The Leaving/Tara Altebrando: reflections by my student, Emma Connolly

When I talk about my students at the University of Pennsylvania—when I speak of their commitment to our work and to our community, the quality of their search and the depth of their answers, their sentences on the page—I am reflecting on what I love best about the school that once educated and now employs me. I am looking past the rumors and gossip and seeing straight into the heart of young goodness.

Because that goodness resolutely lives.

This semester I have again been blessed by the company of young people and their great talent. A few of my students have brought to class not just an interest in poetry or memoir or fiction (or song writing, architecture, economics, rock climbing, medicine, you name it), but a specific interest in young adult literature—an interest that has been heightened by my uber-cool Penn colleague (and YA writer), Melissa Jensen. I've extended an invitation to any in the class to read from the library of new books that make their way to me—and to offer, here, their thoughts.

In this case, Emma Connolly—a young woman who practically defined memoir in her expectations essay, a young woman now looking ahead to a no-doubt stellar career (at least to start) as a middle grade teacher—took home my copy of Tara Altebrando's new and thrilling book, The Leaving (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). I'd blurbed the book for Tara. I wanted Emma's thoughts. Here, in Emma's words, is what The Leaving is all about.

You see what I mean about talent? Intelligence? Can you imagine Emma as the teacher she will be?

This is the Penn I love.

(And I love Tara, too.)

Who are you without your memories?

For the characters of Tara Altebrando’s engrossing, twisting, mysterious, “The Leaving,” this is not a hypothetical question. When five teenagers are dropped off in an abandoned playground eleven years after they went missing, they are celebrated and intensely questioned. Where were they? Who took them? And how can they be telling the truth that they don’t remember any of it?  

As Scarlett and Lucas, two victims of the event known as “The Leaving,” and Avery, the left-behind sister of the only victim who has not returned, try to solve their own history, Altebrando confronts questions of identity, family, and memory. When Scarlett returns home to a mother who has attributed her disappearance to alien activity, she can’t shake the feeling that they are the ones who are from different planets. What if you don’t fit in where you’re supposed to? Lucas is disturbed by the discovery of skills that he must have learned during his absence. Can you be afraid of your past self? Meanwhile, Avery watches their return unfold as she continues to deal with the devastation that her brother’s disappearance has had on her family. Would she be better off like the victims of the “The Leaving,” able to essentially skip over a difficult childhood?

The characters discover unfinished leads from passed-away relatives and potential clues from past selves. They chase after jerkily recovered blips of memory that Altebrando visually represents by scattering words all over the page and interrupting the narrative with blocks of remembered images. With each revelation, we are drawn deeper into the search for answers before being thwarted yet again. Each time the story approaches acceptance of the fact that one might simply be better off not remembering, though, Altebrando reminds us, “Forgetting meant not knowing, meant ignorance, meant maybe making the same mistakes again and again.” So we keep searching, unable to leave this book until the very last page.

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Beth Kephart Temporarily Wins the Most Pathetic Award

You thought that title was a tease?  Because when do I ever tease?  And why would I?  And do I even have the shape and general vocabulary of teasing in me?

I do not.

Proof:  In a friendly battle currently being conducted on behalf of Tara Altebrando's distinctly unpathetic new novel, The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life (nothing Tara writes is pathetic; she's too clever and language invested and talented for that; read my review here of Dreamland Social Club), I have gone up against true literary greats—Gayle Forman, E. Lockhart, Sarah Miynowski, Arlaina Tibensky, and Lauren Myracle—and been found to be the reigning queen (at least in this hour) of pathetic-ism.

Wait.  Is this a good thing?  A boast-worthy thing?  Should I be trumpeting this all over e-creation?

Oh, never mind.  I am the temporary champ of something.  I can count the times that's happened to me on one hand of five fingers with variously filed fingernails.  I am running with this.

The contest (grueling, requiring months of training and a Michael Phelps diet) all came down to a tricky little Tara questionnaire.  I answered as honestly as I knew how, between gulps of Phelps-style pasta.  I answered, tone and fit.  But of course, I answered imperfectly and do feel the need here to say, about that high school friend, that we found each other years later, and became quite close again, and really, that guy wouldn't have been right for me anyway; my friend was doing me a favor.  I also feel the need to confess, as those of you who follow me on Facebook now know, that I may not have ever purchased Twilight tickets, but I am now ballroom dancing to Twilight music.

(You have no idea what I'm talking about.  That's the point of links like these.  You have to go and find out for yourself.)

Tara's questionnaire, which can be found here, includes the following tidbits. I choose this brief passage to underscore my obsession with winning—anything.  Please check out the entire contest, and Tara herself, who is lovely beyond words (and who has some very exciting co-authoring news, concerning another great, Sara Zarr).

TA:  See now I may give you some Special Points for this, just because it’s so awful and sad! What an evil cow! Do you know what an isocahedron is without Googling? If not, give us your best guess.

