Reading Elizabeth Scott’s Living Dead Girl reminds me of my friend John’s analogy of watching a train wreck. It’s a terrible thing, yet you can’t look away. Not only do you not look away, you keep looking to see what else might happen.
Briefly, Living Dead Girl is the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Alice who was abducted at age ten by a man named Ray. Ray has passed Alice off as his daughter in a seedy run-down apartment complex, the type of place where no one asks questions. Ray has also done all the things to Alice that you can possibly imagine. You can’t really say Alice is living. She goes through each day in a zombie-like numbness until Ray comes home from work each day. But she’s aware enough to realize she’s getting a little too grown up and soon Ray will want a replacement Alice, a younger Alice. Someone he can teach to become a “good girl.”
I’ve never read Scott’s other novels, Bloom and Perfect You, both YA romances. This is no romance and it’s certainly not pretty. Although Living Dead Girl contains no graphic sex, lots of things are implied. Thankfully these scenes don’t last long, but good luck trying to escape the memory of them. Scott could have made this an over-the-top sleaze-fest, but she doesn’t. Although a short book (only 176 pages and many of those consist of one or two page chapters), it’s not a shallow “Look what happened to that poor girl” novel. When we hear of stories like this in real life, most of us think or say, "Why don't you just leave? Run? Scream?" As Scott expertly shows, it's just not that easy.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a day-long conference called Their Space: Adding Teens to the Library. One of the presenters gave a seminar on reluctant readers. She spoke about several books, most of them she readily admitted have little to no literary value. But reluctant readers will pick them up and read them, books like Pick Me Up and Do Not Open, both non-fiction books that are sort of a combination of a visual almanac and surfing the Web. Reluctant readers, she said, are usually not interested in fiction unless it has to do with something realistic, such as Living Dead Girl.
So here’s the dilemma. Do you recommend a book that deals with child abduction, rape and torture to a reluctant reader? If a controversial book gets them excited about reading, is it worth it? I know my answer. Let me know what you think.
2 comments:
I think that whether or not you recommend a book like this depends on the person to whom you're recommending it. An older or mature reluctant reader might well be drawn in, a younger or less mature one--no, no way. That's hard to know in a brief interview though, especially in a public library, so I'd probably shy away from the recommendation.
It also depends on the ending of the book. One of the points my children's lit professor made was that children's and YA literature can be dark, very dark, but what makes it appropriate is whether or not it has a hopeful ending. Kids can confront dark things, and in many ways need to, but they also need to have a positive resolution.
That said, I could never read this book. My mommy brain would never get over it.
Laura
I think you're right, Laura. I can't see myself recommending this one to anyone I don't know really well. I also can't justify giving it to someone in the hopes it will get them hooked on reading. As a slight spoiler, however, the book does provide some hope. (But I don't think I could've read it if I had children either.)
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