Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy

Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy Elizabeth Kiem

Marina may be a teen in the Soviet Union, but her mother is the country’s premier prima ballerina, so her family lives in privilege. Marina herself trains for the Bolshoi. Like her mother, she sometimes sees visions. These visions cause problems when, on the eve of Breshnev’s death, her mother sees something she shouldn’t--one of the USSR’s dark secrets about testing biological weapons* that gets her taken away.

Suddenly, it’s not safe anymore. Marina and her father must leave quickly, and end in Brighton Beach where her scientist father struggles to find a job and a way to rescue his wife. All Marina wants to do is dance, and her father is convinced this will help him make contact with the KGB so they can negotiate. Meanwhile, he gets tangled in with the Russian Mob as Marina tries to lead a normal life in a new country while fearing for her father’s safety and sanity.

I really liked this one and Marina’s father’s mental descent. You could see why he thought the things he thought, while still seeing how wrong they were. I liked how the romance was handled. Marina likes Ben, whose parents also escaped the USSR, but he has a girlfriend, Lindsay. Marina and Lindsay are also friends, and while it’s complicated, and slightly heartbreaking, it’s not overly dramatic and the way the characters handled it made me really like and respect them. Lindsay often didn’t know what she was talking about, especially when it came to the KGB and the Mob, but she was a really good friend and a great character.

I do think it needs an end note. Teens today don’t understand Soviet communism and the Cold War. (And trying to explain the terror of the Cold War to kids who’ve grown up in a world of terrorism and suicide bombers is really heart-breakingly hard.) Heck, when this came out a librarian only a few years younger than me was confused about what was so scary about that time. I also wanted to know if the testing episode that Marina’s mother knew about was real. It’s real in the book and seems more than plausible to me. A quick google doesn’t turn anything up, but was it based on other incidents?

I’m also not sure the paranormal psychic-vision thing was necessary. It was the lynch-pin as to why Marina’s mother was taken, and Marina’s visions added some moody foreshadowing, but there might have been another way for Marina’s mother to find out about the testing and made the book straight historical fiction, which would have made it stronger. 99% of the book is realistic historical fiction, and it’s tricky, because it’s a time period that many adults (read: parents and other gatekeepers) remember living through, but many readers (read: teens) don’t know much about, and the 1% that is paranormal makes the rest of the story easier to dismiss as “pure fiction.”

Overall though, I did really like it. It’s hard to go wrong with something that involves the KGB, the FBI, the Russian mob, and ballet. And, as someone who has very vivid memories of the end of the Cold War, I am loving all the YA fiction we’re seeing now about it. (Plus, not a book, and not for teens, but let’s just think for a minute how awesome The Americans is.)


Book Provided by... my local library

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Breaking Stalin's Nose

Breaking Stalin's Nose Eugene Yelchin

I hadn't read this one yet when it won a Newbery Honor last week, but I *did* have it already checked out from the library. WIN!

Sasha is going to be inducted into the Young Pioneers tomorrow, and his hero, his father, who works for State Security will be there performing the ceremony. But in the middle of the night, his father is arrested and the neighbors claim their room. At school the next day, starting with a snowball fight gone wrong, everything unravels and Sasha starts to see the truth about Stalin, the system, and the country he loves so much.

It took me awhile to get into Sasha's voice. He buys the communist line completely and sometimes his spouting of Communist rhetoric can seem like clumsy insertion of background info, but it's not. From what I know about living under a communist dictatorship with a strong cult of personality, that's exactly how a kid who was taught to believe in the system would talk. Plus, when Yelchin is actually adding in background information, it's not clumsy. It works really well

Recently, my dad caught a gang of wreckers scheming to blow it up. Wreckers are enemies of the people who want to destroy our precious Soviet property. I can't imagine anybody who would dare to damage a monument to Comrade Stalin, but there are some bad characters out there. Obviously, they're always caught.

I think that Yelchin's black-and-white graphite drawings really add the text and the story. I especially liked the way he plays with perspective and proportion to really give a Sasha-eye view of what's going on.

As things unravel at school, Yelchin ratchets up the tension and suspense, but this is still a solidly middle grade novel.

I do wish I would have read this before it won, so then I wouldn't have read it with my 'Is this Newbery worthy?' lens. Because with that lens on, I'm questioning "would he have become disillusioned so quickly? would he really have done X?" (X is a spoiler, so I won't tell you.) And I don't think those questions would have plagued me before Monday.

BUT! All doubts aside, it is a GREAT book. I think Yelchin does a FANTASTIC job of painting a society in its ideal and its horror in a way that's understandable and gripping for younger readers without diminishing the scope or facts. After I got into his voice, I loved Sasha. I loved seeing the world through his eyes, even as that world shattered. My heart broke for him.

Also, I LOVED the ending. It's a great ending without being too neat and tidy. Yelchin also has a great author's note.


Book Provided by... my local library

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Every Rose Has Its Thorn

Did I go see Poison last night? Why yes, yes I did. I rocked out in an awesome way. And luckily I work in a library, because I have a very quiet voice today. Screaming loudly all night long will do that to you...

It was a great weekend. Poison just put a nice big bow on it. Friday was my golden birthday,* and I treated myself to a day at the salon (I'm rocking a new cut and color. I'll post some pictures later) and then Dan and I went to see the Simpsons movie before meeting up with friends for drinks and dinner.

