The Sand Child

book by Tahar Ben Jelloun

translation by Alan Sheridan

annotation by Ghada Bedair

The Sand Child is a lyrical wonderland for all who are mesmerized, intrigued, and passionate about words. The Sand Child is truly a piece of poetic beauty each line taking the reader into that enchanted wonderland. With that said, I must admit to being one of those who deeply love language; I love the use of language so much that I find myself jotting down lines from books whose words are strung together like harmonic notes. I do love when prose becomes poetry and this book was not short on this in the least. While reading The Sand Child, I often became so lost in the fluidity and grace of the translated piece that I would have to go back several times and reread parts of the book to remind myself of the plot.

Being a native speaker of the Arabic language, I often have a critical eye on the fine details of the usage of the language the work is being translated into, in this case the translation was simply exquisite.

The story itself is simple:  a father, hopeless about having a son after fathering seven daughters, weaves a lie that his eighth daughter is a son. It shows the intense desperation and deception this father will go to hide that his eighth child is, in fact, a daughter. He masterminds a plan where he strings a perfectly played out lie which no one questions, and the daughter is raised as a son. Through twists and turns we see this confused child grow to adulthood and even marry; what we also see is the traumatic and bitter impact this lie has on her.

What I disliked about the story was the form of narration Ben Jelloun chose. It was a narrator who speaks to a doubtful audience. The narrator claims to have a journal that recounts the story in the voice of the traumatized daughter. This can get muddled and confusing–the shift in voice, with the sometimes overpowering language–and leaves the reader confused and somewhat frustrated. Although the book was incredibly strong in the execution of its translation and its slow unfolding of the child’s life, it was overpowered with clumsy narration.

I have a deep appreciation and respect for translated pieces–the task of taking on language, culture, and all of the small nuances of writing, being capable of crafting a believable tale is quite a feat that Alan Sheridan was successful in doing.

The book does not have a clear ending, the audience in the book eventually become narrators themselves describing what they believe happens to the daughter, some tragic and some happy, yet you don’t get that clear clean ending that some readers, like myself, crave. For some, the open-ended style of the tale is appealing and believable; for someone like myself who enjoys a clear conclusion to the adventure I felt a tad let down and yet hungry to try to concoct what I felt the ending would/should be, and, as any true writer, I did. I must say, my ending is a happy and beautiful one.

The Tortilla Curtain

book by T.C. Boyle

annotation by Telaina Eriksen

The publication date on this book is 1995 but this novel is still as relevant and as controversial today as it was 17 years ago. Tortilla Curtain is the story of two couples—the undocumented workers América and Cándido, and the well-to-do Californians real-estate agent Kyra and environmental writer Delaney.

Boyle has structured this novel as a satirical and brutal mirror. For every action on each couple’s part, the other couple experiences a less-than or greater-than reaction, in a strange and violent  balancing act between the two cultures. The opening event is Delaney hitting Cándido (accidently) with his car on his way home on the winding canyon road to his soon-to-be walled and gated community. This sets off a chain of tragedy that neither party can foresee.   Cándido refuses to go to the hospital and Delaney throws Cándido $20 to salve his guilty conscious.  Boyle then sets up an intricate chessboard of a story where each couple continues to lose things and every loss is diluted in the white upper class couple and magnified in the ill-fated and Job-like América and Cándido.

Cándido is sick and broken from the accident and Delaney’s car is broken. Very soon after the accident, one of Kyra’s pampered dogs is captured in their backyard and eaten by a coyote. América ventures up from the canyon where the immigrants are “camping” and tries to get a job at the job exchange. She is pregnant and a teenager. Bad-luck has dogged Cándido and América throughout their journey north—their coyote (the man helping them cross into the United States) was corrupt and they were beaten and robbed at the border. América gets a job working with toxic chemicals scrubbing kitschy Buddhas for some un-named man, who also tries to grope her. A few days later, her boss forgets to give her gloves and América can barely stand the chemical burn of scrubbing the Buddhas.

