Wherein I am disappointed by a book....or two
Spoilers!
In reading Francisco Stork's recent YA novelIrises, I'm more than a bit disappointed by what seemed to me to be a lot of heavy-handedness on the part of the author. I enjoyed his last book, Last Summer of the Death Warriors, and even though it had a dark subject, I thought Stork did a decent job of not taking advantage of his readers' emotions. That is not the case with Irises however, a book that pulls every one of your heartstrings and then some.
The story centers on sisters Kate and Mary who have a loving family in the [flashback] opening pages but by the second chapter are in difficult straits. Their mother is in a permanent vegetative state after a car accident two years before. She is kept at home and cared for by a part time nurse, her teen daughters and husband. The husband, a pastor, then dies suddenly of an apparent heart attack. Kate, who is 18 and soon to graduate, was hoping to go to Stanford (they live in El Paso) on scholarship. She has not told anyone in her family about this. Mary, a 16 year old artist, wants to stay in El Paso, pursue her art and care for Mom. They have no income (other than Kate's part time waitress job at her boyfriend's father's restaurant), and rent their home from the church. The church wants them out in two months to make room for the young (22) visiting pastor who has decided to stay and fill the now vacant pastor's job. And their only living relative, their mom's sister, comes for the funeral, asks a lot of hard (but necessary) questions and then reveals she is battling breast cancer and can't help anyone and needs to go home to CA. Kate's boyfriend does ask her to marry him so he can fix everything (he's also a senior in high school) but she's not so sure she loves him especially when the gorgeous new pastor hits on her while suggesting she pull her mother's feeding tube.
Oh - and the $100,000 life insurance policy on dad doesn't get paid because the company claims their father lied and had a congenital heart defect he never admitted to.
Did you follow all that? One parent dead, one apparently never waking up, no money, about to be homeless, scholarship hanging by a thread, underage sister needs a guardian, (she has met a hot artist guy though who wants to be her friend) (his problem is he is in a gang and thus might die or kill someone at anytime), and hot pastor guy wants to offer guidance about ending mom's life (there's a lot of stressing that mom is not really alive which is...odd) but also wants to move into their house and get in big sister's pants. Talk about some drama! There is nothing going right for these girls and so of course they spend all of their time not discussing the problems with each other and blunder around talking to everyone else for most of the book.
HOSPICE. Have these people never heard of hospice and how they can provide information and counseling in this situation??? And the family doctor who comes weekly to take care of mom? How about talking to him? And mom has no insurance? It all "ran out"? Can anyone explain this? And dad brought mom home after one bad nursing home experience or because a doctor told him he could have the feeding tube removed which insulted him or because the insurance ran out (all of these are mentioned)? And Kate is eighteen and everyone thought she was going to college in Texas but she never applied there? Or did she fake apply? And how was her dad going to pay for it if they have no money (which apparently what they all figure out after he dies)?
And would any sister really talk to a guy she barely knows (new pastor) and a lawyer she met while waitressing one night, (and thus doesn't know), about letting her mother die before she talks to her sister? Oh - and the pastor guy is of course a narcissistic mega-church wanna be who explains that some people are called to administer to the wealthy just like some people administer to the poor. (Does anyone really talk to someone whose father just died days before about moving on and putting their mother in the ground? Anyone?)
This piling on of unrealistic situations and eye rolling responses by the characters is also the problem I had in Winter Town by Stephen Emond. I really liked how Emond incorporated illustrations (his own) in this novel, both as chapter introductions and a comic that the two characters are working on together. But generally, the way Evan and Lucy interact was as frustrating as Kate and Mary.
