Title: Ballads of SuburbiaAuthor: Stephanie Kuehnert
Pub. Date: July 2009
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Summary:
Kara hasn't been back to Oak Park since the end of junior year, when a heroin overdose nearly killed her and sirens heralded her exit. Four years later, she returns to face the music. Her life changed forever back in high school: her family disintegrated, she ran around with a whole new crowd of friends, she partied a little too hard, and she fell in love with gorgeous bad-boy Adrian, who left her to die that day in Scoville Park....
Amid the music, the booze, the drugs, and the drama, her friends filled a notebook with heartbreakingly honest confessions of the moments that defined and shattered their young lives. Now, finally, Kara is ready to write her own.
Review:
In Stephanie Kuehnert’s new novel, Ballads of Suburbia, we are first introduced to Kara in a two-part epilogue (one in the beginning and one in the end) when she comes home to Oak Park for the first time--to visit her friend Stacey--since her junior year of high school. Right off the bat you already know something terrible happened to her that made her leave and not come back until this point, but this is proven when she walks into her friend’s house and finds Adrian, a boy from her high school days, waiting for her and what had happened is revealed. From then on we follow Kara’s story from the beginning of high school until present day (which was 2000 in the book).
Stephanie Kuehnert is a writing god and that is not something I would say lightly. After reading I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone I thought there was no way she could do any better but I was absolutely blown away by Ballads. From the first chapter you find yourself submerged in Kara’s story and her struggle with drugs, friends, and family; she was the most interesting character that I’ve ever come across, but she was also the most frustrating. I can’t even count how many times I felt like pulling her out of her depression (or stupidity) and yelling at her. At times, she could’ve been the strongest, bravest character ever and other times she was the weakest.
I loved how well you got to know each of the characters through their ballads; it was almost like peeking into their deepest, darkest secrets and seeing them for who they really were. I could appreciate each and every one of them so much more after reading their ballads because I knew them a lot better and understood why they acted the way that they did. Except Christian, he was just a dick.
I must admit that I cried while reading Ballads…several times actually. Crying is not something that I normally do while reading a book because I’m never moved enough, but Stephanie knew all of the right buttons to press to activate such emotion from the reader.
Stephanie Kuenhert dealt with the entire book with such a realistic perspective, she never skipped out on the gory bits of the story, but she didn’t lay it on too thick either. She had the perfect amount to keep the reader interested in Kara’s story but also let them see the affects the drugs had on her and her friends.
I could rave all day about this book but I won’t because I don’t want to spoil anything for the people that haven’t read it yet. So I will just say this: you need to read it because you will be missing out on the chance to read one of the best books ever written.
Plus, the cover is rockin’ amounts of awesome!
For my guest topic I asked Stephanie Kuehnert to write her own ballad!
The Ballad of a Geek Girl and Her Words: Stephanie Kuehnert
I was always a creative kid. At five, I fell so deeply in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder books that I pretended to be her. I made believe I lived in “olden times.” I would dress up in flowered dress two-sizes too big, put on my moon boots, and insist that everyone call me Laura. Though I quit dressing up, part of the fantasy carried on through grade school. I planned to be a writer someday. I have distinct memories of composing my own autobiography in third grade: “She walks to her locker and worries if she can remember the combination. It’s embarrassing to ask the teacher for help….” Thrilling stuff, I know.
I kept my writerly dreams to myself for the most part, at least in third through most of sixth grade. Writing and my love for books was nerdy. I was trying very hard not to be a nerd. We’d moved from the city of St. Louis to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park right before I started third grade. Everything was different. At school in St. Louis, I was admired for being book-smart. Book-smart meant success. Clothes and image didn’t matter; some of my friends were so poor they dressed out of the free box at school.
