Lanna Michaels (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lannamichaels) wrote2025-11-29 07:43 pm
lannamichaels) wrote2025-11-29 07:43 pm
Entry tags:
Turning Twelve by Kathryn Ormsbee, illustrated by Molly Brooks (2024)
Summary: The titular girl turning 12 is Katie, a homeschooled girl in Kentucky in summer/autumn 2004. She is enduring the beginning of puberty -- having to wear a bra*, growing leg hair, getting her period -- while her best friends have temporarily moved to Wisconsin, she is getting bullied at church** youth group, discovering her budding feminist rage about dress codes, and, worryingly, might have a crush on a girl in her theater club. A midgrade graphic novel.
- *the problem. The problem. The PROBLEM WITH GRAPHIC NOVELS is you can say all you want that she feels she is just fine in her training bra and doesn't want to go to one with cups, or have someone suggest a nice comfortable bra from Macy's BUT WHEN THE ART THAT IS DRAWN SHOWS A CLEARLY PRE-PUBESCENT GIRL who does not ACTUALLY HAVE ANYTHING TO PUT IN THAT BRA, it undermines that point.
Because, yes. A++ good job not sexualizing any of these girls. But. But I'm sorry but if you're talking about bras and going through puberty, some of these girls in your artwork need to look like they've hit puberty. - **church unspecified but at the retreat, her church has the word "Baptist" in it, so... I assume she's Baptist?
There's a certain amount of religious-based misogyny and homophobia that is generalized to a great extent but would probably allow someone from the subculture to identify it more precisely, especially based on the location and time period. (I also have no idea if the author's youth group actually was that racially diverse, or if that's just because this is a midgrade graphic novel.) - This book is within that genre I have been noticing, which is "not a memoir but loosely based on the author's childhood, in graphic novel form". Many things were outright confusing to me -- I am used to midgrade books having this thing called exposition and explaining things, HOWEVER I have noticed that graphic novels, with their limited word count, don't do that as much or, in the case of this book... at all. But, in this book's defense, I did not know it was the second book in a series until I got to the ending notes from the author. So perhaps things about Katie's life and friends and homeschool experience (AND YEAR THIS TAKES PLACE -- I worked it out from various things mentioned, such as the summer Olympics, President Bush and nominee John Kerry) are explained in the first book.
The only part of it I called bullshit on is Katie being in therapy for anxiety and OCD (mostly OCD) and having been in therapy for a while now, at age 11, in 2004. So I felt very justified when I got to the ending note where the author was like "I was not in therapy at the time". YEAH I BET YOU WEREN'T. - This is a good book about religious homophobia without ever actually delving at all into the religious aspect, or explaining why Katie is homeschooled in the first place -- the church youth group's cool kids all go to a non-homeschool school (I don't know if it's meant to be public or private school they attend). Katie's parents are basically non-existent in this book except for when she calls her mom to pick her up from the youth group retreat and gets her period the same day.
I'm sure there are very specific religious reasons Katie is homeschooled! I am sure there is a lot of stuff she's learning in homeschooling that are religiously focused! This cannot be the first time she is discovering dress codes. - An emotional beat revolves around the federal marriage amendment, which Katie's social circle is in favor of, but she happily finds out her older sister isn't in favor of. And I had a lovely moment of going "wow yeah I'd managed to forget all about that". Amazing.
- Katie's main joy is the theater and, since the play this year is Annie and Katie is a redhead, she'd thought she had a good chance to be Annie. But she gets cast as one of the orphans instead, but that's all fine, she realizes that she'd be too nervous to play Annie and anyway she's not actually a good dancer. But that lets her meet A New Girl who she never met before, whose grandfather owns a dance studio, and they get to practice dancing, and chat on AOL Instant Messenger to each other, and Katie brings her flowers at the Annie performance and really just falls in love.
Meanwhile, she's getting bullied a lot at the church events, she seems to want to quit the entire thing (including church), and I have to assume her homeschool organization is from the church, so... either Katie is in for some really awful closet years to come, or she's going to have to tell her parents and get some changes happening. But this is 2004, she's in a religiously-based homeschool environment (not a disability-caused or other issue-causing homeschooling), her social group is entirely around the church and this one community theater play she does once a year, but hey, it's 2004 and she has unmonitored internet access, and her older sister, at least, is in favor of marriage equality. - Katie has a job as a babysitter on Saturday mornings because the client, a mom (appears to be a single mom) of two kids (appear to be twins) is a lawyer who has to temporarily work on Saturday mornings. And at the end, Katie is happy she had the job, and is happy that the probably-single-definitely-a-lawyer mom has a job, and the lawyer goes into how her parents didn't want her becoming a lawyer, and, no, they never came around to it, and the way Katie was acting, it sounds like Katie's mother is not employed. But we have no information on that at all, just this question. (Isn't Katie's mother the one homeschooling her? But Katie goes to a "homeschool co-op", which, because I am not that most aware of the details of the homeschool movement, I have never heard of -- around 1998-2002, I was internet friends with someone who was homeschooled but she never used that co-op term, but she attended a group homeschool environment, like, she went to a place near her to be homeschooled, leaving me with the impression from that and from this book that homeschooling is a misnomer and it's actually just a minimally-regulated/non-regulated schooling environment, although in my friend's case, as I recall, she was homeschooled because there wasn't a regular school in a close enough distance that she could get to)
- We don't need no exposition, we don't need no cultural context: characters and situations from Anne Of Green Gables are namedropped, we have at least one case of "bosom friends", there's reference to Mr. Darcy, an illustration of Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley... I want to say that all those things in a non-graphic novel would be explained to the target audience, even though, no, they likely would not, but at least there would be more info. I assume the target audience just shrugs over them and takes them as background easter eggs if they've read Anne of Green Gables.
