The Collected Works of Sara Zarr

I have now read the entire ouvre of Sara Zarr, whom I wrote about the other week. Since she's only published three books so far, and even as a kid reading YA novels of this length and complexity only took me a little over an hour, this was not burdensome.

Zarr has some themes that come up again and again in her books, for good and ill. Among them:

1. She likes to write about parents who are not there even when they're there: an alcoholic mother, a father whose work as a pastor takes him away from his family too much, a single mother whose combination of work as a waitress and nursing school leaves her daughter feeling abandoned, a mother who pretends not to see the problems in her house. This helps set up what seems to be an essential situation for her (so far--it's early days yet, career-wise): a protagonist who feels isolated. I have in my day loved many a tale of family dysfunction, but as a parent I found myself irritated at the extent to which parents are absent. She's a literary writer, so it's more subtle than in much literature, TV, or movies aimed at teens, but she still sets up this dynamic where the parents are unreliable, while teenage friends are steadfast. Half of what goes wrong in these books wouldn't go wrong if these teenagers would just tell their parents something. I suppose that's the equivalent of there being no horror movie if they don't go into the basement, but as a parent I'd like to see parents who can be counted on.
2. She likes to write about aftermaths. In one book, it's several years after a girl was caught by her father having sex with an older boy; in another, a girl who was tormented by classmates in elementary school and has re-invented herself in a new school meets up again with the boy who was her only friend; in the third, the book begins not long after the protagonist's mother has gone into rehab. Sometimes this works--in Once Was Lost, the family dynamic that preceded her mother's commitment is well-drawn through a few flashbacks. Sometimes it doesn't; the plot of Sweethearts, the reunited-friends story, felt painfully contrived. And I still have not even remotely figured out why the protagonist of Story of a Girl was in that car having sex with that 17-year-old boy when she was only 13. I guess because Zarr just wanted to write a book about what happens when a 13-year-old's father catches her having sex.
3. She is willing to let her protagonists be annoying in a way that seems unnecessary to me. For instance, I thought Once Was Lost was her strongest book, and it is the one that deals most directly with faith, and does it well (Zarr is a Christian writer, but not a didactic one so it's not always obvious). But for the sake of plot and drama, I guess, she lets her otherwise-smart protagonist repeatedly wander off alone without telling anyone in the days immediately after a girl from her church youth group has been abducted and is missing. By the second or third time, I just wanted to smack the kid. I suppose it was meant to tell us something about her mental state, but it grated on me.
4. Zarr likes problems that can't be solved, or that can only partly be solved. I wrote before about how, at the end of Story of a Girl, there's been no dramatic resolution--just one tentative conversation between the girl and her father. In Sweethearts, the reunion of the two childhood friends leaves the girl wiser, but her friend is still an emancipated minor who has nowhere to live and is torn between trying to start a new life for himself and wanting to be a presence for good in the lives of his younger siblings. This is one of the things I like about the books: the protagonists wrestle with real problems (if a bit on the dramatic end of the spectrum) and, just like in real life, they can't all be solved, or at least not completely. In this way, in that she invites her readers to think about the mix of happiness and sorrow in life, Zarr is very respectful of the children she's writing for.

Zarr's books raised some interesting questions for me as a parent, about whether I think of these as books I would or would not want my kids to read. On the one hand, I like the moral complexity, and that the kids in these books are dealing with problems and issues that are more substantial than whether the boy they like will ask them to the prom. On the other hand, some of the content seemed a little graphic, both with brief descriptions of sex and with portrayals of violent abuse. And all the sex there is, is bad: the 13-year-old taken advantage of by an older boy, a girl who makes out with (and maybe has sex with; there was one scene in which I honestly could not figure out whether they were supposed to have had intercourse or not) her boyfriend but turns off her mind and goes to another place while it's happening. I'm not sure I want my teenage daughter reading books in which other teenagers have sex, but if she does, I think I might actually like it better if the sex were nice and between people who really cared about each other.

These seem like books worth talking about, probably with teens who are mature enough for the content. But I also found myself wanting to start a reading group for moms, in which we would read YA novels together and our discussion question every month would be, "Would I want my daughter to read this? Why or why not?"