When Jules Rillingale arrives as a freshman at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she’s not sure what to expect. When she was a child, her now-deceased father once took her to this campus and showed her Elfland, an area of the woods where students decorated fairy circles and other shrines, including a tree circle named Peace. Jules’s parents attended UCSC, and formed the Sun-Greeters with their tai chi sensei.
Jules quickly assembles a group of friends around her: Her roommate, Patricia “Patches” Clark, G, a mysterious girl with green-dyed hair, dreadlocked Jack, and perpetually stoned Adam. Together they re-form the Sun-Greeters in tai chi class, and have soon been forged into a tight group that Jules leads in an effort to rebuild Elfland. Jules obsesses over Peace and the link to her dead parents, but Jack pushes another goal: To climb the legendary Tree 9, more than 100 feet tall. When they make the attempt, a tragedy changes everything.
Author Jen Ghastin treats her setting and characters in THE SUN-GREETERS with earnest sincerity. Jules ponders the question posed by G (“When’s the revolution?”) and sees secrets and enlightenment in an eight-pointed star symbol—which begins as a doodle on the pavement but takes on universal significance in her mind. Homelessness, identity, and freedom are contemplated with the stoned seriousness of a college freshman, as the group flirts with direct action to oppose war and the college’s connections to the military-industrial complex.
The writing can be fluid and inventive, but also frequently delves into the treacly and simplistic: “The ribs are supposed to protect the heart. But they can’t when they fully collapse like this. Sometimes you can’t protect your heart at all. Sometimes it’s supposed to break. Maybe that’s how it grows.” Jules takes her attempts at figuring out the mysteries of the universe with a sincerity that leads to overwrought passages that strain the reader’s ability to take her seriously:
In my mind’s eye, I saw a box severed in two halves, one black and one white, two opposites, one and not one. I wrote the words, “This is what I saw” and began to sketch the boxes. Underneath the halves, I wrote, “Binary’s broken.” And it made sense, like there’s no difference between one and two. Just one. Just God or the universe or light or love or consciousness . . . or you. There was always only just you, and you were everything. I sighed. My spirals always come home to this singular Source. Love.
Jules is a thoughtful and occasionally funny narrator, but also a very passive one. Her circumstances force her to observe and report throughout the bulk of the story, which robs it of drama and tension. Meanwhile, the other Sun-Greeters rarely exist as more than one-note figures: Patches is an aspiring journalist, so she is always in reporter mode; Adam is always high and fleeing his problems; G is angry and carries a mysterious back story that turns out to be very un-mysterious; and Jack is restless. We never really understand why they’re pulled to each other in the first place, or how they become so important to each other in just a few weeks. After the tragedy at the center of the story, the group breaks apart and they each deal with their specific problem—including an unplanned pregnancy, coming out of the closet, and getting arrested after a poorly considered act of protest.
The depth of detail given to the setting helps strengthen the story despite its flaws. Furthermore, anyone who has sat up late at night in a college dorm discussing how to avoid the mistakes of prior generations and make a difference will recognize the tone and cadence of the dialogue, which Ghastin nails. But a passive protagonist and uninteresting supporting characters make this less compelling than it could have been.
THE SUN-GREETERS, Jen Ghastin’s tale of young adults struggling against apathy, conformity, and their own betrayals, is earnest and occasionally beautiful.
~Jeff Somers for IndieReader