Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  We’re not even getting into how scary the witch stuff is. Cuz not only does not-really-Julia kill Rachel’s aunt, uncle, and the real Julia by just marking a place on the map where they should go off the cliff, she kills Rachel’s dog, Trickle, by making a wax doll, and she gives Rachel hives (thereby decommissioning her for an evening so she can better steal her boyfriend) simply by splattering her picture with red paint. She makes everyone fall in love with her by sprinkling powder in their water. Oh yeah, also? She always avoids having her picture taken. Do you know why? Because witches don’t show up in them.

  But really, after Rae triumphs and saves her mom from driving off a cliff and gets her boyfriend back, the scariest thing I learned is that having not-really-Julia-actually-some-random-Ozark-person be a witch is the most manipulative plot device I had never seen coming at age 12. After all, there’s not really any reason for not-really-Julia to be a witch. Murdering people, impersonating cousins and trying to sleep with their dads is already pretty scary. But, as a certain Parents’ Choice winner must know, there is no way you are going to focus on any of that when you are twelve. Instead, you are going to make a wax figure of your biggest enemy and try to burn it with a candle. You are going to spatter a photograph of your brother with blue paint and be freaked out by your powers when he gets a bruise two weeks later and, like, NEVER do it again. And, after 22 years pass, you are going to see the cover, shiver, and be magically unable to remember the title at all.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  I Am the Cheese

  By Robert Cormier 1977

  Don’t Know Him from Adam

  In general, the “it was all a dream” trope, that refuge for frantic writers in search of an ending everywhere, should be retired from fiction. That is, except for a few select cases like Robert Cormier’s I Am the Cheese, which uses it not as a happy cop-out—hey, they didn’t really die!—but as an avenue to discuss the unambiguous horror when one really doesn’t know what’s true about one’s self.

  When I started my grand reading tour of the teen shelf, there were only a few boys to be found there—hugely hungry ’Manzo, of course, brought to us care of our favorite pioneer, Laura—and Paul Zindel’s misfit teenagers, manic and/or moody, whose inner thoughts were useful reading for anyone whose main back-and-forth with boys was filling out a biology lab.

  Still, Cormier’s Adam Farmer is the only one who still gives me a small pang of distress when I think of him. Maybe it’s because he’s so unconsciously kind and so unconsciously vulnerable, he rouses a sisterly sense of protection, one I never felt toward all the adventurers, wisecrackers, misfits, and other male-sexed characters I was perfectly happy to meet and find out about. They were there for the future, and frankly, a little too scary to think about beyond the biology-lab stage. But Adam’s story has nothing to do with him rejecting the world—or any of the girls in it. Adam is kind and open and in a nasty situation—and he needs our help now.

  When we meet him, the teenaged Adam Farmer is pedaling furiously toward Rutterberg, Vermont, having lit out hometown of Monument as well as his outspoken girlfriend, Amy Hertz (“yes, she sighs, like the car”) under unknown circumstances. All the reader knows is that Adam is retracing the route he once took on vacation with his parents—also not on the scene for unknown reasons—and, between being menaced by toughs and the occasional pervert, he’s trying to figure out why all of his calls to Amy—who is, ironically, fond of playing pranks where they pretend to be other people—are going unanswered.

  These disturbing scenes, which occur not only in the present but in the first person, are interposed by chapters in the second person, which all begin with Adam being kindly grilled (ostensibly) by someone named Brinn:

  T: And what did you find out, finally?

  A: Too much. And not enough.

  T: Do you really believe that or are you merely being clever?

  (5-second interval.)

  T: I am sorry to be so blunt. Please explain what you mean.

  A: I wasn’t trying to be a wise guy. I was telling the truth. I found out, for instance, about my mother’s Thursday night telephone calls. And when I realized what the calls were all about, it was both too much and not enough. It was worse than just knowing the birth certificates.

  T: Tell me about the telephone calls.

  (10-second interval.)

  A: I have a feeling you already know about them.

  I have a feeling you know everything, even my blank spots.

  T: Then, why should I make you go through it all? Why should I carry on this charade?

  A: I don’t know.

  T: You disappoint me. Can’t you think of one person who will benefit?

