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Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen
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Lock and Key Sarah Dessen Young Adult Fiction 2008 Rating: B-/C+ |
Lock and Key was an experience in procrastination. Way back last October I put it on my I want list and as soon as I could I put a hold on it at the library. However, due to a problem with their supplier, my hold copy was delayed...by months. Which gave me plenty of time to read other reactions to it, some of which were rather tepid - even from Sarah Dessen fans. This meant that by the time my hold copy finally arrived, I felt much more ambiguous about reading it. So I held off and it sat on my dresser until a week before it was due. For the record, I paid my first library fine ever (since becoming a librarian) for Lock and Key. I just couldn't seem to stay interested in it long enough to get 'er done and back on time. There's some good writing here, but the plotting, such as it is, is overfull and a bit repetitive.
I'm quite sad to have to write that. I've given Dessen many enthusiastic finger snaps in the past for This Lullaby, Just Listen, The Truth about Forever, and Keeping the Moon.
Ruby Cooper has had a chaotic life with her dysfunctional mother. Many jobs, many apartments, many men have passed in and out of their lives, and then one day Ruby's mother passes out too. Without saying good-bye. Ruby is a senior in high school and figures if she can make it to her eighteenth birthday, it'll all be okay and The System won't be able to touch her, but then her landlords unexpectedly drop by and see that she's living without heat, without running water in the kitchen, and without the supervision of an adult. They report this, and in swoops Ruby's sister, Cora, to set things right.
Ruby hasn't seen Cora in ten years when Cora went off to college and never looked back. Now Cora has the perfect life with a great job, a successful and enthusiastically friendly husband, Jamie, and a big house in the suburbs (as well as a slightly less-than-perfect neurotic little dog). Ruby figures that if she wasn't good enough for Cora to see before, she won't be a burden on her now, and she decides to make tracks. But the dog and the too nice neighbor boy, Nate, catch her and, feeling guilty and without options, Ruby grudgingly gives this new situation a chance.
Unlike several of Dessen's last books, Lock and Key can't really pass for a teen romance. While Dessen's focus as an author is always on the main girl protagonist and the point of view she uses (first person) ensures that focus, the upbeat nature of her stories and the well-drawn, very appealing guy characters she develops make her, in my humble opinion, very accessible to a romance reading audience. This book will probably not appeal to that same audience. Although there are a few romantic touches, the problems Ruby and Nate and the rest of Ruby's friends face are more serious, less internal, and less easily resolved than those faced by other characters. All of which lend this book a grimmer tone.
Ruby, of course, has to deal with her mother's abandonment and, more immediately, how she will fit in at the expensive private school Cora and Jamie have enrolled her in. Her initial reaction is not to react. She determines that she won't make friends and won't bother connecting on any level with any of these strangely perfect people surrounding her. But sooner or later she has to acknowledge that her mother's cut-and-burn strategy with people hasn't worked very well for either of them and has left as she is today: lonely and untrusting.
Dessen uses the lock and key metaphor repeatedly to show Ruby's character development. Ruby keeps the key to her mom's house (the place of her gradual abandonment) around her neck on a chain, always close to her. In the beginning she is like this key and doesn't fit anywhere. Eventually, though, she realizes the key is pointless - it fits nothing in the new life she's making for herself - and it becomes less and less important to her. Eventually, too, she realizes as she begins to let people in that these people (literally and figuratively) carry their own keys as well. Hers is unique, because it is hers, but she is not the only one clutching past miseries, merely because they are familiar.
What was perplexing to me as a reader was that so many of the secondary characters in Lock and Key are dealing or have dealt with similar issues to Ruby's, but there is no discernible rage about the mistreatment they have received at the hands of people who should have loved and cared for them. Ruby is, in fact, never really angry at her mother. She's angry she has to go to a new school and she's angry at her sister's defection (sort of), but her mother's abandonment seems to be not as important to her as the practical problems said abandonment creates in her life. She is remarkably resilient. I wondered if perhaps Ruby's adjustment goes so smoothly because Dessen wanted to move on to the problems of other secondary characters. Unfortunately, the book is in first person, so the emotional hurdles the reader makes should be the most jarring and exhilarating when they are Ruby's, not another character's.
Also, Dessen frequently resorts to flashback to fill in the reader on information that explains what is currently going on. But the flashbacks aren't very far back - only to that morning or the day before - and so the flow of the book is often disjointed, zigging and zagging between then and now when with just a little rearrangement it could have all been in the now, making everything less confusing and easier to follow.
I do have to give kudos to Dessen for her treatment of two issues: teen rebellion and infertility. During her initial days with Cora, Ruby makes some poorer choices, especially when she feels vulnerable. There is some subtle drug use and even more subtle sex (if you're not paying close attention, you could easily miss the latter). Neither seems out of character for a girl with Ruby's upbringing and experiences, but they are not over dramatized and Dessen doesn't moralize. The issue of infertility arises in Cora's marriage, and Ruby is merely a bystander to it. Still, the emotional pitfalls of wanting to conceive and failing are very sensitively dealt with and Cora's feelings are spot on. The dialogue included could be in a manual on what to say to anyone dealing with this and how not to make stupid, dismissive remarks.
Ultimately, I was a bit disappointed in Lock and Key and was glad to have waited for the library copy. The writing was good, and the characters were flawed, but Ruby's problems smoothed themselves out a bit too easily, leaving room for quite a bit of extraneous plotting that was less interesting. Unless you've got hardcover money burning a hole in your pocket, I'd reserve this at the library too, or read one of Dessen's other, better, books.