The story opens with a newspaper story out of a rural North Carolina town called Black Creek. A teenager named Patrick is known to all the residents of the backwoods town as both the amiable clerk at the local gas station and the village oddity for being openly gay. When Patrick is found severely beaten and tied to a gas pump with a homophobic slur scrawled on his chest, the town is awash with horrified, and almost gleeful, gossip. Cat, a withdrawn sixteen-year-old girl, is particular affected; Patrick was once her closest friend, though she had not been speaking with him at the time of his assault. In a small town where everyone knows everyone, Cat is convinced that she can succeed where the local sheriff is failing, and discover the truth behind what happened to Patrick. Her guilt over the way in which she had handled their friendship drives her to find Patrick’s attacker amidst the residents of Black Creek, and repeated advice from those around her to let sleeping dogs lie only stokes the flames of her anger. However, her quest to shine light on the crime raises the frightening possibility of her being the next target.
This is a rough story to read. It starts with a gut punch and doesn’t get much better. Homophobia, meth addiction, and sexual assault are all touched upon in this story. For all of its darkness, though, Shine never really dips into sensationalism or angst. Everything seems very real in this book. Black Creek is a rural town with rural problems and rural attitudes; while I didn’t grow up as poor as Cat did, I do have enough experience with small-town mindsets to have the setting and characters resonate in a very real way with me. And for all of the darkness in Black Creek, there is beauty, too. Myracle is obviously writing what she knows, and has a talent for presenting the South in a sublime, evocative way, warts and all.
I figured out the mystery early on, but that’s only because I’m fairly familiar with how stories like these play out, unfortunately. But the main plot was extremely well done, with enough tension to keep astute readers strung along but without being too obtuse or boring for teens. The characters are layered, and many are both sympathetic and menacing by turns. Cat, the narrator, is particularly well-written, and her story is visceral and heartbreaking. While the plot itself is something that we have seen before, the mystery in Shine is made compelling by how ambiguous it is, and how there are things left mysterious and unexplained even as the story takes familiar turns.
There are a few things that bothered me, at least momentarily. The introduction of Cat’s love interest (and another potential suspect) is so abrupt that at first I wondered what their first scene together was even doing in the book. The explanation of the tension between Cat and her brother near the end of the book is also somewhat confounding, and appears almost contrived at first glance. The ending, too, is somewhat of a letdown. This could be because I figured the mystery out early on and was hoping I was wrong (I was almost completely correct), but the book also ends abruptly and on a strangely positive note, considering how horrible Patrick’s ordeal was and how bleak things still are by the end of the story.
All of these problems spring from a single source, though, and that source is actually the book's biggest strength: the characters in Shine are not stereotypes, despite their corn-fed hillbilly slang, and they do not act in a predictable fashion. There are no easy answers, here, just as there aren’t any in real life. Sometimes relationships do start in strange, abrupt ways, and considering that Shine is a book for teens, it follows the romance formula in way that is refreshingly understated. While the actions of Cat’s brother in the face of her earliest childhood trauma initially ring false to me and, I imagine, every other big brother who reads this book, Christian’s odd reaction is still evocatively real, in that it proves that not everyone is as brave as they seem. And while the mystery played itself out in the way it was foreshadowed (brilliantly, I might add), I am convinced that another character was involved. I am absolutely sure of this, due to multiple hints in the writing, and despite the fact that the ending does not make any mention of it and wraps things up with a single climactic confrontation. Whether this is an intentional tease by Myracle or just my own interpretation of the reading, it’s still a byproduct of a gripping, tightly-plotted mystery, and lends credence to Black Creek’s gritty, bittersweet realism.
For all that I looked for things to criticize, Shine wouldn’t let me go. I tore through the book, and loved every part of it. This is a grim, unflinching take on the consequences of secrecy and self-loathing, and it also is a paean to the lonely beauty and restorative power of a small, tightly-knit community. It offers a hard glimpse into reality while still telling an oddly sweet story, and it provides a moral without preaching. While there are occasions that the themes could be explored a little deeper or with more detail, this is a perfect example of dramatic teen lit. Once it hit shelves, I imagine it will move quickly. I’d recommend this to anyone looking for a good mystery, regardless of age.
Verdict: 5 / 5
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