YA Books and Nostalgia

I’m working on a round up of kids’ and YA books for the Ledger. I’m having tremendous fun.

I feel like there is a much bigger array of well-written books for young and teen readers than there was when I was younger. I know that part of the reason is that some of the books I loved as a kid (and still love) are still in print, and being read by new generations. And those favorites have helped make a marketplace for new books and new writers. This is not an original thought on my part. Just setting it down as a note to myself. Also, I think the science fiction and fantasy market for YA readers has ballooned. I do not remember specific shelves being set aside for YA genre fiction when I was younger. With a little research, I can learn more about how the trend actually evolved. I’m curious.

I am trying to remember what I was reading between the ages of 8 and 12 or so. I remember reading The Westing Game for the first time. It is still one of my favorite books. Place marker for another post- all-time favorite books list. I wonder what my favorite books have in common.

What does it take for a book to be reread over and over? Can someone (a reviewer?) spot that quality on the first reading?

Because I’ve been reading a whole pile of YA books, I notice that the driving themes and questions are much more based on developing identity. The choices that are made are much more elemental, based on values like bravery versus obedience, conforming or not, aligning with this group or that one. And yes- these are the things that are of resonant importance to young readers who can only imagine themselves being older. The stories show characters figuring things out and making mistakes.

Questions of identity, how you make choices, courage and allegiance- when I was in the “young adult” reader market- I thought real adults had answered those questions in some final form. Now, I know- we’re still wrestling and choosing and trying to be brave. And if it took me working my way through a pile of books about dogs, baseball and high school to realize that, it’s still an important thing to remember.

The Six Sacred Stones (book review)

Swift but not too deep

By ELIZABETH WILLSE

   The 6 Sacred Stones
   Matthew Reilly
   Simon & Schuster, 421 pp., $25
   REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH WILLSE

There are two things you should know about “The 6 Sacred Stones.” One, it is a sequel, featuring the same characters who teamed up to unlock the “Seven Deadly Wonders” in Matthew Reilly’s 2005 novel of that name. And the action in “Stones” cuts off abruptly – to be continued in a novel Reilly is still writing.

Read as a stand-alone, this fast-paced, international adventure will keep you turning pages and may send you searching for Reilly’s other novels.

Fans of Indiana Jones or even “The Da Vinci Code” should take note of this adventure, which zips across continents and ties together the mythology of several ancient cultures.

Jack West must gather his team from the prequel: a professor of antiquity, twin Irish hackers, a pilot from New Zealand and two Arab brothers. Reilly has blended mythologies to create a coordinated system of crystals that must be found, purified and set in their proper locations throughout the world to avert Armageddon. Diagrams illustrate connections between the ancient, powerful places where crystals must be placed and the recurring symbol depicting the Earth as the Great Machine designed to ward off solar apocalypse.

Racing against the ritual’s deadlines, the team flies from China to Scotland to Africa, trying to stay ahead of suspicious characters who want to steal the crystals and harness their promised powers.

That would seem to be the set-up for a suspenseful novel, but, oddly enough, there is very little suspense throughout the first two-thirds of the book. When Jack and his team begin, they have so many geniuses and so much technology assembled that it’s hard to believe they’re in real danger. Then again, perhaps it’s best not to probe too deeply when a man with a titanium arm leads his cohorts on a quest that ties together ancient Egyptian, Aboriginal, Druidic, Chinese and African traditions, positing that a connection between quartz crystals carefully positioned on the seven continents will prevent Armageddon. Best to just sit back and enjoy the ride.

There are a few confusing elements, and moments where the suspension of disbelief is strained almost to the breaking point. Some of these might be resolved by reading Reilly’s earlier work. How did Jack West get a titanium arm? How is it that Lily is one of two people on earth who can instantly read and translate the ancient Egyptian language of Thoth? However, these points are not so much drawbacks to “The 6 Sacred Stones” as they are invitations to read the prequel, and to wait eagerly for the next installment.

Listening Is An Act Of Love (book review)

Stories of Love and Romance

Star-Ledger

Sunday, February 10, 2008,

Accent section.

Word count: 548

REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH WILLSE

To call “Listening Is an Act of Love” a collection of stories about love is misleading at this time of year. Certainly some of the stories are about the romantic, red-hearts kind of love compatible with Valentine’s Day. But such stories are only one aspect of the complex and nuanced stories of love and devotion collected in this volume. There are as many kinds of love in this collection as there are stories to tell — romantic love, the love of families and children, even of longtime friends.

Dave Isay conceived the StoryCorps project and model based on his lifelong fascination with oral histories and his work as a radio producer. The first official StoryCorps booth opened in Grand Central Station in October, 2003. There also is a permanent booth set up at Ground Zero, and a mobile booth that travels to cities and towns nationwide.

