Book Report: The True Meaning of Smekday

If you want, Gentle Reader, to know about The True Meaning of Smekday, you can go to the Adam Rex’s own list of 10 reasons to read it, or—wait a bit, I thought I found out about the book in one of the Unshelved Book Club strips, but it isn’t turning up on the site at all. Hunh.

Well, anyway, the end of the world, Aliens, other aliens, funny things, whatnot. Young Adult science fiction, very funny in places, only somewhat funny in other places, but fun enough to read even when the funny bits aren’t as funny as they ought to be.

One thing I found interesting is that Our Hero is a girl with a African-American father and a European-American mother, who is ’visibly black’, if you know what I mean. I mean, yes, the whole concept is inherently hinky, and the more you look into it, the hinkier it gets, but on the whole, despite there being no very good definition of race, when you go into a room, you can very quickly identify who is black and who is white, right? Not altogether correctly, mind you, but that’s part of the hinkiness. Anyway, I was torn between finding the choice of a bi-racial kid interesting (in light of recent discussions here, among other things) and irritating (because the kid is, in some sense, vanilla, with mostly generic-American-urban/suburban references rather than being a kid who appears to have been largely formed within the context of growing up mixed-race). And then there was a beautiful bit where the kid is looking for her mother, and the System (what’s left of it, after the end of the world) is helping her look and utterly failing because nobody ever asked her to describe her mother. They just assumed, black kid, black mother.

Now, I have no idea how this would read to a kid who had that whole experience growing up, or rather who was in the middle of having it. But I believe that if my daughter were to read this book in a year or two (and I will probably recommend it at that point), that would be a Learning Moment, where she would be startled to be reminded that not only are people different, one to another, which is what makes the world interesting and fun, but people being different to one another means that they are treated differently, and that the different treatment has actual effects. It’s not a big heavy-handed thing in the book, but I really liked it. Particularly as it’s totally an assumption I would make, if I were doing that job. I happened to see the title Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap come across the counter yesterday, and although I didn’t, you know, open it or anything, I thought that conceptual trap seemed like a great phrase, probably better than privilege for discussing that… thing… that makes it both easy to ignore and difficult to see stuff that is obvious to those outside the majority.

Now, having said that, I did find it vaguely irritating that nobody in the book seemed to mind the imposition of Smekday on the Twenty-Fifth of December for religious reasons, nor did any of the book’s characters seem to have any religious background that wasn’t ridiculous. That’s just something I’ve been noticing about a lot of books; I can’t hold up Smekday for particular censure for that. But I think it’s an odd aspect of another conceptual trap, and I would be curious what Christians who read the book think of it.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.