Maus combines two interwoven stories revolving around the Spiegelman family. In the 1970s, Art Spiegelman (as a fictionalized version of himself) interviews his father Vladek, a Jewish veteran of the Polish Army in World War II and a Holocaust survivor, over a period of several years or his new book. The events Vladek recounts to his son are then portrayed through Vladek's own eyes as they happened in 1939-1945. Normally a story like this would be unremarkable, given its similarity to many other accounts of the Holocaust, but Spiegelman makes one vital change: he draws all the characters as animals. Jews are portrayed as mice (Maus is German for mouse, unsurprisingly), Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and so on. There are even permutations of each group, such as an African-American being drawn as an all-black dog, German Jews being drawn as mice with cat's stripes or cats with mouse whiskers, or Jews posing as non-Jewish Poles being drawn as mice wearing pig masks.

I love Maus not only for its rich symbolism, which I'll get into later, but also for its fundamentally relatable quality. Art and Vladek don't get along; their relationship has been strained ever since the death of Art's mother Anja (also a Holocaust survivor) during his teen years, the aftermath Art recorded in a short comic in the middle of the book (with human characters, not animals). Art notes to his wife at one point that Vladek displays all the stereotypes of "the miserly old Jew". Vladek is so distraught with guilt and grief over Anja's death that he withdraws into his own little bubble, irritated by any intruders. When Art stirs up his father's painful old memories for his book, the tension comes to a head as Vladek relives his days as a concentration camp inmate. As the interviews progress, Art realizes that the Vladek he knows--a bitter, cantankerous, penny-pinching old man whom he at least partially blames for his mother's death--is completely at odds with the historical Vladek's extraordinary feats of perseverance, selflessness, and survival. I say this situation is relatable not because I know a Holocaust survivor, but because Art and Vladek's relationship is so much like the one I have with my own father, it's eerie. Just as Art and Vladek bicker over insignificant things like using wooden coat hangers for guests when a wire one would do perfectly, so too do my dad and I not see eye-to-eye on petty issues. Vladek's use of the word "shvartser," the Yiddish equivalent of "nigger," to describe a black character--which comes as a shocker, since Holocaust survivors should be experts on the evils of racism--parallels with my dad, who I've heard make occasional derogatory comments that I don't agree with about other racial groups. By the end of the book, the trials and tribulations that Art and Vladek go through--Art by dealing with his father's eccentricities and foibles, Vladek by reliving traumatic memories of his time in Auschwitz--help them understand each other better, just as my own dad and I had to get into a few major fights before we understood each other better.

That said, I'd like to jump back a little in the discussion and delve a little deeper into Spiegelman's liberal use of symbolism. As I said earlier, the Jews, both during Vladek's flashbacks and while Art interviews him, are portrayed as mice. This falls directly in line with the Nazis' view of the Jews as vermin to be exterminated. However, this is also a nod to the Jews' need to hide from the Gestapo in German-occupied territory: mice must hide from cats or be killed. On the reverse, the portrayal of Germans as cats shows the cruel nature of the Holocaust: cats don't just kill and eat mice, they capture and toy with them first. In the Nazis' view, Jews were the natural enemies of all true Aryans, just as cats are the natural enemies of mice, and thus did they justify the systematic murder of any European Jews they could find.

Masks are an important symbol as well. While in the Polish Army, Vladek wears a pig mask to pass himself off as a non-Jewish Pole when he is captured during the German blitzkrieg at the outbreak of World War II. Upon his release and repatriation, he and Anja must walk the streets of their hometown, Sosnowiec, wearing pig masks in order to evade the cats of the Gestapo. Spiegelman has said in interviews that this technique, along with his general portrayal of humans as animals, was intended to show the absurdity of racial profiling. However, I also took away a second meaning--that, at the end of the day, humans and animals really aren't all that different in behavior.

The most significant symbol, however, is that of Vladek's exercise bike. Whenever Art interviews him in the '70s, Vladek hops on the bike and begins to pedal as he recounts the events of his Holocaust experience. The faster he pedals, the more intense the memories get. For example, there is a scene in the book about Vladek and Anja's first son (Art's older brother) Richieu, who was born before the war and was only a small child at the time of the German occupation. He was poisoned by an aunt out of fear of capture by the Nazis and deportation to a concentration camp. As the focus shifts back to the '70s, there is the older Vladek, furiously pedaling away while Art looks on with his tape recorder. The use of a stationary bike, rather than some other form of exercise equipment, is key: Vladek wants to leave the past behind, but no matter how hard he tries, no matter how fast he pedals, he simply can't outrun it. The memories will always remain, and rather than confront them, Vladek shuts them out--until Art pushes him for more information.

Finally, the drawing style is simple, yet effective. Spiegelman uses no colored ink in Maus; everything is drawn in black and white, with the single exception of the aforementioned mid-book mini-comic "Prisoner on the Hell Planet: A Case History," which is drawn mostly in varying shades of gray. Characters are told apart only by their clothing. The lines are sharp, almost angular. This serves a twofold purpose: first, to show the stark contrast between Art and Vladek, as well as the contrast been the former's perception of the latter and the reality; second, to once again show just how absurd it is to divide a population along racial lines. Almost all the characters in each group of animals are indistinguishable from their fellows, except for clothing. According to an interview he gave in 1991, Spiegelman stated that he purposefully intended to make every character of a given nationality look alike, because "these metaphors...are intended to self-destruct in my book--and I think they do self-destruct."

This was not the first time I read Maus, but at least for me, this book never gets old. Rich in symbolism, heartbreakingly tragic, wryly funny, and poignantly written, this ought to be required reading in every high school literature class. At least in my opinion, it's that important.

American Born Chinese is really three parallel stories that don't intersect until the very end of the book. The first is a retelling of the Chinese fable of the Monkey King, who defies the gods in order to prove he is their equal. The second is about the life and trials of Jin Wang, a young Chinese-American boy who faces latent racism at school. The third is the tale of Danny, a regular white American kid who is suddenly forced to deal with his blatantly stereotypical Chinese cousin Chin-Kee. These stories all run parallel to each other, but finally intertwine in the closing pages, in a surprising way that I'll discuss later. For now though, I'll just talk a bit about the way Yang tackles the issues faced by Asian-Americans.

Discrimination against Asian-Americans has been a problem since...well, since Asian immigrants have been coming to this country. The railroads across the West were built by primarily Chinese laborers who amounted to little more than wage slaves--men working long hours in oftentimes dangerous conditions with no benefits, for a daily wage we would consider insulting today. President Chester A. Arthur even authorized the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended the immigration process for Chinese immigrants and threatened any who stayed without the proper credentials with imprisonment and deportation. This law remained on the books until 1943, a shocking 61 years.

Today we would consider such practices to be morally reprehensible, but at least in Yang's eyes, the racism of yesteryear is still ingrained in the national consciousness today, albeit latently. Jin's story in particular showcases just how those attitudes are still prevalent. Jin, a young second-generation Chinese immigrant, is bullied by his classmates in his new school due to his race, leading him to internalize feelings of disdain for his mother culture, which still has a profound effect on his life. Some kids, when exposed to messages like that, will develop feelings similar to Jin's--they see their racial, ethnic, or cultural difference as a social handicap, and will do anything to assimilate into whichever culture they feel pressured to join. In my opinion, not only is this a disservice to that child's home culture, but it also exposes the prevalent culture--usually the stereotypical "American" life--as nothing more than a vast conglomeration of people without identity. There's no reason why anyone should be bullied or picked on because they are different. Think about how many cultures have been carried to the U.S. by immigrants over the years, and how many new ones have developed in the melting pot. It's just not right that any culture should be singled out as inferior; be proud of it, I say. I'm fiercely proud of my Irish and German heritage, for example. So while I empathized with Jin's feelings of discomfort when faced with his "Asian-ness," it was hard for me, as a person who takes their heritage seriously, to understand why he felt that way. You should always be proud of who you are; "fitting in," as far as that term goes, is for people who are too scared or too lazy to take pride in where they come from.

