A Fresh Start

In Bluefish by Pat Schmatz, Travis has a complicated relationship with his grandfather, his sole guardian. He’s not excited about the fact that they had to move away from the creek where Travis found some peace of mind, and he misses his hound, Rosco. But it is a chance to start fresh. And to leave behind the nickname his peers had given him: “bluefish.”

The book opens with a good Samaritan act. Travis sees a stray shoe come flying past him while he’s at his locker. Shortly thereafter, a kid ambles by who’s missing one. Travis returns the shoe to the kid without a word and continues on his way. This earns him the respect of Bradley (the one-shoed kid) and also Velveeta, a silent witness. A friendship tenuously takes hold among the three. It’s sealed by a teacher, Mr. McQueen, with a knack for matching the right kid with the right book, and for offering the right comment at the right time. Travis has never known an adult like that, and Velveeta is sorely missing the one adult who had served that role in her life.

With the aid of this friendship and adult guide, both Travis and Velveeta find the courage to confide in one another. There’s a hint of attraction between them, but Schmatz keeps their connection platonic, exploring the full extent of what it means to be a true friend and confidante. Through their friendship, each transforms his and her self-image, and they begin to see in themselves the sense of possibility that they bring out in one another. Schmatz packs an emotional wallop in this brief novel.

Griefstricken

Grief is such an all-consuming experience. When grief strikes, the ground shifts like an earthquake, and then the tremors continue for days, weeks, months, often when we least expect them. It’s hard to see or hear anyone or anything else. Jandy Nelson captures that experience so beautifully in The Sky Is Everywhere when Lennie says, “It’s as if someone vacuumed up the horizon while we were looking the other way.” When her sister, Bailey, dies, Lennie looks for ways to feel intense alternative emotions, like getting involved with her sister’s boyfriend, and then creating a love triangle with Joe Fontaine—and shutting out everyone else. And then there’s that feeling of, why do I deserve to make a life when my sister’s has ended?

All of us who have lost someone close to us know that the intensity of the feelings may lessen with time, but the feeling of loss never really goes away. We just learn how to carry that person with us. Lennie does it through her poems to her sister, set adrift in the river or aloft on a breeze. We find ways to honor their spirit, the music they loved, the dreams they dreamed. The tension in The Sky Is Everywhere resides in the question of whether or not Lennie will allow herself to pursue the music she herself loves and her own dreams.

When my mother died, a friend who had also lost her mother told me, “It’s like living underwater.” And it was. It felt like everything was happening at a remove. I could see that the world was still spinning and that life was going on around me, but I felt separated from all of it. Gradually, I surfaced again, but it took time, and everything was different when I did. In The Sky Is Everywhere, we watch Lennie during her underwater period—loving and laughing but at a remove, seemingly unaware of the consequences of her actions. And then we see her come to the surface. It’s how she gets there that makes Lennie’s story such a moving and healing experience.

We Only Absorb What We Can Handle

Just as two adults can take away from the same situation two very different experiences, so can children and teens come to the same book and take away from it a wide range of experiences.

I believe that children and teens absorb only what they can handle. Every day they are exposed to difficult subjects and sophisticated topics – on the news, in their schools, and in their neighborhoods. They navigate through the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, the abrupt end of a friendship simply because they must, because that is the reality they face.

The beauty of literature is that it allows children to explore situations and themes that they may not yet have experienced for themselves, and from a safe distance. If it’s too much, they’ll set the book aside, or they’ll skim over a section, or their brains won’t quite take it in. As a teacher, I have seen this happen. The child won’t quite understand that Charlotte died after she gave birth to her spiders in Charlotte’s Web. They’ll remember it as “she went away, and left her babies with Wilbur to look after them.” On the other hand, if they have experienced a loss like Wilbur’s, they feel reassured by Wilbur’s ability to go on, to remember Charlotte and to know that, while no one will be her equal, she also leaves behind their shared memories and her prodigy. Sometimes just knowing that others have lived through a loss like theirs can help children cope. Similarly, seeing a teenage character experience intimacy too soon may help a young adult to rethink a decision, and to wait until they experience the kind of mental connection that Mia and Adam share in If I Stay, or that Katsa and Po forge in Graceling.

I believe we have to have faith in young people’s ability to process what they’re ready to process and to set aside the issues they are not yet ready to handle. I’m not advocating handing YA novels to 10-year-olds, but I think that kids are extremely observant, and that they often perceive far more than we give them credit for. So bring on the literature, and let’s allow them to explore situations and moral questions from a safe distance, trusting that they will find their own comfort zone.