Empress of the World - Sara Ryan

[bookgazing]

I know I said I was going to take ‘Empress of the World’ on holiday with me, but after my depressing reading experience I cracked. I decided that a young adult novel might be just what I needed to remind myself that modern books do not suck, so I pulled ‘Empress of the World’ by Sarah Ryan down from my bookshelves. It was exactly the right book for me and my faith in good modern novels is back.

Nicole is studying archaeology as part of the Siegel Institute summer program for gifted students. Nicole is a notebook girl and she drifts from the dull speech given on the first day of the program as she writes down her thoughts and sketches the people around her. One of the girls she draws notices her pictures and that’s how Nic meets the friends who will come to define her summer: nice but screwed up Issac, uber-enthusiastic Katrina, composer prodigy Kevin and Beautiful Hair Girl, Battle. Nic quickly finds herself attracted to Battle, which is odd because she always thought she liked guys…

‘Empress of the World’ is a love story, a story of summer love, first love and first love with someone of the same gender, but it never feels like an intense, angsty novel. That’s mostly because it’s written in the first person, from Nic’s point of view and while she’s unsure about her feelings towards Battle before they begin their relationship she’s completely in love the whole two weeks they’re together. This total immersion in Nic’s opinion and feelings makes it easy to connect with Nic and to empathize with her, making her a likeable narrator. It’s a bit weird to say that her sort of self-focused attitude is what makes her so easy to like, but Nic is never deliberately inconsiderate, she tries to understand other people and this is clear from the thoughts available for the reader.

As Battle, can be a little more obscure she is sometimes harder to like. Honestly when I started this book I thought I was going to roll me eyes at Battle a lot during the course of ‘Empress of the World’. Her feelings are a mystery to Nic and she seemed to cultivate a deliberately enigmatic personality to increase her allure. I was sure she was going to be a ‘wise woman’ figure, always shaking her head indulgently at Nic’s mistakes as she comes to terms with liking girls. Battle also comes off a little bit priggish in the beginning, holding her nose when Katrina smokes and sometimes making comments that make her sound like the preacher’s daughter she is. However, the way Nic describes her feelings about Battle, made me see her with new, less cynical eyes and as it becomes apparent that her reticence stems from doubt in herself and in other people, caused by her family she is a much more sympathetic character. Then she does something monumentally awesome which made me look at her with awe (no spoilers but it’s perhaps the best fictional act of teenage rebellion I’ve ever read).

The cast of friends that surround the couple are one of the novel’s standout features. It is still rare to find novels where the secondary characters are as interesting as the main characters. Kristina and Issac avoid ‘buddy syndrome’, where friends become convenient plot devices that allow main characters to work through their feelings. Issac has his own problems, as his parents get divorced and his dad tries to prove he’s Jew-enough for Israel. Kristina is this crazy ball of energy who just blurts out whatever she feels and she’s a female computer programmer, with a fiendish enthusiasm for fashion combinations. If anything was missing from this novel it was more Kristina. There’s a possibility that giving her a stronger, independent storyline could have overpowered the delicate story of connection that is central to the novel, but I personally I think a balance could have been found that allowed Kristina to do a little more. I did like how her sudden turn around about her inappropriate crush tied in nicely with one of the main things Nic discovers during the book, that not everything comes from a fully thought out reason.

I actually turned around and re-read the book after finishing it for the first time so I could really focus on the details of this book. It’s got the typical fast, intense pace you’d expect from a young adult novel, which makes it an easy book to race through, but it’s also short enough that you can easily go back after your burst of book gluttony and read it again. After a second reading the real roots of Battle’s secrecy and unwillingness to answer personal questions are clearer, as are the impulses that drive Nic to question and label everything. It’s also fascinating to see Sara Ryan use Nic’s thoughts to discuss society’s desire to understand and label everyone’s relationships and sexuality.
You can read Sara Ryan’s thoughts on a new topic every Wednesday as part of the ‘What a Girl Wants’ series at ChasingRay. If you want to know why I picked up this book head over to Collen’s Bookslut column 'Holiday Break' where she gets excited about how this book has smart teenage characters.

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