Writer's Workshop - A time I was scolded as an adult.

Supervision

“Um, excuse me?  Are those your boys over there?”

My friend and I stopped chatting to look at the woman before us.   I glanced over my shoulder to check on our older daughters, both on the “the big kid” side of the playground, before turning back to her, feeling slightly uneasy. 

She had obviously come from the younger kid side, where some sort of celebration involving a playgroup, snacks and bubbles was going on.  My friend and I each had a two-and-a-half-year-old boy in addition to our five-year-old daughters, and the boys had been trying to crash the party since we’d shown up.  We’d been half-heartedly trying to rein them in, but the party took up the whole picnic and sandbox section, and there was a bubble machine involved.   There was only so much we could do.  I could see their little blond heads, merrily jumping up and down, slamming into other kids as they popped bubbles. Oh dear.

I guess I said yes, or nodded, or did something to confirm that, yes, the uninvited guests at her playground bubble party belonged to us.  It was hot.  I had had a rough day with my daughter, and almost any outing with my high energy little boy left me kind of frazzled.  I really just wanted to chat with my friend for a minute while our kids played in the reasonably safe, enclosed playground, but I had a bad feeling it wasn’t going to happen. I was already pretty sure I wasn’t going to like where this mom was going.  Her voice was painstakingly polite and a little nervous.

“Well, um, they’re welcome to have snacks with us, and to play with the bubbles, but we’d appreciate it they had some…”  She swallowed almost imperceptibly, her eyes darting away from us. She was younger than I was, with wavy hair that looked adorable in her ponytail, and really cute earrings.  My shirt had a ketchup smear near the hem and my hair was half-dry from swimming earlier. 

She took a breath. “We’d really appreciate it if they had some supervision.”

I actually felt my stomach drop, sheer disbelief at her word choice and its implications making me blink.  Shame and anger rushed to tinge my face while I stared at her, stock-still and silent for what felt like forever but was only a few seconds, as my mind went into a weird dichotic overdrive:

Supervision?!  I’m standing right here! He’s in my sight! The playground is fenced! We’ve been here dozens of times!  And, hello, I have another child to watch! She must be a first time mother.

Oh, God.  She looks embarrassed for me. He must be being awful. He must be messing up their party.

I mean, they’re having a party at a public playground.  We have just as much a right to be here as they do.  What did she expect?  Did she think the other two-year-olds would just ignore the damn bubble machine?

She said the boys were welcome to join them and have snacks.  She probably just doesn’t want them grabbing stuff. I’m sure he’s not taking turns. We really need to work on that more.  Why haven’t I worked on that more?

I bet their snacks are all organic.  And from Whole Foods.  Or fruit.  Organic fruit from Whole Foods.  Gluten-free organic fruit from Whole Foods.

We should eat organic more. I bet her kids didn’t have McDonald’s for lunch. 

Seriously? A BUBBLE MACHINE.

I would never bring the bubble machine to the playground.  If we had one.  No wonder he wants to play with them.

“I mean,” she faltered a little in the face of our silence, “really, they’re totally welcome to play and stuff, just… just with some supervision.”

 That word again. A slap in the face.  

Maybe she doesn’t realize how she sounds.  Maybe it’s coming out wrong.

I hate her.

She’s nervous. 

She thinks I’m a bad mother.

She thinks I’m a bad mother.

I remained silent. Shame warred with indignation, because just who does she think she is, and anything I said would be either overly apologetic or snarky, both of which would make me feel bad about myself later. We must have made some vague gesture of acknowledgment, or agreement or something.  Within minutes we collected our kids and left. 

Later, months later, I recounted the story to a group of friends and acquaintances, all mothers, all sympathetic to me, since I was the one doing the telling.

Who does she think she is, they agreed, sharing their own stories of times other mothers had made them feel small and incompetent. Mothers, women, need to support each other. If only we could all be in this together.  If only she hadn’t been so judgmental.   

 I agreed, and felt vindicated.  She was wrong.  I wasn’t a bad mother.  

 Sometimes I wondered, though.  A lingering doubt:  Was she really the one judging me?

Review - PERFECT CHEMISTRY, by Simone Elkeles

Perfect Chemistry, by Simone Elkeles

“Miss Ellis?” Mrs. Peterson says. “It’s your turn. Introduce Alex to the class.”

“This is Alejandro Fuentes. When he wasn’t hanging out on street corners and harassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what I mean. His secret desire is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you, Mrs. Peterson.”

Brittany flashes me a triumphant smile, thinking she’s won this round. Guess again, gringa.

“This is Brittany Ellis,” I say, all eyes now focused on me. “This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes so she could expand her wardrobe, and spent her daddy’s money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets. Her secret desire is to date a Mexicano before she graduates.”

Game on…


You can’t wait to read it, right?

I couldn’t either. I started off in love. This retelling of Romeo and Juliet/ West Side Story, etc. began perfectly. I was totally enamored and it could do no wrong. But in the final third the magic began to fade. I ended with mixed feelings, not really knowing if I had legitimate reasons for wanting to break up or if it was just me.

Brittany Ellis has the perfect life. She’s that girl from high school – the smart, rich beautiful cheerleader with the quarterback boyfriend. The one who doesn’t seem as though she can be real. And she isn’t. Brittany’s life is carefully constructed façade. Her ice queen routine is held rigidly in place so that no one can get close enough to learn the truth; her family life is beyond dysfunctional, Brittany is the primary caretaker for her mentally and physically disabled sister, and she must try to keep the peace so that her parents don’t send away her sister away.

Alex is a thug. As the “enforcer” for the Latino Bloods he is feared by everyone in his neighborhood and at school, but no one knows that he is a gang banger only to keep his mother and brothers safe and that he wishes he could do anything else.

Socially, Alex and Brittany are stratospheres apart. Thrown together when they are assigned as lab partners in chemistry* it’s hate at first sight. Until it’s not. The more time they have to spend together, the more they realize they aren't as different as they thought. Their romance is touchingly and believably developed as each slowly begins to see behind the stereotypical image of the other.

* (Seriously? Lab partners again? This is the third YA book I have read this month about a boy and girl who meet by becoming lab partners. Two of them involved mysterious boys with supernatural powers. And Twilight was not one of the books.)

This is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, so there aren’t a lot of surprises, but I think that adds to the enjoyment. Since you basically know what happens, you get to anticipate their unfolding relationship. Unfortunately, the rushed ending kept me from loving this as much I thought I would when I started.

Things I loved:

• The instant love/loathe attraction between Brittany and Alex. Every interaction, every conversation between them screams of their mutual infatuation, even when they can’t stand each other.

• Alex and Brittany both are very well drawn characters. Each has a face they show to the world, and each has a very different inner life. Their motivations and actions make sense for them, even when they are doing stupid or reprehensible things.
  

• Their relationship (for most of the book) is well paced and realistically developed. While they are immediately drawn to each other, they aren’t immediately in love. We get to see why they fall for each other, what each can offer to the other.
  

• Dual POV narration. I love dual POV in any romance, but it worked especially well here, when Alex and Brittany were coming from such different perspectives.

Things I didn’t (Some Spoilers)

• The ending was rushed. Not only did the time line go from day to day to several months passing all at once, but several key scenes that should have been big emotional show downs seemed almost phoned in, with stilted, monologue-like dialogue. Characters were talking at each other rather than to each other.

• There is an epilogue and I hate it. I’m probably in the minority, but I didn’t think it was sweet, I thought it was unrealistic and over the top. Explaining why would be very spoilery, but the good news is that if you hate it, it is easy to ignore. If you love that sort of thing, there it is.

• This one is going to get ranty - Early on, Alex takes a bet that he can get Brittany to sleep with him by Thanksgiving. I hate, hate this clichéd storyline. I even hate the milder version, like in She’s All That. This is not cool. A guy making a bet to trick a girl into having sex with him and then giving up the bet because he has fallen for her is not romantic. Presumably, if he had not falling in love, then he would have gone through with the bet, so the heroine is now involved with a guy who was willing to emotionally and sexually manipulate and humiliate another person for fun and personal gain, just not someone he personally loved. Any guy who thinks it is ever okay to abuse anyone’s trust this way is a total jerk and should be avoided at all costs. True story: I went on one date (one) with this guy in college who voluntarily told me that this was how he hooked up with his high school girlfriend, ending with, “I mean, later I loved her.” Well, that makes it okay then! Ass.

This storyline was mostly saved for me because of Alex’s situation. He is reluctant to agree to the bet, but cannot afford to appear weak or unsure in front of his friends. The bleak reality that his involvement in the Latino Bloods constantly forces him to be someone he is not and do things he hates is a theme throughout the book, and the bet is yet another example. But still, it did detract from the romance for me.

