By: Powell's Staff,
on 9/25/2015
It's one thing to read about censorship in a news article; it's another to become aware of the threat at a nearby library or school. For Banned Books Week this year, we reviewed hundreds of documented appeals to remove materials from a local public library, school library, or course curriculum. Below are 30 books that [...]
By: Maryann Yin,
on 7/7/2014
Writer Nancy Garden has died. She was 76-years-old.
The New York Times reports that Garden became most well-known for her 1982 young adult book entitled Annie On My Mind; it was one of the first to feature a lesbian relationship. Since its publication, “the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies and has never been out of print.”
To honor Garden’s memory, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group will make a donation of $2,500 to the National Coalition Against Censorship. According to the press release, these funds will directly support the Kids’ Right to Read Project which offers aid, education, and direct advocacy to people fighting book challenges or book bans in schools and libraries.
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By: Betsy Bird,
on 6/27/2014
Anything I say on the subject of the recently deceased Nancy Garden will be inadequate. However I would like to note that she provided invaluable help with the book I recently co-wrote with Jules Danielson. Without her aid we would have been seriously up a tree. I am very sorry she won’t be able to see the final copy herself. She was a joy to work with.
I’m mildly peeved that I didn’t learn that the Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced With Adversity had been awarded until I stumbled across the fact on Twitter. Reading this article I can see that the win of librarian Laurence Copel, the founder of the Lower Ninth Ward Street Library in New Orleans, is well and truly deserved. In fact, I sort of pity the committee in choosing anyone else after this. Copel kind of sweeps the floor with the competition. How on earth do you compete with THAT? Wowza.
And for today’s Daily Image, I bring you the coolest idea of all time. When Angie Manfredi tweeted that her library was doing a spy party for the kids called Spy Night, I was impressed. She asked for spy picture books, but all I could come up with was Andy Rash’s Agent A to Agent Z. At any rate, this is the laser maze set-up they created in one of the stacks.
So brilliant I could cry. Thanks to Angie Manfredi for the image!
By: Beth,
on 10/14/2009
Once upon a time, being homosexual in a YA novel meant you were the sidekick, if you were lucky. If you the main character, you could be abused, raped, beaten, or even killed. Homosexual characters didn’t get happy endings–until Annie on My Mind.
Annie on My Mind
Nancy Garden
Published 1982
The copy of Annie on My Mind that I got from my library includes a telling quote from School Library Journal: “No single work has done more for young adult LGBT fiction than this classic about two teenage girls who fall in love.” In a few words, the appeal of this novel is summed up. Nancy Garden creates a touching love story that survives amidst prejudice and opposition, while managing to not preach or judge.
Liza and Annie meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Liza, practical and level-headed, plans to become an architect. Annie is dreamy and emotional, an ideal temperament for the singer she wants to become. When they meet there’s a connection. They can be silly and play make-believe, or serious as they talk about anything. They make time for each other after school and on weekends, and soon Annie is all Liza can think about. Even though they’re from different worlds–Liza attends a private school and lives in Brooklyn Heights, while Annie goes to public school and lives in a run-down apartment–the two girls fall in love. Being two girls in love feels right, although they never seem to find a way to be alone together. So when Liza and Annie have a chance to do that, by using the house where two of Liza’s teachers live, they take it. But their actions have wide-ranging consequences, and not just for them.
Annie on My Mind brings to life what New York was like in the early 1980s. Yet the novel isn’t dated. Part of that is the descriptions of museums and parks, places that haven’t really changed in the intervening years. The Temple of Dendur at the Met is still clear and bright, as described by Garden. But in the same breath, we see a New York that doesn’t really exist anymore–or at least we hope it doesn’t. Because in this New York, discrimination is commonplace. Liza’s school, which is on the verge of closing, is run by Mrs. Poindexter according to her rigid standards. Although her actions against Liza leads to her dismissal, Mrs. Poindexter’s disgust of the homosexual lifestyle hurts more than just Liza, but also the teachers Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer. And while the trustees disapprove of Mrs. Poindexter’s handling of this situation, they can’t deny that the school can’t employ homosexual teachers.
Adding realism to the story is the progress of Annie and Liza’s relationship. When Annie on My Mind opens, it is six months after the end of high school. Liza has pulled away from Annie, dealing with the guilt she feels over her actions. Liza blames herself for what happened to her teachers. She also looks at Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer and sees the future she wants: living with Annie, being as comfortable together as two old shoes. But while that’s what Liza wants, it’s also scary. So Liza spends an early winter evening remembering how she and Annie fell in love and how a few people nearly destroyed them. And those memories help Liza make a decision, to not give up all she feels for Annie. Ending with a telephone reconciliation and an exchange of love, Garden doesn’t punish Annie or Liza for being lesbians.
A story of love and its power, Annie on My Mind shows that homosexuality is not evil or perverted or wrong. Once classified as a mental illness, homosexuality is now seen as little different from eye color: it’s one thing that makes a person who they are. That change of opinion has happened in part thanks to novels like Annie on My Mind. How lucky we are, to see what a good book can do!
Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.
It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,
I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.
Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.
And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”
When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:
I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.
Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.
It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”
MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!
I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.
Posted in Annie On My Mind, Garden, Nancy, LGBT reads, Luna, On Genre, Peters, Julie Anne, Shades of My So-Called Life
