By
Cynthia Leitich Smithfor
CynsationsCheck out the book trailer for
Three Truths and a Lie by
Brent Hartinger (Simon Pulse, 2016). From the promotional copy:
A weekend retreat in the woods and an innocent game of three truths and a lie go horribly wrong in this high-octane psychological thriller filled with romantic suspense by a Lambda Award–winning author.
Deep in the forest, four friends gather for a weekend of fun.
Truth #1: Rob is thrilled about the weekend trip. It’s the perfect time for him to break out of his shell…to be the person he really, really wants to be.
Truth #2: Liam, Rob’s boyfriend, is nothing short of perfect. He’s everything Rob could have wanted. They’re perfect together. Perfect.
Truth #3: Mia has been Liam’s best friend for years…long before Rob came along. They get each other in a way Rob could never, will never, understand.
Truth #4: Galen, Mia’s boyfriend, is sweet, handsome, and incredibly charming. He’s the definition of a Golden Boy…even with the secrets up his sleeve.
One of these truths is a lie…and not everyone will live to find out which one it is.
The Order of the Poison Oakby Brent Hartinger
Published by: Buddha Kitty Books
Released on:
Paperback
172 Pages
Rating: 3/5
There are definitely things in this book that I loved. Brent revealed a soft side of Russel that was just amazing. Having being taken advantage of by children at camp, Russel realizes he must quit looking at them like burn victims, but as the ornery children that they are. I just loved how he took (sneaked) them out in the middle of the night and told them stories and had made an impact on them. I'm not so sure I cared much for the love relationship that took place. It could've went a different way and I would've been fine with it, but it happened to go multiple ways, and that left me uninterested and feeling as if it were a bit far fetched. Overall, it was still a good read.
Received for review purposes from the author.
Banned Books Week goes on and today’s booktalk is GEOGRAPHY CLUB by Brent Hartinger. It was successfully banned for its homosexual content in Brent’s own hometown in 2005 – read Brent’s great post about it – and has continued to appear on the most challenged lists. In Brent’s blog post, he quotes a local parent who defended GEOGRAPHY CLUB at the time: “This is the most bogus thing I’ve heard of [...] It is about gay students. However, the most important part of the book is that it’s about bullying, outcasts, about tolerance [...] This is a really good book for any student to read.”
Generously contributing a booktalk today is the eloquent, often provocative, teacher, librarian, and blogger Jonathan Hunt (you can also visit him over at School Library Journal‘s blog Heavy Medal):
When is a Geography Club not a Geography Club? When it’s the front for a Gay-Straight Alliance, of course! Russel Middlebrook believes himself to be the only gay student at his high school, but when he makes an online connection with a job from his school, he begins to realize there may be others, too. Ultimately, seven students will come together to form the Geography Club, offering support to each other through thick and thin. Readers will fall in love with Russell – regardless of sexual orientation – because his voice just rings so true: funny, angsty, yet wise. There’s been an explosion of gay and lesbian young adult fiction in recent years, but this gem remains one of the very best.
Thanks so much, Jonathan! For more information, you can see this interview with Brent, check out Brent’s website (in particular, his information for LGBTQ kids is a wonderful resource), and follow Brent on Twitter.
I finally finished some books, and I’m going to pretend that it isn’t made much less impressive by having skipped last week. So in the last two weeks:
Books finished:
- SEXUALITY AND SOCIALISM. I loved this. I am proud of Sherry Wolf, the author, who is also my friend. I was very familiar with the U.S.’s history of homosexuality and homophobia through the early ’70s, and with many of the debates in the LGBT movement today, but almost totally ignorant about the period in between. So my favorite parts of this book were about the rise of queer theory (which the author has an interesting and, to my mind, convincing critique of as “militant defeatism”) and the connections between the LGBT and labor movements, from the 1930s to today. Fun stuff.
- DIARY OF BERGEN-BELSEN by Hanna Levy-Hass. This was fascinating: Levy-Hass writes about the starvation, the diseases, etc. but what seems to pain her the most in her concentration camp experience is the collaboration of her fellow Jewish prisoners. A committed communist before her imprisonment, she helps to lead resistance in the camp: she is chosen to represent 120 women when they organize to demand control over the food distribution (to take it out of the hands of corrupt relatively ‘privileged’ prisoners and make it equitable).
