Review: Gone, Gone, Gone by Hannah Moskowitz

Posted on May 30, 2011 by Phoebe 6452 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F2011%2F05%2F30%2Freview-gone-gone-gone-by-hannah-moskowitz%2FReview%3A+Gone%2C+Gone%2C+Gone+by+Hannah+Moskowitz2011-05-31+01%3A58%3A20Phoebehttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phoebenorth.com%2F%3Fp%3D645

Gone, Gone, Gone by Hannah Moskowitz
Recommended.

I meant to hold off on starting Hannah Moskowitz’s 2012 release Gone, Gone, Gone until later. After all, I’m in possession of quite a sizable pile of books to review, and Gone, Gone, Gone won’t be released for a year—it seemed prudent to save it for another time. But it called out to me from my eReader on a long bus ride, and once I started this terse, powerful little novel about two boys falling in during the DC sniper shootings, I just couldn’t quit. Moskowitz’s impactful prose, transmitted via the very real voices of Lio and Craig, kept sucking me in over and over again. While I was in New York for BEA, I found myself ignoring my ever-growing stack of free books and hoping instead for subway delays just so I could keep reading—the story was that real, that powerful.

I don’t doubt that part of the reason I found Craig and Lio’s story so enticing was that I could relate to it. At fifteen in 2002, Craig and Lio are just two years younger than me. During the historical period in question, I was just graduating high school, enmeshed in my own first love experiences and grieving my own dramatic/traumatic childhood. I remember getting out of school early on 9/11, wandering around town in a daze with my own punk rock (and largely gay) coterie of friends. I remember, too, the DC sniper shootings—and the strange, tenuous link that there seemed to be between the two events. Though Moskowitz bungles a few minor details (“I’m being emo” was not yet part of high school vocabulary—it was a term reserved almost entirely for the shoe-gazer indie genre that few high schoolers cared about; casual homophobia even in reasonably welcoming suburban schools was all too common at the time, rather than surprising), it’s mostly spot-on for the tensions, anxieties, and emotions of the time.

And Gone, Gone, Gone is a story about emotions, really—of learning to get over your past, of acknowledging your love of the damaged, of reminding yourself that you still live and breathe even as the rest of the world falls apart. The plot itself is simple: Craig, who has been hoarding animals since his exboyfriend went nuts after his dad’s death on 9/11, wakes up one morning to find them all gone following a break-in. He and Lio—one-time cancer patient who lost a twin brother to the disease—work together to recover them even as terror sets in across their Maryland suburb thanks to the DC sniper shootings. They start to fall for each other—but must come to terms with the grief and anxiety of both of their pasts, first.

Their voices were incredibly true-to-life, the driving force of the novel, really. I was fonder of Lio; he’s got a harder edge than Craig, who was a bit twee and woobie-ish for me. Craig’s prone to melodrama, but it’s a realistic sort of hand-wringing, one I recognized from my own adolescence. It’s the tendency to mythologize certain people and events and to blow small tragedies out of proportion despite one’s fairly comfortable existence. Had the book been in Craig’s voice alone, I would have likely found the narration tiresome, but Lio’s voice—reticent, dry—offered a refreshing contrast.

Honestly, it was these voices, as they relayed their tender, burgeoning romance, which truly carried the novel for me. I don’t think I was ever wholly convinced by the voice in Moskowitz’s recent Invincible Summer–I was always very aware that Chase was a construct, a character created by a precocious, opinionated young woman with her own very distinctive voice. I anticipated that the same would be true for Gone, Gone, Gone–that it would also be a novel dominated by my awareness of the author. But instead, I found myself sucked in again and again. Craig and Lio were born fully-armored, it seems, from Moskowitz’s keyboard. They’re the kind of characters that feel more like friends than figments of someone’s imagination, the sort of characters whose non-existence you can’t help but mourn once you reach the novel’s conclusion.

It was the novel’s conclusion, incidentally, that posed my largest stumbling block in whole-heartedly enjoying Gone, Gone, Gone. Unlike some readers, I felt it was adequately paced; the dual ticking-clock of both the sniper shootings and the rescue of Craig’s pets provided mounting tension throughout. Sadly, by the end of the novel both plotlines sort of fizzle. It’s a bit of an “is that it?!” kind of ending, and while I appreciate Moskowitz’s aim to give us a novel that’s not altogether tidy, I would have preferred something that felt at least more conclusive.

I also wasn’t entirely sure about Moskowitz’s approach to identity, but I knew that might have been a sticking point for me going in. A few months ago, she and I (and several other posters) debated issues of queer identity in YA on Absolute Write. We were discussing the pervasiveness of “issue books”—and whether or not we’ve reached a time period when it’s appropriate (or honest) to write characters who “just happen” to be gay. Ironically, I really liked Moskowitz’s approach to sexual identity here. This isn’t a coming out story, but it’s still a story written with awareness of queer identity and the difficulties that identity might pose for modern teens. Though most parents in the book are accepting, for example, Lio’s dad seems to be holding out somewhat naively for a change of heart in his son.

But I wasn’t quite as convinced by her approach to racial identity. Craig is black, but other than a throwaway line or two (stating his racial identity explicitly), this has no impact on his character. It’s not that I think that all books about black kids should be issue books, either—in fact, I feel quite the opposite. Nor should all black characters be, say, treated as racial stereotypes, of course. But Craig is a black, gay, rich kid living in a largely white suburb, and on the edge of a city with striking racial and socioeconomic tensions. It would have added some interesting complexity to both his character and the wider novel had Moskowitz brought her deft, subtle hand to issues of Craig’s racial identity, the way she did to both Craig and Lio’s sexual identities.

Still, this is, broadly speaking, a sensitively-written and enveloping book. Despite my (admittedly slight) reservations, I couldn’t help but feel as if Craig and Lio had become dear friends by Gone, Gone, Gone‘s conclusion—and can’t help but feel that you’d be a fool not to read it, too.

A review copy of this book was generously provided by the publisher.

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