Curious about Fantasy and Science Fiction

 

Image source: Penguin Random House

Stead, Rebecca. When You Reach Me. 2009. 208 pages. LP: $17.99, ISBN: 9780385737425. Ages 8-12

From Mr. Scrooge visiting his younger self in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol to Meg searching for her father in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, time travel has fascinated young readers of science fiction. Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me presents time travels in two ways: the main character, Miranda, attempts to help save a friend's life with the assistance of a time traveler and young readers also get to travel to life in late 1970s New York City. 

For today's children, the setting of When You Reach Me may be almost as unfamiliar and exotic as the concept of time travel itself. Miranda and her friends rely on watches to know what time it is--mobile phones are decades away. She and her best friend, Sal, are 'latchkey kids--' their single moms trust them to walk home from school, let themselves into their urban apartments, and start their homework without supervision. Miranda and her friends create their own routines free of adults, built around delis, bodegas, and slightly sketchy stretches of city blocks. They even work for sandwich ingredients at the deli on their lunch hour (where Jimmy the owner stretches his eyes back and adopts a mocking Chinese accent in one scene--hopefully another relic of the past). Many social programs for children began and flourished in the 1960s and 1970s such as free school breakfasts, Reading is Fundamental, and free school-based dental care--this last one depicted in Miranda's school. Stead presents these and other quirks of growing up in the 1970s in an edgy city like New York credibly; creating a fascinating backdrop to her time travel mystery.

At first nothing seems too strange in Miranda's world. Then Sal gets violently punched for no discernible reason by a complete stranger, stops talking to Miranda, a house key goes missing, and unsettling notes begin to appear. These are blips of unease in the story; discordant notes that set up a feeling that something is not quite right.

Stead skillfully weaves her plot out of these many disparate, discordant notes so that in the end, it is both clear and emotional. A character who will seem familiar to anyone living in a large city--the unhinged, laughing homeless man--is actually from the future, returning to save Sal's life and sacrificing his own in the process. We train ourselves to ignore such fixtures of urban life even as we pity them. Stead's story gives him the dignified role of hero. Just as with her accurate depictions of a bygone decade and the complexity of children's friendships, her writing beckons readers closer, asking us to find understanding for those on the fringes of our stories.

Image Source: HarperCollins

Young, Brian. Healer of the Water Monster. 2021. 368 pages. LP: $19.99, ISBN: 9780062990402. Ages 8-12

Brain Young's fantasy is not set in a separate universe but rather provides the Navajo back story for our own earth, and a path forward to heal it. Once Nathan goes to spend the summer with Nali (his grandmother) on the reservation, the fantastical and the familiar begin to overlap. In Healer of the Water Monster, a decimated pond can be explained by both traditional scientific reasons--poison from a nearby uranium mine--and by fantastical, allegorical reasons based on Navajo mythology--the water monster himself is slowly dying from this poison.

Nathan is a fully relatable tween--aghast at the lack of cell service, processed foods, and indoor plumbing at Nali's mobile home but determined to prove a point to his father who, Nathan feels, has betrayed Nathan by choosing to bring his girlfriend along on their Father-Son trip to Las Vegas. Nathan is a science buff, and suggests that a summer on the reservation will help him implement a research study pitting the growth of native corn against processed, fertilized corn. After arriving he wonders if this way to punish his father was really the best choice.

Nathan encounters the strange and spiritual almost immediately when a talking frog steals the corn kernels he planted for his experiment. He then meets the ailing Water Monster, a holy being, who Nathan names "Pond." Pond used to be a thriving body of water before his uranium poisoning. Nathan must travel to the Third World, depicted in the Navajo creation story, to obtain medicine to heal Pond.

Alongside the main plot of Nathan's journey to heal Pond runs his family's journey to heal Nathan's Uncle Jet. Having fought in the Afghanistan war, Uncle Jet turns to the forgetfulness offered by alcohol and drugs to make it through each day. Like Pond, Jet is slowly being poisoned to death. Navajo belief is that Jet is playing host to a dark spirit who infected him during the war, a spirit who makes him believe he is worthless. Just like Pond is an allegory for a real pond, the dark spirit is an allegory for depression. Through a Navajo ceremony, coupled with therapy and antidepressant medicine, Jet can be free of this malevolence.

Young unflinchingly depicts the harsh effects of both uranium poisoning on the environment and alcohol and drug poisoning on an individual. Uncle Jet survives, the ceremony appears to ease his depression and gives him new hope to carry on with psychiatric care. Pond, however, does not, even after Nathan's successful journey to the Third World where he obtains the necessary medicine. Not every harm to the earth can be healed.

As Native American Heritage month concludes, I noticed how some portrayals of indigenous people seem based in the past, as though they are historical fixtures no longer relevant or relatable to today's children. Books like Healer of the Water Monster let young readers know that kids like Nathan--fully modern while also immersed and influenced by their cultures--exist. Moreover, books like Young's open up different ways to understand and begin to seek solutions for challenges like environmental pollution and depression.