‘Matched’ by Ally Condie

Let’s start at the beginning. Matched is the story of a 17-year-old girl named…crap. What is her name?

Okay. Matched is the story of a teenaged girl named Cassia Reyes, who lives in a dystopian future nation called The Society. We are, apparently, meant to believe that this is as a result of some kind of war, that The Society was created as a place where people can live peacefully and contentedly, without violence, doubt or really any unhappiness or injury until the age of 80, when they die. Yes, it is ripped off from The Giver (a far superior work, but I digress).

The story starts on the night of Cassia’s Matching Banquet, a night sort of like a prom where she’ll find out who she is going to marry. Oddly, teenagers have to decide at this age whether or not they want to spend their lives with someone at all. But the point is, Cassia’s personal information has been run through some sort of database along with the personal information for a bunch of other people her exact age and she’s been matched with — oh boy! — her childhood best friend.

But wait. When she goes to insert a MicroCard into her Port to reveal more information about her Match, a different face appears. Could The Society have made a mistake?

Yes. They could have. But not one bigger than the mistake I made in trying to listen to this book.

‘A Great and Terrible Beauty’ by Libba Bray

I’ve been in a bit of a reading lull for much of June after I read The Magicians Trilogy and then Ian Frazier’s excellent Travels in Siberia. I’ve never been struck by Post-Amazing Book Disorder so strongly, so I suspect dashing about preparing for a rather lengthy stretch of travel probably fostered the disease a bit more than usual.

In between panicking and packing throughout June, I haunted more “what to read if you liked The Magicians” lists than I care to admit and came up with nothing terribly inspirational. I roamed my bookshelves hoping to inspired and even pilfered a few volumes from my mother’s bookshelves. I started doing crossword puzzles for the first time in years. In short, I was rather adrift, literarily.

The one book from those post-Magicians lists that seemed at least worth trying was Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, about a British girl shipped back to England from her Indian home after her mother’s death to attend a “proper” finishing school. Amidst this upheaval, said girl also starts to have magical visions into a beautiful alternate reality, haunted by her mother and a hideous black spirit intent upon her destruction.

It’s a promising setup, combining some bits of Hogwartsy boarding school with Victorian notions of spiritualism and magic (the Cottingley Fairies girls spring to mind more than once) plus a dash of “Mean Girls” tossed back a hundred years or so.

Despite these alluring parts, I would not by any stretch say this was a particularly great book. What I liked about it most was its largely female cast — there are only about four male characters of any consequence amid a large cast of starring and supporting women, all with rich personalities and backstories. It is rare to find a book so unabashedly focused on women, particularly one spotlighting a teenage girl that doesn’t veer immediately off into territory which defines her by which boy she has a crush on or which male authority figure is telling her what to do.

A Great and Terrible Beauty focuses instead on the intricacies of female intimacy, power, and friendship. This emphasis is both welcome and unusual. Indeed, in terms of casual feminism, author Libba Bray certainly deserves a polite and ladylike “cheers!” for her efforts.

YA Conversation (Final Part)

As has been widely reported, young adult literature is enjoying huge popularity at the moment with adults and teens alike reading YA books in droves. Consequently, the genre has become the target of some spirited debate (most famously from Slate’s Ruth Graham in her piece “Against YA”).

In Part One of this conversation, we discussed the differences between “adult” and “young adult” novels while in Part Two, we talked about how schools are using YA and if a YA-based curriculum is really a good thing and Part Three explored the lack of complexity and the phenomenon of adults reading young adult novels.

Kate: Here’s the one niggling doubt in my mind about YA literature: while the complexity of the works being studied in schools has definitely fallen, in their day, works by Austen and Dickens were lumped in with other, more frivolous works as something to distract young people from more important reading of “the classics.”

Jane Austen talks about the “dangers” of novels in Northanger Abbey, a work that mostly centers on a young girl who takes novels, including works by Austen’s predecessor Ann Radcliffe, rather more seriously than she should. Few except scholars of that time period and students of popular literature read Radcliffe now. When they do, they read it as a reflection of the culture of the time, filled with anti-Catholic hysteria and a preoccupation with social class and virginity. The Romance of the Forest is a rip-roaring good story, but there’s not much there apart from sensationalism and a glimpse into the Gothic sensibility.

