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A review by thelizabeth
In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard
5.0
This was recommended by Sara. VERY STRONGLY!
Fiiiiiive stars? Yeah, okay. This is partly because… I just want more people to pay attention to this book, and this writer. Please.
I will also say this right off the bat, to get a few people's attention, which is, RIYL: Lynda Barry. These girls, they are Lynda Barry's spiritual children, they are full-flesh neighbors of Arna and Marlys and everyone. Wrong and awkward and hurting and mistaken, and silly. Carrying on with their stuff while the hard and dark world of the adults goes on indoors. And dogs.
The thing is, in this book, nothing… happens? It isn't about action but feeling. It really is just about 14-year-old girls, one in particular, whose name is Jo (like the author), though no one calls her this. She's just our narrator, and we're in her head, floating on the fluff that is having a best friend to think everything up with and ignore everything bad with. They live in a grubby Illinois town in the 1970s, and don't have much to go on, and there are some serious family problems. But the magic of the book is in the very real depiction of the weird netherworld that children inhabit underneath, or above, their family problems. They have to endure them, and they are stressed by them, but also they are still children, wanting children things. Playing with toy soldiers in their room, getting emotionally invested in the clothes they want to buy off layaway with babysitting money. All of it genuine, all of it top priority.
About a third of the way through, there is a turn. So far we've been mostly talking about babysitting and shopping, and melting down into an emotional mess at the approach of a boy's potential glance. And then, Jo finds something in her house that she does not expect to see, and suddenly the book opens a new door in her mind through which we learn some new things that she had not been saying before, a lot of them. The darkish tone of teenagerdom that we've been coasting along with suddenly chills your gut.
What she sees means that something very bad may have happened, which — in perhaps the most realistic thing I've seen in YA book in a while — she cannot bring herself to deal with, and so goes about with her evening, just helping to make dinner, avoiding the closet in the basement, while she thinks of a way for the thing to not be true. That feeling (and the suspense) is one of the most horrifying and emotional that I've experienced as a reader in ages. And it highlights what makes the meandering of this book so much stronger in its realism than anything more tightly plotted would be — give this situation to almost any other strong-and-sassy YA heroine out there, and they would have opened the closet door on the first try. But Jo can't, she can't make it belong to her, she won't do it until her mother makes her.
I read the rest of the book in a fearful daze. It felt like the ring of a really loud bell that gets whacked with a mallet, like when something hits you in the head and you feel like you're ringing. Devastation could be lurking in anything, lurking behind every boy or every weird dark field they wander through, or amongst the cheerleaders who emerge two-thirds of the way to hold a slumber party of doom. (The award for People Most Unprepared to Be Invited to a Cheerleader's Slumber Party goes to our main characters. The candidates are running unopposed.)
I now need to read everything Jo Ann Beard has ever written, and I'll try. I can't believe she has published so little, conventionally at least, that I can go buy or check out from a library. This book is fascinating as a transitional work, the memoir-as-fiction, which is a type that can be either dubious or revelatory (more echoes of Lynda Barry). It's her first novel, let alone her first YA work, so this is a hopeful adventure. Extremely.
Fiiiiiive stars? Yeah, okay. This is partly because… I just want more people to pay attention to this book, and this writer. Please.
I will also say this right off the bat, to get a few people's attention, which is, RIYL: Lynda Barry. These girls, they are Lynda Barry's spiritual children, they are full-flesh neighbors of Arna and Marlys and everyone. Wrong and awkward and hurting and mistaken, and silly. Carrying on with their stuff while the hard and dark world of the adults goes on indoors. And dogs.
The thing is, in this book, nothing… happens? It isn't about action but feeling. It really is just about 14-year-old girls, one in particular, whose name is Jo (like the author), though no one calls her this. She's just our narrator, and we're in her head, floating on the fluff that is having a best friend to think everything up with and ignore everything bad with. They live in a grubby Illinois town in the 1970s, and don't have much to go on, and there are some serious family problems. But the magic of the book is in the very real depiction of the weird netherworld that children inhabit underneath, or above, their family problems. They have to endure them, and they are stressed by them, but also they are still children, wanting children things. Playing with toy soldiers in their room, getting emotionally invested in the clothes they want to buy off layaway with babysitting money. All of it genuine, all of it top priority.
About a third of the way through, there is a turn. So far we've been mostly talking about babysitting and shopping, and melting down into an emotional mess at the approach of a boy's potential glance. And then, Jo finds something in her house that she does not expect to see, and suddenly the book opens a new door in her mind through which we learn some new things that she had not been saying before, a lot of them. The darkish tone of teenagerdom that we've been coasting along with suddenly chills your gut.
What she sees means that something very bad may have happened, which — in perhaps the most realistic thing I've seen in YA book in a while — she cannot bring herself to deal with, and so goes about with her evening, just helping to make dinner, avoiding the closet in the basement, while she thinks of a way for the thing to not be true. That feeling (and the suspense) is one of the most horrifying and emotional that I've experienced as a reader in ages. And it highlights what makes the meandering of this book so much stronger in its realism than anything more tightly plotted would be — give this situation to almost any other strong-and-sassy YA heroine out there, and they would have opened the closet door on the first try. But Jo can't, she can't make it belong to her, she won't do it until her mother makes her.
I read the rest of the book in a fearful daze. It felt like the ring of a really loud bell that gets whacked with a mallet, like when something hits you in the head and you feel like you're ringing. Devastation could be lurking in anything, lurking behind every boy or every weird dark field they wander through, or amongst the cheerleaders who emerge two-thirds of the way to hold a slumber party of doom. (The award for People Most Unprepared to Be Invited to a Cheerleader's Slumber Party goes to our main characters. The candidates are running unopposed.)
I now need to read everything Jo Ann Beard has ever written, and I'll try. I can't believe she has published so little, conventionally at least, that I can go buy or check out from a library. This book is fascinating as a transitional work, the memoir-as-fiction, which is a type that can be either dubious or revelatory (more echoes of Lynda Barry). It's her first novel, let alone her first YA work, so this is a hopeful adventure. Extremely.