Four Reasons Why

Here are four reasons why you should head for the library. Right now. Or as soon as you get to school. Try to contain your enthusiasm.

Disclaimer: All of these titles have some sexual content ranging from implied to explicit. 

 

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

This book absolutely terrified me. Granted, I have a brother who has undergone two organ transplants to date, so novels like this one and Never Let Me Go by the masterful Kazuo Ishiguro haunt me at a very basic level. But I am not easily scared, in general, by literature. Neal Shusterman has managed to tap into a dystopia so disturbing that I couldn't sleep the night I finished it. The action is intense, the three protagonists are fascinating in their similarities and their differences, and the ethical questions about our society today are downright eerie. The actual unwinding scene is one of the most beautifully crafted I have ever read, but it also made me want to throw up my lunch. Have I got your attention yet?

13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

I didn't love this book, but you might. It deals with bullying and suicide prevention, both of which are incredibly serious issues. Here's the issue I had, and it's personal, so you can disagree with me in your head, but you can't tell me I'm wrong. So there. I was bullied from the end of elementary school to the beginning of high school; I have the scars to prove it. But I'm still here. I wasn't convinced that Hannah would have made the choice she made and reached out when she did. I still sense a flicker of hope in her voice. So for me, the premise of the book, ultimately, did not ring true with the girl I came to know. Nonetheless, you should read this book, think about it, and carefully consider your words and actions for a long time afterwards.

The Secret to Lying by Todd Mitchell

This was an interesting read. The protagonist, James, goes through a transformation as complete as any I've seen in recent YA titles. And it's not pleasant. A realistic, contemporary story, this one will make you squirm in your seat. The decisions James makes are uncomfortable and his personality is unlikable. The book brings up some difficult questions about the identity of a teenager who feels like a non-person. Read this book and let me know if you dislike James as much as I did.

My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park by Steve Kluger 

This one I loved. About 110%. And I read A LOT, people. I read this novel at the suggestion of my good friend, The Boy Reader, who is an elementary school teacher. But this isn't an elementary school book. Don't let the flying lady with the umbrella fool you. The main characters, T.C., Augie, and Ale, are all incredibly authentic high school students. I loved their interactions, their crises, their friendship...every last drop of it. But what I loved the most is that this book normalizes the experience of being a gay high school boy. Augie is Kurt Hummel before Kurt Hummel came to be. Or maybe he's Chris Colfer. Or something like that. You get the point, right? READ THIS BOOK. It is gentle, beautiful, and a revelation all in one neat little package.

Urban Edibles Part 4

Once your plants are in the ground, you need to be responsible about how you water. Veggies like lots to drink. You can let them get a little thirsty, but if you wait until they’re parched, it’s too late. Talk to your parents about the possibility of installing a drip system onto an existing hose or sprinkler line. That way you can control when and how much you give your plants. You won’t waste any water, and you can turn off the hose if it rains. You can also hand water your plants with a hose, just don’t forget! A dehydrated plant is an unhappy plant.

Here are some raised bed planting ideas:

·       Plant basil and tomatoes for caprese salads. We grow heirloom    

        tomatoes of all different colors. Some of our favorites are Flamme, 

        Dagma’s Perfection, Green Zebra, and Black Cherry. These make a 

        boring old red tomato salad jump of the plate. So to speak.

·       Plant a Three Sisters garden.  

     

     Tween Trivia: Native American Iroquois Indians planted 

     corn, beans, and squash together for spiritual and   

     practical reasons. As the corn grows, the beans use the 

     corn stalk as support. The beans have lots of nitrogen on 

     their roots that gets into the soil and helps the 

     other plants grow. Squash plants grow low; they help 

     hold back weeds and keep moisture in the soil. Pretty 

     ingenious.

What a gorgeous example of a Three Sisters garden!

·       Grow a pizza garden: Tomatoes, basil, oregano, peppers, onions, 

        garlic…pepperoni. Just kidding.

·       Grow a pumpkin patch for a fall harvest party. Fair warning: If you are  

        nice to pumpkin seedlings they will take over the world. I'm only 

        exaggerating a tiny bit. Plan ahead.

