Some Novel Ideas

Legend: Same Dystopia, Different Day

    Absolutely everyone has noticed the rash of dystopian YA novels kicking around the bookstore these days. I was recently in the wonderland that is Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, and their YA room had a great "I'm Dystopian!" display. Author Philip Reeve wrote about the phenomenon in this month's School Library Journal. And you can't escape the promotions for the upcoming movie version of The Hunger Games. I'm guilty of being quietly obsessed with the genre ever since I started teaching Lois Lowry's classic The Giver twenty or so years ago.

    Well, in the past few years, I've read: The Hunger Games series, The Maze Runner series, the Chaos Walking series, the Gone series, the Uglies series, Incarceron, Divergent, Matched, Delerium, Enclave, Shipbreaker, The Roar, etc., etc., etc. Lots and lots of 'em. Some of them are great (Shipbreaker, Delerium, Chaos Walking series); some are very good (Maze Runner, Uglies, Gone, Incarceron). All of them are addictively readable.  For some reason I cannot fathom, we are fascinated with our own inevitable, horrific future. What we know for sure: Earth will suffer many cataclysmic disasters which will (probably) be our fault; the new government of what is left of the U.S. will be oppressive and totalitarian; the poor will be really poor and the rich will be really rich. And one last thing: Some plucky teenager with mad fighting and survival skills will soon see it all for what it is and will fight back.

    So what is different about Marie Lu's Legend, which will be published later this year and has already been optioned for the screen? Truthfully, not much. When I received the galley of Legend and read the back cover, I actually groaned. Aloud, not inwardly. My obsession was in danger of spilling over into compulsion: Yet another dystopian novel I must read. No, really, I just can't do it again. Please make it stop!

    Still, I cracked Legend open and began. Original it ain't, but, I gotta tell you, I liked it.  I liked it a lot. Despite being able to predict almost everything that was going to happen, I couldn't put Legend down. And if it's done right, it could make an awesome film. At the very least, it would be a great video game.

    June is a war-ready prodigy in the future Republic of America, a perfect soldier-to-be, who grew up in the golden light of Los Angeles's richest district. Day is a prodigy of another kind. He is from one of the city's poorest districts, and he's also the country's most wanted terrorist/criminal.  June and Day could not have come from more contrasting origins, but their worlds are about to collide in a big way.

    When Day's family is quarantined because of a breakout of the newest strain of plague to run through the L.A. slum areas, he needs to steal some plague cure quick. June's brother Matias, who seems to be the ultimate Republic soldier, is murdered at the hospital on the night that Day tries to swipe a few vials of the cure. Now, Day is the number-one suspect in the crime, and June is out to exact her revenge.

    Soon, however, June and Day cross paths in a most unlikely way.  An uneasy alliance, even a touch of romance develops, and June and Day start to uncover some horrifying truths about the Republic. Everyone, it seems, is a pawn in the Republic's game, from the poor dying of plague each season to the most loyal soldiers defending the land. Both June and Day have trust issues, and it's easy to see why considering the ever-shifting circumstances of their lives. They are opposite sides of the same coin, simultaneously the user and the used, in a society that believes they're both expendable.

    Legend is terrifically violent. It's remarkable that Day lives through half of the torture and injury he endures. And the brutally creepy people surrounding June will make your skin crawl. Legend walks a very thin line between making its point and being gratuitous. But Day is so likable, somehow, a tough but essentially vulnerable boy who just wants to save his family, that the reader forgives the over-the-top moments of gore just to cheer for the upstart hero. June's loyalties are more wavering, so we're not sure what to make of her. Ultimately, she is also a victim of the government's cruelty, but you don't start to root for her until the very end of the book.

    Legend is narrated by June and Day in alternating chapters. It's a well-managed device that gives the reader a look into what each is thinking without any encroaching sentimentality. Lu offers a few well-timed plot twists and an exciting climax that will leave the reader both sorry and satisfied. I figure there's a sequel around the corner, too. Which I will most likely read in one sitting, on the day of its release. Sad, aren't I?

 

Paranormalcy: Don't Judge This Book By Its Cover

    The title of this post presents you with a sort of impossibility when it comes to actual books. Sure, when you're talking about people, you're not supposed to judge someone just based on his or her looks, but the cover is the first thing you judge a book by, isn't it? I know in these days of ereaders and ebooks, we don't linger over the covers of books the way we would in a book store.  And I'm saying that as a person who reads almost everything on my iPad at this point. But I still tend to be attracted to a book based on its cover, even if I'm just browsing through the Kindle store on Amazon.

