Boy Toy, by Barry Lyga, is not a book for everyone. This is the story of a high school boy who's still recovering from the aftermath of a sexual relationship that he had with his teacher when he was 12. It's harrowing, in a lot of ways--her manipulation is so well-chronicled--and though I wouldn't call it explicit, it's pretty frank about the sexual acts that are taking place.
What I find most impressive about the book, though, is the impressive voice of the viewpoint character. Most of the story takes place when he's 17, in high school, and starting to deal directly with some of the long-term effects of what happened. He's not happy, exactly, but he's got kind of an equilibrium that he's sustained, which has been thrown off completely. The author captures beautifully the balance between this really smart kid's understanding of the fact that it's not his fault, and the deep, unshakable feeling that he's messed up and will never be normal again. He's not an unreliable narrator; rather, the irrational but inevitable feelings he's struggling with are made unavoidable and real.
But there are also chunks of the book told in flashback, where he recounts the relationship and its aftermath. In these parts, he's 12, but he's also sort of 17 telling the story of when he's 12. And the author does a brilliant job with this, of conveying exactly how all of these events came across to him, his guilt, his compulsion. It was amazing, to watch this teacher seduce a child, and to be able to see the boy's anxiety and desire and confusion and his sense that this is really happening, this is how it is with adults, and at the exact same moment, to watch a predator moving in on her prey, and to see and feel how repulsive it is, even as he's feeling drawn in. It's such a balance, and you don't even really feel the author doing it till, say, you sit down to blog about it, and realize that it sort of bowled you over.
The thing that strikes me here, though, and really makes me think about how a teenager would see this book, is the almost perfect absence of adults who treat him like a person. Not even like an adult, but like any kind of person at all. His doctor. The female police officer. That's it. His parents go back and forth between seeing him as an object that has been damaged and a stupid, disobedient kid who maybe should have known better, or at least could have spared them all this trouble--besides being caught up in their disintegrating marriage. His teachers are either absent, condescending, or outright hostile. His best friend's parents are so awful as to not be worth discussing.
And yet, you don't feel like he expects anything else. He doesn't seem to feel alienated, or even really lonely, not the way depressed teens are so often portrayed. It's more like he sees solitude as natural, and his separation from so many people in his life as the natural running of the world. This sense of his strength in isolation is such a source of power to him, I feel like this is the part of the book teens would touch on. This kid is working his way through his stuff, not entirely alone (he has Zik, Rachel, Dr. Kennedy), but through his own power. Adults, other kids, it's all really just background to what's going on inside him, his struggle with himself, to figure out who he is and what he is capable of. And from the very beginning, even before he starts solving these problems, you can tell that this is a guy who is going to hold his act together, this is a guy who, even in the middle of a panic attack, has nothing to fear outside of himself. He finds his own support system, he creates it, he struggles with himself. He's not completely deprived of family support, his school has not written him off, he has a very few, very good friends. But this is a kid with strength in himself, and the sense of empowerment that spending time with Josh Mendel can give a reader is really pretty impressive.
So, after much rambling: hats off to Barry Lyga. Unlike a lot of brilliant authorship, you can't see him pulling the strings. You just get to the end and realize that every word of this amazing book came out of this guy. I'm impressed.
1 comment:
Reading your post I'm reminded of how I felt when I first read Boy Toy. I had heard lots about it so I knew it was going to be intense. But, what really jumped out at me was how the protagonist is so alone. As you mention. And, how he struggles so much with guilt, responsibility, and sadness.
I was also struck by the way he shows one face to the outside world, particularly his best friend, and his reasons for that, while inside he struggles constantly. He's not so different really from Deanna in Story of a Girl. These two characters are alone and constantly worried about what people really know about them.
Lyga took a very difficult topic, didn't tone it down at all, and makes readers think about the topic in an entirely new way. At least I thought about it in a new way.
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