Target

One of the great things about YA lit is it’s seemingly more timely than adult fiction. Without relevance, the YA audience can be lost very quickly. In the case of Target, the issue of bullying is taken to its extreme. It seems clear to me that sexual abuse exists on a continuum—with the snide and snarky remarks at one end and actual physical abuse of the sort the protagonist suffers at the other. The reactions and comments of the responding police officer, the hospital staff, the newspaper report, and Grady’s (the 16-year-old protagonist and rape victim) classmates occupy varying places on that continuum. Even his well-intentioned parents are negligent to the degree they allowed him to suffer without assistance of friends or professionals.

Crucial to a consideration of this novel is the role of Grady’s friends. It’s one of the things I’d ‘misremembered’ (to use the word of some contemporary politicians). An exchange between one of his friends from Before with his father long after the attack was particularly poignant, and I wish it had been longer—as it is, the friend’s frustration and grief is powerful.

Something Johnson does very well in Target is slip in and out of the consciousness of Grady, moving from straight forward narration to Grady’s own thoughts. Following the boy’s rape:

That Monday, obviously in no shape to go back to school, he stayed home. His mother offered to stay with him, but he mumbled No, and she looked relieved. He wanted to forget about his parents, forget about himself, forget about what had happened. He wanted to not move.

As soon as they left, he went into the bathroom. Taking hold of his mother’s tiny manicure scissors, he carefully, bit by bit, hacked off his hair till he was almost bald.

Then he went back to bed to finish not moving.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out the pen and pencil stuck there, fingered them. Better. He ran his thumb over the smooth wood of the pencil. They shiny yellow paint that coated it felt thick and comforting. He remembered the fat pencils he’d learned to write with in grade school, their cheerful sturdiness.

Johnson doesn’t provide readers with a tidy ending; indeed, the ending might seem rather abrupt. And that’s, probably, as it should be. Victim reaction to violence of the kind Grady suffers is too varied, too individual, to resolve with a ‘happy ending’ or the all-too-common gloomy ending found in much YA fiction. Instead, it ends on a note that everyone can share—a note of hope. It's a shame this title is Out of Print; even a casual reading of Target could go a long way toward informing some of the more inane comments made in the great bullying debate that we've seen too much of recently.