YA or STFU

Girl from Mars, by Tamara Bach

Bach, Tamara (2008). Girl from Mars (translated by Shelley Tanaka). Toronto: Groundwood Books. 180 pages.

I had seen this little book in a friend’s bag and was immediately drawn to its cute cover and kind of quirky title. When I found out that Girl from Mars was a translation of a novel that had originally been written in German (its German title is Marsmaedchen), I was sold. Told from the first person perspective of fifteen-year-old Miriam, the novel describes Miriam’s growing friendship with a new girl in her class and the eventual transition of this relationship from friendship to romance.

Miriam has lived her entire life in a small, rural town and, when Laura, a girl from the city, joins her class, she begins to see a world beyond the one in which she has grown up. Tired of life in the beautiful but stifling small town where she knows nearly everyone, Miriam wonders when she is going to finally “wake up” to life and fears that perhaps her experience is no more she can hope for. Laura, of course, is Miriam’s wake-up, and their short and bittersweet romance give Miriam hope for the kind of future and life she had never before entertained.

I guess you could say that this book is a romance. You could also call it something of a coming out story. I’m not so certain that Bach’s novel can be so easily classified. Perhaps it’s the German translation, or maybe it’s just that my American provincialism colors my expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised by the novel’s lack of sexual didacticism. I’m used to those First Time Same Sex Encounter Novels that involve a lot of process and exposition; the type of books that don’t go into detail about sex acts (sadly), but that devote page after page to processing the character’s New Gay Feelings. And I guess this is fine and what a lot of readers and writers seem to require from the genre. The conclusions of these types of novels tend to stick in my craw a bit, as most of them resolve with the character Accepting The Fact That Now He/She is Gay and That’s It. The conclusion of Girl from Mars didn’t seem nearly as invested in establishing a concrete homosexual identity for its character (to replace the default heterosexual identity already solidifying in “typical” teens) as it did in allowing same sex relationship to emerge as one of many possibilities in a world Miriam is just learning to see differently. Wenn ich nur das deutsches Buch haette! Das wuerde ich sehr gern lesen.