Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
My rating: 4/5 cats
To describe how you feel after a girl explodes in your pre-calc class is a tad tricky.
when i read the first 30-odd pages of this book as a netgalley preview, i was AMPED. it had so many things i loved – spontaneous combustion, leonard cohen, bleak house, plenty of cussing and mara – a sarcastic narrator whose response to her schoolmates suddenly blowing up into little bloody pieces is not to be scared or sad, but to make completely inappropriate jokes, or deadpan the situation:
Here’s what happens when a guy blows up during your group therapy session that’s supposed to make you feel better about people blowing up. The group therapy session is officially canceled. You do not feel better.
this is my kind of girl!
i was so excited to read the whole thing that i was very bad – i bought it the day it came out – on my birrrrthday – and i pushed it ahead of other books i was “supposed” to read, figuring it was YA so it would be fast and i would just love it to pieces before returning to my “oughtta” reading list. but i gotta say, despite a really strong open, it kind of meandered its way through the story without a clearly-defined purpose, and i didn’t love it as much as those first thirty pages.
i love the idea of it – spontaneous human combustion is a criminally underused premise for a book, especially the way it’s used here – not as an isolated incident, but as an epidemic that plagues the senior class of a new jersey high school, causing students to suddenly essplode into bloody bits. there’s no identifiable cause for the phenomenon, and no way to predict who will pop off, which adds a delicious blanket of WHO WILL COMBUST NEXT?? to the proceedings. at the outset of the phenomenon, there are plenty of theories and speculations floating about the causes – starting with the knee-jerk racist accusation of “terrorists,” since the first two kids were darker-than-snow complected: turkish and chinese/korean, followed by blaming everything from sexual orientation to drugs, searching for overlapping characteristics between the kids and grasping at straws.
it soon becomes clear that these kids don’t have anything in common except being part of the same class and that even students who transferred or tried to leave town are at risk.
the FBI rolls in to investigate and quarantine the students, while the remaining kids try to cope any way they can – sex and drugs and rock and roll (in the form of bon jovi, but still…), drinking, parties, distracting themselves with projects, or investigating the situation on their own.
but the book kind of falls apart, particularly in the relationships between the characters. at the start, mara and tess are inseparable and their relationship is strong and funny and sweet – they even have their own driving mixes to play loudly and scream-sing to as they roll through town. even when mara starts dating dylan, an enigmatic fellow around whom many unsavory rumors swirl, the relationship doesn’t come between the girls, and the three baby-sleuths team up with special agent carla rosetti to get to the bottom of the combustions. but at some point, tess just drifts out of the narrative, with only a vague, weak explanation for her absence. the relationship between dylan and mara is also a bit dubious – coming out of nowhere and requiring the reader to just get on board and not analyze how and why it came to be apart from him being …sad. And dangerous. And fascinating. the same unconvincing quality affects mara’s voice – as much as i loved the opening snark and “fuck this shit” attitude, she rarely sounds or behaves like a teenage girl, even one of the badass variety. she’s wildly inconsistent – she’s independent, but jealous of one of dylan’s exes to the point of confrontation; she’s a bit of a loner, and yet she’s suddenly the mouthpiece rallying the remaining students to action; she’s extremely close to tess, and yet she avoids her for most of the second half of the book. and she’s straight, but there’s some lesbian subtext that is never addressed or explored. she and tessa cuddle a lot, including head-in-lap snuggling, they are very free with the “i love yous” and “sweeties” and hair-braiding and kisses, which might just be the way a male writer thinks teen girls behave (it’s not really – i’ve never put my head in the lap of a female friend unless i was angling for more), but there’s also mara’s fascination with special agent carla rosetti. at first, it’s hero-worship admiration and awe for a powerful lady with a cool car and a badass job, but there’s also this:
As she bent over and her hair brushed my face, I gave her a good sniff.
A little weird, I admit. But also informative.
Rosetti wore perfume. Nice perfume. Not that I expected her to smell like coffee and gunpowder, but it was surprising how subtle and soft her scent was. Undergarments were now something to wonder about. What manner of lace was rubbing up against her holsters?
now maybe this is another thing a male writer thinks teenage girls do – speculate on the undergarments of other females (they don’t. again, not unless they want to see those undergarments scattered in their sheets. sorry to prick that balloon, dudebros (that is a balloon in your pocket, right?) but all that pillow-fighting and casual nudity 80’s horror movies convinced you went on all the time whenever two or more girls got together? urban legend.
it’s just a little frustrating that it’s out there without being addressed.
while we’re pointing out negative reactions – special agent carla rosetti does not act like an FBI agent any more that mara acts like a real world girl.
but these are just little complaints. okay, medium-sized complaints. i did enjoy the book overall. it’s frequently funny – there’s a wonderful scene in which the president addresses the students that had me lol-ing, and i think SHC-as-metaphor for the specific unpredictability of senior year is a neat trick – it captures the uncertainty of the future for these students, the way that people are going to just vanish from your life as everyone scatters to their different colleges and transition into adulthood, close relationships are going to falter, people will be left behind. exploding teens gives a nice carpe diem urgency to those who remain unexploded, but who could be set off at any moment. because that’s just what teenagers need, right? more encouragement to live in the moment without regard for the consequences?
i also enjoyed the shift in the reactions to the explosions, which continue throughout the book. after they’ve gone on for a while, people shruggingly adapt to the combustions as just something that happens sometimes.
…someone needed to tell the victims’ stories. I promised I’d be that someone. It was a promise I most certainly did not keep. Because when things really went off the rails, when spontaneous combustions were so common that we hardly stopped classes for them, when my blood alcohol concentration reached whatever blood alcohol concentration is required to make blackouts a daily thing, I began to lose track of who the victims were.
i dunno – it’s a good book, but not a great one, even though it does rock the leonard cohen. but i agree with mara – it’s an oddly sexxy song to play at the funeral of a teenage girl.
but a million points for giving me a spontaneous human combustion novel. the world needs more of them!
for more of these, check out: http://explodingactresses.tumblr.com/
*******************************************
NOW AVAILABLE!!
which means that today is my BIRTHDAY! which means i can buy this book for myself for my BIRTHDAY! which sounds nerdy and sad, but is NOT!
*******************************************
i read the 32-page sneak peek of this that is up on netgalley right now:
https://s2.netgalley.com/catalog/book…
this is a YA novel about spontaneous human combustion that not only comes out ON MY BORNDAY, but also uses my favorite dickens novel (Bleak House) as its epigraph and also, in the first 32 pages, features a leonard cohen reference; l.c. being my favorite singer/songwriter.
so it’s pretty much the best thing ever.
it is also, i realized once i’d finished reading it, by the same guy that wrote The Riverman, which is itself a pretty rad book.
also, it’s a YA novel about SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION.
and if that’s not enough to make you want it, i feel sad for you.
i cannot WAIT until i can read the rest of it.