·       Grow a tipi garden. Caution: This one takes more room than a raised 

        bed has to offer. Think back yard. Have a couple of willing grown ups 

        help you make a tipi out of branches, bamboo, old bits of wood…you 

        get the idea. Grow peas, beans, nasturtiums, hops, grapes, anything 

        that will climb, up the tipi. Plant other yummy things around the base. 

        The result: A late summer hide out and dinner to boot.

At the end of the growing season, when your plants are not producing anything yummy and the first frost is around the corner, it may be time to shut down your beds for the winter. But don’t let the remains of all those amazing plants go to waste! They can be turned into super-rich vitamins for next year’s crops. Which leads us to our next topic...

Choose Your Own Adventure

Okay. Three books in one post. I'll be brief.

I was disappointed in Insurgent. Granted, this is not unusual when the first book blows your mind. I enjoyed the second, and I will read the third, but I was not nearly as impressed with this one. The tension felt much weaker, very drawn out. Way too much waiting for something to happen. And the massive cliffhanger? I didn't really think it was that devastating. I presume we're headed for Zombie-ville or cannibals or Stepford outside the fence, but I am not crushed that the third volume won't be out until next year.

I still love Tris and Tobias. They rock. I would totally have wanted to be one of them when I was fourteen-ish. I still do, if I'm being honest.

I felt like several conflicts should have been addressed in more depth including Peter's bizarre explanation of redemption, what's up with those wacky Amity folks, and Fernando and the ladder? Really? Tris shows no emotion, and there is absolutely no transition. I'm pretty sure he's still hanging out up there.

Next, Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs. This is a book from 2008, but a title I didn't know. I hold Will Hobbs in high regard because he's a really cool guy, and because boys swallow his books whole. (Girls like them, too; they just chew more slowly.) This is a middle-grade read, 100% action. Mountain bikes, road bikes, caves, Martians, near-death experiences...what more could a boy ask for? It's a quick, light read, under 200 pages. Many of my 6th grade boys would LOVE this book.

I didn't, but that is so not the point. I'm always on the lookout for solid boy reads. Fred is a pretty awesome antagonist, too. Oh, and then there's the medieval catapult and the toilets...

And finally, The Fault in Our Stars. A mentor of mine, the amazing Mark Overmeyer, recommended this to me, so I moved it to the top of the pile. I loved this book. As an adult, I loved its treatment of terminal illness and the absolute blind terror of dying that haunts me.

For an adolescent reader there's Hazel's voice, the excellent and highly entertaining vocabularies possessed by both her and Gus, and the heartbreak.

Just read it.

There are so many dreams and realities embedded in this book, I was devastated when it ended. Yet it ended perfectly. I do believe this. I do.

Okay?

Urban Edibles Part 3

So once spring rolls around again and you get the itch to dig, you can buy seedlings at any home-improvement store or garden center starting in about April. But beware! If you want to be a true Green Tween, find out where and how the plants are raised. Many small, local greenhouses grow their plants nearby. Taking it a step further, if you look for heirloom seedlings, you will be helping to save a variety of plant that may be hundreds of years old! (An heirloom plant is one that has been grown for generations and generations, and is not being mass-propagated anymore.)

Ask someone before you buy; if the salesperson can’t tell you where the plants were grown, maybe you could try a smaller, independent store. The closer to home your plants are grown, the more environmentally responsible you will be.

So now that you’ve brought home your adorable little seedlings, what about the dirt? Raised beds have an added bonus if the dirt in your yard is bad. Ask your parents about this. If they’ve ever tried to grow ANYTHING, they will know. Your dirt may be rich and dark, dry and sandy, or heavy and full of clay. Raised beds allow you to decide on the kind of dirt that will make your plants happy. You are the master of the raised bed universe. Cool, yes?

We use a mixture of topsoil, store-bought organic compost, and chicken poop mixed with wood shavings. The plants LOVE this. We just pile it into the beds and stir it all together with a shovel. We have also used a process called permaculture, where we in the fall we create layers of cardboard, vegetable waste, grass clippings, pine needles, etcetera, until we have created a sort of raised bed lasagna. Through the winter, under several feet of snow, all the layers decompose and add their nutrients to the earth. 

