THINGS, that’s what! Very, very exciting things that are so awesomely awesome that I am afraid to share them with you. (I am very superstitious in this way. I very strongly believe that a good thing spoken of is a good thing that will be taken away.)

I will tell you about them as soon as they are more set in stone, but the basic thing is that someone more influential than I read my play and called it “a beautiful, moving piece of work,” “a fully developed play with a very assured and mature voice,” and “Seriously, the best play I’ve read in a long time.”

…I may or may not have cried, I was so happy and excited.

(Also, side note: I have taken a brief hiatus from recreational reading as I memorize my lines for a production of The Children’s Hour that I am in, but Stuart will be here soon with reviews!)

Originally, the plan for doing this project, as I mentioned, was to revise twenty pages a week. I did this for two weeks, completing the first act. My advisor and I then agreed that if I went on to the next act without considering the changes that had been made to the first, I would be getting ahead of myself and the play would be a hot mess by April. So the next week, we took a closer look at Act One as a whole. It was at this point that my advisor gave me such awesome feedback and suggestions that I requested a second week away from revisions to implement the changes and write an outline.

This past week, I still did a few revisions, including cutting three scenes, writing two more, and making little tweaks here and there to existing scenes. I also composed an outline, which is something I only ever do for plays; I find outlines for novels too binding. For plays, however, and for this one in particular, with of its flashbacks and different locations, I needed some sort of bible to reference. In writing the outline, I decided to cut at least one more scene and try to combine it with another. If not… I must sadly bid one of my favorite scenes good- bye.

I mentioned how sad I would be to get rid of this particular scene to my advisor. Funnily enough, the scene only exists because he suggested it, but after I wrote it, I really loved when happened and the conversation between Mary and Peter; Mary makes a life-changing decision and Peter feels deep emotion for someone for the first time. But even with those gems, everyone involved agrees that it’s just unnecessary and slows down the play. My advisor told me, “Even if you eventually cut a scene, writing it is what got you where you are, so it was still a valuable experience.” This is very true, and it was nice to be reminded of that.

The most valuable thing he told me is that this play will not be finished by April. He said I have a few more drafts before I reach its full potential. I was at first disappointed to hear this; I had hoped that I would be able to market this script by May. However, considering that it’s a completely different play now, I’ve accepted that I’m starting from a few paces back than anticipated. He also told me that if this play is a hot mess by April, that’s fine; I’ve been doing the work and developing the play, which is the point. I am so happy that I chose to work on this as my thesis, even though I’m scared that I won’t know how to revise it on my own.

The biggest shock over these past two weeks is finding out that this play is no longer a children’s play in any way. I thought this was a recent development; I always considered the show to be fine for ages twelve and up. But in addition to the asylum scenes and the constant possibility of insanity throughout the play, I’ve now added some romance that I’d never even thought of until my advisor told me that I’d set up a road; why don’t I take it? I was nervous about writing that scene, as I don’t have much experience in writing things like that. The scene is tamer than my advisor was probably suggesting, but I really like it and the direction in which it’s set everything. It’s opened up doors for me to explore another part of growing up: realizing that you’re experiencing romantic attraction for the first time. Because of the time period in which the play is set, it lets Mary break a lot more rules, which is really exciting.

On March 23rd, I’ll be having a private reading of most (possibly all) of the play with current theatre students in the department and getting some feedback from the actors and some people who will be listening. I then have bout three weeks to revise some more and give it to a director and cast of alumni to rehearse a few times before the public reading on April 23rd. No pressure… :p

Now I must go to my writing class and have a deeply personal piece of mine critiqued.

I first heard about Sophie Flack’s novel Bunheads in the actors’ magazine Backstage. The article was about the author’s experience as a dancer in the New York City Ballet and how she took that period in her life and turned it into a (fictional) book.

