Becoming Carly Klein: A Novel
“Carly’s upcoming disappointments and confrontation with reality can’t spoil the sense of looking through a knothole to witness what we’ve been told not to watch or hint at.”
Elizabeth Harlan slips away from the “young adult” literature where she’s made her mark, as instead she tries a sneaky slide across the division between teen years and full adult presence. Carly Klein is 16 years old, almost without friends in an all-girls high school in New York City, and so annoyed with her parents’ well-meant but clueless directions that she’ll do almost anything to make it into a bigger, more honest world.
The last straw is when both her parents manage to ignore her birthday. Or it should be—except things can always get worse, which is clear once Carly arrives at a girls’ camp her mother thinks will be pleasant and cool in the Rocky Mountains. It’s not. And although her efforts to spy on the counselor’s sex life don’t go as planned, Carly manages to get kicked out of camp. But she’s not running away or hitting the road or indulging in self-harm. No, in a brilliant new version of how to launch into adulthood, she’s been sneaking into her mother’s home office to read the psychiatrist’s work notes, and peopling her imagination with the clients she mostly never meets.
However, the client she becomes fascinated with—or more precisely, whose interactions with her mother she keeps imagining—is Daniel, who is blind and a college student. So when she starts stalking him (sorry, but it’s true), and discovers he’s seeking a “reader” to help him study, she’s got nothing to lose, has she? Applying via a phone call makes the job hers. He’ll never guess who she is, or her age. Besides, she already knows so much about him: “When Daniel says, ‘Let me give you my address,’ Carly realizes, horrified, that she almost let on that she already knows where he lives.”
From there, the wild plot becomes more predictable, but it’s still been such an unusual setup with such wild potential that Carly’s upcoming disappointments and confrontation with reality can’t spoil the sense of looking through a knothole to witness what we’ve been told not to watch or hint at. Harlan’s wrap-up reverts to some young-adult tropes in an overly sweet way that reduces the power of the suspense she’s layered in the first two thirds of the novel; a dash more cynicism and a stinging shake of unavoidable bad consequences might have rescued the finale. But then, of course, the book would have moved into noir terrain, an area Harlan seems unwilling to admit into even the darkest city nights.
This won’t be a book that adults want to read more than once, but those who opt to send a teen into its pages should read it carefully beforehand. There are a lot of questions that Harlan and the therapist in the story gloss over. The best young-adult readers will be demanding answers to many of them, as well as a wearing slightly grossed-out expression, by the time they’ve consumed the story.