I've been a fan of the Bones TV show for some time, and I know that it's based on a series of books written by a real-life forensic scientist. I've been meaning to check out Reichs's books--they're the type of thing I'd likely read on my Kindle when traveling--so when a friend passed Virals on to me, I decided it was a good opportunity to preview the author before purchasing any of her work myself.
At the start of the book, readers learn that fourteen-year-old Tory Brennan, the protagonist of Reichs's first teen book, has recently moved to live with her father upon the death of her mother. In a typical teen-directed storyline, the father and daughter don't know how to communicate, since Kit first learned he was, indeed, a father only upon the death of Tory's mother--the girl he had sex with during a summer camp in high school. Add an exotic location--an island off the South Carolina Coast, inhabited only by the families of scientists doing research in the even more isolated island further out to sea-- to the disconnected parent mix, and Reich has the perfect premise for Tory and three male friends (also children of workers on the island) to form a close bond in a short time. Their common isolation and high intelligence allow them to cross social boundaries that would usually keep them apart, thus allowing for their diverse interests and knowledge (lock picking, real estate databases, bones, computers, primate behavior...) to be drawn on when things get tense.
And things do get tense, as this is a murder mystery involving monkeys, wolfdogs, prep school snobs, and a 30+ year-old kidnapping. I don't think it's giving away too much of the plot to reveal that the four teens end up catching a designer virus, created in secret by the head of the island laboratory, since the book's title steers you that way. To find out how the virus affects the quartet, you'll have to tune in yourself, however. I'm guessing that readers will have the opportunity to see these Virals develop further as well, for the conclusion leaves things wide open for a sequel, one in which I wouldn't be surprised to see the appearance of iconic "Aunt Tempe"--Tory's recently discovered great-aunt on her father's side.
Overall I'd say that this is a pretty good first effort at a teen book. Reichs tells a pretty good story, and she manages to get some good science education in in the process. While she seems a bit off in language and the like at times, it's easy to overlook these adult lapses because she's chosen exceptionally intelligent teens to tell the story. I'm guessing that I'll enjoy her style more in the adult forensics series, which I will be adding to my Kindle for my trip later this month, but I liked this well enough that I'll keep my eyes out for the sequel as well.
As an undergraduate and graduate student, I became aware of the uneven playing field that exists for men and women in American society. I studied the feminist movement; read Simone de Beavoir, Susan Faludi, Camille Paglia, and dozens of other key authors in feminist thought; and became actively involved in supporting abortion and reproductive health rights for women. Over the years, these principles have held their importance in my personal beliefs, but while I've read an occasional new text and I donate regularly to Planned Parenthood and NOW, I haven't been actively engaged in the movement.
My declining action and involvement isn't uncommon, I know, as age and adulthood often moderate earlier passions. Over the past five years or so, though, anti-feminist sentiment and behavior have increasingly caught my attention. There are plenty of major public examples, like Limbaugh's feminazi label and Beck calling Hillary Clinton a bitch, but more subtle things are beginning to bug me: Sarah Palin labeling herself a feminist, my female students mentioning how back in the day, "before men and women were equal...," and the increased frequency with which 30ish-year-old women with advanced degrees are taking their husbands' names upon marrying--something that declined with my generation. And, while it's not yet enough to make me hoist my protest sign or act in the angry manner of my youthful days, I do spend a lot of time thinking about it and what it will mean for my 3-year-old niece when she reaches college.
Fortunately, Susan Douglas has been not only thinking about current trends in feminism, but she has been studying and quantifying them. In Enlightened Sexism, she explores the impact that a media-dominated culture is having on women and equality, concluding that even when seemingly empowering women, many TV, music, and movie products do quite the opposite. At the heart of her exploration is what she calls enlightened feminism, "a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress--indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved--so now it's okay, even amusing to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women." Enter The Bachelor and The Man Show, The Spice Girls, and Victoria's Secret ads.
There were a lot of concepts introduced in Douglas's book, along with a ton of information about popular music and shows with which I've had no contact, and I'm still chewing it over. One thing I keep coming back to, however, is a point she makes about the role that strong female leads on TV have contributed to enlightened sexism. I have to admit that one of my guilty pleasures is crime shows of all sorts. So, when Douglas discussed the fact that these shows--The Closer, Law & Order, the CSIs--all have a large number of highly successful women in positions of power, my first reaction was, "That's good, right?" And, to an extent, it is good to have shows that provide girls and women with strong, positive role models. (In fact, I'm convinced I'd be a forensic scientist if I was a girl growing up today.) However, these same shows--as well as West Wing, Rizzolli and Isles, and a slew of others--have also contributed to enlightened sexism by making it seem as if women have, indeed, made it in the world--in numbers equal to men. In these shows, we're police chiefs, head investigators and lab supervisors, and even the President of the United States. In reality, women today still hold such positions in much lower numbers--and some not at all--than do their male counterparts. However, because they see these women in powerful roles in our media lives, Americans begin to believe women are equal to men in the workplace, creating the basis needed for enlightened sexism: the belief that feminism has done its job. It's a fascinating concept and one that has me thinking anew about my DVR list.