Immediately, I was interested; as I mentioned in my review of Lucky Break, I’m a sucker for stories about performance art, and I’ve always been fascinated by ballet in particular. The book, the article said, focuses on the backstage life of a dancer, as opposed to the glamour onstage, and I couldn’t wait to read it.

The story follows nineteen year-old Hannah Ward, a dancer in the corps de ballet with the Manhattan Ballet. As all ballet dancers must, she’s dedicated her entire life to her art and dreams of promoted from anonymous corps dancer to soloist. However, the world of dance is a cold one, and no matter how hard she works, she’s overlooked, watching her friends move up in the world while she stays where she is. Eventually, Hannah begins to question if it’s worth it: does she really want to waste her college-age years in a single building, working and sweating and one injury away from it all being for nothing? After a show one night, Hannah goes to a bar and meets a college guy who is playing guitar there, Jason. They instantly get along and Jason shows Hannah that though she lives in New York, she doesn’t actually live in New York. With him, she has fun touring the city and just hanging out, something she rarely gets to do. But when Hannah glimpses the door to a promotion opening, she pushes Jason aside to work toward that. In the end, Hannah needs to decide between the hard world of ballet and the everyday world.

Bunheads,sadly,was a bit of a disappointment. Flack is a student at Columbia University, but the first few chapters reminded me of an amateur’s writing exercise. The writing is clunky and occasionally forced, making for an uncomfortable read. For example, at the beginning of the third chapter,  a paragraph runs thus:

“Matilda doesn’t come around the theater often- backstage isn’t the best place for a kid- so I’m always surprised that she remembers my name and that she seems so excited to see me. I guess she’s what they call precocious.”

Additionally, in those same chapters, Flack goes overboard with the teen vernacular; the youngest character is sixteen, the oldest, nineteen, but all of them speak in the same unrealistic way, from the overly sweet “Oh, Bea, it’s just like you to find something nice to say,” to the stereotypically teenage “like, totally.”

This problem does improve as the novel goes on, but there are other issues that remain throughout the book. Flack sometimes doesn’t give her readers enough credit and sums up the life of a dancer within dialogue. While it is admirable that she is trying to keep her reader informed, what the dancers are discussing is so normal to them that they wouldn’t have lengthy, explanatory exchanges about it.

Flack’s novel gives us a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes world of ballet, which was what drew me to the book in the first place, and there are definitely some harsh realities that Hannah and her friends have to face. First and foremost is a problem in almost any artistic field: your best friends are also your worst competition, and sometimes it’s hard to find the balance. There is the stereotypical, but sadly still true, expectation for ballet dancers to be rail-thin; Flack dismisses the rumors that all dancers are anorexic, but doesn’t deny the fact that they still can’t eat very much, or their weight is commented on. Hannah gets her first period in the novel, not uncommonly late for someone whose body is so rigidly disciplined, and when she begins to develop, her chest is noted as being a problem and possibly grounds for dismissal.

There is also the eternal struggle for any performance artist: will I have wasted all of this time just to fail in the end? Should I quit now and enjoy life, or keep working in the hopes that one day, the person in the spotlight will be me? Hannah grapples with this throughout the novel, and while her internal musing is believable, I didn’t like how the novel was separated almost into chunks: Hannah’s commitment to ballet, Hannah’s rebellion, then back to commitment, then, ultimately, rebellion. I liked that Hannah made a brave choice at the end of the novel, but it was almost expected in the pattern. However, even though the sequence hinted that Hannah would make the decision she does at the end, I was unable to see her make that decision for herself before telling the director of the ballet company. I don’t think Flack meant to it to be a surprise- and perhaps to a non-performer, it wouldn’t have been- but a lot of the things that Hannah complained about, I put into the category of Things You Deal With As a Performer, as opposed to Things That Might Drive You to Abandon Your Life’s Dream.

For all its drawbacks, I liked the novel enough to finish it. I do think Flack should have polished the novel a bit more before sending it off to agents and publishers, but it was an enjoyable enough read. I hope that, like Cassandra Clare, this first novel is merely a glimpse of the true writing talent she has and that if she publishes again, her compositions will be at a higher level.

