The Sparkle Project

September 25th to October 2nd is Banned Book Week so we are currently in the midst of celebrating all that has been banned, challenged or frowned upon. While this isn't as huge an issue in the UK as it is in America (although we do have a lot of church anger over His Dark Materials), censorship is something that needs to be talked about and tackled worldwide. This is something that happens everyday and is often allowed to happen without any real discussion over the issues at hand or the topics considered so terrible that they must be sealed away and forgotten about. According to the American Library Associaton, the ALA, over the past 9 years, American libraries were faced with over 4300 challenges and over half of them were because of "sexually explicit material" or "inappropriate language." But genuine fears have been twisted into something unrecognisable just so they match the perceptions bigoted and ignorant people already have (such as the recent case with "Speak") and people get scared about what's out there so are afraid to fight back. And so often it's children and young adults that end up missing out. Last year, out of the top 10 most challenged books in USA, 6 were childrens or young adult books:

1. “TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R (series), by Lauren Myracle
Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs

2. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
Reasons: Homosexuality

3. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Anti-Family, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide

4. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee
Reasons: Racism, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

6. “Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

7. “My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult
Reasons: Sexism, Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide, Violence

8. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things,” by Carolyn Mackler
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

9. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker
Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

10. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier
Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

(Side note: Twilight? Sexually explicit? Okay, Twilight does sell sex, albeit in the same way that Disney sells sex but seriously, those books are the anti-viagra. As if you needed any more proof that book banners are stupid. And no, I don't feel bad saying that.)

So what can you do about it? Simple - read. Buy books, go to the library, request these books, do some e-book downloading or hit the web at Amazon. Nowadays it's becoming harder and harder to hide information so take advantage of that and don't be afraid to fight back. Take full advantage of your freedom of speech and don't let anyone tell you differently.

Giveaway time!

As seen in my previous post, I reviewed one of the most challenged YA books in recent years, "The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie and gave it a rave review which, coming from me, is a big deal. To pass on the love and information, I will be giving away my copy of the book (slightly battered but I prefer the term 'well loved') to one lucky commenter. To enter, just leave a comment in this entry before Monday 4th October and I'll pick one person at random.

“The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”

Author: Sherman Alexie.

Publisher: Andersen Press.

Pages: 230.

Summary (taken from Fantastic Fiction): In his first book for young adults, bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story
of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully
written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by acclaimed artist Ellen Forney, that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live.

Cover impressions: My copy of the book comes with a glowing quote from Neil Gaiman that declares “I have no doubt that in a year or so it’ll be winning awards and being banned.” Now that Banned Book Week is upon us and the brain melting mess that was “Speak-Gate” has highlighted just how big a problem book banning is, I thought there was no better time to review this book than now, especially since this book was also recently removed from a school library not too far from the district where rape apparently equals soft core pornography.

Junior, a.k.a. Arnold Spirit, is in many ways a typical teenage boy. He’s often foul mouthed, thinks about masturbation quite a lot, often bottles up his feelings and has a wicked yet frequently bleakly dark sense of humour that reflects his situation. Regularly mocked and bullied by the rest of the ‘rez’ because of his disabilities (he was born with water on the brain, much like Alexie himself – the book is evidently semi-autobiographical), Junior’s struggle for identity and independence is something I think is universally relatable. His witty and relatable narration tackles some pretty hard hitting topics, like alcoholism, poverty, racism, bullying and the struggles still faced by the Native American community to this day. I give major credit to Alexie for his skill in describing the heart breaking conditions and circumstances that surround Junior in his everyday life and not once making the story feel over wrought or full of drama for the sake of drama. It’s genuinely heart wrenching stuff to read the scenes where Junior talks about being poor. The equally witty and hilarious illustrations, provided by Ellen Forney, work hand in hand with the rest of the novel to show Junior’s thoughts and feelings in ways he has difficulty expressing aloud.

