I rarely read more than one young adult book at a time because I need more intellectual stimulation that. I love YA for its stories. All the best books say things that are true about life in the way that an "adult" book can't. But they're not challenging. I like to be challenged, at least to a point, when I read.
The exception to this rule is when a YA book comes along that can't wait until I'm done with whatever series I'm in the middle of. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago with Rebecca Stead's Goodbye Stranger, which was just recently published. Stead's When You Reach Me is one of my favorite young adult reads. It is so rich and wonderful. I'll be reading it again and posting about it before too long because it's too good for me to leave on the shelf. When I read Stead's follow-up to that book, Liar and Spy, about 18 months ago, I was a little disappointed. That was probably inevitable. Whenever a writer, any writer, publishes a book that finds its way into my top ten all-time, the next book of that writer's is never as good. I can't think of a single one that has been.
So I went into Goodbye Stranger with modest expectations. I knew it would be no When You Reach Me. I hoped it would be a little better than Liar and Spy, which wasn't bad, but just kind of pedestrian. Not what I hoped for from a writer with whom my first encounter had been so satisfying. Stranger is probably better than Liar. I'd have to read them both close together to say for sure. I don't know when I'll be able to do that because I learned my lesson when I bought Liar in hardcover. A reread of Stranger will have to wait until the paperback is on shelves.
Stranger tells the story of several different teenagers in New York City. One thing I love about Stead's books, all of them, is her New York setting. It makes me wish I had grown up there. These kids are normal, another thing Stead is very good at. She doesn't dress up her characters with terminal illnesses or super powers; they're just ordinary kids, and they do all the things my students do. That in and of itself is an achievement, because especially in today's literary landscape it is hard to write a story about ordinary kids. The main character, Bridge, was in a car accident as a young child that still scars her emotionally and physically, but not deeply. She lives a pretty regular life with her parents and older brother Jamie, and spends lots of time with her best friends, Emily and Tab.
A primary plotline in the book is Emily taking a scandalous picture of herself and texting it to a boy. We've all lived in the digital age long enough to know that the conclusion here is foregone: the photo goes public, and everyone involved is in big trouble. As soon as I realized that this was going to happen, I was really curious to see how Stead would handle it. Would this be a cautionary tale about not doing things that compromise your own purity, or a 21st-century story of empowerment arguing that girls should have the same rights as boys when it comes to being half naked?
The answer is neither. Stead actually provides very little in the way of judgment about Emily's decisions. I went back and forth in whether I liked this or not. Certainly the decisions are not without consequences, and that provides valuable instruction on its own. On the other hand, shouldn't Emily at some point have expressed deep regret about what she did? She never does. She's upset that certain things resulted from it, but that's it. Part of me feels that an adult writer has a moral obligation to draw the line more clearly than that, but ultimately, I think Stead did the right thing. Kids know when they're being moralized. That's why so much young adult literature sucks. The very thing that rubs me a tiny bit the wrong way may also be the thing that makes Stead the perfect writer for contemporary teenagers. She doesn't condone what Emily does, but she doesn't outright condemn it either. She lets the reader decide.
It wouldn't be a Stead book without a bit of mystery, and Stranger's comes courtesy of a nameless teenage girl who skips school on Valentine's Day and wanders through the city, brooding over things in her life that aren't fully explained until the end. It took me a while to realize this, but the rest of the book starts long before this day and then climaxes on it, so that all the action comes together at once. Stead is very skilled at this too. The girl turns out to be one whose name we already know; she is an ancillary character in Bridge's story. Stead's ability to keep me turning the pages until she ties the threads together makes her work worth reading.
I will say that the threads don't tie in as satisfying a way as they did in When You Reach Me. It was probably about as satisfying as Liar. But when I read this book again, and I will, it won't be for the catharsis of a brilliantly conceived ending. It will be to remember what it is to be thirteen and to care far more about what your friends think than what you think. Or to not even be sure what you think. And it will be for her way with a metaphor: "Life was a too-tall stack of books that had started to lean to one side, and each new day was another book on top." It is really hard to find new ways to say things like "Life was overwhelming," but Stead does it in every chapter. Good prose is hard to find.
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