Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate

Rating: WARTY!

"From a Newbery Medal–winning author..." Okay let me out! I've pretty much consistently been thoroughly underwhelmed by Newbery winners. Newbery to me is the equivalent of boring and pretentious, so I read them no more.

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Rating: WORTHY!

The only other Katherine Applegate I've reviewed was Eve and Adam, which I rated a worthy read back in February 2013, shortly after I started writing this blog.

I listened to the audio book for this. It's a very short book, less than four hours listening time. The reading is by Adam Grupper, whom I've never encountered before. In some ways his voice sounded perfectly right, in others not so much, but on balance, he did a really decent job with it. I particularly liked his take on Bob, the terrier mutt, and Ruby, the newbie elephant.

I liked this novel despite it being a Newbery winner. I read some of the negative reviews for this, and they seemed not to get it. There were reviews stating things like, "animals don't talk to one another". Well, duhh! That's exactly what I mean by them not getting it. The fact is that animals do talk to one another - they just don't do it in plain English, but they do communicate, particularly elephants, dogs and great apes (and yes, you are a great ape biologically speaking whether your ignorant religion likes it or not. Humans are genetically closer to chimpanzees than rats are to mice). The thing these reviewers are missing is that this actually isn't a story about animals which can talk to one another, it's how animals might talk to one another if they could. More realistically, it's a commentary on how humans treat animals spoken from the perspective of some of the animals we abuse so badly.

The ignorance among some reviewers about the smarts and sensitivity of the animals portrayed here was scary, and indicative of the second-rate science education which is proudly delivered to US citizens. Yes, gorillas, elephants, and dogs are sensitive. Yes, they do feel things in ways similar to humans. No, they don't speak English, but yes, gorillas (and chimpanzees, and Orangutans) have been taught to express themselves using American Sign Language for the deaf. Look up Koko and Kanzi and those are just two names off the top of my head. Yes, gorillas and elephants (and chimpanzees) paint pictures with paints and draw pictures with crayons in real life. Deal with it.

I started listening to this with a feeling of déjà vu, like I'd read it before, but either I didn't read the whole thing, or I read something else that was similar to this, yet not this, because after that initial feeling, the story went in ways I didn't expect, which diminished the feeling considerably. I thought this was a story where the animals would bust out of their confines and go on the run. That's not how it ended. The fact that they didn't break out made it more realistic and more sad, for me.

The story is told in first person from the perspective of Ivan, a silverback mountain gorilla who has been in captivity since infancy after he and his sister were kidnapped and his parents killed and turned into ashtrays. His sister died from the shock of confinement, and Ivan has been alone since. Since then, the only other wildlife he has seen has been on the cranky TV he has view of from his cage.

Ivan is stoic and limited in his perceptions. He's an ape of few words, although he's allowed poetic expression from time to time. He knows only what he sees, and doesn't think too much about what was or what will be. Most of what he sees is from behind the glass window into the mall, where he looks at ill-behaved passers-by and starers-in. He's allowed crayons and paper which he uses to draw what he sees, although both his artistic skill and vision are limited. His pictures are sold in a store near his cage. In his heyday, he had fans (the 'one and only' comes from the billboard on a highway near the mall), but now, the Big Top Mall and Video Arcade has gone downhill, and there are fewer visitors and even less money for maintenance, food, and treats.

Ivan's closest friends are Stella the elephant, who is sick from an infected foot the owner can't afford to get treated. Nevertheless she's expected to perform once-a-day for paying visitors, where she walks around while a poodle runs on her back and head. The placid Ivan does his turn there too. Nothing changes. Until young Ruby arrives - an infant version of, and replacement for, Stella. Ruby kicks things up a notch and the questions she peppers Ivan with are hilarious. Ivan gets "outside" news from Bob, the terrier mix who sleeps with him at night, but spends his time foraging and avoiding humans during the day. For me it was Bob and Ruby, not Ivan and Stella, who made this story. They represented hope which the gorilla and older elephant no longer had.

The blurb suggests that Ivan takes action to improve things. He doesn't. He has no power. Instead, he has actions performed upon him, and in the end, although far from ideal, these actions do improve his life and Ruby's considerably. I recommend this as a worthy read and a good discussion book to share with children of all ages.

Eve And Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate

Title: Eve and Adam
Author: Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate
Pages: 291
Publisher: MacMillan
Rating: Worthy!
Perspective: first person present

Well, I started this one last night thinking to read a couple of chapters before I go to sleep, and suddenly it's midnight and I'm at chapter 14 already which is about a third of the way through the book! The book is ordered in an alternating perspectives, one or two chapters written from the female first person - Eve's - the other from a male first person: not Adam's! Though it was a husband and wife team who wrote this novel, there's no indication as to who wrote which parts.