Also in Boyle’s balancing act are two teens from Kyra and Delaney’s neighborhood causing trouble for the undocumented workers staying in the canyon. They tear apart Cándido and América’s camp, ruin América’s only good dress and paint “gang sign” graffiti on the new gate to whip up fear and mistrust of Mexicans. Two other undocumented workers scrawl graffiti on Kyra’s favorite for-sale house. These two characters rape América on her way home from work and give her gonorrhea which causes her girl-child, when she is born, to be blind.

Another fascinating mirror in the book is that a white-collar criminal is under house arrest in one of the huge houses in Kyra and Delaney’s neighborhood. As they raise the gate and the seven-foot stucco fence in the neighborhood to keep the Mexicans, coyotes, snakes and scorpions out, they seem to not care at all that they are walling this criminal in. No one seems to be concerned about what he has done to warrant house arrest for three years because he has maids and catering and tasteful decorating.  Another bit of worthy, though somewhat heavy-handed irony, is that there is little doubt from Boyle’s prose, that undocumented workers help build the wall that ends up surrounding the neighborhood.

As the story arches to its conclusion, Delaney and Kyra lose their other dog to a coyote, their cat, Dame Edith (another humorous tongue in cheek reference to the haves and the pretentious in this book is that Kyra has named all of her pets after the famous literary Sitwell family–Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverel) is eaten by Cándido and América in their desperate hunger. Kyra is oblivious to the suffering of the immigrants, but is incensed when she sees a dog left in a car in the heat.

Cándido receives a free Thanksgiving turkey from a shopper at a grocery store and is so excited to roast it that he accidentally starts a fire in the dry season which obliterates Kyra’s favorite house she is selling, her dream house, and ruins the Thanksgiving of everyone in the neighborhood. In the chaos, the white-collar criminal escapes, with potentially millions of dollars squirreled away, while Cándido steals supplies from backyards to help the in-labor América. He even steals dog dishes to use as pots and pans. Cándido’s theft, which is personal, is more outrageous then what the white-collar criminal has done, because that crime was done organizationally and systemically. This literary observation is also just as pertinent today as it was 17 years ago.

Boyle’s book draws fire for its characters being stereotypes. I am not sure if this accusation is leveled at Kyra and Delaney (who recycle and are mostly vegetarian) or América and Cándido, who have an impossible litany of horrible things happen to them.  These characters all feel real to me—not as in I might meet them on the street, but I recognize their complexity, hypocrisy and humanness. Perhaps in some people’s vision of liberals, they aren’t quite so hypocritical. Or perhaps some readers don’t like that Cándido and América are uneducated and that Cándido occasionally hits América. It is a well-documented fact that as unemployment rates increase, domestic violence also increases. Cándido and América’s story of the corrupt coyote rings true with much nonfiction I have read as well.  Perhaps some readers also don’t realize Boyle’s mirroring technique and instead see a heavy-handed portrayal of have and have nots—where I saw a satirical layering of the bitter struggle for survival versus the first-world problems in the United States which cause us “stress.”

I also realized that every time Delaney wrote about the coyote for his nature column, what he was really writing about was immigration. This veiled column (pp. 211-215) is a masterpiece of showing and not telling but its complexity reverberated for me because character Delaney was “telling,” letting author Boyle show us so much about this character and the world and culture he lives in…which happens to closely resemble early 21^st century America. The mere fact that Boyle names the young, pregnant, beaten, besieged teen in the book América is a constant reminder to the reader of what our country used to be, and contrasts it to what our country is now, without the author ever having to say a word on that subject.

As a writer, I learned much about the power of parallelism while reading this story—not just the rhetorical device of constructing sentences and paragraphs, but the power of alternating viewpoints and intertwined tragedy and the unintended domino effect of character actions on the other characters within the novel.  In addition to a stinging social commentary about immigration, poverty, violence and even healthcare in the United States, Boyle has also produced a remarkable and envy-worthy structure for this novel.

