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Library Day in the Life Round 5: Tuesday or “The More We Get Together the Happier I Will Be.”

Today was my last day of storytime for the summer. We only ran Family Storytimes this summer – for ages 0-5 years. This is a notoriously strange storytime to do since it’s hard to select materials appropriate for that age range and even more difficult to keep all those involved engaged for a full 30 minutes without slipping into utter chaos. Not going to lie – there was some chaos involved, particularly since the numbers went from 45 people the first week, to 75 to 90 back to a manageable 70-something today. Action rhymes became some baby mosh-pit action! It was wild and totally fun. If I could make a living free-lancing storytimes for libraries… I would. Except, y’know, there’s librarians to do that sort of thing.

Here’s a brief outline of what I did each week. But “brief” I mean the craft and one of the books or rhymes… I can’t remember them all!

Week 1: Leaf necklaces (Materials needed: Leaf-shape cut outs, yarn, things to decorate with, glue)
Debuted my new song Who’s My Pretty Baby,(I learned it from Elizabeth Mitchell’s album You Are My Little Bird), with success. Goes like this:

Who’ll be my baby
Who’ll be my pretty little baby?
You’ll be my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
Hey, hey, pretty baby
Ho, ho, pretty little baby
You’re my, my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe.

Who’ll be my little man?
Who’ll be my nice lady
Who’ll be my funny little bunny
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
(lather, rinse, repeat first verse)

Week 2: Monkey paper bag puppets (Materials needed: brown paper bags, pink oval shapes for the face and brown oval shapes for the ears, glue)
The book Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett, (who I laude copiously throughout this blog), worked phenomenally well for Family Storytime! Babies enjoy the simple rhyme and pre-schoolers enjoy reading it as a “read along.” You read a line and they repeat it back. For extra fun – act out the animals!

Week 3: Butterfly straw puppets (Materials needed: Butterfly-shaped cut-outs, straws, crepe paper streamers, markers, tape)
The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O’Connell. I love, love, love this book. Babies enjoy the theme and the “baby’s day” aspect of it… toddlers like helping you make the onomatopoeias. It’s easy for parents to help you out – everybody wins!

Week 4: Paper plate flowers (paper plates, tissue paper or crepe paper cut into pieces, glue)
Is Your Mama a Llama (Deborah Guarino) – One little boy liked this so much he took it home with him!

At the end of the hour, several of the mothers came up to tell me how much their children enjoyed the storytime and promised to be back in the fall. In light of all of the extra administrative /off-desk and hands-off type of work I seem to be doing lately, it’s the ability to interact with customers, especially in an environment like storytime, that makes my job worthwhile.

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Library Day in the Life: Monday – Administratapalooza.

During Library Day in the Life Round … was it 3? I was running around doing Summer Reading Club programs and working at the reference desk like a madwoman. This past Monday, I ran around troubleshooting camp administration, overseeing more super-secret library classification testing, whipping Programming Volunteers into shape and lots of administrative unpleasantries that I should not describe not only under the auspices of good professional conduct, but would also bore anyone reading to tears. But let it be said that I administrated with the best of them. More tomorrow, as it’s Storytime Day!

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Pre-Party Library Day in the Life #5: THE WEEKEND.

Today is technically the first day of Library Day in the Life Round 5. But, since I’ve already been at work for two days, I thought I’d fill the Internet in on my “Monday” and “Tuesday.” Also, this provides a good explanation for my unintelligible blogs and tweets towards Thursday and Friday of this week. (Psst! It’s because I’ll have been at work for seven days…)

Saturday in the Life: The Day of Good Intentions or The day where e-mail happened.

9:00: I get to work expecting a delicious day off-desk during which I will surely achieve all of the prep-work for the end of the month reports, etc.

10:00: Summer Reading Club reporting hours begin. I say hello to the volunteers and go back to e-mail.

10:00: A lovely young woman shows up for a proctoring appointment. Good news: I totally know what she’s talking about! Bad news: Between her virtual educators and the library, someone has managed to think a “9″ is a “4″ (or vice-versa) so, here she is, ready to take and exam on the 24th instead of the 29th. The study room we usually use for proctoring has been booked all day, so I put her in my manager’s office since she’s not here and it’s a really nice office. I type in the password for her online exam and she’s off!

10:20: Volunteers are bored. So, I give them project to do, then of course, that’s when people show up to report. Volunteers are un-bored.

