White Lies

Written by Sara de Waard

DCB

978-1-77086-649-2

224 pp.

Ages 13+

May 2022

Birthdays should be joyful celebrations, especially for young people. I know that lots have elaborate events (perhaps sometimes too extravagant) but for some the mere recognition of the day as auspicious would be enough. Sadly, for 15-year-old Missy Bell, her last three birthdays have been tortuous and her sixteenth is almost upon her and she has no reason to expect any different. Ever since the death of her younger brother Jeremy when she turned 13, Missy's special day has been marked by her parents behaving badly through their grief and Missy dealing with the fallout on top of her own loss and guilt. In fact, most of the time, they don't even recognize her needs, with her father Tim, whom she refers to alternately as Trick or Treat, wallowing in alcohol and other illegal substances, and her mother Susanna now in prison and unable to see beyond herself.  

An untethered Missy has found refuge at the vintage toy store of Ren Lin, where she organizes and cleans voluntarily for multiple hours most days of the week. Even though Ren's perfect daughter Valkyrie doesn't trust Missy and is often rude to her, the store is a far better choice than going home to a house with little, if any, food, and a father often drunk or high on the couch hurling abuse at her. By keeping the routine of working at the store, seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Tandalay every Monday, visiting her mother the first Wednesday of the month, and going to school, Missy is keeping it together. For now. 

But two new people enter her life and offer her something she's rarely experienced. First, there's the new custodian, Miss Maalouf, who extends supportive kindnesses to Missy. And then there's classmate Luke Geurtin, who also visits a mother at the penitentiary. Missy and Luke form an unorthodox relationship that is both supportive and hostile, as the two damaged teens try to navigate feckless parents, poverty and abuse, and systems purported to offer support. Only time will tell whether they can feel beyond their traumas and circumstances.

 

Sara de Waard, an author and screenwriter of Métis descent, has delved into numerous issues in White Lies, giving us a tough story about childhoods, or at least teen years, saturated with misery and discouragement. It's about young people not living their best lives because those who should be there for them aren't and, in fact, work against them, mistreating them with neglect or emotional abuse, and sometimes even physical harm. Those who should love them, their parents, give them very little but strangers like Miss Maalouf, Ren and even Missy and Luke for the other step up, offering what they can. But Missy and Luke are working at a deficit, trying to survive and, knowing that their parents are the only ones they have, make do. And still they persevere.

The soft ceiling tiles soften the profanities of the inmates, but can't silence them. The four-letter words puff from the ladies' mouths like rings of fire, blazing through the massive concrete gathering space. But they fall on my deaf ears. I'm used to it. Nothing shocks me now. I may look like china in a bull's shop, but I'm a matador of life's crap.  (pg. 22)

Thankfully, without solving all of Missy and Luke's problems, Sara de Waard has given them hope, in each other and in others–though perhaps not their parents–that perhaps a little kindness will help lift them out of difficult circumstances or at least sideways so they can avoid harm.

My Story Starts Here: Voices of Young Offenders

Written by Deborah Ellis

Groundwood Books

978-1-77306-121-4

224 pp.

Ages 13+

October 2019

Reviewed from advance reading copy

Deborah Ellis's opening words "There but for the grace of God go I" from John Bradford are prophetic ones that resonate throughout her latest young adult non-fiction book as young offenders, recent and not, and others unmask family histories, criminal offences and misdeeds, judgements and outcomes. They are stories that could be anyone's but these are their own voices, told as they lived or recall, and they deserve to be heard.

Over twenty young people, named only by their first name and age, were interviewed by Deborah Ellis, a process which she explains in her introduction. Their stories include domestic abuse, poverty, addictions, bullying, foster care, loss, mental health struggles and family dysfunction. Their stories are as diverse as the individuals profiled and we learn a lot about each person beyond the crimes that drove them into the criminal justice system. But there are the crimes, from theft to assault, vandalism and arson, and trafficking of drugs and weapons. Still Deborah Ellis gives these young people the opportunity to explain. To explain where they came from, what they were thinking, what they were feeling, and how justice may or may not have been served. Many are hopeful, trying to see beyond their pasts and their pains and their crimes, and make futures for themselves and their families for which they might be proud. They're not perfect, but then none of us are, and some minimize their responsibilities for choices made while others own their decisions and circumstances.

I don't know if I'll ever get rid of the pain I'm carrying. Maybe I can turn it into something not so heavy. (Lindy, 19)

But Deborah Ellis does more than just give voice to these young offenders. She offers background information about anger, foster care, abusive relationships, witnessing abuse, restorative justice and the importance of a high school diploma. In a question accompanying each young offender's story, she makes the reader think about how they might address the issues which these young people have experienced and makes suggestions about how to make things better in her "Taking Steps" sections. Still the best advice often comes from the young people themselves.

That little thing that's in the back of your head, that says, "Don't do this!"? Listen to it the first time. (Beth, 19)

In addition to the twenty plus young people she highlights, Deborah Ellis also gives voice to past offenders and those who work with young offenders–these are each identified as a "Voice of Experience"–and family members of offenders. Their perspectives, from the distance of time and the other side of the justice system and from the heartfelt viewpoint of family, give different frames of reference to the hardships with which these young people have been dealt or are dealing. 

Deborah Ellis has always sought justice in letting those whose voices are rarely heard speak freely. From Three Wishes (2004) and Off to War (2008) to Kids of Kabul (2011) as well as Looks Like Daylight (2013), Deborah Ellis has let us hear what Palestinian and Israeli children, children affected by AIDS, soldiers' children, Iraqi refugees, and Indigenous kids have to say. She holds true what Maya Angelou acknowledges so eloquently in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

With My Story Starts Here, Deborah Ellis has released the untold stories of young offenders and hopefully provided them with another step forward to healing.

