The Names They Call Us by Emery Lord

Lucy Esther Hansson saves the day for her friend Brianna at prom but can she save her mother from cancer?

Prom night turns into the most difficult night of Lucy Esther Hansson's life. After rescuing friend Brianna who is dumped by her date at prom, Lucy and boyfriend Lukas stay to help clean up. Principal Cortez tips Lucy off when he tells her they are thinking of her mother. This immediately upsets Lucy because it reminds her of freshman year when her mother had breast cancer. She had a lumpectomy but did not require chemo or a mastectomy. Suspecting her mother might be ill again Lucy calls home and her mother confirms her worst fears. Lukas drives a devastated Lucy home. At home her mother tells Lucy that a lump was found during a check-up two weeks prior and the biopsy confirmed cancer. She is scheduled for surgery on Monday morning and that her father will be telling his congregation in the morning.

During the service, Lucy who is angry at God, decides to leave before her father informs his congregation. Lukas is shocked at Lucy's anger and her lack of faith in God. Her mother tries to reassure her. The next day, May 1st, Lucy's mom has both breasts removed and spends two days in hospital. The month of May is filled with graduation parties, exams and her mother's recovery from surgery as well as many doctors appointments and tests. The tests reveal that Lucy's mother's cancer is in her lymph nodes and that she requires six cycles of chemotherapy.

In June, before Lucy and her parents set out for their summer camp at Holyoke, Lucy's mother approaches her about the possibility of spending the summer Daybreak, the camp across the lake. Lucy's mother's friend Rhea Mills runs Daybreak, which just had a counselor quit. Her mother suggests that the camp which is for young people who have experienced trauma in their lives, would give Lucy a chance to make new friends and better help her cope with her mother's situation. Lucy refuses but her mother tells her that she needs her to go so that she will know she will be okay without her.

Lucy is thrown another curve when she meets Lukas and he tells her he wants to put their relationship "on pause". Upset that Lukas has talked with everyone but her, Lucy agrees. Lukas wants to "reassess" their relationship when he comes to visit her at Holyoke in July.

Lucy arrives at Holyoke and meets Rhea who shows her to Cabin 3A where she will be staying with nine campers and two other counsellors. Anna Miroslaw, one of the counsellors gives Lucy a tour of the camp and introduces her to counsellors, Henry Jones, Mohan Tambe, Keely Simmons and Garcia. When a fight breaks out between two campers, Lucy feels overwhelmed and has an asthma attack, but Anna reassures her, telling her that feeling overwhelmed is common.

From the beginning Lucy finds herself attracted to Jones, a tall, dark-skinned counsellor with a big smile. They find an immediate connection because like Lucy, Jones is a musician, he plays trumpet. Jones draws Lucy into the his group and also helps her fit in by having her accompany the kids choir for the talent show. Lucy gradually begins to become part of the group, accompanying Anna, Simmons, Tambe and Jones on their Friday night parties, saving Neveah who has an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Lucy discovers that these counsellors have been at Daybreak for several years.

But as the weeks pass, Lucy begins to form friendships that help her understand life and resilience of the human spirit. Daybreak is full of secrets and secret wisdom that help Lucy cope with this stressful time in her life.

Discussion

The Names They Call Us is about a young girl's journey to come to terms with her mother's illness in the midst of growing into adulthood. Lord who breaks her story into four parts, spanning from April to August, has populated her story with a cast of very diverse characters; transgender Anna Miroslaw, dark-skinned Jones and Rhea, Rose Min who is Asian, pregnant fourteen-year-old Tara and a host of characters from various backgrounds.

Lucy, daughter of a pastor, staunch Christian and an accomplished pianist and captain of the swim team, experiences two stressful events just before the beginning of summer; her mother's cancer has returned and her long-time boyfriend Lukas decides to take a break from their relationship. The return of her mother's cancer creates a severe crisis of faith for Lucy.  She begins struggling with her faith because she believed that if she prayed to God he would heal her mother. Instead her mother is ill again and she sees God has having broken his end of the bargain. "I prayed while scrubbing dishes after dinner. I prayed with every stroke, back and forth, back and forth, down my swim lane. I prayed while walking between classes...I should have begged." In the bathroom she questions, "...I think up at God: We had a deal. How could you? How could you?"

Lucy feels completely betrayed by God. She has been praying in thanksgiving all the time, for her parents, for Lukas and her Aunt Rachel. At church the Sunday after she learns of her mother's relapse, Lucy finds she doubts Psalm 46: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. "Really, God? Where? I mean, seriously. Give me a dove with white flapping wings. A rainbow stretched over our house. Give me literally anything -- a feeling, a holy light, a burning bush..." Lucy looks at the statue of Jesus Christ above the altar and feels betrayed and alone. "He stands on the altar, stone arms wide and ivory palms up--a pose that used to look welcoming. Now He looks halfway to a shrug. Your mom has cancer again and there's nothing you can do about it. He's right. I feel helpless, hapless, planless."

This results in Lucy running out of church and when confronted by Lukas, she tells him, "I trusted God would heal my mom, and He did. Except He didn't." She finds Lukas's attitude patronizing because he doesn't have a sick mother. Lucy finds herself questioning everything about God. When Lucy's mother asks her to attend Daybreak, Lucy tells her mother that she needs to be around Christian kids, but her mother counters that faith isn't caught from other people. Lucy finds herself "hurt and confused by a God that has never hurt or confused me before."

When she visits Holyoke after her first week at the Daybreak camp, Lucy marvels at the faith of the young people there. "...I'm jealous --disgustingly, hotly jealous. My heart aches like the sore muscle it is. I covet their innocence, their easy belief. They trust the world; they trust God. They see him everywhere. Like I did, my whole life, and I didn't even know to appreciate how good I had it." Lucy puzzles over her mother's choice to read the book of Psalms, about praising and glorifying God when she is so sick. She also attempts to have her mother allow her to return to Holyoke for the rest of the summer. Lucy mentions the pregnant fourteen-year-old and is shocked when her mother expresses her wish that Lucy make her feel loved and supported. Lucy's parents have always taught her to wait until marriage for sex, and she can't understand her mother's disappointment with Lucy being scandalized by the young girl's situation. However Lucy's visit ends with her trying to see traces of God in everything, just as her father mentioned in his sermon.

At camp Lucy finds herself still talking to God. She asks Him to help her be a good friend to Anna who it turns out is transgender. As she begins to learn the stories of the campers and the counsellors Lucy begins to feel gratitude for what she has - two parents who love her. "I've been so angry-- at God and the universe and cancer--that I think it's been hard to touch gratitude. That my mom can get treatment, that we have a support system, that I was born into such love."

From Henry though, Lucy learns the most. Henry lost his sister who committed suicide when he was ten years old. Despite being angry at God, Henry decided to chose to believe in Him. Lucy wonders if she too can choose to have faith. Over the next few days Lucy finds some measure of peace, "When I try to pray, I don't feel like a crazy person talking to a man in the sky. It feels like me choosing to ask the God I've always known for guidance. Even if one of my prayers is 'Please help me stop being so mad at You.' "

From her friends, Lucy learns how to cope with her mother's cancer and rediscovers her own faith. From Henry, Lucy learns that real life is not an escape from trouble and that one cannot live in a bubble. Daybreak demonstrates to Lucy how people go on living in spite of terrible things that happen. "Hasn't Daybreak shown me, day after day, that people can outlast unbelievable pain? That human hearts are like noble little ants, able to carry so much more weight than you'd expect. Hasn't my mom shown me that, every day of my life?" Keely tells Lucy, "You can be okay again. Just a different kind of okay than before." The Daybreak counsellors and campers are proof that people can survive terrible things and still have a good life.

By the end of the novel Lucy chooses to believe in a God that forgives people in a moment of despair and anger. "If I'm going to believe, it has to be in a God who would forgive my father for this word. I have to believe in a God who knows how much my father loves my mother. I have to believe in a God who would sit beside my father in that car, place His hand on my father's back. And maybe it took me until now--until this terrible moment-- to realize, but I do."

The Names They Call Us is a novel that explores a whole host of themes besides faith; that of friendship, family, how to cope with serious illness, loss of a loved one,  and forgiveness. In some ways the novel takes on too much. There are several subplots; Lucy and Lukas, Lucy and her new relationship with Henry, and the secret past of her mother that Lucy uncovers at Daybreak in the midst of a medical crisis. The novel takes its title from the names people give others when they sometimes speak without thinking. For example, when Lucy's mom asks her to consider going to Daybreak Lucy refers to the camp as "the hippie camp". As Anna gives Lucy a tour around Daybreak, she refers to the Christian camp Holyoke as "It's some crazy church camp..." Lucy says nothing to counter Anna's remark because "It's just that...telling people you're religious can make them assume a whole list of things about you."

Overall a very modern take on faith in the contemporary genre of realistic, young adult fiction.

Book Details:

The Names They Call Us by Emery Lord
New York: Bloomsbury                       2017
388 pp.