The Paris Wife

book by Paula McLain

annotation by Talya Jankovits

I have a soft spot for books that take history and spin it into marvelous fiction based on thorough research. Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, is the epitome of such fine work. Taking the story of Hemingway’s first marriage and merging fictional voice with real life events, McLain presents to us a novel, a work known as fiction, but one that probably more closely brings a reader to the intimate lives of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson that by the time you finish the book, you are unsure if you read fiction or fell into the world of a real woman in the 1920′s.

There are so many striking aspects of this novel that made my head dizzy with want. Firstly, the research is thorough and detailed. From authentic description of place and time to vernacular, fashion and a movement of writing that swept through and made a place in the literary canon. McLain takes a world that to many avid readers of literature, might seem dreamy and unreachable and through conviction of narrative, places her reader in Paris cafés with writers such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Its a writer and literary academic’s wet dream. She so fully captivated this time that there were moments where I felt disappointed to put the book down and face our own modern reality. This is a testimony to how well McLain researched her characters and time period. When taking a chunk of history and using it for fiction, a writer takes many risks and often, falls short, but McLain sets the bar high and honors a woman whose experiences deserved to be captured and shared.

At times, I wasn’t sure if I was reading fiction or someone’s actual memoir. I so thoroughly believed McLain’s fictional voice of Richardson and Hemingway, and all the real life writers that came in and out of the story as characters that I hardly thought these conversation were imagined. Everything; each interaction, character development and change in plot felt authentic. What most struck me is the change I saw in Hemingway in the novel. McLain was so careful to allow the character to morph into himself. Nothing felt sudden or expected, something of note when reading a novel about a person’s life that has been so thoroughly exposed and studied already.

I think the challenge of character development is greater when trying to capture an actual person, because you are already limited by what that person became. Laws of fiction are broken to an extent when committed to staying true to history. But McLain made it seem easy and seamless, as if these people were her own. The conviction was mesmerizing.  Days on end have passed and I still can’t get the characters out of my head. I feel haunted by them, betrayed and torn. I don’t think that it’s only because the actual marriage of Hemingway and Richardson was so rich in story already; it’s a tribute to McLain, who merged these people into fiction and brought the reader closer to them than a memoir ever could.

I’m working on a historical fiction novel myself, but unlike McLain, I am not limited by honoring the lives of real people. I have the luxury to explore my own characters of creation, but I am familiar with the demands of history and the obligations it imposes on fiction. I  decided to take greater liberties with my historical background and events and I’ve made these decisions in order to honor and serve the fiction which demands to take place on the page.

I am humbled by McLain, who did not compromise her commitment to history nor her vision of fiction and was able to produce something that felt both fictional and real. The Paris Wife is writing at its best.

The Buddha in the Attic

book by Julie Otsuka

annotation by Tina Rubin

Stories dealing with the misguided actions of the U.S. government toward its perceived enemies usually affect me like a punch to the gut. But I need to know, so I don’t run away. Julie Otsuka’s novella about the Japanese picture brides who came to California between the two World Wars was a killer in that respect. Her short, Hemingwayesque sentences were icebergs of emotion.

Otsuka uses an interesting device: her point of view is first person plural. The “we” of the book is a group of young Japanese women who meet on the boat, sailing to an unknown future in America to meet Japanese husbands they have never seen. The husbands, of course, had sent twenty-year-old photos back to Japan to win over their brides and hired professional writers to craft their courtship letters. The narrative arc moves from the women’s arrival and initial disappointment to their inevitable adjustment—to their husbands as well as to the new country, culture, and language. Most accept their fate stoically and thrive despite disease, extramarital affairs, and having to work in the fields or as maids to white families.

I read the book with mild interest until the last forty or so pages, when the Japanese internment begins. After that, the anguish of the author’s understated words hit me, and I could only read a page or so a night before choking up. It was then that I recognized the degree of Otsuka’s skill. Despite keeping individual characters at arm’s length throughout the book, she managed to reveal who they all were. And I cared about every one.

