Psst….you’ve no doubt heard of CliffsNotes. Now there’s “StephsNotes”—with just ten helpful hints, they’re even simpler than the Cliffs original!

StephsNotes to:

 JELLICOE ROAD by Melina Marchetta

Dear RR:

You know who you are. You’re the kid librarians and teachers are always trying to find a book for. A book that appeals to the non-reader in you, the Game Boy player, the wise cracker, the hurt in you. They’ll work through a list of Books Recommended for Reluctant Readers, trying to find just the right fit for you. You might even find yourself enjoying one or two. But I can tell you right now, the book they won’t be bringing your way is JELLICOE ROAD, or, as they call it in Australia where it was first published, ON THE JELLICOE ROAD by Melina Marchetta.

But hey, should you ever find yourself in high school English, stuck with a teacher who is in love with having her students read Printz award winners, this set of StephsNotes just might help you NOT FAIL the class. I, of course, don’t guarantee ANY results—I mean the info is, after all, FREE. That said, here goes.

Melina Marchetta: The Mini-Biography

Melina Marchetta lives in Sydney, Australia. She used to teach high school English to a bunch of boys, but now she just writes full-time. You can do that if you happen to write books that wind up on best seller lists and win international awards such as the Printz. Such is the case with JELLICOE ROAD (did you notice the shiny gold “P” on the cover).

Melina has brown, curly hair, was born in 1965, and probably speaks with an Australian accent.

She writes novels for teens. Her first was Looking for Alibrandi. Her second, Saving Francesca seems to be a popular choice among library thieves as it was recently voted “book most likely to be stolen from the library.” Her third novel is the one you’re not reading, titled JELLICOE ROAD. And if you’re sick of edgy teen-scene stories, she has yet another new book out. It’s a “fantasy epic” this time, called Finnikin of the Rock, which just got picked up by American publisher Candlewick.

Now, here’s a juicy bit. Wikipedia has it that Melina “left school” when she was fifteen and went to business school, where she learned typing….hmmm, handy skill for a writer. Like a lot of us “reluctant” learners, she put her smarts into action in the business world then went back to school to earn the degree she wanted. She got a job teaching so she has a lot of first-hand knowledge about the school settings in her books.

And yes, Google her so you can read most of this stuff right from the source.

We suspect she has a cat, but no sources confirm this.

Helpful Hints for Cutting Through the Literary Lingo

Read closely and you’ll hardly have to read the book at all….

Hint #1

Technique: The scattered italic parts are supposed to be parts of a manuscript, a story that one of the characters (Hannah/Narnie) is writing.  (Trust me, this tidbit will help a lot.) The manuscript is based on a true story—that of Hannah’s youth. Writers often say that the first chapter is the last chapter in disguise, and in the case of this book, add an ‘s’ and you’d be about right. The first couple of chapterS are the last couple of chapterS in disguise. You just don’t realize it because you haven’t read any of them—yet.

Hint #2

Setting: The setting may be Australia, but Marchetta writes the story in such a way that it could be almost anywhere. Dial-in on the setting, and you get to a boarding school outside of Sydney where the Townies, Cadets, and Jellicoe students converge.

Which leads to…

Hint #3

Setting and Situation:  The “Territory Wars” are as trivial as they seem. It’s the relationships between characters that you have to keep your eye on.

Hint #4

Cast of Characters: This is the most complex part of the book. Holy smokes, it takes forever to figure out who everyone is. It’s kinda like trying to catch a cartload of kangaroos.

There is one set of characters in the manuscript (the italic parts) and another in the main part of the book. A couple of characters cross over. All of them, in both stories, are connected because of a horrible car accident that took place on Jellicoe Road.

The two stories take place 22 years and a generation apart. If you’re worried that the chart below will give away too much, consider the likelihood of your actually reading the book. If the chances are slim to zip, cast your concerns to the cats. But even if you do read the book, blowing through some of Marchetta’s make-believe-mysteries will only help you follow the complicated storyline.

Hint #5

More on Characters: All of the main characters are tragically flawed—either by some external thing that happened to them or by something they did. I’ll just spit it out: Taylor was abandoned (to Hannah) by her druggie mother after being abused by a twisted kiddie diddler. Griggs killed his abusive father in an attempt to protect his mother. Fitz accidentally killed Webb. And the list goes on. It’d be such a boring story if these were plain old orphans.

Hint #6

Theme: They say 99% of all “kid/teen books” are about the child-parent relationship. JELLICOE ROAD, check, check, check. The whole story is about Taylor trying to figure out who her parents are and how her memories of them fit together. Too bad you have to wade through a hundred pages of memory and dream flickers and flashes before you have the slightest clue what’s going on.

Hint  #7

Weird Stuff That’s Kinda Freaky-Cool: The boy-in-the-tree dream scenes are the best parts of the book. Oh, and the house burning down and first sex and decapitation and the Mullet Brothers and the secret tunnels are all eerie-quirky bits that make a fairly boring book slightly more readable.

Hint #8

Getting it Done: If you’re really pressed, just start at about Chapter 11 or 12 —okay, AFTER you’ve read the Prologue (you don’t want to miss the gory bits)—and you’ll be able to figure the rest out from there. If you’re really pressed for time, just read the Prologue, Chapter 1 and then jump to Chapter 25. All the wiggly crap in the middle is just there to lead you in circles anyway. (Somebody will no doubt feed me to the dingos for saying that, but oh well. For you, RR, anything.)

Hint #9

Reviews: Book reviews won’t tell you much—except the three-Ls that you’ve already picked up here: The book is long, laborious, and literary. My favorite review of this book is super duper short. In fact, it’s a “Haiku Review” from the blog site www.emilyreads.com (http://www.emilyreads.com/2009/02/jellicoe-road-review-haiku.html).

Jellicoe Road: Review Haiku

A searing look at

loss that’s sometimes in love with

its own misery.

She nailed it. And there is not much more to be said. Well, except this last important hint…

Hint #10

Message: Despite all the times you think the book is going no where, Marchetta actually does wrap everything up in the end. But even I’ll admit that 412 pages is a long road to walk to learn this one simple thing: That despite death, life goes on. In fact, you’ll see the phrase, “And life goes on” four times in the last 6 pages. It’s as if it’s a mantra for the living—a reminder to live and “go on” despite all the bad juju that happens in life.

So, RR, as you’ve probably figured by now, the book is complicated and there are a lot of characters to keep track of, but I cried at the end—both for the joy of finally finishing (I’m a bit of a slow reader myself) and for the joy of a story “well-wrapped.” I don’t know if the characters change so much (as is often a writer’s goal), but they definitely begin to heal, which may be all we can really hope for. 

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Got an idea for a future StephsNotes?

Shoot an email to StephsNotes@ReadItForMe.com. We want to read whatever you don’t want to! Okay, I admit, that’s not a real email address, but you CAN comment here…

It’s not quite what you might expect. A few contemporary poems, an abundance of classics, but even then only ones that have a spin.

Last semester I put together an anthology of children’s poetry, just over 20 poems in all, under the guidance of my professor, the celebrated and often published poet David Wagoner. Many people asked what made the cut and expressed an interest in seeing the list. 

Your wish is my blog. If you have an interest in seeing a particular poem or noting its source, just comment and I’ll post the info. The main criteria was that each poem had to see the world through a child’s eye…and it had to pass muster when it came to David’s exacting standards. 

During this project, I read hundreds of poems, and by far the most difficult thing was paring the selection down to a mere 20+ poems. 

FEARS, DELIGHTS, LESSONS, AND LAUGHTER: An Anthology of Children’s Poetry

compiled by Stephanie Lile

I. RESONANCE: Poems that resonate with who we are, what we dream, what we’ve lost, and/or what we fear

1. To Einstein, My Dog: It Was Quiet (Joyce Sidman)

2. A Negro Speaks of Rivers (Langston Hughes)

3. I Dream a World (Langston Hughes)

4. Final Curve (Langston Hughes)

5. A Circus Garland (Rachel Field)

                        Parade

                        The Performing Seal

                        Gunga

                        Equestrienne

            Epilogue

6. The Falling Star (Sara Teasdale)

7. Hugo, the Lord’s Nephew (Laura Amy Schultz)

II. LESSONS LEARNED: When “nonsense” poems make perfect sense

8. Jabberwocky (Lewis Carroll)

9. The Walrus and the Carpenter (Lewis Carroll)

10. The Adventures of Isabel (Ogden Nash)

11. The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus (Ogden Nash)

12. Sara Sylvia Cynthia Stout (Shel Silverstein)

13. Jimmy Jet and His TV Set (Shel Silverstein)

14. The Ghoul (Jack Prelutsky)

III. BREAKING (and REMAKING) THE MOLD: Poems that make you go “huh?”

15. There Was A Young Lady of Portugal (Edward Lear)

16. There Was A Young Lady (Edward Lear)

17. One Fish, Two Fish (Dr. Seuss)

18. Great Day for UP! (Dr. Seuss)

IV. INSPIRATIONS: New twists on old favorites

19. This is the House that Drac Built (Judy Sierra)

20. ’Twas the Night (Jon Sceizka)

21. There Is A Lady (Eve Merriam)

22. Star Light, Star Bright (Eve Merriam)

For information on any of the poem titles listed above, just post a comment, and I’ll post the info.

