Teenagers
Love and justice
Two black authors explore tales of same-sex and interracial teenage love in a new crop of young-adult novels. In her monthly children's books column, Polly Shulman reviews 'Lives of Our Own' by Lorri Hewett and 'The House you Pass On the Way' by Jacqueline Woodson
Publishers know how compelling adolescents find justice and love. All those hormones zipping around make teens eager to invent whole new self-definitions, give them the power to freak out their parents as never before and transform what were once mere fantasies into serious possibilities. Along with deplorable developments in the hair and skin departments comes a deeper and more active engagement with serious matters. Whom will I love? What if my friends disapprove? Is any grown-up capable of understanding? How can a world exist in which cruelty, inequality and heartbreak are possible? What can I do to change it? Will I survive?
The tricky task confronting a writer of novels for adolescents is to raise such questions without making suicide look like the sensible choice, while resisting the temptation to serve up artificially sweetened hope. Teenagers may have a taste for rainbows and unicorns, but they know when they’re being talked down to. Two new novels, by African-American writers young enough to remember adolescence in embarrassing detail, do an excellent job of addressing their readers with respect.
“Lives of Our Own,” by Lorri Hewett, follows a pair of high-school girls, one black, one white, through a harrowing period. The earnest, almost generic title — after all, what coming-of-age story couldn’t be called “Lives of Our Own”? — is nevertheless emblematic of the book’s power and charm. Like her teen readers (if they’re lucky), Hewett refuses to let the chance of sounding clichid keep her from forcefully exploring heartfelt emotions.
Shawna, the African-American heroine, is new in Dessina, a small Georgia town, although her father grew up there. Separated from Shawna’s mother, an ambitious lawyer, he has taken his daughter to live in his mother’s house. Shawna feels out of place in Dessina. Her expensive car and clothes set her off from the other African-American girls, who fear she may be a snob, while the white girls have no use for her at all. They’re busy planning the Old South Ball, an event at which the black students aren’t welcome. While not used to such dramatic segregation, Shawna is no stranger to somewhat subtler forms of prejudice. Back in Colorado, for example, she had a white boyfriend who was ashamed to acknowledge their relationship in public.
Shawna’s chapters alternate with chapters written from the point of view of Kari, the white heroine. Kari’s grandmother spent the best moments of her life at the Old South Ball, and she can’t wait to live them again through Kari — particularly since her own daughter, Kari’s mother, never enjoyed that sort of femininity. At first, Kari goes along with the program unquestioningly. But when Shawna writes an editorial for the school paper attacking the ball, Kari finds herself, to her own astonishment, making a distinctly unfeminine gesture. She throws a rock through Shawna’s grandmother’s window. The incident hurdles the two girls into a star-crossed friendship, as they discover that Kari’s mother and Shawna’s father knew each other in high school and become convinced that they share an illicit sibling. How else to explain Shawna’s father’s sudden departure for points north without finishing his senior year, or Kari’s mother’s nine-month stay with an out-of-town aunt? The trip Shawna and Kari take together to search for their joint sibling rattles their love lives, realigns their social status and leaves them with a friendship they never imagined. “Lives of Our Own” is a melodrama with the potential to transform enemies into sisters.
Jacqueline Woodson’s brief, lyrical novel “The House You Pass on the Way” takes the theme of otherness even further. While Hewett describes two separate but connected communities, with the forbidden love happening where they meet, Woodson takes her readers into a single community, the Southern town of Sweet Gum, where almost everyone is black. The heroine, Staggerlee (nee Evangeline), has a triple load of issues to set her apart from the other girls in town. Her mother is one of the few white women in town; there’s a statue downtown of her paternal grandparents, famous African-American singers who were martyred when a bomb went off at a civil rights protest; and although she hasn’t told a soul, not even her mother, Staggerlee is gay. In sixth grade she kissed a classmate, Hazel, who soon afterward “found a way to never speak to me again.”
When Staggerlee’s cousin Trout comes to stay, Staggerlee feels for the first time that she has someone to talk to. The two share more than just the urge to rename themselves (Staggerlee took her name from the outlaw hero of a ballad their grandparents sang; Trout’s real name is Tyler, but she admires the feisty fish). When Trout explains that her mother sent her on the visit to learn to be “a lady,” Staggerlee realizes at once what that’s code for:
“Staggerlee knew why [Aunt] Ida Mae had sent Trout here; she could see it in Trout’s eyes and she could feel it when Trout sat down next to her. There was a feeling growing inside Trout, and Staggerlee knew it because it was growing inside her too. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe it had started before she was born and would keep growing — into the earth — long after she had died. She knew it was secret and shameful. When Mama had given her a taste of wine for becoming a woman, she knew that was different somehow — that the woman thing happened to every girl and because of this, they could celebrate it. But what was happening to her and Trout — that was different. They were alone together. There was no one standing behind a closed door smiling and holding out a glass of wine.”
Trout’s visit only partly relieves Staggerlee’s loneliness. Soon after she returns home, Trout stops answering Staggerlee’s letters and phone calls, a move that echoes Hazel’s. When a letter eventually arrives, it’s signed, ominously, “Tyler.” Although she feels that she’s lost her soul mate, Staggerlee counts her blessings — loving parents, a few new friends — and tries to understand Trout’s defection. Despite her heroic name, Staggerlee is an expert at patiently waiting for adult freedom.
In its way, that resignation is as important an adolescent skill as a flair for melodrama, and it’s much harder to find in fiction written for teenagers. Woodson and Hewett understand how difficult it is to live up to the expectations of another generation, how hard it is to take lessons from history while making decisions for oneself. Their novels should reassure young readers that society can change, if slowly, and that change is worth waiting and working for.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N:
“LIVES OF OUR OWN”
__BY LORRI HEWETT | DUTTON, 214 PAGES
“THE HOUSE YOU PASS ON THE WAY”
__BY JACQUELINE WOODSON | DELACORTE PRESS, 99 PAGES
Polly Shulman edits news articles for the journal Science. More Polly Shulman.
Interview With My Bully: The bully who asked me out
Caleb insulted my dead boyfriend in front of our entire class. Years later, I learned what he'd really been after
(Credit: Tad Denson via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock) My prep school may have been home to the offspring of politicians, federal judges and national media personalities, but first and foremost we were teenagers. And so in the spring of 1998, my class gathered in the school library to plan our senior prank.
“We should direct all highway traffic into the school parking lot!” somebody suggested.
“Let’s cover everything in Vaseline!” someone else said.
I played along, but I was having a tough time. Eight months before, my boyfriend Ben had been killed in a car accident. He’d been different from the other guys: almost preternaturally kind and, like me, overly intellectual. On the way to our junior prom, we’d sat in the limo discussing “The Great Gatsby.”
Continue Reading CloseJennifer Miller's debut novel, "The Year of the Gadfly," is out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. More Jennifer Miller.
Desperately seeking survival
I was 13 and diagnosed with terminal cancer -- then Madonna showed me how to live
A detail from the cover of "Madonna & Me" When I was 13, my parents drove us 45 minutes from our home on a rural wooded peninsula to a suburban-mall movie theater to see “Desperately Seeking Susan.”
I wasn’t eating popcorn: One year after a surgery that removed a portion of my jaw, I could barely chew. This was just one of the small humiliations that had accumulated after I had been diagnosed with terminal thyroid cancer, undergone extensive surgery and testing, survived a recurrence of the cancer, and traded a death sentence for the murkier and far less glamorous reality of a rare genetic disorder. My neck was sliced halfway round, my jaw riddled with holes, and I had been diagnosed with a second, separate and distinct, type of cancer. The treatments had just started to remove the skin cancer ravaging my torso. Over the next three years I would have nearly four hundred biopsies.
Continue Reading CloseBee Lavender was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest but emigrated to Europe in 2004, where she lives in London with her family. Her books include a memoir about danger titled "Lessons in Taxidermy" and the anthologies "Breeder" and "Mamaphonic." Bee is the publisher of the online edition of "Hip Mama" and created and publishes Girl-Mom, an advocacy website for teen parents. More Bee Lavender.
A teen’s blog-inspired coming out
A plea for tolerance motivates a high-schooler to enlighten his mom
Dan Pearce (Credit: danoah.com) There’s a saying that nobody ever changed his or her mind on the Internet. And most of the time, that sad maxim holds a lot of water. But sometimes, something amazing happens.
Take, for instance, what happened after Utah blogger Dan Pearce wrote a frank and lovely essay on his Single Dad Laughing blog back in November, titled “I’m Christian. Unless you’re gay.” In it, he wrote about his friend he calls Jacob, a gay 27-year-old who lives in his conservative Christian community, and how “love, kindness, and friendship are three things that Jacob hasn’t felt in a long time.”
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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.
Expelled for profanity
An incident in Indiana raises the question: Should tweeting an F bomb get you kicked out of school?
Austin Carroll and Garrett High School (Credit: AP) Austin Carroll is a 17-year-old high school senior in Garrett, Ind., who recently did something so outrageous that it got him expelled from school. He used profanity. On Twitter. Oh my stars and garters! What is the world coming to?
To hear even his own family describe him, Carroll sounds like a bit of a handful. Last month, he earned a suspension for violating the school dress code and wearing a kilt, and last fall, he ran afoul of the school administration for tweeting an F bomb via a school computer.
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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.
The sexual politics of “The Hunger Games”
The anticipated new movie and "Twilight" have one thing in common: It's women who have the power and passion
Kristen Stewart and Jennifer Lawrence If there were ever a good time to be a young woman, this isn’t it. As if a massive backlash against contraception and sexual freedom, a recession and a perverse diet culture weren’t enough, it’s almost impossible to get tickets for the new “Hunger Games” film.
As you certainly know by now, in “The Hunger Games,” Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl living in a dystopian far-future America where children from slave communities are forced to slaughter one another on television for the amusement of the wealthy. Katniss is moody, rebellious, deeply committed to protecting her mother and baby sister, and can incidentally shoot a man’s eye out through his windpipe. Right now, millions of nice young ladies all over the world want to be her. This should probably worry Rick Santorum more than it seems to.
Continue Reading ClosePage 1 of 45 in Teenagers
These stories are also fairly obviously about class. Vampire novels are straightforward tales of class treachery, all about wanting to offer yourself to wealthy social leeches who will, in return, grant you power, beauty, eternal life and pots of money; one somehow never reads about vampires who have to work for a living. “The Hunger Games,” meanwhile, is an occasionally eye-watering narrative arc about economic inequality and social unrest, in which the hero finds herself fighting to survive between the cruel, cartoonish extravagance of an overbearing ultra-capitalist state and the murky machinations of the neo-Stalinist rebels. Sex, class and power: Three things that are on most little girls’ minds far more than polite society likes to contemplate. No wonder these films have them screaming in the streets.