- This book felt like it was trying to appease several audiences, and -- in a mirror of how I've felt with some Jewish books -- none of them are actually the author's homeschool movement that she was in.
One of the audiences is kids who want to pick up recent-historical novels and, to them, ah, how horrible and awful and homophobic the past was, but this was Historical Setting so it's all fine now, this is just a story about someone else.
Another audience is kids who are in similar situations, and for them, this says "it's okay if you're queer" and "it's okay if you don't like your church" and "you have allies in unexpected places" and DOES NOT say to them "it's okay if you tell your parents" nor does it say "it's okay if you tell your crush". This is important for safety, and in the afterword, the author even says, only go to these websites for more info if that's safe for you to do that. This is not a book that thinks that homophobia is a thing of the past.
BUT for any audience in the precise situation, they might bounce very heavily off of "oh come on, she's 12, she can't be just hearing about all of this now" or various details about the youth group or the names of the groups who go to the youth group retreat with their group, or with a million other things. - Overall: that there is this book about realizing you're queer and not fitting in, that it's not marketed as an issue book, that it's not a problem that she's queer, that this is a coming of age book and not a tragedy, that this is a graphic novel shelved with all the other ones, that the target audience is middle schoolers... that's pretty damn cool.
no subject
It also looks like it's the sequel to another book, which sounds like it does more exposition about the homeschooling. Anyway nothing sounds implausble to me about the book from your description; but various aspects of culture have shifted since then with will make the book less relatable to kids these days.
But a few specific speculations: based on my experience and other reviews I've found of the books, it sounds like homeschool co-op is a one-day-a-week thing to provide social interaction and structured classes on specific topics. Also, in somewhere like Kentucky in the early 90's, the Christian homeschool group might be the only group in town, and so people who chose to homeschool for other than religious reasons might still join it. (My homeschool group was for the homeschoolers who wouldn't touch the Christian group with a ten foot pole, and was much smaller than the Christian group.)
no subject
I got set off by "I'm sure there are very specific religious reasons Katie is homeschooled!" because while that could well be true, I'm aware enough of the spectrum of reasons why people homeschool their kids that it wasn't obvious to me (and I looked at the start of the author's book *Lucky Few* where the protagonist starts out by going on a rant about how she's one of the *normal* homeschooled kids, not the weird religious or hippie types). But also I read an interview with the author which makes it sound like her actual experience was of being closeted througout her teenage years.
Also, I didn't realize that recent-historical childrens' books were a genre that was getting published now! I thought I'd heard that children's publishers pretty much only published historical-historical (typically meanining WWII or earlier) and contemporary books. I guess that must not be true because you mentioned that this is part of a subgenre of semi-autobiographical graphic novels -- maybe it's not possible to write this unless it's semi-autobiographical? I assume that some of the appeal is to parents who want to show their kids how things were different when they were young.
no subject
The reason I think Katie is homeschooled for religious reasons is because of the church stuff and the youth group stuff, and her close friends are also from the church and youth group. But I haven't read the first one in the series, so I don't know.
no subject
Yeah, I do think that both Katie-the-character and Kathryn-the-author are likely some brand of Christian homeschooled, I just can't tell exactly how far along the Christian extremism spectrum, so it seemed possible that sexist dress codes were actually new to her, especially if the homeschool group became more conservative for some reason. Homeschool groups and religious youth groups are some of the easiest ways for homeschoolers to have a social life (true for me), so I mostly read into that "her family is Christian and OK with her socializing and going to co-op with mostly evangelicals". (Also my stereotype is that homeschoolers who go on to become traditionally published authors tend to be a bit more academically than religiously focused.)
I've now read Lucky Few, set in Austin, TX in the 2010s, so a much more liberal environment, where the protagonist is trying to distance herself from the stereotypes of religious homeschoolers -- she herself is cool with her (also homeschooled) BFF having two moms and thinks dress codes are bullshit -- but does have to acknowledge over the course of the book that actually her parents are conservative and homophobic (and probably didn't decide to homeschool her entirely for academic reasons). Unfortunately this is not executed at all well, due to being crammed into the background of a standard YA romantic comedy.
no subject
1) coop is once a week, on Fridays
2) no explanation for the homeschooling is ever given, even though there is a perfect spot in the book to put in, when Katie is relating people's negative or concerned reactions to finding out she's homeschooled. I assume this is either to not get bogged down in it, or to universalize the experience of being a tween and needing minor in-clinic surgery and developing OCD and enduring friendship breakups.
One advantage of homeschooling is shown, in that this book, like the sequel, shows how easy it is for people to move during the school year when they don't have to worry about how that interferes with the school year. And, funnily enough, the best friends moving away at the beginning of the 2nd book are best friends of short duration: they move to the location during the school year in this book, IIRC after January, maybe even early spring.
Katie's not moving around but these two books sure are showing a lot of changes in her social circle.
no subject