Greatest Torment, Greatest Treasure

Endangered by Eliot Schrefer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Endangered by Eliot Schrefer started popping up on my radar through the various authors, educators, and agents I follow on Twitter. I knew nothing about it, but trusted the positive social media attention--and so, I will be adding it to my classroom library on Wednesday and book talking it to my classes. I loved the many layers the book was built upon:

a) it is a difficult, harrowing, journey akin to Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water
b) as a reader I learned about the endangered bonobo ape
c) the palliative exposure of some of the political realities of the Congo
d) the strong and detailed writing had me wondering and second-guessing if this was non-fiction (it is fiction)

Ultimately, the strongest layer is the element of suffering. My gosh, so much suffering permeates these pages. Both human and animal.

Within the Q&A With Eliot Schrefer, the author notes:

"The moment I knew the bonobos would become a novel, though, was when I read about Kinsuke, an orphan who had arrived at the bonobo sanctuary too frail to survive. In her final moments, she had held tightly to the rope that her captors had used to restrain her, refusing to let it go. It was her only possession left after everything else had been taken from her, and she died clutching it to her cheek. Sometimes your greatest torment can also be your greatest treasure."

Endangered is challenging and moving; fictional and informative; alarming and humbling. Schrefer's story bridges the divide between YA fiction and adult fiction because it does not matter that a high school girl, Sophie, takes us on this journey. What matters is that so many human beings and animals suffer this journey every day.

It makes me feel grateful to be where I am and who I am. It also makes feel that familiar awe for the power of storytelling that had been missing from my book pile until just recently.


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YA Book Review: The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have never reviewed John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway. Never reviewed the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The impulse to blog about my stuggles reading Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, or Bleak House has never been felt by me.

So, to review The Fault in Our Stars by John Green feels a bit like reviewing The Catcher in the Rye, In Cold Blood, or On the Road.

I read The Fault in Our Stars over the last 24 hours, about 300 days after its first positive reviews appeared. Also, by my estimation, I read it about 299 days after one of my 8th grade students, Alyssa, told me it was one of the best books she ever read.

Ultimately, the book speaks for itself and if you read it, you will also understand--whether it happens in the next 24 hours or at the end of next 300 days does not matter.

Great literature removes something from us, I think. Sometimes it is our breath. Sometimes it our prejudices. Sometimes it our fears.

After reading The Fault in Our Stars, I am left different than I was when I began it. Not that I am less whole, but that I am more finished, like a marble sculpture. We are all these unfinished, imperfect, hulks of stone and life fractures us--shaves us--chips us. I do not know what my marble looks like to the rest of the world, and I am not sure what I look like to myself, but do you that feeling when you see a Rodin for the first time, up close, live, and you marvel at the possibilities of stone? when you marvel at the possibilities of iron, and muscle, and force? when you marvel at smoothness and whiteness and beauty and the silence of others staring at the art?

And you know when you walk away from that art...and you wonder about your own possibilities? the part of the wondering where you feel small, insect-like, and incomplete?

But you are comforted because you walking down the steps from a museum or away from an experience that chipped something away from you that you didn't need, that got in the away, that hid a piece of you you never knew existed?

So, forgive me, if I do not review John Green's The Fault in Our Stars because, well, the piece of marble it chipped away was mine.

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YA Book Review: Splendors and Glooms

Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After several dozens of pages into Splendors and Glooms, I found myself hoping that the villain Grisini, a Victorian puppet master, would use his magic to kidnap children by turning them into marionettes. I even thought, if he does not, what a great idea for a story...

And then he did it.

I can't decide if I was able to anticipate this series of events based on what Schlitz revealed, or if he author meant to make it more of a surprise for the reader. Was the story predictable? Or was I just lucky with my guess?

Being predictable isn't horrible...after all, I know the story of Romeo and Juliet (as do many) and would still watch the play. Most know what happened to the Titanic and yet we watch the film.

As a reader, I did feel that I knew the story as the story unravelled. Little came as a surprise...but I can't determine if that is a good thing or a bad thing, because I liked the story.

I also can't determine several things:

I can't decide whose story this is. Who is the main character?

I can't decide if I "buy" that a magic stone could be destroyed by a child packing it in a snowball. This is a magic stone, minde you, which protected itself from being crushed by a heavy iron pan by sensing this and redirecting the pan down upon the hand of the person trying to rid the world of its black charms. This is a stone so powerful it burns to the touch, can break spells, can summon people from miles away to drop what they are doing and walk zombie-like to it. This is a stone that can only bring the owner relief if it is stolen from the owner--and the bulk of the novel is the plotting of the witch to get one of the children to steal this magic stone from her dying clutches. All of that said...a snowball destroys it.

I don't know...

I can't ascertain how old the children are. We're told they are teenagers, but they do not act, speak, or read like teenagers in my opinion. I think their age dissipated in the setting of the story in Victorian London. In an effort to ensure accurate dialect, the feel that these are authentic teenagers is lost. With the onslaught of referring to such things as "coppers" me-finks I imagined the younger characters as more in the image J.M. Barrie's Darling children than any of John Green's Katherines, Alaskas, or Margos.

That said. I liked it.

Purportedly dark and Dickensian, Splendors and Glooms reminded me of the kind of story I liked when I was twelve. Thinking of it like "Oliver Twist light," or "PG-13 Pinocchio" it fits somewhere in the Middle Grade to younger Young Adult category and is a worthwhile book to keep on your classroom library shelf. For all of my uncertainty, I feel confident that my students will like the novel.



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