Review - The New York Four by Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly
If you’re looking for subtle or profound statements on growing up, finding your place in the crowd — hell, just finding yourself — and the psychological effect New York City has on a naive person, “The New York Four” may not suit you. If you’d like a teen soap opera version that touches on all those points — with a lot of loose threads dangling for an inevitable sequel — then step right up, Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s likable page-turner of college girl angst.
Riley is a socially awkward, shy Brooklyn girl who breaks out of her sheltered home life to attend NYU. The city unfolds for her — indeed, the novel at times reads like a teenage hipster’s guide to NYC — and she settles into her girl clique. The novel is structured through a series of psychological interviews on film, with the girls talking about their school lives — it’s part of a job they all land that requires evaluations.
The bulk of the novel revolves around Riley’s relationship with her over-protective parents and the rediscovery of her long lost older sister, as well as a mysterious romance subplot that dances alongside her quest for an apartment with her new college girl friends — the more life experience you have, the more obvious the revelations of the romance plot will be to you. You want to warn Riley, but these kids have to make their own mistakes, you know?
The others in the New York Four get less space for their characters to unfold — a page here, a page there. Because of this, there’s not a lot to their characters beyond certain assigned traits that don’t always draw you to them — if you find boy hungry stock characters annoying, then you probably won’t want to know more about the lively and mildly cliched Merissa. And in the character Lona, certain creepy implications are left unanswered — they don’t exactly endear you to the character, a typical “weird, artsy” girl.
“What is Merissa like at home around her family?” Riley asks herself. “What does she think about when she’s alone?”
The book doesn’t bother to answer those questions.
Given this treatment of the secondary characters — to the point that some of them are questionable as likable one — I can only assume that this is the first book in a series, during which further aspects of these girls will be revealed . . . and these aspects will no doubt cause heartache, angst, and drama.
Can’t wait!
In a lot of ways, this actually reminds me of Frederick Kohner’s Gidget novels and therein lies its charm. It’s basically an innocent, fantasy-laden vision of what teenage life is, filled with conflicts over life decisions and boys, all put in a modern context. There might be romantic mishaps in a Gidget story, but here those mishaps involve secretive texting on cell phones. Riley might not get a job at the United Nations, but pretty much everything else in “The New York Four” reminds me of the tone of “Gidget Goes to New York” which, I suppose, puts it in direct line with the genre, both then and now, of young girls making it in the big city.
High literature this ain’t — but as a guilty pleasure, it certainly works — it’s a graphic novel beach book, to be sure.
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