Moon at Nine

by Deborah Ellis

Pajama Press

978-1927485576

224 pp.

Ages 14+

For release April 2014

When the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979 and an Islamic republic ruled by the Ayatollah was established, it was initially seen by many as replacing an extravagant, secular, westernized regime with one based in Shia faith and clerical rule, albeit with an anti-Western sentiment.  But for a fifteen-year-old girl, Farrin, it means being extremely cautious about revealing her wealthy family's support of the Shah and her own enjoyment of American television and creative writing.  Though Farrin doesn't approve of her mother's parties with excessive food and prohibited drink, music, dancing and cigarettes, knowing that many Iranians were suffering, she worries for their safety should the Revolutionary Guard learn of their indiscretions.

Attending a school for gifted girls (transformed from one for wealthy families only), Farrin meets a new student, Sadira, who has been out of school caring for her father after the rest of her family was killed in a bombing.  Because Sadira's father, a cleric, had been imprisoned and tortured by the Shah's secret police, Farrin is apprehensive about sharing her family with Sadira, though she is drawn to Sadira's compassion and fearlessness, and her pro-woman views.

"...your girls need to go to school.  Men have run this world long enough, and they have made a mess of it." (pg. 65)

Recreating themselves as the "Demon-hunting Girls of Iran" (pg. 84) in keeping with Farrin's forbidden allegory about a girl fighting Iranian demons and beginning to feel the power of their friendship, the two girls make a pact that they would look at the moon at nine o'clock nightly so they could be together in spirit if not physically.

A visit to the Tomb of Hafez, the great Persian poet, and partaking in faal-e Hafez (fortune-telling based on randomly-selected text in the book of Hafez) intimates the course of Farrin and Sadira's relationship.

"No death invades a heart that comes alive in love:
Our immortality is etched in the book of life." (pg. 118)

While Farrin revels in the realization that she is in love with Sadira, their world begins to implode, with school spies informing on them, angry parents vowing to arrange marriages for each girl, and the Revolutionary Guard arresting them for deviancy.  Yet, through ensuing lies, interrogations, threats, assaults and imprisonment, Farrin and Sadira still have their Moon at Nine and the hope that they will be together again.

Deborah Ellis is Canada's most modest and accomplished author of social justice stories for young people, and Moon at Nine can be added to that auspicious collection.  Based on a true story, the girls' relationship in Moon at Nine is personal and precious but never explicit, unlike the merciless response of others to it.  Prohibited love may be ill-fated, but in the 1980s Iran of secrets, surveillance and suppression,  it was perilous.  Still, in Moon at Nine, Deborah Ellis thoughtfully embeds a sliver of chaste love into that dispiriting world and, without contriving an unrealistic happy ending, offers a glimmer of possibility.

Guilty

by Norah McClintock

Orca Book Publishers

978-1554699896

223 pp.

Ages 12-15

2012

Reviewed from ebook

978-1554699926

There's usually no single truth because every story varies with the perspective.  So too with crimes.  And in Norah McClintock's Guilty, two young people, Finn and Lila, see two crimes from two different perspectives.  The first crime, ten years earlier, had Lila's father, Louis Ouimette, accepting a guilty plea for the murder of Finn's mother.  Now, only three days after Louis Ouimette's release from prison, Finn's step-mom Tracie is shot, and Finn's dad shoots Louis in self-defense.

While Lila tries to deal with the loss of her father and the logistics of being alone and returning to live with her aunt in Boston, she tries to reconcile her confusion about the events that took her father's life.  Her dad had always told her that he hadn't killed Mrs. Newsome but the stolen goods had been found in his apartment, so he took a plea to get out of prison faster to be with his daughter.  But what was he doing at the Newsome's when he'd vowed to be turning everything around for her?

Meanwhile, Finn is helping his father cope with the loss of his second wife (even if Finn couldn't stand her): going to the police station, helping with funeral arrangements, tiding up Tracie's wardrobe.  But Finn can't help but be reminded of his mother's murder.  He'd only been seven but finding her body when he and his dad had returned from an evening out at his dad's club had been traumatic.

When Lila goes to the police station to enlist the help of Detective Sanders, she meets Finn who shares with her his rage at the man who killed his mother and how his dad had killed that man, unaware that he is speaking about Lila's father.  That meeting is but the first that bring Lila and Finn together as she pursues information from the police files, from a prison tutor and from old work mates at Mr. Newsome's club, as well as discretely from Finn, who begins to reconsider what he knows about both crimes. 

Guilty is a perfect example of why Norah McClintock is the queen of Canadian YA crime fiction, having won the Arthur Ellis Award for crime fiction at least five times.  In Guilty, the reader knows that there are major gaps in the police reports about the crimes from the onset, with Finn claiming to be a witness when the reader can tell the limits of his observations.  And with Lila delving into the details of both crimes, using only the resources most people could access (e.g., internet, library, newspapers, interviews, etc.), her pursuit is reasonable albeit determined.  She is not just looking for the answer to, "Who-dun-it?" but also to "Why?" and "How?," making the mystery far more complicated to unravel.  Guilty is great plot-driven crime novel that doesn't sacrifice its fine characters for want of a better story.  With both Finn and Lila coming at the crimes from different perspectives, converging at a dramatic life-threatening climax, Norah McClintock keeps the story fast-paced and intriguing, hopeful for justice (the coveted aim for most readers of crime fiction) and even peace of mind through resolution.