REVIEW: LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON'S THE IMPOSSIBLE KNIFE OF MEMORY

     Ah. That cover (Viking, 2014). Teresa Evangelista, the designer, is a genius. Barefoot girl standing on a crack in the ice, looking down into the abyss.  It's a perfect image.
     As Laurie Halse Anderson has made clear in interviews, this book came about because she looked down deep into her own abyss.  Her father was a traumatized veteran of World War II who left for the battlefields of Europe at age 18 and came back a changed man.  His Army unit had been among those that liberated Dachau.  He saw things there that he could never unsee and never forget.  Back home, he raised his family and served his community as a minister.  He made it work until his demons outran him.  He drank, and he lost his job, and he drank more.  Anderson remembers both the before and the after, and in this book, she delves into her own memories, as well as into his.  She wrote KNIFE because she needed to honor his courage, but in the process, she also honors her own.
     Captain Andy Kincain has been a widower for 17 years, since his 20-year-old wife was killed in a car accident when their daughter Hayley was an infant.  But he was also an active Armed Services member for much of that time, so Hayley was raised with devotion and stability by her paternal grandmother.  But Hayley's "before" ended when she was almost seven, and her grandmother died.  After that, Hayley's guardians were the team of her father and his post-traumatic stress.  Andy's girlfriend Trish did a pretty admirable job serving as Hayley's mother until Andy's instability drove Trish first into drinking, and then into fleeing.  So from the time Hayley was twelve, she and Andy were vagabonds,  staying in one place only long enough for Andy to decompensate again and feel the need to move on.  Hayley has no other relatives and no other harbors.  She and Andy are locked together with unbreakable chains of love and pain, and neither of them seem to know any more which of them is the parent and which the child.
     The book opens shortly after Andy has made a completely uncharacteristic and apparently selfless decision: to stop running.  He and Hayley have returned to his hometown and moved into his childhood house so that Hayley can go to school, for the first time in five years.  She'll attend her senior year in high school and stay until she graduates.  Hayley hates this plan with every fibre of her being, but most of what she thinks of as her reasons really just mask her terror at the thought of leaving her father alone every day, unprotected.  She can't allow herself to feel the terror, but due to years of parental example, she has no problem twisting it into volcanic rage.  Hayley is a survivor, and her survival weapon is to attack when she feels threatened.  But, having been taught about the world by her father, she is unable to differentiate actual threats from imagined ones.
     Enter Finn on Page 14, and here begins my main problem with the book.  I believe that I know why Anderson felt that Hayley needed to develop a romantic attachment to a boy in her class.  Andy's Army flashbacks are raw, brutal, and agonizing to read about, and so are some of his behaviors.  Finn is the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, the sop to make teens want to continue to the end of the book.  But Finn is not a credible character.  He is, instead, an idealized image, custom-made to fit Hayley's needs while expressing almost none of his own.  I can accept that he's attracted to Hayley as soon as he meets her, because initial attractions are often inexplicable.  But I cannot accept that he continues to cheerfully pursue her despite her continuous, withering attacks on all of his attempts to get to know her.  In fact, her rebuffs are so vitriolic that Finn's continuing to blithely ignore them begins to feel masochistic and more than a little creepy.  Even once Hayley and Finn are definitively in a relationship, it's very difficult to see what, if anything, is in it for him; he apparently exists for the sole purpose of serving as Hayley's lifeline.  Anderson seems to recognize this, and more than halfway through the book she provides him with a traumatic family issue of his own, but its role in the story feels tacked on, not organic, and Hayley is never called on to empathize or offer guidance.   If anything, the sketchiness of the story line about Finn's sister only seems to emphasize that, in this as in every other way, Finn is on his own.  I know that Anderson wants the reader to believe that this Hayley-Finn love story is a healthy one, but I see it as the opposite, and that detracts from my ability to appreciate the book as a whole.  And I want to be able to appreciate the book, because its language is exquisite, its lessons are important, and Hayley, Andy and Trish are stunningly real.  And besides, you know how I feel about Laurie Halse Anderson.
     The story of Hayley and Andy, two drowning people clinging to each other, is the story Anderson felt compelled to tell, and I believe it's a story that teen readers would feel compelled to finish, even standing alone.  The only way out is through, Anderson tells us, and that message comes across loud and clear.  I wish that Hayley had been allowed to come to that realization on her own. 
     A few nights ago I watched a PBS documentary about J.D. Salinger and was struck by a parallel between him and Anderson's father.  Salinger was in his mid-20's when he marched off to World War II.  Not only did he participate in D-Day, but he also participated in the liberation of a German concentration camp.  He, too, returned a haunted man, and the ghosts of his past also left scars on his daughter.  So in a sense, the same experience that led to the creation of Holden Caulfield also led to the creation of this book, one generation removed. 

JENNIFER HUBBARD: UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP

     I met Jennifer Hubbard at an SCBWI conference this past June, and in August I interviewed her for this blog.  There, I noted that Hubbard's third published YA novel, UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP, was due to be published by Viking in September 2013, and that I couldn't wait to meet Maggie, its protagonist, when that happened.  I must confess that it's taken me until the end of November to meet Maggie (my fault, not hers!), and the pleasure it brought me exceeded all my expectations.  In fact, this book was not only a gripping read; it dealt with the topic of bullying in such a deep and powerful way that I think it should be on the required reading list at every high school in the country.
     Seventeen-year-old Maggie Cameron was bullied mercilessly in junior high school by Raleigh and her posse, apparently targeted for no better reason than that Raleigh had sniffed out her vulnerability.  All through seventh and eighth grade, Maggie lived her school days in a constant state of terror, never knowing when or how the next attack would strike.  Her intensely vivid flashbacks illustrate that for her, she had survived the equivalent of two years in a war zone.
     Maggie's reprieve arrived in the form of Raleigh's family's relocation to Italy after her eighth-grade graduation.  In the years since, Maggie has been able to relax her constant vigil - but only to a degree.  She is not about to win any popularity contests, but she's managed to form two close friendships: with Sylvie, to whom she can talk about almost anything, and with Nick, whose stepfather has taught him and Maggie hiking and mountaineering skills.  Over the past few months, Nick's stepfather has dropped out of their increasingly ambitious hikes, due to problems with his knees, and Nick and Maggie's solo outdoor ventures have brought her a kind of joy she's never felt before.  Now, she's tentatively beginning to try to sort out how much of the joy stems from the sense of accomplishment and power that climbing a mountain can bring, and how much stems from being with Nick.  But what good does it do to try to decipher how she feels about Nick when no boy could possibly ever be attracted to her?  Because if there was one thing Raleigh and Company made crystal clear to Maggie, it was that she was permanently, incurably unlovable.
     And then.. Maggie's worst nightmares comes true.  Raleigh is suddenly here, back from Italy, attending Maggie's high school, and Maggie's fragile new sense of safety and security is swept away like a mountain climber halfway to the summit being overpowered and swept to his death by a deadly gust of wind.
     Every word of dialogue in this book rings true, from the kindness and compassion Nick and Maggie show each other, to the cruelty Raleigh once inflicted on her hapless victim, to everything in between.  Because Hubbard gives us plenty of nuanced and conflicted secondary characters: Adriana, who used to be Raleigh's sidekick back in the dark days, but who now seems to want to be something different; Vanessa, who's girly and popular but whom Maggie would probably like anyway, if she weren't much too interested in Nick; and Sylvie, who pulls back from Maggie just when Maggie needs her most.  And, because it's actually not all about Maggie, we learn that Nick has his own personal Raleigh - one even harder to fight back against, because it's his emotionally abusive father, no longer a part of Nick's household but still very much a part of Nick's psyche.
     Hubbard told me in her interview that she wanted this book to explore, not so much bullying itself, but its aftermath, and that's indeed what it does.  No one is spared.  I've heard it said that when people become addicted to drugs or alcohol, they stop growing emotionally, so they remain arrested at the age at which their addiction began.  In a similar way, Hubbard suggests, victims of abuse become so traumatized that their development is arrested too.  Perhaps because Maggie has loving and supportive parents, she doesn't respond to her victimization by identifying with her tormenter and becoming one herself.  She does, however, discover to her horror that because of the trauma she's experienced, she seems not to have developed a normal level of empathy.  Her damaged view of the world is polarized between Me - the one everything is wrong with - and Not-Me - the people for whom life is smooth and easy, and whose inner lives therefore don't require much attention.  It's only when Maggie unwittingly jeopardizes both her friendship with Sylvie, and the possibility of having something more than friendship with Nick, that she must face the fact that no one goes through life without having to deal with fear, loss, and insecurity, and that from time to time everyone needs a helping hand.
    I plan to get in touch with my local school board to recommend adding UNTIL IT HURTS TO STOP to its high-school curriculum.  It not only conveys truths about relationships and power that would benefit all teens; its characters are utterly believable, its story line is memorable, and the writing is so good that it's almost invisible.  This is Hubbard's best book yet, and the most wonderful part of it all is that I feel absolutely certain that there are even better ones still to come.  Maggie finds her power in this book, and so does Jennifer Hubbard.