Here’s how she did it. Otsuka relates much of the action by opening her paragraphs with words like “some of us” or “most of us.” She follows with  statements expressing many different situations, ending with a specific thought by someone in the group that illustrates the point. As I absorbed first the general examples and then the narrower one, I began to differentiate the characters—although I didn‘t realize it at first.

An example, from the opening chapter, “Come, Japanese,” on the boat:

At night we dreamed of our husbands. . . . We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her. (5)

Or, from the chapter simply called “Whites”:

One of us blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. Others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. . . . We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. . . . But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we’d disappeared. (37)

As the novel goes on, Otsuka attaches names to the characters but keeps the structure intact. The effect is to reveal the tremendous power of each detail. Details tell the entire story, yet each one, so carefully chosen, becomes irreplaceable.

In a startling final chapter, “A Disappearance,” the first person plural now represents the whites who are left behind after the Japanese have been rounded up and taken away. The unexpected shift in point of view is a delicious surprise. Not only does it work perfectly, but it’s a logical choice, given that the original “we” is gone. And from a historical perspective, even if a fictional one, the reactions of the whites trying to make sense of their friends’, schoolmates’, and local business owners’ disappearance wraps the book up with food for thought.

This is a novel that remains in one’s thoughts long after the last page is read—for Otsuka’s technique as well as her story.

Shutter Island

book by Dennis Lehane

annotation by Lee Stoops

“…How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”

~ Dr. Cawley, Shutter Island (170)

 

Sometimes, the story alone is enough to carry a novel. How freeing would that be? This is the case with Shutter Island. Surprisingly, the writing is not as strong as one might expect from a repeated New York Times’ best seller – one whose stories have been turned into several blockbuster movies (including one that went on to win a number of Academy Awards). Lehane, in Shutter Island, has managed to present a story gripping enough that it doesn’t need exemplary prose to compel the reader. I’m the first to admit, I’m jealous.

Told from the close third person perspective of U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels as he, along with his partner Chuck, investigates a missing person report on an island that houses an institution for the criminally insane, Shutter Island explores mystery, truth, perspective, love, loss, and denial from a variety of angles through plot twists and weaves that leave the reader satisfied, stunned, and in tears.

Lehane’s writing is quick and familiar, sometimes colloquial, sometimes period savvy (think 1950s), though never consistently, and never all at the same time. Fortunately, the story flows, rages, even while leaving gaping holes that help make the reveal at the end unexpected but mostly believable. The pace of the narrative gives it strength enough to help the reader ignore some of what might be considered failed language techniques. An example of an evocative, engaging scene written strangely:

“Teddy started to trip down on his knees in front of the toilet, heaving into the bowl as the ferry’s engine chugged and clacked and Teddy’s nasal passages filled with the oily smells of gasoline and the late-summer sea. Nothing came out of him but small streams of water, yet his throat kept constricting and his stomach banged up against the base of his esophagus and the air in front of his face spun with motes that blinked like eyes” (12).

Lehane’s sentences tend (as in the above example) to run wordy, often including clichéd turns of phrase, descriptors, or confusing structure. While this might work for a Joan Didion essay, it makes fiction, specifically mystery grounded in the insane, difficult to read. But, the plot holds its ground and gives the reader reason to continue reading.

The setting (remember: mid-1950s island, institution for the criminally insane) offers the story an environment free from technology and as much strict adherence to laws, statutes, or even societal expectations. The island, and its war-time structures (defensible buildings that remain from World War Two) turned institution and housing for the island’s patients and staff, exists in ominous isolation off the foggy New England coast. The liberties the doctors seem to take with patients, medicine, and procedures give Teddy’s character and narrative credit. The reader may question the reliability of the narrator, but it all feels legitimate throughout. The reliable, unreliable narrator is nothing new, but pulling it off with inconsistent prose is a remarkable achievement. It’s both a surprise and not a surprise to learn, in the end, that Teddy is, in fact, no longer a U.S. Marshal, but that he is a patient in therapy, working through an experimental, last-ditch effort to save his own life and mind – literally: a failure in the exercise will result in his lobotomization.

