Boy Underground

"Some things are impossible for us to change, and any time we try to do something impossible, it's going to wear us out. It saps our life force. Our energy. Maybe you hate a thing more than anything. But it's what is. To accept it means to see that it is that way, and that it won't be another way no matter how much you hate it."

Boy Underground is a novel by best-selling American author, Catherine Ryan Hyde. In the fall of 1941, fourteen-year-old Steven Katz starts high school and makes some new friends. Suki (Itsuki) is slim, beautiful and funny, with Japanese parents. Ollie (Oliver) is little, but stylish and smart. Nick (Nicholas) is tall and well-built, and Steven is instantly smitten. He just hopes they'll overlook his stupid questions and let him hang out with them.

By early December, they are ready for a hike into the Sierra Nevada mountains. Steven's mother Beth, who is more concerned with social standing than her son's happiness, queries why he's no longer with his (socially acceptable) friends-since-kindergarten: he doesn't tell her their increasing xenophobic, homophobic comments have put him off. His father, Marvin is an authoritarian land-owner who approves of anything that will make a man of his younger son.

The four friends enjoy their hike, but when they return, the world has changed. A far-off event and a local one have an enormous impact on their lives. Anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of Pearl Harbour puts Suki and his family under threat of detention is an internment camp while America's participation in the war puts seventeen-year-old Ollie under threat of the draft.

Closer to home, Nick's drunken father has beat a man into a coma, then uses his son's close likeness to shift the blame onto him, the threat of reform school making Nick a fugitive from the law. Which is how, several weeks later, Steven's quota of nearby friends reduces by two thirds, to the boy he is hiding underground.

At school, no-one talks about their missing Japanese classmates: "A complete vacuum of words. It was as if those boys and girls had never existed. I guess what they said about it was exactly what they wanted us to think. Nothing. We were being asked to think nothing of it. We were being asked to rewrite history and act as if we had never known them." Steven's continuing friendship with a Japanese boy has been noted in town with disapproval (except for one important exception), but he refuses to deny his friend, even if it results in his ostracism.

Ollie's early enlistment worries his friends: their concern is vindicated. Keeping Nick safe and well in the root cellar isn't easy, but Steven is prepared to make any sacrifice to help his friend, and his efforts to prove Nick innocent are not in vain. In his encounter with Nick's father, the guilt and fear he sees somewhat enlighten Steven about what seem inexplicably cruel actions.

Ryan Hyde saddles this young protagonist with several heavy burdens, but while his unsupportive family fails to understand him, his friends do not: correspondence from his absent friends gives him courage; his connection with Nick grows stronger every day; and when Nick finally departs, good advice comes from an unexpected quarter.

Ryan Hyde's characters never fail to steal into the reader's heart and there may be moments when tissues are required. As always, she gives them wise words and insightful observations: at fourteen, Steven already understands "If you have shortcomings, I fully believe it's better to look them in the eye. Pretending otherwise gets you nowhere." Ryan Hyde gives the reader another wonderfully moving and uplifting read.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing.