Ashley and Jen By Jack Weyland Bookcraft, 2000. Hardcover: 287 pages. ISBN: 1-57345-803-1 Suggested retail price: $16.95 (US) Audience: Youth, mostly girls
Reviewed by: Katie Parker

Summary

The summer before their senior year in high school, Ashley and Jen tangle at girls' camp and are sentenced to spend a night together by themselves. Ashley's your basic perfect Mormon girl who doesn't even know how to fight, and Jen's a rough type who hangs out with the wrong crowd, drinks, smokes, all that stuff. Through the course of their time together, they become best friends. Jen gets Ashley to loosen up a little and play some camp pranks, and Ashley convinces Jen to start coming back to church. After camp they make friends with Nathan, a social misfit in their ward who turns out to be a lot of fun. The three of them do crazy fun things together like starting an Italian soccer team. Their coach is Nathan posing as a foreign exchange student who yells Italian phrases from a tourist guide like "Where can I find some tent pegs?"

This much of it is the sort of thing you'll find in many Weyland books. It's enjoyable enough, if you like his writing, but it's nothing he hasn't done before. To me it seems like this story appears in some form or another in every book that he writes.

The aspect of the book that really grabbed me is Ashley's struggle with bulimia. Yes, it's another stock thing of Weyland's to address some big issue in many of his books, and this one is the bulimia book. Still, I was impressed with the way he handles it.

When Jen and Ashley first spend time together, Jen notices Ashley throwing up sometimes after meals. No one else seems to notice or care (Ashley hides it carefully), but Jen's been around and she picks up on it. At this point, Ashley hasn't been doing this long, and with Jen's and Nathan's friendships she's able to control herself. But after a few months, when Jen and Nathan pair off and leave Ashley alone, things go downhill for her. It's even worse when she goes to Ricks in the fall, where she makes a new start alone. Her obsessions with food and with having a "perfect" body start to take center stage, and grows wildly out of control. As her condition progresses, she lies and manipulates people more and more to cover up her physical ailments as well as her binging and purging.

Weyland shows all this vividly throughout much of the book. There's a scene where a nice guy has come to see Ashley, but all she can think of is getting rid of him so that she can go eat the brownies in her trunk. After he continues to call her (which she largely fails to even notice), she finally lets him think that she's waiting for a missionary so he'll leave her alone. Prior to the brownie scene, as the people around her go through church services and a normal Sunday, she elaborately plots how she can avoid eating until she can have her brownies, without her roommates questioning her. There's another scene where she's supposed to drive from Idaho to Salt Lake for the funeral of Nathan's sister, but ends up in a hotel room with a bag of pancake mix and a bottle of maple syrup. She spends the next few days making herself pancakes, throwing them up, and making some more. She explains to her parents and friends that she was caught in a snowstorm and had to wait it out at the hotel. Throughout all of this, we get to read Ashley's internal conversations with herself, showing her complete confusion and growing feelings of helplessness.

When Ashley visits home, Jen becomes concerned about Ashley's weight and her passing out when they try to play soccer again with Nathan. She tells Ashley's parents about her throwing up after meals, and Ashley promises she'll do better. Her parents are satisfied with this at first, but eventually realize that Ashley has no intention of trying to change and that her condition is only becoming worse. They get her into treatment, and, while it's not an easy road back, she does (of course) make it.

Critique

As I've previously stated, I felt that Weyland handled the "bulimia scenes" quite well. I had no idea how complex and uncontrollable such a condition could really become, but I found this depiction to be fascinating and eye-opening. And I felt like the problems were a lot more three-dimensional than many of us often expect from Weyland.

He also did reasonably well at establishing reasons for Ashley developing her disorder, such as showing how her parents expected perfection from her and stifled her personality, and how she felt a need to be able to control things in her life. These, of course, are not offered as the hard-and-fast problems that led her to it, but they are still provided in the background. The problem is that these terrible parents of hers are able to change into good ones very quickly when needed for their daughter's recovery. The scenes where her parents apologize to her and try to help mend their problems are, really, fairly realistic. But once that's taken care of, her parents are wonderful. This is believable to a point, but sooner or later I would expect them to revert to old ways, especially under the stress created by Ashley not yet recovering. But that never happens.

I didn't find the character of Jen to be completely believable, either. Jen is initially shown as pretty wicked, but we soon see that she's mostly just mischievous, and suddenly she wants to repent and do better. For the most part, she doesn't look back. This almost fades into the background against Ashley's story, but it's still enough to bug me. And why would a worldly girl like her want to have anything to do with a geek like Nathan? As long as you don't wonder things like this, you can overlook this and enjoy the rest of the book. But I wish there weren't always, predictably, so much to overlook.

Another thing that bothered me is a stylistic trait of Weyland's. When introducing a character, he occasionally jumps in and gives his or her life story in a few paragraphs. Another technique that he uses is to completely switch to the other person's point of view, so that we can see their true intentions. Neither one of these really has to be a problem, but both of them bother me. I'd like for him to use more subtle means to convey the necessary information, and to leave out the information that isn't necessary.

But there are many things that Weyland does well. He uses humor quite convincingly, and places Ashley in a variety of situations playing against a variety of characters.

I apologize for this lengthy review, but there's a lot in this book that is worth discussing, and Jack Weyland always seems to be a hot topic. I honestly have a lot more respect for him and his work now than I did before. I'd give the part of the book that follows Ashley's struggles a solid thumbs-up. The rest of the book -- well, it's standard Jack Weyland. And that's okay.

-- Katie Parker