Map of Ireland
by Stephanie Grant
Scribner. 197 pages, $22.
IF YOU LIKED the film Juno and its wise-cracking teen heroine, you’ll enjoy Ann Ahern, the teen protagonist in Stephanie Grant’s new 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 busing program to mix students from segregated neighborhoods. While she’s ashamed of the white mothers who alternately throw rocks and pray in front of her school—and also of George Wallace, who comes in a wheelchair to show his solidarity—she learns that racism runs deep, spawned by ignorance in others and in oneself.
As in Catcher in the Rye, our heroine is looking back on the events that have led 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 Ahern begins with “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 Eugénie, who is the “blackest person [she’s] ever seen.” At thirteen, 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, she also loses her cocksure attitude when she encounters true fear for the first time. Stephanie Grant deftly and without apology captures the overt as well as the internalized racism that resides in both Black (which Grant always capitalizes) and white characters during that time. When the yellow buses 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 very good, having been abandoned by her husband and left to raise five children alone. Ann and everyone she knows live side-by-side in the projects. Her high school overlooks the “cold, boatless, Boston Bay,” and the yellow school buses in the middle of chaos are vivid. Red-headed and freckled, she claims she’s been told that 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 some letters she’s written to her French teacher. At the institution to which she’s sent for setting fires, Dr. McGrath tells her that setting fires signals “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 Fynn did—which was basically fuck guys—lots and lots of guys—but was it really so much worse?” Ann Ahern comes of age on a dark lonely road after an auto accident. In an epilogue, we see that Ann has matured, but she’s 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 forward-falling momentum that’s hard to resist. In 1974, the entire country was experiencing racial growing pains. Stephanie Grant avoids sentimentality as her characters deal with historical and internal conflicts. She manages to elicit equal compassion for the praying mothers, the confused and angry white children, and the terrified and hopeful Blacks. Like Ann’s mother and her friend Fynn, everyone simply does the best they can. Martha Miller is a frequent contributor to the G&LR.
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