My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger is like a spoonful of sugar. It is enticing, sweet, and it can help the medicine go down (or even just make a bad day a little better) in the most delightful way. It is a charming tale of three 11th grade students who are given the assignment to write about their best year. For our three narrators/protagonists, that was their ninth grade year.This is the story of TC, Augie, and Alejandra, three very different, but equally endearing characters. The reader learns about their most excellent year through diary entries, class assignments, instant messages to each other and other friends, e-mail, and letters (some to famous women of the past—those were my favorites!). It is a unique and modern way to go about telling the drama of these teens’ lives.
It is a cute story about friendship and its importance in teen’s lives. Readers will each have their favorite characters because there is something to cling to in each of them. TC is a bit of a wise guy, but his interactions with a young deaf boy show a much deeper side and if that does not impress, his baseball knowledge will. Augie is lovely; he is a great friend to TC and Alejandra and has exquisite taste in Hollywood starlets (The cools kind of starlets from old Hollywood films---Natalie Wood! Lauren Bacall! Yay! ---not the flimsy Paris Hilton kind). Alejandra was the toughest for me to like a first. She seems almost too perfect (too smart, too sassy, too pretty and too talented at singing and dancing …). However, she grew on me and by the end I really liked how much she had grown as a character. Plus: 1.) She writes to Jacqueline Kennedy (fantastic choice) and then switches to Mary Poppins (a part of the book that I loved) 2.) She is the daughter of a diplomat and has a cool friend and correspondent in her former secret service agent Clint (I want a friend like Clint; you will too) 3.) She is a girl that has an opinion and she actually states it out-loud (most of the time the reader just gets to read the thoughts of their cool female narrators, but Alejandra speaks her mind. It’s kind of awesome!).
This book is not the most serious of the YA novels I have read so far, but it has a really good message. The multiple perspectives and different types of narration re-enforce the novels key theme of communication. As people, when we communicate with each other and learn to understand our differences, then we can build a community. What a great message that is! This may be a more utopian type of world than what exists today. ***Spoilers***In this book, being gay is very accepted, parents are involved in their children’s lives, and if you really need to, you can meet Julie Andrews (people said this is way too unrealistic and maybe it is, but you never know…Julie Andrews is a classy lady, maybe she would take the time to write to a kid that looked up to Mary Poppins, that needed Mary Poppins in their life). Maybe it is ok to sometimes read about a world that is like our own, but a little bit better. Maybe the lessons that we learn from taking another perspective, like in the previous post for We Were Here, will be something we’ve gotten used to and we’ve moved past that someday. Isn’t it valuable to have some books that we read send a message that someday we’ll be able to move beyond those super serious conflicts? I think it is.
Parent/ Teacher Advisory: There are issues of love, identity, sexuality, and death discussed, but for the most part it is one of the tamest YA novels I have read. I will say though that it amused me how the adults in the novel did not seem to have much authority and some people may find that a little troubling; but, I would argue that these parents are at least very involved and accepting of the children and the choices their kids make, which is a very good thing, in my opinion.
Overall recommendation: I loved the pop-culture references throughout the novel; they were so great (and they were mostly historical, so the book won’t be dated in a few years)! The writing style takes a little while to get used to because of how often the narration switches and all the various ways in which information is coming to the reader, but once you get used to it, you can admire the effort it most have taken to put all of that together into a cohesive story. My Most Excellent Year is a little unrealistic, everything fits together much too neatly. However, I don’t think this devalues the work; the emotional arcs of the characters and their wit and humor are still easy to relate to, even if the plot is not. Basically, like I said before, the novel is like a spoonful of sugar. It is really good sometimes, but you cannot have it all the time or it will make you sick. This is a very sweet novel (I enjoyed it!), but in some ways, it does not have the highest literary nutritional value. That does not take away from its importance in the realm of YA novels. It offers an uplifting experience that is not always present in other novels. So read it for fun on a day when you need help escaping your own problems and it will help in its own way, like swallowing some medicine with a spoonful of sugar.
No comments:
Post a Comment