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Journal Entry 2 by KathleenMolloy on Thursday, September 11, 2008
 Author Mary-Lou Zeitoun hides out in the Gatineau Hills. In my mind, that makes her West Quebec author and as such she finds her YA novel 13 on my hit list for the 2nd Canadian Book Challenge. She’s the 9th west Quebec author I’ve enjoyed for this challenge and the fourth YA author.
When I was a YA I didn’t read YA and now I’m making up for lost time. Gawd, I missed a lot of YA fun back then.
Zeitoun’s book 13 reminds me of conversations I had with my gal pals in the early 80s; giddy, filled with teen longing, and loaded with mistrust of adults.
It’s written like a rambling diary and the story unfolds very much the way a girl in grade eight might talk – or blog.
It opens with “What a bunch of losers” and we learn from the get-go that Marnie is right, and her parents, and her principal, and the nuns, and even her friend Edna are wrong – all wrong, and so it goes. It’s Marnie against the world, an unjust world where girls that wear makeup get raped because they encourage it, trusted male roll-models take naked photos of stupid girls that let them, and when a punk band lead singer sucks your finger during his stage show you worry that you might have to reciprocate the sucking. And you worry that you might be a Lezzie. And you want to run away to New York so that John Lennon can fall in love with you. And you say you don’t care if boys call you a dog but it rips your gut out.
And the world isn’t fair. When you want to play the drums in music class you get saddled with the French Horn, cuz girls don’t play the French Horn.
Bump it up a few decades and tell me how much this story will change. Today Marnie wouldn’t want to be the designer of vinyl record covers., cuz … what’s a record anyway? And she wouldn’t have to play the French Horn because no public schools have the money for music lessons anymore. And forget Spin the Bottle when you’re 13; now it’s hooking up at 10 and 11.
But Marnie would still be right and the world would still be wrong.
Buy the book here:
http://www.sentex.net/~pql/thirteen.html
Beer drinkers love 13. Check out this review by a suds selling beer company:
http://www.uppercanada.com/template.asp?CName=Mary-LouZeitoun13
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Journal Entry 3 by KathleenMolloy at Bramalea, Ontario Canada on Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Released 3 yrs ago (9/16/2008 UTC) at Bramalea, Ontario Canada CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:
from Wakefield Quebec to Brampton Ontario's favourite poet
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13
This book is in a Controlled Release!
