Amy Lukavics | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Book Review: Nightingale by Amy Lukavics

Nightingale by Amy Lukavics

Harlequin Teen, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1335012340

1951 isn’t the best time to be a teenage girl, especially one who doesn’t want to conform to society’s expectations. Talk about horror! Amy Lukavics, author of frightening and gruesome YA titles Daughters Unto Devils, The Women in the Walls, and The Ravenous, has another terrifying tale in Nightingale, which this reader feels is on par with Sarah Pinborough’s work, with a plot that twists and turns, constricting like a snake in the shadows.

It’s 1951, not the greatest time to be a teenage girl, especially one who doesn’t conform to society’s expectations of becoming another June Cleaver. Despite the same first name, though, June Hardie is an unconventional girl. She doesn’t fit in: in fact, even her family doesn’t seem to like her very much. The only time anyone pays attention to her is when stripping her of any self-confidence, or training her to fill a stereotypical role. Her happiness exists in the form of her science fiction stories, an escape that she prays will become a reality. One morning, her mother calls her “Nightingale” and suddenly displays a sweet side that doesn’t quite fit… and June snaps.

She wakes up at Burrow Place Asylum, a place that resembles a mix between the mental institution in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and the psychiatric institution in Shutter Island. The nurses and doctors shatter any remaining hold on reality June held onto, feeding her medication and eliciting visions that she knows can’t be real. Her fellow patients, or captives, warn her to keep a low profile and avoid severe “treatment” that has caused others to disappear. Her roommate, Eleanor, believes herself to be dead but might be the closest thing to a friend in the world.

What starts off as a teen book about a girl seeking to develop her unique identity morphs into a story for any age or gender as the plot drives the reader through unpredictable pathways. When the ride comes to a sudden end, “shocking” is an understatement as a descriptor.

This is definitely a breath of fresh air for YA thrillers. Lukavics knows how to snare readers, pin them down, and scare the living crap out of them– not a simple task these days. Adult readers, especially those who are fans of Sarah Pinborough, shouldn’t let the YA label stop them from picking up this outstanding novel. Highly recommended for mature teen readers ages 15+ and adults.

Contains: gore, violence, mature language.

Reviewed by Dave Simms

Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available: Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline, in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.