is a difficult book for me to evaluate, because there is no way Im going to enjoy reading about the bullying and psychological torture of young kids.
For that matter, I am illdisposed from the very beginning to like reading about private academies for privileged kids.
There are some aspects to the plot that intrigued me though, and I wanted to see how they played out.
It seems like there are only two types of students at Mariana Preparatory Academy in Nye, Massachusetts: incredibly cruel, or incredibly stupid.
The former prey on the latter, as you might expect, The faculty isnt much better, but to describe them we can add a third category: ineffectual,
The story is told from three points of view, Iris Dupont,, a new student at Mariana, wants to be a reporter, Her hero is Edward R, Murrow, and she frequently conducts “conversations” with him in her head, She and her family are residing at the temporarily empty house of the former Mariana headmaster who is away in London.
Iris is sleeping in the former bedroom of the daughter, Lily, who provides the second point of view,
Lily is an albino who attended Mariana at the same time as one of Iriss teachers, Jonah Kaplan.
Jonah tells the story from the third point of view, Jonahs twin brother, Justin, used to be Lilys boyfriend,
One additional main character has a large role in the story but no point of view of her own, and that is Hazel Greenburg, a contemporary of Lily, Jonah, and Justin, who is
important to all of the other characters.
Marianas environment is intense the students are under pressure from their parents to perform academically so they can get into the best schools.
They also are subject to the usual adolescent stress to belong, to fit in, and to be popular, Fueled by the influence of a few unbalanced individuals, they come to take all of this tension out on each other.
Miller is showing us an “extreme” ecosystem, which is the focus of Jonah Kaplans curriculum in science class, As the author explains:
"Extremophile is a scientific category, which literary means “extreme loving, ” The name applies to microscopic organisms that thrive in places inhospitable to life, I think thats a pretty apt summary of teenage life”
And yet, as Mr, Kaplan explains in class, these organisms cannot survive in a “normal” environment, They are trapped, just as the students are trapped in the prep school with its distorted survival mechanisms, Some survive by attacking those who are weaker some react to the isolation and despair by capitulation to the mutant social system and some even choose suicide.
Iris wants to believe she is better than the others, but she, too, adapts to her new habitat, Even Edward R. Murrow, Iris is finally forced to admit, harbored a complexity and darkness at odds with his public image,
Discussion: One of the recurring discussions in the book is over whether those who give in to the bullying of or entrapment by the stronger students are culpable.
As one victim thinks to himself:"You are gullible and disgusting you brought all of this on yourself, ”
It is interesting that every single one of the victims has a similar reaction,
The bulliers justify their behavior in a similar way:"People act within their nature, The victims didnt have to participate but they did, ”
The collaborators in bullying too have excuses:"What were we supposed to do We trusted that person, who changed our lives, pulled us out of our pitiful, weak existences.
”
At the end of the book, most of the bulliers have not learned anything, nor have the collaborators.
This is perhaps the scariest message of the book, Maybe they couldnt live with themselves if they thought they were wrong, But maybe whatever made them act like that in the first place is so strong that they are impermeable to selfdoubt.
Im not sure how Iris comes out of this, She knows she “had become lost in a moral maze” but she is still so lonely and in search of connection that its not clear the choice she makes at the end of the book is any wiser.
Evaluation: The author did a fairly good job of keeping my interest in spite of my dislike of the subject matter and virtually all of the characters.
I cant honestly say I had fun reading it it is a pretty nightmarish story, But I wouldnt hesitate to recommend it for a book club: there are plenty of issues in this provocative book to keep any discussion group happy.
Iris is a fourteenyearold aspiring reporter whose parents move to get away from everything, enrolling her in Mariana Academy a private prep school with so many secrets just waiting for her to discover.
Iris is kind of a loner, but she thinks she's found someone who understands her in her science teacher, Mr.
Kaplan Jonah, because of their shared experiences, In an effort to better understand her new world, Iris sends herself undercover, investigating Mr, Kaplan's own time spent as a student at Mariana and Prisom's Party, a secret society at the school that exposes secrets and scandals as they see fit.
The story is told from three perspectives Iris's, Jonah's, and Lily's Lily's part takes placeyears earlier, when she and Jonah were students at Mariana.
At first, their voices sort of blended together because they sounded so similar, but as the book went on, I really enjoyed the different narratives.
All were telling the same story, but at different points, and from vastly different perspectives, I loved getting to see Iris investigate a mystery she really knew nothing about, while Jonah stressed about how past and his present converging, and Lily describing events in her own life as they unfolded the same events that Iris was looking into and Jonah continually thought about.
I'm not quite sure how to classify this book, It wasn't a full mystery or thriller, despite the secret society aspect and the fact that Iris was trying to investigate something, and it wasn't a young adult/teen novel despite Iris's age and the high school setting.
Instead, the book was fairly quiet with so many thoughtful sentiments and a lot of interesting turns, It's not a style that's for everyone, I'm sure, but I loved it, The writing was beautiful, and I continually highlighted passages because of how much the sentiment resonated with me, I'd actually originally borrowed this book from the library but because I couldn't renew it, I ended up buying a copy I'm glad I did, as this is one I may reread or reference in the future.
It was just beautiful.
The best part of this book, for me, was not the plot itself or even the characters.
I simply loved the way that the author used the story to illustrate without a heavy hand! how high school experiences stay with you and mold you into the adult you'll eventually become.
I loved seeing the ways these characters responded to problems and how they'd grown or not due to circumstances they'd been thrust into and choices they'd made.
It was such a nice depiction of secrets and longings and how everything mixed together to manifest itself later in life.
There was a lot of retrospect and thoughtfulness throughout, and it was exactly the sort of slowpaced book that is probably underrated overall but just so good.
I loved so much about this book and would easily recommend it to others with the disclaimer that it's not action packed or particularly thrilling but simply a really wonderful story about the complexities in life.
I'm so glad I read this and will be definitely picking up future books by this author,
The mystery in this story was enough to keep my attention but I did not warm to many of the characters and I think that really took away from the grand scheme of things in this book.
If I had to sum this book up in just one word, it would be FUN, When I think about it, I imagine everything in the book taking place in superbright Technicolor, but also having a kind of retro sheen it has a distinctives/s feel, which I think made it a particularly enjoyable experience to me because I grew up reading the YA novels of that time.
It is an adult book but it's also something of a love letter to that particular type of YA think Point Horror/Point Crime and, one of my personal favourite series that probably nobody else remembers, The Mystery Club that now seems rather quaint.
It certainly has dark themes but it's a very easy read and has a lightness of touch that stops any of the bad things that happen from actually seeming at all horrifying.
It would make a good film!
Things I liked:
The setting, Obviously. It's a private school with a strange history, full of privileged, competitive kids behaving exactly as you would expect them to, except this school has a weird, zealous emphasis on equality and a rather liberal interpretation of whatever its curriculum is supposed to be.
It's instantly captivating.
The plot is a proper, oldfashioned mystery, The kind where everyone has terrible secrets and has done dark deeds and all the characters are a little eccentric and possibly mad.
I mean, there's a secret society that publishes newsletters exposing staff and pupils' misdemeanours! And nobody knows who they are! How could you not want to know more about that
Iris is a really engaging heroine.
Once I got past a bit of initial annoyance at her precociousness, I was completely rooting for her to get to the bottom of the mystery and succeed in her aspirations to be a prizewinning journalist.
I even loved her imagined conversations with Edward R, Murrow, to the point that I was annoyed when her love interest was introduced because I knew she'd be speaking to him instead.
Although I liked Iris a lot, I was glad the other narratives Jonah and Lily had been included because, if there hadn't been at least one adult voice, this would have felt too light to be classified as anything other than YA.
That said, it still reminded me of all the best things about the YA books I read when I was a nearteenager/young teen.
It's occasionally schlocky, silly and even slightly surreal, but all the better for that!
Reservations I had:
The opening is too fastmoving.
There's no sense of Iris adjusting to Mariana and no real suggestion of how she feels about being uprooted and thrown into an unfamiliar environment nor does it seem like any of her new classmates react to her at all.
While I enjoyed the oftenquirky description, the book sometimes felt like it was a little overwritten,
Iris and Jonah's narratives are too similar, stylistically speaking, to be believable as individual voices,
Some of the details stretch the truth too far, even for a YAalike novel, for example .
Hovering around.
I think Miller put her money on a “proven” formula: prep school secret society narrative gold,
Heres what we got: Prep school secret society flimsy characters a dash of wtf why did I fall for this, get me out of here.
I knew I was going to be annoyed with ayearold “journalist, ” Overly inquisitive, irritatingly dedicated. That fly buzzing around your head, Wouldn't have felt this way if I found Iris clever, witty or winsome, But she ended up being likesteps behind “the enemy” and quite clueless in the end, I wanted a Veronica Mars, and I got a kid playing grown up,
So I skimmed it, Not the whole thingjust likeof it, And by skimmed I mean, I read the dialogue and could give a crap about all the mundane descriptions and shallow commentary.
That all became filler, just puffing up the book so it doesn't seem like you can pretty much get the full sense of it in the dialoguebut you can.
And then the structure of the book gave me friggin whiplash! Why did anyone think it was a good idea to havedifferent perspectives that change every single chapter It reminded me of Thirteen Reasons Why that book I loathe and how it was so frustrating having to actively think,Ok, this is Clay talking now.
Same thing happened here, Your characters, Miller, do not each have welldefined, distinct voices, so all the voices sound the same, I often read a chapter thinking it was Iris voice when it was actually Jonahs: Confusion ensues, I think you have to be really good at character development to handle that many perspectives, and I'm not convinced Miller is.
But I appreciated the attempt at intellectualism, The book is separated intosections, introduced with a quote from a scientific text Iris comes across, called “Marvelous Species: Investigating Earths Mysterious Biology.
” Anything thought provoking about The Year of the Gadfly comes from these quotes and how they relate to character behavior throughout.
For instance:
“These extremophiles thrive in darkness, feeding on poisonous methane and sulfur gases, The renowned molecular philosopher Lucinda Starburst has written that intraterrestrials grow strong on substances utterly destructive to human life, and yet they shape our lives at the most fundamental level.
They force us to reexamine what it means to create and destroy, to benefit and harm, ”
Extremophiles, intraterrestrials, whatever you want to call themtheyre a cool source of comparison to what the books secret society, Prisoms Party, is and stands for.
But it somehow turned juvenile when the characters started referencing it, Let readers infer what they will from the quotes retain a modicum of subtly, Instead, we get a teacher who introduces the idea at the very beginning of the book, with that nauseating, condescending contrarianteacherchallengesaclassroomswholeperspectiveonlife cliché.
Reallyget me out of here, .
Gather The Year Of The Gadfly Narrated By Jennifer Miller Accessible In Document
Jennifer Miller