I’ve been on a review kick lately. It’s a nice departure from my fiction projects now and then, and it gives me a chance to talk up queer-themed lit that may get overlooked elsewhere.
This week: Greg Herren’s young adult-mystery SLEEPING ANGEL (Bold Strokes Books, 2011).
The story has a terrific premise: Eric, a high school football hero and Junior Prom King, wakes up from a coma to find out he’s the only person who can solve a murder he remembers nothing about. He was pulled from a car wreck with a classmate in the backseat. The classmate Sean had a bullet in him, and he didn’t survive the car crash.
Eric has total amnesia.
The portrayal of Eric early on was one of my favorites parts of the book. Eric is panicked and confused. He knows he should feel something for the people who are worried about him, like his mom, but he can’t. He searches for clues about what kind of person he was. Amnesia can be a convenient mystery plot device, but here it’s a departure point for a multi-dimensional journey of discovery.
One discovery is Eric’s brain injury somehow gave him the ability to hear people’s thoughts when he touches them. Those interactions, revealing what’s really on the minds of his family and friends, are nice, intriguing moments. They shed light on Eric’s character and keep the story moving forward.
We find out the deceased Sean was gay and being bullied at school. Eric was one of his tormenters. The history between the two places Eric as a prime suspect in Sean’s murder, and Eric can’t say whether he did or didn’t do it.
It’s an interesting approach to the subject of teen homophobia. Amnesiac Eric – removed from social pressure and the attitudes of his peers – can’t understand why he would kill or even dislike Sean just because he was gay. Eric is ashamed when he hears from other people, and starts remembering himself, how he treated Sean.
With all those narrative hooks, and Herren’s tight, fast-paced writing, I sped through the story to the end. Eric finds a Facebook message from Sean asking him to a confidential meeting just before the car accident, and I was dying to know what the meeting was about and who shot Sean.
I’ll be judicious, and just say another nice aspect of the story is the build-up of various suspects. What could’ve been a heavy-handed lesson about the treatment of gay teens becomes richer through the range of people in Eric’s life. I liked especially Eric’s younger brother Danny who is full of rage and hurt because Eric is perceived as the perfect son.
I went back and forth about what it meant to take the story from Eric’s perspective versus Sean’s. It felt at times that All-American hetero Eric didn’t deserve to be the story’s hero just by virtue of becoming enlightened about his bad behavior through this scary episode in his otherwise privileged life. In fact, Eric expresses as much, which earns him some self-awareness points, but Sean, for whom there was much more at stake in the story, was more interesting and likeable to me.
Overall though, SLEEPING ANGEL is a satisfying mystery with very clever storytelling approaches.