But maybe that's why Yang included that facet of Jin's personality. That inner conflict--who you are versus who you think you should be--drives his storyline. Of course, the flipside of that is Danny's storyline, a sitcom in which he must deal with his walking, talking Asian stereotype of a cousin, Chin-Kee (and isn't that interesting, that Yang, himself a Chinese-American, would include a character like that?). Chin-Kee doesn't seem to have a problem with who he is, yet his behavior is so outrageous that you can't help but feel sorry for Danny, whose life gets progressively worse as Chin-Kee's antics destroy his social life. Danny's discomfort around his cousin serves as a counterpoint to Jin's, and that's where the ending ties everything together. Jin goes to bed one night after a fight with his friends (the only other Asian kids in his school) and wakes up as Danny, who tries to stop Chin-Kee from embarrassing him yet again. In the ensuing fistfight, Chin-Kee is revealed to be the Monkey King from the first tale, who changes Jin back to his normal form and tells him that he came to serve as his conscience. Jin, afraid that he appears to the people around him as Chin-Kee, feels like Danny (as evidenced by his initial treatment of his friend Wei Chen) even while he still lives his life within a heavily Chinese-influenced culture. An old Chinese woman earlier in the story tells him, "It's easy to become anything you wish...so long as you are willing to forfeit your soul," but the Monkey King does indeed serve as Jin's conscience: he reminds him, and the reader, that he is not his own stereotype, and that he can still be who he wants to be while maintaining his cultural identity.

Even though this won't replace DMZ as my favorite graphic novel ever, Yang's delightful use of the twist ending really made this read enjoyable. I thought the way Yang tied all the loose threads together to show Jin, the protagonist, how to deal with the latent racism he faces at school and his consequent inner fear of being stereotyped. The simple drawing style, a reflection of Jin's childlike perspective, was just the icing on the cake. I may very well use this book in one of my classes in the future...although sneaking a character like Chin-Kee past the school board might prove to be a challenge.

Before I get started, I'd like to go on record saying that as a history buff, none of the information I read in this book surprised me. Hitler's boyhood in Austria with his distant father and doting mother, his multiple rejections from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, his formative years in the army--none of that is new to me. But that doesn't make it any less fascinating. Hitler, despicable though his actions were, was nothing if not a complicated, multifaceted man. After reading Giblin's book, I did a little browsing on Wikipedia and found the following lines from Mein Kampf:

"There were very few Jews in Linz. In the course of centuries the Jews who lived there had become Europeanised in external appearance and were so much like other human beings that I even looked upon them as Germans. The reason why I did not then perceive the absurdity of such an illusion was that the only external mark which I recognized as distinguishing them from us was the practice of their strange religion. As I thought that they were persecuted on account of their faith my aversion to hearing remarks against them grew almost into a feeling of abhorrence. I did not in the least suspect that there could be such a thing as a systematic antisemitism."

Did my eyes deceive me, or did I just read that Hitler actually felt sorry for the Jews at one point in his life? Of course, in the next few lines of that excerpt, he goes into detail about how passing a Hasidic Jew on the street made him an anti-Semite on nationalistic grounds, which says all kinds of interesting things about Hitler's psychology. I love those "what-if" scenarios, where Hitler (although he didn't know it at the time) reached a crossroads in his life, and what might have happened if things had gone the other way. For example, he was rejected twice from the Vienna Academy of Arts; reproductions of his artwork are included in the book, and I have to say, they're not bad; not amazing or groundbreaking at all, but not bad. What interests me is what would have happened if he had been accepted. Most likely, he would never have joined the army, which means he would never have acquired his martial fetish, which probably would result in his being much less of a German nationalist and much more of a law-abiding Austrian citizen. Giblin, unfortunately, doesn't really explore those scenarios, but since this is a biography and not an alternative history novel, I'll let it slide.

But all that aside, what really struck me about this book was its evenhandedness. Giblin takes the position of what one of my history professors called "disinterested scholarship" (as opposed to "uninterested"). That can be a precarious approach with books about Hitler and the Nazis; you have to be careful not to cross the line into praise or you're likely to be ostracized by the scholarly and literary communities, but you can't just write a fiery condemnation because anyone can do that. Ripping on Hitler is the easiest thing in the world to do. This, in my opinion, is where Giblin succeeds. His approach of "just the facts" helps paint a more even portrait of Hitler by revealing him for what he was: a charismatic, conflicted (some would say tormented), passionate man who loved dogs, painting, and military history. This was a guy who could laugh at a Mickey Mouse cartoon one day and order the extermination of thousands non-Aryans the next. The dichotomy is astounding on its own, and in Giblin's straightforward portrayal of the facts (all meticulously researched, by the way) the stark relief is all the sharper.

Although Giblin's evenhandedness is admirable, in my opinion, he goes a little too far; The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler often reads almost like a history textbook. Since Giblin wrote the book for a middle school/high school reading level, you would think he would know to avoid clinical descriptions of historical events. If there's one thing kids hate to read, it's academese (even academese written for their reading level). I'm not exactly saying he should dumb down the language of the book or anything, but let's be honest: history bores a lot of kids. I'm just of the opinion that it's better for them to understand a concept in simpler terms that they can better understand, than for them to be forced to memorize a complex explanation of the concept that they probably won't retain anyway.

That said, Giblin's tendency to air on the academic side does come in handy in one respect: the photographs. Everything in Hitler's life, from the Nuremburg rallies to Hitler's baby photos, is represented, and though all are in black-and-white and some are pretty out of focus, they serve to not only break the tedium of the text for young readers, but also to drive home for them that Hitler actually existed, and the things he did actually happened. I'm sure that to many young history students, Hitler is merely a name and a face that they associate with evil because they've been told to do so. Seeing his entire life documented in photo form allows the middle school history student for whom the book was intended to absorb the material differently--by including a photo of Hitler as a child, for example, Giblin allows his intended audience the opportunity to realize that Hitler was real, not just a name, a photo, and a few lines of description in their textbooks. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is used to brilliant effect here, and I know it probably sounds bad, but I wish more biographies written for younger readers would include more photos.

Giblin, despite his rather dry writing style, really got my attention with this book. I used to read history books all the time, even when not required to at school, and The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler made me want to get back into it again. If I were a history teacher and not a literature teacher, I might hesitate to add this to my students' reading list due to its slow pace, but as I said earlier, this isn't a novel, it's a biography, and an extremely well-researched one at that, so I suppose that can be excused.

Francisco Jimenez is the son of Mexican farm workers who emigrated illegally from Guadalajara to southern California in the '40s, and he grew up in a series of labor camps as his family moved from job to job. His experiences, here presented in the form of short vignettes from throughout his early life, form the basis for The Circuit. I've long thought that too many Americans refer to illegal immigrants abstractly--that is, we refer to them as one shadowy entity, a faceless group of vaguely unpleasant boogeymen that is somehow holding America back economically and socially. In my opinion, that's a totally wrongheaded approach. I'm not sure whether Jimenez intended to send a message to white America with this book or not, but I certainly picked up something. After reading it, I thought Jimenez is trying to say, "Yes, we exist. Yes, we are human. We're just trying to find a way to make ends meet."

The right wing in this country has long demonized illegal immigrants (a term which, in the political parlance of today, is unfortunately synonymous with "Mexican"), telling horror stories of illegal aliens coming here simply to mooch off the healthcare and education systems without having to pay a dime in taxes. One of my former roommates (who I don't speak to anymore, partially because of sociopolitical issues like this) told me once about how an illegal Mexican immigrant crashed a car into one of his friend's cars and fled the scene of the crash for fear of being caught by the authorities and deported; he then had some choice words about "border jumpers." Not only do I think it's unfair that immigrants, illegal though they are, are treated and spoken about in this fashion, but I also think that the people saying those things seem to have an extremely short memory. We are a nation built on immigration, both legal and illegal. If you don't have any Native American ancestors in your family tree, you are a descendent of immigrants, and that's a fact. Jimenez knows this, and I think he sought to humanize those people who are so often marginalized by right-wing pundits simply because they came here for a better life. Jimenez' parents (indeed, his entire family) worked long, difficult days in the fields picking vegetables, a job no American worker would to do, yet today they would still be ostracized simply because they jumped the border. That's what I don't understand about people who constantly scream about how all illegals need to be deported: these are people who have families to feed and support, just like us, and they do the jobs no one else wants to do. In a way, illegal Mexican immigrants work harder than most natural-born American laborers, and for less pay, fewer benefits, and no recognition. Like Jimenez and his family, they work their fingers to the bone for a few dollars a day and nary a complaint is heard from them. But when a white, natural-born American citizen has to take a small pay cut, he goes crazy...then rants that night at the dinner table in his suburban McMansion about "those lazy Mexicans" who are just here to leech off "hardworking Americans." The duplicity is mind-boggling.

Jimenez, however, doesn't use The Circuit as a soapbox to expound on the myriad problems faced by immigrant workers. Rather, he uses the book as a way to put a human face on an issue that many Americans vaguely refer to as a "problem." The stories, which are sequential (though they do not necessarily take place one right after the other), show not only what life was like for Jimenez and his family in their adopted country, but also how one family perseveres in the face of adversity that would tear most families apart. There are no stereotypical lazy Mexicans here; on the contrary, the work ethic shown by Jimenez' family and their fellow workers is astounding. Even while heavily pregnant with another child that the family almost certainly can't afford, his mother continues to work as the camp cook, thus satisfying her own desire to be useful as well as providing a necessary service to the rest of the camp. His father, when plagued by back problems, wants to keep working, but his fellow workers keep him off his feet and assume his workload of their own accord. Jimenez himself writes heart-rending passages about how upset it made him to leave school every time his family moved to another camp, and eventually he becomes a field worker like his parents, striving each and every day to earn enough money to eat and buy a few other necessities. Each family member contributed to the survival of the overall family unit, and as a result, they grew even closer than before. Jimenez does his best to emphasize mutual love and support, faith, and hard work in order to break the stereotype of the freeloading illegal alien.

After reading this book, I will never understand how so many people can say that illegal immigrants are just here for a free ride. The struggles that the Jimenez family encounters in The Circuit are legion, but somehow they emerge as a tighter, more cohesive family unit than ever before. Something tells me that a white, suburban, middle-class family from the Heartland wouldn't be so lucky. The Circuit is Jimenez' defiant reply to all proponents of locking down America's borders. But rather than accusing the American public of being ungrateful--instead of saying, "What would you do without us?"--Jimenez instead says, "We are really not that different from you." As I said earlier, he puts a human face on a group of people that too many natural citizens view as an abstract problem, and that is where The Circuit succeeds so beautifully.

The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler tells the life story of the twentieth century's most feared and reviled dictator. Beginning at Hitler's birth in Austria and covering his stint in the German military during World War I, his rise through the ranks of the obscure National Socialist Workers Party in the 1920s, his election to the post of Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and ending with his fall from power and suicide during the closing days of World War II, Giblin paints an intimate, unbiased picture of what made one of the most hated men in history tick.

Giblin makes a point of not passing judgment on Hitler--history has done a good enough job of that already. Instead, Giblin takes a Dragnet-like approach of "just the facts." The opening chapter of the book is a concise two-page explanation of what Hitler did during his years in power, but passes no judgment. At the very end of the chapter, Giblin asks several questions not about Hitler, but about the climate that produced him--how was he able to gain widespread support for his policies? What kind of psyche does it take to construct a plan to eliminate an entire race? Why did he nearly succeed in his crusade? "Those are the questions for which countless biographers, historians, and psychologists have sought answers in the years since Hitler's death," Giblin writes, and his book, written for adolescents in the middle school/high school age group, endeavors to answer those same questions in an age-appropriate manner.

Giblin's writing style throughout the book is clear and to the point; you will not find any grandstanding or loftily worded passages about the evils of Hitler's regime here. All the details are presented in the disinterested manner of a historian in search of "just the facts." This could make for ponderous reading at times, especially for the book's intended audience. But the inclusion of numerous photographs from Hitler's early days, his stint in the German Army during World War I, and his early activities with the Nazis, as well as several of his sketches and paintings, help break the tedium; young readers may be surprised to learn that Hitler was indeed an aspiring artist and loved to draw. (Note: what might have happened to the world if Hitler had been accepted to the Vienna Academy of the Arts instead of being turned away multiple times and joining the military instead is a thought that should give the reader pause.)

Giblin's book, though perhaps a bit tedious, is highly informative for any young reader seeking information on one of the worst tyrants in history. The inclusion of period photos and Hitler's own artwork help drive home the point that this man was just like anyone else; the text reinforces the idea that he was, to a greater extent than many realize, a product of his environment. If young readers can think critically about that concept, they can also draw conclusions not just about Hitler and Nazi Germany, but their own environments as well.

Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World retells the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to traverse Antarctica (the South Pole had been reached for the first time two years earlier by Roald Amundsen). After their ship, Endurance, was frozen in and crushed by the pack ice thousands of miles from any form of civilization, Shackleton and his 27 men spent five months camping on the open ice, trying to stay alive in the face of a vicious Antarctic winter. Shackleton himself and a handpicked crew of five men eventually made a harrowing 800-mile journey to desolate South Georgia Island in the Atlantic Ocean in an open 20-foot lifeboat to secure help for the rest of the crew. All 28 men survived, and Shackleton returned to England a hero. Hollywood couldn't have written a better ending.

I love stories like this. They seem too incredible to be true, but there they are, staring you in the face with facts. Shackleton and his men did survive, and indeed, he returned to the Antarctic seven years later at the head of another expedition. He died of a heart attack on South Georgia, the site of his rescue, in 1922, and was fittingly buried there. It's a story that, by all rights, sounds like it was dreamed up by some Hollywood screenwriter in a corner office in sunny California, but we humans have a way of surprising even ourselves with our indomitableness and will to survive. It's a story that's too good not to be true.

I've always been an avid history buff, and while I was growing up I went through a long fixation on the sinking of the Titanic. I read every book about the ship that I could get my hands on: firsthand accounts of the discovery of the wreck by Dr. Robert Ballard, collections of survivors' tales, and even some of the sizeable body of apocrypha that the disaster generated (Captain Smith committing suicide and the band playing "Nearer My God to Thee" as the ship took its final dive, for example). Most, if not all, of these books sought to impart to the reader some kind of lesson--whether with historical facts or with admonitions on the hubris of man--and, as I recall, were age-appropriate (this was around my fourth- and fifth-grade years). It's in that respect that that I think Armstrong succeeds. Where the story of the Titanic was essentially a Greek tragedy, where if any one thing had gone differently, the ship might have escaped disaster, Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World seeks to entertain as well as inform and instruct, and a 22-year-old college student can pick it up and be just as engrossed in the story as a 12-year-old sixth-grader. Both individuals can absorb the same lessons and draw the same conclusions about hubris, nature's fury, and the human spirit with equal ease.

One of my favorite novels is Dan Simmons' The Terror, a fictionalized version of the 1845 Franklin Expedition to the Canadian Arctic in order to discover the location of the fabled Northwest Passage. Simmons' description of the biting cold, the otherworldly effect that three months of total darkness has on the polar landscape, and the mounting desperation and hopelessness of the men of the expedition really brought home for me what Armstrong was trying to convey. As I said earlier, human beings, fickle and fragile though we are, have an incredible hidden capacity for resourcefulness and a boundless will to survive when faced with overwhelming odds and almost certain death. Armstrong expertly captures that fierce determination with this story. Reading about the cold, the howling winds, the lack of food and other supplies, the ever-shifting ice--I may just have an overactive imagination, but Armstrong's descriptions put me right there in that lifeboat with Shackleton and his men. It wasn't hard at all to imagine what must have been going through those men's minds when their expedition leader told them that some had to stay behind while others had to make a not-at-all certain bid for rescue in an open boat in the most desolate and empty area of the world.

I think Armstrong and other writers of nonfiction for adolescents should be given some kind of special medal. Not only does their work entertain readers with seemingly impossible but entirely real feats of human achievement, but it also educates. How many schoolchildren had never heard of Ernest Shackleton before reading this book? Luckily, I did, but others might not be so fortunate. Shackleton's story is one of the greatest exploits of leadership and survival ever recorded, and as we all know, history holds all kinds of lessons for those who know to look for them. But again, how many kids don't know this story? How many of them, having never been exposed to such a tale, might read this and feel the same fire that Shackleton and his men surely felt deep within their chests when they resolved not to just give up and die in the Antarctic cold? That's another thing about stories like this: they inspire. I'm not going to rush out and organize my own Antarctic expedition anytime soon, of course, but reading Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World and other books like it really makes you wonder what you would do if placed in a situation like that. Nonfiction, particularly tales of survival, allows you to hold a mirror up to yourself and ask, "How would I react?" After inwardly asking that question, I find that the reader, more often than not, not only gains a little extra insight into themselves and their own spirit, but also gains a deeper appreciation for the historical facts of what happened and the human factors that brought about the outcome. If Shackleton and his men had simply given up, they would've become just another footnote in the history books, casualties of mankind's never-ending pursuit of going as far as possible. But their survival has become a celebrated story of the inexhaustibility of the human spirit, and not only willingness, but also readiness to endure the hardest of hardships.

Cameron Smith, the sixteen-year-old stoner protagonist, is diagnosed early on in the book with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, variant BSE--the incurable human form of mad cow. The book is a darkly humorous journey that may or may not take place entirely in Cameron's mind as his brain slowly succumbs to his illness, but regardless of whether or not the events are real, I thought it was funny.

While it certainly seems like the events of the story are the product of a fever dream--and many online reviews seem to agree with this--I'm not convinced. Bray never specifically says whether it's real or not, and let's face it--adolescent literature, particularly fantasy, is getting weirder every year. I'm not sure if that's just a ploy to keep young readers engaged or what, but it worked on me. I like the idea of being sent on a quest to find a cure for a supposedly incurable disease by a punk-rock angel, and have it written as if it were actually happening. That's what fantasy literature is--fantastical things are supposed to happen as if they were everyday occurrences. In my opinion, people who read this book and thought Cameron's adventures all happened in his head kind of missed the point. Whether or not a weird road trip happens in your head during the course of a fantasy book is totally irrelevant. The way I see it, Cameron's trip (and that word can be taken in more than one context) is more a search for his own personal meaning, rather than a mere hallucination. They say that perception is reality. If you can see, hear, touch, taste, or feel something, it's real...right? I certainly think so, and I think Bray does, too, which is why she never explicitly states that the things Cameron experiences and the people he meets are real or not. It's implied.

That said, Cameron himself is an interesting case study. One review I read said that he was cut from the same cloth as Holden Caulfield, the whiny and self-important protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye and, as I said way back at the beginning of the semester, one of my most hated literary characters of all time. I have to disagree with that statement wholeheartedly. While Caulfield (at least from what I remember) never takes the time given to him by J.D. Salinger to do a little self-reflection, Bray makes Cameron do just that for the whole length of the book. Cameron begins as a stereotypical teenager: a disaffected, disconnected, sarcastic, pot-smoking underachiever, complete with a popular sister and well-to-do parents. He's a lot like me as a teen (minus the pot, which came later, but that's a story for another time); our families are even similar. His personal motto is "no expectations, no disappointments" (even that sounds familiar). Like me, Cameron is not dumb; he just doesn't apply himself. The initial symptoms of his incurable brain disease are chalked up to his drug use and "bad attitude," but when he finds out that he is inevitably going to die of mad cow disease, he falls into a coma--and embarks on his whimsical quest to find a cure from the mysterious Dr. X. The people he encounters along the way--Dulcie the punk-rock angel, Gonzo the video game-obsessed dwarf, the undercover revolutionary Library Girl, even the Norse god Balder (who is trapped in the shape of a lawn gnome)--teach him a valuable lesson: that reality is what you make of it.

Some people found it troubling that Cameron could not make that connection in his "waking life," only in his dream state. I think that's the point: Bray took a character who treated life as if it were a chore, and made him realize that that one life is the only one you get, so it's important to appreciate it while you have it. It's sad that Cameron had to contract a fatal disease in order to recognize that fact, but in my opinion at least, it was necessary. Cameron was so apathetic that he needed to stare his own impending death in the face to realize how valuable life is.

Cameron isn't the only one who comes to a realization; Library Girl also makes an interesting observation about the nature of self-worth. She explains to Cameron that "a lot of the stories or words or even ideas contained in most books could be negative or hurtful or make you question your happiness or even question the concept of happiness as an ideal." She continues by telling him that Don Quixote, for example, may be enjoyable to some readers, but it frustrates others because they don't understand it right away, "so it had to go." I thought this was highly important to an understanding of the book's themes: just because you don't get something doesn't make you stupid or inadequate. You have to consciously tell yourself that you are good enough, even if you don't quite measure up to other people's standards. What are other people's standards worth, anyway? In Bray's eyes (and mine), the answer is "not much." Library Girl's removal of Don Quixote from the shelves in order to avoid inducing a "nonpositive experience" in readers is the embodiment of the idea that some people aren't good enough, so standards must be lowered. But she's missing the point: there shouldn't be any standards. Standards themselves create a sense of inadequacy, and they shouldn't be a measure of self-worth.

The Hunger Games (which is apparently the first book in a trilogy that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay, both of which I'll have to check out now) takes place in a post-apocalyptic future, in the nation of Panem, which rose from the ashes of what used to be North America. Panem is divided into thirteen areas: the Capitol, where the affluent live in luxury, and twelve poorer surrounding districts. At some point before the story begins, the districts staged an unsuccessful rebellion against the Capitol; the Capitol responded by forcing each district to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen (called "tributes" in the story) to the Capitol to participate in the Hunger Games, a deathmatch in an outdoor arena where each child must fend for him or herself until only one is left standing. The tributes are chosen by lottery, and when young Primrose Everdeen is picked to go to the Games, her older sister Katniss volunteers to go in her place.