Check out SproutRobot for a handy tool to tell you when to plant what in your area. This super-cool website provides easy raised bed plans and ideas for Tweens to make WITH THEIR ADULTS. 

Dystopia, Extinction, and Corpses. Oh my.

Where did I leave off. For some reason I'm not reading as fast as usual. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the preoccupation with selling my own manuscript. Maybe it's the call to build epic Lego monuments with my son.

Still, I have finished three books in the past couple of weeks.

However, none of them are new! How useful am I? 

So. I finally read Catching Fire and Mockingjay, largely at the urging of the kids in the novel-writing class I was co-teaching. They all told me Catching Fire was amazing and Mockingjay bit the big one. I agree.

When I started the H.G. #2, I was concerned with the amount of back-story and internal dialogue and telling embedded in the narrative. In fact, I was getting darn sleepy right around the time when the whole plot exploded magnificently. After trudging through the first hundred pages or so I devoured the remains. Yum. Loved the ending. Hoped against reason that Peeta was done for. No such luck.

That said, #3 was dull, ridiculous, and I just didn't buy it. And I had finally truly bonded with a character, Finnick, and what happens? Well, I won't say. Except to mention that I was mightily distressed. He and his true love were/are essentially the only sympathetic characters in my opinion. Give me Finnick over Peeta any day. The ending was not satisfying in any way, and the whole District 13 issue was bizarre and underdeveloped. Enough said. Read it, disliked it, moving on...

...to Ship Breaker. This one had been on my radar for a while. I started it, realized it wasn't contemporary fiction about environmental issues and the Gulf Coast, and put it down. Then after reading a couple of hum-drum realistic volumes, I picked it up again. Overall, I very much enjoyed this book. I am completely intrigued with the near-future, not-quite-apocalyptic, very possible, not zombie-infested setting. I was 100% convinced that this could be the legacy we leave for the next generation or two. Nice.

My only issue was with the editing. Yes, I'm a language arts teacher. Compulsive editing is a curse, sort of like still having all 50 states memorized in alphabetical order in a musty pocket of my brain since 5th grade. Can't help it. Sometimes it just rears its ugly head.

So here's the thing. The protagonist in Ship Breaker "blossoms with pain" a disturbing number of times throughout the book. Indeed, the descriptions of Nailer's agony are almost identical in so many places that I became extremely annoyed at the interruption to the otherwise groovy flow of the book. Go ahead and read it if you haven't; try to restrain yourself from hi-liting thee offending phrases.

The author, Paolo Bacigalupi, lives in western Colorado, so we can assume he's pretty cool. Maybe he'll read this and tell me to stop being a blossoming pain in the rear. That would be awesome.

I would recommend Ship Breaker to most of my students.

Just realized that I've finished a couple of others.

Where Things Come Back (John Corey Whaley) was awfully disappointing. This makes me sad. I had this grand and amorphous idea blossoming (I couldn't help myself) that this was a novel about the fragility of human existence and our irrelevance in the grand scheme of the history (and the future) of the world. Now that I'm verbalizing this, I guess that is what the book was about...sort of. But I found the two narrative threads disjointed to the point that they never made sense together, in the end.

I am a huge fan of disjointed. But this wasn't believable disjointed for me. Maybe I need to read it again. Maybe you should read it and tell me what you think. Maybe I should go to bed.

And finally, I think, there's Dead End in Norvelt. Having heard Jack Gantos speak on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me about his youthful exploits, I was rubbing my hands in gleeful anticipation when I opened this book. I expected it to be side-splittingly funny. But it wasn't. I like the morbid nature of the book, but it became a bit ludicrous after a while. And the plot was a bit tedious until the last 20 pages when everything speeds up and resolves in a bizarre manner. I do love the history lessons and the theme (again) of realizing one's place in the evolution of the universe. But I was not overwhelmed with joy, sadness, anger, or any other emotion at the end of the book. I was just done.

