Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 21

A real murder that flounders in a YA novel

I've been thinking about Mary Downing Hahn's mister death's blue-eyed girls for a long time. I read it a couple of months ago and was very attracted to the story. Based on a real double murder that occurred in the author's hometown when she was in high school, it's about two teenage girls shot and killed in June 1955 in a park near Washington DC. In her Afterword, Hahn explains how she knew both girls, went to the crime scene that morning and how a boy she knew was taken in for questioning and although released, largely condemned by the community. (The murders were sort of solved in 2000.1 )

Hahn wanted to explore the impact of the murders on the accused boy and so she sets up the narrative to show potential murderers (this is all fiction she makes clear) who knew the girls and the proceeds from the crime to the accusation and the fallout. The story follows a classmate of the dead girls, Nora, who also has a fledgling relationship with the accused boy. The narrative moves from the murder ("Mister Death") to the accused boy to Nora to diary entries from the dead girls. It's rather disjointed and never quite comes together with both Nora and "Buddy" remaining two-dimensional characters for all that they propel the plot. In the end, the murders are unsolved, Buddy leaves, Nora suffers from her association with him and the whole town continues to believe that the wrong person committed the crime. It's a very unsettling ending which I guess is the point - no one ever solved the real crime and at her 50 year high school reunion Hahn's classmates still thought the accused boy was guilty.

There is a story here - you can't help but see a story here - but I don't think Hahn has framed it the best way. The insertion of the accused muddies the story; as no one knew anything at all at the time (and still really don't), it confuses the plot and made me wonder if I was reading a murder mystery where the criminal would eventually get caught or a look at how society handles a violent act in their midst. She alludes in the end to thoughts about Columbine and other examples of teen crime and I wondered if maybe she was trying to make a statement about disturbed teens or even bullying by including the "Mister Death". Thinking about all of this pulled my attention from Buddy's dilemma and that only got worse as Nora's feeling kept getting in the way as well. I didn't know if I was looking at a romance or a coming-of-age novel or what. And blaming Buddy just seemed...convenient. It was as if Hahn took the crime and created fill-in-the-blank characters to fit it. I couldn't help but think that someone like Stephen King could have done a lot more with this and maybe it takes a horror novelist to make a novel out of an unsolved murder. Or maybe this needed to be a mystery and Nora needed to solve it or Buddy did or Nora and Buddy needed to solve it together.

Or maybe something - anything - just needed to happen here.

Clearly Hahn has been haunted by the murder for her entire life and that is something I can respect. But if that's the reason why she wrote this book (and her Afterword suggests it is), then maybe it should have been a novel for adults about a woman haunted by such events from her youth. That might mean it was a short story or novella if she didn't have enough to write a full length novel. Or maybe it should have been nonfiction, or an essay or an article. Hell, maybe it should have been a poetry collection.

What has struck me in the months since I read mister death's blue-eyed girls is all that I wish the book had been. It was a frustrating reading experience for all that it promised but couldn't deliver. There is something here, something I can't let go of but it's not enough and that's what makes it more disappointment than anything else.

1There was a weird confession of who did it more than ten years ago - but it seems sketchy at best to me even though it looks like the police were willing to close the case based on that information. Hahn relied heavily upon that info for her plot.

2See the original news article - with mention of the Buddy character being taken in for questioning here.

The delightful books that came my way this holiday

A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science (Great big huge coffee table book in all of its glory!)

Wendy & The Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein by Julie Salamon

Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg ("A courageous woman's memoir of her harrowing eighteen-year odyssey through the Soviet Union's prisons and labor camps".)

Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins (short stories) and Errantry by Elizabeth Hand ("strange stories")

Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds by Lyndall Gordon

Murder Casts a Shadow by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl (A Hawaii mystery set in 1934)

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay (A classic novel published by the NY Review of Books) and The Fire by Katherine Neville (A sequel to her novel The Eight which I loved)

The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors by Judith Pascoe

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, the new edition which includes alternative endings, early drafts and 1948 introduction

Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt and Grace: A Memoir by VOGUE Creative Director Grace Coddington

The Last Phantom Vol 2 - a trade paperback collection of one of my favorite superheroes!

