A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Most realistic (ie, not fantasy) YA novels with single-word titles are awesomely depressing. Moreover, they are frequently about hot-button social issues and are not uncommonly in verse.

Sold, by Patricia McCormick. Child prostitution is bad. In verse.

Cut, by Patricia McCormick. Self-mutilation is a serious issue.

Skinny, by Ibi Kaslik. Anorexia is sad.

Massive, by Julia Bell. Anorexia is still sad.

Smack, by Melvin Burgess. Heroin is bad.

Willow, by Julia Hoban. If you kill your entire family in a car crash, you will need lots of therapy.

Shooter, by Walter Dean Myers. Don't shoot up the school.

After, by Amy Efaw. Don't throw your baby in a Dumpster.

Exposed, by Susan Vaught. The internet is evil.

Trigger, by Susan Vaught. Suicide sucks.

Glimpse, by Carol Lynch Williams. Child prostitution is especially bad when your own mother pimps you out.

Crank, by Ellen Hopkins. Crystal meth is bad. In verse.

Glass, by Ellen Hopkins. Crystal meth is still bad. In verse.

Burned, by Ellen Hopkins. Mormons are sexist. In verse.

Identical, by Ellen Hopkins. Incest is wrong and creepy, especially if it involves a father and only one of his identical twin daughters. In verse.

Impulse, by Ellen Hopkins. Suicide, attempted murder, bipolar disorder, abortion, cutting, child abuse, drug addiction, an affair with your high school teacher, and prostitution are all bad, but not bad enough to provide fodder for a single book on each. In verse.

Only counter-example I can think of offhand: Prom, by Laurie Halse Anderson, about the prom.

A classic sf novel about a Jesuit whose faith is tested by aliens who, to his shock and horror, seem to get along perfectly well without religion. They must be a plant by Satan to make humans think that a society can function without religion!

While I normally don’t have trouble setting aside my atheism in order to sympathize with religious characters’ crises of faith, this particular dilemma struck me as so profoundly non-troubling and the conclusion he draws from it so remarkably stupid, that I ended up reading the book feeling morally and intellectually superior to the hero. That is not actually an enjoyable experience. Surely the Problem of the Righteous Heathen is one which an intellectual priest would have encountered before?

I'm not quite getting the "classic" nature of this, though the aliens are pretty cool. Was it that most sf didn't tackle religion at all other than via made-up alien religions?

View on Amazon: A Case of Conscience (Del Rey Impact)

( In which there is awesome depressingness )

Ann Halam is the YA pen name of adult sf author Gwyneth Jones. I have never been able to penetrate more than three pages into any of her adult novels, which annoys me as the premises usually sound quite interesting. The unvarnished prose of her YA novels is far more to my taste, though their tones vary between rescued from "too depressing to read" by relatively hopeful protagonists and relatively upbeat endings (this book, Siberia) and awesomely depressing (Taylor Five, a semi-finalist in the awesomely depressing awards.)

Dr. Frankin's Island is a riff on The Island of Doctor Moreau. (I read the book of the latter and vaguely remember it as a fun old-fashioned adventure. I also saw the movie, fell asleep on my friend's floor, and kept waking up, seeing Marlon Brando in increasingly bizarre headgear (a bouquet of flowers, a troupe of stuffed monkeys, etc), and was slightly dismayed when my friend later confirmed that no, I had not dreamed the bit where Marlon Brando wore a bucket on his head.)

Halam's take has three teenagers get plane-wrecked on an island, and then captured and, in quite horrifying detail, transformed into animal-human hybrids. The teenagers' terror and despair are vividly depicted, as is their endurance and, later, existence in an animal form. The friendship between the heroine, a Jamaican-American or Jamaican-British girl who is transformed into an aquatic form, and her companion who is given flight, is convincing and lovely. But Halam's protagonists are often so absolutely trapped by their circumstances that action is either impossible or futile. This makes her books painful to read, even if her heroines do eventually triumph, as they do here.

