Official Review: The Clique by Valerie Thomas
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Official Review: The Clique by Valerie Thomas
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Clique" by Valerie Thomas.]
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The Clique follows several months in the lives of four high school juniors: Kate, Hannah, Maddie, and Audrey. The title is somewhat misleading. The book is not primarily about these girls excluding or picking on others. It’s more about the relationships among the four of them, including relationships to their boyfriends, parents, teachers, and so on. Although they do many of the foolish, catty, and yes, treacherous things that you would expect in a book called “The Clique,” I would not call their behavior cliquish. This is, in fact, a book about loyalty.
Audrey (“Aude”) is the focus of the book. She is beautiful, smart, talented, and skilled at leading a double life. Aude’s parents are Mormons, and in the book, this means that they make her wear to school clothes that are so modest and old-fashioned as to look Amish. (For the record, I know a few Mormon families, and I don’t know any who dress like that. Nor have I noticed Mormon women wearing “no makeup,” as Aude’s mother does. But let’s accept that for the purposes of this book, they are an unusual Mormon family.)
Audrey is the youngest of four girls. All of her older sisters were compliant, but Audrey wants to go her own way. Every day she secretly goes over the house of her friend Kate, where by prior arrangement she keeps a more normal high school wardrobe. She changes into her “popular girl” clothes, puts on her makeup, and goes to school. Then she changes back into her conservative clothes before going home.
Despite being restrictive about clothes, Audrey’s parents give her quite a lot of freedom in that she has a car and they allow her to go to her friends’ houses and to parties. Hence, she has a “tall, handsome” boyfriend, and she likes to drink. At school, she is popular, but also, of course, disliked, and seems to think she is better than others.
About the first half of the book is spent in setting up all this background. It’s done in a very natural way, as we see the kids hanging out, drinking beer, going to school and going to lunch in between classes. One by one we get to know them and the dynamics of their relationships.
Finally, when all this has been set up, comes the dramatic part, where a boy who lusts after Audrey (and who appears to be a sociopathic genius) sets out to destroy her, breaking up all of her significant relationships with a covert campaign of blackmail and lies. You can well imagine the results.
I don’t read a lot of YA novels, so I don’t know how The Clique compares to others in the genre. To me, it was a deceptively simple book.
The “simple” part: it is written in the present tense. It does not include a lot of analysis or description. The description of Aude’s boyfriend as “tall, handsome” is pretty typical. We don’t even find out anyone’s eye color. I could have used a lot more description, because it would have helped me visualize the characters and thus keep them straight in my mind. Especially at the beginning, all of these girls and their boyfriends were hard to keep track of. Nor is there much description of the scene. Although the story takes place in Colorado, the mountains are mentioned only once or twice.
None of the characters in the story is unusually articulate or philosophical. None of them, apparently, like to go out into the mountains to hike or hunt or any of that. There are very few references to books they have read, to religion or philosophy. It’s all just their teen world.
And yet, and yet. Despite this somewhat boring simplicity, the book somehow manages to be complex and even deep. In their seemingly banal, teen-speak conversations, the kids reveal their hearts. Every seemingly pointless scene of kids hanging out is actually moving the plot forward. Several very serious issues are raised, touched on, and dealt with in a fashion, but not delved into (illegal drugs, alcoholism, abusive relationships). The point of the plot remains Aude’s creepy stalker and the havoc he is wreaking on her relationships. The author does not get sidetracked into the serious issues mentioned above, although each of them has the potential to completely hijack the plot. This gives the book a feel of being limited in its focus, but also a realistic feel.
I was also intrigued by the way the parents are handled in this story. There is never an adult who swoops in at any point, dispenses wisdom, and ties things up neatly. But neither are the adults portrayed as one-dimensional, completely out of touch. Some of the parents are clueless about what is going on in their kids’ lives. But not all of them. Once in a while, an adult listens and offers wise words of support … but it is still left to the four girls to solve their own problems.
