You Know Where To Find Me -- Rachel Cohn
Miles and Laura were cousins, but they grew up like sisters. For years, they did everything together, despite the fact that they never attended the same school. When adolescence hit, they grew apart. It wasn't a happy occurrence, but it wasn't an ugly situation, either. As Miles puts it: "two cousins who loved each other like sisters turned back into cousins".
In the spring before her high school graduation, Laura returned to Miles. They'd spend hours together in their old treehouse, getting high and enjoying a comfortable silence.
A week after graduation, Laura committed suicide.
I'd been feeling torn about picking this one up -- on the one hand, it's by Rachel Cohn and I'm always up for reading her books, but on the other it deals with some pretty dark stuff and I wasn't so sure if I was so into that, especially as it's December and that's depressing enough, thankyouverymuch. But when I finally picked it up, I ended up reading it in one sitting. The reason? Miles' voice:
They call me "8 Mile" at school--white trash with the wide load, capable of the occasional decent rap. I'm the token white girl at a D.C. charter school that's 70 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Caucasian, 4 percent Asian, and 1 percent fat (me). Teachers say I'm a natural-born writer. What I really am is a natural-born reader. I may write stories during class to pass the time ticking away at my boredom, and I may sometimes let my best friend Jamal turn my words into performance art, but I plan on pledging foremost allegiance to books written by other people. I would have nothing to say if I ever tried to be a real writer. My life is a waste not worth reporting. Whereas, even bad books are rarely boring. Words jump. Pages fly. Action. 8 Mile observes it all, but does not live it.
Her voice is observant, witty, argumentative and her words have a strong rhythm. She plays with language and punctuation, switching up and out of styles and narrative modes without warning. But at the same time, Miles herself is difficult. She's not an easy person to like. She's prickly, self-destructive, preachy and she can't seem to get out of her own way. I do think that some readers will find her very off-putting and that could very well affect their opinion of the book -- that seems to be the way things go with first-person narratives* -- and it's entirely possible that my mixed feelings about Miles affected my feelings about You Know Where To Find Me as a whole. Because my feelings are mixed.
Strengths first: While I thought Miles' voice was the major strength, I did see another more subtle strength. Oddly enough (as the reader never meets her), it was Laura. As the story goes on, Miles listens to other people remember her and mourn for her. And so as the story goes on, as Miles learns more about her, so does the reader. I liked that. I also thought it had a good sense of place.
My major difficulty with the book (other than not really connecting with Miles despite enjoying her voice) was that I felt like there was a whole lot going on in just over 200 pages: Miles' grief, her relationship (or non-relationship) with her parents, her changing relationship with Laura's father, her problems with school, her addiction, her feelings for her best friend, her new relationship with Laura's best friend, her passion about campaigning for DC statehood, her attraction to suicide, her crash dieting. I know that life is like that, that it doesn't pause when tragedy strikes, but I felt that some of the issues could have stood more exploration. When the ending came, it felt jarring. Not because of how it ended, but because the last couple of chapters felt like zoom zoom zoom bang** over.
I don't really know how to wrap this up because my feelings are so mixed. So. I'm not going to. And there you have it.
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*Example? A lot of people hated Inexcusable because they hated the narrator.
**Zoom zoom zoom bang over? What? That's totally a technical term.
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Previously: