January09_3
From brilliant new Australian fiction to blockbuster American girlie pulp: Judy Blume's 'Summer Sisters'. Mildly entertaining chick lit about a rich girl/pool girl friendship across a couple of decades. Judy Blume is a name from my early teenagerhood; I'm sure she wrote 'Are You There God, it's Me, Margaret', which I remember as a dangerous book for 12 year old girls.
Moved on to finish John Marsden's 'The Journey'. I have a lot of respect for John Marsden, as a teacher, an advocate for literacy and young people; he wrote the 'Tomorrow' teen series and a stack of books about boys and powerful, thoughtful parenting. But 'The Journey' is wierd; it's a piece of fiction tracing the rite of passage to adulthood of a 15 year old boy who sets out from his home, alone, to travel the country, broaden his horizons and grow into a man. So he discovers his body, comes to respect nature, becomes independent and resiliant, works, meets oddities and finds understanding of the diversity of humankind, has sex, falls in love, faces danger... the story seems to be a structure shaped around a checklist of life lessons. There is a lot of exposition of ethical concepts packed into dialogue or thoughtful reflections. It's nothing like contemporary teen fiction; it seems absolutely without irony, thoughtful and earnest rather than knowing. I can't imagine G reading it - when he's 13? 15? - but it's a primer for all the stuff that's hard to talk about, so I'll keep it on the shelf with all the other books I hope he'll read when he's older.
Moved on to finish John Marsden's 'The Journey'. I have a lot of respect for John Marsden, as a teacher, an advocate for literacy and young people; he wrote the 'Tomorrow' teen series and a stack of books about boys and powerful, thoughtful parenting. But 'The Journey' is wierd; it's a piece of fiction tracing the rite of passage to adulthood of a 15 year old boy who sets out from his home, alone, to travel the country, broaden his horizons and grow into a man. So he discovers his body, comes to respect nature, becomes independent and resiliant, works, meets oddities and finds understanding of the diversity of humankind, has sex, falls in love, faces danger... the story seems to be a structure shaped around a checklist of life lessons. There is a lot of exposition of ethical concepts packed into dialogue or thoughtful reflections. It's nothing like contemporary teen fiction; it seems absolutely without irony, thoughtful and earnest rather than knowing. I can't imagine G reading it - when he's 13? 15? - but it's a primer for all the stuff that's hard to talk about, so I'll keep it on the shelf with all the other books I hope he'll read when he's older.
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