P.S. And I just have to say, I’ve loved the Jabberwocky for so long, I memorized it, took the liberty of “finishing” it for LC (it’s so great, but so unresolved), and recorded it once a while ago. Poetry can be such a blast.

For those of you who are David Macaulay fans (The Way Things Work, Cathedral, Pyramid, Black & White, The Way WE Work) there is a must-see exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum right now. It runs through June 14, 2009 and it’s fantastic. Set up to show the progression of Macaulay’s work from “envelope sketches” to finished work, the exhibit is so great I’m going back to see it again—and this time not on a “free night.”

The only thing I missed in the show was a glimpse at the final-final version of the various sets of work—in book form.  Next time, I’m tempted to bring my own copies of the books into the gallery for comparison. But trust me, authors and illustrators and curious minds of all sorts will love this intimate view of Macaulay’s studio process. Just don’t do what I (as a notorious museum geek) always seem to do and make the security guards nervous by getting so into it you inch too close to the irreplaceable  art. 

The Tacoma Art Museum, like all the museums in the downtown Tacoma “museum triangle,” is open for free every Third Thursday evening. But if you want a more immersive and exclusive experience, go see the show on a weekday afternoon when the galleries are a bit more quiet. It’s worth the cash. 

Lastly, if you want to meet David Macaulay, come on down to the “Big Draw” Community Festival on April 19, 2009. For twice the fun, you can also check out the “With Our Hands” Folk Art Festival at the Washington State History Museum just two blocks away that same day.

Hey All,

I came across this poem while reading Laura Purdie Salas’s children’s poetry book AND THEN THERE WERE EIGHT: Poems about Space. It’s about a very cool THING.

Aiming High

Silver arrow to the skies, you’re my mighty mirrored eyes

Finding stars and Saturn’s bands, you place them gently in my hands.

Okay, so what’s that thing? 

Think about it. It’ll come to you.

Laura has a few other books of children’s poetry out that are lots of fun, including:

DO BUSES EAT KIDS? Poems About School

FLASHY CLASHY OH-SO SPLASHY Poems About Color

She was our guest poetry speaker in the Craft of Children’s/YA class through the MFA program of the Whidbey Writers Workshop, and she was great! Poetry forms have always befuddled me, but between her guest presentations and A KICK IN THE HEAD: AN EVERYDAY GUIDE TO POETIC FORMS by Paul B. Janeczko a whole new world (complete with singing angels, blues brothers, and pickle bucket bangers) opened up for me.

I’m still no genius poet, but I have a much greater understanding of the challenges of both forms and free verse. Pick up those books at the library or bookstore, and you will too.

Arrivals and Inventions: A Two-Book Review

By Stephanie Lile

The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Published in the United States by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic, Inc., 2007. Copyright 2006.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Published by Scholastic Press, New York. Copyright 2007.

There is a land somewhere far away from each of us where the language is unknown, the symbols unidentifiable, and the social structures unseen. And yet we must go there. For reasons that lurk larger than life, that threaten our very existence, we must go. We must travel to another place, and make our way in unfamiliar territory. Still, memories linger, and merge with new experiences. Do we despair at the differences, or do we celebrate survival? Whether going to a new place or learning a new thing, we are all in some small way, at risk of becoming The Arrival.

Shaun Tan, in his extraordinary work The Arrival, explores what it is like to arrive in a new place not knowing the language or the geography or the people. His is a story of a man who must leave his wife and daughter to go find work in another country. Through pictures and gestures, the man finds a room to rent, a job to work, and food to eat. All is strange and confusing, but he learns to survive and make friends. Through it all, a lone family picture and an origami crane symbolize memory and hope for a happier future. Tan does all this without placing a single word on the page.

In The Arrival, pictures tell the entire story. But these are not just any pictures. They are both universal and exclusive to every reader. Rendered with an unparalleled imagination and emotion, Tan’s story in pictures touches the soul of anyone who has ever felt out place anywhere. It reveals the complexity of the immigration story with detail and insight pulled from actual stories and references of migrants to Western Australia, Britain, and the United States. From the frustration and discrimination of being tagged as an immigrant, to the joys of being befriended by an unexpected pet, to the compassion expressed through the sharing of arrival stories, Tan gives us a personal glimpse of what it takes to survive in a new place. Faces of sixty immigrants line the endpapers like a high school annual—each black and white pencil drawing alluding to another life story, another story of Arrival.