So my question is, how can you tell if a contemporary work is worth studying closer and may be the next Austen, or if it should be enjoyed as a good story and maybe a reflection of culture, such as Radcliffe?

A Conversation on YA (Part III)

As has been widely reported, young adult literature is enjoying huge popularity at the moment with adults and teens alike reading YA books in droves. Consequently, the genre has become the target of some spirited debate (most famously from Slate’s Ruth Graham in her piece “Against YA”).

In Part One of this conversation, we discussed the differences between “adult” and “young adult” novels while in Part Two, we talked about how schools are using YA and if a YA-based curriculum is really a good thing—should books being accessible matter? And does the “at least they’re reading” argument really hold water?

Corey: So where does an education system that teaches YA leave us? In our last part, Kate asked about why adults might be fleeing to the children’s section and reading YA. Are they doing it because they no longer wish to be challenged?

Personally, I don’t think it’s that adults don’t want to be challenged. I think it’s more a problem of adults never being challenged as young adults and children, so they just continue reading in the similar vein as they grow up. I’m not sure the choice by adults to read “Young Adult Literature” is really as much of a statement or intentional choice as we (and the media) make it out to be.

Kate: I think it’s just a marketing distinction. People are reading books now that they would have read before, they’re just marketed differently. The difference is, people take this pride in it, and I think it’s because of the marketing furor over YA books — the idea being that the books are so talked about that everyone must be reading them, so we talk openly about them rather than sort of hiding them.

Many times I think YA is missing any kind of moral or ethical complexity. There are good guys and there are bad guys and there is never any confusion. Bella would feel much differently about Edward if, in fact, he did kill humans — all kinds of humans, as do the werewolves in The Last Werewolf and Talulah Rising. Sookie Stackhouse struggles a lot with the question of good and evil when it comes to the supernatural. You don’t really find that in YA, at least, as far as I’ve seen.

Corey: That is really the bottom line for me, too. I got really puzzled at that lack of complexity and then eventually troubled. In execution, I found my forays into YA imaginative fiction to be well short of intellectually stimulating. They were entertaining, sure, and I marvelled at the creativity of the authors. And yet…

In the end I found myself rather agreeing with Ruth Graham (and you, Kate!)—young adult books tell simple, clear-cut stories with neat endings and easily-followed plotlines. And adult readers, while they may well enjoy these fables (essentially), should really aspire to something more.

Kate: Of course we should aspire to something more! I recognize that reading isn’t important to some people, and the same holds for complex literary analysis. We all have the right to read and enjoy YA books of any ilk.

But I agree with Ruth Graham that the pride people take in reading YA fiction is puzzling. As a psychological study of teenage brains and human development, maybe. But to be proud of exclusively reading fiction meant for teenagers is a little like Bethany Frankel squeezing into her toddler’s pjs — it might fit, but that might also mean there’s something seriously wrong. In this case, with popular culture’s current definition of “literature.”

Corey: Which I guess brings us around to the distinction between “fiction” and “literature,” which is probably a conversation for another time!

Stay tuned for our final installment!

Next time, we explore the future of YA literature. Kate notes that many books now considered classics started off perceived as frivolous novels. Will any of the books written now that are perceived as “frivolous young adult novels” stand the test of time?

A Conversation on YA (Part II)

As has been widely reported, young adult literature is enjoying huge popularity at the moment with adults and teens alike reading YA books in droves. Consequently, the genre has become the target of some spirited debate (most famously from Slate’s Ruth Graham in her piece “Against YA”).

Source: Lynley Stace

In that spirit, Literary Transgressions’ Kate and Corey staged their own conversation on the topic.

In Part One of this conversation, we discussed the differences between “adult” and “young adult” novels and decided YA is missing a degree of complexity (in characters and premise) that challenges readers of “adult” books.

Kate: So is this love of YA just an increased dumbing down of literature? Are adults so sick of asking questions and being challenged to think that they’ve fled to the children’s section, where they can find pure escapism?

Corey: I think when this interest in YA is reported on, it is often used as an example of the demise of western culture as we know it and, indeed, a dumbing down of literature. And a large part of me wants to put on my old man hat and shout at adults who read YA fiction to get off my porch. It is a genuine shame that people, in general, are no longer reading the classics like they used to. This isn’t nostalgia or sentimentality on my part—according to a recent study, “the complexity of texts assigned [to students] has declined about three grade levels over the past 100 years.”

