Changing the Course of Your Life. (A Review of Gayle Forman's Just One Day)

Sometimes a book just clicks with you. The voice of the writer draws you in. You get the characters. You laugh and cry and cringe along with them. The entire world view of the author aligns with yours. I LOVE books like this. The bummer is that it's a rare experience to find one. The writer part of me usually doesn't let it happen. I analyze the experience as I'm going through it. Why'd she start with a prologue? What made the main character say that when the author just told us he was a different kind of person? It's annoying, to put it mildly. Still, as a reader I'm always hoping for that love whenever I flip back the first page of a new book.

So it just happened and now I want to shout out my joy. The book is Gayle Forman's Just One Day (pub date: Jan., 2013). I love Gayle Forman. Her two previous books If I Stay and Where She Went are among my favorites. She's edited by the amazing Julie Strauss-Gable at Dutton. Side note: Julie Strauss-Gable is my dream editor. If you're looking for good, absorbing books for your teens (or for you) start with any book on her list. (And what a list it is. John Green. Ally Condie. Stephanie Perkins. Nova Ren Suma. These people are the stars of YA literature.) 

Let me start with a brief summary. I don't want to give too much away and one criticism I have of the book is that the blurb on the back reveals a little too much. On the surface it's a love story. Obedient, sweet, good girl Allyson is on one of those see every country in Europe in a few weeks kind of trip and she's not having a good time. Her best friend from forever is bugging her. The endless touristy sites are boring. She's off to college in the fall and she just wants to get on with it. Then--she meets Willem, a handsome Dutch actor whose tooling around in England with a rogue Shakespeare company. The two spend an amazing day together that basically changes the course of Allyson's life. I'm not saying anything more about the plot.

Here's the thing about plot: there's only so many plots when you come down to it. Girl meets boy/girl loses boy is one. Then you have your character takes a journey story line. And your character experiences a death plot. I was talking about this the other day with a friend--telling her about a great book I read (shout out to Jennifer Castle here) The Beginning of After about a girl who loses her family in a car accident. I said to my friend: it's sort of a cliche' how many car accidents there are in teen books. Then I laughed. Because MY YA book starts off with a car accident.

So what is it about car accidents? Well, I think it's just a dramatic way to get your story going, push your character into a dark place she's got to figure out how to crawl out of. What's really going on in these books is the character is discovering who he or she really is. It's the classic Coming of Age theme. Death tends to make you think about that kind of thing. Also, Love.

Back to Just One Day. Willem is the catalyst for Allyson's journey--meeting him forces her to question the sleepy obedient good girl way she's been living her life and wonder if there's another path. There's lots of traveling in this book, both actual traveling (that will make YOU want to travel, I promise) and metaphorical traveling--a true mental and emotional journey for this girl, who could be every girl on the cusp of becoming a woman--a person.

Which means learning what you want to do with your own life, what you love and what you hate (is this best friend truly your best friend? Do you really want to study Chemistry? How do you want to cut your freaking hair?) and discovering that you might have more control over these decisions than you realized. Because we are talking teens here, there's an interesting and kind of heartbreaking subplot about throwing off parental expectations too. I've written about this before--how often in YA books you have either non-existent parents or neglectful/abusive ones. It's disturbing. But the vehicle is a symbolic way to highlight this necessary growth process. If you ever want to be the hero in your own life, inevitably, you've got to shuck off the parents and strike out on your own. I love how Gayle Forman handles Allyson's helicoptery parents. They are the antagonists (particularly the mom) but they are not villains. They're complex, flawed, well-meaning people. (Or maybe this was just  MY reading, because I've got helicoptery mom tendencies in me!)

All of the characters in this book are complex and real. The best friend who keeps changing her hair style and clothes so that Allyson hardly knows what the girl will look like each time she sees her. The new best friend, a cool African American guy who's brilliant and funny and wise to the ways people wear different masks depending on who they're dealing with. And of course, the GUY. Mysterious and beautiful Willem--the boy every girl yearns for--the one who gets our jokes and says we're pretty and who when he touches us makes us feel an electric current running straight to our hearts.

Who cares about the boy though? 

Here's the great thing about this book. It's Allyson's story. It's potentially every girl's story. Could something that happens on just one day change the entire course of a person's life?

Why not?

Buy this book for your daughters, people. And then you read it too. 

Keeping the REAL in Realistic Contemporary YA Fiction

Some people lament about what they call "dark" topics in young adult fiction. They're squeamish about the idea of their kids reading (knowing) about drug use or homosexuality or rape or suicide. "Why can't there be more books about plucky girl sleuths and sunnybrook farms?" is what they're thinking. Yeah, I get it. I'm a parent too, and it's tempting to want to protect our kids, keep them innocent and safely bubbled up beneath our helicopter-y arms. But, uh, good luck with that. Even the plucky sleuths of yore had to fight evil--in the shape of smarmy villains. And wasn't the sunnybrook farm chick an orphan?