I sound harsher than I meant to. I really did enjoy Perfect Chemistry, just not quite as much as I initially thought I would. A sequel titled Rules of Attraction is coming out in May 2010 and I will definitely read it.

Parental Concerns - Harsh language in English and Spanish. Underage drinking, drug use and sex. Lots of violence.

Links:

Simone Elkeles' website

Other YA Romeo and Juliet retellings:

Romiette and Julio, by Sharon Draper
If You Come Softly, by Jacqueline Woodson (get your tissues out for this one)

Cover Art for LINGER, the sequel to SHIVER

Check out the beautiful new cover for Linger, the sequel to Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver:



Ms. Stiefvater posted it, along with the first paragraph of Linger, on her blog, with express permission to spread it around.:) Find the first paragraph here. Linger doesn't come out until July 2010. I'm so intrigued! How to wait!

Halloween Roundup: Books for Kids (small ones)

It's the time of year when the kids and I almost have the Halloween books memorized. Spooky fun to follow:

In the interest of full disclosure I will admit that these books are not my favorites culled from a huge selection of holiday books. Rather they are the entirety of our Halloween collection, at least five of which I got in a value pack from one of those Scholastic book order sheets that my kids bring home from school. Yes. So, onward!


Room on the Broom, by Julia Donaldson. Pictures by Axel Scheffler








“Down!” cried the witch,
And they flew to the ground.
They searched for the wand,
But no wand could be found.

Then all of a sudden,
From out of a pond
Leaped a dripping wet frog
With a dripping wet wand….

I love to read to my children. Of course I do! But….(shifty eyes) occasionally, you know, you get a little tired of a book? And you want to maybe hide it, so you can go one day without reading it, because if you read it one more time without at least a twelve hour break you are going to lose your mind? (Go, Dog, Go! I’m looking at you.)

This book is not at all like that! In delightful, clever rhyme we learn about a very sweet witch with a propensity to drop things, who always makes room on her broom for whatever thoughtful and caring animal has retrieved her belongings. I won’t spoil the end for you, but let’s just say that a broom can only take so much and that frog must have been heavier than he looked. Also, there’s a dragon.


The Halloween Play, by Felica Bond

It was three days before Halloween,
and Roger’s class was giving a play in honor of the event.

From the same illustrator who brought us If you give a Mouse a Cookie, this cute little book about a young mouse named Roger with a pivotal role in his school’s Halloween play is short and sweet. The illustrations pre-date the “If you …” books. They are clearly by the same person, but seem less polished and slick, which gives the book a very comfy, folksy feel. Reading time is about two minutes, tops. If your children are like mine they won’t count it as a full book, but more like an intermission or commercial between the real books. Still, it's super cute. My kindergartener is somewhat scornful of it's abbreviated length, but my two-year-old loves it.


Skeleton Hiccups, by Margery Cuyler. Illustrated by S.D. Schindler

Skeleton woke up.
(hic hic hic)
Had the hiccups.
(hic hic hic)


A poor skeleton plagued with the hiccups (to which you’d think he'd be immune as he is sans diaphragm and all. Such poor luck!) tries various methods to get rid of them. He employs old standbys like drinking water, holding his breath (?) and eating sugar to no avail, until his friend Ghost wises up, holds up a mirror, and causes Skeleton to scare the hiccups right out of himself.

This has been a big hit with both of my kids. The pictures of Skeleton trying to ingest various substances only to have them fall through his ribs, eye sockets, etc. are apparently HILARIOUS. The hic, hic, hic refrain is also a crowd pleaser, although it psychosomatically makes me feel like I’m going to get the hiccups every time I read it. Kind of like when you see someone yawn. Hic hic hic.

Bonus - Between straight memorization and her burgeoning skills, my kindergartener can read it to herself and/or her two-year-old brother. Entertaining and confidence building!

Be warned that your children might wander around muttering hic! hic! hic! to themselves after reading this book, but it’s not that annoying. You get used to it. Eventually. Really, it’s cute.


Next up: Part 2! The excitment!

Review: City of Bones (The Mortal Instrument Series #1), by Cassandra Clare

“You don’t know much, do you?” he said. There was a lazy contempt in his gold eyes.

