Bruiser

Bruiser, by Neal Shusterman, is a YA novel I picked up at the library because the kids and I all loved his previous novel Unwind and had enjoyed The Schwa Was Here and Antsy Does Time. Bruiser goes places the previous novels didn't, though; it almost makes me wonder if Shusterman was anticipating the new sign we've seen sprouting up in YA sections of various bookstores this month--"teen paranormal romance."

The novel alternates between the viewpoint of Tennyson and his twin sister Bronte, whose parents are on the verge of divorce, and Bruiser and his little brother Cody, who live with their uncle. Bronte starts dating Bruiser, and eventually the lives of all four characters get inextricably tangled up.

Shusterman is a good writer, and there are lots of delightful passages, like what Bronte has learned about dating from watching her friends:

"1) From Carly I learned never to go out on a date with the younger brother of the most popular guy in school...because he thinks he has something to prove, and he'll try to prove it on you.
2) From Wendy I learned that playing ditsy and stupid will only get you boys who are stupider than you're pretending to be.
3) From Jennifer I learned to avoid any boy with an ex-girlfriend who hates him with every fiber of her being...because chances are there's a reason she hates him so much, and you may find out the hard way.
4) From Melanie I learned that, while it's true that guys have one thing on their mind most are greatly relieved and easier to deal with if you make it emphatically clear right up front that they're not going to get that one thing in the foreseeable future. Or at least not from you. Once that becomes clear, either they go after some girl who never learned the warning signs, or they stick around."

Bruiser's favorite poem is Alan Ginsburg's Howl, and one of his chapters is written in imitation:

"I saw the weak hearts of my classmates shredded by
conformity, bloated and numb, as they iced the
wounds of acceptance in the primordial gym, hoping
to heal themselves into popularity,

Who have devolved into Play-Doh pumped through a
sleazy suburban press, stamped in identical molds,
all bearing chunks of bleak ice, comet-cold in their
chests,

Who look down their surgically set noses at me, the boy
most likely to die by lethal injection with no crime
beyond the refusal to permit their swollen, shredded
cardiac chill to fill my heart as well...."

Bruiser's secret is unbelievable, and luckily it's not the entire point of the novel. Tennyson says, near the end of the novel, that everything that's happened is "because we longed for healing and happiness--as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain."

This is not Shusterman's best, but it's an enjoyable fast read.

Antsy Does Time

Because I loved Unwind (see my review here) and liked The Schwa Was Here, I picked up the newest YA novel by Neal Shusterman when I was at the library. It's narrated by Anthony (Antsy) Bonano, the same character who narrated The Schwa Was Here, and it's just as much fun.

The chapter titles alone are worth checking out--one of them is "Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me, Think I'll Eat Some Worms," in which Antsy learns more about the family of his friends the Umlauts and realizes "that the Umlaut can of worms was a big old industrial drum, and I was already inside, eating worms left and right."

Gunnar Umlaut is one focus of this novel, a 15-year-old classmate who tells Antsy that he's dying and who is carving himself a tombstone. When we first meet Gunnar, he's telling a kid how Of Mice and Men ends--"the dumb guy dies at the end." Then he reels off a list of spoilers: "Rosebud's a sled, the spider dies after the fair, and the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth in the distant future." Gunnar's interests include making up quotations on the spot, and there's an appendix of his fake quotations at the end of the novel, in case you don't get enough as the story is told (I kind of like Eleanor Roosevelt saying "all right, I admit to having cursed the darkness once or twice"). Antsy comes up with the idea of giving Gunnar a month of his life, and soon people are lining up to donate time to Gunnar.

Antsy gets famous in his school as the "Master of Time," and the nature of such adolescent fame is revealed by the way he describes dressing for the part in a tie "covered with weird melting clocks designed by some dead artist named Dolly." I was also reminded of his age when he leaves the house for a date with Gunnar's older sister Kjersten, telling his mother "I'll be home by eleven...and just in case I'm not, I put the morgue on your speed dial....I made a mental note to actually put the morgue on her speed dial. She'd be mad, but I also knew she'd laugh."

Some of the characters from The Schwa was here reappear in this novel, and Mr. Crawley continues to be "kidnapped" every month. When Antsy and Lexie have a zip line built in a park for his amusement, he turns around and sells it to the city, saying to Antsy "the difference between you and me...is that when I look at the world, I see opportunity. When you look at the world, you're just trying to find a place to urinate." In the end, though, Mr. Crawley turns Antsy's unfortunate display of temper into a tourist attraction, too, saving the day for him and his family. Antsy doesn't manage to save the day for Gunnar and his family, but he does finesse a successful Initial Public Offering on the months remaining in his own life (in a chapter entitled "Life Is Cheap, but Mine Is Worth More Than a Buck Ninety-eight in a Free-Market Economy").

