The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith
Copyright 2010
Square Fish - YA/Fantasy-SciFi
358 pp.

I have mixed feelings about The Marbury Lens, a book in which a pair of glasses with purple lenses transport characters to another world, a dark place known as Marbury that has been ravaged by a disease that turns people into monsters.

Jack is not a very happy young man. 16 years old, reserved and uncomfortable in his home life with grandparents Wynn and Stella, born to an unwed mother and teased at school, the only thing that keeps Jack going is his friendship with Conner, who cares for him unconditionally. Conner and Jack are preparing to travel to England to visit a school at which they're considering finishing their high school educations. But, first, they have plans to party.

At the party, Jack gets drunk and is pressured to do things (besides drinking to extremes) that he doesn't want to do. He tries to stumble home but gets kidnapped. Helped by a mysterious force, Jack manages to escape but the worst isn't over. By the time he arrives in England, Jack has been severely traumatized. When a mysterious man gives him a pair of glasses with purple lenses, things get really weird. In Marbury, Jack and his friends Ben and Griffin must fight to survive. Jack is pulled back and forth between the two worlds and isn't certain what's happening. Is Marbury real or was his brain damaged by the drugs given to him by his kidnapper? Is it worth even trying to survive in such a horrific place? Is there anything he can do to save his friend when he discovers Conner has been claimed by the monstrous disease that turns people into "devils"? How is a ghost able to help Jack in both Marbury and the real world? Or, is the real world even real at all? Why does Jack feel compelled to keep returning to Marbury?

As I was reading The Marbury Lens, the most overwhelming thought to which I kept returning was, "This is coming from a very dark place." I wondered what happened to the author to prompt him to write something so dark. And, when I say dark I'm referring to violence and gore, fear for one's life, the terror of torture and attempted rape . . . seriously unfathomable dark, not the kind of things this mind could even begin to approach from a written perspective. An interview with the author included in the book confirmed that the author did, indeed, have some very bad experiences as a teen. I'm going to share the part of the interview I feel is most relevant:

" . . . The Marbury Lens is ultimately about how one tragic event can have rippling consequences over the timeline of an innocent's life. The Marbury Lens is about how Jack tries, arguably with varying degrees of success, to deal with that issue despite his obvious flaws and predilection toward blaming himself." The next book in the series (so far, there are two books but the author mentioned on Twitter that he hopes to someday write a third) explores how Jack's trauma effects those around him. As dark as it is, there was a point at which I felt the same unbearable pull to return to the book that Jack feels about returning to Marbury and I do want to read on.

What I disliked about The Marbury Lens:

While it's probably realistic in many regards, I found the heavy drinking to help the two main characters forget their problems distressing. And, it was pretty shocking to me that at a mere 16 years of age Jack was so heavily pressured to prove his heterosexuality. He was relentlessly teased and not without effect. All the way through the book, Jack keeps thinking, "F*** you, Jack," to himself, not only because he's traumatized but probably because the constant abuse and the feeling of being rejected (starting with rejection by his own mother) has damaged him to the point that you wonder if he can keep from taking his own life. Although he doesn't ever mention suicide as a possibility, Jack's self-loathing is worrying. However, when he's in Marbury, Jack's survival instinct is his dominant feature. So, you know he has the capacity to dig deep and find a way to emerge from trauma.

I've recently taken to reading negative reviews in order to find out what people hate about a book, either to compare my own feelings with that of others or just out of curiosity. And, yes, the heavy drinking, sex, the constant use of vulgarity, the graphic violence and gore were all mentioned in the 1-star reviews of The Marbury Lens (the book still gets high ratings, in spite of its detractors). There have been times I have flatly rejected finishing books for less, so I can understand the readers' sentiments. But . . .

What I liked about The Marbury Lens:

There are some fascinating aspects to The Marbury Lens and they kept me turning the pages. For example, although the book is incredibly gory, I wanted to know what Marbury was -- whether real or imagined. Jack isn't the only person who can travel to Marbury but is it possible that he's imagining everything -- both the real world and the gory parallel world to which he repeatedly travels? I also just happen to love survival, so I did my best to overlook the horrifying parts and focus on the survival aspect. I really enjoyed finding out how Jack and his friends dealt with challenges.

One of my favorite parts involved a train full of mummified bodies in the middle of a desert. How did the train get there? How did its passengers die? Those questions aren't answered (although the author hints at an explanation in Passenger, the second book) but the train, in spite of its horrors, contains an unexpected treasure trove that will help the boys in their fight for survival. And, occasionally there is a glimpse of that train, or its parallel, in the real-world portions of The Marbury Lens. In other words, I was intrigued enough to keep turning the pages.

Recommended with a family warning - Although The Marbury Lens is a Young Adult book, it's one I'd advise reading along with your kids if they are at all interested in it as young adults. There's plenty to discuss. Many of the scenes in the book serve as warnings of the dangers of heavy drinking, trusting strangers, not being honest with the adults in your world (although, fortunately for Jack, he trusts Conner enough to reveal most everything and it's only when he's not fully open that their friendship falters).

As a parent, those are some of the things I would talk about with a teenager, along with how to find the confidence to say "no" to things that make you feel uncomfortable. The teen years are rough and I'm all for opening dialogue to let your kids know you've got their backs. But, The Marbury Lens is definitely a dark read, maybe too dark for some. If you have a particularly sensitive, nightmare-prone child, I'd advise steering him or her away from The Marbury Lens. The book did feed into my dream life, although oddly not in a bad way. Had it produced too many nightmares, I probably wouldn't be interested in reading Passenger. But, it definitely has the potential to trigger nightmares. There are also oversized bugs that eat the dead. Eww.

Side note:  There's a ghost named Seth in The Marbury Lens and while I had trouble understanding how a ghost could do the things this one did (luring the monstrous "devils", helping people heal), I really liked that particular character. He has a backstory all his own, which is slowly revealed, and his presence adds an interesting dimension to the overall story. And, in the end, you have to realize that there's a fantasy aspect to The Marbury Lens that cannot be reasoned out. Best just to let go and see where the author takes you.

©2015 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo and an F2F Report

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Copyright 2013

Reagan Arthur Books (an imprint of Little, Brown and Co.) - Fiction

290 pp.

Source:  Advance Reader Copies were provided by Little, Brown and Co. for group discussion

What We Need New Names is about:

Darling is a 10-year-old child living in poverty in Zimbabwe.  She used to live in a nice home rather than a tin shack and had 2 parents rather than one struggling mother and an AWOL father. She used to go to school before things went horribly wrong in her country.  

Now, Darling and her friends spend their days roaming around, searching for food to steal and playing games.  Darling's aunt in America says she'll come for Darling, one day, and eventually she does.  But, when Darling arrives in America, she finds that life is different -- better in some ways, yes, but she misses her home and her friends.  And life in America is far from perfect.

In general:

We Need New Names is a very difficult read because of the horrors Darling and her friends observe and experience.  Through her eyes, you see rape, starvation, murder, political upheaval, an angry mob, the horror of AIDS and other injustices so common the children are inured to them to the point of turning the evils they witness into games.  There are humorous moments, but they're rare. The following quotation describes Darling's thoughts as she and her friends are getting ready to play "the country game":

If I'm lucky, like today, I get to be the U.S.A, which is a country-country; who doesn't know that the U.S.A. is the big baboon of the world?  I feel like it's my country now because my aunt Fostalina lives there, in Destroyedmichygen.  Once her things are in order she'll come and get me and I will go and live there also.

~ p. 49 of Advance Reader Copy, We Need New Names (some changes may have been made to the final published edition)

What I liked about We Need New Names:

I felt transported to a different world while I was reading from Darling's perspective.  It's hard for some of us to imagine what it's like to be so hungry that you'll gorge on stolen fruit with the knowledge that you'll pay for the theft with equally painful constipation, but during the months that guavas are growing the children in We Need New Names spend a lot of their time climbing trees in the nicer part of town, stealing the guavas and suffering the consequences. Otherwise they'll starve until the humanitarian aid trucks arrive (and what little food those trucks carry doesn't last long).  

While my Face to Face book group members and I agreed that We Need New Names had its flaws, it was certainly a learning experience reading about life in Zimbabwe.  And, it's always interesting to read about what it's like for a person entering the U.S. from elsewhere -- the culture shock and the disappointments of moving to a land that one has visualized as practically utopian.

What I disliked about We Need New Names:

This seemed to be a group consensus, although we didn't have a show of hands: Sometimes it seemed more like an adult was writing through a child's viewpoint than a true child's perspective because Darling knew too much.  Granted, a 10-year-old can be brilliant and very wise, but if you take the country game as an example, it shows a striking knowledge of geography and politics.  And, sometimes Darling seems a bit too wise for her age:

Gradually, the children gave up and ceased asking questions and just appeared empty, almost, like their childhood had fled and left only the bones of its shadow behind.

~ p. 76, ARC

The occasional simile or metaphor that sounded rather adult threw me out of the novel, but only briefly.  My biggest complaint would have to be the fact that I had difficulty getting into the book in the first place.  It did not grab me and suck me in until around page 75.  Because the description of the book reveals that Darling ends up going to America, I was also a little dismayed that her move didn't occur till the middle of the book.  I expected the story to be more about the culture shock and adjustment than her life in Zimbabwe.  

