The Glass Cafe, or The Stripper and the State; How My Mother started a War With The System that Made Us Kind of Rich and a Little Bit Famousby Gary Paulsen
Publishers Weekly
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In one of his minor efforts, the prolific Paulsen serves up a righteous, pro-free-speech theme accompanied by big helpings of over-the-top plot lines. Twelve-year-old Tony, in whose disingenuously na?ve voice the story is told, lives with his single mom, Al, a stripper with a heart of gold who hopes to finance a Ph.D. in literature. In art class at school, Tony discovers a talent for drawing, and almost overnight he produces an extraordinarily nuanced set of life drawings, using his mother's barely clothed co-workers as models. When his enraptured art teacher enters his work in a show, someone reports Al to the state as an unfit mother (for encouraging her son "to draw pornographic pictures"). Enter a policeman and a thick-headed social worker, and before readers can say SWAT team, the action escalates to a conflagration worthy of national news coverage. Besides the exaggerated events, Paulsen looks to the endless run-on sentences and artless grammar of Tony's delivery for humor ("So you know my name is Tony and I am twelve and my mother who is named Alice except nobody calls her that, they all call her Al, like she was a guy only she isn't, is a stripper, only it's called exotic dancing, at a club called the Kitty Kat, except that everybody calls it the Zoo," reads the first half of the first sentence). Readers who like this style of writing can rest easy: Paulsen maintains that style all the way to the end. Ages 10-up. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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BookList
: From BookList, September 1, 2003, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission. : Gr. 6-8. This first-person contemporary story is based on an incident from Paulsen's past but it seems like a fairy tale. Twelve-year-old Tony lives with his mother, Al, a stripper who is working toward her doctorate in literature (she loves Dickens.) They're great pals, so when Tony, a talented artist, wants to hone his skills, Al takes him to the club where she works, and he sketches the women in various stages of undress, perceptively conveying their weariness or the mileage they have on them. Tony's art teacher sends the drawings to a contest--and a viewer calls social services. Al is not about to have Tony removed from her care without a fight, and a legal battle ensues. In a very happy ending, Tony and Al win the case, and, for rather vague reasons, Al wins a lot of money in a settlement from the state, enabling her to become a full-time student. There are lots of problems besides the premise. With a pocket-size format and fewer than 100 pages, this is more like a short story than a novel or even a novella, and Paulsen often breaks a cardinal rule of fiction by telling not showing. Still, this may work for reluctant readers or hardcore Paulsen fans.
IleneCooper. : | distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.: |
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