As you may recall from Soapbox week last month, I had a few thoughts on the depiction of class in contemporary YA literature. That post actually built on several others from across the litblogosphere (several of which I excerpted in my post). One book I was thinking about then was Diane Les Becquets Season of Ice. I won't be reviewing this one formally until my December column (an eclectic column of "books for reading over winter break") but I wanted to write about it here a bit as the author has done such an outstanding job of writing about class in a way that fits perfectly into a story that is about something else altogether.

The basic plot follows high schooler Genesis and her search for her father. The family (Gen, her father, stepmother and younger half brothers) live in Maine where life is tough but working in the lumber industry and picking up side jobs wherever possible keeps everyone afloat in a solid middle class existence. But this is a family dependent on the father to earn a living and when he disappears in a nearby lake while on a dock repair job things get tough quick. Because no body is recovered before the lake freezes, no claim can be put on his life insurance. So Genesis must drop out of school to waitress full time, her stop mom must pick up cleaning jobs and the reality of struggling to make it without the primary breadwinner becomes very clear. Complicating things are Genesis' questions about what happened to her father. He probably died on the lake but what if he didn't, what if he just ran away?

Season of Ice is first and foremost about a teenager's quest to make sure she really and truly did know her parent as who he really was. Because Gen is a stepchild now, there is also the issue of family. If her father is dead, does she have any family left? Will she still fit in with her stepmother and half siblings? There's a lot of well done coming-of-age plot here, a little romance, a ton of Maine atmosphere (and for this French Canadian a welcome dose of that ethnicity). But more than anything it was all the many ways that Les Becquets slipped in bits and pieces of a middle class life - and how tenuous your hold on that life can be - that puts the book way over the top. It's not about class, but the family's economic situation is never far from the story and because that is how so many of live, it's nice to see done so well in a YA novel.

The post title is taken from the book in a scene where Genesis is looking for someone and stops by their house noting that the yard is full of automobile parts, five gallon pails used as stools and other things. "Though my dad had prided himself on keeping our house and yard 'intact' which meant a place for everything, including whatever scraps he may have accumulated and saved for a grander purpose someday, junkyard parts and chickens and snowmobiles and dogs were the typical lawn ornaments in our parts."

When I read this I immediately flashed on my own neighborhood - with its two block homeowner's association that allows no cars to be worked on, no basketball hoops attached over garage doors, no clothes lines, no playground equipment, and on and on. When I grew up fixing your car in your driveway was a point of pride - you knew how to fix and you did it yourself. I have never seen anyone in this neighborhood so much as change oil in a vehicle, let alone spend an hour with the hood up on a truck. (We work on our own cars in the garage.) I throw jeans out over the tailgate of our truck to dry in the summer and my husband just waits for someone to complain. It's an odd place to live - not one we chose for these reasons but ended up sort of stuck with. Appearance is everything here, appearance and protecting that all elusive "home value". Anything that might suggest you work with your hands is considered a negative on the value of the neighborhood.

I'm surrounded by people who hire someone to mow postage stamp sized lawns.

I would consider this a 21st century development except I can remember shortly after my mother remarried and my brother brought his car over to our large driveway at our new big house to do some work and my stepfather kindly explained that was not what driveways were for. The car had to go. And then he went out and scrubbed the driveway.

It was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen.

My brother towed his car to our father's house and worked on it there and it was all fine. Reading Season of Ice has brought all of this back to me in a major way, and made me look at my neighborhood with an even more critical eye. This isn't how I want to live; I like coming from people who worked with their hands and my pride in that history is only increasing.

I mean really - when did it become a good thing to have to pay someone to change your oil?