10:30: Sit down at my email again, remember that the chess instructor needs yet another white board because the dry-erase surface on the big white board on the wall has somehow lost its capacity to … er… dry erase. Basically, it’s borked. Carry another white board upstairs. Bump into a lot of things.

10:40: E-mail.

11:15: Proctoring person says her exam crashed. I log her back in.

11:30: Prepare registration materials for all classes running in the next week…

The afternoon was really a blur. I don’t even remember what I ate for lunch. Basically, I got through my e-mail and that was my major triumph of the day. Buh. “Oh well,” I thought (foolishly), “there’s always Sunday!”

What did happen on Sunday? I should give you a little background. Shortly before I was hired, Markham Public Library created a new kind of classification system. It’s called Customer Centered Classification, or C3™ for short. It basically limits the call numbers to four fields, and arranges the books by subject headings which are, we hope, more intuitive for customers to find. The arrangement facilitates browsing and the shorter call numbers is supposed to make it easier to find, shelve, and shelf-read the books. It even won an award this year. Before anyone asks me questions, I should mention that I don’t work with C3™ since my branch hasn’t been converted yet. We’re still living in the days of Dewey, which is fine by me since I don’t know Dewey very well, yet, and it’d be nice to learn before we switch to the new system.

I mention all this because my main activity on Sunday was to conduct some testing with Dewey using some volunteers from the Teen Advisory Group. I can’t really get into the nature of the tests, but at 9:59 am, I realized that I needed to select about 90 more random titles for volunteers to work with. This involved pulling all of the books, writing down their titles and call numbers and re-shelving them. And the volunteers were due at 11:00. I’m happy to say that I can re-shelve 90 books in 20 minutes never having worked as a page, but by the time we were ready to begin, it was 11:20. I did bring them Timbits, so I was mostly forgiven. As I’ve mentioned – I can’t describe the tests, but I will say that after I told the volunteers what they would be doing, they looked a little bleak. “This, uh, sounded much more fun in the e-mail.” one of them said.

Flash forward to 2:30 p.m. The volunteers have left, shakily agreeing to take part in the second part of this test. I sit down to type up their response sheets and I realize – I’ve forgotten to have them do the last part of the test. Ah, well. They didn’t have it in them to get up on the Dewey Decimal System for 4 hours straight, anyway and really neither did I.

2:30 pm: Oh right, lunch. I should mention that Sunday was the Deli Duel, where several awesome local delis faced off to win the title of best smoked meat sandwich. Several of my friends attended to eat various sammiches. I was… not there. I had cold pizza.

3:00 p.m.: I now find I’ve lost the will to do any actual, thinking work. So, I turn to my crafts for storytime, which I had originally been saving for the volunteers on Monday. I am making snake puppets. After tracing about 35 of them, I realized they look distinctly sperm-like. Hopefully the parents won’t be offended…

5:00 p.m.: Stumble out of the building, into my car and make it home in time for the 6:20 show of Inception. Which was spectacular.

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The Library Your Library Could Smell Like.

I’m sure we all know about the Old Spice Guy “Man your man could smell like” commercial. After all – it’s one of the best ad campaigns ever, resulting in hundreds of kazillions of internet dollars and serious lulz. (Did I just say that? Yes, I did.) Recently, the campaign (look – I’m referring to it as a sentient being) has given back to its expansive internet fan base and had the Old Spice Guy, Isaiah Mustafa answer questions in character in a slew of hilarious video responses. It was like talking to an internet meme!!! It was delightful and crazy. I loved it. I especially loved that libraries got a little special moment in the sun thanks to the tweets of @wawoodworth:

Old Spice Guy Talks about Libraries

The following day, my twitter feed yielded this library promotion gem:

New Spice

The Harold B. Lee Library has harnessed the Old Spice Guy’s single-shot internet fame and used it for a hilarious way to promote libraries. Of course it won’t be recognized (the joke, that is) in 15 years or so, but I was really pleased that this library was savvy enough to jump on this popular ad campaign and work it in our favour. Monocle smile.

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TMI.

Question: When is information too much information?
Answer: When information is in the form of my Twitter feed that I established in the interest of being professionally responsible and then… became kind of involved (read: addicted) on a personal level. At first I tweeted sparingly about library related topics only but then it kind of branched off to personal topics… frustrations with work… gastrointestinal upset… hangovers… etc.

