Book Review: Far From You

Book Review: Far From You by Tess Sharpe 

Goodreads Description: Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice. The first time, she's fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that'll take years to kick. 

The second time, she's seventeen, and it's no accident. Sophie and her best friend, Mina, are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina's murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night. 

After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to find a chilly new reality. Mina's brother won't speak to her, her parents fear she'll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places, so Sophie must search for Mina's murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina, and about the secret they shared. 

My Review: Sharpe's Far From You exists in a nebulous space for me. Even after several months, I still can't decide how I feel about it. It's a mixed bag; while the positives are on point, the negatives make me so frustrated that I wanted to throw the whole book out, good parts be damned. For one, it's an excellent read, full of twists, turns, red herrings and scattered clues that make it a satisfying mystery to unravel. It also has a deep emotional core that sits atop a romance that meshes together so many confusing adolescent feelings and experiences: love, jealousy, anxiety, social stigma, interpersonal drama, grief, and loss. The romance captures a realistic look at teenage social dynamics that spiked a wave of nostalgia for my own adolescence, where the interpersonal drama and intense emotional reactions were all claustrophobically bottled up within our tight-knit teenage cliques. Yet despite the realism, the book falls into the YA publishing trap when it comes to depicting teenage drug use: wanting to borrow the drama of addiction while failing to actually represent people with addiction. YA publishing errs on the side of caution when tackling these stories, preferring to depict addicts as victims rather than as having an active hand in their own addiction. While this is the safer approach when appealing to parent pocketbooks, it purposefully skews the perception of addiction and differentiates between "deserving" and "undeserving" addicts. When the point of writing a story like this is to encourage empathy towards people living in different circumstances, creating this distinction in fiction that isn't reflective of reality is more problematic than not publishing fiction on addiction in the first place. 

Before I elaborate on its problematic elements-- we'll start with the basics. The book features a first person POV with a writing style focused primarily on action, with little introspection or lyricism to its style. This helps to keep the pacing swift as the mystery builds upon itself layer by layer. The text also features heavy flashbacks that jump all over the timeline, and this scattered sense of events shows the reader how Sophie's trauma and addiction have rattled her memory and ultimately the story of her life. The book is gritty, managing a noir detective-like tone, but not as much as one would expect -- Sophie largely hangs out with non-drug users, which significantly reduces opportunities for sketchier scenes. The book's focus on the romance subplot also detracts from its 'edginess.' The depictions of drug use are minimal and purposefully vague, which ultimately prevents glamorization and copycat behaviours. There are just enough signal words, like 'snorted,' to give hints to the methods, but no overt descriptions of her use.  

As far as queer representation goes, this book is wonderful. It features a relationship between a bisexual woman and a lesbian, and explores the nuances of how labels affect them - Sophie's ability to love men as well as women allows her to blend in with heteronormative society, while Mina doesn't have that option. The book also beautifully conflates the stigmas of addiction with WLW attraction - showcasing how both addicts and LGBTQ2S+ people live dual or shadowed lives that prevent them from self-actualization. The text also digs into how homophobia manifests differently for bisexual vs lesbian women, which is just... *chef's kiss* Books that dig into the nuances of identity and interpersonal relationships really get my motor running, because expanding empathetic understanding for those different from you is what writing is all about. 

Which is why the depiction of drug addiction left me seriously disappointed. Firstly, I want to be clear: Far From You is not completely unrealistic. There are a lot of very real elements to Sophie's addiction that do speak truth to the experience, but the narrative still falls into the same victimization pits that claim many other YA books dealing with the topic. The origin of Sophie's addiction is revealed within the first few pages: a car accident left her with chronic pain and a near--unlimited access to prescription painkillers. The addiction that develops almost feels inevitable. The 'car accident' narrative is extremely popular in YA when tackling drug addiction, because it removes a character's personal responsibility for their addiction. This unfortunately creates a distinction between "deserving" and "undeserving" addicts --  those who are victims of treatment mismanagement are therefore worthy of our attention, support, and treatment, while characters who instigate their own addiction through the use of street drugs are ultimately "monsters" who deserve to be vilified and forgotten. Unfortunately, Far From You highlights who is "deserving" and "undeserving" very clearly when Sophie encounters a teenage meth addict later in the book who is trying to get clean -- she is incredibly rude to him, condescending, and treats him as the liar 'addict' stereotype - a stereotype she vehemently fought against when parents and adults pinned it on her. This lack of empathy for someone going through nearly the exact same situation as her feels strange - I could write it off as a character flaw, if the narrative itself didn't treat Sophie and Matt so differently. Matt is in recovery, yet spoken about like garbage, the worst is assumed about him, he goes to NA meetings, and he is heavily watched by his entire family. He's treated as dangerous, as a bomb that's about to blow, while Sophie, on the other hand, gets incredible freedom, and people act like they're just disappointed in her -- when Sophie is the one who has supposedly gotten someone murdered. 

This unbalanced treatment left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because in my experience working in a youth detox/rehab facility, teenagers don't follow Sophie's trajectory of car accident, pain killers, addiction. They usually look more like Matt, and have chosen to use substances to cope with trauma, or because their parents did it, or because of abusive peer pressure, and now find themselves powerless against their addiction. The Matts of the world are just as deserving as the Sophies, and I'm tired of fiction that draws a line between types of addicts, because this distinction influences our politics, our laws, and how we treat the most vulnerable in our society. Frankly, I think understanding what makes someone reach for a pipe is far more fascinating than borrowing the drama of drug addiction through a victimization narrative that allows characters to "play bad" without being "one of them." 

TL;DR: All in all, 4/5 stars. A story about love and loss that enmeshes the stigmas of homophobia and drug addiction, while ultimately failing the addicts it hopes to represent.