09. ALEX Award · Adult Book for YA | Our Voices Break Open

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

By Kevin Wilson

Annotation:

A sorter at a Scrabble factory worries he will spontaneously combust; brothers come to blows over an origami contest; three bored college grads decide to dig a tunnel beneath their town . . .

Recommendation:

Kevin Wilson has created a work of the highest literary quality with his collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. Mr. Wilson's razor sharp observations capture the broad bizarreness of the human experience. These are the universal and timeless works of a fantastically funny and imaginative literary genius!

Although not directly marketed to teenagers, the fast-paced, free-form fiction in this book will have wide adolescent appeal. All of the stories center on an unusual or unexpected juxtaposition of elements. For this reason, the book is a study in liminality – the bizarre, “between-ness” that is a hallmark of adolescence.

Along with being resonant and relevant, Kevin Wilson's work is wildly original.

Consider Go, Fight, Win! -- the saga of a cheerless high school cheerleader who prefers building model cars to boys. She muses: “sex seemed like chicken pox, inevitable and scarring.” The coming of age story grows oddly touching when the teen decides to practice kissing with her neighbor – a geeky, 12-year-old pyromaniac.

Then there is, Mortal Kombat which presents a violent, Karate fighting video game and two lonely high school outcasts. The boys fall in love with the game, and though they fight mightily against it, they fall in love with each other.

Wilson’s extraordinary work resonates with the core developmental concerns of young people. Another case in point: The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide For Sensitive Boys. Here, Wilson’s adolescent angst is delivered as crisp, catalog description:

"The sheaths that protect the upper end of the fingers of the dead sister contain small doses of tricyclic antidepressants (see also Attempts to Medicate). During stressful situations, the ingestion of the nails potentiates the action of catecholamines and creates a low-level sense of well-being and calm . . . In particularly bad moments, the dead sister will chew her nails down to the quick and into the flesh, leaving tiny crescents of blood on the papers of tests, the sleeves of her shirts, the skin of those she touches."

All of the eleven stories in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are wonderfully well written, and most are directly relevant to the emotional and social turmoil of the teen experience.

In Birds in the House, Wilson juxtaposes a Japanese war bride with her Tennessee farmer husband and three big, brawling boys. Per the instructions left in a will, the violent brothers must create a thousand tiny paper birds to determine who will inherit the ancestral mansion.

Wilson's dialogue is not what his characters say -- it's the conversation his clashing images have with each other. Birds in the House is the brutally honest delivery of delicate truths about culture.

Surprisingly fresh and original, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth tests the boundaries and pushes the limits of the short story format.

The Baby's Teeth is a tale that desperately wants to be about many things: relationships, art, passion, dreams. Finally though, it's about a baby born with a full set of teeth. At a certain point in the plot -- the two, dueling narrators implicate us in the unfolding strangeness:

"In the coming months, there will be many things. Fights, accusations, declarations of love and hate. It is heartbreaking, but you only want to know of the baby, where it is, what it is doing, is it smiling. We have grown tired. The story is hard to tell. The evaporation of love makes us think of our own lives. We have tried to make you see this, but always the baby."

The tensions between unexpected elements make Wilson’s stories unique and bizarre, but his plots are credible and his characters carefully drawn. Included in the back of the book is an interview with the author. Wilson reveals that one of his greatest challenges in writing is: "Embracing the ridiculous nature of the story without making the concerns of the characters ridiculous." He has met the challenge with these compassionate portrayals.

Regardless of what publisher, Harper Collins designates, this is an outstanding publication for the young adult reader. Making a considerable contribution to literature that will stand the test of time, Kevin Wilson's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth breaks new ground!

Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification: ALEX Award winner, Humor

Citation: Wilson, Kevin. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Print.

Kevin Wilson home page
http://www.wilsonkevin.com/