    Which is why I really had no interest in Kiersten White's Paranormalcy at first.  I mean, look at that cover!  What distinguishes this book from all the other Starcrossed-Entwined-Abandoned-Withered-Everlasting teen paranormal fantasies out there? Nothing, if all you did was check out the cover. Pretty girl, pink gown, dark sky, wind sweeping through her hair, blah, blah, blah.  That could easily be a Bella, Grace, or Nora, or any other so-called heroine of today's YA fiction standing there.

But it's not.

It's Evie.  And Evie is nothing like those other girls.  Sure, she's a teenager longing for family and love and acceptance. But Evie is also genuine and funny and awkward, and she stumbles over herself, and she says the wrong things sometimes, and she just wants to be normal. She's your BFF, your "Let's watch trashy TV and eat popcorn" pal. Oh, and she kicks ass. Evie is a heroine you can really root for.

Ever since she was a little girl, Evie has lived at and worked for the IPCA, the International Paranormal Containment Agency. She has a pretty special power that makes her incredibly valuable to the agency: she can see through any paranormal's glamour, that facade that most people see instead of the actual vampire or hag or whatever.  Armed with her taser, Evie can tag and bag just about any wayward paranormal out there. So what if her best friend is a mermaid and the only thing close to a mother that she has is her boss?  So what if she doesn't get to go to high school with real kids or get a driver's license or other normal teenage stuff?  Evie is comfortable, independent, and good at her job.

But things begin to change rapidly for Evie after a cute teenage shape-shifter named Lend breaks into the IPCA, looking for intel. And someone is out there killing paranormals, too. What does all of this have to do with Evie?  She's wondering the same thing. Just as Evie's falling for Lend and trying desperately to stay away from former boyfriend Reth, a seductive, gorgeous faerie, things at the IPCA start to crumble around her.  Are the people and creatures of the IPCA, the only family Evie has ever known, really the good guys? How does Lend fit into what's happening around her?  And why is Reth stalking her more closely than ever before?

Following Evie through this adventure is like communicating with a friend through Facebook.  Her voice, that of a modern teenager struggling to understand herself and her world, is spot-on. Evie's "normal day" may not mirror those of a typical teen, but her self-conscious angst and her "I am totally falling for this guy" innocence make her someone you'd totally want to hang around with. In addition to a terrific narrator, Paranormalcy also offers a terrific cast of unusual yet relatable characters. I see that the sides are already lining up for Team Lend and Team Reth online. But it's the humor that makes this book so special and so different from most of the YA lit that's out there today. When you read most of these paranormal romances, you get the feeling that no one ever smiles or laughs or enjoys life.  I laughed out loud more than once while reading Paranormalcy, and I love that Evie doesn't turn sour even in the midst of the worst personal crises she faces. Kiersten White is my new author-hero, a bright light in the dark world of teen lit today.  The sequel to Paranormalcy, Supernaturally, comes out at the end of July. If Evie were a real girl, she'd be waiting right next to me in line at the bookstore, totally psyched and squealing excitedly about what adventures await.  

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

Divergent: I've seen it all before

As I write this, I am watching "The Matrix" on AMC.  This is my absolute favorite movie of all time.  They just "woke" Neo from the dreamworld of the Matrix, and he's about to find out what the real world actually is.  This movie is visually stunning in so many ways.  I've used it to teach about viewing movies with a critical eye.  It's just a delight for a film junkie like me to watch, even if this is the fiftieth time I've seen it (at least).  In addition to its visual appeal, "The Matrix" is a wonderful story about being the master of your own destiny, fate versus free will, and the dangerous reach of technology. It is wholly original.

Which brings me to Veronica Roth's Divergent, a dystopian novel set in a futuristic Chicago.  What does Divergent have to do with "The Matrix?" Nothing, and that's my point. Where "The Matrix" is a highly inventive, groundbreaking movie, Divergent is  a remix of The Hunger Games trilogy with a bit of The Giver thrown in for good measure.

Observe:

As much as her name resembles that of a character out of The Crucible, Beatrice Prior lives not in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts,  but in post-apocalyptic Chicago. The city (The country? The world? Roth never reveals what lies beyond Lake Shore Drive) has been divided into five factions, each inhabited by people who embody that faction's virtue: Amity, Dauntless, Erudite, Candor, and Abnegation (SAT word alert! Couldn't Roth have just used Selfless?).  At age 16, kids choose the faction in which they will spend the rest of their lives. Generally, that means staying in the faction you're born into.  But not for Beatrice. Never feeling like she wholly belongs in the selfless realm of Abnegation, Beatrice chooses Dauntless. She doesn't know if she's right for Dauntless either, but at least she won't be bored.

