'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' by emily m. danforth

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The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a difficult novel to summarize.  So much happens between its covers: Cameron's recognition of her attraction (both emotional and physical) to other girls; a car accident that kills both of her parents when she's only 12 years old; the inevitable changes her life undergoes when her aunt Ruth becomes her legal guardian; the short, but intense, love affair with Coley Taylor, the town's golden girl; and Ruth sending Cameron to an evangelical boarding school that promises to change Cameron's sexuality.  In emily m. danforth's hands, it's a quiet, multi-layered novel where a young woman looks back over her teenaged years with the eye of someone who's not only older, but much, much wiser.  

If the idea that a teenaged girl coming out as a lesbian would be shocking, danforth set The Miseducation of Cameron Post in the early 1990s, before Friends featured Ross' lesbian ex-wife and her wife as something so normal, it bordered on the mundane.  That was a rarity on prime time television then.  So for Cameron Post to identify as a lesbian in 1991 in small-town Montana, it constitutes an earth-shattering event.

The novel is quiet in its tone, so when the big moments arrive, they land with the force of a thunderclap on a quiet evening.  Appropriately, those moments are also act as catalysts that force Cameron onto a path that isn't always of her choosing.  

The first two-thirds of the book outline Cameron's exploration of her sexuality from the first chaste kisses with her friend Irene to the furtive explorations with Lindsay, a fellow competitive swimmer to the explosive relationship with Coley that pulls the novel into the final third, which takes place at Promises, the evangelical gay-conversion therapy boarding school where Ruth ultimately sends Cameron to "cure" her, in an increasingly painful year as the leaders of the school take everything about their students and attempt to turn it into something evil and dirty.

It's the last third of the novel where the complexity matures.  One one hand, it's impossible not to feel indignant rage at the treatment of the students at Promises.  And yet...  To Lydia and Rick, the leaders, as well as the students' parents and guardians, Promises is what will save their children from eternal damnation.  That's what gives this part of the novel an underlying bitterness: they're doing it from a place of love, albeit a love that ultimately proves destructive.  It's not a love I recognize

The spare, wistful tone of the novel makes it difficult to even categorize The Miseducation of Cameron Post as a YA novel.  It doesn't feel like a YA novel.  It has more in common with so-called literary fiction (aka "adult fiction").  This isn't a bildungsroman, where Cameron is in search of herself. Cameron knows who she is, thank you.  She really just needs to find a place that will allow her to be.

For Cameron, "miseducation" applies to so many things.  One of the notable instances of Cameron's miseducation is Lindsay's insistence there is a narrow definition of a "real" lesbian.  Lindsay only spends summers in Miles City, and lives in Seattle the rest of the year.  Her sense of security (namely that she won't be sent to a gay-conversion school) allows her to freely express her sexuality with all the certainty that her way is "right."  The other, of course, is Promises and their assertions that everything about Cameron, from her "masculine" name to the way her parents raised her, are the external nudges that have made her a lesbian.

Give The Miseducation of Cameron Post a try.  This lovely, lyrical novel shouldn't be missed.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

I usually post book reviews here, but this is somewhat book related.

At which point do you tell yourself, "I really don't like this book, and I don't think I want to finish it?"

It's taken me most of my life to this point to realize it's actually okay to put a book down if it's not holding my interest and not feel incredibly guilty that I didn't just keep swimming, er, reading.

I can remember books I've started, put down after a chapter, and picked up again several years later only to find the book is actually delightful.  The one that sticks out the most happens to be Pride and Prejudice, by the way.  My next exposure to Jane Austen was in an English class in my undergrad program, and we read Emma.  I loved it so much, that I made a vow to revist Pride and Prejudice at some point.  I did.  I devoured it, as well as Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion over the course of a summer break during my third and fourth years of my undergrad degree.  Persuasion is my one of my favorite novels of all time.  I read it every couple of years or so.

