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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 288
Started: 7 May 2023
Finished: 10 May 2023
Summary:
There are three people in the interview room: Gloria, her mother, and the Detective Inspector trying to figure out what exactly occurred in the fifteen days Gloria and her charismatic yet mysterious new friend Uman went missing. As the DI begins to pry apart Gloria's story, it slowly becomes clear that rather than a horror story of kidnapping or abuse, Gloria's disappearance was a desperate teenage attempt at autonomy and adventure.
Thoughts:
Exciting, intriguing, adventurous--a lot of this book was well executed. The feeling of mystery in slowly unraveling a story via alternating interrogations and prose descriptions of events is great; the format worked really well for the story. The story itself was also quite interesting, and the freedom and mysterious draw of Uman, combined with the story told in retrospect, was really engaging. The gravity the novel gave to Uman was also super cool; it made the story feel big and sweeping and important in a way that it wouldn't have without such a charismatic driving force. The book was also intensely British; Bedford used lots of phrases like "going round his house" or other British-isms that marked the novel as Not American in a pleasant way.
This book did have clear issues surrounding identity. It's written by an older White man, which makes the young female narrator feel a bit strange. The intense teenage dissatisfaction and listlessness felt very Catcher in the Rye, but it made me slightly uncomfortable that this teenage girl was written by a man. Furthermore, Uman, the mysterious and capricious friend who enchanted Gloria, put her under his spell, and convinced her to upend her life for his adventure, has dark skin. Considering the charismatic and larger-than-life nature of the character, this characterization plays into the racist archetype of the Brown man who is both deeply wise, and also a threat to the innocent and pure White girl. For a book released in 2016, I'm not quite sure how this clumsy application of an archetype wasn't caught and corrected.
This is a flawed book, but if readers are willing to recognize and break down the flaws as they read, I do think it's a book worth reading. It's exciting and mesmerizing and a very immersive application of Salinger's idea of what being a teenager is.