2. Similes and metaphors in a first person child narrative are often jarring and unrealistic, but I can be sold on them if they are restrained, used judiciously, and if the author can demonstrate that the child comes from a family or community with a tendency toward them. Again, it requires a bit of willing suspension of disbelief on my part, but I can make it work if they are not flagrantly unrealistic.

3. So I have mixed feelings about a book like ONE CRAZY SUMMER. On the one hand, I think it is guilty, in certain instances, of too much information, but on the other, I feel like there is an admirable restraint (or not enough information–so that the reader has to infer), but doesn’t this create a curious dichotomy (i.e. the girl who tells me everything she thinks about the word litterbug doesn’t tell me how she really feels about her mother’s arrest). Is that out of character? I don’t know. I’d need to read this a third time and pay closer attention to the narrative voice. In fact, I’d need to reread all these first person narratives again–CONSPIRACY, ONE CRAZY SUMMER, THE KNEEBONE BOY, FORGE, and COUNTDOWN–and look for specific examples of my (presently) half-baked theory.

4. I think CONSPIRACY OF KINGS has the best narrative voice of the first person fiction. No, it doesn’t have that mesmerizing voice of ONE CRAZY SUMMER (and I’ve now listened to it on audiobook–and it is mesmerizing). We’ve noted the double meanings built into the narrative, how it has two audiences (Eddis and us–and Sophos has to funnel information to us through the lens of what Eddis lacks in knowledge (which is why Sophos can wax about Sounisian politics and geography and such).

SCORE. I’ve never consciously thought about this, but it makes so much sense.

(Whether I’m writing journals, letters, or just recounting an experience to someone over google chat, I often use dialogue; my college journals are full of it, as I’m sure my college friends would be thrilled to hear. But this is probably influenced by the first-person narratives I’ve read, and not organic–at least, not originally.)

For example, even with A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS which you all know I love . . . Do you really think that Sophos would write a two hundred page report for Eddis? Unlikely . . . but supposing he did, do you think he would complement his narrative with dialogue? Again, unlikely. I’ve read contemporary journals and historical ones, and even people that tend toward the verbose do not write dialogue. So . . . what happens is that the author makes a contract with the reader. You write us a damn good story and we will pretend that this is narrative is an accurate representation of his written report. Any first person narrative that purports to be written operates under this principle.

There is often an additional contract with first person: if your voice is unique and distinct and completely absorbing then I will pretend like other deficiencies in the narrative do not exist. I’ve mentioned before that I think this is happening somewhat with ONE CRAZY SUMMER; I don’t think the plot and setting, for example, are as distinguished as A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS, but it hardly seems to matter. If you love the voice, you are blind to this, and so we have authors doing wildly different things with voice to capture this elusive quality. We’ve already discussed the autistic voice of MOCKINGBIRD and its predecessors. I’m almost tempted to make it one of those parlor games where each person has to speak like a specific first person narrator and then everybody has to guess what their “problem” is or who they are.

One of the trendiest things right now is first person present tense which some people claim lends a sense of immediacy, but one of the strengths of first person is the distance in time from the story, that the narrator can reflect on the story and craft it for the audience (which can make those written narratives effective). But if you are going for a first person present tense with a vivid sense of immediacy–like this is happening in real time, then you leave yourself little room for an exceedingly internal voice. It just comes off as very talky, and hyper-aware. See, I think Franny is aware of her headband, and certainly conscious of everything she says about it, but if this is a representational voice (i.e. if we are eavesdropping on her) then it is weird that she would be voicing this internally, and if it is presentational (i.e. she is aware that she is telling a story to an audience) then does she really think we need a play-by-play commentary of the headband? What’s next? Her heart rate? Flatulence? I’m coming across more negative than I really am because I don’t think this is necessarily consistent throughout the book, and I think Wiles does some wonderful things with first person. But back to the beginning: it doesn’t take much to get me annoyed by first person.

