Shift Your Reading Habits…

            To Include This Book

Amy Huntley reviews The Shifter by Janice Hardy

“Stitch together enough wrongs and it makes a blanket that almost keeps out the chill.” So says Nya, the main character in this fantastic new Balzer and Bray book, due to be released in October 2009.

Fifteen-year-old Nya is able to remove pain from other people through a simple touch. This isn’t so uncommon in her world. But what is uncommon is the way she can transfer that pain into another person. With unusual abilities comes unusual responsibility. Nya knows that she is in danger of being kidnapped because of her potential as a weapon. She knows she can be forced to inflict pain on others. Her efforts to avoid this outcome place her in complex situations where she finds herself having to bargain with her own moral code.

But don’t be misled by all this talk of morality. This is a book about tough choices, but the mid-grade reader won’t be able to put it down because of its hair raising action and suspense scenes. Set in a vividly imagined world,  and filled with interesting characters, this book is sure to please both male and female readers of all ages. We all have something to learn from it.

I can’t wait for the sequel.

 

A Review of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

 Amy Huntley

Guilty.

I've long been a person who romanticizes Native Americans. Idealized versions of Native American life have been woven deeply into the fabric of our culture. What REAL experiences have I had with Native Americans and their reservation life? Only a few: met a Navajo while passing through the reservation in Arizona when I was 16. He took me into a teepee (that's right, even though Navajos were not teepee dwellers, he had one set up at a roadside area where he was selling jewelry) and told me the story of his experiences fighting in the Vietnam War. He shot a monkey in the jungle and got into trouble for going back to bury it because he considered the monkey his brother. It was a cool story. I've been to Soaring Eagle. I've visited ancient pueblo sites in New Mexico and gone to Pipestone to see where the sacred stone for peace pipes was mined. But what all these experiences have in common is that they have reinforced rather than challenged my romanticized ideals of Native Americans.

What I love about Sherman Alexie's book is that it adds a strong dose of good old Realism (yes, I mean the literary movement that followed Romanticism) to the stew of impressions I have of Native American history and modern culture. Not that there's a single Native American culture. There are many. I learned that long ago in my travels to Native American exhibits, museums and reservations. But with Part-time Indian, for one kid (the narrator, Junior), at one reservation, during the all too vulnerable teen years, I truly got to see another side of Native American culture. Junior's complex feelings about the people of his reservation remind me (in some ways) of how I felt growing up in a small, insular farming town. His frustrations with money troubles, girls, alcoholism within the family, and the high mortality rate for the people of his reservation all ring so true.  His narrative voice is poignant and real. Something any one who remembers the teen years--no matter what their background--can relate to. I walked away understanding the difficulties Junior faced without being overwhelmed by them. Junior himself faces them with grace, dignity and the best humor he can muster. I truly appreciated his story--and the way Alexie shared it.

Even Then You Were Gone

A Response to Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why
By Amy Huntley

Jay Asher’s first novel has been successful in reaching The New York Times Best Seller List. It’s also been successful in reaching a part of me that I haven’t thought about in a long time—the twenty-two year old young woman whose cousin hanged herself.

This novel centers around high school junior Clay Jensen, who receives a set of tapes following the suicide of Hannah, a girl he had a crush on for years. The tapes were recorded by Hannah just before her suicide. The story seeks to help teen readers understand the complicated dynamics of Hannah’s decision to take her own life. The tapes explore thirteen experiences that come together to explain why she has decided to kill herself.

The reader journeys back and forth between the thoughts of Hannah as recorded on tape, and those of Clay as he listens to them. He struggles to understand Hannah’s experiences and choices. He also battles complicated feelings about his peers as he learns new things about their involvement in Hannah’s life.

This all makes for compelling reading. I found myself wanting to read the next chapter, “just until I find out what person Hannah will talk about in it.” The problem was, as soon as I discovered who that person was, I wanted to know more about how that person’s story intersected with Hannah’s decision to kill herself. Of course, as soon as I knew that, I needed to read the next chapter…

This is a fascinating story concept. It allows readers to see how complicated interactions of things that are seemingly small, even if mildly cruel (like a list rating which freshmen are hot and which are not) can have devastating consequences when paired with other circumstances in a person’s life. This is a lesson I believe we all need to keep relearning, and Asher provides it in a unique way.

But none of this is really what I reacted to in the novel. As someone who was left behind when a person I loved chose to commit suicide, I appreciate the way Asher examines the thought process of the person making such a far ranging and permanent choice. Clay’s own interpretations and observations of that thought process help readers see them even more clearly.

I was twenty-two when my cousin killed herself. At twenty-two I had a lot more in common with the teenagers that Asher is trying to reach than I do with the forty-one year-old I have become. Two months after Kristen’s death, I was still struggling to name my frustration with her choices. I wrote a rather lengthy letter to her—which Asher’s book prompted me to pull out. One of the things I wrote in that letter was, “And I tell myself one hundred times a day you’re gone. But I still don’t know that because it’s the same—it’s the same as when you were alive. Even then you were gone.” Asher captures this exact feeling beautifully when his narrator says, “I would have helped her [Hannah] if she’d only let me. I would have helped her because I want her to be alive." These words are an echo of my own feelings reaching out to me across 19 years.

This is an engaging and highly charged reading experience. I recommend it not only to teens, but to their parents as well.