The Club

Written by Eric Walters

DCB

978-1-77086-734-5

264 pp

Ages 9–12

March 2, 2024

 

It's the start of their Grade 8 year, and Jaxson and best friend Logan are looking forward to making their final year in middle school an epic one. While Logan is all about basketball, Jaxson is driven by playing his trumpet. But then a new girl, Liv Parker, joins their school. Though Jaxson sort of kind of has a girlfriend, Samantha, Liv is an extraordinary trumpet player, and she and Jax are thrown together, in a good way.

When the music teacher, Ms. Hooper, auditions the students for the senior band, she knows that Liv and Jax are going to be the stars of the band and hopefully take them to the city championship, finally. In fact, she wants them to play a duet for the first school assembly just days away. To prepare, the two have to meet after hours at each other's homes. Though their households are very different, with Liv and her mom Jenn, a cybersecurity expert, living in an immaculate big house with a grand piano, Jax and his mom Ali, an artist and art history prof, live in a cluttered house filled with colour and stuff. Still, the two teens find they have a lot in common, including their music, love of sushi, and ways of thinking. Moreover, when asked about their dads, they both acknowledge that subject as "complicated." 

But soon things get even more complicated for both of them. When Samantha learns how much time Jax is spending with the new girl, she feels threatened and he can't convince her that they're only friends. Still, with all their rehearsing for assemblies and solos, Jax and Liv are spending more time at each other's houses, and by chance, their moms are becoming friends. But with that friendship, personal details are shared, and Jenn and Ali begin to wonder whether the kids share more than just a virtuosity with the trumpet.

 

The theme of family is a common one in contemporary stories, with families that were once deemed traditional now being seen as just one of a myriad of forms that families can take. Whether a family has a mom and dad like Logan's, or is a single-parent household like Jax's or Liv's, or like those reconfigured through divorce or loss, a family is a family is a family, and Eric Walters recognizes that families come in all shapes and sizes and are all natural. What makes them families is the love and respect that is given and received within that construct. And regardless of how that family was created, whether through sperm donation, a heterosexual marriage, adoption, or one of countless other ways people enter others' lives, it is valid and valuable if family members choose for it to be so. (Thankfully the kids' moms give them some choice about whether to explore their paternal heritage and never compel them to embrace DNA as the ultimate basis for family.) 

Blood makes you related but it doesn't make you family. (p. 176)

Fortunately for Jax and Liv they would probably always have become family, regardless of their DNA. Just as Logan and Jax always considered themselves brothers, Liv and Jax were already simpatico because of their love of the trumpet and music. The DNA just made their relationship official and genetically solid.

 

Eric Walters's Afterword tells the reader that the story of The Club was inspired by a true story of half-siblings discovering each other through their DNA. Their story, like that of Jax and Liv, was one of positive connection. For the kids in The Club, there is no conflict or expectation that they must embrace strangers as family. For those two kids, it happens organically. But without the support of their core family, related or not, neither teen would've been secure enough to welcome others in and put themselves out as they become part of a larger club.

The story of The Club could be happening anywhere in the world. The circumstances are not uncommon, and with access to DNA and ancestral records, it's becoming more frequent that genetic relatives are being linked. But Eric Walters makes this less about the process and more about the outcomes and what they mean for these kids. Their worlds have changed and in a good way. I do wonder about those circumstances for which "new" family connections may not be positive or welcome but that would be another story. In The Club, Eric Walters gives us a story of being a family, discovering family, and making family. For Jax and Liv, they are able to strengthen what is already there with those who were previously unrecognized and make for a new type of familial association.

Pulse Point

Written by Colleen Nelson with Nancy Chappell-Pollack

Yellow Dog (Great Plains Publications)
978-1-927855-97-3
192 pp.
Ages 12-15
May 2018

With global warming, many of us acknowledge that things in our world are going awry.  Scientists have been warning about its consequences that include increased flooding, droughts, fires, mudslides and more, though it seems too few are listening now and in the world from the time Kaia's elder Mae (whom we would call grandmother) was much younger. But, in their world, when those impacts escalated and became dire, the scientists had prepared and created self-sufficient Cities run on the energy of its Citizens.

Though the Citizens may not consider it to be a problem, happy to be safe under the dome of the City, the social constructs of their new home have been exclusionary and are discriminatory. Only people with the right skills and genetics are allowed to live in the City.  Those excluded, called Prims (for Primitives), retreated to the Mountain outside, and the City is constantly on guard and setting Prim Threat Levels. Within the City, each Citizen is connected via a pulse point or microchip implanted in a forefinger to allow for monitoring of energy generation to ensure balance with energy usage. Kaia, who lives with her birth elder Sy, a gardener, and Mae, works as a fetal assessment technician (where defectives are identified for termination) and endeavours to generate extra energy at the gymnasium to share with the elderly Mae.  Anyone who cannot produce sufficient energy must undergo balancing, the process by which the Council ensures the City stays in equilibrium.

But Lev, the progeny of an Overseer, Kellan, a fallen hero, and Tar, a Councillor, is smitten with Kaia, though her genetic ranking is far beneath him. With Tar manipulating people and circumstances to ease Lev's path to becoming a leader, and Kaia's pulse point no longer working, essentially taking her off the grid, Kaia makes a decision that will take her from the only life and people she has known into a wilderness and on the run.

Colleen Nelson is well known for her dramatic YA fiction (The Fall, 250 Hours, Finding Hope, Blood Brothers) and Pulse Point is no less suspenseful in its story nor less powerful in its delivery.  However, because it is her first speculative fiction and collaborative work with her sister Nancy Chappell-Pollack, Pulse Point reveals layers in characterization and world-building that are new.  It's a tense read with all the attributes of great YA: relationship drama, interfering progenitors (i.e., parents), burgeoning romance, secrets, confusion, and conflict. But, all that takes place in a world in which stasis is achieved through the generation of energy and elimination of the unproductive, in which blue eyes are considered a defect, romantic matches are based on genetics, and everyone is monitored (a.k.a. linked) through their fingertips, making Pulse Point a bigger story. Look carefully and you'll see how Pulse Point's worlds could be our own. The two communities, one outside the City and the other under its dome, are a sharp contrast of old ways and new ways and the distrust and clash between the two is inevitable. While Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack resolve the story, revealing Kaia's origin story and secrets long kept hidden, they also leave a door open for a sequel. It's a good thing because there's still a whole new world that needs to evolve to make things right for Kaia and Lev, and Citizens and Prims alike.

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Check back tomorrow for my Q & A with authors Colleen Nelson and Nancy Chappell-Pollack in which they reveal much about their writing process and story lines from Pulse Point.  Always an insightful discussion when speaking with Colleen Nelson, we learn more than any blurb on a cover could reveal!

Here are all the stops on this blog tour:

• May 28: Stuck in YA Books
• May 29: CanLit for LittleCanadians
• May 30: Reading Maria
• May 31: Chapter by Chapter
• June 1: Biblio Virgo

Be sure to check them all out!