At the end of the book, Douglas says. "I think that, in our heart of hearts, we do miss feminism: its zeal, its audacity, its righteous justice. So let's have some fun, and get to work." I'm beginning to think more about where my job within this work will be, and I'm grateful to the boost that Douglas's book provided.
I remember reading comics as a girl--mainly Archie, Richie Rich, and the like. We rarely bought them in my household, but I'd read them at friends' houses or encounter them in the library. Then, for a good 25 or so years, I never thought much about comics: they were for kids, or guys, or geeks. Five or six years ago, though, the California Association of Teachers of English selected Persepolis--a graphic novel depicting the author's girlhood during the Iranian Revolution and Iran-Iraq War--and reintroduced me to the idea of graphic texts. I found the format compelling and was challenged by the effort to retrain myself as a reader--searching visual texts for meaning to supplement the written words. It seemed a good skill to introduce my students to, and I used Persepolis for two years in my developmental English classroom with great success: students who never would have read a traditional text about such a subject loved it, many of them voluntarily going on to read the sequels on their own time. I started an inquiry into comics in the K-16 classroom, thereafter delivering workshops on the subject at several conferences and integrating a variety of comics and graphic novels into classes whenever possible.
Not one to limit myself to a few "classics" or "scholarly" texts, I started expanding my repertoire into serial comics as well, reading for myself as well as for my classes. My sister Sarah had gotten into comics a couple years earlier and was in the process of writing a graphic novel, so our interests overlapped: we bought tickets to Comic Con in the summer of 2008 and plunged into the comic world with 100,000 other geeks in the San Diego Convention Center. It was remarkable, and since then we've returned, this past Spring expanding geekdom to attend APE (a small press comics convention) in San Francisco.
All this is being told to establish the fact that I am a regular comics reader, most likely having one of the best collections of graphic novels and comics in our small community. (I'm always willing to loan books out, too!) I pretty much try anything out there, drawing the line only at superhero comics--and mainly because that would open a huge world to explore. And, there's enough good stuff out there that I can leave the tights and cleft chins alone. The Chew series, for instance, is a great adult comic for anyone that thinks that a storyline about a law-enforcement officer who works to control people's eating habits it funny. I am one of those people.
Tony Chu is cibopathic: he need only chew on a piece of food--and in his line of work, all too often, a piece of flesh--to know where it grew, how it was picked or killed, how it was processed, etc. It's a blessing and a curse, and the poor man eats nothing but beets when left to his own devices. Unfortunately, he is often called to taste less savory items in his day-to-day life as an agent in the FDA--one of the most important police forces in a world where chicken is illegal after a bout of avian flu that nearly wiped out the human race. In this third trade, collecting issues 11-15, Chu's ex-partner is running amok in the culinary underground, his current part-robotic partner is up to his usual antics, and Tony's girlfriend--a saboscrivner, who can write about food with such skill that the reader can actually taste it--is sticking around.
You just don't get cannibals, fricken (artificial chicken), and severed thumbs in enough standard novels these days. Chew delivers them all with aplomb and humor.
Several years ago, I read Westerfeld's Uglies series for teens, set in a future where everyone is transformed at age 16 from an Ugly to a Pretty through radical plastic surgery, and was hooked. The man simply knows how to tell a story, drawing the reader into a world intriguingly different, yet hauntingly similar to his/her own. He has published a second, also excellent, teen series called Midnighters, a few stand-alone teen books, and a good sci-fi trilogy for adults. In the Leviathon series, Westerfeld tackles another sub-genre: SteamPunk.
Take a future with Victorian-era morals, behaviors, and dress, mix in one fully-mechanized society a'la the Industrial Revolution, and shake it up with another equally mechanized society--but with mechanics based on biology and the creation of new beings, thanks to Darwin's good work--and you have a rich SteamPunk environment. It's a genre that has been gaining ground among fantasy and sci-fi folk in recent years. And, while I am less taken with it than some other branches of the genre, Westerfeld's story and gift for making the unreal quite normal make this a pretty good start for someone interested in checking out the trend.
The story alternates between two main characters: a teen girl posing as a boy to serve in the English (Darwinist) airforce and a Austrian (Industrial) prince whose parents were recently assassinated in the Balkans. (Why yes, it does sound familiar!) Against this early-WWII-with-a-twist backdrop, the two improbably meet, become unlikely friends (though she longs for more), and eventually fight as allies. In this second volume of the series, the action focuses on Istanbul, which has remained neutral in the war thus far. Featuring helium-powered biological blimps, lizards that serve as verbal messengers, mechanical multi-legged and -armed tanks, sultans, and spices, it's a winning combination for male and female readers alike.
