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iknowcommawrite has a great review of The Grounding of Group Six, a deeply peculiar YA novel which I bet at least some of you read and were boggled by, and which I loaned her if she'd post on it. Go forth and discuss! (The Grounding of Group 6
on Kindle.)
coffeeandink solves a decades-old mystery for me by naming the book whose name I could never remember, The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and The Splendid Kids
, and asks about subversive children's literature.
What books have you read where you thought, for reasons other than that it sucked, "How in the world did this get published?"
on Kindle.)coffeeandink solves a decades-old mystery for me by naming the book whose name I could never remember, The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and The Splendid Kids
, and asks about subversive children's literature. What books have you read where you thought, for reasons other than that it sucked, "How in the world did this get published?"
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Pretty much anything I've read by Hilary McKay, notably the Casson Family books. (Which are stupendous.) It's probably just a difference in attitude between American and British publishers; but I certainly did think that repeatedly.
P.
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To some degree my initial response was dictated by some very adverse comments I've gotten over the years about Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, which is much tamer in most regards and did in fact get published, but was rejected by a YA publisher. It's not as good as the Casson family books -- Hilary MacKay has an unerring sense of balance and is incredibly good at both comic and tragic timing -- but given the reactions, I kept boggling at the fact that this series isn't even YA, it's middle grade. But, as I said, British.
P.
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I also remember a book called "Lisa Bright and Dark" in which a teenage girl's friends attempt to fix her bipolar disorder with amateur group therapy? I was fascinated by the YA novels about mental illness but the ones in circulation in the mid-1980s were NOT GREAT, I have to say.
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It certainly wasn't the best book on mental health ever, but I don't remember getting the message that amateur group therapy was a great way of fixing things. I got the message that you stick by your friends even when they're mentally ill, that the stigma around mental illness is harmful, that reading a handful of library books doesn't make you an expert clinician but that social support is better than nothing, and that eventually maybe the adults will get a clue and do something constructive.
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As a teenager I had poor boundaries and an excessive desire to fix my broken friends and I think Lisa Bright and Dark fed into this, but I think you're probably correct that this wasn't really the fault of the book and more an illustration of how YA books sometimes feed precisely the stuff they're trying to warn against (see also: every eating disorders novel ever, and Thirteen Reasons Why).
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My partner said that during her misspent adolescence, there was a book about how Drugs Are Bad, except it explained in great detail everything the protagonist took and mixed, and gave my partner lots of ideas she would never have come up with on her own, and it worked really well as a how-to manual for her and her friends, and we were boggling at how anyone ever thought publishing this book was a good idea.
I don't know the title, and it may have been in Portuguese. I'd have to ask.
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I remember all this because I read it in The Time Before Spoilers and I seriously thought he was on a trip and escaping, and it turns out, but no! He has been there the entire time! And has amnesia and the adults are interrogating and gaslighting and drugging him! The big reveal is when he calls his sorta-girlfriend's number and not only is she not there, she hasn't lived there for years. I remember not liking Cormier a whole lot but I kept being drawn to his novels in the library and would read them and then feel pretty freaked (my parents wouldn't let me buy copies, LOL). It's kind of amazing how often adults are out to get teenagers in 1980s YA novels.
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LOL I love how we both remembered "obliterates" (the last sentence is something like, "until subject A is terminated or subject A obliterates").
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House of Stairs by William Sleator. Although now, in retrospect, it seems like the predecessor of the recent host of YA dystopias.
Also, Harriet the Spy and its sequel, The Long Secret, are old hat now, but when they were published in the 1960, they were pretty controversial.
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But better, because MG and YA books were slimmer then, so there's less padding.
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It's about characters from the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries time traveling to the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Unfortunately, it alternates talking heads with characters rushing around doing the same things in different places. Every scene is either a subset of characters discussing their plans for time travel (usually while sitting down at a meal together), or a subset of characters traveling to a city with a time machine so they can get to their destination city to meet another time traveler from a different time who is either trying to assist them or thwart them. Characters change names and faces regularly as they time travel and impersonate each other and historical figures.
