Maybe she’d always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them.

It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when Harry Potter didn’t exist. I grew up with each of the books in that series, and I wouldn’t want to have experienced them in any other way.

Yes, I’m going to talk about Harry Potter now. But I’m not going to talk about how wonderfully imaginative it is, or its complex plot, or how it covers everything from friendship to redemption to the power of love in the face of evil. J.K. Rowling does something else fantastic that’s hard to catch the first time you read the Harry Potter series. In a world as huge as the one Rowling has created, you get something that you don’t usually find in your typical chapter book—characters who don’t seem to play a big role, who only seem like they’re just in the background, until later on they reveal that they have worries and depths and lives that you don’t know about.

I’m talking about people like Mrs. Figgs. The old lady who babysat Harry a few times when was little, and was never heard from again (save from breaking her leg or something) for several years of Harry’s life. And why would you hear from her? She’s just a character who exists to show that Harry’s childhood was void of anyone he could really talk to.

Too often in books, the thing that draws a hard line between fiction and reality, is that most characters have a deliberate reason for existing, while the minor ones are background decorations. Nothing more, nothing less. When the Love Interest walks into the room, you can tell that that’s the person that the protagonist is going to end up with. There is usually a Best Friend character who’s there so that the protagonist can talk about their problems to someone, and maybe they’ll get thrown together with some leftover character too.

But Harry Potter, in all its gloriously detailed world-building and plethora of characters, does so much more than that. Could anyone predict, from the first three books, that Ginny would become Harry’s love interest? Ginny stands for everything I complained about in the second part of the last chapter I wrote. She’s shy around Harry and we only get glimpses of her in the first few books, and from that we make assumptions that that’s all there is to her character.

There are tons of characters that have hidden depths in this series, but I think the one that I’ll remember most is Snape. Not entirely likable—but a completely three-dimensional human being. Voldemort might be one-sidedly evil, but Snape’s development really changed the way I consider first impressions. Most books won’t go that extra mile, but what matters is that they’re capable of it, and if the stories are, then people in real life can too.

Most of the few billion other people on the planet will be background characters for us. But it can be so easy to ignore everyone who isn’t in our personal circle. Reading Harry Potter made me think of all the people I assume will never enter my life. Maybe one day that neighbor I’ve never spoken to will save me from dementors gone wild on my quiet suburban street. You never really know in life, and I never want to rule anyone out.

But beyond the characters in the novel, or the setting, or the plot, there’s another crucial part of every book that’s ever been written. And that’s the person who wrote it. I love that you can get the sense of who a person is by how, and what, they write.

One easily identifiable author is John Green—his books are hilarious, and they cover lots of things like friendships and romance and growing up. But somewhere, I think he falls into the Best Friend trap. Where the other characters in the book are just there to revolve around the main couple, not as people in their own right.

Don’t get me wrong, I love John Green. I love his sense of humor and his unabashed nerdiness, I’ve obviously borrowed his penchant for footnotes, and I recommend his books to all my friends. But I wish that his books weren’t so similar to each other, and moreover, I wish that the roles that his characters played weren’t almost exactly the same in every book.

This is my least favorite part of the formulaic elements of John Green’s novels. I like cheering for the underdog, but it’s as if there’s always certain characters have to be regulated to sidekick status, comic relief, nothing more. The ironic, witty and incredibly-wise-beyond-their-years (and okay, fine) white kids are the Main Characters. What I find is that the side characters—usually some sort of minority (Indian in An Abundance of Katherines, Native in Paper Towns, Korean in Let it Snow, overweight in Looking For Alaska, or blind in The Fault in our Stars… yeah, it can feel a little ridiculous at times) have more flaws, but they don’t get nearly as much character development as the main couple. I think I’m insinuating that those nerdy, witty kids are stand-ins for the author himself, which isn’t a completely bad thing. Every book has a piece of the author in it.* Maybe there’s a reason all of Dan Brown’s books feature men in their mid forties as protagonists, or that The Help is about black maids yet centers on a young, white, female journalist.

If the character is a stand-in for yourself, it’s not as easy to really put them in a tough situation. As I’ve already said, there are middle-grade books that aren’t afraid to let their characters tread into territory where we get a glimpse of their flaws; those flaws that make them human.

And so, when you let go of that wish fulfillment, that’s when you can let your characters feel like their own people. Despite my criticisms, I don’t think I could take my own advice. If I wrote a book, I doubt I could help putting elements of myself in there.