I read an interview with Suzanne Collins in Publishers Weekly, in which she talked about her inspiration for this book. She claims her inspiration came from channel-surfing on TV one day, and the lines between a reality show and coverage of the Iraq War "began to blur in this very unsettling way." She also says she drew inspiration from the ancient Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Now that she mentions it, I can see those inspirations come out in the story. Katniss is totally a futuristic version of Theseus, but that brings up a whole other point that I'll get to in the analysis section of my response.

Anyway, getting back to Collins' inspiration, I love moments like that. You'll be sitting down, not really being creative or whatever, and then something will just appear to you, whether in front of your real eyes or in your mind's eye, that makes you say, "How come I never thought about X like that?" It quite literally hits you like a thunderbolt: everything is illuminated for one glorious instant, and that instant is what produces ideas. It happens to me every once in a while, when I'm working an overnight shift or otherwise up late doing nothing. Something will just click, and I'll write lyrics for my band or a story for a class or whatever comes out. Collins took a moment like that, and crafted it into an entire universe with its own history, landscape, and norms. Something like that doesn't just happen every day.

I especially liked this story's themes of rebellion, and Collins makes effective use of that theme by filtering it through her adolescent characters. I've said in previous responses that growing up and going through puberty is one of the scariest, most confusing times in a person's life. You don't know why you're angry all the time; you don't even necessarily know who you're angry at. All you know is that you feel like something's wrong and has to be changed. I think that's why this book appealed to me so much. I never lost touch with the angry fifteen-year-old I used to be, and I still cheer inwardly when I read a book or see a movie in which a wrongfully persecuted kid outsmarts his adult oppressors. Katniss' defiance of the Capitol's wishes at the end of the book--to kill Peeta so there is only one winner of the Games--spoke volumes to me. It told me that Katniss was not content to just do what she was told, but to make her own way. It's also an excellent example of an adolescent taking adults to task for their behavior. Over the course of the Games, the leaders of Panem change the rules several times in order to make the Games more exciting for viewers at home to watch. Since audience support can be critical to a tribute's survival of the Games, and Katniss and Peeta band together to give themselves a better chance of survival, the authoritarian leaders change the rules to say that two tributes from the same district can win the Games as a pair. But when the rules are changed again in order to force Katniss to kill Peeta to increase viewership, the former threatens to commit suicide instead. This supreme act of defiance is imbued with a subliminal message of reversal: kids change the rules mid-game, whereas adults are supposed to abide by the rules no matter what. It speaks volumes about Katniss that, at least in this one way, she is more mature than her leaders.

That brings me to the point I was going to mention earlier. The fact that Collins chose the myth of Theseus as a basis for this book raises all kinds of interesting questions, particularly about human nature. The foremost observation in my mind was that not much has changed since Theseus entered the labyrinth and slew the Minotaur. People are just as obsessed with blood now as they were then, and may very well still be far into the future. In ancient Greek legend, Crete required Athens to send youths of both sexes to be devoured by the Minotaur as tribute after losing a war. Today, we watch UFC and other mixed martial arts on TV. In the future (or at least the future that Collins envisions), we will have the Hunger Games. The main point I'm trying to make is that human nature does not change, not even after a catastrophe that quite literally changed the world as we know it. Katniss, her family, and her friends exist in a world that is very different from ours, but also so alike that it's uncanny. In both worlds, the government is the ultimate authority; people have very little actual say in what happens to them (all illusions of freedom, choice, and independence to the contrary). In both worlds, people still watch bloodshed for amusement; the desire for entertainment at the expense of someone else's well-being is the same, and only the venue has changed. I think that was one of the main points Collins was trying to make in writing this book, and indeed, the whole trilogy: that no matter how advanced we think we are, we haven't changed much since leaving our caves thousands of years ago.

I talked with my roommates about this book quite a bit over the weekend. All of them had read it at some point or another in school (I read it for the first time as a freshman in high school), but not within the last five years. I was excited to revisit it for this class because a) I described it to my roommates as "Nineteen Eighty-Four for kids," and b) I've matured as a person since the first time I read it, and my attitudes on being an individual (as cliché as that sounds) are pretty firmly cemented on the side of "free expression for all." Jonas, the protagonist, lives in a world without memory or strife, where everyone is happy but identical to one another. All emotional depth has been eradicated from this seemingly idyllic world where society has taken the act of "blending in with the crowd" to an extreme with the Sameness doctrine, and Jonas becomes the apprentice to the Giver, the old man who stores everyone's memories from before Sameness. When Jonas experiences vivid pre-Sameness memories via the Giver's telepathy, he realizes that the world he lives in is devoid of everything beautiful: love, music, even color. He must then make the decision of staying and acting out his place in society as he is told, or breaking out and living life as it was meant to be lived. Ultimately, he chooses the latter, and that's why I love the book: it's a snapshot of a kid (Jonas is only twelve) standing up and making a conscious decision not to follow the herd, to make his own way.

If you went to a private Catholic school like I did, then I'm willing put money on the fact that, like me, you had a dress code or uniforms at your school. I grew up wearing nothing but navy blue, white, and red shirts, the only colors we were allowed to wear in elementary school. In middle school, it became green and white. In high school, we could wear any color, but it had to be a tucked-in collared shirt or sweatshirt, and khakis were a must. Guys' hair could not be longer than their shirt collar, and piercings and facial hair were out of the question. Girls were allowed only one piercing per ear, were not allowed to wear skirts above the knee, and could not dye their hair any unnatural colors (not even black). No one could wear clothing deemed "offensive" by the dean of students and principal, which could be whatever they wanted (I thought I was being rebellious by wearing AC/DC and Led Zeppelin T-shirts under my collared shirt to class every day). Basically, everyone had to look more or less the same. One girl in my class actually transferred schools in our sophomore year because she dyed her hair bright red and would not dye it back to her natural color when ordered by the principal; we had to sit through a long, school-wide assembly where the principal told us (and this is a direct quote) that "if you want to be an individual, go somewhere else." That really stuck with me, and having read The Giver the previous year for freshman English, I thought it was really ironic that a school so obsessed with conformity would require all its incoming freshmen to read a book that did nothing but rail against conformity.

Jonas was easy for me to relate to in high school. He had the special gift of being able to hear music and see color when no one else in his society could; my talent was being a natural on the drumset in a school that placed much more emphasis on sports than music. He began as a regular kid in his conformist society, while I conformed to the fashion and religious practices of my school. Finally, we both made a conscious decision to leave that conformity behind after experiencing something that opened our eyes to how hollow that life was: his impetus was experiencing memories through the Giver, while mine was listening to heavy metal for the first time.

That said, I believe that Lois Lowry fully intended to write this book for disaffected adolescents like me. While The Giver is not a feel-good story, she forces readers to ask themselves how they may be conforming to whatever society they live in. In other words, she uses Jonas to turn the mirror around and show it to the reader, which (in theory) should make them wonder: if that were me, how would I react? I think the message is especially powerful when the reader is under the age of 18. It's a well-known fact that kids are easily swayed by the herd mentality; it's hard to stand up and be an individual at a stage in development when not following the crowd is seen as weird or uncool. I know--it happened to me. But Lowry's choice of a 12-year-old boy for her protagonist is a telling reference to her intent in writing this book (at least in my opinion). The way I see it, Lowry chose to make Jonas a preteen and put him through the worst crisis a preteen can go through--being viewed as "different"--in order to show that, yes, it is possible to not only buck the trend everyone else follows, but also to make your own way. Jonas' choice to flee his home with baby Gabriel at the end of the book represents the final break between him and his old life; he has fully separated from the herd and, for better or worse, makes his own way. The ending is ambiguous--does he or does he not freeze to death? But there is a glimmer of hope in the music that floats from the houses Jonas sees through the snow--the promise that the grass is, indeed, greener on the other side of the fence.

