Book Review: I Crawl Through It

Book Review: I Crawl Through It by AS King 

Goodreads Description: Four teenagers are on the verge of exploding. The anxieties they face at every turn have nearly pushed them to the point of surrender: senseless high-stakes testing, the lingering damage of past trauma, the buried grief and guilt of tragic loss. They are desperate to cope, but no one is listening.

So they will lie. They will split in two. They will turn inside out. They will even build an invisible helicopter to fly themselves far away…but nothing releases the pressure. Because, as they discover, the only way to truly escape their world is to fly right into it.

The genius of acclaimed author A.S. King reaches new heights in this groundbreaking work of surrealist fiction; it will mesmerize readers with its deeply affecting exploration of how we crawl through traumatic experience—and find the way out.

My Review: This book is certainly a product of its time. It was published in 2015, when internet meme culture began to shift away from XD rawr randomness, mustaches, and hipster irony. The book uses this "randomness" meme culture as a metaphor to explore domestic trauma, mental health, and the struggles of growing up, but it feels like a "fellow kids" moment, as King doesn't seem to have a clear grasp of the culture she's emulating. 

This book's approach to trauma is... interesting, to say the least. It features a cast of protagonists that are all coping with their personal traumas, though even after finishing the book, it's hard to tell what each character is actually dealing with. The book cloaks the reality of what happens in surrealism, and then relies on that surrealism to convey the emotional fallout and coping methods of each character; how they "crawl through it," if you will. But either King is scared of naming the traumas outright -- perhaps that would shatter the denial-like illusion -- or she has little understanding of how to express traumatic experiences through surrealism due to a lack of personal experience -- or both. Because of that, the surreal elements lack metaphorical significance to the events at play. Everything feels disjointed and purposeless -- random without any understanding of what made "randomness" meme culture work. Some of the metaphors used did connect back to the subject in a powerful way, such as China turning herself inside out as a response to anxiety, but so many elements feel completely disconnected. Several characters escape to a "genius-land" on an invisible helicopter, and while I could see the intention behind this subplot (escaping the stressors of reality through an imaginary paradise), the metaphor completely falls apart once they arrive and it fails to communicate anything meaningful about escapism, the myth of genius, academic/career pressures placed on youth, etc. 

It's a shame, because surrealist fiction can effectively express the confusion and intensity of traumatic emotions, but King doesn't dive deep enough into the emotions to achieve that. It's just randomness for randomness' sake, with no thought behind the arrangement of surrealist elements. There's no emotional gut punch here, no interesting metaphorical take on life, or even cool magical realism vibes. The book pretends to be deep, but it's shallower than the kiddy pool. 

TL;DR: All in all, 1/5 stars. Painfully underwhelming. 

Book Review: Code Name Verity

Book Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein 

Goodreads Description: Two young women from totally different backgrounds are thrown together during World War II: one a working-class girl from Manchester, the other a Scottish aristocrat, one a pilot, the other a wireless operator. Yet whenever their paths cross, they complement each other perfectly and before long become devoted friends.

But then a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over France. She is captured by the Gestapo and becomes a prisoner of war. The story begins in “Verity’s” own words, as she writes her account for her captors.

My Review: Classifying this book as YA was a bit of a strange choice. While the coming of age and friendship aspects are very YA, the voice feels off. The book spends a lot of time on female war pilots -- how they lived, worked, and were promoted -- to the point where it slows down the narrative. It adds to the historical accuracy at the cost of pacing, and makes me think this book would fit better in the adult market. It often reads like a report more than a novel, and while that works with the WW2 setting, it doesn't really jive with a teenage voice. Wein does insert some obvious teenage moments to make the characters feel younger, but these moments stick out, and read like they were added later in order to age the manuscript down. 

Other than that, the book is fairly solid. The framing of "Let me tell you how I ended up in this situation" is a little cliche, but Wein shakes it up by focusing the story on Maddie, the pilot back home, rather than Verity, the spy captured by the Nazis. This creates an air of mystery around Verity and her circumstances, as we only learn about her through the way she tells the story of her friend. Honestly, my biggest gripe with this book is that it's not sapphic. There's a weird romantic tension between the two main girls that I wish would have been expanded on. It would have deepened the stakes and tension while also exploring queerness during the time period. I have no problem with friendship stories -- in fact I love them, and wish there were more -- but these girls did not read like friends. Friendships feel more genuine to me when there's a sense of unconditionality - when people know that they can fully be themselves, because the other person loves them for who they are. Yet with romantic interest, there's always a bit of tension and the players are more cautious, because they can sense something powerful building, and they have no idea what's going to happen to their relationship when that "something" comes to light. In every scene with Maddie and Verity, I could feel the weight of that romantic tension, but it never boils over into anything real, leaving me rather unsatisfied by the end. It felt like eating a dish that was missing a key ingredient.

 

All in all, if you're a history buff, then absolutely snatch this up. If you're not interested in WW2 history, you're not missing much by passing on this one. 

TL;DR: 3/5 stars. A deep dive into WW2 pilots in novel form.