*True midwesterners will know what this means and will therefore divine how old I now am.

My parents gave me a hammock and so I spent Saturday enjoying that while reading the ever-exciting, yet very insightful, Managing Archival & Manuscript Repositories. I was planning on doing much of the same on Sunday, but it was rainy rainy rainy rainy. Bad for hammocking, good for my dry dry dry lawn and flowers. So I instead hung out on the couch. After awhile, I turned on the TV and guess what was playing? Right on the channel that was on? This Is Spinal Tap! How fitting! Then we saw POISON. Rock on.

Anyway, shall I talk about some books? I think I shall.

This weekend also saw me finishing the very fun Red Scared!: The Commie Menace in Propaganda and Popular Culture by Michael Barson and Steven Heller


This is not a history of communism (although it does offer plenty of that) nor is it pro- or anti- Commie. Instead, this is a light-hearted, but very well-researched, book about communism's role in American pop-culture.

It spends a lot of time looking the movies, books, news coverage, and pamphlets published and distributed during the twentieth century. Starting with reaction to the Russian revolution, and then moving to America's love affair with Russia during WWII and then the cold war proper and the COMMIE MENACE. It touches on the stories that took America by storm-- our love affair with J. Edgar Hoover, the McCarthy trials, and communism in Hollywood. It does not actually examine these issues in-depth but instead looks at how they American public perceived them and what type of news coverage they were getting at the time.

And that's the point of the book, how America perceived communism and what type of treatment it got in the news, as well as in our entertainment. It's a great look at these issues. Especially wonderful are the massive amounts of full-color illustrations of movie posters, book covers, comic books, trading cards and massive amounts of memorabilia and ephemera to illustrate everything...

Misty Peppers

POPCORN!

10 points to anyone who gets that.

Keeping with the theme of random, here are some books I haven't reviewed yet. That's today's theme. I really need to catch up. I didn't start keeping notes until January and I'm still facing a backlog since September, so these are kinda short, because my memory isn't that long. Still, you get the last impression of a book. OK-- I've started writing this post. The "theme" has been narrowed a wee bit. These are all YA books that I liked. Not shout-from-the-roof-tops-love, but really enjoyed and liked.

Doing It by Melvin Burgess

This is hilarious, but not nearly as frothy-fun as I was expecting it to be. The basic premise is a bunch of British boys trying to get laid. One of them ends up boinking his teacher. One is obsessed with finding some action for Mr. Knobby Knobster. Burgess injects a lot of humor into this, but it's not the male equivelent of Georgia Nicolson. There are real issues here that are seriously dealt with, but it's not angst-ridden.

Eva Underground by Dandi Daley Mackall

This is a really interesting book about a teenager whose father is an organizer for the Polish Underground, so they move to Poland so he can, um, organize. It's a great look at fitting in to a new culture as well as life behind the Iron Curtain. I think it will really spark some further research in some readers, as you're never sure quite *when* it takes place until JPII gets elected Pope and everyone in Poland is super-excited. There were a few minor details that got me though-- one is a type towards the end where the printer switched Krakow and Warsaw, so that page made NO sense. The other is that she misses hanging out at Abercrombie and Fitch, even though that really wasn't a mall store until the late 90s. Just saying. Still, an awesome book.

Yellow Line by Sylvia Olsen

This is the first book I've read put out by Orca Soundings. This is a hi/lo line of books (high content level, low reading level). I was really surprised by how good it was. Vince lives in Pacific Canada in a small town near a First Nations reservation. The two ethnic groups (White and First Nation) segregate themselves everywhere-- in living, on the school bus. One on each side of a yellow line. Because this is a short book, things happen fast. Vince's friend and cousin, Sherry, starts dating someone who's First Nation. Vince develops a crush on a girl who is. The parents and some of Vince's friends are literally violently opposed to this idea. The plot comes quickly and there isn't a lot of character development, but it still sheds enough light on a heady topic and situation.

Red Kayak by Priscilla Cummings

This is really well written and is on several people's shout-off-the-roof list. The plot and characters just didn't grab me. I'm not sure why. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood the afternoon I read it. Anyway, Brady lives on the northern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. There are new people moving in, new development and McMansions going up. Fishing is threatened. Brady befriends the D'Angelo family, part of the new wave of people coming in. Brady's friends play an awful joke that ends in tragedy. Brady is then torn between doing the right thing and snitching on his friends. It's really well-done and not over-wrought, but still gives the situation the gravitas it needs.

Invisible by Pete Hautman

Dougie is a loner, an outcast, and really, a bit of a weirdo freak. His best friend Andy is athletic and popular. They don't hang out a lot at school but the next-door neighbors talk every night through their bedroom windows. It becomes apparent really quickly that Dougie is not the most reliable of narrators and there's something else going on. Or is it just that with YA fiction we now expect some sort of massive sixth-sense type twist? It was a good book, but I knew something was up way before it was revealed, so the last half of the book I was just thinking what's going on already?!

5 books in one post. And the grocery store now has cherries, so I know where I'm going after work.

Yes, my dinner tonight will be cheese and cherries and bread with olive oil. Yummy. I can't wait.