Review: Junie, by Erin Crosby Eckstine

The cover is beautiful, but I didn't love the book...

Rating:

📿📿

Initial Response:

This book wants to be several things, and in the end doesn't do any of them particularly well.

One Sentence Summary:

An enslaved young woman in antebellum Alabama comes to terms with her enslaved existence while completing tasks for her sister's ghost.

Tell Me More:

For most of this book, I wavered between 3 and 4 'stars,' but by the time I got to the end, I decided that the issues I thought might have just been "not for me" problems were a little bit bigger than just "not for me" problems. For me, if a book gets less than 3 stars, I think it has issues at the level of craft-- and as much as I wanted to like this book, I think it has some issues that really hold it back from being everything it wants to be.

Junie feels like it's trying to be several different books all at the same time. It's part slave narrative, part YA romance novel, part ghost story; but it doesn't quite manage to be all of these at once, and therefore feels disjointed and tonally inconsistent. The ghost-story plot in particular felt almost incidental to the character arc, and even undermined it in my opinion. The book seemed to be at war with itself, with the majority of the book being about Junie slowly coming to realize the limitations of her place as an enslaved person and eventually seeking freedom from those limitations and her enslavement; but there's also a ghost? Who needs her to do... things? For... reasons? I think the book would have been stronger without the ghost subplot. Specifically, I think the effect of the ghost subplot is to externalize Junie's motivation to escape, instead of allowing her to come to that decision herself; and the sad side effect of this externalization is that Junie's characterization suffers. Rather than letting Junie wrestle with her desire for freedom in a way that creates a satisfying character arc, Junie escapes almost by accident (while not really wanting it) because the ghost needs her to.

In the author's note, Eckstine says that she wanted to create a well-rounded enslaved character, as she finds that most enslaved characters in literature tend to fall into tropic categories; unfortunately, I don't think she succeeded. Junie didn't seem real to me-- her characterization seemed thin. On the one hand, I have no problem believing that she's a sixteen year old girl, as she doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with much beyond what book she's going to read next. Several times during the first half of the book, I checked the blurb to see if I could find the letters "YA" anywhere; but alas, they were nowhere to be found. Her characterization felt like a 21st century teenager to me-- yes, she is living on a plantation as an enslaved person in the immediate prelude to the civil war, but there was nothing to ground her struggles to that time period. Perhaps this is what Eckstine meant when she says she was trying to create a well-rounded character; but for me it broke immersion. I wanted an historical richness that this book just didn't have.

Furthermore, Junie's character arc is technically complete, but not emotionally resonant. I could see the signposts Eckstine was throwing up while I was reading the book, but the beats didn't hit emotionally for me because Junie is never allowed to wrestle with what an escape attempt would actually mean. Whenever it comes up early in the novel, she immediately shuts it down because she doesn't want to leave her family. Over the course of the novel, there's never a moment (that I can remember, at least) where she counts the costs and decides to escape on her own. She is just kinda forced into it by circumstances outside her control.

The strongest part of the novel was actually the love subplot. Unfortunately, I didn't know this was going to be a YA romance novel when I picked it up, and it wasn't enough to save my reading experience. Junie is getting 2 📿 (because necklaces play an important role in the story); and please know that I really wanted to like this book. A southern gothic tale about haints (which this book called 'haunts' for... reasons?) that wrestles with slavery in the antebellum period? That's my jam! This book was just not it. I've tried to be generous in this review, because I want to approach every book on the grounds of what it is, not just what I want it to be. Hopefully this post effectively conveys my reasons for disliking the book without being unduly meanspirited.