In which kids act like kids

Another Goodwill find: Sixth Grade Secrets by Louis Sachar. I loved this book when I was a kid, but I never realized it was by Sachar, who I associate with the Wayside School books. (I bet other people about my age have this association, too, while people a little younger than us know him as the author of Holes, which I've never read.)

Laura Sibbie is just about to graduate from the sixth grade. When she was four, she broke a lamp because she was mad about having to get her hair cut. Her father encouraged her to tell the truth by telling her the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Laura confesses, and her father tells her since she didn't lie, she doesn't have to cut her hair. Eight years later, Laura still has never cut her hair, or told a lie.

In a previously-alluded to event, several clubs formed in the sixth grade which resulted in hostility and kids being left out; one of those kids' parents complained to the principal, and now there is a strict no-clubs rule in Laura's class. But after Laura buys a trucker cap that says "PIG CITY" on it, she can't resist the urge to start a secret club named for her cap. In order to ensure loyalty, Laura and her two best friends give "insurance"- something very embarrassing that will be exposed to the whole class if a person should happen to spill the beans about Pig City. The first three items- a picture of one of the best friends getting a bath at age 3, a fake news article about the other friend being ticklish, and Laura pens a declaration of love to their teacher, Mr. Doyle.

The next day, the girls start recruiting new members. They choose a girl from their class and initiate her into Pig City. Every day the girls invite a new member to join, but they are overheard one day by Gabriel. Gabriel has a crush on Laura, and writes her a note explaining he knows about Pig City but promises not to tell, and asks to join the club. In typical YA book plot twist, the note in intercepted by a classmate who hates Laura, and she changes the tone of the note to one of extortion- if Laura doesn't kiss Gabriel, he'll tell about Pig City.

Of course, things go horribly wrong. When Laura confronts Gabriel about the tone of the note, he calls her a liar. Big mistake- it's an accusation Laura finds incredibly offensive. They scream at one another, and Gabriel start his own club, Monkey Town. As elementary clubs tend to do, the main point of the clubs becomes trying to torture the rival club members by turning their desks upside down, swiping their homework, and breaking their pencils. Things start to turn more violent when Pig City holds Gabriel down and coats him with mustard. As retaliation, he steals the box of insurance and exposes Pig City's secrets to the whole school. Pig City dissolves and Laura is blamed. When Laura walks home from school that night, two members of Monkey Town hold her down and chop off her waist length hair above the shoulder.

Fortunately, adults get involved at this point. Gabriel also defends Laura's honor by punching the hair-cutters in the mouth. Laura's friends forgive her, Gabriel and Laura make up, and Laura gets a cute haircut.

• Laura plans to be the first female president. She thinks some pretty awesome feminist things about the ways women are valued and how it undermines their real worth- for instance, "...it bothered [Laura] when people told her she was pretty. Nobody ever told George Washington he was pretty!"
• While Laura claims to never lie, she makes a LOT of- well, I was going to call it "equivocations", but then I looked the word up, and that's not exactly the correct term. She applies some circular reasoning to situations, I guess. She admits after the hair cutting incident that she deserved it, since she had in fact been lying all along.
• Can I just say how much I adore books where kids act like they really do? Sure, they are twelve and immature, but the girls talk about whether boys are into girls who are "stacked". Laura tries to distract Gabriel from the feud, and from exposing the insurance, by offering to kiss him (his original demand, she thinks) and thinks to herself "She'd seen enough movies to know men like to kiss pretty women, no matter how rotten they are!" Pretty astute.
• Once the insurance is out, and Laura is implicated in a running tally the teacher's been keeping of misdeeds, Mr. Doyle offers to lessen the punishment since "I can't very well ask someone who loves me" to carry out the punishment (remember, Laura's insurance was her declaration of love). Laura takes back the love letter and throws it away, then says calmly to him "No, I'll do it. I don't love you anymore." I think that's a kick-ass comeback.
• Laura's parents want to file an assault charge after Laura's hair is cut off, but Laura doesn't want to. I think her parents should have insisted, although the culprits do get suspended for the remainder of the school year.
• It's sort of scary how kids act once they form packs. I remember some malicious moments on the playground, though nothing on scale with cutting someone's hair off.
• Which brings me to the cultural identity piece. Are these sort of cliques unique to the American school yard? Surely not- I think it seems like human behavior to form groups and square off. It even happened in Laura Ingalls Wilder books, with her enemy Nellie.

So, I still enjoy this book as an adult. It's well written, and funny, and looks at kiddie politics with a really fair and accurate view. I had heard before, and just confirmed, that Louis Sachar spent time in second and third grade classrooms for college credit. The writer for "My So-called Life", Winnie Holzman, took part in a program that let her be a teacher's aide or sub or something in California high schools so she could write more realistically about teenagers. I hate to admit I'm out of touch with what it's like to be a kid, but I am, and I think you'd have to back and observe to really remember all the drama that happens at school.

By any other name

My husband and I have been married for 7 years. We dated for less than 2 years before that, and we were young (though at the time, I felt perfectly adult and ready to make life decisions). Now that I'm older, I think wow, I did a really good job picking a husband, a better job then I knew I was doing. I couldn't have articulated this then, and didn't even know I was looking for it in a mate, but my husband's hilarious, and his sense of humor gets us through a lot of tense moments. So, I'm happy- I wouldn't change a single second of my life if it meant not ending up exactly where I am- but sometime there are things in our marriage that we didn't consider as thoroughly as we should have.

My husband is first generation Indian. His parents and older brother immigrated here just a couple of years before he was born. His father was adamant that he get to be a normal American kid. He doesn't speak the mother tongue, he had pierced ears and dreadlocks in college, and he dated (and married) American girls. As he's gotten older though, he wants to be more integrated in Indian culture.

This is such a weird concept for me. When asked about my culture, I draw a blank. I'm just your average white girl from the Midwest. I'm not religious, so I don't even have that sort of cultural identifier. I can sort of think of some things that one could call American Culture, but it's just not the same as having dances that are specific to your region of India, or seeing photos of women in outfits and being able to pinpoint what city in India they are from just by the pattern of the fabric.

Recently, we visited some close family friends of my in-laws, who my husband refers to as his "godparents". While my husband and I were visiting them, we also saw some other family friends. I asked what their names were, and hubby's godfather immediately told me "Dr. and Mrs. X, to you." I laughed, thinking he was kidding, and said, no really. He looked at me quite seriously and said "It would not be right for you to call them anything other than Dr. and Mrs. X."

Maybe I just have a temper, but I immediately thought, dammit, I'm 30 years old, it is beyond patronizing to be forced to refer to these people by their last names. Then I though, ahhh, a cultural difference I can point out. Most of my friend's parents, at a certain point (jr high, maybe?) told me to call them by their first names. I think I always called my parent's friends by their first names, and I even have friends who teach elementary school and have their students call them Miss FirstName. All of these seems preferable to me- forcing someone to speak to you in respectful manner does not force someone to respect you.

As I thought more about this name issue, I remembered how in "The Namesake", about Indian newlyweds who immigrate to the US, the parents do not call each other by their names ever. The wife calls the husband something that "translates roughly as 'are you listening to me?'" And for the first time in 7 years of marriage, it dawned on my that this is why my husband never says my name. He'll call for me from a different room, but he just says "Hey, what are you doing?" Or "Hey, can you make me tea?" He has one completely unromantic pet name for me, which he uses sometimes, but never "honey" or "babe". The list of names I call him could go on forever (everything from "bud" to "angel face"). At times I've gotten mad and pointed out he never calls me anything, and he's never articulated that this is a learned behavior. He is not even aware of it, he claims it is not a conscious choice he is making.

I was hoping my YA books would back me up that it's an Americanism for children to call adults by their first names, but in "When We First Met", the older brother's fiance Mimi refers to her future inlaws as Mr. and Mrs. Pennoyer. So, maybe I can't call this a cultural identifier after all.

When We First Met

I recently had my first-ever home decor idea. My mom bought me a cilantro plant for my anniversary and I thought, wouldn't it be cute to plant it in a teapot? So off I went to the closest Goodwill, which happens to be in not the best part of the city. (By the transitive property, you can correctly assume that my home also happens to be in not the best part of the city.) Alas, no teapots or anything else cute to plant my little cilantro sprout in, but of course I couldn't leave without cruising through the book section.

To my intense dismay, there was nary a SVH or BSC book to be found. How could this be? Am I really that old, that books that sold thousands and thousands of copies aren't even at the Goodwill anymore? How sad. However, I did find and buy a Norma Fox Mazer I'd never read before: When We First Met.




Some background about my love for Norma: After the Rain is one of my favorite YA books. I still own it, but I think it may be at my mom's, or in a box in the spare room. I also love Silver, and I had A, My Name is Ami and B, My Name is Bunny when I was a kid. I read E, My Name is Emily in the past few years (got it from the library) and it was sorta weird, there was this whole two-girls-kissing-one-guy scene which seems a little kinky for YA, and then they trick the guy into kissing one of the girls' brother. I am not a homophobe at all, but I think it's a weird thing to do, and in general, icky to trick anyone (especially a 12 year old boy) into having a homosexual experience. Girlhearts was kinda eh for me, too.

So, I had high hopes for When We First Met, since it was written back in the day (1982) so I was expecting something more of AtR caliber. The synopsis:




Jenny is 17 and has been described as "a Modigliani girl" and says after that she has never felt pretty. If you, like me, have no clue what a Modigliani painting looks like, here you go:

As far as being compared to art goes, I don't think it's that bad. As the novel opens, Jenny notices a new kid in her drama class, a blond boy with rainbow suspenders and "the face of an angel." But it's March, a sad dreary month anyway, but extra sad for Jenny and her family, because older sister Gail died in March two years ago.

