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Sharla

by Budge Wilson

The designation “young adult literature” is a confusing label to everyone concerned. More than one writer, having written about adolescence, is surprised to learn at the publisher’s gate that he or she is a young adult writer. The American Book Award-winning writer Ouida Sebestyen once said, “Here I am, an OAP [Old Age Pensioner] apparently writing for YA. I thought I was just writing.” Publishers run hot and cold on the marketability of young adult books. Bookstores are flummoxed, frequently throwing up their hands and putting all juvenile fiction into a young adult bay, where Betty Waterton lies uneasily beside Linda Holeman. In my library, the YA section, respectfully distant from the children’s department, is nonetheless chiefly populated by 11-year-olds. And the real young adult readers, the high school students? They are reading all over the map, blithely ignoring us old adults, in this as in so many other areas of life.

The prolific and versatile Nova Scotia writer Budge Wilson provides a laboratory case in the vexing young adult conundrum. Her short story collection, The Leaving (Anansi, 1990), mines the timeless territory of adolescence—the sudden shifts in perspective when we see our parents and teachers in a new light, emerging sexuality, the feeling of imprisonment, the increasing complexity of moral choices, and the escape hatch of metaphor and poetry. This collection won the CLA Young Adult Book Award and I have recommended it to many teenage readers as well as adult friends. However, the stories were originally published in adult literary magazines and the collection was not published on a young adult list. Nor does the format of the book with its quality paperback size and understated cover and design suggest young adult.

Budge Wilson’s latest novel, Sharla, tells the story of a 15-year-old girl recently moved to Churchill, Manitoba. Sharla’s father has lost his well-paid job in Ottawa and the family is trying to cope with the tensions of a new home and a changed financial situation. Angry at her parents, emotionally on edge, cynical about life in the “polar bear capital” and disgruntled with school, Sharla accepts a clandestine part-time job with a handsome photographer who is visiting Churchill to do a photo essay on the community. She goes along with the photographer’s dangerous and illegal plans to bait the polar bears to attract them for close-up shots. In the aftermath of the resulting near-catastrophe, Sharla sees the photographer and her life from a new perspective.

As in the stories in The Leaving, Wilson here presents a well-crafted and convincing portrait of a teenager trapped in her own misery. In response to tension, Sharla becomes emotionally frozen. Wilson captures that dreadful teenage feeling of waiting, waiting for real life to begin. The emotional shape of the story, freezing and thawing, cold and warm, inert and protean, is echoed in the setting. Churchill in late October is a town waiting, expectant, for the bay to freeze over and the bears to appear. Sharla finds some release in basketball and some in poetry but it is in her relationship with the natural world, in her two encounters with the polar bears and in the final scene gazing at the northern lights, that she is able to transcend the morass of adolescent solipsism that she describes as “trapped inside my own head with the blinds pulled tightly down.” Her encounters with the bears are encounters with grandeur. “Standing on his hind legs. So enormous, so dignified, so elegant. Looking at me.”

Sharla is clearly published as a young adult novel, with mass-market size and the obligatory close-up portrait on the cover. The package here is different from the short stories but is the real content? There are some stylistic differences. Sharla contains more dialogue than Wilson’s short stories. The narrative voice is less complex. Many of the short stories are told as flashbacks, thus providing the stereo voice of adult and youth, recollection and immediacy. Sharla speaks with unadulterated teenage cadence and diction and the present tense narrative gives the novel a kind of stylish coolness. Some of the effects in Sharla are more obvious than those in the stories. Her friendship with schoolmate Theo involves discussions of anger management that feel a bit talky and contrived. The stories in The Leaving give readers more room to draw their own conclusions.

At its heart, though, Sharla comes from the same world as The Leaving. Both show respect for the realities of adolescence, for its pain and for the seriousness of its immense questions. Both capture the young adult’s passionate desire to be heard. And both illuminate moments in which our lives are deflected from their prescribed courses, the moments in which we most truly become our unique selves.

Young adult literature? About teenagers or for them? In an ideal world we would jettison the labels and simply read, for the pleasure of language and story and for insights into who we are, who we have been, and who we might become. These pleasures and insights are ones that Budge Wilson skillfully reveals, regardless of the package.

 

Reviewer: Sarah Ellis

Publisher: Stoddart Kids

DETAILS

Price: $5.99

Page Count: 163 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-7736-7467-5

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1997-11

Categories:

Age Range: ages 12+