Cherry Heaven, by L.J. Adlington
Adlington, L.J. (2008). Cherry Heaven. NY: Greenwillow (HarperCollins). 458 pages.
It’s been a long time since I really savored a young adult novel and this sequel to Adlington’s The Diary of Pelly D. (2005) shook me out of the YA funk into which I’ve lately fallen. Told from the first person point of view of Luka, an imprisoned worker at a water company, and in a third person narrative sympathetic to Kat, a newcomer to the small “frontier” town in which Luka lives, Cherry Heaven slowly reveals the evil at the heart of a new community considered a model civilization. When Kat, her sister Tanka, and their foster parents travel from the war-damaged city to The New Frontier, a so-called “land of peace and prosperity” where both foster parents have found work, the sisters both anticipate and dread the relocation. Tanka, Kat’s gorgeous, ditsy sister, is hoping to meet good-looking boys and, in service to this goal, quickly ingratiates herself with the small community’s popular crowd. Kat is more thoughtful and less eager; however, when Tanka begins dating Aran, the son of a high-ranking community leader and business owner, she is curious about information he seems to be with-holding. Meanwhile, Luka, the imprisoned worker, has escaped the Factory and is lurking around Kat and Tanka’s home, an estate called Cherry Heaven Luka’s mother had designed.
Like The Diary of Pelly D., Cherry Heaven makes clear allusions to the Holocaust, particularly to the populations of Europeans living near concentration camps and ghettos who claimed ignorance of genocidal atrocities. The futuristic setting and its evocation obscure what could be an obvious allegory, however, and these details are part of what make the novel exquisite. Adlington ratchets up the suspense as Luka’s plan to exact revenge on the leaders who imprisoned her in the Factory begins to play out, and as Kat uncovers details related to a ten-year-old murder on her family’s new property. Admittedly, the end of the novel is a premier example of deus ex machina and the epilogue is clearly intended to satisfy Pelly D. readers; however, the novel–which could really act as a stand-alone and not a sequel–was so effective that I could almost excuse its denoument in favor of its climax.