As she goes through the miserable, tortuous, often gratuitous initiation process in Dauntless, "Tris" makes a few friends and a few enemies, falls for her initiation trainer (whose name is Four, by the way, which tripped me up occassionally because it wasn't always immediately obvious whether "Four" was referring to the number or the person), leaps from the roof of a skyscraper more than once, and saves her city (world?) from the evil Erudites. Along the way, Tris's narrative treats us to buckets of blood-soaked violence and the usual teenage sexual longing. 

So? You're thinking that Divergent doesn't sound too much like The Hunger Games, except for the choosing ceremony, the training, the smarter-and-braver-than-she-thinks-she-is heroine, and the civil war. What's my beef with this book exactly?  I don't think Veronica Roth gives us a new and interesting heroine here, at least not yet.  Tris is Katniss with tattoos.  The cadence of her speech, her temperament, her gritty vulnerability- they all mimic Katniss, leaving Tris without an original voice.  My hope is that as the trilogy develops, Tris will find her own authentic voice. I also hope that Roth develops some of the other characters into rounder, fuller individuals. The bad guys in Divergent are so bad, just through and through evil with no redeeming qualities, they seem like characatures. And a couple of the more interesting characters got themselves killed already, so I assume they won't be around for books two and three. 

I have one other issue with Divergent: Since when does covering your body in tattoos and piercings equal bravery? How does erudition equate with greed? And why can't children in Abnegation ask questions at the dinner table or look in a mirror? I get what Roth was going for here.  In order to have conflict big enough for war, she wanted the groups to show the extremes of their factions' qualities.  But, it's too much.  What is so brilliant about Lois Lowry's The Giver is the delicacy of its characters.  All of them, from Jonas to Asher to the Giver are so finely drawn. Real people aren't so brutally evil or so utterly selfless. Real people are a messy amalgam of goodness and immorality, nobility and ambivalence; extremes, but also in-betweens.  I didn't get that from Divergent, and that was disappointing.

I'm sure that Divergent will find an audience.  Kids who are lost without Katniss but who feel a bit too old for Rick Riordan's Kane Chronicles will enjoy Roth's series.  At least, they'll enjoy the first book.  If, by the third, she has not fleshed these characters out into whole people, patience may run thin. 

Haven: Here We Go Again

Let's play Guess the Book.  I'll tell you some plot tidbits from the book I just read, and you tell me what book it is.  No peeking at the book cover to the left.  It's just there for show, anyway.

A teenage girl moves to a new city and enters a new school.  She is immediately fascinated with one of her classmates.  He's pale and beautiful, and all of her new friends tell her to forget about him. Apparently, he doesn't pay much attention to anyone at school, and he keeps to himself. But, of course, their attraction is supernatural.  The guy our heroine has fallen for is-(gasp!)-a vampire! So, against her better judgment (but right in line with her hormones) she gets involved with the bloodsucker, helps him fight the enemy vampires, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So, what book did I just read? Of course! It was Twilight! Oh, wait...Let me just look at the cover again here...Huh? I wasn't reading a Stephanie Meyer book? Really?  'Cause I could have sworn that...Oh, okay, this one's actually called Haven, and it was written by Kristi Cook.  Let's stroll on over to Miss Cook's website and see what she has to say for herself. Well, what do you know!  Right here in the second paragraph on her homepage, she says of Haven: "Think X-Men meets Twilight." More about my take on this statement later.  For now, my review:

Violet McKenna is a self-proclaimed "freak" who, due to family circumstances, is forced to move from Atlanta to New York with her stepmother. Once in the Empire State, Violet enters Winterhaven School, a boarding school in the Hudson Valley, that she was "drawn to" in a way she cannot explain.  As soon as she settles into her new life, Violet finds out the school's big secret: everyone at Winterhaven has some kind of supernatural power, whether it's telekenesis, clairsentience, astral projection, or, in Violet's case, precognition. For Violet, learning of her school's special students is somewhat comforting.  Now, she doesn't have to be a freak who can see the future.  She's just another student who happens to have a special power.

But all is not perfect for Violet at Winterhaven. She is immediately spellbound by Aidan Gray, a mysterious and beautiful classmate who spends most of his spare time in the school's chemistry lab, working on a secret experiment.  He rarely gives his fellow classmates the time of day, so everyone is surprised that Aidan is just as bewitched by Violet as she is by him. But Aidan harbors a very dark secret, one that puts his life in constant danger, and Violet is drawn into his world despite her own misgivings and her ever more powerful visions of Aidan's death.

Haven is indeed a pageturner. It's highly readable. It is the first book in a planned trilogy, and Miss Cook certainly leaves enough loose ends to justify a sequel. Haven will fit comfortably into Barnes and Noble's "Teen Paranormal Romance" section. Fans of Twilight will find Haven, if not original, then at least satisfying.

But every detail of this book is a cliche, and this brings me back to my earlier point.  I have a problem with books like Haven. By the author's own admission, this book is a combination of plots and characters from other stories. If the X-Men have supernatural powers and Twilight has the vampire romance, why would you write a book that completely rides on the backs of these other stories?  Time after time as I was reading Haven I found myself groaning at yet another hackneyed character or plot point. Girl leaving her old life behind to start over? Check. Mysterious and gorgeous guy she falls for? Check. Vampires? Check. Teenage sexual longing? Check. Initially frightened girl transforms from damsel in distress to plucky heroine? Check. Books like Haven are the reason why I don't read books like Haven!

So, come on, YA novelists! I know these books sell, and that's why they're all out there. But another threadbare plot with the predicatbility of a movie about the Titanic (Yep, it's gonna hit the iceberg again, folks!)? Please, you can do better.  There are a number of wonderful YA authors out there who are pushing the envelope and expanding readers' imaginations: Neal Shusterman, Catherine Fisher, Patrick Ness, Cassandra Clare, Carrie Ryan, James Dashner, Scott Westerfeld, just to name a few of the current authors I respect greatly. Before the second novel in this series comes out, Kristi Cook would do well to take in some of the best new writing for teens.  I think she'd discover that her writing talent could be put to much better use.

The Internet Has a Feed Chosen Just for You!

This summer, my son and I are taking a trip to Oregon. He and I spent a ton of time online looking at hotel reviews and maps and room rates, and we finally narrowed it down to this one great looking hotel.  We browsed the hotel's website for a while, and we ended up booking our stay on one of the travel aggregator sites.  The next day, and for quite a while beyond that, I noticed that in my Google Reader feeds, the advertisements at the bottom of each entry were ALL FOR THAT HOTEL.  In other words, the internet, or more specifically, Google, had been monitoring where I'd been browsing and had honed in on the place it thought I wanted.  Google had personalized the ads just for me.

That idea is not a comfort to me.

Nor is it a comfort to Eli Pariser, who discusses this very issue in the following TED talk.  Watch it and squirm:

 

OFLA 2011 Presentation Reources

Below you will find the various resources presented at OFLA 2011 by Dr. Franz Gruber and me in our session, Latin Projects Via Voicethread.  Dr. Gruber and I completed two projects with Voicethread this year, an ancient architecture project with 8th grade Latin students, and an Ohio city project with 7th grade Latin students.  Here you will find Dr. Gruber's slides, my slides, several student project examples, and a several other relevant links. If you have any questions regarding these or other Voicethread projects, please contect Dr. Gruber or me at:

franz_gruber@columbusacademy.org

stacy_nockowitz@columbusacademy.org.

 

 

Latin Projects via Voicethread

View more presentations from nockowitzs.

Using Voicethread- OFLA

View more presentations from nockowitzs

Architecture Projects:

 

Ohio City Projects:

 

Other links:

Ohio Classical Conference (OCC): http://www.xavier.edu/occ/

The Ohio Classical Conference is a professional organization of Latin and Greek teachers of all levels (elementary, Middle and High School, and University); it has as its purpose the advertisement of classical language learning (learning Latin and Ancient Greek) and classical studies in Ohio, and the promotion of the common professional interests of its members.

Handout from presentation: Download Latin Projects Via VoiceThread

Writing As Storytelling

    A few weeks ago, Ben Mikaelsen came to our school as this year's visiting author.  Ben was a delight, and I'll write more about his visit in another post, but for now, I want to concentrate on his philosophy about writing. 

    "Writing," he said, "is storytelling." 