“We hoped. We hoped we could save you. We stuck our reputations on the line. And now word will get out that we allowed a patient to play act his grandest delusion and all we got for it were a few injured guards and a burned car. I have no problem with the professional humiliation.” He stared out the small window square. “Maybe I’ve outgrown this place. Or it’s outgrown me. But someday, Marshal, and it’s not far off, we’ll medicate human experience right out of the human experience. Do you understand that?”

Teddy gave him nothing. “Not really.”

“I expect you wouldn’t” (308).

Teddy arrives on the island tasked with finding a missing mental patient. In the end, he learns the truth about himself and his violent, tragic past. Yet, whether a choice, an act, or simply the result of his lost-cause condition, he reverts to ignorance of his life’s truths. Lehane’s masterful storytelling, in spite of inconsistent textual presentation, creates with Shutter Island examples of compelling plotlines and interesting technique choices.

The thing that is frustrating, to me, as a writer, about the book is that it works. It works so well, even though the writing raises every red flag we’re taught, as writers (even as readers), to avoid. Lehane explores grief, anger, insanity, denial, love, trust, and mystery in ways that invoke the reader’s full emotional commitment. But his seeming disregard for the rules of writing is maddening. Maddening because I know I’ll never get away with the same thing, maddening because I can’t let enough of those rules slide, maddening because I have yet to trust one of my stories, any of my characters, enough to let them tell the story with the kind of fervor that might free me (and my readers) from the rigors of writing. Way to go, Lehane, way to go.

The Knockout Artist

book by Harry Crews

annotation by Kate Maruyama

Rob Roberge introduced me to this underrated but brilliant writer who pretty much blew me away. He passed away Wednesday at the age of 76. In his honor, we’re re-running this annotation from 2009.

Given the dark subject matter, I had thought this noir book would be a chore, but found it instead a heartbreaking delight. Crews takes us directly into the dark underbelly of society, accompanying Eugene, the eponymous knockout artist, to one of his gigs. He gives us Eugene’s simple look at the world, taking stock in his surroundings, staring at the jackets in the closet across from him. When Jake comes in with Oyster-Boy, thin, pale, shedding skin, a dog collar around his neck led by the enormous and salacious Purvis, we know that he has crept into the darkest side of town, the part most of us don’t want to see but can’t help staring at. But Eugene keeps his head, protects himself by fighting off any interaction with these people and goes and does his job, knocking himself out.

Within one chapter, Crews has given us a coherent world and a solid hero with a strong voice. There is something uncorruptable about Eugene, made more obvious by his introduction taking place in a deeply corrupt society. What is it about this guy that is so decent despite the fact that he is a kept man and knocks himself out to make money? He is deeply buried in self-loathing, but there is something solid at the core of Eugene that will never be soiled. The complexity of a character having such opposing aspects to his personality makes for a compelling protagonist. I seriously need to work toward that, but figure I’m still years away.

Things for Eugene are bound to get worse, we know this from our classic noir surroundings; his simple act of blacking out regularly is very Phillip Marlowe. Of course we are introduced to the mysterious and tragic woman (Jake), then the user trouble woman (Charity).

Pete is a beautiful best friend character. Crews does a great thing by taking us inside Eugene’s hopes for Pete. When it looks like Pete is getting his life together, Eugene buys it. We know because of the nature of the book something awful will happen, but Crews is careful about weaving Eugene’s hope in a way that makes us feel it with him; Tulip cleaning up Pete’s apartment, the fact that the two are clearly in love. Eugene has a respect for this real love, and knows more and more clearly it is not what he shares with Charity. Crews has a real eye for finding the good in people readers might otherwise not think of: Tulip who had a sex act with a teddy bear on Bourbon Street, is the woman who gives Pete something larger to live for. And Pete, porn and snuff film projectionist, who could not make peace with Eugene’s knockout living, saw the good in her, which makes him more appealing.

