SMALL PRINT
Well told coming-of-age stories great summer reads for teens
July 6, 2008
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Deirdre Baker
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Just in time for the best in summer reading, Marthe Jocelyn, author of TD Award-winning middle-grade novel Mable Riley — as well as several other novels, anthologies and a shelf full of picture books — now takes her considerable talents into the realm of teen literature in Would You (Tundra, 165 pages, $19.99, ages 12+). And she demonstrates, once again, her ability not just to captivate her readers, but to take them farther than most in thinking about and understanding the human condition.
Natalie is spending the summer before Grade 11 having fun — working as a lifeguard, hanging out with friends, and doing the occasional midnight pool-hop for excitement. One night, her older sister Claire is hit by a car and wounded so badly that she goes into a coma. Suddenly, the game “would you?” that Nat and her friends play takes on a whole different meaning. It’s no longer a funny contest to gross each other out, but a way to pose questions Natalie must confront about her sister’s future: “Would you rather feel blinding, scorching pain and then die quickly? Or no pain, but prolonged, trembling decay instead?” or, in another version: “What if she dies? And what if she doesn’t?”
Jocelyn writes with sombre wisdom and humour about this life-changing situation. We get a strong sense of Claire as sister and friend, but the story is Natalie’s as she recounts the impressions, thoughts and experiences of an intense ten days — from the night before the accident to the evening after Claire’s funeral. Nat’s tale is an accumulation of short passages with headlines; a map of the geography, practical and emotional, that she travels. “The First Doctor of Many” is one section; “What Do They Mean, Exactly?” another. “Invasion of the Well-meaning” marks the descent of friends and neighbours; “We Make Room For New Truths” is the moment the family realizes that Claire’s brain is dead.
How sensational, how melodramatic a subject, one might think. But this is a sane, compassionate novel, reflecting not some predictable YA angst, but the calm, sadness, fear and even pleasure of a girl who lives a traumatic week with clear-eyed perception and openness. It offers its audience the brisk pace and sparky friendships of a quick YA read (and its pool-inspired dust jacket makes it a shoo-in for the beach). But the differences are Jocelyn’s hallmarks as a writer: a dry, quirky sense of humour, unexpected, refreshing turns of phrase, and insights articulated so lucidly that they will stick in the mind for years.
Mary C. Sheppard’s One for Sorrow (Penguin, 244 pages, $14, ages 12+) follows a more protracted, less drastic period of adolescent trials.
Isabelle Heffernan, 15, an inhabitant of remote Riverbank, Newfoundland in the 1970s, can hardly wait to turn 15, leave her bitter sister Louise and her bedridden, deadbeat mother, and head for the big city. But the year holds big changes for Issy and her family: a marriageable doctor brings Issy’s mother back to health, and an even more marriageable police sergeant begins courting Louise. Issy’s old friend, Wish, shows up again, kind and loving and sweet on Issy. Even more significantly, illiterate Issy discovers that her problems with reading have nothing to do with her brain, but only with poor vision.
The peppery prose of Sheppard’s earlier story, Seven for a Secret, resurface in this companion novel. Issy may be illiterate and mousy in her 15-year-old person, but as an older narrator looking back on her youth, she has a knack for evocative expression. “At home I was like a sad dog,” she recalls, all “tangled up for good in the net of misery and woe that was my family.” Hard not to respond to that with appreciation, as well as to the Newfoundland out-port culture and setting Sheppard recalls so sharply.
One for Sorrow doesn’t have the zesty, irreverent voice that made its predecessor so delightful and energetic — perhaps because its narrator is painfully shy; perhaps because she tells the story long after it happened. Issy has the measured, distanced voice of a woman looking back, although where she’s located in time isn’t clear. Her retrospective stance and evenly paced sentences give the story the feel of memoir, rather than the happy fictional illusion that it’s happening even as we read it. But despite its relatively sedate rhythms, this is well worth the read.
Deirdre Baker teaches children’s lit at the U of T. Her Small Print appears every two weeks in The Star’s Sunday book pages.