Book Review: A YA School Story Mystery Falls Short

 The Temple House Vanishing, by Rachel Donohue (Algonquin Books)

I requested an ARC of this book based on the description: a mystery set in a Catholic boarding school. Twenty-five years before the opening, Louisa, a brilliant but lonely student, and Mr. Lavelle, a charismatic art teacher, have mysteriously disappeared. Victoria, who knew them both, has just committed suicide at the school itself. Why did she kill herself? What happened to Louisa and Mr. Lavelle? Did they elope together? Were they murdered or did they perish through an accident? Or were the disappearances unrelated? The atmosphere of an isolated Victorian mansion set on a cliff in Ireland added to the appeal.

Very early in the book, however, I became increasingly disappointed and frustrated. By the end, I was ready to throw the book across the room in disgust, except that I was reading it on my Kindle and I don’t treat my electronic devices so cavalierly. Based on the description, The Temple House Vanishing promised me a genre novel – YA, school story, and mystery, all in one – and yet it consistently violated the conventions of all three.

The opening point of view, a journalist who happened to live on the same street as Louisa and who is investigating the disappearance, was hard to relate to and never made any sense to me. She isn’t involved in the events, and her own life, irrelevant to the rest of the story, seemed remote and uninteresting. Then we get into Louisa’s story, narrated by herself. Therein lies the second hurdle, because Louisa doesn’t sound or act like a teen, even one who’s stuck in her head. Almost all teens, whether intellectual “brains” or not, center their lives around the fundamental issues of those years: independence from parents, confusion about who they are and what they want to become, desperate need for approval from peers, and so forth. Hormones saturate their bloodstreams, and the parts of their brains associated with executive functions, delayed gratification, and long-term planning, won’t mature until their mid-20s. It doesn’t matter how bright or academically gifted they are, they are still at the mercy of these internal storms. Louisa’s first-person narrative reads like the overly elitist pontifications of a writer with a very poor memory of her own teenaged years, or perhaps one seen through extremely adult-colored lenses, and with no understanding of the conventions of the genre. I cannot imagine a teen reader finding Louisa believable or interesting.

Then we meet Victoria, who becomes the object of Louisa’s bloodless passion. Both girls exhibit a disconnection between their intellectual philosophizing and their relationships so extreme as to verge into psychotic dissociation. I never perceived, through their speech or behavior, or through the inner voice of the narrative, any shred of genuine emotion until very near the end, when it became clear that Louisa was just as infatuated with Victoria as Victoria was with Mr. Lavelle. But for the most part, each experiences a pale, distant imitation of obsession, not the visceral stuff of teen suicide pacts or Romeo and Juliet. Not a hint of lesbian romance, requited or not, could I discern.

Escapism and Pleasure

One of the criticisms of genre fiction that amuses me most is that it's escapism, as if that's a bad thing. I think just the opposite. Nobody, except the unbelievably incompetent, escapes to jail. (I'm not talking about the chronically incarcerated who, unable to function in normal society, deliberately choose actions that will return them to imprisonment, although that's an interesting image when it comes to preferred reading material.) No, the direction of escape is toward freedom, imagination, innovation, pleasure. In other words, we move toward becoming bigger, richer lives. So what is “escapism” an accusation of? Why is it bad to want something better?

What do we mean by “escape”? Escape from what? The critics mean, of course, escape from "real" life: responsibility, order, duty, piety. Underlying this notion is the assumption that life should be serious (serious = grim, humorless, unpleasant, joyless). You should work hard and deny yourself pleasure "for your own good." You should accept the way things are ("be realistic"). If you find reality oppressive and intolerable, it's because there's something wrong with you. You're weak-willed, inadequate, ineffectual, immature, lazy, stupid . . . you've heard the litany. I've exaggerated a bit here to make a point, which is that this attitude ("life sucks, get used to it") arises from a pernicious blend of Puritanical abhorrence of pleasure and the need for conformity in an industrialized society. Under such a system, the two greatest sins are to seek delight and to follow one's own preferences. In other words, to not only be open to change but to create it, to challenge the established order, to question and to dream.  To value joy above productive capacity and meaningfulness above popularity. To be an individual, not a cog in an assembly line, to sometimes be productive but other times contemplative -- in other words, to be unpredictable and unique.

When we speak of pleasure, we cannot avoid the issue of sensory pleasure and sexual ecstasy. Sexuality is a powerful, primal source of energy. No wonder industrialists are afraid of it, except when they can use it to sell things. They want us to be consumers, not originators. This brings me to a second way in which escapism is considered bad, and that is as a force of appeasement, of sedation, a means to drain off rebellious energy and maintain the status quo. I think genre literature, especially fantasy and science fiction, works exactly in the opposite way. The dichotomy and mutual exclusivity between body and mind or spirit is not a universal belief, nor is the insistence on negating or minimizing the importance of the full range of physical sensations. They are, however, tools of a hierarchical society. People are, after all, easier to control when they can be convinced to invalidate their direct experiences of themselves and the world, to distrust themselves and instead trust an external authority. Pleasure must be sinful when it seduces people from abject obedience. And yet, in every age and circumstance, people consistently seek it out, whether through sex or music or drugs or listening to a whopping good tale.

Original Vision vs. Compromising With the Market

A recent discussion with a fairly new, immensely talented writer highlighted for me a dilemma that most of us will face sooner or later. What do we do when what we really want to write, when the stories that catch on fire in our imagination, do not fit into a neat marketing niche? All of us fall somewhere along the spectrum from safely, predictably commercial to unclassifiable, idiosyncratic, and therefore of no interest to traditional publishers. One highly successful genre writer confided in me that her fantastic sales numbers were the luck of the draw. “I happen to write stories that are commercial and draw a large audience,” she said. “It's my natural authorial voice.”

I also know writers who are so original in their vision and so delightfully quirky in their execution that editors throw up their hands in frustration because although they adore this author’s work and see the author as the next great literary voice, they cannot envision a way to market it. In the best of times, such authors found a home in the midlist, and that still happens, although less frequently now than when editors had more power (and the freedom to discover and nurture new authors).

If you believe in your work, how can you be sure but this is not infatuation with your own words but that your work truly is of high quality? Every writer I know goes through spasms of self-doubt. Writing requires a bizarre combination of megalomania and crushing self-doubt. We need the confidence to follow our flights of fancy, and at the same time, we need to regard our creations with a critical eye. Trusted readers, including workshops like Clarion and Clarion West, critique groups, fearless peers, and freelance editors can give us invaluable feedback on whether our work really is as good as we think it might be. Of course, they can be wrong. It may be that what we are trying to do falls so far outside conventional parameters that only we can judge its value. It may also be that we see on the page not what is actually there but what we imagined and hoped.

Deborah on the multiplicity of sub-genres

Over on Amazing Stories, the "Chain Mail" discussions with Book View Cafe authors tackled this question:

Recently there has been an uptick in the number of “sub-genres” related to the field. Where before there was just “science fiction”, that split into ‘space opera’, ‘hard’ and ‘new wave’ during the late 50s/early 60s, now there’s — science fiction romance, western sf, post-apocalyptic, slipstream, alternate reality — the list goes on. Is it helpful to have all of these sub-categorizations (allowing readers to find what they really want) or detrimental by pigeonholing work and placing impediments between a reader and the discovery of new types of works?

Here's my answer:

I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing, and even if I did, I would most likely be wrong. However, I do have some thoughts on the tendency to make more and smaller sub-sub-sub genres. One pertains to the desire on the part of many readers to find a book that is exactly like the last one they loved in terms of reading experience. This tendency explains why there are so many sequels-ad-nauseum in both film/TV and books.

Years ago, I took over stewardship of the library at my daughter’s elementary school, so I got to watch what books which kids were picking. The big thing back then was Goosebumps. We parent librarians had high hopes for the series, because the titles and covers appealed to boys who were otherwise “reluctant readers.” With glee, we watched the boys check out one after another of these books. I at least had my fingers crossed that at some point, they’d branch out. Mostly, however, they didn’t. They wanted that exact experience, and after reading three or five or twenty books with basically the same plot, they’d get bored and stop reading. As frustrating as this was to witness, I believe that some reading is better than none, and those kids carried with them the memory of first discovering that books can be cool. And picked up another book some day. Maybe Harry Potter.

The other thing about sub-sub (etc.) genres is that so many of them are crossovers. Science fiction mysteries. Westerns with magic. Paranormal Romances. Steampunk vampires. There’s a playfulness in taking elements we love and seeing how many new ways we can combine them. It must drive the marketing people nuts.

This, I think, is a very good thing.

The photograph is by Eva Watson-Schülze (1867-1935), public domain.

Thanks, Anne McCaffrey, and Genre Boundaries

Reposted from Book View Cafe blog:

Anne McCaffrey’s death, and all the reminiscences and tributes offered in her memory, intersected with what-I-am-thankful-for. Many people, writers and readers both, have described the ways they are thankful for her work and her personal presence in their lives. They’ve said it far better than I, but each memory is personal and hence, unique. Writer Juliette Wade blogged on how McCaffrey’s “Pern” set an example for her own work by blurring the borderlines between fantasy and science fiction.

One of the things about McCaffrey’s work that left a deep impression on me was not so much the “blurring” of genre lines as how she combined story elements in interesting ways. More than that, when I read everything of McCaffrey’s I could get my hands on, I was astonished at how many genres she wrote in. I saw her telling stories in whatever form they needed to take; I saw that she, like me, was interested in a lot of different things and she was fearless in pursuing them.


Certainly, it’s become much more difficult for anyone but a Big Name Writer to switch around from fantasy to science fiction to something in between to romance/women’s fiction, and so forth. The bean-counters and marketing departments hold the purse strings. Many of us have found, to our sorrow, that such limitations are not lightly flaunted. “Marketing says they can’t place this,” is too often a death knell.
Even while we wrestle with the practicalities of trying to earn a living by writing, we should not — we must not — allow such forces to hedge in our imaginations. About the time I sold my first novel, I remember people talking about how important that debut was because it was the book you’d be re-writing for the rest of your career. I was appalled, for much as I loved the story, the characters, the world of Jaydium, there were many other stories, characters and worlds screaming at me — pleading with me, haunting my dreams — to write them. That’s one of the glories of short fiction, which allows me to play in diverse and alien sandboxes, with no computers tracking my sales figures to determine if my next novel will be marketable.

I don’t expect I will ever get to the point where a publisher will gladly bring out my next book, regardless of genre. But I never, ever want to stop dreaming in more than one color!

Thanks, Anne, for this and much more.