“You seem to be a mundane like any other mundane, yet you can see me. It’s a conundrum.”

“What’s a mundane?”

“Someone of the human world. Someone like you.”

“But you’re human,” Clary said.

“I am,” he said. “But I’m not like you.”

-City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare

Reading City of Bones, the first entry in Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series, isn’t going to change your life, but it sure is entertaining. From the opening moments when fifteen-year-old Clary Fray interrupts what she believes is a murder - a bizarre one in which the body disappears and she is the only one who can see the three tattooed, teenaged perpetrators- the story takes off and never looks back.

Clary, with her art and her best friend Simon and her somewhat over-protective single mom, has a pretty normal life. Until the night she witness the “murder” that no one else can see, and she is plunged into a supernatural world that she could have never imagined. Within 48 hours Clary’s mom has disappeared, her home isn’t safe, and her mother’s friend, Luke, the other trusted adult in her life, has turned his back on her.

Left to rely on Jace, Alec and Isabelle, the teenagers from the club and members of the mysterious Shadowhunters, Clary is about to find out that nothing – not her life, her family or herself – is as it seems.

I strongly suspect I may be the last person left to read this book, but just in case: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW


Five things I loved:

• Vampires! Werewolves! Fairies! Angels! Demons! Warlocks! This is an equal opportunity urban fantasy. Practically every faction of the supernatural world is represented. Something for everyone!

• The detailed mythology of the Shadowhunters. For an imaginary supernatural phenomenon (as opposed to an actual supernatural phenomenon, like werewolves or vampires, which are totally real. Or just have an existing mythology. Whatever helps you sleep at night.) Cassandra Clare did a great job with their backstory, both as a group and as individual characters. I completely believed in them.

• Jace. Against all sense and good judgment, but he’s a tormented bad boy who secretly yearns for love. Yum. (Fun takes on literary bad boys at Persnickety Snark and Angieville)

• The witty dialogue. It did feel a wee bit forced in spots, and I don’t know if I believe that even Jace could really manage such constant urbane sarcasm, but most of the time it was hilarious.

• Clary. I just liked her. She had her moments (see below) but on the whole I found her to be a very relatable character. She wasn’t larger than life, she was just a normal girl thrown into an insane situation, dealing with it as best she could.

Five nitpicks:

• I wish there had been more from Jace’s POV. The one tiny snippet we got felt like a tease, and oddly didn’t tell us much, other than that he found Clary to be beautiful.

• This one is petty, but I got a little tired of hearing about Jace’s golden loveliness, regardless of how much I appreciated his loveliness in and of itself. What with Jace, Edward Cullen, and Sam from Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, I feel like I have overdosed on beautiful golden-eyed boys. Especially since I am pretty sure I have never seen an actual, real person with yellow/golden eyes.

• There were several story elements that reminded me of other books. Nothing major, and most of them can be attributed to tropes that are standard themes in the genre. However, when Hodge gives Clary the picture of the young members of “The Circle”, it reminded me so much of the scene in Order of Phoenix where Mad Eye gives Harry the picture of the original members of The Order that it yanked me right out of the story.

• Occasionally Clary could be obtuse in the extreme, and she had a major blind spot where Simon was concerned. Also, she couldn’t seem to decide if she wanted to be his girlfriend or his mother. This leads me to…

• I know it was central to the plot, but I really don’t enjoy love triangles very much. Although I have to admit, the sudden unexpected turn into V.C. Andrews territory at the end make this one more interesting than most.

This sucked me in and kept me up way past my bedtime finishing it. I did see a couple of the plots twists coming from about a hundred pages in, but I definitely was not expecting the Flowers in the Attic vibe at the end. I am icked out, yet intrigued. If I hadn’t already planned on reading the next book, that would have done it. If by some chance you haven’t read this yet and enjoy urban fantasy, I absolutely recommend it.

Review: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater

...Every one of my senses was whispering to me over and over to get closer to her, closer to her, as close as I could. She twined her bare legs in mine and we kissed until we had no more breath and got closer until distant howls outside the window brought me back to my senses.

-Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater


Oh, angsty, doomed, teenage werewolf romance, how I love you.