  (5-second interval.)

  A: Me. Me. Me. That’s what you said at the beginning. But I never asked for it. I never asked to benefit by it.

  (4-second interval.)

  A: I have a headache.

  T: Don’t retreat now. Don’t retreat. Tell me about the phone calls your mother made.

  (5-second interval.)

  A: There really isn’t very much to tell.

  Like a doctor’s chart made all the more horrible by its formal impenetrability, these transcripts of interviews create a horrid sense of foreboding. This is only increased by the periodic flashbacks of his loving family and childhood, which come in brief, lyric bursts:

  He curled up in the bed, listening. He always liked to listen at night. Often he heard his mother and father murmuring in their bedroom, the bed making a lot of noise, and there were the nice sounds of his father and mother together, making soft sounds as if they were furry animals like the stuffed animals he always slept with, Bittie the Bear and Pokey the Pig, his friends. His father would say: “Hey, boy, you’re getting too old for all those toys, three and a half, going on four.” The boy knew his father was joking, that he would never take his friends away. Anyway, his mother would say: “Now, now, he’s a long time from four, a long long time.” The tenderness in her voice and her perfume like lilac in the spring.

  The revelation that Adam and his family are part of an early form of the Witness Protection Program, one he remembers himself during these interviews, is a welcome answer to Adam’s present quandary, but it’s not really what this book—which anticipates Memento by more than twenty years—is about. It’s a book about losses of all kinds—not only identity, but family, friends, one’s love, one’s home and connections in the world. The title comes from Adam’s father’s love for the song “The Farmer in the Dell,” with its “The Cheese Stands Alone” refrain—and just like the song, I Am the Cheese shows how easily something innocent and guileless can be ripped away, without apology or warning. When the present is revealed to have been a dream, one usually wakes up to find the bogeyman gone. Adam only wakes up to the nightmare.

  EXTRA CREDIT

  The Arm of the Starfish

  By Madeleine L’Engle 1965

  On the Straight and Sparrow

  I am proud to say that everything I ever learned about cellular regeneration, I learned from Madeleine L’Engle. Oh, and the layout of Lisbon and any bits of Portuguese (para means “in order to”!), as well as the workings of the State Department and the proper treatment of shark bites. (I’d say I learned that from Jaws, too, but if you flip to the last chapter, you’ll see that had more effect on my grasp of female arousal.) Speaking of female arousal, I also learned not to trust pretty girls abroad—and DEFINITELY to never let them get ahold of your passport.

  Adam Eddington, making his first strong-silent-type appearance in a L’Engle novel, is a marine biology student headed to Gaea Island to study starfish regeneration with the now adult Calvin O’Keefe, a job he’s gotten through the good graces of his mentor. (Starfish, for your information, contain a central nerve structure similar to that of humans, although they can immediately generate a new limb when one is lost. See what I mean by knowing everything?) Unfortunately, on a stopover in Lisbon, Adam is waylaid by the lissome and dangerous Kali Cutter, t
he blond daughter of the wealthy, craven tycoon Typhon Cutter, and Adam’s summer morphs into a very different kind of dangerous experiment.

  Cutter, bloated, with lean, trailing limbs like a spider’s, is out to steal O’Keefe’s research—and therefore control the phantom-limb-replacement industry until the end of time. (Cutter? Get it, Cutter?) But it’s not so easy. As O’Keefe soberly tells Adam, the animals who’ve been injured naturally benefit by his research. But those injured deliberately by local villagers seeking the spare change O’Keefe pays become monstrosities. (O’Keefe takes the physique’s wont to represent the psyche into the human realm in the case of Typhon: “The odd distribution of the weight is glandular,” Dr. O’Keefe said, “but I don’t think it’s as simple as all that. It also reflects the choices he’s made in his life.”) It’s a high-stakes game, one with horrifying implications if the research gets into the wrong hands. “So I guess this kind of thing makes enemies?” Adam asks. O’Keefe is perturbed. “They are enemies, Adam,” he tells him. “You don’t have to make enemies of them.”