With ONE CRAZY SUMMER there were a couple instances that I still remember from my last reading, and there may be more that I do not remember. One instance was in the first chapter, I think, where Delphine gives us a physical description of herself. Third person is guilty of info-dumping, too, but when first person couples it with the representational/presentational thing then it just weirds me out. A second instance I recall is her digression on the word, litterbug, which Emily mentioned at our mock Newbery as an example of great writing. I appreciated the thematic connection, and I liked the gist of it, but she stopped the narrative for half a page to riff on a single word. Again, does she talk like this to herself, in her head? Or does she really think we have the patience? For me, that’s a great thought, but it’s a sentence or two at most.

But you know what I think is amazing about ONE CRAZY SUMMER? Although these little things drove me crazy from time to time, she really hit it out of the park with the big stuff, namely that the pivotal turning point in the book is Cecile’s arrest. Williams-Garcia doesn’t let Delphine explain at all how that affects their relationship with Cecile, but rather she shows us. To that point, the girls had been indifferent toward Cecile, but seeing their mother–their crazy mother, yes, but their *innocent* mother–arrested for having business ties to the Black Panthers (i.e. guilt by association) galvanizes them, and they take up the cause in support of her, and Cecile, in turn, grows fonder of them for their show of support. The whole guilt-by-association thing reminds me of MONSTER by Walter Dean Myers, but I think here Williams-Garcia has taken it down to the level of middle grade fiction without losing any of the finesse and subtlety that Myers had.

More scattered thoughts on the way, I’m sure . . .

One Crazy Summer certainly isn’t a “favorite” of mine. I looked back at the first page and see what your friend is talking about: there are two rather elaborate similes in that one page. I think I found those similes in general more authentic-feeling than those in Countdown, though I’m sure there are missteps in One Crazy Summer and occasional effective similes in Countdown.

As I read, I got more involved. I rather liked the documentary inserts. But then along came the report about Khruschev, if that’s what it is. It’s written in a kid’s report style, but no attribution was made. Is it just the author telling background? I decided to think of it as a kid’s report that could have been written at the time.

But then came the report about Kennedy. Talk about walloping me out of the story! The report told how well he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis and about his assassination. So thanks for reminding me that I don’t need to be tense about the Cuban Missiles! That one definitely couldn’t have been written until after its place in the story. A report about Kennedy as a kid might have written it THEN would have been evocative and helpful. What was inserted really detracted, for me.

And I’m still not sure what those sections were doing there. All the other inserts seem to be quotes and photos from the time. If this was not, it would have been nice to attribute it to a fictional school kid (like Franny), and make it fit with the other material.

I should be getting my copy of Countdown tomorrow, so I can’t comment directly on that one yet, but in terms of what Blakeney calls collage style, I felt it worked more smoothly in Cardturner than in Dark Emperor, KKK, or Sugar, for the very simple reason that it was all arranged as part of the main narrative. There where white whales to tell you it was okay to skip ahead to the summary box, but the explanations were in line with the main narrative, not beside it. With KKK and Sugar, I often felt frustrated because I couldn’t figure out when in the narrative was the best time to jump aside and read the captions. I really wanted the information in the captions, but I had some trouble letting go of the smoothly-flowing narrative for them. With Dark Emperor, I knew when to read the sidebars, but they were in such a different voices that I sometimes felt let down, not by any of the text, but by the transition from poetry to nonfiction and back again. (Ignoring that poetry is classified as nonfiction, because that’s just weird.)

I’m with Wendy and not Jonathan–third person and first person narrators can do *different* things and each have their limitations. It would be way harder to pull off all the false directions and hidden meanings in Conspiracy of Kings were the book mostly in third person instead of mostly in (a very self-aware) first–and those are really what make Conspiracy so good.

I’d predicted Keeper’s name’s origin, and just assumed that yes, she’d had a “normal” name before her mother disappeared, but it made enough sense to me that they would have nicknamed her, and had it stick, after her mother’s abandonment. Signe’s life at that moment got less complicated but in many ways harder; she might have subconsciously needed Keeper’s name to remember why she took this on.