Lana Wood Johnson has written her new novel, Technically, You Started It, entirely in text message exchanges between two high school juniors: Haley Hancock 和 马丁 Munroe II. Because the two teens share many things in common, they bond during these communications, realizing that they’d rather have their texting relationship “than nothing at all” (298).
马丁, who is h和some, 丰富的, 著名的, 迷人的, 和聪明的, is named after his financial genius gr和father who has funded most of the advances in science 和 technology. His father is not only a big risk-taker but someone who can’t “wait more than a second before getting remarried” (74), so he has been divorced two 和 a half times.
Haley, on the other h和, thinks things to death 和 has an overactive responsibility complex. Having been raised a nerd, Haley gets her propensity for technology, 家谱, 和 a general indifference to visuals from her mom. Although she isn’t religious, she believes in algorithms 和 spends a lot of time either reading or inside her head, two situations which contribute to her being somewhat socially challenged. Her parents are “a lone normal spot in a family of super weird” (74), 和 Haley’s mother’s super power is hearing phones on vibrate.
The two young adults are intelligent, 博览群书, 和 enrolled in Advanced Placement courses; however, they have 复杂的 families. 马丁’s family is 《皇冠登录welcome》 和 人 magazine 复杂的, while Haley’s is Dr. 菲尔。 复杂的. 与他们, texting becomes both habit forming 和 awesome since they are able to really talk to each other. Texting allows them the distance of the screen 和 the freedom to be their true selves. 最终, they develop a friendship, talking genuinely to one another: “When I talk to you, I actually talk to you. It’s not just filling time. You know who I am” (213). They not only share their social anxieties 和 relationship insecurities but also aspects of themselves that reveal their philosophical cores. They discuss meaty issues like the competitive nature of school 和 how the gifted 和 talent program might just as well be called “Hunger Grades.” Yet their relationship turns out to be built on misunderst和ing.
Readers of Johnson’s novel will likely share many of the same experiences 和 questions explored by the novel’s protagonists, questions like, why aren’t things easy when you like someone, or why does real life have to be so strange 和 weird-filled? They also discover that while anger goes away, disappointment lingers; it “fills the whole house [和] steals all the air” (191). Although during their discussions, the two teens generalize about girls being 复杂的 和 about guys hiding their feelings or playing Xbox to ignore their feelings, their conversations do reveal several human truths: that some friendships run their course while others can grow from a soul-mate spark, a chemistry that is based on “the person inside the skin more than the skin itself” (220). With references to the 金赛规模, we also recognize that people do not fit into exclusive heterosexual or homosexual categories.
- Posted by 唐娜