Historically Banned Books: An Overview

If you've read some other posts on this blog, you know how strongly I feel about banned books. I make no apologies or excuses for the fact that I believe a person should be able to read what they want to read, regardless of what others think of it. After all, somebody will be offended by just about anything that's out there, and along those same lines, there is a perfect book out there for everyone.

Shortlist.com has put together a partial list of historically banned books, in the form of some interesting charts and graphics. Take a look, and remember that not everyone has a choice in what they can or cannot read. In my opinion, we are very, very lucky to be able to make those choices for ourselves.

Book Review: "In The Shadows" by Kiersten White (author) and Jim Di Bartolo (artist)

Hybrid formats of writing and art in books have always caught my interest. After all, words on a page can be used in some innovative ways: Jonathan Safran Foer, in one of my favorite examples, uses overlapping text, different spacing and outline formats,and even some black-and-white photos to enhance the story in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and to help deepen the story and express thoughts, feelings, and different representations of his characters and their surroundings. Graphic novels take this hybrid approach all the way, completely integrating text story with art so that the story is incomplete without one or the other.

In The Shadows by Kiersten White and Jim Di Bartolo combines sections of graphic art and others of text to tell the story of a small family in the Maine countryside, around 1900. Minnie and Cora help their mother to run a boardinghouse, their business since their father died years ago. They keep company with Arthur, a young man whose past is somehow connected with their family, and whose mysterious origins keep him alone despite Minnie's growing feelings for him. One summer everything changes for them, when brothers Thomas and Charles come to stay with them. Charles is dying of an illness that Thomas hates himself for being unable to stop, but they may have a chance for one last summer of fun together in the company of Minnie and Cora.

But the troubles plaguing Thomas, Charles, and their father turn out to be the same ones that killed Arthur's parents, the same ones that keep him separated from those around him and make him afraid of himself. If he lets himself delve into the secrets of his parents, will he succumb to obsession and paranoia as well? He doesn't have a choice in the end if he's going to save Minnie and Cora, using what knowledge he kept after his parents' death to uncover a sinister ring of powerful people in the shadows of the world stage. The Ladon Vitae, as the organization is called, use their immortal lives to control international politics, industry, history, culture and to play with the lives of those around them. To uncover their secret and stop them, to rid them of their unnatural abilities and undo the source of them, Arthur may have to sacrifice more than he hoped.

This novel is formatted in alternating chapters of stunning art (with no words at all) and text. It took me a very long time to realize this, but the art chapters begin where the text story ends, so that throughout the book you jump back and forth between time periods. This is an **awesome** idea, if the reader knows to look for it. The dates of the different images in the art chapters were the only clue into what was happening with the time periods, and those were not displayed very prominently. If you were really immersed in the story, like I was, it was very easy to miss the dates entirely. The result was that once I finally realized what was happening in the interplay between text and art, I had to go back through all the art portions again to really understand what was happening and appreciate the idea as a whole.

The interpersonal relationships between Minnie, Cora, Arthur, Thomas and Charles were well-developed and definitely drove the story, but I do wish that more time and energy had been spent expanding on the idea of the Ladon Vitae and their origins, motivations, etc. The conspiracy portion of the story line was anemic at best, even though it was the whole reason for this life-changing undertaking for the characters. The reader was never really presented with much about them, other than that they were evil and in control. It was a missed opportunity from my point of view, one that could have made Arthur's actions much more significant.

If you like character-driven stories that involve some suspense and conspiracy, a dash of magic, danger and some pretty innovative formatting with art and text, pick up a copy of In The Shadows by Kiersten White and Jim Di Bartolo. The story background isn't terribly deep, but it is creative,with a happily ever after in the end. You can find your copy at a local, independent bookstore near you.

Writing Advice from Stephen King

Few contemporary fiction writers can claim the kind of success that Stephen King has seen over the course of his career. So when he offers writing advice, it strikes me as worth listening to. In this interview with Business Insider, King offers his opinions and expertise on everything from writing approach to content and self-perception. It's an enlightening read for anyone from the dabbling writer to the established author who's looking to give their stories an extra edge.

Book Review: "Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia" by Jenny Torres Sanchez

October was Mental Health Awareness month. While I very much hope that everyone reading this heard about it at some point during the month, I mention it again now because depression, anxiety, and a whole slew of other disorders impact so many people every day, myself included. Whether or not you're aware of it, you know someone who struggles with mental illness either in themselves or someone close to them.

It seems as though the transitional period that is teenhood is when many of these mental health challenges can make themselves known. Small things can pile up to crate a seemingly insurmountable of adversity, or one big catastrophe can explode your life into so many fragments that you feel like you'll never be able to pick them all up. And when you're in the middle of trying to define who you really are for the first time in your life, as is the case for a lot of teens, it's sometimes very easy to get to the point of being overwhelmed.

Frenchie Garcia is at her breaking point. Or, rather, her melting point. She's 17 and still living with her parents in Orlando, her application to art school in Chicago was rejected, and her best friend has all but disappeared thanks to his girlfriend. It's enough to make anyone a little bit depressed. All her plans for her next steps in life have fallen through, and the only things Frenchie has the energy to do are walk to the neighborhood graveyard for chats with the headstone of someone named Emily Dickinson (not the famous poet, just someone who happened to share her name) and lie in bed thinking about the night that Andy Cooper died. Depressed, frustrated and full of guilt, it's not long before Frenchie is alienating the only friends she has left and showing the worst side of herself to the only person who might be interested in helping her work through her problems.

Desperate to come to terms with what happened the night Andy Cooper died, and hopefully through that start getting her life back together, Frenchie launches a half-baked plan to recreate his last night alive and try to find some meaning in it, some reason for the way it took place. If she can find a good explanation for why he died, maybe she can show herself that it really wasn't her fault, and escape the depression that's eating her life from the inside out.

"Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia" by Jenny Torres Sanchez is the story of a teenager's desperate attempt to find closure before she completely self-destructs and ruins her own chances of rebuilding her life. The way that Frenchie starts losing control and perspective, lashing out at the people around her and creating more problems for herself in the process, felt very realistic to me. Partially this was because Frenchie herself expressed a kind of incredulity that so many things could go wrong in such quick succession. As the reader I could clearly see that Frenchie's own irrational actions, caused by her depression and inner turmoil, were what was causing her problems with the people around her. But since the book was written from her perspective, I was able to understand Frenchie's frustration and the sense of powerlessness that went with her situation.

While her parents and her friends Joel and Robyn play important roles in Frenchie's life and struggle, namely by being wronged by and then forgiving Frenchie, they remain very static characters without much background or development. This ensures that the reader focuses on Frenchie and her progress, but ti also results in a certain lack of the depth that similar stories like John Green's "Looking for Alaska" or Ava Dellaira's "Love Letters to the Dead" possess. I think I would have appreciated the significance of Frenchie's relationships and how she first damages and then repairs them if there had been more time spent actually letting me get to know the people who are important to the protagonist.

Essentially this entire book centers on Frenchie, her thoughts and emotions, almost to the exclusion of every other character. While I felt that this was a sort of missed opportunity to deepen the story as a whole, I also understand that it makes sense from a certain perspective. I'll be the first to admit that when I was a teenager, my entire life revolved around me and my emotions. Looking outside of them was a difficult task, and it's also the big challenge that Frenchie has to overcome in order to set her life straight and move forward. For other teens who are struggling to see their way through the same issue, Frenchie's "selfish" perspective might be the most sympathetic.

One detail that really bothered me, despite the fact that it's very small: at one point, Frenchie is allowed to get a tattoo, at a parlor, without having her ID. She does it on a whim, without her parents' permission, and it's all thanks to the fact that one of the artists there recognizes her from the night that Andy Cooper died and vouches for her. In reality, a tattoo artist could lose their livelihood over that. I understand that for the sake of the story, he was supposed to represent a supporting character on Frenchie's journey to acceptance. But there were other ways that this could have been done without the blatant misrepresentation of the tattooing community and the impression that's given of tattooing and body modification in general being "not a big deal" even if you're a minor.

If you're looking for a sweet, sad story with a hopeful ending about picking yourself up and moving on, and the crazy things you sometimes have to do in order to achieve that, pick up a copy of "Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia" by Jenny Torres Sanchez. It came out last fall and is available right now at your favorite local, independent bookstore.

2014: Best Books So Far

It's hard for me to believe that in just under two months the year will be over. 2014 has been full of some truly amazing new book releases, from new authors as well as old favorites. As people begin to think about the holidays and seasonal gift-giving, The AV Club has put together a list of some of the year's best books so far. They include everything from graphic novels to edge-of-your-seat suspense novels, to new superheroes, and include categories like "Best biographical depiction of a genius asshole" and "Best reimagning of a fairy tale that is still full of surprises." You're sure to find some great recommendations from this year, for yourself and for your holiday shopping, but giving this list a browse.

Book Review: "The Country of Ice Cream Star" by Sandra Newman

I hadn't read anything by Sandra Newman, who has written a number of books thus far in her career. But I picked up her latest, The Country of Ice Cream Star, at the suggestion of a coworker who enjoys the same kind of gritty SpecFic tales of harsh future worlds that I do. My first thought, before I even opened the cover? "Wow. This things is a monster." Which is why I hope you'll excuse the fact that it's taken so long to read the whole thing and prepare this review. But I promise you, despite the length of the book itself, there wasn't a single page that was a chore to read.

Readers know the purpose of the story, the journey that it contains, before the novel itself unfolds. We're told from the very beginning by narrator and protagonist Ice Cream Star that this is the story of how she brought a cure to her people, and all the other people of the world around her. But the true pleasure of this book is in finding out exactly what the significance of that declaration is. In what used to be Massachusetts before an unknown plague either wiped out or drove the general population to a legendary place called Europe, Ice Cream Star and her band of Sengles scrape out a meager existence by raiding old houses and scrounging what they can from the woods. They deal with their allies, avoid their enemies, and once they reach the age of eighteen they die of an unknown sickness called only "posies." It's a harsh, fierce, and beautiful world for Ice Cream, her brother, and the others that make up their clan, and she is just as brilliant and intense as the world around her.

What she thought would be a fairly predestined existence is turned on its head when one day while scrounging around some collapsing houses, she and her clan find a "roo." He's a white man, fully grown, and is brought back to the Sengle camp in a mixture of both curiosity and concern. But soon he integrates himself into daily life in Sengle camp, even learns the rudiments of their language, and the significance of his presence becomes known. Desperate to save her brother Driver from dying of posies, Ice Cream demands to know how it is that the roo, Pasha, lived beyond eighteen. Because of what she discovers as their friendship and trust develop, and through the sudden changes that start to take place in their woods, Ice Cream and her clan are catapulted into a fantastic adventure that I can really only compare with the Lord of the Rings in its scale.

Ice Cream is no hobbit, and there is no Sauron lurking on the eastern seaboard. But there are Russians with powerful guns and a need for child soldiers, a city of Catholics ruled by a santa reina, a race of warriors that guard a walled city called Quantico, and the promise of a cure for posies if only Ice Cream and Pasha can somehow retrieve it from the ships that hold it safely offshore. It sounds like a pretty straight-forward adventure: overcome the adversaries, get to the goal, and live happily ever after. But oh dear reader, this book is so much more than that.

There are an incredible number of things that Ice Cream has to worry about on a daily basis, looking after her Sengle clan and caring for her ailing brother as well as managing allies and deciding what risks are worth taking not just for herself, but for those who depend on her in a world that is reliable only in its difficult circumstances. Sandra Newman takes all these into consideration as Ice Cream tells her story, weaving them into the larger plot in a way that doesn't ignore the larger challenge but also conveys all the things that can distract Ice Cream from her goal. These seemingly small everyday developments, and the relationships that they inform and change, have huge ramifications as the story goes on and Ice Cream must regroup again and again in the face of changing situations.

This story is brilliant. But what's even more brilliant is the way in which it's written. The entire thing, in the voice of Ice Cream Star, is written in a fantastic vernacular that Newman invented for this purpose. It sounds like a cross between AAVE and Haitian creole, and as I mentioned, this enormous book is comprised entirely of this incredible linguistic feat. The language flows so smoothly, it doesn't give the impression that Newman wrote out the text and then translated it into Ice Cream's vernacular; instead it sounds like she's actually thinking in that voice as she writes. Which does mean that it took me a couple of chapters to accustom myself to the pattern of writing, of speech and the expressions that it contained. But oh, what a rewarding experience once my brain really started to engage. The language is like the world around the characters, like Ice Cream herself: stark, honest, with pockets of obscure truths and observations that made me have to stop reading for a few seconds to just appreciate the beauty of what had been said. I think my favorite example from the Advance Reader Copy that I read was something to the effect of "I love you like broken legs." The truth of the description there, the pain and the torture with that feeling of adoration for someone, is just such a simple way of describing an emotion that sometimes even prolific writers fail to communicate well.

I find it interesting that I read this book now, since at Sirens Conference last week I participated in a great discussion of race in SpecFic (and fiction in general). It was observed there that unless a character is specified of belonging to a minority race or ethnicity, they are presumed to be white. Similarly, characters are assumed heterosexual until proven otherwise. In this book, it's pale skin that is an anomaly, pale skin that indicates a minority status and a sense of apart-ness, of otherhood. It's what makes Pasha immediately interesting to and separate from the Sengles, and I as a reader didn't even think to consider the racial implications in this novel until that point was driven home by Ice Cream's descriptions of Pasha's coloring. It's a subtle but profound way of refuting the general trend in a lot of literature, to assume a certain color or race until told otherwise, and the way that Newman accomplished it with her directness and the perspective of the characters is just beautiful.

This is not a book to be missed. It's brutal and wonderful and so very human in the way the characters react to situations they never even imagined. They carry a spark of determination combined with a sense of hopelessness, and through it all is this pervasive feeling that Ice Cream will always keep moving forward simply because she never stopped to think that there was another option to her. With Pasha by her side, and her clan in her heart, Ice Cream is a formidable character with a story to tell that you won't forget. The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman will be released on February 10th, and I highly recommend that you mark you calendar and make your pre-orders now at your favorite local, independent bookstore.

Sirens Redux

I just had the privilege of spending the weekend with some of the most amazing women I've ever met. It was Sirens Con 2014, a feminist SpecFic gathering of people from across the literary community, and even for someone like me who spends a lot of time exploring the book industry in general, there were a lot of eye-opening moments that changed not only how I see the feminist presence in SpecFic but also how I see myself fitting into it.

Every year Sirens features a specific theme to explore, and this year it was spirits and hauntings. Attention was focused on how feminism, and the female experience, was represented in writing that features women and ghosts or the ghosts of women, and how they are represented in the literary world. Three keynote speakers gave us three very different perspectives on the issue: Kendare Blake, Rosemary Clement, and Andrea Hairston. Kendare writes primarily in the horror genre, Rosemary is the author of YA Gothic stories of witches and ghosts, and Andrea is a playwright as well as a novelist who turns her focus toward the presence of ancestral spirits and how they connect the past and future. I strongly encourage everyone who reads this blog to check out their work, for their diverse perspectives as well as for their dynamic, spine-tingling writing skills.

In addition to three amazing authors who I haven't read before (but you can of course expect some reviews of their work to appear here shortly) I was able to connect with a wide variety of committed, amazing people from all over the literary community. Some attendees were writers and authors, but others were literary agents, publishing reps, bloggers, marketing experts, and other professionals who somehow intersect with the book world. The writers were in all stages of publication, from having their first book deals to searching for agents to just starting on their work, which was encouraging to me personally as someone who sometimes feels like I'm falling behind on what I really want to do full-time someday: write. Having a support network like that, and knowing that there are others out there around the country and the world working toward the same goals as you and helping to encourage you to make some headway, even just a page a day, is a powerful motivation and a true gift.

While it is true that there are some diverse female writers and characters in the genre, the other idea that I really brought home with me (aside from a truckload of inspiration) is that SpecFic as a whole is still woefully behind in representing people of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and creeds, both regarding minority authors and characters who come from more diverse backgrounds. Most of the authors who are making inroads regarding this discrepancy between the people around us and the people in books are women, but this important challenge remains: how to bring readers into contact with the works that will help to broaden their perspectives and the horizon of both SpecFic and writing in general.

After meeting so many amazing individuals and learning so much about the feminist movement in literature, SpecFic specifically, I'm both overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge facing women and minority writers and inspired by the fact that there is a discussion going on about this, that there is a movement to help subvert writing that really doesn't represent the rainbow of humanity around us. I know that there are a lot of people who will disagree with the idea that women and minorities are still underrepresented in SpecFic (and literature as a whole). And that's great; dissenting opinions are what help to open the discussion. But I will point you toward the recent death threats made to female and minority gamers as a well-publicized example that within geekdom, literary as well as technological, we as humanity still have many ways in which we need to consider where we stand regarding equal representation.

I'm open to hearing other opinions about women in fantasy literature: Do you think we're accurately represented? What about minority characters or people with nontraditional genders and sexual orientations? How can we broaden our horizons in literature by encouraging diversity in readers, writers, and the rest of the literary community as a whole?