I've shared my stance on this before, so I won't rehash, but it's something that's been bugging me--not the fact that YA writers write about this "dark" stuff but how they treat the material.

I don't want to go off on another bad books tangent (also went there before) and I know it's a subjective thing--what works and what doesn't/what's a page turner/what has heart, etc., but I've read a few books lately that I'd hate for my fifteen year old daughter to read. Soap-opera-y junk that highlights a sensational topic the way trashy magazines do, basically just a YA version of peer pressure--portraying drug use or sexting or mean-girl bullying as whatever because everyone is doing it anyway.

Then I had the great good luck to read three books in a row that deal with difficult subjects while never crossing over the line into lurid. The keys to getting this right, I think, have to do with character (as in never putting plot before one) and complexity (sorry, this isn't a black and white world) and heart (when the characters are so real you care about what happens to them).

A few weeks ago I read Personal Effects by E.M. Kokie (a debut novel from Candlewick due out in September) and still can't get the voice of the main character, Matt Foster, out of my mind. The first time we meet him he's one minute away from beating the crap out of a classmate. Not the type of action that typically makes a reader sympathetic. But we soon learn that Matt's buckling under the weight of anger and grief--at the death of his idealized older brother in the Iraq War and at his authoritarian, abusive father. Nevermind his other "smaller" conflicts: dismal grades and a crush on a girl who will likely never see him as more than a friend. When Matt has a chance to see his brother's personal effects, he defies his father and sets out on a quest to figure out who his brother really was.

This book could so easily have veered into stereotype (I don't want to give away the brother's secret) but it never did. Also it's a rare YA novel that deals with war or the armed services. Mark this one as Coming of Age with an unexpected, complex twist.

Buried by Robin MacCready came out in 2006 and for some reason never crossed my path. It only did now because I'm on my own personal quest to read every YA novel edited by the brilliant Julie Strauss Gabel (Why? Because she's my dream editor. Why? Because she edits John Green and Nova Ren Suma and Stephanie Perkins and Ally Condie, just to name a few.)  Anyway, the main character in Buried, Claudine, has got big problems too. Her mother's an alcoholic who's just gone on a binge and taken off and now Claudine's stuck cleaning up the literal and figurative mess.

(Brief digression about parents in YA books. Let's just say that many parents in YA books would not win a Parent of the Year Award. Maybe this is unfair. But the truth is ALL teenagers are struggling one way or another to grow up--to assert themselves--to figure out who they are, apart from their parents. Sometimes this is easy. (Okay. Really. Is this ever easy?) Sometimes it is hard. Sometimes kids are making this human journey toward adulthood under the tutelage of neglectful or abusive or just plain a-hole-ish people. Enter YA literature to present the variety of ways that parents can blow it and that kids can escape and thrive.)

But back to Claudine. She's a model kid, considering her pathetic mom. Gets straight A's. Keeps the trailer clean. Takes care of herself and others. Dutifully attends an Alateen-like group meeting. With messed-up Mom gone, it's even easier to be responsible. Claudine's got a great system for organizing her many tasks, and so what if she bends the truth about her mother's latest disappearance, telling the kids at the meeting that her mom's in rehab? Oh, this book may make you a nervous wreck. Because you'll quickly care about Claudine and her increasingly over the top enabling ways. There's a twist at the end of this one too--that's pretty horrifying but thankfully on the realistic side of the line.

Last but in no way least is Colleen Clayton's soon-to-be-released novel What Happens Next. (I keep hearing at conferences editors saying they're looking for the next Sarah Dessen. Sarah Dessen, if you don't know, is the queen of realistic/contemporary/stand-alone YA fiction.) Okay, editors. So stop looking, because I'm presenting to you: Colleen Clayton.

The topic of this novel is such a potential mine field: date rape. Most writers would slip over the lurid line in a second. But Clayton deftly avoids that. Example one: the voice of sixteen year old Cassidy (Sid) Murphy is honest and wise-cracking and self deprecating. Ordinary world for Sid is joking around with friends and being irritated about her appearance--red hair, big boobs. Example two: the incident itself is handled carefully and the after-effects are realistically complex. Case in point--Sid struggles to tell her mom what happened (and here is a mom who is not awful, by the way) deciding that she can deal with her mom's anger but not her mom's horror and grief. I could not put this book down, marveling the whole time I was reading it that I had no idea what was going to happen.

This is what real is, I suppose. To be thrown into a horrible situation or be faced with a complex problem and NOT know what to do. To have to muddle through and figure things out as you go, probably messing up along the way, maybe even making stuff worse for a while, before you emerge (safe! better? grown up?) on the other side.

Thank goodness our teens have got a few good books to read along the way.