Cordelia Strube's Precocious High School Heroine
Canadian Literature's Crystal Hurdle reviews Cordelia Strube's Lemon, focussing on the work's eponymous teenage protagonist whose cynical insights breath new life into the genre of high school melodrama. Lemon came out in 2009:
Comic Bildungsromans
Master (mistress?) novelist Strube’s Lemon is [a] strongly realized and engaging[…]protagonist/first-person narrator. She lives with her stepmother, was almost killed by her adoptive mother, and is suspicious of her birth mother’s wish to meet. The adults in Lemon’s world, including a cross-dressing History teacher and a “comfortably clueless” librarian, seem to have little to offer. The book opens with the stabbing of her vice-principal stepmother by a student, revealing the micro-macro theme: High-school life may be a crock, but it is as dangerous as a war zone. The book develops by a series of juxtapositions: real vs. literary, local vs. far away. Parallels between genocide and high-school life are not over the top. Nastiness occurs not only in third world countries. Close to home, a friend’s mother, ill, struggles with maintaining employment and vital health benefits.
Lemon’s paid employment at Dairy Dream offers a cheeky look at retail…but her volunteer employment at a hospital, where, nurturing, she befriends cancer kids, makes one want to cry at life’s injustices.
Vulnerable, Lemon wishes to seek redemption through reading, but it is not enough. She reads Clarissa, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, several plays by Shakespeare, and more. She perceptively reduces all of the classics to tales about pining women. Of Shakespeare, “I can’t stand all this love-at-first-sight bilge, couples obsessing over each other before they’ve even had a conversation. People are always blaming Hollywood for our screwed-up perceptions of romance, but as far as I’m concerned, it started with Shakespeare.” History, like literature, is similarly (and amusingly) cut down to size. During English class discussions, shocking comments by the sexually abusive jocks and party girls reveal the brutality of high-school life, in which a lock-down is understated, and gang date rape is planned as party entertainment.
The book exposes such sordid issues as suicide, the holocaust, violence, the degradation of women, and fakery. Lemon wishes for “an advertising campaign that makes killing a sign of weakness…that makes not killing sexy…” Her stepmother deplores Lemon’s penchant for “Sick Topics” (as might the reader), but they are so rife, Lemon cannot but continue thinking of them. She shows her compassion and humanity in not sloughing them aside.
The book’s ending is too rushed, with a rapid climax and epiphany, not to mention the disappointing sudden loss of earlier pivotal events such as repercussions to the friends’ date rape; however, the ending’s hopefulness does not seem out of place. The book, depicting almost nihilistic events, is big-hearted and funny because of its narrator, whose voice and vision are cynical, poignant, piercing, mordantly funny. “Low self-esteem is a term used to excuse rudeness, laziness, meanness.” This is black humour at its best. Lemon herself should be on her stepmother’s shelf of Extraordinary Women.
-Crystal Hurdle
