Obsession

Charles Dickens

Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz felt like such a departure for the Newbery Medalist. When I got to interview her recently, I asked her how she arrived at this Gothic tale of puppetry, magic, mystery and obsession.

“Whenever I finish a book, I’m sure I’ll never write another,” Schlitz said. “So, I thought, ‘I should write from my obsessions. What do I love?’ The answer was Charles Dickens, and marionettes.” The author followed her obsessions, and she also created characters with obsessions of their own. Cassandra the witch can’t live with her fire opal, and can’t seem to live without it. Magician and puppeteer Grisini’s relationship with money and magic is much the same.

Schlitz’s obsession with Dickens comes through in more overt ways—the orphans Lizzie Rose and Parsefall (under Grisini’s guardianship), the London setting and the establishment of several characters’ plot lines that lead to a climactic intersection. But there are also more subtle connections to the Victorian writer. Schlitz visited Dickens’s house. She could picture him in his red waistcoat dashing up and down the stairs. “It’s an old staircase, so they have a decline in the middle of the tread,” she recalled. “People thought him vulgar because he wore a red waistcoat.”

Stairs factor into Splendors and Glooms when Grisini falls down the staircase of his boarding house, when Clara Wintermute’s father ascends the stairs of Grisini’s boarding house in search of his kidnapped daughter and meets Lizzie Rose, and the stairs in Cassandra’s house also play a key role for conversations overheard and narrow escapes. The scenes on the stairs often serve as transitions in the novel, resulting in a change of heart or luck (both good and bad, depending on which character you are) or a moment of insight.

The sense of obsession permeates the novel: Cassandra at her mirror, surrounded by images of former owners of the fire opal engulfed in flames, Mrs. Wintermute so consumed by grief at her other children’s death from cholera that she neglects Clara, and Grisini’s obsession with power gained through magic and money. And of course, the puppets. Cassandra, a puppet to her fire opal, Clara a puppet to her parents in a home filled with death masks and devoid of laughter, and Parsefall’s obsession with the marionettes, practicing and practicing in his desire to be as facile with the puppets as Grisini is.

Most importantly, Laura Amy Schlitz’s obsessions led to this compulsively readable novel. Which only goes to prove that following one’s obsession, or--perhaps more accurately--passion can lead to positive ends.

An Unlikely Friendship

To thoroughly enjoy The Cheshire Cheese Cat by Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright, illustrated by Barry Moser, you must first accept that a cat (Skilley) could prefer cheese to a mouse

Once you accept that, you are in for a treat. There is in today’s London an inn called Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, and although it was rebuilt after a fire, it stands in the same spot where Charles Dickens often dined and wrote. Dickens is the first to notice strange doings in one of his favorite taverns, and that Skilley seems to be catching and releasing the same mouse (Pip) over and over again. But he is not the last.

Various tensions emanate from the situation, and much of the fun of the novel is the discovery of who’s rooting for the mice and who wants them gone. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Adele, the mouse-hating barmaid, brings Skilley’s nemesis, Pinch, to “help” with the mousecatching. Skilley, attempting to hide from Pinch his friendship with Pip, accidentally hurts Pip. Skilley confides in Maldwyn the raven, and their illuminating discussion about how to repair the friendship could serve as a model for children experiencing similar circumstances.

As Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday approaches (on February 7, 2012), this book makes a terrific introduction to the Victorian writer, his humor (his writer’s blocks) and one of his favorite haunts.

The Internet: Uniting Readers and Writers

In literature, there have long been examples of fans reaching out to their favorite authors--Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr. Henshaw and The Mouse of Amherst by Elizabeth Spires--and of course, Charles Dickens read new installments of his novels aloud to his readers on the streets of London. But it’s hard to believe there was ever a time when writers were so accessible to their fans across the nation and around the globe. John Green is one of those writers.

On BlogTalkRadio last week, I mentioned John as someone who writes about smart kids (okay, I called them “nerds,” having been one myself, but as Youth Empowered talk show host Eric Komoroff pointed out, that’s a loaded word). In Green's most recent book, Paper Towns (which comes out in paperback next month), one of Q’s two best friends, Radar, rewrites entries on a Wikipedia-like site in his free time. This is a kid who enjoys exercising his intellectual muscles.

Green has 4,967 friends on Facebook; 6,459 members of his SparksFlyUp page on LibraryThing.com; and more than 610,000 followers on Twitter. Early adapter that he is, he’s likely also on sites unknown to me with comparably impressive numbers of followers. But there is perhaps no forum for capturing the imaginations of his fans better than Nerdfighters. You have to see it to appreciate its many aspects, but Nerdfighters is essentially an online community for blogging, conversing about recent events and literature, and vlogging (the video equivalent of blogging). As Green explained, “Videoblogs are community-oriented. They are shaped by the viewer. TV is not.” Green established Nerdfighters with his brother, Hank, and the two create videoblogs that simulate a conversation. Because it’s completely authentic, and because John and Hank Green are, shall we say, keenly attuned to their teen audience, teens flock to the site and not only respond but also create their own original material.

Witnessing John Green with his fans is a wonder to behold. They tell him which parts of his books they liked best and why, and which parts they didn’t like (at times, they are brutally honest). At the signing I attended, one teen told him she liked Paper Towns even better after she’d read Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman’s book provides clues to the whereabouts of Margo, a character who’s disappeared), and then reread Paper Towns. And the best part is, the teens feel like they’ve only begun the discussion. After they go home, they continue to engage with the author and with each other in conversations on Nerdfighters. As a former teacher and a lifelong reader, I get very excited about seeing kids—especially teens—get this passionate about books, history, politics and geography. So I’ve become one of those converts who believes (not to evoke Jon Scieszka’s name yet again, but…), like Jon Scieszka, that the Internet is not the enemy, and that we can foster kids’ love of reading in all kinds of venues. So let’s hear it for John Green and the Nerdfighters!