Undercover

This is a beautifully written book about young Elise who is bookish, shy and awkward, but has poetry in her soul. Her voice is unique. As she struggles with classmates, her parents rocky marriage, first love and loneliness, Elise escapes to a deserted pond where whe teaches herself to ice-skate, allowing the magic of words to immerse her. The style of writing won't appeal to everyone, but I loved it. It is lyrical, moving, full of wonderful imagery and a hint of magic. A truly charming read.

Elisa Cantor has a way with words and a connection with nature. However, she uses her talent for creating metaphors to ghost-write love notes for the boys in her grade. Ordinary and plain-looking herself, Elisa knows that she will never get the attention of a boy like Theo, who asks Elisa to write metaphors for his love interest, the hellish but beautiful Lila. Meanwhile, Elisa’s father’s work prevents him from being home, causing the rest of the family to begin to fall apart.

Elisa spends most of her time skating on her frozen pond in the woods while trying to figure out her growing friendship with Theo. However, Lila is jealous of their friendship and threatens to make Elisa regret talking to Theo. Will Elisa find the courage show more within herself to stand up and believe in herself, her talents, and the strength of all kinds of love?

UNDERCOVER is simply stunning. There are some books you read for the sake of the story, and there are some you read just to see the words fall perfectly together, to hear the way they sound in your mind. Beth Kephart’s words do not conjure up vivid scenes involving the characters and their predicaments; instead, they push the boundaries of language and remind us of the multidimensionality of words—that language is not simply a means to a message, but rather a form of art itself.

Elisa’s way of thinking puts us readers easily into her mind, understanding where she is coming from and why she is feeling what she feels. We see the world through her descriptions, which perhaps does not give us as clear a picture of the other characters as we would like—but they are understandably incomplete character sketches. Elisa’s mother, sister, and father are all compelling and possessing unique characteristics, while Theo is an appealing romantic interest. Lila, Theo’s evil girlfriend, seems a little underdeveloped to me, but I’m willing to overlook that in light of the numerous other positive qualities that this book has.

All in all, UNDERCOVER is a fantastic work of art that just might change the way you look at the world. I am now thoroughly a fan of Beth Kephart and look forward to reading more of her books in the future. show less

This modern teenage retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac is excellent, in spite of the predictability of the centuries-old but still beloved plot line.

Elisa Cantor is a high school sophomore, known more for brains than for beauty, unlike both her sister Jilly and her mother. Nevertheless she is in great demand with the guys, but only for her talent in penning poetic tributes to other girls with whom they are infatuated. But when Theo Moses wants help winning the hand of the beautiful but nasty Lila, everything changes for Elisa. She begins to fall for Theo herself.

In school, she is studying Cyrano and recognizes the parallels. She laments:

"Why can’t she [Roxanne] see that it is Cyrano’s heart and head inside those letters? Whey can’t show more she tell how much he loves her? And what does this say about people in general, that they can’t see what is standing before them? Beauty rules, every single time. Beauty is the password.”

She has no one to turn to for guidance or sympathy. Her mother is fighting with her father because he is constantly away on business. Their separations threaten to become permanent. Her older sister has other interests, revolving around her good looks and popularity. Elisa teaches herself to ice skate, and this becomes both her release and the source of redemption, not just for her, but for her whole family.

Evaluation: This lovely book was a National Book Award Nominee, and the author’s subsequent work has likewise received high praise. She has a wonderful talent for seeing both the pain and the poetry of teenaged angst. I know I want to read the rest of this author’s work. show less

I was certain that this book wasn't going to work for me- it began with more than one cliché and I mentally rolled my eyes. I don't know when I started noticing Kephart's extraordinary facility with language, maybe by the second chapter. The words in this book are muscular, flexible and entirely beguiling. The main character is a nascent poet who is gradually coaxed into herself with the assistance of a phenomenal teacher and a pond.

Read it for the glorious use of language, if nothing else.

How lovely it is to read a book for teens that dare escape the tiring plot about handsom, god like strangers and supposedly troubled, adolescent girls as deep as the snow in Sahara. How nice it is to read a book for teens with beautiful language and references to poetry.

In this book we meet Elisa, a young girl, who is misunderstood at home, and not really popular at school. She keeps to herself most of the time and her older sistee will not even acknowledge her at school. But Elisa has a secret, a secret she shares with almost every boy in school. Or every boy in love that is. She is a ghost writer. She write love notes for boys who wants to impress a girl. The girls are never told who the real poet is, and so Elisa can keep up the show more charade. But then Elisa falls in love with Theo, a boy she just wrote a love note for, a boy who is in love with someone else.

I really liked this book. It is gentle, moving and in a way, tender. Elisa is a very likeable character, and in many ways she reminds me of Paloma in [The Elegance of the Hedgehog], one of my favourite reads this year. Paloma has her profound thoughts and observation of movements, Elisa is preoccupied with explaining the changes in the nature surrounding her to her absent father.

