Hello, YA Book Club-ers! It’s time for some back-to-school reading! This month, we’ve tackled The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass. The novel follows Jake, a high school student blessed (or cursed?) with the ability to see spirits. He’s made peace with his life as a medium, but when the ghost of Sawyer Doon, a school shooter, begins following him around town, things get dicey fast. This novel is about coping with personal trauma, finding yourself, and learning how to make the most of what you’ve got.
We’re going to spoil stuff from here on out! CW: This book discusses suicide, sexuality, and sexual abuse.
Mary: I picked this book because I think we always need to have more POC in the horror genre, and the cover of The Taking of Jake Livingston is absolutely gorgeous (Designed by Jessica Jenkins, with cover art by Corey Brickley). The book jacket compares the novel to Get Out, which...I didn’t really see! Do you think this novel earns its comparisons?
Emily: I feel like a lot of things get compared to Get Out if they’re a horror story with a Black protagonist. Even if the stories have nothing in common with Jordan Peele’s film beyond that. And recently, I’ve seen Lovecraft Country and Candyman added to that comparison list. So what I’m hoping is that eventually there will be so many stories centering people of color that we won’t make these “easy” comparisons anymore. So yeah, in other words, no, no I didn’t think this book had anything to do with Get Out.
Mary: I think you’re absolutely right that it’s an easy comparison, and I also hope that someday (soon) we won’t be able to make that easy comparison. Look, I love Get Out, but this book was nothing like it! Lol
The novel uses an interesting narrative structure, with the first person perspective jumping back and forth between Jake and Sawyer’s journal (which he kept pre-school shooting). We kind of get to know both boys gradually, and discover that they have more in common than it initially seems.
Even though I love this POV-shifting in other novels, it felt strange here, mostly because I find it difficult to sympathize with someone who ended the lives of so many of his classmates. I do think the novel wants us to sympathize with Sawyer a bit, and I admit that parts of his narrative are absolutely harrowing to read, but...does that justify what he did? I don’t know.
Emily: Yeah, I was conflicted. Because on one hand, I was intrigued by Sawyer’s perspective. And I think when horrible things like school shootings happen, we want to be able to make sense of it. I have to admit one of my immediate thoughts when I realized we would be getting Sawyer’s perspective was, good, I’d like to know why he did this horrible thing. But the truth of the matter is that there’s never going to be a “why” for something so terrible that’s going to feel satisfying. Or maybe “satisfying” isn’t the right word. But I guess what I’m trying to say is we can want answers, but there’s never going to be an answer that’s good enough. And despite the fact that Sawyer had a horrific backstory, I felt uncomfortable with the fact that we were sort of prompted to feel sorry for him. School shootings are sadly a very real issue, and I could not go there.
Mary: I felt uncomfortable about it, too, Emily. Like sure, he had a really, really awful home life and I felt bad for him, but not bad enough to excuse a school shooting. I don’t think anything could be so bad that it excuses that, you know? I get what the novel was trying to do, and I do feel like I understood Sawyer better and felt some of his hopelessness, but that doesn’t mean I liked him. Maybe we weren’t supposed to excuse him at all, but the way the novel was portraying him makes it hard to say.
One of the things that we pick up on as the novel goes on is that both Sawyer and Jake are gay, and that their sexualities informed a lot of who they became as people. While Sawyer went down the path of hate, taking out his frustrations and trauma on others, Jake became introverted and quiet, afraid to let others see his full personality.
Where Sawyer’s story ends, Jake’s gets to continue on, and he eventually enters into his first relationship at the end of the novel. How did you feel about how the novel handled sexuality?
Emily: Honestly, for me, it felt like a bit of an afterthought, and again I felt uncomfortable about this space where Jake was meant to empathize with Sawyer and his struggle with his sexuality. There was also this sort of weird love story thing happening with Jake that was pretty underdeveloped. Basically, this book is trying to do a lot, I think, and it’s really short. So I felt like I had high expectations, and the book didn’t have enough space to meet all of them. I think this probably worked better for you than it did for me though, huh?