And I really am done, for now.

Urban Edibles Part 2

There are several alternatives to buying grocery store produce, and one of them happens to be a whole lot of fun. In our front yard we have removed all the sod and replaced it with two raised veggie beds and an array of low-water plants.

Tween Trivia: Kentucky bluegrass, the most commonly used turf in front and back yards in the U.S., originated in Europe and was intended for cool, moist climates. If that’s not what the weather looks like where you live, you’re likely using a whole lot of water to force something to stay green that would rather be growing somewhere else.

Veggies like sunshine, and they require regular water, so you need to consult with your parents about if and where it’s okay for you to plant. This is a family project, not a Mom-and-Dad-are-on-vacation-in-Mexico-and-Grandma-is-babysitting-so-I-don’t-have-to-ask-permission project. Don’t even think about it.

We have very hot, dry summers where we live. The growing season -- the time from the last hard frost to the first hard frost -- is pretty short. We make the most of it by planting seedlings around Mother’s Day and caring for them up until around October. Today is October 9, and we picked a bowl full of tomatoes. Crazy.

In our raised beds we plant lots of herbs. When we need oregano, thyme, parsley, or basil for a recipe, we can snip it fresh out of the garden. At the end of the season, we hang the herbs upside down to dry and use them all through the winter.

We also grow tomatoes and squash. There’s nothing quite so delicious as eating an heirloom Black Cherry while it’s still warm from the sun. Doesn’t that sound better than a store-bought tomato that’s been sitting in a box in a dark van for several days? The beauties below are all heirlooms from our front yard. The family favorite is the Green Zebra, second from the left. For an interesting NPR article about the book Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, click here. You may never want to eat another store-bought tomato. And trust me, once you've eaten one grown in your own garden, there's no turning back.

We have also planted cucumbers, peppers, and peas in the past as well as nasturtiums, which are a type of edible flower. Yum. Eating the plants you’ve grown right in your own back (or front) yard is a responsible way to cut down on the resources you use. And it’s delicious.

Are you ready to start planning for next spring? Stay tuned...

Urban Edibles Part 1

I have horrible news. I didn't get to go thrifting with my favorite slam poet this past weekend. I promise, that post is coming, but I am switching gears just a little bit for the time-being...

Everyone from your parents to the First Lady wants you to eat your veggies, right? Some of you probably even like veggies, much as you hate to admit it. But that’s just fine. As you grow older, the more your palate matures. Give veggies a chance. They’re delicious -- mostly…even I can’t eat okra -- and they are good for you in about a gazillion ways.

And to grow them, you hardly have to impact the planet at all, if you’re careful.

You can grow a vegetable garden to feed your family for a whole summer and into the fall from a six-foot by eight-foot raised bed. No, not like your super-comfy sleep-a-pedic mattress. That would be a waste of a perfectly good piece of furniture, plus the plants wouldn’t like it.

A raised bed is a simple wooden frame that is built above the ground in your gardening space and filled with super-powered dirt. Don’t panic, I’m going to give you directions on how to do this. For now, let’s focus on the why; then we’ll move on to the how.

When you grow your own produce, your carbon footprint shrinks. And what exactly is a carbon footprint? Well, it’s a super-complicated interaction where humans do things that create nasties called greenhouse gases. Those gases contribute to global warming which, in turn, is causing problems all over the world. There is a much better definition here: http://www.livestrong.com/article/159514-carbon-footprint-definition-for-kids. Check it out.

But you’re just minding your own business, right? You’re not creating any of those noxious gases, right?

Wrong.

Next time you’re in a grocery store, check the itty-bitty label on the strawberries or the cucumbers. Chances are, they weren’t grown in the United States. If they were, that’s an improvement, but it’s still not ideal. Most of the vegetables and fruits you buy from the store, even an “all-natural” grocer, are transported hundreds, sometimes even thousands of miles to reach their destination. This requires gasoline which uses a limited energy resource and increases our fuel dependence on other countries. It also means that what you buy isn’t fresh at all; it’s been boxed up and transported anywhere from days to weeks depending on the product. So what’s a tween to do?