The plot-advancing scenes all read like: "Now I will go to London in 1850 so I can get to London in 150 AD so I can take a ship to Alexandria, where I will run into someone from 2050 New York whom I last saw in 50 BC Alexandria, which was last month for me but 10 years ago for him. He will tell me how in the last 10 years (for him) I showed up in 2050 New York under a different name and wearing a different face, which hasn't happened for me yet, but as a result of this conversation I will decide to go to 415 AD Alexandria and try to stop his past self." Every 5-10 pages, it feels like, we're in a different place and time, trying to figure out how to get to yet a different place and time. Hardly anything *happens*, people just race around space and time trying to rescue or intercept each other, while arguing about the morality of their respective goals.
The book was 250 pages long and needed to be at least 400, so we could get to know and care about the characters, or at least keep track of what's going on. Instead, we got a whirlwind of a few pages of dialogue here and there interspersed with a few pages of plot summaries here and there. It's the sequel to a book that was slightly better and didn't make me wonder so much how it got published (The Plot to Save Socrates), but wow. I'm planning to skim the next book, but I expect it to be much the same.
ETA: I just noticed the subject's post and should add that this is not a YA book.
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I have been afraid to reread The Girl Who Owned a City as an adult because of the Objectivism, but I cherished it as a child. And was incredibly misled by the blurb with compared it to Lord of the Flies, which turned out to be a much less enjoyable reading experience.
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2. Half of everything William Sleator ever wrote, for one. Some very weird books in there! Also, Galax-Arena, which I'm still not sure about.
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2. I love Sleator. Galax-Arena was memorable without me actually liking it.
I
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I liked it -- I had some reservations about some other parts of it (e.g., the title concept) -- and I didn't think it was nearly as odd as The Grounding of Group Six sounds -- but I am a little surprised that it got published at all. Like, "very nice cozy domestic poly people where not much overt Fantasy Plot happens until near the end," although it is catnip for me personally, doesn't seem to me to be a super hot ticket item for most publishers.
...Well, I wrote the above and... looking at the publication, it looks like it was printed by NESFA and hasn't in fact been picked up by a bigger publisher, so okay, that does actually make some sense. :)
ETA: Another one: This one's for
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Please review Lifelode and I will come talk about it. It's very strange but also very enjoyable. I liked the domesticity and the worldbuilding.
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When I first read the book, I was kind of wistful about the idea that I didn't have anything like the lifelode concept in the book -- and was boggled to realize a few years later that spinning (one a wheel, not a stationary bike) had taken that place in my life. Unfortunately, modern society isn't set up to let me make a living from doing it.
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One of my weirder things with Orfe is that because I read it around the same time I saw the movie Strange Days, and I had this auditory overlay to PJ Harvey's Hardly Wait song where I'd always hear the "I can hardly wait" repeated build-up as "It makes me sick".
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Actually, I say that but I just went to the author's website to check the publication date, and discovered two things I didn't know:
1. It was the first Australian novel to have a gay main character, so I'm revising my opinion of how much a publication risk it was.
2. The ebook's available for free on her website!!!
Anyway, it's contemporary YA published in 1987, and includes sex scenes involving teenagers, a masturbation scene (ditto), and explorations of identity and sexual safety that felt honest rather than didactic in a way that impressed me.
Also, the lesbian protagonist ends up happily dating two different girls at the same time. Who know about each other. In 1987.
I'm well aware that lesbians were DOING that then and earlier, and that getting to keep being friends with your exes or to negotiate nonmonogamous relationships were Things well before the internet, but generally they weren't publishing young adult books about it. Or nominating them for the Premier's Literary Award. Or putting those books in school libraries for teenage
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One of the most boggling books I read as a kid, although it was definitely not meant as YA and I was not supposed to read it, was My Sweet Audrina. You're not the first and best Audrina! You must sit in her room and rock in her chair until you become her! Audrina's father sleeps with everyone! Four women fall down the stairs! The already bizarre narrative takes an ugly turn into gang rape and gaslighting! IDEFK. That and Audrey Rose, which I was not supposed to read either. Late seventies and early eighties American horror novels were wild.
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