Title: The Sea of Tranquility
Author: Katja Millay
Publisher: Harcourt
Rating: WORTHY!
This is the kind of novel which ought to be banned, because it makes other writers feel like giving up in despair in the fear that we will not be able to write anything of this quality! It's a YA novel, but it's a YA at the grown-up end of the scale, and by that I mean not only that it contains language and sexual situations, but it also isn't afraid or shy of telling a mature and life-like story. The Sea of Tranquility is coming at you ready or not, and I almost wasn't ready!
The only real problem with a novel like this is that you either end up loathing the author for seemingly effortlessly putting together a magical tale which you wish you'd thought of first, or you end up adoring the author for putting together a magical tale even though it was seemingly effortless, and even though you wish you'd thought of first!
A couple of minor observations (note that this is a galley copy ebook I'm reading):
On p91 the conversation is a bit hard to follow - who is speaking?!! A bit more clarity would have been nice!
On P93 "you're lack of faith" should be "your lack of faith".
P367 conversation "who's speaking now?! confusion again
P381 "stepped foot" sounds clunky to me
Millay's effort wins this year's award for most obscurely mysterious novel! It also wins the award for best kick-ass phraseology, including gems like: "puddles of dumbass", "panty-combusting", and (please forgive me for this one, but I did say these were gems) "fuckuppance". And Millay knows 'interrobang', so she gets props for that, too. Maybe I'll like her! Or more accurately, maybe I’ll like her story-telling.
Once again my vow to avoid first person narratives is thwarted. Yes, thwarted. Millay also wins that award, too, since she has no less than two first person perspectives, fully integrated. Although I found this a bit confusing initially, because I’d thought the name of the narrator was merely a chapter title, I did develop a working relationship with it pretty quickly. By fully-integrated I mean that the names are not confined to chapter titles - they randomly appear in the narrative within the same chapter which actually works better for me.
Millay likes to flirt evilly with tropes, including your standard two guys and one girl triangle, but (and maintaining the trigonometry metaphor) she has an interesting angle on everything she writes, so I'm not nauseated by it. Her main characters are Nastya Kashnikov (was she named like that because it sounds similar to Kalashnikov?! I suspect it's not her real name), Josh Bennet, and Drew (as in drew a blank because I can’t recall what his last name is...ah, here it is: it's Leighton). This story starts out with a major YA trope of Standard Disaffected Girl meets Standard Ineffectual Boy, but there are twists galore, so let's start with those. I blew through ninety-nine pages without any effort at all, which is a really good sign. Can I be so lucky as to finally be reading both a hardback and an ebook that I like, and in tandem, too?! We'll see!
Nastya is a mute, but don’t read that as dumb. She's smart and has a really amusing view of her fellow students, but she has some serious issues, the major one of which seems to be that she's dead! That's what she says - she died, and apparently was resurrected, and having started thinking that this was a paranormal novel, I've been teasingly and skilfully led away from that misperception by Millay, so I think that this death is metaphorical: I think it's the death of a dream. Nastya was a really good classical pianist, but a hand injury has killed that. She was evidently assaulted, perhaps raped and now lives in fear of assault, but she refuses to be trapped by her fear and fights it at every turn.
A related problem which she has is that she can’t stand too much noise around her, and she's rather anti-social to boot - more than likely because she can't stand bustle, and the reason for that appears to be that it's harder for her to tell when someone might be approaching her threateningly with so much distraction around her. She hates to be touched, as one guy learns to his amazement when she puts him on the floor just because he idly grabbed her arm. She loves to run, and she isn't afraid to run late at night, but she carries what amounts to a kosh, and she carries pepper spray, and she's taken self-defense classes, and she will not listen to music while jogging because it would prevent her from hearing someone approach. So yes, she refuses to be crippled by her experience, but she is hobbled by it. For exmaple, she will never play the piano again! I'm not joking, but how she can feel that that part of her life is over when this girl seems to be doing just fine is a bit of a puzzler.
