Audiobook Review: Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money

Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan. *sticks out tongue*

Let me just say that Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money (written by Christopher Paul Curtis and narrated by Joe Holt) is perfect for a road trip. Perfect. My daughter and I laughed SO HARD during various parts of the book. It was kind of amazing.

The characters are fantastic, the narrator is great, and the plot is so absurd. I mean, just really. Basically, the book asks what you would do if you, as a nine-year-old member of Flint Future Detectives and the second smartest kid in your grade, received a quadrillion dollar bill from one of your neighbors.

If you are Steven, you have to deal with a father who forces you to think critically, a mother who tries to use psychobabble on you, a best friend who is younger than you but looks older, a ginormous dog that looks like a bear, a secret agent with something to prove, and a dictionary that insults you every time you use it.

It’s just a lot to deal with is all.

But it’s so fun to listen to.

Quirky Brown: 7; Support Your Local Library: 37; Audiobook Challenge: 5/6; POC Reading Challenge: 22

Book Tour Review: 32 Candles

“[A Molly Ringwald Ending is] a perfect ending. It’s when somehow, against all odds, people manage to surmount all issues of class, status, and personality to get together at the end of a story.” I thought about that definition, and then realized for the first time: “It’s basically impossible. I’ve never seen that kind of ending happen in real life. I mean not ever.”

When I was invited to participate in the book tour for 32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter, I was super excited. Not only is it my first book tour, but I’ve heard great things about the book, and, of course, that meant I had no excuse to put off reading it any longer.

32 Candles follows narrator Davie Jones from a Mississippi adolescent who is obsessed with Sixteen Candles, Molly Ringwald movies, and the John Hughes oeuvre to a Los Angeles adult who has to confront her past and realize what a happy ending really is.

What I Liked

– Davie. She’s a great character: good willed, strong natured, and incredibly flawed. The pain and rejection she experiences influences so much of who she is, but I love that she’s not a sadsack character. She’s full of life and, more importantly, funny. She’s also a little crazy. But, hey, aren’t we all?

– Nicky. Oh gosh, I just love Nicky. He’s so fully realized, and I just have such a clear picture of him in my mind. I keep trying to figure out what it means that I’m so drawn to these kinds of anal, control freak characters, but I figure it’s because they’re so amazing.

– I love that Carter manages to take a look at Hollywood fantasy (my argument is always that realistic teen fiction always has an element of fantasy) and shows how detrimental clinging to these kinds of false narratives can be while at the same time showing they can be empowering. I mean, yes, maybe you won’t get the guy or the perfect ending, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go after what you want.

– I love that it takes Davie thirty-two years to come of age. It makes sense. Her growth is stunted by trauma and her mentality kind of gets stuck at sixteen. (Through Nicky, Carter calls attention to that fact in a great scene.) While I love, love YA fic, most of us don’t really come of age/mature by eighteen, so I dig that Carter recognizes this in her novel. Davie is still emotionally sixteen.

– I really, really enjoyed the way Davie came into her own.

– I found the book delightfully unpredictable. I mean, obvs, she is going to run into the people from her childhood again (why else spend so much time talking about them?), but a few twists kept me guessing. I’m a hard reader to surprise, so that’s always pleasant for me.

– I love, love the cover. So great.

– This book is a ridiculously engaging read. And considering the fact that once I signed on for the book tour, it became required reading, that’s saying a lot. I read it practically in one sitting. (Okay, over the course of a weekend. When I had other things I should have been doing.)

What I Didn’t Like

– I wanted some (most) of the relationships to be developed more. Everyone’s purpose in Davie’s life is clear, and it makes sense that a lot of the relationships are shallow, but there was still a lot of room for development in pretty much every relationship, especially the friendships.

– Some major revelations are glossed over, which makes me wonder why they were included. They don’t really seem to have an effect on Davie, and, if that’s the case, why does the reader need to know?

In conclusion: I found this to be a fun summer read, perfect for the pool or beach.

I received this book for free from the publisher to review. Check out Ernessa T. Carter’s blog posts at Fierce and Nerdy and stay tuned for a Q&A with the author!

Quirky Brown: 5/3; POC: 14/15

Book Review: Saving Maddie

I had no doubt that Madeline Smith needed saving. I just wasn’t quite sure if I was interested in being her savior.

Saving Maddie by Varian Johnson is the story of two preachers’ kids, Maddie and Joshua, and what happens when they grow up–and apart.

What I Liked

– I like that at its core, this is a story about friendship. Specifically, it’s about two best friends and what happens when they rediscover each other after some time apart. Maddie has changed a lot, and Joshua has not. Joshua wants to recapture that same innocent friendship they had when they were kids (not so innocent–he always had a crush on her), but Maddie knows that’s impossible because she has been through A LOT, most of which Joshua doesn’t know about and probably can’t understand.

– I think Joshua is a great character, one we don’t see enough of in YA, honestly. He’s smart and responsible (oh, how I can relate), but he’s also tied to the idea of goodness in a way that makes him unapproachable to his peers. He’s included because his dad runs things, and he’s left out because he wants to do what’s right and has no problem saying what he thinks he’s right. That marriage to goodness is also a flaw because, as Maddie points out, he doesn’t examine why he just tows the line with his parents, especially regarding sex. There’s this great bit where she tells him that if he doesn’t want to have sex before he gets married, that’s fine, but to stop saying it’s because the Bible says so and his dad says so. She wants to know what HE thinks and what HE feels about the things he’s been taught, and he’s just not there yet. I really liked that a lot.

– The English teacher in me loves also that Maddie gets Joshua to read and expand his mind. More importantly, I love that she asks him to analyze the literature and not just summarize it. It goes back to my previous point. WHY do you think these things, Joshua? It’s what I have to teach my students, so I liked that it was part of a natural conversation the two characters had.

– Josh’s relationship with his parents is ace. Maddie’s secret just made me sad.

– Oh, I also like how Johnson examines the tension of being a kid who wants to do the right thing while having friends who do things you don’t agree with or condone. It’s not easy, and I think he’s successful at showing that Josh is a good AND a frustrating friend all at once. Usually, we see that in the–I don’t want to say bad, so let’s just say more ethically challenging friends than the straight-laced friend, so it was nice to see.

– I really liked the resolution of the narrative and how Johnson handles the “saving” aspect of the novel. Does Joshua save Maddie? What does it mean to save someone?

Another thing I find interesting is the language we use in these kinds of situations. If the roles were reversed, Maddie would be trying to change Joshua, but because Joshua is the one doing the reaching out, he’s trying to “save” Maddie. (This is not ignoring the religious bent of the novel. I think it still stands that the societal interpretation is that girls want to change boys and boys want to save girls. The terms are practically interchangeable, but the loaded meaning of each is not. Just food for thought.)

– Great characters all around.

What I Didn’t Like

– I hate, hate, hate the cover. The reason I hate it so much is that the narrator is a boy, and the cover has the book squarely marketed at girls. In fact, the spine of the book is pink. Pink! BOYS DO NOT LIKE READING PINK BOOKS. As a friend and I discussed, it makes us wonder about who the publishers think the audience for the book is. It’s certainly not boys who are struggling with being good. Is it “bad” girls who need to know that there are nice boys like Joshua out there who want to save them? Is it girls who wish they were “bad”? Is it “good” girls who also need to know there are nice boys like Joshua out there? I DON’T KNOW. I just know this cover infuriates me because it is alienating half of the audience it should be attracting.

Even if it is pretty. I mean, it matches the book and all, and I love the colors and everything, but ARGH. GENDERED. INCORRECTLY GENDERED AT THAT.

So annoying.

– My other issue is that this book is TOO SHORT. I felt like it could have been a good fifty or so pages longer. I would have really liked to see Joshua deal with his best friend’s little sister having a crush on him, more with the girls in the youth group wanting a dance ministry. And I really, really, really wanted to see more between him and his parents. I think there’s so much more going on beneath the surface, and the narrative as written only touches on some of it. Joshua’s only real defiance is his commitment to Maddie, but there’s so much more he’s dealing with that Maddie should/could have been a catalyst for in the actual narrative, and it would’ve been nice to see it addressed. Fifty more pages! That’s all I ask!

In conclusion: I liked this book. It’s worth a read, even if the cover makes me bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Quirky Brown: 4/3; Support Your Local Library: 17/30; YA Challenge: 12/20; POC: 11/15

Book Review: Sex, Murder and a Double Latte

The downside of writing sex scenes is that my mother reads my books.

