Waking up

One of the themes I appreciate from All We Know of Love is travel as a wake-up call to self-absorbed teens. I remember a bit of a wake-up call in my life. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t well-traveled as a teen. I’d lived in Texas, Colorado and Alberta, Canada. I’d spent my summers across Canada and the U.S. My parents encouraged me to see things outside my world. I had all kinds of books about countries around the globe. I heard stories of my parents’ living in Hong Kong. I heard stories from my friends who lived in Iceland, Japan, and South America. And I was a kid who appreciated differences. When I traveled, I noticed the local architecture, tried the local food, tried (unsuccessfully) to introduce other regions’ fashions to my school at home. Still, during my 17th summer, I woke up.

I’d just stepped off the plane and into an airport in Scotland. And it hit me: Every day that I wake up and live my little American life alongside my American friends at my American school, this entire country is full of people waking up and living a life too. And they have never seen my school. And good grief, there are more than 100 more countries full of more people who’ve never seen my school. Who cares if I my hair looks crappy on the first day of my senior year?

How about you? Did travel ever wake you?

New plan

I’m here, I’m here! And I have a reason why I’ve been AWOL.

You know how when you take something you love and make it into work, that thing you love becomes a chore? I discovered a few disturbing facts after starting this blog:

1. Devouring books started to feel stressful. Instead of purely enjoying it from cover to cover, I had to take notes and start thinking of how to approach and present a review of it. Not only was it not fun anymore, but it was also causing me to accumulate large stacks of overdue library books.

2. I don’t like reviewing books. I am not a literary author. Or any kind of author. What do I know? And if I actually finish a book, that means there’s something in there that I like and my personality is such that I want to focus on THAT and end every review with, “blah blah blah, but who cares? I still liked it.” If I really have a problem with a book, I just don’t bother reading it. I am a bad traditional book reviewer.

3. Those large stacks of overdue library books get expensive.

So, I’m trying something different. Brief reviews. Summary and a few informal thoughts. And a hope that I will still get faster at it. I can read a couple of books per day, but it seems to take me at least a week to post something about it. But I will keep persevering because I still like this idea. And I’m not one to throw in the towel. So keep tuning in.

BOOK: All We Know of Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin

Love. Natalie Gordon doesn't know enough about it. She wants - needs - to "figure out how to get love and how to be loved. And how to give love, without giving myself away." And she knows she'll get the answers if she can just finish a conversation from four years ago - a conversation with her mother, who left Connecticut for Florida right in the middle of that conversation. So Natalie buys a bus ticket.

And on her way to Florida and her mother and the end of the conversation, she meets some people - including a grandmother who "has that look, like someone who likes to care about other people for no reason at all," a runaway middle-schooler, a teenage mother/waitress who hardly leaves her small town despite sometimes feeling "hungry, almost burning, though she knew no food would be satisfying," a quiet man with a name that seems too ordinary. They are strangers with their own stories of love and strangers who manage to reach Natalie in a way that family and friends don't:

It means connection. And that's just about all there is in this life, I think. Even the very temporary, even the transient, even the people who you are never going to see again but who exist because we need them to, because we are human.

And that, I believe, is the truth that brings this story together and leads Natalie to her answers, or maybe non-answers. I liked this story of a girl who is perceptive and open enough to let strangers bring meaning to her own thoughts. It feels authentic. I care about and root for Natalie as she struggles through yet another pregnancy scare from her on/off boyfriend, a fight she had with her best friend Sarah, and the horrible thought that gnaws at her heart: that she is "a girl whose mother had chosen to leave her, who had not wanted her. Whose mother had walked out the door one night and never came back."

This is not a book with a lot of comic relief (although it has its few moments) and maybe that’s why my cheese detector started wailing – mostly at the end of the story, which seemed just a bit too heavy with earnest, epiphanous moments. I kept having to put the book down just so my brain could breathe.

But I certainly don’t think anyone would argue with my kudos to Nora Raleigh Baskin’s excellent writing.


Book Information:
TITLE: All We Know of Love
AUTHOR: Nora Raleigh Baskin
ISBN: 1406315516
PAGES: 208
PUBLISHER: Walker Books Ltd

Throwing out boxes

In Bronx Masquerade, everyone knows that the tall Black guy plays basketball. But heaven forbid he should read books in his spare time. For fun. And the caramel-complexioned girl with the long, wavy "good hair?" She MUST think she’s better than everyone else because, you know, she's pretty.

Boxes. Everyone in high school gets put in one. I hated my box when I was in high school and I fought particularly hard to get out of it (prepare yourself for a little taste of my smug teenage spunk):

I’m Asian and I do not LOVE (nor am I even good at) math. Get over it.

I am not a good violinist because I am Asian. I am good because I practice. For hours at a time. Get over it.

I am Asian and I’m not trying to be valedictorian, be in the top twelve or maintain a straight-A record. Get over it. But I did graduate 18th in my class without even trying. So suck on that.

Oh but I guess that means I’m smart. And smart girls are ugly and NO FUN AT ALL. So I guess I’ll go home, hide my hideous, hideous face and recite MATH PROBLEMS.

Back then, the closed minds saw my race before they saw me. Curiously, it isn’t what they seem to see first anymore (except, I'm sure, for when I’m trying to park my very Asian Toyota). I have a whole new set of stereotypes to fight now, but since this site is about teenage boxes, I won’t go there.

Which box did you fight as a teenager? Or did you even try to fight it at all?