Alex Read #3:over and under by Todd Tucker

Aarrggh! Reading 10 books before the end of school is a little challenging, but fun. Writing about each one is HARD!! Especially if it's one I enjoyed. Why is writing about something I didn't especially like much easier?

over and under is a graceful novel about best friends Andy and Tom, and the last summer before high school. It's 1979, and the boys rule their rural south Indiana kingdom, riding bikes, spying on the local factory strike, exploring caves and practicing their crackerjack marksmanship. Tom and Andy aren't identical, though. Tom, son of a large family, impulsive and reckless, is the instigator of the adventures that only-child Andy follows and narrates. The strike at the Borden Casket Company highlights another difference: Tom's family is labor, Andy's is management. And when one of Tom's cousins is implicated in an explosion that kills the factory manager, family loyalties pull hard and set the friends on divergent paths toward their adult selves.

The story is narrated by an adult Andy, with the maturity and knowledge of hindsight, so even though there's a lot of action in the book (chase scenes, drunken ne'er-do-wells, shotguns, even some swordplay) the overall effect is reflective: the rawness and tension fades somewhat. The opening chapter is a little misleading -- I almost didn't get past the horrific accident with a factory saw that sets the stage for the years-later factory bombing.

There's a nicely done subplot about women's rights and domestic violence that, while is kind of obvious, is also essential to Andy's coming-of-age that summer. The book has been compared to To Kill a Mockingbird (which I think is a bit of a stretch) and Stand By Me (the movie from Stephen King's story "The Body," which feels closer). I'd also put it in with Jim the Boy and Dandelion Wine. And something about the cave explorations and escape, and the brutish father of Andy's crush, echo stories of another pair of rural adventurers, Tom & Huck from Missouri.

Alex Awards Read #4:Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

As a reviewer, I tend to follow a Booklist-style policy -- only publish reviews of recommended books. If I don't like it, I just don't write about it. But, I promised to read AND briefly review all 10 Alex Award books before the end of the year. Sigh.

So I forced myself to keep picking up Sharp Teeth, a novel-in-blank-verse about packs of wolf- or dog- people living and fighting in Los Angeles. Though they are supposedly "lycanthropes" or werewolves, they spend an awful lot of time masquerading as plain old dogs. A main character, Lark, is the leader of a pack that's just been betrayed and scattered by one of its own. Lark seems to have some big plan (he works as a lawyer, I think, in his human life. Is this allegory?) involving poker and infiltrating rival packs. There's an unnamed female, who leaves the pack for Anthony, a nice guy (100% human, at least for a while) who's just gotten a job as a dogcatcher. And a bunch of other characters, including a brute who heads the rival (and much less refined) pack, several women who either start or end as the lone female that holds an otherwise all-male pack together (through the doling out of sex, I think, which seems to be the way these critters work), and some policeman whose role in the story I never quite got the point of.

If you're getting the impression that I skimmed most of this book, you'd be right. I did try, really I did. I picked it back up three times, hoping I would figure out why it got good reviews and was selected for the Alex Award list. Eventually I gave up, and just started turning pages, looking for clues to what happens.

I will say that I did reflect quite a bit on the whole free-verse novel format, wondering if that's why I didn't like this book. That wasn't it -- I actually respect the format more than before, for its spare language and the way it forces the reader to bring imagination and poetry to the reading experience. Nope, it's just the story. I can't figure out why anybody thought it needed to be written, that's all.

When you don't like a book that has gotten awards and good press, it does make you wonder where the problem lies: am I shallow, dumb, missing something important? Maybe. I will see if any of our good high school "customers" are interested in reading Sharp Teeth and giving me an opinion. For now, I'm moving on to the next 2009 Alex Award book on my list, and hoping it's a "page turner" of a more satisfying sort.

