On the Bookshelf—Review of the Chemical Garden Trilogy

   

Wither, first book in the Chemical Garden Trilogy, by Lauren DeStefano
Young Adult
Post-apocalyptic, Dystopian


On Saturday I read Fever, the second of the Chemical Garden Trilogy, in a single day, lying in bed listening to the wind in the autumn trees, eating chocolate. I think I read the first book, Wither, in a similarly short time in August. And now I'm anxiously awaiting February 12 when the third book, Sever, is published.

Imagine a time in the future: Scientists and doctors have found a way to fix genetic defects in babies. A generation of healthy, long-lived individuals is born. They in turn have children, but when this new generation matures, the women die at 20 and the men at 25. Every successive generation dies in their early twenties. Scientists can't figure out what's wrong.

Now there are only that first super generation, in their sixties and seventies, and the newer generations, all under 25. Orphanages train children to do the tasks adults normally would. To ensure the species survives, birth control has been outlawed, men take multiple wives, and girls become brides as young as 13. Some of these girls come from bride schools, girls who yearn to become the bride of a wealthy man. But many are forcefully wed, kidnapped off the street and sold to the highest bidder. Those who are not chosen are shot and left in the gutter.

This is the story of Rhine. Sixteen, an orphan, she is stolen from her twin brother and chosen as one of three brides by a young man named Linden. She enters a world of wealth and privilege with her sister-wives, but she knows she is little better than a slave. All she wants is to escape and return to her brother, the only family she has left. While plotting her escape, will she slowly succumb to the luxury that surrounds her? Will her old life become but a dream, as she is lulled into complacency by good food, maids at her beck and call, fancy parties? Will she forget that the shy but endearing Linden is both husband and captor?

But worse than all that is the looming threat of Linden's father, a doctor bent on curing his son's short life expectancy at any cost, a puppet master pulling strings in the background, enacting who knows what horrible experiments, hiding secrets in the basement.

And still, Rhine's life is ticking away. Just four years until she reaches twenty, just four years until she faces death, if she survives that long.

A post-apocalyptic YA, I feel The Chemical Garden Trilogy is a more feminine Hunger Games. It is better written than most YA, the prose elegant and contemplative and colorful. Rhine is intelligent and full of verve, just as a heroine should be. I love the bond that slowly grows between her and her (sometimes mysterious, sometimes annoying) sister-wives. Housemaster Vaughn, Rhine's mad scientist father-in-law, is seriously creepy. Oh yeah, and one of the servants is an attractive and sympathetic young man Rhine would like to get to know.

The second book of the trilogy is just as good as the first, at times colorful and haunting, at others frightening and disturbing. I found myself becoming nostalgic along with Rhine for situations in the first book (can't give more detail than that, spoilers!).

If you enjoy YA, The Chemical Garden Trilogy is well worth your time.

Manifesto Monday—Thirty-two Statements About Writing Poetry

Is it Monday? I think it's Monday. In the hope it's Monday, here's a manifesto.


"Thirty-two Statements About Writing Poetry"
Marvin Bell

1. Every poet is an experimentalist.
2. Learning to write is a simple process: read something, then write something; read something else, then write something else. And show in your writing what you have read.
3. There is no one way to write and no right way to write.
4. The good stuff and the bad stuff are all part of the stuff. No good stuff without bad stuff.
5. Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.
6. You do not learn from work like yours as much as you learn from work unlike yours.
7. Originality is a new amalgam of influences.
8. Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
9. The I in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.
10. Autobiography rots.
11. A poem listens to itself as it goes.
12. It’s not what one begins with that matters; it’s the quality of attention paid to it thereafter.
13. Language is subjective and relative, but it also overlaps; get on with it.
14. Every free verse writer must reinvent free verse.
15. Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.
16. A short poem need not be small.
17. Rhyme and meter, too, can be experimental.
18. Poetry has content but is not strictly about its contents. A poem containing a tree may not be about a tree.
19. You need nothing more to write poems than bits of string and thread and some dust from under the bed. 20. At heart, poetic beauty is tautological: it defines its terms and exhausts them
21. The penalty for education is self-consciousness. But it is too late for ignorance.
22. What they say “there are no words for”–that’s what poetry is for. Poetry uses words to go beyond words.
23. One does not learn by having a teacher do the work.
24. The dictionary is beautiful; for some poets, it’s enough.
25. Writing poetry is its own reward and needs no certification. Poetry, like water, seeks its own level.
26. A finished poem is also the draft of a later poem.
27. A poet sees the differences between his or her poems but a reader sees the similarities.
28. Poetry is a manifestation of more important things. On the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.
29. Viewed in perspective, Parnassus is a very short mountain.
30. A good workshop continually signals that we are all in this together, teacher too.
31. This Depression Era jingle could be about writing poetry: Use it up / wear it out / make it do / or do without.
32. Art is a way of life, not a career.

