Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (Edited by Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci)

If you’re a nerd or a geek (self-proclaimed or not!), go all out an celebrate your geektastic nerdiness! “You’ve got the heart and soul of a geek or you don’t”, Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci must have thought and they knew they had friends who’d think just the same… so never too shy to try something completely out of this world, they asked some of their YA writer friends to contribute a story of their own (whether they be Klingon, Quiz Bowl, LARP or band-inspired). Sara Zarr, John Green, David Levithan, Garth Nix, Barry Lyga and a bunch of other secret or not so secret geeks jumped at the occasion et voilà…Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd was born.

There are definitely a couple of standout stories in this collection. The first highlight for the cat came with David Levithan’s “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” (in the middle of the book), about a boy’s own reasons for joining the quiz bowl team and secret admirations. Levithan is a master at characterization and proves that here as well. Barry Lyga’s “The Truth about Dino Girl” is at first almost “typically” geeky (the geek as outcast and victim), but then gets a very dark twist at the end – we don’t need to over-glorify “the geek”, you know, lots of them have mean streaks, just like those meanies out there… Plus you get the added bonus that it’s set in Brookdale! Wendy Mass’s “The Stars at the Finish Line” is a very sweet story about stars and love! There is a great dynamic between the two protagonists here. What more do you need? And then the collection ends with an absolute bang… Libba Bray’s “It’s Just a Jump to the Left”! You knew there had to be a story about Rocky right? And Libba does it right and manages to write a whole coming of age novel in the span of a short story!

There’s a story for every type of geek here, and obviously not all the stories will work for everyone (the cat admits to not feeling much for a couple of the stories here!). But I don’t think that was the point of the editors. I think they wanted to come up with a book full of stories of being passionate about something, and sometimes that passion can get out of control and become an obsession, and sometimes that passion is what defines you, but sometimes it’s not.  Sometimes you grow out of your passion or obsession, sometimes it’s the thing that will comfort you forever. Geeks, nerds, freaks… they’re not all the same, you know.  It just happens that it’s the geeks who end up being picked on all the time, or made fun of. But that’s alright because at the very least, they don’t forget to be awesome. And if you keep an open mind, and look past what exactly it is “the geeks” are passionate about (instruments, books, sci fi, The Rocky Horror Picture Show…), you’ll see that these stories are what a lot of stories for teens are about: finding love and acceptance, finding yourself, staying true to yourself. Isn’t that the most natural and universal thing in the world?

Very LeFreak (by Rachel Cohn)

Rachel Cohn came to the cat by way of David Levithan. Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares are up there with some of the coolest, hippest, and genuinely touching books in contemporary YA. However, it has become all too obvious now that Rachel Cohn is at her best when she’s collaborating with another writer/editor. Very LeFreak even seems too much a rehashing of the Cyd Charisse books, and the hipster-speak that seemed kinda cool in those books, now just feels as hollow and fake as the hipsters she’s describing… at the very least the language employed by Cohn here  is a true reflection of the shallowness that is the character of Very LeFreak.

I may have fallen out of love with Rachel Cohn, because this book… not the first time I was majorly let down with what I’d hoped to be a fresh take on an old tale: addiction. In Very’s case the addiction is to “new technology”, you know the hipsters whose iPhones and iPads and whathaveyous are merely extensions of their otherwise meaningless bodies and no-original-thought brains? But by the time you actually get to the addiction part of the plot, readers have to spend about a 100 pages with the uber-obnoxious egomaniac that is Very LeFreak…  And that is a tough 100 pages to get through, when *nothing* really happens,  nothing but establishing Very as this unlikeable character (that, for one, is something Cohn has achieved: establishing her main character).

However, my main issues with this book are the plot and the dramatic structure, the minor characters (who basically serve no other purpose than to orbit around Very) and the convoluted language. I don’t care if a (main) character is “unlikable”. I mean, seriously what’s to like for instance about Bounce in Adam Rapp’s The Children and the Wolves?  I do care about how that character is used in the plot of the book, in what way the other characters are developed (or not) and what their purpose is in the book, and the language and style used to make me, the reader, believe that what I read is true, honest, as genuine as can be.

As for the plot and its structure? The dramatic structure (and the pacing!) is cleverly hidden amidst Very’s abundance of mocca-frappa-cino-lattes . I already mentioned we get about a 100 pages of establishing Very as a character… then there’s the big intervention thing that makes her go into rehab, and then at the very end of it all there are things thrown into the plot so randomly, that it’s hard to think that a serious editor had a closer look at this book! The pacing here is so incredibly off!

And the language? What I’d once called witty and sharp, I can now only describe as annoying and too try-hard.  Cohn has a tendency to write run-on sentences. You haven’t even hit page 2 and you’ve already had to stomach something like: “Hey, she wasn’t even bothered that yesterday she’d been fired from her work-study “security” job checking student IDs – a feat that, contrary to her university career services advisor, was not, like, impossible to pull off – yet Very probably could be counted on later today to blow the remaining credit on her maxed-out card for primary wants like new headphones rather than for secondary needs such as food and tuition.” Oh, I get what she’s saying, that’s not it. But imagine reading page after page after page after page of this type of sentence… oh, now I get it, *that* is where the plot was hiding!!! So these overly long and intricately plotted (Get it? Get it?) sentences just stand in the way of genuineness.

