Since I’ve finished my committee reads, I’ve had time to finally read for me. I could write lengthy reviews on each of these, but sometimes that feels like more pressure than enjoyment. And my idea of short is longer than most people’s anyway. In this set of reviews, I’ve got a book coming out today, a book that’s been out for a few years, and a book that’ll be out next month. They’re very different in topic, but all are contemporary/realistic YA.
The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson (out this week)
Like you’d expect of Anderson’s work, this is well-written, compelling, and tackles the issue of the impact of PTSD not only on the sufferer — who happens to be the father character — but also on those who are related to or have a relationship to the sufferer. This is emotionally-gripping, and I thought that Anderson really knocked it out of the park with Hayley’s snarky yet pained voice at the beginning of the book. That voice made the book for me, and it gave a real sense of the anguish she felt as her father’s primary caregiver. But when Hayley met Finn and began a relationship with him, her edge dulled significantly. In many ways, this makes perfect sense: she finally has someone she can talk to, relate to, and having that romance is an anchor for her. I found myself less invested in Hayley and more invested in her father’s well-being when it seemed like her voice shrunk.
Some of the plot points in the story were a little underexplained for me, as well. I needed to know more about the step-mother/not-a-step-mother who had been part of the reason Hayley and her father chose a life on the road in the first place. Was she an enemy? Was she to be trusted? Because by the end of the story, Hayley herself wasn’t entirely sure, but she was almost too willing to trust. Given the anger which Hayley had described their relationship, it seemed too easy and convenient, and I think part of that goes back to Hayley’s voice being tamped down.
The biggest let down, though, was the ending. It wrapped up far too quickly, far too easily, and the pacing in the final 15 pages of the book was way off. While the story itself spanned a few months at the beginning of the school year, once the Big Event happened at the end of the story (one that ultimately changes Hayley and her father’s relationship and both of their relationships with his PTSD), nearly a year blows by in just a few pages.
The Impossible Knife of Memory has a lot of tragedy in it, and at times, it felt a little bit too much. Hayley also abandons her best friend when she’s in need — her parents are going through a big divorce — and she does so not to help her father, but in favor of strengthening her relationship with Finn. It felt a little bit out of character for her, and given how much time speeds by in those last pages, I never got to know what happened with that plot thread nor if their relationship ever came back together. That said, it’s Laurie Halse Anderson, and it’s a solid contemporary YA novel. Readers who love her will pick this up and enjoy it, despite the weaknesses. Those who are new to Anderson, though, may want to start somewhere else. This is a nice addition to stories of PTSD, and interesting to me is that it publishes at the same time as Lucy Christopher’s The Killing Woods, which also tackles a father’s PTSD on his daughter. They’re nice companions to one another.
Making the Run by Heather Henson
I decided to pick this one up after reading through this list of YA recs and realizing I’d never even heard of it. It’s been out for a little over ten years, but topically, it’s as relevant as ever.
Lu’s mother died too young, and she’s been grieving that loss for a long time. It’s the end of her senior year and she cannot wait to leave her small town of Rainey, Kentucky, but when her older brother’s best friend Jay returns to town after his own leaving-after-high-school trip, Lu begins to fall for him. Add to that a best friend whose life is changed dramatically by one bad decision and then changed even further by an accident, Lu wonders if she’s destined to ever get out of Rainey or not.
Henson created a really angry girl in this story, and I thought that anger came through brilliantly. Jay says to her at one point that she either needs to use her anger or her anger will use her, and I felt that summed up the trajectory of Lu’s journey. The setting was palpable, and I appreciated that Henson allowed Lu to have hopes and dreams of getting out of Rainey that weren’t dependent upon her getting a scholarship and going to college. Lu’s only an okay student, and she doesn’t want to do that. She puts her passion into her photography, and while she doesn’t know if there’s a future in it, she’d rather spend time in her basement studio than hitting the books. It was refreshing to read a story where “the future” and “getting out” weren’t bound up entirely in the idea of college.
I didn’t feel like the rest of the characters were fleshed out quite enough, though. I never found what made Jay attractive, and while I felt bad for what happened to Lu’s best friend, I found all of the ancillary characters to be merely filler. None of them felt like they had lives of their own but were instead names. In context, it made sense since that’s all they were to Lu, but it made for a bit of a drag on the story.
