This book is...it's very special. I have so many thoughts that it feels difficult to even pick where to start. I feel like I should start that this is a wonderful companion piece/extension to The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin, this is apparent in both plotline and that it's straight out referencing in the opening pages. I encourage people that enjoy this book to go back and give that a read - it's only a shot story but I feel like it will only add to the experience of reading Pew (I'm also seeing if I can get an extra BR point thrown in to anyone who does this :YA_FingerGuns: ).
“Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.”
The premise of sitting behind Pew's eyes and almost being directly spoken to by the characters of this town is fantastic and at times very uncomfortable, particularly as the novel moves on- Pew’s confessors demand reciprocity after all. Pew listens then they urge for Pew to do the same. As we shift from observing them alone, moving through the world, to Pew in this isolated, fundamentalist, down South American town, being shuffled from person to person, we start to get a better sense of who they are...somewhat. We grow more comfortable with Pew’s anonymity and muteness, while the townspeople grow more wary. To them, Pew certainly knows the answers to their questions, they’re just unwilling to reveal any information. It takes on this wonderfully liminal and almost dreamlike feeling as we seem to wander directly behind their shoulder through these interrogations.
Each person, assures Pew that they can fix them; Pew will finally see them as safe and share their secrets, and thus the problem of Pew will be solved. Pew will finally open up, reveal their history and thus will be saved from the invented pain and confusion that town places on them. As Pew remains silent, the family that initially takes them from the church offering them refuge 'as long as it takes and as long as you need' along with the rest of the town that were eager to solve the 'Pew problem' stop seeing them as a vulnerable victim to uncooperative trouble. They are uncomfortable and suspicious of someone not willing to disclose to them. Not everyone feels this way- Nelson an adopted refugee offers her compassion but not necessarily friendship, eager too, to get away from these people (who initially tried to lump them together based on skin tone alone) or teenaged Annie who is also isolated from this community by her simple want for everyone to be treated the same offer her a bit of quiet in a sea of wheedling 'concerns'.
Physicality and the form of the body is a prominent aspect of this book; one that I feel was explored in a fantastic way. Pew seems to almost 'shift' according to what people want to see - at times they're trying to find reasons not to help them. Is Pew a boy or girl? Is Pew black or white? How old is Pew? So much of the town's hospitality is conditional. Nelson's nationality, Annie's want for equality and Pew's lack of identity all sit in the same category of things that make this town uncomfortable. This is a place that is certain of themselves - they are living in the correct Godfearing way, they are doing what is right and Pew rubs against that. After all how far can empathy spread to those that are not known to us?
There's a whole heap of interpretation that you can get from this book and it makes me greedy to talk about it and my head heavy: fundamentalism, community, self-acceptance and identity, forgiving vs. forgetting, conformity, social injustices, politics it all feels valid and it all feels like it has a place in this short book. Meeting each new person in this strange town - a father lamenting the change in his logical daughter after marrying into a well established family in the town, the deathbed confessions of true cruelty given to a wife, a missing son who empathized with tigers- all feel realized and only press upon these ideas more.
The day of the festival really sits in my mind as this unforgettable chapter as everyone, blindfolded in the church begins to expose their sins aloud, followed by the hollow acceptance from their congregation after - After all, everyone is broken, right?
It feels like what initially was used as a means to connect the community and put everyone on equal footing almost becomes a means to live by the view of "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission". We get subtle uncomfortable insights about how bad the town gets closer to the Forgiveness Festival - the fact that the hospitals are often filled with injured people, that things happen to the girls of the town, that they need more active police officers before the festival. It brings to mind almost like if the Purge was well-written or good . The sea of voices recanting their sins - ranging from domestic abuse, cheating on their partners, watching a murder, cheating on their algebra exams, wanting divorces, struggling with their relationship or belief in God to stealing a magazine in the doctor's office. Are they truly beseeching for forgiveness or is the way they fall back in ritual almost treated as a quick fix to forget their guilt?
The ending is wonderfully ambiguous but I have two running theories that I'm kind of ping-ponging between. The congregation wraps up (after another small reference to Omelas in how the children react) following a reading of 'names of those that were killed' with a planned picnic in the church's parking lot. Instead of going to the parking lot both Pew and Annie seemingly leave through the back door. The language here is very ambiguous on what happens with much reminder that Pew was nonexistent before waking up in the church before being forgotten once again. We can see this as a very literal case of Pew's tapering and strange ending pages being that she was indeed a human sacrifice to the church, joining the list of the dead (potentially Annie too) due to their lack of conformity.
Or we can take this from the view of something symbolic in what fundamentalist religion can do to someone's identity and the shrinking of their horizons. As they leave out of the back, seeing this vibrant mix of the world their views are broadened and they are forgotten, this could be allegorical to what happens when someone leaves a fundamentalist space. They leave out into the world and no one knows (or assumedly cares) about where they go because they don't fit anymore.
But WHO KNOWS, it's fun to try to figure out and I definitely rambled too long on this. If anything it helped get my thoughts a bit more organized to bump it up to a 5 stars.
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