I promise this is the last graduation picture.  I just wanted you to see how good 👍 I look in regalia. 

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You Belong To Me

     We tend to associate cults with religion gone extremely wrong. A number of YA novels have featured protagonists trying to escape from isolated extremist religious communities, usually under the dictatorship of a charismatic minister, featuring harsh discipline, deprivation, and cruelty. But in You Belong To Me Hayley Krischer shows that they can exist in more secular organizations. 

     "Girls like me don't get invitations to Deep events. Girls like me aren't supposed to be interested in beauty serums, namaste hands, mindfulness apps, crystal water bottles, and the expensive white lace dresses that everyone wears who is adjacent to wellness guru Deena Patterson. Especially not me, Frances Bean Ellis, the teacher's daughter."

     Bean (as her friends call her) is quite unlikely to be recruited by the multimillion-dollar beauty and wellness company run by Deena and daughter Julia. She's way less wealthy than her elite private school peers--a teacher's daughter on scholarship. She's a member of a Victorian goth group. She describes the Femme (Deep branch for teenager girls) bunch as "Girls with huge smiles on their faces, looking like someone vacuumed the brains out of their skulls."

     But Bean has a crush on Julia. So when she gets a fancy invitation to a Femme event she accepts despite her friends' and mom's misgivings. And she's quickly enchanted by the luxurious ambiance and the sense of community. Not to mention the message. 

     "I've never heard someone speak like this before. There've been motivational speakers at school, and sure, I've seen people online preaching on how to live a clean life. But Deena's so passionate, so understanding...And of course, she's right. I'm in charge of myself. Thats what I want. To be in charge of myself."

      Bean becomes more and more involved with Femme, the Deep organization, and Julia and more alienated from her former besties, especially when they start writing an expose on Deep and Femme for their school paper. She resents her mother's questions. 

     But even she is deeply troubled and not sure what to do when she sees one of the Femme girls dead in the hot tub of the Deep spa.

     What evil lurks in the hearts of Deena and her minions? Betcha you want to find out. 

On a purrrsonal note, I'm back from a romantic weekend getaway with Eugene at camp. The weather again was a tease. It 🌧 Ed Saturday and then cleared up 🌞 Sunday when we left for home. I got in some good reading. And we watched a really funny movie before bed. 

A great big shout out goes out to the love ❤️ 😍 💖 ❣️ 💕 💘 of my life, Eugene of course. 

Jules Hathaway 

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The Champions (YA fiction)

     Years ago Kara Thomas wrote a book about a nice little town where people were becoming scared because someone was killing the cheerleaders. Readers wrote to her asking if there was more to the story. Her answer was the very worthy sequel to The Cheerleaders: The Champions in which she not only presents readers with a superbly crafted chiller, but also shines the light on an issue people tend to sweep under the rug.

     Eleven years earlier media coverage of the cheerleaders' deaths had made Sunnybrook infamous and left the residents yearning for a more positive defining narrative. Salvation has arrived through the high school football team, the Sunnybrook Tigers. They've captured the state championship two years in a row and seem on track to bring home a third victory. Needless to say, in the high school and the town they're big time heroes. 

     "It's near impossible to get tickets to games, and every business on Main Street has a PROUD SUPPORTER OF SUNNYBROOK FOOTBALL poster in their front window. Last year, a record number of football players signed with D1 colleges, and all anyone can talk about is where this year's seniors will end up."

     Hadley, Thomas's narrator, is not a fan. For years she's had her heart set on attending Columbia and becoming a New York Times staff journalist. Starting her senior year she's determined to become editor of the school paper and up against tough competition. She wants to get a hard hitting piece on a controversial topic into the first issue...

     ...needless to say, a piece on the Tigers is not what she has in mind. But when no one else volunteers she takes the assignment. With the editorship in mind she's going to slay the piece even that it's about the last thing she wants to write.

     Staring at her empty document, she's distracted by an email by SportsFan@gmail.com: Tell Kirk you can't do the article. Make her give it to someone else." It's only the first ominous message she receives from this anonymous source implying that the guys on the team may be up to something more sinister than trophy pursuit...

     ...maybe aided and abeted by adults at the school and in the town who have vested interests in seeing that nothing jeopardize the miracle comeback narrative...

     ...and maybe somehow linked to the tragedy people are so eager to leave in the past.

     Needless to say a lot of people don't want Hadley uncovering secrets even with one player dead, another in a coma, and the team starting to fall apart.

     In our society too often "promising" male athletes are able to get away with just about everything. It's especially egregious in cases of sexual assault when their misdeeds are covered up by not only their teammates, but the adults in charge. Including this reality in a highly engaging YA novel could raise awareness of this issue. 

On a purrrsonal note, it looks like Eugene and I are going to camp tomorrow. It's a good thing I got more library books! Hopefully it won't 🌧 too much. Hopefully we'll find yard sales with awesome merch. Tomorrow I'll be offline and I'll post Sunday.