From the very first paragraph of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, written by Ransom Riggs, Jacob claims that his life is painfully average, and of course, nothing promises a story more extraordinary. After the disturbing death of his grandfather, Abraham, Jacob is sent to a psychiatrist to cope with his grief. During his sessions, Jacob begins to sort out the strange collection of words his grandfather whispered to him with his dying breath: “Go to the island… Find the bird. In the loop. On the other side of the old man’s grave. September third, 1940. Emerson- the letter.” After being given a book of Emerson poems, Jacob deduces that his grandfather wanted him to look for answers where Abraham grew up: Wales. Reluctantly, at the insistence of Jacob’s psychiatrist, Jacob’s father takes him to Wales for a three-week vacation.
As soon as he arrives, Jacob seeks the help of locals to find the children’s home where Abraham was sent to escape the Nazis as a Polish child. The locals are less scared of the place than confused as to why Jacob would have interest in the bombed remains of the school. Determined, Jacob hikes through the Welsh rain and finds the ruin of the school. Inside, he finds that the upstairs rooms are mostly intact, the hallways lined with the strange pictures that his grandfather showed him as a child- unbelievable images of children levitating, lifting impossibly large boulders over their heads, conjuring fire with their hands. In a trunk, he finds thousands of the same photos and begins to doubt that Abraham’s stories were, in fact, stories.
This notion is proved when he meets a few of the children from the story; looking exactly as they do in the pictures, seventy years later. When Jacob tries to speak to them, they run. He dashes after one of the girls and after passing through a cave, finds himself in the same place, but in September of 1940. The girl, Emma, pulls a knife on him and demands that he tell her why he followed her. She doesn’t believe him when he says he is the grandson of Abraham and takes him to see her headmistress: Miss Alma LeFay Peregrine. Miss Peregrine, though saddened to hear of Abraham’s death, is delighted to see Jacob; she seems to have been expecting him.
Jacob is soon introduced to all of the children of Miss Peregrine’s home, children with special abilities known as “peculiars.” Abraham, too, was a peculiar, able to see monsters known as wights. With the help of the peculiar children, Jacob works to find a way to eradicate the beasts that murdered his grandfather and might very well come for him, as well.

I enjoyed this book a lot. One of the most original parts of the book is that it is based around, if not on, vintage photographs obtained by the author. The photographs are reproduced in the book’s pages and, most of the time, add a lot to the story. There were a few that I thought were forced into the plot simply because it was time for a picture, and others that seemed retouched to the point where they didn’t look like photographs anymore. In the back of the book, Riggs writes that none of the pictures have been retouched further than they were before he saw them, and while this may be true, I still found some of them to be inauthentic.

Jacob is a great character with whom to go on a journey. Riggs writes him in a way that toes the line of too-angry teenager, but never crosses it, and Jacob grows out of that angst as the novel progresses, finding that other things in life are more important. He’s wry and smart and is mature enough at sixteen to accept the peculiars as his friends, despite their strange personalities and abilities.

The solitary thing that bothered me about the novel was Jacob’s relationship with Emma. I love romance in YA fiction, but I dislike when modern-day characters get involved with characters from the past. While Jacob and Emma were only separated by seventy-odd years (as opposed to the few hundred that separates the Twilight protagonists), I still hold that it is intensely uncomfortable to watch a character kiss his seventeen/eighty-eight year-old crush who also happened to be his grandfather’s girlfriend. As another author has observed about these kinds of romances, the problem is not whether the person looks old; it’s that they are old. Jacob himself acknowledges the weirdness of this situation, but that doesn’t stop him from making out with Emma a few pages later. Don’t get me wrong, the scenes with them are cute, but I was constantly nagged by the fact that he was thinking longingly about a woman who is essentially in her eighties, no matter how youthful her physique.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children covers every base for the YA reader that enjoys creepiness, mystery, and a bit of romance thrown in there. If you’re buying this one, get it in hard copy as opposed to on an e-reader, as many e-readers tend to dislike oddly formatted books, of which this is one. But no matter which format you purchase, just purchase it; it’s worth it.

