ON THE YA BOOKS I’M READING

As Brave as You by Jason Reynolds  – I picked this book in the young adult section of FULLY BOOKED because, from the blurb, it seemed like a book about family relationships. The protagonists are 9 and 11 years old with a grandfather who has dementia. He lost his son in some war, and the boys learn about his sadness later on. To me, it does not register much except for some parts where the dialogue succeeded in making me read it up to the end. For young boys maybe, this is a wonderful adventure book, but I wasn’t into it that much.

Merci Suarez Changes Gears by Meg Medina was a New York Times Bestseller – and I learned of this book from that list. The blurb was by R.J. Palacio who was the author of that YA Book turned into a movie – Wonder. About a girl in her pre-teen discoveries, this too, has a sub-story about a grandfather who has dementia. I found this a better read than Judy Blume’s “Dear God, It’s Me Margaret”. Merci Suarez is braver, more adventurous, and less self-conscious.

I didn’t enjoy The Giver that much. I have confirmed that I prefer realistic settings to dystopian narratives. However, I can understand how this book resonated with so many young people. I believe that young people prefer structured and probably predictable narratives.

I have to read Human Acts by Han Kang again. This one, has too much reality, the bitter reality. The human body is so thrown out there literally and metaphorically, and the question of the soul separated from the body becomes too depressing to contemplate. Of my December reads, this one really could not even make me cry, but I cringed and felt some similar pain somehow.

The e-books that I finished reading are both enjoyable reads. Freewater by Amina Luoman Dawson is another story about black slaves. Young heroes in this book discover a route to freedom and take it, but in the process, they leave someone behind. The tale is about courage and how this was both an inevitable and a necessary choice even for the young who knew that freedom isn’t something that can be had without a sacrifice and worse, death. The language is unsentimental, I get to see the scenes as if I am watching a film, yet I am not told how to feel. However, whatever feelings I have truly encompassed my deepened understanding of the desperate situation the young characters are in.

Maizy Chen’s Last Chance by Lisa Yee is a narrative of diaspora. The young girl Maizy learns about her roots through a story told by her grandfather’s friend. Incidentally, the friendship is somehow scarred that the girl tries to connect the dots and discovers how her race negotiated the challenges of displacements via migration.

Among these books, I rank Freewater no 1, followed by Human Acts, then Maizy Chen’s Last Chance. I am reading books for Young People to listen to how they respond to real-life situations. I just heard Neil Gaiman say in “Masterclass” that honesty is what makes him go on as a writer – that to be a writer, one must be honest.

In my mid-twenties when I wrote and submitted some poems, I had some friends read the poems first to hear what they thought about them. One of them said that I reveal too much about myself in my writing. Maybe it is both the crafting and the telling. The crafting was juvenile, therefore listless and without direction. The telling almost always established a beginning and an end and I was afraid to get lost in the self-conscious progression. Therefore they were coming out from a bad liar. The fiction wasn’t fictional enough, the poems didn’t have cadence and the voice was generic.

Listening to Neil Gaiman, I thought, well, all writers start that way. However, how writers graduate from journaling personal revelations to crafting a reality to give it a larger-than-life status, is what writing is all about.