The Alex Crow

On his fourteenth birthday, Ariel played Pierrot the clown in a school play.  He stayed dressed in his clown suit after the play, because one of his classmates had hidden his clothes as a joke. 

Later the same day, the rebel soldiers came to town.  They abducted some of his friends as involuntary conscripts; they killed the others.  Ariel hid in a walk-in refrigerator while the rest of the town was gassed to death.  Only Ariel survived.  For the next few months, Ariel wandered about, struggling for survival -- an orphan and a refugee -- dressed in the clothes on his back -- those of Pierrot the clown.

A year ago, I reviewed Andrew Smith's funny, revolting, and preposterous YA novel, Grasshopper Jungle.  Yesterday, I ran across the New York Times's review of Smith's latest novel, The Alex Crow.

I had to read it.  And I have.

But for a jammed rebel rifle, Ariel would have died on his fourteenth birthday.  He escapes one harrowing experience after another, including forcible rape by older boys in a UN refugee camp, until, just before he turns 15, he bumps into an American officer at the camp.  The officer -- Major Knott --befriends him, brings him back to America, and places him with the family of a friend and co-worker in West Virginia.

We never learn the location of Ariel's homeland, except that it's in the eastern hemisphere.  But, as Major Knott learns, Ariel has accomplishments beyond those of a survivor.  He is fluent in both English and French ("I like languages").  He knows immediately that West Virginia is "in the eastern United States, between Virginia and Ohio."  He is intelligent, and he is observant.

In West Virginia, he meets his adopted family, including a brother Max, just sixteen days his senior.  Max and Ariel are sent to a summer camp for six weeks.  A major portion of the novel relates their adventures at camp (extremely funny at times), the growing if strained friendship between the two brothers, and Ariel's gradual discovery of the reason Major Knott was so generous with his time and energy, and so willing to bring Ariel to the United States.

All bullying involves the bully's desire to exercise control over another.  But not all those who long to control others are obvious bullies -- they aren't necessarily tough "big kids" in school, or violent rebel soldiers, or teen rapists, or insecure camp counselors.  Nor even overly-inquisitive psychologists.  Sometimes control freaks come to us under the guise of friends, as good people who wish to "make the world exactly the way we want it to be.  All for the best, of course."

After reading the review -- a favorable review -- in the Times, I was expecting a book full of horrors, a book every bit as bizarre as Grasshopper Jungle.  A book that, as the review put it, "left me uncomfortable and emotional and  wondering what exactly would make someone write a book like this."  But no.  Aside from a bit of science fiction, that isn't what I read.  I found Ariel's life to be amazing and unusual and frightening and sad, but not unbelievable. (Although there were a couple of bizarre side plots, involving other characters.) And very touching.

And the aspects of science fiction?  In another five or ten years they may seem prescient.  To those of us in 2015 who know of drones, drones used both for observation and for targeted killings; of omnipresent surveillance cameras; of warrantless monitoring of communications; of unchallengeable "no fly" orders; of the exponential increase in the computing power of chips -- none of the disturbing and intrusive science in The Alex Crow seems preposterous.  Just not fully developed, as of yet.

So far as we know.