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CM . . .
. Volume X Number 2. . . . September 19, 2003
excerpt: He stares out the widow at the city towers and North Shore mountains, remembering his mother, who is standing and smiling, eyes closed, face raised to the sun. Birds come to her and flock about her and alight on her hands and shoulders and brush her face with their wings. It is only an image, one he has dreamed up probably, but it seems true all the same. He remembers her as she was on the day of the accident. His father and Becky are still upstairs. It is very early in the morning. Birds sing in the trees and gardens. His mother wears her blue track suit - the one Dad got her for Christmas. Already she has been out for her daily run along the sea wall and is now working in the kitchen, peeling and chopping, preparing food so their supper will be ready when they get back home from the annual air show. But Mike and his family never enjoy the carrot-parsnip soup that his mother is preparing. On their way home from the Abbotsford Air show, a drunk driver crosses the median, collides with the Scott family vehicle, killing three of them, and leaving Mike critically injured, his legs a mangled mess that are amputated just above the knee. Not surprisingly, he is one angry 16-year-old; nevertheless, his best friend and his Aunt Norma (with whom Mike goes to live) are patient and supportive, remarkably tolerant of his rage and understanding of the extent to which he has lost all that had meaning for him. Returning to his old high school, a year later, Mike finds that "now everything was meaningless. He endured it only because of Aunt Norma and Robbie." (p. 28) Mike keeps everyone at a distance, but one day, the yearbook editor corners him for a special project: a special commemorative edition of the school's yearbook, being published in celebration of Carleton High School's 50th anniversary. And because Mike is a whiz at history, he is the natural choice to create a chronicle of Carleton High for the yearbook and "for posterity." (p. 35) Considering that his own personal history has altered irrevocably, he is also an ironic choice. Offered a "special deal" - he gets out of a mind numbingly boring history teacher's class in order to undertake the research — he takes on the task. Mike begins his quest for information about Carleton's past alone, but in the archives room where he works, Sarah materializes. He assumes that she's "an eager beaver" grade eight student sent to help him; she's there almost every day, assailing him with questions about his accident, his family, discussing fate, free will, movies, music, whatever. At first, she's a total annoyance, but over time, Sarah becomes Mike's muse, and soon, he finds himself missing her when she's not there. Still, there are some things that he finds very strange: no one else seems to know her; he never sees her anywhere else in the school; and unaccountably, as Christmas approaches, she displays absolutely no interest in the holiday. Then, just before the Christmas break, Mike encounters a sobbing, injured Sarah in the archives room; he calls for help, she disappears, and no one believes him when he tells his story to school officials. As the holiday break draws to a close, Mike discovers the link between Sarah's history and Carleton High School's, and at this point, the story takes a totally unexpected direction. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it at once, mysterious and totally plausible. And when Mike is able to give Sarah the peace she has sought, his gift enriches himself, as well. Waiting for Sarah is a really unusual work of adolescent fiction. It's not your average teen "problem" story; for the longest time, Mike's disability isolates him from everyone, and his turnaround is slow, with plenty of set-backs. High school life is described with pin-point accuracy; you can hear the whirr of the overhead projector in the history teacher's classroom and feel the boredom of yet another tedious lesson. This is a book which I really believe would appeal equally both to female and male readers; unfortunately, I think that the title would lead most guys to think that the book is a romance. Mike's struggle is portrayed in all of its frustrating reality, and I think that most readers would appreciate the authors' honesty. Early on, deep in self-pity, Mike remembers "the family eating together in the evenings. Rules and arguments about behaviour and chores and the Internet and TV watching. Ordinary lives that were meant to go on in an ordinary way but were now just memories." (p. 18) Ordinary life, memories, mystery, and fate - they're all here in this book. A great choice for senior high school fiction collections. Highly Recommended. Joanne Peters is a teacher-librarian at Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, MB.
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