PLA 2012: Friday, March 16

On Friday morning, I attended the ConverStation How to Safely Manage Discruptive Patrons, led by a staff trainer from the Oklahoma City library system and an educator from the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI). This session provided a useful overview of CPI's scale of workplace violence and practical tips on recognizing the state of mind of disruptive patrons (and colleagues!) and handling the situation appropriately. It was another solid, useful session with plenty of good advice. I was glad to hear the presenters making important but often unappreciated points such as that all staff need to be given the knowledge and skills to deal with a disruptive person and that an environment in which discourtesy and disrespect are permitted is the first step to an environment in which aggression and violence (physical or emotional) are possible. I left the session feeling more confident that I could handle disruptive patrons and more assured that it is important to deal with even small disruptions promptly to keep them from escalating (this latter is something that I often struggle with).

Then – I'll admit it – I skipped out on the second Friday-morning session. I'm a knitter, and there was no way I was going to spend three days in a different city and not check out the yarn stores! Before I struck out, I browsed the Reading Terminal Market. I'd heard it was worth looking around (it is! It's kind of like a bigger, more food-oriented Faneuil Hall, for those who know Boston), and I had only had tiramisu for breakfast so I thought I should get something to eat. I found a creperie and had a sweet crepe with caramel and powdered sugar. It was very good, though I tend to like my crepes a little less cooked; this one was not overdone but was pretty brown.

In my quest for yarn, I ended up going to Rosie's Yarn Cellar, which is down near Rittenhouse Square. (There's also a store called Loop within walking distance of the convention center, but I only had time for one place; Rosie's was slightly closer and sounded as though it had a cozier vibe whereas Loop sounded as though it was more "modern" and sharp-edged in feel.) It was about a 25-minute walk past some truly gorgeous 18th and 19th century architecture. The store was quite cozy, a small two-room affair tucked below street level. It was chock full of yarn without feeling cramped, and the staff person was very friendly. I ended up purchasing not yarn, but buttons for a sweater I'm working on. Easier to carry back to New Hampshire, anyway!

I had just enough time to run a couple of necessary errands and grab a (reasonably good) chicken salad sandwich from the deli in the Market before the Unconference began. I had heard about Unconferences a while ago and found the concept fascinating, so I was excited to finally have the chance to participate in one. Unconferences originated with a person who realized that some of the most exciting and invigorating experiences he was having at conferences weren't in the sessions; they were, instead, the conversations he had with other attendees, because those conversations were addressing the most pressing issues for the people involved. An Unconference is basically a conference without a pre-planned agenda. Participants propose "session" topics at the start of the conference, select which topics they want to discuss, and go from there.

The PLA Unconference began with the moderator introducing the concept and explaining the ground rules (including the "rule of two feet": if you are neither contributing to nor learning from a discussion, you should use your two feet to move to a discussion where you can contribute and/or learn). Then people proposed topics by writing their ideas on large post-it notes and sticking them up on the wall. Each person had thirty seconds to explain what they wanted to do in their proposed session, then we all voted on which topics we preferred. After that things ran like a (small) conference: there were different tables in the room, and each table was designated as the site for a particular "session". We had two sets of sessions, with a break in the middle.

The first Unconference session I attended was on the future of public libraries. I didn't take a lot of notes, but it was a good conversation about our current frustrations and hopes. The only thing I ended up writing down was a particularly good point made by one person: that we are defined by our services, not our bricks and mortar. I think that's an excellent thing to keep in mind as we move forward. (It would be interesting to try to envision what a public library without any physical location might look like...) For the second session I attended a discussion on multigenerational programming and programming for boys, and had a great time swapping ideas with five or six other librarians.

After the Unconference, I meant to get some ice cream (there was a place in the Reading Terminal Market that I had heard was supposed to be fabulous) but instead ended up chatting in the hallway for the whole time, first with someone else who had been at the Unconference and then with someone I'd met at dinner on Wednesday evening. By the time I had stopped talking it was only ten minutes to the next session. I'd hoped to go to The Elusive Library Non-User – but it was already totally full by the time I got there (!), with a man standing outside the door turning people away. So instead I went to Public Libraries and Academic Libraries: A Town-Gown Collaboration that Works. This was another ConverStation, and this one was actually run like a discussion. I got to share some of how we try to work with Dartmouth and reach out to its students, and listened to a lot of good advice on how to reach out to various elements of the campus community. Most of what I took away from the session was how to work with professors, particularly ways to encourage development of longer partnerships.