I wouldn't call Darling's delayed arrival in America a bad thing, though; it was just unexpected. I actually thought the 150 pages of life in Zimbabwe were the best.  Once Darling arrives in Michigan, she is surprised to find herself longing for her home and even having a bit of difficulty appreciating her comparative prosperity.

Here is where we dive into the group's thoughts:

Although We Need New Names generated such a noisy discussion that our group leader finally gave up and passed out a feather (only the person holding the feather is supposed to speak) to get things under control, it was a rather ragged and unfocused discussion, which is probably my fault.  I didn't think to seek out discussion questions and since I was the person who provided the books, I was expected to have done so.  My mistake. On the plus side, everyone had something to say and, in fact, there were a couple topics I thought about in advance but didn't get around to mentioning.

One thing about We Need New Names that really frustrated the members of my group was the fact that Darling was never really happy in America.  Once she arrived, she discovered America has its own problems with racism. She wasn't poor but she wasn't wealthy, either, and sometimes she could hear gunfire in the streets. The reality of America didn't match up with the America of her imagination, in other words.  But, was she merely disappointed with a less-than-perfect new home and frustrated with being an outcast or did she manage to blend in just enough to become a sulky teenager who was more American than she realized? In the latter part of the book it became apparent that, at least for Darling, immigration meant a life between two worlds, neither of which were comfortable.

Other things we discussed:

• Two particularly harrowing scenes involving one of Darling's friends, who was pregnant at the age of 10. 
• How the children reacted after seeing a young man murdered in the street.
• Whether or not children in general have a lesser sense of right and wrong than adults, based on a particular scene in which some wealthy white people become victims of a mob home invasion while the children observe (and what takes place after the destruction has ended).
• What probably happened to Darling's father when he went to South Africa to work in the diamond mines.
• The differing roles of men and women in a war-torn country. 
• Why Darling was unable to return to Zimbabwe from the United States and how envy and her unwillingness to tell her friends back home the real reason she couldn't return caused them to slowly stop communicating.
• The names in the book.  We agreed that we all enjoyed the unusual character names like Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro (the local minister), Godknows (a friend of Darling's), Mother of Bones (her grandmother). 
• The absence of Darling's mother during most of the book.
• The difficulties of immigration . . . which led to mention of A Good American by Alex George.  We'll be reading and discussing A Good American in September.  

A few topics that didn't come up but which are worth discussing:

• Darling's comments about how much easier it is to believe in God when you live in a place where it's possible for prayers to be answered vs. how easily she dismissed faith while living in extreme poverty and with very little hope.
• AIDS was mentioned but only briefly as it related to a particular character. We didn't really talk much about the prevalence of AIDS in Africa.
• I suspected Darling's mother may have fallen to sleeping with men for pay but neglected to bring that up to see if anyone else thought the author dropped hints to that effect. We did talk about how difficult it must have been for the adults to survive and keep their heads up when they couldn't even feed their own children.

The bottom line:

Recommended - An excellent group read but very gritty with harsh language, violence and frightening situations. Nobody at all said, "I didn't like this book" or "I just didn't get the point," and the group discussion was enthusiastic to the point that it degenerated and became kind of a chaotic noisy mess.  Even the feather didn't entirely do the trick when it came to calming the group down.  I think we all agreed that it was clear the author is a fairly new writer and the book could have been a bit more polished but everyone got something out of it and when our group becomes that noisy, it means there is more than enough to talk about.

I liked the author's use of similes:

Dumi's deep voice is a little rugged, like it walked all the way to America and is now worn out from the effort.  [. . . ]

She smiles, and I stare at her because of the way she smiles.  Like she is hearing music and she is dancing to it on the inside.

~both: p. 179, ARC

On a personal note:

The day I finished reading We Need New Names, I was in our former town running errands so I met my husband for lunch in a nice restaurant.  As we were sitting there with our bread and fancy butter in a puddle of sugary goo that neither of us ate much of because we were in the mood for a light meal, I found myself wishing there was some way to gather all that excess fresh food that we waste. I imagined a giant air tube sucking food from our Land of Plenty to wherever it's needed.  We Need New Names is definitely the kind of book that makes you look around and reassess the quantity of possessions you have and the food you don't eat -- things that could be useful to someone else.  

©2013 Nancy Horner. All rights reserved. If you are reading this post at a site other than Bookfoolery  or its RSS feed, you are reading a stolen feed. Email bookfoolery@gmail.com for written permission to reproduce text or photos.