I've never read any of Neil Gaiman's other books (I've seen the Coraline movie but that's it), but if they're anything like this, he may be the biggest closet Nightmare Before Christmas fanboy ever. The protagonist is Nobody "Bod" Owens, a young lad whose entire family was wiped out in a brutal triple murder when he was just a toddler (which carried out by a mysterious figure identified only as "the man Jack"), and who ends up being adopted by the ghosts of a friendly (of course) Victorian couple in an abandoned graveyard. He grows up learning ghost tricks like fading into invisibility, befriending various graveyard denizens, and having various morbid (but kid-appropriate) adventures. Looks to me like someone watched Corpse Bride a few times too many.

It doesn't surprise me that The Graveyard Book came from the same man who wrote Coraline, which was adapted into a Tim Burton-style 3D movie directed by Henry Selick, the same man who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. In my opinion, that's not a coincidence. There seems to be an enormous market out there these days for macabre literature and movies marketed towards children and adolescents. The Twilight craze is only the latest manifestation of this fad; fangirls were drooling over Nightmare and Edward Scissorhands way back in the early 1990s. Now that Twilight is at the apex of its popularity, with new adolescent-themed books with cheap knockoff plots appear in bookstores almost monthly, Gaiman is cashing in on his success with Coraline, and giving Twilight fans something to read while waiting for Stephanie Meyer to finish her latest thesaurus-abusing novel in the process.

I may be a bit strong with my opinion here, but authors like Neil Gaiman do very little to help adolescent literature. I don't think that because I think macabre children's books are bad for their moral development or something equally crazy; that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that The Graveyard Book came out during the peak of the biggest surge of horror-related children's media yet in American pop culture history, and in my opinion, The Graveyard Book and its contemporaries (every teen vampire novel ever written, for example) are transparent cash-ins, attempting to get their slice of the pie before the kids get bored and move on to something else. It's not that Gaiman is a bad writer (whereas Stephanie Meyer couldn't write her way out of a wet paper bag, and even Stephen King said so); it's that, at least in my eyes, he is wasting his talent. Robert Cormier managed to be edgy and even downright morbid without being kitschy in his books. Why is it so hard for Gaiman?

I suppose it's time for me to stop ripping on the author and get down to an analysis. Gaiman makes extensive use of sequential, but not always related, vignettes to portray Bod's upbringing in the graveyard. Some have likened this to Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book; in fact, Gaiman himself admitted that he thought it would be fun to write The Jungle Book as if it took place in a cemetery. Here again, though, I have to interject my opinion that Gaiman could make much better use of his talent than "updating" a literary classic for the MySpace generation. I knew Hollywood was running out of fresh ideas for movies, but I never thought I'd see the day where novelists would do the same.

I found a lot of literary parallels to Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events books as well. Having read much of that series myself, and realizing that the plot devices get more and more repetitive with each successive book, I can say this for a fact. The protagonists of both books suffer traumatic events early in their lives, are taken in by various kooky and spooky characters, get into all kinds of macabre mischief, and all the while are pursued by a mysterious murderer with a network of agents who is bent on eliminating them. Gaiman's writing is again highly derivative here; although Lemony Snicket did not invent the "clever child outwits evil mastermind" by any stretch of the imagination, and although he too is guilty of a variety of miscues in his books (repeating plot devices, recycling characters/situations/lines, etc.), he did it before Gaiman.

I don't mean to offend anyone who liked this book with this response. I'm just not a fan of this kind of literature. I'm sure at least a few people in the class enjoyed it, but I'm very choosy when it comes to supernatural-themed adolescent media. I will admit that I liked the film version of Coraline, but that choosiness comes out especially in books. Authors like Gaiman are fantasy writers, and I'm a huge fantasy fan, but I just can't get behind something like this. I prefer "realistic fantasy" (it does exist, check out George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series), which is most often marketed towards adult readers. I wasn't even a fan of children's fantasy growing up; Disney movies and the like were not for me. Now, at 22, that choosiness has solidified into a deep suspicion of fantasy books that come out at the height of a fantasy craze, one that has lasted over a decade and is inevitably going to run out of steam. I wonder what Gaiman will jump to next.

Regan is 15 years old, socially awkward, and has a big secret: her 17-year-old brother, Liam, is actually a transsexual named Luna. Though Liam is described as intelligent and handsome, and many of the girls at school have crushes on him, he is secretly tortured by having to hide Luna, his true identity, while in public. Regan lets him use her room to try on girls' clothes and has "girl talk" sessions with him, but she too is afraid of what the world might think if her brother's secret is revealed. Their parents are no help: their father, Jack, doesn't know Liam/Luna's secret, and pressures him to engage in manly activities (sports, dating, etc.); their mother, Patrice, is constantly drugged up on antidepressants and is obsessed with her job. She has known about Liam/Luna's secret for a long time, but chooses to ignore it because she can't cope with the reality of having a daughter in the body of a son. These factors, coupled with his already apparent desire to become his female alter ego full-time, pressure Liam/Luna to leave town in order to undergo the transition process without fear of harassment or prejudice, leaving Regan to contemplate her own life now that she is free of having to worry about her brother (sister?).

I had a textual analysis professor last year who self-identified as bisexual, and our class used to talk a lot about LGBT literature and how it's slowly but surely gaining more and more acceptance in the literary world. We never actually read a whole lot of LGBT literature though, and when it comes to that genre, I can count the number of books I've read on one hand and still have room left over (before Luna, the only book I'd read like this was Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home). Reading Luna was an eye-opening experience, to be sure: not only did it provide some insight into the mind of a transgender person, it also examines the effects of that person's transition on those around them, particularly their family. Regan is both supportive of and embarrassed by her brother's lifestyle, and the battle between those two emotions frames the whole narrative. While I have no gay, bisexual, or transgender family members, I likened this story a lot to my own experience of being a metalhead in an upper-middle-class suburban Catholic family. I went through a lot of inner turmoil as a teenager, trying to reconcile the positive message of the private Catholic high school I was attending with the extremely negative treatment I received (merely for being dorky) at the hands of my classmates, which in turn led to my own frustratingly fruitless search for God (which is still ongoing, if suspended). I contemplated an elaborate public suicide ritual at least once, and in my despair, I turned to heavy metal as a way to channel my anger, aggression, and disgust into something more productive.

Seven years later, I'm as happy as I've ever been. I say now that my music is an enormous part of who I am, but in all honesty, I can tell it still turns a lot of people off--not the least of whom are my parents. I remember my dad expressly forbidding me to listen to Ozzy Osbourne when I was in middle school; now I play in my own death metal band, which makes Ozzy seem pretty tame by comparison. It says a lot about my parents that they eventually became tolerant of my activities; they were at least willing to put up with my vitriolic opinions about life, people, religion, and sociopolitics, and now they even make the effort to listen to the noise I blast from my car speakers and headphones every day. But it wasn't easy getting them to that point, given their rock-ribbed Catholic backgrounds and the fact that metal has long been misunderstood as "the devil's music." I used to get into shouting matches with my dad at least once a week, and my mom was forever asking me why I was so angry. The simple answer to that question is that it's a lot more complex than that, but my parents didn't realize that, which only made me feel worse. Luna operates under the same principle: Liam/Luna and Regan's parents don't understand what their children are going through, and the ways of dealing with it (or not dealing with it) have adverse consequences on their kids' lives. I won't go so far as to say that I know what Liam/Luna is going through, but at least I can relate.

