Althea & Oliver
What if you live for the moment when life goes off the rails—and then one day there’s no one left to help you get it back on track?
Althea Carter and Oliver McKinley have been best friends since they were six; she’s the fist-fighting instigator to his peacemaker, the artist whose vision balances his scientific bent. Now, as their junior year of high school comes to a close, Althea has begun to want something more than just best-friendship. Oliver, for his part, simply wants life to go back to normal, but when he wakes up one morning with no memory of the past three weeks, he can’t deny any longer that something is seriously wrong with him. And then Althea makes the worst bad decision ever, and her relationship with Oliver is shattered. He leaves town for a clinical study in New York, resolving to repair whatever is broken in his brain, while she gets into her battered Camry and drives up the coast after him, determined to make up for what she’s done.
Their journey will take them from the rooftops, keg parties, and all-ages shows of their North Carolina hometown to the pool halls, punk houses, and hospitals of New York City before they once more stand together and face their chances. Set in the DIY, mix tape, and zine culture of the mid-1990s, Cristina Moracho’s whip-smart debut is an achingly real story about identity, illness, and love—and why bad decisions sometimes feel so good.
Althea Carter and Oliver McKinley have been best friends since they were six; she’s the fist-fighting instigator to his peacemaker, the artist whose vision balances his scientific bent. Now, as their junior year of high school comes to a close, Althea has begun to want something more than just best-friendship. Oliver, for his part, simply wants life to go back to normal, but when he wakes up one morning with no memory of the past three weeks, he can’t deny any longer that something is seriously wrong with him. And then Althea makes the worst bad decision ever, and her relationship with Oliver is shattered. He leaves town for a clinical study in New York, resolving to repair whatever is broken in his brain, while she gets into her battered Camry and drives up the coast after him, determined to make up for what she’s done.
Their journey will take them from the rooftops, keg parties, and all-ages shows of their North Carolina hometown to the pool halls, punk houses, and hospitals of New York City before they once more stand together and face their chances. Set in the DIY, mix tape, and zine culture of the mid-1990s, Cristina Moracho’s whip-smart debut is an achingly real story about identity, illness, and love—and why bad decisions sometimes feel so good.
At first I thought this is one of those cute, inane book with the tired friends-to-lovers trope. Thankfully it’s not. It’s gritty and raw and wrong. Cristina Moracho creates a problematic but real friendship between the two characters, Althea and Oliver, who are friends since age six. Their relationship takes a turn when Oliver contracts a mysterious disease. Althea Carter is a regular-ish teenager (she does some pretty great sketches, but don't they always) brought up by her divorced dad who’s a history professor and textbook cool-dad. Ever since Oliver McKinley came over one day to Althea’s house they’ve been best friends and partners in crimes. Not only are they inseparable, Althea’s life is pretty much Oliver. As she grows into adolescence, Althea begins to have feelings for Oliver (I know, I know), but he doesn’t feel it back; he makes his position clear after their one kiss. When Oliver keeps falling asleep for weeks or even months, rendered helpless by a weird sickness, the Kleine-Levin Syndrome, also called Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, Althea finds she doesn’t really know what to do with her life, making rebellious choices like dying her hair black, dating a really disgusting guy, and publicly beating him up in school. Althea eventually loses Oliver’s trust when they have sex during one of his sleeping bouts, where he can talk and move but he’s not really conscious of what’s happening. In other words, she rapes him without meaning to. I think on one hand she knows what's happening, but she also thought childishly that she'd be able to cure the sleeping beauty with a kiss. Obviously, she doesn't. After Oliver finds out what transpires, they have a huge fallout and severe ties, with Oliver leaving for New York to join a study on and Althea trying to move on. She eventually travels to New York to apologize to Oliver for her actions, but he succumbs to another attack of sleep right before she gets to meet him. For a month she slums it with a bunch of college drop-outs working in a soup kitchen. I guess this is the defining point where Althea finally grows up and develops her own person instead of existing as “Oliver’s friend.”
Oliver’s perspective is filled with his frustration with his condition, which may not even be curable. Imagine falling asleep in June and wake up in August. His life loses continuity and breaks into pieces: times when he’s awake and times when he’s asleep. Other people move on while he’s unconscious, one of which is Althea. Even though he’s angry at her, he tries to find Althea in NY when he hears she’s been to hospital trying to visit him and never went home. As I read the book, I sympathize with Oliver, because he never asked for any of this, the disease, Althea’s betrayal, and life in general. Before reading this story I never knew there’s even a syndrome like that, just sleeping for days and missing huge chunks of your life. It’s like dying and coming back to life repeatedly. Worse, you never know when sleep might pounce again, and perhaps this really is your last day conscious until several months later. I can’t imagine the anticipation and fear this disease inflicts constantly. Moracho also adds some really boho-cool characters into the mix, with New York as backdrop. Althea starts to live in a soup kitchen crew's house, where said college drop-outs pool their meager money together to pay rent. They accept Althea among them, some with open arms and some quite gingerly. In the end Althea finds who she is and whatever because Oliver isn't there anymore.
Althea & Oliver is not the easiest book to read; it has these slow patches that makes me want to skip ahead, and its characters aren’t that likable. Still, Moracho’s story captures two vibrant people’s reaction to serious problems in life, which in the end is entirely worth reading. I think I even shed a few tears here and there, and I don’t cry at books (unless it’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a different story entirely). So for anyone tired of swoony, kissy teen romance, read Althea & Oliver for a change.
