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Sita

All We Can Do Is Wait, Reviewed by Sita, 13

All We Can Do Is Wait by Richard Lawson is an incredibly moving story about life, death, and the gray area in between. It is set in Boston, Massachusetts, with the collapse of the Tobin Bridge bringing hundreds of people to Massachusetts General Hospital to hear news about their loved ones. Among them are five teens: Scott, Alexa, Jason, Morgan, and Skylar. Scott is waiting to hear about his girlfriend; Skylar worries for her older sister; Morgan hopes for news about her father; Jason and Alexa—siblings who are not close—try to comfort each other about the fate of their parents. As they all sit in the waiting room, their fear and agitation pushes the teens together, and they end up forming a surprisingly close bond, even though they have only known each other for a few hours.  The characters felt incredibly lifelike and relatable, and the author manages to make the reader empathize, if not sympathize, with even the most detestable characters. In a very short span of time, each character undergoes a change of heart, priorities, or of character. Jason and Alexa start to repair their fractured family; Scott tries to finally let go of the past; Skylar learns the importance of confidence and self-reliance; Morgan learns to accept change. In addition to its captivating characters, the prose in All We Can Do Is Wait is well written and does an excellent job of conveying emotions. Jason says he “still felt rooted in place…because he didn’t know what was left of his life inside.” Skylar “felt herself standing very much in the middle of it. Not the center of it, not the focus of all this chaos, but caught in its tightest, fastest winds, circling around her, whipping past and jostling her like turbulence.” On the surface, this book seems like many others: a saga highlighting the dystopian undertones in our society, simply following the trend of forcing character development with over-the-top disasters. But it is much more than that. Waiting rooms, where the entirety of All We Can Do Is Wait is set, are just what they sound like: rooms meant for waiting, settling in as we twiddle our thumbs until we are called in, or we get The News, or really, whatever gets the story started. They are rooms for the “Inbetween.” But in this book, waiting rooms are not the place where you wait for the story to start; they are a story in themselves, rooms full of soon-to-be widows or orphans, full of future history-book-worthy events. This novel explores the moments before death, the seconds before the grief sets in, the instances before someone’s world changes, and how knowing that you are in a room meant for exactly that can bring strangers together or extinguish the last remaining embers of a once-close relationship.   All We Can Do Is Wait by Richard Lawson. Razorbill, 2018. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!

Community: A Most Unique TV Show

In the first episode of the sitcom Community, Jeff Winger, a lawyer disbarred for faking his bachelor’s degree, has to go to Greendale Community College to get his degree. To win over a woman in his Spanish class, he pretends to be a Spanish tutor with his own study group. Five others from the class join the group too, and they form an unexpected friendship over the show. Thus begins six seasons of film homages, subversive self-referentiality, and resonant character development. Community references specific movies and entire genres of film, and references can last anywhere from one line to an entire episode. What distinguishes homages in Community from your average spoof is that the characters recognize homages when they see them, often making a point of accentuating the homage, especially Abed, the film enthusiast who seems to know more about television than the real world. The show has many paintball episodes (in which the entire school plays a game of paintball assassin) and a Hot Lava episode (in which the school plays a game of Hot Lava), which include homages to Star Wars; Lord Of The Rings; Mad Max; and the post-apocalyptic, western, and spy genres. In the Star Wars episode, Abed “calls dibs” on playing Han Solo once he realizes the game is becoming like the aforementioned movie.  Appropriately, for a show that seems to know all the tropes of popular culture, it knows when to subvert them, too. When Annie loses her pen, she makes everyone in the group stay in the study room until they find out who took it. Abed sighs, saying he hates bottle episodes, which take place in one room, usually to save money or to speed through character development. Like other bottle episodes, this episode was highly emotional, but lacks the forced character development. The episode “Paradigms of Human Memory” is in the format of a clip episode, which is a tool used mainly to dramatically cut costs by recycling old footage. The episode, however, included entirely new footage, and was one of the most expensive episodes of the show. Community has been on the verge of cancellation many times, which the show has addressed. In the season 5 finale, when NBC had cancelled the show, Abed said, “We’ll definitely be back next year. If not, it’ll be because an asteroid has destroyed all human civilization. And that’s canon,” looking directly at the camera. The show references itself in a very intelligent way, using Abed’s love of film and habit of relating life to TV to be self-referential without breaking character or losing realism. But without great characters, Community would fall flat. While in the pilot episode, they appear to be nothing more than one-dimensional stereotypes, they quickly become fleshed-out characters with realistic portrayals of their diversity. Abed has Autism Spectrum Disorder, and “represents a unique individual on the autism spectrum rather than a stereotypical bundle of symptoms,” according to Interacting With Autism. In addition, each episode has ramifications. A revealing episode focused on one character forever changes how others treat them. In the episode “Advanced Dungeons And Dragons”, Pierce bullies Neal, whom the study group is trying to prevent from committing suicide. As a result, Pierce and the rest of the group become more distant and fight much more often.  One of the main characters on the show, Shirley, says when talking about Abed’s favorite show, “It’s smart, and doesn’t talk down to its viewers.” It would be very hard to find a more appropriate and succinct description of Community.

