Map of Ireland. By Stephanie Grant. Scribner. 197 pages. Hardback. $22.00.
If you liked the film Juno and its wise-cracking teen heroine with the caustic wit, you’ll enjoy Ann Ahren, the teen protagonist in Stephanie Grant’s novel. Map of Ireland is a story about a lesbian teen from South Boston and the things she learns about prejudice and love in 1974, the first year of the city’s school bussing. While she is ashamed of the white mothers, who alternately throw rocks and pray in front of her school, and of George Wallace, in a wheel-chair, who comes to show his solidarity, she learns that racism goes deep, and it is spawned by ignorance—other’s as well as her own.
Like Catcher in the Rye, our heroine is looking back on the events that lead to her detention. While Holden Caulfield hooks the reader with “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come down here and take it easy,” Ann Ahren claims, “I’d blame my being stuck here on those stupid yellow buses and the violence they seemed to bring. . . .[but] I’m trying to understand who my actions say I have become. My actions were this; I burned down the house of my friends.” Ann’s story begins with a description of her French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugenie, who is the “blackest person [she’s] ever seen.” At 13, Ann is finding herself a social misfit at an age when everyone wants to blend in. She fantasizes about same-sex attractions and actually loses her best and only friend, Fynn, the class fat girl, after her lesbian desires are exposed. Ann develops a crush on her teacher and thus embarks on a journey that shows her the world outside of South Boston. During this journey, Ann not only has her first sexual experiences, but she loses her cock-sure attitude when she encounters true fear for the first time.
Stephanie Grant deftly and without apology captures external as well as internalized racism that resides in both Black (black is always capitalized) and white characters during that time. When the yellow busses come, they bring two black girls that Ann finds alternately enraging and enthralling. These girls join the basketball team and the team falls apart because no one will pass the ball to the Black girls and the Black girls won’t pass the ball to the white girls. Ann’s knowledge of the world outside of South Boston is limited. Her family is Irish Catholic, headed by a mother who seems to be doing her best, which is sometimes not good enough, after she has been abandoned by her husband and left to raise five children alone. Ann and everyone she knows live in the same apartments: the projects. Descriptions of Ann’s high school that overlooks the “cold, boatless, Boston Bay,” and the yellow school busses in the middle of chaos are vivid. Ann, red headed and freckled, claims she’s been told she has a face like a “Map of Ireland.” Her past is full of fires, but the first one we witness is in the family bathroom, where Ann tries to burn letters she’s written to her French teacher. Dr. McGrath, from the institution, tells her that fire setting is “poor impulse control,” but Ann thinks of it as a way of coping. She ruminates, “What I did—setting fires—might have been more severe, more noticeable than what Ma and Flynn did—which was basically fuck guys—lots and lots of guys—but was it really so much worse?”
Ann Ahren comes of age on a dark lonely road after an auto accident. In an epilogue we see that Ann has matured, but she is still struggling to comprehend the events that took place that year. This book is a quick read, not because it is short, but because the prose has a momentum that is a little like falling over forward; it’s hard to stop. Even the rare reader who can’t identify with Ann Ahren will care about her. In 1974, the entire country was suffering growing pains. Stephanie Grant avoids sentimentality as her characters deal with historical and internal conflicts. She manages to elicit compassion for the praying mothers, the confused and angry white children, and the terrified and hopeful Blacks, equally. Like Ann’s mother and her friend Fynn, everyone simply does the best they can.�
