Saturday 28th November 2009
by Caroline
In between serious grown-up novels, I decided to pick up a copy of Wendelin Van Draanen’s Flipped when I saw it at my favorite Goodwill. It cleansed my palate after the intense Isaac Bashevis Singer period piece from my previous review, and it took me back to my life as a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, the same way Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing — my next Cannonball review — spoke to me as I am today.
Juli Baker has loved the same uninterested (uninteresting?) boy since his family moved in across the street six years ago, whereas Bryce, the boy in question, tolerates Juli’s presence, grumbles about her, and finds her a nuisance. In their eighth-grade year, Juli begins to come into her own as a brave, smart, and independent young woman, while Bryce’s wimpy attitude and boringness start to show.
In a clever series of events involving Juli’s pet chickens, she sees through Bryce and his shiny family, and one of Bryce’s most cowardly actions hurts and changes Juli’s feelings perhaps beyond repair. She learns a lesson in style over substance and stops being hypnotized by Bryce’s pretty blue eyes and nebulous short statements. Other characters in the book help to further Juli and Bryce’s progress: Bryce’s best friend turns out to be something of a bully, he makes a really offensive remark about Juli’s family, and Bryce does not confront him about it; Bryce’s grandfather befriends Juli and admires her courage, causing Bryce a great deal of jealousy and mixed emotions.
Van Draanen uses a postmodern he-said-she-said writing style, alternating chapters between the perspectives of Juli and Bryce and illustrating the clear differences between the minds of most eighth-grade boys and girls: Juli is articulate, considerate, reading twenty words into every one Bryce actually says and acting in the interest of other children’s feelings; Bryce is a plain bumbler who reinterprets situations I trusted Juli to remember more clearly in hindsight. Both have moments which are fuzzy (“I don’t remember what we said after that, but . . . “) and these stake out Juli and Bryce’s personalities.
Eventually, Juli and Bryce start to talk and get to know each other, which adds nuance to the stereotypes each has at the beginning — Juli isn’t annoying, and Bryce is no dreamboat. The ending is wonderful and I welled up a little. And I give Van Draanen a lot of credit for having the chutzpah to implicate adults in a way atypical of young adult fiction: She does not spend much time spelling out their personalities but uses vignettes and representative anecdotes to make it clear what kind of people they are, and no one ever says the grown-ups have the best answers.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
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