17 June 2010
Smiles to Go (book review)
Filed under reading
Smiles to Go by Jerry Spinelli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When scientists observe the first known death of a proton, only Will Tuppence and his best friend Mi-Su seem to understand the significance of such an event. For Will it means that nothing can be counted on, and that everything is impermanent, including him and whatever he leaves behind when he’s gone. As he struggles to come to terms with this thought, his world incomprehensibly and obliviously continues to move around him in ways predictable and not-so-predictable. His bratty younger sister continues to annoy him, only now she’s finding new ways of doing so. His friends Mi-Su and BT continue to be his friends, although perhaps not in the predictable way they always had been before. They even kiss each other in a moment Mi-Su says could not be helped and which Will is sure should have been his. Will, meanwhile, continues to try and give structure to a world that steadfastly refuses it.
Jerry Spinelli manages again to come up with something unique. The author’s voice here takes on a strange tone, one perhaps reminiscent of the writer’s voice in Eggs but without the weight that story’s narrative seemed to bear with its serious subject matter and its fragile, at-risk characters. Spinelli here sticks mostly to very short chapters, not numbered in strict sequence beginning at chapter one, but numbered according to the time that’s passed since the death of that first proton. Several chapters are not even a page in length, and a few are just one or two words. The result is a terrific, uneven pacing that seems to stop, start, glide, and turn like the skateboard Will refuses to let his sister ride. At times the reader is hurled from one episode to the next, while at others the reader seems to glide through long, smooth passages of dialogue.
Spinelli’s main character is not as likable as in some of his other work, and this might be where young readers find some difficulty in sticking with the book. Mi-Su is the supportive friend readers will like right away, but Will’s pettiness and inability to treat his sister with any kindness at all might turn some readers away. If they can stick with the story, however, they will find a kind of depth thoughtful readers will find rewarding.
I respected the way Spinelli handled the narrative in Eggs, a book that presents two characters in awful situations. In that story, the writer leaves it to the reader to understand what kind of changes his characters are going through. There seems to have been concern that readers might not get it, because there is an author’s Q-and-A section at the back of the book that attempts to help puzzled readers. However, in Smiles to Go, he seems to have caved in to the urge to put everything into words, letting his character summarize his feelings near the end of the story in a kind of After-School-Special, “and-this-is-what-I-learned” kind of way. One could argue that young readers need this kind of debriefing, but I am disappointed by this decision and think it cheapens what is otherwise a very well-written book.
2010-06-17 :: me