Mary: It did and it didn’t. I didn’t love that the tether between Sawyer and Jake was their shared sexual orientation, and I’m not sure what the point of that was. Like, are we supposed to think, look, all gay people aren’t bad! Or are we supposed to think, oh all gay people have to endure trauma and rise above it! Neither of those things should be true. I will say that I didn’t feel like I needed more of the love story for Jake, because it felt like it was just getting started and would continue beyond the book. I’d definitely like to read about Jake’s continued adventures, and it seems like the novel leaves that open as an option. I don’t love sequels, but I also don’t like rushed love stories!
The Taking of Jake Livingston goes to some pretty dark places. Sawyer is sexually abused by his uncle, and Jake is physically abused by his father after his father discovers he’s gay. Both boys experience trauma because they’re gay, and that feels significant. I think a lot of YA books try to gloss over the very real hardships LGBTQIA+ individuals have to face because of ignorance and hatred, but this book doesn’t, which is interesting. I’m not one of those people that thinks we need to gatekeep YA lit from stuff like that, either. I read truly horrific stuff when I was a young adult, and I turned out okay I guess.
Emily: Yeah, I don’t think YA should talk down to its readers. These are real things teenagers deal with.
Mary: Agreed. It’s refreshing to see characters that experienced bad things but move forward. I guess Jake moves forward and Sawyer does not. Jake certainly isn’t forgetting what happened to him anytime soon, but he does seem to forgive his mother for her involvement.
Emily: Yeah, I just felt like Jake’s relationship with his mother was a little more simplistic than it would be in real life. I wish Jake’s relationship with his family, especially his brother actually, had been more fleshed out. I’m going to sound like a broken record here, because I’m just going to keep saying this book is too short. I feel like a lot happened and yet not a lot happened.
Mary: Oh for SURE. It could have been longer to flesh out some of these relationships, especially with his mom. I mean, I’m glad he forgave her, but WOOF it’s a lot to forgive.
I also feel like even after finishing the novel I don’t have a clear grasp on how ghosts work or what the afterlife is like in the world of Jake Livingston. Like, I guess you can hang around as a ghost until you don’t? I did think it was interesting that a lot of ghosts seemed trapped in their dying moments, on a loop forever, but God, that sounds awful. It’s kind of a bleak picture of the afterlife.
We had to.
Emily: Yeah, I think it would have been nice to see a little bit more of the “status quo” when it comes to ghosts and get an idea of how this magic works before we get Sawyer. Because Sawyer pops up pretty much in the very beginning, probably because he’s a POV character, and it would be weird to drop the diaries in halfway through the story. But still, we get all this Sawyer stuff happening at the very beginning, and Jake seems terrified. And I just kind of felt like, “Oh? I guess this is not how ghosts normally work?” But I just had to take Jake’s word for it because I hadn’t seen that much ghosty interaction before Sawyer. Again, this is just another thing that would have been more fleshed out if the book were a little longer.
Mary: I wanted to like this book more than I did. I mean, I enjoyed it, and read it mostly in one sitting, but the great cover and the description made me think it was going to be something it just wasn’t.
Emily: Yeah, it was a fast read, but overall, it was pretty underwhelming for me. Like, I enjoyed it, but do I have a lot of thoughts about it or things to say about it? Not really. It didn’t really leave me thinking about it after I finished it. I gave this one 3 stars because it was an easy and page-turning read, but I feel like in a week I’m going to forget everything that happened in this one. What was your rating?
Mary: I gave it 4 stars because I see so much potential in it and enjoyed how it wasn’t afraid to pull punches. It also felt SO intense to me because I read it in one sitting, and that might have affected my feelings on it, a bit. Also, I just really love seeing a POC author writing horror about a POC protagonist and I want to see more of that, so I rated up. I think I’d probably personally rate it (on my own private non-Goodreads list) as more of a 3.5 or 3. But now, we must move on. Want to tell everyone what we’re reading next?
Emily: Next up, we’ve got The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky. We’re keeping the horror train going! I don’t know much about this one, honestly, but I do know it’s about a mysterious club that’s obsessed with horror, which is definitely something I can get on board with! Come back at the end of August to get our review!