The Grounding of Group Six and other strange YA novels

[rachelmanija]

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?"

Comments

[naomikritzer]

There were some really strange YA novels in circulation back in the 1980s but the one this reminded me of was the ones by Robert Cormier -- The Chocolate War, I Am the Cheese, The Bumblebee Flies Anyway. Did you ever read those? They are ODD. The Chocolate War was one of those books that got censored over and over and over, which is bizarre given that the main takeaway I remember was something like "Peer Pressure: sometimes bad," which is a deeply uncontroversial moral? (OK, there was a scene where a kid walked in on another kid in the boy's bathroom, discovered him masturbating, and pretending to take his picture since by chance he was carrying a camera at the time. The camera didn't have film in it, but the victim didn't know this. That was probably the source of the attempts to ban it. Neither boy in that side story was the protagonist.)

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.

[thawrecka]

I actually studied The Chocolate War in high school English, and I think possibly the controversy could be because of the authority figures siding with the bullies and the bullies winning.

[cahn]

Yeah, I didn't study it but I did read it and I remember it was a really depressing book!

[mildred_of_midgard]

It's admittedly been a while since I read Lisa Bright and Dark, but my vague recollections are that the amateur group therapy was a last resort driven by the systematic refusal of the adults to admit that anything serious was wrong, the amateur therapy was about as effective as you'd expect from a bunch of teenagers, and the moral of the story was that the adults should have listened earlier, because things didn't have to get that bad.

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.

[naomikritzer]

I looked up the reviews of it and that plus my very disjointed memories suggests you're spot-on.

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).

[mildred_of_midgard]

That sounds entirely plausible to me!

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.

[kore]

Aw, that is all true. I do still think the book rather glamorizes mental illness, though, and like in Never Promised You a Rose Garden, it's difficult to tell what Lisa actually has.

[rachelmanija]

I still don't understand I Am the Cheese. Like I literally have no idea what's happening in it.

[naomikritzer]

Good to know! I remember the tag line on the cover was "a bike ride through the Twilight Zone" and since I liked the Twilight Zone, I checked it out and NOTHING MADE ANY SORT OF SENSE.

[kore]

Yeah, he thinks he's on a bike ride, but in reality he's just circling around the grounds of a mental hospital and he's acting out a literal circle where the government is trying to see what he remembers and he just retreats into this fugue state instead. Sort of like Tiptree's "O My Sisters," but that was compact and amazing whereas Cormier's book is full of filler and weird twists that don't go anywhere.

[kore]

I believe what's happening is: the narrator was the son of someone in the mob or who turned on the mob, and his family was in witness protection. He doesn't remember his early years, and thinks he's just been the protected identity all his life. He thinks he's on a long bike trip but in reality he's bouncing around on the grounds of a mental hospital projecting his psychosis onto the other people who live and work there. His parents died in a car crash, which he finally remembers, but the sinister guy who visits and interrogates him is, surprise, a sinister government agent who IIRC helped kill his parents either because (I forget) he has Mob ties or thought the parents would blab. The kid has been at the hospital for years and years and they've been trying to get him to remember who killed his family (and maybe if he remembers what his father knew, and/or that the agent was there) but he just goes off into the fugue state on his bike. When he unwraps the teddy bear he's been carting all over at the end, which is the one remnant of his former life and survived the car wreck with him, the agent tells him his real name and he remembers the song his mother used to sing, but not much else. And the end of the book is the report from the government agent saying they should just keep on trying to extract the memories from this kid until he's killed or dies ("obliterates").

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.

[rachelmanija]

Whoa, that's bleak.

[kore]

Robert Cormier, everyone! *jazz hands*

[cahn]

I used to reread it fairly frequently in the hopes that eventually, someday, I would figure out wtf was going on. I eventually decided (and this was a while ago, so I might not remember details correctly) that what's going on is that the main character's family is involved in some sort of espionage or ... something? ... and they are put in basically a Witness Protection Program, but the bad guys find them. Narrator is the only survivor and is taken by the... government? bad guys? I am not sure we actually know? and given lots and lots of drugs so that they can figure out whether he knows anything. (I can't remember whether he actually does know anything or not, or whether it's even possible to tell from the book.) The drugs totally screw up his brain so he goes insane and keeps thinking he is escaping (the "trip" he takes on his bicycle), but it's actually all just a big drug-induced hallucination (hence that last scene where all the people in the asylum actually look like the people he saw on his "trip"). I think there's some indication (there's a note most of the way through about how the recommendation is to keep the subject until he "obliterates") that the drugs are messing him up progressively worse and he'll probably eventually just, well, obliterate.

[rachelmanija]

YIKES.

[kore]

YUP

LOL I love how we both remembered "obliterates" (the last sentence is something like, "until subject A is terminated or subject A obliterates").

[kore]

AHAHAHA I REREAD LISA BRIGHT AND DARK SO MANY TIMES. There was even a movie! ....no wait, that was Lisa and David, also based on a YA novel about mentally ill kids.

[carbonel]

I could be misremembering, but I seem to recall Lisa, Bright and Dark and Lisa and David as being in the same volume. which was confusing, of course, because it was totally different characters.

[kore]

And different authors!