If You Can Get Past the Stereotypes, Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train Isn’t a Bad Read

Every so often you have a day. You know what I mean: the kind of day when you just wish you could go back to bed and call in sick to life. Then you read about someone who has had it way, way worse, and remind yourself that you’re being a baby and need to just grow up. So if you’re looking for one of those books to knock you back into the stratosphere, zinging a hole through your halo of self pity, here’s a great one.

I picked up the audiobook of Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train on the recommendation of my dad, and while it took me a little while to work my way into it, I generally enjoyed this unique story. I can’t say that I have any knowledge of these orphan trains, nor can I say that I’ve read a lot of realistic fiction stories about orphans in general, and was lured in by these “new” topics. On these points, the author demonstrates an impressive mastery, and does an even more impressive job of weaving in facts with the stories. As I read, I  found I was also intrigued  by the structure of the narrative: one story follows orphan Molly, a 17-year-old goth girl of Native American ancestry, and the second tells the story of Vivian and her experiences as an Irish immigrant turned orphan in the early 1900’s, ultimately shipped out of New York City to the mid-West on an orphan train.

The two narratives interweave and overlap fairly well. Molly meets the wealthy 90-something-year-old Vivian while completing a community service project after she’s caught trying to steal a copy of Jane Eyre from the local library. Her boyfriend’s mother works for Vivian and, despite her dislike of Molly, asks if Vivian would be willing to allow Molly to clean her attic for this community service project. (Of course, Vivian is kept out of the loop as to Molly’s thievery, believing that Molly is performing this chore as community service for school). Vivian of course agrees, and Molly embarks on her attic cleaning adventures.

Molly herself is understandably prickly, having been tossed about from one foster home after another. Her current home really isn’t much better, with her foster parents–Ralph and Dina–not the best fit for her, either. But as her hours of community service tick by, Molly recognizes Vivian ad more to her than just an old lady whose attic she’s cleaning; she realizes instead that Vivian has become a friend, a sympathetic familiar knowledgeable about the aches and pains of being an orphan bounced through the foster care system. It is through this bond that Molly learns of Vivian’s life and struggles, just as Vivian learns of Molly’s.

What I Liked:

Molly’s not a saint. She messes up (ok, maybe stealing a book from the library isn’t the worst thing she could have done, but it’s still not a good thing), she can be mean (defensive technique for survival), she can be deceitful (again, defensive), the list goes on. There’s something that just rings false when a protagonist is an infallible perpetual victim, and to avoid that, the author did a good job of giving Molly a personality. Could she have been given more of a personality? Definitely–but there’s at least something here to work with. In many ways, I thought she was a dead ringer for Matt, the goth girl too-old-for-foster-care but still-a-darned-good-though-misunderstood-student in Kathryn Erskine’s Quaking. (Yes, she’s that much of a stereotype).

I liked that Molly was biracial: again, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s great to see authors who are willing to present diverse characters. Her boyfriend is also biracial, though of a different background. Unfortunately, racial matters are not a large issue in the context of the book, though Molly’s Native ancestry is linked in limited ways to her perspective of the world, and as she proceeds through the story, it seems to become increasingly important to how she sees herself. However, her perspective on this identity, what it means to her, etc, is not explored, and her boyfriend barely even acknowledges his.

The story itself had a number of twists and turns. Some were pretty predictable, some were not, and it was this mixed blend that made the story interesting and kept the pages turning. It certainly painted a unique picture of the children subjected to this orphan train, as well as a parallel to the fate of foster care kids today.

What Wasn’t So Great:

Yes, there were twists and turns in the plot. But my, this story could be predictable. I’m not much of one to harp on this point–I prefer to lose myself in the narrative rather than focusing on what’s going to happen next–but even I had some difficulty with this.

Vivian’s younger self, although told in retrospect and thus perhaps being given the rose-colored lens treatment, is overly perfect. She seems to never do anything wrong; she never wants for anything above or beyond the most humble and meager of wants; she never complains about her place or her lot; she never engages in questionable behaviors; she is a good student who values education. I had some difficulty swallowing all of this, particularly in light of the number of challenges she faces in her life. I think a fault might have made her come to life more as a character. Though we here many references from the infamous Anne (of the Green Gables variety), Vivian’s way too good a kid to be similar, even if they share a hair color and lack of parents.

Dina, Molly’s current foster mom, is such a flat stereotype it’s alarming. Now, because I agree with the author’s “agenda” with the negative traits that she stereotypes in Dina (I’m pretty ultra liberal, and Dina’s perhaps the exact opposite), I wasn’t upset by her embodiment of these traits. The fact that Dina’s a living wicked stepmother, modernized and every bit as ugly as anything the Brothers Grimm dreamed up, did. In fact, that so many of the characters in the book–Dina being just one of them–are quite so one-dimensional bothered me quite a bit. And kind of bored me. And ultimately just frustrated me.

After such a lengthy blending of narratives, the ending comes quite suddenly, and rather quickly at that. It felt like one minute we were hearing about how weird old Vivian had a strange schedule and no relatives, and the next she’s accepting Molly as a long-term tenant in her house and surfing Youtube for panda videos. Oh, and her long lost daughter, but that’s just sort of thrown in there.

I also found the ending implausible: so Ralph and Dina were really just in it for the child support money? Really? And Molly and her boyfriend Jack just make up, no problems? And Vivian’s just willing to take in a 17-year-old she doesn’t really know and isn’t legally supposed to have? And Vivian’s daughter’s just totally cool with connecting with her birth mother who decides out of nowhere to contact her for the first time? Hm.

Final Thoughts:

Hm. Meh. I really enjoyed the historical aspect of this–that an author did the research and put together a compelling piece on such an otherwise unbelievable doing (the orphan train), while simultaneously trying to put a face on orphans today. Too bad, then, that this was so riddled with stereotypes. At the end of the day, I had trouble truly engaging in the characters and the one-dimensional nature of them made the story more predictable than it needed to be. As a result, it was a lot less interesting. It’s a good book, with a unique story to tell, but it’s not the best one out there.

What did you think? Anyone else out there pick this one up and have similar thoughts? Anyone else out there pick this one up and completely disagree?

On Demons, Contrivances and Unanswered Questions: Delilah Dawson’s Servants of the Storm

A giant storm. Death. Destruction. Ghosts. Demons. Inccubi. Succubi. Zombies. Witches. Romance . . . If it sounds like I just described the vast majority of your local YA Lit section, rest assured I”m not generalizing, but simply listing some of the elements at play in Delilah S. Dawson’s Servants of the Storm.

The book opens with the tragic death of Carly, best friend to Dovey, during a giant Katrina-type hurricane set in Savannah, Georgia. The storm basically destroys the city, killing numerous people in it’s wake, and leading to a lengthy rebuilding and repairing process. The story focuses on the aftermath a year after the incident, as the town continues to struggle to return to it’s former glory, yet retains an on-going dark underside that it just can’t seem to shake.

Dovey has spent the year in a haze, after a very public meltdown/freak out at Carly’s funeral. Nondescript bottles of white pills keep showing up for her to take, and she dutifully does, daily. Until now, when she decides that she’s tired of living in a numb fog. But with her new-found clarity of the mind comes also a clarity of the eyes, and she finds it almost impossible to believe what she’s seeing around her. People who are monsters, controlling people who are nothing more than living zombies, forcing them to do their bidding, and many of Savannah’s citizens existing in the same numb fog that Dovey woke herself up from.

What really gets her attention, though, is the occasional random glimpse of Carly, which propels her on a demon-laden quest to learn whether her best friend is really dead or alive and what she’s doing wandering the streets, rather than tucked away six feet under.

