Reading Update

Zetta Elliott A Wish After Midnight

Argh! This is the third terrific YA novel I've read this year that ends too soon! A Wish After Midnight has great, complex characters, a wonderful premise, and no simple answers. It also draws from the tradition of YA that started with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, that yanks young people back in time to learn lessons about history, and their role in the present. But it ends before one of its central conflicts is resolved, and I can't figure out if it's supposed to have a sequel or not!

Genna is her mother's best hope for getting out of their impoverished neighborhood in Brooklyn. She's a good student, smart and ambitious, and isn't distracted by a social life. But she's lonely, and feels neglected by her mother, who is more focused on her older brother and sister, both always in trouble and both always mean to her. And she's just fallen in love with an unusual boy named Judah, an immigrant from Jamaica who teaches Genna his ideas about Africa and where they truly belong. Genna is dazzled by Judah, but resists his plans to move to Africa as soon as they've graduated.

Genna has a confrontation with her mother after her mother throws her older sister out of the house, and, making a wish in her favorite fountain, finds herself magically dragged back in time to New Year's Eve in the Brooklyn of 1863, where she is inexplicably beaten and left for dead. (There are several important moments in this book that are insufficiently described. It's frustrating, but the book's strengths are in exploring complexity, not depicting high drama, and the former is very satisfying.)

She is taken for a runaway slave, and falls in with an abolitionist doctor, who hires her to look after his baby. This relationship is one of the wonderfully complex ones in the book (SPOILERS START HERE): the doctor is truly impressed with Genna's intelligence, self-possession, and ambition, yet he discourages her from thinking big. He is truly a self-sacrificing abolitionist, yet (like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is referenced here) still strongly believes in the inferiority of the African. He really wants to do right by Genna, but is being blue-balled by his wife and expresses an ambiguous, and not entirely savory, interest in her, down to being jealous of her boyfriends. There's nowhere comfortable to come down on the topic of the doctor: he's neither entirely good, nor entirely contemptible, and kudos to Elliott for being able to conceive of a nuanced character who's a product of his time.

Kudos also for Genna's conflicts, which are multiple and complex. She is essentially conducting a debate in her own head and heart over her place in contemporary American society. She resists how her mother renders the complexity of racial relations as (literally) black and white, and she also resists Judah's rejection of American society entirely.  She recognizes herself as an American, with a desire to be a part of her own society, and with responsibilities to it. But at the beginning of the novel, she does have a certain naivete, mostly depicted in her easy acceptance of somewhat patronizing help from an upper-middle-class white woman who hires her as a babysitter. It is in comparing the subtle dynamics of her relationship with her 21st century patron with the blatant dynamics of her relationship with her 19th century patron, that the complexity of power dynamics and race start to become clear to Genna.

And it's when she experiences the draft riots of 1863 that she has a moment of giving up on the U.S. and agreeing to leave for Africa. But the moment doesn't last, and in extremity, she wishes to return to her own place and time, leaving Judah behind.

... and that's where the novel ends. We never get to find out what happens to Judah; we don't get to see if her nearly-dying wish was a resolution she took, or if she finds she can't really commit to her own time and place after all. We don't get to see her new relationship with her mother, or how she deals with the woman she babysits for when she gets back. We don't see what happens to her siblings, either. And we don't get to see how all of this has affected the way she sees her life in contemporary America. And that last one is the whole point of sending a character back in time: to give them perspective on their own time. Plus, let me just say it again: we never get to find out what happens to Judah.

If there's a sequel planned ... well, even then, this was an awkward way to end this book, before anything at all is resolved. But if this is a standalone book, well, there are about 30 pages missing off the end of it, i.e. the entire denouement. We don't get our reward. We don't get the coast down to the finish.

Why does this keep happening in books I read? It happened in Flygirl, and in If You Come Softly. What is going on? It's driving me nuts!

Comments

[Zetta Elliott]

There is a sequel! You can read excerpts of Judah's Tale on my blog:

http://awishaftermidnight.wordpress.com/judahs-tale-excerpts/

Thanks for such a thoughtful review...

[claire]

Awesome! Can't wait to read it!