Today’s post is brought to you by Hyperbole and a Half, creator of the mystical creature known as the Alot!
This morning, after my usual check of Google News (no mishaps this time, thankfully), I headed over to my second website of choice, The Weather Channel. Shut up, no I am not fifty. Anyhow, there I am perusing the ten day forecast, relishing in the temperate temperatures of the south whilst my parents in Michigan battle sub-zero snow storms, when I get a little chill myself. Scrolling down to the featured videos I was met with a horrendous sight.
Do you see it? Well, do you? It’s a travesty! An outrage! It’s an…an…ALOT!
It’s not enough that I have lost all faith in Google, but now The Weather Channel too? What’s next, Obama starts “conversating”?
I live in a sad, sad world.
Summary: Lara Ardeche has it all. Homecoming queen as a junior, great looks, and awesome boyfriend, and you can’t even hate her because she’s so…nice. Then, she starts gaining weight. A lot of weight. Uncontrollably. And soon, Lara Ardeche is living life in the fat lane
Okay, so while part of the point of this blog is to expose Young Adult and Teen fiction as compelling literature that should be taken seriously I cannot in good faith allow you to assume that I think so highly of all YA literature. Just like adult literature you have to dig through the muck to find the diamonds. And, while I like to focus on the positive, I would be amiss to ignore those that fell short of the mark. Therefore I am officially introducing Mucked Up Monday – a day that I will dedicate to reviewing YA and Teen literature that left me feeling a tad bit deflated.
For Mucked Up Monday’s premiere edition I will be featuring a book that has tantalized me for years: Life in the Fat Lane by Cherie Bennett. Ever since I was about thirteen I would see it on the shelf, pick it up, read the synopsis and put it down as something to read “someday.” It seemed interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the gobs of Science-Fiction and Fantasy that I was inhaling at the time. Well, after a well-timed trip to Value Village yesterday I finally got my hands on a copy for a measly twenty-five cents and settled in to tie up that loose end.
I finished the book in one night, refusing to allow myself to put it down. Not because it was that good; the opposite, in fact. I pushed myself through the pages like a pregnant woman through labor, cringing at the dead horse that was being mercilessly abused with a literary battering ram.
Alright, so the book is supposed to be promoting self-image and accepting everyone regardless of petty differences like weight. It’s an admirable image and what drew me to the book in the first place, but the delivery falls incredibly short. From the first line of the story (“Would you rather be fat or dead?”) the unrealistic, one-dimensional characters are obsessed with weight. This might make sense if it was only the main character who obsessed, but it was literally every single character. The protagonist, Lara, was a perfect little princess whose own father began spazzing when she gained ten pounds, as though it were the end of the world. Every single conversation between characters revolves around weight and the idea that being fat is worse than just about anything else.
Lara’s own mental stigma against weight perhaps makes more sense than anyone else’s in the book. She begins to rapidly gain weight for no reason, despite exercising regularly and nearly starving herself. She understandably falls into a depression. These scenes were well written and relevant to any teenager who has tried – and failed – to lose weight. The problem is how obsessed everyone else is with her weight. The prose is written in such a way that Lara lives in a universe where literally nothing else matters to anyone. Ever. The idea itself is absurd. High school sucks, but it isn’t a complete void of morality.
The best part of this novel was the background conflict. It turns out that Lara’s perfect life isn’t so perfect after all, even beyond the weight gain. Her chain-smoking mother is desperately trying to hold onto the affection of her absent, adulterous father while her brother lives in a typical pre-teen angstland (and he’s probably the most realistically written character in the book). Honestly, the story of Lara’s mother being unable to cope with losing her husband to the point where she allows him to have an affair was the most intriguing part of the story (and rather reminiscent of The Once and Future King).
I think my biggest problem with this story is that the characters are just so hard to relate to. Most thirteen to fifteen year old girls won’t relate to being the pageant winning homecoming queen, and they certainly won’t relate to the obsessive behavior shown by the secondary characters. Perhaps there are communities out there like Lara’s (God I hope not), but I haven’t ever encountered them. You can’t get a solid message across to adolescents with unrelateable characters. It just isn’t possible. And overcompensating by mentioning “fat is not evil” five million times does not make the message meaningful.
So, great concept, poor execution. Life in the Fat Lane gets a whopping two out of ten on the scale of Young Adult Awesome.
I like books. Books need shelves. Shelves are sometimes expensive and a bit boring. So, I was looking around for a cool way to shelve some of my books. What I found was an invisible shelf tutorial on youtube. I thought it was pretty spiffy, although I’m not sure I could ever part with a book permanently (which this tutorial requires). The end product looks like this:
Cool, huh? Here’s the video tutorial, courtesy of youtube:
So all of this begs the question of what book to turn into a shelf? Should it be one of the classics, so that I can seem pretentious? Maybe a book that personally reached me (in which case it would be hard to part with)? Or should it be something silly or quirky to show personality? It’s all a huge dilemma, but at least I now have my next rainy day project! I’ll be sure to post pictures once I create my shelf masterpiece!