This moving work, published in the United States by Arthur A. Levine Books, begs the question, “Why no Caldecott for this one?” This year, in 2008, the Caldecott Medal for illustration went to Brian Selznick’s clever and intriguing book The Invention of Hugo Cabret. While “Hugo” is without question a compelling work of art and story, highly deserving of its honor, The Arrival stops any Caldecott follower in his or her tracks. Like Hugo, its pictures speak as loud (actually louder) than the words, and the images are rendered with a similar technique and style. But the catch of the coveted Caldecott is that it “shall be awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen or resident of the United States, whether or not he be the author of the text.” The Arrival fails these criteria on two counts. Shaun Tan is not American and the book was not originally published in America. It was first published in Australia by Lothian Books in 2006.

Testament to Levine’s eye for signing international books with groundbreaking impact, The Arrival is stunningly produced. Harkening back to turn-of-the-century leather bound photo albums, even the pages possess a gritty texture and faux crackled edges to suggest the original documents that provided much of its inspiration.

Production for Hugo was groundbreaking, too. Echoing the old wide-angle to tight shot movie imagery, the book’s hefty 530 page count stunned booksellers and buyers. But its message, innovation in production, and early film inspiration moved readers beyond those hurdles as quickly as a 30-second film trailer makes a person want to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour movie. Unraveling the mystery of a broken automatron and a young, orphaned Hugo Cabret, this story weaves a magical tale of life’s desires and disappointments as seen through the eyes of Hugo. After the death of his father and uncle, he secretly takes over the maintenance of the clocks in Paris’s grand train station. The story evolves from what he sees and hears while secreted away inside the station’s walls.

In comparing these two books, one significant difference is the speed at which you find yourself reading. I found myself wanting to read Hugo film-flicker fast and The Arrival sightseer slow. Yet interestingly, while these two books vary noticeably in dimension, production, and pace, their messages are largely the same. Theirs is a message of invention—and reinvention—of our selves. And yet the bigger question both stories pose is, “How will you do it—how will you get there?”

If we follow Tan’s and Selznick’s lead, we invent and reinvent ourselves by unlocking the stories captured in life’s pictures. Their works make it seem deceptively simple.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

This review first appeared on the Whidbey Writer’s Workshop student site at www.whidbeystudents.com.

Middle-Grade or YA: WHERE’S THE “WAR” IN WEDNESDAY?

by S.T. Lile

“All of my friends were Irish Catholic or Jewish, and there were some years I was the only Protestant kid in the entire class,” says Gary Schmidt in an article posted on the Calvin College website. He’s an English professor there with a particular interest in investigating the ways that “our individual life stories reveal underlying patterns” – patterns that are both universal and transpersonal, that bind us together as human beings who are trying to make sense out of the ups and downs of life.

That statement is, in essence, the theme of The Wednesday Wars, Schmidt’s 2008 Newbery Honor book. There was talk of this book following in the bi-award footsteps of Schmidt’s earlier work, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy that won honors in both the Newbery and Prinz categories for middle grade and young adult respectively, but that didn’t happen. Why?

The answer to that question lies in how the author deals with the story’s underlying world events and personal issues of the characters. The HOW is what separates middle grade from young adult, in theory as distinct a difference as that which separates middle school life from high school angst. The pressures are different, the perspectives are different, the range of experience is different. If The Wednesday Wars were compared to Prinz medalist Looking for Alaska, the only commonalities one would find is a semi-geeky male main character interacting with a bunch of other kids in school. Everything else is a league apart, and it’s not just because the Alaska characters are older.

Here’s why.

Consider the concept of concentric circles, the old rock-thrown-in-water analogy. For the characters in The Wednesday Wars, their world is the center of the circle. The bigger life-impacting issues such as the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, and Walter Cronkite’s news reports belong to other people and live in the outer circles. If this had been a Prinz book, these outer life issues would be intimately co-mingled with the lives of the central characters. For example, Holling would have had to register for the draft, not Holling’s sister’s boyfriend. In The Wednesday Wars, each of these outer-life issues is personified by a different character.

Mrs. Baker, the teacher Holling is certain hates him, is portrayed as hard and angry, although we learn later that she’s kind and giving but made hard by the heavy sadness of having her husband sent off to Vietnam.

