Crushed (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Crushed
A newish junior at Jemison High, Audrey arrived with her two best friends, Lea and C.C., from a private school that topped out at the tenth grade, and they're negotiating the shift from a milieu of academic earnestness to something more of a free-for-all. Jemison gets more interesting for Audrey with the arrival of new boy Wickham Hill, and soon Audrey is involved with the sexy transfer student with the mysterious past. As is so often the case with the McNeals' work (see Zipped, BCCB 3/03), the protagonist's story is but one plane in a much more complex geometry. Clyde, a cripplingly shy classmate adores Audrey from a distance; Wickham, the result of an extramarital affair, struggles with rejection by his wealthy father and a past vehicular manslaughter charge; Audrey's father finally reveals to his daughter that the family has lost its money; a scurrilous underground newspaper prints student and faculty secrets. The result is a network of trajectories that bring surprising changes to everyone, but it's Audrey's journey in particular that the book features in an insightful portrait: a clearly good person, she nonetheless finds it plausible to do some bad things out of love and self-protection. The authors extend their own grace to their characters, so Audrey finds forgiveness and new possibilities after her follies; this isn't a behavioral directive so much as a sympathetic documentary of human interrelationships and the consequences of choices, with an underlying emphasis on the value of real connection. McNeal fans and other young believers in human possibility will find food for thoughtful hope here.
