Tag Archive | Lemony Snicket

Launch Party Date + A Mini-Rant

Jun11

I’m excited to announce the time and place of my release party for Sparkers: Friday, September 26th, 2014 at 6:30pm at Red Balloon Bookshop in Saint Paul, MN! I lived just a few blocks away from Red Balloon last year, and its proximity was one of the best parts of living in that neighborhood. Red Balloon is where I met Eoin Colfer (when I was…12?) and Maggie Stiefvater (when I was 21). Back in October 2012, as Maggie Stiefvater dedicated my copy of The Raven Boys, I couldn’t have imagined that two years later I would be celebrating the publication of my first book in the same store. The party is still a ways off, of course, but feel free to mark your calendars.

Now for the (entirely unrelated) mini-rant. Last week, Slate ran a piece about young adult (YA) literature, something to the effect that adults should be ashamed of reading YA books. If you haven’t already read the article and want to, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding it (though in addition to the article itself your search will undoubtedly turn up scads of rebuttals–the piece hit a nerve). A new commentary lamenting the choices of the reading public and/or expounding on what’s wrong with YA literature appears every couple of months, so this wasn’t exactly surprising, but I think this deliberately provocative article particularly irked readers and writers of YA and middle grade (MG). Others have already responded to the Slate piece more deftly than I will be able to, but I can’t help sharing some of the thoughts I had as I read the article because it was so astoundingly condescending and at times so blatantly wrong that I was practically sputtering at my computer screen as I scrolled through.

First off, it alarms me that the author casually dismisses all genre fiction out of hand in order to focus on the only kind of YA books she is even willing to consider as potentially worthy of adult consumption, namely, YA contemporary. There is no reason why realistic fiction should automatically be elevated above science fiction, fantasy, etc. in either the adult or YA/children’s realm. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of genres. There are excellent books and less excellent books in every genre.

The author states that she didn’t cry when she read a certain bestselling YA novel about two teenagers with cancer. Great. Neither did I. She is entitled to find that novel occasionally eye roll-inducing, but there’s no need to be smug about it and imply that she’s more sophisticated than those adult readers who genuinely enjoyed the book.

The author sets up a clear dichotomy between YA novels, which have “uniformly satisfying” endings, and adult novels, which presumably have complex, ambiguous, or open-ended endings. This is kind of ridiculous. There are YA and MG books in which not every loose end is tied up*, and there are in fact whole classes of adult novels in which satisfying endings are de rigueur. Of course, it’s pretty clear that when the author talks about books for adults she’s only talking about serious, literary fiction (Literature with a capital L–however you define it), but if that’s the case, why single out YA novels for disparagement? Does she think adults should be equally ashamed of reading category romance or cozy mysteries (examples I give with caution, since I know very little about them)? My hunch is she does think so, but she doesn’t talk about it because it would undermine her argument that adults reading adult books = good and adults reading YA books = bad.

Then I got to this: “These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction.” At this point, it became obvious that the author simply didn’t know what she was talking about. She can’t have read many books for teenagers or even for children. Because this sentence is flat-out false. When I read it, the first work that leaped to my mind was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I am fascinated by these books in large part because they’re practically the epitome of “the emotional and moral ambiguity” that the Slate writer claims doesn’t exist in YA. A Series of Unfortunate Events isn’t even YA, it’s MG, which means it’s for even younger children.

For those not familiar with it, A Series of Unfortunate Events is about three siblings, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire, who are delivered into the hands of a villainous guardian after their parents perish in a fire. The first few books chronicle their woes as they move from one incompetent guardian to the next, always being pursued by their first guardian, who is after their parents’ fortune. Part of the charm of the books is the narrator’s constant warnings to the reader that this tale is not a happy one. Many installments in the series end in the Baudelaires’ failure to accomplish what they had hoped. The guardians who love them die; their new friends are torn from them or betray them. As the series progresses, the line between heroes and villains blurs, and what previously seemed black and white collapses into murky gray. The Baudelaires find themselves making choices of dubious morality and even hurting others to try to escape their enemies and save themselves and their friends. They doubt their past decisions and are no longer proud of or comfortable with themselves. I’m afraid I’m making this sound very dry; the books are not, and you should read them! The point is, A Series of Unfortunate Events is rife with moral ambiguity.

I also point to this series to refute the claim that all books for young people have neat, satisfying endings. As I read Books 10, 11, 12, I wondered how Lemony Snicket was going to end things. He couldn’t come through with a happy ending in the final book because the whole premise of A Series of Unfortunate Events was that it was an unhappy story. An ending in which all was resolved would destroy the integrity of the series. But surely he couldn’t end with the Baudelaires’ ultimate defeat or even death because he had legions of young fans who would be crushed, right? I seriously wondered how Lemony Snicket was ever going to pull off a fitting conclusion to the series. But guess what? He did. The last volume ended not happily, not unhappily, but ambiguously. He left so many unanswered questions. And it was so right. It was the ending the series called for, and it proves that not all children’s books have simple endings.

When articles like the recent one in Slate come out, people sometimes respond by quoting Madeleine L’Engle (“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children”) or Philip Pullman (“There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book”). This makes me uneasy too. Not the quotes themselves, but the way in which they’re sometimes used, defensively, or sometimes even smugly. In such a context, these quotes imply that, actually, it’s books for young people that are superior. This strikes me as playing the same game as articles that exalt adult literature and denigrate YA or MG literature. Why should we even have this debate?

