By positioning a large portion of the story in a school, Valente reminds us that being a child means being told you don’t understand. (Because what kid would simply sit at the bottom of a slide?) This whole scene is so detailed and focused on the physical that it’s hard to read it and not feel transported to this uncomfortable, claustrophobic moment.Īgain and again the main character is confronted with all that she doesn’t know. She engages with her surroundings, but as a preteen, she doesn’t use the slide in the way it was intended. (Playground equipment: it’s weird, isn’t it?)Īdditionally, the playground is where complicated social interaction takes place when you’re this age, and the main character’s reaction to this tense moment is just the move a lonely, overwhelmed eleven-year-old would make. I can remember burning my thighs on the black rubber of the swings, the abrupt sting of it, the way my skin stuck as I leapt away I can remember the static, humid heat inside the tube slides. As the classmate leaves, the main character tries to sit on a swing, but burns her legs, and then she retreats into a tube slide, “where the light is muted, a pink glow that surrounds in plastic heat.” Valente’s description of her tactile experience with the playground equipment is surprising yet familiar. Lauren Doherty wants to know if she will come to her birthday sleepover, a party we know she doesn’t want to attend, but agrees to anyway. In one of the first scenes where we see the main character interact with someone her age, she’s approached by Lauren Doherty (a character always referred to by her first and last name, a tiny detail that nonetheless recreates the feeling of being in elementary school-the familiarity yet the need to specify exactly who you mean when you say “Lauren” because there are probably two more in your grade). Valente clearly captures the physical spaces of childhood, and she uses these places to illuminate the complexity of the main character’s situation (and to break our hearts a little in the process). We’re so specifically in the “you” character’s present, and as a result, we’re also trapped in the reality that her sister is missing and likely dead. This story is so good in part because Valente does such a wonderful job of depicting the darker side of childhood-the isolation, the immobility, the constant awareness of all that’s unknown. Louis, and becomes a little obsessed-she borrows a book from her teacher and eventually befriends a new student named April (a girl with the scars of self-injury covering her forearms, someone as much of a pariah as she is) who shows her the entrance to a cave in her backyard. She learns in Social Studies about the intricate system of caves that stretch beneath St. She’s isolated and lonely, unsure of how to interact with her teachers and classmates. The story opens at the start of the following fall, a few months after the sister’s disappearance, as the nameless main character returns to school. Louis” is told in the second person and follows an eleven-year-old girl as she and her family try to cope with tragedy. Louis,” out in issue 10.1 of Redivider, being a kid is especially rough-her identical twin sister has gone missing, and although she seems to accept that her sister is never coming back, she’s still left waiting as the adults around her try to soften the truth and as she struggles to feel connected to her peers and family. ![]() ![]() Although being a kid was great, it also could feel like moving against a wall-something hard and delimiting.įor the main character in Anne Valente’s story “The Lost Caves of St. ![]() There were moments when I longed to grow up. A two-hour trip to the store with my parents seemed to occupy an entire interminable afternoon. I was an impatient child (and now I’m an impatient adult). I’m not sure about anyone else, but I can remember feeling stuck as a kid.
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