#yes it’s YA but it’s also well written well made and very smart & poignant

[desertsquiet]

Was re-reading the hunger games and well, the prequel couldn’t have come out at a more appropriate time

[thelowercasegimmick]

YA Review, 10/7/16: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

Sometimes, I think I should talk about politics more on this blog.  It’s not like I don’t have strong political opinions.  I think part of the problem is that, much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, I am on Tumblr, which is not exactly known as a forum for rational discussions.  I guess that’s a way of saying that I’m afraid of getting into an argument I can’t win, or saying something ignorant that ends up hurting people.  But the truth is, everything is political, and YA books aren’t exempt from that.  I do generally believe that a book’s artistry can be evaluated separately from its politics, but that only works to a certain extent, and only with certain books.  When a book’s aims are explicitly political, there’s really no way to evaluate whether the book succeeds or not without talking about its politics.

This book gives me plenty to talk about besides its politics, and I’ll talk about that as well.  But given that this book is about ex-gay therapy, and Danforth was inspired by the Zack Stark controversy, it seems important to me to talk about Danforth’s political agenda, and how that affects the reading experience of this book.  Because part of what made this such a powerful read for me was the fact that yes, this book does speak to my own politics - my experience was strongly affected by the fact that Danforth is writing about something deeply important to me.

I’ll be honest: I don’t generally like books that directly address politics.  Books like The Hunger Games (2008) and The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2011) are very political books, but they use allegory rather than directly addressing their issues.  While this does make it more likely that readers will miss the point (I honestly doubt that most fans of The Hunger Games actually got the allegory), it also lets the authors write with a defter hand, so that the books are rarely preachy or overdone.  The futuristic settings and sci-fi stories force the authors to focus on other things besides the message, and as a result, those books tend to have much stronger characters and plots than books that address politics directly.  Books like Luna (2004) and Wide Awake (2006) that address political issues directly and structure everything around those issues are generally badly-plotted with boring characters.  You get the impression that the authors weren’t actually interested in telling a story - they just wanted to talk about politics, and the plot and characters are just an excuse to do so.  They’re the kind of books that get called ‘preachy’, and there’s a reason people hate preachy works so much.  It’s hard to think of a bigger disappointment than being promised a story and being given a political rant in exchange.

Because of all that, I can’t praise Danforth enough for her restraint in how she wrote this novel.  It would’ve been so easy for her to make this novel nothing but an excuse to show various ways that ex-gay therapy is bad.  But that’s not what this novel does.  This novel is just as much about Cameron as it is about ex-gay therapy - perhaps even more about Cameron, given that she isn’t even institutionalized until halfway through the novel.  This feels like a perfect blend of a political message and a character-oriented one - this is a story about how very personal politics can be.  Cameron’s story couldn’t be told without this political message, and the political message would be very different with a different viewpoint character.  And, as a bisexual person myself, the knowledge that I could have ended up in Cameron’s situation had I been born into a different family made the reading experience all the more visceral for me.  That won’t be everyone’s reading experience, obviously, but I related to Cameron a lot, and that made the character arc all the more powerful for me.  And it helps just how on-point Danforth’s political message is, in relation to that arc.  Danforth clearly knows a lot about corrective therapy, and in the minor characters, she incorporates a lot of different aspects of how the therapy affects people.  Apart from this helping to provide a lot of good development for the side characters, it paints a very complete picture of just why most gay people find this therapy so objectionable.  This could’ve easily been an angry, bitter book, but Danforth is a more subtle author than that.  Instead, the dominant emotion is sorrow - she emphasizes all the loss that occurs, and the lasting consequences of the trauma for these characters.  I couldn’t ask for a better character arc centering around a political issue.

Moving away from politics a bit, I want to expand a bit more on how surprisingly subtle this book is.  Danforth opens the novel when Cameron is twelve and her parents die, and slowly works her way to when Cameron is fifteen or sixteen.  This is an incredibly risky choice - I almost always hate novels that try to incorporate such a large time scale.  But Danforth uses this to excellent effect.  She’s smart enough to leave very little to summary - almost everything we learn comes from a scene.  This extended opening essentially serves to set up (and even begin) Cameron’s character arc, in a way that just wouldn’t work as well in a set of flashbacks.  I might not have even missed this information if it wasn’t there, but I’m so glad that Danforth had the sense to realize that it was necessary - it adds to the character arc in a lot of subtle ways.  This novel is an excellent example of showing rather than telling.  Part of the reason I felt Cameron’s character arc so strongly is that I felt it - Danforth never beats us over the head with it.  This is not an intense book; the emotional high points are few and far between.  But the parts between those high points flow very naturally and always stay interesting, and when the emotional high points do come, they’re all the more poignant as a result.

Unfortunately, the prose was the only thing that prevented this novel from being truly excellent.  This book was written in first-person, which was a huge mistake, because Danforth isn’t even trying to write a convincing voice for a teenager.  Danforth has a PhD in creative writing, and while that’s not usually a bad thing, it’s certainly a problem when your teenager talks like a thirty-something who majored in creative writing in college.  This prose would’ve been fine if it was third-person - Danforth definitely writes with the skill of a creative writing PhD.  But writing a teenager this way was just the wrong artistic choice, and it distanced me from the story quite a bit.  Skilled as Cameron’s character arc is, it’s easy to feel a bit at an arm’s length from her at times, mostly because she doesn’t talk like any teenager I’ve ever known.

But I still highly recommend this novel.  I honestly can’t think of another YA book that directly talks about politics this well.  This is subtle, well-structured, and with a wonderful character arc.  There’s simply nothing like this in YA, and it’s a shame that Danforth doesn’t seem to be releasing another novel.  I’d hate for such a talented author to only release a single book.