Dear Dad, I can’t keep track of the changes alone, I can’t do this without you. Dear Dad, it snows, then the snow is gone, then it snows again harder, and I can’t find where I was going to inside all the weather. Dear Dad, Is this what it takes to be so good at poems, that you hurt all the time and you don’t have real friends and you have no one to talk to, so you write?

I needed the scorch of the moon and the cold on my face. I needed the stream beneath the moon and the sky full of stars. I needed ravens if there were still ravens clumped up in those trees, and if there were an owl hiding out somewhere, just one white owl, I’d climb his back and I would say, Please. Fly me anywhere.

Here’s another change I’ve noticed: The dark is more than the sun dropping off, more than the moon and the stars. It’s what you can’t see that you hope you will see, what hasn’t been that might be.

I would heartily recommend this book to any of you. Just looking at the quotes, made me want to read it again. show less

While most high schools seem to stratify into various subgroups - jocks, brains, leaders, followers, trendies, what have you - there's a larger breakdown that overlays them, and within the subgroups the same breakdown occurs: those that are in the thick of it, and those on the sidelines. The ones on the edges are the watchers, the less sure of themselves - like Elisa Cantor, they're the 'undercover operatives.' Beth Kephart's novel Undercover explores the year when Elisa slowly began to come out from undercover.

Elisa prefers staying in the background, not standing out. Her emerging talent for poetry is expressed in the brief written lines she provides to her male classmates to give to their girlfriends, passed off as their own. She's show more distant from her beautiful mother and older sister, who seem to be so many things that the world values more (and that she isn't), and with her father away on a seemingly endless business trip, she's spending a lot of her time on her own; her new favorite place is a pond in the nearby woods where, as winter comes, she teaches herself to ice skate. At school, her Honors English class is working on plays and poetry, and Elisa is shaken to realize the similarity between her providing 'metaphors' to the boys for their girlfriends and the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac. She is even more shaken to realize her growing feelings for one of those boys, Theo.

I was a bit of an undercover operative in high school myself, and Elisa came across as very real to me. The novel is narrated in Elisa's first-person voice, and she is the most fully-developed character in the novel; we see the others characters primarily through her eyes. This struck me as particularly appropriate, though, as it did in Goldengrove by Francine Prose, another story told though the voice of a teenage protagonist at a particularly self-referential stage of life. But that limited perspective doesn't detract from Elisa's appeal; she's more eloquent and expressive than the average teen, but her voice sounds true and the connection the reader makes with her is real.

I've been reading the blog of Elisa's creator for nearly a year now, and Elisa's voice sounds like it was written by Beth Kephart. This is a good thing, and so is Undercover. show less

If UNDERCOVER were a movie, I would say it's a slice of life story. You both start and end in the middle of things, but it's still satisfying. Intelligent Elisa may not be conventionally pretty, but she walks in a world of beauty. She appreciates the outdoors and uses the nature around her to inspire poetry. In turn she gives this poetry to male classmates to aid them in attracting the girls they like. The person who taught her to pay such attention to nature, her father, is away in San Francisco. Her parents' marriage might be falling apart.

Elisa's at a crucial point in discovering who she is, but she's floundering. She's closer to her father and her sister is closer to their mother, but now her father isn't readily available. Her show more crush Theo is dating the possessive Lila, whom Elisa helped Theo woo. Luckily, she discovers those close to her are allies even when their relationships are strained. She's also encouraged by her English teacher, Dr. Charmin, who recognizes the potential in Elisa's poems.

As with any good slice of life story, UNDERCOVER works because reader's can see elements of their own life in Elisa's, even when the two diverge. I used to skate, although never outdoors and never over a permanently drowning girl. (I do live in Texas. Outdoor ice skating just doesn't work.) During my parents' divorce, my mother used skating to deal with her emotions. The scenes of Elisa skating on the pond, which are numerous, resonate with my own experience.

Likewise, I never had a teacher quite like Dr. Charmin. But I did have wonderful English teachers. I remember reading poetry and plays aloud in class. Of course, the only emotions I was ever overcome by were embarrasment and humor. (Deimyts and I read the two main characters of WAITING FOR GODOT. My character started asking his whether he ever hung himself, because it would give him a boner. Very startling. We also read two characters in a shorter Polish play titled THE UNVEILING. His character began to show another character how to properly seduce a woman - my character. This is the sort of stuff you need to be prepared for! These lines creep up on you!)

One of my biggest quibbles with most books set in high schools is the fact they never seem like any high school I ever attended. But Beth Kephart writes characters I could see myself knowing, in situations I could see happening. And she does it with beautiful language. Elisa's voice has a steady flow and Kephart uses elegant imagery. I hope UNDERCOVER not only pulls readers into Elisa's world, but pushes her world out into theirs and encourages them to read some of the prose and poetry mentioned within the story. (Believe me, it's worth reading.) show less