Review: Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Phoebe 48110 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2010%2F12%2F17%2Freview-like-mandarin-by-kirsten-hubbard%2FReview%3A+Like+Mandarin+by+Kirsten+Hubbard2010-12-17+20%3A56%3A03Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D481

Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard

Recommended.

Usually, I save my FTC/keepin’-me-honest disclosure for the end of my review, but here, it seems prudent to state it up front. I won this review copy of Kirsten Hubbard’s March 2011 debut Like Mandarin through a contest on her group blog, YA Highway. What’s more, I “know” Kirsten (not in the biblical sense of the term, of course, getchermindouttathegutta!) as well as any two people who have exchanged emails but never met can know one another. In fact, we met on goodreads, and bonded over a book (which shall remain nameless) that we both hated. She dug my honesty; I liked how welcoming she seemed in a genre that can often feel closed off to those still aspiring toward becoming professional writers.

When I read about Kirsten’s book, the story of a plain girl growing up in Wyoming who befriends a flashy, slutty older girl named Mandarin, I suspected I would love it. The plot summary—stating that “Mandarin’s unique beauty hides a girl who’s troubled—even dangerous”—promised the kind of thorny female friendship I love in both young adult and adult literature, paired with a poetic lyricism that’s often absent in modern YA. I was excited, but a little nervous, when I won the review copy. Though Kirsten assured me that she really wanted an honest review (she was, after all, more than familiar with my review style!), I wanted to like Like Mandarin very much.

Surprise, surprise; I had nothing to worry about.

Like Mandarin is, in fact, lyrically beautiful. The prose has a rhythm to it that’s poetic, but never hackneyed or trite. She fills fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter’s world with the kind of specificity and accuracy that you find in really good poetry. For example, Grace isn’t just bookish. She into geology and rocks, a detail I found both surprising and fitting. And the way she describes this love early in the novel particularly affected me: “As soon as I heard [my sister] thump down the stairs, I knelt beside my stack of shoe boxes. I removed the first two—the ones that contained shoes—and swapped the quartz stone for a baby geode, the size of a half walnut. If dinner got too infuriating, I could poke my thumb inside the stone, feel the angles and rock candy ridges, and think about geology instead of my mother” (34).

It’s this kind of detail that also elevates the setting of Washokey, Wyoming among many places you’d find in YA. This is a story that couldn’t take place anywhere else. The antics shared between Grace and seventeen-year-old Mandarin are completely apropos to Washokey and only Washokey. You’re deeply immersed in this place, even as you learn about the girls’ shared yearning to escape from it.

But, as Grace and Mandarin skinny-dip, go dancing in a cottonseed storm, and steal the taxidermied trophy heads off the walls of the local supermarket, their friendship becomes increasingly complicated, built on a skeleton of competition, half-truths, and insecurities. They don’t quite hate each other, like, say, the group of friends in Margaret Atwood’s stunning Cat’s Eye, but there are thorny realities that underlie their tenuous relationship—the obfuscation of certain facts and Grace’s incipient sexual awakening.

And, realistically, there is a light sexual undercurrent to the way that Grace looks at Mandarin. It’s not a story of a coming out, but a realization of one’s own female sexual power, and the strangeness of seeing the things you want to do—to elicit lust from boys and jealousy from girls—reflected in another person. This tension was mighty compelling and perfectly balanced. Hubbard’s prose wasn’t didactic, but more a simple reflection of the complex truths that underlie the emotions of many pubescent girls.

But what really made Like Mandarin a satisfying read was the characterization. With a character as multifaceted as Mandarin herself, many less-capable writers would let their protagonist and secondary characters fall into the background. But the supporting cast—Grace’s mother, her little sister Taffeta, even the catty girls and semi-anonymous boys (oh, poor Davey Miller! Someday, you’ll find your Grace!)—are all written in a way that acknowledges their own complexities, too. The characters live and breathe and are clearly walking around with their own thoughts and lives in the far-corners of Washokey even as Grace seeks to escape them.

But my favorite character was by far Grace herself. Her strong, beautiful voice carries us through the narrative. She’s a stunningly real girl: a jerk to her little sister, unsure about what she truly wants in life, ignorant about positive male attention (Davey! Oh man, did I love this character, for all of his four scenes). In a genre chock-full of anonymous girls that are meant to be little more than empty screens against which teens can project themselves, Grace manages to be both specific and very empathetic. She’s the kind of character you wonder about days after you finish the book. I found myself wondering, where did Grace end up going to college? Did she stay friends with Mandarin? How will she look back on her childhood going to pageants and collecting rocks in Washokey?

Like Mandarin did have a few small flaws, which I find difficult to discuss without spoiling. There was a scene near the climax where Grace’s voice became a bit too self-reflective and expository for my liking, and the very end of the book was quite evasive about one specific matter for the sake of tension, and it sacrificed a bit of realism in being written this way. Still, those are exceedingly minor problems, nitpicks, really.

As a whole, Like Mandarin is intense and engaging and thoroughly beautiful. Hubbard’s sense of character and place reminds me quite a bit of authors like Judy Blume and Norma Fox Mazer, the last great generation of women writing contemporary fiction for teenagers. These authors created worlds so well-realized they were all but indistinguishable from real life, but their books are often seen as dated or irrelevant for teenagers today. I haven’t really encountered an author before who has managed to take up this style or these strengths in quite the same way, but I’m happy to say that Kirsten Hubbard has. I’m glad to know her, and ecstatic to have had the chance to read Like Mandarin.

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