Calvin

by Martine Leavitt

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-720-7

180 pp.

Ages 12+
November 2015

Just because Calvin, the book, is being touted as YA doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be read by everyone and anyone who needs to have an understanding of mental health issues. Calvin, the main character, and his friend Susie both may be seventeen years of age and dealing with boy-girl relationship issues, but the book is far more than just realistic fiction for teens.  It’s akin to a Canadian YA version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, about a young man who goes on a pilgrimage to find meaning and meets an assortment of individuals and learns new truths that help him interpret his life.  This is a book for anyone mature enough to handle the truths within.

Calvin, the book, is a letter to Bill Watterson, the creator of the hugely popular comic Calvin and Hobbes.  Convinced he is connected to Bill Watterson because of his name, being born on the very day the last comic was published, and having a stuffed tiger named Hobbes and a friend named Susie, Calvin, the book’s protagonist, is sure that Bill Watterson is the man to help him out when he is diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Escaping with Susie’s help from the hospital, Calvin embarks on a treacherous winter pilgrimage across Lake Erie to Cleveland where he is somehow assured that Bill Watterson will provide him with a new and final comic that will display Calvin as a well-adjusted teen without an imaginary Hobbes.

Written both as dialogue between Calvin, Susie, Hobbes and an odd assortment of bit players and as text of Calvin’s thinking, Calvin takes the reader into the mind and experiences of a boy newly-diagnosed with schizophrenia who cannot deal with that reality.  Though she has not associated with him for the past year, Susie, a childhood friend, insists on accompanying Calvin.  So, after carefully outfitting themselves for an 87 km winter walk across a barren lake, Calvin and Susie set out from Point Pelee National Park.  Only Bill Watterson knows, apparently, because Calvin had written to the cartoonist, requesting he meet them on the other side of the lake.

The wind only whines and whistles and wails when it’s trying to get into the cracks of windows and doors.  It only thumps and bellows when it bumps up against trees and houses and cars.  But on a big flat empty lake, it’s just a force.  It’s a big soft hand that pushes and presses at you, silent, steady.  Soon you realize the wind isn’t flowing around you, over you, it’s flowing through you, penetrating the electromagnetic field that gives you the illusion of being a solid entity, whipping straight through you, spinning your atoms like tops and leaving them dizzy and frosty and deeply impressed. (pg. 65)

What seems to begin as a lark becomes a dark and dangerous survival test, with Calvin grappling with the imaginary Hobbes for possession of his mind and Susie revealing hidden truths to Calvin.  Just as Calvin has difficulty determining what is real–even Susie could be a figment of his imagination–so does the reader as the duo with Hobbes in tow encounter an ice fisherman, a poet, a parking lot, snow goons, and a monster, discussing brain activity, God, war and peace, school, and Bill Watterson’s motivations.  It all comes down to Susie helping  Calvin see that “I know about you but you don’t know about you” (pg. 132) and Calvin helping to keep Susie safe.

Reading about someone dealing with a mental illness is a very different beast than being inside them as they wrestle with their mental health issue.  And beast seems an appropriate term because Martine Leavitt takes the reader into the beast that is Calvin’s schizophrenia, as creative and quirky and potentially ferocious as Hobbes, Bill Watterson’s comic tiger.  With an issue as colossal as that immense Lake Erie, Martine Leavitt is able to take us into that part of Calvin that is both confused and distinct and searching for identity.  Scared of the monster he perceives himself to be and anticipating the judgements that will be aimed at him,

Hobbes: Since when did we care what people think?
Me: There’s more of them. The definition of sanity is a democratic thing.  They get to decide. (pg. 21)

Calvin is running from his fears and towards his perceived salvation.  Salvation may or may not be waiting at the end of Calvin and Susie’s crossing but Martine Leavitt ensures a resolution.  It’s not all nice and neat but it is what it is: an ending and an beginning.

Blue Mountain

by Martine Leavitt

Groundwood Books

978-1-55498-423-7

165 pp.

Ages 8-12

November, 2014

The struggle for survival may bring readers of adventure stories regularly to the brink of their seats, anticipating the worst and hopeful for the best outcome but always calmed by the fictional nature of the story.  But, though a fictionalized account of a herd of bighorn sheep in the Rocky Mountains, Blue Mountain reads as authentic and harrowing as any biography of an explorer or a leader making life-and-death decisions for others.  Blue Mountain may be about bighorn sheep but the story of Tuk and his herd mates is a heart-rending tale of life on the edge, an account of the struggle to survive in both the natural and man-made worlds.

