Shine: Lauren Myracle

I don't know what drew me to this book. It's about a hate crime against a gay teenager. Stories like this infuriate me, so I usually avoid them. But something about this one caught my interest, and I'm so glad it did. Shine is an incredibly intense story that literally left me breathless. The last twenty pages had my heart racing and my blood pumping.

Cat is a sixteen year old loner in her tiny Southern town of Black Rock. She is one of only three students who passed 11th grade. Poverty and drug abuse are rampant. They aren't quite the hill people of Appalachia, but very nearly. When a hate crime is committed against Cat's childhood friend, Patrick, she breaks out of her comfort zone to track down the attacker. Her first suspects are a group of boys, including her own brother, who taunted Patrick for being gay, but simultaneously offered him protection from others who might have hurt him. Cat interrogates each member of the Redneck Posse but comes up empty handed. While trying to find Patrick's attacker, Cat is forced to face the people she shut out of her life after a disturbing experience when she was just 13. After enlisting the help of several people who knew and loved Patrick, Cat makes a shocking discovery that may risk her life.

Wow. That's the only word to describe this book. It is intense and emotional and dramatic and painful and hopeful. It is about Truth and Justice and Poverty and Drug Abuse and Secrets and Friendship and Family. The characters are dimensional. The story is real. The mystery is intriguing. The ending is...breathless. I have read books by Lauren Myracle, always thinking that she's an average young adult writer: relatable teen characters, modern conflicts, happily-ever-after endings. Shine proves me to be wrong on so many levels. Which isn't to say that the characters in this book aren't relatable or that the conflict isn't modern, because they are. Cat is a very real heroine with very real faults and very admirable strengths, and unfortunately Hate Crimes are a part of daily life for people all over the world. However, this book doesn't have a happily ever after. Because it's a realistic story with a realistic ending, and the reality of Meth abuse is usually death.

A word of warning to my sensitive readers; this book is emotional and intense, at times even painful to read. If you have ever encountered sex abuse, drug abuse, or hate crimes, this book will hit very close to home and could be triggering.

On the other hand, Shine serves as an incredible piece of social criticism art, reminding readers of a forgotten region in America and forcing us to acknowledge that the battle against prejudice is ongoing.

Rating: $$$


ARC received courtesy of Abrams Books. 

The Patience Stone: Atiq Rahimi

The title The Patience Stone: Sang-E Saboor comes from a Persian folktale about a magical black stone, the Sang-E Saboor, which absorbs all of the pain and suffering of the people who speak to it. The legend goes that when the stone has taken in too much sorrow, it will explode all of the pain and suffering on the world and that will be the day the world ends. This folktale is the key to this short novel about a woman who sits with her comatose husband in a room somewhere in the fractious Middle East.

Atiq Rahimi has written an incredibly poignant and moving story about a woman’s liberation. In the Middle East (and in many other places, as well!), women face harsh criticism and must obey strict rules of conduct. There are some who believe that these rules of conduct are archaic and should be thrown off. Rahimi is one of them, as illustrated by his novel. The woman in his book is a wife and mother who is caring for her husband in a single room while guns blast in the street outside the window. Her husband was shot in the neck, and is alive but comatose. It is this state of living unconsciousness that allows the woman to talk to her husband as she never has before. She derides him for his behavior in their marriage, and she reveals some of her innermost secrets to him. She speaks to him as a wife would never be allowed to speak to her husband in their culture. She speaks to him as she would to the Sang-E Saboor.

What Rahimi has done with his novel is given a voice to an entire population of women who have been held silent for centuries. The Patience Stone is an incredible volume of important weight. If women worldwide are ever to have equality, then it is of dire importance that their stories be heard and understood, no matter how painful it is to hear. Rahimi is putting the pain of a real life in our faces and we must have the strength to listen.