Last autumn, I purchased Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book.
I'm glad I bought this book. I enjoyed it enough to scoop up the next two in the series, Boyfriends, Burritos & an Ocean of Trouble
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In Motorcycles, Sushi & One Strange Book, we meet 15-year-old Jessie Hatcher. Jessie's a classic example of a teenaged girl with ADHD. She also is the daughter of a passive-agressive, bipolar single mom who is currently doing time in a psychiatric ward following a suicide attempt. Jessie has to go live with the father she met just yesterday.
While in the airport with her dad, a fellow passenger hands her a book: up an old, badly treated, leather-bound book with the initials RL embossed on it. It was on the seat where she was sitting and he assumes it must be hers. She takes it to avoid a scene. Jessie has a lot of obstacles to overcome in her life: new town, new house, new dad, new half-sister. Reading RL is part of what helps her to gain control of her ADHD and her life in general.
The book seems at first to be a collection of stories about some guy named Yeshua and his buddies. Anyone out there who has studied the Bible or has a passing acquaintance with ancient Aramaic should be hearing bells about now. Needles to say, Jessie did not. What she did hear was the book answering the questions in her head. At times, it really seemed like the book was listening to her thoughts and responding to them.
RL helps Jessie through the toughest part of her young life, a period of upheaval and inner turmoil, and enables her to make some very difficult decisions. At the end, the book tells her that it is time for her to pass it along. It really isn't much of a spoiler to note that Jessie writes her name and phone number in it leaves the book on a bench outside a bookshop.
In Boyfriends, Burritos & an Ocean of Trouble, Bryn Christopher* finds RL in an emergency room. She has been in a car accident caused by her boyfriend, Preston. The ER doctor is the one who notices the bruises on her body and immediately realizes that Bryn is being abused. When Bryn points her finger at Preston, her Dad believes her and the DA's office is ready to prosecute, but nobody at school believes her. To them, Preston is the golden boy, the star of the swim team with Olympic aspirations. Bryn is cyberbullied mercilessly by the teens from school, her home is graffitied, and Preston and his buddies apply additional physical force to pressure Bryn into dropping the lawsuit - despite the restraining order against him.
Bryn's maternal grandmother, Windy, comes to stay. Windy begins giving Bryn surfing lessons. At first, they are entirely unwelcome, but as the days go by, Bryn begins to enjoy surfing and begins to trust men again. Between her time in the surf and her time reading RL, Bryn begins to put her life back in order.
Bryn, having had somewhat more church experience than Jessie, recognizes RL for what it is much sooner in the story. The ability of the book to answer unspoken questions is even greater in this volume. After the trial, when it is Bryn's time to pass along the book, she writes her name and email address in it and leaves it on a fast-food restaurant booth seat.
The third volume to date, Tournaments, Cocoa & One Wrong Move I finished at about 5 o'clock this morning. Couldn't sleep, so I figured I would read. In this book, the situation is somewhat changed from the previous two. Jessie Hatcher was not quite a social outcast but she was certainly not one of the popular girls. Bryn Christopher was a drama club kid who thought herself lucky to be dating the school's most promising jock. Cass is Austin Bluffs High School's best female athlete. As a high school junior, college teams are already scoping her out. Her team is poised to win the Colorado state championship and her chances of making the WBA look outstanding.
Right up until she blows out her right knee in a bad landing after scoring a game-breaking winning layup to win the county title.
Cass's problems arise mostly out of her need to please her father. Trent was a basketball star in his teen years; now he is living vicariously through Cass's career and criticizing every mistake, real or imagined. Nothing is good enough. Cass is so driven to get back into the game that she accepts the aid of her future sister-in-law, Gretchen. Gretchen, a third-year medical student, meets Cass at a coffeehouse (where RL slips into Cass's life) and offers the injured girl "natural supplements", to help speed her healing. When suspicion arises at school about drug use, Cass tests positive for anabolic steroids.
Life changes entirely for Cass. The physical therapist tells her she should gain weight; at 5'10", she weighs only 120 pounds and exhibits classic symptoms of Female Athlete Triad. Her father plans to appeal the life-time ban the school levies. She gets moved out of Basketball Conditioning and into a study hall. Her basketball friends shun her. Worse yet, her art instructor insists that she work the guy who has nicknamed her "Roid".
Unlike Jessie and Bryn, Cass picks up on the fact that RL is a sort of Bible the first time she reads it. RL and her physical therapist, along with her mother (who finally stands up to Dad), help Cass through the pain of isolation from the team, the constant teasing in study hall, and her need to work with Rafe, her art project partner.
After the appeal hearing, it is Cass's turn to send RL along to another in need. She writes her name and email address in the book and takes down Jessie and Bryn's information, then she leaves the tattered, leather-covered RL on a seat at the bus station.
The first few pages of Limos, Lattes & My Life on the Fringe were included at the end of Tournaments. The fourth, and final, book in the [Real Life] series seems to be about teasing, bullying, and popularity contests.
Each of these novels has merit in its own right. Each one deals with a subset of the problems teenaged girls often face in high schools around the country today.
Girls afflicted with ADHD may go undiagnosed for many years. Since females often present with less of a hyperactivity component, girls are sometimes simply labeled as "daydreamers". Girls who present with significant hyperactivity are often labeled as rowdy and avoided by their peers.
Most stories in the news about abuse seem to involve parent/child situations or husband/wife situations. Not much is said about boyfriend/girlfriend abuse but it exists. A man does not wake up one morning and begin to slap his wife around. It is a process; first there are warning signs and then there is escalation. My guess is that most marital abuse had its seeds of mistreatment sown when the people involved were dating.
With the widespread use of social networking sites and cell phones, teens have a greater ability to communicate than ever before possible. This availability has lead to many teens being cyber-targeted by their peers in recent years - some have even been driven to despair and suicide from the harassment.
Female athletes are not the same as male athletes. Male bodies can continue to function normally at much lower BMI ratios than males can and yet female athletes are often pressured by coaches, team members, and parents to be faster, stronger, better, and thinner all at the same time. Injured teen athletes often return to the court of the field too soon because their coaches are thinking in the short-term and not focusing on the athlete's long-term health and playing career.
Nancy Rue may tread where angels fear to go but parents, educators, coaches all need to go there - so that our daughter may not.
* Inside the book, she is called Bryn Christopher. On the back cover, she is called Bryn O'Connor. Must have been a last-minute edit??
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2 yarns:
Didn't the first one deal with abuse from a boyfriend?
I wonder what RL stood for Real Life? They sound interesting reads.
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