Books removed from Bitch Magazine's Feminist Booklist.... I FINALLY FINISHED!

I first learned about these books and the whole controversy when Scott Westerfeld sounded off on his blog, which I got through Goodreads. A magazine out of Perth, Australia (a place I've been to and LOVED) called Bitch Magazine put out a list of the top 100 feminist Young Adult novels. After the list came out, a few people complained about three of the titles, which they claimed were not feminist because they didn't deal well with rape. Scott Westerfeld asked that his books be taken off the list if that was how things were being dealt with. So, naturally, I HAD to read these three books!

The first one is called Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott. This is one of the more difficult books I have ever read, especially considering it's only 170 pages. It is about a girl (Alice, though that is not her real name) who was abducted when she was 10 years old while on a field trip to the aquarium. Almost five years later, she is getting too big for Ray, her abductor. He gives Alice the job of finding her replacement. This book is deeply psychologically and emotionally disturbing, but in the end, I think it fairly accurately portrays what a young girl might go through in similar situations. I can imagine why some people would question this book's place on a feminist booklist, but I can equally come up with a good rationale.

I have to admit that I am at a complete loss for words on why Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce was pulled and replaced by Bitch Magazine. While I figured out the twist LONG before Scarlett and Rosie (the sisters the book is named for) do. As the title suggests, this book is a very unique twist on the Little Red Riding Hood story. At merely eleven years old, Scarlett's grandmother is horribly murdered and eaten by a Fenris (a werewolf). To save her nine year old sister, Rosie, Scarlett takes on the Fenris with only a shard of a mirror. She kills the Fenris, but only after it has taken one of her eyes and left her horribly scared. Now, seven years later, the sisters spend their lives training and luring Fenris to their death. The Fenris of this novel don't just make new Fenris by biting them. There is a secret code that the sisters and their friend Silas have to crack now that the Fenris are congregating in Atlanta to find the new "Potential" Fenris. I really enjoyed reading this book, especially seeing as I was expecting a morally difficult look at "rape culture" and found an action packed, whirlwind of a read! I can't wait for Sweetly to come out this summer! It is a "companion" to Sisters Red!

Ok, so I FINALLY finished Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan! And boy, was it a tough read! The beginning was extraordinarily difficult because of all of the atrocities that befall the main character, Liga. This is actually a retelling of Snow White and Rose Red (of sorts), but starts with their mother, living on the outskirts of an old-world kind of town. Her mother died a few years ago and for a while now, has been taking his liberties with Liga. When she gets pregnant, he visits the local "mudwife", a witch of sorts, and buys some herbs to get rid of the baby. When she gets pregnant again, she hides it from him for as long as she can. He finds out eventually and goes back for more herbs, but gets run over by a carriage on his way back and dies. Liga has the baby and soon after, another atrocity visits her that is so bad, she goes to the cliff, throws her baby over and intends to kill herself. A "moon baby" catches the falling babe and saves her and gives Liga two jewels to plant outside her front door. When she wakes up the next morning, two beautiful bushes have grown where she planted the stones and she is in an alternate universe... the place of her heart's desire. About nine months later, she births another baby girl and raises them in this perfect world. This book deals with healing and moving past bad things that have happened to you. It also deals with letting your children live their own lives and make their own ways in the world. I definitely see why people would want this taken off the booklist, but I can also see why others would want it on. Liga's daughters grow up to be their own women, one a powerful sorceress. I can not really make a straight decision one way or another. This is definitely a book that will stick with me for awhile (and I wasn't entirely thrilled with the way it ended, especially for Liga), but I might have been happier never having read it.

All in all, I'm glad to have read these books, if only for the fact that I might never have happened across Sisters Red or Jackson Pearce. I am looking forward to reading Sweetly, which comes out next week! I may try to read the three that replaced three on the booklist, but it probably won't be for awhile, because I'm waiting for the release of The Power of Six, Sweetly, Goliath, The Death Cure, and Crossed, all of which come out in the next three months! YAY!