GLBT Fiction NOT in the Paideia Library - But You Should Know About Anyway

Usually one wants to highlight all the really good services that your organization DOES offer. In this case, however, there's just so much Young Adult (and YA-friendly) fiction coming out that our library just can't buy it all, even though we have readers who've read everything we've got in a genre and still want more. At one point, I started creating a "next-best" running list of titles of GLBT novels that sound good but aren't in the Paideia Library's collection. But you know what? There are just too many!

Instead, I very heartily recommend the blog of YA author Lee Wind, who has been committed to reviewing GLBTQ-themed novels for teens since early 2007. The sidebar of his blog, I'm Here, I'm Queer, What the Hell Do I Read? links to all his reviews, categorized by theme. Check it out.

Other places to look for recommendations:

• The Lambda Literary Foundation, which gives the annual Lammy awards and publishes the Lambda Book Report GLBT Literature, a website devoted to books, cinema and other GLBT arts.

• The Rainbow List from the American Library Association. The 2009 list features 34 recently published books for youth from birth through age 18, representing a broad range of GLBTQ experience.

You can find these books at your local public library (links to Atlanta-area online catalogs here), in libraries around the world (via WorldCat), or as a last resort, you could buy them at your local independent bookstore.

Of course, you can always check the Paideia library catalog, or the recommended reading lists for all the great books we DO own!

Why Good Librarians are So Darn Nice

This spring, the faculty Library Committee is looking at student research skills in the JH & HS: what skills they should be learning, what they are learning, and how the library can help bridge whatever gaps there may be, either by teaching or supporting faculty as they teach research skills.

I've been reading up on national standards for high school students, and on the college student's research experience. We recently completed a survey of recent Paideia grads on their preparedness for college-level research; we're doing pretty well, they say, but there are always areas for improvement.

Two documents have been really interesting reading this week. First is the American Library Association's Standards for the 21st Century Learner, an outline of learning/research skills all students (and adults, for that matter) need to master for true information competency/literacy. It's much more succinct and snappier than Chapter 2 of 1998's Information Power, an earlier outline of "information literacy" standards from AASL.

The other is a progress report from Project Information Literacy. Entitled Finding Context: What Today's College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age. The description of the college students interviewed in this survey sounds not too different from high school students. They rely on Wikipedia for big-picture context when starting research (high school students also rely on SparkNotes for literature support); no matter how long is allotted for a research assignment, a majority will wait until the deadline looms to get started; and that settling into a topic, or "finding the right question to ask," is one of the hardest parts of the whole process (especially tricky since that's a first step and holds everything else up!). Here's what they said about libraries and librarians [emphases are mine]:

Students, who used libraries, looked to them, and especially to the reference librarians they consulted as sense-makers. Librarians helped students satisfice [ I learned a new word! It means 'make do with good enough'] their individual, often time sensitive, information needs. One student said, “librarians on this campus can be saviors, you need them to show you how to navigate a complex library system.”

Many participants considered formal library instruction (one-time, individual class visits) of little value to them, too. Throughout our sessions, participants reported that “library talks” (i.e., bibliographic instruction) made sense at the time, but that it was hard to recall and apply months later, when students were working on a research assignment. [the 'teachable moment' for these skills only happens when students have a burning need-to-know]

Other participants reported that they infrequently consulted librarians with the search terms they entered into scholarly research databases. Students told us “we are just as capable to enter basic search terms as librarians can,” “that I’ve been able to get by, so far, without librarians,” and “I don’t need a tour of the library, I just need to find one thing...now.” One student said, “my first step used to be the library, but it was too much information, now I just go to the Web.”

We found, generally, that when students did not receive (or request) the service they value delivered at the moment they need it from librarians, they quickly change course. Participants found a solution on their own, which is usually found online and derived from self-taught techniques that help them find the context they need. [Yikes!! The pressure!! :-)]

An ACRL (Association of College and Research Librarians) blogger wrote, rather pessimistically, that the report wasn't news to research librarians, and that what he took away from it was for librarians to keep on doing what we're doing. I have a little different take. What I read from it is that librarians who are successful in helping (and yes, teaching) students to conduct research absolutely must be available and approachable. We don't get a lot of chances to convince a needy student that the library is a dependable place to go for research needs. The ACRL blogger had it right, though, when he said it's all about building relationships.

