Kristin’s Comments (group member since Dec 09, 2014)

Kristin’s comments from the The Vertical Alliance group.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini's second novel. It tells the tragic stories of two Afghan women married to the same abusive man. The book is exhausting because there are few reprieves from domestic violence and anger. It repeatedly made my physically nauseous. It is a compelling story of tenacity, friendship, and bravery.

I can't help but compare Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Eric Larson's The Devil in the White City. Admittedly, this is partly because I am new to the true crime genre (if that is how these two books should be categorized). Also, Larson carefully studied Capote for "insights into how Capote achieved his dark and still deeply troubling account." I compare them because Capote succeeds where Larson flounders. I do know that my comparison between the two stories breaks down because Capote is literary while Larson is journalistic in scope. Also, Capote immersed himself into the crime days after it occurred, offering him access to fresh emotions and events. Larson looks a back a hundred years to a story with witness accounts.

Capote writes about the apparently motiveless murders of the peaceful Clutter family in 1959. He shows the grieving and paranoid community, the determined and resourceful detectives, and the despicable yet pitiable killers (Dick Hicock and Perry Smith). The novel is deeply empathetic to the murderers without dismissing their guilt. Capote deliberately shows what about Hicock's and Smith's character and history made them capable of killing. Capote condemns the crime, but aligns himself with the murderers's desires to be known as more than killers.

Larson tells the stories of H. H. Holmes, a serial killer in Chicago in the 1890s, and the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Both plot lines are stories of creativity, cunning, and power. However, the parallels between the two stories end with their shared historical context and characters motivated by power, making it difficult to discern the purpose behind Larson's structure. Shock and awe propel the story, leaving little room for readers to empathize and question. Larson's Holmes is demonic, completely stripped of human impulses, motivations, and emotions. Yet, Larson never questions how a human could so closely resemble the devil. Nonetheless, the stories of Holmes and the World's Fair are riveting and exciting. The writing is flawless (making it at times boring). The research is extensive. Students with interests in history and mystery will enjoy this book if they have built up stamina as a reader.

The Maze Runner by James Dashner is the first in a trilogy (with two prequels) of dystopian novels that fits firmly in the line of The Hunger Games and Divergent. Dashner imagines a massive and mysterious maze in which adolescent boys inexplicably find themselves. The boys live in the middle of the maze and are tasked with finding their way out. They instate a brutal order complete with an economy, labor, laws, and capital punishment. The story follows Thomas, a new addition to the maze as he attempts to solve the mysteries of the maze and of his character.

I got Maze Runner in the library last month and it has been very popular with students. In fact, I have not spoken to a single student who disliked it. Boys and girls all describe it as a very exciting novel with an awesome cliffhanger ending. The book, however, is not particularly well-written and is well below a high school reading level. Nonetheless, I think it is a valuable as a bridge text (in particular to Golding's The Lord of the Flies). It is exciting, dramatic (and cheesy), and raises some interesting questions about authority and government.

Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

Bomb by Steve Sheinkin is a Newberry Honor book that tells the story of the race to build and steal the atomic bomb. The stories Sheinkin recounts are fascinating. I learned that there was a Soviet spy masquerading as an American physicist at the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico. His papers about the bomb were so detailed that Soviet physicists were able to make exact copies of the American design. I also learned about the ten Norwegian soldiers who destroyed the Nazi heavy water plant in Norway by skiing with hundreds of pounds of equipment over mountains, climbing into a 600 foot ravine, crossing a river, climbing up the other side, crawling through air ducts, and blowing up the tanks in the middle of the night and winter. They effectively destroyed the Nazi's chances of creating an atomic weapon. Bomb reads like a really good Wikipedia article (with added dialogue and dramatic rhetorical questions). It is both easy and interesting (I'm thinking some 8th and 9th graders would particularly like it). However, it can be difficult to follow the many narratives. Sheinkin tells the story chronologically and so jumps between multiple Soviet spy rings in America , British and Norwegian soldiers in Nazi territory, American physicists trying to build a bomb, and American spies trying to infiltrate German laboratories. Maintaining all these story threads may be difficult and off-putting for some students.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Unbroken is a heavy book. One friend told me that halfway through he got frustrated with author Laura Hillenbrand for going overboard on suffering before remembering that the book is historical. Louis Zamperini is an Olympic runner stationed in the Pacific during World War II. When his plane crashes, he survives four weeks on a rubber raft (with sharks literally jumping out of the water trying to attack him) only to be captured by the Japanese before reaching land. He spends years being transported through the maze of brutal POW camps in the Pacific and on Japan. After release, he falls into deep depression and alcoholism before his conversion at a Billy Graham crusade. The story ends with Zamperini's offer of forgiveness to a particularly sadistic guard. Hillenbrand supports her narrative with detailed descriptions of planes (who become characters), geography, cultural motivators, and military strategies. She immerses the reader into the world of the Pacific theatre and deeply connects him to Zamperini's narrative of defiance and perseverance. This is one of the best books I read this year and I highly recommend it for high school students.
A word of warning: the violence and suffering portrayed in Unbroken is graphic. Many prisoners are beaten with boots, clubs, bats, and fists. Guards are described as being sexually aroused when abusing prisoners. A guard kills a duck in front of POWs by sodomizing it. Zamperini wakes from a nightmare to find that he his strangling his pregnant wife. Hillenbrand is matter of fact rather than gratuitous but does not conceal Zamperini's suffering with ambiguity or euphemism.

Cinder


Cinder is a dystopian, futuristic, plague-ridden, cyborg retelling of Cinderella set in Beijing that centers around political tension between humans and Lunars (a species developed from humans that live on the moon) and is told by a mechanic/cyborg/orphan who doesn't know that she is a princess/Lunar/plague carrier. The plot and characters are underdeveloped. Characters make decisions over the course of minutes or days that would logically require weeks or months. Nonetheless, Cinder is fun. There is romance, intrigue, and rebellion. The ugly duckling turns out to be a swan (and a massively important political figure). Unlike some other recent YA dystopian novels, Meyers isn't trying to communicate some great universal truth about society so it doesn't bother me too much that she isn't a great author. She just writes a fun story that lots of high school girls are going to enjoy. This is the first of four (Scarlet [Little Red Riding Hood], Cress [Rapunzel], and Winter [Snow White]).

As you read YA books, post short review of them here. We can use this discussion as a resource for finding new pleasure reading books to hand to students.

The ability to 'see' a book in your head is vital to the continued engagement and enjoyment of literature. Maybe movies about books can be used to support students who struggle to visualize stories?

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
Mary Poppins, P. L. Travers
Divergent, Veronica Roth
The Space Trilogy, C. S. Lewis
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte