Ms. Belben's Random Recommendations
...A Few of My All-Time Favorite Books
Updated January 2007

Assuming the voice of a child in an adult novel is a tough task--not only is there the risk not sounding like a kid--or worse, sounding too much like a kid, too precious--it's also difficult for an adult writer to construct a story about a child's life, from a child's perspective, that is entertaining, engaging, and interesting to an adult audience. Probably the best-loved, best-written example I can recall is To Kill a Mockingbird, narrated by the precocious but not precious Scout Finch, and one of my all-time favorite books.

Mister Posterior and the Genius Child by Emily Jenkins comes close to achieving the kind of remarkable voice that makes Scout Finch such a believable and likeable character. It is the story of eight-year-old Vanessa Brick, who, like Scout, is being raised by a single parent--in this case, her mother Debbie, a sympathetic and sturdy mom in her late twenties who, for a portion of the novel, dates a priggish ashram member named Syd who is constantly battering her--and Vanessa--with his need for "openness" and "expressiveness." Debbie, whose parents swoop down into her life only occasionally to offer unwanted parenting advice, seeks solace in her friend Katty, in her vegetarianism, and in her ever-growing collection of pound-rescued cats.

But the story doesn't really belong to Debbie. It's Vanessa's story, and as obviously impacted as her world is by her mother, hers isn't a world complicated by her parent's issues. She has plenty of other, eight-year-old-ish things to worry about. It's the early 70s. It's third grade. And this is the year that Vanessa Brick becomes "the most notorious child in the history of the Cambridge Harmony PTA.

Cambridge Harmony is the setting for most of Vanessa's adventures. It is there, on the first day of school, she is bullied by a girl named Marie, who shoves her up against a wall and moons her. "It wasn't the first bottom I'd seen, but it was the first to be forced upon me," Vanessa says, and the remainder of the story is a very funny, very intelligently written story about a child dealing with a series of adults, and occasionally children, who behave in strange and often inappropriate ways.

Cambridge Harmony is all that you might imagine in a 70's concept school without being a cliche. Students gather in a sharing circle each day to talk and sing, they call their teachers Ron and Joyce, and they make "learning choices" and "express themselves." Vanessa's best friend is Anu Badhuri, her co-founder of the group No Boys Allowed, and the two are close friends until a series of strange events interferes with their friendship.

When Anu is confronted by a man in the park who exposes himself to her, her parents pull her out of school for awhile, and then monitor her closely when she returns. Vanessa, who's also been dealing with a mysterious man who appears at her bedroom window at night and exposes his own rear-end, writes a play for her school's spelling club (the Super Duper Spellers) in which all of the characters' names are synonyms for "buttocks." The play is dittoed and sent home before the teachers read it, and a major controversy ensues. Anu, traumatized by her experience with the flasher, and overly protected by her parents, stops being friends with Vanessa, and Vanessa must navigate the playground politics on her own.

While Vanessa is a very smart, even precocious eight-year-old, the story escapes cuteness. Her voice is true and real--not an adult's imitation of what an eight-year-old might sound like, but a real, true-to-life child with a mixture of innocence and insight, being parented by a vulnerable, likeable mother who is trying to help her daughter face the self-righteousness and political correctness that had their genesis in the 1970's. Anyone alive during that era will laugh at Emily Jenkins' skillful poke at its pretentious goofiness and love Vanessa's intelligence, humor, and resilience.

I can't describe adequately how thoroughly I enjoyed this book--it was definitely one that I was sorry to see end, and I urge you to read it. It will go on my list of books that I plan to read again.

The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place by E.L. Konigsburg.

Margaret Rose Kane has been sent to camp while her parents go on an archaeological dig in Peru for the summer, but she isn’t happy with the arrangement. In fact, she refuses to participate in camp activities, insisting whenever the camp director asks, that she “prefers not to.” Eventually her behavior irritates her bunkmates, who begin sabotaging Margaret, and she ends up leaving camp to spend the summer with her eccentric uncles.

Her uncles, Morris and Alex, have spent the last 45 years building three elaborate, artistic towers in their back yard at 19 Schuyler Place. The towers, which are made of steel and twinkle with hundreds of pieces of polished glass, hold a treasured place in the memories of many Schuyler Place natives, and especially in Margaret’s. But when a local “redevelopment” group insists that the towers are a dangerous eyesore, and that they must be torn down, Margaret decides to do what her uncles have been unwilling to do: she’s going to fight for their survival. She summons her courage and gathers willing collaborators to assist her in her fight to save the towers.

As in her earlier books, including The View from Saturday and Silent to the Bone, E.L. Konigsburg does a masterful job of creating a highly likeable, intelligent, and sparky heroine, as well as weaving together multiple threads of meaning and plot to create a richly textured, highly enjoyable story. Konigsburg has a gift for creating not only an entertaining story, but one that is educational, too, as she incorporates details about history, art, and culture, without ever being didactic or condescending.

Margaret’s story of civil disobedience, protecting art, and thinking for yourself will be appealing to readers of all ages. Highly recommended as a middle school or early high school reading group, and a must-read for fans of Silent to the Bone.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

During my year-long hiatus from Washington, most of my reading had something to do with Veronica Mars—I read books about crimes and criminals, high school life, detectives, police work, and an assortment of books about writing. Because there was a bookstore on the ground floor of my apartment building, I was never far from a great selection of new things to read, and when I wasn’t searching for material to inform my work on the TV show, I was looking for things to transport me back home.

The best book I read that took me out of the city and back into the northwest wilderness was Jim Lynch’s novel The Highest Tide. Winner of the 2006 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, it captures perfectly everything I love about Washington—the weather, the outdoors, the wildlife, and the water. It also features an independent, intelligent teenager who loves nature and thrives on the time he spends exploring the beach outside his Olympia home.

When he discovers a giant sea squid on the shore during one of his daily walks, thirteen-year-old Miles O’Malley is suddenly cast into the international spotlight as the media descends upon his town to interview this young scientist, who continues to make unique discoveries on the beach and attract even more attention.

But Miles isn’t interested in the media attention or in fame—he loves the ocean and his time on the beach, and his immediate concerns are more typical for a teenager: he’s falling for a girl, he’s worried about his parents’ constant arguing, and he’s struggling to grow up and make sense of the world around him.

Lynch’s novel is beautifully written and perfect for Washington residents and especially those who love the Puget Sound and its wildlife. Funny and unforgettable, it will remind you of all we have to be thankful for.

Readers of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones will gravitate toward this equally compelling story of a teenager grappling with a tragedy. Alice McGuire is a senior at Millstone Country Day, an elite prep school she has attending for years with her best friend, Matthew Swan.

When the story opens, we learn that Alice is struggling with Matthew’s recent disappearance during a trip to Mexico. In the weeks since he vanished, members of the community—Alice’s classmates, their small town, their families---have to accept the likelihood that Matthew will never return. This is a difficult venture, since Matthew was charismatic, brilliant, and loved by everyone—especially Alice. “There are no words,” Alice says, “and you can’t go around screaming, ‘boy who loved me! Hair smelled like lemons! Hands made me whole!”

Alice’s bond with Matthew began when they were children, and both he and Alice and their families assumed they would spend their lives together. As the likelihood of his death becomes more apparent, Alice tries to overcome her loss and maintain a sense of calm about other calamities going on around her. “I felt strange,” she says. “Things like that separate you; so when you watch TV and everyone else is laughing you think nothing will ever be funny again. Famous people can act dramatic and talk about their loss. Normal people are supposed to behave like nothing happened and not upset everyone else’s sense of denial.” She confronts her parents when they act too perfectly, asking her if she has any questions about Matthew’s disappearance and her own grief. They expect her to say no, she’s fine, but she surprises them, asking, “Why did I take so long to understand the meaning of life,” she asks, “And what am I supposed to do now that it’s been taken away from me?”

Millstone Country Day requires seniors to complete a year-long project, and Alice has chosen to volunteer in a unique program at the local prison, where she helps lead a group of prisoners in a writing group. After becoming involved with the group and forming loose bonds with her prisoner-students, her classmate Sigrid reveals a secret to Alice that complicates her role at the prison and her sense of loyalty to Sigrid and to Matthew.

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

My summer experience as a nanny for an infant required that I find things that I could do while watching him (at least from a short distance) and that could be done in the 5-10 minute intervals of time during which he wasn’t crying, pooping, or otherwise requiring attention. Surprising not only myself but many people close to me, I began cooking. And I don’t mean the usual cooking I’d been subsisting on for the last 30+ years—the kind that involved poking holes in a microwavable pouch and then spinning the food around in the magic box for a few minutes. I mean actual cooking. The kind that requires drizzling tomatoes with olive oil and blanching things and soaking small fruits overnight in a bisque of brandy and cranberry juice. I made white sauce, clam sauce, pesto, chili, artichoke-garbanzo bean soup, and a bunch of other stuff that’s much easier to just buy in a can. But now I know what it feels like to be Julie Powell. Sort of.

