06 January 2008 HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE by Benjamin Alire Saenz, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, June 2008, ISBN: 1-4169-4963-1

Notes from my reading, Day One:

"I didn't stop there. Of course I didn't. I just felt I had to add that I probably had a better idea of the serious philosophy of anarchy than a man like him whose addiction to order seriously undermined his feeble attempts at engaging his imagination.

"He returned my remark by reminding me that he remained unimpressed with my shallow intellectual demeanor and that nothing could disguise my obstinate, disrespectful, and undisciplined attitude. He said being a smart aleck didn't actually make me smart. And then he said it again: 'Despite your extensive, if aggressive vocabulary, you're nothing but an angry, disrespectful young man who needs a little discipline.' You see, the thing with adults is that respect is just a word they use to guilt us nonadults into doing what they want us to do. But did Mr. Alexis leave it at that? Of course not. He reminded me and Tom and John that it was a privilege to attend a pre-med magnet school and if we weren't very careful, well, we just might be sent back to a normal school. That's how he put it. A normal school. That guy, he destroys me. Where in the hell was he going to find a normal school? How can schools be normal when they're run by adults like him."

To tell you the truth, reading HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE has so far been really slow going for me. But that is only because Ben Saenz is a poet, and while there is theoretically not a line of verse in the whole book, reading it is sure causing me to treat it as if it were an exceptional volume of YA poetry. This is one of those books that I need to read aloud and then read aloud again so that I can savor the words and expressions -- English and Spanish -- of entire amazing passages.

Notes from my reading, Day Two:

I would really prefer to have an audience so that I could actually be sharing these words and expressions and entire amazing passages but, instead, I have been sitting up in my room alone, reading aloud and loudly to myself, and totally cracking up every couple of pages, particularly with the Jake monologues. Yes, there are a whole slew of passages here which are so hysterical that I am repeatedly delaying any forward motion by re-reading and re-re-reading two- and three-page passages aloud in order to cause myself to laugh all over again. (By now the family dog must think I'm in serious need of a mental health professional.) In fact, I was inspired to write the Day One notes yesterday upon reaching page 39; now -- hours of reading later -- I've just finished re-reading page 52. And I'm still sitting here cracking up.

Notes from my reading, Day Three:

HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE is a story about what it is to become a man. It is the tale of two teenage guys in El Paso, Texas who know each other on a very casual basis. What they don't yet know they have in common is that neither really knows more about his own respective father than what he has gotten from his mom and -- in Ramiro's case -- his mom's sister.

Ramiro Lopez lives with his thirty-something, single mother, who works for a physician, and his younger brother Tito (an angry, violent, drug-abusing teenager with deadened eyes who is big trouble). Ramiro attends Jefferson High School (La Jeff).

Jake Upthegrove, the self-described teen anarchist (whose attitudes and observations about adults have kept me in stitches for days) lives with his mother -- whose "work" is shopping --and his wealthy-attorney-stepfather in a home that is staffed by a full-time Mexican American maid and a part time gardener. Jake attends the pre-med magnet high school that adjoins La Jeff.

"Put it this way: The good, intelligent pre-med magnet school students 'attend their classes in a separate facility.' So we don't even have 'contact.' That's the word they use too. 'Contact.' Like they've landed on the moon. I mean, crap, what's wrong with contact? What are we gonna do to those kids, kill them? Touch them? Infect them with Mexican ways of thinking? Make them ride burros? Take their English and put it between two pieces of corn tortillas until it sounds Spanish? What? It really makes me mad. So we're all separate. I mean, the only person I know from the pre-med magnet school is this guy named Jake. We both sort of hang out in the same place on the school grounds. We don't say much -- we just sort of nod at each other. Sometimes we exchange a few words. That's it. He likes to smoke. Sometimes we talk a little bit. Not a lot. I mean, I'm not sure what to say to the guy. The thing is, I don't think either one of us fits in at school. It's a place we go to because we have to. "School is like this speed bump, and I think we're both in a hurry to move on down the road. So we both sort of hide out just off the school grounds, which is illegal. Well. not exactly illegal, but against the rules. Rules, see, they keep us in line. In line is better than chaos, I suppose. Or maybe not. Who knows?"

I'm not going to blog each succeeding day in the week that it took me to finish reading the book with all of the u-turns I made along the way. But I have, in fact, now spent a lot of quality time with Ramiro and Jake and can say that this one is right up there with my all-time favorite YAs.

From reading HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE, it is clear that becoming a man has much to do with relationships. There are relationships here between adolescent guys and other guys, with girls as friends, with girls as girlfriends, with teachers, with siblings, with neighbors, with hired help, with mothers and with themselves.

HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE is not a book that is going to be able to be taught in middle school because of the language contained in it, but it will surely appeal to many students heading into high school and this is unquestionably a book good enough to be added to a high school English curriculum.

Ben Saenz is also the author of SAMMY AND JULIANA IN HOLLYWOOD, which was up at the top of my Best of 2004 list. It is not at all going out on a limb to predict that a year from now HE FORGOT TO SAY GOODBYE will be sitting up there on my Best of 2008 list.

Richie Partington, MLIS

Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com

Moderator, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/

BudNotBuddy@aol.com

http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks