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What is Real
by Laurie Neale
Reality is hard enough to find and understand when you're a teenager, but 17-year-old Dexter Pratt's life is more complicated than most. His parents divorced when he was young, his father attempted suicide, and his beloved stepbrother died of heroine overdose-or did he?
Addicted to the pot that he and his wheelchair-bound father, an ex-lawyer, grow in their farmhouse basement, Dex tries to navigate his way toward reality in Karen River's YA novel, What is Real?
One of the most compelling aspects of this novel is that, just like Dex, the reader cannot fully decipher what is real. The book is written from Dex's point of view, and since Dex cannot grasp reality, the reader cannot either.
What is real? Can you really trust your memory's account of the past? Can the nerve impulses that bombard your brain with raw sensory data be trusted, and can your brain be trusted to properly interpret these signals? And most of all, do you want it to?
Rivers' prose is splintered and abrupt, just like human thoughts can be, and her writing style creates a sense of immediacy and confusion by throwing the reader into the middle of the action, submerged in Dex's thought patterns, as clueless as Dex in his search for reality.
Dex's character is layered and convoluted. At the beginning of the book, you believe what he's telling you about his life. You meet him in the middle of a movie about his life in which he is the director. His only problem is that he has forgotten what the script is about.
Halfway through the story, you are no longer sure Dex can be trusted. He knows stuff that he can't-or won't-admit. You discover Dex has been withholding information from both you and his conscious self. He simultaneously searches for reality and obscures it, editing and re-editing his history like a filmmaker editing the final cut.
It's difficult to put down What is Real-literally-because we want Dex to discover the truth so we can, too. We search and question with him. We want to find out if Olivia is real, if aliens did create those crop circles, if Our Joe is really a pedophile, or if it's all part of Dex's suppressed, drug-induced imagination.
Ultimately, What is Real deals with the challenges of being a teenager and the difficulty of sorting through emotions, grappling with truth, and losing your innocent views of the world.
Karen Rivers has capably illuminated the teenage struggle to cope with life's challenges: losing loved-ones, being neglected, realizing you may not achieve your dreams and dealing with failure.
And, disturbing, she effectively reveals how sometimes living in reality isn't actually as desirable as living a lie.
[Laurie Neale is with the Print Futures program at Douglas College.]
Reality is hard enough to find and understand when you're a teenager, but 17-year-old Dexter Pratt's life is more complicated than most. His parents divorced when he was young, his father attempted suicide, and his beloved stepbrother died of heroine overdose-or did he?
Addicted to the pot that he and his wheelchair-bound father, an ex-lawyer, grow in their farmhouse basement, Dex tries to navigate his way toward reality in Karen River's YA novel, What is Real?
One of the most compelling aspects of this novel is that, just like Dex, the reader cannot fully decipher what is real. The book is written from Dex's point of view, and since Dex cannot grasp reality, the reader cannot either.
What is real? Can you really trust your memory's account of the past? Can the nerve impulses that bombard your brain with raw sensory data be trusted, and can your brain be trusted to properly interpret these signals? And most of all, do you want it to?
Rivers' prose is splintered and abrupt, just like human thoughts can be, and her writing style creates a sense of immediacy and confusion by throwing the reader into the middle of the action, submerged in Dex's thought patterns, as clueless as Dex in his search for reality.
Dex's character is layered and convoluted. At the beginning of the book, you believe what he's telling you about his life. You meet him in the middle of a movie about his life in which he is the director. His only problem is that he has forgotten what the script is about.
Halfway through the story, you are no longer sure Dex can be trusted. He knows stuff that he can't-or won't-admit. You discover Dex has been withholding information from both you and his conscious self. He simultaneously searches for reality and obscures it, editing and re-editing his history like a filmmaker editing the final cut.
It's difficult to put down What is Real-literally-because we want Dex to discover the truth so we can, too. We search and question with him. We want to find out if Olivia is real, if aliens did create those crop circles, if Our Joe is really a pedophile, or if it's all part of Dex's suppressed, drug-induced imagination.
Ultimately, What is Real deals with the challenges of being a teenager and the difficulty of sorting through emotions, grappling with truth, and losing your innocent views of the world.
Karen Rivers has capably illuminated the teenage struggle to cope with life's challenges: losing loved-ones, being neglected, realizing you may not achieve your dreams and dealing with failure.
And, disturbing, she effectively reveals how sometimes living in reality isn't actually as desirable as living a lie.
[Laurie Neale is with the Print Futures program at Douglas College.]
Submitted on May 26, 2011 in By David.
