After a pretty m’eh first round, we have a finalist for last year’s (2020) National Book Award versus this year’s (2021) Kirkus winner.
I had a few qualms about both if I’m entirely honest. But nothing that would stand in the way of giving both a hearty YAAAAHHHHS.
Sidebar: HBO’s Station Eleven is currently giving me a lens through which to view our world right now, a way of generating hope and optimism, focussing on the truly kind and empathetic during times of crisis. In the spirit of this, I’m just going to say a few things that I love about both of these texts. That’s it. Just things I love.
Traci Chee’s We Are Not Free
I love the way that many characters get their chance to narrate a part of the text, each voice convincingly authentic and revealing. I love the way the organization of who “tells” the next piece allows the form of the novel to generate content: so many interesting parallels and juxtapositions; so many interesting ways in which characters and contexts and ideologies buffet against each other; so many Rashomon-ish moments of different people’s perspectives on the same incident. The seamless integration of both individual character voice and the voice of authorless authority.
I love the way that this, stealthily, reveals itself as a multimodal text…and each of those forms reveals something about theme and character. And history. And story.
I love how time works in this text. STICK AROUND FOR MY TED TALK ON HOW TIME WORKS IN THE SAME MANNER IN WE ARE NOT FREE AND THE THIRD SEASON OF SUCCESSION (I am not joking about this).
I really think there is a place for this book as a whole class novel, and would heartily recommend a class set or two (already purchased—bless you, Book Warehouse Christmas Season sales). I agree that engagement may be an issue if one just dropped it into students’ hands, but as a Teaching Text—pretty incredible, I think. Even the ways that the structure of the novel asks the reader to analyze initially at a micro- level, but eventually at a macro- level…man, give me a grade 10 class STAT.
Christina Soontornvat’s All Thirteen
Sidebar 2: see...this is non-fiction for Young Adults done right. No one needed to "fictionify" the account and to insert themselves first-person-style into the narrative to make this gripping and engaging. Just be well-written and researched and structured.
I loved (though…I see others sure didn’t--looking RIGHT. AT. YOU. HRYCUN.) the interstitial breaks in the narrative to elucidate on “Meditation” or tell me more about “Human Responses to Levels of Oxygen Concentration.” Maybe I’m a dummy, but I found them really interesting and illuminating. Like…perfectly spaced out. Timely (and…metaphoric and clever? “Rules To Dive By”? NOICE). I felt they proactively gave me the requisite “expertise” to sagely nod when experts were talking about ketamine. This personal expertise also appears after watching three hours of, say, Bobsledding during the Winter Olympics. Illusory sense of expertise, but just what I need!
I loved how invested I was. I love how many times I cried (like, really crying. Those notes on page 152? Saman Gunan? OOF. A full-blown mess, I was)). I loved that there were times, as I turned the page or came to the end of a chapter, I had a huge exhalation—because I had been holding my breath for way longer than I should have been.
I loved the precise craft of the thing. Not just the chapters (so cleverly considered!) and the look (the interaction between text and image!) and the feel (the physical weight of it in my hands!) of it—but there were sentences that truly made me gasp. Passages that I tagged for use as Mentor Texts.
I feel bad for the book in that The Rescue is such a hit right now, and documentaries are so widely available on streaming services that…I think lots will watch the movie rather than read the book (and the eventual [and pretty-much-inevitable] Oscar-nomination will cement this prediction). But…there’s lots the book does MUCH. BETTER. than the (pretty good, much-lauded) movie does, specifically the ways in which the boys and their families remain the focus— Soontornvat’s very personal interviews and research (THOSE SOURCE NOTES THO) speak to the story that she was committed to tell. And HOLY TOOT, does she ever.
Both are worth reading.
But my vote goes to We Are Not Free.
No comments:
Post a Comment