When We Collided by Emery Lord Published by Bloomsbury USA Childrens on April 5, 2016
Genres: Contemporary
Pages: 352
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We are seventeen and shattered and still dancing. We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know…
Jonah never thought a girl like Vivi would come along.
Vivi didn’t know Jonah would light up her world.
Neither of them expected a summer like this…a summer that would rewrite their futures.
In an unflinching story about new love, old wounds, and forces beyond our control, two teens find that when you collide with the right person at just the right time, it will change you forever.
Emery Lord’s WHEN WE COLLIDED, which won the 2017 Schneider Family Book Award for representation of disability, is excellently titled. Collision, in all its forms, is somehow inherently violent. It is something that is abrupt, disorienting, life-altering. It is a moment after which nothing is the same.”When we collided” is therefore a very apt description of what happens to Jonah and Vivi.
Jonah’s world is shrinking. His father died six months before and his mother has been unable to rouse herself from her grief, leaving Jonah and his older siblings to take care of the younger three in the house. They have to juggle schedules and make meals and manage a household and be parents, when they’re still little more than children themselves. And worst of all, they have to do all that without letting anyone else in their small town know what’s going on.
Vivi’s world is shifting. Partly to escape past mistakes that are slowly revealed to us as an audience, Vivi and her mom have moved to a coastal tourist town in California for the summer. Vivi is larger than life, a girl who feels every part of a moment with all her soul — and is throwing away medication every day that keeps her from those feelings. Vivi has bipolar disorder, though no one but her mom knows, and I so appreciate that this book doesn’t shy away from using those words, and doesn’t shy away from showing us exactly what that feels like inside your head.
But while I got the feeling that this was supposed to be mostly Vivi’s story, it was Jonah’s I was most drawn to, Jonah the amazing big brother, who has to take care of his younger siblings (I am a sucker for that trope). Jonah, who feels so bogged down in what his life has become that he needs some shining, whirling force to pull him up out of the mire.
The book had issues. It went on too long for me and it wasn’t until the very end of the book that I was able to actually like Vivi. This may have been part of the point, but I found myself often frowning over how unhealthy aspects of Vivi and Jonah’s relationship were, which was a shame, because so much of it was exactly what the other needed.
Luckily, what the book does well, it hits out of the park. We need more representations of mental illness that are as frank and open as this one. We need more examples of characters like Ellie and Carrie and Officer Hayashi who are open about depression and bipolar disorder and don’t shy away from differentiating mental illness from the person who is ill. And the book is also a rare gem that doesn’t try to convince us that every high school romance will be forever. This relationship, this experience, this collision course was what Jonah and Vivi needed that summer, but you know almost from the beginning that it won’t and can’t last. That was handled realistically and beautifully, and I applaud Lord for it.
Memorable quotes in WHEN WE COLLIDED:
There’s a knock from the front of the house. I lean back to look out the storm door. Vivi’s standing there, waving and holding what appears to be a bottle of win. She’s almost an hour early. Shit. She wasn’t supposed to know how much effort when into dinner. It was supposed to appear effortless. Like a feast at Hogwarts. Wait, no! I don’t want to be Dobby in this equation!
“Maybe we were dying planets, Jonah, being drawn into the darkness. When we collided, we bounced each other back into orbit. And now we have to do that — we have to return to our own paths because that’s what we gave each other.”
That’s the thing they never tell you about love stories. Just because one ends, that doesn’t mean it failed. A cherry pie isn’t a failure just because you eat it all. It’s perfect for what it is, and then it’s gone. And exchanging the truest parts of yourself — all the things you are — with someone? What a slice of life. One I’ll carry with me into every single someday.
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