I picked up a copy of Steve Berman's first novel, Vintage: A Ghost Story
(Lethe Press 2007) at Darkovercon as one of the thank-you freebies for helping break down the art show. I seem to be reading a lot of young adult fiction lately, but this book is unusual in being a sensitive and convincing gay adolescent romance combined with a genuinely creepy ghost story.
The nameless first-person narrator is a teenage Goth, a high school dropout and runaway who now lives with an aunt and works in a vintage clothing shop run by the dashing alcoholic Malvern. He has a circle of female friends, led by the beautiful, black-clad Trace, all of them suffering from various degrees with family drama and coming-of-age issues of sexuality and romance, but has never so much as kissed another boy. So he is delighted to find his interest in handsome football player Josh returned...except for the small detail of Josh having been dead for fifty years. All the characters are beautifully drawn: alienated, Ecstasy-popping, closeted lesbian Liz; death- and occult-obsessed Trace with her habit of attending random funerals; Aunt Jan with her hopelessly inept cooking; the unexpectedly artistic Second Mike; and more.
Berman builds a fascinating story out of the narrator's struggles with the dangers (physical and emotional) of his affair with the phantom Josh, the growing collection of unhappy ghosts drawn by his talents as a medium, and his suppressed attraction to Trace's younger brother. The simultaneous menace and pathos of the ghosts and the realistic problems of the present combine for a gripping story that feels true to the unusual, non-mainstream teenagers I've encountered over the last decade or so. I recommend the book for young adults of all orientations as well as less-young adults interested in a queer speculative fiction or in a spooky little tale that effectively captures the conflicts and culture of another generation. It was, deservedly, a 2007 finalist for the Andre Norton Award for young adult science fiction and fantasy.
Update 1/24/09, from Steve Berman's website:
1/5 of the royalties from Vintage will be donated to charities helping gay teens: 10% will be donated to the GSA Network, which assists Gay-Straight Student Alliances in high schools; another 10% donated to the Trevor Project, which works to prevent suicide among gay youth.
Visit Steve Berman's website and/or read for yourself (shopping in a good cause):
helping break down the art show
That Susan... We just can't take her anywhere without her making trouble.
Seriously... Strictly speaking, I am impressed by your description of the book, and by its publishers releasing it. It seems less like a Young Adult novel and more like a story about young adults.
Posted by: Serge | January 24, 2009 at 10:29 AM
That's a hard distinction to make, isn't it? Fiction for young adults vs. a story about young adults or about matters of particular interest to young adults. It's sort of like discussions I had with Raven before Arisia over "teen panels" vs. "panels about things that interest teens."
Vintage is written at an fairly high level, but it's a fast read and the page count is a little misleading; there's not as much text per page as a typical adult novel. Would I have liked it as much if it had just been about teenaged romantic/sexual angst, gay or otherwise? Probably not; the ghost aspect is what really grabbed me. It is not, thankfully, some gauzy, heart-tugging paranormal romance story with an improbable ending where everyone lives happily ever after. But it's also a bit more linear and simplistic (problem -> solution; problem -> solution) than a typical adult novel.
For something I picked up completely by chance, I'm rather pleased.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 24, 2009 at 11:02 AM
Would you then say that the book is something between Young Adult and Adult?
As for my original comment... On some other blog I recently made some comments about TCM showing an early 1970s movie musical version of Huckleberry Finn. I remembered an article about it in Reader's Digest when it came out, and how they were decrying the lack of wholesome family movies. When I saw it, not long ago, I found myself thinking that this toothless whitewashed movie would have Mark Twain spinning in his grave. Frankly, anybody who think that Huck is a kid's story because the main character is a kid missed all the parts about slavery, and the nastiness of people.
Posted by: Serge | January 24, 2009 at 03:21 PM
Serge:
No, I'd say it's a YA novel that's perfectly find for non-young adults.
I'm a little startled by your implication that a kid's story can't have slavery or any nastiness in it. Huckleberry Finn isn't written at the young child's level, and I don't think older children need or ought to be sheltered from such things.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 24, 2009 at 03:29 PM
I'm glad your reward for helping us out turned out to be such a pleasant one. I may need to go looking for that book, based on your comments.
Lara
Posted by: Lara VanWinkle | January 24, 2009 at 03:51 PM
Susan... I don't think older children need or ought to be sheltered from such things
I agree, but the people who made that movie obviously thought so. It was painful to see Paul Winfield playing Jim with such a sunny disposition - at least in the parts I could stand.
