Saint Anything, best-selling YA author Sarah Dessen’s new novel about a girl whose older brother is in prison, reminded me of another book I read recently, Silent Alarm by Jennifer Banash. In Silent Alarm, Alys’s brother kills fifteen people in a school shooting and then kills himself. Saint Anything features Sydney and her brother. The brother Peyton accidentally injures a bicyclist when the irresponsible and troubled Peyton is driving while intoxicated. So, the Silent Alarm crime is much more violent, premeditated and consequential. Nevertheless, the two girls experience many of the same emotions: guilt, anger, sadness, and a fear that life will never be good again.
Dessen gets a lot of things, even most things, right in this novel of a teen who is re-building and re-imagining her life and her relationships with family and with friends. Sydney decides to change schools at the beginning of the novel, a decision that propels many of the other events in the story. Because she changes schools, Sydney makes new friends, in particular the Chatham family who become a sort of anchor and refuge for Sydney as she remakes her life after Peyton goes to prison. Sydney’s mother is obsessed and focused on “being there” for Peyton so that he will know that he has not been abandoned while he’s in prison. Sydney’s dad is emotionally absent and somewhat passive. Sydney is feeling angry with her brother for being so foolish, tired of being ignored while playing the part of the “good child” in the family, and guilty for what happened to the bicyclist, David Ibarra, who is now in a wheelchair as a result of Peyton’s reckless and criminal negligence.
I did wish that someone could have pointed out to Sydney that the guilt she felt was false guilt. Alys in Silent Alarm feels guilty, too, thinking that maybe she should have noticed her brother’s descent into violence and done something to stop him. However, several people in that book tell Alys that she is not her brother, that she is not responsible for his actions. Although, she may feel truly and authentically sad about her brother’s crime and sympathetic toward his victims and their families, Alys is not to be blamed for her brother’s actions. In the same way, Sydney is not Peyton, and she and her family did not force him to get drunk and drive a car thereby crippling another person for life. Sydney can and should feel sorrow over her brother’s actions and sympathy and concern for his victim, but any guilt she feels is false. However, no one in Saint Anything ever articulates this very important point to Sydney.
That oversight in counseling was my only beef with Ms. Dessen’s novel. The writing doesn’t sparkle, but it’s adequate. The romance is sweet and inoffensive. Sydney does make some relatively poor choices, especially about drinking alcohol and hanging out with people who drink to excess, but compared to her brother’s massively poor choices, Sydney is only a small-time adolescent experimenter. There’s a subplot that centers on Sydney’s relationship with a friend of Peyton’s, a much-older-than-Sydney friend. That subplot goes much like this story that Dessen tells in Seventeen magazine about her own teen years, and I thought it was handled well. I hope Sydney’s experience will be a cautionary tale and a liberating one for many young teens, male and female.
My daughters, ages 20 and 16 just read Saint Anything, and I’m hoping it will lead to some conversation in our family about guilt and poor decisions and consequences and even the mercy of God in Christ, even though Ms. Dessen doesn’t quite reach as far into the Christian realm so as to mention the need all of us have for God’s grace and forgiveness. Saint Anything goes far enough to lead down a profitable road for those willing to delve a little deeper into the subjects raised.