Choice quotes:

“I’d begged them to skip [my birthday] party this year because, among other reasons, I couldn’t think of a single person I wanted to invite, but they worried that I spent too much time alone, clinging to the notion that socializing was therapeutic. So was electroshock, I reminded them.”

“It’s not even a decision, really. You stay. It’s only later- years later- that you begin to wonder what might’ve happened if you hadn’t.”

Let me back up a little and tell you about the project itself. Since taking a children’s theatre class my sophomore spring, I have been working pretty steadily on a play that is a prequel to Peter Pan. A few of the scenes I wrote were workshopped by classmates so that I was able to not only hear them read, but see them on their feet. The professor of that class is a playwright herself, and she gave me a ton of great feedback during the writing process. At one point during the semester, we had private meetings with her about our final projects (which, for me, was this play, partially written), and at the end, I told her that this wasn’t just a project for me- that I wanted to do things with it. She responded that she knew and hoped I would. And while I probably would have gone forward with the project anyway, because I am stubborn, hearing that from her really gave me the confidence to do so.

However, not everyone was so sure about this project. The next fall I enrolled in the only playwriting class my university offers, and when I pitched this play as my final project (this time required to be at least 80 pages), my professor responded with raised eyebrows, “Well, if you think you can make it interesting…”

Fast forward to now, and that same professor has become my biggest advocate. Quite quickly during that playwriting class, he became very supportive of me and my writing. I don’t know that it was even that I was turning out good-quality material, because a lot of the time, I wasn’t. I think he could see that I was serious and was willing to dedicate myself to a project. And dedicate I did: at the end of the semester, I handed in a 92-page completed script.

I continued to work on the script while I was abroad in England (where the play takes place), and while there, I took a class on asylums and mental health treatments in Britain, which are featured in a minor way in the script. When I returned to the US, I did another draft, and then finally another in December.

Now that thesis has officially started, the same teacher that has been my advocate is my thesis advisor. I’m really excited to be working with him, because besides being a published and produced playwright himself, he is so supportive of me and this script and, after our first real meeting yesterday, I know that he’s going to really push me to make this script great.

So here’s my plan for the next few months: my advisor and I have decided that we want to get two new drafts of the play completed by the end of the semester, when my work will be presented in a public staged reading. In order to make this happen, I need to revise twenty pages a week and there won’t be time to discuss the first round of changes until we reach the second. Twenty pages already seemed a little daunting to me, but then my advisor started giving me his feedback. Wow, is this going to be hard. As he pointed out, my play is good, but it’s not great. It has the potential to be surprising and brilliant, he said, but in order to get there, I know I’m going to have to work really hard.

The biggest challenge, actually, are the small things, of which there are many. If he kept saying things like, “Take this character out,” “Make her less of a brat,” “You don’t need this subplot,” etc., I think that would be much simpler than what I actually have to do, which is a lot of little things. Most of the notes he gave me on the first twenty pages are on very subtle things, like increasing the mystery of the first scene and having the main  idea of the scene be left unsaid, but still be present. Of course, it’s not all gloom; a lot of his suggested changes are so simple but can change things so incredibly. For instance, in the first scene, my main character Mary (the Mary Darling you meet in the original Peter Pan story) is told by her husband that she can’t speak of events in her childhood because it is evidence that she may be going crazy (possibly again). Then the scene ends and the second one begins with her children running around and playing a game before bed. “Why don’t you combine the scenes?” my advisor asked. “It’s more powerful and overwhelming if she doesn’t have time to think about the conversation she’s just had with her husband.” Of course! That makes the play so much more active already!