In the Garden—Autumn

I love autumn. I think the transition seasons—spring and autumn—are my favorites. Autumn blew in one evening a couple weeks ago, with dark winds that made me think of tornadoes.

When I first feel autumn in the air, the whole world seems different and wonderful; that crisp air has an ambiance aided by layers of memory. There's nostalgia for autumn in Bellingham: walking down S. College Drive with Katie, wind buffeting us backwards, the rows of trees with their changing leaves; a pot of mulled apple cider on the stove of Lavender Corner and pumpkin muffins in the oven, warm spices in the air; listening to the Hazards of Love while it storms outside. But there's also memories from first moving to Idaho, the little joys autumn would bring me that punctuated my loneliness as I slowly settled in: the vibrancy of fall sunshine, different in Idaho than on my side of the mountains; listening to a Halloween station on Pandora while painting a giant Miller Lite can for a costume exchange; carving a pumpkin, sticking a glow stick in it, and putting it in front of my apartment to lure in trick-or-treaters, my first residence that was accessible to costumed children*; making mummy dogs for the first time.

Right now fall is at its best—the reds of the leaves contrasting so beautifully with the green still on trees. This is what I call Mabon season, or sometimes Mabon moving into Samhain—we can break out cozy scarves and cardigans, the leaves are a gorgeous rainbow echoed by yellow and russet mums in planters, but there are still petunias overflowing from pots and the farmer's market is still full of apples and pears and sweet corn and jewels of concord grapes, and we can still relish the last of the plums.

One of my strawberry plants in my garden is valiantly flowering, hoping to lure in a bee. My sunflower is blooming like there's no tomorrow. Despite the leaves of my tomato seeming to rot on the stem from the cold, tomatoes are still turning orange on its vines. My other two tomatoes, barely holding on all summer, had finally started flowering in September, giving me last-minute hope, just before the cold snap came and ruined it all. I bought a pot of russet mums, and they cheer up my doorstep something wonderful. This late in my Idaho career, I'm only putting energy into perennials I can take back to Washington with me, these chrysanthemums and my flower bulbs included.

I'll plant more bulbs soon, a few tulips as well as some snow drops and an iris I bought at the Lentil Festival. I'll check the stores for dark purple hyacinths I can pair with bright daffodils, and then all spring I can giggle to myself and make Homer allusions and toss my hair. I've been debating whether it's better to plant bulbs in a waning moon or waxing moon, and finally decided on waxing. Clear nights lately have displayed a lovely crescent moon (reminding me of someone who once called the crescent moon God's fingernail), and after Monday's new moon I'll get those bulbs in the ground.

The end of October will be a good time to dig grass and weeds out of the stepping stones around my house, and then tuck my bulbs in with a layer of compost and leaves before the cold of winter.


What's your favorite part of autumn?


*No trick-or-treaters came.

On the Bookshelf—Two Adorable Children's Books

Need a dose of cute? Try these books:

Panda and Polar Bear by Matthew J. Baek

Little Polar Bear lives on top of an icy cliff. One day he falls down the cliff and discovers himself in a warm green world he never knew about. He soon makes a friend, a little panda bear, and the two of them play games and have fun. But Polar Bear misses his family. Can he and Panda find a way for him to get back home? What will happen to the two new friends?

The two bears, inventing games and having fun, are just like two real kids. The illustrations are lovely, the bears adorable. And there's a surprise at the end of this story about two different worlds interacting.

Bears on Chairs by Shirley Parenteau, illustrated by David Walker

Possibly the most adorable book ever. Four stuffed bears (Calico Bear, Fuzzy Bear, Yellow Bear, and Floppy Bear) find four chairs that fit them perfectly. But what happens when Big Brown Bear comes? What if Big Brown Bear wants to sit down? Told in fun rhyme and illustrated in pretty pastels, this story will teach your child the joys of sharing. But who cares about moral lessons for children when you can look at pictures of the cutest cuddliest bears ever?

Monday Manifesto—If You Want to Write

I'm about to work on a story I have due this week, and to get me in the spirit I just re-read the first chapter of Brenda Ueland's If You Want to Write, published in 1938. The book is more of a writing manifesto then a book of technical help. It's lively and passionate and funny. Whether you write or paint or sing or bake cakes, whatever it is you do, Ueland can tell you a thing or two about doing it with gusto.


from If You Want to Write

I have been writing a long time and have learned some things, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones.

This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.

***
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. Try not expressing anything for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter or draw a picture or sing, or make a dress or a garden. Religious men used to go into the wilderness and impose silence on themselves, but it was so that they would talk to God and nobody else. But they express something: that is to say they had thoughts welling up in them and the thoughts went out to someone, whether silently or aloud.

Writing or painting is putting these thoughts on paper. Music is singing them. That is all there is to it.

Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. Jennings at Johns Hopkins, who knows more about heredity and the genes and chromosomes than any man in the world, says that no individual is exactly like any other individual, that no two identical persons have ever existed. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.

So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because self-trust is one of the very most important things in writing.

***

You must practice not perfunctorily, but with all your intelligence and love... A great musician once told me that one should never play a single note without hearing it, feeling that it is true, thinking it beautiful.

And so now you will begin to work at your writing. Remember these things. Work with all your intelligence and love. Work freely and rollickingly as though they were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

Sundry Sunday—Alex Day, Psy, and John Green

Here are three videos and a quote I've been digging this week.

• This music video by Alex Day is awesomely geeky. The bits in front of the spinning color background crack me up. After watching the video a couple times, I found myself singing it to myself.

• Technically, I've been digging this Psy video for two months. And chances are you've already seen it, since it's become hugely popular. But in case you haven't seen it. Any time the gentleman and I hang out, there is a good chance one of us will start singing "Heeeeeeeeey sexy lady..." or start riding an imaginary horse. We've even discussed being the two guys in the elevator for Halloween; that guy in the elevator is just so happy, and wonderful, and he makes me so happy.

• And finally, a couple things from John Green. By now, you probably know I adore John Green. He is funny and insightful and so very smart. Here's a recent video about what to do with your life: 

• And here's a quote:

You can buy the poster with the quote here.

What are you digging this week?

Manifesto Monday—Pigeon Manifesto

Welcome to Jujubes and Aspirins' new tradition of Manifesto Monday! If you wondered why last week there was no manifesto, it is because I haven't had internet and only posted on the days I had time to visit a computer lab.

This week's manifesto is an excerpt from Michelle Tea's poem "Pigeon Manifesto." You can read the entire poem here.


from "Pigeon Manifesto"
Michelle Tea

The revolution will not begin in your backyard because you do
not have a backyard...

The revolution will begin at your curb, in the shallow pool of
shade that is your gutter. The revolution will begin with the
pigeon bobbing hungry in the street—it is now your job to love
her. It is now your job to not avert your eyes from her feet, your
job to seek out and find the one pigeon foot that is blobbed in
a chemical melt, a pink-orange glob, a wad of bubble gum. The
pigeon splashed in a pool of chemicals laid out to kill it because
so many of the people hate the pigeons. This is now why you
must love them. We must love the nature that does not make it
onto the Discovery Channel, onto Animal Planet. We must love
the nature that crawls up to our doorstep like sparechangers
and scares us with the thickness of their feathers, their mutant
feet and orange eyes. Someone could have made dinner with the
rice on the corner but instead they sprinkled it on the curb with
the hope that hungry pigeons ate it, and that the grain would
expand in their stomachs, tearing them open, felling them in
the street, plump and feathered and dead in the gutter. I think
perhaps this does not even work, because I watch the pigeons
peck at the rice and fly off on grey wings. I hardly ever see
them dead in spite of how many people try to kill them.

Pigeons are doves. They are rock doves...
...What you might not know is when you call a pigeon a
rat with wings you have given it a compliment. The only thing
a rat lacks is a pair of wings to lift them, so you have named the
pigeon perfect. When you say to me I hate pigeons I want to
ask you who else you hate.