Book review: Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best by Maria Padian

This is a hilarious and heartbreaking story of two teen girls and the summer when everything changes for them. Both Henry and Eva are New Jersey natives and excellent athletes: Henry's a master on the tennis court and Eva is a graceful ballerina. When opportunity knocks for both of them the summer before their junior year in high school they throw open the door: Henry sees freedom from her overbearing father and a chance to build her talents on the court. Eva sees the chance to be the best as well as even more pressure to be graceful, lighter, more perfect on the dancefloor.

Soon, Eva's obsession with physical perfection leads her down the path to anorexia, and her health issues overwhelm everything else. But through it all these two best friends know that Jersey Tomatoes are the Best, and nothing will come between them no matter the distance.

Well, it seems Maria Padian had a bad case of bad book summary with this one.  The one on the back is actually an excerpt from the book, and out-of-context at that.  It makes it seem like the entire thing is just about them living in New Jersey and surviving it, when it’s actually about two friends who get into summer programs for their respective interests.  One learns that competitive sports should be about the game, not psyching your opponent out to the point where they mess up.  The other descends further and further into an eating disorder that apparently started long before the book does.

Like her previous book, Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, the book does live up to expectations where it counts.  The story itself is well thought-out, and the characters are, for the most part, interesting.  The basic writing is just as good as it was in her first book, too, with no clear flaws.  She writes clearly and concisely, with no instances that come right to mind where she overwrote and brought more attention to the prose than what it was trying to say.

When it comes to more complicated conventions, though, she does fall a little short with this one.  This book relies heavily on flashback scenes within the text, no indicators separating them from what’s currently happening.  The flashbacks are in past tense, while the current action of the book is in present.  As I said, the book relies heavily on these flashbacks rather than just having the scenes happen in real time, and it can get complicated and confusing, not to mention there are places here and there in the present tense text that switch to past (an editing problem, of course, but with so much jumping around it’s more of a problem than it might have been if the book had all been in past tense and some things were simply missed in the conversion).

Eva’s anorexia is handled realistically, I think, for the most part, but it gets a bit ridiculous when it comes to them actually sitting down and looking back at warning signs leading up to her being hospitalized.  A common symptom of extreme anorexia in girls is missing their period.  If I remember right, this is because the body is so malnourished that it uses the nutrients that would go towards preparing it for reproduction to sustain itself, and sometimes even eats the egg cells.  According to the book, Eva hasn’t had her period in almost a year, which would suggest that her condition got really bad a long time ago.  By all means, she should be extremely sick, if not dead.  If it weren’t for that, Eva’s character arc would’ve been fine.  As it is, it just looks like a bit of bad research and a lot of unhealthy denial on the part of pretty much everyone Eva knows.

For the most part, this is a good book, especially for one that alternates first-person points of view.  Padian tried some new things with the book that didn’t quite work, but they didn’t deter me from wanting to finish it, and I say that’s a whole lot of points towards her.  So, happy reading!

On writing LGBT YA books

In every area of writing, you find things that you shouldn’t do.  My specialty is young adult, specifically writing YA novels with protagonists who are on the LGBT spectrum.  The internet has created a bigger literacy of the terms among people who aren’t on the spectrum.  There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and the focus of this article isn’t on the allies but on writers in general.

What shouldn’t you do when writing a novel that has an LGBT lead?

Well the things vary.  LGBT stands for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender” which are all different experiences a human can have, even if the first three might seem the same to some.  Like any human experience, though, no two people going through the same one are going to have the same story.  What one person sees as stereotypical and degrading, another finds as their truth.  Stereotypes do often come from (stretched) truths at first, and to dismiss someone’s experience is to do them a disservice.

There are butch lesbians, effeminate gay men, bisexuals who enjoy a life of sex with both men and women, and transgender people who follow all the usual tropes of “feeling different” from a young age.

But that shouldn’t be all of who they are.  It’s true that many people with differing sexualities and gender identities participate in pride parades, in gay-straight alliances, in rallies for their country’s government to give them the same rights that are afforded to everyone else.  However, have you honestly ever met someone whose entire existence revolved around being different?  What a boring existence that would be, though I suppose this is where a hipster joke would go, huh?

Just because a character is different doesn’t mean you have to make them dwell on it the entire book, putting every free thought and moment into pounding it into our heads that they’re trans* or bisexual or anything.

With the uprising of self-publishing, you find more and more books with main characters who are on the LGBT spectrum, and that’s a good thing.  Commercial publishing houses aren’t always willing to take the risk of straying too far from the norm, not because they don’t want to, but they don’t have the faith that they’ll sell enough for it to be worth putting all the effort a commercial publishing contract entails just for one book.  Any company’s bottom line is its profit, after all, and in a society that is progressively becoming more accepting, the story of a white, straight girl falling for a handsome guy who sweeps into her life sells better.

I’m not saying issue books don’t have their places.  But we as a society are never going to get past seeing other sexualities and gender identities as different if that’s all that’s portrayed in fiction, which is more readily accessible to us than real life examples; only about one in ten people are gay, which is quite a high number in the big scheme of things, but statistics don’t tell us the whole story. You could have a whole town made up mostly of those groups of nine people, especially here in Maine where some town populations barely reach a thousand.  And while it’s true that sexuality is fluid, you’re more likely to meet an openly bisexual or gay person who admits that than someone secure in their heterosexuality.  Gender tends to be less so, from a combination of society’s expectations and how a person feels about it themselves.

Teenagers are more accepting of things that their parents and grandparents will shun.  While not all know exactly what to do or how to voice this, there’s still the chance in there to let them know that being accepting their gay friend or their trans* friend is okay, and doesn’t need to be a big deal.  Someone being on the LGBT spectrum doesn’t stop them from doing anything their friend who’s not can do.  So why aren’t there more books where an LGBT teenager worries about college, or is suffering a broken heart, or tries to mend their life after the death of a close friend or family member?  Why aren’t there more books where what they do is more of important than who they are? 

My guess is that it’s because with all the hoopla about gay rights and marriage and the effort to suppress them, society has shown us that it DOES matter that we’re different.  It extends everywhere, from looks to body type to things you have control over, such as your past times.  Comic book conventions aren’t seen as a gathering of people who appreciate the arts, but as a smelly, geekish festival to be mocked and avoided.  I would, personally, love to go to Comic-Con.  I pity the soul who wouldn’t! Comic book fans might get ferocious, but they have just as much excitement in their eyes when they meet Stan Lee as a teenage girl might get if they had the chance to go backstage with One Direction, or any other singer or band that’s popular right now.

People might be different from you, but they still enjoy doing things.  They’re not trying to oppress you by being LGBT or black or a comic fan.  They’re happy being left alone so they can live their lives as they see fit.  And that more than likely involves wondering what to have for supper more often than “What gay thing can I do today?”

Just think about it next time you read a gay YA book and have to consider how realistic you think it is.