Her ability to keep her thoughts lucid in these conditions is remarkable, and she expresses immense frustration with her fellow prisoners and pain at seeing their servitude, even while acknowledging that her own relative physical health (and it was relative: the descriptions of all of their bodies are chilling) is likely what makes it possible for her to keep hold of her senses. At one point, she writes that for the rest of her life she will judge people not by how they act in “normal” conditions, but by remembering how they did, or imagining how they would, act in conditions of inhumanity.
Levy-Hass was the mother of Amira Hass, who remains the only Israeli journalist to live in the Occupied Territories so she can report in honesty and solidarity with Palestinians. Hass’s introduction and afterword, substantial essays about her parents’ lives before and after the camps, contribute enormously to the book. In particular, she draws out the personal and political implications of her mother’s subsequent disillusionment with the USSR, whose Soviet Red Army had liberated both of Hass’s parents.
- Most excitingly, I am back to reading kids’ books! Yesterday I finished ONE-EYED CAT by Paula Fox, a lucky find at a used bookstore, and GEOGRAPHY CLUB by Brent Hartinger, which kicks off my LGBT teen book reading series. Reviews of these two are coming.
Reading this week:
BRENT HARTINGER is the author of many books for teenagers, including Geography Club, The Last Chance Texaco, Grand & Humble, and Project Sweet Life. Brent's book honors include being named a Book Sense 76 Pick (four times) and the winner of the Scandiuzzi Children’s Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Judy Blume Grant for Best Young Adult Novel.
Also a playwright and a screenwriter, Brent has several scripts under option and in the process of studio or network development, including a film version of his novel, Geography Club.
Brent teaches writing on the faculty at Vermont College in the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. He lives in Seattle with Michael Jensen, his partner since 1992.
Brent writes regularly on gay entertainment for AfterElton.com, and founded and now edits a fantasy-themed website, TheTorchOnline.com. Visit Brent's author website at www.brenthartinger.com.
Reviews for Project Sweet Life:
"A hilarious story filled with mishaps, close calls, and outrageous adventures....the novel will be especially appealing to middle school boys."
-- School Library Journal
"The boys’ friendship, lightly and expertly depicted, drives the book, while their smartly plotted moneymaking schemes are creative, highjinks-filled, and hilariously almost effective."
-- Horn Book Review
"Marked by sly wit and a certain old-fashioned jauntiness, this tale of three chums on a quest for indolence strikes many a wish-fulfillment fancy...Hartinger blends urban legend with the actual history of Tacoma’s routing of its Chinese community (author’s note included) to craft an irresistible setting (who wouldn’t want to explore lost tunnels under a city in search of treasure?), humorous episodes tinged with mild danger, and a light-hearted mystery"
-- BCCB
Marlene P:What was your inspiration for this story?
Brent: Project Sweet Life is about three 15 year-old boys who are told by their dads to get jobs -- "because work builds character!" But they've always been told that age 16, not age 15, is the year that you're required to get that first "summer job," so they were all counting on having one last summer of job-less freedom to share together. They don't feel they're dads' demand is fair.
So, seeking to preserve one last golden "job-less" summer, they invent "fake" jobs to satisfy their dads, and then embark on a series of "get-rich-quick" schemes in order to make the money they should be making from working. But getting rich quick is more difficult than they think!
The inspiration? Well, it was very, very much the way my friends and I felt when we were teenagers: we took "summer freedom" very seriously. As we got older, we worked, of course, but the way we saw it, we'd worked hard all year long, and we'd work hard for the rest of our lives, so there was nothing wrong with taking some time off in the summer and enjoying ourselves. We were only going to be young once! Work hard and play hard.
Ironically, just as in the book, I'm convinced that playing hard, at least the way we did, builds far more "character" than if we'd worked at KFC all summer.
Marlene P: Do you remember writing the first words? Are they still the same?
Brent: What an interesting question!
I had to check this. This first words are:
"Dave," my dad said at dinner, "it's time you got yourself a summer job."
And yup, they were the words right from the beginning. I have a tendency to jump right into things, and you can see that the book's central problem is right there at the start.
Marlene P: What kind of research did you have to do for this story?
Brent: Interestingly, the very first inspiration for the book, even before I knew the story, was a true story I'd heard as I child: how my hometown of Tacoma, Washington, rounded up all its Chinese residents back in the 19th century, burned down Chinatown, and forced all the residents out of town and on a train down to Oregon. It was an historical event that ended up being called the "Tacoma Method" for a city's dealing with its immigrant population, and even today, over a hundred years later, Tacoma has a very small Chinese American population (not surprisingly).
I've been haunted by the story all my life. Can you imagine? Having your home burned down and being told to just leave? "Go away -- you and your whole community are not wanted here"?
As I got older and became a writer, I knew I wanted to write about it. But I didn't trust myself to write a historical novel or a literary novel -- I'm not a particular fan of either genre as a reader, and I'm a big believer that you should write the kind of book you love.
Anyway, Project Sweet Life is my attempt to write about this chilling historical event. I admit it's a "light," very round-about attempt! But there ends up being a treasure, and a big mystery that the kid attempt to solve, and it involves the expulsion of the Chinese, and the tunnels the Chinese supposedly dug under the city.
I'd like to think there's also a lesson about racism and historical accuracy in there somewhere.
And yes, I did a lot of research! I talked to town historians and read lots of local books. The best part was trying to find evidence of those actual tunnels -- which I sort of did. Do they really exist? I honestly think they do, but I can say no more -- I've been sworn to secrecy!
Marlene P: Which books influenced you most when you were growing up?
Brent: It's funny, because this book was very much inspired by the kinds of books I loved and read over and over again when I was a kid. Which were books like The Mad Scientists' Club, The Great Brain, The Chronicles of Narnia. Basically, stories about kids who go on pretty crazy, often "episodic" adventures, usually involving mysteries, but -- as I sort of mentioned above -- also end up discovering some important things about themselves and the world.
A lot of reviewers have commented on the "old-fashioned" nature of the story (in a good way!), which makes me happy, because that's exactly what I had intended: just a good, old-fashioned, somewhat outrageous, somewhat wacky comedy of errors -- but with contemporary characters and a more contemporary feel.
~~~Cafe Note~~ As a regular part of our interviews, featured authors will pop back in for one week after their interview is posted to answer any other questions blog readers may leave for them. So if you have any questions or comments for Brent, please post them now.
Yes, it's time for another Google Ping where we post a children's author's name over and over again to see how long it takes them to either: a) Google themself and find me, or b) find out through the grapevine that they have been Pinged.
We'll see who is the fastest of all the authors to answer the Google Ping. The author must respond in the Comment section of the entry and somehow identify themself as being who they really are.
The current leader is Lisa Yee with 3 hours 5 minutes with John Green's time of 42 minutes still in contention since he posted anonymously. This has been a major issue among the judges, but they have decided that since Friday was his brother, Hank's, birthday tribute video that John gets an extension on his proof. The judges have determined that if John Green acknowledges the Google Ping on Brotherhood 2.0 on Tuesday AND he works the word "rhinoceros" into his vlog that his record time of 42 minutes will stand.
Brent Hartinger, the author of Dreamquest and Split Screen: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies is the next up.
Here we go:
Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger, Brent Hartinger,
And the clock has begun at 5:45pm EST on 5/7/2007.
According to an article in the Daily Press & Argus, Erin Gruwell, author of the controversial The Freedom Writers Diary made a stop in Howell, MI, where her book has been targeted by a group of parents opposed to allowing its real-life language be allowed in the schools. I would encourage you to read the whole article.
Meanwhile, Monroe County, MI has chosen Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury for their Big Read as has Anchorage Alaska. Anchorage Daily news reports that RAY BRADBURY, 87, author of Fahrenheit 451, will participate in an interactive simulcast at 3 p.m. March 23 in the Assembly Chambers at Loussac Library. Participants are encouraged to submit questions in advance.
The CBC has taken their share of criticism for not allowing award-winning author Yann Martel to read from Mein Kampf on a radio broadcast made in celebration of Freedom to Read Week.
Bookslut interviews Maryrose Wood, who is the author of Sex Kittens and Horn Dawgs Fall in Love and is one of the authors who is taking the "Banned Book Challenge."
Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher became the second book in less than a year to be removed from Carroll School District, Iowa. It was removed from the English class after a local pastor complained about its explicit language but has since been returned. Peter Hedges' What's Eating Gilbert Grape was returned after a superintendent removed the book without following the official policy. Crutcher's official view of censorship is, "The truth screams to be told in its native tongue." He maintains a page on his site that deals with censorship issues about his and other authors' books.
