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After each of the very public (and I don’t have to qualify this, tragic) suicides by very young people in recent years nearby (to refresh your memory of their names, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Phoebe Prince) that were linked in some way to bullying, my antennae are up about this issue. Author Holly Thompson’s antennae are up, too—and she wrote a young adult novel about the subject. Orchards takes place the summer after Kana Goldberg’s friend Ruth has committed suicide. Kana, who is half-Japanese and half-Jewish, is one of a group of eighth grade girls blamed for excluding Ruth. In order to heal from the loss, her parents decide to send her to Japan, to her maternal side’s relatives helping in the mikan orange groves.
The story, told in verse that read to me like the journal entries one writes when not quite ready to write it all down, grapples with identity and compassion and how those two things ultimately must go hand in hand.
For Kana, a huge factor in figuring out who she is has to do with the two cultures that her body encompasses. To wit, her aunt thinks Kana must eat “bad American food.” Her aunt says “look/and points to/my butt/as evidence.” Kana knows her butt is evidence of her father’s side’s peasant Jew body and that however stringently she might try not to eat, she’d still not have a tiny Japanese body. Kana’s summer immersion in family and culture helps her learn more about the influences that have, in her life up until then, seemed more far away than close, yet so strongly have guided her upbringing, like discovering missing puzzle pieces.
The exercise of meditating upon Ruth, the friend treated sometimes more like outcast—more in jest than Ruth took it—weaves itself, at times one-sided conversation, through Kana’s summer, her internal landscape altered by the shock of that event and loss and the sense that she’d been party to a misstep that contributed to a peer losing her life. It is poignant to witness this young woman trying so hard to put herself in Ruth’s place and to make sense of a boy’s conclusion that Ruth was bipolar like his sister. He’d reached out to try to help the girl, who’d ended up hanging herself in his family’s apple orchard.
Kana’s Japanese family believes in the power of being busy, of work, and of time being its own tincture so the summer isn’t one of long conversations about the tragedy (imagine certain Jewish relatives’ mode of dealing with the aftermath to a teen suicide). In this way, time pulls the reader along, through the end of Japanese summer school, then work in the groves, holidays and attendant rituals. For me, Thompson’s vivid descriptions of place and ritual were probably the most absorbing part of the book.
As summer nears its close, Kana notes the friends—scattered in different places their parents considered proper for healing—begins to reconnect online: “humor/starts to return/barely noticeable at first/like a tide change.” Kana’s observation of the friends’ edging into shared levity again mirrors her own, as she appreciates her family and her ancestral home.
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I’ve been thinking a lot after finishing the book about whether Kana’s voice and perspective felt authentically like a rising ninth grader’s and I have to say not really. But what’s interesting to me as reader is that didn’t matter a bit. In fact I think the kind of awareness revealed served this story so well it was absolutely necessary. The heart that guided us through these really difficult places had to be a tiny bit more sophisticated and seasoned than Kana could actually be.
Such a haunting and absorbing read requires that I share no more details of narrative, because I hope you’ll get hold of a copy and discover for yourself this beautiful story, one that you’ll then want to place in the hands of teenagers in your life, as I did with mine. (He loved it, as did my mother).