Aided by Isaac, a cambion (a sort-of demon) and her one remaining best friend, Baker, Dovey enters a world that she was never meant to see, let alone truly interact with, in Savannah’s dark underbelly, as the greater and lesser demons controlling the city fight for power.

What I Liked About It:

1. The writing style is fairly lyrical. For me, it wasn’t as fast a read as other YA Lit books, but it was a more beautifully written one. The author creates a very unique character in Dovey, one who may have the mind of a teenager, but who has the heart of someone far older.

2. This really isn’t an idea that’s been done and redone. It’s a unique story (which I think we can all appreciate) and it’s one where you really won’t anticipate all the twists and turns of the plot.

3. It’s definitely creepy–haunted amusement park with broken rides that Dovey has to ride? Check. Creepy basement storage area that she has to go through? Check. Squirmy, slithery things that she has to fight off? Check. Demons chasing her in all their grotesque glory that she has to defend herself from? Check.

4. The author doesn’t shy away from race when writing Dovey and Carly. Dovey is biracial (her father’s Caucasian and her mother is African American) and Carly is described as very dark skinned. However, the question of race and identity is not one addressed in the book, as the bigger concern in identity seems to be more focused on human v. demon instead.

What I Didn’t Really Like:

1. While the story does create rules for the suspension of disbelief, the rules seem to conveniently materialize at exactly the moment when they’re needed. As a result, there are several scenes where the tension should be pretty highly ratcheted but which instead come off as just feeling contrived.

2. Maybe I’m just a class A selfish jerk (as a former lawyer, I’ve certainly been accused of worse), but I’m not sure why–whether Carly’s a dead dead or a walking dead–Dovey would repeatedly risk her life and eternal soul to find out? Carly hasn’t asked her to, and Dovey has no reason to believe she can do anything about it, but she does this repeatedly, even after many warnings–by demons, mind you–not to.

3. The author uses a wide swatch of characters in creating this story. We meet, in fact, dozens of characters–who are only relevant for a scene, then are never seen again. Back to the previous point of rules materializing when and where needed, so too does the cast of characters. Dovey’s lost and needs directions? Cue creepy carriage driver with parrot, or random girl in hoop skirts, or convenient pirate ghost, or Carly’s ancient grandmother, who also conveniently happens to be a witch. Dovey needs help/a break? Cue random bar with super handsome bartender (who’s not yet legally old enough to bar tend . . . ?) This is pretty distracting, as the function of each of these characters seems to be exclusively to further Dovey’s self-assigned mission in only one scene, and then never to appear again.

4. Dovey keeps telling us that she’s pretty smart, but she’s actually kind of reckless and dumb. I guess when most of the other kids in your town are being drugged by demons it’s not that difficult to be smarter, but even then I have to question her choices, which seem to repeatedly endanger the living surrounding her. What’s more, she’s very trusting, especially when she’s been given every reason in the world not to be.

5. While the whole town is apparently taking demon pills, for the first 3/4 of the book, Dovey’s mom is not only mentally sharp, but insisting that Dovey take her pills–even forcing her to swallow them while she watches. I actually thought that mom was one of the demons herself because of this, but that theme never materializes, even though we randomly (random because it seems to have nothing to do with the plot other than to be an added fact) learn that Dovey herself is part demon at the end of the story (and somehow tries to use her demon powers to control others? Huh?). What’s more, though Dovey is concerned about/loves her parents, she’s apparently never concerned enough to worry when her dad disappears for days or her mother decides out of nowhere to bake a feast and then snooze on the couch for a couple of days. Sure, it makes it easier for her to complete her own mission, but really? Is she really that unaware of the world around her?

6. This book really didn’t need a love triangle. But it got one anyway. Yet, although she’s 17 (and doing the equivalent of running up the stairs instead of out the open door when the monster’s chasing her), she supposedly just really doesn’t know/isn’t interested in the attention she’s getting from the two boys in the triangle with her?