The Language Inside by Holly Thompson

Emma Karas has traveled with her family from Kamakura, Japan to America with her family so her mother can receive cancer treatment. Emma, her younger brother Toby and her parents left shortly after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Although Emma was born in the United States, she has lived most of her life in Japan and considers herself Japanese. When she was in Grade Nine, Emma transferred from a Japanese school to an international school. It was during this year that the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck northern Japan. Although her family was fine, some of her friends lost relatives. Emma and her father helped her best friend, Madoka and her dad clean up Madoka's grandparent's home in Miyagi. During the cleanup, Emma learned her mother was sick and that they must leave for America. Emma's plans to play varsity volleyball, attend a Model UN conference in the Philippines and to visit her friend Madoka were put on hold as their lives underwent a drastic change.

Now Emma finds herself, her mother and Toby living in a small town outside Lowell, Massachusetts, with her father's mother, YiaYia, while her father works in his firm's office in New York. She is enrolled in Grade Ten at the local high school. Emma misses her father and her friends, Madoka, Kako, Kenji, and Shin in Japan. In addition to coping with her mother's illness, Emma feels like she has abandoned her Japanese friends when their need was greatest. The stress of all these changes and her mother's illness leads her to suffer from severe migraines.

Hoping to help her granddaughter adjust to life in America, YiaYia arranges for Emma to volunteer at the Newall Center for Long Term Care as a poetry helper. Emma's first time at the center is marred by a migraine which causes her to collapse. A fellow student, Samnang, whom she was supposed to meet there, arranges for her to be taken to back to her aunt's home. Samnang's kindness to her is that start of a friendship that will blossom into a romance.

At the Newall Center, Emma is paired with a forty-six year old woman, Zena who has "locked in syndrome" and who can only communicate using her eyes. To communicate with Zena, Emma must use a special letter board.  Samnang  is paired with  two men Leap Sok and Chea Pen who are Cambodian refugees and who escaped the Pol Pot regime years ago.

Emma learns that Samnang is Cambodian and that there is a large Cambodian refugee population in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is part of a Khmer dance troupe and as Emma and Samnang's friendship develops she also learns that his life hasn't been an easy one. Emma can relate to some of Samnang's struggles to find his place in America. Although she is white, she feels Japanese. But in America, she doesn't look like she's out of place. As she tells Samnang, the language inside her is different from the language outside.
it's not just losing
Japanese words
and phrases

it's as if I've lost
half of myself here
but no one knows
because I'm a white girl

here
I don't look like I belong in Japan
here
I don't look out of place
here
everyone thinks I must be glad
to be "back" in Massachusetts

as if this were home
            but it's not 

Emma's work with Zena makes her realize how much her mother will need her in the coming weeks and months as she recovers from breast cancer. She wants to go back to Japan, but she doesn't want to be like Zena's daughter who "swam off with her sister" leaving her alone in the rehabilitation center. She begins to recognize that maybe she has a duty to help her mother as she struggles to heal from her illness. In addition to this Emma begins to realize that  she has many good things in her new life in America, not the least of which is her friendship with Samnang and her growing relationship with the Cambodian community. When her parents give her the option of returning to Japan with her father, Emma must make a difficult decision, one that will affect her life for years to come.

Discussion

The Language Inside is a beautifully crafted novel that tackles many different issues and does so very ably. There is the overarching theme of identity with Emma who is American but who feels Japanese inside and Samnang who is American but feels Cambodian. This struggle is reflected in the book's title about the language inside (that is how we feel and who we are) being different than what appears to be on the outside. Through dance both Samnang and eventually Emma begin to reconcile their two worlds.

This theme of identity is also expressed in the character of Zena who has "locked-in syndrome". On the outside Zena appears to be a person who can't communicate, appearing to have a life that is very limited. But Zena has a remarkable inner life that is trapped within her. Because she cannot readily communicate, her thoughts or "language" remains trapped inside her. Emma helps Zena to bring this "language inside" to those around her, through the creation of her poetry.

Zena was modeled after Julia Tavalaro, who was a 31 year old mother who suffered a debilitating stroke that left her paralyzed and apparently unconscious. Many years later it was discovered that Julia was fully aware of the world around her  but that she was only able to communicate using the motions of her eyes and head. 

Holly Thompson's free verse captures equally well the fear and hurt of a young girl struggling to cope with a new life and a family crisis, as well as the blossoming of a first love. Well written, evocative and fascinating, this lovely novel is for fans of poetry and also for those who wish to sample this genre. Thompson who was born in America, lives in Japan. This is her second verse novel.

Book Details:
The Language Inside by Holly Thompson
New York: Delacourte Press     2013
521 pp.