Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

People recommend books to me a lot. It's hard to know when or how to fit them all in! And then there's the worry I won't like a book that is very dear to a dear friend's heart. For a long time, I just avoided reading books that had been recommended to me, unless someone pushed a physical copy into my hot little hands. (This is still the fastest way to get a book to the top of my list.) So I started a new list to read of books friends recommended. If you want to get in on this, you can recommend a book on this post.

This book was recommended to me by Liz

If there is a truism about our world as it exists now, it could be that teenagers will be assholes to each other and everyone around them. Not even necessarily on purpose (although sometimes quite intentionally), they tend to be feeling everything and not yet have the skills to deal with emotions and people, or know how to get into or out of situations that spark those intense emotions without being cruel.

Moreno-Garcia knows this, and her teenage characters are frustrating and engaging both, and the adult versions of the same people still recognizable, and in at least one case, still lashing out to stay away from emotions. Of course, since that character is coming home in 2009 to attend the funeral of her dead father and clear out his apartment, emotions are everywhere.

Parts of this book remind me of Y Tu Mama Tambien, a movie by Alfonso Cuaron that I'm very fond of, in that both centre around teenagers who have no idea how to really broach the silence and admit that they want, that they desire, that they, even more scarily, have feelings for each other. In a weird way, bodies are easier than the vulnerability of emotions.

In 1998, three teenagers who feel like outcasts are friends. Meche (short for Mercedes), obsessed with music and better at science than humanities; Sebastian, poor, loving literature; Daniela, still slightly childish, prone to frilly things, but kind. Meche and Sebastian are really the main characters here, although Daniela is the malleable glue that holds two strong personalities together.

As they negotiate the treacherous terrain of high school, and the fact that there are unacknowledged or partially acknowledged depths of feeling between them, Meche discovers that she can do magic, with the right record, the right song. She pulls Sebastian and Daniela into this with her, even as her parents marriage is dissolving.  It's a heady idea, that you can change the world as a teenager, make it more right, more what it should be than it is.

Of course, since Meche isn't a particularly nice teenager, that soon spills over into revenge. At first, passed off as righteous anger, but then the power of being able to hurt people moves into retribution for smaller and smaller things, and her friends pull away.

All this is interspersed with Meche excavating her father's apartment and enduring the days of his novena. Daniela and Sebastian come back into her life, even though she screams at them to come out. They were with the emotions she buried, those she has kept at bay as she fled Mexico to work in Norway. Of course they bubble up.

All the feelings of high school, of wanting and not having words, of being afraid of wanting, of hurting and wanting to hurt - this book evokes all those feelings that remain complicated into our adult lives. Meche may have learned particularly little in the intervening years, but she's a prickly, slightly obnoxious host into this world where magic has a cost and friendships are broken.