'The Latte Rebellion' - Sarah Jamila Stevenson

[bookgazing]

‘The Latte Rebellion’ by Sarah Jamila Stevenson is the latest contribution to an area of YA that I hope is going to grow and grow. In my short time of reading YA I’ve come across a few novels which focus on teenagers organising movements for social justice. Last year I read ‘The God Box’ and ‘The Mariposa Club’, where teenagers tried to form Gay Straight Alliances. I also read the outstanding novel ‘8th Grade Superzero’ by Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, where young characters work out that they want to give back to the community and then mobilise to improve their world. I love novels about vampires with all my fantasy addicted heart, but I wouldn't mind seeing this branch of contemporary young adult fiction take off with the same kind of force that consistently pushes paranormal young adult novels into the bestseller lists.

At a pool party a racist remark, made by Roger Cho, the obnoxious head of the Asian Cultural Society, makes biracial students Asha and Carey decide to set up a club for biracial students at their school. Setting up the club seems like an easy way to fight against Roger’s ignorance and add some extra skills to the girls college applications, but it’s quickly blocked by Roger and the school administration.

Asha and Carey are outstanding students, focused on getting into college, but as school begins to come to an end they’re feeling the pressure to improve their chances of getting into college and at the same time, crave a little release. With a little inspiration from their favourite coffee drink they turn the club into a small business venture, by setting up a website called ‘The Latte Rebellion’ to sell t-shirts that show people’s support for the biracial community. The girls just have to do a little grass roots marketing and hide the money from their parents, so they can take an end of school bff trip to London.

Like ‘8th Grade Superzero’, ‘The Latte Rebellion’ acknowledges that movements like the rebellion don;t always begin because the organisers have saintly motives. Asha and Carey initially think of creating a club for biracial students because of a racist remark, but they really launch the rebellion as a vehicle to improve college applications and earn money for a holiday. Stevenson makes an important point with her choice of character: Asha isn’t some saintly, politically involved figure, but she goes on to become concerned about issues of social justice. As Asha gets more involved in co-ordinating the movement, she attends some political meetings at her cousin’s university, which encourage her to keep going. The movement grows and she comes to realise that the rebellion means a lot to biracial people, which crystallises what that the movement really does mean something to her. She illustrates that just because a teenager doesn’t keep a halo in a hatbox doesn’t mean they can’t come to feel that issues are genuinely important to them. By setting up a heroine who has to come to the realisation that campaigning for social justice is important Stevenson avoids making a book about teenagers ‘getting involved’ as worthy as that phrase suggests such books are.

Stevenson also slowly makes it clear that the effective results the rebellion achieves aren’t undermined, just because the rebellion has less than altruistic beginnings and again I think that’s a great point. Corporate social responsibility projects often have than charitable motives behind them, but if co-ordinated properly, they can do some good. However, I kept returning to the fact that Asha and Carey’s initial marketing is misleading, or at the very least exceptionally vague, using phrases like ‘In order for the Latte Rebellion to achieve its goal of spreading the word around the English-speaking world, consuming coffee at every turn, we must raise the necessary funds.’ to suggest that all the money raised would be used to further the cause of the rebellion. The rebellion isn’t a formalised cause, or charity, subject to laws about what the founders do with the money, so Asha doesn’t do anything illegal and in the middle of the book Asha does pledge all the money she doesn’t need for her holiday to the rebellion. Still, I was surprised that none of the new members, even asked Asha why she was using a chunk of supporters money for her own use. It’s an unexamined line that might have added complexity to the examination of co-ordinating a movement for change.

I enjoyed seeing The Latte Rebellion grow and change. I also found Asha’s emerging political conscience really convincing, especially as it emerges out of issues that directly impact her, for example when she learns that top colleges are not equipped to deal with applications from someone who identifies with more than one race. Unfortunately I wasn’t as convinced by other aspects of the story, such as the friendship between Asha, Carey and Miranda. At the very beginning of the book Asha and Carey’s relationship feels a strong, fun friendship and their conversations are full of familiarity and common feeling:

‘We both stuck our tongues out at each other. Then we put out our hands and wiggled our fingers together like we were playing “Chopsticks” on an imaginary piano, followed by putting our hand sover our heads and doing an Indian-style back-and-forth head motion. Then I went for a high five and accidentally hit her in the head because she thought it was the part where we shake hands. We broke out in shameless hysterics, which earned us some weird looks that I valiantly tried to ignore.’

As the novel develops the girls begin to have different priorities, which is fine, it’s interesting to see a novel which builds a main strand around the involved ups and down of a female friendship. What bothered me about the developments in Asha and Carey’s relationship was how fast the conflict came on and how quickly Carey dropped out of their friendship with very little explanation. The book doesn’t explore why Carey really feels threatened by the way the rebellion threatens to consume time, or why she steps away from Asha when their interests begin to diverge. The reader can make assumptions based on what we know of Carey’s life (she needs a scholarship to escape to college, she seems a little bit boy crazy and maybe gets involved with Leonard kind of fast) but there’s no chance to verify these assumptions, because the book doesn’t suggest any connections between Carey’s background and the way that her character acts over the course of this book. Her seriously negative reaction towards the growth of the rebellion doesn’t seem to have much reasoning behind it. She says she has to focus on her school work and that Asha should concentrate on hers, but without any reference to the background reasons that push Carey to be so concerned with grades, her words sound priggish and accusatory. Carey sounds like a bad friend and her drift from Asha comes across as a failing, rather than the result of logical, contextually appropriate reasoning.

Carey is in opposition to Asha throughout this book and Asha is the likeable protagonist, which makes Carey easy for the reader to dislike anyway, but the missing access to her reasoned decisions make it hard for the reader to do anything but judge their friendship as broken, long before she finally betrays Asha. I felt like this approach diminished the reality of Carey’s character and made her a simplistic character. Carey’s quick, unexplained split from Asha also made the girl’s friendship feel like it was based on shallow founding, that could be easily disrupted, when that’s exactly the opposite of the way Asha describes her past relationship with Carey. I don’t want to say that this one relationship acts as a comment on all female friendship ever, but I feel uneasy about this depiction of female friendship. I’m not that bothered that Stevenson presents a female friendship that fails, women’s friendships do break down and realistic literature needs negative relationships between women, just as it needs positive ones. It’s just, Stevenson’s creation of a female friendship that fails doesn’t contain all the complication I’d expect to see in the breakdown of a long standing teenage female friendship. Asha has explained how far back their friendship goes and how close they are in passages like:

‘We’d developed our secret handshake in sixth grade after being the only two new kids in our class, and now it was a tradition. I’d asked Carey over to my house that first week of school, and it turned out we both had protective parents, a secret and embarrassing love of old teen movies like The Breakfast Club and Dazed and Confused, and weekly cravings for pineapple pizza. We both had a silly streak, and we spent at least a monh refining our handshake. It was our first “master plan” in a way…but obviously not our last.’

that their separation is too simple and too unexplained for me to understand.

Maybe I’m overly focused on this one relationship. Asha’s friendships with other characters (male and female) aren’t exactly deeply explored, instead they act as a way of keeping Asha on track with the rebellion. This feels like a destination novel, rather than a journey novel, where the goal of the novel is to get the reader to the end for the emotional payoff of the conclusion where they’ll find out how the rebellion got out of hand and whether Asha will be expelled from school, because that’s the best bit. I don’t know if that makes sense, because obviously the goal of every novel is to keep the reader hooked so they want to find out what happens at the end, but ‘The Latte Rebellion’ feels like a book that is more focused on the end goal than on the developing lines that come up along the way. The plot drives the reader on with its plot structure, which switches back and forward from the past where the rebellion is just being created, to Asha’s current disciplinary hearing for charges of disruption and terrorist activity. The use of the unknown, threatening future event in the past narrative has the effect of pushing the reader through the pages to find out what necessitated Asha’s disciplinary hearing and increases the tension of the book.

This constant focus on the end didn’t agree with me at the time I picked up ‘The Latte Rebellion’, because I felt like I was being hussled from behind every step of the way, but that’s a totally mood-related thing. I’ve read novels that operate in the exact same way and loved them. I just wasn’t in the mood for that kind of style when I picked up this novel. It’s more important to look at whether this style worked for this particular story.

In my opinion it did and it didn’t. This focus on tense, forward pushing narrative style increases the excitement of the story. A feeling of extra jeopardy is introduced by the way the novel focuses so intently on the way the rebellion shapes Asha’s life. Readers are reminded by the way that the novel constantly refers back to the disciplinary hearing, that the conclusion of the novel is make or break for Asha. The feelings of tension and the reader’s worries about whether Asha will be expelled, transfer themselves nicely on to Asha’s worries about college, as two very stressful strands are explored close to each other (will Asha be expelled and Asha’s college rejections). ‘The Latte Rebellion’ provides an effective reminder of how pressurised teenage academic life can be and how it feels like there’s one chance to get everything right, or you’ll end up working a dead end job forever. However, the constant push of the main plot doesn’t compliment other strands of the novel, like the issues surrounding Carey and Asha’s friendship. This area of the novel in particular ends up feeling rushed and needs more space and time to be explored fully.

While I doubt ‘The Latte Rebellion’ is going to make the list when I choose my favourite books read in 2011 it was an entertaining, if rather shovey, reading experience that made me think more about teenage activism. Not every book is the love of your life, y’know, but not every failed romance is a waste of time either.

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