I guess I’m contradicting myself; however, I think that that part of yourself that goes into a book is also crucial in making it what it is. Louis Sachar, famous for writing Holes, wrote a book called The Cardturner because he feel in love with the game of bridge one day. Gary R. Schmidt doesn’t miss a chance to include baseball in his stories, or set it in a time period that he grew up in. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is one of my favorite books, and it’s pretty much a biography of the author, Sherman Alexie.

My one pet peeve

Despite my complaints about John Green’s books, he described something perfectly, something I’ve been struggling with as I’ve reached a few bends in the road.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

I mentioned Plain Kate in an earlier chapter, but I didn’t get a chance to talk about the author as much—and she has quite the story. She used to be an astrophysicist at CERN**. And when people gasp at how implausible that is, it upsets me. When people consider scientists and writers so incompatible that anyone can’t be both, I just feel more strongly that those two disciplines aren’t as drastically different as they appear. Both help us understand the world, understand others, understand ourselves. Is it too hard to consider that people are more complex than one or the other? It’s why we label people as Ravenclaw or Slytherin, heroes or villains, good or bad, major or minor. It’s why we label people as introverts or extraverts, quiet or outgoing, math people or art people, so on and so forth.

(We split literature in genres, too. So that way, we can say that we’re not science-fiction people, or historical-romance types, but honestly, I think that it’s the characters and the story that matter, not whatever arbitrary label you slapped onto every single word in that book.)

I absolutely can’t stand it when people act as if any person can only be one thing. It’s as ridiculous as seeing someone get angry over something one day and saying “oh, hey, that person is angry right now and must be angry all the time and I can reduce their entire personalities, motivations, and being into one word: angry.” Just because someone is ‘quiet’ in class doesn’t mean that they’re meek and stunted personality-wise, and just because you think someone is ‘loud’ doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of being introspective and thoughtful. We’re all of these things and more, not one or the other.

I want life to be spontaneous and unpredictable, or, in other words, a litle like Libba Bray’s writing career. She became well known for A Great and Terrible Beauty, which is set during a Victorian time period and features magic, corsets, fantasy, and lots of romance. The next book she wrote was as drastically different as you can get from that style—Going Bovine was about a teenage guy who gets mad cow disease and goes on a crazy road trip that may or may not be all in his head. It also has a talking garden gnome, a fairy, and a dwarf. Once you get past the shock factor, I love that she doesn’t have to write romantic fantasy novels for the rest of her life just because that’s the first thing she was known for.

Then there are books that make people famous, and the ones that they write for themselves; take Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver series for example. It came out right on the heels of Twilight and became mega-successful with its paranormal romance bent. I’m not a huge fan of that series, but I’m grateful for that it came out at the height of the trend because whatever she chose to write next could afford to be less conventional. And the next book that she wrote embodies a lot of the things I like about what story an author chooses to tell.

Her next book was called The Scorpio Races, which, as you may know, involves a deadly race with man-eating water horses. Without the recognition that her name had for Shiver, I don’t think that publishers (and readers) would’ve given The Scorpio Races a chance. It’s not a trilogy, for one thing. There’s no series or franchise potential for a standalone. But I think that it’s the book that Stiefvater always wanted to write; it’s the kind of book that could only come out of her personal love for horses, myths and folklore, not whatever was trending at the time. I think we need more books like that.

So what I’m trying to say is, a physicist can write a Russian folk tale, an author who writes paranormal romance can create a world of flesh-eating horses, and someone can move from Victorian-era fantasy to psychedelic road trips initiated by mad-cow disease to over-the-top beauty queen satire if they want to. It’s ridiculous to limit yourself to any one description, just like it’s stupid to say that you can only have one passion. Maybe it makes understanding other people simpler, but I want to believe that there’s more to anyone than what meets the eye. If anything, it stops us from trying to understand others at all. And aren’t those the first steps to discrimination, mistrust, and ignorance? It’s liberating, then, that it’s at least displayed in the real world by the books that people write.

End thoughts:

• *I can’t find a way to word that in a non-awkward way
  
• **There’s something about the word ‘astrophysicist’ that sounds mind-boggingly impressive BUT IT’S NOT
• Despite everything I said here I think personality typing is fun, but if and only if we ignore the stereotypes and don’t use them to judge people. For me they’re an interesting way of understanding yourself, but not in any way limiting what you can be

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

–Alberto Manguell

Before I get to the books that have impacted me more recently, I ought to talk about what made me such a huge reader in the first place. I have two other things I want to stick into this chapter as well:

a) reasons why some are more likely to leave an impression in my mind, and
b) the importance of not only the story itself, but also the experience of reading it.

I have my older sister to thank for my voracious reading habit. She would bring home books from the ‘big kid’ part of the school library, and I read every single one she got her hands on. (I’ve always been attracted to things that I’m not allowed to do.) Anyways, her being four years older than me means that I was reading Redwall when I was in kindergarden.

My parents were big fans of libraries because a) free stuff and b) free stuff. They never bought me any because they knew I’d seek them out on my own. I was never used to actually owning books, and looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s natural for them to be coming and going, and if I really want to re-read something, I have to make more of an effort to track it down.

When I look back at those particular few books that changed me, a surprisingly large number of them have an extra factor in common. It’s this: when I picked them up, I had no expectations. I knew nothing about them.

The thing about expectations is that they can backfire, but when you have none at all, it’s huge when something turns out be brilliant. And the one factor that forced me to try books that I wouldn’t have otherwise was the limited selection at the library. Yep, for once, the fact that it didn’t always have the shiniest, newest, most powerfully marketed books was a chance that affected a huge part of my younger teenage years.

The books that were at the library weren’t ancient; but the ones that I would want to read unquestionably were always on hold or on a waiting list, so I ended up picking whatever caught my eye on the shelf. These were the books that I had overlooked. They were the ones that I would see from time to time but never really jumped out at me. And they ended up being the ones that changed me.

A solitary activity?

Reading is never a truly isolated experience for me—I always have to share it with someone else. Whenever I stumble upon a book that’s amazing but virtually unknown, I feel this gigantic need to find someone who’s read it as well.

There’s always that powerful need to know that I’m not alone in reading something incredible, but perhaps there are downsides. When a character dies in a book no one’s heard about, it feels more… real. It might be just me, but knowing that everyone was grieving for Dumbledore lessened the blow of his death. (And also the fact that everyone had spoiled it for me.)

Then again, reading something that I know nothing about is an experience. There’s a few particular books like this, and I’m saving some of them for last, but it’s one of those life-affirming moments, you know? I read so much that most books are just a blur at the back of my memory, but there are some that are impossible to forget years and years later.

A quick example: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I was eleven when I found it randomly on the library shelf, and I almost completely gave up on it because it didn’t capture my eleven-year-old attention span immediately with its big words and odd narrator. I had no idea that it had so many glowing critical praise—and, at the time, none of my friends had read it—but there was one small paragraph that convinced me to keep with it.

In the first chapters, the chronology of the scenes jumps all over the place. I had no idea what was going on, but there was this one scene where Death mentions seeing a boy and a girl give a teddy bear to a pilot who had crash landed near them at some point in the future. That image struck a chord with me, and I decided to continue with the story, and what followed was a lot of tears and heartbreak and becoming acquainted with irony.

And then, that ending. It was the first time where it wasn’t just the fact that those beloved characters died. The narrator even spoils it for you at the beginning of the book. Instead, I was emotionally wrecked because of the way it was written. That was a huge revelation for me at the time. That’s the moment where I realized how powerful words can be.

Anyways, once I left the world of K to 2, books were incorporated into the classroom and reading was no longer always an isolated activity. It’s a hit or a miss most of the time, and I think it always depends on what book you’re reading as a class, but the only time I felt like I had really experienced something as a group was in grade five.

Movies are vastly different from books when it comes to how we enjoy them. When you watch a movie, it’s probably with friends, or in a theater with a bunch of other people. You experience the ups and downs and emotions as a group. The closest thing that came close was popcorn reading.

I think that popcorn reading was is a surprisingly effective way to read a book for class. You always have to be on your toes in case you get called on, and you experience what’s happening with the class as a whole. My fifth grade english teacher tried reading the entire book aloud, and what resulted was an audience that was uninterested and disconnected.

Then, we read The Breadwinner as a class. Like the keener I was, I read the entire thing before we got a chance to go through every chapter as a class, and it was a curious experience. Every time we got to a passage where something shocking happened, I felt that anticipation to see how everyone else would react. And it was pretty wonderful, not to be alone when something happens that strikes some emotional part of your brain. You have to force some people to read the book at the start, but soon enough everyone was captivated.

If I was looking for that kind of experience now, I guess the closest thing that could compare would be a book club or something. But even then, I don’t think it’d be the same as being ten years old and reading something out loud, knowing that at that moment, everyone is experiencing the same thing with you. At the same instant. I may not have been aware of it at the time, but it was going to be something I’d never forget. Not just the story, not just the words, but the experience itself.

End thoughts:

• REMINDER THAT I WROTE THIS WHEN I WAS 17 AND AM EMBARASSED

Just story, and characters.

I think that people change more significantly throughout middle school than they do at high school. It was always the biggest leap, from the same class every year of elementary to something so much bigger. Likewise, going from picture books to middle-grade literature is an equally large leap in terms of growth.

Gary R. Schmidt won a Newberry honor for books like The Wednesday Wars or Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, but I think that his latest book is his real masterpiece. It has an unassuming title—Okay For Now, an incredibly lame cover, and an unexpected protagonist: Doug Swieteck, a young delinquent who plays a minor role in The Wednesday Wars.

Okay For Now is terrific.

This book demonstrates that you don’t need to write in an overly detailed or sophisticated way to create something complex, moving, and very funny. Doug’s first-person narration is unmistakably that of a thirteen-year-old boy. He’s anything but charming at the beginning; he’s stubborn and he doesn’t show his soft side too often lest people start to think he’s a chump.

Doug isn’t like me at all; he’s obsessed with baseball, he has an alcoholic father, older brothers who torment him, and, oh yeah, he’s illiterate. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that sometimes you don’t need to share superficial similarities to relate to a character. One of the many things that this book does flawlessly is create a compelling voice. I still connected with that skinny delinquent because he felt like a real person—not someone I idolized, not someone I wish I could be, but someone that I cared for nonetheless.

There’s a moment near the middle of the book where something beautiful and subtle happens. It’s a moment that changes everything without having to explicitly shove a message down your throat. Up to that point, Doug has never referred to his brother by name. Heck, even in its previous companion book, The Wednesday Wars, Doug’s brother makes a few appearances throughout but he isn’t named, either.

Although these books should be mandatory reading for middle-grade students, it’s just as good for teenagers and adults. I read Okay For Now first, but The Wednesday Wars uses Shakespeare to parallel the protagonist’s journey through middle school.

I find it strange that some of these books for younger readers can say so much to any person, regardless of age. I just read Okay For Now and although I make it sound like a lot of Tough Stuff award bait with abuse and the importance of literature and all that jazz, it’s never preachy or contrived.

It’s also worth mentioning that no book has ever made me laugh and cry so much at the same time. The thing is, it wasn’t always because I was feeling sad; it was probably the weirdest thing I’ve ever felt, crying because I was just so… happy. That book did strange things to my heart.

Now, onto that fancy ‘complexity of the human being’ part.

The are characters who make Doug’s life difficult. But what matters is that these same characters undergo just as much growth as Doug. The brother who bullies him struggles with his own problems, the gym teacher who humiliates him is recovering from his time in the war, etc, etc. Everyone has some good and bad in them: this is something that I’m convinced applies to everyone even outside the fictional world, and I’m glad that there are books, aimed at younger readers, who work this into their stories.

Another middle-grade masterpiece that tackles some difficult truths is A Monster Calls, byt Patrick Ness. In this case, the telling of stories becomes the backbone of the entire book itself.

It’s a book about a boy, Conor, whose mother is dying from cancer. Every night, at exactly 12:07, a monster appears at his bedroom window. A great big creature in the form of the ancient yew tree in his backyard, who gives Conor a warning and an ultimatum. He’ll tell him three stories, but, after the third one, Conor has to tell him a story in return. Not just any story, but his own story: the one that tells his truth.

And although it’s painful to see his mother suffering, the real conflict in the story is within Conor himself. The monster’s stories all deal with fables where there’s no clear line between who’s good or bad; the evil queen in one story is only trying to help her country, and other tales feature people who do bad things without being completely bad themselves. When the feelings that Conor was struggling not to think are revealed at the end of the story, I saw that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t directly identify with his grief—what I did recognize was that a person is filled with a million different contradictions at any moment of time. It’s all just a part of being human.

“Stories are important, the monster said. They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.”

Sometimes stories are meant for us to escape from the everyday mundane and fulfill our fantasies, but sometimes stories are there to help us make sense of life. It doesn’t matter if you think things that are terrible, if your emotions are a big conflicted mess of possibilities, if right seems wrong and wrong seems right. What matters is what you ultimately decide to do. And that is one powerful story indeed.

Its important to know stories… If we don’t tell strange stories, when something strange happens, we won’t believe it.

–Shannon Hale, The Goose Girl

For some reason, a huge part of our culture and upbringing involves being acquainted with a set of sometimes outrageous, sometimes overly idealized stories that involve princesses, magic, true love, and (as they used to be, at least) the occasional severed foot.

Those fairy tales were a big part of my childhood, too. But I tended to prefer the more active heroines—first, the ones who were in between independence and helplessness, such as Ariel or Belle, and then Mulan and Pocahontas on the other end of the spectrum. Cinderella? How much more passive can you be? In those fairy tales I was always wondering why those long-suffering girls didn’t just go out and DO something about their predicament. In one little book, my demands were answered. And of all stories, it was about Cinderella.