  But this distinction is a lesson Adam, who is given to considering that even the enemy may have virtues, will have to learn. He’s asked to look after O’Keefe’s redheaded, spirited daughter Polyhymnia O’Keefe (who your dedicated L’Engle reader will know is not only truly good but also preternaturally wise), who is also an object of Cutter’s for her familiarity with her father’s research. But Adam, blinded by Kali’s looks, can’t choose between them.

  Thus entereth Canon Tallis, L’Engle’s jack-of-all-trades philosopher, clergyman, spymaster, and father figure to the rescue, hot on the trail of discovering whether or not Adam has gone over to the dark side—something, through the course of the novel, Adam himself must wrestle with, too.

  Never one to be married to any particular genre, L’Engle creates in The Arm of the Starfish a happy melange of classic thriller, sci-fi, romance, and philosophical treatise on the nature of evil and forgiveness. Poly, on the cusp of love—clad in a red woolen swimsuit, despairing of her straight up-and-down figure—is the moral center of the novel, the adolescent who pushes Adam to be honest and good even as he’s drawn in by Kali’s genteel manipulations, as does the O’Keefe clan as a whole, who remain firm in my affections despite their propensity to burst into four-part harmony. It’s a famous L’Engle combo of morality and philosophizing married to religion, topped with two shakes of science and served with some fantastic chase scenes. (And a dolphin!)

  Also pulling Adam away from the arms of evil is Joshua Archer, who acts both as his protector against the Cutters and as the gentle interrogator, his questions designed to lead Adam to the truth—even though leaving himself so open that Adam finally comes back to haunt him. The book concludes in a series of chase scenes on the streets of Lisbon that don’t really make much sense except that they allow shots to ring out and opaque quotations to be uttered, as well as lots of rattling of papers and mysterious numbers. But by the end, Adam has accepted not only that there is something called good and evil, but that he’s responsible for both, especially when Archer is killed saving him—what Tallis Canon calls “the fall of the sparrow”—the necessary sacrifice in the face of evil. That doesn’t mean good people have to knuckle under it in bitterness, though. As the wise village chief (there’s always gotta be one) who’s been helped by O’Keefe says, “It is not enough if you pray neither for nor against. You must pray. For.”

  EXTRA CREDIT

  Dragons in the Waters

  By Madeleine L’Engle 1976

  Phair Game

  If there’s a truth all mystery writers should take care to remember, it’s that the only better place to set a mystery than a dark, many-roomed villa in a remote location during an electrical storm is, of course, on a boat. Practically any boat but a kayak! Because not only does the boat achieve with dispatch all the mysterious and crucial advantages of the villa—isolation, crush of strangers, places to hide and suddenly appear, questionable power sources—there might also be some sailors! Try working a sailor—to say nothing of a crew—into a remote villa sometime.

  Dragons in the Waters is one of L’Engle’s more baroque formulations, and I love it even more because. The story of the young, Southern scion Simon Bolivar Quentin Phair Renier, it contains appearances of many of L’Engle’s key players, including Poly O’Keefe, the flame-haired daughter of Meg (yes, A Wrinkle in Time’s Meg), Calvin O’Keefe, also of same, pianist Dr. Theo Theotocopulus of the Upper West Side and The Young Unicorns, respectively, and Canon Tallis, all-around problem solver in the lives of both the O’Keefes and the Austins.

  Simon is being escorted to Caracas under the auspices of his newly declared cousin, the vaguely oily Forsyth Phair, who has nonetheless provided Simon’s Aunt Leonis with a tidy little sum for the portrait of their mutual ancestor he is transporting. Unfortunately, someone keeps attempting to kill Simon, and Poly and Charles, named for his uncle Charles Wallace, keep irritatingly preventing it. Will Simon—and the portrait—make it to Caracas alive? And can solving the mystery of the initials in faint letters on the portrait keep Simon alive long enough to know what they mean?

  Dragons is dreamy, vivacious, peculiar, and whimsical—as suits a novel with an Indian princess, a mysterious crew, more cellular regeneration, and a full crew. Alongside wonderful cozy visions of tea with the captain and thick fisherman’s sweaters and saltwater onboard pools, there is a mysterious tribe called the Quiztano Indians, who have their own relation to Simon, and a large-scale kidnapping, as well as the revelation of certain heretofore unknown bloodlines. Yes, yes, as it happens, there is a return-of-the-great-white-prodigal relationship, but did you hear me when I said there was a tea service and a saltwater pool? Also a race of beautiful people who live with nature in houses on stilts. Perhaps someone should try to set a murder mystery in one of those!

