On the joy of reading children's literature as an adult
The Thread's Must-Read
"We Are Okay”by Nina LaCour
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We meet Marin as she’s mocking up a fake bulletin board in her college dorm. She’s cutting pithy sayings out of magazines and jotting down lyrics that she likes, aware even as she does it that it won’t camouflage her loneliness from her best friend, who's arriving for a visit. “Each paper is the same white,” Marin realizes. “It looks desperate.”
I thought I’d long since forgotten what it was like to show up at my new college in upstate New York, knowing no one, listening to the happy chatter of the girls from the City who’d all gone to high school together. I remember thinking of freshman year as a character test: “I can endure anything for four years and then I’ll be free to do whatever I want.”
As it turned out, I loved college. And leaving the safe circle of friends from home was good preparation for the career moves I would make across the country.
Marin has also left a close friendship — a first love, really — to go to school on the other side of the country. But she’s carrying a heavy load of unresolved grief that’s so tender any reminder of home is unbearable. “I have only just learned how to be here,” she thinks. “Life is paper-thin and fragile. And sudden change could rip it wide-open.”
The story of those slow-healing wounds unfolds over a long snowy weekend in "We Are Okay," and although I saw where this book was headed, Nina LaCour wrote with such tenderness and grace that I blinked away tears through the final pages.
-K.M.
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