Heidi Ayarbe
Autor de Freeze Frame
Obras de Heidi Ayarbe
Obras relacionadas
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Carson City, Nevada, USA
- Lugares de residencia
- Carson City, Nevada, USA
Colombia - Educación
- University of Nevada at Reno (BA|English Education)
Miembros
Reseñas
Freeze Frame por Heidi Ayarbe
CW: Attempted suicide
Great look inside the mind of a teen with OCD.
See my full review here:
http://whatsonthebookshelf.blogspot.com/2012/07/compulsion.html
See my full review here:
http://whatsonthebookshelf.blogspot.com/2012/07/compulsion.html
Rating: 3.5
15-year-old Kyle Carroll’s best friend since kindergarten, Jason Bishop, sleeps over at the Carroll house one Friday in early October, the evening before the big homecoming American football game at the high school. On Saturday morning, as the friends wait for breakfast, they walk out into the backyard. Still in their pyjamas on this chilly autumn morning, they end up in Kyle’s father’s shed. Within minutes, at 9:16 am, Jason is shot with a gun that Mr. Carroll forgot he even had. At 10:46 a.m., Jason, now at the local hospital, is declared dead, and since all signs point to Kyle’s being the shooter, he is taken into custody.
Within days, the juvenile court judge remands Kyle to three years’ probation under the strict supervision of his parole officer. He is also to receive ongoing psychological evaluation by the state-appointed psychiatrist. Although Kyle still doesn’t know what happened in the backyard shed, he finds the sentence inappropriately lenient and says so: “‘It didn’t make sense. It was an open-and-shut case. I killed him. I confessed. And they send me home because it was an ‘unfortunate incident’?”
The central problem in Ayarbe’s young adult novel is that Kyle can recall nothing about those moments preceding his friend’s demise. He has sessions with a psychiatrist and says little. With his utterly flat affect and atypical behaviour, Kyle appears to be in some sort of dissociative state. Wondering what’s wrong with this boy, the reader presses on to find an answer which the author seems reluctant to provide. Knowing of Kyle’s interest in film, his psychiatrist recommends that he write a screenplay of the scene to try to access the memories his mind is hiding from him. Later, a school librarian provides him with a place of refuge, encouragement, and understanding.
Using first-person narration and relying heavily on flashbacks, Ayarbe slowly—too slowly—reveals the story of the boys’ friendship, which had apparently been fraying in recent months. Prior to high school, Jason, like Kyle, had been something of a loner. At the start of tenth grade, however, he’d “ditched” Kyle, who was perhaps becoming a social liability. While Kyle ate alone in the cafeteria, Jason went off campus for lunch with a new gang of popular, athletic boys. After his friend’s death, Kyle replays memory after memory of their decade-long friendship. He also converses with his dead friend, visits his grave, and watches out for Jason’s precocious eight-year-old brother, Chase, a victim of bullying.
Kyle is a movie buff who had hoped to pursue a career in film. The book makes mention of numerous directors and movies, not all of them familiar or meaningful to me. It’s hard to imagine a younger reader finding much value in these references either. However, Ayarbe does use the language of filmmaking effectively to communicate Kyle’s mental processes. He “fast forwards”; wishes he could “edit”; speaks of “scenes”, “takes”, “cuts”, and “rewinding”, and he also thinks about the “freeze frame” in his life—the vivid, motionless scene when action and time were suspended and his friend lay dying in front of him. Kyle realizes that if he were a director, he could change everything, but the movie that plays in his head cannot change, and nothing is under his control.
Initially, Kyle is not a particularly likeable character, and I questioned whether his amnesia was enough of a premise on which to build a novel. I soldiered on, however, and this time it paid off. I discovered what had occurred in the shed that Saturday morning in autumn, and I warmed to Kyle in the process.