  EXTRA CREDIT

  Secret Lives

  By Berthe Amoss 1979

  The Portrait of an Artist

  Every childhood reader has the book whose title she’s forgotten, but whose particulars stay with her so strongly as to almost intersperse themselves with her own memories. That book for me is Berthe Amoss’s Secret Lives, whose Tomato Surprise sandwiches cooked under a broiler have remained on my mind long past any reasonable browning. I’ve actually never met anyone who’s read this book, which continues to astonish me. It’s a marvelous mystery on its own. It’s also, like, for instance, Hangin’ Out with Ceci or Starring Sally J. Freeman as Herself, a meticulous portrait of a period, down to the very last decoder ring. But most important, Adelaide Agnew is a heroine as smart, funny, and complex as any I’ve ever met in the Booker-nomination crew, one I demand be released into larger circulation immediately to take her place at the side of Vicky Austin, Blossom Culp, and Harriet M. Welsch.

  Addie Agnew, growing up in 1937 New Orleans, is chafing under the care of her two ancient, rattling aunts, Eveline and Kate, who’ve taken over her care since the death of her mother, Aspasie. “It just seems to me that, this being 1937,” Addie grouses, “there ought to be a hint of modern times around here, but Three Twenty Audubon Street and its occupants have been lifted straight out of the Dark Ages.” She might as well have said “the graveyard,” since that’s where, after reciting their catechisms, Eveline and Kate often joyously look forward to relocating.

  Drowning in slipcovers and shutters, Addie is also plagued by her next-door neighbor and first cousin, Sandra Lee, a perky blond with curls and turned-up nose who, to Addie’s consternation, more closely resembles the ancient portrait of her mother, Pasie, hanging in the living room. There’s also Tom, the freckled next-door neighbor who is sourly immune to her charms and schemes, as well as Holly, the theatrical, commanding daughter of Addie’s housekeeper, Nini, who proves a welcome, if occasionally caustic, companion to Addie’s flights of fancy. These mostly involve Addie reliving her circumstances of her mother’s death through an imaginary character called Jane Whitmore, another glamorous blo
nd who’s died in dramatic circumstances.

  In a story as old as Aunt Kate’s cloves, Pasie’s dramatic death has been recounted for Addie so many times she can almost remember it, though she was only a baby when it occurred: “I…wondered why I’ve never learned to say ‘was’ instead of ‘is’ for my mother. It has been such a long time since my mother, father, and I lived in Honduras. My father was manager of a banana plantation there and my mother painted landscapes, until one day, a hurricane came along, and a tidal wave swept most of Belize and our house into the Gulf. My father saved me, but, in Aunt Eveline’s version of what happened, my mother was torn from his arms and hurled into the arms of the angels. I can’t remember any of it—a strange, funny thing when I stop to think of how dramatic it must have been.”

  Yes—wondrous strange! Unfortunately, little is left of Pasie for Addie to remember her by, except a sheaf of old practice drawings and Eveline’s rapturous recollections. (About her looks: “No, dear, I was never pretty. Your mother, now…” About her art: “Her professor considered her talented. Most talented!”) Adelaide, despairing over her brown curls, snub nose, and poor painting skills, is desperate to find any hint of herself in her mother—or any hint that her mother loved her. Slowly, however, by overhearing stray bits of information, questioning everyone to distraction, breaking into a crypt, then decrypting her mother’s recovered diary, Addie starts to find a Pasie very different from Eveline’s recollections.

  While the world Addie dreams up for her mother and standin Jane Whitmore is steeped in hyperbole, as purple as a silent film, the world Amoss conjures up for the reader is wry and funny, a vibrant portrait of a family and of New Orleans. For the reader, the slow uncovering of the mystery of Aspasie takes place at the same nail-biting pace as for Addie, as does our appreciation of her family, which Addie learns to love at about the same time we do.