This felt very real to me, in a way that I think a lot of current stories about middle class or lower middle class teens don’t. There’s not always a golden ticket out. Kids who want out have to consciously choose to do that sometimes, and I felt Lu’s struggles at the end about whether she could do it or not do it were authentic. I’d pass this book off to teens who love photography, who might not be the kinds of kids who are university-bound but still have dreams and aspirations, and it’s definitely the kind of story teens who live in similar towns and want nothing more than to get out will completely get. I could see readers who dig gritty stories in the vein of Gail Gailes, Heidi Ayarbe, or maybe even Ellen Hopkins. It’s older, but it is definitely not dated.
Faking Normal by Courtney Stevens (available February 25)
The reviews are likening this to Anderson’s Speak or to Sarah Dessen, but I had a lot of issues with this tackling of rape What could have been a powerfully rendered story about secrets, lies, and the long-term effects of being a rape victim were instead marred by the fact this book was much more a whodunit than it was a fully-fleshed, rich, pained account of the after effects of what Alexi went through. Readers are lead astray more than once on who the criminal was here, and it was unnecessary because it removed the power and immediacy of what happened to Alexi away from her. Readers instead wonder if it was this football player, that football player, or someone else entirely. Alexi knows fully who it was, so this isn’t about her figuring it out.
More than that, it became far too obsessed with Kool Aid boy and Captain Lyric (who are the same person, which is a spoiler but not a spoiler than anyone who reads a few pages wouldn’t guess), and the story ends up allowing Alexi’s new romantic interest to steal her story of survival. He even takes the opportunity to tell her best friend what happened, despite the fact Alexi herself hadn’t felt comfortable doing so.
The story is set in the south, and it reads with that very southern feel in terms of some of what the characters say and how they act. There’s nothing wrong with it, and it in fact enriches a lot of the story and characters. I forgave some of the weirdness the teens had around Kool Aid boy, who liked to dye his hair with Kool Aid, as simply something that teens where they lived did. Perhaps it was weird to them a boy would want to color his hair in weird ways (I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and teens did it every day so it was never noteworthy — perhaps here it was).
However, there are a lot of awkward turns of phrase, and there are entire passages that needed some tighter editing. Again, I think a lot of this happened because this book didn’t know what it wanted to be. Was it meant to be an exploration of the way a survivor survives? If that’s the case, I never got to know what it was Alexi was really thinking or feeling. There was a lot of talking around how things were or talking through how things were, rather than talking about the things themselves. For example, Alexi took out her pain by scratching the back of her neck, but as readers, we’re never privy to how that felt or the things Alexi experienced prior to doing it or in the moments while it happened. She simply told us she did it and she worried about having blood found somewhere or being discovered with her hair pulled up. There’s not an immediacy to it.
What bothered me was that Alexi didn’t get her own story here — it kept being moved or displaced or handed over to someone else. And when she did get her own story, it didn’t always make sense. The first football player she went on a date with also tried to assault her and she left the situation very angry about it. After accepting an apology, she then later thought that he was Captain Lyric and then changed her mind about his intentions all along. I had a hard time suspending disbelief about the relationship dynamics between Alexi’s sister and fiance, especially at the end of the story. Moreover, I thought that when the reveal happened and we learn the identity of Alexi’s rapist. I had an even harder time buying that the criminal had never done anything in the prior ten years that would have roused suspicions where they should have been roused. It’s not that Alexi is being blamed here — far from it. It’s simply a matter of actual statistics.
I wanted more from this book and I needed less, too. Faking Normal had some charm to it, and I thought that Kool Aid boy was pretty interesting. His backstory was compelling, despite the fact I thought it was convenient how he and Alexi ended up spending so much time together. I thought Alexi herself really was pained and that what happened to her hurt her not only on a personal level but it hurt her because of the implications it would have for other people. She cared deeply about other people in a way that I think many readers will relate to — you can’t always stand up for yourself when you worry about the repercussions for other people not directly involved with something.
This is a worthwhile book because of what it tackles, but it’s not the best in the field. I think the comparisons to Anderson and Dessen are a little heady, and part of me wonders if those comparisons are based because of topic more than the actual exploration of story or the writing itself.
Review copies of The Impossible Knife of Memory and Faking Normal from the publisher. I purchased my copy of Making the Run.