Pass The Popcorn: Divergent

I have a lot of close friends who never had a child. I have others whose offspring are already away at college, medical school or out in the real world. Still another (a late bloomer, I guess) has a toddler. Think about that for a moment. Wow, is she brave!

Now, I love these women, I do. But, I also feel sorry for them.

How do my peers, women of a certain age, survive without a teenager on hand to tune them in to what's hot, what's not and what definitely-absolutely-positively cannot be missed?

How, for example, would any of these women know about Divergent? OMG.

Yes, Divergent is the latest pop culture phenom. (And I have my daughter to thank for my intimate knowledge of it.) First was Twilight. Then, The Hunger Games. Now, Divergent.

What happened to teen fiction? Somewhere along the way, the romances of yesteryear (how we all swooned over Healthcliff back in my day!) and the real-life real-girl narratives (Are You There, God? It's Me, Alex) morphed into these dark, dystopian sagas. It's not enough for a heroine to be a typical teenager, riddled with adolescent angst or — worse! — acne. Now, apparently, you have to be in a love triangle with a vampire and a werewolf. Or be in a fight to the death with other teen tributes. Or be a square peg individualist in a round hole faction in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic, bombed-out version of Chicago.

That, my friends, is where Divergent comes in.

Last weekend, my daughter and I had second-row, center seats for the new movie based on Veronica Roth's bestseller. After a war which virtually annihilated the human race, the powers that be decided that the survivors' best chance of ... well ... surviving would be to restructure society into "factions," each based on its members' core personality traits, and each playing a prescribed role for the betterment of all.

Sounds orderly if nothing else, right? The problem is that our heroine, one Tris (née Beatrice) is an anomaly. Despite some standardized testing that makes the SATs look like a walk in the park with puppies and kittens and ice cream, her results are "inconclusive." She doesn't fit into one of the factions. She is, in a word, in a bestseller title, divergent.

So, what would you do if you found you didn't really fit in? Well, naturally you would risk your life to join the toughest group, right? Of course right. 

Tris selects "Dauntless," whose brave members serve as society's warriors. But, choosing Dauntless doesn't mean that Dauntless chooses you. So, Tris has to go through all kinds of initiation hell: leaps out of moving elevated trains, scaling an old ferris wheel, hand-to-hand combat with nasty characters who are considerably larger, stronger and just plain meaner. There's blood. There's guts. 

There's a hunky instructor.

Tris and "Four" (as one smart-mouthed initiate asks, "What, were One, Two and Three taken?") fall in love and foil a deadly coup driven by another faction, the "Erudite." But, even as they escape in the final moments of the movie, we know it ain't over. There are two more Divergent books and probably three more Divergent movies (following the examples of Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games, Hollywood will certainly split the last book into two installments).

Here's what I think my daughter and her peers find so appealing about all this. As teenage girls, they feel a lot like Tris. They are asked to conform. They are pigeon-holed as "brains" or "beauties." They may not be forced to fight each other in a ring, but things can get pretty brutal online.

Here's what I like. Tris is a girl. She's brave; she's strong; she holds her own. She even holds her own against boys. Does she ever!

Here's what I don't like. The way the studio felt the need to glam her up for the movie poster. Shailene Woodley was nowhere near as curvy or "come hither" in the actual film. Her hair was pulled back. And her stretch pants weren't quite that stretched.

Still, if Tinsel-town's executives are willing to produce bazillion dollar projects about a girl ... well ... stretch pants or not, things are looking up.

If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of my new book Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.   

Mother-Daughter Book Club

Jane Austen. Charles Dickens. Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

Their very names conjure images of sweeping moors, great manor houses, high teas and high waisted dresses. These are a few of my favorite authors. These are authors whose classic works my daughter will someday read. If, that is, they are assigned as required reading by a teacher.

She's certainly not going to do it to please me.

I was always a reader. My daughter, despite being quick to point out "I'm not you, Mo-o-om!", is also a reader. (That is, she's a reader when she doesn't have access to her laptop, her cell phone or the television.)

When she was little, I faithfully read her all the Madeline books, Winnie the Pooh, The Lonely Doll, and Little Bear. And, she has beautiful editions of Peter Pan, Heidi, and Little Women. These are in pristine condition. They are in pristine condition because she hasn't even opened them. Her tastes, clearly lie elsewhere.

(We did try the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books, but in the very first chapter of the very first book, Pa slaughters and butchers a pig. We were done.)

My daughter never succumbed to the literary phenomenon that was Harry Potter, but she's loyal to a number of other young adult series. She read every Saddle Club book, then moved on to Canterwood Crest. Right now, she's wrapped up in three different serials: Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars and The Lying Game. (Although I haven't had the time — or, let's face it, the stomach — to read any of these myself, I can only imagine from their titles that they celebrate some pretty poor behavior.)

A couple of years ago, my daughter begged me to read the Twilight books. I scoffed at the idea until my best friend encouraged me to go ahead and try them, reminding me "You want her to read your recommendations, right?"

(My thirty-second review? Let's see ... between the damsel in perpetual distress, the sexy yet sex-less vampire and the thinly veiled pro life plot, the books are not exactly a feminist manifesto. I read all four volumes in one week at a Mexican resort. That's seven days I'll never get back.)

Recently, I was thrilled to find a tattered Yearling paperback of Calico Captive at a restaurant and used bookstore in Connecticut. (An extremely cool place right on Route 84. When you buy a meal there, you get to take a free book!) It was one of my favorite books in junior high and I couldn't wait to share it with my daughter. The story follows the adventure of a New England settler and her family who were abducted by Indians and sold to the French in Canada. Um, suffice it to say the enthusiasm was mine and mine alone. She did, finally, finish it after much protest, and grudgingly asserted, "It was okay."

This summer, she'll have to make it through David Copperfield, required reading for ninth grade Honors English. It promises to be a very long summer. I have forbidden my husband, on pain of death, to so much as mention the concept of Cliff Notes.

Meanwhile, my daughter just devoured a book recommended by her current English teacher. The assignment was to read an award-winner and I had suggested The Summer of My German Soldier. Classic, right? I expected the teacher to applaud my choice. Instead, she took one look and said, "That looks awful. I'll find something better for you." And, indeed, my daughter absolutely loved the alternative title: The Perks of Being A Wallflower.

"Well," I sighed, resignedly, "I guess you're just my contemporary fiction reader."

"What's that supposed to mean?" she demanded.

"It just means you prefer contemporary books."

She rolled her eyes. "Contemporary?" she snorted, "It's set in the 90s!"