Holling’s sister Heather, is the high school Flower Child who despairs at the worlds’ injustices and fights against the constraints placed on her by her parents. In her character we see a politically aware and hopeful person who gets shredded by the mean-hearted assassination of presidential hopeful Bobby Kennedy. Her personal loss of hope as a result of that event mirrors the shattering of the collective hope held by millions of Americans at that time.

The interactions between Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi represent the blind discrimination and hatred that comes from knowing only the idea of a person, not the person herself. Theirs is the type of racism and discrimination that comes from the pain of war—Mrs. Bigio loses her husband in Vietnam and takes out her grief on Mai Thi only to later realize that Mai Thi as an individual had nothing to do with his death. Having lost her family and been transplanted to America, the young Vietnamese girl’s life was as ravaged by war as Mrs. Bigio’s.

Holling’s parents comprise a weird cliché of “typical middle Americans” who follow the news but who never really let it sink in. They are as plastic as the coverings on their prefect couch cushions—impervious to the sorrows of the world around them and immersed in a weird self-absorption that keeps them oblivious to the trials and sorrows of their children. They are the biggest disappointment in the book.

Shakespeare, however, is the voice from the past. He comes through for Holling in the unexpected role of a sort of spirit guide, introduced in the story to help Holling through this difficult transition between seventh and eighth grade. We hear Shakespeare speak through Holling, “Toads, beetles, bats.” We see plot parallels between Romeo and Juliet and Holling and Meryl Lee (fathers with rival architecture firms). We discover, as does Holling, the concept of universal emotion as it applies to lives across time.

And as for the rats, they, too, have their own sub plot, and it’s an important one. They represent the nervous anticipation of the time—the perception that vengeful, unseen things are lurking in the walls of the world. Things that can’t be captured or caged no matter how hard you try. Instead you must wait, and watch the ceiling tiles bulge, listen to the scratching and scrabbling in the walls, and know that the rats are collecting things to use against you in any small-minded way they can.  They are bigger villains than Doug Swieteck’s brother. They are the Villains of Unknown Power, which was largely the perspective on governments of the time.

Each character in the story played an essential role. Each role epitomizes Schmidt’s idea that “our individual life stories reveal underlying patterns” in the bigger world picture. In that sense, the book was a success. But on a larger scale, was it more than a “year in the life” story? What would it take to bump it firmly into the young adult genre? The answer is this—Schmidt could write the sister’s story, complete with political strife, first sex, and parental defiance. Hers would be more of an emotional tale driven by self-motivated action as opposed to the story of a seventh grade boy who spends his days reacting to a whirlpool of events that swirl around him.

The joy of a great middle grade book, however, is that it can maintain that suspended moment between unjaded youth and scared-shitless teenager. The Wednesday Wars does that with humor, a finely woven series of sub plots, language, and the unexpected realization of small dreams.

While some would say those realizations of small dreams make the book sappy and predictable, their purpose was to shift the reader’s (and the characters’) expectations. We often expect things to go a certain way and feel that things have failed if they don’t. The shifts in this book help us remember that what you think is true about a person or way of doing something isn’t always so. Holling learned that about Mrs. Baker numerous times. Although Schmidt almost overdid it (Mrs. Baker couldn’t just be a runner, she was an Olympic runner), her role was like that of the Oz—a big tough persona on the outside, an accomplished, kindhearted human on the inside. It just took a few lifts of the curtain to see that.

The “war” in The Wednesday Wars runs throughout the plot, setting, and cast of characters. Everyone is fighting his or her own little battle whether at home or abroad. Sometimes that “war” is merely a matter of perception that changes with time. Sometimes, the affects of war lie in its reverberations and the bonds it creates. Such was the case with Mrs. Baker and Mrs. Bigio opening the telegram from the no-longer Missing in Action Lt. Baker.

From that scene and the one of Holling meeting his sister at the bus station, came one of my favorite lines in the book, “Sometimes you have to let yourself be found.” It was Holling’s wisest line and it applied to his sister, to Lt. Baker, and possibly in some small way to himself as “being found” by Shakespeare.

What that line means in a deeper context, if we follow Schmidt’s idea that patterns in humanness exist that are both “universal and transpersonal, that bind us together as human beings,” is exactly what it says. Sometimes we have to stop fighting and hiding and open ourselves up to being found. It’s hard to do, but that’s what growing up is all about.

War is the pattern that bound these characters together as human beings. How these characters interact is what makes this a middle-grade novel.