Book+Review+(SciFi,+Teen)+-+A+Fly+on+the+Wall

For those of you who have ever thought, ‘if only I could be a fly on the wall…,’ this book will definitely fulfill your desire to be a part-time parasite. As a clever rendition of and allusion to the man-turned-fly phenomenon in Franz Kafka’s //The Metamorphosis// (1915), E. Lockhart’s YA novel //Fly on the Wall// features 16 year-old Gretchen Yee who actually //wishes// she could be a buzzing insect in a place quite fitting for a grimy species: the boys’ locker room. In an effort to answer her highly preoccupied concerns about what boys really think, Gretchen spends the first third of the novel as a human, the second third as a fly, and the final third as a kind of “superhero” who predictably emerges as a self-confident teenager. She is suddenly unafraid of asking her long-time crush out on a date, patches things up with her best friend Katya, sympathizes with her newly separated parents, and persuades her Principal to let the girls have the boys’ more spacious locker room next Fall. And that’s all thanks to her lucky break as a boy-snooping vermin! However, while I did manage to //fly// through Gretchen’s adventures, the novel being a mere 182 pages long, I was never able to settle my two opposing thoughts: this is either a really smart and authentic text about the insecurities of teenagers and the power of misused words such as “fag” and “gay” - - or I’ve just absorbed the most twisted, embellished, and unutterably raunchy psychoanalysis of a teenage girl. That is, since Gretchen Yee is first presented as a quiet, shy, and misunderstood teenager who finds solace in her childhood collection of Spider-Man comics, Pez dispensers, and Bean Curd Babies, I was somewhat blindsided when her human-to-fly transformation called for an equally vermin-like distortion of her vocabulary. I mean, who would’ve thought Gretchen had it in her, and besides, does Lockhart really mean to overanalyze boys’ “gherkins” and assign letter grades to their butts so that girls will replace their curiosities with the notion that boys’ anatomies are just case studies to be scored? And yet, while I’m just about ready to slap a Parental Advisory sticker on the book’s cover and call it a day, Lockhart swiftly throws in a bit about how a group of boys’ liberty with the words “fag” and “queer” can be potentially devastating to those in their circle of friends who are, in fact, homosexual. So I guess there’s something to be said about an author who can talk about the insides //and// outsides of adolescents, all while giving a lesson on the power of words without anyone really getting hurt. But that’s just me being polite to award-winning YA author John Green of //Looking for Alaska//, who acknowledges //Fly on the Wall// as “the best YA novel… [he’s] ever read.” Who knew that “biscuits” and “gherkins” would grant Lockhart such high praise?! Parents and teens: this one gets the flyswatter.