I Can Read Damnit!!
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: What My Mother Doesn't Know in the Clearcut
Topic: Book Reviews
Today I started and finished a wonderful young adult (a.k.a. teen) novel called “What My Mother Doesn’t Know” by Sonya Sones. This book has two distinctive features: it was one of the most challenged books (books that people try to ban from schools and public libraries) of 2004 and it was written in a poetry format.

I picked up the book to read in honor of Banned Books Week(September 24-October 1st). I am also trying to re-read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone. At the library, we are planning a 4 hour and 51 minute read-a-thon of banned/challenged books (based on the list compiled by the American Library Association). I picked up Sones’ book expecting something depressing, overtly sexual, or sensational. It turned out to be a sweet and uplifting tale. The book is subtle. The main character, Sophia, deals with anti-Semitism, her parents’ rocky marriage, and her burgeoning love life without hitting the reader over the head. The simple and innocent language that Sones’ has her character speak with makes her story much more powerful. You get the feeling that a teenager actually wrote this, and not an adult pretending what a teen of the 21st century might say or do.

And since we’re on the topic of books, let me also recommend the very adult novel Clearcut by Nina Shengold. I am only a quarter of the way through this book, but I’m already completely engrossed. This is, so far, a sexy story about Pacific Northwest woodsman, Earley Ritter, and his lust for a Greek tree planter named Zan. The downside is that Zan is the girlfriend of Reed, the hippie college dropout Earley employs as a partner in cutting tree stumps. The story takes place in the 1970s when sex seemed much easier to have and had fewer consequences. I can’t wait to see where this story goes. I’m already casting the movie in my head. Earley is large, broad, unkempt man in his late 20s that two women find sexy. What man in Hollywood is fairly tall and can be sexy will being unkempt? I’m thinking Viggo Mortensen (although he may be too old)
or Heath Ledger.