I'm happy to read her books once-- they're very gripping and smart-- but I don't think I'd ever re-read them.

While going through old LJ entries, I found this hilarious excerpt from a locked post. I was in Tokyo at the time, and having a lousy time for reasons having nothing to do with Japan:

Yesterday, rather than lurking miserably etc, I went to an English used bookshop in Ebisu on the theory that that would surely cheer me up. I immediately headed for children's/YA, hoping it would have lots of Bristish fantasy like the last time I was there. The first book I picked up was about a teen football player who becomes a quadriplegic. Just what I wanted to read. Nix! Then a book about a boy with a hawk. I flipped to the end. Someone shoots it. Next, race problems. Child labor in a coal mining town. Dead dogs. More race problems. Holocaust. Homeless teens. Holocaust. Homeless teens during the Holocaust. Race problems. Dead otters. Dead aborigines. Dead Jews.

We're down to the final agonizing round... and proof that the majority of you believe that the ruination of your own life and the death of humans is more agonizing than the death of pets, which is not what I expected when I began the poll.

It's also interesting to note that neither contender is a realistic "problem novel," which is the genre which comes in for the most criticism for depressingness. One is sf-- the genre many of us fled to in the hope of something more cheery-- and the other, whose identity I have hidden due to spoilers, is a psychological horror/thriller.

Which encounter with death by starvation in a cold dark place is more agonizing?

[Poll #1140422]

The battle of Orangutan vs. Apocalypse was very, very tough. I'm not sure the current results were really statistically significant. Nevertheless, Apocalypse wins and goes on to the next round.

Once I shook up the brackets, "shoot your rabid dog" easily trounced "shoot your veggie-eating deer."

Because I added a new contestant in the last round and so ended up with an odd number of finalists, the winner of the Paterson entry is now going up against another newbie which I forgot to add last time, Sounder.

( Death, death, mutilation, madness, and more death, but no blindness unless you count Sounder losing an eye along with half his face to a shotgun blast )

In honor of The Anime Ewo Awards, I present the YA Agony Awards! Voting by rounds. Expect spoilers, though honestly these books are not exactly surprising, ie, the dog dies.

Please argue for your favorites or nominate others in comments.

( Dead dogs, dead moms, and the death of the universe )

I am a connoisseur of the post-apocalypse novel. But what I like about the genre is the idea of the desperate struggle to preserve civilization and save the people you can, or, after the disaster, to re-create civilization from scratch. I am also a sucker for stories of disparate groups of people banding together and finding unsuspected heroism when faced with a situation where they must find more strength than they ever knew they had, or die. I like this, I suppose, because I figure that if I made it through the first hit, I'd be in that group, testing myself to the limit and risking everything because I've got nothing left to lose.

This is not that kind of story. It has absolutely no onstage violence, no corpses littering the streets with rats eating them or anything like that, and yet it's one of the most disturbing, plausible, and haunting apocalypse stories I've ever read.

It's the diary of Miranda, an ordinary teenage girl in a small town in Pennsylvania. One night a meteor hits the moon, knocking it into a lower orbit. Immediately, tidal waves drown coastal cities. Her mother is a writer, and when lists of the dead go up, her agent, editor, and half the writers she knows are on it, because everyone in New York City is dead. The President gets on TV to recite platitudes about the spirit of America. Gasoline goes up to ten dollars a gallon. School goes on, then gets cancelled. Everyone tries to keep life going on as usual, as much as they can, but environmental catastrophes begin to snowball...

It's the small scale of the story that makes it so easy to identify with, and the little details that make it so chilling. People start leaving, looking for a better place. A letter arrives from one of those, a month late but before all mail stops, to say that borders are closed and they're stuck in a refugee camp. Miranda tips off a friend that food is being handed out, and her mother goes into a fit of rage, screaming that she is never to do that again, that she risked her family losing food for the sake of a mere friend, and that she is only to think of her family and no one else, ever, or they're all gonna die! Two months later, they're digging up and eating tulip bulbs.

