It's the End of the World As We Know It....

About four years ago, I got the chance to teach a course at GMU entitled "Young Adult Literature in Multicultural Secondary Settings" (or some equally stupid title which meant, using YA lit in middle and high school English classes).  I used the syllabus of a colleague I really admired as the basis for my own, and borrowed her assignment of reading 25-30 YA lit books over the course of the semester.  That sounded like so much fun, that I decided to do that as well, so I spent that semester teaching the course and reading a pile of YA books that I'd never had time to read before.  The thing about YA lit is that even though I know there's amazing stuff out there, it never occurs to me to put them on my already mountainous "to be read" pile of books, and this was like a free pass to do just that; the equivalent of borrowing your niece and nephew so that you can go see Little Mermaid before you had kids of your own.

That was so much fun, that I've made it a practice to put a YA title on my list (or in my Kindle queue, these days) periodically, just to check out what's happening.  And yes, I did read the Twilight series, but this post is not (thankfully) about them. 

I just finished Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer, and I've realized I'm a bit of an apocalypse junkie.  I kind of love these end-of-the-world scenarios, beginning with an early worshipful relationship with Stephen King's The Stand, and continuing all the up to my sincere adoration of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. 

Pfeffer's story of an asteroid knocking the moon closer to the earth's orbit and the ensuing environmental fallout (figuratively and literally) is certainly not the roller coaster ride of King's book, and can't boast the phenomenal writer's craft in The Road, but it was a fun enough read to prompt me to download The Dead and the Gone, Pfeffer's telling of the same story from a different perspective (which is an interesting twist on the traditional sequel, I think).   Life is a much stronger story - told as a series of journal entries written from the perspective of an adolescent girl whose biggest problem pre-asteroid was dealing with her parents' divorce, and who finds inner strength and resourcefulness she didn't know she had.  There is a lot of focus on food here - I had no idea how quickly food would run out in the case of the disasters Pfeffer describes.  I even learned a little science - while I had anticipated that the repositioning of the moon would impact tides and cause all kinds of related environmental disasters (floods and tsunamis), I hadn't realized that it could also cause all kinds of volcanic activity which would intern create ash clouds that would block out the sun.  From there, it's a forgone conclusion....but Pfeffer leaves the ending uncertain and unwritten.  Just like it is.

The Physik Book of Deliverance Dane

This one was purely for fun.  I've always liked period pieces.  My husband swears that if, while flipping through channels on the TV I catch a glimpse of anyone in a corset, that's what we wind up watching.  I also like stories about witches - no comments from the peanut gallery, please.

The Phyisck Book of Deliverance Dane is no great literary masterpiece, but a fun, relaxing escape.  The story is Connie's - Constance.  A graduate student in history at Harvard, Connie (Constance) is embarking on her dissertation, trying to find and hone a topic while also cleaning out her grandmother's abandoned home, and deal with her flighty and difficult advisor.  For various reasons, Connie finds her research leading her to attempt to find a rare primary source - the physick or receipt book of a woman tried and found guilty of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials.  She finds that her life and the life of the accused witch, Deliverance Dane, intersect in many important ways. 

"My Orange Duffel Bag"

Read the first half of the book the first time I opened it. The story is fascinating, and the presentational style is equally compelling. Hard to describe, but falls somewhere between scrapbook and collage. Reminds me of the Griffin and Sabine series a bit -- although the style they use is as suited to they story they convey as Bantock's is to a correspondence. My friend Echo Garrett helped Sam Bracken create it -- it is his memoir.

It is not available through amazon.com. Apparently there are lots of issues (of which I was unaware until Echo explained it to me) and they chose to publish through the website for the book instead. Don't have the URL handy but you can google the book title -- or it has a fan page on FB.

I would love to hear from you what you think of it -- and pass the feedback along to Echo. I am trying to get her involved with Fall for the Book -- and she and Sam are already doing a lot of touring and other promotional work. The book was only recently released.