Also did I mention that I’m a bit of a potty mouth?

Then Library Day in the Life Round 4 happened, and I used Twitter for most of the week because I didn’t have a lot of time to blog properly. I gained some extra followers from the library community at large – I was pretty surprised. After awhile, though, I realized that this is not professionally prudent. Now, I also feel the need, as so many others have, to separate personal from professional in the realm of social media. Why? I want people who follow me because we’re in the same profession to have a stream of relevant information (not that mine is the best professional Twitter feed ever) but also spare them the mundane facts of everyday life. Like what I had for breakfast, where I’ll be for the afternoon, etc. Also, I want to be able to drop the occasional F-bomb or talk about the strange colour of my pee post-ingestion of B50 complex vitamins if I feel so inclined without worrying about being viewed as immature or unprofessional (although sometimes I am both ) on a day to day basis.

The Plan: Slowly but surely starting up my “official” library Twitter feed ( @garz4lib, bien sur!). Then I’m probably going to lock up my personal feed because you never know when Library of Congress is watching.

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Happy Mother’s Day Garza 1.0!

This Mother’s Day, I wanted to thank my mom, Lynne, for encouraging me to enter this profession in the most public way possible. She’s a totally amazing librarian herself and has been in public and private libraries for probably more years than she’d care for me to share on the internet.  She originally went into this field to help people, all people, find the information they need. I grew up running around libraries, “flushing out patrons” at closing time and listening to her stories about crazy reference questions. I used to pretend that I worked at the same library she did and prompted her to play along. “Meg! What are you doing here?” she’d exclaim in our living room (which, thanks to my father, is actually a bit like a library). I’d pretend to be nonchalant “Oh… I just work here.” Then we’d do it all over again. This dream was interrupted by wanting to be a detective, a marine biologist, an anthropologist, a writer, a kindergarten teacher, until finally – panicking with English-majortitis, I thought more practically about job options. With my mom’s influence, I decided that I wanted to help people, too, particularly children, so here I am.

3 years ago this March, I started working as an intern at Bloomfield Township Public Library in the Children’s Department. She had recently retired from this particular library, but still worked occasionally as a substitute. We joked about now actually working at the same library… I was given the nickname Garza 2.0 the day I began that job. Inevitably, we worked a shift together and it was … well, it just seemed natural. “Meg! What are you doing here?!” “Oh… I just work here.”

Thank you, mom, or being amazing and supportive and for everything. Love, Megan

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Comics for Kids, What’s Next? Being a Champion for the Comic Book

Today was the first day of the Toronto Comics Arts Festival (TCAF) – “Hooray!” says I and hundreds of other people who crowded into the Toronto Reference Library. I went to TCAF for the first time last year and was kind overwhelmed by everything to see (and buy!) during the second day of the festival. In the intervening year I’ve learned much more about the comic book world here in Toronto and this year I had An Agenda. On Saturday I went to a few panel discussions one of the “Perils of Autobiography” (featuring Tory Woollcott, Erika Moen, Marc Ellerby, Adam Cadwell, and Adam Bourret – awesome type people) and the other on the future of comics for kids called “Comics for Kids: What’s Next?” One of my professional goals for the year 2010 is to improve the scope and marketing of the graphic novel collection in my branch, so I felt like this would be an interesting place to get some new titles and selection guidelines.  The panel itself included: Raina Telgemeier (Smile), Frank Cammuso (Knights of the Lunch Table), Clayton Hamner (CTON’s Super A-maze-ing Year of Crazy Comics!), Karen Li (Editor, Kids Can Press),Eva Volin (Librarian), and Diana Maliszewski (Teacher), and moderated by Scott Robins, who blogs for the School Library Journal “Good Comics for Kids” blog. I did get some good suggestions for titles (despite my consumption of comics, most of them aren’t meant for kids… I need to read more!) but also some excellent points about promoting the comic book to parents, teachers and librarians and the future of the kids graphic novel. Here are some of the ones that stuck with me…

The creators say that we are in need of YA graphic novels! Non-superhero esque, that is. Eva Volin (the librarian on the panel) has the answers… of course the librarian has the answers. Check her out!