Different does not even cover it...

The two books I am going to write about could not be any more different. They only have one thing in common, being used...

City of Light by Lauren Belfer takes place in Buffalo right before and during the Pan American Exposition in 1901. Louisa Barrett is the headmistress of a prestigious school for girls. Many of her girls go on to fill traditional roles of wife, mother and hostess, but her greatest hope is for them to break out of these roles and pass the bug on to their children. Belfer's language is beautiful and the book is a nice balance of fact and fiction. I learned (or relearned) a lot about the Niagara Falls power station. Threaded throughout this book are a couple mysteries. One is fairly obvious and can be guessed at as soon as the question comes up. The other is more elusive and surprised me even as the answer was being revealed. I truly believe that reading is more about the journey than the destination, so I enjoyed the book, but the ending wasn't what I had been hoping for. After talking to friends, I decided that the protagonist ended pretty much where she began and that's where our disappointed laid. I would like to read Belfer's second book, A Fierce Radiance, so I'll see if she's gotten better at endings! (I didn't tell you how being used had to do with this book, because it's a major plot twist and I'm not giving it away!)

The second book is ALL about being used. It is called Tricks by Ellen Hopkins. As the title suggests, the books is about turning tricks. More specifically it's about teenagers who end up in situations where they have to turn tricks to survive. It is about five teenagers from five very different families and walks of life. I think I've read all of Ellen Hopkins books and I think this was the hardest to read. I could feel these teenagers getting dragged down and making bad choices without even knowing it, believing in the people who should have their best interest at heart, but don't. All in all, the book left me with hope... and a serious case of NEVER wanting to go to Las Vegas! It is a subject that I have always pondered writing about, because there are so many kids that this really happens to. Eventually, I wanted to explore (in writing) how a teen might end up on this path. After reading this book, I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to, but it's still an idea!

I have one more book to read of those three books that were yanked off the top 100 feminist books for Young Adults. I think after that, I'm going to take a break from reading these tough subjects! Maybe I'll reread Harry Potter in anticipation of the last movie!

Crazy Week Amid Disaster

I know it's been over a week, but it's also been crazy here! Last week was Girl Scout week, so we had events EVERY NIGHT (FYI I'm a Brownie leader). Ash Wednesday was last week. A huge earthquake and then tsunami hit Japan and thousands of people died. What an awful event! I'm still not quite able to fathom the damage done. I keep looking at the photos and thinking that maybe the world really is ending... Maybe that's why I keep reading books about Dystopias and and futuristic worlds. They make me think that what we have now is not so bad. Maybe more people need to read them so they can recognize when things are heading the wrong way!

The first book I'm going to write about is not a book about a dystopia. It's called The Shadow of the Wind and is by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It is one of the more beautiful books I have read this year. There are so many "deep thoughts" within the pages, it's hard to remember most of them. The story takes us through the young life of Daniel, the ten year old son of a book seller. His father takes him to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time and he gets to pick out a book to protect. The book he picks is called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. Daniel reads the book and is so taken with it, he tries to learn more about the author and find more of his books. Throughout the book, we see Daniel go through his adolescence and are swept up with him in unravelling the mystery of Julian Carax's life. This book has everything: romance, mystery, horror, murder, crime, intrigue. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time, while others slip out of my memory.

