Thanks to Partner NetGalley for the digital ARC of Amy Reed’s The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World in exchange for an honest review. The book released July 9, 2019.
From the opening of Amy Reed’s The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World, we know that her story will be both firmly rooted in our reality and also slightly off from that reality. The epigraph comes from L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and focuses on people’s preference for home, even if that home is “dreary and gray” (loc. 38). As the novel begins, we’re immersed in the world of Billy and Lydia, dual protagonists whose points of view alternate to tell the story. Billy is from Rome, and Lydia is from Carthage.
These dueling sister towns in Washington hold a sort of joint claim to fame: Christie Romney’s Unicorns vs. Dragons YA teen fantasy series (which is set in Carthage) and Caleb Sloat’s band Rainy Day Knife Fight (Caleb, Billy’s uncle, grew up in—and escaped from—Rome).
The world here is gritty; both teenagers are familiar with poverty and hunger, and both are outcasts who are deeply lonely. Billy’s grandmother has raised him in a home of hoarding and neglect, while Lydia’s father Larry is a single dad. After her mother died in a car accident in the midst of abandoning them, Lydia has built emotional walls around herself, choosing loneliness over vulnerability. Billy, conversely, is constantly reaching out only to be turned away by everyone. When Billy approaches Lydia after the consolidation of their schools, Lydia responds with her typical bristly comeback . . . but she also leaves the door open to friendship.
We come to know Billy as someone who is constantly trying. He tries to be better, to learn more, to be kinder, more helpful. He relies on the “twenty-four-hour AA meeting channel” (loc. 284) and television therapists for advice because no one in his life cares enough to offer any. Lydia, meanwhile, has walled herself off from her father just as she has from everyone else. Her only hope seems to come in the dancing that serves as her emotional outlet and her inspiration.
The friendship between Billy and Lydia, which is absolutely my favorite part of the book, grows slowly as their world becomes stranger. The leader of the U.S. is the King, and his behavior becomes more outrageous as the plot unfolds (yes, there are some shadows of our real political situation here!). Billy’s house turns against him, disintegrating and seeming to hold something threatening in its walls. Lydia is followed by a shadowy figure of which she can’t quite get a clear view. And then there’s the fog, which grows thicker and smells and becomes more malicious as the story continues. Through all of this growing magic, Billy and Lydia nurture—sometimes grudgingly—their friendship, fighting through the easy urge to turn against each other when their lives go wrong. Watching them come to know each other and to understand the other’s weaknesses and strengths is a beautiful journey.
I really appreciated the gradual growth of the dark magic that surrounds Rome and Carthage: there’s much that’s sinister in this novel, but none of the fantasy evil overshadows the malevolence rooted firmly in reality, in the casual cruelty of the people who are supposed to care most for these teenagers or in the easy aggression of their peers. Amy Reed is brilliant at making us feel the loneliness and sadness against which Billy and Lydia fight, and because that depression is so vivid, I found the moments of hope and courage and earnestness to be so, so moving. The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World isn’t easily categorized into a single genre and should therefore appeal to a multitude of readers.