Beloved, Toni Morrison

I chose to read Beloved as part of Sarah's Back to the Classics challenge, as it was a regular title to appear on lists of books banned from school libraries. Looking it up on Goodreads, opinions were polarized: reviewers either loved or hated Beloved and could not understand any other point of view. I decided to give the book a 50-page or 3-chapter trial, and decide at that point whether or not it was for me.

Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who chose to kill her small daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery. After many years of mysterious activity in Sethe's home, a young woman appears at her door who calls herself Beloved - the name on the child's gravestone - and who knows things that only Sethe's children ever knew. Is this girl Sethe's daughter miraculously returned to her, or does Beloved have a more sinister purpose?

When reading Beloved I had no difficulty in understanding why it is a regular banned book. With themes of infanticide, cruelty, rape and torture, Beloved is a dark, disturbing novel, not suitable for young or sensitive readers. However, I found myself wondering if people call for its censorship out of discomfort, not wanting to look closely at a shameful era of history; one which, like Beloved, will not stay dead.

I have to say, I didn't really enjoy Beloved. Beside the obvious, that it covers subjects highly unpleasant to think about, I found the writing style very patchy. Though Morrison's writing can be beautiful and poetic, I found it somewhat dense and at times impenetrable. I tuned in and out of the writing and sometimes found myself reading a few pages without really taking in what was going on. She switches between characters, past and present and first and third person narration with little warning, and if I'd put the book down it took me a little while to be able to tune back in to what was going on at a particular point. At one point, the book took on a stream of consciousness style which, although full of fascinating language and imagery, I confess I couldn't get its meaning. I think my personal preference of storytelling is more traditional.

And yet, when I reached the end, I found myself unable to let Beloved go, feeling that it needs at least a second reading to get everything out of it. Perhaps more. I didn't always enjoy reading it - and yet, I felt the need to do so again. Love it or hate it, or if, like me, you don't quite know what to make of it, ultimately Beloved is an important work of literature which deserves its place as a classic.



Boys Don't Cry, Malorie Blackman

It must be fourteen or fifteen years ago I first read a Malorie Blackman book. Operation Gadgetman was the first, and Hacker and Thief. One contained all sorts of computing references (almost certainly Hacker) and "modems," which I had no idea what they were. This was a few years before the Internet could be routinely found in homes; our computer was the old Atari with a dot-matrix printer. We didn't even have the Internet in school.

A few years later, when I had moved into the young adult age group, I discovered Noughts and Crosses, a dystopia which was heartbreaking and brilliant, probably the first book I read which ends in a particular way for a main character - to say more would be spoilers galore. Noughts and Crosses found its way onto the shortlist for my A-Level English coursework for comparison with Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I didn't think teen fiction, no matter how good it was, would be considered by teachers. (I now suspect I might have been wrong.)

After three sequels in the world of Noughts and Crosses, Blackman returns to the recogniseable world to tell a powerful story about teenage single parenthood, and is unique in taking the viewpoint of a seventeen-year-old father whose ex-girlfriend shows up with a baby, informs him he is the father, pops out to the shops - and runs. I've read quite a few books about teenage single mums: Mary Hooper's Megan books and Dyan Sheldon's And Baby Makes Two are the ones that stick in my mind from my teen years. Blackman wrote Boys Don't Cry realising that the issue has been covered entirely one-sidedly, and that teenage fathers are just expected to do a runner. Blackman shows another side to the story. When Dante gets up one morning, he's expecting his A-Level results and an acceptance into university. Instead he finds himself the father of little Emma, and in just a few moments he has to rethink his entire life plan.

Boys Don't Cry is also about what it means to be a man, and we see this through Dante, his younger brother Adam and his father. Dante's mother died several years before and the family don't like to talk about their feelings. Adam is openly gay, but that is Not Something They Talk About. Dante feels enormous frustration that no matter what he does, it never seems to be enough for his father to show pride or love. Something terrible has to happen before the three will open up to each other.

In previous works by Blackman, there are a mixture of male and female narrators, and it is interesting to see a female writing from an exclusively male perspective: mostly Dante but with some chapters from Adam's point of view. She captures the boys' voices well, and reading Dante's story I found myself transported back to high school - he could quite easily have been one of my classmates. Adam is a slightly arrogant, obnoxious yet likeable younger brother, and the dynamics between them were of an entirely believable sibling relationship. In the later scenes, when the family start talking to each other about what's on their hearts, I did find myself wondering whether this was really how a family of men would interact or if it was a female writer shaping the world to how she thinks it ought to be.

Boys Don't Cry did not take me very long to read, but I know it will take a long time to forget. There seems to be quite a high teenage pregnancy rate on the Isle of Wight, where I live, and Blackman challenged my thoughts and prejudices about teen parents, and evoked sympathy and compassion. Boys might not cry, but this girl certainly did.

Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

THE FIRST TEN LIES THEY TELL YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL

1. We are here to help you.

2. You will have enough time to get to your class before the bell rings.

3. The dress code will be enforced.

4. No smoking is allowed on school grounds.

5. Our football team will win the championship this year.

6. We expect more of you here.

7. Guidance counsellors are always available to listen.

8. Your schedule was created with your needs in mind.

9. Your locker combination is private.

10. These are the years you look back on fondly.

Melinda Sordino was an ordinary teenager, happy and popular, until the party the summer before she started high school. Now her grades are slipping, her friends shun her and she skulks through the corridors silently, just trying to get through the day without drawing attention to herself. If only she could tell someone why she really called the police that night.

Speak is a brave, important Young Adult novel that I first read when I was about Melinda's age, and it struck a chord with me. Thankfully I'd never experienced the horrors she had, but I knew how it felt to be the outcast at school, hiding behind my books and trying to persuade everyone I didn't exist. Halse Anderson captures the cliqueyness, injustice and sheer brutality of high school existance. The novel deals with a difficult subject sensitively, and despite her depression, Melinda's narration provides sarcastic humour all the way through with her biting observations about school, her teachers and fellow students, giving the staff names like Mr Neck ("A predator approaches: grey jock buzz cut, whistle around a neck thicker than his head") and Hairwoman. ("My English teacher has no face.")

Melinda finds refuge in a disused supply cupboard that she customises with a poster of Maya Angelou, who she views as a role model. The only other person she feels able to trust is her art teacher, Mr Freeman after spending her lunch times working on her art project to avoid the nightmarish cafeteria. Melinda uses her art project, "Tree" to help her understand and express her emotions through the school year, and it is Mr Freeman she confides in when finally she finds herself able to speak up.

Speak has been made into a film starring a teenage Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame as Melinda. Though it doesn't cover everything in the book, it captures the soul of the story very well and is certainly worth a watch if you can get hold of it.

I was moved to reread and review this novel after discovering that the other side of the pond a wannabe moral guardian with the improbable name of Scroggins has deemed Speak to be inappropriate reading for young people, due to its addressing a difficult subject, namely rape, and is campaigning to have it banned from school libraries. Now, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wants to protect young people. Nonetheless, it is very worrying that he is more upset about a book in which a girl tries to cope after being raped, and eventually seeks help, than about the heartbreaking number of people across the world, across the USA, in his own state and probably among the same students he is trying to protect, who don't know how to cope or where to turn after rape. While reading people's twitter and blog comments, I discovered that many people who have been in Melinda's situation found Speak gave them the courage to speak up and seek healing for themselves. Scroggins cannot be allowed to get his way as by doing so he would send out quite the opposite message to the book and risks sending victims of sexual crime back into silence and despair. It seems that - like many who call for the banning of books - that he hasn't actually read it, as his argument is that Speak is pornographic. If he has read it, and that is his perception, I fear it speaks more about himself than the novel.