ring: How a Gang of Fame-Obsessed Teens Ripped of Hollywood and Shocked the World, which disappointed me terribly. I thought Sales might use the case to get an interesting new viewpoint on the cult of celebrity and reality TV, the way that historical true crime writers use cases as windows on their time periods, and, well, she does use it as a viewpoint. It’s just not interesting or new. She echoes the thousands of other indictments of our cultural obsession with fame at any price - incidentally, I find it hard to think of any lower-hanging fruit; everyone loves to hate reality TV and celebrity obsessions - and adds nothing interesting or new.

She also has a source problem: the case involved seven suspects who were formally charged (and a few other possible suspects who never were charged), but most of them (including Rachel Lee, whom the others generally fingered as the instigator) refused to speak to her. In the end the book is based heavily on the testimony of just one of the burglars: Nicholas Prugo, who confessed everything to the police, and tended to paint himself as a sad, lonely, anxious boy, led astray by his glamorous mean girl friends and their obsession with celebrity.

Prugo seems painfully honest - his confession was the only reason the police had enough evidence to charge him - so I have no doubt he told the truth as he saw it. But Sales basically ends up accepting his story as the truth, full stop, because it fits nicely with the indictment of celebrity culture and reality TV that she wants to write.

Has anyone seen Sofia Coppola’s movie take on the case, which is also called The Bling Ring?? I think Coppola probably brings a more interesting perspective to the case than Sales did, so I’m curious if it’s worth watching. I did like her Marie Antoinette; it’s rather surreal and dreamlike and odd, very different from anything else I’ve seen. A lot of that movie is simply a deluge of stuff, and I feel like that would be a good approach to this story.

What I’m Reading Now

The Novel: An Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600, which rather turned me off by beginning with an impassioned defense of experimental prose, which is apparently the only way that a novel can be “art.” Three-dimensional characters or a well-paced plot are mere “entertainment” - and the author swears he doesn’t mean this dichotomy as a value judgement, but dude, if you didn’t mean it as a value judgement you would have chosen different words.

This is in the introduction. I’m hoping that he’s gotten it out of his system and will not let this argument besmirch his actual book, because I really am curious about the ancient tradition of novels. We’ll see.

What I Plan to Read Next

The 2015 Newbery winner has been announced! The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander. So obviously I will be reading that.

I might also read the Newbery Honor winners this year: Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson, and El Deafo, by Cece Bell.