Friday night was the All-Conference Reception. I'd been having success networking so far, so although I am shy and usually don't do too well at these kinds of large gatherings I thought I'd go for half an hour or so and see how things went. First, however, I needed the ice cream fix I'd been waiting for all afternoon! And it was worth the wait. I had mocha chip, which is my favorite flavor, and it was incredibly good – I'd say #2 or #3 on my list of all-time favorite ice cream shops (behind my hometown farmstand, of course). Then it was off to the reception.

I'd expected a big room full of people talking to each other, with flowers on tables and hors d'oeuvres being passed around. Instead, it kind of felt bizarrely like prom, but with everyone in work clothes. There was a live band singing a cover of Katy Perry's "Firework" as I approached the ballroom, and there was buffet-style food, including entrees, once I got inside. (I tried the pasta, wasn't a huge fan, and decided to get dinner later.) Within a couple of songs the band was trying to get people out on the dance floor, and a few of us went. It was a lot of fun, and some people were really cutting loose (including some guy in a suit, which was hilarious). I went to sit down for a bit as the band took a short break and ended up chatting with someone else for a while. (She was a new library director, and I asked her for some career advice, which she quite graciously gave.) While I was there, the person I met at the Unconference came over with a friend. I ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the evening, periodically getting up to dance. I had a blast; it's been a long time since I had a chance to dance at an event like this! I think we surprised the band – they seemed to have been expecting a fairly sedate group, but by the middle of the evening the floor was packed and people were really getting into it. It was so much fun. Next time, I am definitely planning to stay for the whole conference reception if it's going to be like that!

PLA 2012: Thursday, March 15

My first session of the day was Engaging Customers in an Online Environment, led by four California librarians. This was a pretty solid session. It covered a lot of basics, but the speakers also offered some ideas and tips that were new and interesting to me, like taking advantage of memes or the need to have a clear goal and measurement metrics for your social media use (should be obvious, I know, but I hadn't been thinking about this this way). The presenters clearly knew their stuff and offered a well-organized, insightful, and engaging presentation.

During the break I had a meeting with the person in charge of Maryland's One Book program. She had helped to run a forum/get-together for librarians in charge of community read events on Wednesday, but I had arrived too late to attend that event. However, she generously agreed to meet with me to summarize what had been discussed. It was a great conversation and I really enjoyed meeting her in person (we'd communicated by e-mail a bit in the past).

Then it was off to a "ConverStation,"* Reaching for the Future: You've Got to Take the Risk to Get the Reward. This was the only unmitigated disappointment of the conference. The description made it sound as though this session was going to be a high-level discussion of the future of libraries, incorporating some talk about the need for creativity and how we can work as a field to innovate in the face of the sweeping societal changes and the challenges we are encountering. What actually happened was quite different. First, the presenters spent ten minutes plugging an entirely different conference that they were putting together and wanted us all to attend. They then briefly summarized six characteristics of creativity and presented the idea of having "experience zones", or small surprises scattered around the library for patrons to encounter - such as a puzzle or a cross-stitch for people to work on, or a place where patrons can write what they love about the library on a post-it and then stick it to a wall. When they announced that we were going to break into groups and brainstorm our own little ideas like this, I left. I was stuck standing in the back anyway, and the session was clearly not going to be what I thought it was.

Unfortunately, the other session of interest to me was full (one of my only major criticisms of the conference as a whole was that room planning was really not well done - I and many other people were locked out of over-full sessions more than once). So I checked my e-mail at the Internet cafe while there wasn't a line, then went up to the exhibit hall for a while.

For lunch, I met up with a bunch of other New Hampshire librarians. I had expressed an interest in dim sum, which it is nearly impossible to get in my area, so we went to a place called Dim Sum Garden right near the conference center. It wasn't "real" dim sum but it was amazing anyway - lots of dumplings, most of a kind I'd never tried before. And after all of us were very full, it only came out to $8/person! I am definitely adding that restaurant to my "must-revisit" list for Philadelphia. Conversation was, once again, enjoyable and stimulating. It was nice to get to know some of the people I encounter on mailing lists and at New Hampshire Library Association conferences a bit better.

Full of amazing Chinese(?) food, I returned to the conference center for Isn't It All Just Improv Anyway? Building Successful Relationships in the Workplace and Community. I admit: I went to this session because 1) I took improv in college and loved it, and 2) I couldn't pass up the chance to meet a real live Second City performer. The session was fantastic. The presenters introduced the five elements of improv (trust, communication, acceptance, building, and spontaneity) and then led us through a variety of improv games that can be played in the workplace to improve relationships, address problems, and facilitate communication. It was fun and thought-provoking - and though I'm not in a management position right now (and I doubt that improv at staff meetings would really fly at my current library), it's definitely something I will keep in mind as a management option later in my career.

