YA New York

I have been searching for this book. Seriously, ever since all the hullabaloo (see this), I have been thinking that I really, really needed to read Cures for Heartbreak. Not just because of Margo Rabb’s piece in the New York Times, but also because Cures sounded like a genuinely awesome book.

And it is. It’s heartbreaking. (Duh.) And it’s extremely well-written. In the NYT piece, Margo says she had been working on this book for eight years, and I understand now why she felt that it was a bit of a slam to be told the book was YA. Don’t get me wrong. It is a wonderful book for teens, but it’s just as wonderful for adults.

The book opens with Mia, our protagonist, her sister Alex, and her father shopping for a coffin for Mia and Alex’s mom, who died twelve days after being diagnosed with cancer. (Margo’s mother died nine days after a cancer diagnosis, so this book is more than a little autobiographical, with an afterword talking about Margo’s own struggle with heartbreak.)

Any of us who lost parents at a young age will identify with Mia. Margo’s book is so very real, you can tell she wrote from a very intimate place. It’s the sort of book that could (and should!) be nominated for major literary kudos, and if the YA categorization hindered that, I’d be hopping mad.

My only quibble, and it’s a little one really, is that Margo wrote this book as fiction in the first place. She has fictionalized the details of losses she really experienced, and while I can see how it would help move the story forward more easily, I also feel like the raw emotion would almost be better suited in a memoir. It’s just so pure that, as a reader, I felt like Margo was taking something away from herself by fictionalizing the story. I could sense, reading the novel, that the emotions weren’t the sort of thing you could just make up, and long before I reached the afterword I knew there was a lot of truth in what I was reading.

Regardless, I am amazed by Margo’s ability to encapsulate grief the way she did, to bring readers along for the ride, and for some of us, to help us move through our emotions and understand them better. That, if anything, is the best reason I can think of for this book being YA. A sixteen-year-old who has lost her mom needs this book more than someone does ten or twenty years after losing a parent at a young age.

And now for a mea culpa: I was wrong. I mean, I wasn’t wrong that YA is awesome, but I was wrong about putting Margo into an anti-YA camp. Still, when all is said and done, I am very, very glad this book was published as young adult fiction, because otherwise I would never have gone looking for it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.