Book Candy

Sunrise Over Fallujah

 In 1988, Walter Dean Myers wrote Fallen Angels, a coming-of-age novel set during the Vietnam War and based, in part, upon Myers’ own service as a soldier.  Praised for its fidelity to detail and its portrayal of a compelling protagonist in Richie Perry, an 18-year old from Harlem who confronts the fear, boredom, and horror of war, Fallen Angels won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1989.   

This spring, Myers published Sunrise Over Fallujah, which chronicles the experiences of Richie’s nephew, Robin “Birdy” Perry, a newly enlisted private in the US Army’s Civil Affairs team that accompanies the Third Infantry on its invasion of Iraq in 2003.  As Captain Coles, Birdy’s commanding officer puts it, Civil Affairs is supposed to “’bring a human face to war’” by arriving in the aftermath of combat in order to learn the needs of the civilian population (15).  Corporal Marla Kennedy, a member of Birdy’s unit, is more blunt, observing that “’If they’re sending us, they screwed up’” (142).

Not surprisingly, war turns out to be very different from what Birdy had expected, and Myers captures his realization in this passage, a description of the chaos that ensues when Civil Affairs searches a house in An Nasiriyah, where a young resident is shot after trying to escape:

I kept my eyes away from the house we had searched.  Over and over I told myself that the kid had used the rocket launcher, that he had tried to kill Americans.  Maybe he even had already killed Americans, and he was the enemy.  In a way I was cool with that.  In my head I could deal with his being dead.  But it had all happened so quickly.  One moment he was alive and he was scared, as I was scared with him and for him.  And then he was dead.  I had never been that close to anyone who was killed.  I had heard the boy talking, had seen his dark eyes darting around the room.  Then I saw his body jerking in the dusty street, as if he had already been separated from it.  I wanted not to think. (60-61)

In addition to relying upon his own military service for inspiration, Myers draws upon the experiences of his son and daughter-in-law, both of whom he credits in the afterword for their assistance.  Sunrise Over Fallujah is neither a war protest novel nor a blindly patriotic text; rather, it offers readers – especially those who are contemplating a military career – the opportunity to think about their choice carefully.  At various points in the narrative, Birdy realizes that the bonds that he has established with his unit mates could never have happened in civilian life, given the men and women’s differing life circumstances.  On the other hand, Birdy also recognizes that war presents soldiers with a constant stream of moral quandaries which challenge the mind and the soul. 

Baseball Fever

As I mourn the departure of Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez from my beloved Detroit Tigers in a trade with the Yankees, I thought I’d try to cheer myself up by writing a short review of a few outstanding children’s and YA books that provide interesting glimpses into the grand old pastime.

When I was in 9^th grade, I was assigned a book report on Chaim Potok’s The Chosen (1967), a coming of age narrative that followed the unlikely friendship between Reuven, a Modern Orthodox Jew and Danny, a Hasidic Jew.  The story is set in Brooklyn during the 1940s, and though it is written in the first person, from Reuven’s perspective, it focuses on Danny’s struggles with his father regarding vocation and faith.

Okay, okay, you ask, “where’s the baseball?”  The two young men meet when they are on opposing sides in a thrilling youth league game that propels them into a complex friendship.  I recommend this book as a classic coming of age story, with a truly intellectual grounding – and a great feel for how the game was played during the golden era of the sport. 

Mike Lupica, an award winning sports journalist, has written three baseball-themed YA novels, but my favorite is his newest, The Big Field (2008), because it deals with one of the important relationships in the game – that between a player and his position.  If you’ve ever witnessed a guy who’s been a shortstop his entire career move over to, say, first base or third base, you’ll know that the transition can be tough.  Just ask half of the Tigers’ roster this year! 

Lupica weaves two storylines into The Big Field – the father/son conflict between Keith “Hutch” Hutchinson and his dad, a washed up minor leaguer, and the player conflict that arises when Hutch is forced to switch his position in order to make room for a superstar. 

Of course, I should mention Ken Mochizuki (author) and Dom Lee (illustrator), the creators of Baseball Saved Us, a picture book that features the role of baseball in providing young Japanese American children with a means for coping with the dynamics of WWII internment.  While I join with other reviewers in praising the illustrations and the intent behind this text, I do feel that the didacticism is a bit overpowering -- a point which brings me to my last entry, Virginia Euwer Wooff’s Bat 6 (1998), a fantastic intermediate novel, also set during WWII and also focused on the discrimination faced by Japanese Americans living on the West Coast in the aftermath of internment. 

The “Bat 6 Tournament” is an important rite of passage for the town’s 6^th grade girls, whose rival grade schools – and the entire community - are riveted to the spectacle, from the selection of players, to the preparation, to the game itself.  Told from the perspective of multiple teammates from each school, the Bat 6 tournament becomes a microcosm for the town’s troubled race relations.  Although it would appear that Bat 6 was tailor-made for didacticism, Wolff skirts clear of simple moralizing – in fact, Bat 6 celebrates complexity – both in life and in the game.

Wither Graphic Novels?

Now that the major publishing houses have finally shown some interest in the graphic novel by setting up imprints and hiring in-house artists, I wonder what it will mean for the genre.  When I began studying the graphic novel in 2003, I learned very quickly that the popularity of series such as Jeff Smith’s Bone and the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets was based, in part, upon the authors’ willingness to confront pressing social issues. Moreover, it was clear that the author/artists’ unique styles were a major factor in the series’ popularity.

For awhile there, it was fatigue-wearing teen boys and I hanging out under the Manja/Graphic Novels sign at Schuler Books or Barnes and Noble.  When we struck up conversations, these guys almost always revealed an intense interest in art and a devotion to storylines that dealt with “serious ideas.”  Today, when I head over to the graphic novels section, I’m just as likely to make room for preteen girls and jocks and…well, just about anyone else under the age of 18.  The traditional YA literature section isn’t a ghost town, but I never have to jostle a “youth” aside in order to get at a book there as I do in the graphic novel section.

Publishers’ desperation to tap into the graphic novel market was reflected a few years ago when Simon and Schuster began to publish graphic novel companions to the Nancy Drew Mystery series under an imprint called “Papercutz.”  Here’s what Terry Nantier, founder of Papercutz, had to say about his company: “We're living in a very visual age and kids have a lot of different distractions — from the Internet, to videos, to video games, to TV and DVDs….  We're using a point of view and a style that kids know and understand.”  Okay, I know this probably isn’t fair of me, but doesn’t it sound as if Terry Nantier is calling graphic novels “a distraction,” right up there with video games?  Later on in the article that includes this comment, Nantier reminds us of the “TRUE” value of the graphic novel: “The Japanese comics are doing very well with tweens and teens. It's getting them hooked on reading. Graphic novels and comics are looking to be a wonderful bridge to get them into books.”  Yes, it’s the old “gateway ploy,” to paraphrase Inspector Clouseau – those graphic novels are so easy to read that heck, they can “trick” kids into reading.  Except that graphic novels are not “easy” to read or to interpret.  They ask readers to develop NEW skills, some of which are intuitive, but others of which are certainly not.  For instance, the disjunction between text and picture, which is often designed to express irony, is a phenomenon that requires a great deal of interpretative sensitivity – oh, but don’t get me started!

Here’s the funny thing.  While the text for a Papercutz version of the Nancy Drew text remains the same as the print original, the illustrations could have come right out of Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket or any other popular manja series.  It’s a bit disjunctive (in a completely non-ironic way) to see tame, sweater-wearing, Hybrid-car driving Nancy from the traditional text, geared up like a sex kitten but talking like her "old" self.  (In a USA Today review of the series, journalist Carol Memmott expresses her shock at the attention paid to the depiction of Nancy’s best friend Bess Marvin, whose cleavage is forever stealing the show.)

The entire Papercutz ensemble of graphic novels has the feel of a rushed project – a rush to profit.  But Simon and Schuster’s interest in the medium extends, as well, to the newly formed imprint MIX (or ALADDIN MIX), a division devoted to producing graphic novels for teen girls.  The MIX logo reads, “Real Life.  Real You.”  I’m very tempted to add “Real Boring” (okay, “Really Boring”). 

I just finished reading one of the best selling MIX books, Hope Larson’s Chiggers, a novel set at a co-ed camp in Larson’s native North Carolina.  Larson is no slouch – she’s the winner of an Eisner Award for Special Recognition, one of the comic industry’s highest honors, and she’s a very talented artist.  So far, so good.  However, compared to Larson’s work for an adult audience such as Salamander Dream and Gray Horses, Chiggers seems to lack some of the emotional depth one has come to expect from her work. The story is focalized through Abby, a self-conscious girl, who experiences a number of friendship ups-and-downs, especially when she defends Shasta, a supposedly non-conformist girl who…well, she just doesn’t seem very non-conformist.  The feeling of a rushed production lingers over the imprint, setting Larson into a different category from some of the independently published innovators in the genre of YA graphic novels, such as Gene Luen Yang (author of American Born Chinese) or Bryan Talbot (author of The Tale of One Bad Rat).  To be fair, there are some compelling moments in Chiggers, especially when Abby responds to her first love -- and compared to the Nancy Drew texts, Chiggers reflects Larson's impressive and very unique artistic talent.  However, her portrayal of teenage emotions and behaviors seems circumscribed -- keep in mind, this is an artist who wrote for the graphic novel compilation True Porn 2 -- so she may feel constrained by the YA genre.  I suppose one could say that Larson has been "Hallmarkized."

I’m currently writing an article on this aspect of the graphic novel marketplace, so forgive the rant.  For those of you who have studied the graphic novel with me, you know how passionate I am about the genre – I would hate to see such texts written for a YA audience diminshed by a rush to profit.  More on this later.

Memmott, Carol.  “’Nancy Drew’ Finds Clues in Graphic Novel.”  USA Today.  April 18, 2004.  http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-04-18-nancy-drew_x.htm.