The book is often challenged for its strong language and sexual imagery but it feels natural to the voice of a frustrated teenage boy. It’s a very personal book that doesn’t shy away from Junior’s difficulties as he tries to balance being the outcast in the reservation, who sees him as a traitor for wanting to leave, with being the outcast in his new all white school. While it’s a deeply personal story, the supporting cast is full of interesting characters, such as Junior’s first new friend at high school Gordy, possibly the biggest geek ever created. While the book is a quick read at 230 pages and some of the storylines just seem to fade away into the distance as the book ends, that’s just a small fault and in no way spoils the book. I can understand why cowardly censor loving book banners would want to remove this book from libraries – it’s a powerful book that has more guts than half the stuff currently on the shelves. It’s an unforgettable book that tackles subjects a lot of people would rather forget about and it’s a perfect example of why I love YA.

5/5.

Remember to buy, read or borrow as many banned books as possible. Nothing scares a coward more than knowledge! Here's the American Library Association's page on Banned Book Week.

"Speak" by Laurie Halse Anderson is about rape. It's a wonderful book but it's not an easy read. It's honest, brutally so, and often heartbreaking, but it's brave and tackles issues that are still seldom talked about today. It's a modern day YA classic so obviously it's a top target for book banners.

Like this jerk.

No, I don't feel bad for calling him a jerk because this man is so ignorant it makes me feel angry just to think about him. In his so called Christian crusade to rid schools of filth, he calls for the removal of "Speak" from the shelves (along with "Slaughterhouse Five" which is just so ridiculous I can't even find the words to describe how stupid it is) because it is "soft pornography." For him to think that about a book containing rape is disgusting, not to mention him outright lying about the book's intent. But the wider issue here is censorship.

Books are powerful things. They can change people, change opinions and hell, they can change the world. Books like "Speak" are why I'm a YA fan. It's gutsy and talks about a taboo issue with unflinching honesty. It doesn't talk down to teenagers or dress up issues. It's not afraid to talk about rape, even when others are. And fear is what really drives censorship. Fear and ignorance. It's the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to reality. By pulling the book, or any book, from the shelves of a school or library or bookshop, you are denying people, especially young people (the vast majority of the top 10 most challenged books in USA are aimed at teens and children), the chance to explore new topics and new worlds and maybe even think twice about things. What message does it send out when you write incoherent rants about rape being equivalent to soft core pornography? Don't teenagers and young women have enough to worry about? It's crucial that we change perceptions about women and rape. In Scotland, a recent Rape Crisis Scotland survey of more than 1000 people found that 23% of people thought a woman was partially responsible for her own rape if she was drunk, while 17% thought she bore some responsibility if her clothing was revealing. No. Rape is rape. It's not sex. It's NEVER the victim's fault.

"Speak" authour Laurie Halse Anderson rebutted this stupid man on her blog and offers links and advice on how you can tackle this issue head on. Banned Book week is coming soon and I heartily recommend you pick up "Speak" and read it if you haven't already, or any number of books people try to take away from readers. The strongest weapon readers have against people like this is just reading the books.

When I first started the Sparkle Project all those months ago, my friends and I joked that my reviews would somehow get me blacklisted from every YA publisher in the world, or the disgruntled authors would send out the ninjas to silence me. It wasn’t until my “Shiver” review that I started to take my jokes a little more seriously, then noticed something about the genre that set my brain firing.

The publishing industry is full of close connections and friendships and the YA market is no exception. I for one find great enjoyment out of watching some of my favourite writers tweet each other or blog about their misadventures together. I’m fascinated by the way they work together and their differences in techniques, characters, etc. It appeals to the part of me that loves the mental image of a group of writers getting together on dark, stormy nights to compose stories together like they’re Byron and the Shelleys or something. But recently, as I’ve written my reviews and done far too much research for this project, I’ve begun to think that maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

The YA community has begun to feel very cliquey. Authors become good friends with bloggers and reviewers (I myself follow several writers on Twitter and one on LiveJournal although they don’t follow me back), giving interviews and freebies to give away, organising competitions and web-chats, and then they have these glowing reviews pop up everywhere. We have writers defending each other online from criticism because they’re friends with each other (the most infamous example I myself have talked about is the “In defence of Hush, Hush” post which has now been deleted from the now agent represented author’s blog). We have authors giving each other glowing reviews and cover quotes often as big as the book author’s name without any sort of disclaimer that the writers are good friends. We have books that aren’t very good being trumpeted as the hot new thing because of combinations of all the above. If you’ll forgive my admittedly sketchy word choice, it’s all begun to feel a little incestuous.

