Torn Away by Jennifer Brown

"At this point, I could believe almost anything.  People think a tornado drops down on a cow pasture or a trailer park and everything is fine.  They never think about things like infected cuts and broken legs and old ladies crushed by air conditioners in their bathtubs.  They never think about orphans."  Page 176-177    

Can't you feel the happy and positive energy exuding from the words above?  

Jersey Cameron, survives an F5 tornado in her small town of Nowhere, Missouri.  A great deal of other people in her town didn't; including her mother and sister.  As is the norm for Jennifer Brown books what would seem like the climax happens on the first page and where the narrative ends up from there is the unique ride that is reading to the end of one of her novels.

So much of Jersey's identify is communicated so quickly in this leisurely reading three-hundred page book that I was winded after five pages.  How's that so, you ask?  Because on page one we are told everything in her life gets knocked off the planet by an F5 tornado.  If getting five pages in was a rush, the rest of the book was exhausting. 

The tornado takes everything about her life and identity away; absolutely everything.  (And unless you've survived one of these horrible instances before, be prepared to be overwhelmed and humbled by how much 'everything' encompasses.)  After the tornado takes her mother and sister, her house and her town, she watches it take everyone else that had been important in her life away in it's wake.  There's no communication.  None.  There are missing people.  Her friends are gone; the boy next door is gone¹; her step-father finds himself incapacitated to do the duties of his station and be her parent².

So she goes to live with her biological father, who she has never met or seen in a picture and things start to get really bad.  Like, worse than a tornado bad…  It's a bit of a Cinderella story.  It's a bit of a coping with PTSD story.  And in the oddest way, being a Cinderella PTSD person makes Jersey, and vicariously the reader, appreciate what they had even more, and to a higher degree, what's left.  Even as a jaded, bitter "I know what's coming next" reader it's really, really hard to see any positive signs in Jersey's life, and yet as she has absolutely nothing, when she's willing to look it's not hard to find something positive because she's literally got nothing.  

She has to start over, and she has to make do, and do the best she can with what's she's got, because as she's constantly reminded; she doesn't have options.  

From having read two others, this absolutely felt like a book by Jennifer Brown and I love reading her novels and seeing her develop as a writer.  (There were about twenty pages at the end I didn't like, but that was it.)  In some ways Torn Away is a book that rehashes some of her old standby staples she always writes about, in other ways it's new and different.  One issue I missed that I'm so accustomed to getting from her is how her protagonist deal with relationships.  Jersey's story is easily Brown's most intimate of the novels I've read: everything is about, her her her her her.  And that's not a bad thing, only I was surprised.  

I'd always felt Brown's strongest quality lie in her interaction with characters: volatile Kendra and her mentally ill brother Grayson; guilt soaked Val vs herself, her family, her therapist and the world.  Jersey is alone.

This isn't a light-hearted, easy, or fun book to read, nor is it difficult or a chore in anyway.  It's sad and not in the 'this author is manipulating my emotions in a cheap way to get an effect' kinda way either.  Things get bad and then progressively worse.  I don't think Brown does 'happily ever after' endings.  More like 'We've been through some shit and there's still more ahead, but I think you got it from here…'  It was a very Sara Zarr like book.  (How awesome of a thing was that to say?)  

I've never once gotten the story I expected from the premises of a Jennifer Brown novel.  She is amazing.  I thoroughly enjoy her books.  I hope I never get what I expect from a Jennifer Brown novel.

1)  The kid next door was a particular source of anxiety for me and the reason why I finished reading so quickly.  He was such a huge symbolic character for Jersey and I couldn't stand the heartburn of worrying about him.  Read it; let me know if you felt the same way.

2)  Ronnie, was easily the most oddly sympathetic character I'd ever come across.  Bizarre in every way.  Even as he's kicking Jersey out of his life, and she is begging him to let her take care of him she forgives him.  It's a character like this that makes me say, "Wow… Brown looked into to how tornados effect people more than even she wanted too…"  Ronnie.  Wow.    

Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown

"This is what it's like living with a mentally ill person: everyone afraid to move.  Everyone afraid to speak.  You don't say certain words like suicide or crazy, and you do everything in your power to keep the good milliseconds lasting as long as they possibly can.  And you don't rush into anything at all, because rushing feels like courting disaster and you don't even know what that disaster is, because it's never the same disaster twice.  A ruined birthday?  A scene at a restaurant?  Police cars in the driveway in the middle of the night?  All of the above?  

And you don't ask for attention.  

And you get used to it when you don't get any. 

And you try really, really hard to forget that not getting attention hurts and that this person--this muttering, shadow-eyes, scabbed patient--was once your hero and best friend in the world.  Back when he was just a "weird kid."

And you try to remember that you still love him, even if some days, you can't exactly pinpoint why."  Page 8

Kendra's older brother, Grayson, has problems.  Not in any sense that most people can readily identify with either.  It's not merely Grayson's extreme OCD but a host of other anxiety issues that attest to his mental health and render his life eternally to the care of someone else.  

For the past few years Kendra has, consciously or not, made a choice about how she treated her brother.  She was never indifferent and she most certainly did care, but she was for the most part hands-off: the direct involvement she left to her parents, Grayson's doctors, and the institutional facilities he regularly checked into.  They have grown apart and due to some rash (i.e. bad) decision making on her part, facilitated by some serious trouble she has gotten herself into, we see how she plans to reestablish her past relationship with Grayson, maintain it, and even make it stronger.

Kendra is running away because she is in trouble at school.  It's not shallow, surface level trouble either, rather she'll probably be expelled, have her scholarships revoked, and not go to college kind of trouble.  Though not part of any grand premeditated plan, she manages to somehow accidentally--believably-- kidnap her brother and they head out to California, from Missouri.  Kendra excels at overreacting.  Here you would think the cliches come in, and here you'd be wrong.

They pickup Rena, a young woman not much older than Kendra, and her infant son.  It is almost immediately that we see that in a car with the leader of a school wide scandal, a single mother without a penny to her name (literally) and a mentally ill kid who is already miles away from his meds that Kendra is perhaps the least 'normal' person in the car.  

Kendra's discovery about so many things concerning Grayson and how they apply to their relationship was wonderful to watch unfold.  They physically get in a fight and she notices how much weight he's lost since he's been away at the most recent treatment facility.  She never looked at him long enough to see this; she had to physically start pushing him around to notice.  Rena points out, more than once, how genuinely nice he is and Kendra is appalled that she never came to see such an obvious truth.  Grayson is good looking and girls find him attractive and Kendra is outright offended at how she has had the opportunity to know him better than most anyone else ever would and yet she was never aware of these things.  She begins to marvel at how self-absorbed she has been in years past not wanting to get involved with Grayson and his problems.  She'd rather escape from all his drama and be normal.  And yet, on this impromptu, under-funded, not thought out beyond 'get in the car and drive' road trip she kinda treats him like shit… 

This, was a masterstroke by Brown.  Grayson has been coddled by his mother ever since the severity of his illness was uncovered even against the recommendations of his doctors that preach exposure therapy.  Kendra is stubborn, never more so than when she owns up to a mistake like taking someone such as Grayson half way across the country without his meds and not truly being capable of caring for him.  She's never directly mean to him, but she does revel in making Grayson uncomfortable, and everything makes Grayson uncomfortable: the car, a restaurant, a hospital, the motel… She's always joking but circumstance have made her jokes serious; Kendra has chosen to make Grayson confront all that makes him sick or suffer one of his epic meltdowns  knowing that there will be no one available for miles that can help him.  Needless to say, this makes for a ridiculous amount of tension on every page of this book.  

Which brings me to the third and greatest character in the book.  California; the cure; Zoe.  Kendra has it in her head that if everyone would stop coddling Grayson and make him deal with life that he would do so and be okay.  (The full extent of which she is wrong make some of the more intense sections of the book.)  She is going to fix her brother.  California, and Zoe her erstwhile best friend and past pseudo girl friend for Grayson represents a panacea for all his ails, or so she thinks.  Before she moved away, Zoe had a calming affect on Grayson that seemingly no other has had.  Rena too fits this mold in a very fleeting manner.  Reuniting with Zoe will be the culmination of all the trials she puts Grayson through in getting to California.  What Kendra is blind to--and never once stops to consider along the way--is that if she wants to be; if she actually applies herself, and works at this unique and extraordinarily difficult relationship, no one has a more calming and positive affect on Grayson's mind than she.  

The lack of overt affection between the two is a great strength of the novel.  Even when she wants to hug him, with full regard of how poorly Grayson responds to that kind of contact, she doesn't.  It's the kind of thing her mom would do that she feels has held him down.  Right or wrong, she's stubborn to a fault.  And her faults are colossal.  A lot of bad things happen in this book and yet Kendra never stopped pushing him.  

Their interaction is brilliant and it's interesting to see how similar they are.  They each feel they've have destroyed the other's life over the course of living their own.  And in no small degree they are both right.  The story, and the story of both their lives, is all about Grayson.  Even though it's told through Kendra's first person there is no distance or objectivity with Grayson.  No one hates that fact more than Grayson.  While his self-loathing is evident from the outset it is never explicitly communicated until a 'full-on freak out' as Kendra would say near the end.  He's almost always completely lucid (and it's usually some manifestation of his genius that pushes him into freak out mode) even if he has to always be counting something, touching something, rubbing something.  He can joke, and recall anecdotes from years past, he can sing along with the radio and bad pop music.  And after being forced into so many awkward situation by his sister he is surprised at the full extent of what he is capable of doing that he didn't know he was capable of doing.  

Kendra's self loathing is jealousy of all that has been taken away from her due to Grayson and a little bit of jealously masquerading as guilt for allowing them to grow apart in the first place. 

"Zoe was able to do something for Grayson that nobody else could: accept him for who he was.  Laugh and have fun with him.  Love him.  Make him relax.  She was able to do what I only wished I could.  She would never try to cure him.  She'd only try to make herself understand him better.  I was his sister.  I was his blood.  Why couldn't I do that?"  page 153

"...the feeling of resentment that I tried to stuff away because when someone can't even walk through his home normally, resenting him somehow feels mean.  Not to mention pointless.  Resenting Grayson wasn't going to cure him."  Page 9

Grayson is aware of how hard he's made his parents life, and Kendra's.  He feels like a hostage himself.  He's sick and not willfully so.  What he needs Kendra to see is that his pills, Zoe, nor this hell-bound road trip will cure him.  

They got in the car because of Kendra's problems; Grayson was an unfortunate casualty of Kendra's impulsive wrath.  They drove to California, 1,800 miles from home, because she thought she could outrun her troubles.  As strong as Kendra is, discovering the true nature of her problems and how to save herself from them took the help of the most broken person she knew; the one she'd been trying to ignore for years.  Understanding how, and why, is the reason you should read Perfect Escape.  

How do I write this review?

I'm not sure I'll ever read another book again.  Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown may have destroyed my ability to read for pleasure.  I'm pretty sure that everything I may read for the rest of my life will be awful by comparison.  The bar has been set too high and my bookshelves are now weighted down with fail...

It's a rare feeling upon finishing a book that one can be so wholly satisfied with the experience that the thought of reading something else seems nothing short of absurd.  That is exactly how I feel.  Hopefully, this feeling will fade after a good night's sleep.  My sentiment aside I do feel a bit confused as to how to leave comments for this book.  I generally rip the books I love to shreds.  The ones I don't like I spend time trying to express reasons as to why.  I rarely rant or gush and when I do those are my worst bits of commentary.

I won't be ripping Perfects Escape to shreds and I'm not even going to attempt to temper my gushing.  In thinking about this I've come up with the following three thoughts:

1  The book personally speaks to me in a powerful and favorable way and for whatever reason I can't see it objectively.

2  The book is factually the best bit of fiction ever set to paper.

3  A combination of the above two (which is what I'm currently feeling, hours after finishing it).  

There may be other options, but right now, I admit to being blind to them--willfully or not.  I don't want to talk about this book.  I want to forcibly make my friends read it so I can talk about it with them.  I'll write it up tomorrow or the next day (I'm gonna take at least that long and enjoy basking in the glow of how good this book was).  Once written, I'll hang onto it for a bit longer in hopes of not gushing to the point of losing credibility.

Is objectivity a set goal in writing a review?  If so, I plan on failing that criteria.  

Hate List by Jennifer Brown

Valerie has a hole in her leg.  She was shot by her boyfriend the same day Nick decided he was fed up with a lot of things and opened fire at school.  She'll have a lingering physical pain and a limp the rest of her life, but it's the days that immediately follow the shooting that will determine the quality and length of what is to be 'the rest of her life.'

Val occupies as unique space in the minds' of the Garvin High School community: she's the hero, she talked Nick down, and got him to stop shooting.  The bullet she took wasn't meant for her rather someone else.  She is also the instigator of the shooting and only barely manages to fall just short of co-conspirator.  Never being the popular kid, Val starts a list of all the things she hates.  Most things on the list are abstract ideas or intangible concepts like algebra, or her parents arguing.  Other items on the list are people: teachers she doesn't like; students who think it's funny to make fun of Nick and beat him up in public; students who call Val names everyday; that break her MP3 player for no reason; students that take exception to the fact Nick's family socio-economic status doesn't resemble their own.  Physically making the list was a form of venting for Val.  When she shared it with Nick he took things to a level she never foresaw.