A great big shout out goes out to Eugene. 

Jules Hathaway 

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Mariam Sharma Hits The Road (YA fiction)

     When Mariam, narrator of Sheba Karim's Mariam Sharma Hits The Road, gets a phone call from her best friend, Ghaz, a New York University student, she gets some shocking news. Ghaz hadn't read a modeling contract carefully enough. A picture of her in basically underwear in a very sexualized pose is larger than life on a billboard in Times Square. 

     Now this would come as a shock to just about any mom. If this was one of my kids at that age I'd have had serious concerns about how this would impact their future. But Ghaz is in a more difficult parental situation. Her desi Muslim parents shut her in her room without access to her laptop or phone. They are shamed by how she has disgraced their family in their conservative religious community. They want her to finish college in Pakistan and not come back to America until she's properly married. 

     Umar, the third member of the besties trio, comes up with a rescue plan: a kidnapping and a cross country road trip to New Orleans. 

     Ghaz is not the only member of the trio who has family issues. Mariam's father totally abandoned her family when she was a toddler, never to be heard from again. She wonders if this is why she ghosted a really decent boyfriend when they got serious. Is she too much like her missing parent? Umar is gay. His father is virulently homophobic. 

     "It was weird, to think in the far reaches of the universe, two suns drew closer and closer in a cosmic dance of love, while down here some people tried to get as far away from one another as possible. My father from us, me from Doug, Ghaz from her parents. Then there was Umar, sometimes running away from his sexuality, sometimes running to it. And now me, chasing after my father. All three of us in flux, our friendship serving as an emotional anchor."

     Despite spats the three draw even closer as the miles go by. Their colorful ventures into novel situations such as drag shows and honky tonks and hard won insights into their family situations make Mariam Sharma Hits The Road a highly engaging read.

On a purrrsonal note, the library children's garden and the community garden are coming along super. A lot of good veggies are being b

planted. Even my little garden is looking pretty. 

A great big shout out goes out to all our gardeners. 

Jules Hathaway 

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A picture from the sendoff

This is one of my favorite higher education send off pictures. I'm wearing the totally gorgeous graduation outfit Elizabeth Allan got me. Our shopping day was so much fun. It was incredible that during one of the busiest parts of the academic season she found time to take me to Target. In the picture I'm with Elizabeth and my advisor, Leah.

Today my fun will be taking pictures at the Orono Public Library's children's garden and volunteering at the Orono Community Garden. Getting lots of fresh air and sunshine. Doing my best to be repulsive to ticks, black flies, and mosquitos.

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Two YA Novels in Verse

     My very favorite novels are written in free verse. I like how the required economy of words leaves no room for the verbose, the superfluous. Takes you to the gist. And the books that manage to vividly convey a distinct sense of time and place, of personalities and relationships within that format are pure magic. So the day I discovered two of these gems in the YA section of the Orono Public Library I felt truly blessed.

 

    Rex Ogle's When We Ride takes readers to a neighborhood long past it's years of niceness and prosperity. 

"Cars on bricks in front yards. 

Angry pit bulls barking mad.

Paint flaking off houses like dry skin.

Bars on windows, like detention centers.

Junkies walking up the asphalt, day and night"

It's a place where people struggle to keep a roof over their heads, food on the table, and the lights on. Ogle's narrator, Diego, works after school bussing tables at a diner. His mother works six days a week at two jobs.

     Diego's mother is determined that he achieve the kind of success and life she couldn't have. She's going to do whatever she can to help make this happen. 

"She's always saying, 

'Education is everything.

And you're going to college 

if it's the last thing I do.'"

And Diego is fulfilling her expectations. He's achieving academically despite the time he has to spend working. He's filling out college applications. 

     Diego and Lawson are long term best friends, more like brothers, even though their lives are going in drastically different directions. Lawson is an indifferent student. 

"'Why you bother with that shit?

Grades don't mean nothin' in the real world. 

They're just letters and numbers."

Worse yet he's doing and selling drugs. He's gone from just selling grass to pushing harder drugs, getting involved with seriously dangerous people in the process...

     Leaving Diego caught between loyalties--to his mother and her dream or to his bestie and his survival. 

     What we're taught about the fight for women's suffrage in America tends to be pretty sanitized. We learn about about the movement leaders, the big conferences, and the marches. We're told that one of the most fundamental rights of those of us who aren't he/hims was gained by hard work and sacrifice and should never be taken for granted. We're not usually filled in on the premeditated cruelty and outright brutality some of our foremothers had to endure. Marcie Flinchum Atkins' One Step Forward reveals some very inconvenient truths. 

     The narrative arc of the story goes from 1913 to 1920. The setting is Washington DC where Woodrow Wilson is doing his presidential best to ignore the suffragists. Even some of their supporters are urging them not to distract the head honcho when there's this world war going on. Only they don't see their cause as a distraction. How can America claim to be fighting for democracy while denying so many of its citizens the right to vote?

