Amelia Anne

In my opinion, the beauty of its prose is what makes the YA novel,  Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield stand out.  I think Rosenfield made a conscious choice in how she wrote this novel, in terms of style and layout.  The end result is certainly an effective and almost poetic read.

Regarding the characters in the book, a number of my classmates felt that Amelia Anne stood out as a more vibrant character than Becca.  I actually found James to be the most interesting and dynamic character in the novel.  I certainly found him to be the most likable. One student in our group raised the question of how the author managed to make us care so much about Amelia Anne when we know from the first page (and the title) that she is dead.  Does the knowledge of her impending death somehow imbue her scenes with more urgency?

Ultimately, those who were not satisfied with the book attributed it to the fact that, in their opinions, it did not fulfill their expectations of the mystery genre, which raised the question of whether conventions are as well established in the YA market.  We seemed to agree that there is more flexibility in genre expectations of a YA novel, which allows an author to experiment a bit more in the writing of a YA novel.

(WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD)

I think it’s interesting that some readers found the added scenes about the town or about Brendan’s death to be extraneous and perhaps unnecessary.  In my opinion, these were the scenes that added true depth and originality to the story.  The charm of this book, I think, lies in its depiction of the small town, which certainly served as a character in and of itself.

The idea that gossip is the lifeblood of the town and that everyone knows everything literally seeps from the pages.  In fact, this is why the death of Amelia Anne is so disturbing to the inhabitants of the town.  Her identity, her killer, the reasons behind her death are all unknown.  The town’s inability to keep anything secret is a nice contrast against the one event no one talks about - the day three women visited the house of a mother in mourning, an outsider who is like a ghost wandering their town. The fact that James was one of the boys who witnessed Brendan’s death, to me, makes that scene critical to the book.  James has known too much death in his lifetime and in two cases, has been asked to become a participant in the act of dying, to provide a victim the ease of death.  In many ways, this too is the poetry and beauty of this book - that death is horrible and often violent, but in some cases, can become a blessing in and of itself.

Fault in Our Stars / Not a Test / Ashfall

In The Fault in Our Stars (WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD), we see Hazel on a journey toward acceptance, not of her own mortality, but rather of that mortality in others.  Hazel has lived with the knowledge of her own death for quite some time and has accepted her own mortality, from that moment in the hospital before we ever met her on the pages of this book, when her mother asked if she was ready and she answered yes.  We read The Fault in Our Stars, knowing that Hazel has already accepted her own mortality.  It is the journey toward acceptance of Augustus’ death that is truly her coming of age journey - the acceptance that some will go before her, including the boy she loves.

In This Is Not a Test (WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD), Sloane too has already accepted her own mortality.  She is ready to die.  She has decided on a day and time and it is only through sheer circumstance that she ends up surviving beyond the moments of her intended death.  She is somehow caught up in the race for survival, even as she has convinced herself she is in a race toward death.  She must somehow achieve an acceptance of the loss of Lily before she can truly embrace the idea of life.  She must somehow reach a point in her coming of age story where her will to live drowns out her will to die, where she is able to see that there is something worth living for, even in a world defined by the words “zombie apocalypse”.

I’m going to throw in a third book here, simply because I just finished reading it and it is on my mind as I grapple with the issue of death in YA novels.  Ashfall by Mike Mullin is another end-of-the-world, apocalyptic YA novel.  The main character, Alex, is on a coming of age journey as well.  As he treks through a post-volcanic world, trying to reach his family, he encounters people willing to help in times of terror and others who wish to harm.  Along his journey, he is continuously forced to make decisions that may not only impact his chances of survival, but also his ability to retain a sense of humanity.  His journey isn’t necessarily one toward an acceptance of death, or of Being-toward-death, but rather one of living with strength and honor.  He is continually confronted with the idea that it isn’t how we die that matters, but rather how we live.

As for my own writing, my thesis project is a YA fantasy that features quite a bit of death, some of which happened offstage before the novel begins, and more that occurs as the novel moves us forward.  I don’t know that I am dealing with death in a way similar to either John Green or Courtney Summers.  Death hovered over The Fault in Our Stars persistently.  There was always an awareness that death was coming for many of the characters, sooner rather than later. Hazel and Augustus spend much of their time ignoring its presence until they are unable to avoid its reality any longer.  Courtney Summers had death occurring offstage for much of the novel, then ruthlessly killed two-thirds of her cast in the final chapters of the book.

In essence, our characters struggle to accept the mortality of others. Though our methods for dealing with death are quite different, the journeys of our characters may be the same -  Hazel must accept the loss of Augustus, Sloane must accept the loss of Lily, Alex must accept the loss of his parents, and my own characters must accept the losses in their lives.

In the end, I think that it is the willingness to live, the act of turning away from death and embracing life, that truly represents the shouldering of adulthood and is truly representative of the stories being told in YA literature today.