Ultraviolet

Ultraviolet by R.J. Anderson

ISBN:  9780761374084
London:  Orchard Books, 2011 - not yet available

Plot - Alison Jeffries is a strange girl.  She doesn't have many friends but she does have an ability that she's been aware of since she was six and that she's been taught to hide, as it is so very strange, even possibly an indication of madness according to her mother.  Alison can taste feelings.  People, numbers, and subjects have colors.  Liars smell bad.  When we first meet her, Alison is coming back to consciousness in a hospital room, soon to be moved into Pine Hills, a psychiatric clinic for mentally ill teenagers.  As Alison pieces together the events that led up to her being sent to a mental hospital by her own mother, she wonders how what she saw happen could possibly have happened.  She and Tori, the perfect, popular girl at school who seemed to gain only pleasure from tormenting Alison, got in a bad argument, and then Tori literally disintegrated in front of Alison's eyes.  Alison confessed to having killed Tori and was immediately plunked into the looney bin and filled with drugs to help her forget.  No one seems to be interested in understanding Alison, her confusion and pain over the tragedy, or her seeming madness until Dr. Sebastian Faraday begins to indicate that maybe she isn't so crazy after all.  From there, Alison begins to come to life, knit together some pieces of her mysterious experiences, and eventually she starts to comprehend that nothing she has known is as it has seemed.  Nothing.

Critical Evaluation -Ultraviolet is a wild ride steered by a wonderful main character/narrator through interior and exterior scapes that surprise the reader at every turn.  Alison is a perfectly unreliable narrator, keeping the reader in the dark about plot twists and intimately tucked into her own very colorful head.  Her tone is anything but sunny and sweet; she is confused and frightened, but not at all a pushover.  Characters, especially Alison, are fully developed and lead the reader on to learn what on earth is actually happening in Alison's reality.  She is strong but injured by misunderstanding and shame, and readers will cheer her on as she gains insight and confidence.  The other teenage characters in the psych ward are wonderfully developed, but then not included nearly enough for how much the reader knows about them.  The plot moves somewhat slowly at times, but takes a terrific sprint into radically surprising territory in the last quarter of the book.

Reader's annotation -  Ultraviolet is the story of a girl who has powers she doesn't understand and that may have just vaporized the most popular girl in school; if Alison can figure out what she's all about she may eventually get to leave the insane asylum.
Genre - YA fiction
Curriculum Ties - Possibly discussions of synesthesia in a psychology unit, or discussions of what constitutes mental illness in social studies classes
Booktalk ideas - 

1. Read the opening section where Alison is being admitted into Pine Hills.  Begin with "My handcuffs snapped open..." and end with "'...but so far no trace of her has been found.'"
2. Does the number 17 have a color or a flavor in your mind?  Is History red?  Can you identify liars and cheaters by a certain smell?  This sensory phenomenon is called synesthesia, and Alison has it in spades.  Her mother told her it might mean she's mentally ill, and so for most of her young life she's both tried to hide it and been constantly aware of its presence between herself and the outside world.  Might it have something to do with the fact that she now thinks she might have actually killed another girl?

Reading level - 15+ due to complexity of writing

Challenge issues - none apparent

Why I included this book - It was positively reviewed by School Library Journal and is an example of extraordinarily good writing, to begin with.  I decided to include it because the story itself is fantastic and very original, and the interior experience the reader is granted into the life of a person with synesthesia, often associated with artistically minded individuals, is out of this world.