Then it was time for something a little more serious. For my last Thursday session, I chose to attend Building Your Base (& Your Budget). Led by the coordinator for library growth and sustainability in the Mid-Hudson (NY) Library System, this session discussed the strategies for increasing community engagement and support developed by the Mid-Hudson Library System as part of their "Building Your Base" project. My library is lucky enough to enjoy strong community support, and we already implement some of the ideas from this session (e.g. provide great service first, since that will naturally make people want to support the library). However, it also provided good insight on how to identify non-supporters of the library and find the best way to reach out to them and hopefully change their minds, as well as some solid practical advice on how to improve marketing and outreach efforts without using lots of additional resources.

Afterward, I took an hour-long walk around downtown Philadelphia. (The architecture is lovely, but I was sad to see many homeless people around the city. They seemed to be more prevalent than in other cities I've visited. I hope that the city is taking some steps to address the issue.) For dinner I ate at Maggiano's, just a minute or two from the convention center and across the street from the Reading Terminal Market. It was a fabulous, typically huge Italian meal, and my waitress slyly pointed out that they offer desserts in individual sizes for $2.50 that can be wrapped up and taken back to one's hotel room. After that, I couldn't resist the tiramisu! It stayed in a bucket of ice overnight and I had it for breakfast in bed the next morning. It was amazing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I think that these sessions were meant to be smaller, discussion-driven events, though none of the ConverStations I attended were small (although they were in smaller rooms, they were inevitably full to overflowing) and some were run mostly like lectures.

PLA 2012: Wednesday, March 14

I arrived in the midafternoon, checked into my hotel, registered, read through the conference program and chose my sessions, then started in on the exhibit hall until dinnertime.

One thing I'd been really worried about before coming was that I would barely talk to people the whole conference. My only previous conference experience was ALA Annual, which was huge and overwhelming; everyone there seemed to know someone else already, so I never really ended up being able to connect with that many people. As a result, I was thrilled to see in a pre-conference e-mail that staff from the Free Library of Philadelphia were going to be hosting dinners at area restaurants for interested conference attendees. I signed up to eat at a Vietnamese place on Wednesday evening, and I'm so glad I did. There were about ten of us, and the conversation was lively and interesting. It was a great start to my conference, and helped me to feel comfortable and welcomed as a young librarian and novice conference attendee.

PLA 2012: Or, I Think I Burned Out My Brain

I was fortunate enough to be sent to PLA 2012 in Philadelphia last week the week before last (it took me a while to write up this whole thing!). It was awesome. And exhausting! An incredibly stimulating experience, both in the sessions and in all of the people I met.

I will try to post my detailed notes for the individual sessions I attended, but to start with I wanted to write about my experience in general. Originally this was going to be in a single post, but then the Word document I was drafting it in ran to eight pages... so I'm going to make one post per conference day, plus a wrapup/overall thoughts post, over the next week or so.

Public libraries = education? Yeah, that works for me (more or less)

On November 4, I attended the New Hampshire Library Association fall conference. I'm not sure I appreciated before how useful it can be to take a little while away from the day-to-day reality of my job to meet with colleagues from many different libraries and talk about our successes, challenges, and ideas. It's so easy to get focused on the nitty gritty of what needs to happen each day that I sometimes find it hard to step back and think about the bigger picture (part of why posting on this blog has been so scarce, I think). So I left the conference feeling refreshed and excited to get back to work, with some new "big picture" things to think about!

In this post, I'll talk about the first session of the day, which was probably the most thought-provoking and potentially controversial. This session consisted of a webinar led by Valerie Gross, the president and CEO of the Howard County Library System in Maryland, called "Transforming Our Image." If Ms. Gross' name sounds familiar, it may be because you read her article, "Transforming Our Image Through Words That Work", in the Sept/Oct 2009 issue of Public Libraries. I recall reading the article at the time and being intrigued but not totally on board. After the webinar, I felt that her ideas make much more sense to me, although I still have some quibbles.

The presentation had three main sections: first, Ms. Gross made the argument for re-branding libraries as educational institutions like schools; second, she explored how we can accomplish this re-branding through simple changes in the terms we use to describe our libraries and what we do; and third, she spoke about the logistics of implementing this kind of change.

Ms. Gross began by stating that by choosing our language carefully, we can control our image and the values that other people assign to us. She noted that in this economy, funding is proportional to the value placed on an organization, and quoted a number of unfortunate statements by various government officials that characterized libraries as discretionary or nonessential services.* Ms. Gross noted that librarians have to constantly make the argument for libraries' importance, whereas schools, for instance, don't. She argued that we have to use words that people understand and that convey our value in an incontrovertible fashion - and that strongly aligning ourselves with education can put us in the same "safer" category as the schools when it comes to budget time. In other words, if we say that we are education or education is our role rather than that we play an educational role or we support education, we will position ourselves to be well-funded instead of having to fear more budget cuts.

How should we accomplish this re-positioning or re-branding? Ms. Gross argued that it's actually relatively straightforward. Simply changing how we describe what we do, moving from "library lingo" to terms that are more meaningful to the average person and more clearly connected to education, will encourage people to start thinking of libraries as, and therefore treating libraries as, educational institutions more like schools than discretionary social services. A large segment of the webinar was devoted to discussing ways to rephrase what we do. Often, this involved taking a term that can have a broad meaning or a variety of meanings, and/or that often connotes something quite different to librarians than it does to the average person, and finding a more specific and immediately understandable way to say it.

Some of my favorite suggestions for rewording: changing programs to events and classes (I always feel like I'm going to get misunderstood when I say I'm in charge of "adult programming" at my library -- people tend to think "computers"!), changing reference to research and reference interview to research needs assessment, changing information to education, changing database to specialized online research tool (how many people could tell you what a database is, in the context of a library?), changing "free" to no charge or no admission after all, as we have to emphasize, library programs aren't free -- the funding just doesn't come directly from attendees!), and circulation clerk to customer service specialist.

(There were a few suggestions I didn't agree with. A reference librarian is just not an "instructor", for instance, as far as I'm concerned. I don't teach people on the reference desk. Nor do I "instruct" when I organize and lead programs -- oops, "classes and events" -- I am usually in the background, doing logistics but not presentation. "Research specialist" is perhaps better but I still don't think it quite covers what we do. I'd rather stick with "librarian" and re-educate the public about what that job actually entails!)

Ms. Gross closed by talking about how to implement her ideas in our own libraries. This section of the talk was largely aimed at management and was fairly common-sense -- make sure to involve staff and external constituencies, change the way you present yourself to funding authorities by changing your statistics and budget headings, etc.

My thoughts? Largely, I think Ms. Gross' arguments make sense. Point by point:

Libraries are absolutely in a place where we need to find a way to legitimize ourselves in the eyes of many funding authorities. Is rebranding ourselves as "education" the right way to go? I was skeptical coming in, but after the webinar, I'm on board with the idea of rebranding libraries as educational institutions. I think that the connection of libraries to education is pretty obvious, and I thought that the idea made some sense even before the webinar. Initially, I had some reservations because I thought that some of what we do doesn't, in fact, qualify as education. Where is there room for leisure reading, recreation, crafts, and other "less serious" things that libraries promote under the umbrella of education? This is probably a common concern, and Ms. Gross addressed it directly by noting that education includes "instructive and enlightening experiences", which would encompass the various "community-center" roles that libraries are beginning to fill as well as recreational reading and activities. I think one does have to make the explicit argument for this being relevant in order for people to see it, but it does make sense. People can educate themselves in ways that are totally irrelevant to what we might think of as formal schooling, just because it enriches their lives. I think a lot of things that libraries do that aren't easy to directly connect to education could fit in under this idea that life-enriching activities and learning are also legitimately education.


Will simply changing what we say make a difference? I think so. Word choice definitely influences what people think -- that's practically the whole idea behind branding and marketing. I also agree that some elements of "library lingo" are not meaningful to our patrons. Words that we use all the time and that are transparent to us signify very little to many people walking through our doors. And even if experienced library users do know what "circulation" (e.g.) means, shouldn't we aim to be comprehensible to anyone who comes through our doors or encounters us online, without having to educate them about basic vocabulary before they can interact with us effectively?