Based on what you know of the YA field, would you say that they usually shy away from darkness? If they do, it might be because publishers don't want to anger parents, who tend to forget what they were exposed to as children.
Posted by: Serge | January 24, 2009 at 04:07 PM
I don't think I know much about YA literature, so I have no opinion. I don't read enough of it, despite what it's looked like a on Rixo lately.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 24, 2009 at 04:14 PM
Thank you for the kind words about the book. :)
Posted by: Steve | January 24, 2009 at 04:21 PM
Autogoogling? :)
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 24, 2009 at 04:27 PM
Still, Susan, you probably know more about the YA field than I do in spite of my reading the Locus reviews. There may be more darkness in the YA literature than I think since my impression is based on what kid movies are like. That is a trap I should not fall into, I know, considering how many people's opinion of adult SF is based on movies and TV. On the other hand, there have been movies like The Last Mimzy, which, while it had nearly nothing in common with the Lewis Padgett story, dealt with darkness: heck, it's about two kids from Today who know that their actions and decisions matter and will affect whether or not Tomorrow's humankind will avert extinction.
Posted by: Serge | January 24, 2009 at 04:55 PM
Modern YA literature often has quite a lot of darkness. I believe that there's always some kind of hope or redemption at the end, but I could be mistaken about that.
Posted by: Mary Aileen | January 24, 2009 at 05:29 PM
I don't really read YA literature, but when I was a kid, I had a book called Stonewords or Ghostwords, that was dark and sad and written at a grade school level. I read it three or four times before it got lost somewhere in the transition from kid to teen. Meanwhile, the much happier books that I read in that period of my life got read and set aside without another thought (and they now all blur in my mind until it's just one big blog of horses, teen and pre-teen girls, and winning races against impossible odds).
So I think there is a market for kid and YA novels that have a dark and/or bittersweet tone. I doubt very much that teens and adults just suddenly become Goth or Emo overnight -- they have to start being drawn to darker, sadder things earlier in life.
Posted by: AJ | January 25, 2009 at 02:29 PM
AJ... Maybe the kids who become Goth used to go straight from YA to adult, or straight from no-reading to adult.
Regarding Susan's comment about happy endings... This always makes me think of old-time film director Frank Capra. People make fun of his happy endings, but his main characters go thru Hell before they get to the happy end. The most famous example would be It's a Wonderful Life, which begins with George Bailey contemplating financial ruin and suicide on Christmas Eve, and we discover that his whole life was a succession of his giving up on his own happiness for others, and he literally stops existing, before he finds that he mattered a lot to everybody else.
Posted by: Serge | January 25, 2009 at 03:20 PM
Is Steinbeck's The Red Pony today considered a YA? I've never read the book, but I have seen the movie (with a score by no less than Aaron Copland), which of course may diverge considerably from the original. It is about growing up, with quite a bit of darkness in it.
I am reminded of a Locus interview with Terri Windling a few years back. If I remember correctly, she said she didn't enjoy horribly dark stories because she was quite intimately acquainted with darknes when she was growing up.
Posted by: Serge | January 25, 2009 at 06:32 PM
I expect it's my (very limited) choice of children's/young adults novels I've read recently, but they all seem fairly dark. Pullman's Dark Materials and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events which admittedly I've only read 12 of the 13 books of, spring to mind.
Even Harry Potter was darker than my memory says kids books were, but then again I was reading Dragonlance and David Eddings at the age of 10 and never really looked back from adult books after that.
Posted by: Neil Willcox | January 25, 2009 at 08:05 PM
Yeah I really liked it. IMO it is hard to do Goth in a way that feels both sympathetic to a non-goth grownup and realistic, and Vintage succeeds. Also at taking teenage love seriously without making it into forever and ever.
Posted by: Mer | January 25, 2009 at 08:55 PM
Serge:
Never read it, so no idea.
Neil:
I'm trying to think what children's/YA stuff I read, and I do recall some dark moments even in things like Marguerite Henry's books and other horsey stuff, even if they went on to happy endings.
Mer:
You know what's funny to me? The stuff in the book that apparently is supposed to be Goth only reads as such to me because it is so labeled. I thought wearing black and hanging out in cemeteries and enduring angst and playing with Ouija boards such were perfectly normal things to do in high school, and I was never Goth. (I'm not sure Goth existed as a subculture at that time; if it did, I wasn't aware of it.)