And also three long out of print titles on Alaska aviation which I look forward to mining for information on my current book.

I've just finished the bio of Wendy Wasserstein and it made me cry - what an interesting life that was cut so horribly short. For all that we had barely anything in common, I found her work to be very familiar to me - especially her drive to prove herself, to cling to her creative ambitions, and to demand a life in the arts. Those strong feelings of being a failure during college and immediately afterwards - those really hit home. This is just truly a wonderful read, highly recommended.

My Year In Reading 2012

In no particular order, but grouped together in ways that make the most sense to me, here are my favorite reads this year:

Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead defied all expectations and proved to be so much more than the mystery I thought I would find. The characters, the setting, the dialogue, all were most compelling. But it was the backstory that Gran created that really put this over the top. I dream of a sequel like you would not believe. Another mystery also impressed - Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand. Graphic, brutal, the very definition of cold and hard, this one takes you into the recesses of a heroine's mind as it threatens to splinter apart. No one wants to grow up to be like Cass Neary and yet Hand makes you care deeply about her anyway; she's damn near majestic in this novel.

The Mirage by Matt Ruff should not work, really, but it does and brilliantly. Seeing 9/11 in this mirror world gives Ruff lots of room to play with big ideas. It's not a "gotcha" book either, but a very smart and thoughtful one. Ruff should be a household name as far as I'm concerned.

Lincoln's Dreams by Connie Willis was overlooked by me for far too long. I loved the history bits, obviously, but also the mystery, the relationships, and the ending slayed me. I'm just never disappointed by Willis. (And like Ruff, she does twisty-turny better than most. It's the very definition of interstitial.)

The Birding Life by Laurence Sheehan is a great big coffee table book with lush photos of birds and bird life in art and interior design and literature. It's the kind of book you page through again and again. A luxury read.

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma was recommended by Kelly at Stacked and it proved to be one of the creepiest YA titles I've ever read. It's subtle but sinister from start to finish and for all that it is impossible it is also utterly believable. This is an author to watch for sure.

Other YA I gulped down with glee were the Book of Blood & Shadows by Robin Wasserman and The Diviners by Libba Bray. Wasserman's book is a thriller of the first order but even better than most as it incorporates so effectively the issues of trust and love that first come up in the teen years. I also love the history here - and how compellingly she brings the distant past to life. Bray has written fabulous horror in The Diviners, which is NOT paranormal romance but rather a mystery, a set piece, some Bradbury, some King, some Buffy at her Scoobies-loving best and an enormous bloody valentine to 1920s NYC. Both books are good for what ails you.

Polar Wives by Kari Herbert and Visit Sunny Chernobyl by Andrew Blackwell are both straight-up nonfiction of the best sort - compelling, clearly written and full of the authors' own thoughts on their subjects. Herbert shines a light on the long overlooked wives of several great explorers and Blackwell hits some of the planets hellspots. The books could not be more different in subject matter but are easy to dip into and crack with literary energy.

Zeuglodon by James Blaylock is my MG read of the year - funny, outlandish, full of adventure, exactly what the average ten-year old could want. It reminded me of childhood reads in a good way and made me long yet again for Dick Van Dyke, circa Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, to be my father figure. (They lived in a windmill! A WINDMILL!!!!!)

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Bryan & Mary Talbot. Bryan Talbot is one of my favorite gn authors and artists and his illustrations for his wife's book are lovely. Her story though, about her own life as the daughter of a Joycean scholar and the parallel life of James Joyce's troubled daughter Lucia, is extremely compelling. This is the sort of subject I think is made for the gn treatment - the pictures illuminate the tale and in the end, oh how your heart will break for Lucia. (I should note I knew nothing about her which really annoyed me after studying Joyce's work in high school.)