Ella Enchanted is one of those books that I can remember reading over and over again, the way that you do when you’re little and repetition never gets boring. For once, here was a heroine who had a perfectly justifiable reason for her inability to stand up against her cruel stepmother and sisters. She’s cursed to obey any command given to her, even if it endangers her own life. It’s a great way to give the protagonist some challenges to overcome, without making it seem like she chooses to be passive.

I hate using the word role model, but if I had to have one when I was young, it’d be her. She isn’t afraid to bring about change when she finds herself in an unfair situation, and she does it by thinking of clever tactics, all with wit and good humour. In the traditional story, the prince falls in love with Cinderella just… because. In Ella’s story, the relationship is built on mutual admiration (and love for sliding down stair rails).

Another crucial element of how important this book was to my childhood is that Ella is flawed. She’s a good person, but she’s definitely not perfect; whether it was natural or something born out of the curse, she’s incredibly stubborn, and a little too outspoken. Although my parents would love it if I was always polite and positive, you can’t expect that out of everyone all the time.

In life, I’ve run into situations where I think something is unfair, but I feel powerless to do anything about it. The fairy tales that I heard when I was a kid all seemed to tell me that I couldn’t do it on my own—I’d need magical intervention from a fairy godmother, or a miraculous moment where tears bring you back from the dead, or some other outside influence. But although there is magic in Ella Enchanted, it’s what causes the problem, and it’s Ella’s determination and cleverness that gets her out of them. Looking back on it now, this is everything I’ve strived to do and be.

Although Ella is admirable for her strength and independence, Gail Carson Levine wrote another book that taught me so much despite the fact that the heroine was the complete opposite. In The Two Princesses of Bamarre, the titular characters are sisters—the elder, Meryl, is not unlike Ella; confident, fierce, and a good warrior. But the one who takes center stage, is the younger one: a timid, and, well, cowardly girl. She’s scared of spiders, she expects others to risk their lives to defend the castle, and she would never venture outside their walls.

That girl, Addie, demonstrates a different kind of heroine; one who starts out as a seemingly weaker person but experiences tremendous character growth. She doesn’t become a braver person overnight, but it she changed so gradually that I had to stop and realize that the same girl who was afraid of the dark was fighting a dragon. She does this because when the plague reaches her family, it’s Meryl who falls ill. It was prophezised that the cure would be found when cowards found courage, and Addie learns that you can’t always expect somewhere out there to make a change in the world.

So she sets out on an adventure, but it’s a difficult one; she gets lost, she loses hope, finds it again, battles monsters, falls in love, and in the end, the conclusion is bittersweet. It might sound a bit fantastical, but the story is grounded in reality. Addie stumbles from one place to another, and it takes time for her to overcome her fear. What really got me is the fact that she did it all for her sister; she wasn’t a matyr who wanted glory or who genuinely wanted to save the entire kingdom, no, in the end, she was motivated to leave her comfort zone because she loved someone else too much to lose them.

Because of this, The Two Princesses of Bamarre rivals Ella Enchanted as the fairy tale-like story that influenced my late childhood years. It’s not a competition, anyway, so I’ll just say that both remain as the stories that defined my perception of courage, bravery and heroism.

It’s funny, isn’t it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

–Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

Life’s so much easier when you’re still a kid—you don’t have a stressful workload, you don’t have to worry about your future, and your books still have pictures in them.

What I love about Roald Dahl is that a) he is completely bonkers b) a creative and witty guy and c) he doesn’t treat children like idiots. He doesn’t shy away from the tougher stuff in life, but his stories are still filled with humour. A lot of the books that are marketed towards children are formulaic; although long-running series such as The Babysitter’s Club or The Magic Treehouse bring back fond memories, each book isn’t as completely original or unpredictable as Roald Dahl’s.

The one moment that widened my view of how books could venture outside of the realm of the expected was in The Witches. Near the middle of the book, a boy gets turned into a mouse—and he doesn’t simply recover. Not only that, but it’s implied that he is murdered by his own parents. In your typical fluffy children’s read, this would be unheard of, and to tell you the truth, I thought it was shocking (and pretty damn terrifying).

Still, that incident involved a minor character, who wasn’t even likable. It lessens the blow, to a certain extent. And then, the book takes another unexpected turn: the main character himself gets turned into a mouse. There is no miraculous cure, no extra twist in the end that sets things right. But it’s a happy ending, nonetheless.

