Student Picks: Thomas and Gibbons

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- The Hate U Give, written by Angie Thomas, follows the novel’s protagonist, sixteen-year-old Starr Carter, as she toggles between two worlds: the black impoverished neighborhood where she lives with her parents and brothers, and the wealthy private school in the suburbs.

Starr leaves a party with her childhood friend, Khalil Harris. Starr and Khalil get pulled over by One-Fifteen (nicknamed by Starr from the police officer’s badge number), Brian Cruise, Jr., for a busted taillight. Khalil is manhandled out of his car and then shot three times in the back. Starr becomes the sole witness to his murder and deals with the pressure of having to testify against the police officer to a grand jury.

The truth casts a shadow… people like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time… when it ends right.

Maybe this can be it.

These stories are all too familiar, and Angie Thomas doesn’t suddenly decide to give this story the justice that is deserved, tying Khalil’s case with an indictment. That would too easy and not at all realistic. Instead, she stays authentic within the confines of social realism, shining a light on the festering divide of American society and police brutality. The Hate U Give is a young adult book that I recommend for everyone.

Katie Fenton-- I was in search of the perfect piece to read and analyze for the third semester close reading essay, and Kaye Gibbons’ novel Ellen Foster was the recommendation. The story follows the childhood of the narrator herself, Ellen, as she bluntly deals with multitudinous experiences of loss, pain, and torture, as well as the responsibility of raising herself in a world of adults who choose not to.

As a child, Ellen lives with an alcoholic, abusive father and a sick mother who takes her own life in order to relieve herself from her pain and her awful husband. Ellen is bounced from house to house and rejected by her own family time and time again.

Eventually, Ellen finds her escape from this fate, and is able to find out what it is like to truly be part of a family. By no means is Ellen Foster a feel-good novel. However, it is one that profoundly fits into the childhood rhetoric of many of today’s youth. This novel is a worthwhile read and an intense reminder that we’re all just trying to find a place to call ours.

Student Picks: Danielewski and Price

K.A. Hamilton-- If point of view is the frame of a story, House of Leaves is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece. There is no central hero, but a chorus of multiple candidates vying for the role in a dark and shifting world. The effect is a book that will haunt you well after you've put it down. 

At its core, House of Leaves blends the unlikely bedfellows of horror and romance, as a couple attempts to repair their marriage under increasingly terrifying circumstances. This is wrapped in layers of metafiction, footnotes, and secret codes.

Of course, no review of this book would be complete without mention of its layout. Central to the story is a terrible, endless labyrinth and an intangible monster that are reflected in the chaotic spread of words across the page. Danielewski engages not just the five senses, but a sense of time and space as well. House of Leaves is ergodic literature at its finest: genuine, heartbreaking, and infectious. In an age of ebooks, there are few novels I own a physical copy of, much less two. But I keep an extra around for lending, should anyone else want to lose themselves inside the House.

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- I have been looking for books that contained similar themes to my writing in hopes that it might improve my craft, and stumbled upon Richard Price’s Samaritan by accident.

In the vein of episodic police procedurals, Samaritan encompasses characters from all walks of life crammed together on the page, surrounding an amplified criminal case. The novel follows Ray Mitchel, an ex-English high school teacher, ex-cab driver, and ex-screenwriter, who has returned to the Dempsey, New Jersey projects where he grew up. But Ray returns as a wealthy man, and his altruism leads him to the hospital’s intensive care unit with a massive brain injury after being “tuned-up.” As his childhood friend, Detective Nerese “Tweetie” Ammons, tries to solve Ray’s case on the "who did it" and "why," past secrets are revealed.

What’s most intriguing about this novel is that the most painful moments, and the most insightful pieces of these characters’ pasts, are all done through dialogue. Samaritan has a magical quality, mixing poetic figurative language with an urban tongue that I got sucked into immediately.

Student Picks: Wasserman, Curtis

K. A. Hamilton-- Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire is the story of teenagers struggling to reclaim their identities from the grips of small town life. The central character is at once a daughter, an outcast, and a rebel, and impossible to refer to by name without taking sides. She is “Hannah,” “Dex,” or “Hannah Dexter,” depending on who you ask, and the prime battleground on which Kurt Cobain-worshipping Lacey and popular Everygirl Nikki wage their intimate culture war.

To read Girls on Fire is to experience the cautionary tale firsthand. Wasserman presents raw teenage realities a la carte, free of the morality-story garnish so commonly heard on the news. With startlingly clear technique, she humanizes figures we’re so often warned not to empathize with. By keeping close, readers are allowed to let go of the “why” just long enough to remember the “why not,” and maybe even recall “how good it felt to burn.”

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- We’ve all heard that “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” and my literary mind feels we should turn to literature for this history. There is no better book for that than The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis.

It follows the Watsons, who make their way from Flint, Michigan to Birmingham, Alabama because their son has been getting into trouble, and his parents think staying with his grandmother may be the change he needs. But 1963 is a turbulent time in the South, and Curtis weaves fiction with the historical event of the September 15th, 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The event in this book is almost 55 years old, but racial tension still exists, and places that should feel sacred or safe, are instead places where children are met with fear, hate, and violence.

If you’re a parent, read this with your children. If you’re a teacher, share this with your students. If you’re neither, but a human, read it anyway. Start the conversation that Curtis sparked: one that asks how we can change and make sure that violence is not so easily accessible, especially when our children are the target.

Student Picks: Offill, Rushdie

Jemiscoe Chambers-Black-- Have you ever had something remind you of your toddler years and make you not want to share? That’s what Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation did to me. It’s the book that I clutch to my chest and scream, “Mine.” However, it’s so beautifully written, I have to share.

Dept. of Speculation’s structure is written in short paragraphs of randomness that become gorgeous prose. The novel follows a writer who vows never to get married because she is too busy becoming an “Art Monster.” But she ends up falling in love, getting married, and eventually having a baby, and in her confliction and honesty, I’m moved. There are many delicious moments in this book that spill off the page when the inner thoughts of this career woman turned stay-at-home-mom pour out:

“What did you today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.”

Eventually, her husband has an affair, and the reader is taken on a journey filled with love, family, sacrifice, and eventually forgiveness. So, while I’ve shared this gem, know that no one can borrow my copy. I really recommend this book, but get your own.

Kirah Brouillette-- On a whim, I re-read Salman Rushdie’s infamous novel The Satanic Verses, the magically real story of two morally bankrupt Bollywood actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who die in a terrorist plot and are later reborn as an angel and Satan. With an embedded storyline around the prophet Mohammed that offended some Muslims enough that violent protests followed and the author himself was put under a fatwa by the Ayahtollah Komeni in 1989, it can be a tall order to finish.

What gets you by though, is the purity of Rushdie’s prose; the way he uses cadence and free punctuation to draw you into this foggily familiar world – a world where realism meets the magic of literary allusion, all bound by rising emotion shared between all characters, in both worlds at once.

“Is there a Devil. After that the glass – baprebap! – began to shake ... slowslow at first, then faster-faster ...  until it jumped ... fell down on its side and ... into a thousand ... pieces, smashed. Believe, don’t believe ... but thenandthere I learned my lesson: don’t meddle, Mhatre, in what you do not comprehend.”