Shusterman is one of the few YA writers who creates intelligent and engaging male protagonists, and Antsy is well worth your acquaintance.

How to Unwind Without Ever Stopping

Over the weekend, Walker, Eleanor and I read Neal Shusterman's Unwind, and enjoyed it thoroughly. We were passing it around during a busy weekend consisting of set-building for Eleanor, soccer games for Walker, and lots of chauffeuring and spectating. Lest you think the chauffeuring a routine matter, let me assure you that one of the soccer games, yesterday's, was two hours away by car. We drove so far I could see progress in the blooming trees. Our Bradford Pears are just beginning to bloom, that white unfolding that still has the tight shape of balls, and by the time we got to the soccer field, the Bradford Pear blossoms were blowing across the street and the green of the leaves was beginning to replace the white blooms. So we didn't have a lot of time for reading, except in transit. Sunday morning we did spend a few hours at home, and Ron finished The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, so it's now the next book on my pile. He says it's even better than the first one.

At any rate, reading Unwind is like watching one of those movies that carries you along for an hour and a half of pure pleasure, and then you get out of the movie theater and start thinking "Wait. If she did that, how could this have happened?" Sometimes it's best not to think too much about a story, even if it is thought-provoking. The premise of Unwind certainly is, and it's revealed bit by bit as the story goes along. The story has three main characters, and they're all "unwinds," which means that they're scheduled to be taken apart to provide spare body parts for others. Connor is 16, doesn't make good grades, and gets into fights, which causes his parents to schedule him for unwinding. Risa is 15 and a ward of the state but doesn't show enough promise as a concert pianist to earn her continued support. Lev is 13 and a "tithe," which means he's the tenth child and his religious parents slated him for unwinding from the moment of his birth. It's not until page 114 that we learn anything about what happened to cause such a future:

She thinks about the days before the Heartland War, when unwanted babies could just be unwanted pregnancies, quickly made to go away. Did the women who made that other choice feel the way she felt now? Relieved and freed from an unwelcome and often unfair responsibility...yet vaguely regretful?
In her days at the state home, when she was assigned to take care of the infants, she would often ponder such things. The infant wing had been massive and overflowing with identical cribs, each containing a baby that nobody had wanted, wards of a state that could barely feed them, much less nurture them.
"You can't change laws without first changing human nature," one of the nurses often said as she looked out over the crowd of crying infants. Her name was Greta. Whenever she said something like that, there was always another nurse within earshot who was far more accepting of the system and would counter with, "You can't change human nature without first changing the law." Nurse Greta wouldn't argue; she'd just grunt and walk away.
Which was worse, Risa often wondered--to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born?

Finally, on p. 223, we learn more about how this future came about:

"There were dark days leading up to the war. Everything that we think defines right and wrong was being turned upside down. On one side, people were murdering abortion doctors to protect the right to life, while on the other side people were getting pregnant just to sell their fetal tissue. And everyone was selecting their leaders not by their ability to lead, but by where they stood on this single issue.... And then came the Bill of Life....I was right there in the room when they came up with the idea that a pregnancy could be terminated retroactively once a child reaches the age of reason," says the Admiral. "At first it was a joke--no one intended it to be taken seriously. But that same year the Nobel Prize went to a scientist who perfected neurografting--the technique that allows every part of the donor to be used in transplant....With the war getting worse," says the Admiral, "we brokered a peace by bringing both sides to the table. Then we proposed the idea of unwinding, which would terminate unwanteds without actually ending their lives. We thought it would shock both sides into seeing reason--that they would stare at each other across the table and someone would blink. But nobody blinked. The choice to terminate without ending life--it satisfied the needs of both sides. The Bill of Life was signed, the Unwind Accord went into effect, and the war was over. Everyone was so happy to end the war, no one cared about the consequences....Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened...but people like to keep what's theirs, even after they're dead. It didn't take long for ethics to be crushed by greed."

By the end of the novel, Connor, Risa, and Lev succeed in ending the practice of unwinding. How that happens is well told; it's only some of the awakenings they have along the way that will strike you as unlikely, at least after you finish reading.

Sometimes the things that strike you as unlikely really are. If you haven't heard about this controversy, check out this reproductive "art project":
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513
http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/08-04-21-00.all.html