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attackfish) wrote2009-05-18 03:01 pm
attackfish) wrote2009-05-18 03:01 pm
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The Grounding of Group 6 by Julian F. Thomson: Parenting Made Simple
The library is a dangerous place to do research, so many distractions.
Fish: *Studies like a studious student*
Books: We need you, we want you, take us with you!
Fish: No, no, I cannot!
Books: But we're free.
Fish: Well you can't argue with... No, I've read all of you already. I am good, I can resist, I will not succumb!
Books: Awwww.
The Grounding of Group 6: Excuse me, um, Fish, you've never read me...
Fish: You poor thing! I never meant to neglect you so horribly.
I can't resist the pitfalls of such powerful temptation, but I can delay it, checking out my prized finds and saving them for later.
Julian F. Thomson's The Grounding of Group 6 is about a class at a school for young delinquents, a last chance school, where parents send their children to shape up, or if necessary send them to be disposed of. The five students who are slated to be killed, and their "teacher", the man intended to do the killing, head off into the woods for orienteering, but when he gets to know the kids, and he discovers he's to disappear too, their teacher can't go through with it, and they go on the run.
The Grounding of Group 6 asks "'Whatever happened to so-and-so?' How many times had someone said that to a friend? And gotten back the answer, 'Oh he or she just went away to school and I lost track of her or him.'" It then postulates that some of those kids die schools like Coldbrook Country School at the behest of their parents. These kids are supposed to be the worst, the unfixable, the truly evil, but of course sending one's child to be murdered says more about the parents than the children.
The kids each have problems. One cheated on her free writing assignments, one slept with her mother's lover, one couldn't get along with his mother's new romance. None of them have done anything to warrant death or to prove they can't fix their own lives. Even Nat, their "teacher" has his issues. He's a gambling addict, deep in debt to the uncle of a friend who wants him dead.
My problems with this book are several and mostly technical. Thomson overloads the book with exposition. He includes pages and pages of backstory, and tells the readers whenever possible instead of showing. He doesn't even try to work the information into the narrative. On a related note, he prefers to summerize events within the narrative instead of letting the reader see them as an event. I would have loved, for example, to hear what Marigold and the other kid's parents wrote about them instead of just hearing it described, or even better, I would have loved to hear Marigold's phone conversations where she quoted those letters. Also, there was no identifiable plot. They hung out in the forest, fell in love with each other, and by chance killed off the people trying to kill them before drifting back down to the school as normal students.
I normally don't much like non-linear storytelling, but this book could have really benefited from it. If instead of giving two page summaries of all the character's lives up to the start of the story, ending with their reason for being there, Thomson instead wrote scenes from their earlier lives that conveyed the same information, the book would have sucked me in and kept me sucked in.
As for non-technical stuff that annoyed me, Nat and Ludi's romance creeped me out. Not only is she the mystical martyr to the cause, the wise one, the barely a character instrument of the author, but she was sixteen. Nat, a new college graduate, is about six years older than she is. The glowing, sweet romance of the pair pissed me off both at Thomson and at Nat. Also, every single kid was a healthy, normal, white upper middle class to wealthy kid. The class part, I can't quibble with, because these are the kids of parents wealthy enough to have them offed this way, and it was the eighties with even fewer minorities with money than there are today, but why did none of the kids have a health problem? That hits the parents in the image just as bad as any of the minor infractions the kids did that got them sent there. Why were none of the kids queer? Coming out certainly might have gotten them sent there. Why did none of them have a neurological disorder or minor mental illness? Thomson was too busy painting them as near perfect blameless creatures to go into that. Lastly, the ending, with the students of Coldbrook voted on sensible school rules was disingenuous at best and smelled like a message to me.
At the same time, the dialogue, what there was of it, sparkled; it just popped. It was so perfect, and at times funny, or chilling, or fatalistic, and it's deliciously quotable. The kids banter and chatter like real teenagers, teasing each other, and their teacher, and I just kept giggling through the whole book.
I shivered reading this book, scared, in a good way, the good way that comes from knowing my parents would never do that, and my brother and I certainly gave them reason to. My brother went on wilderness survival behavior modification, and I went to an alternative school. I'm glad I didn't read this right before I started at that new school. There is a fear in this book about school and its motivation.
Ludi's recitation of the philosophies she grew up with, about the glib, stupid assumptions about class, queers, minorities, and women made me laugh and hurt at the same time because not much has changed. She does it just to prove she could be the ideal student if she wanted to. When Nat says "You really know The Answers. You must have been great in school," she replies "I was a model prisoner in a lot of ways. I didn't talk back or smoke in the girls' room. But I just didn't do a lot of things I was told to. And I made people furious, because They Knew I Knew Better." Nat just replies, "That's like giving the Wrong Answer on purpose, isn't it?"
The ideas and dialogue got me through this book and had me thinking about it for a long time after I read it, so I guess that makes it a good book.
From now on, this book will be added to the pile of books I hold up and wave wildly whenever someone says I read nothing but Fantasy. At least it's Young Adult.
Fish: *Studies like a studious student*
Books: We need you, we want you, take us with you!
Fish: No, no, I cannot!
Books: But we're free.
Fish: Well you can't argue with... No, I've read all of you already. I am good, I can resist, I will not succumb!
Books: Awwww.
The Grounding of Group 6: Excuse me, um, Fish, you've never read me...
Fish: You poor thing! I never meant to neglect you so horribly.
I can't resist the pitfalls of such powerful temptation, but I can delay it, checking out my prized finds and saving them for later.
Julian F. Thomson's The Grounding of Group 6 is about a class at a school for young delinquents, a last chance school, where parents send their children to shape up, or if necessary send them to be disposed of. The five students who are slated to be killed, and their "teacher", the man intended to do the killing, head off into the woods for orienteering, but when he gets to know the kids, and he discovers he's to disappear too, their teacher can't go through with it, and they go on the run.
The Grounding of Group 6 asks "'Whatever happened to so-and-so?' How many times had someone said that to a friend? And gotten back the answer, 'Oh he or she just went away to school and I lost track of her or him.'" It then postulates that some of those kids die schools like Coldbrook Country School at the behest of their parents. These kids are supposed to be the worst, the unfixable, the truly evil, but of course sending one's child to be murdered says more about the parents than the children.
The kids each have problems. One cheated on her free writing assignments, one slept with her mother's lover, one couldn't get along with his mother's new romance. None of them have done anything to warrant death or to prove they can't fix their own lives. Even Nat, their "teacher" has his issues. He's a gambling addict, deep in debt to the uncle of a friend who wants him dead.
My problems with this book are several and mostly technical. Thomson overloads the book with exposition. He includes pages and pages of backstory, and tells the readers whenever possible instead of showing. He doesn't even try to work the information into the narrative. On a related note, he prefers to summerize events within the narrative instead of letting the reader see them as an event. I would have loved, for example, to hear what Marigold and the other kid's parents wrote about them instead of just hearing it described, or even better, I would have loved to hear Marigold's phone conversations where she quoted those letters. Also, there was no identifiable plot. They hung out in the forest, fell in love with each other, and by chance killed off the people trying to kill them before drifting back down to the school as normal students.
I normally don't much like non-linear storytelling, but this book could have really benefited from it. If instead of giving two page summaries of all the character's lives up to the start of the story, ending with their reason for being there, Thomson instead wrote scenes from their earlier lives that conveyed the same information, the book would have sucked me in and kept me sucked in.
As for non-technical stuff that annoyed me, Nat and Ludi's romance creeped me out. Not only is she the mystical martyr to the cause, the wise one, the barely a character instrument of the author, but she was sixteen. Nat, a new college graduate, is about six years older than she is. The glowing, sweet romance of the pair pissed me off both at Thomson and at Nat. Also, every single kid was a healthy, normal, white upper middle class to wealthy kid. The class part, I can't quibble with, because these are the kids of parents wealthy enough to have them offed this way, and it was the eighties with even fewer minorities with money than there are today, but why did none of the kids have a health problem? That hits the parents in the image just as bad as any of the minor infractions the kids did that got them sent there. Why were none of the kids queer? Coming out certainly might have gotten them sent there. Why did none of them have a neurological disorder or minor mental illness? Thomson was too busy painting them as near perfect blameless creatures to go into that. Lastly, the ending, with the students of Coldbrook voted on sensible school rules was disingenuous at best and smelled like a message to me.
At the same time, the dialogue, what there was of it, sparkled; it just popped. It was so perfect, and at times funny, or chilling, or fatalistic, and it's deliciously quotable. The kids banter and chatter like real teenagers, teasing each other, and their teacher, and I just kept giggling through the whole book.
I shivered reading this book, scared, in a good way, the good way that comes from knowing my parents would never do that, and my brother and I certainly gave them reason to. My brother went on wilderness survival behavior modification, and I went to an alternative school. I'm glad I didn't read this right before I started at that new school. There is a fear in this book about school and its motivation.
Ludi's recitation of the philosophies she grew up with, about the glib, stupid assumptions about class, queers, minorities, and women made me laugh and hurt at the same time because not much has changed. She does it just to prove she could be the ideal student if she wanted to. When Nat says "You really know The Answers. You must have been great in school," she replies "I was a model prisoner in a lot of ways. I didn't talk back or smoke in the girls' room. But I just didn't do a lot of things I was told to. And I made people furious, because They Knew I Knew Better." Nat just replies, "That's like giving the Wrong Answer on purpose, isn't it?"
The ideas and dialogue got me through this book and had me thinking about it for a long time after I read it, so I guess that makes it a good book.
From now on, this book will be added to the pile of books I hold up and wave wildly whenever someone says I read nothing but Fantasy. At least it's Young Adult.