I can also recall books I've read, disliked from the first chapter, but kept reading.  Not because I loved the book, but there was the expectation that it would get better.  I've read books that friends raved about.  Me?  Not so much.  It's not just pop fiction, either.  I've picked up award-winning novels that just didn't grab my attention from page one.  Why?  Who knows?  It could be any number of reasons.  Maybe that book isn't for me.  Maybe I'm in the wrong headspace to appreciate the book.  Or perhaps I've merely grown weary of the author's formulaic writing.  (Remember Chandler's mom describing her writing process on Friends?  Yeah, like that...)

Sometimes, I think  it's a holdover from high school, when you were assigned a novel that you found dreadfully boring and slog to just read a single chapter (I'm looking at you, Heart of Darkness!), and you just had to finish it because there would be a quiz during your first period English class tomorrow.    It was only when I started my library degree a couple of years ago, that I felt like I had been given permission to stop reading a book if I didn't like it.  Because really, if you don't like a book that you're reading for your own pleasure, why continue to read it if you dislike it?  Oddly enough, I find that since I've given myself permission to stop reading a book, that it's much easier to for me to tell my students, "Hey, try this novel.  If you don't like it, it's okay.  We can pick out another one!"

In the end, it doesn't matter if you're reading graphic novels, tarty romance novels, mysteries, heavy literature, making your way through the new YA shelf in the library, or weighty biographies of American Founding Fathers.  Read what you enjoy.  And if you don't like it, put it down.  Make a note of the title in your Goodreads account.  Maybe later it might be a different story.

Cheers and happy reading!

'The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

The opening lines of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina go something like this: Happy families are all

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alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.  Salvador Silva and his adoptive father, Vicente, seem like a stereotypical happy family.  Salvador is a fairly content and well-adjusted teenager, about to start his final year of high school.  He has college applications waiting to fill out.  But lurking beneath the surface are the unhappy moments that afflict all families, each with their own unique pattern.

As much as Salvador loves and adores his father, he can't help but wonder about his biological father, and feels incredibly guilty for doing so.  Vicente's mother -- Salvador's beloved Mima --  is ill, which upends Salvador's previously well-ordered life.  But at least Salvador's life is more-or-less on an even keel, thanks to Vicente's patient and loving parenting style.  His best friend, Samatha, has a difficult relationship with her mother and as for her father, he might as well be a stranger on the street.  Salvador's friend, Fito, has a nonexistent relationship with his mother, because according to Fito, she abandoned him for the siren song of addiction, and his father left El Paso for California to look for work, and Fito hasn't heard from him since.

Finding a place where they can find a level of balance that approaches happiness is what drives this novel.  It's more of a character study than one with an easily described plot.  Saenz shows his readers how each character reacts to a given situation, such as when Fito's mother throws him out of the house, or Salvador punches a classmate for insulting Vicente.  The threads that bind this novel together are the ties of friends and family -- both the families they're born into and the families they create.  Family seems to be an ongoing theme for Saenz, from his earlier work He Forgot to Say Goodbye to his award-winning Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.  And in The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, it looms over the whole book.

Another compelling theme of the novel is the nature vs. nurture argument, something Salvador grapples with on a daily basis, as he tries to answer the question of whether nature or nurture has more power over who Salvador will be when he grows up.  Fito struggles with it as well, albeit in a quieter way.

Saenz is capable of some truly gorgeous writing that lifts your heart into your throat, which at times borders on poetry (even though it's not technically poetry).  Like this quote: "...she burned her hand when some hot oil splattered.  The F word went flying through the kitchen and landed in the living room, where it hit my dad right in the heart."  Saenz is a master of figurative language.

Most of the novel takes place within Salvador's head, as his internal monologues and observations of what goes on around him.  Due to the subject matter, there's a lot of poignancy to Salvador's thoughts, including one about the different types of silences between people or ruminations on love.  I'll admit to needing more than one tissue.

There is a bit of salty language in the book.  Salvador even makes note of the fact that Samantha has had a love affair with the F word, as she chastises him for his swearing.  It never feels gratuitous and absolutely feels organic in the mouths and minds of Salvador, Samantha, and Fito.

Other books like The Inexplicable Logic of My Life are: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the new Ms. Marvel series of graphic novels, featuring Kamala Khan, Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park.  They all have themes of family dynamics running through them.