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Musings: Writing From The Heart: Strange Star by Emma Carroll and Out of the Wild Blue by Blue Balliett

Strange Star by Emma Carroll

Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0399556050

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

In a recent interview, R.L. Stine expressed his frustration with the writing advice “write from your heart.” To paraphrase, he said “I don’t write from the heart. I write to entertain.”

You may argue that Stine writes formula fiction, which can be predictable, and that it’s shallow to write only to entertain. Only you can make that decision, but know that just because you are writing out of love, that doesn’t mean your writing will be loved, or even understood, by the audience you are trying to reach. I’m writing about children’s books here because that’s what I love and where I’ve recently seen examples of this, but if you’re writing for any audience, this still applies. In general, people who read to escape are looking for a good story, one that flows. They don’t want to have to work for their chills and thrills. I think that’s particularly true for children and teens.

I’ve come across two books this month that illustrate this perfectly. The first one, which I recently reviewed here, Out of the Wild Blue, by the outstanding children’s author Blue Balliett, was a tribute to Nantucket and its ghosts. It is clever and literary, and the worst book she’s ever written. I read it because I was asked to by another school media specialist who couldn’t get through the first 20 pages. Both of us are baffled at the amazing reviews this book has gotten from other librarians and reviewers. Heavy on atmosphere, this book shorted us on character development and plot. It was WORK for me to get through it, and what kid wants to have to work for the creepiness and chills you expect in a ghost story? I mean, the story is practically a love letter, but it’s not successful as an accessible ghost story for children. Or, for that matter, for at least two other adults with expertise in children’s literature.

The second, Strange Star, by Emma Carroll, has a lot of originality, although it’s not necessarily successful at getting the reader to fully suspend disbelief, and some of the pieces don’t connect as smoothly as they could. Strange Star centers on the events of the “haunted summer” during which Mary Shelley first conceived of Frankenstein. The first point of view character, is Felix, a free black servant boy working for Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati, whose goal is to convince Byron to take him back to England as a footman. His story is told in third person. We get Felix’s impressions of Byron, the Shelleys, and their friends, and some pretty detailed information on them is communicated through him. Felix isn’t only used as a way to communicate information, though. He is a character with agency and his own motivations. The second point of view character, Lizzie, an English village girl who was struck by lightning, blinded, and kidnapped by a scientist obsessed with using electricity to resurrect the dead, speaks in her own voice. Her experience of the same group of people that Felix admires is a terrifying one.

The author named many of the fictional characters in the book after characters in Frankenstein as well, even naming the scientist Francesca Stine. She managed to include historical figures like William Godwin, Mary’s father (a relatively minor part of her life after she ran away with Shelley) as a character, whose motivations and actions help move the story toward its conclusion. The messages of and ideas behind the creation of Frankenstein come through clearly in the book—clearly Carroll did her research and used it creatively.

As someone who’s read Frankenstein and also read a lot about Mary Shelley, I found this to be really well done and clever. It is vivid, not just in its descriptions and setting (the title is Strange Star for a reason), but in its portrayal of terrible emotions, particularly grief. Carroll also did a nice job of seamlessly integrating diversity into her characters. But I am not the audience. This is a book written for middle-schoolers, most of whom will not yet have read Frankenstein or heard of Mary Shelley. They won’t even yet have encountered the work of Percy Shelley or Lord Byron. They will miss most of the references and won’t be able to connect the dots when things are implied rather than stated outright (okay, maybe you don’t want them to figure out that Claire Clairmont has a thing going on with Byron). You would have to love Frankenstein and be fascinated with the life of Mary Shelley to write this book, but so much of it will be above the heads of the readers it is targeted for!

I’m sure there are more readers for this than for Balliett’s book, because Carroll handles plot and character development much more effectively—parts of the book are disturbing and even terrifying—but while Strange Star is definitely one to remember, and certainly one I’d recommend to fans of Mary Shelley, it’s more the book that Carroll wanted to write than the one her target audience will appreciate.

As an adult choosing or reviewing a children’s book for a child or teen, it can be easy to forget that we can’t read these books as if they’re written for us when making recommendations. And as an adult choosing to write a book for a child or teen, or really anyone looking to read for pleasure, it’s important to recognize that, if you want to reach readers, writing from your heart is not enough.

 

Posted on September 21, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

Pegasus Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1681777528

Available: Hardcover, used paperback, Kindle edition,

 

We know Mary Shelley as the daughter of revolutionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and muse and wife to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who as a teenage girl who wrote Frankenstein, but beyond the anecdote of the challenge to write a ghost story issued one night at the Villa Diodati. But we don’t really KNOW her, beyond the facts of her life.  Somehow, her own life and thoughts have been passed over in favor of her companions, and we have been mostly left with the myth of Frankenstein’s creation, and the many permutations of her novel that have capitalized on it.

In this biography, Fiona Sampson aims to capture the “real” Mary, through her letters, journals, and publications, those of her friends, family, and colleagues, and recreating the context of the time she lived in and how that affected her, from the reading she chose, to the effects of changing climate and the development of electricity.  During the short time she was with Shelley, Mary was pregnant five times. Three of her children died at a young age, and she miscarried a fourth. During the same time period, her half-sister Fanny and Percy’s legitimate wife Harriet both committed suicide.  Intense and intellectual to begin with, Mary dealt with difficult emotions like grief and guilt as well as physical problems while still taking responsibility for the mercurial Shelley’s welfare, and completing and publishing a book. These are the facts of Mary’s life with Shelley, but Mary’s life did not end when Shelley’s did– and throughout her life, she was a survivor. Sampson has taken an unusual and effective approach to her subject, taking a “close-up” of who Mary Shelley was and how she became that person, a young woman who, surrounded by great men, “forced open the space for herself in which to write” and because of that, was later able to establish a literary life of her own.