I think that it’s important for characters to earn their happy endings, and it’s important for there to be some instances where everything doesn’t end perfectly, all with a bow and a cherry on top. I’m a realist, and I love it when a book isn’t afraid to tell the truth, no matter how hard it might be.

Another children’s book with darker tones is more recent; it’s called Plain Kate, by Erin Bow. Where Dahl’s novels are fun, eccentric, and sometimes cartoonish adventures, Plain Kate is poetic and lyrical, drawing a lot of power from its atmosphere. It’s set in a country that could be called the fantasy counterpart to 16th century Poland/Lithuania, with a plot that’s inspired by Russian folk tales. (Pretty cultured stuff.)

It’s a world filled with magic (the kind that comes at a price), superstitions, and gypsies. Like other folk tales about a young person coming of age, Kate loses her father at the beginning of the story and ends up without a home or a direction to follow. Her skill at woodcarving and her status as an orphan leads to her being accused of witchcraft, and in a fit of desperation she makes a deal with a stranger who turns out to be dabbling in witchcraft himself.

Kate wishes for a friend to share her troubles with; the stranger, Linay, grants it—by giving her cat the ability to speak. The cat in question, Taggle, is exactly what I imagined a cat would be like if they could talk. He’s haughty, condescending, but loyal when it truly matters.

Kate and Taggle are admirable, sympathetic, and flawed characters, but the one who really changed the way I perceive character roles is that of the antagonist: Linay. More specifically, I want to talk about his status as the ‘villain’ of the story. He’s a tricky character to place.

He moved like a jumping jack that was strung too loosely, so that he seemed about to turn a flip or clatter into a pile of bones and string. His zupan’s loose skirts swirled around his knees and its undone sleeves swung as he walked. Every man in Kate’s country wore such a coat, but on this man it hung like a costume. Kate wondered if he was foreign. His strange, witch-pale skin and hair made it hard to tell. The white coat bleached him further, made him look like a painting that had half washed away.
“Lovely lass,” he drawled, leaning sharp elbows on her counter, “I hear you work wonders in wood.”

Just like Snape of Harry Potter fame, or Mayor Prentiss in Chaos Walking, I was never sure whether I could trust him or not. Every scene hints at his motives, and whether they’re good or bad is an ongoing mystery. Right until the end, I didn’t know whether I could like him or not; after I turning the last page, I came to my conclusion.

In some ways, my conclusion was that it didn’t matter. He was a person, a perplexing, polarizing one, and although I could never forgive some of the things that he did, he did genuinely (and surprisingly) come to care for Kate. He wasn’t good or bad, but he was capable of both, just like anyone. He made me cry when I wasn’t even sure if I liked him or not. I can’t find a good way to say this, so I’ll just borrow some words from John Green.

I don’t know where people got the idea that characters in books a supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make your brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

–John Green

Even now, here’s my stance on Linay: ahhbdgbdmerhasdfsdsfdfseieiweoawer.

What people read revealed so much about them that she considered our card catalog a treasure house of privileged secrets; each card contained the map of an individual’s soul.

–Alice Hoffman, The Ice Queen

As a teenager, adults are always asking you about yourself. What seems to be one of their favorite questions (and it’s always for something unavoidable, like a scholarship application or a personal essay), is this:

“What are you passionate about?”

What are we passionate about? My first reaction is why this has to be such a big deal, and why can’t there just be one right answer that you love to hear, because I really could use this scholarship and no one really tells the truth for these things anyway. (I blame the traditional education system for raising me to wonder what that right answer is, instead of letting my repressed creative mind run wild.) I like a lot of things. I like sleeping in until noon and crying like a baby during Pixar movies and pushing the limits of procrastination beyond the impossible. But passion is such an important sounding word, like whatever you choose to associate with it is your be-all, end-all until the day you die. Oh, you say you love to knit? Well why haven’t you taken that love to the next level? Honestly, you can’t say it’s your passion unless you’ve dedicated your life to knitting the most fantastic and ambitiously designed knitted garment in history and donated fifty-six thousand hand-knitted caps for newborns in Indonesia and started a world-class knitting museum because this is your Passion and without one what is your purpose in life?*

I think that seventeen is a little too young to be sure of what your passion is. I’m not sure you’ll find it even when you’re thirty or sixty or a hundred and two. Or maybe you’ll have had it for quite a while, and you spend most of that time trying to figure out what it always was.

So, after six thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty-seven days of living on this lovely planet, I think the closest thing I have to this grand thing called passion is literature. Books. Stories. Words. Scribbles on a page.

