Sweethearts, by Sara Zarr
Zarr, Sara (2008). Sweethearts. Boston: Little, Brown. 224 pages.
Known in elementary school as “Fattifer,” overweight, lisping Jennifer Harris suffered through her early school days and lonely afterschool hours with one friend, the equally outcast Cameron Quick. A quiet soul who seemed to understand Jennifer to a degree her mother never mustered, Cameron was Jennifer’s best friend and perhaps even her first love. When, in fifth grade, Cameron disappears and Jennifer learns first that his family has moved and then, that Cameron has died, Jennifer retreats even further socially. Her mother’s remarriage and the family’s subsequent move to a new area of town provide the impetus for a transformation and Jennifer loses weight, changes her name to “Jenna,” and insinuates herself with the popular kids at her small, alternative high school. When Cameron reappears–and with him, Jenna’s memories of their shared past–she is both ecstatic that he is alive and anxious that she will be forced to confront the more difficult days of their past.
The first person narrative shifts between Jenna’s memories of her youth with Cameron and her present; both story strands allude to an ominous event in Jenna’s and Cameron’s past. This allusion creates a kind of suspense in the novel and, though readers might be initially let down at what seems to be the relative tameness of this scene, its description and its implication are richly haunting.
Like Zarr’s first novel, Story of a Girl, most of this novel’s action is part of the characters’ pasts and the narrative tension is invested in their present understanding and interpretation of these situations. While the title of this novel would seem to suggest that it is a love story, Sweethearts is not, in my estimation, a romance. The bulk of the novel is given to describing Jenna’s and Cameron’s complicated closeness and real affection for each other; however, I don’t really think that this relationship is described in romantic terms. If anything, Zarr contrasts Jenna’s past and present relationship with Cameron with the other relationships she has been told are more significant in her life: her difficult and silence-filled relationship with her mother and her physically passionate but somewhat fatuous relationship with her boyfriend. To find someone who knows you so well and likes you anyway, Zarr seems to suggest, is an uncommon gift, and not one so easily labeled in terms of mere romance.