Stimulus/Response: Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

Sweethearts by Sara Zarr

I've learned to live with it.

The taste of peppermint makes me sneeze, the sound of Anthony Bourdain's voice makes me fall asleep, and reading Sara Zarr makes me burst into tears.

I've given up on trying to understand the first two things, but I've been giving some thought to the Sara Zarr situation. I don't have much in common with the protagonists of either Story of a Girl or Sweethearts, and I can't particularly identify with their experiences. However, Zarr is so masterful at conveying a teenage (and more generally, human) sense of isolation, frustration, confusion, and powerlessness that it's impossible not to identify with those feelings, if not with the circumstances that gave rise to them.

At the beginning of Sweethearts, we meet Jennifer Harris in elementary school, an overweight girl with a lisp, a 10-year-old who washes her own clothes in the apartment laundry room while her mom's between work and nursing school so the other kids don't tell her she stinks, an outcast who's tormented by everyone in her grade.

Except for Cameron Quick.

The two outcasts bond together, but it's not the usual kind of outcast childhood friendship, born out of exclusion from every other corner. They take care of each other, understand each other, and what's more, they truly love each other.

And then one day, Cameron disappears. The teacher tells her he moved, the bullies tell her he died, and Jennifer's mother won't say anything to confirm or deny either suggestion.

Flash forward eight years. Jennifer Harris is gone, and Jenna Vaughan has taken her place. Jenna has lost the weight and the lisp, she's enrolled in a new school, her mother has remarried a genuinely decent man, and the outcast Jennifer has been replaced by a pretty, popular teenage girl. Still, Jenna isn't comfortable with her new self, and she holds her new friends at bay with clever small talk and a happy, uncomplicated demeanor.

And then, Cameron Quick comes back, and everything changes.

Jenna is now old enough to ask hard questions, and begins to understand more about the harrowing circumstances of Cameron's home life then, and why they were kept from her. And she's also forced to reexamine painful and frightening memories in their shared past, as well as her own transformation to the person she is now. How much can people change? Can you ever really escape yourself? The answers here are hard, but also hard-won.

When I read pre-pub descriptions of Sweethearts, I was skeptical. The plot just seemed too bizarre to be realistic, and yet, it is. I tried to find a passage from Sweethearts to demonstrate what makes it so emotionally powerful, but that's not how Zarr works. As in Story of a Girl the language is fairly unadorned, and there's no one paragraph that encapsulates it all.

The book's exceptional resonance is accumulated gradually, painfully, and realistically, and in the end, it feels like you've experienced the long-repressed build to a good cry alongside the protagonist, rather than the emotionally manipulative line that sets you off.

Zarr's books will appeal to fans of Sarah Dessen (Someone Like You, The Truth About Forever) and Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak, Prom), but her ability to strike deep, immediately recognizable chords of feeling in her readers sets her above even these YA fiction stars.

My New Favorite Author: Southland by Nina Revoyr

Southland by Nina Revoyr

In the wake of the Margaret Seltzer faux-gangster memoir scandal last month, novelist Denise Hamilton wrote a column for the Times recommending a book to wash away the bad taste of that whole mess: Understand This by the wonderful Jervey Tervalon. The book focuses on the lives of eight teens living in South Central Los Angeles, and is, Hamilton writes, "as haunting and painful and tough and tender and true as Seltzer's memoir is false."

Alongside Tervalon's book, I'd also suggest Nina Revoyr's Southland, which captures an altogether different, and seldom examined side of South Central -- its history as one of Los Angeles's first racially mixed neighborhoods.

The book's main character is Jackie Ishida, a fourth generation Japanese-American woman whose parents' drive towards assimilation and upward mobility have effectively divorced her from her family's past. Though she's a UCLA law student and her parents are doctors, her grandfather, Frank, owned a grocery store in the Crenshaw district and raised his children there until the 1965 Watts riots.

When Frank dies in 1994, Jackie discovers an old will among his papers, leaving the store to Curtis Martindale, a man she's never heard of. A little investigation leads her to Curtis's cousin, Jimmy Lanier, who gives her some shocking news. Curtis Martindale was one of four African-American boys found locked in Frank's walk-in freezer after the riots. The murders were never reported to the police, since the neighborhood's beat cop, a white officer who frequently brutalized the black and Japanese residents, was seen leading the boys inside the store. Jackie and Jimmy decide to put together enough evidence to bring a case against the white officer, and begin tracking down people from the old neighborhood.

Revoyr intertwines this search with flashbacks spanning six decades, and told from a variety of character POVs. We see the Japanese-American interment camps of World War II and the segregation that exists for black workers in the Long Beach shipyards. But we also see the Family Bowl, frequented by Japanese and African-American Crenshaw district residents alike, and racially integrated neighborhoods where people are genuinely neighborly.

Revoyr doesn't view the past idyllically, but she's able to see a brief moment in time where Los Angeles could have moved in a much different direction. Here, and in her equally terrific The Age of Dreaming, she provides devastating historical accounts of racial prejudice in Los Angeles's sometimes white-washed past.

Although I've come to Revoyr's writing only recently, I can't recommend her enough. She's too good to miss.

Not Shocking

Pastrami vs. knowledge? In Los Angeles, pastrami wins.

Langer's ousts Central Library in LA Magazine's kinda weird "64 Greatest Things About L.A." showdown.

How to Make a Doctor Smile

Me: (upon being told that all was essentially well and curable) Oh, Dr. _______, thank you! I spent five minutes on WebMD this morning, and had myself convinced that I had a hole in my eardrum and was going deaf. Then I decided I should probably find out from a real doctor. Thank you so much!

Doc: (beaming) Well, um, that's the downside of WebMD.

(Note: a slightly modified version of this dialogue also works with librarians)

Glorious Grits from Termite Hall

We've written about this book before, but now that we've had time to try out a few recipes it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Termite Hall is full of the author's signature wit and charm - and it's a heckuva read for a cookbook - but we'd hate to mistake the garnish for the main course.

Though we've only made a handful of dishes to date, each has been a winner. Granted, we've studiously avoided some of the more esoteric dishes - I'm pretty sure I can die happy having never tasted aspic - but the more gelatinous courses are definitely in the minority.

Of the recipes we've tried, my favorite by far is the first one we made: grits and corn pudding. We followed Eugene's advice and fried up some sausage and pears (with a little brown sugar added), and then served them over the pudding. It was nineteen kinds of awesome. And better still, the next morning we hauled out the cast-iron skillet and made fried grits with the leftovers. And that, friends, was good eatin'.

So, we thought we'd share - bon appétit!

Grits and Corn Pudding from Eugene Walter's Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall.

Cook 1 cup grits in 4 cups water, 1 tsp. salt, stirring constantly. When grits come away from side of pan, remove from fire, let cool awhile. Add 1/2 cup milk, tin of creamed corn, tablespoon unsalted butter, pinch of salt, dash of cayenne as well as freshly-ground black pepper. Add one cup grated sharp cheese. Fold in thoroughly 3 beaten eggs, pour into buttered casserole, dot top with pea sized dabs of butter. Bake in moderate oven 30 or 40 minutes or until knife comes out clean. Good with pork sausage and fried hard pears for Sunday brunch.

Dang. Now I'm hungry.

The 1947project Is Dead!

Long live the 1947project!

The L.A. historic true crime-a-day project has morphed into something new and wonderful, a house-by-house exploration of a lost Angeleno neighborhood:

"For the next year, we will be exploring the lost neighborhood of Bunker Hill in all its permutations. Yes, we'll be reporting on the crimes upon the hill, but we'll also look at architecture, social life, notable residents, transportation, redevelopment, its mysteries and what small survivors remain from the glory days. With this project, we intend to shine a light on a community that was displaced by a well intentioned but misguided slum clearance plan that tore the heart out of L.A.'s downtown, a blow the city still staggers from."

Swing by the new digs.

In Defense of the Seven Deadly Words

Last week, I expressed some chagrin over my use of what Bob Harris of the NYT's Paper Cuts called the seven deadly words of book reviewing.

The 200+ snarksome, pissy comments generated by the post set forth a ton more. Apparently "sweeping epic," "tour de force," "page-turner," "readable," "wickedly funny/darkly comic," "nuanced," and "rollicking" are making people want to "claw their eyes out" in droves.

Yes, there are a few bits of book-reviewese that I dislike immensely: luminous, dazzling, and wise, to name a few. And while I feel that literary criticism is probably ill-served by the overuse of this language, I also believe that book reviewing needs it. And I'll stand on Michiko Kakutani's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say this.

What I do, what many other lit bloggers do, and even what most "legitimate" book reviewers do isn't literary criticism, it's readers' advisory. We're telling our readers why they might or might not want to pick up a book, and those readers are possessed of an understandably short attention span. After all, why would anyone waste their time reading about a book that they don't want to read?

So, we have to work fast.

However, overused the word "taut" may be, it tells the reader something about an author's writing style in the same way that "rollicking" tells us something about the pacing and tone, and "page-turner" about the general reading experience. These words are shorthand, a kind of secret readers' code that lets us know as quickly as possible whether we want to pursue a book.

And I happen to like books that are "poignant."

I used to write 1000-word reviews for venues more legitimate than my own sorry little blog, but eventually the process began to feel like an empty exercise in saying something that hadn't already been said, using far more words than needed to be used in the first place.

Because in nearly every case, I'd decided that I wanted to review the book by reading a 150-word review in PW or Library Journal or Booklist.

A book review needs to serve the interests of the reader, not the ego of the reviewer. And while there's a place for the dense and linguistically classy review, I'll usually opt for the populist approach in my review-reading and review-writing. Hell, it's what all the kids are doing anyways, even the NYT.

It's more "readable."*
_____________________
* The only "Seven Deadly Words" comment that actively annoyed me was the one that read, “'Readable.' I don’t know what that means. Is the work grammatical? Is it a comment about the book’s typeface?"

I happen to love this word, which describes a piece of writing with qualities that appeal to a wide range of readers. The librarians at the Madison Public Library have done an excellent job of tapping into this appeal with their "Too Good to Miss" and "Beyond Bestsellers: Best of the New" book lists.

Um, don't miss them.