What about the specific word choices? I listed my favorite suggestions for rewording "library lingo" above, as well as my major objection (i.e. replacing "librarian" with "instructor"). Overall, I think most of the suggestions in the webinar were good. However, I also think this is an area where individual libraries may need to tailor their choices to their patrons. And I am concerned that doing too much rewording could create an environment that is buzzword-y and just as jargony as some libraries currently are. For instance, while "programs and services" is kind of vague, I think that the suggested alternative of "curriculum" is going to be just as confusing to many people who think of a curriculum as a planned series of lessons that make up a coherent course of study -- which is not really what you find at a library. (How about just "what we do" or "what we offer"? I think that would actually work in most cases where we're saying "programs and services".) If we aren't careful in choosing alternative ways of saying things, we could come off as pretentious or just trying to hop on the latest bandwagon to sound "cool", like that executive who always talks about "synergy" but clearly has no clue as to what the word really means.


-----------


* As an interesting and semi-related aside, my library does not close for (e.g.) severe weather unless the entire town government closes. (Employees are encouraged to only come in if they can do so safely, however; and we have had days with only a few staff actually in the building.) My director's reasoning for this is that essential services do not close for weather, and if we want to be perceived as an essential service at budget time we need to behave like one in other circumstances.

Read Something! PSYCHIATRIC TALES (Darryl Cunningham)

Psychiatric Tales
DARRYL CUNNINGHAM
2010/2011
Graphic Novel, Nonfiction, Essays

Summary

Based on his work as a psychiatric nurse, Cunningham wrote the eleven graphic (as in "told in pictures", not as in "explicit") essays collected in this book. The essays discuss specific mental illnesses, work on a psychiatric ward, suicide, and the author's own mental-health struggles, with an aim toward fostering understanding of and destigmatizing mental illness.

Appeal Characteristics

• Pacing: Very short "chapters" -- each one is probably readable in 20 minutes, maximum
• Pacing: The text generally consists of declarative/factual statements or quick dialogue; sentences are short
• Characterization: The reader often just gets quick anecdotes about people and is not really told their broader story or what happened to them. (The exception to this is Cunningham himself, who opens up about his mental health in one of the essays.)
• Frame: The stories are pretty much self-contained; there is little continuity other than that they usually have the same setting and narrator
• Visuals: 6 panels per page, with the text usually at the top of each panel
• Visuals: Dramatic use of black and white: often white figures on a black background, or showing the same or similar images twice with black and white reversed

Notes

• The book touches on suicide and on the author's own struggles with anxiety and depression, so it may be triggering for some people.

Readalikes

• Girl, Interrupted? (I have only ever seen the movie, and that quite some time ago.) -- similar subject matter and setting, both from the perspective of a person who has been within a mental institution (though one as a patient, one as a nurse)
• Broadly, I'd recommend this to psychology students, especially those with an interest in abnormal psychology.

It's amazing how long it takes you to fall into a rhythm once you graduate from school and get a job.

At least, how long it's taken me.

In the past year I got hired, moved to a new apartment, bought a car and some furniture, started my job, weathered a 75-mile commute in ridiculous winter weather, moved again (to a much brighter, quieter, and more pleasant apartment, I'm glad to say), bought more furniture, and here I am. Life is just starting to fall into a routine and we still aren't 100% unpacked. No wonder blogging has gone by the wayside.

But here I am. Still kicking, and smack in the middle of my library's community read programming (10 events in 6 weeks, all of which I'm responsible for organizing though thank goodness I don't have to be in attendance at every one). Busy busy busy busy busy. Ran two recruitment drives to sign local college students up for cards last week, and I have a program to do Monday night.

Almost a year in, and I'm still greatly enjoying myself. I'm hitting my stride, getting my routines firmly in place. I'm starting to feel like I have a handle on the rhythm of the year. I've made some changes in the way certain aspects of my job are done, introduced a few new ideas, and have a couple of other things on the back burner. Mostly it's small stuff. More forms, new policies, different procedures, little things that help us keep records and help me to stay organized. For instance, we're now asking patrons who attend programs to fill out an evaluation. We've never collected that kind of data before. Part of the form asks where they heard about the program and in six months I hope to use that information to streamline my publicity workflow. We're asking volunteers to sign yearly agreements with us to confirm their contact information and so that we have actual records of who is still with us and what they're doing. (Trying to wrangle a list of the volunteers for last year's statistics was a real adventure -- seemed like my predecessor had had most of it in her head!)

Now that I'm finding my feet in my personal and professional lives again, I hope I'll be posting here more often. (Famous blogger's last words.)

Read Something! _The American Heiress_ (Daisy Goodwin)

The American Heiress
DAISY GOODWIN
2010
Historical Fiction, Romance

Summary

Cora Cash is the wealthiest of Gilded Age New York's eligible young ladies, and her mother is determined to secure for Cora through marriage the one thing money can't buy: an aristocratic title. True to expectations, Cora makes an enviable match to an English duke. But the straightforward American heiress soon finds that English society is rife with unspoken social codes, secret alliances, and duplicitous betrayals. Set adrift in an unexpectedly unwelcoming new life, Cora must mature from a spoiled rich girl to a woman capable of making her own way in society.

