MADreads

The Isolates

March 6th, 2010 Lisa - Central

I am often in the market for an author I haven’t read before and to find one I sometimes troll the debut author lists in some of the journals.  That’s how I came across Asta in the Wings by Jan Elizabeth Watson.

It starts in Maine, in the 1970s, where 7-year-old Asta and her 9-year-old brother Orion live with their mother, Loretta, in an isolated house in the country.  Loretta seems delightful at first; she acts out movies with the children, regales them with family stories, shares her Big Movie Book with them.  The kids don’t go to school, and do their lessons at home.   But it doesn’t take long to realize that something is pretty wrong in the household.

Asta narrates the story.  As she describes her daily life, you gradually come to realize that Loretta’s crazy.  Asta and Orion believe everything Loretta tells them so they never venture outside in order to protect themselves from the plague out there and the dead bodies piled up on the side of the road.  Loretta locks them in the house when she goes to work and they entertain themselves with TV, their games, and for meals, choose from unlabeled cans of food.  They are used to, and like, the feeling of hunger as it is a sign that their bodies are keeping them healthy.  But Asta’s optimism doesn’t hide from the reader the fact that Orion is getting very ill, maybe even starving.

Then one night, Loretta doesn’t come home.  The next morning the kids leave the house, in their mother’s boots and coats as they don’t have their own, to look for her.  They know so very little of the outside world, it’s amazing they manage.  Asta helps herself to some sweets in a store they come across and gets kicked out.  Eventually they get on a school bus, where a sympathetic driver figures out what’s going on and gets the police involved.

It turns out mom was in a car accident in blizzard the night before.  Her delusional behavior is immediately apparent and she is hospitalized.  The kids become famous, called “Isolates” in the news.  Orion stops talking.  They end up in separate households - Asta with her Aunt Bernadine, who she never met, and Orion with a kindly opthamologist and his wife.  Though her situation isn’t perfect, and she misses Orion plenty, Asta manages.  She pretty quickly integrates herself into her new world.

Asta is a great little character, though Watson might have given her a voice a bit older than a 7-year-old.  It’s an unusual story, with an underlying tension that keeps you thinking something bad is going to happen.  I found myself quite taken with the book, and always eager to pick it up again.  A talented new author.

Entry Filed under: Recreational Fiction