I’ve had one personal instance of reaction to this clique-like behaviour when my review of Maggie Stiefvater’s “Shiver” brought about some comments from the author herself. Maybe I overreacted of maybe something was mistranslated over the internet as it often is, but I genuinely felt a little threatened by Ms Stiefvater’s comments, especially the part about how my reviews may prevent me from being published in the future. But her final comment mentioned that she was good friends with Carrie Ryan, author of “The Forest of Hands and Teeth” the next book I was planning on reviewing, and how she would be very hurt if I wrote a bad review of it (I didn’t, by the way, it was the only book in the Project I really liked, but that’s beside the point.) This felt very weird. A huge part of being a writer is being criticised.

I write stories. I’m trying to write a YA novel right now. I have a few friends who help me edit it and check my work as I go along and I ask them to be as critical as possible, otherwise I would just write the biggest heap of crap. Criticism makes me a better writer and it stops me from making huge mistakes over my content. I can’t help but wonder why professional authors in the YA genre aren’t calling out problematic elements of the genre, even if they are friends with the culprits. It’s possible to be friends with someone and not kiss their backsides all the time, especially when they don’t deserve it. Maybe pointing out possible problems is exactly what they need. There’s a huge difference between the author’s intent (wanting to write a romance with a bad boy) and the resulting reality (sexual harassment masquerading as love) and maybe they don’t realise this. This isn’t just the job of other writers of course, the publishers and agents need to step up and do their jobs too. I know I’m just the ranting feminist blogger who seems impossible to please but I genuinely love this genre. If writing things like this do stop me from being published, if criticising the genre and its faults makes me some sort of enemy, then I’m not sure I want to be a part of that industry. I’d rather be the rambling, opinionated nerd than the mafia ninja.

Thoughts? How do you feel the internet has helped/hindered the market? My next review will either be a House of Night recap or The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie as part off Banned Book week. Tell your friends!

“The Knife of Never Letting Go”

Author: Patrick Ness.

Publisher: Walker Books.

Pages: 496.

Summary (taken from Fantastic Fiction): Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town of men. Ever since the settlers were infected with the Noise germ, Todd can hear everything the men think, and they hear everything he thinks. Todd is just a month away from becoming a man, but in the midst of the cacophony, he knows that the town is hiding something from him - something so awful Todd is forced to flee with only his dog, whose simple, loyal voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, the two stumble upon a strange and eerily silent creature: a girl. Who is she? Why wasn't she killed by the germ like all the females on New World? Propelled by Todd's gritty narration, readers are in for a white-knuckle journey in which a boy on the cusp of manhood must unlearn everything he knows in order to figure out who he truly is.

Now that I'm no longer clogging up my poor, infinitely patient LJ friends pages with my ramblings, I feel a sudden urge to spam the hell out of this blog, but since I don't want to run out of things to say too quickly, or annoy the followers I have (12 followers! Hi to you all, that's seriously cool and flattering) I'll pace myself. Until then, here's a brief summary of things to come.

• The House of Night series recap. (I described the first book in the HoN series by P.C. and Kristin Cast as being the YA version of Anita Blake. It has all the trademark crazy but with less sex and more slut-shaming and annoying teen speak. Since I had a little too much fun with my review of the first book Marked and a few commenters said it only got better/worse from there on, I have decided to continue the series for your enjoyment/mental torture. Since the series is currently 7 books long, with an 8th coming soon, I won't be short of material in case I need to pad this blog out a bit.)
• Rambling musings. (I'm still fascinated by the genre and the wider messages and implications of the tropes and cliches, not to mention the business of the YA industry itself, and believe me, I'm not short of things to say on it! So expect a few rants on that, the next one being about the dreaded YA Mafia that I'm so terrified of.)
• Film Fridays. (As well as loving books, I'm a big movie nerd and I thought it would be fun to stir the pot a little by doing a few movie reviews. Some will be random reviews based on whatever I last saw and hopefully I'll share some of my thoughts during awards season - I'm a nerd for that sort of thing and my predictions are usually pretty damn good - but mostly it'll be similar to the Sparkle Project with my thoughts and recaps on the sort of films that women are supposed to like and the further topic of female pop culture that I briefly touched on in this post. If there's a film you think I should review then please leave a comment below.)
• Book reviews! (To quote the oft-imitated M. Bison, Of course! To be honest I'm still looking for stuff to review. I've got my eye on a couple but I'm a bit worried I might just end up repeating myself and rambling on about the same stuff I said in the original project. So if there's something you think I should read then once again, leave a comment here or on my LJ. My next review will be up tomorrow or Thursday. It's a positive one too!)
• Literary Nostalgia. (A suggestion of a friend of mine, I will sporadically be revisiting the books that I read during my adolescenes. I read 65 books in my first year of high school so I'm going to look back at some of those and see how they've aged, if they still hold up to scrutiny, if I still enjoy them and the like.)

