Charlotte Kersten

“Because those things…they say way more about the person who said them than they say about you.”

Year published: 2019

Category: Magical realism, YA

Representation: Trans boy (side character)

Summary: Magpie Lewis started writing in her yellow notebook the day her family self-destructed. That was the night Eryn, Magpie’s sister, skipped town and left her to fend for herself. That was the night of Brandon Phipp’s party.

Now, Magpie is called a slut whenever she walks down the hallways of her high school, her former best friend won’t speak to her, and she spends her lunch period with a group of misfits who’ve all been socially exiled like she has. And so, feeling trapped and forgotten, Magpie retreats to her notebook, dreaming up a place called Near.

Near is perfect–somewhere where her father never cheated, her mother never drank, and Magpie’s own life never derailed so suddenly. She imagines Near so completely, so fully, that she writes it into existence, right in her own backyard. It’s a place where she can have anything she wants…even revenge.

My thoughts: If you were to combine the “teenage girl silently spiraling due to trauma” aspect of Speak with the “dissociation paradise where all her dreams come true” aspect of Tender Morsels, I think that could get you close to a description of this book. In this case, there turns out to be a dark edge to Magpie’s paradise, she can’t control it as much as she thinks she can, and she ends up staying there instead of embracing the complexity of the real world as opposed to what the characters do in Tender Morsels.

Magpie’s arc is very much a descent into darkness and vengeance instead of moving toward support and healing of any kind even though there is some hope in the relationships she develops with Clare and Ben, both of whom are incredibly sweet and great characters. The bleakness of her character and her descent are definitely well written.

Her confrontation with her ex-friend Allison is also very interesting – it turns out that Allison knows her boyfriend Brandon assaulted Magpie, but she chooses to stay in a relationship with him due to the prospect of marrying into his money and dismisses her own experiences of assault. Allison insists that she and Magpie were never friends, but this is then complicated by the snippet that we see from Allison’s perspective at the end.

As for what I thought of the ending overall, some of the decisions feel somewhat arbitrary – after Magpie ventures into Near, the teacher Magpie killed and Magpie’s father come back after being destroyed, but Brandon doesn’t. I wish we could have seen Magpie’s thoughts behind deciding who to send back and why to punish her teacher and father instead of Allison and her mom. I still am not quite sure what to think of the very end, where Allison decides to enter Near herself, but I’m leaning on the side of liking it and what it means for her to step away from the real world/Brandon and join Magpie. This is a strange one that definitely won’t be for everyone, but I found a lot to appreciate overall.