7. We keep getting added information about the characters, like Isaac the semi-demon, and how he knew Dovey before the storm, but there seems to be no purpose why. If that information was to have affected Isaac’s credibility, well, wouldn’t the fact that he’s a demon and drugged Dovey once be quite enough? We are, in fact, somewhat bombarded with facts that, presumably, should provide a better understanding of what’s happening around Dovey and in Savannah, yet they never really add up to much of anything. Just more information to digest, but for no real purpose. These loose strings make the story somewhat difficult to connect with, especially with all the different characters involved.

8. Plausibility is lacking. I know, I know–it’s a story about demons and the like, but still. At varying times it’s suggested that the whole town is drugged by the demons, at other times it’s just part of the town. But those that are drugged act in ways that would bring Savannah itself to a stand-still, which would probably be noticed. So assuming that some people aren’t drugged–like Dovey’s mom, for most of the book–why wouldn’t she notice that people are generally acting weird? Or worry that a broken amusement park is running? I know the author mentions demon magic here, and I can suspend an awful lot of disbelief for the sake of enjoying a story, but this not even I could suspend disbelief and accept.

9. What with all of the pinkie biting in the story, it’s a wonder that anyone in Savannah has pinkies anymore at all. And I get that, again, demon magic might make this less noticeable and all, but Dovey also talks about tourists. Wouldn’t they notice, having not yet been drugged? Or what about the people of Savannar who are not drugged? Or, even if that fails, what about the people who leave Savannah to travel somewhere else altogether? Seeing people in mass missing their pinkie fingers would seem to me to be something that would catch the attention of the non-demon-drugged.

10. So in the end, does Kitty die? Did Josephine follow through with her threat from Riverfest after Kitty’s spectacle? Is Carly free, even though it’s not clear whether her pinkie was burned or not? And is Dovey in need of hospitalization? And what happened to Isaac when Baker and Dovey were found and hospitalized? So many questions, so few answers . . .

One last point: While the cover is haunting, what in the world does it have to do with this book?? In no scene is either Carly or Dovey wearing a short pinafore-style dress. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, is any given character. And why does she appear to be light skinned, especially when the one point the author brings up repeatedly is that Carly is very dark skinned and Dovey is more medium toned?

Overall:

The premise is interesting, and the author has a beautiful way with words, but this is not one I’d pick up again. The YA Horror Lit market is constantly receiving new reads, and while this one does do some unique things, it feels more confusing than engaging.

What do you think? Anyone out there read this one? Have any thoughts/opinions on it? Any clarity to add to the unclear?

On Race, Reparations and Ghosts: Why Sarah Smith’s The Other Side of Dark Has Everything But the Kitchen Sink

My, my, my. . . I will freely admit that I’ve had to wait two full days after finishing this book before being able to organize my thoughts enough to even attempt to succinctly write about them! I’ll be perfectly honest: I picked up Sarah Smith’s The Other Side of Dark 100% on a whim. I’d read nothing about it, hadn’t seen any press reviews for it, didn’t even particularly (like a small child) find the cover that enthralling. Honestly, I liked the title. So when I picked it up and scanned the book cover summary, I was doubly pleased that it sounded like something that I would actually want to read and think about in the greater sphere of YA Lit.

Let me just say that one of the greater critiques that YA Lit has faced is the issue of race. Or lack thereof, to be more exact. While occasional non-white bit players in stories do appear, usually they aren’t the central character. Or, at the very least, their issues with racial identity are not at issue. I think I mentioned in a previous post or two how YA Lit editors have bemoaned the fact that no authors seem to want to tackle this question head on. Enter The Other Side of Dark. I assume this title was designed to work on multiple levels, the other side of dark being light, a yin/yang connection. The book itself deals with issues of light and dark (both physical and metaphysical) and one of the central themes it addresses is biracial identity. As a biracial adult (1/2 Native American, 1/2 Caucasian) I find this idea fascinating, as the book addresses the more common black/white dichotomy, but really digs it’s heels into the shades of grey between.

