Cleaning Up
Cleaning Up
Jess picked up her knapsack, locked the back door and put the key under the mat. She got back on her bike, but she didn’t want to go back to the trailer. Her father would already be working on tomorrow’s hangover. Tansy and the other kids would still be hogging the beach and wasting their time and money on horseshoes and cigarettes.
A path led from the back door through a yard with grass so long that Queen Anne’s lace sprouted from it, past a wooden shed with peeling paint and windows too dusty to see through, and then threaded through a field.
Jess pushed her bike through goldenrod, asters and sumac. The path grew so narrow she thought it would disappear altogether, but then she saw a narrow break in the sumac and the path opened to a field, and across it she could see a pond and an old barn, and in the distance, another road.
Jess crouched down in the high grass for a moment. She tucked her knees into her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
The trailer park was full of people all the time. You could hear them talking and coughing, blowing their noses and laughing.
Here there was just the wind rushing through the tall grass and a red-winged blackbird skirting along the top.
This could be a perfect place for a secret garden. You wouldn’t even need walls; the sumac would hem it in. Wild grass could frame the garden, and there could be black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed to attract monarchs. You’d have to know about the garden to find it, to know where the break in the sumac was. Otherwise it would just look like a wild field. Jess would only tell other garden-worthy people it.
She picked at a strand of clover and breathed in the sweet scent. But who would care about a garden in the middle of a field?
Anyway, a secret garden was supposed to be a secret.
Cleaning Up follows Jess Darling the summer before her last year of high school. Her father, an alcoholic, has again lost his job and stopped paying rent on their apartment. Instead of a summer in Kingston working for a landscaping company, Jess is living in a tent in a summer trailer park. Jess also works part-time cleaning houses, and her saving grace this summer is a referral to Liz Gupta whose house is a bike ride away from the trailer park and in desperate need of a deep-clean. This part-time job quickly becomes a mystery to solve – specifically, why is there a trashed bedroom upstairs that Liz never mentioned? It clearly belongs to her daughter, Quinn, who is Jess’ age, but Liz never answers Jess’ question about what to do with the room. Jess can’t figure out how Quinn, a girl whose parents provide a stable home, could have left her room in such a state. Should she even go in there? As the summer progresses and Jess works to clean up the house, she also tries to piece together Quinn’s life and figure out what exactly would make a teen disappear so completely from a house while leaving such a mark in her room. Jess soon finds Quinn’s diary and feels more and more drawn into what she imagines is Quinn’s perfect life.
Jess isn’t just cleaning for the summer, though. The Gupta’s nephew, Matt, is living in a converted shed on the property and is growing vegetables to sell in the city at the farmer’s market. Jess strikes up a wary friendship with Matt (and his friends Cat and Yolo), scared of giving too much of her self away to strangers, embarrassed by her living situation and her father’s alcoholism. As the summer progresses, Jess spends more time with Matt and more time imagining who Quinn is and what her life would look like if she and Quinn had been friends. The Gupta’s house provides Jess two escapes – real life with Matt, where Jess helps with the garden and joins a band, and her imagined friendship with the version of Quinn she has built up over the summer. As Jess becomes more attached to these escapes, she also becomes more determined to keep her old life, with the alcoholic dad and the evictions and the musty tent, separate from the summer life she has built. Things come to a head when, on the night of her first concert in the band, she crosses a line with the Guptas, sending her new life crumbling as she tries to retreat from everything connected to her new summer life. Liz, however, has other plans and wants to finally tell Jess what really happened to Quinn; how will Jess reconcile her summer imaginings with the truth?
Cleaning Up is an engaging read, keeping the central mystery as a thread connecting Jess to new people and places over the summer while also allowing readers to see Jess grow over the course of the book. Lieberman addresses substance use in an age-appropriate way, but this content is something that should be kept in mind when recommending the title. Jess’ father’s alcoholism plays is central to the plot, and (spoiler ahead) Quinn struggled with alcohol and drug use before attending an inpatient treatment centre, which is where she has disappeared to this summer. Outside of this caution, Cleaning Up is an excellent book. This title features an explicitly racially diverse cast and does not feature any romantic relationships for our protagonist, both of which are appreciated by this reviewer. While books with female protagonists are most often aimed at female readers, the plot of this book will also likely appeal to diverse readers who enjoy realistic fiction, mysteries, and coming-of-age stories.
Susie Wilson is the Data Services Librarian at the University of Northern British Columbia where she supports all aspects of data use in the academic setting. She currently resides in Prince George, British Columbia.