Memoranda – Page 31 – Michelle Cooper, Australian author

‘Goodbye Stranger’ by Rebecca Stead

This is a gentle, thoughtful novel about friendship, love and change by Rebecca Stead, who won the Newbery Medal for When You Reach Me. I liked this book very much, but also wondered how many middle-grade readers – the intended audience – would persist with it. But I’ll come back to that thought later. Goodbye Stranger is the story of Bridge, a seventh-grader, and her best friends Tabitha and Emily, who all made a vow back in fourth grade to never, ever fight – which proves difficult when their lives seem to be moving in different directions. Bridge was nearly killed in a traffic accident a few years earlier and when not pondering the purpose of her existence (“You must have been put on this earth for a reason, little girl, to have survived,” a nurse told her), she worries whether her friend Sherm “like likes” her, whether her older brother Jamie will ever manage to get rid of his toxic “frenemy” Alex, whether the moon landing was faked, and whether she’ll fail her French class. Meanwhile Tabitha has discovered feminism thanks to her English teacher, Ms Berman (“the Berperson”) and Emily has grown breasts, become the star of the soccer team and is being pursued by older boys.

'Goodbye Stranger' by Rebecca Stead The plot revolves around a sexting scandal. Why did Emily send a revealing photo of herself to Patrick when she promised Bridge that she wouldn’t? Who sent that photo to all the boys in eighth grade? Does this mean Emily is a “skank”? Should Sherm tell the principal what he knows, even though he’ll be ostracised by the other boys if he does? If Patrick wasn’t responsible, then who is he protecting with his silence? Why does Emily insist on staying loyal to Patrick? And who revenge-posted that revealing photo of Patrick? There’s also a rather confusing subplot set several months into the future, involving an unnamed older teenager responsible for another scandal and narrated in the second person. Other relationships are shown in order to further explore the theme of love – for example, Emily’s parents have divorced but they still go on dates, Sherm’s grandfather has walked out on his wife after fifty years of marriage, and Tab’s mother observes Karva Chauth (when “Good Hindu women fast all day to show their devotion to their husbands”, which Tab thinks is anti-feminist, although her older sister Celeste thinks it’s “romantic”).

There were a lot of things I liked about this novel. The main characters are smart but realistically flawed and the smartest of them does something very, very stupid, yet somehow plausible. They do things they regret, and then they say sorry, face the consequences and learn something from it. The friendship between the three girls is lovely and I really liked that by the end, they’d realised that ‘No Fights’ doesn’t work very well as a friendship policy. Most of the characters are also really NICE, which was a pleasant change after reading so many YA novels filled with snarky, cynical teenagers. The sibling relationships are great – Bridge and her brother Jamie bond over their shared love of a cheesy Christmas movie; Tab and Celeste have very different interests, yet manage to share a bedroom amicably; Emily (and her friends) care about her odd little brother Evan. The parents, grandparents and teachers are also caring and sensible and I especially liked Mr P, the “intense” teacher who oversees Bridge, Sherm and the other members of Tech Crew and runs a book club for kids with divorced parents. Also, the setting was great! I love reading about New York students who walk home from school to their brownstone houses via the local diner, where they sit in booths and order vanilla milkshakes and cinnamon toast to share. (Possibly New York readers get a similar kick out of reading stories about Australian teenagers riding around their farms on quad bikes and bottle-feeding orphaned kangaroos.) Despite the characters in this novel being very privileged, they’re also ethnically diverse – Bridge’s father is Armenian-American, Sherm’s grandparents migrated from Sicily, Tab and Celeste’s parents came from India via France – but none of this is made into an Issue.

However, some things didn’t work so well for me. I didn’t understand why the Mysterious Narrator chapters had to be in the second person, why the timeline had to diverge from the main plot or why the narrator had to be Mysterious. I found these sections confusing and distracting, and I think the novel could have done without them. In fact, my main criticism of this book was that there was just TOO MUCH going on. While the author is highly skilled, this book is nearly three hundred pages long and her efforts to connect every little subplot and character mean that plausibility is stretched to its limits by the end (for those who’ve read the book, the moment when Bridge realises which yellow VW ‘caused’ her accident was the moment I shouted, “ENOUGH!”). It was this that made me wonder whether the book might be too long, complex and slow-moving for a lot of eleven- and twelve-year-old readers (I should note that the ‘sexting’ parts of the book are very mild – I don’t think they’re too confronting for this age group to read). Some reviewers have also raised this concern – for example, this commenter felt the book “reads just like a contemporary literary novel for adults.” A teacher-librarian on Goodreads believed it would not appeal to her own students and a commenter below her review wondered “if children’s writers are writing for the award committees, rather than the kids”. Meanwhile Elizabeth Bird at School Library Journal, who has served on the Newbery award panel, raves about the book and thinks it’s perfect for middle-graders but acknowledges:

“…were it not for the author’s fantastic writing and already existing fan base, it would languish away in that no man’s land between child and teen fiction. Fortunately Stead has a longstanding, strong, and dedicated group of young followers who are willing to dip a toe into the potentially murky world of middle school.”

I agree with most of these points of view – I think Goodbye Stranger will find an audience of thoughtful pre-teen and young teenage readers, but will not appeal to many in this age group. I also agree this has been published internationally and is receiving lots of publicity only because the author is already well-known and critically acclaimed – but hopefully this will encourage more publishers to take a chance with subtle, complex, realistic books for young teenage readers who find the sex and violence in some YA books a bit too much for their tastes.

This Looks Strangely Familiar …

The Scent of Secrets, by Jane Thynne, is historical fiction set in 1938 and published last month in the US and Canada by Ballantine Books and Doubleday Canada. “The novel richly fuses fact and fiction with a cast of real Nazis and their British admirers, such as the Mitford sisters and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,” according to its Goodreads page. It “puts a new spin on an ever-fascinating era, fraught with glamor, political tension, tragedy, and romance.” What an interesting idea!

To make things more confusing, it was published under the title A War of Flowers in the UK and is the third in a series (although The Scent of Secrets is the first of the series to be published in North America, according to this Q & A by the author). The second book in the series, The Winter Garden, looks like this:

'The Winter Garden' by Jane Thynne — ‘The Winter Garden’ by Jane Thynne (Paperback published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster)

I guess Jane Thynne’s publishers really, really like that 1949 photograph by Frances McLaughlin-Gill.

By the way, if you’re new to this blog and you’re wondering what I’m going on about, five years ago I wrote a novel about political tension, glamour, tragedy and romance, set in 1938 and featuring real-life Nazis and their British supporters, including the Mitford sisters and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It looked like this:

'The FitzOsbornes in Exile' - North American hardcover — ‘The FitzOsbornes in Exile’, North American hardcover, released on April 5th, 2011

‘Rivers of London’ by Ben Aaronovitch

I absolutely loved Rivers of London, the first in a series of novels about Constable Peter Grant of the London Metropolitan Police, who unexpectedly finds himself apprenticed to a wizard and solving gruesome supernatural crimes. It’s a very entertaining mix of police procedural and urban paranormal (complete with ghosts, vampires, demons, river nymphs and whatever bizarre, blood-sucking creature Molly the Maid is supposed to be), although Peter’s new wizard master, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, wants to make it clear he’s not Harry Potter:

“In what way?”
“I’m not a fictional character,” said Nightingale.

(Also, Nightingale travels in a 1960s Jag, rather than on a broomstick. And the vampires definitely aren’t sparkly.)

'Rivers of London' by Ben Aaronovitch — Paperback cover of UK edition of ‘Rivers of London’ by Ben Aaronovitch

The story involves two strands. In the first, a supernatural serial killer seems to be on the loose in London; in the second, the gods and goddesses connected with the River Thames are squabbling over territory. There’s plenty of blood, action and snarky commentary, and the two narrative strands are twisted together satisfactorily by the end of the book.

What I enjoyed most, though, were the characters, who are all interesting, funny and realistically multicultural. This shouldn’t be at all remarkable, except I’ve just finished reading several contemporary novels in a row that were set in Sydney or London or New York and yet were exclusively peopled with white, middle-class, heterosexual characters (just like their respective authors, in fact). In Rivers of London, Peter, the main character, is London-born, with a mum from Sierra Leone and a white dad who’s a jazz musician (and junkie). Peter’s background is integral to the story – he has an understanding of certain London cultures that Nightingale lacks, so it’s an advantage to have Peter on the team. Yet the author also acknowledges the realities of being a young black man in London, such as when Peter catches a train and observes the other passengers warily assessing him (“I was sending out mixed signals, the suit and reassuring countenance of my face going one way, the fact that I’d obviously been in a fight recently and was mixed race going the other”). It isn’t all Serious Discussion of Race Relations, though – Peter, worried he’s about to be sent undercover in a dangerous black community, blurts out to his commander, “I don’t like rap music!” (His confused superior, who’d actually planned to send Peter off to do boring paperwork because Peter gets so easily distracted on the beat, nods slowly and says, “That’s useful to know.”)

The other characters are just as real and interesting as Peter. Working alongside Nightingale is Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, Scottish cryptopathologist. Peter’s friend Lesley is a beautiful young blonde who is far better at police work than Peter. Lesley has a “terrifying lesbian” supervisor called Detective Sergeant Miriam Stephanopoulos (who turns out to be slightly less terrifying than Peter first thinks). The Londoners whom Peter encounters during his investigation include a Danish housewife, a Sri Lankan refugee working in a cinema, a Turkish doorman, some white Hare Krishnas and a Nigerian goddess. These characters aren’t diverse because the author is trying to be Politically Correct or a Social Justice Warrior or because someone started up a Twitter hashtag campaign against his books – this is just what GOOD WRITING looks like.¹

There did seem to be a few plot holes – for example, it takes Peter and Nightingale more than 200 pages to work out what’s going on with the serial killer, when I’d figured it out after the first murder. (Admittedly, there was a big clue in the cover art of the hardback UK edition I read – and I noticed that that part of the artwork had been minimised and blurred for the paperback cover.²) Peter also shows a strange lack of curiosity about his new wizard mentor, even though several characters warn Peter about Nightingale. I mean, I know Peter can be a bit dim sometimes, but if I was suddenly whisked off to live with a wizard and learn magic, I’d want to know a bit about him. Also, how come Peter can suddenly see ghosts and detect magic only now, as a young man? If he was born with magical abilities, wouldn’t he at least have had an inkling of his powers during his childhood? Maybe this will be addressed in the subsequent books, but I must admit, I was so busy enjoying the story and laughing at the jokes that I didn’t worry too much about the bits that didn’t make complete sense. Apart from Peter’s exciting battles with the supernatural, there’s also a lot of fascinating London history (and a really cool chase scene, with the characters running through London’s history all the way back to Roman times). I’m already a few chapters into the sequel, Moon Over Soho, and it’s excellent so far. I’m really looking forward to the rest of this series.

Miscellaneous Memoranda

Or, A Collection of Book-Related Links That Caught My Attention But That I Never Got Around To Writing Blog Posts About.

– And yes, I know I ended that sentence with a preposition and started this sentence with a conjunction. At least I have a better understanding of punctuation than these cake decorators. Not all Cakes are Wrecks, though – look at these amazing book-related cakes.

– Here’s a fascinating (if you’re a traditionally-published author) post by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Manija Brown about why they decided to self-publish the second book in their Change series, after Viking published the first book. It says so much about how the publishing industry works these days. (Incidentally, the manuscript of the first book in the series started off that GayYA thing.)

– And here’s an article by Sally Nicholls about why it isn’t always necessary to kill off the characters’ parents in children’s books. (It does make plotting exciting adventures much easier, though.)

– I have no interest in reading Go Set a Watchman, partly because I don’t feel the need to read the unedited first draft of a novel that I’ve already read and enjoyed, but also because I have doubts about whether Harper Lee has given her consent for it to be published. Has anyone else read it? What did you think?

– Speaking of which, what is going on with the book bestseller lists at the moment? Last week, the Sydney Morning Herald’s top ten bestseller list consisted of the previously-mentioned unedited first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, four of the Treehouse books by Andy Griffiths and FIVE colouring-in books! Now, I have nothing against Andy Griffiths – his books may not be my cup of tea, but he’s brought a lot of laughter and excitement to a lot of child readers. But colouring books? Why are they being counted?

– However, I do approve of this – a lot of people tweeting about what Young Adult books would look like if the books were Very Realistic.

– I also liked (possibly not the right word) this article by Annabel Crabb about a man who wrote her a detailed letter criticising her latest book, even though he hadn’t actually bothered to read the book. It reminded me of the time I was doing a book signing at an English teachers’ conference and two separate men came up to berate me for having the nerve to publish my book as a ‘Vintage Classic’, when my book was clearly not Classic Literature. Not that they’d read the book. (Not that I’d had any say in that book being republished under the Vintage Classics imprint, anyway.)

– Although if they had read my books, they probably would have objected to them anyway, because the books are full of princesses. Princesses doing girly, princessy things like buying ball gowns and learning how to curtsey and looking for a suitable husband, and also fighting Nazis, giving speeches at the League of Nations and writing newspaper articles about the plight of child refugees. There’s a good post about Princess Shaming over at Tea Cozy (the comments are interesting, too).

– And those men probably would have scoffed at the notion of a tiny island kingdom, as well. I guess they’re not aware of the “republican monarchy” of Atlantium here in Australia (“At 0.76 square kilometres we are counted among the world’s smallest states, which brings into play certain practical realities; we choose to deal with these in a pragmatic manner.”)

– I mean, those men probably don’t even believe in sea monsters!

'Colossal Octopus' by Pierre Denys de Montford, 1810 — ‘Colossal Octopus’ by Pierre Denys de Montford, 1810

‘On Writing’ by Stephen King

'On Writing' by Stephen King

I loved On Writing, a very entertaining and informative book about being a writer. It’s part memoir, part conventional fiction-writing guide, written in an amusing, self-deprecating style. For example, here’s Stephen King describing his first ‘best-seller’, a novelisation of one of his favourite horror films, self-published when he was at high school:

“Working with the care and deliberation for which I would later be critically acclaimed, I turned out my novel version of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ in two days … blissfully unaware that I was in violation of every plagiarism and copyright statute in the history of the world.”

He sold out his entire print run to his fellow students, making an enormous profit, although his principal later made him refund the money and told him to stop wasting his time writing “junk”. King received advice that was far more useful from the editor of his town’s newspaper, where King had a part-time job writing sports reports:

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story … When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

King goes on to describe his development as a writer – studying literature and creative writing at college, writing stories for magazines, then working on his early novels while supporting his young family by teaching high school. His wife fished the opening chapters of Carrie out of his wastebasket and convinced him to keep going with it. Carrie ended up being his first published book, made him a fortune, and set him off on his career as a best-selling author of horror and speculative fiction. It wasn’t all smooth sailing after that, though, and he writes eloquently about his struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, and then about his physical rehabilitation after he was nearly killed in a horrific traffic accident.

The second half of the book provides a lot of practical, well-organised advice about writing fiction, although King cautions:

“…no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

He divides writers into a pyramid, with a lot of bad writers on the base, some competent writers above them, a few “really good” writers above them, and at the apex, the geniuses – “the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys.” He believes it’s impossible to make a bad writer into a competent one, or a good writer into a great one, but that “it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one”. He also believes that stories are like fossils, “part of an undiscovered pre-existing world”, excavated from the ground using a writer’s box of tools.

His advice includes:

– Read a lot and write a lot. He provides a list of his favourite books (his favourite writers include Pat Barker, Bill Bryson, Annie Proulx, J.K. Rowling, Donna Tartt, Anne Tyler and Evelyn Waugh) and he says that watching television is a waste of time.

– Write quickly, work every day to a schedule, and don’t stop until you’ve finished a draft. He thinks a first draft should take no longer than three months and claims he wrote the first draft of The Running Man in a week. However, he does acknowledge that The Stand took sixteen months and (probably not coincidentally) is his fans’ favourite book.

– Don’t ever plot, because “plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible”.

– “Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”

– Similarly, symbolism will only become evident once you’ve excavated your story: “If it is there, and if you notice it, I think you should bring it out as well as you can, polishing it till it shines.”

– “Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others”, which is why H.P. Lovecraft, a painfully shy snob, wrote such terrible, stilted dialogue.

– When revising, remember this important formula: “2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%”

And if you get stuck, remember, “Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.”

I can’t say I agreed with all of it (personally, I find plotting essential, and while I’d love to be able to finish a first draft of a novel in three months, I can’t imagine that will ever happen) and some of his advice about finding a publisher is a little dated, because the book was written fifteen years ago. But I found all of it fascinating and I’d recommend this to anyone interested in writing as a craft or as a career.