Rachel Cohn, get your butt in gear, find that great editor who brought out the best possible writer in you and be great again! And no, I don’t mean that lackluster uninspired dystopian ditty you’ve been working on!

Every Day (by David Levithan)

Every day, A wakes up in a new body and experiences a day in the life of that body. When A wakes up  in the body of 16-year-old Justin he thinks will just be another day in the life of a rude high school jock-jerk. However, when A meets Justin’s girlfriend, Rhiannon, he starts to feel something he’s missing in his own transient existence: love. Of course, being in someone else’s body every day, not knowing whether that body will be male or female, close by or far way, the quintessential question arises: can love overcome being in a different body every day? Can A be loved regardless of whether (s)he is male, female, white, black, skinny, fat, popular, unpopular, … by the same person. Is there some kind of original ‘spark’ that determines one’s essence, one’s true spirit…  A believes there is, as he/she is living proof of that. A also wholeheartedly believes that love should be the strongest force ever and is as such almost obsessively focused on Rhiannon.

Every Day is more of an interesting thought experiment than it is an engaging novel, to be honest.  A is a pure self, completely ridden of any sort of bodily form. A is a self, whose life spark exists solely by virtue of his/her/its thoughts and memories. Over the course of A’s 16 years in existence, A has inhabited many different hosts, with many different lives, and very different families, and very different ideas. A has learned how to adapt, not to get involved and has even learned how to self-negate… that is until A sees Rhiannon and A too wants to be loved and love in return. Levithan very self-consciously explores the boundaries of love, which has always been one of his pet peeves, but definitely never this philosophical. In Every Day he takes us to the most outer edges of those boundaries, coming up with the most fluid of definitions of ‘a self’ as he consciously decides to let the main character A not focus on such particularities as gender or race or shape and size. They are not important if you focus on what is truly universal and unique about love.

If you look at Every Day as a ‘novel’, I think you might be disappointed. There are definitely a number of plot holes and issues which should have been addressed but aren’t . For example, why Rhiannon? What about the story line involving Nathan and the reverend? There are others like A? Where? What about them? What does that mean to A? This is such an intriguing question, but it is never developed by Levithan. Instead, Nathan and the reverend are just presented as some wacko religious nutters,…  and the storyline is discontinued when it could take you in a whole different direction.

Another problem is that all the secondary characters are flat characters as they only get one day to introduce themselves. There’s no character development: not for the bodies A inhabits, and not really for Rhiannon and A either. They are static (which is a weird concept if you think about the fact that A is such a fluid character…).

If you look at Every Day as an author’s vessel to convey a message, then the message initially seems to be very clear: love should know no boundaries. Gender doesn’t matter, or does it? As much as you want to believe this (and A certainly does), it seems that even the other characters don’t really. Rhiannon recognizes A for sure, but there’s not the same level of intimacy when A is a girl, which begs the questions whether gender and sex really don’t matter? Maybe not in an incorporeal world? But what world is that exactly? It also begs the questions as to what exactly love is. Because, like it or not, A is one obsessive dude(tte), and if that’s the sort of love he/she wants, then that is a very limited interpretation of the concept. Also, A (Levithan too?) preaches acceptance… when it comes to gender-issues. But what about when A wakes up in the body of a fat boy? Acceptance is nowhere in sight… I don’t know whether these seeming inconsistencies are there on purpose or not…

The reason why Every Day still gets the 3-star rating despite the many shortcomings is because of the fact that it’s definitely the type of book that makes you think about and then rethink some preconceived notions about gender, racial and sexual identity. Every Day has a fascinating premise, and is a daring thought experiment, executed just in the right way for what Levithan sets out to do (that pesky present tense… ). However, it cannot live up to anything the cat’s read before of Levithan, alone or in collaboration with another author.

Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares (by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan)

Whenever Rachel Cohn and David Levithan decide to collaborate the cat feels like a kid in a toy store. There are always so many deliciously drawn side-characters  and so many extraordinary places (usually in New York) to discover that it’s hard not feel a little bit giddy with anticipation! Plus, toy store execs are usually cunning enough to make the store light up and sparkle even more during the holiday season. And if giddy excitement weren’t enough of a incentive to read this book, suffice it to say that Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares is yet another proof that a good book doesn’t need anything more than a simple premise (Boy Meets Girl)  in a simple setting  (a city – New York – during  the Christmas season).

Boy Meets Boy (by David Levithan)

Set in a pre-Glee era, the world in Boy Meets Boy is not just a highly idealized gay utopia , but it is in the first place a very necessary take on high school life as it could/should be. On his website, David Levithan talks about Boy Meets Boy: “I’m often asked if the book is a work of fantasy or a work of reality, and the answer is right down the middle – it’s about where we’re going, and where we should be.” The cat absolutely loves this charming little book of hope and love.