With me, reading works a lot like a NetFlix queue.  There’s always three or so books at the top, which are the books currently in progress or up next.  These usually have an order, most of the time dictated by school deadlines and the like.  The rest of the queue, though, tends to be rather amorphous, with books moving up and down depending on my mood or what book I happen to pull out from under the sofa first.  (Yes, book storage in this house has become so dire that I’ve taken to hiding books under furniture.)

Here’s my list at the moment.

Up next:

1.  Brilliant — Rachel Vail
2. Jane Slayre — Charlotte Bronte and Sherri Browning Erwin
3. Flash Fiction Forward — Robert Shapard and James Thomas

In the Queue:

• Dial-a-Ghost — Eva Ibbotson
• The Great Ghost Rescue — Eva Ibbotson
• Out of the Dust — Karen Hesse (for the verse-novel challenge)
• Witness — Karen Hesse (novel in verse)
• Make Lemonade — Virginia Euwer Wolff
• This Full House — Virginia Euwer Wolff
• Gully’s Travels — Tor Seidler
• The Graveyard Book — Neil Gaiman
• Going Bovine — Libba Bray
• Catching Fire — Suzanne Collins
• The Mysterious Benedict Society — Trenton Lee Stewart
• Seeing Redd — Frank Beddor
• Where I’m Calling From — Raymond Carver
• Tooth and Claw — T. C. Boyle

What’s in your queue?

I first learned about this book at a conference and from the minute I heard the premise, I knew I had to read it.  A teenage girl who sees invisible faeries… how cool is that?  These are not cute little pixie faeries either, but creepy, dark, scary things and from minute one I expected this to be the best.  Book Ever.

Right away I wanted to like this book, and I have to admit, when it came to living up to every expectation, it delivered.  Sort of.  Problem is, it delivered a little too perfectly.  Every time I got to a part where I wanted something as a reader (“gee, I really want to know what Grams thinks of all this…” or “What’s Seth been up to during this scene?”) bam! Marr would hit me with the answer in the next scene.  I felt like I was reading this as a piece from workshop and Marr was anticipating every possible critique I could make.

There’s a fine line between a book that fills a reader’s expectations and one that is predictable.  Wicked Lovely skirts that line throughout.  There was a bit of a lull in the middle when it became very clear to that there was no “easy” way for the central conflict to be resolved.  This meant I had to keep reading in order to figure out exactly how Marr was going to paint herself out of this corner.  Thing is, making a reader keep reading just so they find out how the author resolves the conflict means the reader’s focusing on the mechanics, not the story or the characters.  This is not entirely a good thing.  Also, the inevitability of the central conflict–the fact that there was no solution–meant that the plot slowed down.  After all, there’s only so many times a character can think “there’s no way out of this situation” before the reader says “I get it.  Now get over it and get to the point.”

Also, the way Marr always seems to know just when the reader needs something (a nugget of one character, a hint of a plot thread) means that I never felt like she was holding out on me.  There’s something comfortable about a book that always delivers and in a way, that comfort worked against this novel.  For example, at the end, during a somewhat gruesome scene,  I read the words but I didn’t feel the characters’ agony because I was so used to being in that comfort zone.  Marr did such a good job of making me comfortable as a reader that the book lost its edge.  I know this book is supposed to be dark and edgy with scary-looking fey and characters that have lots of piercings and live in steel train cars, but while my brain registered these details, I didn’t feel them.

I wanted this book to push me outside my comfort zone–to mess with my head a little–and it never quite went there.  When it comes to a good, comfy read, this book does exactly what it should.  It pleases because it’s predictably edgy and conventionally unconventional.  The characters are complex enough to be interesting but not complicated enough to make the reader confuse the good guys from the bad.  We know from the get-go who’s coupling up and who’s going down in the big show-down.   All we need is to find out how the author plans to get there.  This is not a challenging book, but it’s a fun, entertaining read… good for summer and the beach.

iggi says…

One of my favorite picture books is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg.

This book contains various drawings with titles and captions to inspire a story.  The idea is that the reader is left open to devise his or her own narratives from these pictures, captions and titles.

Not only does this book provide several different story possibilities, but the drawings alone are enough to inspire a writer for dozens of stories apiece.  The art is dark and haunting and beautiful.  But before I get carried away, I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

I begin with a challenge: Caroline Star Rose of Caroline By Line has initiated a Verse Novel Challenge and I’m going to do it!

Here’s how it works:  Go to Caroline’s blog and leave a comment on her post “Verse Novel Challenge” so she knows you’re participating.  Then start reading verse novels.  If you make it to 5, you get entered in a drawing for a ARC of her upcoming book May B.

I haven’t decided which books I’m going to read yet, but I have narrowed down the list:

• Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
• Witness by Karen Hesse
• Foreign Exchange: a mystery in poems by Mel Glenn
• Heartbeat by Sharon Creech
• Realm Of Possibility by David Levithan
• Fearless Fernie by Gary Soto
• Stop Pretending: What Happened When my Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonya Sones

Notice that there’s no Virginia Euwer Wolff on the list.  It may seem odd–especially since I loved True Believer and have been meaning to read Make Lemonade for some time–but there is a reason.

Apparently Wolff considers her writing not as verse but as “prose with line breaks.”  In an interview with The Horn Book (2001), Virginia Euwer Wolff said: “Writing my prose in funny-shaped lines does not render it poetry. And there’s nobody more aware of that than I.”

Which leads me to the central question of this post: if an author does not consider his/her work as verse, can we the readers appropriate it as such?

My gut response is no.  If an author says his/her work is prose, then I will read it and accept it as prose, even if there are line breaks and it looks like verse.  Certainly, poetry is more than just prose rearranged with breaks in funny places.  Poetry has an element of surprise and a musicality that differs from prose.  In my mind, prose emphasizes character and story before language whereas poetry puts language first.  The line breaks in poetry serve as parallels to breath and rhythm, whereas prose with line breaks must focus first on telling the story.

For this reason, much as I would love to put True Believer and Make Lemonade on my list of verse novels to read, I can’t in good conscience bring myself to do it.  I’ll probably read Make Lemonade anyway, and maybe reread True Believer for good measure and for fun.