Participants sign up for a time slot and record a 40-minute interview. Two copies of the interview are burned to CD for them to keep, while another copy is stored in the archives of the American Folklife Project. NPR airs weekly segments from the projecton “Morning Edition” and “News and Notes.”

The volume is organized in five thematic sections, with stories of romantic love weaving throughout the book. “Home and Family” tells some stories of first love, marriage, and of beloved relatives. In this section Hee Sook Lee, a Korean immigrant interviewed by her daughter, Joyce Kim Lee, imparts her three essential phrases for a loving relationship: “first, express to each other ‘I love you, honey’; second, appreciate each other by saying ‘thank you; and the other thing is saying ’sorry’.”

‘Work and Dedication” includes stories of first jobs, odd jobs, dream jobs and back-breaking labor. In this section is the particularly sweet story of Scott and Catherine Kohanek, who met at Kenwood Elementary School where she was a special education teacher and he was a custodian. Their friendship and blossoming romance gave him the courage to go back to school and become a teacher himself. They married in the lunchroom of the school where they met.

A section entitled “Journeys” details both geographical and spiritual travels, and “History and Struggle” tells the stories of those who witnessed the Depression, the Holocaust or the birth of the Civil Rights movement, among others. The love detailed in these sections is complex and fierce devotion. A family grieves the loss of its young son. A young man comes out to his family and his small town community. A daughter recalls the first time she and her father talked about his experience in Auschwitz. Taylor Rogers, a sanitation worker who went on strike in 1968, talks about Martin Luther King’s last speech.

The last section, “Fire and Water,” is from story booths set up at Ground Zero and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. If you find yourself reading through tears, rereading some sweeter stories from the first section will help you catch your breath.

It is probably best to read this collection slowly. Each story, no more than three pages in length, is rich and particular in detail. To avoid the confusion that may result from reading too many in one sitting, resolve to make this a book to savor and to return to.

Gentlemen of the Road review

10th-century foxes

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
Michael Chabon
Del Rey, 224 pp., $21.95
REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH WILLSE for the Star-Ledger

Section: Today. Date: 12/23/07. Word Count: 441

My father devoured “Gentlemen of the Road” in one long, spellbound afternoon. I spread the reading over weeks. The novel, Michael Chabon’s latest, also evokes the childhood glee of reading by flashlight, burrowed under the covers.

Chabon spins an excellent tale of honorable thieves, swindles, sword fights and vengeance through the 10th-century kingdom of Khazaria. We first encounter Zelikman, the wiry Jew, and Amram the massive Abyssinian, trading bitter insults, and then sword thrusts, over the destruction of a hat. When it emerges that they are not adversaries, but business partners who have staged the fight to swindle an entire tavern, they are forced to depart in haste. But their fortunes shift again, launching them on a quest to deliver a ransomed and argumentative prince, change their allegiances, raise an army, and participate in the biggest double-cross of all.

There is no such thing as a typical Michael Chabon novel. Those who have read Chabon’s earlier work, such as “Summerland,” “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” or “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” know that Chabon can weave an engrossing tale, seamlessly infusing his story with the stuff of history and legend.

Newcomers will love “Gentlemen of the Road” for the deft way Chabon draws together the stuff of ancient history, the Arabian Nights mythos, and the dime adventure novels of the early 20th century.

The dime novel gets a particular nod. Chapter headings such as “On The Particular Observance of the Fourth Commandment Among Horse Thieves” mark self-contained adventures in Amram and Zelikman’s journey. Gary Gianni’s captioned line drawings depict specific dramatic scenes. However, unlike the typical idea of a dime novel, Chabon allows us to enter our heroes’ interior lives. Their moments of self-doubt, homesickness or compassion make them more complex than the typical adventure hero.

Outside the affectionate bickering of the heroes’ partnership, things can get a little confusing. It can take some concentration to pick up that a bek and a kagan are two kinds of rulers in the land of Atil. Not everyone will know that a mahout is an elephant rider.

Some of the characters are also confusing. A subplot involving Zelikman’s stolen horse adds a character named Hanukah, whose relevance remains largely unexplained. And chapter shifts that describe Amram and Zelikman anonymously, in disguise, can be disorienting. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise well-crafted adventure.

Michael Chabon launches his readers thundering in pursuit of two mismatched adventurers, as they fight, bicker and swindle their way across the Caucasus. It is an engrossing and entertaining must-read. Whether you read it all at once, over a few weeks or by flashlight is up to you.