Powell is the author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, her account of the year she cooked every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. No easy task, but Powell, feeling stuck and bored in her job as a temp, was eager for a challenge. Child’s cookbook is “childishly simple and dauntingly complex, incantatory and comforting,” Powell writes. Reading it, she says, “I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want.”

I won’t spoil the story for you, but I will say that reading about food is almost as fun as eating it, especially in the talented hands of a writer like Julie Powell. She could’ve written a book about deciding to watch NASCAR racing every day for a year and I probably still would have found it hilarious, fascinating, and completely impossible to put down. She’s that entertaining. Even if it doesn’t send you to the kitchen, Julie and Julia serves up a terrific sampling of how to weave a story and a life into an entertaining memoir.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal is a former writer for the now-sadly-defunct Might magazine, of which Dave Eggers was one of the editors. Rosenthal has just published her highly entertaining and very unusual memoir, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, which is so far one of my favorite books of the year. The memoir craze, which some claim began with Frank McCourt’s book Angela’s Ashes, has spawned hundreds of stories—generally unknown, if talented writers zeroing in on the trauma/joy/exercise/experience/death/birth/insight that has changed their life. In Encyclopedia, Rosenthal immediately asserts, “I was not abused, abandoned, or locked up as a child. My parents were not alcoholics, nor were they ever divorced…I am not a drug addict, food addict, or recovered anything...I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.”

Rosenthal goes on to describe her observations and experiences in an alphabetical, encyclopedia style, complete with occasional charts (my favorite is one showing how introducing one friend to another can leave the introducer out in the cold), illustrations, and sidebars. In many instances, she encourages readers to contact her directly with their own reactions to her book or to contribute material of their own—her website, www.encyclopediaofanordinarylife.com is a lot of fun—making this book one of the most clever and entertaining books I’ve read in a long time. And despite the unusual format, with its short “entries” about Rosenthal’s life, but the time you reach the end, you do feel like you know her, her history, her husband, and her three children. You also feel like you’ve been let inside the mind of a very funny, very unique writer. Highly recommended!

Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield

Even though technology has changed, and folks aren’t mixing cassette tapes for their friends and crushes any more, creating a compilation of favorite music is a time-honored tradition that still exists. “I’ll mix you a tape” has evolved into “I’ll burn you a CD”—and in the age of Mp3s and iPods, “I’ll make you a playlist.” Whatever the era, musical mixes mark time periods, capture moments and memories, and become, over the years, audio scrapbooks that serve to evoke happiness, sorrow, pain, and yesterday.

In Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield takes us song by song, through his musical past, including not only the tunes he shared with Renee, but those he learned to love on his own, before and after she was a part of his life. “Every mix tape tells a story,” Sheffield writes. “Put them together and they tell the story of a life.” In middle school, he says, the guys he knew were into the music, the girls were into the social scene. “When the boys busted out the air guitar, the girls would sit down. It was enough to make you doubt their commitment to rockness.” A life lesson emerges from this musical evening: “the harder the boys rocked, the father away the girls drifted. That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody’s happy.”

For Sheffield, a substantial number of the mix tapes in his collection are reminiscent of his short, sweet marriage to fellow writer and rocker, Renee, who died at age 31 after they’d been married only five years. On falling in love with her, Sheffield says, “I could already tell there were things happening inside of me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than ‘irreversible’? It’s a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations.” They road-trip through the South early in their relationship, listening to mix tapes and radio, Renee screaming to the music, and Sheffield writes, “I thought to myself, Well, I have wasted my whole life up to this moment. Any other car I’ve ever been in was just to get me here.”

I feel as if I’ve wasted a portion of my own life a) not knowing that Rob Sheffield was alive and writing, b) not appreciating those mix tapes of Air Supply, Journey, and Kansas that I made in 1983 by holding my tape recorder up to the radio, and c) not appreciating that all those high school dances where I rolled my eyes while the guys air-strummed their invisible guitars along with some garage band mutilating Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” would be formative events that I might have learned more from and written a book about. Rob Sheffield did it, and he did it well. Love is a Mix Tapes rocks. And it’s here. In the BEHS Library.

*An added bonus is Sheffield’s adeptitude at weaving unusual words or variations on ordinary words into his writing, so I got a few new vocabulary terms. Always a good thing. My life feels much more complete now that I can throw “ostentorium” and “seraglio” into conversations.