Friday the 13th or, YA* is not a dirty word
Or, it’s actually been a pretty good day** and not only is time hurtling by like a hellhound*** but stuff I really want to point and shout at is stacking up and in another day or two I’ll forget which is my best trick of all, unfortunately, and I figure there’s all this Friday the 13th energy washing around, waiting to turn you into a tadpole or make you win the lottery even if you didn’t buy a ticket, so I might as well ride a little of it.
Emoon [@emoontx] saw it first, and tweeted the link to ‘The Kids’ Books Are All Right’, printed in the NYTimes, no less, about—brace yourselves, this is going to come as a shock—adults are reading books for young adults. YAAAAAAH. I retweeted somewhat ungraciously, adding ‘I am a 30+ year survivor of “when are you going to write a real book?”’—and I’m not impressed. I ‘follow’ the Huffington Post Books section, and they retweeted, so I retweeted again as follows:
Oh do stick yr hushed amazement in yr ear RT @HuffPostBooks: Why it’s okay 4 adults 2 love YA books as much as teens http://huff.to/dAxuSS
I thought about blogging about it myself, but as the above pithily indicates, I was going to have some trouble being professionally polite. And then, lo, Jodi sent me this link:
http://www.gayleforman.com/blog/2010/08/10/sandbox/
Way to go Gayle. Yes, flaming frell it. Yes.
Which will also serve as a much-delayed lead-in to telling you that if you haven’t read Forman’s book IF I STAY, you have a big, sobbing, heart-wrenching, glorious treat waiting for you. Jodi† blogged about it a while ago†† http://jmeadows.livejournal.com/760957.html
. . . but I never quite got around to it, partly because Pollyanna and I kept arguing about terms. See, there was no way I was going to like this book. My editor sent it to me—it’s published in another part of the Penguin forest from me—and I took one long disbelieving look at it and laid it down again for several months.††† It ticks all my instant-death boxes: It’s written in present tense. The heroine is a Sensitive Teen. I hate Sensitive Teens. They give me a rash. She’s not only sensitive, but fabulously talented, and already has her great musical gift to organise her life around. I hate sensitive teens who already know who they are and what they’re good at. She also has a Perfect Boyfriend who not only has his own clear, mature aims and goals but gets hers. Also, he’s cute. He could at least be geeky and spotty. But nooooo. He’s cute. I probably hate Perfect Boyfriends the most of all.
SPOILER ALERT HERE. Jodi was very good when she blogged about the book—she didn’t give anything away. My own feeling is that you’re allowed to blow the set up, the first (say) twenty pages—I’m very literal-minded in my little dragons-and-pegasi way and I find it too difficult to get behind a read this book without mentioning at least a few specifics. So, if you’re willing to take Jodi’s and my word for it, and you like sitting down to a book that you know absolutely nothing about but that the odds are good you’ll like it (which in fact I do, so I will perfectly understand), STOP READING NOW.
But for the rest of you: Mia, our heroine, and her much-loved parents and little brother, are on their way to see friends. School’s been called off because of snow; but the snow stopped almost as soon as the announcement was made, so the roads aren’t even slippery. Slippery enough however: There’s an accident. ‘The car is eviscerated. The impact of a four-ton pick-up truck going sixty miles an hour had the force of an atom bomb.’ Mia’s parents are both killed instantly; she and her little brother are dangerously injured. Mia tells the story as a disassociated spirit, as her damaged and unconscious body lies in a hospital bed connected to various drips and tubes and life-support machinery. The point at which the book really grabbed me for the first time happens when Mia first ‘wakes’ outside her body immediately after the accident, and sees the wreckage around her: ‘You wouldn’t expect the radio to work afterward. But it does.’ She sees what has happened and can’t bear it. ‘Wake up! I scream. Wake up! Wakeupwakeupwakeup! But I can’t. I don’t. . . . Then I hear something. It’s the music. I can still hear the music. So I concentrate on that. I finger the notes of Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no. 3 . . . as I often do when I listen to pieces I am working on. . . . I play, just focusing on that, until the last bit of life in the car dies, and the music goes with it.
