The Internet exists to teach us that we are never as obsessed as we think we are. There is always a more fanatical collector or expert on obscure 16mm film reels or paperback young adult novels, to show us we are but mere enthusiasts. On a recommendation from the YALSA listserv, I visited The Dairi Burger to read about the reissue of the execrable teen series Sweet Valley High. Witty and smart readers visit the site and demonstrate a remarkable memory of plots and characters that overwhelms my own. But we all have similar stories. Most of us read compulsively, sometimes under bedsheets with flashlights, and devoured books like cakes then and now. Some of those books were destructive to our impressionable psyches, but when we’re all grown up we hope they form a generational bond, a laugh, a deep roll of the eye or maybe even some critical analysis.
While the SV canon—and it is canonical, though sometimes flexible with fact and reality, with hundreds of titles and series within series—may seem benign and forgettable to most, Francine Pascal’s covert mission of normalizing repulsive, greedy, shallow, and extraordinarily sexist behavior has helped to socially condition most of her vulnerable young readers. At the outset of each book, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield, our heroic twins are always described in their perfect size six, tanned, sun-streaked blond glory, with eyes the color of the Pacific Ocean, even! What is intended to read variously as virtue, vivaciousness, ambition, magnanimity in the twins is really callowness, condescension, ruthlessness, self-righteousness. And what of the fat or single, LGBT folks, people of color, the poor? If they even exist in this world, they are tragically doomed or soon forgotten and they function as catalysts for the primary characters, eliciting pity and contempt.

This reissue is completely irresponsible and unnecessary. And the only reported edit is that Jessica and Elizabeth are now a perfect size four. I know that none of this is new, that we are all familiar with the evils of media for young people. Most likely children and teens today will not be interested in hoary Sweet Valley when they have young adult books like Gossip Girl, The A List, The Clique. The new offerings are mordantly self aware and cheeky and seem sometimes to have a hint of parody, even while they exist primarily to prop up the most garish and exclusive brands. In the SV books, characters are often kidnapped, raped, beaten, and tragically killed, but maintain a glazed innocence and mostly abstain from drinking, drugs, and sex, except for when it kills them to prevent others from indulging. At least the new naughty YA books aren’t pretenders.

And for illustrative purposes here are some choice quotations:

“There are a dozen fairy-tale princesses, Rose thought, and they’re going to make me a fairy-tale princess too.”

“He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”

Lila, upon seeing Manuel: “I don’t know how she can date him. He’s so ethnic and working class.”

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While librarianship is an apolitical profession for many, I endeavor to practice advocacy and activism in the library and dispense with the fallacy of neutrality. In my first year as a librarian, I have not been successful in implementing the tenets of what may be called radical librarianship and I am still trying to figure out what it means to cultivate social justice in and through the library. The best way for me to do this may be to incorporate activism into youth programming. My first project is an Amnesty International chapter at the library.

My friends and I belonged to our high school AI chapter and Wednesdays after school consisted of a clutch of punks eating pizza and writing a letter or two but spending most of our time messing around. It was a good time and I talked to people I wouldn’t have talked to otherwise. I do not know yet how successful AI will be at the library. Young people are particularly interested in their freedoms and rights, which may easily extend to a concern for the freedoms and rights denied to political prisoners from China, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Burma, and throughout the world. Perhaps AI will provide a context for understanding about the Other, for fostering compassion, for fighting injustice. Maybe it will just be a fun gathering of letterwriting and pizza. That would be enough.

In a great interview in the November 2004 issue of Arthur Magazine musician and activist Kathleen Hanna said, “I think it’s completely political for people to feel joy in a joyless culture. That in itself really is doing a great service to the planet.”

This is a guiding principle for me. I think in our programing and outreach efforts, joy is a most worthy aim.

If anyone else wants to start an AI chapter at their library or school, there is some information here.

This Product Is Harmful To Your Health

Most of us are familiar with the mandate of women’s magazines to build us up on one page and tear us down on the next through the cult of the body, the aspirational advertorializing of products and celebrity, and the usage of stereotyped gender roles. While men’s magazines may be culpable of these offenses to some degree, they are fundamentally different. They are based on interest and experience and doing rather than shopping and adorning and being and are defined less by guilt, caution, and anxiety than by an enthusiasm for subjects like music, biking, design, naked women, business, or literature.

