“The Road to After,” By Rebekah Lowell. Nancy Paulsen Books, 192 pages. Age: 10-14. $16.99
In choosing to tell her own story of surviving domestic abuse through the eyes of one of her daughters, Biddeford native Rebekah Lowell has made a leap of empathy. It’s a choice that gives her debut middle grade novel added poignancy and power.
“The Road to After” starts with the mother and two daughters being scooped out of their home by police in a heart-pounding maneuver that feels more like a military raid than a rescue. They hurry to grab the things they love most and leave before the father returns. Eleven-year-old Lacey takes her nature journal but is told she can’t take her beloved dog. And then she must do something she’s never done in her life: set foot outside her house without her father.
We never meet the father, but we know lots about him. He owns many guns. He has many rules: No leaving the house. No opening windows. No saying the word love. No birthdays. No visitors, even grandparents. Break a rule and you might get hit. Living in terror of his temper, Lacey’s mantra has become “Stay quiet. Stay inside/ and if he wants to play, play along”.
Lowell is careful to limn the nuances of both their old life (“before”) and their new life on the outside (“after”). The after life contains some wonders – chocolate chip cookies, dolls – but at first it’s just plain scary. The only thing Lacey knows for sure is “I live on the other side/ of the rules I thought I knew.” When her father goes to jail, Lacey does not rejoice. “I wish I’d been able to say goodbye,” she says, missing him and wondering “why we couldn’t have / just talked to him/to get him/ to change.” She blames her mother, who has responded to freedom with fear and sadness, staying in bed with the shades drawn. She blames herself.
Gradually – very gradually – they all emerge, like moles breaking through the soil, blinking in the sunshine of normal life. Going grocery shopping, getting their own car, moving to their own apartment. Lacey discovers libraries, gardening and the healing power of nature. She becomes engrossed in drawing in her journal. She makes a tentative friend. Her mother has a big breakthrough and decides to leave Maine to pursue a long-suppressed dream – to study art. It’s not easy, but she manages to do it.
Nothing in this story is easy. Lowell says it was inspired by her own experience and “based in facts.” As such, she doesn’t sugar-coat anything. There are setbacks and disappointments, sadness and anger. Getting away from this man – his pervasive voice in their heads, his constant criticism, their guilt, their fear of him finding them, the sense of loss – all of this is just plain hard and “takes its own sweet time.”
As the title implies, this is a journey, and there is no facile happy ending – only the family’s determination to survive and live life on their own terms. Lowell’s focus is not on the past but on the future, the road to recovery. She fills the story with small moments of sweetness, discovery and growth that balance out the pain and create a patchwork quilt-like portrait of a family’s resilience.
Lowell’s other wise choice was to use verse to tell the story, and she does it well. Her writing is simple but eloquent, rich in metaphor. Her accompanying illustrations are equally simple and well suited to the story.
The book’s only shortcoming is that it is such a thinly disguised memoir that, but for the point of view switch, it barely seems to qualify as fiction. The storybook mother, for example, attends the same Virginia art school as Lowell did, also has two daughters, and lives in Biddeford. Lowell is a good enough writer that she should feel safe giving freer rein to her imagination. I look forward to future books that do so.
“The Name She Gave Me,” By Betty Culley. HarperTeen, 416 pages. Age: 12-18. $17.99
In Betty Culley’s “The Name She Gave Me,” the parent with anger issues is the mother. Sixteen-year-old Rynn was adopted in infancy by a woman with her own motherhood issues that leave her unable to love Rynn, no matter how hard the poor girl tries. Worse, she has a temper that leads Rynn to dub their household Volcano Island. Her father dotes on Rynn, but he is weak and unable to protect her from the volcano.
Yet the two of them have one big thing in common: He’s an outsider, a New York City refugee who has decided to start a garlic farm in rural Maine. Though he’s liked, he’ll always be from away. Rynn feels the same way. “No matter what we do,” she muses, “we’ll never truly belong.” And that’s what this book is really about: belonging.
Belonging generally begins at home. But Rynn’s an only child with apparently no other relatives – although her mother once taunted her with the fact that her birthmother had another daughter, “one that was good enough to keep.”
When she realizes her mother will never make her feel like she belongs in their home, she starts looking elsewhere. She enlists her best friend June whom she considers “the anti-adopted.” June has roots, a tribe, she’s “surrounded by relatives,/people who look like” her, and she even lives on a road named after her family. Their search for Rynn’s birth family uncovers the fact that Rynn does indeed have a younger half-sister.
Rynn sets out to find her – but the reader has already met her: partway through the novel, an endearing, open-hearted 9-year-old named Ella (short for Sorella, or sister) starts narrating sections of the story. She’s prone to making pronouncements about life, in her refreshingly candid voice, ending each one with “and that’s a fact.”(One of Culley’s strengths is writing children of this age. She gets their voices and attitudes just right.) It turns out Ella lives just a few towns away. She’s in foster care (yet another dad in jail) and that’s just tickety-boo with her, as she adores her foster mother Martha.
The novel has a few shortcomings. The mandatory (for YA novels) young romance lacks any real spark. And the plot loses credibility as Culley strains for a dramatic climax. The mother – the one character for whom we have no sympathy – seems to be channeling Cruella de Vil as she makes a play to steal Ella from her happy home, and in so doing hits the front page of the local paper.
The free verse format also works less well here than it did in Lowell’s book. It’s perfect for a poetic metaphor (having a hole in your heart, for example, which Rynn, literally, did at birth); or to describe abstractions such as the adult penchant for euphemism (“I’ve had sixteen years/ of being told I was chosen/instead of the obvious fact/that I was given away.”) But Culley’s story includes so much that is mundane (i.e., “Welcome to your/23AndMe/Ancestry/saliva collection kit”) that one wonders if good old-fashioned prose might not have been a better option.
Nonetheless, she has created characters whom we care about. We’re with Rynn as she struggles to leave home, to find and bond with her sister. Culley makes us understand the need to find your tribe – something most people take for granted – with lines that bring the reader up short, like this one: “It’s the first time in my life/anyone has ever said I look like/someone else.”
Another of Culley’s strengths is her genuine affection for life in rural, interior Maine (where she lives, and sets all her books). She portrays it, often with an understated humor and always with compassion, warts, scars and all. When Rynn’s mother dismisses June’s sister as a “druggie,” the girl retorts: “Remind me to take [her] off my list/for character references in drug court.” And when Rynn’s father finds a missing tot, Rynn feels he should be widely hailed as a hero. “But it’s only Beacon, Maine,” she notes wryly, “so Dad gets the first piece/of pie.”
Culley’s greatest strength – and the novel’s – stems from the authenticity of her voice. If the insights into Rynn’s and Ella’s trials and triumphs ring true, it’s because Culley (like Lowell) writes from experience, having been adopted out of foster care and having discovered other siblings later in life. Unlike Lowell, however, Culley, is careful to note that “Rynn’s story is not my story.” And despite its minor flaws, it’s a story that will move the reader.
Amy MacDonald is a Portland resident and children’s book author. She may be reached at info@AmyMacDonald.com.
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