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 26, 2009 at 09:03 AM
In nonfiction, I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a child, which obviously wasn't exactly lighthearted. I went on from that to spend a weekend reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, most of which did not stay with me.
When I was seven or eight I read all but one of the Newberry medal winners to that point for a school contest, but I can't say I remember what most of them were. (Yes, I won the contest. Most people read three or four; I read something like sixty.) I know that introduced me to Lloyd Alexander and Madeline L'Engle.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 26, 2009 at 09:14 AM
Susan... I thought wearing black and hanging out in cemeteries and enduring angst and playing with Ouija boards such were perfectly normal things to do in high school, and I was never Goth.
That'd make you a proto-Goth. On the other hand, I think Goth started when you were in your teens. 1986's Beetlejuice featured a young Winona Ryder in what I consider Goth although it might not have yet coalesced into what eventually became Goth. And Gaiman's Sandman was being published at the time.
Posted by: Serge | January 26, 2009 at 11:25 AM
I was never attracted to excessive eye makeup or to what is considered Goth music. And by 1986 I was heading off to university and working RenFaires and attending cons and had plenty to occupy myself with. Nor have I ever read Sandman.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 26, 2009 at 11:38 AM
All this being said, I have to drop by the bookstore today to get a card for my wife since it's our wedding anniversary. I should look for Berman's book at the local Barnes & Noble. They have a very good YA section.
Posted by: Serge | January 26, 2009 at 11:49 AM
Since, as Mer observed to me on the phone last night, he won't actually get any royalties if people keep receiving his book as a freebie, that's a good idea. (Or if you order it through my nifty shopping link, I actually earn a few pennies to support Rixo as well. If enough pennies accumulate, Amazon will even send me the money instead of just a smug statement that I have so few pennies that they're not worth writing a check.)
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 26, 2009 at 12:31 PM
I have ordered it thu your nifty shopping link.
Posted by: Serge | January 26, 2009 at 12:57 PM
I guess one could call Pyle's Robin Hood and Stevenson's Treasure Island, once knpwn as Boy's Adventures, were their day's equivalent of today's YA, with the former having its central character be a young boy, and the former's cast all being adults but aimed at kids. But modern publishing, for ease of marketing, has created genres out of its ancestors that have stricter requirements.
Posted by: Serge | January 27, 2009 at 01:00 AM
Well, and technically, he may never get royalties. He has to earn back his advance before he gets royalties and many authors never actually get royalties.
As to dark YA stories, the WashPost has an article on it today. (There's a couple of side-stories linked in the box under the first para.)
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | January 27, 2009 at 01:07 AM
Ah, and while I was on the WashPost, I noticed that Gaiman's The Graveyard Book has won this year's Newbery Medal.
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | January 27, 2009 at 01:18 AM
Marilee: I learned that by Twitter-stalking him :D
(but Chris showed me the article, too. Still have to go pick up the book, since I didn't get it for Christmas/New Year/Channukah)
Posted by: AJ | January 27, 2009 at 02:46 AM
AJ, I got my copy from the library. I was in the hold queueueue for a couple weeks!
Posted by: Marilee J. Layman | January 27, 2009 at 07:42 PM
Good news for Gaiman followed by still more bad publishing industry news: Realms of Fantasy is closing after the April issue, per SFScope. Apparently the decision and announcement were so badly handled that the news spread before they managed to read editor Shawna McCarthy. Tacky.
Having just last week renewed my subscription for a year, I am miffed on several levels.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | January 27, 2009 at 08:28 PM
Marilee... Regarding Gaiman, I'm very much enjoying P.Craig Russell's comic-book adaptation of The Dream Hunters.
Posted by: Serge | January 27, 2009 at 08:29 PM
According to Twitter, The Graveyard Book is already in works in a movie.
Realms of Fantasy is going away? That's a bummer. I was looking forward to someday collecting a rejection letter from them.
Posted by: AJ | January 28, 2009 at 01:22 AM
What? No more Realms? They're my favorite magazine. Damndamndamn!
Posted by: Serge | January 28, 2009 at 02:34 AM
Well, that was quick.
I received Berman's book today.
Posted by: Serge | January 30, 2009 at 07:52 PM