Even though it seems like graphic novels have generally been accepted into the greater canon of literary works in their own right, (see graphic novels receiving literary awards previously won by text-only books and a graphic novel presence on recommended reading lists), really we have to get more people to hop on the bandwagon

When your colleagues and customers are hopping on the bandwagon sometimes they do so with skewed views of comics. Graphic novels are NOT just a “gateway to ‘real reading’” as so many people think – they are a valid reading experience in and of themselves. Volin says that she’s actually counted the number of words in a graphic novel and a text-only novel of the same length and found them to be more or less of the same word count. Not to mention the visual literacy involved in reading graphic novels. Some panelists argued, truthfully, that people have no problem with kids reading picture books, which are essentially the same thing, so why all this resistance to comics books? Pictures help readers decode language so to integrate images and words for readers of a certain level, it does a lot more for them in terms of success in reading, rather than a text-only format. I would also argue that graphic novels do what picture books are meant to do, but on visual steroids. Yes – they also provide visual clues to what is going on in the text, but picture books have one image to illustrate what is being described in the text on that page. Graphic novels have, or should have, all sorts of imagery from which the reader can extrapolate meaning from the image alone. This is a wholly different skill that we need to cultivate in our readers.

Graphic novels, especially for children, are at risk of not being published as frequently because they are extremely expensive to publish and also because of scanlation, they are being ripped off via the internet so while they may have a lot of readership, it may have nothing to do with how many copies they actually sell. Stacy King, a YA novelist who also works as the marketing manager for Udon Publishing, (and a friend of mine), actually had to explain this phenomenon to me after the panel was over.  (And I apologize if I mess it up, now…) In the history of manga publishing, it used to be that you had these manga pages in Japanese that people would scan post online and then also have a translated file for each panel so you could read, look, and laugh along.  This became such a big thing with such a dedicated following that now manga lovers have the option of reading pre-translated works (put out by people like Udon). Hooray, right? Well, as the technology has advanced, so has the amount of scanned works that are ripped off as bit torrents and downloaded by children (and everyone else) everywhere! This is problematic for publishers, obviously, but it also is problematic for the creators who are sometimes contracted to write or draw a certain series of graphic novels, but because of the scanlation phenomenon, publishers may choose not continue to produce the work.  I think, this is very obviously where the library comes in. We need to advocate the true value of graphic novels to parents, teachers, and yes, other librarians in our community. We need to make sure we have a wide selection of graphic novels from the commercially popular to the quality (and yes, sometimes they are one and the same). We need to continue to market ourselves as a free service and tell our customers that they don’t need to be dependent on downloading to get what they want to read for free, because … we have it! We also need to teach our customers that downloading is illegal, and hurts a lot of people in the industry of creation. So, in conclusion – Hooray graphic novels! And I will get down off my soapbox, now.

(A big thanks to Toronto Comics Arts Festival (Christopher Butcher in particular), the panelists and moderator for making this possible.)

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Eating Disorders in Fiction: Looks by Madeleine George

Meghan Ball is, to put it bluntly, fat. Hugely fat. But despite this fact, she’s sometimes literally an invisible girl at her high school. People treat her either like part of the scenery or she’s the bullseye for horrific abuse. She copes with the sadness that these two unhappy poles bring her by binge eating until she passes out. Aimee Zorn is physically Meghan’s polar opposite. She’s the daughter of a single, absentee mother who (in her opinion) seems better at saving ne’er do wells and turning them into boyfriends than parenting a teenage girl. Likewise, she reacts to this strained relationship by writing poetry and starving herself. The two girls become unlikely friends while plotting to get even with the popular girl who has betrayed them both.

I’ll say this: This book had a lot of potential for me when I picked it up. It’s an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, it’s the subject of rave reviews on the interwebs, Robin McKinley, (a Newbery winner) called it “Brilliant.” … Unfortunately, Robin McKinley, ALA, the interwebs and I disagree. Or, more probably, we’re just not looking for the same things.

I expect books that involved eating disorders (for whatever age of reader) to give a realistic account of what it is to have an eating disorder and provide a story arc that addresses that issue in a plausible and satisfying manner. What may be satisfying to me, however, may be different from an unbiased reader. Yes, it’s personalizing a medium that’s meant to be read by everyone, not just people with eating disorders, so please take me my comments with a grain of salt. But overall, Looks just doesn’t do it for me.