The narrative is told by two characters: Katie Mullen, a veritable orphan after her mother’s tragic death-by-distracted-driver the year before, a freckled white teen from the wrong side of town, now being parented by her stepfather. Her father was a war vet and the mystery of how, exactly, he really died is another part of the story that I’ll try hard not to ruin. The other character is Law Walker, the biracial son of a powerful black father (he’s a show-stopping orator, as well as a highly awarded and renowned Professor of History at Harvard) and an upper-class white mother (she’s a powerhouse in her own right, but focused on the world of architecture and gardening).

Katie’s story is a sad one that thrums with a low-level tension, in which she is labeled as the local crazy: she’s the girl-who-never-got-over-her-mother’s-death, the girl who talks to herself, the girl who doesn’t care anymore. Law walks only with the chosen few, the friends who are untouchable by their high school peers because there is no one as uniquely amazing as they are. Katie’s being groomed for a mental ward; Law’s being groomed for Harvard. But here’s where things become not what they seem: Katie isn’t talking to herself or even going crazy–she just happens to be able to see ghosts. And Law doesn’t want to go to Harvard and become His Father, the Second–he wants to be an architect historian.

Their paths cross one day in a park, in front of the crumbling and decaying Pinebank, a once beautiful mansion that the City of Boston (where this is ostensibly set) has allowed to crumble and fall apart. There, Katie’s drawing crazy death pictures of the house while Law’s trying to convince his gang of friends that they should all band together to try to save the house from Mayor Menino’s decision to tear it down; that it should be a historical landmark redefined and allowed to remain, crumbling or no. Katie and Law’s paths cross here, and the remainder of the book provides their different yet overlapping perspectives on the events going on around them.

Katie’s biggest struggles are, of course, with the ghosts. She doesn’t understand why she sees them, she doesn’t understand for a while whether she’s imagining them or not and she doesn’t understand why the one ghost she does wish to see–her mom–never appears. She also has difficulty being a complete loner in a school where both her stepfather (and his girlfriend) work. Law struggles with some pretty complex racial issues: his father’s seeming hypocrisy, his racial identity and how he feels about it, his comfort with spending time with/dating a white girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Because that’s what Katie is described as: she’s that girl you bring home to mom like a broken bird you just know you can make well, and your mother says someone will, but it ain’t going to be you. And that’s exactly what Law’s mom says when she realizes who Katie is.

There were a number of things that I liked about the book.

The story takes a few twists and turns along the way, but generally it’s well done, with a clear narrative voice and both a central issue as well as a plethora of secondary issues. The writing is smooth and nicely edited, the voices believable for young adults. I really liked the idea of Katie seeing ghosts–an issue that hasn’t been overdone in YA Lit yet–and Law’s struggles with his own racial identity, something that I don’t think has been handled too often (Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian coming to mind as the most popular YA book today addressing this issue). I personally very much enjoyed the Boston references, set in contemporary real-world locations, as I lived there for some time.

What’s more, I appreciated that the author presented varying opinions on racial issues and reparations. We get extreme views in different directions, but we are also introduced to a host of possibilities in between, which is a great way to get an audience (particularly a YA audience) thinking about them.

However, there were also aspects of the story that either didn’t work for me or that I just didn’t like.

First, for Katie, there are a number of questions the author poses that are never actually answered. (Why does she see ghosts? Why doesn’t she see her mother? Why can she talk to some but not others? Why can some talk to her but others can’t?) Eventually, the character seems to just accept that things are the way they are and allows the chips to fall as they do, but having a few of these questions answered would likely make the story more intriguing. (Actually, I think what the author was working toward was that some ghosts are stuck here because of some unfinished something or other, but that’s not ultimately a hard and fast rule that applies to the ghosts that are remaining or that the characters themselves conclude).