While the plot of Winter Town is very straightforward (and less angst worthy), it requires a lot (A LOT) of patience on the part of the reader. The two protagonists are childhood friends who now live apart as Lucy's parents divorced and she moved away with her mother. It's their senior year and Lucy is back for her annual two week Christmas vacation with her father. She has changed dramatically however, is dressed all in black, very sullen, wears lots of dark make-up, the full-on depressed goth experience. Evan has endless patience as he tries to break through the facade and figure out what is going on with Lucy. Endless patience. It is in fact page 184 before readers find out from Lucy (in a sudden narrative voice switch) what happened with her mother and mom's new boyfriend that has caused her to change so much. Basically, the guy moved in, he's a hard ass, he insists Lucy go to church (he also chooses dresses for her to wear which is very very weird and creepy), he calls Lucy a whore because she doesn't wear the dresses (but mom doesn't believe this) and he persuades mom that Lucy is awful. Lucy, in response, acts out, runs around, finds a lousy boyfriend and has sex while running around and getting into trouble and ticks off mom (thus supporting the evil guy's awful assessment of her behavior) so much that she gets thrown out. (I should mention here that mom is a two dimensional character whose motivations are never explained and really is a pretty crappy mother.) Lucy has thus been couch surfing with friends and her awful boyfriend for the past few months and is desperate and possibly suicidal.
What Lucy has never done is tell her father any of this. Because he "works for the navy" (??) he apparently can only see her two weeks out of the year. (He is not active duty in the military so what the heck this job is supposed to be that prevents him from providing a home for a 17 year old is about the biggest plot hole ever.) (I can just see the editorial meeting - "Give dad a job that prevents him from helping her - just make it up - anything will do. SIGH.) Dad still lives in the house she grew up in however and is portrayed as a decent and caring parent. So why Lucy would prefer to be shamed by her mother's boyfriend and become homeless instead of calling the man who loves her enough to fly her home for the holidays every year, is a mystery of epic proportions. And she never tells dad what is going on, even though he clearly wants to help. In fact she doesn't even tell Evan until page 289, right after they finally figure out that they want to be more than just friends. (Yes, that was a shocker.) And then after dropping the bombs about her life she flies back home and walks up to her mother's door with her suitcase. (WITHOUT EVER TELLING HER FATHER.)
This was a book throwing moment for me. You're going home to the mother who chose a verbally abusive borderline sexual predator instead of asking your father for help? Really? This is the right choice for any reasonable person to make? And the book doesn't give readers an answer as to what happens next. Lucy stands at the door, rings the bell and the chapter ends. Next is an epilogue a year later where Evan is happily in NYC trying to break in as a comic book artist and sits at a library and looks up and sees Lucy across the room. Why they are each there without having spoken to each other in year (even though Lucy's father is friends with Evan's parents) is unknown. And how the heck Lucy got there is unknown. It's just a great big happy ending even though it took more than 300 pages to get there.
Here's the thing. I understand that bad things happen. I'm totally on board with stories about the death of a parent or parents who make romantic choices for themselves that end up hurting their kids in physical or emotional ways. I get that. But there were a zillion ways for the characters in both of these books to effect positive change in their lives - a zillion easy ways like picking up the phone, or going to trusted family friends (who are mentioned in the books!) to get help. The fact that they made the wrong choices over and over again was simply not believable. In Irises, the younger sister Mary does see a social worker who is recommended by her best friend's mother. And when she tells Kate what she has learned she is rebuffed so the author can carry forward a few more chapters of anger and frustration for both girls. Rather than the two of them going to see this very nice social worker together, they have to blunder along some more and argue and cry.
Oh, and then after all that the mother's death is revealed only in a, you guessed, epilogue. Everything has turned out just great of course, even though it took nearly 300 pages to get there.
I feel like both Stork and Emonds had decent ideas (Stork had too many in my opinion though) but they asked way too much of their readers. They stretched my faith in their stories beyond the breaking limit. In the end not one of these characters seemed believable to me, nor did the situations they found themselves in. Drama is one thing but these two books were soap operas; all they needed were vampires to truly make their stories unreal. They lost me, which is a shame, because I really hoped for the best from both of them.
