Sixteen-year-old Cat has tried to hide inside herself ever since that horrible day three summers ago when her brother’s best friend took advantage of her in her living room. She separated herself from everything good in her life, including her best friend, Patrick, “which was like dying, since losing Patrick was nearly the same as losing myself.”
But now Patrick is lying in a hospital bed in a coma, after someone beat him up outside the gas station where he worked, jammed a gas nozzle down his throat and wrote a slur in his own blood across his chest. The gas nozzle was held in place with duct tape; his body was tied to the guardrail of the fuel dispenser. He was left for dead in the pitch black of night, her friend who was afraid of the dark—and now Cat, who knows the sheriff’s department will be useless in finding Patrick’s tormentor, is determined to find out who in her town would do such a thing.
“I would speak for Patrick. I’d look straight into the ugliness and find out who hurt him, and when I did, I’d yell it from the mountaintop,” Cat says in ‘Shine,’ the latest young adult novel by Lauren Myracle, who visited Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville to promote the book last November. (Read an article about her visit.)
But it will take all of her courage, and then some, to confront the members of her brother’s “redneck posse”—whom she’s sure know more about what happened that night than what they’re letting on—and uncover what they know about that night. It will mean facing the boy who tormented her that summer, the boy whose very presence “made me want to curl up like a roly-poly.” And it will mean reaching out to the friends she turned her back on long ago—like two of her former girlfriends, Gwennie and Bailee-Ann. And to Cat’s surprise, her former girlfriends in particular, who don’t understand why Cat has kept them at bay for the past few years, aren’t going to make it easy for her. “You ain’t better than me, Cat,” Gwennie tells her. “You think you are, but you ain’t.”
About ‘Shine’
During her visit to Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville last November, Myracle said ‘Shine’ had been her most difficult novel to write to date, and in reading ‘Shine,’ it quickly becomes apparent how much work went into crafting this extraordinarily beautiful, yet painfully raw, story.
The details that shape the setting of ‘Shine’—Black Creek, a North Carolina rural, backwoods town with just over 700 people, much like the town where Myracle and her sisters spent their summers with their father and step-mother—reflect both Myracle’s love for the South and the empathy she has for the teens who grow up in impoverished towns such as Black Creek. "It's a world where, when kids do stay in high school past the age of 16, people wonder why they do," Myracle said of the novel’s setting during her visit to Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville. For instance, in ‘Shine,’ just three students in Cat’s high school class—Cat, Bailee-Ann, and Patrick—are expected to graduate.
In ‘Shine,’ Cat is self-conscious about her poor, backwoods background—even more so since that summer three years ago, when she pulled inside of herself and tried to keep the whole world from really seeing her. There’s a scene in ‘Shine’ where she travels to the library in a neighboring town. When a college guy glances at her, “My heart beat faster, because this was my constant fear ever since my freshman year of high school: that in town, I’d stand out as the outsider I was. The people would laugh—or frown. But I was almost 100 percent sure that I did not smell bad, because I’d put on deodorant this morning, like I always did . . . Was there something else about me? Something that marked me as less than?” But even as she struggles to hide her background from the townies and the university students (“I didn’t talk like most folks in Black Creek. I made a point of it”), she’s quick to defend her town and its people from those who might think Trash at the mere mention of “Black Creek.” “Man. When you get fierce, you get fierce, don’t you?” the college guy says to her in apology, long after she tells him off for calling her the worst name for a mountain redneck that he could muster.
It’s this back-and-forth between the shame Cat feels—for her background; for the way in which she pushed Patrick and all of her friends aside when the hurt she carried made her want to hide from everyone—that Cat wrestles with as she seeks justice for Patrick. Throughout the novel, readers experience Cat’s growth as she opens her eyes wide to herself and the people around her in her quest to do right by Patrick. There are surprises—for Cat and ‘Shine’s’ readers—as she dives deep into the mystery of what happened that night, and what happened in the months beforehand, too. Ultimately, the discovery of who was behind Patrick’s assault will leave readers’ minds spinning just as much as it rocks Cat’s world (“There were certain sadnesses a person had no choice but to live through”).
‘Shine’ can be found at independent and commercial bookstores throughout Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana and at local libraries such as Chicago Public Library and Lake County Public Library.
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