Nova Ren Suma: The Walls Around Us

            This is a young adult novel about ballet and girls in prison. It’s also about selfishness, kindness, evil friends, and justice. Evil friends are a particular interest of mine due to a terrible friend I had. Friends who are destructive and dangerous, not just co-dependent but actually abusive, need a lot more time in young adult fiction, if only to give girls the vocabulary to deal with this phenomenon. Young adults live in a stew of emotional abuse, but often don’t even know how to call it by name, and of course they’re continually conditioned to be “nice” and put up with all kinds of terrible treatment.

            The main story here revolves around Violet and Ori, both ballet dancers. Violet is wealthy and privileged and spoiled. Ori comes from a poor and neglectful family. The girls become friends in the first place because Ori’s father has forgotten to pick her up after ballet practice for the umpteenth time. I’m fascinated by a friendship that seems perfectly healthy and normal at first, but the deeper we get into it, the more toxic and unhealthy it turns out to be. The two girls may be friendly and happy together, but Violet has Ori under her thumb so thoroughly that Ori can’t even articulate the trouble between them to herself. Ori is by far the most talented dancer of the two, but holds herself back to keep the jealous Violet happy, a red flag in any relationship. Violet has no interest in Ori’s disastrous home life or her future. In fact, Violet thinks that she is the one with the biggest problem in the world: two mean girls who bully her. 

            As the story starts, Violet is going to Juilliard for dance, Ori is gone, and we’re seeing the inside of a girls’ prison from the point of view of someone named Amber, in for killing her father. There’s a miraculous moment in the prison where all of the doors unlock simultaneously and all of the girls go free, in the middle of which Amber has a vision of Violet looking for Ori.

            I’m not sure this structure works, to be perfectly honest. As a character, Amber is unimportant except as a prison insider. The story is not in any way about her and treats her almost as disposable. The only time I’ve seen this before was in a middle grade novel called The Mad Scientists’ Club. The narrator was a member of the eponymous club but stayed in the background of every scene, purely a supporting player. It was so odd that I vividly remember noticing this when I first read the book in fifth grade. I even remember where the book was in the stacks of my elementary school library. Clearly it made an impression! Why would a book be narrated by someone that the book isn’t really about? I can think of two dozen good reasons! I feel like I should know the name of this narrative point of view. First person irrelevant? It’s so interesting when the narrator isn’t—or feels she isn’t—the protagonist of the story she’s in.

            This whole novel is that way, though. Violet seems like your classic protagonist, and even thinks she is the star of her story, but her story is actually all about Ori. Amber gets Ori as a cell mate and soon everything is about Ori. But Ori is the one character who does not get a point of view. She never gets to tell her own story. Her life is entirely circumscribed first by Violet and then by Amber. When Violet has some kind of psychotic break and kills the two mean girls with a box cutter, Ori finds her and takes the box cutter out of her hands, only then to be caught with it and convicted of a crime that the rich girl could not possibly have committed. When Amber loses her library cart privileges in the prison, Ori makes a deal to smuggle a hallucinogenic weed in from her garden detail to get Amber her beloved book cart back. That weed gets mixed into the meals and the entire prison population dies, poisoned. In other words, Ori helps Violet and that gets her sent to jail for murder. Ori helps Amber and that gets her killed.

            Structurally, the novel revolves around Violet’s secret: that she actually killed those girls and got Ori blamed for it. As readers, we don’t quite know that right up until almost the end. Amber has a similar guilt that she has to come to terms with, namely her role in sabotaging her abusive stepfather’s truck so that he died horribly in a vehicle fire. But she also feels guilty for getting that weed into the prison and poisoning the whole community. Needless to say, Amber tells her story from after death.

            There’s a peculiar moment near the end of the book when Violet and Ori’s old boyfriend Miles have gone to the abandoned prison to see the place where Ori died. All of the girls who died are still there, haunting the prison after death. The dead girls know that justice has not been done on Violet for her crimes, so they kill her and let the falsely accused Ori take her place, escaping with Miles, going on to Juilliard and dancing and the life she should have had. And I mean, it really happens. Real Ori takes the place of real Violet in the real world, even though Ori had actually died earlier. It’s like a new narrative replaces the old one because of justice.

            Violet is a terrible person, selfish and shallow and cruel, but like any good villain, she doesn’t think of herself as a villain at all. Her hatreds are justified, her actions are reasonable, and her hopes and dreams worthy of pursuit. Since she holds the floor, we believe what she says, but her story comes apart in the telling and the truth comes out. Violet’s half of the novel worked extremely well for me, reminding me of the brilliant Liar by Justine Larbalestier, A Separate Peace, and even Catcher in the Rye, all of the stories of adolescents tormented by their selfish or cruel acts committed on the cusp of adulthood. This would have been a terrific thing to explore in the juvenile detention center side of the story, where forty-two girls were imprisoned for acts that as a culture we have decided they are not old enough to commit consciously. Can a child murder? Do they really understand what they’re doing well enough to call it murder? Can they then be punished as though they understood?

            I rarely read books that make me question so much about their structure and even content, but with this one, I have some criticisms. Where did all of this magical realism come from all of a sudden just at the end that allows a prison full of ghosts to replace a living girl with a dead girl? Why is the magical realism so patchy? There isn’t any at all in Violet’s storytelling. Or is that because Violet is too prosaic to see the magic all around her? I question Amber’s role in the novel at all, given how peripheral she is as a character—she has no story. I’m full of ideas for how to rewrite this whole thing, in fact. Instead of Amber’s non-story, just tell Ori’s story from within the prison. We would lose Amber’s premonitory vision of Violet, but it’s just not that interesting, to be honest. Either amp up or leave out the magical realism, but don’t have it play such a crucial role only in the last twentieth of the novel. Maybe play around a lot more with guilt and innocence and let that drive the ending. Was Ori such a pure-hearted creature? Wasn’t she ever jealous of her wealthy benefactor? Was she ever petty and weak? Where was her ambition and strength of mind? She can’t really be only a saint and a doormat. People are more complex than that. Let Ori have some of the complexity, too.

            Structurally, this novel is about hidden secrets coming out and enacting justice upon the people who tried to keep those secrets. There is almost a sense of divine justice, in the sense of The Oresteia, especially The Libation Bearers. It’s justice almost the way we think of karma now, the balance of things somehow getting people back in a schoolyard kind of way. Violet surely did not deserve her good fortune after letting her friend get convicted for murders that Violet committed. How can the world correct that type of imbalance? This is a fantastic premise for a story that drives itself forward with unstoppable force. We want that justice. I’m reminded also of The Count of Monte Cristo, the absolutely exalting feeling of justice being done that we feel at the end of that novel. I’ve never thought about using the need for justice to structure a story before, but now I have to think about what other forces we might feel that would drive stories in similar ways. This feels incredibly important to me!