George does an excellent job of creating a perfect WASPy high school hell, chock full of apathy from the students, teachers, and administrators. I’ve met a version of all the characters in real life, from Ms. Champoux the highschool administrator dreaming of a career in juvenile corrections, and J-Bar the bronzed horrible antagonist with a secretly soft heart for puppies and basketball, to Mr. Handsley the passionate teacher who believes in the protagonists, but ultimately is too non-conformist for his own good. Come to think of it – I enjoyed the peripheral characters more than the main ones. But even though Meghan and Aimee are more pitiable than likeable, their narratives are constructions of very authentic voices.

The whole idea of being seen or invisible in society with regard to appearance is a compelling issue in high school and beyond. I love that Meghan could literally get away with things most kids would think impossible, simply because of apathy, indifference or disgust on the part of her teachers and other students. While it seems that Aimee is trying to make herself literally disappear, she wanted very much to be seen and loved, like Meghan. She is seen by her classmates and by her family, but also like Meghan, she very rarely has the words to make herself understood or to communicate her needs outside of her poetry.

Other than the plot and the niceties revolving around the ideas incorporated into the text, I’m not as pleased with the book as most critics for the simple reason that I feel that almost nothing is resolved. It’s as if George cooks up a huge pot of pasta, lets it boil, then dumps it all over the floor and walks away.

I find the plot to be a bit predictable – perhaps I’m a bit too well-versed in the evils of adolescent girls. Aimee – an amateur poetess – joins the school’s literary magazine and meets Cara Roy, a beautiful, multi-talented golden girl who takes her under her wing. We learn that Cara and Meghan used to be best friends, then “something happened” during a summer in middle school to disband the friendship and make Meghan (and Cara) who she is today. Aimee opens up to Cara by sharing her poetry, one of which is about anorexia. Cara reveals that she used to be anorexic as a result of this same incident, although neither she or Meghan never intimates to Aimee what has happened. At this point, we can all see what’s coming – Cara betrays Aimee’s trust and creativity as well. Aimee turns to Meghan, who has been trying to warn her about Cara. They decide to make Cara pay for her wrongdoings. They get even.

There’s also the convenient sub-plot of Life at Home. Aimee hates her mom for being so busy and she misses Bill, the hippie poet who used to be her mom’s live-in boyfriend but has since moved on. She wishes he would be her father and support her interests and feed her lime Jell-O, but the professor of literature has other things on his plate besides the daughter of an ex-girlfriend. (Think Hippie Hank Moody). When Bill says that Aimee should rely on her mother for support, Aimee releases herself of her relationship with Bill not without effort, but not really with conflict either. Aimee’s relationship with her mom is no better. When her mother says that she’s proud of Aimee for being creative and writing her poetry, and that Bill would be proud of her, too, Aimee lies to her and manipulates her. I think this is supposed to be the turning point in their relationship, but it falls flat. The reader doesn’t actually meet Meghan’s family until she brings Aimee home one day. She has a kind of lovely, almost Stepford home. Her mother and her little brother Jesse stay at home and make play-doh and bread together. She does comment about her mother’s blithe denial of life and reality, but it’s never developed further.

The conflict with Cara and J-Bar is probably the most unsatisfactory of all. They work out a method of revenge that humiliates them both, but all the reader gets in the end is a final confrontation in which Meghan sticks up for Cara, but then Cara turns on both Meghan and Aimee saying “the two of you deserve each other.” Really, no one is satisfied. This is a prime opportunity for all of them to talk about what has happened either over the years or the past few weeks but instead it just becomes a one-sided confrontation. Nothing has changed and no one feels better for it.

Perhaps this was supposed to be the message – that sometimes life just doesn’t resolve itself. People stay angry, bad blood remains bad, and even prime opportunities for climax don’t result in denouement. But in the final and following chapter and narrative of the book – things seem to be … resolved. Aimee and Meghan are a unit. We are invited to look at them. How they are visible together. How they … eat lunch together? This brings the reader to the slight issue of the eating disorders. Won’t someone please think of the eating disorders? What happened to those pesky things? Aimee eats? In school? With Meghan? What about Meghan? Does she still eat herself unconscious? Eating disorders don’t spontaneously self-correct upon revenging yourself. Especially if it’s not revenge that’s fulfilling. Um, you guys … the kids are not alright!

