Alaska
Suggested by: NPR
Traveled: July 9-10

Here is the problem I had with Point of Direction. It acts as though the only problems worthy of writing about are earth-shattering, specifically terrible problems. It’s not enough to have a mother that ignores a main character except to pour her wine while she’s still in preschool — no, let’s make that terrible childhood lead her to be responsible for the death of a young hiker on a giant GLACIER and then give her brain-ripping nightmares until she hitch-hikes around and has numerous scrapes with death and then is maybe-stalked by a mystery man on a freezing, rain-whipped lighthouse in the middle of an Alaskan winter.

Ok, so I wasn’t totally impressed with Point of Direction. Clearly.

This is a point of frustration with me, and it’s not just in the books that I read. People don’t need to have the royal flush of shitty, unbelievable circumstances to make them interesting. They don’t even need that to make them tragic. Point of Direction’s protagonist, Anna, is a hyperbole. She is impenetrably covered in heavy, reaching problems that guarded against any chance for my attempted empathy. Frankly, she ended up seeming a bit selfish to me, a bit frustratingly smug in her possession of “unique” traumas.

Does it make for easy, even at times engaged, reading? Yes. I tore through this book, because it has that addictive, selfish quality that young-adult type fiction books do. I knew how it would end, and even the silly guesses I made about the mystery thread turned out to be tucked neatly together at its conclusion.

But it’s easy to redeem and heal a character who has obvious wounds and a textbook history. It’s a much more enjoyable experience to get caught up in a world where the characters have subtle scars that forge their identities, where misunderstandings and everyday betrayals create a rich portrait of life’s struggles and triumphs. I guess I wish Point of Direction would have been just a little less direct.