Appeal Characteristics

• Characterization: multiple strong female characters
• Characterization/Frame: dark, brooding, mysterious love interest
• Frame: sex mentioned but not really shown
• Frame: lots of historical detail
• Frame: some parts are from the points of view of servants instead of the socially elite main characters
• Frame: some parts are briefly from the point of view of minor characters who we never see again
• Frame: excellent descriptions make it easy to visualize characters and setting
• Plot/Frame: love triangles
• Plot/Frame: lots of politicking/characters trying to one-up each other for social standing
• Plot/Frame: the state of affairs is pretty clear to the reader early on; we watch the main character figure it out
• Plot: the "right" people are together at the end; a happy ending
• Plot/Characterization: book is more focused on plot than on developing finely drawn characters
• Pacing: midlength chapters broken into somewhat shorter sections

Readalikes

•  The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton? - Wharton is suggested as a readalike on the jacket copy. Age is much more serious, a social novel rather than romantic fluff, but both books center on a love story, contain lots of historical detail from the same time period, and address the differences between European and American Gilded Age societies by throwing a person primarily from one society into the other
• Regency romances - This book is only slightly less fluffy than a romance, and is perhaps slightly more about Cora herself than about her romantic relationships... but barely. Julia Quinn (the only romance author I read) is perhaps not a great match except that both she and this book have strong women and lots of period detail; American Heiress seems a little less unabashedly light-hearted than Quinn.
• Rules of Civility by Amor Towles? - I haven't read it but it just came across my desk as a new book and it could be a match. It's a historical novel (albeit set in the 1930s) featuring a plucky girl who needs to find her own way in a wealthy society with which she is unfamiliar, as well as navigating a romance (and possibly, like Cora, being torn between two men).

Where on earth have I been?

Short answer: Apartment hunting, then simultaneously moving to a new apartment, visiting relatives (both mine and my partner's), and entertaining my mother-in-law for three weeks; also seeing some friends, trying to tidy up our new living quarters, reading, attempting to get some knitting done, spending time with my partner.

And on the work side - planning our ten-event, six-week Community Read program; trying to wrangle a current list of our volunteers and subsequently revamping our entire volunteer program to improve recordkeeping and bring us in line with Department of Labor guidelines, including writing a volunteer policy and creating a bunch of forms; trying to keep up with graphic novel ordering; fielding a bazillion calls/e-mails/in-person requests from people who want to do programs here (on this count I'm actually lucky, I think - I never have to scrounge for presenters/program ideas); running programs, including a book discussion for which I read The Age of Innocence three times; running most of the logistical stuff for an art show at the library; etc. etc. etc. ...

So, I've been busy, and thus not posting at all. Hopefully that will change as my life gets just a bit saner.

Read Something! _Black Hole_ (Charles Burns)

Black Hole
CHARLES BURNS
2005
Graphic Novel, Literary Fiction

Summary

The Seattle suburbs; the 1970s. A sexually transmitted disease called "the bug" is sweeping through the high school population. Those infected are physically transformed, in unique and often grotesque fashion. Chris is the girl that all the boys want. Keith is one of her admirers. When they each encounter "the bug" and the group of infected outcasts living in the woods, the resulting events will take them from home and profoundly alter their lives.

Appeal characteristics

• Plot: Positive ending (if not 100% happy)
• Plot: Open-ended conclusion; though the plot threads are wrapped up, the characters' stories don't feel totally finished
• Plot: At least three intersecting plot threads, one of which is not really obvious as a plot thread until its climax and conclusion
• Plot/Frame?: Coming of age story
• Frame?: Bizarre dream sequences (but outside of dreams, things feel "real" and logical)
• Frame?: Strong and frequent use of visual symbolism and repeated images
• Characterization: Teenage/high school characters
• Art: Grotesque imagery
• Art: Usually 4-6 regular-sized panels per page
• Art: Mostly black backgrounds with white figures; heavy shading

Other notes

• Moderately graphic depictions of sex and violence; male and female nudity; drug use.
• Rape is mentioned but not shown; the aftermath of rape is briefly depicted but not very explicitly.
• My Noting: Books entry for this book is here: http://notingbooks.com/users/hbackman/readings/6202-Black-Hole

Readalikes

• ???