BK: I do, I do! I actually have this funky mathematical term in my YA novel YOU ARE MY ONLY, and not just once. This would be thanks to the fact that my brother is a math genius and I wanted to honor him. Can I have triple points for this one, please? I need something here to put me on a fair playing field. I hate losing.

TA: Again with the points!

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Dreamland Social Club/Tara Altebrando: Reflections

Last week, thanks to Meghan Cox Gurdon's Wall Street Journal article, "Darkness Too Visible," the young adult book world was aTalk and aTwitter (and aFacebook and aBlog, including me, here.) Are the books being written for younger readers too twisted, tormented, unhappy? Do they sensationalize, titillate, and provoke in psychically annihilating fashion? Do they dumb things down or reach over and through? Can censorship be defended? Do real writers write YA?

Conversations like that one give birth to generalities. Today, I'd like to get specific. I'd like to suggest that Tara Altebrando's newly released Dreamland Social Club be given a chance by those who have lately argued that YA is a lesser form of art. No genre, I'd like to suggest, is immune from the flat-footed, a-musical, overly simplified eye roll of a tale. Nor, on the other hand, does genre itself preclude beauty and sophistication.

With Dreamland, Altebrando, a Harvard graduate with well-respected adult titles to her name, provides proof—again—that contemporary young adult literature can be smart, full of heart, and veering toward classic. That its sentences can be crisp and alluring, its context rich and richly researched, its plot complex and original. Dreamland is the story of a teen named Jane and her brother, Marcus, who find themselves (along with their dad) living on Coney Island in their deceased grandfather's house. There's an old carousel horse tethered to the living room radiator, reels of strange old cinema in the attic upstairs, grandmotherly attire in a bar basement downstairs, and a set of keys that lead to forsaken wonders in the old amusement parks. This is a world filled with tattooed boys and giants and miniature people. A world in which a young amputee dances hard. A world that pits heartless developers against the long survivors of this town.

It's a world, and it's a story.  It is also, evocatively, history and all that Altebrando's imagination does with time now gone.

Look, if you have a moment, to see how Tara Altebrando writes. Then buy the book to find out what happens for yourself:

She stood at the window for countless silent minutes, studying the view. Raindrops clung like white pearls to the black electrical wire strung between the house and a wooden pole at the end of the yard. Other buildings loomed there, with their fire escapes zigzagging between windows, and Jane thought of the countless Brooklynites who lived there, unaware that there was a new kid on the block.

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Girls in Wash of Blue (and what I'm reading)

Glasses up. Glasses on. No glasses.

Don't ask me why (my own brain processes often elude even me, the owner of this most porous brain), but this photograph symbolizes my changing relationship to books as I try to decide what to read in hardback, paperback, and iPad2-ery.

Just now, I've ordered the following from the Kindle Store:

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories (Margaret Drabble)
Desperate Characters (Paula Fox)
The Coffins of Little Hope (Timothy Schaffert)
Faith (Jennifer Haigh)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)

These join the following to-be-read Kindle titles (I read both before, as real books):

Selected Stories (Andre Dubus)
Sophie's Choice (William Styron)

Now, from the iBook store:

If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Robin Black

They all join Tara Altebrando's Dreamland Social Club—a real book, a hardcover, as my next reads.

I'll be reporting back, of course.

In the meantime, might I note how glad I have been to be hearing from my students during these summer days. Might I say, too, that I am grateful that there is a new generation of smart young souls who know how to use language—know where sentences begin and end, know, unprompted, how to eliminate their own redundancies, lean into the music. How you are needed. How valued you are. How you might save the world.

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My good book fortune(s)

I'm not quite sure who this lovely lady is—Dionysus, I'm guessing—but I found her standing tall within a Philadelphia street festival, utterly and peaceably alone above the crowds (she was stilts-assisted). I return to her on this rainy morning because I feel her mood. Because I have looked out upon my pile of unread books and determined my short-term future.

Having just left Cleopatra (Stacy Schiff) in her tragic, epic Alexandria, I turn toward next titles. Some of them I've read before and will be re-reading. Some are brand-new both to the world and to me. Some are written by friends or friends of friends, one by a Pulitzer Prize winner who once surprised me with a glorious response to my Chicago Tribune review of her March, some by people I doubt I'll ever meet; two were gifts. I feel decadent, to be honest, to have found this time to read. But I have it; I'm claiming it; it will be forever mine.

My au courant (can I use that term this way?) book list, then:

Sweet Dreams, DeWitt Henry
When We Danced on Water, Evan Fallenberg (a Kindle book—about dance! about Berlin! Becca recommended!)
Dreamland Social Club, Tara Altebrando
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
The Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd
Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf
The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
Touchy Subjects, Emma Donoghue
The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness, Cyrus Samii
The Boneshaker, Kate Milford

Stay tuned for my responses.

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