TWENTY BOY SUMMER – Becky Levine

Fixing Delilah is a wonderful book. The bottom line, for me, is that Sarah Ockler’s prose is smooth, tight, and flowing; her characters are strong and sympathetic; and the story moves along with just enough questions and answers to make me happy. I liked her first book, Twenty Boy Summer, a lot, and Fixing Delilah was just as good–but hit more personal chords for me, so I can recommend it with even more pleasure.

I’m not going to do a full review, because mostly I want to talk about one element of the book that Ockler handles beautifully, from a writing craft point of view, something I’ve been thinking about how to do as I plot my second draft. That element is the transitions, or rather the lack of transitions, from scene to scene. From moment-of-time to moment-of-time.

(If you’re interested in a more complete review, one that gives a good story summary without spoilers, check out this one at A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy.)

Okay, on to transitions.

In the old days, one scene followed another in time and space or, if it didn’t, we pretty much got filled in about what happened during the gaps. The best writers did it trimly and succinctly, rather than giving long, rambly passages of telling, but still–there seemed to be a need for writers to explain what had come between.

Today, not so much. I love that authors drop readers into the moment, often in the middle of some action or conflict. I don’t miss the lead-up or the summary. It’s the kind of writing I want to do myself. But it’s tricky. I haven’t quite figured out yet how much time, as a chunk, my WIP will cover, but I do know that I don’t want to cover all the moments or hours, not even all the days. I want to find a way to write the important scenes and the scenes that make connections, without leaving the reader confused about when they are.

Which is why, after having thoroughly enjoyed the library copy of Fixing Delilah, I’m off to buy my own copy. Because Ockler has managed to do this flawlessly, and I want to read the book through a time or two again–to study, analyze, dissect why and how it works.

The story takes place over an entire summer. Almost three months. 10-12 weeks. 70+ days.

With 34 chapters. One of which contains a single line of dialogue, and other sets in which multiple chapters take place on the same day. Sometimes, Ockler skips hours between a scene, sometimes days, at least once–I’m sure–she skips weeks. And it’s all smooth.

The book feels just like school vacation–when you can barely say what you did for six days in a row, the an afternoon in the treehouse or hiking to a mountaintop stands out in clear, memorable relief. You get a sense of time passing–summer time, made of warmth and laziness with passages of sadness and anger and love and excitement. It’s time set away from the rest of the world, which is what–I think–makes Delilah’s story possible. This book had to take place over time, because the characters need that time–and some of that peace–to change and heal. And Ockler gave them–and us–that gift.

Lovely.

I’ve gone back & forth on whether to weigh in on this, thinking that there are so many people speaking eloquently that maybe my two cents will just be extra. But then that creates silence, at least on my part, and this is the whole problem.

If you haven’t seen what’s up, check out Laurie’s post here about what’s happening with her wonderful book Speak.

As I said, I don’t really know what more I can say that isn’t already being talked about, but for what it’s worth…

I am, as you could probably guess, vehemently against any kind of censorship or book banning. And I don’t care how much quibbling people do about semantics and meaning, when you tell a school they cannot teach a book, when you tell kids they cannot read & learn about that book in their school, when you forbid a librarian from carrying that book on their shelves–that’s censorship. There is no situation in which I find this kind of thing acceptable.

That said, I have a special feeling about Speak. As for many people whose tweets & posts I’ve been reading, Speak was perhaps my first intro into the brilliance of YA writing. I was reviewing books for the Horn Book Guide, and Speak showed up in one of the first boxes I was sent. I opened it, read, and was blown away. Years later, I had the same reaction when I read Wintergirls, also by Anderson, which I bought on purpose because her writing is so incredible.

Both books shocked me, stunned me, pained me. I do a great deal of reading while I eat, and if you think it wasn’t hard to read Wintergirls during a meal or a snack, without staring at the food on my plate, thinking about my attempts to eat healthily and lose weight, dig far into self-examination of my feelings and motives and behavior, well–think again. Anderson is too great a writer to deal with any of these topics and not make you hurt while you read them. To be honest, Wintergirls is a book I would talk to any parent-friend about if/as I recommended it for their child; I would urge them to read it as well & to try and create an opportunity to discuss it with their child, to–at the very least–stay open and aware to what was going on for their child as he or she read it. Because it’s scary.

It’s also real. And it should be read. And shared.

The same is true for Speak, which–again, if you haven’t read it–is about a girl who stays silent because of and about being raped. Rape that this man from Missouri (I really hate to even give him the validation of typing his name here) is calling porn. Sick? Oh, yeah. What’s sicker? That he’s trying to stop kids and teachers from reading the book together and talking about it.

I saw, after I first posted this blog, that Sarah Okler’s Twenty Boy Summer is also on his list. Here’s Sarah’s take on things. Twenty Boy Summer is another book I read and liked and that, in no way, fits the description this man is trying to apply to it. Ack! I honestly can’t remember whether Slaughterhouse Five, his other target, was one of the titles I read in my Vonnegut phase, but I think you all can guess, by now, how I feel about trying to ban it–no matter whether it passed across my reading plate or not. (And if you want to roll on the floor laughing, do read my favorite story by Vonnegut–“The Euphio Question” in Welcome to the Monkey House.)

Anyway…when I was in high school, many years ago, our English teacher was told he couldn’t teach us Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. A board member came to speak with us, at another teacher’s request, and told us that this wasn’t censorship. I can still remember the absolute fury I felt at what I was sure was a flat-out lie. In hindsight, perhaps she was just eyeball-deep in denial, but that’s another kind of lie, and I still feel angry at her for forcing her lie onto our reading, our choices. I feel that same anger today.

So many people have made this statement in the past few days, but it’s worth repeating. I will allow you the right to have some say in what your own child reads. I will admit that there have been times in the past when I have skimmed/skipped portions of a book that I was reading to my son–some racist passages in older stories that I was just too unhappy about and uncomfortable to read out loud to him. Was this a good choice? I don’t know. Did I try, whenever I could, to read the passage and talk to him about it? Yes, I did. I wasn’t always successful in pushing myself that far. Do I pay attention to what he reads these days, at fourteen? Yes, I do. Do I try to read many of the books he’s reading–I do, for my own knowledge and entertainment, and to just…stay aware. So, yes, you have the right to do this with your children. You do NOT have the right to do it for my child, or anyone else’s children than your own. And I will Speak Loudly against you for trying.

As I said, people are blogging about this a lot, and you can follow the Twitter thread at #SpeakLoudly. Don’t know if what I’ve written is a contribution or not, but it was clearly something I needed to say.

Tag: TWENTY BOY SUMMER

Time Passage in Sarah Ockler’s FIXING DELILAH

Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK