Annabel LyonRafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Admission: I'm not the mother of teen girls (although I remember far too keenly being one); I have the other kind. But teens are teens, and they think with different parts of their brains than we do. Which means that just about any parent of one will recognize the sour-sweet persona of Annabel Lyon's protagonist in Encore Edie.
Just turned 13 and freaked by the prospect of high school, Edie's a prickly brainiac with a grunge-inflected fashion sense and a penchant for drama (as in Shakespeare, though not excluding the domestic variety). She's also grooving on jazz, specifically the Sarah Vaughan disc her dad gave her for her birthday.
Her favourite birthday present is the black yoga top from her older sister, the pretty and popular Dex, who is sometimes an ally and sometimes an enemy, "like those knights in Elizabethan times, the ones with the white roses and the ones with the red."
This is the second Edie book by the New Westminster, B.C., author, following 2008's All-Season Edie, which made the Canadian Children's Book Centre's recommended list. It's my first meeting with Edie, and I confess I didn't immediately love her. I wanted to, having adored Lyon's bawdy and audacious reimagining of Aristotle in The Golden Mean, her prizewinning novel for grownups. After devouring that banquet of a book, I wanted passion, not pique.
But a) this is "juvenile fiction" (a term Edie would loathe) and b) the kid grew on me. She's a pain in the butt, is Edie, and she knows it: "I can't fake being nice." And she's her own toughest critic: She's a "dork," an embarrassment. Worse, she's mean to her young cousin Merry, who can't help that she has Down syndrome.
By the time Edie finds herself catapulted into the improbable role of co-directing her new school's musical, though, she's got me hooked.
The premise for the show is brilliant, and it's all Edie's idea: King Lear, reimagined in plain language and set to the sultry stylings of Miss Sarah. Better than Glee. Way better.
Brilliant ideas are what introverted, bookish girls like Edie have a million of. What they don't have so much of is the gumption to share them, let alone put themselves in a position to have to make them happen.
The enormousness of the task is something that anyone, 13 or 31, might crumble in the face of, and you feel anxious for Edie as she canvasses for help - from her best friend Sam and the impossibly cool Regan - and flailingly tries to keep the musical on track.
Happily, the production affords some comic relief: the auditions, where the best choice for the raging Lear is a weedy kid who looks like he might burst into tears; the rehearsals, when the Fool suddenly decides he needs to play his lines straight ("I'm a serious person, you know").
No surprise that Edie becomes even more unbearable as the roadblocks pile up, and manages to alienates her entire cast and crew - all but Merry, her fiercest supporter among the novel's dramatis personae.
And here is the grace at the heart of this slim book, the delicate rendering of Merry, whose most frequent utterance is "yuh" and who just happens - as Edie discovers when she actually spends some time with her - to be crazy for musicals.
The rest is too good to spoil. You'll just have to buy the book for your kid - and read it yourself first.
Sheree-Lee Olson is the author of the novel Sailor Girl. She once translated Hamlet into plain English.