Matched by Ally Condie is a novel about a dystopia. Not to far in the future, the US has been morphed into The (perfect) Society. Everyone has food that meets their nutritional needs, everyone has a job suited to their abilities, and everyone who chooses to gets matched to a person who they will happy with until they die on their eightieth birthday. Or you can choose to be single for the rest of your life. In this society, everything is done for you, and there is very little choice. Cassia chose to be matched and is amazed to get matched to one of her best friends, when everyone else has been matched to people from other burroughs who they have never met before. Everyone who gets matched gets a microcard with all the information of their match on it. When Cassia views her microcard, she see's her match's picture, but then another face comes on the screen, and the face belongs to another friend of hers. Seeing the other boy's face opens up a world of possibilities for her, one being that The Society is not perfect and makes mistakes. Will she choose to accept her match, or will she chase destiny and see where it takes her? I have to admit that the beginning of this book was not easy for me to read. The writing was kind of mechanical and I didn't really get a feel for Cassia. By the end, I realized that's because she wasn't really a person, yet. She just did what The Society told her to do. As the story progresses, Cassia finds her voice and the writing becomes more emotional and easier to read. I really got caught up in the story and look forward to book two! (Yes, it's another series!)

I'm not even going to try to guess what I might write about next time, but I'm sure they'll be good!

Week 2 - Two YA books and a Classic

So, I said last week that I was going to review Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins and Nightlight by The Harvard Lampoon. I also managed to finish The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I guess that's where I'll start. I read The Great Gatsby because I'm going to be teaching it next month in the English class I coteach. It's a book I've been meaning to read for awhile but probably would have never gotten around to without the proper prompting. I did enjoy it. A lot took place in the narrator's (Nick Carraway's) head, and a lot was what he heard. It is interesting how a lot of modern lit focuses on the drama as it is happening. The main character is the person that is going through the drama. Not so in this book. The main character watches a lot of what happens, but most of the real action happens as he is looking back in hindsight. After learning the time frame it takes place in, I got into it a lot more. It is a "roaring 20's", prohibition/bootlegging, jazz era book. Taken as that, it is beautiful.

I talked about the first Underland Chronicles book in my last blog. If you aren't familiar with the series, check it out! In the second book, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, Gregor and his little sister Boots are once again dragged into the Underworld. This time, Gregor must defeat the Bane, a ten-foot-tall, white rat, to save his sister from the other rats who are hunting her and to save the Underworld. But nothing turns out exactly how people expect it in the Underland. Gregor takes another exciting journey through the Underland and the reader tags along, fighting his fight, feeling his pain and enduring all his hardships. One thing that Suzanne Collins excells at in her writing is pulling the reader in and making them feel like part of the story!

The last book I read, Nightlight by the Harvard Lampoon was just too fricken funny! If you liked Twilight, you should totally read the parody! If you hated Twilight, you will love this book! Belle Goose leaves her babyish mom and her travel-street-hockey playing step-dad to move to Switchblade, Oregon, where she meets Edwart Mullen. She detects early on that he is a vampire and she wants him to make her one, too. When she tells her dad she is in love he responds: " ...isn't it a little soon to cut yourself off from the rest of your peers, depending on a boyfriend to satisfy your social needs as opposed to making friends? Imagine what would happen if something forced that boy to leave! I'm imagining pages and pages would happen- with nothing but the names of the month on them!" I almost dropped the book laughing at that point. Later on, Belle almost gets eaten by a real vampire who decides to take her to the vampire prom instead, where the theme is human. Then the vampire starts rattling off the prom themes from former years: "Pimps and their Street Ho's; CEOs and their Office Ho's; GI Joes and their Combat Ho's; Gardeners and their Garden Hoes; Firemen and their Fire Hose..." It's a short book, filled with hilarity... Don't read it expecting to get some kind of greater knowledge out of it, it's just a parody! Enjoy!

Next week:
Matched by Allie Condie
Not sure what else yet, but there's this big controversy going on where three books were put on this top 100 list and then removed and replaced with three "less controversial" books. So, needless to say, I'm trying to get my hands on the books that were removed! We'll see! Happy reading!

New Blog!

Yes, I know it is a month into the new year! But isn't it still a good time to revamp a blog that hadn't been touched in almost 2 years?! (I think so!) I have been reading voraciously (hence the new blog name) for the past few months and will hopefully continue to do so.

I have finished (and started) a few books this week. I'll start with Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins. One of my BFs put me on to The Hunger Games by the same author and those books were SO AMAZING (seriously, if you haven't read them, GO GET THEM NOW!) that I decided to check out her first series. It was a little weird at first, but I got into it pretty quickly. Gregor is a kid from NYC. He has to miss summer camp to stay home and watch his 2 year old sister, nicknamed Boots, and his slightly senile grandmother. On the first day, while he is doing laundry, Boots gets sucked into an airvent and Gregor follows her, dropping thousands of feet, at an alarmingly slow rate. (Does this remind you of anything, yet?) He lands (softly) in complete darkness, finds his sister, and is almost immediately greeted by giant cockroaches who take them to the humans who live down there. Incredibly imaginative, this book sends Gregor (and the reader) on a quest to find his father, who disappeared years before, where he might right giant bats, fight and then ally with giant spiders and then outsmart the giant rats who want to take over the Underworld. I enjoyed reading this book so much that I went out and got the second one (from the library). I'll let you know how that is next week!

Next on the docket was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I had read a few of his graphic novels, but never a full length novel. What a beautiful book! The imagery was incredible and the story haunting, yet endearing. It is about a boy who gets adopted by a couple of ghosts to protect him from the murderer who killed the rest of his family. They name him Nobody Owens and give him the Freedom of the Graveyard, which enables him to remain unseen by outside eyes and gives him some of the abilities that ghosts have. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. I fell in love with Bod and sympathized with him as he tried to find a place in our world. My favorite chapter is Danse Macabre...Let me know what you think!

Coming next week:
Nightlight by The Harvard Lampoon
Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins

Stephanie Meyer - Twilight Series

With the new movie coming out in December and final book of the series just out, these are the books to be reading right now. Meyer writes beautiful prose that flow and leave the reader unable to put down her books. I have to admit, she also makes you want to throw the books across the room at times, but in mind, that's a good thing. Only a truly gifted writer can make you feel such intense emotions! Whether you love or hate the characters, these books are wonderfully crafted and will appeal to girls and women of all ages (and boys and men, too, I think).



It has been a while since I have read the first three books, so I will wait to complete the synopses until after I have read them again, but I want to discuss some issues I have read about online and my feelings on them:

• Bella is not a good role model because she is weak, therefore, we should not let our daughters read this book.

Okay, agree that Bella is weak, especially in New Moon and Eclipse, but why is a weak character bad? A) Her weaknesses make her human. B) Her bad decisions and weaknesses are something to discuss with our daughters. I talk with my 16 year old cousin all the time about Bella's character and her decisions. I think teenager can learn a lot from Bella about how they do and don't want to act in their relationships with their boyfriends and male (platonic) friendships. And besides, telling a teenager she/he can't read something makes them want to read it even more!

Scott Westerfeld - Uglies Quadrilogy

Tally Youngblood lives in a society where all adolescents are "ugly" until they get their
"pretty" surgery. At sixteen, everyone gets a new face, new skin, new teeth, height adjustments and whatever else they need to be an average supermodel. Unfortunately for Tally, her best friend, Peris, just had his surgery and she still has 3 months to go. The worst part of this is that she isn't allowed to go see him, and though he can come see her, pretties rarely, if ever, go back to Uglyville. New Pretty Town is a nonstop party. Once teens become beautiful, all they can do is party and drink and have fun. Tally can't wait to join Peris in New Pretty Town...so she decides to sneak in to see him.

Though she can barely recognize the new Peris, she finds him and promises to be good so they can be together (in a total platonic way) once she turns sixteen. She almost gets caught, but escapes by pulling a fire alarm and jumping off the roof of a building in a bungee jacket. As she's making her way back to Uglyville, she meets Shay, another ugly who has sneaked across the river to New Pretty Town.

Shay and Tally teach each other many things, but Shay know of things that go beyond their world. She takes Tally out to the Rusty Ruins and tells her of people who do not live in their city, nor any other city. She and Tally get along so well, because they both have lost all of their friends. Shay claims that not all of her friends became pretty, some of them stayed ugly and escaped the city. The night before Shay's 16th birthday, she shows up at Tally's window asking her to come with her to The Smoke, the place in the wilderness where the mythical David lives. Tally refuses to go, she wants to be pretty.