Eating disorders are strange extra characters in this story. While Aimee and Meghan never actually admit to their disorders to their families or even each other, it’s abundantly apparent that they are effected by anorexia and binge eating disorder, respectively. There’s also the issue of Cara’s supposed anorexia, from which she is in recovery. Everything is dropped, never to return again. And yes – it’s not about the food but considering that certain other things were not really brought to conclusion, I can’t imagine how these intense emotions that are expressed through relationships with food would be changed. On the whole, while eating disorders provided a potentially intriguing backdrop for the anguished story of adolescent women, I feel in the end they were a clumsily used trope rather than the expressive vehicles they could have been.

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Bulimia in Fiction: A review of Perfect by Natasha Friend

Isabelle Lee (age 13) is coping with the loss of her father and her mother’s grieving by falling into a pattern of bingeing and purging. When she’s caught by her 10 year old sister April (aka “Ape Face”) she is forced by her mother to go to “Group” – a small support group for young women with eating disorders. She’s staring at gross orange shag carpeting when Ashley Barnum, the most beautiful, popular girl in the 8th grade walks in and sits down. The two become unlikely friends as a result of their shared secret and soon begin engaging in symptoms together. Ashley is everything that Isabelle has ever aspired to be, and her friendship re-enforces Isabelle’s self-destructive behaviour. Can Isabelle remain true to herself, keep her friendship with Ashley and get well at the same time?

I admit – I had a very personal reaction to this book. At first, I thought that I would probably not recommend it for young women who struggle with eating disorders, since it might be seen as partially triggering. Isabelle and Amanda enumerate the “tips and tricks” of how to binge and purge more effectively throughout the book. Friend doesn’t pull any punches as far as illustrating how chaotic, desperate and horrifying binge eating can be, and for those empathetic readers who are going through the process of recovery themselves, it might be all too familiar. However, as I thought about it more, these passages, while powerful, might be considered almost superficial when considering the book’s larger message. Here’s why:

Perfect emphasizes that eating disorders are often caused by other emotions beyond a desire to be thin. Yes, Isabelle comments about her “fat” appearance, but it’s not really her main preoccupation. The death of her father, her mother’s grief, her feelings of alienation from her family are all much more present in the book than her desire to be thin. More importantly, the “fat” part of her concern is never present during any of the binge/purge scenes, which are mainly reactive to her feelings about her father. Ashley, too, while making the obligatory comments about her thighs while looking in her underwear, is symptomatic as a result of the absenteeism of her parents and her loneliness, rather than a fear of fat. While at first it bothered me that these reasons were “too facile” – that they didn’t really offer up the larger picture that some issues which lead to eating disorders are more vague and harder to pinpoint that absentee or deceased parents. Then I decided that this book is for pre-teens and I was reading too much into it with personal bias and maybe I should relax a little bit. ^^

While, as I mentioned before, Friend’s writing spares no expense in the description of the “gory details” of bingeing and purging, there was never any mention of the fact that Ashley or Isabelle gained or lost weight because of their symptoms. It’s given that Ashley looks gorgeous all the time, but Isabelle never comments on changes in her own weight. The fact that there is never any “positive” outcome of all their behaviours is another reason I think that this book is “safe for consumption,” if you will. Also, it’s interesting and gratifying to see an author writing about bulimia, rather than anorexia. One problem I have with the treatment of eating disorders in the media and society at large is that while people (in general) are perfectly happy to discuss restrictive behaviours and show endless pictures of emaciated models, no one seems to be willing to talk about bulimia or binge-eating disorder because, well, it’s messy. Hopefully, an increase in narratives like this will work to make this disorder less taboo and illustrate the prevalence of its effects on our culture.

Finally, Perfect spreads the same message I think we should all keep in mind – that eating disorders don’t only affect the people who “look like it.” They can also be wreaking havoc in the life of that quiet girl of average weight sitting in the corner of the cafeteria that never gets noticed.

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Twelve: A Toddler Book for Tweens

In the process of learning to do baby storytime, I’ve learned that one sort of popular book for infants and young toddlers is simply a book that outlines the basic components of “baby’s day.” Briefly, this is because they can easily make connections between their lives and what is going on in the book. Waking up, eating, taking a bath – all familiar territory. This leaves their brains free to fire its synapses on drawing more connection between life and illustration – increasing vocabulary, reasoning power, etc. Okay, I’ll be honest – before I dig myself into a hole, I’m still getting the developmental hang of this. I promise I’ve read something somewhere authoritative, but basically all you need to know is that infants and toddlers enjoy books that reflect the events in their everyday lives very much. (A very good example of this for toddlers is Peekaboo Morning by Rachel Isadora, or one of my faves, The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O’Connell.)

