CARING FOR YOUR CLOWN

Transgender teen Oliver navigates relationships and other hazards with the assistance of a shape-shifting alien in Blume’s YA SF novel.

The sequel to the author’s Caring for Your Clown: Aliens Are Real (2021) returns to the travails of 14-year-old Oliver Jariwala. Assigned female at birth (and named “Olivia”), Oliver is male. He has suffered a traumatic, abusive childhood at the hands of his conservative father, Matthew, from whom Oliver’s mother, Marie, has obtained a divorce. Subsequently, Marie, a scientist, vanished in a laboratory accident—she apparently disintegrated—while working on a “molecular transporter” device. Oliver was adopted by a Marie’s second husband, the loving, equally science-minded Jon Jariwala, whose last name Oliver is excited to take for his own (“ ‘Mom wanted me to wait until I was eighteen,’ he said, ‘But now that I'm legally his kid, I don’t have to…I wanna make sure he knows how much it means to me’ ”). Earlier, the vengeful, psychotic Matthew had pushed for legal custody. Oliver was only saved from Matthew’s brutal control by an intercession from a remarkable friend: a humanoid female alien creature named Dindet, who arrived on Earth via (apparently) the same phenomenon that dematerialized Marie. Though friendly and technologically advanced, Dindet is backwards and troublesome in many ways; bizarrely, she takes the form of a multicolored circus clown (it appears clowns are a recognized extra-terrestrial race). Disguised as a foreign exchange student living with Oliver (while trying to help Jon unravel the mystery of Marie’s disappearance on the side), Dindet experiences frequent culture shock and becomes swept up in capers with Oliver in both this and other dimensions. Oliver, losing patience with Dindet’s increasing absences and erratic nature, experiences deeper relationships with boy-next-door Douglass and a brash upperclassman, Markus, a confident and cool senior connected to the school paper. But even Markus’ own stepbrother, Cody Mulligan, warns Oliver that Markus is bad news. Meanwhile, the institute behind Marie’s fateful science experiment presses for firm answers and results.

Like the ever-morphing Dindet, a more or less an amorphous blob whose forms range from a sort of Harpo Marx–like comical character to a slavering Lovecraftian monstrosity, the plot is a real mish-mash of elements, tilting toward the shocking, confessional work of confabulated author “J.T. Leroy” in its key themes of incest, domestic violence, and gender. This is YA fiction at a rarefied level—the author has a knack for conveying how real adolescents might process the complicated feelings experienced by the characters (“The senior turned to face him, some sorry and sad frown pulling at his lips. ‘And if—if you’re not into it, that’s fine. I don't know how, uh, boy girl—girl boys work, lol’ ”). The Dindet material, which is largely relegated to a subplot here, ultimately dovetails with Oliver’s drama in very dire fashion. The two narrative strands share a painful commonality (in addition to the notion of alien-ation) in their vivid depictions of personal violation and innocents being cruelly victimized.

A winning hero confronts serious issues in this increasingly dark YA/SF saga.