What books would YOU use to turn into a permanent shelf?
The Earth is being invaded, but no one knows about it. When Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco stumble upon a downed alien spaceship and its dying pilot, they’re given an incredible power — they can transform into any animal they touch. With it, they become Animorphs, the unlikely champions in a secret war for the planet. And the enemies they’re fighting could be anyone, even the people closest to them. So begins K.A. Applegate’s epic series about five normal kids with a limitless amount of forms and abilities.
Summary provided by Amazon.
I’m not sure why, but every time I admit to being a fan of this series to the general populace I feel like some sort of alcoholic at her first AA meeting. Maybe it’s because “fan” doesn’t quite encompass the amount of time, energy and money I have spent on this particular series. However, I’m going to (try to) set aside my vast bias and discuss the merits of this book series, clearly meant for children, in the world of adults. Without going on for about ten pages. Because I will. Trust me.*
Alright, so why should you read a book series marketed to fifth graders? Theme. It is all about theme. At its heart, Animorphs is a war story. It talks about the trials of war, the tough decisions of war and the fact that no one truly comes out a clear winner. Sacrifices must be made, innocence must be lost and sometimes you have to become the bad guy to beat the bad guy. Those are some deep issues for a kid’s book, but author K.A. Applegate (and co-auther Michael Grant) handle them in a way that isn’t off-putting for readers, whether they are young or old.
The nice thing about these books is it doesn’t take more than an hour or two to read one. Since they were created for younger readers they are quick reads, but you get a lot of meat in there. The first 23 books alone are some of the best stories I’ve ever read.
Interested? Well, you are in luck! Even though Animorphs has been out of print for over ten years it is easy to find a copy at your local library or Half Price. Even better – Scholastic is rereleasing the series beginning this April with shiny new covers. They’re cheap and fun and entirely worth it. But don’t take my word for it – go buy the first one and see for yourself! You can purchase the book by clicking on the image of the cover at the top of this post.
*As a side note, my sometimes** annoying tendency to write in sentence fragments is entirely the fault of this book series.
**By sometimes I mean often.
What are some of your favorite childhood books? How have they impacted you as an adult?
Etsy's tiarabuttons makes a plea for apostrophe sanity.
Apostrophes, for some unknown reason, tend to befuddle the masses. Particularly the words its and it’s. For some reason the apostrophe has decided to migrate between the ‘t’ and the ‘s’ permanently for a large part of the population. Seems to make sense, right? We were all taught in grade school that apostrophe + s = possessive. Right? Right?
Wrong.
Silly you, haven’t you realized by now that English is the language of exceptions? While apostrophe + s usually indicates possession this rule undergoes a bit of a change when dealing with pronouns. After all, we don’t say “hi’s” or “her’s” or “mine’s” (this is my absolute least favorite grammatical error), do we? No. Why not? Because the English language says so! More specifically, because possessive pronouns are already, well, possessive. They don’t require the extra apostrophe and, under normal circumstances, it seems downright foolish to put one there. However, the word its poses a bit of a problem thanks to the contraction it’s. So here’s your simple its vs. it’s guide to success:
it’s: use only when you can replace the word with either “it is” or “it has”.
its: use the rest of the time.
See how simple it is? I bet you feel silly now, huh? Never fear, it’s a common mistake that even I have made on occasion (but don’t tell anyone I told you that).
What are your grammatical pet peeves?
If you live just about anywhere in the U.S. right now you are being hammered with crazy Arctic weather. Even here in southern Texas schools are cancelled due to snow (I have yet to see a single flake, but that is besides the point). All of these frosty phenomenons have had me thinking about different ways to express my varying states of cold. I figured that, in light of the Thesaurus Rex shirt I posted yesterday, I would spend some time talking about synonyms. Not just any synonyms, but cold synonyms.
Now, bigger isn’t necessarily better. But sometimes synonyms can just be so much fun. They add a certain pizazz to sentences. Instead of saying that it is “cold” out why not say that it is blustery, or freezing, or biting? “Cold” can cover a wide range of temperatures, from the thirties all the way down to the negatives (speaking in Fahrenheit terms), and a thesaurus can help you find the most specific term for the type of cold you want to express.
Thesaurus.com has just released an awesome new visual thesaurus that makes synonym searching even more fun. Take a look:
This thing is so cool. All you do is type in a word and it shows a web of synonyms. Hover over a word to see the definition. Click on a word and more synonyms will pop up that relate specifically to that word.
Yeah, I am totally geeking out over here. Experience the magic for yourself at Visual Thesaurus.
