Books are like...

Cake.  Delicious layer cake.  And since this is my blog, I am going to go with my kind of cake.  Books are like a chocolate, raspberry layer cake, with a bit of creamy custard between the layers, and topped with nuts, some fresh fruit, and (what the heck, why not) some drippy chocolate syrup.  Yep.  That'll do it. 

Books need lots of different components to make them great, just like cake.  Miss something, and you may as well toss it out the window, because it's just not going to be the same.  I am not talking about a box of cake mix you get at your local grocery store and pour in eggs, milk, and water.  I'm talking about a real, honest-to-goodness, from-scratch, like-Grandma-makes-it cake.  A book without decent character development for instance.  Boring.  People have depth and not to show it in a book is like forgetting to put the yeast in the cake mix.  It would be flat and hard to chew.  There has to be a good ending too.  That is the crowning glory of any book. (It's also that lovely bunch of raspberries at the top of the cake.)  It's what makes it.  With out it I always think "that's it?"  Give me flourishes and a climactic ending, or a really good satisfying conclusion.  Something that shows me the character's plight wasn't for nothing and came into his or her own.  Or, if the bad guy wins (which let's face it, sometimes they do) give me some sort of reason why this is how it has to end. 

In short, I want my cake and I want to eat it, too.

Flygirl

Just in case anyone thinks that I cannot read a book without loving it, here is a review of one I actually had to force myself to finish.  It doesn't happen often, but it does happen. This one is called Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith.  

Flygirl is about a young African American woman named Ida Mae Jones who passes herself off as white so she can join the WASPS, a women's pilot group in WWII.  It has really good character development with Ida Mae, and tells her back story fluidly along with the actual plot.  It also shows very well her inner turmoil at her decision to "pass" and how it affects her family and friends.  It also deals with her two personal losses, one in back story and one in the plot.  They are both pretty heartbreaking.

The author does a pretty good job of showing how scared Ida is when she faces racism in the town she trains in, and my heart was hammering in my chest every time.  However, I don't think it went far enough.  The whole time I was reading I was waiting for her to get caught, for someone in authority or one of her new friends to figure out that she was not who she was pretending to be.  She never tells anyone, not even when she starts falling for a white man.  The only time it happens is an old African American man in a store, and it was almost an anti-climax.  I know it wasn't the point of the book, and that the point was her flying and achieving her lifelong dream of being a pilot, but the other issue is racism so it should have been much more developed.

And the worst part is, it cannot be used in a classroom situation at all.  It uses the N-word 3 times in one chapter.  It would never fly in a school.  It doesn't matter if the word has historical use or needs to be included in a scene about racism, because of that one word, it would not be approved for school use.