For months (years?) my mum has been reminding me to get Poor Deer from the library. I’ve ordered it twice, failed to pick it up once, and finally – finally – read it. And it was worth the wait and don’t make my same mistake: go get it!
Though maybe not. Depends on your tolerance for the weird and disturbing, I guess. As Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer follows four-year old Margaret during and after a terrible accident in which her neighbour dies. Margaret tries to explain what happened, but her mother silences her attempt and ever after Margaret stays silent on her role in the tragic death.
Told from Margaret’s young child perspective (well, written as confession by the adult Margaret but through her younger perspective) the reader is offered the view of how peculiar it is to a young child to be told that a friend has ‘gone to a better place,’ and to then… look for her because she must just be away for a little while. How confusing it is to be young (and old) in the face of death, and how much more confusing when adults both refuse to hear the child’s experience and feelings and to infuse the experience with obfuscation and euphemism.
The creepier parts are when Poor Deer begins to follow-haunt Margaret. A constant physical reminder of her guilt that relents for some periods of her life and returns demanding retribution.
The heartbreaking parts are the many occasions when adults fail her. Well meaning neighbours, teachers, an aunt – who very late finds a way to offer the consolation that was needed decades earlier. That in these adult efforts to protect the child they mistake kind words for kindness. What Margaret needs – what all children need – is truth from the adults around them, and the trust from these adults that they can handle these truths. What crushes Margaret is not the guilt, but the inability to speak her crime and have it heard.
And so enter the written confession. The insistence that the truth be heard – however many versions Poor Deer offers. Asking the reader to hold all the possible outcomes at once and to listen.
Literary Vice 