Working on this thesis is going to be really hard and frustrating, but I’m also really excited to see the end product. I’ll be having a private reading before spring break, reserved for people who understand the process of putting on a play, and this first new version will be presented then. I can’t wait!

“We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.” Enter the world of Oryx and Crake according to Adam One, a self-appointed prophet of God, preaching green and some impending doom, a Waterless Flood that will someday wipe out all of humanity. In this particular instance, Atwood suggests a religious analogue to René Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images,” in which the artist demonstrates that an image is a poor projection of reality, a mere reflection of truth (see picture below).

But she does not limit herself to one or two theological points in her commentary of religion throughout the book. Each section begins with a sermon from Adam One, which is heard by the two main characters: Toby and Ren. Perhaps her most poignant suggestion is one that pervades the entirety of the piece, which Adam One sums up here: ” ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ That is the point: not seen. We cannot know God by reason and measurement; indeed, excess reason and measurement can lead to doubt.” This demonstrates Atwood’s concept of the relationship between science and religion. Using the Biblical text of Hebrews, Atwood asserts that religion involves an element of faith that transcends our ability to comprehend. She presents a worldview, here, through Adam One that embraces a truly empirical and scientific understanding of the universe but likewise realizing a degree of mystery in the nature of religion and the belief in God. Beyond a theological standpoint, this theme of faith in the unseen (and fear fear of the unseen, for that matter, in the case of the Waterless Flood and the haunting persona of Blanco) rests beneath Toby’s service with the Gardeners and Ren’s time at school and at the Scales and Tails club.

There are, again as in Oryx and Crake, very pertinent issues in our society that Atwood addresses in the book, like women selling their eggs on the black market and corporations forcing people into perpetual indebtedness (somewhat akin to the days of factory work during the Industrial Revolution). Like its predecessor, The Year of the Flood contains a large underlying discussion of environmental issues, mostly demonstrated through the Gardeners’ religion and practices of recycling, growing organic food, and appreciating the natural world.

Perhaps one of the most compelling issues within the novel is Atwood’s commentary on civil disobedience. Adam One and his Gardeners are defiant of the ways of the corporations by means of lifestyle, a non-violent protest of the materialism, avarice, and disrespect for nature. This seems reminiscent of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience in which he wrote, “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience…” This embodies the nature of the Gardeners that Atwood develops. Whether she agrees with this perspective or not is certainly a matter of question considering the MadAddam terrorist group that branches off from the Gardeners.

Later in Civil Disobedience, Thoreau says that “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong.” And it is regarding this point that the Gardeners experience a great divide. Those remaining with Adam One agree with Thoreau’s second point while others disagree and leave, forming the MadAddam group for whom the entire trilogy is named. MadAddam attempts to eradicate the evil of the corporations, resorting to violent measures in the process. Atwood thoroughly examines the nature of civil disobedience through the experiences of Toby and Ren, providing a compelling commentary on violence, murder, and their place in the survival both of morality and of the human species.

Beyond these deep thematic elements, Atwood does something stylistically in this piece that sets it distinctly apart from Oryx and Crake. She changes voice. Not one, but three times. First, she changes voice from the limited third person perspective of Snowman to that of Toby. Then she switches person from third to first for the narrations of Ren, which is keenly distinct from that of Toby. And there are the intermittent sermons of Adam One (obviously these are in first person as they are his spoken commentary) that present not only the theology of the Gardeners but some of the nature of Adam One himself. These three separate voices serve not only to characterize the protagonists of Ren and Toby but also to develop different perspectives of the thematic issues discussed above. Each voice helps to draw you into the piece and make for a suspenseful plot. Indeed, there are cliff hangers from one voice to the next, and we are left wondering at many points if the characters will even survive.

Ultimately, this makes for an even more compelling read than Oryx and Crake and serves to further our insight into Atwood’s commentary on issues within our society.

