Goodreads Review: Pepperland

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Phoebe No Comments

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars

In one of my college creative writing workshops, my instructor (a pretty well-known poet) told the class that he didn’t think that it was ever possible for a writer to convincingly write from the other gender. I scoffed at that then–Jennifer Roberson’s wonderful narrator Tiger from the Sword-dancer series immediately came to mind–but since then I’ve realized that the number of writers who even undertake such a challenge, not to mention the number who succeed (I’m looking at you, John C. Wright), is fairly low.

Mark Delaney is one of those few male writers who manages to not only tackle a female voice, but successfully tackle an adolescent female voice, to boot. Though I was initially drawn to Pepperland because of the Beatles-connection, I quickly realized that the presence of song titles and Beatles’ trivia was just window dressing for a really involving character study. Star is so strongly and believably written that I checked the cover several times to make sure that Delaney was not, in fact, female. Her story is at times angsty and ego-centric, but very convincingly so. Delaney never seems to look down on Star for her emotional outbursts but also manages not to dismiss them as “typical.” The best word for his portrayal of her would be “compassionate.”

What’s more, Delaney seems to know high school, and the strangely small, self-contained universe of adolescence, really well. The novel takes place in California in the early nineteen eighties, but the details are universal–in my mind, it could have easily been set in my own high school in New Jersey at the turn of the millennium. Though there are a couple stray details that mark this as a period piece, the archetypal quality of the characters should help it to feel relevant to modern teenagers.

Finally, the supporting characters are equally well-rendered, particularly the supporting female characters. There’s a strong feminist undercurrent here–Star’s greatest success is in securing an apprenticeship to a tough-as-nails guitar repair woman, and through their friendship (rather than, say, through her romantic relationship) she’s able to resolve some of her lingering grief over the recent death of her equally self-sufficient mother. Delaney’s never preachy about this, which is probably for the best. Star doesn’t question her own independence or abilities, which is part of what makes her character–and this book–so remarkable.

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