( spoilers )

In the last couple nights, I have dreamed of being invaded by clowns, that telophase was dying, that I had absent-mindedly showed up for physical therapy naked, and that I was falling down a cliff (at great length, because I kept grabbing tree roots that would sloooowly snap, sending me plummeting until I grabbed the next tree root) and it was all my fault for taking a short cut.

I think I am anxious about some upcoming submissions.

The last dream reminds me of the lifechanging accidents suffered by kids in What Katy Did, Emily of New Moon, one of the Malory Towers books where a girl is warned not to go swimming and she does and the current bangs her against the rocks, and some Isabelle Hoffman book where a girl climbs a cliff and falls into the ocean, and a dog that's a drunk and lonely old man's sole companion swims out to save her and apparently drowns, leaving her to suffer agonies of guilt until it reappears the next day. After they end up paralyzed or noticed by creepy old men or the dog drowns or whatever, they always get lectured on how it was all their fault. Insult to injury!

What strikes me about many of these books is that in many cases, the activity is not obviously dangerous or has never been dangerous before-- going swinging in What Katy Did; swimming in the school pool in the Malory Towers book-- but has become dangerous because of some factor which the adult knows about-- a staple holding the swing to the roof broke; currents are dangerous in this time of year-- but does not tell the girl about, because children shouldn't need to know why, but ought to blindly obey anything an adult tells them for any reason. Then when they go swinging or swimming and end up severely injured, they are lectured on obedience.

I note a couple things about these stories:

1. These are almost all books written before 1960. Cautionary tales for children and teenagers certainly do exist after that time, but generally in those, adults do tell the kids why they shouldn't do things, but the kids go ahead and do them anyway. These more modern books tend to involve particular social issues, like drunk driving, joining gangs, doing drugs, and so forth, rather than random and unique accidents.

I am guessing that there was a major change in ideas about parenting and adult-child relationships during the sixties, in which people realized that perhaps blind obedience was not that great, and that it's OK for children to ask why, and OK for adults to tell them.

2. There is a related idea which I have come across much more occasionally, but which annoyed me recently in the Noel Streatfeild novels The Growing Summer and The Circus is Coming. In both of these, children who have led a sheltered life are suddenly thrown into a society in which children are expected to be far more independent. In both books, the children are mocked and criticized by adults for not knowing how to do things which no one ever taught them, but when they ask adults to teach them, the adults mock and criticize them for that and tell them they are supposed to figure things out on their own without asking for help. When they figure it out wrong, they're mocked and critized; when they get it right, the adults are nice.

I find that attitude really despicable, and am glad that it seems to have died out to the extent that no one writes books any more where it's presented as normal and good.

But between attitudes 1 and 2, it seems like the idea is that it's bad for adults to explain anything to children, but children are supposed to both obey adults to the letter, and also, being seen but not heard, carefully watch what others are doing and learn to imitate it without ever actually being taught. I am clearly the model of a modern person, because that seems like a dynamic perfectly designed to foster mindless conformity and child abuse.

3. These pre-1960s stories only seems to happen to girls. Can anyone think of a similar story involving a boy? I find it significant that the girls are often punished for doing physical, unfeminine activities like swinging high and climbing cliffs, and that their punishment is the loss of their physical abilities. There's a great statement of ideas about what girls should and should not do, and what happens to them if they disobey.

Most Gratuitously Depressing Novel (involving an apocalypse)

( I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman )

Most Gratuitously Depressing Novel (not involving an apocalypse)

( Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Short Fiction (involving an apocalypse)

Most Gratuitously Depressing Short Fiction (not involving an apocalypse)

( A Touch of Lavender, by Megan Lindholm, and The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Dramatic Work (involving an apocalypse)

( Wolf's Rain )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Dramatic Work (not involving an apocalypse)

( In the Company of Men )