The story of Tuk, a male lamb, begins on the lambing cliffs with the other new lambs– Ovis, Rim, Nai, Mouf, Sto and Dall–learning the story about the mountain's gifts to the animals.  Lord Denu, the first bighorn, was gifted with tricky feet, strong jaws, and powerful horns, providing his descendants with the moniker of peaceable, since they did not fight but rather stayed in herds that helped protect their numbers.  When the lambs and their mothers return to the main herd at the summer range, meeting the yearlings and the barren ewes, Kenir the matriarch declares that Tuk is reminiscent of the strong lambs of many years ago and has been gifted to them by the mountain to help keep the herd from dying.  This is corroborated by his vision of a great blue mountain, so rarely seen that it is called story mountain.

This is a heavy responsibility placed on Tuk and, though he suffers ridicule from a yearling named Balus and others, one that he does not take lightly or is convinced belongs to him, especially after he fails to save a lamb from an eagle.  But when a mother puma and her kitten put the herd at risk, Tuk uses his lamb horns to bat the kitten off a ledge, resulting in its death and its mother's vow of revenge.  Ultimately, the king of the rams instructs Tuk,

"You must find a way west from the winter valley to blue mountain before she hunts again."..."Son, it is the only way to save the herd." (pg. 38)

And so begin Tuk's journeys, the first being one of personal growth and learning so that he might lead the second one, a trek through inhospitable territories to one where the herd might thrive.  Enduring food shortages, threats from wolves, men with shotguns, monster machines, and unusual altercations with a wolverine, a bear and an otter, Tuk brings them to a place where

Tuk saw that the herd would always be, and that he had been part of the always. (pg. 159)

He couldn't have asked for a better legacy.

Martine Leavitt tells of her father, James Webster, and his love for the natural world and particularly the Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep that he studied.  Blue Mountain is her own story based on his notes of observations of these majestic animals through the seasons and years.

My story became a very different thing than his beautiful and perfectly accurate rendering, but we tell the stories we can. (pg. 164)

As Tuk succeeds so nobly after questioning his own leadership as a bighorn sheep, I believe Martine Leavitt has honoured her father's research and reconfigured it into a splendidly beautiful and accurate saga.  I'm sure he couldn't have dreamed of a finer gift.

My Book of Life by Angel

by Martine Leavitt
Groundwood Books
978-1-55498-117-5
246 pp.
Ages 14+
2012

A great fan of novels in verse  (see my post on Exceptional Novels in Verse for Young Readers), I was astounded to realize that Martine Leavitt's newest book, My Book of Life by Angel, could be added to this book list.  And while the protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl and the context is definitely young adult, I would recommend this book to adult readers as well.  The context of the missing women of Vancouver's downtown eastside and the plight of sex trade workers trapped in unspeakable circumstances brings My Book of Life by Angel from YA fiction to social commentary, all in flowing, powerful, Milton-esque verse.

Angel knows how she got on the streets of Vancouver: her mother's death and Angel's predilection for shoplifting shoes (sadly, only one of a pair).  She thinks about her dad and little brother Jeremy, even sending a letter home, hoping for a response.  But as long as her pimp, Call, threatens to hurt Jeremy if she ever leaves, Angel just keeps her head off what she's doing and does it.  Almost like an automaton, she lists her johns:  little old Fred who can't really afford her, John the university professor who talks of Milton, the Preacher, and an endless track of pathetic, nasty, oblivious, arrogant men. And now everyone is wondering if there is a Mr. P who is taking the missing girls.

Her friend Serena had always told Angel about angels being around and, after Serena goes missing, Angel begins to wonder about the possibility of angels watching over them. Angel vows to clean up her act, starting a new story for herself in her journal My Book of Life by Angel, ever hopeful that there really is an angel to help her.

My angel would be a fresh-dead one,
still longing for chocolate cake, 
still wishing she could come back
and find out who won American Idol.

That's the one I want--
just a junior one
who might not mind saving
a girl like me.
(pg.13)

But when Call brings home an eleven-year-old girl, Melli, Angel is determined to work double just to keep Melli from the life of a sex trade worker.  It's her devotion to Melli and Angel's repulsion of the manner in which another sex worker's assault is handled that ultimately mobilize Angel to make things right, at least as right as she can.

Martine Leavitt's My Book of Life by Angel is a hard story.  It has coarse edges that scrape at your heart and at your sense of decency.  But Martine Leavitt never allows the reader to judge Angel or the other sex trade workers, only those who deem to manipulate their victims.  Sadly, there are always those that seek to force their will on others, through power, abuse, drugs and fear, even through academic knowledge. The fact that Call and his cohorts are attempting to legalize the trade, perceiving themselves to be entrepreneurs rather than abusers, speaks to their arrogance.

Regardless of the hard edges of her story, Angel is an ethereal creature whose fluidity of thought and feeling and grace, courtesy of Martine Leavitt's lyrical and just as ethereal verse, transports the reader from the gritty sex trade of Vancouver's downtown eastside and into the hopeful realm where there is mercy, and goodness prevails over evil.