17. Exile

Exile (Blake Nelson, 1997)

I promise to stop reading Blake Nelson's books for a while. I just got on a roll ordering them from the library and his seem to be coming in faster than others in my queue. Moving on. Exile isn't a young adult novel, but it's similar to Nelson's YA work in theme and setting. Appropriately for National Poetry Month, this story centers around Mark, a spoken word poet from NYC who takes a position as poet-in-residence at a Portland college. I was a little confused because he called it Willamette, but that's really in Salem. It would be pretty difficult to get around downtown Portland on foot if you lived near campus an hour away. But I digress.

Exile is okay. I think it's telling that Nelson calls it his "difficult second novel." Girl was so good that he might have been trying to go in a completely different direction. He's right when he says it doesn't suck. Mark is a seriously messed up guy, and I found him both attractive and repulsive--maybe because I see people I've known in him. Like (too) many of Nelson's protagonists, he stumbles through life not really understanding what's going on around him or how he should behave or react. I guess it's a change from the standard precocious teens or hyper-witty and ironic twenty-somethings in books, but sometimes it goes too far. Mark is also in a state of arrested development, living like a teenager who acts on impulse and does what he wants without thinking of the consequences, while needing a real adult to take care of him. I liked this book, but Mark's realization that he needs to grow up comes kind of suddenly and seems a bit tacked on.

14. The New Rules of High School

The New Rules of High School (Blake Nelson, 2004)

This one's kind of more of the same Portland teen disaffection from Blake Nelson. It is a little different in that Max, the protagonist, is an overachieving good kid instead of a confused alternateen. The indie rock club element is there, but Max exists in the periphery of that scene. He's kind of a jerk, and there are some consequences for that, but it's not moralistic. Nelson is really good at capturing the awfulness of being a teenager and offering a little slice of a kid's life without making it too plot-driven. The little epilogue was kind of lame, though. I don't need to know what happens after Max graduates. I've always liked being left hanging a bit in Nelson's other books.

11. Rock Star Superstar

Rock Star Superstar (Blake Nelson, 2004)

I loved Blake Nelson's Girl, and had been meaning to get around to Rock Star Superstar for a while. Nelson stuck with Portland as a setting, but this time around the protagonist is a boy. Pete is really similar to Andrea from Girl. He's not super cool and doesn't seem to understand what's going on around him most of the time and they seem really self-conscious. That aspect of Nelson's characters bugs me because I don't remember being that naive as a teen. Don't we all judge kids through the lense of how we remember ourselves? I do. What Nelson gets so right are teen relationships. The way Pete's relationship with Margaret begins was so familiar to me. You know how you'd just kind of fall into dating somebody because you sat with them on the bus one day, got seated together in class, or even ran into them at the mall? That part of the story seemed really organic.

The big story here is that Pete's a musician, and because his dad is kind of a hands-off parent, can pretty much devote himself completely to music and skate by in school with no plans for college or the future, beyond playing music. I thought the local-band-makes-good story would be unrealistic, but it worked for me. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by telling you that Pete doesn't get famous by the end of the book, which kept the story grounded in reality. I think this book would appeal to both boys and girls equally. If I was a youth librarian, I'd probably try to sell Girl to a boy if he liked this one. I'll have to check out The New Rules of High School, Nelson's latest.