What I'm Reading Now: The Great Wall of Lucy Wu

Made me laugh? Yup.

Made me cry? Yup.

Made me want to use the words "Judy Blume" in this review? Yup.

Sixth-grader Lucy Wu is obsessed with basketball and hopes to play for legendary UT Lady Vols coach Pat Summit one day. But that's a long ways off. For now, she's short, being forced to go to Chinese school, and in an extended battle with mean girl Sloane---who puts crickets in Lucy's lemon chicken. To top it off, she has to share her bedroom with her non-English speaking, Vapor Rub odor-emitting, suddenly visiting great-aunt, Yi Po.

This novel is about walls: at first, the one Lucy erects in her bedroom to keep her great-aunt at arm's length. But later, there's the one in Lucy's school bathroom scrawled with a mocking poem about Chinese people; the walls between Lucy and her basketball dreams; and most of all, the walls inside that we all use to keep other people out...

What I loved most about this book---and what caused me to invoke the name of Judy Blume---is how debut author Wendy Shang keeps Lucy firmly grounded in her family, but gives us complete access to her inner life. Here is Lucy explaining what sharing a room with her great-aunt is like:

"Yi Po woke up every day before the sun even peeped out. And did she tiptoe out quietly? Not without making the bed! I lay in bed and listened to her every morning, walking around in her flat slippers that made a fwap-fwap sound with every step. I soon noticed that she had a little pattern every morning. Whoosh fwap-fwap. She pulled up the blankets. Swish fwap-fwap. She smoothed the bed. Poom fwap-fwap. She puffed up the pillow.

By the time she fwap-fwapped out of the room, I was too fwapping mad to go back to sleep."

No walls there.

Cross-posted on Goodreads.

Poetry Friday: Morning by Billy Collins

Billy Collins is on to me. He knows I'm a morning person---and even more so in summer when I can wake as early as I like and still be greeted by sunlight.

Morning

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

the swale of the afternoon,

the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,

his many-pointed stars?

This is the best—

throwing off the light covers,

feet on the cold floor,

and buzzing around the house on espresso—

read the rest here

Poetry Friday is hosted today at The Writer's Armchair.

Poetry Friday: Cosmic and E.E. Cummings

Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce, opens with a boy in a rocket ship, far above the Earth---and it's not science fiction. Not really. It's contemporary, with a solidly classic feel to the prose. My far-too short Goodreads commentary was: "Oh, yes, it's cosmic: a book with a totally believable voice and a wildly unbelievable plot.  And it doesn't leave you feeling like you ate cotton candy.  Wise and funny and wonderful." 

I should've also said that it gave me the same feeling as E.E. Cummings's poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town."

My first meeting with Cummings was in English class, in a hard-edged desk, with a worn anthology open in front of me.  We were supposed to be bored. We were supposed to be cajoled into loving this stuff. We were supposed to not want to dance when we read these words:


anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more


What the what? My brain spun. I flipped the words around on my tongue like those ubiquitous Pop Rocks that were popular in the 70s.

And there was more.

Of course, we had to discuss the poet's unconventional use of punctuation, syntax and grammar, etc., etc. What the what, in other words. (Later I learned that he was influenced by Picasso's cubism, which makes complete sense.) But why the why---that's what I wondered. Why couldn't we sing like this all the time?

In Cosmic, the boy hero doesn't "down forget as up he grows." And up he does grow, prematurely, so that everyone mistakes him for an adult. Which puts him in some intensely sticky situations, like on a rocket bound for the moon as the one responsible "dad" overseeing a group of kid astronauts. (I told you it was unbelievable.)

I'm not sure why the why I delight in the otherworldly---and the other-wordy, like E.E.'s poems. I'm just grateful nothing has to be as it seems at first glance. That our pretty how towns can be mundane and extraordinary at the same time. That poetry and classic kids book share much in common----mostly, a belief in the cosmic.  

Julie at The Drift Record has the Poetry Friday roundup today.