“Rage: A Love Story”

I have a love-hate relationship with Julie Anne Peters’ books. On the one hand, they’re mostly easy reads, the stories move fast, and they’ve got that sort of trashy novel romance element to them. But on the other hand, the narrative is often clunky, she has very little flair for sublety, and she tends to write about issues more than characters. Keeping You a Secret was a Coming Out Novel; Far From Xanadu was about Unrequited Love with a little bit of Gender Identity; her latest, Rage: A Love Story is about Domestic Violence Among Teenage Lesbians. In it, goody two shoes Johanna, who volunteers at a hospice and tutors a disabled student falls for Reeve, who is from the wrong side of the tracks and has the scars to prove it. Their relationship quickly escalates into an all encompassing and abusive love affair – I’ll let you guess which one of them is the abuser. Everything is going fine, and poor Johanna doesn’t realize how far she’s falling until it all comes crashing down on her in a splashy denouement (another one of Peters’ trademarks). Meanwhile, Johanna’s sister, charged with taking care of her after both of their parents died, is having miscarriage after miscarriage; and her best friend, Novak is doing some self discovering of her own.

There are a lot of good things about this book. For one thing, despite the inherent annoyingness of Issue Novels, this is an issue that’s not covered very much in teen lit, and I suspect it’s something that happens much more often than we think. It was interesting to get inside the characters’ heads and psyches, and enlightening to see how one becomes involved in such a relationship. For teens who are just discovering love, sex and all things related to it, having stories like this around may broaden their perspective on the different kinds of love. Peters clearly did her research, and I consistently believed and understood why Johanna would get herself involved with Reeve. Additionally, the story moves quickly, and the sexual tension between Johanna and Reeve is palpable and just detailed enough to be believable and relatable, even to straight readers. She doesn’t describe the attraction between the two girls as some sort of strange fire (TM Indigo Girls) or as a foreign concept. The sexual attraction between these two is described with the same easiness that’s usually reserved for the hetero teen couples, and that’s something we don’t see a lot in queer lit either. It was a refreshing departure from the coming out stories that litter so much of the genre.

However, there were a lot of really irritating things about this book, too, and most of them are the same things that irritate me about Peters’ other books as well. Sublety is not Peters’ strong suit, and it shows. The narrative very often takes a way too didactic tone, reading more like an episode of the original Degrassi Junior High than an actual story. Within the first 20 pages of the book, we pretty much know everything we need to know about Reeve’s family and home life, so we know immediately who the abuser is and exactly why she does what she does. Hers is a textbook case of an abusive personality, and we know that right from the beginning. This makes the rest of it kind of boring, and the splashy denouement not so splashy, since we pretty much figured it out way in the beginning. Speaking of the ending… I don’t want to give away too much (though Peters does that for you, so not to worry), but the ending reeked of the same problem I’ve found with all of her books: too many things come crashing down at once, and there are way too many problems given to one character. Johanna lives in an apartment above the garage, because she was recently orphaned when her mom passed away from cancer, not long after her dad died from some other disease. Her slightly homophobic sister and brother in law have moved back to her parents’ house to take care of her and deal with their multiple failed attempts at having a baby. Reeve has an autistic brother, a drug addict mother, an absentee father who molested her, and a currently abusive stepfather. I get Peters’ point that not all high school kids are suburban white kids. But it doesn’t quite ring true for me that Johanna would have two dead parents, be dealing with coming out to her sister, have to live on her own, and also be stuck in an abusive relationship. The subplots and too-much-backstory tend to take away from the main narrative and get kind of exhausting, which is why it ultimately feels like you’re reading a book about an issue, as opposed to a story about a character.

The domestic violence premise of the book would make a good hook for a booktalk, as would the queer slant. I might describe or read aloud some of the passages of the violence inflicted on Johanna, for shock value.

Peters, Julie Anne (2009). Rage: A Love Story. New York: Random House. 291 pages.