Some authors like to be subtle when it comes to themes of acceptance or tolerance, but Peters really hits you over the head with it. Regan and Liam/Luna's parents are either unaware or unsupportive of their son's mindset, and thus their children must rely on each other to cope with their situation. But even then, Regan is uncertain about her feelings towards her brother's transition. Despite the fact that Liam always seemed more like a sister to her, she still finds it hard to picture him as a woman. In one particular scene, for example, Liam shows up at the house in full drag in front of Regan's new boyfriend; Regan, being the teenaged girl she is, is understandably embarrassed. She maintains an overall supportive attitude towards the woman that lives in her brother's body, but it's obvious that Regan still feels at least a small level of discomfort when talking about it, even at the end of the book. I read one review online that said Luna does not have a happy ending; it's hopeful, but not happy, which I agree with wholeheartedly.

While being true to oneself is extremely important in my opinion, one also has to consider the effects one's actions might have on others. I applauded Liam/Luna's decision to let the Luna side out rather than keep it bottled up, but that decision showed the people around him/her for who they really were. Regan is revealed to be a supportive, if not always understanding, sister, while their parents are shown to be selfish and concerned only with how having a transgender child makes them look in the public eye. I'm sure the same things occurred to my parents when I told them I was a full-on metalhead and no longer considered myself a Christian: "How will this make us look? Our son could be a Satanist!" While Satanism is just as much of a joke as Christianity in my opinion, I can see where they're coming from. Monumental changes in home life lead to a wide variety of reactions, which, it must be said, are often based on misconceptions. Metalheads are perceived as devil-worshipping misanthropes; transgendered people are seen as confused sexual deviants. As Peters points out, though, nothing could be further from the truth. Misconceptions lead to prejudice, and prejudice only causes turmoil and angst for those against whom it is directed.

The People Could Fly (the picture book version of the story, anyway) immediately got my attention with all its biblical undertones. The black slaves, working in terrible conditions under heartless overseers, put me in mind of the Israelites in Egypt right away. Of course, slave spirituals from the time period often included Christian references, reflecting the religion of the slaves' new country, but The People Could Fly almost hit me over the head with it. Old Toby, the slave who speaks the ancient magic incantations over those his fellow captives who still remember the old magic so they can fly away from their plight, is an amalgam of all the saviors of the Bible: Moses, Aaron, even Jesus himself. When he himself flies away at the end of the story, there are other slaves left behind (get it? Left Behind?) at the plantation who can't fly away themselves. Toby has performed a sort of Rapture, and those left on earth (literally) must endure the trials and tribulations (continued brutality at the hands of their masters) until the End of Days (in this case, 1865, the year the 13th Amendment was passed), when all will be set free.

Even the illustrations in the book support the biblical references. The paintings depicting Toby chanting over Sarah, the young slave mother and the first person to fly away from the plantation, show him as a bearded old man, almost like the stereotypical portrayal of God as the same. Toby is obviously black and his clothes are those of a slave, but the connection is there. He lifts his fellow slaves to their feet, speaks the words, and away they go. Towards the end of the story, Toby suddenly grows to hundreds of times the size of a normal human being, reinforcing the God connection. All Christian references aside, though, I did notice one thing: there's an illustration on one page of all the slaves Toby has freed, joining hands and rising into the sky in one long train that disappears into the distance. This immediately put me in mind of the Wild Hunt, a ubiquitous myth in Norse, Germanic, and Celtic mythology about a long train of either dead souls or fairies riding across the sky (and the subject of one of my favorite paintings, Peter Nicholai Arbo's Åsgårdsreien). Maybe the legend of people who use magic to fly is a little more widespread than we thought, like the flood myth or anthropomorphic animal tricksters or creation stories (and that's a whole other category right there).

As I said before, this is only the picture book version, so unfortunately I can't say what the other tales in The People Could Fly are like. However, I'll try to dissect Hamilton's literary methods (such as they are, this book being just over 30 pages) as best I can. The entire story is told in black vernacular. There are a lot of sentence fragments and what hoity-toity grammar Nazis would call "rampant grammatical errors," but having taken Genevieve Escure's 3000-level English linguistics class here at the U, I've learned that grammar is relative; that is, there's no such thing as "bad grammar," just grammar that's appropriate for whoever you're speaking or writing to at a given time. Hamilton knows this, and her use of black vernacular and intentional grammatical errors lend an air of authenticity, as if some grizzled old Uncle Remus type of character was telling me the story while it unfolded in the illustrations. Is it bad that I heard Morgan Freeman's voice in my head while reading this?

The story ends not with the slaves flying away from the plantation to freedom, but with the storyteller's explanation of how the story came to him or her: "The slaves who could not fly told about the people who could fly to their children. When they were free. When they sat close before the fire in the free land, they told it. They did so love firelight and Free-dom, and tellin. They say that the children of the ones who could not fly told their children. And now, me, I have told it to you." This is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of the story. All folklore descends from an oral tradition. People in ancient cultures, and in cultures enslaved by other cultures, obviously did not have nearly as much access to education as we do, if any at all. Therefore, with no means to write down their stories, they told them over and over in order to preserve them. Every culture had designated storytellers who also served a spiritual function: Native American tribes had medicine men, African tribes had griots, Hindu kingdoms in India had gurus, and so on. The beauty of oral tradition, though, is that literally anyone could tell a story. The term "old wives' tale" was coined for a reason. The People Could Fly might have been narrated by Morgan Freeman in my head, but it just as well could've been any African-American person.

Monster is the story of the trial of Steve Harmon, a sixteen-year-old black kid from Harlem who is charged as an adult for being an accessory to a robbery/murder. He faces a lengthy jail sentence, and possibly the death penalty. Did he do it? Was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? Neither Myers nor Steve ever definitively says one way or the other, and that's what makes the book interesting. Since it's never made explicitly clear if Steve is guilty or innocent, the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions. The prosecution labels Steve and his fellow defendants "monsters," a hefty accusation. Steve is struck by the surreal quality of the trial, comparing it to a movie. Indeed, the entire story is told from Steve's perspective in the form of diary entries and scenes from a screenplay (Steve is a budding film student), adding his own unique outlook on events in the trial as they unfold. Most memorably (at least in my opinion), a voiceover using Steve's own voice cautions him as he sits in his prison cell, trying to hide his tear-streaked face under a blanket, that this is reality, he can't hide or run from it, and must deal with it as best he can.

Monster raises a lot of interesting questions about the American justice system and the route that youthful offenders take through it. Steve is a kid from the rough-and-tumble (and historically black) New York City neighborhood of Harlem, a strike against him already. Myers' choice of where Steve's race and where he grew up was, at least in my mind, 100% deliberate. As much as I hate to say it, white Americans tend to view ethnic enclaves like Harlem as bad neighborhoods that one would do well to stay away from, when in reality they are living examples of the vicious cycle of broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and incarceration. Living in a rough neighborhood doesn't automatically make you a bad person, and it's hard to break out of an environment like that when you don't have the means, but it seems like the prosecution and the jury has condemned Steve already just because of his background. There's an overwhelming of sense of "guilty until proven innocent" here--that, since Steve has been arrested in connection with the crime, he comes from a bad area of town, he's black, and the arresting officers and witnesses wouldn't lie about the events of the crime, he must be guilty. I see a lot of this going around now with the Ground Zero Mosque situation in New York. People who are against the mosque's construction (actually, it's not even a mosque, it's an open community center that happens to have Muslim prayer rooms) have a mindset that goes something like this: "Muslims destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 3000 people on 9/11. There was no denunciation of the attacks from the Muslim world"--actually, there were, but that's what you get when Fox is the #1 news network in the country--"so therefore all Muslims must either be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers." Never mind the fact that Muslim-American citizens were killed when the towers collapsed, these people think that you have to prove you're an American first, Muslim second, and that the onus is firmly on Muslim-Americans to "prove their loyalty," so to speak. But how can they do that, when conservative white America has already socially and ideologically convicted them of treason and terrorism? Monster is a lot like that: even if the reader doesn't know whether or not Steve is guilty, it's more likely than not that he's a victim of circumstance, and those sitting in judgment have convicted him in their minds as a proxy of the overall problem.