There are books that you hear so much about that you have to give them a try, and there are books that sneak up on you. I find that these are the ones that leave a greater impression on me—because of that element of surprise. It’s the same sort of feeling you get with unexpected friendships, subverting first impressions, and overcoming prejudices.

Realistic or not?

Unlike life, books are just so deliberate. You can spot who the love interests are and who’s good and who’s bad, you can tell which characters are going to be significant and which are just there as background décor, when in reality all these things are impossible to know for sure. Books are static, while life is always changing depending which choice you do or didn’t make. In a book, you’re on that train-track straight path from beginning to end.

But what you make of it is all your own. And that meaning, and those emotions, are always changing and mostly impossible to know for sure. Just like life.

It’s not just the stories themselves that are part of it. It’s also about the experience, sharing it with others, the person who wrote it in the first place, and what you take from it. I’m going to attempt to cover the main points, but the truth is I could never say everything that I want to in this one collection of thoughts.

Anyways, the big cheesy thing that I came to terms with was this—that the written word has a way of finding a place in your soul, and that what does make its way into your sense of self is my way of understanding others. Especially since my friends have started asking me what they should read next; they trust me to know what stories will speak to them, and it’s pretty fun to match the right book with the right person.

There’s a way of thinking about people in terms of what books they might like that can say a lot about the person in question. So, what kinds of books do I like? And what does that say about me?

End thoughts:

• TO BE CONTINUED
• A big bunch of posts that I wrote about writing and reading and writing about reading. It’s very over sentimental and there’s lots of preferential gushing about my favorite books
• *I had a strange fixation on knitting when I was 11
• **Not really on topic, but I think that all those ‘important’ things that are in the books that you have to read for school, you can find in books that don’t go out of their way to teach you a Very Special Lesson.

GIRL OUT LOUD is one of those unassuming books, that fools you with its nondescript cover and generic premise– only to blow all your prejudices away from the very start. It’s incredibly funny, well-written, and, most of all, it has voice. That kind of voice. That grabs you and makes you feel like it’s not just scribbles on a page, but a living, breathing person that you feel like you could go out and meet (and wish you were friends with).

When Kass’s dad pushes her to audition for The X Factor, she just can’t say no. Her family is as dysfunctional as it gets; her little brother’s a budding cyber criminal, her mom keeps disappearing, and said dad has manic-depressive disorder. Despite all this, the first person narration is just brimming with personality and humor; there is a plot building up to her singing audition, but GIRL OUT LOUD is about so much more. Friendship, family, the kind of stuff in most contemporary novels– but it’s never been done quite like this before. I particularly enjoyed her imaginative similes.

“Today we’re sketching portraits of each other, but I want you to follow the principles of the Surrealist movement we discussed last week.” She means putting an ear where the nose should be.

Raff consults a small red notebook. They’re both speaking out of the sides of their mouths in hushed tones and looking around shiftily. This is like watching Ocean’s Eleven–The Early Years.

In bounds Dad, like a spring lamb who’s been mainlining Red Bull.

There’s hardly a mundane sentence in the book– Kass’s voice is the kind that’s immediately distinct, with enough quips, Occasionally Capitalized Words, self-aware exaggeration and scattered inner narration that somehow manages to never veer too far into the overly quirky and distracting side of things. I was surprised at just how much I kept thinking this is what my inner monologue sounds like too!. Kass runs into a ton of the daily awkward/dramatic situations that us teens do, but it was written with a rare kind of genuine emotion that I couldn’t relate to more.

I could scream. He’s like an 18-wheeler with no brakes, tearing around a racetrack honking its horn– it’s all about this great big truck, nothing else on the track matters, around and around, and I’m driving in the opposite direction, but every time we head for a collision I swerve out of the way. I don’t want him to keep going around, but I can’t let him crash.

That’s the hardest thing isn’t it? You can’t stop caring about your family, no matter how much you may want to sometimes. With her mother too often refusing to acknowledge her dad’s bipolar disorder, and her thirteen-year-old brother too busy managing his offshore account to hold the family together, the responsibility ends up falling on Kass. And if she didn’t, she’d feel guilty. I also consider my parents pretty weird, but despite the craziness and the arguments and so on, in the end managing to kind of function despite it all– that’s what being a family is about. And Emily Gale captures it perfectly, with a genuinely funny, flawed, down-to-earth main character to boot.

Hardcover • 288 pp • June 1st 2012 • Scholastic Inc.

End thoughts:

• Hey. Long time no see. School is finally over! Actually, high school is finally over. FOREVER. Scary.

A sample of the thoughts that were going through my head while reading THIS IS NOT A TEST: oh my god ohymygod oh my GOD NO no no WHAAAAAAT JESUS H CHRIST WHAT THE AHHHHHHHHHHHH holy crap s— s— s— s—

Now that I’ve recovered (but only slightly): this book is amazing.

