Michael Cart, ed., 2009.  The long break since my last post reflects my difficulty with finishing books of short stories.  I have trouble getting into them; they’re just too short and I don’t have the chance to identify with the characters.  This isn’t the fault of the renowned list of authors (I was familiar with ten of the twelve), but it did take me a while to finish the book.

There’s been tons of buzz about David Levithan’s contribution, “A Word from the Nearly Distant Past,” but although I may well be Levithan’s biggest fan, I’m not sure this even qualifies as a story. It’s more of the kind of speech your sixties-feminist mother might give you about how young women today have it so easy because of the ground she broke at protest marches back in the day.  And while I agree it’s important to remember the past, I wonder how teens feel about this story.  Does it really speak to them?

I felt the same way about Gregory Maguire’s 117-page….what? novella?  Again, not a story and not for teens.  I loved it actually, but I’m 34.  Am I not giving teens enough credit when I say that they might not want to read this book about men in their forties?  Yes, there are flashbacks to college, when Blaise and Faroukh began their relationship, but most of the book is about men the age of teens’ dads.

Rounding out the trio of really-for-adults contributions is Ariel Schrag’s hilarious comic about a day at Dyke March: meeting up at the BART station, looking at naked girls, indulging in tequila and pot, “us[ing a] rich fag’s bathroom,” and drunkenly texting her girlfriend on the East Coast.  Probably my favorite story in the book, but - say it with me - will teens relate?

The rest of the contributions did seem to speak to teens. Jacqueline Woodson wrote a touching if plotless vignette about a little boy crossing gender borders as well as racial ones; he’s half-black and half-white and was born a girl.  Francesca Lia Block’s story about a pair of troubled teens who make a connection online (one cuts, one has gender issues) was strong, as was Julie Anne Peters’s story in two voices about a pair of girlfriends having sex for the first time.  Sweet and sexy, this is the best thing Peter’s ever written. Emma Donoghue’s epistolary story reminds teens of the bad old days when gay people weren’t allowed to get married, but unlike Levithan’s, succeeds in doing this in a way that teens will understand: the letter-writer is a non-bio mom who got shafted during a custody dispute, and the letters are to her estranged daughter.

Eric Shanower’s comic about a genie granting a young boy’s wish not to be gay and Ron Koertge’s story about…becoming a dog because his father treats him like a dog? were too weird for me but may appeal to teen fantasy readers. William Sleator’s exploration of love between a Thai boy and a white man was moving if a bit predictable.

That’s ten.  I’ve saved the best for last.  Margo Lanagan is a genius, and her story about a young boy revealing a secret affair between a girl and a robber features gorgeous language and an ending I didn’t see coming.  I had never heard of Jennifer Boylan before, but loved her “The Missing Person,” about a little trans girl borrowing her sister’s clothes and sneaking out to the town parade. “It was the first time in my life I had ever felt the sun on my face as a girl,” says the narrator. “I felt like someone who had been released from jail, like someone who’d spent her whole life in a prison only to be unexpectedly paroled, at the age of fourteen, and set loose upon the world.” When a magician picks her out of the audience to act in the classically superfemme role of his assistant, she’s embarrassed about moving from the sunshine to the spotlight, afraid people can tell she’s not like all the other girls. The story is deepened by a parallel narrative about an exchange student who disappeared long ago. Turns out she stepped on insulation in the back of a closet and fell within the walls of her host house, where no one could hear her cries.

So: two excellent stories, many good ones, some out of place, a couple I wasn’t feeling. That’s pretty standard for a short-story collection.  Still, this one probably deserves the attention it’s getting, thanks to the big names and the efforts to reduce tokenization; there were two comics in the mix, and that oft-ignored T in LGBTQ is fully represented.  Definitely worth buying for your library, but consider getting an extra copy for the adult fiction collection.

Justine Larbalestier, September 2009.  Micah is a compulsive liar, which she admits right away, so how can we believe anything she says? She swears she will tell the truth in the book, though, and she promises this in a very believable way - because she’s such a practiced liar. 

Micah’s secret boyfriend, Zach, has been savagely murdered, and she’s one of the suspects. She dances around most issues, but is clear up front about this one: she insists she did not kill Zach.  Throughout the book, she admits she’s told us a variety of lies along the way - she brings a younger brother into and out of existence a few times, for example - but she never wavers from her position that she did not kill Zach. 

I can’t reveal much more of the plot without giving away major spoilers. Suffice it to say that in the middle of this seemingly realistic teen mystery, a supernatural element is thrown in….or is it?  Is Micah lying about that too?  What about this family illness she claims to have?  Is it real or supernatural or completely fake?  What kind of gender and sexuality issues does Micah have?  Maybe none, or maybe that’s actually 100% of her problem, and the whole “family illness” is just a lie or a metaphor or a plot device to talk about gender? 

The author herself states there are at least two ways to interpret the end of the book and that she left the ambiguity in on purpose.  No matter what you think about Micah’s true nature or what her real problems are, this book will frighten and intrigue teen and adult readers alike. Highly recommended.

An Na, M.T. Anderson, K.L. Going, Beth Kephart, Chris Lynch, and Jacqueline Woodson, April 2009.   Six stories by six award-winning YA authors, and I can’t decide which I like best.  It’s not Going’s tale of a girl living in her sister’s shadow, and it’s not Kephart’s tearjerker about a dead best friend, although both of these would have shone on their own.  It’s definitely not Lynch’s contribution about a young man who takes over his father’s pawnshop, the only story to fall flat, mostly because the format doesn’t give us enough time to get to know the narrator.  No, it’s one of the other three.  An writes harshly and poetically about a young woman abandoned by her baby’s father and seeking money for sex, and we think we know why until the end.  Woodson invites us into the mind of a troubled dancer in the black gay ballet scene, a corner of the world I never knew existed.  I think that one might be my favorite, partly because Anderson’s story just makes me feel stupid. Am I supposed to understand whether this scripted dialogue really takes place between two high school seniors — and if it does, the girl is out of her mind — or is it really an elderly couple but one is…really dead?  Just a projection and some memories?  Or am I the crazy one?