Glaciers by Alexis Smith is a very quiet book about ordinary people that will appeal hugely to bibliophiles (a book conservator!) but mostly it is about how we get along, who we hope to be, the little things we do each day as we inhabit the same workspace. It's about friendship and romance and humanity if that makes any sense. Or I could just tell you it's about a man and woman and how they come to know each other. The quietest book I read all year and yet one of the most powerful. A textbook on how to write well.

I heard Kathleen Flenniken read from Plume at the Mazama Book Festival in August and it has stayed with me every since. This collection about the Hanford Nuclear Facility in eastern WA (where her father worked and she grew up near) reminded me so much of my father's career working for the DOD. So eloquent, so powerful, so sad. The power of poetry, for sure.

Redshirts by John Scalzi is the funniest book I've read in ages. I bought a copy for my brother, who made me watch Star Trek when we were kids, and I told him it was written for people like us. It's not easy to do funny well and the plot Scalzi crafted here is really something to behold. Greatness.

As I posted a couple of weeks ago, I like a good romance but it's hard to find a balance between hot and story. Everyone's talking about getting to the "good parts" of the Fifty Shades books - well if the story sucks then I'm done. (Really - when the sex parts are the best part then I think you need to just call it porn and stop trying to wrap it in a literary bow just to make yourself feel better.) Riveted by Meljean Brook is a steampunk book set in her version of Iceland that has a rocket to the moon, a hidden colony of women and a hero that is every bit the damaged stoic type that readers love. Brook is having so much fun with this series, each entry just makes it more intriguing.

The Spindle Cove series by Tessa Dare is much more traditional - pretty standard historical (Napoleonic Wars period) but the women are wholly unexpected, especially in the second book where the protag is a geologist desperate to get to a conference in Scotland. Smart, sassy, struggling to find a way to matter in a social construct that doesn't give them much value, and funnier then heck as they interact with their romantic leads. Plus hot. Totally.

Best final pages of a book I read this year go to Blackwood by Gwenda Bond. This is a mystery/thriller with paranormal elements and I expected it all to be wrapped up nicely but Bond goes big in the final pages and doesn't give her characters a break but rather the conclusion they earned. Sad (but also hopeful). This really elevated the book for me.

And finally, the best confrontation between parents and children occurs in the poignant drama Happy Families by Tanita Davis. There's a moment when the two teens are in counseling with their cross-dressing father and the therapist asks the kids what they want for the future - essentially their goals. One of them (I think it's the boy) just unleashes, demanding to know why it matters what they want when as the kids they are just stuck with whatever their parents decide and have to deal with it. Their plans have already been upended and likely will be again and again because parents - even good nonabusive parents - sometimes really screw up and the kids are along for the ride whether they like it or not. This resonated so powerfully with me and illustrated something YA gets wrong a lot, when readers are given a false sense of empowerment by a novel. Most of us are just stuck at that age, and Davis gets that - she gets it in every book she writes and is why I feel she really is a writer to watch.

Be sure to check out Jenny D.'s year in reading as well! (Thanks for including me in it!)

Happy Christmas

John Lennon forever, but man - Melissa Etheridge nails this song.

Happiest of holidays to all of you, forever.

Read this, reviewed that and the Christmas tree kinda fell. MORE THAN ONCE.

So yesterday we finally got the tree off the wall and upright. Basically, it's so heavy it was bending the plastic tree stand. It's not a huge tree (7 feet) but apparently Colorado Spruce are the Hulk of the Christmas tree world. Who knew?

I'm writing three reviews for Booklist: The Forest House, Still Points North and Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands. I'm reading Economix, a killer gn for my January column. Everybody should read this book - it's smart and funny and I can't believe how much I'm learning. Expect to read lots of positive things about it from me.