Every year Grace waits for winter, when her wolf – the wolf that saved her from a viscous attack by his pack when she was a child – will return to the woods behind her home. Through the winter he will wait and watch over her, only to disappear when spring comes again. Until the fall when a horrible event turns the town against the wolves, and Grace comes home to find a blooded boy with familiar eyes splayed across her back deck…

Shiver is just…lovely. It’s the sweet, sensitive side of werewolf romance. The poetry club of werewolf romance, if you will, with an werewolf who actually writes poetry. A cozy, chilly day, curl-up-with-some-tea kind of book, that makes you sense the nip in air, the leaves crunching under foot, and the howl of the wolves in the night.


Five (mostly) unrelated things I loved: (SPOILERS TO FOLLOW)

• Sam - Grace and Sam – but especially Sam – aren’t your typical mythical/mortal hero and herione. With Sam, I loved that the author went with a twist on the whole supernatural boyfriend thing. Being a werewolf actually made Sam more vulnerable, and didn't seem to benefit him in any way (other than the inherent hotness that being a werewolf implies, of course). He was the one that needed protection. Which brings us to,

• Grace – Grace was totally a girl of action. No fainting due to the force of her own emotions for her. No matter how freaky or bad things got, she always moved forward, trying to find a solution. (HUGE SPOILER NEXT) And when she thought Sam was dead, while devastated, she managed to keep going. Instead of, you know, going into a complete emotional decline because her boyfriend left her, Bella. (although that part of Twilight made me want to cry. Don't tell anyone.)

• Shiver is a details kind of book. When I was younger there were certain books that I would read over and over not because the story was so exciting, but because the writing was such that I could practically feel the story’s world around me. Little things, like descriptions what the characters were eating, or the placement of the furniture, and the smell of the air. Descriptions of everyday routines, like cooking or going to bed. I don’t always like such minutia, but in this case I thought it helped to foster the idea of Grace and Sam isolated and wrapped up in each other, and gave it a dreamy quality.

• The shower scene. The candy store scene. The bookstore scene. Sweet werewolf love.:)

• (MASSIVE SPOILER) The final scene. The author really cut it close, didn’t she? I didn’t really, really believe that Sam was dead, but my confidence that he was going to turn up alive and human decreased with every nearing-the-end paragraph that he did not, making the last lines truly surprising and touching.

Five nitpicks:

• While I liked the idea of Sam as a sensitive, poetry writing emo boy, I didn’t so much enjoy the poetry itself. Poetry written by actual teenage emo boys is usually a bad idea that should never see the light of day and Sam, although fictional, didn’t really buck the trend here.

• Ridiculous nitpick: Why does everyone call Olivia “Olive” for short? Is this really a nickname for Olivia? Is it supposed to be pronounced “Oh-live” or “olive”, like olive oil? Why wouldn’t they just call her Liv or Livvy, which are actual nicknames for Olivia? Why am I spending time thinking about this?

• I don’t think there was enough of a build up to Grace and Sam's romance. I get that it was meant to have an inevitable element to it and I like that, but, as a friend of mine put it, “Relationships aren't just born perfect because you watched the eyes of your hero wolf for years from the backyard.”(words to live by) It needed more build up, and maybe some internal conflict. (I still love them:)

• Shouldn’t Grace be afraid of wolves? The girl has nerves of steel. Also, while I love, love Sam, as the novel went on I grew somewhat worried for him when he was a wolf. He seemed like he might be the kind of person to get a little queasy at the sight of blood, never mind tearing through raw flesh with his bare fangs.

• This last isn’t really a dislike, it’s more of a discussion point. Grace’s parents. They took clueless to a whole new level. She had her boyfriend living in her bedroom for, like, two weeks and her parents didn't notice anything? Of course, my parents were the polar opposite of Grace's, so perhaps this isn’t that unusual and I just don’t know it. Maybe everyone else was keeping werewolves in their bedrooms. Luckies.

In all seriousness, Grace’s neglect seemed to make her strong. Another friend of mine said that she really related to Grace's parents and her life (minus the werewolf, sadly), and didn't see it as a bad thing. Grace's pragmatic self-reliance in the face of bizarre circumstances and danger saved the day. It’s not like she wasn’t managing her life, and if obsessing over a wolf in your backyard because you are so starved for love and affection is a little odd, in this instance it worked out for her. Even though her parents were a little over the top, in this case the lack of parental support didn’t seem like such a glaring plot device as it could have because it was key to Grace’s character.

I loved Shiver. My only regret is that I read it so soon after it’s publication, and now have to wait a year to read the second book in the planned trilogy.