Fragile Things Book Review

Fragile Things:
Short Fictions and Wonders
Neil Gaiman
Morrow, 360 pp., $26.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Willse for the Star-Ledger

Section: Perspective

Date: 10/22/06 Word count: 315

Probably best to get your copy of “Fragile Things” before Halloween. Neil Gaiman’s latest collection is full of strange and spooky tales, good for October’s gray nights.

The prolific Gaiman is best known for the “Sandman” graphic novels, but his novels and short fiction have received critical acclaim as well. “American Gods” won various awards for fantasy fiction in 2002, and a previous short story collection, “Smoke and Mirrors,” won the 1999 Bram Stoker award.

For those new to Gaiman’s particular brand of macabre whimsy, “October in the Chair,” the second story in the volume, serves as an introduction. Twelve deftly personified months of the year gather to swap stories (October tells a ghost story), munching on roast sausages and chestnuts.

Gaiman uses the story-within-a-story device again in “Closing Time,” where the characters tell each other tales in the Diogenes Club, and again in “Feeders and Eaters,” in which the narrator learns the grisly truth behind a friend’s haggard appearance.

Gaiman, who cowrote the screenplay for the upcoming “Beowulf,” enjoys rearranging the classics. In “The Monarch of the Glen,” Grendel and his mother are fussy guests at a Scottish bed and breakfast. The phoenix arrives as a delicacy chased by gourmands in “Sunbird.”

A couple of the pieces are disappointing. “Strange Little Girls” reads like unvarnished notes, and “Diseasemaker’s Croup” and “A Study in Emerald” are too fantasy-world esoteric. But overall, “Fragile Things” is a lovely, spooky, autumnal volume.

It’s Only Rock and Roll (But I Like It): Rolling Stones Essay

 

It’s only rock ’n’ roll (but I like it)

By ELIZABETH WILLSE

FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Date: Saturday 9/28/2002 Section: TODAY Size: 675 words

I have been going to the music store with my Dad since I was too small to see over the tops of the bins that, back then, contained records, not CDs. Some fathers bond with their daughters with softballs tossed back and forth in backyards. My father threw music into my life. My father tossed the Rolling Stones at me.

I remember the joyous, meaty chords of “Start Me Up” in a Sunday morning fanfare through the house. I remember dancing until I fell over, a heap of laughing 3-year-old. I remember reflecting on the very words “Rolling Stones” — the name made them sound mythical, not quite human, like characters in the books I read as a child.

When I was little, I didn’t have a mental picture of a transcendant, skinny man with big, big lips, or a guitarist who’d been scraped to gristle by drugs and time. I didn’t know that the drummer who kept the heartbeat of the band raised prize-winning sheepdogs in his spare time.

I only knew the music. I could sing along with “Miss You” and “Start Me Up” and “Brown Sugar” before I could write my name in crayon. I remember listening to “Sticky Fingers” and “Flashpoint” on the drive to school. I appropriated Dad’s T-shirt from the 1989 Steel Wheels tour. It came down to my knees. The exuberant, red tongue was wider than I was.

By the time the Rolling Stones entered my life, they had long been established as the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band.They had already conquered Britain, invaded America, and were worth more than a small European nation. I never knew them as rock pioneers, but as sort of benevolently raunchy uncles, smirking in corners at all the young guitar-struck kids. When I heard them on the radio, I heard them on the classic rock station.

Dad used the Stones to lead me back to early bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. In their voices, I could hear the outlines of the swaggering growl Mick would later make his own. One song alone, “Little Red Rooster,” introduced me to Willie Dixon and Howling Wolf.

As much as I loved their music, the Stones weren’t the band I wallpapered my room with in fits of teenage idol worship (that was the Beatles), nor were they my first concert experience (Deee Lite). The Rolling Stones did not serve as theme music for my first kiss, my first big love or my first heartbreak. But when I learned to walk in high heels, I went straight from wobbling to strutting — I had the Stones in my stereo for guidance while I practiced in my room.

I’m in my 20s now, and Dad and I still listen to the Stones together. We like some of the same albums, and have some of the same favorite songs. But we’re not hearing the same band.

Dad first heard the Rolling Stones when rock and roll had just begun to define itself. He knew the Stones as scruffy young boys, the darker side of the squeaky-clean Beatles (he was a bit of a scruffy young boy himself, or so I’m told). He remembers listening to “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” in the summer of 1965, in San Francisco, where a whole new world of rock was shaking itself into being.

The Stones I know aren’t new and fresh, the way they were back then. The Stones I know have dabbled with blues, psychedelia, reggae and techno, along with nearly every drug known to chemistry. Some of them have faced down death and won. One of them has faced down death and lost. The Stones I know are older than my father, and have children older than I am.

But here they are again, still ready to rock, and Dad and I are off to see them one more time. I’m planning to stand and soak up every note at the Meadowlands, singing along with the songs that have always been part of my life.