I was heartened one day when, after explaining to a group of students that they needed to quiet down because "I'm mean and cranky," one student just looked at me and said (with a smile), "Yeah, right." Phew! There's hope yet. Ya' just gotta' love 'em (most days).

New Art on Display:Bauhaus Masks

Joe's high school Art Foundations class recently studied Bauhaus masks and the theories of Oskar Schlemmer. Schlemmer's sketches, from "Means of Transforming the Human Body by the Use of Costume," are concerned with the transformation of the human body by means of the disguise known as costume. The function of costume is to emphasize the identity of the body or to change it. Costume expresses the body's nature or it purposely misleads us regarding it.

Students created their own creature masks that either disguise their identities, or emphasize certain aspects of personal identity (interests or identifications), or both. These creations are on display in the Library until after spring break. Come see!

Graphic Novels Get Respect from the New York Times

Remember how the phenomenal sales of Harry Potter pushed the New York Times into creating a separate Bestseller List just for children's books? It appears that the growing popularity of graphic novels has done the same for that format. Today's ArtsBeat blog announces a new Graphic Books Bestseller List, which although it's heavy on superhero stories, it does include a few others, including one called Beanworld that looks interesting. I'll be keeping my eye on the list for future additions to our library collection.

In the meantime, you can explore our already surprisingly large collection of Graphic Books (or "graphic novels," if you prefer. Both terms refer to sustained narratives that depend on comic-style pictures as much as dialogue and sparse description to tell a complete story). New Yorker artist Art Spiegelman's Maus is an early example of the form; Marjan Satrapi's memoir Persepolis is another well-known one.

Browse our collection online through the library catalog, starting with "More Than Superheroes", a recommended reading list of graphic novels in the Paideia Library. Then come on in to check one out (metaphorically and literally) in person. Discover, and enjoy.

Finding Nouf: An Alex Awards Read

Unlike the amazing readers who commit to (and follow through on!) reading a book a week, I have taken on a more modest goal for myself -- read and at least briefly review all ten of the 2009 Alex Award winners by Summer Reading checkout time at the end of May. I've already read The Good Thief, and have just finished Finding Nouf by Zoë Ferraris. Eight more to go.

Finding Nouf is at heart a mystery set in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, with four main characters: Nayir, an honorable bachelor and skilled desert guide; Katya, who as an educated, single working woman, engaged to a man of her own choosing, is breaking many of society's rules; and Nouf, daughter of a very wealthy family, found dead at 16 after a mysterious disappearance. The fourth character is Saudi Arabia's conservative Islamic gender laws, enforced both by official religious police and vigilante watchdogs.

There's nothing startlingly different about this novel's storyline -- pregnant teen runs away, family secrets and cover up, accident or murder? What's really fascinating and different is that Fourth Character, shown through the development of the male and female lead and supporting characters. Katya, who at first seems to be cast as female support to Nayir, pursues the investigation as a personal search for truth, even though she risks her job, her upcoming marriage and possibly her life to do so. This is a 28-year-old woman with a keen mind and a PhD in biology, restricted to working only in a segregated female-only environment, not allowed to drive, who can't run even routine errands without a male escort/chaperone. So much potential to contribute to the entire society, restricted and rejected by religious limitations on her gender.

Nayir is a gentle, thoughtful, deeply traditional man, and something of an outsider (Palestinian, orphaned, raised by an eccentric sort of uncle). He is respectful of women and wistfully wishes for a wife, but has no family to make marriage arrangements for him and is reluctant to pursue marriage otherwise. Working with Katya makes him uncomfortable, intrigues him, and unsettles his assumptions about appropriate behavior, expectations and futures, both for women and for himself.

If you like literary mysteries (√), strong female characters (including teens) (√), and novels with a window into an unknown culture (√), Finding Nouf will deliver the goods.