We start with 17 year old Evening Spiker (don't ask me where that name came from) or E.V. for short, but never Eve(!) crossing the street in San Franciso and being hit by a cable car. She loses a leg and gets an arm mangled and has a bunch of other injuries. She undergoes 14 hours of surgery, and finds herself coming around to an argument between her mother, Terra Spiker, who is demanding that EV be released into her care, and the doctor saying it will kill EV to discharge this girl at this stage. Terra wins and EV finds herself soon in the HQ of the several billion biopharmaceutical business which her mother owns, and which also has a hospital wing.

The man who travels with her in the ambulance from the hospital is called Solo Plissken. It's his perspective which we get counter-point to EV's, not Adam's! He's been a ward of EV's mom for six years, but EV has neither met him nor heard of him before. And he's also up to something: spying on Terra, taking notes, trying to break into her corporate files, trying to get her into trouble with the FDA or with the FBI. I suspect this is because he believes Terra had his parents killed.

EV has a love-hate relationship with her mother, and the EV perspective so far has been flawless, and hilarious, and thoroughly engrossing. I don't know if Grant is writing Solo and Applegate is writing EV or vice-versa or if they're mixing it up, but whomever is writing EV is doing a stunning job. I found nothing wrong with it until I got into chapters thirteen and fourteen when EV is talking about genetics. But I'm getting ahead of myself!

So the thing is that once she's in care of her mother, EV starts to make a startlingly rapid recovery. She not allowed to look at her leg, which suggests to me that her leg (which she refers to as The Leg, as though it's a separate entity with a life of its own) is perfectly fine - just as though it were never severed.

EV has a very close friend called Aislin (I have no idea what it is with these names folks!) whom her mother despises, but EV doesn't care if her mom likes her friend or not. Aislin has a loser boyfriend who is into drugs - not just doing, but selling, which is one reason that her mother despises Aislin. EV has no boyfriend and is concerned only about missing school, so her mom offers her a project, for which she will be paid. The payment she chooses is to be allowed to have Aislin come visit!

The project EV is given by her mother is to design, genetically, the perfect boy. EV is reluctant at first, but when she learns how cool the software is, she starts to really get into the project. And as you may have guessed if you've been following this blog at all, here's where I run into problems. We're never told how the software works, exactly, but the results are projected onto a giant (movie theater-sized) screen in real time as EV makes adjustments and additions and deletions in the genome, but the body doesn't quite work in the way that seems to be implied here. And why the giant screen instead of VR goggles?

As I've mentioned elsewhere in the blog, there is rarely one gene equaling one body component; it's far more often a gene family or group contributing to the body looking the way it does. It's not like a building plan where this wall goes here and three meters above the floor goes the ceiling, and which has a door in the wall two meters from corner C. The genome is actually closer to being a recipe, where different parts 'cook' together each influencing the other as the final product is baked to perfection (or not, as is the unfortunate case all-too-often).

Actually, in some ways, the genome is like a vector graphics program which creates pictures with mathematical formulae, but in this case, the vectors are controlled by the amino acids which create the proteins which build and regulate the body.

So it's hard to see how EV is creating the eyes, as she does, unless, perhaps, the software is taking what she draws on the screen and translating that back to the genes which would contribute to that body part, but it doesn't seem that way from how this is written. Anyway, she designs the eyes to be hazel, because she knows no one with eyes like that but as she plays with them, they end up being the exact same shade of blue that Solo has. This is way too convenient for my taste. It seemed pretty obvious that Solo was going to be the male protagonist when he was stuffed into the ambulance with EV right from the start. There was no reason at all for him to be there, especially since Terra doesn't even like him that much, except to be EV's love interest.

Now we're locked into a standard paradigm. Since he's so cool, and pretty, and since EV is so obviously drawn to him at the start, now we know that he's going to really piss her off at some point only to win back her affections for a happy ending. Unless Grant and Applegate are planning on some major twists, which they've so far failed to telegraph.

So according to that paradigm, next up is an EV crisis with which only Solo can help and of course, this can only be precipitated by Aislin's loser boyfriend. So he's in trouble in Golden Gate Park. He's hiding there. Drug pushers are looking for him because he owes them money. Instead of finding out how much he owes them and simply paying them (Aislin is not exactly a pauper, and EV's mom is as rich as Croesus), Solo sneaks EV out of the Biopharm facility in an electric car marked quite clearly and obviously with the Biopharm's logo. They pick up Aislin and go to the park where they get into a kind of fight with the drug dealers and rescue Maddox, her boyfriend (again with the freaking names! Jeez!). So now the drug dealers, one of whom was armed, know who to come after.

Working alone one night, EV is disturbed by one of the doctors who gives away some information about how the computer software she's using is connected to a genetics machine, but EV is too dumb to make her own connection.

Solo is woken at 2:14am by Terra, and ordered to meet her at one of the building entrances at once. When he does, Aislin is brought in, beaten up pretty badly. Yes, the drug dealers found her and Maddox, meaning that both of them are very, very stupid. There's still no explanation whatsoever as to what role these two are destined to play in this story, although I'm cooking up some cool ideas of my own, which I shall reveal momentarily!

Terra orders Solo to find Aislin a room and a doctor, and not to wake EV, so the first thing he does is wake EV. As Aislin is fixed up and asks how long she will look bruised from this, Solo confuses EV by saying it will take her a lot longer to recover than it took EV. To answer EV's confusion, he takes them into the bathroom where they cannot be seen or heard, and cuts off the bandage on her leg, which is now revealed to be completely healed with no scarring. Solo tells her she's been genetically modified, illegally, by her mom when she was two, to fix a heart defect, which also gave her body Wolverine-like healing powers.

The next morning, whilst Aislin is still snoring in her bed, EV cuts off the rest of her bandages and luxuriates in a hot shower. She takes down her drawing pad and starts to draw, but then gives up on it as a poor substitute, and heads back down to the computer to work on Adam, which is what Aislin named her genetic project.

So if we can genetically modify people so readily, can EV resurrect Maddox from the dead (if the dealers kill him?), or cure him of his drug addiction at least? Is EV really EV, or is she a blank, filled with EV's memories, like the characters in False Memory? I guess we'll find out because at this point, I like this story and I want to know how it ends.

As we get closer to the end, it goes downhill a little bit, but it picks up again at the end. Solo finds a way to get into one of the offline computers and steals a USB drive's worth of data including disturbing images of clones animals and even a couple of failed cloned humans. He's outraged. He gives a copy of the data to Eve, who is also grossed out, as is Aislin. Eve goes to visit Solo and finds him being beaten up by one of the scientists. Eve, Aislin and Solo escape form the Spiker building and cross the San Francisco Bay into the city, where Eve fights with Aislin and finds that Solo has let with the USB drive containing the incriminating images.

Eve can’t find Solo, but she finds Adam. Terra has created Adam based on Eve's design. This, of course, is impossible, and even if it were not impossible, it sure as hell wouldn’t be possible to do this overnight. Eve is suddenly, overwhelmingly in love with Adam, which is frankly, pathetic. Problem one.

Even more pathetic than this, however, is that Solo cannot transmit the incriminating images because he keeps thinking of what it will do to Eve. Problem two. Given what we’ve been told of Solo, this doesn't ring true, not even close. He goes to find Eve and is captured by Spiker employees.

Eve gets a call from Aislin. Maddox has been shot. He might die. He failed to deliver the $9,000 to the drug dealers, yet Eve is still willing to try and help Aislin and Maddox, even after she essentially dismissed Aislin from her life when they crossed the Bay. Problem three.

Eve takes Adam to the hospital. For some reason Aislin does not even see Adam, even though we have been told repeatedly that he is so outstanding a paragon of human male-hood that he can stop an emergency room dead just from his looks. (See what I mean about it going down hill?). Problem four. In the cafeteria, Eve is confronted by one of the drug dealers who tells her they need $13,000 by that night( $9,000 plus interest), or there will be more trouble. This is the last we hear of this issue for the rest of the novel!

So Eve decides she has to confront her mother; she heads to the Spiker building with Adam and Aislin in tow, the two of them getting along rather well together. Solo is captured and taken to the Spiker building where he's beaten up. The scientists plan on dunking him into the tank and reprogramming him, feeling safe that since nothing has appeared on the Internet yet, he has failed to upload the incriminating evidence. So they tank him and head upstairs in an unlikely mob to get Eve's mom. Eve arrives just in time to see her mom grossed out by this mom, and standing firm against them, so Eve climbs on one of the pieces of art her father created, which her mother keeps in her office, and uses it to spike the leader of the scientists in his head. Aislin gets his gun and then we hear no more about what happens to any of these scientists!

Eve, Adam, Aislin, and Eve's mom go down into the basement and rescue Solo, and Eve realizes she doesn't like Adam anywhere near as much as she does Solo, and Adam likes Aislin almost inexplicably. Put like that, it seems like the ending sucked, and it was rather weird with way too many holes left unfilled, but it actually picked up the novel from where it had looked like it was lying and brought it back to life - so to speak, so I'm willing to go worthy on this one.