Ira Gamerman is one of today’s up and coming young playwrights. A produced playwright since 2006, Gamerman hasn’t looked back since getting his first writing grant in 2005. After attending Towson University in Baltimore, MD, for theater performance, he moved on to earning an MFA in playwriting from Ohio University, which he will be receiving this May.  His plays have been performed both nationally and internationally, and I had the privilege of seeing two of Gamerman’s short plays read at the Region II Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival two weeks ago. Both plays were chosen as one of only three compositions to move on to the national competition in Washington D.C.

Both of his plays (Skyscrapers in Sheepskin and Actual Magic) were so awesome that I felt the need to type Gamerman’s name into Google when I got home, and lo and behold, on his website were download-able plays!

Gamerman’s play Split (voted Best Play of the Year in 2008 by the Columbus Dispatch) follows the style that many of his others do, featuring a main character who narrates the events of the play as well as taking part in them, and a considerable amount of humor. Split tells the story of awkwardly charming Adam, a twenty-four year old who, at the advice of his shrink Dr. Frankfurter, is on the verge of breaking up with his girlfriend Ellen because she’s very like his mother. However, before he can, Ellen disappears to Alaska and an old flame, Jenny, walks back into his life. With the questionable help of two imaginary friends, Adam works to sort out his feelings toward the women in his life, therapy, and his own insecurities.

One of my favorite aspects of Split is the inclusion of Adam’s imaginary friends, Mr. Eskimo and Vince Vaughn. They’re fairly ridiculous and vastly entertaining, keeping Adam’s self-exploration from becoming run-of-the-mill or whiny. While Vince Vaughn is most definitely Vince Vaughn, Mr. Eskimo is not, in fact, an Eskimo. As he explains to Adam, Eskimo is not his last name, but his slave name; he doesn’t have a real name anymore.  Mr. Eskimo arrives to help Adam save Ellen (who has not gone to Alaska of her own accord, but has been captured by the Elite Eskimo Underground, a “very dangerous group of rogue Eskimos” that killed Mr. Eskimo’s parents.)

Another fantastical element of the play occurs when Adam imagines an ideal past with his old crush Jenny. Presented as “The abridged history of Adam & Jenny as performed by the Adam’s fantasy players representing the maturity level of the characters at that time not necessarily their age,” we see an infantilized Adam piquing the interest of the young yet sophisticated Jenny, in a conversation that runs thus:

FANTASY JENNY: Guess what?
FANTASY ADAM: What?
FANTASY JENNY: I just broke up with my 32 year old,  long-distance boyfriend who I’ve been dating for the past three years. And now I can take your virginity.
FANTASY ADAM: Wow! Really? Golly, that’d be awful nice of you, Jenny.

Amidst all this craziness, however, is unfortunate reality. Adam still lives with his mother and argues with her frequently- about his relationship with his girlfriend, about washing his hands for dinner, and especially about emptying his trash can. Before she goes to Alaska, Ellen harps on Adam about getting married, but Adam is unwilling. And when Jenny reappears in his life after three years of radio silence, Adam has to decide if he wants to let someone with so much knowledge of his past back into his life.

Split portrays both the reality and the fantasy of life, and reveals that each can be both ideal and kind of crappy. Gamerman’s humorous and truthful style lends itself to unique and enjoyable storytelling, which is probably why his plays are doing so well. If you want to check out Split or Gamerman’s other plays, you can visit his website here.

Choice quotes:

“Choosing not to choose is still a choice… Stand up strong for your confusion. Wave your flag of indecision high and proud.”

ELLEN: So, you’re saying you’re not going to marry me?
ADAM: Um- are you asking?
ELLEN: No.
ADAM: Well- No.
ELLEN: You’re such an asshole.

“Common thread here? Guilt. And they come by it honestly: Mom’s Jewish. Ellen’s Catholic.”