I've got several reviews to finish this weekend for the graphic novel column: Johnny Hiro, Sumo, Escape to Gold Mountain and Darwin. I don't know how this column ended up being so nonfiction-y but it's made of awesome and I hope all of these books get more widely read.

I recently finished Gail Carriger's Timeless, the final entry in her Parasol Protectorate series. I really loved how this series started but the chemistry seemed off in this final entry - almost like Carriger was tired of Alexia and crew. I especially was disappointed by the diminished heat between Alexia and Conall - it's as if now that they were married and had a child, the relationship lost its romance. It still had some fun moments and I adored the twist for supporting character Biffy, but overall I think things ended with a whimper.

If you like your romance hot* and full of marvelous story, then I highly recommend the Tessa Dare Spindle Cove series - three books (starting with A Night to Surrender) in a somewhat traditional historical setting but full of chemistry and smartness and all sorts of unorthodox characters.

In other news, Jenny D. has received ARCs of her upcoming novel! Yea!!!

And, um, it looks like the second printing of my book is selling out. I'm sure the Air & Space review had something to do with that. Merry Christmas, indeed!

* Not hot in a Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-please-spank-me kind of way** but more than kisses and longing looks.

** Not that I'm judging the spank me crowd but, well. Enough said. Really.

Stephanie LaCava's life told in extraordinary objects

I read Stephanie LaCava's book in great gulps last month, falling hard for it both professionally as a reviewer and personally as a reader. In just over 200 pages and full of pen & ink illustrations and diversionary footnotes, An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris begins when LaCava's family moved to France for her father's job. At only twelve-years old and a self-described strange child, she took the move exceptionally hard and found herself clinging to objects from home while also seeking out more things to collect in her new country. The chapters highlight this penchant for noticing and acquiring things - for seeing objects for more than their material worth - and also places she visited as well as more traditional coming-of-age episodes involving family and friends.

As a title for teens it is a major winner and while I can understand its publication for adults, I really see this as classic crossover territory. (I especially like that it follows the author into her adulthood so YAs can see how she navigated what was clearly a difficult adolescence.)

My personal reaction to the book was much deeper however, almost visceral. In moments of upheaval in my own life there have always been certain objects that I cling to - some of which have been with me for decades. My maternal grandfather's foot locker (made for my parents when my father was in the military - his name/rank/serial number are still visible on the top), the 4 leaf clover my mother found and pressed in 1958, my copy of Little Women, given to me for Christmas the year I was nine by my Aunt Irene and read religiously more times then I can remember, the Springsteen cassette my brother made for me when I was in Alaska, beach glass I have collected from the time I was a teenager. I could go on and on.

LaCava has reasons for her struggle to cope with the move, (she explains near the end that her strangeness was chemical but this is never an illness memoir nor should it be viewed as such), but really the point is not why she was this way (because she is just fine) but more how she found objects to cope with who she was. I found so much of this book illuminating - both in what the author did and in the many odd bits of knowledge she feels compelled to share. It really was compulsively readable and I enjoyed it to death. I also have to say that the design is most impressive - the book is small (stocking stuffer size!!!!), and elegant and stands out on the shelf. It is, itself, another object to admire which makes me love the way it proves all over again the notion of books as something to hold in your hand.

Delightful, in every sense of the word. Formal review to follow - likely in February but possibly March, depending on the way the columns turn out. (And yes, it was sent my way by the publisher.)

Science books that caught my eye this year

I put a photo up on facebook of my son's Periodic Table of the Elements made with The Elements cards and everyone liked it so much that I thought I would mention a few science titles here that I was impressed with this year. First up is The Scientists by Andrew Robinson. I picked this up on a whim when it was prominently displayed at my local bookstore. The design is fantastic - 3-4 heavily illustrated pages on prominent scientists arranged chronologically within themes. I've been reading it out loud to my son (he's 11) and we've covered everyone from those we know (Newton) to those I'm completely unfamiliar with (Antoine Lavoisier - the father of modern chemistry). (Yes, I should have known who he was but my high school Chem class was really really bad.) Robinson provides some biographical info and also discussion of their great discoveries and position in science history. It's basic, but there is plenty enough here to understand what each person contributed and again - the illustrations are fantastic. The whole title has an "old world" feel - no glossy pictures but deep rich color and texture. It's published for adults but from my experience works for a wide range of ages.