And to be honest that's all I have planned for now. Hopefully it will amuse and entertain you all.

Anybody who is unfortunate enough to follow me on Twitter probably saw me post a link to this article written by YA author Hannah Moskowitz entitled “The Boy Problem” and they most certainly would have seen me react accordingly. For 10 consecutive tweets. My apologies for that. So to christen the new blog I thought I’d share my polished opinion here.

Moskowitz states in her blog biography that she’s the author of several books, most of which have yet to be released, and also states that most of them have male protagonists so maybe she’s doing some sort of self promotion here. She also offers a brief disclaimer that this piece is her opinion and there will always be exceptions so I’m going to offer exceptions. I can understand where she’s coming from to a point and she’s made some other interesting blog posts about the genre, including one about the exclusivity of YA which I agree with more than this. Right now the genre is very geared towards a female audience because the trend is for Twilight style books. It’s easier to promote something as “The next [insert trend here]” and this is nothing new. We did it with Harry Potter, we’re doing it with Twilight and Percy Jackson and it won’t be long before we do it with the Hunger Games. I can’t comment on her point that boys don’t read YA because obviously I’m not a boy but it does seem like an odd generalisation to make. Gender specific trending is nothing new and while I’m okay with it to an extent (I’d still love more gender neutral media, not just in literature) it is true that since the current bit trend is very much for girls, all the attention is on that. But my main problems with Moskowitz’s article start here:

Write a girl the same way everyone has been telling everyone, forever, to write a girl’ free of gender stereotypes, three-dimensional, and relatable. Seriously, please do, because right now the most popular YA books aren’t pushing this point Moskowitz is making. I’d love to see well written characters of both genders in YA getting the attention they deserve. They’re not being written badly to empower women, far from it. Right now the genre is brimming full of great stories for both boys and girls, not to mention the wide spectrum of literature that teenagers move onto after YA. Right now, as Tamora Pierce offered in her fantastic rebuttal, the market is more open to girls because girls buy more books while boys are more likely to borrow from libraries and the like. Pierce also writes about why she writes female heroes here.

I wish I could conclude this slightly less ranty piece in a more original manner but Ms Pierce said it best. Both boys and girls need heroes and both need books. We all need strong characters and less sexism and less bullshit.

Pretty nice, huh? Seriously, it took me far too long to get a template installed.

After I finished up my Summer recap/review series, The Sparkle Project a few days ago, I found myself at something of a wit's end. There was still a lot I wanted to say about the genre, a lot of books I wanted to talk about, both good and bad, and I had a few other ideas for projects/reviews/etc that were connected to discussing YA and its wider influence and implications. So, instead of bugging my LJ friends with constant posts about things they don't care about, I decided to pitch my tent in the proper blogosphere.

So what should you expect from this blog? A bit of everything, I suppose. There will certainly be more reviews and recaps (as well as hopefully an entire series recap of the House of Night books) and you should definitely brace yourselves for more ramblings and musings on the genre and the gufts/curses it bestows upon the faithful reader. I'm also hoping to discuss female pop culture in general, especially that which is designed to appeal to teenage girls. Hopefully there will be lots of surprises too. I will also take requests. Is there a book out there you think I desperately need to read, for good reasons or otherwise? Please tell me and I'll see what I can do.

There's nothing left to say except I hope you all follow.