Interview with Author Kate Milford

I have always been a big fan of Kate Milford’s books, and so when I heard she had a new book coming out I very quickly knew I would want to write about it. Since I had already written a blog post on her other books, I decided that instead of a review, I could interview her about the book and her writing in general.  The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book was released February 23, and, unsurprisingly, it was very engaging and altogether wonderful. In it, strangers are trapped together at an inn, and as the blurb so eloquently puts it, “to pass the time, they begin to tell stories… that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended.” Each story told in the tavern stands on its own, but an overarching story emerges from all of the tales, making the book feel like a short story collection where each short story indirectly contributes to the overarching one. It takes place in the 1930s, in the fictional city of Nagspeake, the same city in which Milford’s novel Greenglass House is set. In fact, in Greenglass House, the story’s main character Milo’s peaceful winter vacation comes abruptly to an end when unexpected guests start arriving at his parents’ inn. One of these strange guests has with her an old book which Milo ends up reading and the book even ends up driving some of Greenglass House’s plot. This book within a book is The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which readers can finally read for themselves. Below is a lightly edited version of my Q&A with the author Kate Milford.   Sita Welt: Why did you decide to write “The Hollow-Ware Man” [the tale told by Sangwin] in verse? Kate Milford: It was actually one of the first stories I wrote for the book–I think the first three were “The Yankee Peddlers,” “The Devil and the Scavenger,” and then “The Hollow-ware Man.” I wrote the first draft of it back in 2014, when I thought I would be self-publishing The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. I *think* my thinking at the time was that I wanted to write something that would be as haunting as the idea of this character was for me, and I love ominous old poems and ballads. Plus, since one of the things I wanted to do with Raconteur’s was represent a wide variety of different types of folklore, it would’ve been a bit of an omission not to have included something like a poem or a ballad. (In my head, I imagine there’s traditional music for it somewhere in Nagspeake.) But if I’m honest, I don’t think I was thinking about all that exactly, when I first sat down to write the poem. It was something I thought about later–that I wanted riddles and trickster tales and some form of fortune-telling, etcetera, and how nice that I already had something in verse. SW: Where did the idea of “old iron” come from? Why is old iron such a big part of your stories? [“Old iron” is a magical, self-aware iron in the books] KM: I began writing about Nagspeake’s self-aware ironmongery even before I had the first idea for a book set in the city. It was one of the earliest things I knew about Nagspeake. I actually don’t know why I started in with the self-aware iron in the first place, except I’ve always loved the way ironwork can take damage over the years that makes it look like plants growing at odd angles–like you’ve caught a fence or a railing mid-motion, and it’s frozen in place until you turn your back again. There really wasn’t a reason for it to make an appearance in Greenglass House, so it didn’t; however the iron is also why Nagspeake’s locally-made glass has the green tint that gives the house its name–iron oxide can give  glass a greenish hue. But it turns up in the other books set in the city, building to what we see in The Thief Knot and The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. Over time, it sort of became a character, in a sense. SW: Where did names like Trigemine, Alphonsus, Pantin, etc., come from?  KM: Oh, I collect names from all sorts of places! I keep a notebook of names I like and words that I think might make interesting names. Old-fashioned words, obsolete words… right now there’s a tab open on my browser with a list of like a hundred types of seaweeds that I’ve been using for names in a current project. Sometimes if I know something about a character, I’ll pick a word or phrase that has a connection to them, then I’ll look up synonyms, etymology, history, etc., until I find something that sounds like a possible moniker. And sometimes I invent patterns to help me find names, mostly as a game to amuse myself. When I wrote the first draft of the story about the Yankee Peddlers, I gave them all names that were to do with the body. Trigemine, also a peddler, got his name from a body part, the trigeminal nerve. Sangwin’s name fits that pattern too, if you say it out loud. I didn’t invent the ‘Alphonsus,’ but his last name (being a Yankee Peddler) is Lung. Pantin means puppet in French, though I had to look it up just now to remember. The Haypottens got their surname from the word hypotenuse. I love finding names. Coming up with all the names for the different types of fire in “The Reckoning” was some of the best fun I had while writing this book. SW: I noticed that some of your stories seem to have a very eerie feel to them which gives them a very unique tone for a children’s book. Why did you decide to incorporate this into your writing and how did you manage that?  KM: It’s just what I like, I guess! I’m a little like Mrs. Haypotten, trying to tell a cheery story to Maisie and