Age: Middle Grade
Genre: Fiction, fantasy/horror
Lucretia Gardner
and her best friend, Zhao Hun Soong, have a lot in common. Both girls are
twelve years old and have nicknames (Lucretia is “Loochie” and Zhao is “Sunny”).
They go to the same school and live in the same building in Flushing, Queens –
in fact Loochie’s apartment is directly below Sunny’s. But there’s one thing
they don’t share: only Sunny has cancer. Loochie wants to celebrate her
birthday with Sunny, but this is impossible because Sunny is out of the state getting
yet another treatment. When Sunny finally does return to Queens, she is so
sickly that Loochie has to beg to spend time with her. The day they are
supposed to hang out, Sunny disappears and a very creepy, deformed person comes
to lead Loochie to her best friend – but it means going into apartment 6D,
which is supposedly haunted by the shells of former crackheads. What Loochie
finds in 6D can only be described as a horrifying nightmare, but she must fight
through it to save her friend.
Author
Victor LaValle has certainly created a dark world for his preteen characters to
inhabit. LaValle does an excellent job portraying the strained friendship
between Loochie and Sunny as well as the girls’ emotions regarding cancer and
death. I can see readers who have watched a friend suffer through any serious
disease relate to Loochie and her desire for her friend’s healing and for
things to just go back to how they were before. But when the story turned more
towards fantasy with the Kroons in apartment 6D, it got too dark and
nightmarish for me.
I did enjoy
the author’s writing. He used some good descriptive phrases, such as describing
the cool girls at school as “clumped together like socks that had just come out
of the dryer.” I also liked the idea he proposed of hell and heaven as places
we could access from earth. He has Loochie wonder about hell and ask, “why
couldn’t [it] be located in a sixth-floor apartment […]?” And he presents
heaven as a baseball stadium. Sunny describes it like this: “Everyone who makes
it inside is at peace. It’s bright and warm all day. You can take a seat in the
stands or run around with other kids down on the field. There’s no pain in there.
No need for hospital visits. Doesn’t that sound nice?” This passage is particularly
heart-wrenching coming from Sunny and seeing what her life has degraded into
due to her cancer. For her, heaven is simply living a normal childhood. And the
author’s descriptions of the horrors Loochie encounters are truly the things of
nightmares, with a playground full of abandoned toys left by vanished children,
people with slack faces and no jawbones chasing after her, and mud so thick and
deep that she nearly drowns in it.
I guess that
was the author’s point in writing the story – to scare the reader – but I didn’t
enjoy that part of the story. That doesn’t mean the intended audience won’t
like it, but hopefully they will be prepared for the darkness they are getting
into when reading this novella. I would definitely recommend it for the older
middle-grade reader due to the subject matter.
Bibliographic
Information:
LaValle,
Victor. Lucretia and the Kroons. New
York: Spiegel & Grau (Random House Publishing Group), 2012.
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