I read books for adults and books for children and teenagers. Admittedly, the vast majority of what I read is YA or MG. I feel like I never really left the teen section of the library. When someone tosses out that statistic about how half of all YA books are bought by people over 18 (some of whom may be buying the books for teens, of course), it usually takes me a second to remember that, oh, right, they’re talking about me. I’m one of those adult buyers now.

The thing is, reading YA doesn’t prevent you from reading adult literature too, and neither is inherently superior to the other. Why don’t we just respect everyone’s right to read what they like? If a sixth grader wants to read War and Peace, let her. If adults enjoy books for young people, more power to them. If you’re having snide thoughts about someone else’s choice of reading material (I know I have), that’s okay, but maybe keep them to yourself.

Did I say this was going to be a mini-rant? I guess it wasn’t so mini. Ah, well. Happy reading to all.

*Incidentally, School Library Journal‘s recent review of Sparkers counts my book among these when it says that “[n]ot everything is wrapped up neatly” in it. I was honestly a bit surprised, but I’m delighted someone might consider my novel a counterexample to the Slate piece’s claim that all YA and children’s books’ endings are tied up in a bow.

Musings on Character Naming

Jan15

At the beginning of January, I attended the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. Meeting concurrently were the LSA’s sister societies, including the American Name Society. The ANS is dedicated to onomastics, the study of proper names. Practically all the ANS talks sounded fascinating, from “Ojibwe name giving” to “A sociolinguistic analysis of first names given to Lebensborn children within Nazi-Germany” to “How pet owners in Taiwan choose names for their dogs” (!). But the only one I managed to attend was “Contemporary authors: The naming of their fictional characters and places.”

The presenter, a novelist, discussed the origins of some of his own characters’ names and shared responses to a survey he had sent out to other authors (of literary fiction, mostly) about how they named their characters. The responses were fairly mundane, but I was struck by a remark one author made. He said that if you have a clear idea of your character’s personality, the name shouldn’t matter. The name shouldn’t have to fit the character, necessarily, because after all he knows lots of people whose names don’t fit them. I found this interesting for two reasons: 1) I think there’s an assumption that authors try to choose names that suit their characters in some way, whether by their sound or their meaning or their historical or intertextual echoes, and this author seems to discount the importance of character naming; and 2) He almost seems to suggest that authors sometimes use a character’s name as a crutch, a substitute for adequate characterization, and that they shouldn’t do this. Maybe I’m reading too much into his comment, but there’s plenty to ponder there.

I still think a lot of authors do choose their characters’ names carefully and with certain intentions. Perhaps an extreme (but wonderful!) example is Lemony Snicket. The names of the characters in A Series of Unfortunate Events are a carnival of literary allusions (one of the reasons I think this series is extraordinarily sophisticated and meant for readers of all ages). The more well-read you are, the more nods to literature you will pick up on, and I think this is appropriate given the value attached to being well-read in the series itself. I remember the moment I realized a character in The Hostile Hospital was named after the narrator of Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague–appropriate, right?).

As for my own character naming practices, since I mostly write fantasy, I usually either invent proper names (while striving to keep the names in a given world linguistically coherent) or choose a language/culture to draw proper names from. In Sparkers, most people from Ashara have names of Hebrew origin while people from Xana, a country across the sea, have names of Arabic origin. (I’m not sure I would make the same choice today, but it’s too late now.) Of course, Ashara and Xana themselves are made up.

I generally choose names by figuring out what sounds good or right to me. I consider the meaning of a character’s name, but it doesn’t necessarily have to have a clear connection to the character’s personality or role or actions. I just like to know what it is, and if it adds something subtle to the totality of who the character is, so much the better. That said, my main character Marah’s name means “bitter,” and this was a meaning I wanted. Marah started out a bitterer character than she is now, her bitterness having been tempered over years of revision. But the name of the other main character, Azariah, means something like “God has helped,” and I don’t mean this to have anything to do with who he is. I just liked the name.

On the other hand, I once did select some characters’ names much more intentionally. This was in a short story inspired by a fleeting episode in the Bible:

And [Gideon] said unto Jether his firstborn, Up, and slay them. But the youth drew not his sword: for he feared, because he was yet a youth. (Judges 8:20)

In the Bible, Gideon is an Israelite hero who here asks his firstborn son to kill two enemy kings who have killed Gideon’s brothers. I transposed this episode into an alternate 19th c. America and into the context of a violent family feud. The biblical text supplied the bare bones of my plot, but in my story, the father who commands his son to shoot two men from the rival family in vengeance is not a sympathetic figure. I kept the name Gideon for him to preserve the link to the Judges text and because the name fit well in the new setting. I abandoned the name Jether because I don’t like it and it’s too unfamiliar. Instead, I named the son Absalom. I chose this name for several reasons. Most trivially, it has the Swedish form Axel. My alternate 19th c. America was peopled by immigrants of English and Swedish origin, and I liked that Absalom could be nicknamed Axel. According to some sources (alas, I don’t know Hebrew), Absalom means “my father is peace,” and I liked the irony of this. Finally, I liked the reverberations of the name given the story of the biblical Absalom, the son of King David. Absalom rebels against his father, which in a way my character does too. But when Absalom is killed by David’s own men, David says, “[W]ould God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (II Samuel 18:33). Despite everything, David still loves his son Absalom in a way that my character Gideon does not love his son Absalom. However, the anguish my Absalom feels over the ultimate deaths of the men his father tries to make him kill echoes King David’s. The parallels are imperfect, but what interests me is the stirrings of connection.

Incidentally, in Sparkers, Marah’s father is also named Avshalom.