     The narrative is a blend of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, Matilda Young, was a very real person, as were most of the characters of the book. However, the historical record only goes so far. Atkins had to extrapolate from the very little known about Matilda and the literature about the time in which she lived to create her daily actions and thoughts. 

     Matilda was the youngest in a lively family of seven: two parents, four daughters, one son. She was only fourteen when she cut school to secretly to attend the Woman Suffrage Procession. She wanted to see thousand of women marching. 

"No, Matilda, 

you cannot go.

You're too young. 

It's too dangerous."

She was angered when she saw men including her father physically and verbally abusing the marchers and the police doing absolutely, nothing. Unsure of what kind of suffragist she wanted to be and apprehensive about being jailed she began the began sorting mail behind the scenes at headquarters. 

   As the years went by, Wilson went out of his way to ignore the suffragists and their demand, and nothing changed, they devised a new tactic, a silent protest. Women would take turns picketing the White House. At first Matilda stuck to behind the scenes work...

    ...But as Wilson entered his second term she joined the picket line. People began to assault the women. But when the arrests began it was the women who were arrested, jailed, and tortured brutally behind bars.

"Throughout the entire research, writing, and revising process for this book, I never ceased to be amazed at the great sacrifice that suffragists made for our right to vote. Some of them gave up considerable time, money, and comfort. Inez Mulholland died pursuing suffrage for women. Others nearly died from the abuse and hunger strikes in prison."

     Atkins wants YA readers to know that even if they're, like Matilda when she became involved in the fight for suffrage, too young to vote, they can make a real difference by staying up on current events and policies, getting involved with the issues that matter most to them, and communicating with elected officials. 

On a purrrsonal note, OMG, do I have news!!! A people magazine editor has been interviewing me and Amber to do a story on my getting my masters degree after a stroke. Today it came out on the internet. It is so well written. Check it out and feel free to share with your friends and acquaintances. I am certainly going to celebrate with my girls.

A great big shout out goes out to Brian Brant for doing such an excellent story.

Jules Hathaway 

     

     

     

     

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A Catalog of Burnt Objects (YA fiction)

"On November 8, 2018, my hometown of Paradise, California, was obliterated in a  manner of hours by the Camp Fire, the most destructive and deadly wildlife in the history of the state. Eighty-five people died. Ninety percent of the structures were destroyed. And 50,000 people were displaced."

     At that point in time Shana Youngdahl was living on the other side of America in Maine. Although she did her best to support her hometown and help the people whose lives were impacted it never felt like enough until she came to believe that she use her formidable writing talents to do so. The result was A Catalog of  Burnt Objects. 

     "But this book is not just a story of fire. It's a story of family, community, and first love. Because one thing I have learned is that disaster isn't the whole story. It's an important part of it. But the people, their lives, their loves and struggles, and how they get through them--that's the story."

     Caprice, Youngdahl's narrator, is in a complicated and bittersweet family situation. Her older brother, Beckett, has been the drug using black sheep and the cause of much parental strife. After he got out of high school his folks saw him only sporadically until he hit rock bottom, causing a truck crash that left his best friend, Mason, unable to talk or breathe on his own. Now he's come back from four months in rehab. Caprice has no idea what he or family life will be like. 

     "All I really wanted was to get through the coming year without any big surprises, finish the app I was developing, and get into college. That was my program, my plan."

     And then there's Caprice's beloved grandmother who played a major role in her upbringing. She's in a small, drab room in an assisted living place, handicapped by dementia. Sometimes she can't remember who Caprice is or even remember that she is a grandmother. 

     There are some ominous signs like a strangely colored evening sky and the smell of smoke. But most of the residents don't suspect the imminent tragedy until it's upon them with the frantic need to escape through dangerously clogged roads.

     Caprice and her family end up sleeping on cots in a store, trying to cope with a very uncertain future. Their beloved cat and grandfather are missing. Caprice believes that her grandfather is dead and it's her fault.

     Youngdahl reminds readers that fire seasons are growing longer and more wide spread due to climate change and that wildfire smoke contributes to between 16,000 and 30,000 needless deaths a year.

     "I don't tell you this because I don't have hope. I do. I wrote this novel because I do have hope. People can come together and make change. They can support one another and build a better world."

On a purrrsonal note, we're having another 🌧 weekend in central Maine. Except for going to Governors with Eugene Saturday, I've been inside making good progress on spring cleaning and chilling with my good wing cat, Tobago. Can you believe I've run out of library books? Not to worry. I've got 4 inter library loan books waiting for me at Orono Public Library. If the weather isn't too crappy I can pick them up tomorrow. 

A great big shout out goes out to precious Tobago, my best little cat in the world. 

Jules Hathaway 

     

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