Kristen Randle is one of those few authors whose books I buy without more than a swift glance at the jacket blurb. Her intricate command of language is always appealing to me, and her characters are wonderfully human -- I can't help but feel strongly about them, even though it's sometimes a strong feeling of dislike. Though many of her novels are written and marketed for young adults, they are books that an adult can read and enjoy as well. Breaking Rank is such a book.

In Breaking Rank, the story revolves around the Clan, a group of mysterious young men who hold themselves completely apart from normal society. They are devoted autodidacts -- and though I figured out the word means something like "self-teacher," I hadn't realized that learning on your own was unusual enough to warrant its own word. However, autodidacticism is more a philosophy of learning than anything else; the Clan takes pride in their refusal to "play the game" of formal schooling, viewing such learning as "performance knowledge" rather than real understanding, and referring to the kids who learn just enough to make good grades "cribs" because they depend on crib sheets and Cliff's Notes. The Clan members learn through a system of apprenticeships to more knowledgeable members, and in their fields, they're more brilliant than anyone else their age.

But for Baby, the system isn't enough. Though he excels at the things he learns from the Clan, he wants more than they can give him -- knowledge that can only be found in books. And when he breaks from the Clan's self-imposed noncompliance to take a standardized test -- and scores incredibly high -- he makes himself a test subject for the high school principal's campaign to integrate the Clan. Baby is taken out of his remedial classes and put into the honors program; Casey, a bright, well-adjusted young woman, is selected to be Baby's tutor and to help ease him into the new program.

Though initially Casey and Baby are natural antagonists, after much trial and difficulty they grow to respect each other, and naturally that respect starts to become something more. The trouble arises when the Clan learns of Baby's defection, and some of the Clan members -- jealous of his status and talents, wanting to gain power over the Clan leaders -- use his relationship with Casey to force Baby back into the Clan . . . the Clan the way they want it to be.

The story is told in alternating segments from Casey's and Baby's different points of view, but toward the end it becomes almost exclusively Baby's story, probably because Baby's problems quickly become Casey's as well. Casey is LDS, though her religion is never referred to by name; there are many subtle hints, but the only overtly Mormon reference is when Baby quotes a scripture from the Doctrine and Covenants. (There is an amusing scene where Baby helps Casey fold laundry, and she quickly snatches a "t-shirt" away from him, telling him that she'll fold that one. . . . ) Casey is a classic type of young LDS woman: she's smart, witty, secure in her family, and compassionate. She also has no experience with real evil, or with the kind of unstable life Baby lives. Despite her real compassion and desire to do good, Casey treats her relationship with Baby as a game. Though Casey is genuinely attracted to Baby, you get the sense that she doesn't see him as a real person -- at least, not in the sense that her family, her church and her life are "real." He's a supplicant to be helped, a brooding dark stranger with whom to flirt, even a way for her to test the limits of appropriate behavior. As the reader's sympathy for Baby grows, Casey becomes more difficult to like. She redeems herself by the end, but it costs her a huge chunk of her perceived identity and a lot of suffering.

Randle's portrayal of the Clan, and Baby's role within it, is a little disconcerting because it's so different from other gangs in literature. I kept expecting the Clan to be violent and destructive, to pick on weaker people or start fights with their enemies the Cribs (a name which is close enough to Crips to reinforce those assumptions). But the Clan does none of those things -- at least, not at first. And they don't behave in typical "gang" ways. As Baby tells Casey, "The Clan . . . isn't a gang. . . . We're not territorial. We don't steal. We don't vandalize. We don't carry weapons. We are . . . a culture. A society within and in spite of a larger society" (p. 96).

Baby's desire for a different way of life is opposed by his peers, but not in some cliched pseudo-Mafia plot. Instead, there is a complex play for power between the Clan founders and some of the rising members, both of which groups have different ideas about what the Clan should be for; this is all mixed in with Baby's need to please his older brother (one of the Clan founders) and his brother's desire to keep his brother safe and give him everything he needs.

Randle also takes a different approach to portraying teen sexuality. Breaking Rank is charged with a great deal of sexual energy; most of the Clan are sexually active and some enjoy talking about their exploits in great detail to torment Baby, who is not only a virgin, but believes sex should be a private and sacred act:

The way Keele talked about bodies, he might as well have brought the girl into the room so everybody could watch. Baby hated it. There was no love in the telling, no tenderness -- just heat. And just now, Keele was still very hot. Baby knew that heat; he'd learned it listening to talk like this, and it was ugly to him. Whenever they started in this way, he felt a deep, brutal, personal shame, a kind of grief over the passing of something gentle and beautiful. (24)

Baby's enemies in the Clan want to bind him to them by forcing him to break his convictions and sleep with a girl, specifically Casey. This, combined with Casey's initial obliviousness to the real power of her own sexuality, makes the central event of the novel powerfully sensual. And yet Randle uses no graphic description, no obscene language or crudity. The result is, again, disconcerting. Because it is so common to read graphically detailed accounts of sexual encounters, many readers may see this as overly prudish. But it also has the effect of making the "sex scenes" strangely intense, because so much is left unsaid.

Though the book is excellent, it's not new ground for Randle; she has explored the theme of the socially-well-adjusted girl being thrown together with the outsider-loner-boy in her previous novels On the Side of the Angels and The Only Alien on the Planet. This may leave some readers dissatisfied; a friend of mine reacted by saying "This is On the Side of the Angels for a non-Mormon audience." I admit that while I enjoyed this book, I would have liked to see a different sort of story than the kind Randle has told before. Since I found The Only Alien on the Planet so enjoyable, I found myself comparing the two, and that made it hard to appreciate Breaking Rank on its own merits. Though this is a fairly big complaint, it's my only major one.

Whether you're a teen or (even just nominally) an adult, Breaking Rank is a novel worth reading. Give it to your teenaged child or nephew or friend or grandchild, then steal it back for yourself. No -- you should probably read it first. Just in case.

Melissa Proffitt