‘It isn’t long after that the sirens come.’
For my money, one of the reasons the book is so absorbing is the groundedness of it. You hear, graphically and specifically, about the accident, about what happens to Mia—about how they go about trying to save her life—about her prospects—which are not at all good. The entire book takes place in the hospital, while the doctors and what remains of her family and friends wait to see if she will live or die. And this is intercut with the story of her life so far: the music—shortly before the book begins she’d had her audition at Juilliard—the Perfect Boyfriend (who is a rock star, but he’s okay really, he wears Converse All Stars), the best girlfriend. And the family. The family that she is a part of in a deep, genuine way that she knows she is lucky to have. The family who has been destroyed by a little bit of wet road.
It’s also a thriller. Forman does a brilliant job of wracking you silly over the latest section of the hospital vigil . . . and then whoops you back to Mia’s life before, with her music and Adam, the boyfriend, and Kim, the girlfriend, and her parents, and Teddy, her brother, and her dad’s parents, her school, and the ramshackle old house she and her parents and brother live in, and which is something of a refuge for everyone they love. And as you keep anxiously, lump-in-throat-ishly turning the pages you realise that it’s a real question, about whether Mia chooses to stay. To live. Or not. And the present tense narration? This may be the only book I’ve ever read where it’s absolutely right; where the moment-by-moment of Mia’s fragile existence after the accident is perfectly reflected in all those present-tense verbs.
Read it. But have a big box of tissues handy.
* * *
* Pronounced YAH. Or possibly YAAAAAH.
** So far. There’s a few minutes of it left. Things could always change. But Oisin and I spent a big fat chunk of this afternoon drinking tea and engaging in parallel play with our new toys^—he has a brand-new-this-week iPhone4 too. It’s pathetic. Here we are, respected career professionals in glamorous if ill-paid creative callings, both of us a lot nearer sixty than fifty, and behaving like fifteen-year-olds over a couple of pieces of shiny new kit. Well, I’m still badly mired in the Ooooh! Shiny! stage. Oisin is a bit more blasé, having had earlier versions of the iPhone for several years^^, but he’s the one who explained how you can not only take terrible pictures of the person sitting on the other side of the teapot from you but you can then load one of those terrible photos next to the person’s info on your contact page and then assign them their own ringtone.^^^ So the moment your phone begins ringing you know who’s calling. Supposing you can remember if you assigned the theme from JAWS to your dentist or your accountant. Oh, well, it doesn’t matter that much really. You know you don’t want to answer it.
And then at bell practise tonight . . . I genuinely am beginning to stagger through touches of Grandsire Triples on an inside bell. ‘Beginning’ and ‘stagger’ still being the operative words. But given that it was only a fortnight or so ago that I remained clueless on the touches of Grandsire Triples front, this is excellent. I am going to learn this. I am.
^ Piano lesson? Remind me what that would be—? Although he did remember my empty threat last week about bringing something to sing. Well, he’s the one cancelled at the last minute—not me. And this week is—this week. Not last. Besides, I’m hoarse from screaming.
^^ And in fact bears some responsibility for enmeshing me in this whole iPhone thing in the first place. That and Cathy’s Fingerzilla.
^^^ This is getting as appalling as the existence of a cheat app—of several cheat apps—for Angry Birds.
*** Only twenty four hours left to get a recipe in for the sticky-baked-goods drawing for a shiny gold SIGNED copy of SUNSHINE! http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2010/08/07/sunshine-contest-%e2%80%93-round-2-guest-post-by-ajlr/
† Jodi is everywhere. Don’t do anything you don’t want her to see.
†† Right after we’d been talking about how good it was. Jodi, however, wrote about it. I dithered.
††† I finally picked it up again because Hannah and her daughters really liked it.
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