Dead Time/Shelter

 

Christy Ann Conlin’s debut novel Heave (Doubleday 2003) earned her a reputation as a gifted, vibrant writer. Heave was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award. Hailed as a Globe & Mail notable book, Heave made the long-list in the recent round of CBC’s Canada Reads. No surprise then, that Conlin’s young adult novella Dead Time is riveting. As one half of the duet in the Single Voice flipbook series for senior teens, published by Annick Press, Dead Time is a short, but powerful read.

 

A psychological thriller of sorts, Conlin ventures into the volatile mind of Isabella, an incarcerated teen, as she waits clearance on a murder charge. From the first gripping sentence Isabella insists she’s innocent. As her tale unfolds we learn she was a bystander when Sergio, her boyfriend, killed his former girlfriend in a twisted act to prove his love. Conlin controls the story’s tension and the details are so evocative, the book’s a chilling read in the truest sense. (Move over, Stephen King.) By the time Conlin ratchets up the tension to the actual description of the murder, there’s a lot that does not add up. So what did actually happen and why? This is where Conlin’s story succeeds. By book’s end we have been given much to reflect on, much to reconsider. Isabella’s story will linger not just because of the high octane pace or sensational situation of Dead Time. Conlin probes into the depths of her character with poetic prose that is efficient, lyrical and in this example, heartbreaking:

 

 “My mother used to tap her shoe when she wanted something done. She’ll have been gone for three years in the spring and I can still hear the click her high heels made on the ceramic tile.

Click when the door closed behind her. The click the phone made when she’d hang up during our Sunday call after she left and moved. She always said she had to hang up before I was ready to stop talking. And then I would hear the sound of the call ending.

Clickity, clack, I’m not coming back.”

 

Conlin’s other half is west coast writer Jen Sookfong Lee. Her novella is Shelter.

 

In Shelter, we meet Abby, a high school student whose family’s former happiness has collapsed under financial pressures into a messy dysfunctional unit. Appalled by her mother’s lifestyle, sister’s rebellion and saddened by her overworked father, Abby assumes the role of the reliable one. She’s a good student and a planner, a volunteer at the local animal shelter. When she meets Sean, the new night supervisor who exerts an animal magnetism of his own and offers sympathetic ear, Abby is smitten—she falls in lust, love and longing. Lee portrays this convincingly at times and with touches of wit. Abby herself admits: “I’ve suddenly become a quasi-speechless, idiotic obsessive who crouches in shadows and stares at a man who barely knows I exist.” The consequences are serious, however, and by the time the teen realizes she’s made a big mistake, she’s lost a lot more than her better judgment.

 

If this duet is any indication of the entire series, high school students and their teachers will get high-interest, fast-paced, literary reads with much to discuss after the flipping is done. Annick Press knows how to see talent and target market. I look forward to a one-of and more from Conlin. —Sheree Fitch