As Val goes forward with her senior year in high school there is an ambivalence about how she is regarded.  She is on both sides of the coin: some try to ignore her, others wish her dead, and though none speak the words aloud all thank her for putting an end to things when she did.  She doesn't have any friends, not even the ones she used to have.  She's incapable of making new ones due to both how others regard her and her own anxiety.  Her parents suffer her presence and that is about a subtly as their relationship can be put.  Her brother has days of acceptance and disgust.  She feels alone and--circumstances being what they are--in truth, she is.

Guilt is one of the novel's pervasive themes that unified may characters and, at least for me, proved very difficult to identify.  One of the surviving victims had been a very good friend of Nick's up until a year or so before the shooting.  She wanted to be accepted and popular and turned her back on him as running him down was the trendy thing to do.  Her guilt and her wounds take her in completely different directions from Val's.  It's not just the shooting victims that are left alive, but every student in the school has a moment of self-examination where they consider the treatment of their peers and how they, collectively, let things get this far; how it could be fun to treat someone as they had.  If they weren't involved in the abuse did they enable the shooting by doing nothing?  As is to be expected, Val's guilt trumps all others.  She was so close to Nick yet how had she not seen that he had this in him?  The most interesting aspect is Val trying to understand how nothing has changed.  She may have never wanted anyone dead but Val still doesn't like the guys that beat up Nick or the girls that teased her and ran her down.  Big surprise: they still don't like her either.  Almost every interaction that Val has with everyone is an awkward stalemate or has regressed to a state of revulsion.

Val's journey takes her from the hospital, to the psychiatric ward, and finally home under the close supervision of her psychiatrist, who surprisingly, becomes the first friend she makes in months.  (As an aside, it's nice to see someone in therapy and actually benefit from their sessions.) 

The author also gives some interesting food for thought concerning personal responsibility, upbringing, and environmental factors that played a part in the tragedy and in Val's healing process.  How much should Val own up to?  After all she didn't pull the trigger.  Did she come have horrible parents?  (Yes.)  Did they raise her to be a monster?  (Moot-ish...)  Did all the jerks at school deserve to be reprimanded?  Should anyone have been surprised that the bullied kid had a breaking point even if he possessed an high tolerance for poor treatment? 

Every relationship she is in has changed.  And the resolution for all of them is nebulous.

     "He hates me," I said.
     Mom looked up sharply.  "You're his daughter.  He loves you."
     I rolled my eyes.  "You have to say that.  But I know the truth, Mom.  He hates me.  Do you hate me too?  Does everyone in the world hate me now?"
     "You're being silly now, Valerie," she said.  She got up and picked up her purse.  "I'm going to go down and grab myself a sandwich.  Can I bring you anything?"
     I shook my head, and as Mom left a thought flashed through my head like a strobe light: She hadn't said no.  page 164

The above passage is the start of her declining relationship with her parents...

And yet the novel doesn't work itself into one huge cathartic moment that is saved just for the end.  There are bright spots along the way that give hope that something positive can come out of Val's life. 

     "Hey, Val," he said, sitting up.  "You're home."
     "Hey.  Like your hair.  Maximum height on those spikes today."
     He grinned, ran his hand over his head.  "That's what Tina said," he said.  Like nothing had ever happened.  Like I didn't still smell like the hospital.  Like I wasn't a suicidal freak come home to make his life miserable.
     At that moment, Frankie was the best brother anyone could have asked for.  Page 184

Everything felt real; every single aspect, and I haven't the slightest clue as to how Brown pulled this off: Val's confusion, and self-loathing, her relationship with her parents, her brother, the other students, her integration back into society, and how she gets along with her Dr. was a particular achievement.  There was all of one superfluous character and while she stood out like a bright purple thumb she was so trivial as to be easily written off.

Hate List wasn't merely gripping and visceral but convincing to the point where you might think a school shooting victim that has lived in Val's shoes wrote an account of their life and tried to pass it off as fiction.  It's one of those books that you live for the duration of the few days it takes to get through.    

Hate List isn't even the book that put Jennifer Brown on my radar only Perfect Escape was already checked out at the library and I was gonna be number forty something in the queue so I picked this up inside.  How much did I like Hate List?  I'm not waiting in the queue for anything else Brown writes.  She's now on the day-one purchase list.