The Stones, I know, will take their final bows with their arms flung around each other’s shoulders, just as they always do.

And Dad will put his arm around me as we’re leaving the show, just as he always does.

Elizabeth Willse is a freelance writer living in New York. Her father is editor of The Star-Ledger.

The ‘Time Warp,’ Broadway Style

The ‘Time Warp’ – Broadway style:
New show whets appetites of ‘Rocky Horror’ cultists

Reviewed by Elizabeth Willse for the Star-Ledger

Section: Today. Date: 9/28/2002. Word count: 675

The Rocky Horror Show
Where: Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway at 50th Street, New York
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays; 5 and 9:45 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
How much: $30 to $79.50. Call (212) 239-6200.

Hello, my name is Elizabeth and I’m a “Rocky Horror” junkie. I have seen the cult movie more than 10 times and have been in four stage productions. My friend and enabler, Lisa, has seen it 20 times. Even when we’re in the audience, we’re compelled to dress ourselves in tuxedos, fishnet stockings and the like.

So the two of us weren’t sure what to expect from the new “Rocky Horror Show” at Manhattan’s Circle in the Square Theatre. No Tim Curry, no callbacks, and no throwing toast. The campy classic was last seen on Broadway in 1975, when it played barely a month before closing. Could it return without turning into just another Broadway show?

Yes, oh yes.

As soon as the Usherettes sang their way down the aisle, we were hooked. This new production winks at the show’s cult-movie heritage by creating a downstage “audience” of popcorn-laden, lighter-waving company members seated in the front row. The transition from film to theater is complete the moment Brad and Janet literally step off the movie screen and onto the stage.

Background: The original “Rocky Horror Show,” written by Richard O’Brien, surfaced in 1973 at the 60-seat Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in London. After a short while, it moved to the King’s Road Theatre, which seats 500, and was named best musical of the year by drama critics.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the film based on the musical, premiered in 1975, and despite the popularity of the live show, the movie version quickly headed toward box-office death. But then the proprietors of Greenwich Village’s Waverly Theatre decided to screen the satire at midnight.

By Halloween 1976, the movie had developed a loud cult following. They shouted back at the actors. They threw toast and toilet paper. They stood under the screen, costumed, and mirrored the antics of their favorite characters.

If any of this sounds confusing, you’re what’s known as a Rocky Horror virgin – someone who has never seen the movie in a theater, much less who knows when to wave a lighter in the air. (It’s during “Over at the Frankenstein Place.”)

For those Rocky Horror virgins, this new production is a gentle deflowering. You’re able to hear all the songs and understand all the lines – a rarity at screened performances. And though it’s racy, the smooth choreography and wry humor keep the show from being hugely offensive. It’s just moderately offensive.

During one preview, the audience stayed well-behaved until The Narrator – none other than Dick Cavett – took the stage. It’s his job to relate the progress of Brad and Janet’s journey, which he did with a cool delivery, ad-libbing to catch the rowdy audience members off-guard and earning a round of applause.

The entire cast turned in excellent performances, notably Joan Jett as the sullenly sexy, East Village punk Columbia, who is FAR too cool to tap dance. The role of Eddie/Dr. Scott showcased Lea DeLaria’s raw, powerful voice, and Alice Ripley transcended Susan Sarandon’s cautious on-screen sex appeal and reveled in the portrayal of Janet as virgin-turned-vamp.

The man with the hardest act to follow was Tom Hewitt, who stepped into the role – and the towering high heels – of Dr. Frank ’N’ Furter. Hewitt, clad in red vinyl or flowing white satin, struts across the stage, sometimes a prima donna, sometimes a predator. He embodied everything the role demanded: The wicked glee of seduction and the bittersweet yearning of his final lament. His resonant voice and charismatic presence commanded the audience’s attention without eclipsing the other performers.

Other notable performances included Daphne Rubin-Vega (“Rent”) as a sultry Magenta and Raul Esperanza as glittery Goth-boy Riff Raff. As Brad, Jarrod Emrick’s haunting performance of the seldom-heard “Once in a While” got us unexpectedly choked up.

We had first been exposed to “Rocky Horror” as a campy B-movie that only a cultist could love. This show was polished and powerful, and showcased some impressive talent. And it whet our appetites for even more – so after the show we headed downtown to the “Rocky Horror PICTURE Show” at the Cinema Village East. Yet again.

NOTES: Elizabeth Willse of Mendham attends Vassar College and aspires to play Dr. Frank ’N’ Furter as soon as she learns to walk in heels. Lisa Aurigemma, who contributed to this article, is an associate producer at a dot.com and dances one mean Time Warp.