Of all of the things that I got out of Ben's visit, and there were many, this simple sentence resonated with me in a way that I never would have expected. It stuck in my brain and kept tap, tap, tapping through my thoughts. You see, in some fantasy world of mine, I consider myself a writer.  I always have, from the time I was very young, around seven or eight years old.  It's all I wanted to do.  Well, that and read.

    So, why did the utterance of this sentence have such an effect on me?  I think I figured it out. See, the thing is, as much as I love to write, I am not much of a storyteller. What Mr. Mikaelsen was talking about was just letting go of the notion that every word needs to be weighty and special and telling the story you want to tell.  That has always been so incredibly hard for me.  When I write fiction, I gnaw my knuckles over every syllable and twist of phrase.  I get so caught up in trying to make every word the perfect word, I end up writing in nothing but fits and starts. Sometimes I even give up, thinking that it'll just never be perfect so why bother.

    Even now, as I write this post, I'm stewing about words.  How does one overcome that?  Because I think Ben is absolutely right.  The story is much more important than the words themselves.  If you can tell a great story, you can get around to fixing the words later.  Maybe in one of the fifteen full revisions that Ben says he does to each of his books!

    I have actually written a book, a YA novel called The Power of Merit Ruhl, which took me two years to write. I'm proud of it. I had a story I wanted to tell, and I told it.  But I agonized over words the whole time.  Now, I want to try to tell more stories.  I want to write a sequel to my book, and even make it into a series.  I have the stories to tell, the arc for each of the four major characters, in my head.  The question is will I be able to set aside my obssession with words and just tell the stories? 

    My favorite books tell really amazing stories. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a good example of this. If you've never read it, go out right now and get yourself a copy.  It's the story of a small group of friends at a private college who do a terrible thing and then have to hide their mess.  This story left me breathless.  There is one point of such delicious suspense that I practically ripped the book because I was holding it so hard.  Another example of spectacular storytelling: Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier, a book that, though I've read it many times and even taught it, can still keep me enraptured to the very last page.  I don't necessarily remember all of the fancy phrasing and uses of foreshadowing and symbolism from either of these books.  I remeber their stories and how those stories thrilled me. 

    Having said that, I do have two favorite books that are all about words. They also happen to be wonderful stories.  Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth uses words in the most extraordinary ways.  There's a car that "goes without saying" (The car literally only moves when those sitting in it stop speaking). Milo, the main character, gets stuck in the Doldrums, an actual place inhabited by the enerygy-sapping Lethargarians. At one point Milo ends up on the Island of Conclusions, which one can only get to by jumping. But even with all of this phenomenal and hilarious wordplay, it's Juster's storytelling that comes through.  I taught this book for years with 6th graders, and one student, now a senior in our Upper School, came back to the middle school library looking for a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.  Why?  Because in his English class they were talking about the idea of The Quest, and Milo's story stayed with him since he'd read it six years earlier.  That's storytelling!

    The other book I must mention is Mark Dunn's brilliant Ella Minnow Pea. In this gem of a novel, the people of the island of Nollop find themselves being allowed to speak and write fewer and fewer words because the letters on the monument to their island's namesake, the person who came up with the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," are falling off one by one.  The island's government forbids the use of any letter which falls. It's an epistolary novel, one that will captivate word lovers. But as you read the book, you'll be most concerned about what is going to happen to the poor people of the island, particularly young Ella.  She's racing against time and the government to find another sentence that uses all of the letters of the alphabet.  I won't tell you how it ends.  You have to read the whole juicy story.

    Just writing about these outstanding stories makes me want to jump back into writing my own stories.  I will work on letting go of the words and allowing the story to come first.  I must. By the way, I'm attaching the prologue from my novel here: Download Merit Ruhl-Prologue  I hope someone reads it! I would love to know what you think of my story...and my storytelling.

 

 

The World is Obsessed With Facebook

Thought I'd share a video that I learned about from Jeffrey Thomas' blog, Tech the Plunge.  It moves fast, so get your reading glasses on!

 

 

 

I am clearly the lone holdout on this "Facebook" thing. I don't know...I just don't think it'll last.

Yes, that's a joke.

But I'm still not going on Facebook.

Voicethreads for SIGMS Technology Innovation Award Application

Amazing Libraries Slideshow

Maybe this is what my blog is for... just posting stuff I think is cool.  Here's a wicked cool slideshow of amazing libraries around the world.  The library pictured above is at Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, but most of the pictures are from other continents.  Here at my school, we're in the process of talking about building a new Middle School building. I don't think the new library will look like any of the ones in the slideshow, but a girl can dream, can't she?!