Watch Out for the Girl in the Road
Monica Byrne’s “THE GIRL IN THE ROAD”
The story starts with a snake, coiled in a bed, ready to strike. Meena doesn’t know who put it there (terrorist organizations seem the most likely bet) or why, but the one thing she knows for sure is simple: she can never go home again.
I don’t know what spurred the more-recent trend of kick-ass female characters kicking ass in high-speed thrilers, but I’m all about it. For those of you who read The Hunger Games and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / Who Kicked the Hornet / Who Played with Fire series and loved the idea but felt short-changed in terms of ‘writing,’ Monica Byrne has just answered your prayers.
Seriously though: this is like the cake with all the frosting in comparisons to the others. The Hunger Games I read in like 4 days, partially because I NEEDED to know what happened, partly just because I could because the books were written for a 7th-grade reading level and flowed accordingly (I’m not saying this as criticism. YA is SO important; I just craved the same characters to be shown in adult literature). And as for The Girls w/ – I honestly only read the first book and a half and enjoyed the movie much more. Rooney Mara made the COOLEST character, but I hated the way the books almost fetishized her. In the context of the popularity of both of these series, the world is ready for the two strong women presented in the eloquent text of Byrne’s The Girl in the Road.
The first girl, the 20-something Indian Katniss-Everdeen, is Meena, a girl living in the dangerous times of the 2060s. After getting bitten in the chest by the viper, Meena escapes, stocking up on supplies like a waterproof pod (in lieu of our modern tents), a digital scroll, astronaut-esque food powders and proteins, and begins her journey across the Trail, a dangerous stretch of bridge connecting India to Ethopia. No one’s ever returned from the Trail, certainly it’s rare for a girl to cross it, but for Meena, chances of survival are better along this path than in India.
Then, there’s Mariama, a little girl from a slightly earlier time, still enough in the future that children have begun to be implanted with chips, helping mothers find the child that wanders too far. Mariama is one of these children, a girl who’s run away for reasons she never wants to say. The refugee center is frightening; but a truck of laughing, spirited men provide a sense of comfort to the young girl. Soon, she’s traveling with these men as they escort Yemaya, a beautiful young lady who seems like a queen and a mother to Mariama, to her destination all the way across the Saharan Desert.
These two stories are connected. How could they not be? Still, you won’t guess how until the end.
In the meantime, there’s the story of these two (or really, three) women. Meena is out there on the trail overcoming the trials that kill most men, or at the least, drive them to insanity. Not that Meena isn’t worried about her sanity, either. In her rush to flee India, she felt herself watched, followed by a young barefoot girl. Even though the girl hasn’t been seen on the trail, there’s mysterious handprints on the windows of her pod and unexplained occurrences she can’t make sense of.
Mariama has been seeing things along her journey, too. Most notably, after a brutal crash that injuries and even kills the others in her caravan. A girl appears out of the road, telling Mariama about the Ethopia she is from. After Mariama awakes, no one believes what she saw. Yemaya dismisses it away.
Here’s where The Girl in the Road hits where Hunger Games and The Girl w/ do not: (1) The writing (2) The depth (3) The heart. (1) This book doesn’t read like action; it reads like poetry. Details of the Trail are so vivid they’ll leave etching. Stories of scrapes and scars and snakebites are less graphic than precisely curated. (2) Unlike, I’m blanking on the real name, the girl with the tattoo, Rooney Mara, Meena and Mariama are born of a woman’s imagination, never exaggerated to pornographic intrigue, never given the perfect-nature that would make them inhuman. Especially well done with Meena – a bisexual, a girl who at one point says her dharma, her talent, her escape is sex, yet this trait never comes across as her defining characteristic. (3) Rarely do action novels leave a space for empathy for the villain or anything but pity for the victims. In The Girl, nobody is strictly villain or victim, just a combination of the two.
Smart, sharp as a tack, and swift, The Girl in the Road is the action story I’ve been waiting for.
