Very Far Away from Anywhere Else by Ursula K. Le Guin
Recommended.

I stumbled across Ursula Le Guin’s 1976 realistic young adult novel Very Far Away from Anywhere Else while searching for cheap ebooks. Amidst a sea of self-pubbed young adult paranormal, this quiet title stood out—and stood out even more because I’d never heard of it. I’m a fan of Le Guin, as both a writer and a human being, but I never knew that she dabbled in realist YA.

But dabble she did, and Very Far Away . . . , while more a novella than a novel-proper by modern YA standards, is an insightful, painful, and spot-on look at growing up smart in the suburbs. Our narrator is Owen, a lonely senior in high school who dreams of heading off to MIT. But those dreams are nearly derailed by his friendship and subsequent romance with a girl named Natalie, a talented, driven, and career-minded musician.

It’s a bit difficult to talk about the plot here, because, in a way, there isn’t one: this is simply Owen’s account of his last year in high school, stretching from his birthday (when, to his horror, his father buys him a car he doesn’t want) to his departure from his hometown. The narration here isn’t a standard one. Instead, Le Guin utilizes a frame story where Owen is speaking straight into a tape recorder. This means that large chunks of time are glossed over, and many events (including conversations I might have liked to see up-close) are repeated via breezy summary.

All that’s fine, though, because there are really two reasons to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, and neither of them are plot-related.

The first is because of the voice. Le Guin does an effective job of capturing the voice a sensitive, intelligent, but still clearly male character. Owen is undoubtedly adolescent (such as when he recounts his decision to fall in love with Natalie), but also empathetic and astute. Even when he’s subtly contrasting the life of Natalie—a girl driven to succeed in a male-dominated field no matter the cost—with the traditional, family-oriented life of his mother, it’s easy to forget that he’s being written by a woman, and, worse, written by such a well-known one. Owen isn’t Ursula; Owen is Owen, and he seems to come to us fully-realized, born in armor out of the head of a god, so to speak.

The second reason to read Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is because of the details. Owen and Natalie live in a sharply-rendered California suburb, a world of foggy beaches and torrential downpours. They discuss their dreams in Natalie’s sparsely decorated, echoing upper-class home, and, though the story takes place in a time contemporary with its writing, Owen’s quest for college financial aid and the off-hand mentions of college applications still ring very true today.

But my favorite detail was that of Thorn, a paracosm that Owen developed as a child and shares with Natalie. This is as close as Le Guin gets to genre writing here, but it’s never indulgent. In fact, Owen recounts his imaginary world with more than a little sheepishness. He knows he’s sharing something that makes him vulnerable, different—but Natalie’s sensitive reaction reveals how strong their connection really is.

This is a slim book, one which would otherwise be a nice palette cleanser between weightier reads if it weren’t for the fact that it has a very melancholy tone itself. Still, it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Though it was written a long time ago, I suspect it will still ring true for modern teens, particularly those who have never felt quite at home in their home towns.

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Her and Me and You by Lauren Strasnick

I was very excited to pick up Lauren Strasnick’s sophomore novel, Her and Me and You after loving her first book. Nothing Like You was one of my favorite reads this year–dark, sparse, but still lovingly told, the story of a girl dealing, often unsuccessfully, with her grief over her mother’s death. Her and Me and You promised similar delicious angst. It’s the story of Alex, a girl who moves away with her mom after her father takes in a new girlfriend. It promised to be a complicated tale of the triangles formed between teenagers and the other parties in their lives: Alex and her father and his girlfriend, Alex and her best friend and her best friend’s boy, Alex and her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s twin sister.

Strasnick’s prose remains both dark and spare. She clearly knows how to handle her sparse stylistics, and manages to deeply evoke the wintery environment shown on the cover even in a volume composed mostly of dialog. Unfortunately, her command of the pacing felt off here, and it interfered with my enjoyment of the story of Alex’s complicated life.

You see, this isn’t so much a novel as a novella. That, in and of itself, isn’t particularly problematic, though I was quite disappointed to find that my ebook was only 131 pages long, with thirty pages of that a sampler of Strasnick’s first book. However, I could have forgiven that if the story’s development had been tighter, and more fitting for the volume’s slim length.

But it’s not. Her and Me and You takes a very long time to become engaging. While I was immediately drawn in to Strasnick’s debut, this follow-up took a good fifty-or-so pages to get going–and in a format this focused, I’m afraid that she just didn’t have that many pages to spare. Alex and her love interest Fred spend a significant length of time waffling in their feelings over one another, but, though this is true to life, I didn’t feel like I had quite enough of a relationship with Alex to remain riveted.

More interesting was both her, and Fred’s, relationship with Fred’s twin sister Adina. Adina is the kind of cool, but slightly evil friend that’s usually termed a “frenemy” in modern YA–but she’s rendered far more realistically and compellingly. And her relationship with Fred is fascinating. Why does he support her like he does? Why does she try to control his relationships? Is there something romantic lurking there, or is this just a reaction to the fact that their mother is dead and their father has all-but-abandoned them?

As I read deeper into the story of Fred and Adina, I became increasingly engaged. This is where Her and Me and You shines, in examining the fucked-up, confusing relationship between the twins, and all through the eyes of Alex, an interloper. The last third of the book was exciting and addictive.

Unfortunately, it all ends abruptly and with a rosy optimism that both didn’t appeal to me personally and didn’t seem to be a fitting end for what we read before. While I was fascinated by what I found deep within this book once it gained speed, because it prevaricated through its slim first half, and because the ending was ultimately unsatisfying, I can’t recommend it without hesitation. Readers interested in Strasnick might be smart to pick up her debut–thrilling, beautiful, and flawless–before they take a look at Her and Me and You.

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I still can’t believe how well Stephen King does women.

Or in this case, a girl. As someone only a handful of years older than Trisha McFarland, the deliciously spunky, undoubtedly strong heroine of King’s novella The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I can speak with some degree of confidence about the uncanny quality of her character. And, as this story is utterly character-based, I can only call it a triumph–though I fear that King fans in search of a tightly-plotted volume redolent with King’s usual supernatural shenanigans will have to look elsewhere.

The year is 1998, and Trisha is a nine year old girl whose family–mom, dad, and petulant teenage brother–has been recently shattered by divorce. In an attempt at creating some semblance of togetherness, Trisha’s mom Quilla drags her kids on one family-friendly field trip after another: to the auto museum, on a ski trip, and finally on a fateful summer hike through the Maine wilderness. Trisha only leaves the trail for a moment to pop a squat, but somewhat, she loses sight of her mother and brother–and so begins her nine-day-long harrowing trip through the wilderness.

Trisha is a tomboy, the kind, I admit, I always aspired to be as a little girl. She’s a daddy’s girl–she and her father share a love of baseball and of Red Sox player Tom Gordon–but her mother’s imbibed her with enough just enough wilderness knowledge (which berries are safe, how to pee without getting your jeans wet) to keep her afloat. As Trisha stumbles through the forest, we become increasingly aware of the tensions of her age. She and her girlfriend Pepsi are just beginning to explore pop music, and sexuality (they beg their moms to let them dress up as the Spice Girls for Halloween), but still memorize Double Dutch rhymes. Though Trisha’s speech is peppered with her father’s aphorisms (the kind of King-speech that just barely missed setting my teeth on edge in Lisey’s Story, but is put to much better use here), she’s also been growing increasingly aware lately of his predilection for beer. Though her character arc may be slight, this is a coming-of-age story, and that’s no better evident than when Trisha muses that, after this experience, she’ll quit quoting her father and her grandmother and start penning sayings of her own.

It’s good that King is so focused on Trisha’s growth and character, because this truly is a character study, and not much besides eating berries and gathering nuts and following streams happens in this slim volume. There are hints of the supernatural, but they’re never explained and could easily be hallucinatory, and the pacing flags a bit by the beginning of the “Bottom of the Seventh.” But the book’s short length and brisk structure saves it from being tiresome, and, like King’s other meditations on claustrophobia (Gerald’s Game, Misery) it’s appropriately focused and realistically rendered. In a way, it recalls a book from my own youth–a story of a pair of snowbound teenagers called Snowbound!. But in that book, the relationship between the characters and nascent hints of romance were the focus. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is truly a story of survival, and Trisha’s success rests squarely on her own shoulders, lending this book a feminist tint. Hell, never before have I felt so elated at the simple account of a girl catching a fish.

There are a few problems here, but they’re slight: a post-script that feels a bit saccharine for all that’s come before it, a bottom-heavy structure. But frankly? Trisha herself is just so awesome that I hardly cared. I wish I’d read this when I was younger–closer to Trisha’s age–and could have more directly drawn inspiration from it. As it is, all I can do is remind myself that sometimes a girl’s moxy and smarts really can save the day.

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