According to David Arnold’s bio and author photo, he’s a relatively young guy with a wife and a young son. I’m not sure why he decided to write a YA novel from a teen girl’s point of view, but I’m sure glad he did. The story of Mim (Mary Iris Malone) in Mosquitoland is a combination of charming, stressful, exciting, and deeply satisfying.
Mim’s father thinks she might be showing signs of the mental illness that Mim’s aunt Isabel experienced before committing suicide, so Mim has been to a psychiatrist and is currently on medication she doesn’t really want to take. Add that to her parents’ divorce, her father’s rather hurried remarriage, the new family moving away from the mother’s city, and then the discovery Mim is soon to have a baby sister, and there’s good reason for Mim to feel too much is happening too fast. She buys a Greyhound bus ticket and heads back to Ohio to find her mother.
What happens to Mim along the way and the people she meets make up most of the story. There’s a bit of craziness, a little serendipity, and a lot of edgy behavior to stretch what might have been reality into more of a fantasy….but I’ve taken some of those Greyhound bus trips and I didn’t find one bit of Mim’s trip unbelievable.
It’s difficult enough in adult novels to deal with topics of mental illness, learning disabilities, creepy guys who prey on young girls, and fear. Tackling the topics in a YA novel and still maintaining an element of humor and joy strikes me as a very difficult task. Arnold pulls it off beautifully, in my opinion, but that’s from an older reader’s point of view.
I took a look at the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon.com and found most other readers liked the novel. It also appears I’m not the only adult reader choosing YA novels these days, but that’s a potential topic for another day.
Meanwhile, if you like to read YA novels, please add Mosquitoland to your TBR list. If you’ve already read it, I’d love to know what you think.
This is a really interesting premise for a story, Pat. And it sounds as though the characters are as important to the novel as the actual events of the story are. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Interesting how some of the really well-written books out there these days are YA.
And the authors of these YA books are all ages and all levels of education — it’s clear to me they wouldn’t be getting published if there wasn’t a huge market for them, but I sometimes wonder who all the readers are? Is there really a huge generation of young readers….or is it their parents and grandparents who are the buyers and the readers? Someone should do a study on this.
Hi, Pat,
A very complete book review! Definitely sounds like a good read. As a writer of both YA and adult fiction, I am always interested in current YA novels.
Hi Jacqueline! I’m finding YA novels so well written that I pay close attention to a couple of the YA writers I follow who do reviews on their blogs. I think I saw this book mentioned, however, in USA Today.
Interesting mix of elements. I’ve never been on a bus, but a friend took one across country and related the horror and wild side trips to me.
It’s not a mode of travel I’d recommend, Alex, although frankly I don’t recommend any mode of travel anymore except car. I’m pretty much over mass transport in the U.S.