YA or STFU

Story of a Girl, by Sara Zarr

Zarr, Sara (2007). Story of a Girl. NY: Little, Brown. 192 pages.

Sixteen-year-old Deanna is known as the school slut. Ever since her father caught her getting busy in the backseat of her older brother’s friend’s car, she’s been symbolically labelled with the scarlet “A.” It didn’t help matters that Deanna was thirteen at the time, or that her all-too-willing partner was seventeen. In the three years since the incident, Deanna’s father has been unable to forgive her or even look her in the eye.

When Deanna takes a summer job at a pizza restaurant and discovers that her former “flame,” the seventeen-year-old with whom she was “caught,” also works at the restaurant, she is forced to confront those issues from her past. While this sounds like a pretty dramatic set-up, the novel is pretty low key and it is this lack of drama that really lends credence to the story. Set in a small California town way outside of San Francisco, the novel conveys a sense of quiet desperation that would likely be familiar to the denizens of any nowhere town. Deanna’s family is a mirror of the setting and equally bleak: her father is angry and sullen and explosive in turns, her mother seems oblivious, and her brother and his girlfriend eek out a desperate existence in the basement of the house and take turns caring for their lovechild.

I know what you’re thinking: this one really sounds like a downer, and a boring one at that. In fact, nothing really does happen in the book; however, the story is more about living day-to-day with mistakes you’ve made than grand and life changing gestures. I don’t know why I ended up liking this book. Maybe it’s because it did seem so real. The characters are kind of stuck, but they negotiate small ways of working with their situations that speaks more strongly to resilience than any dramatic climax ever would.