From Sandra L Rostirolla, author of the well-received Cecilia trilogy, comes this novel of twelve-year-old Sam, whose family owns a sheep ranch in Australia. The book opens with Sam’s dad calling a vet to come tend to a sick lamb, which arouses the ire of Ben, his older brother. Why does this decision anger Ben? According to Sam, it’s because Ben has a Monster. Everyone does, in fact. Monsters make people do things that are out of character: stay out all night, cuss their parents, bully their siblings. Determined to help Sam–and, later, himself–eliminate these influences, Sam decides to conduct Monster Research by stealing Post-It notes from his little sister and recording his observations, which appear throughout the novel in handwritten-looking pronouncements like “Fact #1 about Monsters: Most people don’t know they exist.” When Mr. Nesbit, a family friend, dies by suicide, Sam writes: “Fact #2 about Monsters: If we let them get too hungry, they can swallow us whole.” There is a risk in this sort of framing device, which is that it can backfire, stripping out the novel’s complexity and reducing it to a meme. (On the other hand, it can take on a life of its own, developing a following-within-a-following, like Gibbs’s rules from the television show NCIS.)
Here, Sam’s Monster facts work, acting like little Psalms in what amounts to a theological treatise disguised as a YA novel (Fact #23 about Monsters: They can make you believe you are one). The “Monsters” are, of course, not literal but personifications. They represent not the bad things that happen in life, but how people respond to such stressors. Rostirolla posits a world in which people are not naturally jerks, or beaten down, or suicidal but only under the influence of unseen, unnamed overlords. In that way, the book is an update of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. Rostirolla scarcely describes her Monsters, which some readers might consider a weakness. Instead, it’s a strength. Monsters aren’t monsters because of how they look but because of what they do–or, better yet, what they are. Like evil itself, they have no origin, no motive, no raison d’être. Fail to take them seriously at your peril.
Sam is a masterful narrator, insightful and un-selfconscious. Some lines impress with their visual simplicity (dust trailing a pickup truck “looks like smoke from a dragon”), others with their wit (“When it comes to girls, I don’t have Ben’s confidence. Or his dimples”). Still others remind us that, though YA narrators are precocious, they are still just pre-teens (a woman’s breasts “swing like happy melons in a hammock”). American readers may struggle with the Aussie diction–dag, esky, footy (for football), Akubra hat–but they won’t be sorry they spent hours or days or weeks with this haunting tale.
Sandra L Rostirolla combines C. S. Lewis-style theology with fascinating characters in her clever and entertaining YA novel, MAKING FRIENDS WITH MONSTERS.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader