This is a dark comedy about Mara, a senior at Covington High School in New Jersey. One day, one of her classmates spontaneously combusts in Pre-calc. Then another explodes in group therapy. Then another explodes. Then another. None of the senior class is safe, and everyone panics to find a pattern or a cure, resulting government intervention and wild speculation about terrorism and shrooms, a virus, a mass government conspiracy and promiscuity. The FBI gets involved. Church groups come to proselytize. The president reassures the kids via skype. And Mara tries to make it to graduation, which seems as likely a cure as any.
The voice sells this story. A lot of it is written in straightforward practicalities, because that's the only way for a traumatized teenager to tell the story without breaking down, and if that happened, we wouldn't have a book to read.
For now, maybe it's easier to speak about practicalities, to describe what exactly happens after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class. You get the rest of the day off from school, and the rest of the week too. You talk to the cops on three separate occasions, and Sheriff Tibble looks at you weird when you don't whimper as much as the guy they interviewed before you. You are asked to attend private therapy sessions with a velvet-voiced woman named Linda and, if you want, group therapy sessions with a leather-voiced man named Vince and some of the other kids who witnessed the spontaneous combustion...
So that's what we did. Half of us "kids" from third period pre-calc met in the media room every Tuesday and Thursday at four, and we shared our stories of insomnia and chasing away bloody visions with food and booze and all sorts of stuff that therapists can't say shit about to your parents because they have a legal obligation to keep secrets.
Nutty as it was, Linda helped. So did Vince. So did the rest of my blood-obsessed peers, even the ones who occasionally called me insensitive on account of my sense of humor.Mara's personality is self-deprecating without being melodramatic, and cynical without being jaded. It matches the dark comedy tone of the story, and makes it feel honest.
The student's reactions feel realistic as they swing from fear to determination to hedonism to nihilism. They give up and pull it together, give up and then try to make the most of it. It's not one set reaction, but a bunch that all happen at once, because no one knows what to do or how they should feel.
The reactions of the community also feel real. They let their prejudices and biases run away with them as they guess at reasons for the explosions based on the identity of the kids that exploded. Must be "a terrorist thing". Must be "a gay thing". Then their turn against the senior class as a whole, treating them as pariahs felt realistic too.
Mara and her best friend Tess have a wonderful girl friendship in this. They balance each other well and support one another. They fight and they make up. They annoy each other and listen to each other. I love seeing healthy relationships in fiction. It's so so so important to show them in YA fiction, and to show you can have conflict in a story without showing friends or romantic partners that treat each other poorly. (And as someone who always slips into friendships where they're the Bert to my Ernie, I especially like friendships between the goofball friend who can't get their act together and the competent friend who humors them.)
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Next week: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne.
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