In a 2005 article for the Princeton Perspective, best-selling author Jodi Picoult explains why she writes banned books.
The truth is, I don’t write easy books. I cover issues such as domestic and sexual abuse, rape, euthanasia, infidelity — topics that are unsettling. My objective as a novelist is to take you for a breathless ride, and to make you rethink what you believe, and why. What is eye-opening to one person is offensive to the next, and it is nearly impossible to draw that line, or determine who has the right to draw it....I don’t write about controversial issues because I like to be edgy. I write about them because, like my readers, I don’t have all the answers. When a moral or ethical question roots itself in my mind, I find myself thinking about what I’d do in that situation. I force myself to turn over every stone, consider the issue from every perspective. I find myself walking down roads that are often uncomfortable....
Read more about
The Pact on Jodi Picoult's web site.
Cynsations, a blog that includes news about children and young adult literature speaks to
Brent Hartinger about what he has been up to since the challenge to his book
Geography Club over its portrayal of homosexuality.
I have such affection for this group of characters. Especially for Gunnar -- maybe because he reminds me a little of Xander Harris. I love it that in this book, he becomes a Relationship Guru.
Russel, Min, Gunnar and Em sign up to work as extras in a horror movie. Split Screen chronicles their two weeks as zombies. But here's the twist. It's a flip book. You remember flip books, right? Read one side of the story, flip the book over and read the other? I always got a kick out of them. So Yay, You!, Brent Hartinger, for bringing the flips* back to me.
Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (Russel's story):
Though they live eight thousand miles away, Russel is still happily involved with Otto.
Kevin Land, Mr. Hottie McHotHot Jerkface Jock from Geography Club, makes it known that he wants Russel back -- and that he's finally willing to come out.
To make life even more complicated, Russel's parents have discovered he's gay, and they are NOT taking it well.
Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (Min's story):
Both of her best friends in happy relationships and singleton** Min is feeling lonely and left out and a little jealous. She's very happy for them, though, and she doesn't like the way that Kevin Land has been eyeing Russel.
Her love life begins to look much more promising when she joins the Brain Zombies fun and meets Leah, who might just be the perfect girl.
But then she discovers that Leah is very much NOT out of the closet -- and that all of her best friends are homophobic cheerleaders. (THE HORROR!! And I am not being sarcastic.)
First off, it was fantastic to finally hear Min's voice. She's super-smart and super-funny (On streaking her hair purple: "I could justify this by saying that I'd done it to express my individuality, but no, I'd really just wanted to shock people.") and I loved her relationship with her mother. I'm definitely hoping for another book that focuses on her. (One that focused on Gunnar would be good, too. Also Kevin.)
I got a huge kick out of the differences in perspective. Russel describes Kevin Land's smile as 'impish', while Min says 'smug'. About Gunnar and the zombie movie, Russel says, "I hadn't seen him this excited since he found lamprey eels in the creek near our house", while Min's Excitable Gunnar Memory is "the night they left the gate unlocked at the sewage treatment plant". Way fun.
I actually liked Min's story more -- I think that was mostly because that was where the surprises were, but also because Russel's segment, on occasion, felt a little message-y to me. Regardless of that feeling, I did enjoy the conversation Russel had with the priest. I would think that when writing a scene like that, it would be tempting to make the guy out to be a jackass, but BH didn't -- actually, I thought he came off better than Russel's parents did. Honest about his own hypocrisy, at any rate.
I don't want to give anything away -- just know that you should very definitely read the stories in Russel/Min order. Good pick for fans of the rest of Brent Hartinger's books, as well as for fans of GLBT lit that doesn't feature a gay character being run over and teens who enjoy breezy romantic comedy.
*And of course it would be Brent Hartinger to bring them back -- after Grand & Humble (which had definite flippy potential, though I like it just the way it is), we all should have expected it.
**Obviously, I re-watched Bridget Jones' Diary recently -- is there anything better than that Hugh Grant/Colin Firth fight scene?
Hi Emily and Elizabeth, I tagged you guys in a meme on my blog: http://rhiannon-hart.blogspot.com/2009/08/abcs-meme.html