The popular girls at my new school only wore clothes from the Gap and Banana Republic. They all wore Keds sneakers. One of them washed their clothes in Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth perfume. My mom saw no point and spending that much money on clothes, so I saved all my allowance money to afford plain pocket-tees from the Gap even though I thought they looked totally boring. I listened to B96, the pop music station even though most of the music (with the exception of Madonna and Janet Jackson) grated on my nerves and I’d rather listen to my parents’ Beatles records. I played down my smarts, though my inner perfectionist wouldn’t let me sacrifice my grades. So I let the popular kids copy my homework.
At some point in sixth grade, I realized my attempts to be “cool” were fruitless. Queen Bee didn’t invite me to her birthday party and Queen Bee’s #2 drone accidentally-on-purpose burned my forehead when she was doing my bangs. I was just the smart girl they could use. I hated my Gap wardrobe. My navy blue hooded shirt from the Gap looked much better when I cut off the hood and poured bleach on it, splotching parts of it pink. There was a vintage store two blocks from my house and a fun boutique down the block from that sold oversize tattered shirts and pink and black striped tights (see photo). I replaced the boring Keds with Converse. Queen Bee and her drones mocked me but it didn’t matter. I had four fellow weird/nerdy girl friends. One introduced me to Depeche Mode. One introduced me to MTV and, later, Nirvana’s Bleach album. One introduced to David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails and Hole. And my childhood best friend introduced me to Rush and Star Trek: The Next Generation. We wrote fan fiction. We were dorks. We didn’t care.
But the whole-words-will-never-hurt-you thing is a lie. Especially when two of your four best friends move away before junior high and you rarely see the other two at school. Queen Bee and her drones got even meaner. And they had Evil Jock Boys on their side, too. In gym class those boys would taunt me. Make fun of my long, kinda stringy hair and flat chest and say I looked like the (male) lead singer of the Black Crowes. I had one new ally in that class, the girl I’d go to my first concert with (Screaming Trees and Soul Asylum), and she would yell at them back when they taunted me. But all I could do was try not to cry and employ passive resistance by making sure to spoil any game we played when I was on their team—refusing to spike the ball when it came at me in Volleyball or to catch passes in Basketball, Football or Soccer. I simply step out of the path of the ball and let them scream in jock-boy frustration. Who knows, I might have been good at sports, but I refused to try since causing our team to lose was the only way I could hurt those boys back.
Then there was another set of mean girls from the other junior high. I met them when I did theatre summer camp. I decided to shake off my shyness and try out for the play instead of doing stage crew like I had the year before. I can’t even recall what I did to incur the wrath of the new Queen Bee and her drones, but they chased me home every day. Me on my rollerblades, loud music blasting from my Walkman forming my shield: Faith No More, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana. Give me louder, angrier. Give me songs that reflect my pain.
In eighth grade, something happened: Nirvana exploded. Kurt Cobain was these geeky, angry, skinny boy. He looked like an older male equivalent of me. And he was screaming and people were listening. He was screaming about feelings I had. And I thought maybe I shouldn’t run from the Queen Bees, maybe I shouldn’t employ passive resistance against the Evil Jock Boys. Maybe I should find my own way to scream.
So I started writing poetry. The first poem I turned into my English class got me sent to the guidance counselor. People were afraid I was “going to hurt myself.” I hated that phrase. “Hurt” was such a soft word. Say “cut”, say “kill”, “break”, “burn.” Use the angry, harsh words that reflect how I feel.
But the thing they didn’t get was that writing it down was *good* for me. If I was writing, I was not cutting, not hurting, not being suicidal/angry/depressed. I was releasing. And it was healthy. My only healthy release over the next few years.
High school was not easy. High school was more mean kids, bad relationships, abusive relationships. It was cutting. It was ditching school. It was drugs. But the one thing that carried me through was my words. First poems, then ‘zines. I passed the ‘zines around school and inspired others. Saw the power words could have. Felt like Kurt Cobain on a much, much smaller stage. I poured my heart into journals and later stories. Eventually, in my twenties, books were born. The second one, Ballads of Suburbia, is one I am particularly proud of because it does what the thirteen year-old geek girl dreamed of being able to do one day. It speaks up.
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