Love Letter in a Yearbook

I so enjoyed A. E. Cannon's Cal Cameron by Day, Spider-Man by Night, and The Shadow Brothers. They captured a part of Provo I knew when I was growing up, people I knew and places. I've seen the hearse Marcus Jenkins and Henry Yazzie drive around in -- it's right down in the next neighborhood -- and the apple orchard at the end of the novel. And the crazy old man in the park Cal Cameron doesn't want to meet, but has to because that's partly what the novel is about.

I especially liked how The Shadow Brothers handled symbolism. I'd always thought of symbolism as literary puzzle, but the hearse is such an organic symbol. Teenage boys love shocking and slightly macabre things, and if one of the boys comes from a culture, like Navaho, that doesn't talk of the dead, the car gains all kinds of resonance, culture lost and sought and wanted and confused. "Apple," the new boy in school, Frank, a Hopi, calls Henry, "Red on the outside, white inside." There are a lot of apples in the valley, a lot of orchards -- were a lot more, so when Marcus and Henry run past one practicing for a race, I felt joyful resonance between landscape and characters.

So I was thrilled when Ann gave me a copy of Amazing Gracie. I moved to Pleasant Grove's small library before I could read the Provo Library's copy. The cover picture always intrigued me. A girl sitting on a floor amidst packing boxes and wadded newspaper, holding a high school yearbook on her lap, but not looking at it, troubled by something.

Her mother's picture. She was ordinary, just like Gracie, and now she's tried to kill herself -- even before the novel starts. I read somewhere a comment that adults don't come off too well in YA novels. The comment suggested that this was part of the moral breakdown of our society. But it's not. It's a convention of the YA novel, a convention of stories about children becoming, trying (or trying not) to become adults, often without the help of adults (who may want to forget they were ever children, ever went through something as harrowing as teen age).

Amazing Gracie both expresses and addresses that concern with the genre. A good deal of the story's action is about trying to find adults who can help, and when Gracie's mother marries a man she knew in high school who quits his job at Geneva Steel to start an MLM business, you can guess things will turn out badly.

I won't tell you that, though. You'll have to read the story. There are other ways for that situation to work itself out (no I don't mean a big pot of money), and in the way the story works out, in the way it addresses the role of adults, I realized something astonishing. For all their rebellion -- whatever that is -- teens want the attention and approval of adults. (That's astonishing? You have two teenage sons and you don't understand this? Well, I don't see them often, and I am a bear of very little brain.) But this story isn't simply a story of want, it tells of want satisfied, which engenders hope, and much enjoyment. Find yourself a copy. It's a good world to wander in.

Oh, and about the setting. I've been to those railroad tracks in American Fork that Gracie walks along, and when Gracie talks about how people from AF are called wuzzers, because they say was instead of were, that's my neighbor across the back fence. I was surprised, looking at my notes that I read this more than a year ago, February 2001. I was sure I read it last summer, but I guess that's just how well the story evokes hot Salt Lake summer nights. I notice there's a new book about to come out, On the Go with Pirate Pete and Pirate Joe. I can't wait to see where that takes me.

Harlow S. Clark