Book Review: The Gap Year

Welcome to my TLC Book Tour for The Gap Year, by Sarah Bird. Before I get into my review, I wanted to remind you all that I’m starting the first-ever Books Distilled online Book Club! We’ll be reading TURN OF MIND, by Alice LaPlante, sometime in September. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP!

On to the review! The Gap Year is the story of Cam Lightsey, lactation consultant and suburban hater extraordinaire, and her teenager daughter, Aubrey.  Aubrey’s father, who left them when she was two to join a high profile cult called Next!, gets back in touch with her for the first time in sixteen years via Facebook under a fake name.  This revelation coincides with Aubrey quitting the band and dating a football player. 

Get Some Perspective

Let’s start with the refreshing parts of this novel.  I really liked the structure.  The story is told from both Cam’s and Aubrey’s perspectives, but at different points in time.  Cam’s sections take place during the August after Aubrey graduates high school (her pre-college summer), and Aubrey’s tell us about the fall of her senior year.  This works effectively to tell us the story of how the “gap year”–referring cleverly here to both taking a year off between high school and college, and to the year in which a gap widens between mother and daughter–came about.

The love story between Aubrey and football idol Tyler Moldenhauer is surprisingly original.  It begins with an innocent flirtation.  It escalates during trips to the quarry, about which she says: “Here are the things Tyler and I do at the quarry: play.  No one would believe that that is all we do” (155).  Much later, after months of hanging out and playing and no kissing whatsoever, Aubrey admits:

Still, without really understanding why he’d chosen me, fearing he’ll be reabsorbed into his golden kingdom at any second, knowing that my heart is going to be broken and I am a complete idiot, I admit that I love Tyler Moldenhauer, and my DNA twists–all its helixes, double and single–around this rewriting of my essential code. … As we drive into the night, the headlights of the oncoming cars flash on and off across our faces like a time-lapse film of the sun rising and setting every few seconds, as if time is speeding up so fast that when this one night is over, years, decades, centuries will have passed.

Seriously, folks, that’s what your first love at seventeen feels like.

Now for the maybe-not-quite parts…

Okay, now for the bad news.  I found the relationship between Cam and Aubrey to be cookie-cutter, mother versus daughter, in an annoying this-is-what-it-looks-like-on-TV kind of way. Cam is overbearing in her wish for Aubrey to have “adventures,” while wanting those adventures to look exactly like her own did.  She also spends way too much time thinking about how Aubrey’s childhood “should” have been–there should have been two parents; they shouldn’t have left the city; Aubrey should have been able to make friends easily who weren’t so overscheduled that they never had time to play.  Cam thinks that all Aubrey’s problems growing up stemmed from the fact that they lived in a crappy suburb where neither of them fit in.  But it gets hard to empathize with that pain when she bemoans it for sixteen years and does nothing to change it.

Aubrey is unreasonably bitchy to her mom, out of nowhere.  It’s like one day a switch flips and she goes from being completely compliant to fighting over every little thing, refusing to introduce her mom to Tyler, refusing to do pretty much anything, including having a normal conversation with her mother that doesn’t involve shouting and/or name-calling.  Maybe I was spoiled by a good relationship with my mom, but I found the complete lack of basis for Aubrey’s behavior–even from her own point of view!–to make the tension feel fabricated, as if this is what their relationship “should” look like, rather than what their relationship is like.

Final verdict:  It’s a pretty good read.  Cam’s job as a lactation consultant provides some pretty funny laughs, such as the opening scene when she’s in the pool locker room and a mom comes up and whips out her breasts to ask for breastfeeding advice.  Aubrey’s father Martin is part of a scientologist-esque cult, Next!, and he works security for their celebrity followers.  Cam makes Aubrey a photo album of her father holding up his hand to shield famous clients from the press.  It’s not the best book I’ve read recently, but I enjoyed it.

What are your favorite mother-daughter stories?  If I’m allowed to mix media, I’d say Gilmore Girls.

The Gap Year
by Sarah Bird