There is such tragic beauty in Eugene’s dealings with Blasingame. It is Eugene who takes Pete into his deal with Blasingame, and it is Blasingame’s world that ruins Pete forever. In trying to free himself from corruption and kink (the knocking himself out) he has unwittingly led Pete down the path to destruction. It is on Blasingame’s boat that the clean Tulip uses again, which plants the seeds for her downward slide, making our final image of Pete, fully immersed in Blasingame’s world, a complete and utter destruction whose responsibility rests on Eugene’s shoulders.

The tenuous, frenetic hope that Crews weaves around Eugene and Pete’s plans for a future in boxing management reminded me a lot of April’s spinning hopes about Paris in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. You can feel the exhilaration of the character, especially when Pete gets on board and starts talking Blasingame’s ear off. But their enthusiasm creates its own tension, since the reader is fully aware that things are not going to end well. It is such a careful balance and I would like to somehow steal that for the climax of my book.  (I actually did end up stealing Yates/Crews’ technique which worked quite nicely)

Charity takes the Noir female villain to the next level. She has the upper hand when we first meet her, as she is keeping Eugene and cataloging him with her sex-produced recording sessions. Crews builds a dominating woman, but once Eugene gets into her files and learns that she was kicked out of school, she becomes even more vulnerable and therefore more interesting. Charity’s drive to get inside other people’s lives and destroy them is all bluster; this fragility makes her completely fascinating and when she takes an interest in Jake, Eugene and we feel genuine worry for her. This reminds me that I need to build my villain’s motivation in a more human way. If I can get into her human need to collect souls, beyond a supernatural level, she’ll be much more interesting. I have her motivation from a stance of pure evil and, frankly, that’s not enough.

Eugene has lost everything, including the one friend who had loved him for who he was and had kept him together. But Crews is careful to leave us with a sense of hope. Jacques comes into the picture only at the end, but we get the sense that his Cajun common sense may well be a solid calming force in Eugene’s life and may help him hang onto the shred of decency at his core. This is an important reminder that if you lead your reader down a dark path, you can’t abandon them there. A sad story works better with a glimmer of hope, or at least a foothold and forward movement for its hero. Something gained.

This was a truly artful book, a pleasure to read, completely not in a genre I’ve ever written, and yet it was totally useful.

The Hunger Games

book by Suzanne Collins

annotation by Kate Maruyama

The premise of Annotation Nation is that every book we read holds something useful for us as writers. The Hunger Games was no exception. I took the excuse that I’m working on a middle grade fiction book to delve into the best selling YA, but it was a thin excuse (my book is reality and history based). Then I used the fact that I need to take my twelve year old to the movie, so I’d better read it first. Then the fact that most adults I talk to who’ve read it say “OhmyGod” and roll their eyes in bliss at the mention of the book.

Long and short, I gobbled up all three books within the space of two weeks and went into mourning for the series passing in a way I haven’t experienced since I was fifteen. But you can get reviews of The Hunger Games anywhere online now. The question for an annotation is: How does the author do what she does and what makes it work?

Hopped up on caffeine and talking about this series with my friend and AN partner, Diane Sherlock, I realized one could probably write a dissertation on this series, it would of course go off into speculative fiction, dystopian futures, allegory, etc. But for the sake of keeping the annotation at least readable, I’m going to deal with mechanics.

Suzanne Collins gives us a fully realized world, the scope of which is limited due to its being a totalitarian state with controlled information—our view of this world grows, with our heroine’s, over the course of the books, but in bite-sized chunks. The fully-realized world of District 12 includes, textures, smells, structures, wildlife, diet (and lack thereof), rules, and is seen through the eyes and told in the strong voice of our heroine, Katniss.