Of course, it is not accurate to say magazines like Rolling Stone, Wallpaper, Bicycling, Juxtapoz, Foreign Affairs, Discover, or Business Week are for men. Women read them too. But most media is intended for a white male audience unless it pronounces otherwise. Why do women need a such large airless body of literature devoted to consuming femininity? Why aren’t parallel glossies for men successful (Men’s Vogue, anyone?)

Unfortunately, this is duplicated for children’s and teen magazines and the makeup and dieting frenzy has been filtered down to children and teens, changing bodies and minds that need play and flexibility more than they need withholding and narrowness. In a public library, the available magazines for young people include CosmoGIRL, Teen Vogue, Lucky, Girls’ Life, Cheerleader, Boys’ Life, Spin, Hype Hair, and various gaming mags. This reading material is a small part of the heterosexist, classist, gendered climate in which kids are reared. Early on, children learn that the life of boys is devoted to fun while girls require regimens and advice, paeans to perfection. Aside from New Moon, I see no alternatives to the monoculture that prescribes The Way to Be for Girls and Boys.

Where are the alternatives? Where is the young adult Bitch, Believer, Adbusters, Arthur, Maximum Rock’n'Roll, Venus Zine, Utne Reader? Why aren’t these magazines in YA rooms? Sure, they have their faults, but they attempt to be sources of knowledge and criticism and enlightenment, whereas more mainstream magazines are devoted to checklists and manuals and rules. Media consolidation is locking us out of alternative choices. There is no more Punk Planet or Stay Free or Sassy or Black Girl. We are depending on conglomerates to teach us about ourselves and our culture.

If we decide to buy these titles for children and teens, we should at least provide them with alternatives. If we can’t buy indie magazines, we should encourage kids to make their own zines in the absence of counterculture print material and check out others on the Web

P.S. What do you think about Adbusters’ proposed CosmoGIRL ads?

Books for the Beast

Books for the Beast is a conference at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore on Saturday, October 27. While I look forward to attending, I am disappointed by the required reading. The literature is intended to be the best that YA can offer, but most of the books are terrible or mediocre. I know there are lots of great new young adult books (Twisted, Un Lun Dun, Alabama Moon, Strays, Beige, and An Abundance of Catherines are just a few that I’ve recently read and can remember.) Why haven’t these been chosen? Why are we saddled with garbage like Say it Ain’t So, What Happened to Cass McBride, Jason and Kyra, and Sleeping Freshmen Don’t Lie? Does anyone know how the literature is selected? I suspect it is related to the holdings at the hosting library. It is sad that as young adult literature is receiving positive attention for its relevance and literary merit—comix in particular— a significant conference seems to select such insignificant and poorly constructed novels.

Each participant reads from two of the genres (ten books). The genres include Science Fiction/Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Multicultural, Non-Fiction, Real Life, and Suspense/Horror. My chosen genres are Multicultural and Real Life and I have read a few other choices as well. I have read fourteen of the thirty books and found only a few worthy of positive notice. Cecil Castellucci’s Boy Proof, Sharon Flake’s Who Am I Without Him: Short Stories about Girls and the Boys in Their Lives, Siena Cherson Siegel’s graphic memoir To Dance, and of course Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese are complex, eclectic, and arresting works that transcend demographic marketing.

One of the interesting aspects of the conference is that teens are invited to attend for free and share their perspectives and perceptions on this body of literature written for them. Although YA novels have a clear intended audience, the opinions of young readers tend to be overlooked and discounted in favor of expert judgment. I am looking forward to a small shake-up in the hierarchy.

The conference runs from 9:00-4:00 at the Roland Park Country School, 5204 Roland Avenue, Baltimore, 21210. Speakers include author Gail Giles and Mark Siegel, graphic novel artist and editor. For more information, email beast@prattlibrary.org, call 410-396-5356, or visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s webpage

Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers
By Cris Beam

Here is a nonfiction story that pops like a novel. This book is amazing and everyone—not just teachers, librarians, and parents—should read it. Beam writes nonfiction like a dream. She renders real people in a raw and realistic, yet literary way, with a flair for dialogue and descriptive details. Her characters are as big as life.

Beam taught briefly at Eagles Academy, a GLBT school where she met the transgender teenagers whose lives she documents. Her main subjects are Foxxjazell, Domineque, Ariel, and Christina, my favorite. Christina is destructive, smart, intense, and heartbreaking; she made me laugh and cry (no, really.) When she cries she hiccups and “sounds like a fish tank” and when she’s scared she curls up in the kitchen sink and eats Doritos. Christina burns brightly and will stick in your mind long after you’ve finished the book.

