I remembered liking Libba Bray from a hundred years ago when I read Going Bovine but on reading that review it turns out that book was just “okay,” and so is Under the Same Stars: just okay.
In this case a three-part time frame set around the same loosely connected family and a quasi-mystery. The mystery: two girls disappear in a German forest during WWII presumed dead. The loosely connected family are the girls and the generations that follow – connected in some cases by family but more through place.
It is mostly a book that repeatedly and excessively emphasizes its theme (it all but quotes the poem ‘first they came for the X and I did nothing) that against moral outrage we have responsibilities to stand up and resist. And while the current political moment is not named, the book makes very clear the repeated instances of authoritarian violence and the obligation for people of good conscience to do more than passively observe.
This morning L. was telling me how her friends play a game where one child is excluded by the rest – the excluded game – and she was trying to explain that she wasn’t doing anything because she was just walking around with them. And while rushing out the door to camp was not the moment to get into bystanders and the immorality of inaction, I did strike me then, as it did when I was reading the book, how obvious it is that we should each act in the face of injustice and how difficult it seems to be to exercise that kind of agency and courage when the appeal of just walking around is so tempting.
Anyway, it’s not a very good book in that the characters are not that rich, the plot not all that surprising (you can call the outcome to the mystery pretty early on) and the theme so transparently aggressive that one does want to scream a bit (though reminding myself it is YA I’ll try to be more generous).
Literary Vice 