Second, despite the fact that school in and of itself is a huge deal in the lives of kids this age (especially ones with parents who are Harvard professors or teachers at their school), that’s really not an issue here. It’s something Katie and Law go to–or skip, as need defines–but school life, homework, peers . . . these issues all seem to be non-issues. Katie just seems to accept that no one likes/understands her, and Law just seems to accept that he’s preternaturally loved and popular because he is who he is.

Third, the author kind of/sort of brings in Downs Syndrome, which is something that really never makes it into YA Lit, but really only as an attenuated connection, which is really disappointing. I laud the author for adding it, but it really has nothing to do with the plot, despite the attention at the beginning given to it. The character with it could just as easily have been a child and served exactly the same purpose. And it feels almost like it was added as an extra twist in the book, just to say it does.

Fourth, I think the author does ultimately dismiss the arguments for reparations, at times over-simplifying what continues to be debated because it’s such a complex issue. She has a tendency of pushing the professor-father into the category of over-bearing bully, too, which seems a bit over the top, but I suppose characters are who they are. Basically, I finished the book feeling that the author’s opinion on reparations was that they’re an obsolete argument that should be abandoned because the white men who traded in slaves felt bad about what they were doing, they aren’t who we are today because it was a different time, and everyone just needs to move on. This is a gross oversimplification, but ultimately what I felt (at least part of) her message was. HOWEVER–as I noted before so too will I note again: on this topic the author did present a wide range of different thoughts/ideas as well as arguments for and against, which made for very interesting reading.

Fifth, she tends to write Katie as fairly stupid. Katie bumbles along and apparently her mother’s death served not just as a trauma to her, but as a theft: all social skills she may have gleaned along the way were also stolen from her. At times, she’s overly concerned with whether Law thinks she’s crazy and whether he likes her, at other times she just allows herself to act stupidly, even rashly–and she knows it when she’s doing it!–but does nothing to mitigate it. She doesn’t speak up when she needs to, she says way too much when she should just shut up. Even the end, when everyone has told her not to go into the building, she does after all (trying to avoid spoilers here). I have a feeling she would not have been lauded as a hero in real life for having done this, yet she returns to school in a new-found fanfare of popularity.

Sixth, everything for Law is about race. Everything. Which is also unfair: yes, he recognizes it as an issue, but should it be the primary issue defining him? What’s more, no one appears to be forcing this issue upon him but himself. (And perhaps his overbearing father, though dad isn’t a constant presence). It’s not as though his classmates are making racist statements, or he’s being abandoned by his friends. He just seems to find everything he does to relate to race, somehow, and indeed tends to get pissy with the people around him who don’t, though he’s free himself to dissociate race when it’s convenient for him or preferable.

Finally, the author does an interesting dance with the interplay between race/privilege/power/freedom. This interplay is what has had my mind reeling, which I suppose is indicative of thought-provoking writing. But what Law (and his band of friends) seem to ponder is privilege. This group are all privileged, blessed with money or fame of some sort or both. But Law is left contemplating how privilege does not equal freedom, how he continues to feel enslaved to the memory of his ancestors before him. Even makes the connection of being haunted (figuratively) while Katie’s haunted (literally) by these ancestors. Part of Law’s argument against his father is that it’s hypocritical for him to expect reparations because he’s so privileged and powerful–that he’s already received reparations upon reparations for being who he is in the position he is in. I’m not sure I fully understand all the twisting and turning of Law and his father’s feelings and opinions on this issue, which is a shame. These are incredibly difficult and complex ideas for a YA author to bring up, wind together, and not fully flesh out clearly. A little added clarity on these would have made them all the more powerful.

Whew–so, in the end, this is a really intriguing book and most definitely worth the time. It marks the authors first foray into YA Lit, though she’s an acclaimed writer of adult literature. Even now as I’ve been working to write this, I still find my head spinning over some of the bigger thoughts and ideas. This made for a truly intriguing read, and I think I’m going to have to consider it a bit more before I finally feel fully settled about it one way or another.

Anyone out there read this? Any thoughts about it or the issues it presents? Feelings on the ideas and how they should best be presented to YA readers?