Navigating through our rigid world is fraught for transgender people. Obtaining employment, education, medical care, a driver’s license, a passport, using public bathrooms, and finding a safe romantic partner are all daily struggles. Because Transparent’s teenagers have been locked out of our limited story of gender, they can astutely critique its absurdities and constrictions. They’re pretty clear that they know what’s up with their bodies and their identities. It’s the rest of us who are confused and fighting so hard to keep everything “normal.” This book shows that transgender people aren’t reinscribing stereotypical gender roles. Being transgender is much more complicated than playing dress-up.

Beam has created a seamless narrative of transgender history, the personal lives of modern transgender teenagers, and the medical and legal travails of most transgender people. I hope this book changes minds and burrows into hearts. That’s why I’m writing this review. At my big city library transgender teenagers are treated with hostility and contempt. We need to work to protect all teenagers, especially the most vulnerable, from harassment and abuse. This book will arm its readers with more information and compassion to fight the good fight. We must keep in mind that “the pervasive self-doubt or self-hate born of a dismissive larger culture will squeeze itself out from the soul’s crack’s somewhere.”

“Her face was streaked with blood and rain. Her hair was soaking wet. She was angry. Afraid. Confused. She was inappropriately beautiful”(168).

Ah, doomed young love.

Kevin Brooks’ Being is a dismal UK dystopian science fiction novel that for some readers probably suffers from redundancy, a bad ending, and an abundance of cool. Unfortunately, the questions that develop in the course of the novel are not adequately resolved by the book’s end, which is troubling but works as a strong nod to the novel’s thematic existentialism. Regardless, I loved it and had a difficult time recovering from it. A little medical, a little conspiracist, and a little technological, Being has shades of “Alias,” Trainspotting, Morvern Callar, Chuck Palahniuk, Run Lola Run, and Poppy Z. Brite. As apparent from the name-dropping, this novel has a specific audience although not the conventional science fiction readership. While Being is unsettling with its grime, depravation, and loneliness, it is not an alienating read. Unlike most dystopias, it comforts and confirms our feelings of being unsafe and disconnected in the postmodern world.

While the characterization is sparse, Brooks adeptly cultivates concern for his heroes, Robert and Eddi. Their relationship is atypical for teen literature yet normal for Brooks’ reality. It is loving, but not sentimental. Robert and Eddi are just two unusually messed-up young people in a world of trouble involving circuit boards, fake identities, and a man (or is he a machine?) named Ryan.

Brooks’ evocative sensory language describes old feelings in new ways and creates panic, pain, and fear. “The slice of the scalpel is quick and tight. At first I feel nothing, just the silent peeling of skin and fat, opening up like a blood red smile…then suddenly the pain cuts in. It hurts”(19).

And later:

“It had some kind of miniature connection sockets all around the edge, little gold things…filaments, dulled silver-white shining dark in the light of the eye. Intricate patterns of dots and lines, circles, and waves. Fine hairs, like slender worms, moving to the flow of something invisible”(180).

And the cover is pretty rad, too.

As a children’s librarian working in an inner-city library, it is always a pleasure to come across new urban titles, especially when a unique approach is provided for our teen readers. Adrian Harper’s Night Biters is an action-packed horror novel in which urban teens, whose days are spent participating in graffiti, skateboarding, and hip-hop fashion, come face-to-face with vampiric forces in the city of Oakland. Harper uses street culture as a setting, rather than a centralized plot or motif, which further validates the positive aspects of hip-hop culture as something common and unproblematic. Still issues of violence are present between various gang groups of Hispanics, African Americans, and white power bikers, but the realistic violence is intermingled with supernatural phenomena.

The novel is self-published through what is known as the “vanity press,” and the book does suffer from misspellings, unfocused writing, and several cut-off sentences. Teens might be interested in purchasing the novel at their own leisure, but the likelihood of a vanity novel being approved for aquisitions is quite low. However, Harper has embarked on something we need more of in teen fiction - novels about African Americans and hip-hop culture where ethnicity is not the central plight. We hope to see more of Adrian’s future work as his writing matures and he continues to fill the holes in teen fiction. Perhaps the sequal, The Rave of Werewolves, will be suitable for a small press publisher?

Harper has a blog, where he writes about reaching urban male readers. We (librarians) are fighting for the same cause as you, Mr. Harper! Please drop a comment or two on Adrian Harper’s blog and let him know what you think about his approach.

Extras, Extras, Read all about it:

• Adrian Harper’s MySpace
• Adrian Harper’s Blog
• Night Biters Web site