Response to Skellig

            It should be simple.  You read a book, and you like it or you don’t.  Yes or no.  However, what if it is neither?  What if you can’t decide?  And as you’ve probably figured out, I have absolutely no idea about how I feel about Skellig, and that feels very uncomfortable.  I feel like Goldilocks who can’t find an opinion that is just right.  If I were to say, that yes, I liked the book.  I would get caught up in the details that frustrate me.  I found it infuriating that Michael’s parents choose to buy such an irresponsible house with a baby on the way.  I found Mina’s home-schooled educated superiority infuriating, and I couldn’t get past shifting focus on who or what Skellig was.  Yet if I were to decide that I absolutely did not like the book, I wouldn’t be able to move beyond the themes that I related to in the book.  I liked the connectedness between the characters, Michael and Mina, Michael and his sister, and especially Skellig and the baby.  I liked that Michael was courageous enough to put Skellig before himself.  I want to have a firm stance on one side of the argument or the other, but I can’t.  And maybe that is the point.

            Just like I can’t decide whether or not I liked Skellig, I can’t figure out the enigma of the namesake of the book.  I have to wonder about David Almond’s intentions as he wrote this book.  Were the uncertainty and the questioning his intention in writing this story?  Readers are given evidence that Skellig is an owl, an angel, a man, and a dream.  He happily eats bugs and mice, although he prefers 27 and 53, and even spits up pellets containing bones and skin of small vermin.  Michael feels “the feathers, and beneath them the bones and sinews and muscles that supported them”; readers are led to believe by Mina’s knowledge of hollow birds’ bones that this must be the case for Skellig’s wings.  Yet we are also led to believe that Skellig is not a bird, he is far more heavenly-he is an angel.  Early on we hear Michael’s mother explain the purpose of shoulder blades.  “’They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel…They say they’re where your wings will grow again one day.’”  We are not surprised that Skellig’s suit coat is restraining wings, growing from his shoulders.  But wait-maybe he isn’t an owl or an angel.  Maybe he is just a really special, human man.  Humans suffer from Arthur Itis, and humans, like Skellig, have a capacity for love and companionship.  However there is still support for one more explanation; maybe he isn’t even real at all.  Michael’s mother tells him, “’I saw this man…another dream…he was standing over the baby.’”  Maybe, maybe, maybe.  Some might like the uncertainty of the novel, but I felt that there was too much ambiguity.  There aren’t enough details to prove anything as being fact.  While I can appreciate that all opinions can be supported in the text, I found it to be frustrating that the purpose of Skellig is that an answer isn’t possible. 

            One of the reasons there is so much ambiguity in Almond’s book is that everything has a double meaning.  The author uses these multi-dimensional characters and objects as symbols that are meant to express more than one meaning at a time.  Not much time goes by in the course of this novel but we learn in the end of the book that “it was really spring at last”.  Spring, being a common symbol to evoke the feeling of new beginnings, has been on its way throughout the book, but finally appears when Michael is at peace with the baby and Skellig.  There is a lot of moving going in the book: Michael moves to a new house, the baby is moved back to the hospital, and Skellig is moved into Mina’s abandoned house.  These moves can represent how the characters are better able to take care of their loved ones.  Michael’s father works night and day to make a home that is better for Joy.  The baby has to go back to the hospital so that the doctors can better care for her and make her healthy, and Mina and Michael bring Skellig to a safe, roomier place so that he can get stronger with their help.  One scene in particular was built upon very interesting symbolism.  The fledglings, on which Mina and Michael have kept such a close eye, have finally emerged from their nest but are not yet ready to fly; they were hidden safely under the hedges by their parents so that they could be cared for and protected.  The parents will keep a close eye on them, feeding and watching, until the little ones are strong enough to fly.  This is an especially poignant scene considering that Michael’s baby sister is dying in a hospital and needs to be under constant observation.  Mina is fascinated by the process and shares it with Michael’s father, who then tells Mina to “’just keep believing…and everything will be fine.’”  The father understands the parallels between these vulnerable baby birds and his baby daughter.  Symbolism adds depth to a novel.  However, in Skellig is the symbolism too much of a good thing?  The intended audience, adolescents, might pick up on some of the hidden details.  But when everything is a symbol for something else, I know that even I missed out on some of the underlying themes.

            Structure of a novel is a powerful tool.  In the case of Skellig, it helps to set up the pace and makes it more readable.  The chapters of this novel are extremely short; most are just two or three pages.  Because of this, there are so many natural breaks that as a reader you don’t know which one to take.  As I read, I could always find an excuse to read just one or two more pages because it wasn’t committing that much more time to continue reading.  Because of this structural choice, I found that the book was very easy to read.  It was easy to continue to read and to maintain interest in what you were reading.  Also, by having many short chapters, the pace of the book was very fast.  There weren’t breaks in time in the plot, and therefore there weren’t breaks in the writing.  It created the effect that, as a reader, we were being given all of the information; we were truly a bystander to the action of the novel.  While structure isn’t the most powerful of all literary elements, it definitely plays an important role in setting the pace and readability of a novel. 

Response to The Graveyard Book

       Many books cross the neat borders that have been made to surround genres and groups of books.  While Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is clearly fantasy, it crosses the border between Children’s Literature and Young Adult Literature.  However, considering the shiny Newbery Medal on the cover, mature readers can assume that the intended audience is children.  It was with this frame of mind that I read Bod’s story.  The fantasy genre entices young readers with worlds they haven’t seen and experiences they haven’t know.  Developmentally speaking, children’s brains can finally understand the difference between reality and imagination.  Through the recognition of the differences between our world and these other fanciful ones we can learn to understand the world around us.  Bod learns to deal with one of the world’s universal struggles, death, with appreciation and peace; perhaps readers can walk away with the same feeling.  How beautiful it is that the dead are shown as living a full and worthy existence.  They are represented as having families, friends, loyalties, and parties.  If I were a child who lost a loved one, this image is far more comforting than that of a ghost that haunts you.  To give children credit, I believe that most that read this novel know that it is imagined, not reality.  However, the portrayal of death in this book demonstrates that there is an alternative way of understanding the images of the dead.  This alternative is one that we can appreciate and find peace in. 

            Apparently no matter where you go, whether it is a school, a street corner or a graveyard, you can not get away from bullying.  The problem has been going on for as long as there have been children interacting.  But in current society, bullying has become a buzz word, and rightfully so.  Without climbing any higher on my soap box, I will just say that it is a problem that needs to be addressed in many ways and in many places.  In Chapter 6 Nobody Owens’ School Days readers learn that even a boy that is raised by ghosts can become engaged in bullying.  All books, fantasy books included, reflect a character that reflects some sort of struggle that readers can relate to.  In bullying terms, Bod is a victim, bystander, and bully himself; all students can relate to one, if not all, of these roles.  As a victim, Bod got stabbed by a pencil and complains that as a result of the unwanted attention he has “[become] a presence, rather than an absence”.  While sitting in the library Bod overhears the bullies, Nick Farthing and Mo Quilling, harassing Paul Singh.  Bod is the best kind of bystander because after he witnesses bullying, he does something about it by encouraging Paul to react.  As a means of fighting back against the bullies, Bod scares Nick off by performing a terrifying Dreamwalk and threatens Mo with eternal haunting.  He goes a step beyond just sticking up for himself and therefore becomes a bully who is threatening other kids.  So what ideas about bullying does Bod, and therefore the readers, walk away with?  Unfortunately, the messages readers get are conflicting.  In the imagined world of Old Town, we learn that reacting to a bully by bullying them back will get them to leave you alone.  In reality, this strategy is highly discouraged with victims because it perpetuates the cycle.  The second message readers learn is that you can successfully run away from their bullies; Bod did.  Again in modern times, running away doesn’t solve the problem and can’t repair the damage inflicted by a bully.  While I appreciate that bullying is addressed in a subtle way in this novel, I found the messages to be skewed from what is important to discuss with children.

            I find that my mind works like a crayon box.  My mind sees everything in bright, bold colors.  I surround myself in color: my clothes, my decorating, and even my organization.  I have been known to describe my classroom as looking like “a crayon box threw up in it”.  Because of this, I always notice the distinct absence of color and as I read I consistently thought about the lack of color in The Graveyard Book.  It left me unnerved.  The tone of the novel is eerie and gloomy.  It was as though the entire book occurred under the darkest, stormiest cloud in which everything is dreary.  Neil Gaiman begins his book with the line: “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.”  And there it was.  Darkness.  Not the darkness of other literature, books that are pessimistic, pained, and despondent.  The darkness of this book was literal; Graveyard was void of light and color and occurred through various stages of night.  As I was reading, I visualized it in shades of gray, some white, some black, and no color.  Everything that traditionally has color, ivy in a graveyard for example, appeared in my mind as a darkened version of the color you would only see at night.  Images of shadows appear throughout the book.  However, as you flip through the book you run into Scarlett, the name of an important character but also a bold shade of red.  You meet Indigo Man, a spirit, who is marked with bright purple rings around his eyes.  The sky above the path to Ghûlheim is described as “…red, but not the warm red of a sunset.  This was an angry, glowering red, the color of an infected wound.”  Lastly, the brooch Bod takes from the Indigo Man’s tomb is described as “glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone”.  The colors appear so stark against the darkness of the story that they emphasize the importance of each of these items.  These images of color create a welcome imbalance of the tone of darkness in the book. 

             The idea is far-fetched: a young boy is raised by ghosts in a graveyard and is given special gifts for protection and to help him survive.  Yet I “bought it”, the whole story, from beginning to end because the characters had believable personalities and somehow the implausible became plausible.  Mrs. Owens, Bod’s mother, has the same concerns for her child that any mother would have.  Her motherly instinct kicks in when she learns that a baby has been abandoned and is in danger.  She needs to protect the baby and proves her certainty by stating that she is “’sure as I have ever been of anything.’”  Everyone has seen the same look on their mothers’ face that Bod sees after visiting Abanazer Bolger’s shop and no punishment is worse than obvious disappointment.  “The look of worry on Mrs. Owens’s face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.”  Ghost or human, Mrs. Owens is Bod’s mother and readers don’t doubt it.  Similarly, readers should have a harder time understanding Bod’s relationship with Silas.  Silas is not alive, but he is not dead; he is undetermined.  Yet, as you read, this detail doesn’t matter because Silas is such a caring character.  He, too, acts disappointed in Bod but is quick in “enfold[ing] the living child inside his cloak” and bringing him to safety.  In the end, we learn that as a guardian Silas has been protecting, in both presence and absence, Bod all along.  The believability of these characters lies in the fact that they are people that we know.  The characters, a worried mother, a protective guardian, even a jealous admirer (Liza Hempstock), are people that we believe in our daily lives, and therefore can easily believe in fantasy.

            Bod is the hero of the story, and like all heroes, he has to go through a long journey to win in the end.  His journey is broken up by the chapters in The Graveyard Book.  Each chapter gives readers the impressions that they are separate short stories that could stand alone.  I had the feeling that each detail, Scarlett and the Sleer, Liza Hempstock, and learning to Fade, would all come together in the end, but I couldn’t imagine how it could possibly happen.  As it turns out, each of Bod’s stories outline knowledge he had to gain and tasks that he had to master.  Ultimately, he was able to use all that he had learned to overcome evil.  Sound like other books you’ve read?  Ultimately, Bod’s quest resulted in his complete understanding of the world around him, inside and outside the gates of the cemetery.  He used his knowledge to outsmart the Jacks, and therefore ridding the world of a most terrible evil.  Bod’s unique quest proved again that good wins out over evil and that knowledge is power.  Neil Gaiman’s book is a great example of how age-old struggles can be retold in new voices and in unique stories. 

Response to Luna

           It was refreshing to read Luna.  It was refreshing because it has been some time since I read a book that left me asking all sorts of questions.  While reading Julie Ann Peters’ novel, I wondered about the characters, the author’s perspective, what I already know, and most importantly, what I don’t.  This book left me considering the perspectives our culture holds about transgender people.

            As I read I first asked, which of these characters were expected and which were unexpected?  In terms of modern society, I wonder…how often are people truly what we expect?  Like many people, I have never met anyone that is struggling with their gender, much less finding ways to “transition”.  Therefore, I only have my pre-conceived notions to guide me and ignorantly have little knowledge about transgender people.  That being said, Luna was a very unexpected character.  I’m not sure what I expected, but I was moved by what I learned about her.  Too often, we see public figures like RuPaul and are left to assume that this is what the definition of transsexual is.  How wrong we are!  As Luna points out RuPaul is nothing but a drag queen and not (to our knowledge) contemplating SRS.  Luna’s fear of being dressed as a girl in public was just one example of what I found refreshingly vulnerable.  Admittedly, my assumptions got the best of me because I assumed that people in this situation are proud and happy.  We hardly see these struggles reflected in society; we only see the success stories.  But now I question, stripped of cameras and publicity, what struggles do these figures tackle in order to become so confident in their own skins?  Regan’s reactions towards her brother were also refreshingly unexpected.  My hope is that people transitioning have a strong, supportive person behind them, and Liam did.  However, Regan’s character was painfully honest.  She constantly did what her brother needed her to do.  By doing so, she pushed her needs and feelings aside in order to help and openly acknowledged that it was as painful for her as it was for him, albeit in a completely different way.  On the flip side, I felt that Luna and Regan’s father was a stereotype of himself.  I mean, come on!  The father of the transgender teen works at Home Depot because he got laid off as an appliance salesman at Sears.  The only way it could’ve been more expected is if he was a construction worker.  While tackling an issue polluted with stereotypes, Julie Ann Peters is guilty of using common ideas about other types of people.  Coming from a home in which my brother struggled because of my father’s male expectations for him, I understood the importance of this totally expected, stereotyped character.  Many men in male-dominated fields find confidence in their masculinity and want to impress that upon their sons.  The dad’s flat character emphasized the judgments impressed upon those that challenge traditional gender roles.  The balance of characters that I both expected and unexpected help to emphasize society’s knowledge about this culture.

            When do facts in a work of fiction fit seamlessly into a novel and when do they become contrived?  As a rule, I despise books that are preachy; I prefer my learning during a piece of fiction to be implicit.  Because of this, Liam’s diatribe about the history of TG’s comes off as artificial.  Close isn’t sufficient in describing the brother and sister’s relationship, and as readers, we can imagine the multitude of conversations they have had about TG’s.  Taking into account the importance of the subject to him, his intelligence, and the honest conversations the two of them have, I found it unbelievable that the Native American’s “two-spirit people” and Joan of Arc had never come up.  I felt that this excerpt’s purpose was to educate the readers.  And while it was quite informational, it didn’t ring true with the characters or the tone of the novel. 

            Critically speaking, how does an author choose when a story begins when there is so much background information needed?  Luna’s story begins mere months before the end of the novel.  Questioning one’s gender is not a matter of just a few months.  Peters weaves a current story with Regan’s memories of Liam’s development; the balance of past and present was sound.  However, the structure Peters used to reimagine the memories was especially poignant.  I had read the first two memories when I realized that my reading flow kept getting interrupted.  Traditional writing breaks a word over two lines with a dash separating two syllables.  As readers, we stop noticing this break because we have never read anything different.  It is different in Luna.  During the memory scenes, and only in the memory scenes, words are broken over lines by syllable but without the prerequisite dash.  For example, instead of a standard “ac-tivities”, we see on page 194 the word is broken as “ac tivities.”  Similarly, on page 39, we see “base ment” and “morti fied” instead of “basement” and “mortified”.  This doesn’t seem like a big deal, is infrequent, and hardly noticeable, but upon reflection the impact is powerful.  The memories are a choppier read than the rest of the novel, just as our own memories are more uneven than our reality.  We stumble over painful memories, just as Regan hesitates over hers. This is a great example of how a small change in structure can impact the truth of the story that is being told.  

            Lastly, I wonder, Regan feels every emotion in a strong way, how can an author successfully describe that severity of feeling?  As an English teacher, I teach about imagery, similes, and hyperbole, but I have never read a novel that has used figurative language as such a powerful and effective tool in description.  Regan observes, “Liam looked so brittle, I thought he’d break” and describes Murielle’s “curly hair [with] springing corkscrews all over her head”.  These comments create instant pictures in the readers’ heads; the pattern of these visualizations is found laced throughout the book.  The visuals readers create are more compelling because of Peters’ use of imagery.  Similarly, when describing the scene created when Luna came dressed as herself to school, Regan states, “that kind of news would have spread like an e-mail virus.”  By comparing gossip to a computer virus we understand that Luna’s story would pass from person to person quickly and inadvertently, and that the damage could be irreversible.  By telling readers that “defeat hung in the air like nuclear waste,” we realize the pain Liam’s parent’s rejection causes is closer to poison than disappointment. Lastly, the hyperbole used in this novel demonstrates the dramatic strength of Regan’s feelings.  “Liam’s face welded shut.”  “I was such a nun.”  “All the mental reminders and memories were jamming up my brain.”  Each of these examples over-emphasizes her feelings and creates an authentic reaction that any teenage girl would have.  Peters’ use of figurative language creates a story of unspeakable pain in a language that readers, especially in her intended audience, can easily relate to and understand.  

          

My favorite books are ones that challenge me to question what I have read and what I think.  Some of the best questions are ones that cannot be answered, but instead beg to be researched and contemplated.  Luna challenges us to think critically about what we already know and to learn more about a culture that is traditionally marginalized in our society.        

Response to The People Could Fly

           My earliest memory: I was sitting on the deck of my grandparent’s cabin.  There is family everywhere.  It is nighttime.  I choose to sit on my grandma’s lap-not my mom’s.  Before we count bats (once I get to 10 I have to go to bed), my grandma tells me stories.  We say nursery rhymes, we practice the alphabet, but my favorite part is her stories.  Her stories are the same ones that she listened to when she was growing up.  I never believed her when she said that she used to be my size, but I never doubted that whatever story was her favorite that night would be my favorite also. 

  

          Folk tales are an important part of all cultures and of most people’s childhood.   We share these stories with the people we love because we love these stories.  We have memorized the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, Cinderella, and countless others, and we don’t need the words on the page to tell the story for us.  Everyone cherishes these stories with a nostalgic fondness, but hardly ever, outside the world of academia, do we examine how these stories reflect our culture’s values.  As we get older, our literature classes teach us that folk tales have a meaning and this realization often times leaves us dumbfounded.  Childishly, we don’t realize that, through these stories, we are taught that you can outsmart evil people, that good wins out over bad, and that you will get punished if you do something wrong.  Most folk tales emphasize the difference between right and wrong.  The power in folk tales is that these values are impressed on us in an implicit way, and that our oral tradition helps us to understand our cultures in a way that textbooks and teachers cannot.  As children we don’t need to analyze the hows and whats of folk tales to learn behavioral rules and the beliefs of our culture. 

  

          The People Could Fly is a collection of American Black folk tales, but I struggled to find the meanings and values reflected in every one of the stories.  Folk tales are powerful because they live on through oral tradition.  We hear folk tales one by one and rarely stop to analyze their message.  A collection of folk tales leaves itself vulnerable to being simply a collection of stories and words on a page.  I couldn’t help but to observe that on paper the meaning of traditional tales are lost.  The stories are undoubtedly seeped in lessons and cultural meaning, but in this format, I found that some of Virginia Hamilton’s stories lacked relevancy.  With story after story, the tales ran together and the meaning of one story melded into another.  Had I been sitting on my grandparents’ deck, on my grandma’s lap, counting bats, and listening to a story that is important to my grandma, these stories would’ve had relevancy.  But words on a paper or a collection of culturally relevant stories will never be as powerful as the oral tradition in which they should be presented. 

            The structure of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folk tales helps all readers, whether they are familiar with the stories or not, to understand the significance of each of the folk tales.  There are two elements of the structure that make her collection cohesive: the groupings for chapters and Hamilton’s insight after each story.  The organization of the chapters clusters all stories with similar motifs together; while the stories don’t build upon each other, a stronger understanding of the motifs in the genre of American Black folklore is created with each new story.  As in all chapters, all stories included in the chapter “He Lion, Bruh Bear, and Bruh Rabbit” have a consistent theme.  Each story has major animal characters with very few humans; the personification of the animals allows us to understand these animals to be symbols of humans.  The structure remains cohesive through the insight Hamilton offers after each story.  It teaches new information about the cultural importance, the meanings of concepts and words, and significance of certain character types and actions.  There are examples throughout the collection.  We learn that “Little Eight John” is meant to teach behavioral rules to children.  We can use her Glossary for Gullah Words after dialect-heavy “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble” to better understand the story.  Lastly, we learn after “Tappin, the Land Turtle” that common “African animal prototypes” like the jackal, hare, and tortoise transitioned through time into the more American animals: a fox, rabbit, and turtle.  The structural consistency helps readers to build understanding of patterns in American Black folklore.

  

          All folk tales seem capable of being connected to one another through common links.  These motifs are what help us to feel that the story is familiar and that we have heard something like it before.  The American Black folktales used to make up this particular collection use both familiar and unfamiliar motifs found in common folk tales.  There are many examples of common motifs, such as the trickster in “Doc Rabbit, Bruh Rabbit, and Tarbaby” and magic and transformation in “Wiley, His Mama, and the Hairy Man”.  However, Hamilton introduces many new motifs that can be found in this culture’s folklore but in few others.  One unfamiliar motif mentioned was the magic-hoe motif in “Bruh Lizard and Bruh Rabbit”; Hamilton’s explains that this motif is common in Europe and Africa.   “The Beautiful Girl of the Moon Tower” mentions a life-in-an-egg motif, and while I haven’t heard any folk tales with this detail, I imagine it would be quite common in creation myths.  The weaving of the familiar and unfamiliar motifs made these stories both predictable and surprising at the same time.

            As mentioned earlier, Hamilton often has to clarify meanings of words in The People Could Fly.  The book uses dialect as a way to root itself in its traditions.  It is mentioned in the Introduction that the dialect “reflect[s] the expressiveness of the original slave teller, and later the free black storyteller.”  The story “Bruh Alligator Meets Trouble” uses the most Gullah words of all the stories.  In fact, so many words are used a glossary is necessary to translate them.  The Gullah language impacts the story by adding the authentic quality of an oral tradition; these words still exist and are understood because of their social significance.  It is also interesting that some statements remain in the tales even though their meaning has been lost through time.  One of my favorite stories, “A Wolf and Little Daughter”, uses a chorus sang by the young protagonist, but Hamilton explains that the meaning of this chorus “does not survive”.  The story is still an entertaining tale and readers are not put off by the lack of understanding; we are most interested in the young girl’s outsmarting of the wolf.  However, we are left to wonder if her song would add another layer of significance to the tale.  The use of dialect in this collection emphasizes the cultural traditions from which the stories were created.  The language reminds us that these stories have traveled many miles, many years, and through many people and experiences.  The traditional phrases remain as an important reason that these stories still exist.     

           American Black folk tales have an important place in American folklore because the stories have survived the same adversity as the storytellers themselves.  “No amount of hard labor and suffering could suppress their powers of imagination.”  The original storytellers didn’t set out to write their stories down or to have scholars study them generations later.  They created their stories with the messages that were important to them and with their words to inspire others and to inspire themselves.