Pubdate: Sun, 12 Feb 2012
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Susan Carpenter

Not Just for Kids

CAUGHT IN A HURRICANE OF DRUGS

Beneath a Meth Moon

A Novel

Jacqueline Woodson

Nancy Paulsen Books: 189 pp., $16.99, ages 12 and up

If there's any common thread among drug addicts, it's an aversion to 
feeling uncomfortable emotions. The cause of the emotion is 
unimportant. What matters is the individual's inability to deal with 
it healthily.

This unsettling cause-and-effect pairing has long been a theme in the 
ever-expanding young adult canon, but it gets a timely makeover in 
"Beneath a Meth Moon." The latest teen novel from National Book Award 
honoree Jacqueline Woodson fuses the devastation of Hurricane Katrina 
with a 15-year-old's meth addiction. Described as an "elegy" on its 
title page, the novel mourns the drowning of a young woman's mother 
and grandmother and the narrator's unwitting embrace of 
methamphetamines as a result.

In less talented hands, such a concept with a one-two punch could 
easily be dismissed as sensationalism, but Woodson handles each 
aspect of her story with compassion and lyricism. Fifteen-year-old 
Laurel may not fully understand or even feel her sorrow, but Woodson 
channels it for her in a tone that explains without condescension.

Told in a pastiche of flashbacks from Laurel's point of view, the 
book embraces the advice of a rehab counselor to "go backward. And 
don't stop when it gets painful." Those same sentences apply to 
Woodson's construction of "Beneath a Meth Moon," which begins with 
the story's conclusion: A successfully rehabbed Laurel prepares to 
recount her struggles.

The book then skips to Laurel's panhandling days - when meth becomes 
her everything, replacing the need for food, shelter, clothing, even 
love - after she stole her father's money, got caught and ran away to 
live in an abandoned hardware store.

"Beneath a Meth Moon" is decidedly nonlinear, but it makes its own 
logic. Individual vignettes are presented as back story, raising 
questions that are later answered with other, more telling vignettes 
about what happened before Laurel's "whole life got washed away" with 
the hurricane, and after - when she was homeless, then hospitalized. 
The effect is a book that reads like a paint-by-numbers artwork with 
a basic template that is eventually colored in.

It is both surprising, and surprisingly relatable, that Laurel had 
been a cheerleader and that the person who first got her hooked on 
the drug was the co-captain of her school's basketball team. Choosing 
such athletically oriented, popular high school characters 
underscores the pernicious reach of meth - the second-most-abused 
illicit drug in the world after marijuana.

Woodson does not shy from the details of meth use. In writing that 
distills individual scenes to their emotional essence, she details 
the exhilarating sensations of sniffing the powder behind a 7-Eleven 
for the first time, the manic energy, the amplification of her 
attraction to and attention from the boy who initiated their 
relationship with the question "You like to party?"

Woodson then tracks Laurel's casual use through to its addictive and 
debilitating conclusion, when Laurel's want becomes a need and her 
body rebels with incessant itchiness, aching and acne.

Gritty as the subject matter is, readers know from the very beginning 
that Laurel finds her way through this mess to the other side. The 
catalyst for this change is a tough-love stranger whose words reach 
her in a way that her best friend's and father's didn't. As Laurel 
comes to realize, "It's a long walk away from meth," but it can be 
done. "Beneath a Meth Moon" invites readers to walk that long road 
with her in a story told with heart and hope.
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