Her plan on entering her new school was to repel everyone by projecting herself as some sort of bad-ass goth, which she does rather well. She lives with an aunt, although her parents are still in the picture. She's small and pale and often runs until she makes herself physically sick. One time, very late at night, she ran so far that she got lost, but she arrived at Josh's house where he was woodworking in the garage. Nastya seemed to recognize this house without ever having been there before (there's a story behind that!). Josh drove her home even though it actually wasn't very far away.
Josh is a loner. His back-story is that his Mom and sister died in a traffic accident on a day when he would normally have been traveling with his mom, but he had switched that particular day to be with his dad. At lunch, he sits on a bench seat outdoors, but no one seems to want to come anywhere near him which fascinates Nastya the first time she sees him because she wishes she had that same power of repulsion. Josh (did I tell you how much I detest that name in YA novels?!) is taciturn and feared because of anger issues resulting from that tragedy. One time when Nastya gets a heel stuck in a crack between the pavers in the outdoor lunch area, and Sarah & co (Sarah is Drew's sister) start to make fun of her, Josh silences them with one short sentence, and later he tells Nastya that he won’t do that for her again. This annoys her because she didn’t ask for help, but it also further intrigues her. Of course, she's seated next to him in carpentry shop, a skill at which Josh excels. So is he Yeshua, and she's Miriam of Magdala?! Think about it!
Drew is intriguing because, ostensibly, he's your ladies man, who can charm his way into and out of anything. He's apparently often borrowing money from his sister. Nastya takes a liking to him but is not attracted to him other than that he amuses her, so when he invites her to a party one weekend she inexplicably accepts; then she gets nauseously drunk, whereupon Drew, who is friends with Josh, deposits her in Josh's care rather than take her home. Drew didn't take advantage of her apparently, and he left her with Josh because he knew Josh wouldn't do so either. Interesting. Fortunately for Nastya, her aunt works night shift so she's just able to get home in time, and her aunt learns nothing of her nocturnal shenanigans.
So yes, a gazillion issues, an amazing set of characters, and answers that come out and tease you unexpectedly. You bet I'm going to keep reading this. This is the most interesting and complex triangle I think I've ever read about, and it keeps evolving. Hipparchus himself wouldn't have been able to tabulate what's going on here. The dynamic between Josh and Nastya changes on a daily basis, and it seems like it's as much on shifting sand as it is on solid rock. The one thing which doesn't change is the quality of the writing, and the fascination I have with these two main characters. I'm now over halfway through this novel and I don't see the quality slipping by as much as an emdash.
The real joy of this novel is to see real characters; characters who are damaged, but coping, who feel like life has kicked them while they're down, and yet still they get up and find a way to move forward, if not move on, and in this motion, blind and blundering as it often is, they're somehow steadily stumbling towards, not away from each other. They're hurting, scared, and skeptical, but they're drawn not by some asinine YA cluelessness about what a real relationship is, but by believable motives and credible needs. And for a YA novel, these characters are so refreshing that it's like a cool glass of sparkling water after too many warm, sugary, and artifically colored sodas.
And it isn't just the two main protagonists. The third member of the triangle, Drew, is just as intriguing and complex as the other two, and there is a host of others minor characters who are anything but minor in the way they're portrayed. The resolution is good, but the ending is a bit too drawn out for me, with Josh and Nastya wasting time with non-issues or with artificially manufactured issues, but I'm willing to let Millay get away with that because the rest of the story is so masterful. Chapter 52 one of the most kick-ass chapters ever written. This is a solid recommendation for this novel and if you don’t read it I promise you that your favorite pet will die of heartbreak!
Including this one, I've recently read three novels featuring physically and emotionally damaged women. Lingerie Wars was simply thrown directly into the landfill by its author. Blind Date was good, but this one, The Sea of Tranquility is better. This one excels at what it attempts and was a true pleasure to read.