Katniss isn’t interesting because she’s the sparkling heroine of a bestselling series, but because she is very human in her petty desires, foolish choices, and lack of expertise. Collins plants us firmly in a real person who knows her inadequacies, constantly misreads situations and people and, soon after making rash decisions, realizes the trouble she manages to get herself into. The rawness and suddenness of Katniss’s realizations not only make her interesting, but keep the reader completely aligned with her throughout the story, enabling the trove of surprises Collins’ has up her sleeve to remain surprising.

Throughout the story, which follows a typical hero’s journey, and in which we expect a proper hero to be built—Katniss is learning, but she will achieve greatness, right?–but Collins keeps her human. Her heroism is accidental. In the sequels, her rise to being a political player are accidental as well and she realizes she’s being built into something that she’s not. Her awareness of her shortcomings are brought out through her admiration of another character (left nameless to keep that first read of the first book entertaining), whom she knows is a truly good person with only heroic motives. Katniss’s understanding that her choices are often selfish or self-saving humble her at the hands of her noble friend. And this awareness keeps us, as readers, completely in her court. If she were the superhero who went off to save the world, we might not be so fully aligned.

Collins also has a unique knack for subverting expectation and it is this talent that makes The Hunger Games series so readable.  She frequently uses the old YA trick of making the last line of a chapter a cliffhanger, “She just has time to reach her hand through the mesh and say my name before the spear enters her body.” (232) “The ants bore into my eyes and I black out.” (194) This trick gets almost comical in the two sequels with that last line zing so pronounced, but remains artful nonetheless as each zing is supremely original and completely subverts the expectations Katniss had in the prior paragraphs.

Where Collins really excels is in the actual surprises of plot. I’m a reader/filmviewer who tends to spoil my own fun by figuring out the rest of a plot halfway through any book/movie. But in The Hunger Games, which seems as if it should be formulaic and predictable–every moment you think you’ve figured out the plot and which way it will turn, the author changes loyalties, expectations, and the game itself, dodging and weaving so that you keep turning the pages, following her lead, guessing where it will go next. And, despite these tricks and turns, the reader never feels betrayed. So often stories take so many twists to baffle the reader that the author loses our trust. But in this book, each plot turn is in accordance with the characters and the world Collins has created for us.  The moment you ask, “How could they?” a part of you answers, “but of course.” For it seems no other way would have worked.

It doesn’t hurt Collins’ YA audience that she has a flair for describing fashion and food and the bedazzling world of the capitol. The rich description creates a sense of wonder and fascination, but elicits disgust from our heroine, accustomed to near-starvation conditions in her poor district. My inner teenager was completely sated by clever futuristic costumes, described down to their concept and execution, by rich, unending food and our heroine’s need to eat up against starving in the games, and by complete makeovers. We’re allowed to revel in the rich world and its trappings, because, with Katniss, we are also allowed to feel superior to such frippery. Deftly handled.

As writers, we so often fall into patterns. I adore it when my characters lead me in an unexpected direction, but so often, I’m trying to force plot and expectations onto them that they become clumsy and plodding. Often I have to delete pages on pages when things get predictable. I think that if we listen to our characters and, when at a plot crossroads, ask if perhaps we should bang a left instead of continuing straight, we may find ourselves in territory new not only to our readers, but to ourselves. We can’t go into our prose and inject chapter cliffhangers—particularly in grownup books, and we can’t wedge in fashion knowledge and sumptuous meals if they aren’t already innate in our knowledge (Collins claims to have been fascinated with fashion as a teen), and we may not even have a calling to writing a dystopian future. But Collins has other lessons for writers to learn.

Dystopian future is neither my calling, nor my province, I leave that realm for other, more suited, friend and relative writers (Kit Reed, Nicole Sconiers) to carry out. After all, at least according to NPR, it looks like there’s a market.

But Collins has much to teach us as far as character, realm (owning it, no matter where or when it is) and plotting. If we can think of each book–no matter how reality based– as its own world, if we can make its mythology solid and its characters true and human, we can reap the benefits of the tools laid out for us in this extremely popular YA novel.