PEN PAL, by Francesca Forrest
"My drops of tears I’ll turn to sparks of fire."
William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
So.
I just read this:
Here's the description:
Em is a twelve-year-old girl in a floating community off the Gulf Coast. Kaya is a political activist in a terrifying prison. They are pen pals. Em’s wistful message in a bottle finds its way to Kaya, imprisoned above the molten lava of the Ruby Lake. Both are living precarious lives, at the mercy of societal, natural, and perhaps supernatural forces beyond their control. Kaya’s letters inspire Em, and Em’s comfort Kaya-but soon this correspondence becomes more than personal. Individual lives, communities, and even the fate of an entire nation will be changed by this exchange of letters. Pen Pal is a story of friendship and bravery across age, distance, and culture, at the intersection of the natural and supernatural world.
My mother read it first. We were on our trip from Rhode Island to Phoenix, and I was about to nap, and she asked, "Do you have anything to read?"
I said, "I have How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, and I have this."
I held up Francesca Forrest's PEN PAL. Sita nodded, opened her hand, smiled. I gave it over and went to sleep.
As I fell asleep, I began imagining the blog I wanted to write about PEN PAL: "I read it 35,000 feet in the air, and it was the perfect way to read this book."
But, actually, I didn't. My mother did.
When I woke up from my nap, probably somewhere over Texas, she was just closing the pages. She turned to me with stunned, tear-starred eyes.
"What?" I asked. "What is it?"
"This book!" Sita pressed her fist to her chest. "It's just... some things... They make me feel such hope."
I was jealous, naturally, that she'd had the experience I'd wanted reading PEN PAL, but I took it to work and read it during some downtime hours, mightily resenting those few moments I had to look up from those pages and actually, you know, HELP PEOPLE.
But that's a good feeling too, isn't it, that complete absorption in another reality, interrupted by frantic messages from the outside?
Of course, the snap-back is more like being brained with a corked-up glass bottle than happening upon it floating on the tide, but some fictions compel me so strongly that it requires brute force to pull me out again.
PEN PAL is a mostly epistolary novel (with breaks for diary entries, news articles, emails, military dispatches) between this kid, Em, who lives in a floating village called "Mermaids' Hands" and Kaya, a political prisoner on a floating prison called "the Lotus" which is suspended above a volcano somewhere near Indonesia.
Kaya's imprisoned because she and some friends held a festival that had been forbidden by the current government. The government put it out that the Lotus prison was intended to honor Kaya, biologist turned priestess for the Lady of the Ruby Lake, the goddess of volcanoes that the festival was supposed to celebrate.
Kaya, of course, never intended such consequences, but has to live with them.
Em, meanwhile, has troubles of her own, between a brother in prison, parents who are separating, and a home in danger from Hurricane Helga.
PEN PAL is an interstitial, hard-to-classify, slipstreamy, magical realism meets profound reality, dreamy, brutal book. It is easy enough for a Middle Grader to read and enjoy, and compelling enough to hook me front to finish and make me cry.
This is a dangerous book.
It made me remember why artists, like Victor Jara, are often executed during a government regime. It made me feel very fierce. It made me feel like bursting out of myself and doing something. I don't know what yet. But I hope I will.
PEN PAL is good companion book, I think, to Delia Sherman's FREEDOM MAZE.
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OTHER STUFF:
PEN PAL WEBSITE:
http://penpalnovel.virb.com/
PEN PAL TUMBLR:
http://pen-pal-pictures.tumblr.com/
ORDERING INFORMATION
- free books for librarians! -
including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, Apple, and Kobo:
http://penpalnovel.virb.com/ebook-and-paperback
AMAZON
Direct Link to Amazon for the Trigger Finger.
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