Black Tuesday (review)

Black Tuesday is the day Jayne's life changes: she starts out as an overburdened workhorse focusing on Harvard, but that all comes to a screeching halt along with her car—which she drives through a red light and into another vehicle, resulting in the hospitalization and eventual death of the six-year-old girl riding in the passenger seat. Jayne's controlling and polished anchorwoman mother sets Jayne up with a great attorney, so her punishment is limited to loss of driver's license and performance of community service (she also perfunctorily attends counseling with a family friend). In the aftermath, she begins to ease up on her long-term habit of diligent striving and attention to rules, doing the rebellious piercing and edgy-hairstyle thing and reveling in the attentions of a sexy guy she meets at the youth outreach center where she's performing community service. While the story has some thematic commonality with Cooney's Driver's Ed (BCCB 9/94), the superficial writing and muddled emotional exploration preclude the book's effectiveness as either emotional drama or ethical investigation. Jayne is largely unsympathetic, starting out as a sour and complaining martyr and then acting out her pain in preteen-styled brattiness, and characterization overall is handed out rather than established. What's more, the actual consequence of Jayne's action, the death of the little girl, is only peripherally touched upon as something that has repercussions for Jayne, and the people around the victim are oddly villainized (there's a whiff of homophobia in the book's approach to the girl's sister, who is Jayne's classmate, and her friend, though it's never actually clear if they're lesbians). Ultimately, it seems less like Jayne worked through her personal and family issues than she got off easy because of that very good-girl history she's trying to reject, and cynical readers will wonder if they, too, can increase their chances of Harvard admission by screwing up as catastrophically and with as little consequence as Jayne.