There were a number of things left hanging at the end of The Clique, perhaps because they are beyond the scope of the book to solve. This bothered me a bit, but keeping in mind the limited focus of the book, the ending was satisfying. I give it three out of four stars.
***
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Audrey (“Aude”) is the focus of the book. She is beautiful, smart, talented, and skilled at leading a double life. Aude’s parents are Mormons, and in the book, this means that they make her wear to school clothes that are so modest and old-fashioned as to look Amish. (For the record, I know a few Mormon families, and I don’t know any who dress like that. Nor have I noticed Mormon women wearing “no makeup,” as Aude’s mother does. But let’s accept that for the purposes of this book, they are an unusual Mormon family.)
Audrey is the youngest of four girls. All of her older sisters were compliant, but Audrey wants to go her own way. Every day she secretly goes over the house of her friend Kate, where by prior arrangement she keeps a more normal high school wardrobe. She changes into her “popular girl” clothes, puts on her makeup, and goes to school. Then she changes back into her conservative clothes before going home.
Despite being restrictive about clothes, Audrey’s parents give her quite a lot of freedom in that she has a car and they allow her to go to her friends’ houses and to parties. Hence, she has a “tall, handsome” boyfriend, and she likes to drink. At school, she is popular, but also, of course, disliked, and seems to think she is better than others.
About the first half of the book is spent in setting up all this background. It’s done in a very natural way, as we see the kids hanging out, drinking beer, going to school and going to lunch in between classes. One by one we get to know them and the dynamics of their relationships.
Finally, when all this has been set up, comes the dramatic part, where a boy who lusts after Audrey (and who appears to be a sociopathic genius) sets out to destroy her, breaking up all of her significant relationships with a covert campaign of blackmail and lies. You can well imagine the results.
I don’t read a lot of YA novels, so I don’t know how The Clique compares to others in the genre. To me, it was a deceptively simple book.
The “simple” part: it is written in the present tense. It does not include a lot of analysis or description. The description of Aude’s boyfriend as “tall, handsome” is pretty typical. We don’t even find out anyone’s eye color. I could have used a lot more description, because it would have helped me visualize the characters and thus keep them straight in my mind. Especially at the beginning, all of these girls and their boyfriends were hard to keep track of. Nor is there much description of the scene. Although the story takes place in Colorado, the mountains are mentioned only once or twice.
None of the characters in the story is unusually articulate or philosophical. None of them, apparently, like to go out into the mountains to hike or hunt or any of that. There are very few references to books they have read, to religion or philosophy. It’s all just their teen world.
And yet, and yet. Despite this somewhat boring simplicity, the book somehow manages to be complex and even deep. In their seemingly banal, teen-speak conversations, the kids reveal their hearts. Every seemingly pointless scene of kids hanging out is actually moving the plot forward. Several very serious issues are raised, touched on, and dealt with in a fashion, but not delved into (illegal drugs, alcoholism, abusive relationships). The point of the plot remains Aude’s creepy stalker and the havoc he is wreaking on her relationships. The author does not get sidetracked into the serious issues mentioned above, although each of them has the potential to completely hijack the plot. This gives the book a feel of being limited in its focus, but also a realistic feel.
I was also intrigued by the way the parents are handled in this story. There is never an adult who swoops in at any point, dispenses wisdom, and ties things up neatly. But neither are the adults portrayed as one-dimensional, completely out of touch. Some of the parents are clueless about what is going on in their kids’ lives. But not all of them. Once in a while, an adult listens and offers wise words of support … but it is still left to the four girls to solve their own problems.
There were a number of things left hanging at the end of The Clique, perhaps because they are beyond the scope of the book to solve. This bothered me a bit, but keeping in mind the limited focus of the book, the ending was satisfying. I give it three out of four stars.
***
Buy "The Clique" on Amazon
Latest Review: "Adventures in space & fiction fantasy" by Robin G Howard