On the morning of Tally's 16th birthday everything goes as planned. She has recycled all of her possessions, has her new face all picked out, gets picked up and driven to the hospital, and is sitting in the waiting room...where she waits, and waits, and waits. Finally, someone comes to her and leads her back down to a car and takes her to a place called Special Circumstances. Most people don't believe that Special Circumstances even exists, but Tally is there. Dr. Cable gives Tally an ultimatum either go to The Smoke with a locket that is a homing device when activated, or never be pretty. Does she really have a choice?

Uglies follows Tally on her journey to being pretty. Pretties finds Tally pretty and trying to discover the secret that keeps all pretties shallow and "bubbleheads". Again, she is trying to escape the city, though this time to escape being a bubblehead with her new man Zane. In Specials, Tally has been turned into a "terrible pretty" fighting machine. Her bones were all ground and replaced with indestructible plastic used to make aircrafts. Her teeth are sharp points and she's covered in tatoos. She likes the way she is, but is it really her, or has she been programmed to feel this way, yet again.

I have not read Extras, yet, as it does not follow Tally anymore. What I like about these three books is that it follows a very strong girl, who underestimates her strength, but is constantly trying to discover herself. Even after society tries to mold her to into the norm, she breaks free and becomes more. She is constantly fighting the norm, fighting mindlessness, fighting ignorance. There is a lot of social significance in these books. Do I think the world will be like this some day? No, but I do think they say a lot about how are world could turn out if we keep going the way we go. Some of the issues these books touch on are destroying the environment, plastic surgery, the influence of popular media, war, human experimentation, and probably others that I can't think of at the moment.

I will add to this post when I read Extras.

Scott Westerfeld - Peeps & The Last Days

Scott Westerfeld is one of my favorite young adult writers (I have yet to read any of his books for adults). Peeps was the first book I read by him and it is still my favorite. Peeps brings an all new meaning to vampire, aka "peep" - being the saviors of the human race. Westerfeld's genre of vampires (peeps) are kick-ass, meat-eating, super humans, who freak out when they are first transformed, hating everything they once loved. They are also the only things that can save the human race from the ancient enemies.


Peeps follows a young man named Cal, who is a carrier of the "peep" virus, having all of the advantages of a peep and none of the craziness. His new job is to catch newborn peeps and take them to a compound for their safety and for training, primarily the women he infected before he found out what was happening to him, as well as the woman who passed it to him.

The Last Days is a sequel to Peeps. I say 'a' sequel and not 'the' sequel because The Last Days is about different people than Peeps. It follows a group of teenagers who are trying to start a band as the world is falling apart beneath them. Moz and Zahler are two guys who play guitar together and consider themselves a band. Moz meets Pearl on the street as a woman is going psycho and throwing all of her possessions out of her apartment window. When she throws a rare Stratocaster guitar, both Moz and Pearl run to save it. Pearl, it turns out, is a rich musical prodigy, looking for a new band after her old band broke up months before. She gets back her old peeps-infected lead singer and they find a drummer, Zahler switches to bass. Voila, they have a band...a band that can do what no one alive, peep or human, has ever seen before. Only the most ancient peeps have heard rumors of a band like this hundreds of years ago when the ancient enemies last attacked.

One of the things I really like about Westerfeld is how he handles point of view. He writes in the first person, but with every chapter, he switches characters. I know that this has become a popular writing style, but I think Westerfeld does it very successfully. Each character very much has their own voice and their own mind. He also does this with the Midnighters trilogy.

Overall, these are great books. Violent, yes. Some adult themes, yes. But a unique and interesting spin of vampires. I think they are definitely worth reading. Westerfeld is a highly entertaining writer who is on his way up the ladder of popularity in YA literature.