Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  Fearing her lowly place in the teen social ladder, miserably insecure, feeling she’s fated to die unable to live up to her charming, popular mother, Addie as we first meet her is convinced both of the injustice of the world and the certainty that she will never take any kind of rightful place in it. But as the novel ends, Addie has come to terms with her mother, having learned that the woman she was looking for never existed. She’s also come to terms with herself, but it’s not because she’s made peace with disappointment. Happily, like most adolescents on the cusp of growing up, she’s only realized that the terms were entirely different than she’d thought. Jane Whitmore, indeed, exists. Addie was only looking at the wrong woman.

  Chapter 4

  Read ’Em And Weep

  Tearing Up the Pages

  No Answer, Try Again

  Let’s all just start crying now. Seriously, just get up, find a flat surface, put your head down and weep—because what follows, I must warn you, is very, very heavy. Children fall to their deaths. Honorable prisoners are shot like dogs in the street. Witty alcoholics in velvet smoking jackets expire, kindly old men’s broken dreams are smashed by the callous young, young college students biking along lonely roads are no match for heedless vehicles. In fact, no one is a match, it seems, for a heedless world—and all in all, there is much to despair over, little justifiable cause at hand, and not a happy ending in the bunch to be found.

  What we find in the drama, however, is a notable lack of the melodrama. Because, while those unfamiliar with the YA market might be surprised to find out it’s chock-full, like the adult markets, of thrillers, comic novels, morality plays, highly naughty books, sci-fi, fantasy, and fluffy chick lit, what it lacks, unlike its counterpart, is a bunch of standard weepies. That’s not to say slim tearjerkers like The Bridges of Madison County or agonized epics like Cold Mountain don’t have their uses. But whatever those may be, they are as yet untested on the under–18 set.

  What we have, instead, is a bunch of straightforward works that address, head-on, the difficulty of the world—revolutionary not because they show how it’s different for the young, but because they show how often it’s not. Summer of My German Soldier’s Patty Bergen finds out not only that her moral code can’t save anybody—but in fact, that it endangers those she loves. The Pigman’s John and Lorraine learn how important a bit of vulnerability is when learning to be close to others—and then how easy it is to abuse, and Bridge to Terabithia’s Jess finds how difficult it is to shed guilt—even when one is not guilty.

  But as much as I’m interested in pinpointing the “lessons” of these books, these authors, thank God, are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, they are fully caught up in the narrative, in drawing characters whose actions are as surprising or disappointing to us as they are to them, who do the best they have with what’s left over, the kind of redemption no one welcomes but everyone has to accept.

  And in that uncomfortable reality, the authors sidestep either easy answers or soppy melodrama. We know why it’s brave of Ruth to stay in Patty’s corner long after the country has abandoned her. But why does her visit to Patty’s new jail break our hearts, exactly? We know it’s sad that Leslie dies—but why is his father’s awkward attempt to help Jess come to terms with that even more devastating? The books don’t seek the answer—they ask the question. And thus we don’t only know what the characters feel—we feel it ourselves. So, like the most profound works of literary fiction, these prompt—but ultimately elude—the best-laid lesson plans.

  BOOK REPORT

  Jacob Have I Loved

  By Katherine Paterson 1980

  Coastal Erosion

  As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother. At Crisfield I’ll board the ferry, climbing down into the cabin where the women always ride, but after forty minutes of sitting on the hard cabin bench, I’ll stand up to peer out of the high forward windows, straining for the first site of my island.

  This is your favorite book, right? Okay, just checking. (MINE TOO.) Why? Is it the island thing? The song thing? The twin thing? Falling in love with an old captain and your formerly nerdy friend and not getting either one? No. It’s that there is no book more quietly, quietly sad, nor one that as brilliantly depicts the psychic disarrangement of childhood without falling prey to convenient justification—say, being funny or heartwarming, or instructive, as in by setting it in stultifying historical period—as this one, which takes sisterly jealousy as neither an object lesson nor a juicy starting point but as the painful, enduring state it is.

  Jacob Have I Loved is the story of Sara Louise Bradshaw, christened ineluctably by her fraternal twin, Caroline, as “Wheeze,” to her eternal consternation. Caroline is not only generally agreed to be lovely, but also possessed of the kind of shatteringly beautiful voice that makes others pay attention (“Caroline is the kind of person other people sacrifice for as a matter of course”) and what Louise takes to be callous disregard for others. (I can now read this only as Caroline’s rare—but fair—lack of adolescent self-hatred.) Louise is, of course, nearly paralyzed with envy of her sister—although it’s less pure envy than rage and shame at how publicly pale in comparison Louise must seem to everybody else, including even her best friend Cal, a chubby, bespectacled nerd.

  The girls have been raised on Rass, a teeny island on the Chesapeake off the Eastern Shore, where their father crabs and their mother, a former mainland schoolteacher, watches over them. Their grandmother, not the cookie-baking type, is suffering from the early stages of dementia and given to following Louise around the house and triumphantly offering damning passages from the Bible:

  I struggled to pry the lid off a can of tea leaves, aware that my grandmother had come up behind me. I stiffened at the sound of her hoarse whisper.

  “Romans nine 13,” she said. “As it is written, ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.’”

  That’s totally going to help you work through that insecurity thing about how no one even remembers your BIRTH because your sister almost died and they were all worried about her, especially when your grandmother whips that out right at the moment you’re dying over your weird inappropriate crush on a 56-year-old sailor that’s returned to the island and you know that no one, ever, not in a million years, would give up their life’s savings to let you go study voice in Baltimore. And also: “Wheeze.”

  Paterson is unflinching about the pain Louise suffers by her second-best status without making Louise’s frustration seem like anything but the unattractive, festering blister that it is. Yes, Louise’s fundamental rage and pain is something that could probably be handled through a triple dose of CBT, Paxil, and a round of family therapy nowadays. But let’s let the pain stand: the few minutes before Caroline exited the womb after her are, as Louise sees it, “the only time in my life I was ever the center of anyone’s attention.” Louise may be both the main proponent and victim of this belief, but it will take her until adulthood to realize that.

  The first insight occurs at the nadir of Louise’s adulthood. While Caroline has gone off to a brilliant career at Juilliard, Louise has left school to crab with her father, out on the water with the men in the hard weather, snapping at her mother when she suggests she might want to go to a boarding school on Crisfield—a cheap simulacrum of Caroline’s life is far worse than a blatant rejection. Stuck in a deliberate limbo, hiding out from her friends, family, and any romantic prospects, she buries herself in crabbing:

  It was work that did this for me. I had never had work before that sucked from me every breath, every thought, every trace of energy.

  “I wish,” said my father one night as we were eating our meager supper in the cabin, “I wish you could do a little studying at night. You know, keep up your schooling.”

  We both glanced automatically at the kerosene lamp, which was more smell than light. “I’d be too tired,” I said.

  “I reckon.”

  It had been one of our longer conversations.


  But, after Cal returns on leave, Louise finds herself pulling on a dress and smearing cheap lotion on her hands, desperately trying to wash off the smell of crab. For her pains, she receives the news that her newly handsome old friend stopped off in New York before coming to Rass to ask Caroline to marry him.

  But it’s not until a rare clear day in spring to wash the windows with her mother that the rage that’s been building in Louise since childhood finally comes out. Unable to contain her bitterness at Caroline having escaped with the best of Rass while she is left only the dregs, she assails her mother and is unexpectedly rewarded:

  I moved my bucket and chair to the side of the house where she was standing on her chair, scrubbing and humming happily. “I don’t understand it!” The words burst out unplanned.

  “What, Louise?”

  “You were smart. You went to college. You were goodlooking. Why did you ever come here?”

  …“It seemed romantic—” She began scrubbing again as she talked. “An isolated island in need of a schoolteacher. I felt—” She was laughing at herself. “I felt like one of the pioneer women, coming here. Besides—” She turned and looked at me, smiling at my incomprehension. “I had some notion I would find myself here, as a poet, of course, but it wasn’t just that.”

  The anger was returning. There was no good reason for me to be angry but my body was filled with it, the way it used to be when Caroline was home. “And did you find yourself here on this little island?” The question was coated with sarcasm.

  She chose to ignore my tone. “I found very quickly,” she scratched at something with her fingernail as she spoke, “I found there was nothing much to find.”

  Louise cannot contain herself:

  “Let me go. Let me leave!”

  “Of course you may leave. You never said before you wanted to leave.”

  And, oh, my blessed, she was right. All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers one iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.

  “I chose the island,” she said. “I chose to leave my own people and build a life for myself somewhere else. I certainly wouldn’t deny you that same choice. But,” and her eyes helped me if her arms did not, “oh, Louise, we will miss you, your father and I.”

  I wanted so much to believe her. “Will you really?” I asked. “As much as you miss Caroline?”

  “More,” she said, reaching up and ever so lightly smoothing her hair with her fingertips.

  And of course, now that Louise has to admit that she’s held herself back more than anyone else has (again, some family therapy and a dose of Paxil), she finds that everyone around her, even the captain, whom she’d loved—to her shame—as a child, has only been waiting for her to notice:

  I sat down on the couch near his chair. There was no need to pretend, I knew. “I had hoped when Cal came home—”

  He shook his head. “Sara Louise. You were never meant to be a woman on this island. A man, perhaps. Never a woman.”

  “I don’t even know if I wanted to marry him,” I said. “But I wanted something.” I looked down at my hands. “I know I have no place here. But there’s no escape.”

  “Pish.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe I’d heard him correctly.

  “Pish. Rubbish. You can do anything you want to. I’ve known that from the first day I met you—at the other end of my periscope.”

  It’s admirable that Paterson refuses to deny Louise her pain, though everyone around her knows it’s unjust, unnecessary—even self-generated. But that’s the horribly ironic nature of pain, of course—not that we can’t help but be taken over by it, but that, despite ourselves, we may be creating it.

  Louise chooses to go to the mountains, to become a nurse practitioner, and even though she marries and has her own child, she still isn’t able to let her sister go, until one night, when she’s called to help a young mother whose husband has clearly been smacking her around give birth to twins. One twin comes easily, and then the second, blue, is in danger, until Louise finally manages to get him stable. But then she realizes she’s repeated her own past:

  “Where is the other twin?” I asked, suddenly stricken. I had completely forgotten him. In my anxiety for his sister, I had completely forgotten him. “Where have you put him?”

  “In the basket.” She looked at me, puzzled. “He’s sleeping.”

  “You should hold him,” I said. “Hold him as much as you can. Or let his mother hold him.”

  Louise realizes that Caroline’s anointment at the moment of their birth as the most valuable twin was not personal, not some grim finger of fate consigning Louise to second-place status. It was only practical—and she was as able to be guilty of it as anyone. It was a harm leveled on her by distraction, not intention—and once she sees that and reverses it, she becomes her own redeemer.

  But I was trying not to cry. Let’s see: I just want to point out that this is one of my favorite covers of all time and I always thought Louise looked prettier than Caroline. So there.

  BOOK REPORT

  Summer of My German Soldier

  By Bette Greene 1973

  Summer Camp

  When I saw the crowd gathering at the train station, I worried what President Roosevelt would think. I just hope he doesn’t get the idea that Jenkinsville, Arkansas, can’t be trusted with a military secret because, truth of the matter is, we’re as patriotic as anybody.

  No one would argue that the Holocaust was not a world-class exhibition of hatred. But Bette Greene, in her novel about a young Jewish girl who harbors a Nazi escapee from a POW labor camp during the close of World War II, is also interested in the horrors of hatred on a person-to-person level—not only to drag out that old hoary butterfly whose unceasingly broken wing causes the destruction of the world, but to question why it’s always the butterfly who gets it in the first place.

  In Summer of My German Soldier, the horrors of World War II and concentration camps loom like black-bottomed storm clouds rapidly approaching, while on the ground a fine storm of hail is starting to sting—petty, small hatreds falling indiscriminately and without mercy on those without shelter. Patty Bergen, Jewish daughter of the South, is the actual daughter of Harry and Pearl Bergen, who own Bergen’s Department Store in Jenkinsville, Arkansas, as well as the older sister of Sharon, who, though far younger, is generally considered the more beautiful and well-mannered.

  It is not enough that, as a member of the only Jewish family in town in the 1940s, Patty is already barely tolerated among her Baptist peers. (Being the kind of precocious word lover who reads the dictionary for fun doesn’t help, either.) But worst of all is Patty’s father, who never hesitates to take his rage out on his eldest daughter, either with his tongue or his belt.

  Mr. Bergen is a far cry from the typical Jewish dad found in old-school YA—who, when in evidence at all, is generally a turn-of-the-century hardworking Tate sort, stamping down rags and letting his children choose books from his store, or a kindly dentist receiving kisses on the news from his adoring daughter. Excepting stepfathers, in fact, genuinely beastly fathers are rare in YA: while they may switch their daughters to make a point (Oh, Pa!) or go so far as to call them fat and useless (The Cat Ate My Gymsuit comes to mind), I can’t think of any other instance where one whips off his belt to beat his daughter by the side of the road…before he even knows she’s sheltering a Nazi.

  But then again, a Jewish girl who shelters a Nazi during WWII is not your standard fare, either. Even before Mr. SS enters the story, Patty’s mother and father treat her with the sort of generic cruelty reserved for other people’s (annoying) children—her father with tempestuous irritation: “Are you questioning me? Are you contradicting me?”—and her mother with an endless stream of politely pointed barbs meant to establish just how hideously unworthy to be her daughter Patty truly is:

  “When I wa
s a girl,” said my mother, turning towards Mrs. Fields, “I used to drive my mother crazy with my clothes. If my dress wasn’t new or if it had the slightest little wrinkle in it I’d cry and throw myself across the bed.”

  “You were just particular about how you looked,” said Mrs. Fields.

  “I wish Patricia would be more particular,” Mother said with sudden force. “Would you just look at that hair?…Here. Go look in the mirror and do a good job. You know, Gussie, you’d expect two sisters to be something alike, but Patricia doesn’t care how she looks while Sharon is just like me.”

  Didn’t Mother know I was still standing here?…I took in my reflection: “Oh, mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the homeliest one of all?”

  But Patty, plagued with auburn curls and a persistent intellect, is ill-suited for the stiflingly Perma-Wave culture in which she finds herself:

  Mrs. Fields smiled her adult-to-child smile. “How are you enjoying your vacation? As much as my niece, Donna Ann?”

  I wondered how I could honestly answer the question. First I’d have to decide how much I was enjoying the summer—not all that much—then find out exactly how much Donna Ann Rhodes was enjoying it before trying to make an accurate comparison. Mrs. Fields’ smile began to fade. Maybe she just wanted me to say something pleasant. “Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

  There are those who love Patty for exactly the singularity she would like to stamp out, chief among them the family’s black housekeeper Ruth, who, knowing well that she is fighting a losing battle, tries to help Patty ward off her mother and father’s abuse by training her to “act sweet”:

  “Hey, Ruth!” She looked up from her wash. “Ruth, know where I was? With the Germans going to the prison camp!”