The Ballad of Lucy Whipple by Karen Cushman

Also Known As: Seriously, Karen Cushman Is The Only Author In The World That Could Write A Book For Young Adults With Poignance And Humor Tied Into A U.S. History Lesson About Manifest Destiny.

Karen Cushman's first two books (Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife's Apprentice) were both unqualified triumphs in my mental library, so when I found The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, I let out an actual out-loud cheer. Having finished reading it -- finally -- I can say that the weird looks I got were totally worth it.

This is the story of California Whipple, told in first-person narrative and pieces of letters she writes back East to her grandparents, left behind in a Massachusettes town 40 miles outside of Boston after her father died and her mother, in a fight of American-ness up and moves the entire family westward during the gold rush, hoping to find gold nuggets littering the ground, dragging along a half-dozen children named things like Prairie and Sierra -- there was a point in the book where I said, "Oh God, it's like I've been trapped by the Park Slope stroller mafia or something." -- and a singular boy named Butte. (Proper pronunciation up for debate. To be kind, I have been saying, Bute -- like butane.) California decides her name is Lucy, since California is preposterous and loathesome.

California drags her heels the entire way, protesting and wailing and talking extensively about how she hates absolutely everything about the "town" in which they settle -- Lucky Diggins, California. Mining is hard and horrible, and Arvella Whipple, California's mother finds employment running the only boarding house in the joint for vagrants and miners, rough people with hard lives, and it becomes an increasingly endearing setting for a revolving cast of everybody from the Gent (possibly a serial killer, but very charming?) to Brother Clyde, a preacher come for lost souls who Lucy hopes will bear her away back to the East Coast.

The story -- all its hilarity and heartbreak -- is classic Cushman. Like with Catherine, Called Birdy, she pulls no punches. If the idea of Birdy's awful father slapping her in a drunken fit as he tries to sell her like cheese to the highest-bidding suitor horrifies you, so will the wretchedness Lucy and her family are forced to endure. But the rough edges, I think, are what make Cushman's books so enormously compelling, she writes some of the most imperfectly-human adults I've ever read, and the frustration of trying to understand them viewed again, suddenly, through the lens of a 13 or 14 year old girl is shocking. It's strange to shift back in time so quickly when for so long we've made our excuses for our more-or-less grown up behavior, but to remember it from the slightly shorter perspective of a pre-teenaged girl is humbling and also heartening, to know that even if you seriously, seriously hate your mother for all the crap she's putting you through, you still love her, and want only the best for her.

I loved Lucy, and I love the uncompromising strength and female cussedness about her -- I only wish there were more writers who could tap that core of awesomeness that dwells at the heart of every girl. Or at least that Cushman would write more books. Hey, I vote the Victorian era. I bet she could totally make me laugh about corsetry.

Recommended Reading?: Buy it now. Get three copies and mail them to your friends and their daughters.
Adults Will Love It As Much As Kids?: Absolutely.
Will I Pervert The Source Material And Ready Dirty Things Into It?: No -- I like to think that the dirty things Cushman writes into her books are intentional, and I like that she doesn't whitewash anything. (To that point, Bernard becomes my second-favorite character in this story.)

Toeing the line

My friend Leah and I are both working on YA novels and the question of so-called appropriateness -- where's the line drawn? -- almost always comes up. Is the cut off purely topical (ie: sex, drugs, rock and roll) or how graphic something is (ie: explicit sex, colorful drug use descriptions, Jonas Brother's concert versus Nordic black metal where somebody once filed a lawsuit over being concussed by a sheep head thrown from the stage)?

An aside about the Motherland before I start reading The Year of the Boar, and Jackie Robinson (Again)

Being of obvious Asian -- and then once you ask me, confirmed Chinese -- descent, I keep getting questions on how I feel about the Olympics. Do the comments the American press brigades there make bother me? Are you disappointed by the gymnastics scandal? The bad air quality? Are you horrified by the lip synching thing?

The lip synching and the gymnasts, I honestly could not even express to you in human languages how little I care. I mean, yes, it's crummy for an entire nation to come together and decide you're good enough, you're just not pretty enough to sing at the Olympics, and for that, she should be awarded therapy and have every copy of Seventeen or Elle Girl in her immediate vincinity burned so as not to exacerbate the situation. Otherwise, oh my God, must I remind you all about the SNL Ashelee Simpson debacle? It wasn't nice but it's not the end of the world. As for the gymnasts, as has been pointed out: if you can play the game, why not give them the freaking gold? If you can dive at 14, why can't you flip at 13? The Chinese gold medal girls Yang Yilin and Jiang Yuyuan were amazing, and they should be commended for having such extraordinary grace and skill despite being -- gasp -- a whole three years younger than everybody may or may not think. The air quality thing I've been harping on Beijing for years, so for everybody else to join in now -- the more the merrier.

As for the complaints about American media being too mean to China? Forgive the profanity, bitch, please. For full disclosure, I'm a proud member of the carrion-picking vulture class of newsgatherers. I'm not going to say there's never an emotional stake when you're covering news, but more often than not, you're carried along by the news cycle. Anyway! My point is: there's no such thing as the media is beating somebody up. Seriously -- you thrust yourself into the national cum international spotlight, you ask for it. Dear China: welcome to the world stage. Get better publicists. Love, reporters.

Now, the requisite to-be-fair graf: I came to the States when I was 3-and-a-half years old -- all the memories I really have of China are colored with not living there, being seperate, so the knee-jerk defense that I have of the country will always be tempered by the fact that I've watched from the in and outside -- that doesn't mean I'm less inclined to bash, it just means I do it with a little more intimacy.

My Side of the Mountain

Also Known As: It's Not Just You, I, Too, Photoshopped All The Various Ways Child Molesters Could Have Come Into Play Here

So by the fourth time I said, "Oh my God, that guy could be a child molester! Get out of the car! Rape whistle! Amber Alert!" I had to put down My Side of the Mountain and remind myself that I was reading a book that predated our current fearfulness of, well, everything for children -- and it makes me both love and dislike it.

In the context of 2008, it's hard to read about a city kid named Sam Gribley escaping to the Catskill Mountains with some flint, $40, and a dream of finding his family's failed homestead. Did I mention he hitchhikes along the way? With truckers? And then shows up in random strangers' homes and sleeps, unassuming and unconcerned with obvious potential danger? If nothing else, had this book been written in the last five years, short of being trafficked into the sex trade, he would have at least had his organs meted out onto the black market. Of course, when Jean Craighead George wrote the book in 1959, I'm sure none of that stuff ever happened.

(To that point, there's a hilarious note in the beginning of my copy of the book talking about how the manuscript was originally rejected for encouraging children to run away from home, with the decision reversed when the publishers decided that running away from home into the forest was okay, just not running away from home into the city. There's probably some kind of legitimate logic to that, but all I could think was, "HELLO. THE UNABOMBER LIVED IN THE FOREST.")

Anyway, the fun stuff: Sam ends up -- after managing neither to die nor be forced into prostitution -- living in the heart of a hollowed-out tree, making himself acorn pancakes on a lid of a tin can and smoking trout, taming falcons etc. and so on. He kidnaps a baby falcon! And kills a bunch of deer! And rabbits! And turtles! And fashions bowls of their remnants! And Sam's so comfortable with rendering death unto the woodland creatures it's instantly alien to a modern day reader, who mostly interacts with the flesh of dead animals through sterilized supermarket packaging.

And then there's Sam's method of playing fast and loose with fire, of inviting strangers persued by the police and into his home, no questions asked. Sam's dear for being trusting, but I spent a lot of time trying not to rend my hair and wanting to slap up all the adults around him for not holding him hostage until child services could come collect him. I suppose that goes right back to my first comment though, about how childhood has changed so much since Sam hacked up deer in the Catskills. I love how free Sam is -- how after two days of being run away, no SWAT team bursts into the forest to airlift him back to his Nintendo DS -- but at the same time, I'm past the age where I can see it only for its romance.

I mean, setting aside the part where he totally would have died from exposure or being eaten by bears or BEING KILLED BY CONVICTS HIDING IN THE FOREST HELLO ARE YOU A MORON SAM? -- and only if his mother didn't beat both the weather and the grizzlies AND HELLO BANDITS to the punch by beating him to death -- the book is charming. But I can't say that it has aged well. Some stories invite you to skim over the more ridiculous elements -- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler -- but My Side of the Mountain feels too spare, to dismantled, a little too much to swallow for the reader over the age of 12.

Recommended Reading?: Absolutely, it's still a classic. Plus, twig fishhooks.
Adults Will Love It As Much As Kids?: Not necessarily, although I guess it depends on how afraid you are that kids will be eaten by bears -- so your mileage may vary on this one.
Will I Pervert The Source Material And Ready Dirty Things Into It?: God, yes. I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I had to bite my lip and lecture myself, "It's not what it reads like. It's not what it reads like. God, I'm going to hell."

So, apparently my dealer's name is Vladimir. Which makes sense.

Vladimir shows up randomly in my neighborhood and parks his unmarked white van in front of a Chase bank and unloads his wares in corrugated fruit boxes. He's not a librarian, and his organizational system, while unscientific, is nowhere near as sick as the one used by the hipsters that run The Strand: children's picture books, dated hardback nonfiction, paperback mysteries and romance novels, thousands of volumes by Danielle Steel, and always a box of YA novels. Like any good dealer, Vladimir disappears for long stretches of time and then shows up right when I'm starting to get the shakes.

"Where were you?" I moaned, digging through a Chiquita Bananas box and trying to decide if my threshhold for public humiliation was high enough to buy the entire collection of Boxcar Children books Vladimir had brought.

"I have another set up in Woodside," he said, and I felt actual physical betrayal, like I'd just discovered my father had a second family in Reno or something. "I have shade there."

I hated Woodside fiercely for stealing God-knows-how-many books that were rightfully mine, and in punishment, I bought only five books from Vladimir this weekend. Yeah, I bet that really showed him.