Kate: NO, YOU’RE RIGHT! Schools are teaching The Fault in Our Stars and not Lord of the Flies. Every time I read a list of banned books, I’m half mad about the banning and half upset that these were reading list books in the first place.

Corey: I really think there is something to be said for a more classical education, even if it is less accessible to “kids these days.” (Sorry, still have my old man hat on.)

A Conversation on YA (Part I)

As has been widely reported, young adult literature is enjoying huge popularity at the moment with adults and teens alike reading YA books in droves. Consequently, the genre has become the target of some spirited debate (most famously from Slate’s Ruth Graham in her piece “Against YA”).

Source: NYMag

In that spirit, Literary Transgressions’ Kate and Corey staged their own conversation on the topic, asking themselves: what is young adult literature? What makes it different from “adult” novels? And is there really something inherently better or worse about either?

Kate: I think there are differences between adult and YA literature, but they are rather nebulous. I think YA novels tend to be more conservative than adult ones when it comes to sex, violence, sometimes happy endings. Bella and Edward’s relationship is prudish to the extreme in Twilight, as Bella gets pregnant the first time she has sex, then quite literally dies and gives birth to a monster, a great lesson for teenaged girls just learning to be ashamed of their sexuality.

But it’s more freeing in other ways. It can be more imaginative, because teenagers are better at suspending disbelief than most adults, still caught between fairy tales of childhood and questions they’ll have later, like “How does no one notice that half of the Cullens are banging the other half, even though they all claim to be siblings?” And I think the “hero” story can be more blatant, because teenagers are still trying to figure out who they are, and the idea that an ordinary person could become, well, anything (vampire, witch, revolutionary, etc.) is very appealing to a teenager determined to do something meaningful.

Corey: Absolutely! The more imaginative nature of young adult fiction is fascinating to me. Some of the most creative writing being done in the realm of “imaginative fiction” these days seems to be happening in YA. From my recent reading experiences in the genre, both Illusive and The Paper Magician have wonderfully creative premises—the former has been billed as X-Men meets Ocean’s 11 and the latter is an Edwardian mix of Susanna Clarke and C.S. Lewis.

Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman seems to be the tent-pole supporting all of adult imaginative fiction on his own with Salman Rushie leading the charge in magical realism. Why is there such a small pool to choose from for “adult” books in this vein? Is this because of the sudden interest in the publishing world for YA, so all genres are benefiting? Or is it just that authors of a certain imaginative bent are writing YA these days? Chicken or egg?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

‘You know, Harry Potter gets really emo after the third book.’

My initial reaction when my sister said this was knee-jerk indignation. The Harry Potter series, in my opinion, is too good to belittle by linking it with a high school stereotype. No one is wearing eyeliner, no one is cutting themselves, and no one but no one is listening to Fall Out Boy in the entire series.

Once I thought about it, though, I realized what she was reacting to — the overwhelming teenage-ness that Harry Potter himself exudes from book four or five on. He is a little crazy; he’s unpredictable, yelling at all of his friends for various trivial reasons; he’s essentially a very angry young man, saddled with a mysterious scar, constant nightmares, and the task of facing down the greatest force of evil in the wizarding world. J. K. Rowling, being a mother, I’m sure knew exactly what she was doing when she was writing Harry, and while he is not always likeable, he is an extraordinarily well-written character.

But for me, the series has never really been about Harry himself. My favorite part of the books is everything else; the owls, Harry’s friends, the strange creatures they meet, and above all the atmosphere of Hogwarts and the wizarding world.

This last aspect, I think, is why the books have translated so well to film.

Some might call it dusk?

Y'all are familiar with symbolism, right?

If I had to pick one word for this book, it would have to be ‘self-indulgent.’ On the surface, Twilight is nothing more than your standard high school story, only perhaps even less, due to the fact that no character has the requisite change or coming of age that is an essential facet of the teenage novel. It’s essentially wish-fulfillment on the highest level, a story about a girl who feels like a loser ending up with the most beautiful boy she’s ever seen and being accepted by an amazing group of people.

However, Twilight‘s insane popularity suggests it’s something more.