New York City, circa 1942. Iris Anderson is an ordinary teenager. As ordinary as any teenager is whose father is back from the war having lost a leg and whose mother killed herself, that is. The three used to live in nice digs on the Upper East Side and Iris used to attend a posh all-girl's prep school. But they've lately come down in the world and now the pair live together on the Lower East Side renting space from a widow whose son is off fighting. Iris's father is a private detective doing his best to make ends meet and now Iris must brave the rougher halls of P.S. 110 where the kids speak their own language and seem to run in close packs.
Kathryn Miller Haines's YA mystery The Girl is Murder was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2012 in the Best Young Adult Mystery category and caught my eye with its NYC WWII setting. It has all the trademark YA features you expect in the genre--a strong young woman trying to make her way in the world, whose parents are either dead or largely absent. In Iris's case, she's left slightly adrift not understanding why her mother, seemingly so in love with her father and happy in their small family circle, decided to commit suicide. Her father is having a hard time running his business, which consists largely of tracking down unfaithful spouses, with a prosthetic leg that slows him down, tires him out and causes pain. Even before the war she felt he was something of a stranger.
On her first day at her new school Iris sticks out like a sore thumb in clothes none of the other girls would be caught dead in, a class schedule she can't find the classrooms for and not a friendly face in sight. Handsome Tom Barney, surely one of the school's more popular boys, points her in the right direction. When worst comes to worst, though, Iris retreats to the girls' lavatory to hide out from all the cold, hard stares and crosses path with cigarette-smoking Suze. Suze and Tom are both part of a group of kids known as the Rainbows that the rest of the school is both awed by and a little afraid of. It's with a curious indifference that Suze strikes up a conversation with Iris.
Maybe it's self-preservation, or the desire to try and fit in but Iris finds herself embellishing the truth with Suze. Suddenly she lives with an aunt as her Pops is still risking his life in the South Pacific like Suze's older, soldier boyfriend. By day's end she's received advice on how to fit in, had her purse stolen and watched Tom being led away to a cop car with his hands in cuffs. Her new life is nothing like her old, and by story's end Iris will have changed and matured and be all the happier for it.
For now, though, Iris and her Pop have an amicable if uneasy relationship. It's Mrs. Mrozenski, the landlady, who keeps an eye on Iris, feeds her and offers her kindly advice (or on occasion covers for her). Iris watches her father struggle to run his business independently from his brother who also owns a (much more) successful investigative agency. Both Iris and her father have the same tenacity of spirit, and its likely that desire for independence that inspires her to do a little investigating on the sly to help her Pops out. He's none too pleased when he finds out and forbids her from nosing in anymore. But when Tom's parents hire her father to search for him (he's gone missing after being released from police custody for theft), Iris is sure she can find out more from her classmates than her Pops can.
And so begins Iris's own personal odyssey to find out the truth behind Tom's disappearance. She finds herself embellishing the truth more and more often, going to Harlem's dance clubs with the Rainbows, wearing lipstick, drinking and digging herself into a deeper and deeper pit as she tries to make sense of her friends, both former and current, actions and motivations.
While this is indeed a very typical YA novel in much of the plotting, it was also quite surprising and unexpected in many ways, too. Miller Haines is very creative in her storytelling and in not giving Iris an ending that is formulaic, and I liked it all the better for that reason. Iris is quite likable, and while she finds herself doing things she knows she shouldn't, it's always with the best intentions at heart. She does change over time and finds out some hard truths about her parents, her friends and most importantly herself.
One of the best things about the book is there is a distinct sense of time and place. It's filled with the right sort of period detail and 'teen speak' that made it fun to read. The story is peppered with slang from the era that made the glossary in the back of the book quite useful (the title by the way has a double meaning, too, since "murder" has more than one meaning). Kathryn Miller Haines has written a second book featuring Iris Anderson called The Girl is Trouble, which I look forward to reading (she also writes a mystery series for adult readers set in WWII NY featuring Miss Winter (which I have heard good things about).
The Edgar Award longlists are always chock full of good books that I like adding to my reading lists. Also from the 2012 list I read The Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson. It's thanks to books like these that prompted my subscription to Soho's Teen Crime series. This month's book is Escape Theory by Margaux Froley, which I think I am going to read next.