Coming of Age

I've read two books that are loosely associated by being about "coming of age": Madapple by Christina Meldrum, and Fun Home; a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. In some respects, the two books could hardly be more different. Madapple is poetic tale that comes close to magical realism, Fun Home is a graphic-novel memoir composed of small real moments based on Bechdel's childhood diary. However, both weigh the cost of an absent or unresponsive father, and both contain challenging scientific and literary references.

Fun Home is an award-winning graphic-novel memoir of Alison Bechdel's complex relationship with her father, a distant and obsessive closeted gay man in the 60's and 70's, and her own coming out as a lesbian.

Bechdel immediately pulled me in with tale of her father's obsession with renovating and redecorating their house, and I never lost interest as her story unfolded. Partly because of the graphic format, she builds the story with carefully chosen anectodes, often excerpts from the diary she started in childhood. The truth of these small real episodes accumulate to tell a powerful story.

Bechdel is the creator of the long-running comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For."

Madapple is teen fiction where much is hidden. You must suspend disbelief from the start of the novel, but toward the end the universe the author has created collapses under the weight of too many unlikely plot turns.

That being said, it is an evocative, enjoyable novel, and is currently madly popular with the teen set. It has a cold and mysterious mother, an unknown father, newly discovered relatives, unrequited love, teen pregnancy, and and a happy ending, as well as herbal lore galore, and many fascinating asides into early Christianity, which drive one of the plot strands.

The story begins in a courtroom: Aslaug is on trial for double homicide. The events that led to the trial are told in a series of flashbacks. The author does a great job of hiding the real story behind the deaths until the end of the book. Chapters are titled with the name of a plant, and the uses, mythology, and properties of the plant move the action forward in the chapter. Aslaug and her mother have an extensive knowledge of local plants, and use them for food, tea, and medicine. "Madapple" is another name for the poisonous jimsonweed plant.

At this stage of my life, I'm more interested in what happens after "happily ever after," but the book pulled me in. As an older-than-teen reader, I particularly enjoyed the herbal lore and discussion of early Christianity.

People who liked "Madapple" more than I did:

"In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, Madapple (Knopf), the worlds of science and faith collide." —Vanity Fair

Madapple has been nominated for the ALA's Best Book for Young Adults (BBYA) list.
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Meldrum provides a bibliography of books she used for research. Included are

The Jesus mysteries : was the "original Jesus" a pagan god? / Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory / Brian Greene.

An obsession with butterflies : our long love affair with a singular insect / Sharman Apt Russell.

Dairy Queen

My grandpa Wenzel had a wonderful truck equipped with a Dairy Queen sensor. Whenever we passed a Dairy Queen, the truck would veer out of his control and turn in at the DQ for ice cream for his grandkids. Grandpa was a big, strong, gentle man, but he could never escape the gravitational pull of a DQ--at least when we were with him. It was fantastic! We begged Mom and Dad to get a DQ sensor too, but we never succeeded.

There's another DQ story about Grandma and Grandpa Wenzel: when the Minnesota Twins won, Grandma and Grandpa would celebrate with a bowl of Dairy Queen soft serve ice cream. When the Twins lost? They would console themselves with a bowl of Dairy Queen soft serve ice cream.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Dairy Queen, is not about that kind of Dairy Queen. Nor is it about a beauty pageant, which you might guess from the cover. It's about D. J.'s 15th summer on her family's dairy farm in Wisconsin, and about cows, football, hard work and not much talk.

D. J.'s family reminds me of the legendary Burkstaller family who farmed next to the Wenzels. The Wenzels would compete with the Burkstallers to see who could get the hay in first. The Wenzels, legendary workers, tipped their hats to the Burkstallers as "real workers." Both families, like D. J.'s, worked from "Can do to can't do," from dawn to dusk.

Dairy Queen, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Houghton, 2006).

D.J. Schwenk, while not really happy, never complains or questions her life on the family's small dairy farm in Wisconsin. After her father injures himself, the 15-year-old girl must do the farm work almost single-handedly, including milking the cows. She never really noticed the similarities between her life and the lives of the cows. D.J. is a jock, so on top of all her farm chores, she takes on training Brian, the quarterback on a rival school's football team. The summer they spend together changes everything as D.J. discovers that she has lots to say about her life and what she wants out of it. Not to be missed. Stephanie A. Squicciarini, Fairport Public Library, NY in School Library Journal

Lots of books!

Recently read:

Asperger's from the Inside Out, by Michael John Carley.
This is a quick and fascinating read. Michael John Carley has been a playwright and a lower-level ambassador, and is now Executive Director of GRASP, the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership. He was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome as an adult, when his then-four-year-old son was diagnosed. He writes movingly of "the whole tumultuous path" to acceptance and understanding of Asperger's, which "changes everything." You will like this smart, articulate, matter-of-fact tale of a powerful advocate for those with Asperger's Syndrome.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher

Eric, or "Moby" to his friends, is fat, and his best friend Sarah Byrnes is severely disfigured by facial burns. They bond over their "terminal uglies" until Eric joins the swim team and starts to lose weight. Fearing the loss of her friendship, he doubles his eating, trying to stay fat for Sarah Byrnes, until she finds out and reads him the riot act. Soon much more serious trouble comes into Sarah's life when she finds out the truth about her past, breaks down, and is hospitalized. In the past, bright tough Sarah has always been a couple of steps ahead of Eric and has helped him out, but now it's his turn to help her.

I have been reading a lot of teen fiction and have enjoyed much of it, but this one stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Colors of the World; a geography of color, by Jean-Philippe and Dominique Lenclos
This is the coolest book! Color junkies will love this, but so will those with an interest in geography, anthropology, and art. From the blurb:

"Colors of the World presents a chromatic journey through the colors of vernacular architecture from the United States to the far corners of the world. Based on the "geography of color" analytic method . . . this book examines the palettes of diverse habitats to reveal how geology, climate, light, sociocultural behavior, the traditions of local residents, and construction techniques uniquely shape a landscape's architectural personality and chromatic character."

To analyze each site, the authors and their students take photographs and create colored pencil sketches of houses, then plot the color patterns of houses onto a color grid showing the predominate palette. They have studied sites in Japan, France, Guatemala, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, but it was the middle Eastern studies in Algeria, Morocco, Iran, and Yemen, with their desert palettes, that particularly fascinated me. If you read this beautiful picture-filled book, prepare to be drawn into a daydreaming trip to far-flung cities of pink, blue, gold, and white.