Izzy, Willy-Nilly

Cynthia Voigt has always been one of my favorite authors, and this book is one of my favorites. Voigt wrote books for young adults before young adults were really an identified genre. “Young adult” in the literary world basically means “teenager,” which, if you think about it, is one of the biggest misnomers in the history of the world. Teenagers? Adults? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA… but I guess it would be bad form to have a library section named “stupid punks who make our insurance rates go up,” so “Young Adult” it is.

Anyway, these YA books back in the 80s were a varied bunch. Basically any book that had teenagers in it fell into this crazy genre. That meant everything from “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” to “Flowers in the Attic.” Oh, my. And I repeat, oh, my. I remember one of my friends reading FITA when we were in junior high and telling me how she could handle it until she realized that the brother and sister in that book were “the same age as Erik and Jozi!!” And YIKES, that was enough to turn her off. (I’m a little appalled that she needed to relate that tripe to real life in order to be turned off by it, but I guess we all have different boundaries.)

So anyway, it’s a little ironic that she related FITA to my life when it’s really Izzy that ended up being a little more applicable. I mean, of course none of us knew that way back when we were reading these YA books. And if I may be inappropriate for a minute, I think it’s slightly (but only slightly, of course) better that a drunk driver ended up impacting Erik and I’s life rather than dirty mattress incest. Um, call me crazy. I believe I’m digressing.

So Izzy goes to a party with a jerky guy who gets drunk and runs her into a tree on the way home. She loses her leg as a result and he gets off scot-free. (Don’t they all?) By the way, this all happens in the first chapter; I’m not spoiling anything. The rest of the book is about how she copes with her loss and her re-entering of society. It’s not a brilliant literary venture or anything, but I have to say that Cynthia Voigt does an amazing job of getting inside the head of a teenager. That’s why I love her writing: she follows their inner workings so astutely that no matter how tortured their thoughts are, it is a joy to read them. And of course Izzy’s thoughts are tortured, as are most of the other kids she writes about, but who cares? Empathy is a gift and it’s very rewarding to feel it through these pages. Highly recommended.