Freak by Marcella Pixley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux – 2007
144 Pages
$10.88 on amazon.com
Review by Andrew Fersch, Interview by Lilli Samman
Middle school is definitely in the running for a place in the top three most traumatic experiences in life. As if it weren’t bad enough that you were expected to do more work, you also had to deal with the major implications of puberty (and the lottery like decision of nature as to when that decides to hit you like a ton of bricks), the forming of new cliques and the utterly baffling overnight identity changes. Mash these up and all of a sudden you land back in the acne-scarred, humiliation imbued, parallel universe that Miriam Fisher, and we all knew, as seventh grade.
In poet/teacher Marcella Pixley’s first novel Freak, the pains and joys of middle school fly off the pages, giving swift kicks (and occasionally kisses) to the reader, inviting them to remember just what it was like to feel different, and to think you were the only one who did.
Pixley takes time to introduce Miriam, the poetry-writing, self-conscious, protagonist affectionately known as Shakespeare, to the few people she lets close enough to her to know her. It is this build-up which allows for the reader to immediately be taken with how lifelike and reminiscent she is of either ourselves as pre-teens, or at the very least, someone we knew. This can clearly be credited, at least in part, to Pixley’s having taught middle school English for the past eleven years. Giving her a daily window into the actions (and the thought-processes) of middle schoolers.
Miriam Fisher is, in many ways, an every-person. She doesn’t like her looks, constantly measuring herself up to those around her. She doesn’t understand why those around her change, while herself changing all the time. She is just plain old confused, and has a really hard time dealing with it. Miriam’s problems are also very recognizable and it takes very little to empathize with her. Having fallen in love with an older boy (who reads Chilean poetry nonetheless), she finds herself dealing with accepting the unattainable, struggling with the loss of her best friend to popularity, while also having to face relentless harassment at the hands of those students who are more popular than she is.
While far from being obvious, Pixley does fall into some common traps, reminding readers of some recent classics (most notably Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli) and although it would be a misnomer to imply that she has lifted ideas from those (and others), their influence is undeniable. This does however speak volumes to a debut novel. Being compared style-wise to some of the greats only means that Pixley is on the right path. What is most impressive about Freak though is what is different. The infusion of poetry as a means to express feeling instead of strictly through writing shines as something that Pixley has a strength in. In addition, there is a solid attempt to let the reader know, that whether you are popular or a ‘freak’, we are all going through things, we just react to it differently.
As with Pixley though, she is going to have to take a page out of Miriam’s life. She needs to find her own way, find her own Clyde, find her own unique and wonderful voice. Let’s just hope it won’t be another ten years of teaching middle schoolers before she let’s that voice out.