Parvana's Journey

It’s finally happened. My tolerance for children’s books has completely gone by the wayside, my ability to look at a book not as an educated adult but as simply someone waiting for a story is absolutely dashed. Again, I read Deborah Ellis’s Parvana’s Journey for my course on taboos in children’s literature. In a sweeping generalization, the book is about war torn Afghanistan and several children struggling to survive as refugees, tracking Parvana, a young girl, trying to find her family after her father’s death.

Clearly meant to be a child’s first exposure to the conflict surrounding the Middle East, Ellis has no qualms about beating her reader over the head with every single point and image within the text. There is nothing subtle about her story telling, and perhaps more harshly, nothing redeeming in her actual writing either. The reader is unable to draw any conclusion for themselves, because Ellis is there shouting with a megaphone, “You see!? Adults are supposed to take care of children, not abandon them! War is bad! I think women are mistreated!” Such a tirade of obvious realizations does nothing to educate a young reader, and leaves adults filled with contempt and scorn.

As this educated reader that I assume myself to be, I find the need to try and find some sort of redemption for Parvana’s Journey, because the idea of a book not having any merit at all saddens me greatly. However, I will admit to struggling with that pursuit right now. I take issue with Ellis’s portrayal of women in Afghanistan, for she takes a traditional Western feminist stance, claiming the burqa as an object of oppression and writing in a style that has been described as “save the Muslim girl.” While I wish to avoid a purely political and anthropological tirade here, I believe that Muslim women are quite capable of saving themselves without the meddling of Westerners who understand nothing of their culture or the customs behind the burqa.

I also fail to see how this book can be any sort of helpful educational tool. Yes, it does give a very basic and elementary view of the Afghani war that can serve as a first exposure for a child. There is violence, bombing, death, every horror of war an adult can imagine, and yet nothing ever stays too bad. There is a lack of true realism that I find disheartening. It’s as though Ellis didn’t quite have the balls to leave her novel with an ambiguous and potentially sad ending, instead choosing to wrap up her plot neatly with Parvana finding her mother and assuming that everything would then be okay. What does this teach a young child? That nothing everything bad will be easily fixed and that there is no true suffering? I don’t propose to let my child in on the crushing cruelty of the world at an inappropriate age, but if anything I would rather my child watch the news with me and then we talk about current events, than them reading this novel and not being allowed to draw the lessons from it themselves.

I promise the reader of this review that I did not go into writing this meaning to be scathing. It’s just that sort of book. So read at your own peril. I certainly won’t be joining you for a second go.

Bridge to Terabithia

How I managed to get through my childhood without reading Bridge to Terabithia I honestly could not tell you. It was one of those books that I always heard about, and I’m pretty sure an excerpt of it ended up on my state standardized testing in fourth grade, but here I am, a senior in college and have just finished reading it for the first time. And guess what? I loved it!

            Yes, yes, that is a hasty judgment without any supporting detail. I’m getting there. In this book author Katherine Paterson has tackled the daunting task of presenting death to children in a way that makes sense and yet does not demean a child’s emotional capability. The language is sparse and beautiful, the story simple. Jess and Leslie are the boy and girl next door, drawn together in their rural town initially by their differences, and soon become the best of friends. Together they create the fantasy world of Terabithia, a land where they reign as king and queen and stalk the forests fighting giants. There they escape their teachers and family, free to share secret hopes and dreams, and free to form a bond that transcends romantic love. Keep in mind, these two endearing protagonists are still children, eleven or so, and their friendship is pure, the coming together of two souls in wonderful harmony.

            Of course, such a beautiful story is bound to meet a tragic end. Books don’t often make me cry, but by the last chapter I had tears running down my face as I faced death, and the acceptance of grief. For fear of spoiling any plot points, I won’t go into detail, but will only say that Paterson understands the grieving process and writes it with integrity, allowing her characters to cope in their own way, and pull at the readers’ heartstrings all the while. She also threw in a bit with a dog, which is a sure fire way to wrench my heart. Perhaps Paterson’s greatest achievement is that in the moment of grief, no one knows how to act. Each character takes a different emotional tact, and the touching scenes come from the intersection of these emotions, particularly Jess and Leslie’s father, where the line between adulthood and childhood is completely decimated by the shared loss.

            It’s a short book, and I feel as though my emotion while reading it, through profound, has been neatly categorized. I was charmed, enchanted, devastated and then given a glimmer of hope. This classic book is worth it’s reputation, and I will be sure to make sure any child of mine reads it well before their twenty-first birthday, and then many times after.

Disgrace

I will come right out and say it. I struggled with this novel. Not in the actual reading of it, for it’s quick and stark, understandable and lacking that absurd authorial elitism that other novels carry like a badge of honor. No, I struggled with J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace because the story made me uncomfortable. This doesn’t happen often, but within the first twenty pages of this novel, I was already squirming with my dislike for the protagonist.

The novel centers around David Lurie, a professor in South Africa, who lives in a world of ideas, completely self centered within his own consciousness. So absorbed within his own sphere is he that the reader doesn’t even find out his name until a good fifteen pages in, after he’s already slept with a prostitute and commented on his need, but not appreciation of women. He then proceeds to have an affair with one of his students. Normal, unimaginative plot twist right? Except that there relationship, short as it may have been, existed in a haze of grey. It is never stated outright that this girl really desires him in any way, and the word rape is just waiting to be said. It is not explicit, there is no violence, but in reading it I just wanted to scream at Lurie to stop that very instant, because the girl so clearly wasn’t into it. Anyone who has remotely been in such a situation, where the headiness of an older, powerful man overtakes the senses would (I imagine) be right there along with me, yelling and remaining stupefied that Lurie doesn’t pick up on the social cues fairly hitting him in the face.

Coetzee cleverly makes the grey area even more obvious by juxtaposing Lurie’s affair with his daughter Lucy’s rape. The two acts of violation are so completely different from one another that as a reader I still found myself more uncomfortable with the earlier affair than the outright rape. Which is horrible! And not quite knowing what to do with that, I will let it alone and leave it to other readers to figure out what happened and how they feel about it.

Despite my discomfort with the protagonist and the questionable violations, the novel did make me feel something. There is a heavy emphasis on Lurie’s work with dogs being put down that absolutely crushed me. Put a dog in a book, kill it, and I promise you, I will sob forever. The dogs worked as distinct characters, tying together Lucy and Lurie’s story and eventually allowing for a symbolic release at the end of the novel. Besides this utter despair at a dog dying, the novel also made me angry, uncomfortable, and frustrated and completely question why on earth this book had won a Booker, a Nobel and been a finalist for the National Book Award. My answer to this last question is that Coetzee’s writing is frank and honest, and further more it made me feel deeply. So perhaps this is not a book I would read again. I’m on the fence about even saying I liked it, but it has affected me, and in the end, that is the point of literature.

The Chocolate War

Secret societies. Manipulative sociopaths. A hero we all root for because he stands up for himself when we cannot. Chocolate. One of these things not quite sounding like the others? In Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, you get all of these, plus a left over uneasy feeling about the cruelty of high school and the unreliability of adults.

            This is in fact a children’s book, despite the obviously dark and dangerous subject matter. In fact it has ended up on the banned book list frequently for exposing the gritty underbelly of an all boys private Catholic school as a home for sexually frustrated, violent prone and psychologically manipulative teens, and a secret society that holds sway even over the faculty. I’m not going to lie; this is not a book that I would have picked up on my own. I read it for a class I’m taking on taboos in children’s literature, and it certainly fits the bill for that. And yet there is something that isn’t shocking at all about this book. Maybe it’s just the desensitization of my generation to violence and the cruelty of the young, but the fact that a secret society controls the student body and no one stands up to it doesn’t seem all that of a remarkable idea to me.

The characters of this group, called The Vigils (hello incredibly non- intimidating name!) fall easily into typical high school archetypes, remaining relatively undeveloped outside of the given parameters. There is the underdog hero Jerry, standing up to The Vigils by refusing to sell boxes of chocolate in the annual school fundraiser. He is quiet, an outsider, and takes abuse like it’s going out of style. He never fully achieves that triumphant moment over the bullying that most other novels would provide, which is perhaps why I struggle to form my opinion of the book. I’ve been trained to want that ending that puts the bad guys down and leaves Jerry riding off into the sunset. Of course, real life doesn’t work that way, and that discomfort is what redeems the novel as a work worth reading.

Archie Costello serves as Jerry’s tormentor, and is one of the most horrifyingly relatable bullies in literature. Perhaps it is a testament to his manipulative power that as a reader I found myself sympathizing with him as he felt increasing pressure as the mastermind of The Vigils, coming up with “assignments” and constantly being plagued with the possibility that the entire system will turn on him. He has the assistant head master in his pocket, and the eerie power struggle between the two of them cast the reliability and authority of adults into greater doubt.

In the end I still can’t quite decide if I enjoyed The Chocolate War or not. On the one hand it is fairly predictable in terms of characters development, but then the plot refuses to adhere to the traditional mode of an anti-bullying story. This disconnect made me uncomfortable, which then caused me to think, so the novel does facilitate that higher cognition one doesn’t always expect from young adult literature. I will recommend with trepidation, for the conclusions you come to as a reader might surprise you, but then, isn’t it always better to be surprised?

Midnight's Children

It is not often that I truly enjoy a novel I am required to read for class. There is a preemptory disdain for the inevitable picking apart of the written word that is sure to follow any assigned book. Yes, I have read wonderful literature because I have been told to, but not necessarily something I would willingly curl up with on a Sunday afternoon when the mountain of homework we all have had diminished just a bit. However, I have found that magical book, the assigned novel that I actually enjoyed tremendously, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. With its sweeping plot and exquisite language, Rushdie’s novel was the well-deserved winner of the Booker Fiction Prize in 1981 and subsequently named the “Booker of Booker’s” twenty-five years later. But enough about the novels accolades! Onto the actual point of reading a book. Because it is good.

            Set in India, Midnight’s Children is the account of Saleem Sinai, whose birth at the stroke of midnight on the night of India’s independence ties his life to his country in magical and haunting ways. Mentally connected with the other children born at midnight, but forever alone in the greatness of his own intuition and connection to the country’s well being, Saleem’s life provides a fascinating read, even for someone (like myself) who doesn’t quite catch every one of the overwhelming historical allusions to India’s volatile early years of independence. Rushdie has achieved a truly sweeping narrative, following Saleem’s family drama across three generations, while simultaneously managing to include a story of vast and painful history between India and Pakistan. Occasionally this sweeping nature overtakes itself, leaving the reader adrift in a sea of detail and narrative tangents. We don’t even get to Saleem’s birth until about one hundred pages in, although that historical lead up is warranted. Towards the end of the novel, details again hinder the progress of plot, and Rushdie, in his desire to make is point clear, trends towards repetition and verbosity.

            Never fear! I’m not about to completely bash this novel. In fact, get ready for some intense praise. Midnight’s Children is the story of the past, told by a present day Saleem. He is writing his history, retelling his life to his companion Padma, thus maintaining two separate narrative tones. Rushdie also occasionally switches perspectives, leaving Saleem to the world for a while in order to investigate the inner struggles of other characters. This structure adds interest for the reader, pulling you out just as you become comfortable within India’s tumultuous past. And what a past it is! Saleem takes on a Forrest Gump quality, influencing moments in history in impossible ways, lending the entire novel a cinematic air.

            Adding to the cinematic quality of the novel is the absolute beauty of the language. Never before have I encountered someone who can craft a sentence with such skill and grace, and even still manage to tuck some humor in as well. His descriptions of people are spot on, pin pointing the features that we are always drawn to in the real world but never dare acknowledge. Saleem, for instance, has a nose that generally is compared with a cucumber. We’d never actually describe someone like that in real life, but definitely would think it. Rushdie takes that very human tendency to the pages of Midnight’s Children. It is a novel driven by its characters, and the believability of these people, despite their sometimes-grandiose lives and problems, is Rushdie’s greatest achievement. You care about these people’s stories.

            I must only fault Rushdie once more before telling you emphatically to go out and read this book. There is elitism in the novel that will not appeal to everyone. Often I found myself thinking, “The book is smarter than me!” during particularly deep historical and political plot turns. However, there is enough plot available to move through these moments with the confidence that you will come out on the other end not being mocked by the novel and it’s celebrated author, but having experienced a epic story of fate and feeling against a back drop staggering in scope and beauty.