I'll get down off my soapbox now and talk about the book itself for a bit. Myers' use of a screenplay/diary format serves two purposes. Not only is it a unique presentation of the story, it also allows the reader insight into Steve's deepest thoughts (and there are a lot, considering he's on trial for his life). Steve's choice of a screenplay to keep a record of the events of the trial, his observations about it, and his reflections on his own past, future, and possible fate make him both believable and sympathetic. Myers makes Steve's guilt ambiguous, and Steve himself never cops to anything. But he's a sixteen-year-old film student on trial for murder who shuttles back and forth between a forbidding courthouse full of biased white people and a maximum-security prison full of hardened criminals. My heart went out to him immediately.

The screenplay format also affords Steve the opportunity to act as his own conscience, voice of reason, or whatever the situation demands. In the very first scene, he explains that the best time to cry in prison is when a fight breaks out, so that way no one can see your tears and beat you for being weak. Later, he tries to hide his head under a blanket to shield his eyes from the harsh realities of the cellblock, but a voiceover in the screenplay--in my mind I read it with Steve's voice--tells him that hiding under a blanket will not change anything; he is still in prison, no matter what he does, and he must deal with it. He's being charged as an adult, after all, so he must deal with his problems like an adult.

Steve's screenplay is his way of coping with his current situation, but it also functions as a mirror for his life. He ruminates on what he's done or not done that brought him to this point, and he tries to make sense of who he is and what will become of him. His father won't look at him. The jury is not disposed to acquit him. His lawyer isn't confident of their success. The prosecution wants the death penalty. All that presses down on Steve's mind, and the screenplay allows him to make sense of it all on paper. However, the reader never finds out what his ultimate conclusion is. The book ends with his acquittal, and even though he walks, Steve still can't answer the question, "Who am I?" The reader can trace his evolution throughout the story, but without a final realization, the reader is left wondering whether Steve can reclaim his life and move on, or become just another street thug like the prosecution accused him of being.

It has been said that Looking for Alaska is a landmark of realistic fiction for young adults, and certainly there's some truth to this statement. Miles and his friends get drunk, smoke, dabble in sex and drugs, and pull ever more daring pranks on rival students. A lot of people seem to be really uptight about kids reading this book, however, due to its explicit content. Now, I'm going to deviate from a discussion about the book proper for a bit and go on a little rant about this. I've never understood why some adults feel the need to denounce any book, especially one written for young adults, as "disgusting" or even "pornographic," as Looking for Alaska was. The sex scene was, in reality, pretty unsexy, and it serves to develop the book's themes of coming of age and self-discovery (Miles is, after all, on his own little quest to find Rabelais' "Great Perhaps"). So why did adults freak out?

The simple answer is, they're way too overprotective. Kids in the age range for which Looking for Alaska is written don't want to read about the Care Bears or whatever, because they can't relate. Adolescence is a confusing, frustrating, often scary time, and kids that age want to read something that reflects the way they feel and see the world. In short, they're growing up, and children's literature, though it certainly served a purpose earlier in their lives, just doesn't cut it anymore. John Green knows this, and wrote Looking for Alaska with an eye to self-discovery without pulling any punches. We've all been there: the awkward first sexual experience, the first time you got drunk/high and the rush of knowing you could get caught at any time but doing it anyway, and the first time you realize that you are largely in control of your own destiny. Adults who call for a book like Looking for Alaska to be banned seem to have forgotten what it was like to be young and confused. My dad is a great example of this. For a frame of reference, I'm 22. When my dad was my age, he was newly married and working full-time. I'm almost positive he hasn't read a book for pleasure in his entire life, and he probably hasn't read a true novel (not a technical manual or a textbook) at all since he was in high school. Basically, my dad grew up way too fast, and that experience is reflected in his attitudes. I'm the exact opposite: I'm free-spirited, I'm not attached to anyone at the moment, and I had an extremely confusing and frustrating time growing up. In fact, I'd say I'm still growing up. People like my dad and people like me will never see eye-to-eye on something like Looking for Alaska, simply because people like him have gotten too wrapped up in being an adult, and people like me are still in touch with that awkward teenager that's still inside us even years after we come of age.

On a more scholarly level, Looking for Alaska is, as I said earlier, predominantly about self-discovery. Miles' explanation of why he leaves home--to "seek a Great Perhaps," a phrase usually attributed to Francois Rabelais as his last words--sets the tone for the entire novel. His hijinks with the Colonel and Alaska lead him down a path of realization: that his "Great Perhaps" entails a rebellious streak that he didn't know existed within himself. Of course, Miles can't know exactly what his Great Perhaps is; if he did, it wouldn't be a Perhaps. Alaska, through her self-destructive behavior in constant pursuit of an escape from "this labyrinth of suffering" and her eventual death, lead Miles to realize that maybe self-destruction is the ultimate answer to the Great Perhaps, which in turn allows him to live his life as he wants, without fear of failure or regret. Alaska is a walking, talking self-fulfilling prophecy. She finds the answer to her own Great Perhaps: that life is painful and the only way to escape it is to die, even if Miles tries to convince her that "we need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken."

"I believe now that we are more than the sum of our parts," Miles writes at the end of the book. He is alluding not only to Alaska's temperamental and constantly changing personality, but also to his belief in her, that she had the ability to rise above herself and her wild and self-destructive tendencies. Alaska's way out of the "labyrinth of suffering" was death, her answer to the Great Perhaps one of hopelessness an inevitability. But Miles knows now that death is only one path. The Great Perhaps is not a prize to be found at the end of the labyrinth, and the path one takes to get there is not a means to an end. Rather, the Great Perhaps is its own pursuit; it is both prize and quest. The key to knowledge, enlightenment, happiness, or whatever one thinks the Great Perhaps is, is the pursuit of same. Essentially, in order to be happy, one must seek happiness out. Alaska's outrageous behavior shows a fundamental lack of understanding of that concept, but through her, Miles is able to discover it for himself.

Looking for Alaska is not just about Miles' quest to shake his unpopular reputation, discover himself, and get the girl. It's also a deep exploration of why people act the way they do. Everyone has a motivation, everyone has their own Great Perhaps which they seek out their entire lives, whether they know it or not. Though Alaska eventually reached the end of her search for death, she failed to see the big picture, which Miles could only understand after her passing: that there's no point in being "terrified into paralysis" by one's search. Alaska was so intimidated by the "labyrinth of suffering" (her guilt over her role in her mother's death, specifically) that she chose to give up. But that's precisely why the labyrinth exists in the first place: everyone goes through it, and it's how we deal with the suffering along the way that each person finds out who they truly are. Miles discovered that he was much stronger than he thought, and in my opinion, that was the point John Green was trying to make to his adolescent readers. It doesn't matter who you are or in what circumstances you live; as long as you keep your eye on the prize--the Great Perhaps--you'll find it simply through the virtue of your search.