Tell Me Lies: Patrick Cooper

I'm not gonna lie, I sometimes pick out books based on their covers. Tell Me Lies was one such find. I'm a hippie at heart, so I was intrigued by this book cover and the flap that describes a story about 1969 and an enlightenment driven commune.

So this is usually the paragraph I dedicate to explaining the story. Except I have no idea where to start! Because this book is about so much more than a guy named Stephen who has some Interesting Experiences. It is about Truth and Love and Community. It is about personal truth and a little bit about personal enlightenment. It is about knowing who you are and what you want and where you belong. All of this is expressed through the story of Stephen, a young English man in 1969. He's the son of conservatives, and has a brother, Rob, who has wrapped himself in anti-war activism. At first, Stephen has a Plan. He is going to work at the pub and live at home until he does whatever he's going to do. All well and good (and dull), until he visits Rob in London. It's kind of like Stephen suddenly realizes there's more to life than living at home. And so begins a Journey. He falls in love and gets his heart broken, he meets a lot of hippies, he does a fair amount of drugs, he seeks enlightenment, he joins a commune, and he falls in Love For Real. Actually, a Lot happens. Too much to recap.

I liked this book. It was a lot to take in, but that's how life goes. Underneath all the things that happen, there is an underlying theme of Stephens search for purpose, which is such a universal experience. Aren't we all searching for a place to belong and feel important? And the way Patrick Cooper writes, I had no problem identifying with Stephen. He's just an ordinary bloke, totally accessible.

My chief complaint about this Young Adult novel is that for a book about Truth and Lies, it takes awhile to get around to how important the truth can be. It's not until the very end of the book that Stephen is forced to question who has given him Truth and who has given him Lies. In fact, until the last two or three chapters, I didn't have any idea what the title referred to. Also, I'm not sure how "young" is appropriate. There is a lot of content in this book that would not be appropriate for middle readers, and maybe even some of the more immature high schoolers. However, I think that most adults would appreciate this novel, if only because Stephen is so accessible.

Rating: $$

Schooled: Gordon Korman

I picked up Schooled at my friend’s house while babysitting because it had a bright and interesting cover. A short, young reader novel, Schooled is a modern story of Tarzan for middle schoolers. Capricorn Anderson grew up on a hippie commune with his grandmother, Rain. When Rain takes a fall and is put in the hospital for six weeks, Cap is forced to lived in a suburban home and attend public school as an eighth grader.
The Tarzan parallels are pretty obvious; like Tarzan, Capricorn is taken out of his home habitat and thrust into a totally foreign culture and treated like a freak. In the name of tradition, Capricorn is nominated the eighth grade class president because his peers assume he will make a fool of himself since he is such a total loser. He wears tie dye and has a long mop of blond hair. He practices Tai Chi on the school’s front lawn before class starts. And he’s a total hippie with no contemporary references. Cap doesn’t even realize how different he is. Nor does he understand that being different is the kiss of death in eighth grade.
Of course it wouldn’t be a young reader novel if there wasn’t a really obvious moral. The moral here is that being different can be good. Cap takes on the responsibility of being class president and unites the entire middle school. His reign is not without mistakes, but ultimately, everyone learns an important lesson and they all live happily ever after.
I have to say that I really enjoyed this book. Yes, it’s trite, but it’s a sweet kind of trite. And the characters are really enjoyable. Everyone, at some point in their life, has felt as alien as Capricorn in a public school, but we survive. We make our own way and create our own niche, which is a crucial piece of information for middle school readers.

Rating: $$

Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost: Richard Rushfield

Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost is a pitch-perfect story of what happens when a new era swallows an old mentality. Richard Rushfield had the opportunity of experiencing Hampshire College at a time when the 80’s nihilism movement was overcoming the drug-induced era of hippie love.

Rushfield’s memoir is a delightfully structured, well written narrative. Beginning with his pre-enrollment days as a kid without social label, Rushfield discusses the realities of a “hippie school”. In its heyday, Hampshire was a college built on the foundation that learning shouldn’t be structured. The student body was a notoriously drug-addicted clan of mixed social circles, while the staff consisted of free-loving, free-thinking hippies who encouraged students to “try it out” whenever faced with something new.

Through a series of well-timed events, Rushfield falls in with a campus clique known as The Supreme Dicks, who are the most hated people at Hampshire. A group of lackadaisical layabouts, The Supreme Dicks lived by a certain standard of nonchalance. It is in his descriptions of the Supreme Dicks housing that Rushfield’s writing really shines. As I read about the food-encrusted paper plates stuffed between couch cushions, stagnant smoke-filled air, and industrious cockroach population, I could feel a layer of grimy apathy climb over me. Such were his descriptions of dorm life at Hampshire, that I could feel the weight of bitter nihilism.

Having discovered that college was a place where teachers didn’t take a roll call, Rushfield reveled in his freedom by not going to class at all, opting instead to loll about in the dingy quarters of his dorm. With a track record like his, it seems a miracle that Richard Rushfield ever graduated. His memoir is filled with the rollicking adventures of a young man on a college campus where one could do no wrong. The era of hippie love and free thinking had created an atmosphere where all expression was artful and censorship was to be banned. However, in the 1980’s, the hippie movement at Hampshire college faced its first set of campus rules. Class completion became mandatory, and disciplinary action could be taken against students for almost anything. The response was nihilistic, with a student body turned aggressive and determined to hold onto its apathy.

Don’t Follow Me, I’m Lost is a meandering narrative, with no moral theme of divine intervention to tie it up neatly. It is a very real—one might even say gritty—story of how complicated it can be to come to terms with responsibility in an atmosphere where apathy rules. Rushfield is a talented writer who brings every scene and emotion to life without trite clichés.