Content warnings: alcohol abuse/alcoholism, sexual harassment by an authority figure, parental neglect, bullying
Middletown by Sarah Moon is a middle-grade/on-the-cusp-of-YA novel about 13-year-old Eli, whose mom’s stint in court-ordered rehab leaves her and her 17-year-old sister alone. Eli and her sister Anna are desperate not to be split up, so they lie. They claim their aunt will care for them. In reality… well, they’ve gotten by this far. They can make it three more months, right?
Eli lives in a vivid, developed, and complicated world. She hides the neglect and financial instability she lives with from best friends Javi and Meena, who come from wealthier families. She doesn’t tell any adults that she’s afraid to walk into school without her friends, because she’s bullied. Middletown feels like a real place. It’s a small enough town for teenagers to bike around; it’s a big enough place for midnight movies and an implied queer community that can’t be quite open, but Eli and Javi can just begin to sense.
While there is some gay pining—Eli’s crush on Meena could launch a thousand ships and then some!—there’s also so much queer joy. Eli is figuring out her gender identity throughout the book. (She never uses pronouns other than “she”, so I’ve kept those pronouns here in the review.) When she and Javi go to a Rocky Horror showing dressed in drag, she experiences a strong sense of comfort and rightness biking through town in men’s clothes with a sock packer. So much teasing between Eli and her sister amounts to, “Okay, homo!” “Whatever, hetero!” It feels organic, reclaimed, and so comfy.
The heart of the novel is Eli and Anna’s relationship, which is both realistic and touching. They love each other. They trust each other. Readers see from the first scene that Eli and Anna have routines they fall into easily. They also tease the heck out of each other—for fashion choices, for bad decisions, for stinking on their road trip. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they let each other down. But they clearly love each other to bits.
Middletown is a very ambitious novel. It doesn’t just tackle generational alcoholism and parentification. It also considers queerness and gender identity, bullying, and sexual harassment. All of those themes are woven throughout the story. They’re well balanced. More than that, though the book has a happy ending, it doesn’t have an easy ending.
(Spoilers) An unexpected turn is that while Meena ultimately reciprocates Eli’s feelings, they don’t work as a couple and decide to stay friends. I liked that. I love the way the queer community is reclaiming the idea of an ex as someone you loved and can love, even if you weren’t right as partners. (End of spoilers)
Ultimately, I think part of the reason the queerness felt so right to me was the way the author handled alcoholism. Alcoholism isn’t sanitized. It’s messy and destructive. Family reactions can include a lot of anger. But teens can and sometimes do cope using humor, and Eli’s Alateen friends show her that it’s okay and even helpful to laugh about hard things. To me, this felt similar to the way me and my disabled friends will laugh about our disabilities—yeah, yeah, we know the outside world is going to opt for heavy pity, but in our lives, this is just reality, like farts and electric bills. And the book approaches queerness in the same way. Sometimes it’s awkward—hello, unspoken crush! Sometimes it’s glorious—hello, first kiss! Sometimes it’s confusing—hello, weird gender feelings! And that’s all fine and real and okay.
After all that praise, there are some shortcomings here. The pacing is a little weird. Because the second half of the book is in a completely separate location, the characters and most plot threads from the first half are absent. The author creates new characters and threads, all engaging, but it still felt a bit jarring.
So, what’s the final verdict?
This was great. It’s an engaging, complex narrative with flawed characters you can’t help but love. It explores complicated subjects without providing easy answers, but maintains a hopeful outlook all the same. I didn’t read this in one sitting—mostly because I was reading it at work—but I did read it all in one day!
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