Kat Zhang was
nineteen when she sold The Hybrid Chronicles to HarperCollins.
Let me repeat
that.
Nineteen.
To put this in perspective, when YA Guy was nineteen, my main accomplishment was sneaking
into a classmate’s dorm room and moving all his furniture onto his balcony. I’d written
novels, sure--I insulted my freshman philosophy professor by finishing a novel
for a young writer’s competition rather than writing a paper for his class--but
I was certainly not selling them to HarperCollins.
Zhang’s
accomplishment would be noteworthy even if the first book in the series, What’s Left of Me, were no better than
average. I mean, come on. I teach freshman composition these days. I’m not
looking for miracles.
But What’s Left of Me is much, much better
than average. It’s excellent. The concept, the writing, the plotting, the
pacing, the characters: all excellent.
Now that’s
something.
In Zhang’s book, we’re
taken to a not-far-future world where people are born with two souls (or
personae, if you prefer) cohabiting a single body. The recessive persona
typically “dies” before the teen years, leaving the dominant persona in
complete control. But in the case of protagonist Addie/Eva, the supposedly
recessive soul, Eva, remains: locked within a shared mind, able to communicate
with Addie and experience everything she does, but unable to communicate with
the rest of the world or move a muscle of their body. The two are what their
society terms a hybrid: a feared and shunned being believed to be the cause of
earlier wars of destruction. If ever their hybrid nature is discovered, Addie
and Eva will be subject to incarceration, experimentation… or worse.
There’s so much
to like about What’s Left of Me, but
I want to focus on the strengths my fourteen-year-old daughter (herself an
aspiring writer who met Zhang at a young authors event) succinctly described:
“It’s really well-written!” It was a
brilliant decision to have Eva, the recessive soul, narrate What’s Left of Me: her desire to return
to full life, to re-experience the autonomy she knew as a child, provides the
book a compelling narrative drive. And the lyrical language of the book
brilliantly expresses the strange condition of being two-in-one, both intimate
and separate, as in the opening words of the prologue:
Addie and I were born into the same body,
our souls’ ghostly fingers entwined before we gasped our very first breath. Our
earliest years together were also our happiest. Then came the worries--the
tightness around our parents’ mouths, the frowns lining our kindergarten
teacher’s forehead, the question everyone whispered when they thought we
couldn’t hear.
Why aren’t they settling?
Settling.
We tried to form the word in our
five-year-old mouth, tasting it on our tongue.
Set-Tull-Ling.
We knew what it meant. Kind of. It meant one
of us was supposed to take control. It meant the other was supposed to fade
away.
That’s really
good stuff. And it gets even better.
What’s Left of Me isn’t perfect. I found
parts of the book, particularly the extended sequence in a psychiatric
institution, not wholly convincing; so totalitarian a society, I felt, could
not have run one of its premier institutions so tentatively, indeed ineptly. And I
was never entirely sure what the origin or significance of hybridity was; there
seemed no rational explanation for why people in this society are born double,
which made me fear the book was using the condition as allegory. Perhaps the
second book in the series will help resolve this question.
But whether it
does or not, What’s Left of Me proves
beyond doubt that Zhang is for real. And that being the case, we can all be thankful she got started
so early sharing her words with the world.