MR. ESKIMO:  Reception is terrible in the mountain range she’s in. Our only means of tracking her will be by her footprints.  What brand of shoe does she wear?
ADAM: I don’t know.
MR. ESKIMO: You’ve dated her for how long? And you don’t know what brand of shoe she wears?
ADAM: She wears a lot of shoes
MR. ESKIMO:  IT IS ESSENTIAL INFORMATION! IT COULD SAVE HER LIFE! SHE COULD BE DEAD, NOW!

As it’s only twenty-one days into 2012, it’s easy to say that John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars has been my most anticipated book of the year, but it’s still true. Green’s books are some that took me awhile to get into; at first I disliked his writing, but even when his style didn’t suit me, his approach to writing an absolutely true story did. I respected him before I liked him because of his unflinchingly honest portrayal of grief in his first book, Looking for Alaska. Now that I am a fan of his books, I look forward to his new releases, and The Fault in Our Stars is the most recent.

The book revolves around Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old cancer survivor who is still only doing just that: surviving. As she says towards the middle of the book, she has never been anything but terminal. When she is forced to attend a cancer support group, she meets Augustus Waters, a handsome and well-spoken survivor of osteosarcoma. The day they meet, Augustus tells Hazel that he thinks she looks like Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta and when Hazel says she’s never seen it,  insists that she come over to his house right then to watch it. From that day on, the two are nearly inseparable, their friendship sprinkled with undeniable attraction exhibited by verbal sparring and a mutual understanding that life is fragile and suckish.

Like any book that features a main character battling a real-world illness, sometimes the story is hard to read, especially when it is written by John Green. Green knows well what a child goes through when they are ill (he was a chaplain in a children’s hospital about a decade ago), and even if he didn’t, Green is unafraid to take the reader by the shoulders and make them look at what life is really like. The best parts about his books are the painful parts; they’re difficult to get through, but the reader comes out on the other side thankful that, finally, someone has thought enough of them to give them that journey.
But the book is not all about illness. As  Hazel observes, she has the full-time job of Having Cancer, but having cancer is also part of her life, which she lives as much as she can. Though we do feel her worry about what the results of her PET scan will be, we also feel the warmth of Augustus’ hand on her arm and her frustration that her parents aren’t living their lives so much as catering to hers.

Just as in his other books, Green tackles serious issues with real, smart characters. The author writes teens as very intelligent people, and that is probably why he is such a star in the YA community. With witty, provocative dialogue, Hazel and Augustus fight not only their illnesses but grief for those that are lost; the reality that they will probably soon be the lost; love for each other, their friends, and their families; frustration with those same people and themselves; and the disappointment that someone held on a pedestal might not live up to that standard in real life.

This is also Green’s first time writing from the female perspective. As with his fellow YA author, Libba Bray, I marveled at his skill at writing from the perspective of the opposite sex. Of course, what both of these authors demonstrate is that writing good characters is writing good characters; the gender of said characters is unimportant.

The best part about Green’s books in general are that you think you know what you’re getting, and then he pulls the rug from under your feet. In The Fault in Our Stars, he uses jarring single sentences that cause your stomach to drop and you to dread turning the page, sentences like “I never took another picture of him.” Green is brave enough to see past the happy ending the reader thinks is coming and give them the reality they probably didn’t want. So if you’d like a good literary wringing of the heart, you should read The Fault in Our Stars!

Choice quotes:

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A non-hot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy… well.

…The diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.

I think my school friends wanted to help me through my cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn’t. For one thing, there was no through.

“I had a few good kisses with my ex-girlfriend, Caroline Mathers.”
“Years ago?”
“The last one was just less than a year ago.”
“What happened?”
“During the kiss?”
“No, with you and Caroline.”
“Oh,” he said. And then after a second, “Caroline is no longer suffering from personhood.”

“You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“I think forever is an incorrect concept,” I answered.
He smirked. “You’re an incorrect concept.”
“I know. That’s why I’m being taken out of the rotation.”

Of course, I am using the word “finished” loosely; this draft is finished. But I’m still very happy, as this is a novel I’ve been working on for over two years and made a gigantic mess of during National Novel Writing Month in November. So this is good!

