When Cody's estranged best friend kills herself, Cody agrees to collect her things from college and comes to discover her best friend in ways she wasn't aware through her roommates, her computer and the life she'd created for herself.
The long version:
Engrossing from the start. Cody, as conceived by Forman, is a complex main character for young adult (in my opinion) in that she's not likeable or relatable from the start. And it doesn't help that the start is a dark place in which Cody is embodying a range of complex and unpleasant emotions in response to her friend's suicide. Resentment, detachment, confusion, these are the qualities that Cody first expresses when we meet her as she's processing her emotions.
One of Forman's strengths is her ability to write involving, subtle, relatively complex two-person drama in which the relationship is messy, filled with competing interests and emotions and the characters and their journeys are very human and, I'll say it again, messy. It's what I loved best about her two books "Just One Day" and "Just One Year", both of which I thought represented a leap in maturity and growth from her big (now) blockbuster "If I Stay" and follow-up "Where I Went".
You may not love Cody from the start, but you understand and identify with her as the book progresses, your heart aches for her as she processes not only her friend's reality but her own reality too. And in her male counterpart Ben McCallister, you get an equally complicated character who isn't all he appears to be and is refreshing when he's not the YA-Fantasy-Boyfriend material that I find in a fair amount of young adult fiction.
The book also continues a great trend in young adult literature focusing on 18+ characters and the post-high school experience. For years I've been excited to see the evolution of "Young Adult Literature" expand to include not only an audience that's over eighteen but characters and stories about those post-high school years told in thoughtful, contemplative ways that serve as that gray area between traditional YA and Adult Literature where books are getting longer and incorporating more complexity and/or mature themes.
That segment of literature that focuses on the 18-22 year old experience has been automatically shelved in Adult Fiction until recently. When we have started to see books with 18-25 year old protagonists appear on Young Adult shelves, many of those that have made an appearance are perceived or labeled as "New Adult", which in my mind are more romance-laden melodramas that may or may not contain more explicit sexual content. "New Adult" is tricky, not universally accepted genre in my opinion, and certainly not a division found on our library shelves. In my mind, "New Adult" is a genre and not an audience classification the way we segment our audiences between Children-Young Adult-Adult.
In seeing the audience for Young Adult expand beyond the long-assumed 12-18 year old audience, it seems natural that the content of YA has now begun to fill that gap with stories that both redefine Young Adult Literature and tell those stories in fresh, new ways. I Was Here is the epitome of that transformation within YA and I devoured it.
No comments:
Post a Comment