The first part opens seven days after the main characters journey through infested streets to reach shelter: their high school. The group consists of:

• Sloane: the narrator, a girl who’s already given up on surviving the apocalypse;

• Cary: a pot-selling slacker turned ace survivalist;
• Rhys: his lancer, a decent guy and a voice of reason;

• Grace: the beautiful/perfect student body president;
• Trace: her short-tempered twin brother, who blames Cary for the death of their parents; and

• Harrison: the youngest, a freshman, and a crybaby.

It’s a character study of a group of flawed, realistic teens. It’s a psychological exploration of what happens when you’re pushed to your very limits—whether it leads to paranoia, or blame, or denial, or what you cling on to when the world falls apart: love. It’s utterly terrifying.

This is what reading THIS IS NOT A TEST was like: a bunch of miniature heart attacks in every chapter. Not always because of in-your-face action, but the sheer tension between the characters and the constant external pressure of what loomed outside the school walls was just… insane. This is a zombie novel that isn’t focused on body count or constant gruesome terror; it made me care about the characters, first and foremost. It is just as much about Sloane’s inner turmoil as it is about character dynamics during a zombie outbreak, and the fact that she wants to die, to give up, well– by the end, you’ll see how much she changes.

Which doesn’t mean that it shies away from describing the zombies in all their terrifying, gory, glory. When there’s action, it’s the kind that makes you faintly cling to the pages while making it impossible to look away. I was freaking out. What Summers has perfected in this novel is the wham line. I thought that it favored the kind of slow-burning psychological tension but when stuff falls apart it’s worded in a way that actually causes your brain to pause for a second in shock. There are beautiful moments– and horrific ones as well. When she describes the undead, it’s like I want to turn away but I can’t. Using just words, she makes it even more terrifying than seeing it on film. The writing is incredible.

4.5 out of 5 stars

This book was drop-dead har har amazing. The only other book I’ve read by Courtney Summers was Cracked Up To Be, and I thought it was just okay– so even if you’ve never heard of her, or read books by her, even if you love her writing but wasn’t sure about the zombies– okay, if you like well-written books at all, read THIS IS NOT A TEST. It is excellent in so many ways; the tension, the unputdownable factor, the terror, the twists and turns. The writing. The characters.

All brilliant.

(And terrifying.)

Paperback • 320 pp • June 19th 2012 • St. Martin’s Griffin

End thoughts:

• This book doesn’t come out until June… but you should definitely pre-order it ASAP.
• Just a note, I get scared easily. I’m a complete wimp. Like, commercials for scary movies scar me for life, and just seeing the POSTER for a horror movie gives me nightmares.
• I read this entire book in one frantic night, and at one point I was too scared to keep going. I swear it’s because it was so dark and quiet in my room. and stuff.
• Baxter was without a doubt the scariest character in the whole book for me. And he’s just a person. I couldn’t handle the paranoia, it freaked me out so much
• If this happened in real life I would be either a) the first to die or b) Harrison. Oh Harrison.
• Does anyone know what the last page was supposed to say? It was too hard to read on my e-reader.

So, as you may have noticed, this blog looks a little different than it did before. It’s nice to switch to something more simple for a change. (I admit that I’m enjoying the rotating headers a little too much, too. I’ll try to get some credit for the art soon.) It’s called Chateau if anyone’s interested in using it ;)

On to other new things: if you want to keep up with updates via GFC, you can re-follow by clicking here or in the sidebar. I’ve also changed up my review/general post format in a few ways:

• Ramblings on the cover will appear if you hover over the image of the book cover
• I’ll try to summarize the plot within the review;
• Let me know if you have any feed back on the different post titles– for search engine optimization’s sake, the name of the book/author will still be in the page’s meta info, but what you see will be different.
• I hope the extra large cover images will help with that!

School is so relaxing right now… I can’t help but feel like I’m really going to miss high school. Anyways, I can feel all nostalgic and stuff later! I’m off to hoard reviews for when I have to adjust to those crazy uni workloads.

End thoughts:

• I also want to write more random posts… maybe on movies or manga or TV and so on. I hope it won’t be too jarring
• University angst!!! I’m feeling it. Although I’m so blissfully overcome by senioritis at the moment that I don’t want to make any decisions =w=
• Let’s see what’s on my to-do list… update the review index, open a recommendation page, actually write something sensible for my about page…
• TIME IS GOING BY TOO QUICKLY it feels like I just posted something and then bam that was two weeks ago