Also, side note: there will be posts that are not reviews coming up soon, when Stuart and I get into the swing of our final semester (eek) of undergraduate education. In the meantime, in mere minutes I will be posting a review of John Green’s latest novel, The Fault in Our Stars!

Sweetly, by Jackson Pearce, is a modern retelling of Hansel and Gretel. From the beginning, though, Pearce adds her own little twists while still being faithful to the original(s). In her version, the two main characters are brother and sister, but their names are Ansel and Gretchen. It hasn’t always been just the two of them; when Gretchen was six, her twin sister was taken in the woods by a creature with yellow eyes, a creature that Gretchen has since called the Witch.

Twelve years later, things have gone further downhill; while Ansel and Gretchen are still hurt and healing, their mother died years before from grief, causing their father to turn to alcohol and eventually die himself. Their stepmother, unable to bear the sight of them, turns them out of the house.  Feeling this is best for all of them, the two pack up their Jeep and head to North Carolina’s beach, where Gretchen dreams of an open, warm, and sunny place that is free of dark forests. But when their car breaks down outside of Live Oak, Georgia, Ansel and Gretchen are forced to walk into town to try to get a tow. It’s obvious from their first entrance into the town café that the village is not welcoming to outsiders. There is one person who is willing to help them, though: Sophia Kelly, who needs assistance in running and repairing her sweet shop on the edge of town.
At first, Gretchen and her brother are wary of staying with Sophia, especially after hearing that most of the townspeople regard Sophia as the beginning of the end for Live Oak. However, Sophia is kind and welcoming, and what’s more, she understands the siblings’ feeling of loss for their sister. Soon, a week turns into a month, and then a few months, and eventually the sweet shop feels like home. Gretchen enjoys talking to their host and Ansel and Sophia soon begin seeing each other.
But as Gretchen gets to know Sophia more, it’s obvious that not everything in Sophia’s life is as perfect as the candy Sophia makes. There’s an underlying sadness to everything Sophia does, and her obsession with getting young girls to attend her chocolate festival is far beyond that of a simple nervous hostess. With the help of a boy from town, Samuel Reynolds, Gretchen begins to uncover who Sophia really is and if the town really does have a reason to fear that Sophia will bring Live Oak to its end and who- or what- the witch in the woods really is.

This is the second book of Pearce’s that I’ve read. The first was Sisters Red, and while I liked Sisters Red better than this book, Sweetly was still excellent. Pearce has a very unique style- it’s witty, but in less a snappy way than a more weighted, thoughtful way. Gretchen, like Rosie and Scarlett in Sisters Red, is able to show anger without being annoyingly angsty and thoughtful without slowing down the pace of the story.  The character of Sophia Kelly is complex- though not as much as she might have been- and she kept me guessing throughout the novel.

One of the best aspects of Pearce’s works is that she writes wonderful action scenes. Their pace is spot on and she doesn’t hold back from describing something gruesome or shocking. What’s more, her characters- be they male or female- never become sudden action heroes when faced with danger. If they have combat skills, they earn them. Gretchen, determined to defeat the monster that snatched her sister, asks Samuel to teach her to use a rifle.

In her previous work, I’ve loved the romantic relationships between characters and felt all warm and fuzzy when they got together. But in Sweetly, I didn’t feel that way about Gretchen and Samuel’s budding relationship. This attachment felt forced, as though Pearce wanted the two to be together, but couldn’t find the exact way to make it happen.  I didn’t believe that, when faced with peril, Gretchen would run to Samuel for more than borrowing his gun.

The book, as a whole, is very good. The story is intriguing and I cared about the characters. Pearce’s studies of philosophy feature largely in this book (Sophia is a fan of Nietzsche and Gretchen’s musings are often philosophical), and it makes her characters deeper. She’s not afraid to let her work be smart, and that’s one of the things I love about her writing. Definitely pick this one up!