Freeze Frame is not a perfect book. First of all, there are a few too many flashbacks to scenes of childhood. Second, the screenplays written in the style of a number of different directors—Tarantino, Lynch, and Hitchcock, to name a few—become tiresome after a while. And, finally, there are plot developments that I found a little hard to credit. Even so, there is still lots to appreciate in this novel. Ayarbe is an ambitious writer. The story she presents and the issues it raises are hardly run-of-the-mill young adult fare. I laud her for that.… (más)
15-year-old Kyle Carroll’s best friend since kindergarten, Jason Bishop, sleeps over at the Carroll house one Friday in early October, the evening before the big homecoming American football game at the high school. On Saturday morning, as the friends wait for breakfast, they walk out into the backyard. Still in their pyjamas on this chilly autumn morning, they end up in Kyle’s father’s shed. Within minutes, at 9:16 am, Jason is shot with a gun that Mr. Carroll forgot he even had. At 10:46 a.m., Jason, now at the local hospital, is declared dead, and since all signs point to Kyle’s being the shooter, he is taken into custody.
Within days, the juvenile court judge remands Kyle to three years’ probation under the strict supervision of his parole officer. He is also to receive ongoing psychological evaluation by the state-appointed psychiatrist. Although Kyle still doesn’t know what happened in the backyard shed, he finds the sentence inappropriately lenient and says so: “‘It didn’t make sense. It was an open-and-shut case. I killed him. I confessed. And they send me home because it was an ‘unfortunate incident’?”
The central problem in Ayarbe’s young adult novel is that Kyle can recall nothing about those moments preceding his friend’s demise. He has sessions with a psychiatrist and says little. With his utterly flat affect and atypical behaviour, Kyle appears to be in some sort of dissociative state. Wondering what’s wrong with this boy, the reader presses on to find an answer which the author seems reluctant to provide. Knowing of Kyle’s interest in film, his psychiatrist recommends that he write a screenplay of the scene to try to access the memories his mind is hiding from him. Later, a school librarian provides him with a place of refuge, encouragement, and understanding.
Using first-person narration and relying heavily on flashbacks, Ayarbe slowly—too slowly—reveals the story of the boys’ friendship, which had apparently been fraying in recent months. Prior to high school, Jason, like Kyle, had been something of a loner. At the start of tenth grade, however, he’d “ditched” Kyle, who was perhaps becoming a social liability. While Kyle ate alone in the cafeteria, Jason went off campus for lunch with a new gang of popular, athletic boys. After his friend’s death, Kyle replays memory after memory of their decade-long friendship. He also converses with his dead friend, visits his grave, and watches out for Jason’s precocious eight-year-old brother, Chase, a victim of bullying.
Kyle is a movie buff who had hoped to pursue a career in film. The book makes mention of numerous directors and movies, not all of them familiar or meaningful to me. It’s hard to imagine a younger reader finding much value in these references either. However, Ayarbe does use the language of filmmaking effectively to communicate Kyle’s mental processes. He “fast forwards”; wishes he could “edit”; speaks of “scenes”, “takes”, “cuts”, and “rewinding”, and he also thinks about the “freeze frame” in his life—the vivid, motionless scene when action and time were suspended and his friend lay dying in front of him. Kyle realizes that if he were a director, he could change everything, but the movie that plays in his head cannot change, and nothing is under his control.
Initially, Kyle is not a particularly likeable character, and I questioned whether his amnesia was enough of a premise on which to build a novel. I soldiered on, however, and this time it paid off. I discovered what had occurred in the shed that Saturday morning in autumn, and I warmed to Kyle in the process.
Freeze Frame is not a perfect book. First of all, there are a few too many flashbacks to scenes of childhood. Second, the screenplays written in the style of a number of different directors—Tarantino, Lynch, and Hitchcock, to name a few—become tiresome after a while. And, finally, there are plot developments that I found a little hard to credit. Even so, there is still lots to appreciate in this novel. Ayarbe is an ambitious writer. The story she presents and the issues it raises are hardly run-of-the-mill young adult fare. I laud her for that.… (más)
“The plan? It’s totally ad hoc. Every time I try to create a hypothesis and procedure, anomalies come up and I’m scrambling to make sense of everything. Maybe a good scientist would be able to come up with methods to work with the change in elements. Maybe I’m a really bad scientist.”
“If there is a God, he must be a scientist and we’re lab rats. I look up. What if the sky is the lens of God’s monocle? And nighttime is the blink of His eye? ‘The data has been compromised!’ I want to shout.”
15-year-old Maya Sorenson comes home from school one day to discover that her house in an upscale Reno, Nevada neighbourhood is being emptied of furniture and appliances. The next day, the repo men come for her dad’s Beamer . . . and the police for Mr. Sorenson himself. He is cuffed and taken into police custody for tax evasion, fraud, and embezzlement. Maya is not surprised. She’s been through something like this many times before, but until now her scam artist, con-man father has been prescient enough to get them out of town before the authorities catch up. Also, she’s never before had to deal with leaving a nice house at such a respectable address.
Because Maya’s mother died years before and there is no family to care for the teenager, she’s taken to a temporary children’s shelter until her case can be sorted out and longer term foster care arranged. With her relentless brainiac “vomiting” of scientific facts, the whip-smart girl quickly makes enemies at the home, but she does not scare easily. She also shows she has the conscience and moral centre her father lacks. She looks out for a younger boy, new prey for the meanest three group-home kids, and she monitors her possibly suicidal roommate Nicole’s Prozac bottle, fearing that the girl is at risk of overdosing.
The children’s shelter staff are eager to hand off Maya to a Bible-thumping foster family, but before they do so, Maya has a last visit with her imprisoned father. During that meeting her dad reveals that he has relinquished legal responsibility for her. His situation is “complex”, he says; it’s in his daughter’s best interests that he does this. He also reveals that Maya has an aunt: her mother’s sister, Sarah. In order to locate this woman, Maya needs to find the shoebox containing her mum’s personal effects and letters. (It was left in the house that the two Sorensons were forced to vacate).
The plot thickens when Maya leaves the children’s home early one morning to retrieve the shoebox, only to discover that her roommate has followed her. Nicole has been in foster care for nine years; her mum was a meth-head, and her absent father’s life has apparently been dictated by the mob. He seems to have sent the girl post cards, however, and she’s pretty sure he’s in Chicago. If Maya knows science, the bright, illiterate, and street-smart Nicole is a veritable walking encyclopedia of organized crime. She can give her new roommate as good as she gets, and she quickly convinces Maya that she is in need of someone with common sense, not to mention a sense of direction. From the contents of the shoe box, Maya has determined that her aunt is likely in Boise, Idaho. Two girls travelling together, Nicole points out, are much safer than one entirely on her own.
It’s not easy getting to Boise. First, there is the problem of how and what they will eat. The two have next to no money. Luckily, Nicole is a skilled shoplifter. Second, there’s the question of where they can rest and sleep. It’s November and unseasonably cold. And then, of course, there’s the matter of travelling itself; walking and hitchhiking are both fraught with difficulty, especially for young girls. Maya and Nicole’s challenges multiply when they gain an additional travelling companion: Klondike, a ten-year-old disfigured boy with Tourette’s. At the mercy of his tics and a brain that has him endlessly spewing profanity, he is fleeing trauma of his own.
Ayarbe’s is a gritty but engaging young adult novel. There are rough situations and some pretty rough language as well. The author leavens the dark subject matter with a fair bit of snappy, humorous—if not always believable—dialogue. There are a few other problems, too. Although the novel is mostly realistic, some elements of the plot are not plausible. (The group home’s allowing Nicole, a suicidal teen, to be responsible for her own psychoactive medication doesn’t ring at all true. The degree of the girl’s illiteracy and the plot development that hinges on it are also hard to credit.) Nevertheless, the basic details the author provides about the chaos, squalor, and dangers faced by homeless kids (fleeing dysfunctional families and institutionalized care) are convincing.
The book is overly long, and I think the author could’ve tightened it up by reining in Nicole’s stories of gangsters. Ayarbe might also have refrained from reporting Maya’s every sigh, and the author could have toned down her protagonist’s obsessive use of the scientific method to solve problems. Both became tedious reading after a while, On the whole, however, this is a satisfying novel, with an appropriately open-ended conclusion. It is fairly fast paced, and it explores many themes of interest to young adults.… (más)
“If there is a God, he must be a scientist and we’re lab rats. I look up. What if the sky is the lens of God’s monocle? And nighttime is the blink of His eye? ‘The data has been compromised!’ I want to shout.”
15-year-old Maya Sorenson comes home from school one day to discover that her house in an upscale Reno, Nevada neighbourhood is being emptied of furniture and appliances. The next day, the repo men come for her dad’s Beamer . . . and the police for Mr. Sorenson himself. He is cuffed and taken into police custody for tax evasion, fraud, and embezzlement. Maya is not surprised. She’s been through something like this many times before, but until now her scam artist, con-man father has been prescient enough to get them out of town before the authorities catch up. Also, she’s never before had to deal with leaving a nice house at such a respectable address.
Because Maya’s mother died years before and there is no family to care for the teenager, she’s taken to a temporary children’s shelter until her case can be sorted out and longer term foster care arranged. With her relentless brainiac “vomiting” of scientific facts, the whip-smart girl quickly makes enemies at the home, but she does not scare easily. She also shows she has the conscience and moral centre her father lacks. She looks out for a younger boy, new prey for the meanest three group-home kids, and she monitors her possibly suicidal roommate Nicole’s Prozac bottle, fearing that the girl is at risk of overdosing.
The children’s shelter staff are eager to hand off Maya to a Bible-thumping foster family, but before they do so, Maya has a last visit with her imprisoned father. During that meeting her dad reveals that he has relinquished legal responsibility for her. His situation is “complex”, he says; it’s in his daughter’s best interests that he does this. He also reveals that Maya has an aunt: her mother’s sister, Sarah. In order to locate this woman, Maya needs to find the shoebox containing her mum’s personal effects and letters. (It was left in the house that the two Sorensons were forced to vacate).
The plot thickens when Maya leaves the children’s home early one morning to retrieve the shoebox, only to discover that her roommate has followed her. Nicole has been in foster care for nine years; her mum was a meth-head, and her absent father’s life has apparently been dictated by the mob. He seems to have sent the girl post cards, however, and she’s pretty sure he’s in Chicago. If Maya knows science, the bright, illiterate, and street-smart Nicole is a veritable walking encyclopedia of organized crime. She can give her new roommate as good as she gets, and she quickly convinces Maya that she is in need of someone with common sense, not to mention a sense of direction. From the contents of the shoe box, Maya has determined that her aunt is likely in Boise, Idaho. Two girls travelling together, Nicole points out, are much safer than one entirely on her own.
It’s not easy getting to Boise. First, there is the problem of how and what they will eat. The two have next to no money. Luckily, Nicole is a skilled shoplifter. Second, there’s the question of where they can rest and sleep. It’s November and unseasonably cold. And then, of course, there’s the matter of travelling itself; walking and hitchhiking are both fraught with difficulty, especially for young girls. Maya and Nicole’s challenges multiply when they gain an additional travelling companion: Klondike, a ten-year-old disfigured boy with Tourette’s. At the mercy of his tics and a brain that has him endlessly spewing profanity, he is fleeing trauma of his own.
Ayarbe’s is a gritty but engaging young adult novel. There are rough situations and some pretty rough language as well. The author leavens the dark subject matter with a fair bit of snappy, humorous—if not always believable—dialogue. There are a few other problems, too. Although the novel is mostly realistic, some elements of the plot are not plausible. (The group home’s allowing Nicole, a suicidal teen, to be responsible for her own psychoactive medication doesn’t ring at all true. The degree of the girl’s illiteracy and the plot development that hinges on it are also hard to credit.) Nevertheless, the basic details the author provides about the chaos, squalor, and dangers faced by homeless kids (fleeing dysfunctional families and institutionalized care) are convincing.
The book is overly long, and I think the author could’ve tightened it up by reining in Nicole’s stories of gangsters. Ayarbe might also have refrained from reporting Maya’s every sigh, and the author could have toned down her protagonist’s obsessive use of the scientific method to solve problems. Both became tedious reading after a while, On the whole, however, this is a satisfying novel, with an appropriately open-ended conclusion. It is fairly fast paced, and it explores many themes of interest to young adults.… (más)
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