While not a complete look at the Shelleys and their friends and family, the zoom-in focus on Mary Shelley makes this a worthwhile, and fascinating read. Recommended for adult library collections

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on August 22, 2018 by , Reply

Teen Read Week: Guest Blog by Jason Henderson– John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

Jason Henderson is the author of the Alex van Helsing books, about a fourteen year old descendant of the vampire hunter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula living in a boarding school near Geneva, who just might be the supernatural world’s James Bond. The first book depends a lot on the events of the Haunted Summer at Villa Diodati, where Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Lord Byron, and others decided to test their ability to write an original ghost story on a dark and stormy night.

       

I asked Jason if he would write a little about the Haunted Summer. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the only literary work to emerge from that party at the Villa Diodiati; John Polidori is largely unknown today.Except, apparently, in Texas, around Halloween, when you can go to a Polidori Pumpkin Party. Which would be a TOTALLY cool event for any library (or teen group) to hold. I know I want to go!

John Polidori, Mary Shelley, and the Haunted Summer

by Jason Henderson


My favorite Halloween Activity is something called Polidori’s Pumpkin Party, a major leaf-blown Autumn fiesta started in Texas of all places back in the 90s. We named it after a guy named Polidori; more on him later. But the idea of the party was this:

• Invite your friends to a Halloween Party

• Cost of admission: something creative. A story (keep it under ten minutes, guys), a painted mask, a cupcake if it’s creative

• Everyone has to sit at the hot seat and present without making a fuss about how their offering isn’t any good. If they start doing that, everyone should yell, DECLAIM! Until the person stops apologizing and reads.

• Repeat until everyone has presented.

 

The Polidori Party became a lifeblood of creativity for me and my friends both in school and after because it was an excuse to be creative, to have to be creative at least once in a year. “Are you ready for Polidori”? “I still have to write for Polidori”. Everyone spent time (often literally the day of the party, but that’s life) preparing. Hint: I really recommend making this part of your Halloween tradition.

Every Halloween I think of Polidori and his friends, who were generally considered the coolest kids in Europe, in the cold summer months of 1816. They were the original haunted story-slingers, brash and overconfiden,t and often brilliant.

I wrote about them in my first Alex Van Helsing book, and most of this recap in fact bears a strong resemblance to a talk given by Alex’s mentor, the motorcycle-riding super spy Mister Sangster. Mister Sangster has the benefit of teaching on the very lake where the group hung out—we can only imagine.

It is to me the perfect Halloween story, though it wasn’t actually Halloween. It was summer, and it was cold.

The party at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816—the Haunted Summer–consisted of five writers: Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who were already quite famous; two young women writers, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Shelley) and her half-sister Claire (whom Mary disliked so much that she doesn’t even mention her in the introduction to Frankenstein); and Byron’s doctor friend, Polidori, who wrote short stories. They were bored out of their heads, because although it was summer, there had been a massive volcanic eruption in Asia that had clouded the sky and made the weather everywhere cold and rainy. So Lord Byron issued each of them a challenge: write the scariest, most terrifying story you can.

In her introduction to the 1831 edition, Mary says the famous guys each wrote some minor pieces, and that Dr. Polidori had—and this is kind of fun—“some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole — to see what I forget — something very shocking and wrong of course.’”

I mean, we had to base our party on him.

Remember: they were all very young.

Lord Byron, on the run from creditors, was 28, Shelley was 24, fleeing his marriage, with his new 18-year-old mistress Mary; John Polidori was 21;  and Claire was 18. After the summer which birthed The Vampyre, Childe Harold Canto IV, and Frankenstein, they didn’t last long, either. Polidori was dead in five years, Shelley a year later, and Byron two years after that. Within eight years, all but Mary and her sister Claire were dead. In between were tragedies no parent should ever endure, and they endured them again and again.

But in 1831, something about the record changed. When Mary was 34, she rewrote her masterpiece Frankenstein for a new edition. She promised her editor that the revisions would be minor, a few typo fixes here and there. But it wasn’t true—the 1831 Frankenstein was a clean-up job. It got rid of  the messy politics of the earlier version, and, best of all, added her introduction, which told the story of the Haunted Summer, but cleaned that up, too: it eliminated Claire, by whom she was embarrassed, and most of all, changed what the attendants were writing about.

When I wrote the first Alex Van Helsing book, the crux of the story was that something about the change Mary made to  when she was in her thirties was an attempt to hide something about what happened when she was a teenager. That there are secrets between the lines. I feel that way today, and it is true of my own books. So there are secrets inside secrets.

Here we are in October. Capture the spirit of that crew: Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Claremont, Polidori. What are the secrets you can reveal?

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Interested in learning more about John Polidori?

Find out how to host a Polidori Pumpkin Party by visiting the Polidori Society’s website.

Check out The Vampyre, the influential novella he wrote during the Haunted Summer.
Polidori also appears in Veronica Bennett’s teen title Angelmonster, which is very well written.

For a more substantial account of the evening at the Villa Diodiati and the people who were there try The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler.

And, of course, there are Jason’s own books. In the spirit of the challenge at the Villa Diodiati during that Haunted Summer, take the time to celebrate your creativity this Halloween!

Posted on October 18, 2013 by , Reply