We are introduced to Jenny's mother in chapter two, who is dealing with having lost a child better than most people in YA tend to. (No talking to her dead kid ala Andie and Jack's mom on Dawson's Creek, for instance.) She does send red roses and a mean letter to the woman who ran Gail over. See, Jenny refused to run to the store for Gail, so Gail had to ride her bike in the rain to pick up cream, and was hit by Nell Montana, who is described as a drunk driver. So Jenny's mom writes to Nell on the two year anniversary to remind her of the accident, as Jenny's mom is sure Nell doesn't think about Gail ever.

Jenny continues to see Angel Face at school, at her part time job at a burger joint, and finally Jenny and her BFF Rhoda run into Angel Face and one of Rhoda's groupies, and the four go for pizza. Every time Jenny sees Angel Face, they stare, smile, look away, then sneak glances again- Jenny tries to think how to start a conversation with him. Then We learn Angel Face's name- Rob Montana. Uh oh.

So, Rob spends a lot of time convincing Jenny it's ok for them to be attracted to each other, which Jenny resists on account of her family and how she knows they will feel about this. Rob claims his mother was NOT drunk, had only had one drink, and in fact is very remorseful about the accident. Eventually Jenny agrees they can be "friends" as Jenny and Rob, no last names, no baggage. Things go well. They fall in love. Jenny meets Rob's mom, who seems weird and a little mean to me, but Jenny says she likes her and starts to have some sympathy for the other person whose life changed two Marches ago.

Eventually Jenny brings Rob home, her family goes ballistic and order Rob out of the house, and insist Jenny break up with Rob. She refuses for a while, then complies, then realizes it's not fair for her family to tell her who she can and can't be in love with, as she can't be happy without Rob. It ends with Rob writing her a letter saying he still loves her, and Jenny leaves to go see him after he gets off work, telling her parents she's going to see Rob. Her parents aren't happy, but tell her to be careful and ask if she needs any money. So her parents have decided to accept Jenny's love for Rob, although they still don't approve.

I sort of rushed that for two reasons: 1. The book was a little boring. 2. My favorite part of booky blogs is when I get to the list at the end.

• Jenny's best friend is Rhoda Rivers. I wish I had my copy of After the Rain because I'm pretty sure the main character in AtR mentions being "A Rhoda Rivers watcher", because Rhoda is a fascinating dresser and outgoing personality. I freaking LOVE crossover events, even ones as small as this- I like thinking about characters existing in a universe together.

• Rob's mother, Nell, is 36 at the time of the accident. Rob would have been 15. At 17 he claims to have an older sister who's since moved away (to college?). So Nell had her first kid at 19 or earlier. I always do that sort of mental math about characters.



• At one point, Jenny and Rob have been dating for two months (although they always refer to each other as being "friends", which I find weird) and they talk vaguely about getting married someday. I find that very realistic and refreshing- I talked about marriage with my boyfriend when I was 16, too. I think most teenagers take themselves and their relationships very seriously, and I don't like when adults act like teens are silly and foolish when in love.



• So, Jenny KNOWS her family will have trouble with Rob, yet she just brings him over one night and goes, here's Rob Montana. We're friends. Now, while Norma treats the young love with the respect it deserves, I think Jenny would be smart enough to tell her parents gradually about Rob- "I've met Nell Montana's son" would be a better start then just walking in with him. I can't even imagine how I'd react if I were Jenny's parents.



• There's a subplot where Rob's mom tries to kill herself after meeting Jenny's mom at the mall. Jenny's mom seems very confused by her emotions- she sort of wants to forgive Nell, but deep down, she just doesn't. That makes sense to me.



• They publish an account of Nell's "accidental overdose" in the newspaper. I doubt that would happen, even in the 80s. Rob even is quoted as saying his mom takes sleeping pills but probably just forgot she'd taken the medication and accidentally took it twice. No way the paper would interview the kid of a person who attempted suicide, right?



• Jenny's father is the one who really lays into her after she brings Rob home, and he thinks to himself "To tell the truth even when she [Jenny] was a little tyke, he'd been sort of uneasy around her. Cute little thing, but always looking at you, looking and watching, those dark eyes, and keeping her own thoughts." I think it's sort of sad he thinks this about Jenny, it's almost like he's wishing it were Jenny and not Gail.

• Rhoda is mentioned a lot in the beginning, and a lot after Jenny breaks up with Rob, but not much in between. On the other hand, it's stated that after Gail died and Jenny couldn't do much of anything, Rhoda would just walk for hours with her and talk her head off. I like that Rhoda was supportive when Gail died, but I don't like when girls drop their BFF when they find a boy, even if that is sort of true.

• While it's been two years since Gail died, you get little glimpses into how Jenny's life has changed- it's implied she used to run track, but couldn't bring herself to care anymore after Gail died. I think that's a pretty true description of grief.

• Jenny's mom watches the little sister, who's 5, walk to school through binoculars. That's nuts, what's the point of that? She's 5, if you're paranoid now (justifiably so), just walk her to school. What good does watching with binoculars as she gets run over do?