Yesterday I read Wake by Lisa McMann. This book was a bestseller for young adults and a sequel came out this spring, with the third in the series to come out next year. I just don’t get it. Okay, this book was easy to read and mildly entertaining, and its premise of one girl finding herself, again and again, within the dreams of others had potential. But the potential was spoiled by a predictable plot devoid of surprise or suspense, and incredible (as in, unbelievable), flat, and uninspiring characters. Throw in the surfeit of checked-out or drugged-out or dead/evil parents, the overflow of badly-conceived dreams that were formulated to work the plot and had nothing to do with the actual mode or rhythm of real dreams, and a teen romance with all the appeal of vocab homework, and the result is a book best left behind on the school bus, or better yet, on the shelves of the bookstore. The avid book reading teen who lent me the book, when asked what the book was about, answered “nothing really” — I should have taken the hint, and not borrowed the book.
The recently-released young adult novel written by Allison Burnett,Undiscovered Gyrl, is a book to be swooped off the bookstore shelf and read and lent out, and read again by parents and teens. Undiscovered Gyrl is a searing and poignant portrayal of modern day teenage-hood, where the attention and connection and affirmation that teens need and crave can be found not through genuine face to face communication but through the false conduit of the online community. Parents and even friends can become upstaged by the gratification of online communication that is both immediate and anonymous.
Katie, the narrator, begins blogging to document her year off after high school. She quickly becomes absorbed by the blogging, a vehicle for both invention and venting, and her blog becomes hugely popular due to its outrageousness, its sexual details, and its intimate sharing on family and friends. Katie is gratified by popularity and feels both validated and understood. But the support and understanding seemingly offered by her online community is anonymous and amorphous; the empowerment she feels blogging leads her away from some good decisions and gives positive re-enforcement to some bad ones; even negative re-enforcement, as when her readers disapprove of her actions, makes Katie only more stubborn and self-destructive.
The character of Katie provoked feelings of utter impatience, undeniable disgust, and keening protectiveness. As the mother of teenagers, my stomach clenched as Katie missiled towards cataclysm, and like all parents, I clutched at straws of hope that she would brake, stop, assess, and save herself. Her own mother, trying to rebuild a life for herself after marriage to an alcoholic and years of financial struggle, is unaware of what her daughter is going through on a daily basis (she is a checked-out parent but unlike the parents in Wake, we understand her situation; we may not like it but we understand).
Only Katie’s blogging community knows what Katie is up to but they don’t really know her at all, as much as they read her and comment back to her. They are behind a barrier of anonymity and cannot reach her; her mother is behind another barrier of disconnection, and her friends (so-called) and lovers are behind yet another, one built of selfishness and deceit. It is only a matter of time before those barriers become walls of enclosure and suffocation, yellow tapes marking the scene of disaster, with Katie in the center of it all.
Undiscovered Gyrl is scary for adults, cautionary for teens, and a good, suspenseful, and unforgettable read for everyone.
