Slant

By Laura E. Williams
Milkweed Press

Perhaps it wasn’t a strain of the imagination when Laura Williams, Korean American adoptee and author, created Lauren Wallace, Korean American adoptee and narrator of Slant, a young adult novel that comes out this October. If Williams’ personal experience is the source of the warm and quirky details that enrich this story, I applaud her staying close to the truth.

When Slant begins, Lauren makes a fervent wish on her thirteenth birthday candles for a procedure called blepharoplasty, and in subsequent chapters, we learn that Lauren is saving money for this double eyelid surgery in order to make her eyes look more "Caucasian." If she changes her face, Lauren decides, she’ll fit in at her Connecticut junior high school. She will no longer be bothered by the classmates who call her “gook,” “chink,” and, of course, “slant.”

Lauren is intelligent and likeable. The descriptions she gives of her teachers, classmates, and her widowed father’s first date with a new girlfriend are lightly sarcastic and observant. (She describes her English professor father as loving “Shakespeare and all things ‘olde with an e’.”) The narration fixates on certain points (such as the height difference between Lauren and her best friend Julie) that a real adolescent would fixate on, and as slightly whiny teenagers go, Lauren is admirable. She cares for her little sister, not only claiming her “heart hurts” from loving her so much, but also imagining the intense love and pain of being a parent.

Lauren’s empathy also comes through when she learns the full circumstances of her mother’s death during a confrontation between her father and grandmother, who has comes for her first visit since the untimely passing. Lauren’s reaction to the discovery about her mother is rather hastily concluded, but perhaps that’s for the sake of the book’s salient revelation. The well-adjusted Lauren is able to recognize that her self-consciousness is not unique to her. Thus, Lauren’s story is not just about an eyelid surgery, and not even just about self-esteem. It’s centered on the realization that she is happy – and, as readers close the last page of this thoughtful and interesting young adult story, we are too.

Review by Elizabeth F. A. Meaney