Palmers Gate (review)

Robby has been living in Palmers Gate for three years when Colleen Lardner moves into the neighborhood and his fifth-grade class, and her spacey detachment leads to her becoming the class butt, nicknamed "Lardner the Retardner." Though Robby is buddies with some of Colleen's worst tormentors, he sees her enough at home to develop a vague sense of responsibility for her; subsequently, he witnesses things—her sending a note around class offering to strip for the guys after school, her playing out sexual assaults with her dolls, her frightening father and passive, depressed mother—that make him suspect that something is terribly wrong at Colleen's house. The retrospective touches (the story is set in 1972), preference for the implicit over the explicit (it's never overtly stated that Colleen's father is sexually abusing his daughter), and open-ended shape (Robby ends up in military school after setting fire to Colleen's house, and readers never find out what happens to Colleen) make this read more like an adult short story than a YA novel, and for all Robby's sympathy for Colleen, she's a bit of a programmatic symptom cluster. Varela writes with fluidity and an easy particularity, though, making Robby's small middle-grades world a vivid one with its many unforcedly interconnecting strands, and there's an interesting challenge in Robby's silence about his response to Colleen's abuse ("What could he have said? That he'd had enough and he needed to stop something from happening that he wasn't sure was actually happening?"). Abbott's Firegirl, reviewed above, is a more powerful and accessible examination of a young person's complicity and responsibility, but the skillful style and evocative exploration of Robby's world will draw sophisticated young readers.