Overdoing it

While Chris Crutcher did a good job of talking about child abuse and the way it can affect people, I think he overdid how much of an impact it has upon the world. It seemed like almost every character in the entire novel had some back-story relating to child abuse: Mott, Carly, Barbour, in some ways T.J., Heidi, Rich Marshall, and Chris, as well as from conversations on the bus, the possibility of Simon (he said he wanted his mom dead) so that’s a majority of the characters in the entire novel.

Now, I understand that he wanted to get a theme across. But people do have other motivations for being who they are: you can be a psychopathic one-legged anti-social guy with a nice streak and have had a perfectly normal upbringing with some other dark turns. It just seems like you were waiting for every character to reveal their histories with it, and it almost distracted from the story itself.

This isn’t to say I don’t believe it’s a widespread and serious problem; I just think he could have had some diversity in character backgrounds. It almost, sadly, dulled the shock of learning a character had a tragic past as it would in most novels, because almost everyone had one, if not a bad present as well. You just couldn’t help thinking the moment you found out Mott had something to hide that it was a strong possibility.

In most novels, there are only one, maybe two characters, with something real deep to hide, and it always flips how you view them on your head. Crutcher manages to show that doing the opposite makes the converse: give a ton of characters something to hide, you start to expect it and view them the same before and after. Maybe for T.J. it was something of a shock, but for the reader it becomes obvious where things are going before they begin.

I suppose it sort of shows something about young adult literature in general: If you’re going with a big theme, you have to have more subtleties than you do explosive shock, because the explosive shock itself becomes normal if it’s overplayed.