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A Step from Heaven
An Na
middle grade - young adult

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been one month since my last posting.

I have a really good excuse! Honest.

I'm bogged down in MFA thesis writing. I have to hand in the rough draft on Friday, which means I've had a whole 2.5 weeks to research and write it out. Stress. Where would I be without you?

Still, I wouldn't miss The Book Review Club for anything so I've surfaced for a few short, glorious moments to commune with the outside world...and remind myself, there is an outside world.

Here we go.

A Step from Heaven is the story of a Korean girl, Yung Ju, and her family as they move from Korea to the United States. The story follows the trials the move presents for all of the family members. The father becomes increasingly abusive, until Yung Ju is faced with either turning him in to save her mother's life (as well as her own), or turning a blind eye yet again.

Gripping stuff.

From a craft angle, I really enjoyed the vignette format An Na used to tell her story. The piece begins with Yung Ju and her father at the ocean. He is teaching her to swim. It is an endearing moment. The father is not just a brute, but he loves his daughter. Also, the scene highlights water, which is an underlying current throughout the book.

By telling the story in vignettes, the effect is very aquatic. The vignettes lap against the reader's mind like small waves. Building. Building. Ever building. Until the climax of the story when Yung Ju saves her mother and with one phone call, sweeps her entire family onto a new, healthier emotional trajectory.

The one issue I had with the piece is that, since it begins when Yung Ju is four, she refers to everyone in her family with their Korean titles, i.e. Mother is Uhmma, Grandmother is Halmoni, and Father is Apa. It might just be me, but it took me a chapter to figure out who each of the titles refers to. In the end, I caught on, but it caused me a great deal of initial confusion, as well as raised the question, if I plan to tell a story in first person, with a non-native English speaker, and want to stay true to character, how do I bring in the names of the people closest to my character without confusing my reader? It's a tough question. This approach did not feel satisfactory for me, but at the same time, I am hard pressed to come up with a better one, other than to abandon the foreign names and use ones in English. Tough call.

Nevertheless, this is a phenomenal read. The writing is tight. The flow even. The climb to the climax excellent. The characters well-rounded. And it is fairly quick. So, if you are looking for a short, craft-packed, well-written piece, look no further. A Step from Heaven is your piece.

For other great reads, check out our fearless leader, Barrie Summy's, blog!

Now back to that nagging thesis. Ugh.

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At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor is doing what she does so very well—forcing us to think hard about the big things. Her post is titled "How to recommend a book written by and/or about a person of color (POC)" and, with her typical intelligence, she parses the issues, concluding, "If we want to fully integrate publishing—if we want to make bookstores places that only have an African American section in the context of history...then we need to depart from the impression that minority books can ever be lumped together. They are as diverse and unusual and unique as the genres they are written for."

I could not agree more, and I could not be prouder to call Colleen a friend. I've not posted about the Liar book cover controversy because everyone else has done that so well and because I've had my own cover challenges—once in my memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places, and once during the design work for The Heart is Not a Size, my forthcoming Juarez novel.

But all of the talk has caused me to think back on 2001, when I chaired the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury. We were five people asked to read upwards of 160 books. We set down criteria for excellence at the outset, established guidelines that would allow us to put YA novels on equal footing with picture books, history books, poetry books, biographies. Then we focused on the task at hand. We'd never met one another, our team of five. We had no politics to argue against or for, no statement we were trying to make. We were simply looking for the five best books of the year—the five books we wished to recommend to young readers, teachers, librarians, parents. The books we wanted carried forward.

Excellence prevailed. Excellence resulted in our selection of the following five exquisite, timeless, please-recommend-them books. How can we influence what others read? We can, when we are given a voice about books, make sure we use that well.

With the fierce originality that inheres in the very best of books, Virginia Euwer Wolff takes on life's hardest questions in TRUE BELIEVER and then dares to answer them. Love and religion, hope and sacrifice, community and class are spoken to and through Euwer's audacious narrator, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn. In a voice that manages both authenticity and lyricism, and with a fractured prose-poem style that perfectly captures the particulars of LaVaughn's sometimes bewildering circumstance, Wolff has written a masterful, fearless, and most essential novel.

In CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, Marilyn Nelson takes the familiar sketched outline of the life of former slave and renowned scientist George Washington Carver and fashions a revealing, richly textured portrait of an extraordinary and unforgettable man. Like Carver himself, the poems included here are elegant, careful, and rich with detail; they hold a quiet but unyielding power.

In Kate DiCamillo’s novel, THE TIGER RISING, two bereft children, walloped by death and abandonment, find a caged tiger in the woods. They learn from their fascination with the creature that they and the life burning in them, the power of their emotions, and the solace in their relationship match the tiger in brightness, despite the darkness of their loss. The story is small but deep, populated with characters of mythic presence and written in a lyrical style that transforms the Florida backwoods into poetic territory.

History books are so often filled with the contributions of adults. However, in WE WERE THERE, TOO, Phillip Hoose has chosen to highlight the fascinating role that young people have played in the making of America. Using diaries, journals, and interviews, Hoose brings us unforgettable new insights into the courageous young people who dared to make a difference. These compelling pages yield a new, refreshing look at another kind of national hero.

In A STEP FROM HEAVEN, first-time novelist An Na creates an authentic portrait of an immigrant child and her family. A little girl when the story opens, bound for college by the time it ends, Young Ju tells of her journey in a brilliantly maturing voice as confusion gives way to articulate comprehension. The cumulative power of the book’s precisely imagined moments and its unwavering point of view carry the reader with Young Ju toward understanding—not just of where she is going, but where she has come from. To read A STEP FROM HEAVEN is to experience, or re-experience, what it is to grow up.

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Before Jill Santopolo was officially my editor, she was my editor—calling one day to ask if I might write a story for a planned new HarperTeen anthology. The story, as I understood it, was to focus on a chosen turning point—on a moment of emergence, clarity, vision.

I'd written short stories for years before I'd ever written books; I've always celebrated the form's power. I'm a fan of the deeply distilled, the evocative, the provoked. I favor poetry over plot, emotion over explanation, wisdom over information; the short story seems to favor such things too, or can. Read the exquisite Steven Millhauser piece in this Sunday's NYTBR. Consider his words here:

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html?ref=books

The point is, I said yes. I said yes and loved every moment of immersion in a piece I finally called, "The Longest Distance Between Two Places." Written early last year, it confronts teen suicide and its aftermath—and a decision to live on.

I saw the cover of the anthology today, and I'm really proud to be part of this project. I'm especially touched to see An Na's name here, for seven years ago, while chairing the National Book Awards jury for Young People's Literature, I read her gorgeous "A Step from Heaven;" as a team we nominated it as a top five title. I remember many things from that evening of award giving (Jonathan Franzen's talk, sitting beside Terry Tempest Williams on that stage, my son out in the audience, holding court, and, later, Steve Martin entertaining my child). But I especially remember An Na's graciousness in the moments after the winners had been announced. It made me even prouder that I'd pushed for her inclusion in the top five.

I can't wait to read this book.

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