Lauren Myracle's Shine

Shine is set in Black Creek, North Carolina, where Patrick, a gay teen, is now in a coma after a brutal beating. He was found tied to a gas pump outside of the convenience store where he worked. The nozzle had been stuck into his mouth and "Suck this, faggot" written in blood across his chest. His childhood friend Cat investigates the hate crime, fearing that the police will never find out who is to blame. She is convinced that the guilty party is someone in their own community.While the central tragedy of this story is in the verbal abuse, harassment, and violence aimed at Patrick, a huge number of other little heartbreaks orbit it. While Cat has been keeping the abusive incident that caused her to withdraw from all of her friends (and people in general) to herself, she hasn't seen what else is happening in Black Creek. Her investigation into Patrick's beating leads her into all the dark corners.

I had a little bit of trouble relating to the characters in this book. They come from such a different world than the one in which I grew up: Thoughts of Jesus and whether or not you are sinning are
on the minds of most of the teens and the adults; extreme poverty and/or depression has caused a lot of the community members to deal and use meth; adolescents have little or no support from the adults in their lives and most drop out of school before they reach 16. Each of those problems is the cause or the result of another one, and they create a cycle that sustains itself, but weighs down the people of Black Creek to the point of ruin. To me, Shine creates a worst-case scenario for LGBT youth. And while it's true that young gay people live in places like Black Creek, it's not the only place where they could become the victims of hate crimes. There might be a tendency among teens who read this book to think that "those things don't happen here."

Please read the comments below for more information about this map...

 According to this map showing hate crime rates across the US in 2008, there were just as many hate crimes in Wisconsin as there were North Carolina. Many Madison citizens feel like negative aspects of the rural south are a very distant reality, but we're not as far from it as we'd like to believe. I think it would be important to address this with students who read this book so that they'll be on the lookout in their own schools for the warning signs that Cat and the adults in the town ignored - not only signs of possible violent acts, but for signs of drug involvement and sexual harassment/abuse.

I was really glad that this book has a happy ending - at least in one respect - because I cried several times while reading. Hopefully Myracle's power to create an emotional response in her readers will help keep adolescents interested and build empathy in them for the many types of characters she introduces. I hope it will also show them the consequences of bad decisions (it may be on the border of seeming "too preachy") and the horrors of hatred, encouraging them to think about their actions and hold their peers to a higher standard of respect for others and for themselves.