The Elements cards are excellent - oversized and sturdy and can easily be arranged into all sorts of patterns. The accompanying book has been a best seller for awhile and author Theodore Gray just released a further study into the subject with The Elements Vault. We have both of these books and they give you a better idea of what the Periodic Table is all about and what all the elements are for then pretty much anything I've come across. Again, design is a big deal here - oversized, glossy, full of pictures, easy explanations, humor and sly wit. This is the first time I've really gotten a handle on this chart (we were just told to memorize it in that awful class - never why it mattered or even where the hell it came from). Lots of factoids here makes it quite appealing for younger readers. My son has poured over the first book again and again and I'd especially point this in the direction of teens; great stuff. (The original book is on wicked sale at Powells right now & free delivery.)

And finally, the entire Scientists in the Field series is worth taking a look at. These are published for the 12 & up crowd but every time I've had one out in a group of adults, they have been unable to resist them. I've reviewed quite a few and without fail I'm impressed by the information imparted, the excellent photos and the conversational tone. The best part is the many different professions I've discovered when reading these books from folks who track trash in the oceans to those who combat population growth in wild horses. Anybody who has dreamed of learning more about nature, the universe or even anthropology will find the series irresistible - in my perfect world they would be on every shelf and dominate the best of lists.

Air & Space Smithsonian reviews MAP in current issue. WOW.

This is a moment my eighteen-year old newbie pilot self didn't even dare dream about. From the December/January issue currently on the newstands:

"There are two ways to tell a flying story: the truth and what everyone wants to hear," Colleen Mondor writes in The Map of My Dead Pilots. "You can't have it both ways."

In describing commercial flying in Alaska, instead of the story you want to hear, she rivets you with compelling non-fiction. Mondor spent four years in the 1990s as an operations dispatcher at one of the small indie airlines tethering the state's remote towns and villages to civilization. Map provides an artful and contemplative recounting of the experience in language as terse as a cockpit voice recording.

Pick any thankless, dead-end gig you ever worked in the Lower 48. Add under-maintained aircraft, double-digit sub-zero temperatures, plus the occasional need to brandish a handgun on the company chief pilot next to you in the cockpit. There are no 9 a.m. conferences in H.R. here. Mondor's world consists of the Bosses, the Owners, and the Company: the "saggy chairs, scratched desks, timed-out airplanes and pissed-off agents." Pilots desperate to move on and those with nothing to come back for. Most of all, there's weather.

The narrative is inhabited by ghosts: a new hire at the dead end of a box canyon, "the good pilot" who flew a Navajo into the Yukon River, and many others. Mondor pores over the cartography of pilot error, overdue flights and "probable cause unknown." Nobody gets closure, nothing emerges unscathed - not the romantic image of Alaskan bush flying, not the writer's own job description: Dispatchers "always lied about the load," she writes of signing off on cargo planes hundreds of pounds over takeoff weight.

At intervals, corpses pop out of caskets in transit, obstinate nuns try to bump a teenage overdose victim off a medevac flight, and sled dogs make just awful air freight. And the time clock ticks on us all.

Writers are frequently advised not to quit their day jobs. Be grateful Colleen Mondor did, then wrote about it.

Popping In...

....to say that all is well and apologies for light posting but I have been swept up lately in holiday [semi]madness. All packages should be winging their ways to relatives everywhere by the weekend (well, most of them anyway) and calm shall be restored. Posts are forthcoming on science book recs, my favorite reads this year and Stephanie LaCava's lovely memoir.

Plus other stuff - more soonest!!! (In the meantime - do check out the December issue of Bookslut with a host of amazing titles in my column and a feature on coffee table book recs for teens - and a few for the younger set.)

Kate Zambreno's Heroines: "I align myself with the genealogy of erased women."

After reading this impressive recommendation at Jezebel, I immediately added Heroines to my wish list and my brother promptly purchased it for my birthday. (Go him!) It's a starkly confessional title, boldly written, split into paragraphs that often leap from one biographical subject to another and always, always circles around the subject of creative women and the husbands who dominated and controlled them. Through it all author Kate Zambreno struggles with her own efforts at writing while being an academic wife and following her husband's career to places she does not want live and communities where she does not feel at home.

The primary historic figures in Heroines are Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles and Jean Rhys. But there is also Sylvia Plath and Martha Gelhorn and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Lucia Joyce and, well, I could go on and on. Zambreno writes about researching these women, about how their lives became cornerstones for her own, about her abject frustration and utter despair over how they were treated by their contemporaries and the men who were supposed to love them. There is also, as she makes clear, that appalling manner in which history has dismissed their work, branding them difficult at best or all often crazy. Zambreno is raging against the night in much of Heroines and I found myself compulsively turning the pages and often raging right along with her.

Some choice bits:

A haunting refrain: Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist, Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.

To be so compelled to save a heroine in a book that it makes you want to throw a book across the room. I feel this for: Breton's Nadja, Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.

While visiting the library of the Art Institute of Chicago while researching the influence of Mary Reynolds, the mistress of Marcel DuChamp:

The tweedy rare books librarian doesn't want me to touch the more fragile books. He voices his skepticism about how much of the vision behind these extraordinarily bound books are Reynolds', he suggests they are mostly DuChamp's design, which he just told Reynolds what to do. Of course he thinks that. I mean, of course he thinks that. But it's also a case of peddling - the items acquire more value being the brainchild of a great man, as opposed to his mistress.

And this on her struggle to find her way:

During that time I decided someday I wanted to write the Infinite Jest for fellow fucked-up girls, for the slit-your-wrist girls like me. I hadn't even finished Infinite Jest, but I knew it didn't speak to me, just like I knew Kerouac's On the Road didn't speak to me, because he kept writing about jumping into girls and I knew I was one of the girls who were fucked and forgotten.

My copy of Heroines is full of post-its, women I want to learn more about (there is an excellent bibliography as well), points I do not want to forget. I don't agree with everything Zambreno had to say, especially her misery over living in the Midwest due to her husband's job, but I do understand why she felt this way, why her depression became that much greater when she found herself in a place so unfamiliar from what she knew and what she wanted to know and why she wondered if her anger for the women she studies was valid or excessive. (I feel that same anger now.)

But even when disagreeing, I still identified so much with how Zambreno felt about being a struggling writer, about being dismissed so casually, about being so frustrated by so much. And the more I read about Zelda Fitzgerald and the other women she researched the more I want to reach back in time and throttle my teachers and professors. Every single time I learned about one of these great men of letters, I also was taught that the woman in their life was a mess. Always. Zambreno makes clear in Heroines that there was a hell of a lot more to know in their stories, and a hell of a lot more to appreciate.

There is, honestly, part of me that is devastated by reading Heroines. It all hurts so much, to know how casually these women were treated, how all too frequently they were tossed away. I wish I could save them - all of them - fictional and real. I wish you didn't have to take a "Women's Studies" course in college (if you're lucky enough to find one) to know their truth and instead it could just be part of 10th grade English, part of what we all simply know to be true. Damn.

I highly recommend Heroines for the women writers in your life, or any who want to challenge the accepted histories of so many literary lights.

Also see Kate Zambreno's blog and Jenny McPhee on Zelda Fitzgerald in the current Bookslut.