The book Twelve by Lauren Myracle, in my opinion, does something similar for tweens. They’re in a stage of developing autonomy, just like toddlers – and granted, it’s not like learning to walk and speak, but it’s literally growing a new body, maybe realizing that your ideas and values are different from your parents or your classmates, and other stuff that fuels the growing of blemishes, the writing of bad poetry and the need to be a total punk. Having a book reflect life experiences might be helpful getting through the day-t0-day drudgery of pumping endocrine systems, romance, school, parents, etc.

Twelve is actually a sequel to the book Eleven (bien sur) which introduces us to Winifred “Winnie” Perry, your typical suburban American pre-teenager. Winnie is fairly average: she’s pretty, not wildly intelligent, but smart enough to do well in school (though the academic aspect of her life is barely mentioned). She is, however, incredibly insightful and self-aware for a 12 year old. She analyzes her relationships with her various friends, her family, and her body like a pro, although sometimes she is extremely embarrassed by all three. You can also tell that despite the embarrassment factor, Winnie truly loves and enjoys her family. Her parents are down-to-earth and supportive, and her equally self-aware older sister Sandra is a teen, yes, but a good role model for Winnie. Who, in turn, is a wonderful big sister to 6 year old Ty. She even lets him try on her bras!

From Winnie’s narration at the beginning of the book, if we haven’t read Eleven (and we didn’t), we can assume that during the past year, her best friend, Amanda, has jilted her for the more popular, fashion and girly Gail. Through this social turmoil Winnie struck up a friendship with Dinah, who seems less mature and more fragile than Amanda, but is kinder and a more devoted friend to Winnie. During the course of Twelve, Winnie develops breasts, graduates from sixth grade, gets her ears pierced, attends sleepover summer camp, goes skinny-dipping, starts her period, learns to use tampons, enters the world of junior high school and *gasp* meets a guy! Changing personalities, evolving friendships, developing bodies, and how to be a good person while worrying what the world thinks of you all figure prominently in this novel, as they do in most lives at that age. Sometimes I thought “This is Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret for the digital native age!” but it’s sweet and funny in its own right. Looking back at my own life at that age, (and the sometime trauma it caused me), I was at times very touched by Winnie’s successes, failures and commentary. For a reader who is the same age as Winnie, her experiences will also serve to normalize the sometimes difficult, humiliating, and joyous process of growing up for tweens.

The flow of the book takes the reader from Winnie’s twelfth to thirteenth birthdays. Since Winnie’s birthday is in March, the natural storyline of the book goes from the end of one year of school through the summer and up until the spring of the next year at school. The story itself is not quite a story, it’s more of an internal monologue that can jump hours or days at a time, analyzing all the new life experiences that Winnie’s 12th year has brought her. The novel seems like it’s more of a stream of consciousness or a bulleted list of events than an actual plot.

The setting also tends to change quite a bit and so do the people. There are a lot of characters in this novel, some of which are permanent, some fleeting, some are prevalent in some chapters  of her life (harhar) and completely absent in others. A few provide interesting information about Winnie as a character, but most just seem to be window dressing for the scene. For instance, Winnie meets a whole cabin of girls at Camp Winding Gap, but we as readers hardly ever get to know them and they disappear with in the span of a few pages.  While reading, I was put-off by this laundry list of places and people, each with their own little crisis or situation. When were any of these things going to become really consequential? Amanda, Winnie’s former best friend, returns for a summer of friendship at camp, then all but disappears when Winnie starts school in the fall, only to re-emerge as a goth in the sequel, Thirteen (shhhh!). Except for perfunctory comparisons to Dinah, Amanda is essentially dead to us as readers. Meanwhile, she’s seamlessly replaced by a girl named Cinnamon, who then becomes a friend-fixture in the rest of the novel and the sequel. Perhaps my initially adverse reaction was personal: I like follow-up. I like plot. But, looking back on my own years, I realized that perhaps this is how the book mimics life. The year that bridges elementary and middle or junior high school is one of changing peer groups, schools, and general upheaval. People come and go, we’re introduced to new characters every day, and while there might be story arcs like camp, finding partners, school… it’s just illustrative of a time of great change in our lives. A staggering work of literary genius, perhaps it’s not. But it is a lovely alternative recommendation for the pre-gossip girl in your life.