Don't Challenge it, Except Perhaps on the Grounds of Banality: Charise Mericle Harper's Flashcards of My Life Emily is an everyday ordinary middle-school girl: a girl who apparently spends most of her time obsessing about girlfriends, boy friends, and - especially - boyfriends. So when her Aunt Chester (not the lady's real name, mind you, more of a descriptive nickname: wink-wink, nudge-nudge) gives Emily yet another in a string of weird birthday presents, Emily figures that she'll use the gift just enough to seem grateful and then forget them. After all, what middle-school girl would possibly be interested in a box of plain cards called Flashcards of My Life? Especially when it's up to the recipient to fill them out, and they have boring titles like "Duty," "Fate," and "Surprise"? Wait: this could be interesting, ‘cause here's one called "Sex"!
Emily has one true, 24/7 friend, Sandra; one good friend, Becca; two school friends, the Sarahs (Sarah W. and Sarah J.); and one boy friend (Mike). Right now she doesn't have a boyfriend or even a crush, not even on David (who's mutually crushing with a Sarah, at least this week). Her life pretty much revolves around how to juggle her friendships, especially since her 24/7 friend Sandra doesn't like the Sarahs very much. Lots of the flashcards of Emily's life seem to end up dealing with the day-to-day shifts in loyalties. An only child, Emily is curious about the siblings of her friends, especially Sandra's high-school-age sister Claire. She's oblivious to the relationship between her parents, shrugging it off most of the time as "Mom's mad at Dad again." She apparently has only three classes at school - French, band, and gym (where she's learning ballroom dancing) - and virtually no homework except for practicing her clarinet. Her family isn't wealthy (Sarah W.'s family is), but they're apparently middle-class. Maybe lower middle-class.
As Emily plows through the stack of what looks like "a million cards," the result is precisely as Aunt Chester (and the card designers) intended - Emily takes a little journey of self-discovery. She performs some self-assessment: for instance she realizes that she pretends to be a pessimist, but it's just a thin shell surrounding her native optimism. She considers her strengths and her faults. She ponders the true meaning of friendship, and the real difference between a boy friend and a boyfriend.
During the weeks in which Emily journals her days on the Flashcards of My Life, she'll suffer earth-shattering catastrophes and tremendous joy; scaled to a middle-school sense of self, of course. She'll realize what a true friend really is, and even grow up - a little: it is, after all, only a matter of a few weeks...
For her first YA novel Flashcards of My Life, author Charise Mericle Harper (who's since gone on to write the Just Grace chapter books for pre-teens) chose to chronicle a month or so in the life of a middle-school girl. Unlike television sitcom middle-school girls, however, Harper's Emily isn't a brainy nerd or other kind of wunderkind, and she's definitely not smarter than her parents. In short, she seems to be pretty much the archetype of the middle-school girl; post-puberty of course (she does complain a bit about the diminutive size of her... "bazoombas"). What that means is th at the vast majority of Flashcards of My Life records the minutiae of a middle-school-age girl's existence, complete with all the angst and floods of tears that come with it. The kids are socially inept; a quart low on the self-esteem scale, and - most of all - curious about the opposite sex. Not that curious, mind you; the best these young-uns manage is a dry kiss or two on the swing at the park. The kids also seem to be in some kind of time warp: Emily has a computer at her house and occasionally uses it to email Sandra; but cell phones, MP3 players, and headphones are strangely absent - as are television, radio, and music other than band and Emily's dance lessons in gym. One wonders if kids reading this can even identify with Emily's "dull" life.
In truth, pretty much all Flashcards of My Life has going for it is the format. The book's printed using the fake hand-printed font that direct mail companies use to try to fool you into thinking you're getting a hand-addressed letter. The flashcards are mixed in with the text as well, filled out in Emily's handwriting (which just happens to be the same font), and the book and cards are liberally illustrated by Emily's little line drawings (actually drawn by Harper). They're of about the same artistic level as those in Antoine St. Exupery's The Little Prince, and seem to me rather crude for a teenager, even one who's only thirteen or fourteen.
Though the target demographic of Flashcards of My Life is clearly middle-school girls like Emily, the presentation seems to me too young for them (not that I've ever been a middle-school girl, mind you). The heaping helping of self-esteem training fits just about any age, but the content seems a little "young."
Given that the content seems more suited for pre-middle school children, it should come as no surprise that Flashcards of My Lifewas number ten on the list of most-challenged books for 2008 (two years after its publication). Here's why: SEX. For instance, the kids surmise that the gym teacher is a lesbian because she went to Paris with her female roommate (even though Emily says that Aunt Chester is her mother's "soulmate friend"). The key line is,
"...Janell tried to start a whole Ms. Clark-is-a-weirdo-lesbian rumor, but Carol put a stop to it right away. Carol said she thought lesbians were cool and that anyone who made fun of them was shallow and a discriminator, and then she looked right at Janelle, so there was no doubt who she was talking about. I used to think Carol was sort of stuck-up and snobby (she's really rich and popular and on the volleyball team) but maybe I was wrong. If I were a lesbian, I'd pick a girlfriend who was exactly my size so we could share clothes. Maybe that's why Ms Clark has such an amazing wardrobe." Well there you go: not only does Emily mention lesbians, she thinks making fun of them is the D-word... bet that doesn't sell well in Colorado Springs. Over at "the river," the only one-star review says, "I was excited to find this book and quickly skimmed through it to see if it would be a good fit for us. On one particular page, the heading is 'Sex'. This book is geared towards junior high children, ages 9-12 [sic]. I am very disappointed that the author felt like it was necessary to discuss this topic in a supposedly innocent children's book." Puh-lease. The card that says "Sex" on it has Emily and Sandra catching Sandra's sister and her boyfriend partially naked, but both still have their pants on - and then Emily worries for weeks that Claire is pregnant. Too graphic, I guess (or maybe someone doesn't want her kids to know that people often get naked before having sex - especially when it's light out).
The bottom line on Flashcards of My Life? The bluenoses don't like it because it admits that people have sex, and - even worse - it suggests that not liking lesbians is shallow and discriminatory. On the other hand, I didn't like it because it was boring and made middle-school girls look shallow and silly. Maybe they are - but shouldn't a book with a middle-schooler for a heroine show her doing something mature?