Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth

[This is another one I read for my YA course at SMU which I ADORE - the book and the course.] 

Gansworth, E. Apple (Skin to the Core), (2020), Montclair, NJ: Levine Querido.

Ages 12+ according to the publisher. 

This book had been recommended to me so much, and I resisted. Stupid, stupid me. This is a beautiful exploration of growing up in a community, the importance of family and the impact of popular culture, particularly when you are in a group that is outside the “norm.” It doesn’t hurt that the author is almost exactly my age, so the references brought up my own memories of adolescence. 

I kept the windows open for all the searches I did on my phone while reading this book. I investigated “eee ogg” (gossip), Iroquois False Face masks (unsettling), David Bowie on Dinah Shore (She kept asking him back!)Tuscarora Reservation (Dog Street is there, called Mount Hope Road!)Lewiston Reservoir and ribbon shirts. I learned so much. 

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to see if the poems inspired by the Beatles’ songs shared the rhythm of their namesakes and was thrilled to find that sometimes they did. 

But the thing that made me swoon over and over was the language. I am not a poetry person, but I found myself re-reading big swaths of the text, out loud, even. In part it was the way the words worked together, but mostly it was just how visceral the writing was. 

There is not a lot of us/them language - other than in the boarding school sections - but there doesn’t need to be. The consequences of American imperialism are so perfectly drawn that they barely need to be called out, and yet Gansworth does here, to perfection.

p.75 [My Brother Tries Quietly to Wake Us Up] - As we stare at this static image, we realize that even on color TV, Indians are frozen in the past, designed for a black-and-white world instead of the brightly colored one where we live together, and breathe current air, feeding trees and taking oxygen from them, an exchange we did for centuries before others arrived, claiming new borders and driving us away because we didn’t use land the way they did. 

The pop cultural references are so familiar to me. And the way that your music feels when you are 13 is universal, Rez or no Rez. 

p.90 [Metamorphosis] - …guided by Top 40 streaming in from some unknown tower, maybe in Montreal or quebec City, “Wildfire,” Young Americans,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Stand by Me,” “Love Will Keep Us Together,” strung together so they feel like a message that I’ll get when I can successfully tune in directly instead of the phasing in and out reception you get on every Rez I’ve spent time on.”

Anyone who grew up in a world of religious conservatism (as I did) recognizes the way that the pious can make you feel. 

p.122 [Masks Unmasked] - [Darth]Vader’s gleaming metal skull, even poorly rendered, spooked my aunt, so she always sat where she couldn’t see it, convinced Star Wars, like The Exorcist and Salem’s Lot and Carrie, and anything else I loved, was the work of the devil, and that I was playing with fire. She tended to see the devil everywhere, but especially lurking inside me and my idea of fun. 

Anyone who spent any time in any Spencer’s Gifts in the 70s or 80s recognizes this perfect description of the inventory!

p. 125 [In Spencer’s, I Become Someone Else for Under Ten Dollars] - The back is filled with carousels of posters, giant decks of cards featuring every sweating rock star you know.

The most powerful sections were the Hunger Tests. As someone who has never been hungry for more than an hour in my life, the descriptions of the circumstances of not having food were more powerful than the descriptions of the feelings of hunger ever were. 

p. 147 [Hunger Test 3. Cumulative Exam] - …your stomach forgets its empty state long enough for you to fall asleep and dream of a time, a place where you might have leftovers, because there was enough prepared, for you to have taken too much to start with…

The writing in this book is some of the best I have ever read in YA - it’s up there with The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by MT Anderson or Melinda Marchetta’s Jellicoe Road. And the content is equal to the art. A few weeks ago I read the young readers version of Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask by Anton Treuer, and I thought it was great. But I learned more by reading this work of art than I did reading a work of nonfiction.