#CBR11 Review #04: Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey


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Jasper Jones follows a boy named Charlie, a teenager living in a small Australian town known for it’s gossip and the way stories about people get out of hand into a mythology surrounding them. One such object of the town’s disdain is a young outsider, Jasper Jones, who comes to Charlie’s window one night asking for help. Jasper shows Charlie the discovery he made in the woods of a dead young girl named Laura, and fearing that he will be the one blamed for her death, wants Charlie to help him in discovering who killed her.

From this initial concept, a lot of different strands are developed as Charlie comes to learn things about life and about his town in particular; these include Charlie’s own family issues with his angry mother and acquiescent father, racism in the town (particularly shown towards a Vietnamese family, the son of whom is Charlie’s best friend, Jeffrey), finding first love, learning new things about friendship, lies we tell to protect ourselves, and more than anything the fact that people are afraid (or more likely, cowardly) to stand up and do something when they see injustices being done. This last facet is really hammered home in Charlie, but also left me feeling a little empty given how the resolution of the novel was a little unclear and also the learning of the truth behind Laura’s death unravelled without much action on the part of Charlie or Jasper in the first place: it felt a little incongruous.

The other main issue I had with this novel is that it was unnecessarily descriptive in parts, or excessively wordy in terms of Charlie and Jeffrey’s (albeit realistic) teenage discussions that went on for too long, or the extreme detail put into describing cricket playing which I just didn’t understand and seemed to slog on with the pace of the novel. Yet this was then paired up with an almost overly poetic ending, especially when explaining what happened to Laura without ever really wanting to go there and say it: it’s pretty dark stuff, which maybe is why in a YA novel one might be hesitant to be so graphic, but these are important subjects and ones on which the overall plot of the novel hinge.

That said, despite my qualms with the incongruous writing at times, I found Jasper Jones to have a lot more underlying plot points and themes than I expected given the basic premise presented. It drew me in with the mystery and definitely provided some strong characters along the way as well. Maybe not something I would reread right away, but worth at least one go through it!

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