By Tom Ryan and Robin Stevenson
(Running Press Teens, 2020)
I’m not sure I have much to say about this book. Glad it was published. I hope a lot of teens read it. I would recommend it, but I think I’ve had my fill of young adult for a while. Any criticisms I may have are (mostly) because I’m not the target audience.
When You Get the Chance is another YA title told in a he said – she said format, two authors alternating chapters, each offering the perspective of a different character as the story advances. (Think Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn or Here’s to Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli.) In this case, the two authors are Canadian, one in Nova Scotia, the other in British Columbia, like the characters within the novel.
This is story about cousins: Talia who’s an eighteen-year-old lesbian and Mark, seventeen and gay. They live on opposite coasts of Canada and meet again after seven years, brought together for the funeral of their grandfather in Toronto. Chummy in childhood, having spent summers at the family cottage in the Muskokas, they’ve grown into different people. Despite both being queer, they don’t relate much to each other. Talia is the serious one, an excellent student who sticks to the rules. Mark is a charming partier who always lands on his feet. (These personalities feel somewhat gender-stereotyped. I’d have liked to have seen the roles flipped.) Mark’s nosy, precocious ten-year-old sister is a sidekick in the cousins’ adventures.
Things I like about the book:
· It’s truly Canadian.
o In the film industry, Canadian locations rarely play themselves. Toronto may pretend to be New York City, Vancouver acts as Seattle and rural Alberta fills in as Montana. Heaven forbid a story should actually take place in Canada. Canadian settings are rare in publishing as well, unless the book is released by a Canadian publisher. In this case, When You Get the Chance is unabashedly Canadian and published by Running Press Teens, an imprint of The Hachette Book Group in the U.S. Let young American readers get a taste of their northern neighbor.
o Part of the story takes place in Toronto, the country’s largest city, for which many Canadians have a love-hate relationship (or maybe just hate). So big and so diverse, Toronto can portray itself as the center of the universe, at least in terms of anything under the red and white maple leaf flag. Mark, coming from Halifax, is particularly in awe of all the larger city has to offer though, in time, he comes to appreciate some of what his hometown has to offer.
o The other prominent setting is Ontario’s cottage country. I grew up in Ontario and I didn’t realize how special and perhaps distinct the province’s cottage culture was until my family moved to Texas while I was in high school. Every time I’d mention our cottage, my Texas friends would imagine some fancy second home and look at me like I was rich. While obnoxious monster cottages have popped up in the last few decades, cottage life traditionally centers on a lakeside cabin, kept in one family, simultaneously hosting multiple generations throughout the summer months. Cottages are homey, decorated in kitschy items, canoe paddles on a wall, a door jamb with pencilled in notations of children’s growth from year to year, shelves filled with beach towels and very old (classic!) boardgames. It’s ever-slow, peaceful pace that matters, not some state-of-the-art Wolfe oven. While the heart of cottage country is along Georgian Bay (an arm of Lake Huron), you can find cottages anywhere there’s a lake in Ontario. (My family’s happens to be on a broad expanse of the Ottawa River.)
The idle nature of cottage life offers a better chance for Talia and Mark (and Paige) to get to know each other better. In an urban setting, it would be more likely that, after initially seeing how different they are, they’d find plenty of distractions to maintain their distance.
· The book shines a light on Pride celebrations. Co-author Stevenson has previously published nonfiction on the significance of Pride, including Pride: The Celebration and the Struggle (Orca Book Publishers, 2020), so it must have seemed natural to have a section of the story involve a road trip from cottage country back to Toronto for the festivities. For a teen reader, the Pride references probably plant a seed: attend a smaller scale, local Pride, but one day take in Toronto Pride in all its bigness and boldness. If not Toronto, then New York, San Francisco, London or…there are so many that we older folks may take for granted.
· Speaking of relics, When You Get the Chance features several older LGBTQ characters who serve as mentors while also giving Talia, Mark and the book’s target audience a sense of perspective—the way things were and some of the events that led to the current level of freedoms. It feels odd to read about young queer characters who have no sense of Stonewall other than its frequency as a buzzword but, considering the riots occurred more than half a century ago, it’s a reminder of the history we relics need to share. (As far as I can recall, the novel doesn’t mention the AIDS crisis or include characters living comfortably with HIV. I suppose one YA book can only do so much while keeping story as the primary focus.)
Everything wraps up tidily by the end of the book. Too tidily for my tastes. A seemingly mysterious, yearslong, much-ado-about-nothing conflict between Mark’s mom and Talia’s father disappears. As well, despite repeated mention of how much trouble Mark is supposed to be in for some poor choices, nothing comes to be in that regard. Moreover, Talia drops a belated bombshell on her heretofore not very resilient father and it goes over swimmingly. I felt the authors were rushing to the finish line. (Not that I wanted more about any of these problems; I would have preferred different conflicts in the first place.)
When You Get the Chance is worth a read. Don’t let my grumpy old guy point of view deter you. And now let my YA sabbatical begin!
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