...Or Not?

I chatted with Brian Mandabach at the First Annual Kidlitosphere Conference, and got a brief sneak peek at his debut novel, …Or Not? (Flux, 2007) I was enticed, but had five long weeks to wait before I could get my hands on a copy for real. (Note to library users: put quotation marks around the title, or the Boolean search engines'll get you.) Now I’m back to talk about it.

Just reading the jacket copy, you might think …Or Not? is the story of a confrontation between pinko Cassie and the right-wing jerks at her Colorado middle school. As it turns out, it really isn’t. Misconceptions aside, however, I enjoyed the story all the more for what it is.

Cassie Sullivan feels very deeply; I can think of no better way to put it. She’s smart and introspective and extremely sensitive to the pain in the world, particularly the pain of innocents. That’s why she’s a vegan, and that’s why she opposes America’s war in the Middle East. What sense does it make, she wonders, to counteract the terrorists’ killing of innocents on 9/11 with the killing of innocent families in Afghanistan or Iraq? Unfortunately, voicing her views in school does put her in a spot of trouble with some of her teachers and fellow students.

But as I said, that’s not where the real story lies. It’s just a catalyst for the real conflict: Cassie’s existential crisis. Living in a world filled with people doing such terrible things to each other and the planet, trapped in our routines of endless test-taking and kowtowing to authority, being so small and insignificant in a universe so vast, how can we go on living, day after day? Many days, Cassie wishes she could escape to her family’s rustic cabin in the mountains; some days she wishes she could escape the tethers of life completely.

In Jay Asher’s big debut Thirteen Reasons Why, the main female character finds reasons not to go on living. …Or Not?, in contrast, is about Cassie’s discovery of reasons to live, even when she’s feeling weighed down by the tedium and sorrow of life. It’s about finding the resolve to hang on, even when she feels helpless and hopeless.

I enjoyed and identified with Cassie as a character. You get the impression that she is a true individualist – not going against the grain for the sake of turning heads, but because she’s being true to herself, even when it’s unpopular. She does have a touch of righteous indignation about her, but Mandabach successfully prevents her from being insufferable by surrounding her with characters who respectfully disagree with her, and whom she respects in turn. Cassie’s prickly and wants to be left alone, yet she also longs to be loved. Kirkus' reviewer calls her "spoiled", and it's true that Cassie isn't facing dire circumstances; but as anyone who suffers from depression can tell you, life doesn't need to be dire to be difficult.

The whole time I was reading the school scenes, I wished I could break into the story and give Cassie and her parents a copy of The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn. Cassie seems like a natural candidate for unschooling. She’s mature, intelligent, and driven in her particular areas of interest. She’s tortured by the rote learning, test taking, and stifling atmosphere of her school. Outside the confines of formal schooling, who knows what she might achieve? I can envision her writing books, learning to live sustainably, traveling the world to help people in need and causes she believes in. For that matter, her friend DJ might also be a good candidate for unschooling – not that his mother would ever go for it. He’s obviously remarkably intelligent (he writes a helluva love poem, anyway), yet barely scrapes by in school. He just doesn’t seem to be cut out it.

…Or Not? isn’t perfect. It runs almost 400 pages, which felt slightly long. The school harassment issues, which initially seem like the book’s focal point, drop out of the plot almost entirely, about a third of the way in, only to pop up again at the end as another incendiary event. Meanwhile, it’s suggested that a former friend of Cassie’s is behind the harassment, but the reasons for the end of their friendship and the ex-friend’s apparently extreme antagonism are never explained.

Nonetheless, I found …Or Not? to be a very enjoyable and thoughtful read. I imagine many teens will read Cassie’s story and think, “I thought I was the only one who felt this way about life!” And that by itself will give them hope as they learn to be.