Unlike with most authors, I discovered Kyra Davis’s blog before I ever read her books. I can’t even remember how I ran across her website. I think my Google Reader suggested it, and then I read this post and was hooked. So after almost a year of reading her blog, I finally decided it was time to try one of her books, so I gave Sex, Murder and a Double Latte a try.

With beach and pool weather upon us (I do live in Florida), I will say this book would make a good beach/pool read. While murder is always intense, there’s a lot of comedy in the book and some romance. It’s not too heavy, the characters are fun, and the situations are a bit…well, Sophie (the main character) does manage to get herself into quite a few unbelievable scrapes.

When I finished the book, I thought it read like a grown-up Nancy Drew. Sophie has her two sidekicks, her gay best friend (who I am going to just say is Ned–not that Ned is gay, but he and Nancy were not exactly anything more than dance-going buddies), and her slightly dangerous love interest (Frank Hardy, of course). There are distinct differences between Nancy and Sophie, but I still maintain the comparison.

But I digress.

Again, a solid read. I had the killer pegged about halfway through, which took away some of the suspense, but it was still fun and definitely amped up as it got closer to the conclusion.

POC Challenge: 10/15; Support Your Local Library: 17/30; Quirky Brown: 3/3

Book Review: The Man in My Basement

“Sometimes,” he said and then hesitated, “sometimes an opportunity can show up at just the right moment. Sometimes that opportunity might be looking you in the face and you don’t quite recognize it.”

Oh, Walter Mosley. I am beginning to think that you and I are just not cut out for each other when it comes to your high concept, non-mystery work. The basic premise of The Man in My Basement is a white man, Bennet, asks Charles Blakey–a black man–if he can live in Blakey’s basement, but Bennet wants more than to just live in the basement: he wants to be imprisoned there.

I had two major problems with the book.

1. The book feels as though it’s trying to be deep. I don’t really like to work for meaning when I read. By which I mean, yes, I am an Englishist by trade, and I am used to, as Joan Bauer would say, pulling meaning from a stone. However, I hate reading a book and feeling like I should be making meaning out of what is there. That I should be actively overthinking as I read instead of the book just being awesome and me just feeling like there’s something more. I don’t even think any of that makes sense, but it makes sense in my head. Basically, the whole time I was reading, I felt like I was missing something that was totally obvious and that the book was trying so hard to be deep, yet I was swimming in shallow water. Blergh.

2. The other big problem I had is the main character. I just didn’t care for him, didn’t like him, didn’t really understand why this story needed to be told. He’s unlikable and surrounded by unlikable characters. There was no one for me to latch onto, and characters are my thing. I can forgive a lot for awesome characters.

The one thing the book does have going for it is that Mosley is a master storyteller. Even as I had all of my feelings about the book, it was still immensely readable, and it was easy for me to get pulled into the world of the story when I picked the book up. But this book was a total bathroom book, and even then I read a magazine or another book before I finished this one.

Quirky Brown: 2/3; POC Reading Challenge: 4/15; Off the Shelf: 2/5

Book Review: One Crazy Summer

I wished I hadn’t opened up that newspaper. I wished I could go right on thinking we were having breakfast, painting signs, and learning our rights. I wished I didn’t know that I was marching my sisters into a boiling pot of trouble cooking in Oakland.

I can’t decide if I like One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia so much because it’s a really good middle grade novel about a girl who spends the summer trying to get to know the mother who abandoned her or because it’s a book about a girl who spends the summer at the Black Panther Party summer camp.

I mean, I really cannot decide. Because it is so hard for me to separate my love of the Black Panther Party from the rest of the novel, and the fact that this book is written, basically, about the experience of participating with the Panthers as a child just…I can’t even put it into words.

The setting and premise are awesome is what I’m trying to say.

It’s hard for me to talk about the book itself because I really want to just go off on a tangent about how into the Panthers I was in college. I think to understand how into them I was you need to know that when I went to Oakland two summers ago, I was really super bummed that I didn’t have enough time to take the Black Panther tour.

Really super bummed.

But this isn’t about me. This is about the book. One Crazy Summer, while about a girl’s experience at the summer camp, is more specifically about eleven-year-old Delphine, and the trip she takes to get to know her mother. I always have a problem talking about well-written books because there’s not much to say except: this book is good. The characters are well-drawn, the setting and tone are pitch-perfect, and the relationships are all clear as is the thread of conflict throughout those relationships.

One of the things Williams-Garcia does well is mention key historical moments about the Party without overexplaining. It’s more of an invitation to find out more. What is COINTELPRO? Who is Li’l Bobby Hutton? What happened the night he died? (I don’t think she mentions Eldridge Cleaver, but he was there. So: who is Eldridge Cleaver?) Why do they call the cops “pigs”? It also doesn’t come up that the FBI thought the Free Breakfast Program was the most dangerous aspect of the Panther’s activities, but it’s easy to see why Hoover wanted it shut down immediately. (Also, did you know that’s why schools serve breakfast now? You can thank the BPP for that.)

Probably the best thing about the book (aside from Delphine, and, of course, the BPP) is Delphine’s mother, Cecile, and the complicated relationship she has with her children. As an eleven-year-old, Delphine’s understanding of her mother is perfectly rendered. As an adult reader, I appreciated that the reason Cecile left is as simple and complex as the fact that she couldn’t name her youngest daughter. Something Delphine doesn’t quite understand–nor would a reader in her age group–but that I can imagine her thinking about over and over as she becomes an adult.

I also enjoy we get an East Coast perspective of the Party as well as, through Delphine’s narration, how older black people (like her grandmother) see the Party.

So what I’m saying is I really enjoyed the story on its own terms. And I love, love, love that cover.

Now that that’s out of the way…

ADDENDUM, WHEREIN I TALK ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY

Can I talk about my experience with the Black Panthers now? Basically, my gateway drug was Assata: An Autobiography. (And thinking about it, I really probably should have named my daughter Assata because THAT IS HOW MUCH I LOVE THE BOOK. And Assata. SHE IS SO BADASS AND I LOVE HER.) I read that in an intro African-American studies class and immediately wanted to know more. So I signed up for a seminar on the Black Panthers where we read pretty much all of their autobiographies and seminal works. We discussed their philosophies and their complicated relationships. We read books related to them. I forced my friends to watch Panther with me. It was pretty intense.

So, some books if you’re interested in learning more about the Black Panther Party in their own words:

Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton by Bobby Seale
To Die for the People by Huey P. Newton
Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by George Jackson
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party by David Hilliard (probably my second favorite after Assata’s autobiography)
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story by Elaine Brown
War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America by Huey P. Newton
Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill

Also did you know that Jesse Jackson got his whole Rainbow Coalition bit from Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago Panthers?

MY MIND IS FULL OF ALL OF THIS KNOWLEDGE.

(Fred was, tragically, assassinated by the police–there are pictures of them carrying his body out and smiling–as he lay in bed next to his pregnant girlfriend who did not incur a single bullet wound. SERIOUSLY.)

And we all know that Huey from The Boondocks is named after Huey P. Newton. So.

*****draws hearts around the Black Panther Party*****

Quirky Brown Challenge: 1/3; Support Your Local Library: 4/30; POC Reading Challenge: 3/15

2011 Reading Challenges

I have decided to sign up for the following reading challenges for 2011.

Quirky Brown Reading Challenge: The focus here is on books offering an offbeat black experience, which I’m taking to mean no hood lit and no books about slavery (although 47 counts as offbeat, I’m sure). I’m going to do Level II, which is three books.

Books Read for the Challenge:

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley
Sex, Murder and a Double Latte by Kyra Davis
Saving Maddie by Varian Johnson
32 Candles by Ernessa T. Carter
Mr. Chickee’s Funny Money by Christopher Paul Curtis

YA of the ’80s and ’90s: You had me at YA. You won me at ’80s and ’90s. And that graphic! So much win all around.

Books Read for the Challenge:

A Star for the Latecomer by Bonnie and Paul Zindel
Tangerine by Edward Bloor
Static Shock Vol. 1: Rebirth of the Cool by Dwayne McDuffie, Robert L. Washington III, and John Paul Leon
If This Is Love, I’ll Take Spaghetti by Ellen Conford
Alias Madame Doubtfire by Anne Fine
Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Best Friends Tell the Best Lies by Carol Dines

Support Your Local Library Challenge: No brainer. I get all of my books from the library anyway. I’m doing the mini level: 30 books. I don’t really get the image for the button there, but whatever.