Book Review: Hold Still by Nina LaCour

Imagine waking without your spine. Losing the bone and cord that holds you upright, that gives you your nerve. Caitlyn wakes on a warm June day to news that her best friend, Ingrid, committed suicide. We experience every crushed breath, every limping thought as Caitlyn staggers beneath the weight of her anguish. The story's first-person narrative takes us through each season of Caitlyn's first year alone. The summer passes quickly as the main character flees literally and figuratively from her loss. As fall brings her back to high school, though, she reinserts herself into society a staggering, hollow figure.

What awakens Caitlyn from her numb state? Who will fill the void in her heart? It certainly doesn't seem to be her favorite photography teacher, Ms. Delani. No help comes from Alicia, Valerie, or any of the other popular girls. Will the new girl, Dylan, offer solace? And why does cute, popular Taylor keep hanging around?

Some of the strongest scenes in this novel are shared among Caitlyn and her mom and dad. YA novels, like YA movies, can prop parents in a scene like store displays, waving too-wide hands and smiling too-bright smiles. But Caitlyn's parents have enough layers of their own to make them real and extremely sympathetic. Also, the scenes that take Caitlyn out of her affluent suburb and into San Francisco thrum with energetic detail that surely must come from the author's own delight in her hometown.

Caitlyn is a girl you want to know. She's angry and haunted, she's considerate and bold, she's resilient and kind. She uses art to heal, and her art inspires the reader to look at the world in honest colors, just as Nina LaCour's writing inspires us to look at the women around us with clear, compassionate eyes.

Check out Nina's very cool site, http://www.ninalacour.com/

Really More of a Sprinter . . .

I've never run a marathon. I did a 5k ten years ago, and you know, how could I not be proud of the gold medal that I (and 15 others) received that bright Saturday? However, I'm usually really ready to be done moving after two miles. Going the distance? Meh. Not so much my thing. I'm more into snacks. Watching snow fall. Smelling pretty soaps.

Honestly, coming to terms with my lack of stamina is oozing out this week more than ever before. The scoop is that not only do I love reading YA fiction, I seriously want to put out some stories of my own. So I signed up with Laini Taylor and two dozen strong-willed writers to pound out a rough draft of my current work-in-progress by the end of the month. (Check it out and join the fun! www.growwings.blogspot.com )To accomplish this goal, I genuinely need to write 1100 words a day. We've all been at it for five days now, and I am flat-out, nose-to-the-ground exhausted.

Who knew writing took this much work? :)

My brain hurts. My eyes hurt. My ears hurt--straining to hear the conversations, the background noises, the scratches, the breaths that my characters hear.

So, okay, I get it. You can't be a sprinter and hope to win a marathon. Writing 200 words a day between baby cries and laundry cycles wasn't getting a book written; it was just fanning the dream of the someday, the I hope to be. At best, I could hope for a plastic medal on a nylon ribbon at the end of the Door County Fun Run.

I saw Billy Collins many years ago at a poetry reading. He told a story about how a man asked him his vocation, and Billy said, "I'm a poet." The man nodded enthusiastically, gestured toward the young girl next to him, and said, "Oh, my daughter writes poetry."
Billy told us that he wished, later, that the conversation had continued; that he could have asked the man, "Oh, and what do you do?" and the man would have said, "I'm a banker." Then Billy could have gestured to the toddler next to him and have said, "Oh, my son plays with loose change."

I've been playing with loose change and calling myself a banker.


What an excellent and awful lesson to learn. :)

Prada bags and gal pals

A girlfriend posted on Facebook yesterday that her Prada bag arrived in the mail.

I'm not a 'bag' person; I've never been the woman with the French tips and shiny red Chanel or the burgandy acryllics and nut-brown Luis Vuitton. I don't do nails and I don't do bags. So why did I hide my FB friend? Why did I quietly banish her from my live news feed?

Well, we're going on four months of unemployment. I took the year off from teaching to be with my babe, and Jay was let go in September. It's been a skin-and-bones winter, a food-stamps and savings-dwindling winter. Why can't I have a big enough heart to embrace both my current poverty and her extremely good fortune?

Maybe because poverty is bigger than anything I've known. It fingers and winds itself into every aspect of me; it seems thicker, stickier, and far more copious than my old generous spirit or my desire to celebrate others.

Ah--that's the stuff we're not supposed to say, right? That anything is greater than our care and consideration of others? But let's just say it one time. Poverty is enormous and extremely ego-centric. Its weight wears friendships down; its relentless push backs the most considerate into dark corners.

Money buys Prada bags and gal pals; it buys pink-scented, martini-clinking, gloss-slicked girlfriends that celebrate each others' purchases. Without money, I feel a lot more alone; uncelebrated and struggling to see past my family's needs to celebrate anyone else. I feel a lot less pink, a lot less glossed, a lot less part of any 'grrl' power circle. Perhaps money buys support, too, then, and praise, and the elation you feel after you and the gals hug and kiss and giggle. On the flip side, poverty brings quiet, then, and one's own deep gray shadows. I don't mind the quiet and the gray because they're real. But I do miss the grrls.