Editor’s Note: Each Sunday in September, Ida Fogle of the Daniel Boone Regional Library will explore a different aspect of this year’s One Read title, MO Walsh’s “The Big Door Prize.” Columns may include minor spoilers.
It’s easy for adults to forget how difficult life can be for teenagers.
We often see our own problems as more important: marriages, mortgages, the need to make a living. But if given the chance to relive our high school years, I think most of us would turn down the offer to go back. In “The Big Door Prize,” author MO Walsh places big problems on the shoulders of his teenage characters.
Some of them are experiencing typical sources of teen angst, even if the details are peculiarly unique to this story. There’s Denny Cadwalder, so insecure and desperate for a friend that he doesn’t develop any interests or identity of his own, just copies those of someone he wants to impress. Unfortunately, he fails to understand the nuances of Pokémon and is often little more than an irritation to the boy he admires.
Then we have Rusty Bodell. A disheveled loner, he becomes suddenly interested in fashion and grooming after receiving a reading that reads “LOVER” from the DNAMIX, a machine that promises to reveal one’s potential life station.
But two teenagers carry much more than their peers, with serious effects on their mental health. Jacob Richieu, 16, is heartbroken after the death of his twin brother Toby in a car accident. His mother died when he and Toby were babies, so now the family is made up of just Jacob and his father, a man who can’t get by in his way.
For the most part, Jacob feels isolated as he struggles to understand how someone like his twin, a confident and popular soccer player, could cease to exist without warning, and how his own life can go on from here. . The only person he talks to about his brother is Trina Todd, Toby’s girlfriend, who “has clung to Jacob in curious and troublesome ways.”
Life has dealt Trina a difficult hand. She lives in poverty with a single father, Lanny. He’s not really raising her, but he keeps company with various criminal elements and is involved in a lot of drug dealing. The only adult relative who makes an effort for her is her uncle, and as a parish priest, he has many other demands on her attention.
While Jacob’s grief leaves him untethered and full of questions, Trina is filled with smoldering anger, with an unshakeable certainty about her worldview. The two bond over shared trauma, or so it seems, with Jacob experiencing a chaotic mix of emotions for her: attraction, fear, and pity.
It is easy to sympathize with their sufferings. However, neither Jacob nor the reader knows the half of it until the end of the book.
We only see that Trina’s behavior, which at first could be attributed to neediness, continues to escalate ominously. To her, Toby’s death was not simply a tragic accident, even if it was caused by her poor choice to drink and drive. She hints to Jacob that there is much more to the story. There are people who bear the blame, people who deserve punishment.
Stunned by his own pain, he ignores a few warning signs. I won’t spoil the ending. I’ll just share that, like in real life, tragedy could happen if some adult somewhere doesn’t start paying close attention.
I’m Listening: A Lecture Panel on Adolescent Mental Health will be held at the Boone County Center for History and Culture at 7 pm on Wednesday, September 21. Visited oneread.dbrl.org/events for a complete list of One Read events.
