You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott
My rating: 4/5 cats
Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder.
i think i’m gonna go ahead and give this five stars cats after all. because, confession time – as far as her non-noir stuff goes, i didn’t love her last two (Dare Me and The Fever) as much as i loved The End of Everything. i didn’t dislike them by any means (although many readers did), but i thought that while they excelled in their depiction of the darker aspects of teenage girlhood, as do all her books, the surrounding stories weren’t as strong as the one in The End of Everything, so as overall reading experiences they were a little shaky, but with these amazingly sharp scenes, descriptions, observations that were more than worth the price of admission.
this one, however, does both: it’s another exploration of the claustrophobic, secretive, grubbily emotional world of female adolescence, and ALSO an amazing domestic suspense novel. and by approaching the theme from a different angle this time; from the POV of the mother of a teenaged girl, abbot puts a little spin on ground familiar to her readers; a fresh perspective on the transition of girl to woman from a character who has both been there herself and is now witnessing it in her daughter.
That’s what parenthood was about, wasn’t it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn’t yours anymore but herself.
this book features an ordinary couple – katie and eric knox, whose fifteen-year-old daughter devon is a gymnast so gifted she actually has a shot at the olympics. oh, and they have a son, too, but drew’s not an accomplished gymnast, so he gets overlooked a lot. by them, anyway – doing his homework and reading books in gym bleachers where he is shuttled and dumped, all their attention focused on devon’s contortions and ambitions. the book, however, does not overlook him, and his quiet resignation and patience are among the most emotionally resonant scenes in the book, while his status as spectator allows him to observe many things the rest of the family misses while their attention is elsewhere.
this has all the familial tensions you expect to encounter in a domestic thriller – murrrrrderrrr, suspicion, temptation, secrets, an overfamiliarity with spousal habits making deviations from the norm stand out and cause apprehension…
but then there’s this extra layer of tension slapped on top because of the particular stresses, both financial and emotional, of being the parents of a high-performing child in a hyper-competitive environment where an injury could literally ruin the family, who have given up so much to the pursuit of devon’s dream.
because this path involves a ton of sacrifice. most of katie and eric’s time is spent taking devon to practice or competitions, reviewing the footage of her performances, and fundraising for the never-ending stream of registration fees, gym dues, costumes, coaching, travel expenses, etc, while their house and car slowly fall apart around them.
like the cheerleading in Dare Me, gymnastics is a perfect microcosm for abbott to eviscerate with her skillful picking apart of girl-culture and relationships. it’s a precarious path these girls are on, where a tenth of a point can make or break a career and there’s such a small window of opportunity available to gymnasts, before gravity and puberty end their careers, so there’s this intensity to everything they do. they are in a state of suspended animation, where hips and boobs are liabilities, and their bodies are machines to manipulate and propel like weapons. normal standard of beauty do not apply – torn-up and heavily calloused hands and feet are not only par for the course, but valued, and the gymnasts have iron wills, extreme abilities to suppress pain, and a ferocious drive, giving them an adult focus in their teeny gymnast bodies.
That was what gymnastics did, though. It aged girls and kept them young forever at the same time.
abbott thrusts the reader into a full immersion into this world, and it is incredibly effective. the book is primarily delivered through katie’s perspective, so it’s technically an outsider’s experience, but she’s supplanted so much of her own life to focus on devon’s career, she’s as tunnel-visioned as devon, and the scene where she goes to devon’s school and sees her, for the first time in ages, among regular teens instead of other gymnasts, is shockingly powerful.
abbott is so good at writing dread, at giving even innocuous situations a glaze of unease. it takes a long time for the death – the situation that drives the novel – to happen, but everything leading up to it – you can just feel things starting to bubble and there are all these heavy indications of approaching tragedy. it’s masterful. even when NOTHING tense is happening, abbott can make it feel so:
He’d never woken up, and the only sound now was his breathing, hoarse and ragged. For a second she thought she saw his lashes lift, the white of one eye looking at her, but she was wrong.
and her depictions of the other gymnastics-stage-moms – hilaaaarious:
Maybe it was all those arched backs, those manicured nails gripping water bottles, their glossy manes, the high, whinnying sounds they made, their beady eyes. It reminded her of the hyenas in Drew’s favorite animal book. They have excellent nighttime vision and hearing. True. They have powerful jaws and sharp teeth that they use to break open bones so they can feed. Also possibly true.
so, yeah – full five stars cats and a wicked disjointed review for this one, just to differentiate it as being tighter and more cohesive than those other books i gave four stars cats to but was really only feeling three-and-a-half.
and i just now realized i only gave 4 stars cats to The End of Everything.
whatever – i suck at math.
and also the balance beam.
if you were wondering.
